Magic Steps (12 page)

The roughs were a hundred yards away, lurching closer’ as they argued.

Peering through the slit in the spells that hid her, Alzena saw a cloud of smoke rise behind the houses. Nurhar’s fire arrows had set the Cod Alley stable roof ablaze.

The roughs were fifty yards off. A hamlike fist swung; Alzena heard furious snarls. Two of them waded into each other. Their friends tried to pull them apart, then joined in. Alzena watched. A few house doors opened: those suspicious-looking servants peered out. If they were Provost’s Guards in disguise, they would be uneasy. This was a prosperous street. Peacekeepers here moved troublemakers on in a hurry. It would go against their training to stand by during a brawl.

Here came the supposed beggars to watch, maybe to interfere. Now all of the roughs were punching, kicking, wrestling. One of the beggars moved in and went flying. A manservant ran out of a house and dove into the fight, as did the second beggar.

Alzena grinned. Now the other false servants would watch their comrades in the fray—not Rokat’s house, or anything that took place three stories overhead.

Hot air patted her; a flat boom sounded from the alley. The keg of battlefire in the burning stable had caught and exploded. Bells pealed and horns called, sum moning everyone to fight the blaze. The archers on top of Rokat’s house ran to the back of the fiat roof.

Alzena checked her rope to make sure it was properly anchored, then jumped out and across from her window to her target. She landed with a thud that went unheard in the fire alarms’ racket. Off with the rope. Walking cat-footed, Alzena reached the door to the house, and eased herself inside. The archers, watching the fire as it tried to jump from the stable to the neighboring buildings, never looked behind, them.

Two guards in the garret below had gone to stare out of the tiny dormer window at the fire. Alzena was past them and down the stairs, into the house proper, with no one the wiser.

The family’s protectors had moved them to the nursery, the biggest room on the floor below the garret. A nursemaid was playing with the baby in its crib while the young mother spun and told a story to the little girl. Fariji Rokat paced,’

his dark, face tight.

.Alzena drew her knife and killed the baby first, one cut, while the maid stared. When she screamed, the mother leaped up so quickly that she knocked over the little girl and the spinning wheel. The mother raced over to see what had become of the infant. Alzena killed the girl-child as she began to cry..

Fariji looked right at them. What’ did he see? Her knife was spelled with unmagic, like the, sword she now drew from, the sheath on, her back, Rokat wouldn’t see the blade, only his little girl as she fell over, bleeding.

He gasped and lunged for the child, just as his wife had gone for the baby.

Alzena stepped into his rush and cut at his neck, smiling. He had seen his children die. That was good.

She stuffed his head into her carry-pouch and turned to regard the woman and the maid. They stared at Fariji Rokat’s headless body, screaming. Alzena hesitated.

Was the woman pregnant again? She was young; they had seemed much in love.

No use taking chances, Alzena thought, and ran the woman through. Going to the side window, she climbed out. Below her was a first-story addition to the house.

She dropped onto it with a clatter of tiles.

She felt an arrow’s bite. It took her in the calf, punching through the bulge of muscle to the other side. Alzena cursed and rolled off the tile roof. She landed easily on the pile of hay that lay on the ground, waiting for the servants to cover the garden for the winter. More arrows flew around her—the quick-witted archer was shooting fast, trying to hit what he couldn’t see. She waited until a man ran out the back door, then slipped into the Rokat house. The real servants had been sent away—only warriors in street clothes were here now, and most of them were running upstairs in answer to the nursemaid’s shrieks,.

In the room near the front door Alzena stopped to deal with her injury. First she broke off the arrowhead, then yanked the shaft from her leg. Both went into her carry-pouch with the head; she dared not leave them for any harrier-mages to use. There was some blood, not a lot, and most was going into her boot. If she tried to bandage it here, people would see the bandage apparently floating in midair outside the nothingness spells.

She limped out of the house and into the street. The roughs were still fighting.

From the sounds that came from Cod Alley, the fire was out of control. She hobbled down Tapestry Lane, shaking her head.

There ought to be fun in this victory over the hated Rokats. Even the prospect of her family’s pleasure in what she did seemed unimportant now. Before corning to the house she had worried about killing the children, but when her work got to that, she had been cold. What was the point to any of this, if she felt nothing?

