The Smoke-Scented Girl (24 page)

All day and all evening Evon had tried
not
to think of Kerensa, but now he allowed himself to
remember her as he’d seen her last, in her white nightdress, her
hair braided and her eyes shining with the excitement of finally
learning what had driven her all the long way from her home. He
traced runes in the air and said, “
Spexa,”
and the air
parted like an oculus and he saw her, close enough to touch. She
lay on the bare wooden floor of an empty room, her back to him, her
hair still braided but untidy. Someone’s feet were in the circle of
his vision, booted feet that paced near Kerensa’s head. Evon made
an involuntary noise of protest. “I can’t see her face,” he
said.

“Take
spexa
by the sides as if it were
a mirror, and turn it,” Mistress Gavranter instructed, and Evon did
so. The image wobbled along with his concentration as he felt a
cool, soapy
something
in his hands, though he knew
spexa
was merely a construct of his mind. He turned it and
imagined walking it around Kerensa until he could see her face. It
was unmarked, but her hands were bound and as he watched he saw her
body and face contort with a scream. The
spexa
fell apart;
he sat on the horse, hands clenched, shaking with fury.

“Again,” Mistress Gavranter told him. “Time
enough for anger when we face our enemy. This will go much faster
if you can locate her. Observe.” She pointed at the balding
magician and an ordinary-looking woman with intense eyebrows who
were gesturing in tandem.
Spexa
sprang up in front of them,
positioned where they could look through it at the house. The lens
gave the house the appearance of an architect’s drawing, the walls
invisible, all the rooms laid out in stark black lines as if a
child had gone over its bones with a black crayon. No furnishings
were visible, and the image was empty of people. “That’s the best
we can do against their abjurations,” Mistress Gavranter continued.
“We can find a path to any room in the house, but unless we enter
it and lay
spexa
on every door in the manor, we will not
know where to look for the young woman. For Kerensa. Try
again.”

Evon calmed his breathing and cast the spell
again. This time, when the image formed, he was looking at her as
if standing near her feet. “Take the
spexa
and aim it
upward. Find a window,” Mistress Gavranter instructed him. Evon
grasped the nonexistent handles and swiveled it, and found himself
looking at Odelia Cattertis. She was talking to someone out of his
sight. She looked bored. The image shook as Evon once again had to
gain control of himself. Out of curiosity, he turned the
spexa
to see the person Odelia was talking to.

He saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with a
heavy red beard and curly hair that hung past his shoulders. He was
dressed in waistcoat and old-fashioned knee breeches, but he looked
more like a pirate than a gentleman. He replied to whatever Odelia
had said, then scratched his beard and stepped away.

“Can you show him to me?” Mrs. Petelter
asked, startling Evon and causing him to briefly lose focus. He
nodded and brought the
spexa
around. The man had taken a
seat on an old sofa with the stuffing coming out of the cushion. He
picked at the stuffing with his thumb and forefinger and with his
other hand drew out a gold watch and consulted it. He said
something, then leaned back and crossed his legs.

“Rayner Valantis,” Mrs. Petelter said. Her
voice had an uncharacteristic eagerness to it. “We’ve suspected him
of any number of illegal activities, but never been able to catch
him in the act. This is an unlooked-for boon. We try to capture
him, understand?” This last was directed at her people, who nodded
their assent.

“We understand, but I can’t make any
promises, Mrs. Petelter,” Mistress Gavranter said. “Magic in combat
situations is imprecise at best. Retrieving Miss Haylter—” she
glanced at Evon—“is our first priority.”

“Yes, I know, Mistress Gavranter,” Mrs.
Petelter said, but Evon suspected she wasn’t listening. She turned
away to consult with one of her agents. Evon remembered what he was
supposed to be doing and turned the
spexa
toward the walls,
looking for a window. The room was on a corner, windows lining two
adjacent walls. Evon looked out and saw nothing but fields and then
forest, then thought to look down and saw a guard pass by, far
below. There were three banks of windows below him, and about fifty
feet away from the foundation there was a white boulder next to a
lone pine tree.

