The Tainted City (64 page)

Marten said, “No. There is more you must convince him to do. We’ll speak of it in Alathia.” With that, he turned away.

Well, that was disturbingly vague. But I was too tired and sore to care. I settled against a boulder and cradled Melly to me, stroked her hair off her bruised face. For a time, I didn’t think of anything else but her slow, steady breathing.

“Dev!” I looked up to see Cara kneeling before me, concern in her eyes. Her injured arm was bound in a sling, but her lacerations had closed, her bruises faded. Lena must’ve given her charms or cast some healing spellwork. I gave Cara a wan smile.

“We kept Vidai busy, all right,” I said.

Her laugh came out more like a sob. “So I hear. And look who I found.”

She moved aside. Behind her was a scrap of a boy with hard, wary eyes. He had Pello’s wild mop of curls, though his face was round, his skin Sulanian-dark. His clothes were ragged, and one ankle was bruised and raw.

Maybe Vidai hadn’t wanted to kill yet another child. I remembered Pello gasping out those anguished phrases of Varkevian, and my heart twisted within me. Likely the boy had never known his father. Just as Melly hadn’t known Sethan; and now, they never would.

“I’ve something for you,” I said to the boy. “It’s from your father. He was…a brave man.” The crescent moon necklace hung around my own neck. I slipped it off and handed it to him.

He didn’t speak, but one fist closed tight on the little moon of malachite.

“We’re ready,” Marten said. I levered myself to my feet, groaning as pain spiked through my stomach. Melly felt as heavy as ten coal sacks, but I shrugged off Lena’s offer to carry her. Stupid, maybe. But I couldn’t let her go.

Lena herded us into a ring of sigils scribed on a granite slab, well away from the scorched and darkened lines of Ruslan’s quicksilver pattern. Kiran lay huddled at Marten’s feet. Stevan’s body lay in the ring also, wrapped in a leather coat I recognized as Cara’s.

Beyond the ring, Ruslan stood framed by the Cirque’s sky-piercing Knives, watching us with glittering eyes. Mikail sat by his side with his head hanging low. New anger burned in me. We’d saved Ninavel, but I didn’t feel a damn bit of triumph in it. Life would go on, streetside—my friends would laugh and dance in the night markets, safe from riots and from dying of thirst—but Ruslan and those like him would go right on killing as they pleased. The bastard hadn’t suffered so much as a hangnail in this, while so many others paid with their lives.

I understood now the desperate outrage that had driven Talm and Vidai. There had to be a way to change things in Ninavel. One that didn’t involve killing kids or destroying the city outright.

Marten and Lena started singing. The sigils around us lit. Kiran stirred at Marten’s feet, moaning. Before light rose to swallow us, I saw Ruslan stride forward, his gaze locked on Kiran. His mouth moved in one silent word.

Remember.

Chapter Twenty-Six

(Kiran)

“K
iran? Can you hear me?”

The voice was female and concerned, but it didn’t sound like Lizaveta’s. Kiran opened his eyes, confused.

He lay on a cot in a one-room wooden cabin, the rough-hewn planks of walls and floor covered in freshly laid ward lines. Dusty gold shafts of sunlight slanted through pine branches outside the cabin’s single small window.

A young woman leaned over him, studying him with grave intensity. Circles showed dark beneath her eyes, and lines of stress and sorrow marked her freckled face. Kiran’s gaze skipped downward to land on her uniform.

Alathian.
Kiran thrashed upright on the cot, his heart racing. He sought power to reinforce his barriers—and cried out, his hands flying up to his temples, as agony seared through his head.

“Don’t,” the woman said, anxious. “Kiran, you must not try any spellwork. Your soulfire is not yet recovered from our translocation. If you let me, I can ease the pain…” She reached for his forehead.

“No!” Kiran flinched back. He knew her now: Lena, Martennan’s first lieutenant. Did she mean to bind him? Had they done so already? His head hurt, he couldn’t think—

Lena drew her hand back. “My apologies…I know you believe us your enemies.” She sighed and pushed aside a lock of dark hair that had straggled free of her braids. “Do you remember what happened when we fought Vidai?”

Fragmented flashes tumbled through Kiran’s mind. He took a deep breath and focused inward. His barriers were terrifyingly thin, his
ikilhia
guttering lower than he’d ever felt it. But raw as his mind was, he sensed no foreign bindings, only the same gaping holes in his older memories. As for more recent events…he remembered fighting, remembered…

The knife sinking deep to pierce Stevannes’s heart,
ikilhia
bursting free in a flood so intoxicating Kiran thought his own heart might fail from the pleasure of it—

“I…helped Ruslan cast,” he said, the words thick on his tongue.