After lunch, Sandry remembered that she needed some copper beads for a trim on one of her uncle’s tunics. Like any noble she could have asked the merchant, whose shop lay on Arrow Road in the eastern part of the city, to send a clerk to her with a selection, but it was too nice a day to stay indoors. The bead merchant, a woman she and Lark dealt with often, was delighted to see her, and had a dozen new types of bead to show her. With a number of packages tucked into her saddlebags, Sandry and her guards turned back toward Duke’s Citadel. They decided to crosstown on Yanjing Street rather than tangle in the afternoon crowds on streets like Harbor, Gold, and Spicer. They were a block west of Market Square when Kwaben pointed out a billow of smoke ahead, marking a fire.

As they rode closer—the blaze was on one of the little streets that emptied onto Yanjing—they began to hear talk A bunch of drunks brawling had started it, some people argued. Others said that Provost’s Guards were protecting a merchant from assassins, and the killers had started the fire.

Hearing that, Sandry and her guards followed the gossip past the alley where the fire was and onto Tapes try Lane. The Provosts Guards had set wooden barri cades there. Inside them a group of tavern roughs sat, faces sullen, roped together as prisoners under three Guards eyes. Another Guard questioned a young woman in a nursemaid’s cap and apron who sat on the steps to a house. She rocked back and forth, weeping, scarlet hands pressed to her face.

The Provosts Guards would have liked to keep Sandry outside the barriers on both ends of the street, but they couldn’t refuse a noble who was also a mage.

Grudgingly they let her through. Passing the barricade, Sandry glimpsed dark smears on the steps and walkway before the house where the guard questioned the nurse maid. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

She: dismounted and took her mage’s kit’ out of a saddlebag. Then she backed Russet to the other side of the barrier, blocking Kwaben and,Oamawhen they would have followed. “Stay there.,”’ Sandry told them. ‘“There’s something I need to see.”

“My lady,” protested Oama.

Sandry shook her head.. “I’ll be within view unless I go inside—and, there’s plenty of provost’s folk, about, aren’t there? Sandry looked at the female Guard holding the barricade, who nodded. “So inside I’ll be safe, too. The fewer people who walk around here, the better. Close up,” she ordered the Guard.

The woman swung the barricade into place. “I don’t know that you should monkey about here, my lady,” she said, eyeing Sandry’s kit with mistrust.

“Master Wulfric Snaptrap will vouch for me,” Sandry replied, though she wasn’t sure of that at all. What she was sure of was that those smears of darkness, if they were the same as those on Guryil and Lebua the night before, had to be protected until Snaptrap could look at them himself. Does this stuff rub off on people? she wondered, approaching the Rokat house slowly, inspecting the ground before her and on either side. Would it stick to anyone as it had to Lebua and Gury? She couldn’t take a chance on whether it might or might not.

She reached the house without seeing any smears between it and Yanjing Street.

“So far, so good,” she murmured.

The Guard who spoke to the crying nursemaid turned away from the woman in disgust. He looked at Sandry. “Who let you in?” he growled.

Tin Sandrilene faToren, the duke’s great-niece,” she said, examining the steps for dark smears. A number of them stretched from the door along one side of the steps to disappear under the sobbing woman. Sandry glanced at her and swallowed hard. The woman’s hands, which from a distance looked as red as paint or dye could make them, were covered in blood. Her cap, apron, skirt, and blouse were splotched and her shoes nearly black with it.

Sandry took a breath to clear her head of the giddiness of shock, thinking, I have got to get smelling salts. To the unhappy Guardsman she said, “Can she move? There are signs of magic here, and she’s sitting right on them.”

“Of course there’s magic,” said the Guard bitterly. “Murdering beasts walk by twenty-four of us to hack up four people, two of them kids—you bet there’s magic in it,” He bent down and gripped the woman by the elbows, lifting her, “Up, wench—you’re sitting on magic.”

Sandry stared at him. “Two kids?” she asked, horrified.

“Two little ones. This girl was their nurse,” explained the Guard. “Says they all died in front of her, and she didn’t see what done it.”