“Excellent,” Mistress Gavranter said. “Upper
left corner...that one.” The two magicians holding the lens turned
it as she directed. Evon dismissed
spexa
and saw, off to the
left side of the building, a white boulder with a darkish smudge
next to it that might have been a pine tree.

“Plot a route, please,” Mistress Gavranter
told the two, then indicated that Evon should dismount. She joined
him on the ground and beckoned to the rest of the magicians to
gather near. “Those of you with combat experience know what to do,”
she said. “
Frigo
and
forva
only if absolutely
necessary. If the weapon is close to triggering, we’ll have more
fire than we know what to do with. Those without combat training
will hold
presadi
as we advance, then guard the rear. Mrs.
Petelter?”

“My agents will follow as far as the front
doors, then spread out to take on purely mundane attacks so you can
save your spells for the other magicians,” Mrs. Petelter said.

“Leaving her free to hunt for that Valantis
fellow,” Piercy said in Evon’s ear.

Evon jumped. “Don’t be so sneaky,” he said
irritably.

“If I weren’t so sneaky, I’d have been caught
seven times over by now.”

Evon retrieved Kerensa’s bag from his horse
and tied it securely to his back. “I’m tired of waiting.”

“How fortunate for you,” said Mistress
Gavranter, “because it is time to go.”

Clear, bright moonlight lit the snowy fields
with a bluish glow that made everyone look half-dead, eyes shadowed
and cheeks hollow and dark. Near the head of their small force,
Evon divided his attention between his footing and the half-sphere
three feet in front of him, a transparent film that rippled with
the movement of the magician who held it, the balding man whose
name Evon still didn’t know. It was about ten feet tall and thirty
feet wide, an awkward burden, and Evon half expected it to be torn
from the magician’s hands like a kite in a strong wind. But the
magician wielded it with dexterous ease, and the fifteen people who
walked behind it had no trouble staying within its shelter. Beside
them, the woman with the aggressive eyebrows held an identical
shield protecting Mistress Gavranter’s group.

“This makes me extremely uncomfortable,”
Piercy whispered. His boots, like Evon’s, made no noise on the
crusted snow; unlike the rest of the party, wrapped in a bubble of
desini cleperi
, only their boots and Mistress Gavranter’s
shoes were so muffled. No spells could be cast from within the area
of silence, and while it was possible to extract yourself from it,
that took time. So Evon and Mistress Gavranter remained unaffected,
to cancel the spell when they reached the manor. Evon had excluded
Piercy from
desini cleperi
as well, since he already moved
like a cat and would need to be able to alert Evon to hidden
dangers. “We ought not to be able to simply walk up to the manor
shielded only by a filmy bit of nothing. It’s hard to believe they
can’t see us.”

“The most they can see is a ripple in the
air, and in this light, even that won’t be visible unless someone
is very, very lucky. And they’ll only hear our movements when we’re
too close for them to do anything about it.”

“I still say it’s unnatural.”

“If it were natural, it wouldn’t be
magic.”

They were near enough now to see the passing
guard as a figure rather than a moving blob against the
brightly-lit manor. He and the dog he led crossed in front of the
manor’s front door, moving toward the left. The dog lifted its
head, and Evon cursed mentally, gestured and whispered,
“Olficio
retexo.”

The guard said something Evon couldn’t make
out at this distance, looking down at the dog, whose head moved
from side to side, up and down, and it shifted its weight as if
coming to alertness. The guard looked around, his eyes passing
sightlessly over the invisible crowd, then tugged impatiently at
the dog’s leash. It strained against the pull for a moment, then,
with a movement that in a human would have been a shrug, followed
its master. Evon looked at Mistress Gavranter, who gave him a nod
of approval. Evon felt like a fool for not remembering the dogs
before. Pray the Twins this was the only mistake he’d make
tonight.

They slowly approached the front doors, the
shielding magicians reshaping their spells to cover the groups from
the sides as well as the front. Piercy’s observations had paid off;
they had timed their approach to coincide with the moment both
guards were at opposite ends of the building, around the corners.
Piercy slipped out from behind the shield and pressed his ear to
the door, nodded, then quietly pushed it open and went inside.
Moments later he reappeared and beckoned to them. Evon and Mistress
Gavranter dismissed
desini cleperi
, and leading a file of
magicians and agents, Evon followed Piercy through the door.