Lena’s breath faltered, grief darkening her eyes. “You took Stevan’s life.”

Pain colored her voice, though he didn’t hear anger. But she must be angry; he’d killed one of her friends. Had she and Stevannes been as close as he and Mikail? He couldn’t imagine the chasm in his heart if Mikail died. Guilt shot through him, fracturing the memory of that terrible, wondrous ecstasy.

He shouldn’t feel guilt. Stevannes had been his enemy. Besides, if he hadn’t killed Stevannes… “We all would have died, and Ninavel with us, if I had not,” he said to Lena.

Her eyes searched his face. He didn’t know what she was looking for. After a short silence, she said, “Do you recall what happened afterward?”

Everything after was hazy and muddled, like a fever-dream. He remembered trembling, feeling sick and strange, as something prowled around him, watching him with eyes that dragged at him like claws.

The demon.
It had spoken of temples, and scarred souls, and attacked Mikail…and out of Kiran’s horror and desperation, a fissure had cracked open in the wall at the core of his memories. He’d said—

His mind recoiled in a rejection so violent it nearly shattered his hold on consciousness. He hastily blinked away the darkness that threatened his vision.

“I don’t remember.” He didn’t. Wouldn’t. The wall was solid. The demon had left, and Mikail had survived—that was all he needed to recall while he remained in Alathian hands.

“You don’t know why we brought you here?” Lena looked anxious again.

Here. Kiran glanced around the cabin. The wooden walls…and beyond his fragile barriers and the sharp, forbidding mutter of the wards, the aether was dead of magical energies. Another flash came, of Ruslan shouting at Martennan, something about a drug…

Alathia. He was in Alathia, trapped behind their border wards, where Ruslan could not reach him. A new memory broke over him, a brief instant of clarity as bitingly sharp as mountain air: Ruslan holding him close, whispering,
I once burned a confluence to claim you for my own. I would not let Martennan take you from me, except that I have seen your soul today. You are
akheli
, and you will break your bonds and come back to us. I promise you, the Alathians will pay in blood for daring to touch you. If a
nathahlen
can bargain with a demon, think what better alliance an
akheli
can make!

Ruslan must not bargain with those…those creatures! Cold, unreasoning horror left Kiran reeling. He scrambled off the cot, only to fall back with a strangled cry as the wards’ magic lashed across his mind.

Lena made a low, dismayed noise. “Kiran, please. You need to take care.”

Kiran gripped his knees to hide the shaking of his hands. “You must let me go. Now! Or Ruslan will take Vidai’s path. You saw what an untalented man could do with a demon’s power. Imagine Ruslan turning that against your country!”

No surprise showed on Lena’s face, only solemn, worried intensity. “He will do it anyway. Even if we released you. His pride and arrogance will allow no less, after Marten outmaneuvered him.”

“Free me, and I will convince Ruslan not to deal with demons.” Kiran had to convince him.
Otherwise,
the fear whispered,
he will bring destruction on himself and all you love along with those you hate, and innocents will die in numbers Vidai never dreamed.
If Kiran returned and enlisted Lizaveta and Mikail to help cool Ruslan’s temper and recall him to caution, Ruslan would yield. Ruslan would not abandon the idea of revenge entirely, but he would take a more temperate course.

Lena said, “I fear he would instead convince you. Just as he convinced you we are your enemies. The mark-bond gives him too much power over you, Kiran. You can’t hope to deal with him as an equal.”

Of course he wasn’t Ruslan’s equal, inexperienced and damaged as he was. Kiran changed tactics. “What does it profit you to keep me?” he demanded. “If you kill me to spite him, you will only goad him further. Or do you mean to bind me again in some ill-considered attempt to use me against him?” Whatever the Alathians’ intent, Kiran had to escape them. Yet right now he felt so weak he doubted he could make it across the room, let alone break the wards that imprisoned him.

“Marten brought you here to
help
you.” For the barest instant, Lena displayed a dark, strained desperation equal to his own. “There is someone you must speak with.” She unbarred the cabin door.

Dev edged through. He looked as weary as Lena, his wiry shoulders slumped and his face shadowed, but his green eyes remained sharp as ever. When he crossed the wards on the cabin floor, the lines stayed dark and inert. The wards were keyed directly to Kiran, then; an important fact to know.

