Masques (3 page)

He waited for them to leave. Tonight, he thought hopefully. Tonight would be the third night he’d spent here, maybe it would be the last. But part of him knew better, knew just how long it took for a body to die of thirst or of hunger. He was too strong yet. It would be tomorrow, at the soonest.

He’d distracted himself with the hope of death, and only the sound of the woman’s feet told him that she’d approached. He opened his eyes to see a sturdily built woman, plain of face except for her large sea-green eyes, leaning over the edge of the pit. She wore the uniform of the mercenaries, and there were calluses and mud on her hands.

He didn’t want to see her eyes, didn’t want to feel interest in her at all. He only wanted her to leave him alone so he could die.

“Plague them all,” she said, her voice tight and angry. Then her voice softened to a croon. “How long have you been here, love?”

The wolf recognized the threat of the knife she held as she slid down the far side of the pit to stand, one foot on either side of his hips. He growled, rolling off his side in preparation to get up—because he’d forgotten he wanted to die. Just for a moment. He shook from exertion, sickness, and from the pain of moving his leg. He lay back down again and flattened his ears.

“Shh,” she crooned, inexplicably sheathing her knife in the face of his aggression. “Not so long as all that, apparently. Now what shall I do about you?”

Go away,
he thought. He growled at her with as much threat as he could, feeling his lips peel back from his fangs and the hair rise along his spine.

The expression on her face was not the one that he’d expected. Certainly not one any sane person would turn on a threatening wolf she was standing over. She should fear him.

Instead . . . “Poor thing,” she said in that same crooning tone. “Let’s get you out of this, shall we?”

She dropped her gaze away from his and knelt to examine his hips, humming softly as she moved closer.

She didn’t stink of fear, was all he could think. Everyone feared him. Everyone. Even
Him
, even the one who searched. She smelled of horse, sweat, and something sweet. No fear.

He snarled, and she wrapped one hand over his muzzle. Sheer astonishment stopped his growls. Just how stupid was she?

“Shh.” Her voice blended into the music she was making, and he realized that her humming was pulling magic out of the ground around and beneath them. “Let me look.”

He was as surprised at himself as he was at her when he let her do just that. He could have torn out her throat or broken her neck while she examined every inch of him. But he didn’t—and he wasn’t quite certain why not.

It wasn’t that killing her would bother him. He’d killed a lot of people. But that was before. He didn’t want to do that anymore. So perhaps that was part of it.

He knew she was trying to help him—but he didn’t want help. He wanted to die.

Her magic swept over and around him, cushioning him. The wolf whined softly and relaxed, leaving the mage in him fully in charge for the first time since the illness had hit. Maybe even longer ago than that.

Her magic didn’t work on the mage because he knew what it was—and, he admitted to himself, because it wasn’t coercive magic. He was mage enough to read her intent. She didn’t want the wolf to become a lapdog but only to relax.

But the woman’s helpful intent wasn’t why he didn’t kill her. Not the real reason. He hadn’t been interested in anything in longer than he could remember, but she made him curious. He’d only ever met a practitioner of green magic, wild magic, once before. They hid from the humans in the land—if there were any still left. But here was one wearing the clothes of a mercenary.

She could pick him up—which surprised him because she didn’t weigh much more than he did. But she couldn’t hoist him high enough to reach the edge of the trap, so she set him down again.

“Going to need some help,” she told him, and clambered to the top. She almost didn’t make it out of the pit herself; if it had been round, she wouldn’t have.

When she departed and took her magic with her, it left him bereaved—as if someone had covered him with a blanket, then removed it. And only when she left did he realize that her music had deadened his pain and soothed him, despite his being a mage on his guard against it.

He heard the horse move and the sound of leather and something heavy hitting the ground. The horse approached the pit and stopped.

When the mercenary who could do green magic hopped back into his almost grave, she had a rope in her hand.

He waited for the wolf to stir as she tied him in a makeshift harness that somehow managed to brace his bad leg. But the wolf waited as meekly as a lamb while she worked. When he was trussed up to her satisfaction, she climbed back out.

“Come on, Sheen,” she told someone. Possibly, he thought, it was the horse.

The trip out of the hole was not pleasant. He closed his eyes and let the pain take him where it would. When he lay on the ground at last, she untied him.

Freed at last, he lay where he had fallen, too weak to run. Maybe too curious as well.

ONE

Aralorn paced, her heart beating with nervous energy.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She intended to sneak in as a servant—she was good at being a servant, and people talked in front of servants as if they weren’t there at all. But then there had been that slave girl, freshly sold to the very Geoffrey ae’Magi whose court Aralorn was supposed to infiltrate and observe . . .

Maybe if the slave girl hadn’t had the gray-green eyes of the old races, eyes Aralorn shared, she wouldn’t have given in to impulse. But it had been easy to free the girl and send her off with connections who would see her safely back to her home—proof that though she had lived in Sianim all these years, Aralorn was still Rethian enough to despise slavery. It was even easier to use the magic of her mother’s people to rearrange her body and her features to mimic the girl and take her place.

She hadn’t realized that slaves could be locked away until they were needed; she’d assumed she’d have work to do. It was well-known that the Archmage’s passions were reserved for magic, and he seldom indulged in more fleshly pleasures. She’d figured that the girl had been purchased to
do
something—not sit locked in a room for weeks.

Aralorn had been just about ready to escape and try again using a different identity when she’d been brought up to the great hall of the ae’Magi’s castle four days ago and put into the huge silver cage.

“She’s to be decoration for the ball,” said the servant who put her in the cage, in response to another servant’s question. “It won’t be for a week yet, but he wanted her here so he could see the decorations and her at the same time.”