The entrance hall rose two stories into the
air and seemed to extend all the way to the back of the house. Red
and black tile made a geometric pattern on the floor, a
trompe
l’oeil
that made the floor seem creased instead of flat. Creamy
pillars marched around the room, supporting a gallery on the second
floor from which someone could look down on the entrance or, if
they had a very long pole, could tap the vast crystal chandelier
hanging from the center of the ceiling. Dark halls led off the room
on all sides, and two staircases ascended to the second floor on
opposite sides of the hall. The walls were adorned with portraits
of dark-bearded men and overweight women, all of whom glared at
Evon’s intrusion into their territory. The hall was otherwise
empty. Evon checked his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock.
Twenty-four hours since they’d taken her. He tried not to think
about the many delays. Surely she would know he’d come after her.
Did she think he’d abandoned her? His stomach was in knots. He
realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten—something
along the route? He slowed his breathing and tried to concentrate.
Time enough for self-recrimination later.

Mrs. Petelter’s agents spread out through the
room, disappearing down the halls, and Mrs. Petelter waved
something that gleamed in Evon’s direction before following. A
mirror.
Contact me when you’ve secured the weapon,
she’d
said,
and we’ll pull out
. He didn’t actually believe her.
She needed to capture Rayner Valantis to keep from looking like an
incompetent, and she wasn’t likely to give up on that just because
he told her they could leave. But he was willing to go along with
the pretense so long as Kerensa was safe.

Mistress Gavranter signaled to Evon to lead
the way up the left-hand stairs. No one had argued with her when
she’d said Evon would go first; some of them, no doubt, hadn’t
wanted to be the one to draw enemy fire, and others were convinced
by her argument that Kerensa would be more responsive to someone
she knew than to strangers grabbing her. He had memorized the route
and now took them along the second floor gallery toward the stairs
at the back of the building, servants’ stairs that bypassed the
third floor and took them to the servants’ quarters at the top of
the manor. He cringed at every noise the magicians made, their
heavy breathing and wheezing and one terrifying cough that ought to
alert every person in the manor. But no one appeared.

Evon had just turned to Piercy to ask him to
look down the next cross-corridor when a door opened and a
rectangle of light appeared on the dark red carpet ahead of them. A
woman stepped out and saw them. Her mouth opened.
“Desini
cucurri!
” Evon said in an urgent whisper, but two other people
shouted the same words and the woman fell over in the face of a
triple paralysis spell. Inside the room, people began exclaiming in
surprise, and someone looked quickly around the doorway and
shouted,
“Frigo!”
A woman cried out behind Evon, and he
heard the sound of a body hitting the ground.

“That’s it,” Mistress Gavranter said. “To the
stairs, everyone, and be prepared for lethal force.” She didn’t say
whether she meant to expect lethal force to be directed against
them, or for them to use lethal force, but Evon had already made up
his mind on that point. He raced toward the far stairs, Piercy
dogging his heels and half a dozen magicians following. The same
Speculatus magician shouted,
“Frigo!”
again, but someone
behind Evon said,
“Retexo,”
and he heard the high-pitched
whine of a spell aborting.

Halfway up the stairs, he heard footsteps
running along the hall above toward them. He came bursting out of
the stairwell at them at full speed, shouting
desini
cucurri
, and wove through the falling bodies of nearly a dozen
men and women before stopping to wait for the rest of the magicians
to catch up. They were so
slow
it was driving him mad, but
he had enough sense left to wait for them. Two were panting hard as
they came off the stairs, and Evon told them, “Stay here and keep
the stairs clear. We’ll be leaving in a hurry.” They nodded, and
while they tried to look fierce, all they managed was
gratitude.

He’d gotten a little turned around in his
attack, and as he took a moment to look around for the right path,
he heard a woman shout, “
Desini cucurri!”
The balding man
shouted, “
Retex--
” and Evon felt
desini cucurri
brush
past him as he whipped around, making the left side of his face
tingle and his heart beat faster at the near-hit. Odelia stood only
a few yards away, smiling. “Evon Lorantis,” she said. “The more
fool me, for not guessing you were part of this. You found the
girl, didn’t you?”