“Kiran.” Dev crouched beside Kiran’s cot and said to Lena, “Give us a minute, huh?”

“I’ll be right outside,” she said.

Kiran suspected that was a warning more than an assurance. He eyed Dev warily as the door shut behind Lena. Ruslan had said Dev was Sechaveh’s man, but Kiran feared the Alathians held Melly now. If so, Dev would do their bidding without hesitation.

Dev heaved a sigh. “Couldn’t tell you this with an Alathian in the room. It’s disturbing enough to hear myself say it. But…thanks. For, uh…making sure Ruslan didn’t cast using Melly.”

“She didn’t deserve to die.” The words escaped Kiran before he thought.

“No,” Dev said. “Do you wonder where you got that idea? I think you know it didn’t come from Ruslan.”

Kiran shifted on the cot, uneasy. The conviction was as strong in him as his certainty that disaster would result from Ruslan seeking out demons…yet if he were honest, he didn’t fully understand the grounds for either belief. “The Alathians bound me. Some effects still remain.”

“They did bind you,” Dev agreed. “But not like that. They bound your magic, that’s all. They didn’t fuck with your head. That’s Ruslan’s specialty.”

Ruslan had destroyed Kiran’s memories, but not with malicious intent. Or so Mikail insisted, and Kiran believed his mage-brother. How could he not, when he knew the depth of Mikail’s love for him? And despite Ruslan’s high-handed ways and harsh punishments, Kiran knew Ruslan loved him just as fiercely.
I once burned a confluence to claim you for my own…

He crossed his arms and gave Dev a cold stare. “Ruslan loves me, while the Alathians tried to cripple me. It seems clear enough whose account I should believe.”

Dev rubbed at the spot between his eyebrows. “We could argue about this all night,” he said. “But you know, there’s an easier way. I told you if I got Melly safe I’d let you see my memories. All of them.”

A thread of curiosity surfaced; Kiran buried it. He needed to escape, not let the Alathians lure him into relaxing his guard. “I don’t need to see your memories.”

“You’re afraid,” Dev said. “You don’t want to think Ruslan and Mikail lied to you. Because yeah, there are few things worse than finding out someone you love betrayed you. But tying on a blindfold doesn’t change the truth. It only makes you more likely to walk off a cliff.”

The air in the cabin felt suddenly stifling, the wards’ mutter scraping all the harder against his injured mind. Kiran shook his head. Dev was wrong about Ruslan and Mikail. This was all some Alathian trick. “Who says your memories are the truth?”

Dev cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Not this again,” he muttered. “Listen. I don’t trust the Alathians either. For reasons you’ll see, if you look in my head. So by all means, if you find somebody’s messed with my mind, I’d love to know.”

Kiran was silent. He shouldn’t do this. Shouldn’t be tempted. On the other hand, when he found evidence of tampering, as he surely would…he might use it to convince Dev to help him escape.

A crooked grin twisted Dev’s mouth. “At the very least, you’ll get to see where you traveled in the mountains.”

Kiran remembered Dev saying,
You weren’t bad, on rock.
Hesitation crystallized into decision.

“Do you have a knife?” he asked Dev.

“A knife.” Dev looked wary now.

Kiran smiled, not kindly. “If you want me to look in your mind, it will be on my terms.” Blood contact would make the search far easier, a boon with his
ikilhia
so weak—and it would allow him to cast any manner of binding he chose upon Dev. Assuming he could manage a casting in his current condition. Or that the Alathians wouldn’t notice it if he did.

He thought Dev might bolt. Instead, Dev studied him, long and hard. At last he muttered a curse and pulled a thin blade from a slit in his belt. “You’d better not suck the life out of me.”

“I don’t need a knife for that.” Kiran meant it as a warning, in case the Alathians intended to play some harsher game than merely confusing him with false memories. But when Dev flinched, guilt returned to plague him. The Alathians might easily have altered Dev’s mind without his consent, making him as much their prisoner as Kiran.

If so, Kiran wouldn’t try to bind Dev. He’d free them both. He softened his tone. “If this is no trick, you need not fear I will harm you.”

“It’s not a trick.” Dev handed Kiran the blade.

“Give me your hand,” Kiran said.

Dev extended it gingerly, as if he was afraid Kiran might burn it off. Kiran sliced a swift line down Dev’s palm, then a matching one in his own.