Sandry met his eyes. “She probably didn’t,” she whispered.

“I know,” replied the man, grim-faced. “Story’s too stupid to be true elsewise.”

“You’ll have to take my word for this,” Sandry told him, “but I can see traces of the magic they used to hide themselves. It conies straight down these steps from the house, and goes that way,” She pointed down the street. “I’m going to cover it, to protect it, till your harrier-mages can see it.”

The Guard raised his eyebrows. “That’s right sensible of your ladyship,” he said, his manner more respectful than it had been earlier. “Go ahead, do it.”

In her kit she normally kept a number of spelled cloth squares she could use to handle things she didn’t want to touch with bare skin. She used some on the marks on the steps between the door and the street, then warned the Guards in the house away from the broad streaks she could see on the wall beside the door.

They wouldn’t let her inside. Sandry accepted that and followed the marks down the street instead, covering each with a cloth square and murmuring the words that would start its protective spell. Anyone about to touch one of those squares would instantly want not to. They’d want to get away from the square and whatever it covered.

She ran out of them where the marks turned onto the walkway. Now what? she thought, looking at the smears: they led straight toward the far barricade. The more she saw, the stronger was her urge to cover them, to protect others from them, but she had never imagined a situation where she’d need more than fifteen of her cloths. She supposed she could send her guards to a cloth merchant. The problem with that was that she would have to wait here idly, while anything might happen to the un protected marks.

Sandry turned to look at the house, and heard a rustle—her own clothes. Of course! she thought, triumphant. She wore a silk undershirt beneath her blouse and tunic, and long silk breeches under her wide-legged pants. They wouldn’t let her in the house to remove her underclothes, but there was no need to go indoors, if she managed things properly.

She spread her magic into her underthings. It only took a breath of time to make everything she wore at tuned to her and her power. Within a second breath, she felt material slide as stitches pulled out of seam’s. Her top slid under her waistband, rolling to form a snake of silk that wriggled down one leg of her breeches and out. Next she undid the stitches in her under-breeches, letting the cloth pull apart into its separate pieces. She felt silk gliding down her legs and bent over. The pieces crawled into her hands, one pant leg at a time. She looked reproach fully at them: the threads that secured her delicate lace to the cloth had refused to give up their treasure.

Now she told them silently. The threads resisted a moment longer, then glided out of the cloth. The lace bands, rolled themselves up neatly, until Sandry could put them into her pockets. She could always sew the lace onto new underthings.

There was a pair of scissors in her mage’s kit. Sandry used them to cut up the panels of her silk underclothes. She returned to work, placing the new squares over the marks on the ground, then sketching the signs for protection, and, avoidance that would, keep them safe. It took a little longer than using the ready-made cloths had done, but it was basic magic. She worked it quickly.

Her third rough-and-ready square was down when she noticed a black rim to the next mark on the flag stones. She drew closer, puzzled: what was it? This stuff was of the real world, not the magical one. It was just a thin stripe, outlining what looked like the side of a shoe. After a moment’s thought, Sandry covered the entire thing. She then made her silk arch and stiffen like a bowl over the mark. She didn’t want anything to touch that outline until the harriers saw it.

The next unmagic smear was clean—no dark rim. The one after it was not. Again, Sandry protected it with raised silk, and went on to the next. It was clean; the one after showed a heavier outline. Now she was certain: this was blood. The killer who cloaked himself in the absence of all things—unmagic, Wulfric had called it—was hurt.

On down the street she went, past the second barricade. The blood rim began to fade at that point: the killer must have bandaged his wound, though bloody traces still remained around the dark magic. Ten yards from the barricade, at the intersection with Silver Street, the marks ended. Sandry put her hands on her hips and glared at the last visible smear of unmagic. She didn’t think the traffic on this larger street would have rubbed out all trace of those marks, so what had happened?

“Looks to me like he, or she, got took up—horse or cart,” a crisp Namornese voice said at her shoulder. Sandry looked up at Wulfric Snaptrap. “You did nice work here,” he added, pointing back down Tapestry Lane. Behind him two other Provost’s Guards who wore the white trim of mages nodded eagerly. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant. They both carried heavy bags over their shoulders.