Decoration. The ae’Magi had purchased a slave to decorate his great hall.

It had seemed out of character for the Archmage, Aralorn had thought. It took more than power to become the ae’Magi. The man or woman who wore that mantle of authority was, in his peers’ eyes, a person of unassailable virtue. Only such a one could be allowed the reins to control all of the mages—at least all those west of the Great Swamp—so there was never again a wizard war. Purchasing a person in order to use her as decoration seemed . . . petty for such a one as the ae’Magi. Or so she’d thought.

Four days ago.

Aralorn shivered. Her shoes made no sound on the marble beneath her feet, not that anyone would have been able to hear them over the music.

Beyond the silver bars of her cage, the great hall of the ae’Magi’s castle was resplendent. By reputation, if not fact, the room was nearly a thousand years old, kept beautiful by good maintenance and judicious replacement rather than magic.

Though this room was the heart of the ae’Magi’s home, by tradition no magic was to be done here. This was the place the rulers of men conducted business with the ae’Magi, and the lack of magic proved to one and all that there was no magical coercion taking place. Aralorn now knew that the current ae’Magi didn’t particularly care about following tradition, and coercion was something he used . . . on everyone.

That first day, she’d been shocked when the stone beneath her feet vibrated with magic. She looked out at the room. Ten centuries old, or at least ten centuries of care and careful preservation by the finest craftsmen available. And the ae’Magi had saturated the stone with magic. No one would think to check, would they? And if they did, they’d just suspect another ae’Magi, an earlier one, because Geoffrey ae’Magi would never defy tradition.

This evening it was lavishly decorated for the pleasure of the people who danced lightly across the floor. Late-afternoon rays of sunlight streamed through the tear-shaped crystal skylights etched on the soaring ceilings. Pale pillars dripped down to the highly polished ivory-colored marble floor that reflected the jewel-like colors of the dancers’ clothing.

Aralorn’s cage sat on a raised platform on the only wall of the room that lacked a doorway. From that perch, she could observe the whole room and be observed in return. Or rather they could see the illusion that the ae’Magi had placed on the cage.

Instead of the tall, white-blond woman that the ae’Magi had purchased to decorate his great hall with her extraordinary beauty, observers would see a snowfalcon as rare and beautiful, the ae’Magi had told her, as his slave, but not so controversial. Some people, he’d told her, licking blood off his hands, disliked slavery, and he disliked controversy.

He’d decorated the room around his slave for his own amusement. Disguising her as a rare predator was simply a joke played upon the people who’d come here for entertainment.

A chime sounded, announcing new visitors. Aralorn hugged herself as the ae’Magi greeted his guests with a warm smile. He’d smiled that same smile last night while he’d killed a young boy and stolen his magic.

The stone floor had been red with blood, but it wiped up cleanly, and only someone able to sense magic might notice the pall that unclean death had left. Or not. The ae’Magi was the lord of mages, after all, and they could only use their powers to the extent he allowed.

She was scaring herself again—that was really not useful at all. Biting her lip, Aralorn gazed at the dancing nobles in an effort to distract herself. She matched names and countries to the dancers’ faces with the ease that made her the valuable spy she was.

The ae’Magi had killed an old man, an old man without a spark of magic—human or green—about him and used the power of the death to turn the walls of the great hall a sparkling white. “An illusion,” he’d told her. “It takes some power, and I don’t like to use my own when I might need it at any time.”

That had been the first night. On the second, he’d brought a man—one of his own guardsmen. With that blood, the ae’Magi had worked some magic so foul that the taste of it lingered on Aralorn’s skin still.

The boy had been the worst. Only a child, and . . .

Dozens of the rulers of the kingdoms of the Anthran Alliance were present. Some of them had been members of the Alliance for centuries, others were newer than that. The Empress of the Alliance wasn’t here, but she was six, and her guardians kept a sharp eye on her lest any of her subjects decided to make her cousin the new empress instead. Just because they were allied didn’t mean they were loyal subjects. The squabbles among the Alliance helped keep the coffers of Sianim full.

Gradually, she managed to replace the boy’s dead eyes with dates and politics, but she still paced her cage restlessly. It wasn’t just the horror of her discovery of exactly what kind of man held the power of the ae’Magi that kept her from sitting down—it was fear. The ae’Magi scared her to death.

There was a kaleidoscopic quality to the dance: the brilliant colors of the rich fabrics twisting around and around only to stop, rearrange themselves, and swirl into motion once again. More like a clockwork than a dance populated by real people. Perhaps it was a side effect of all the magic. Or maybe it was deliberate, the ae’Magi amusing himself. He liked to make people unwittingly do his bidding.

She saw the Duchess of Ti and the Envoy of the Anthran Alliance dancing cordially with each other. Ten years ago, the Envoy had had the Duchess’s youngest son assassinated, sparking a bloody feud that left bodies littering the Alliance like a plague.

The Envoy said something and patted the Duchess’s shoulder. She laughed gaily in return as if she hadn’t had the Envoy’s third wife killed in a particularly nasty manner only a month ago. She might have thought it a clever ruse designed to put the other off guard, but the Envoy was not particularly politic or clever. Aralorn wondered if the effect of whatever spell the ae’Magi had apparently cast upon his guests was specific to them and whether it would last beyond this evening. Just how powerful was he?

When the musicians paused for a break, people crowded around the Archmage, Geoffrey ae’Magi, drawn to his twinkling eyes and mischievous grin the way butterflies surround the flowering coralis tree. When a butterfly landed on the sweet-smelling scarlet flower of the coralis, the petals closed, and the flower digested its hapless prey over a period of weeks.