Sourcethief (Book 3) (32 page)

"That right there ... you never make that
exchange," Kyrus said as Rashan removed his light-squared bishop from the
board. Kyrus's move to capture Rashan's knight was obvious. "And it was
the right move, not just copying my style without understanding it."

"You got in and pillaged Caladris's offices
before I got around to it. You got to suck all the sweet nectar out, but the
husk of what remained was not devoid of interest," Rashan said. He paused
and leaned across the board. "Caladris was writing a book on chess."

The next hours were lost in combat. Rashan's
understanding of the game had clearly grown reading Caladris's explanations of
Acardian theories. While Kyrus had never seen the notes Rashan referred to, he
knew he was seeing Rashan play Lord Harwick's game. The warlock was new at the
differing style, but it was an improvement on his typical play.

"So why are you so resistant to becoming part
of the Inner Circle?" Rashan asked after making a play. Brannis's matches
had been much the same with Lord Harwick: idle time filled with idle words. At
least, they had been largely idle coming from Lord Harwick's mouth. From Rashan
there was always the risk of a fork in the conversation leading down a
treacherous road.
Truth, but with the best bits snipped out
, Kyrus
reminded himself.

"A lot of reasons," Kyrus hedged. He took
his mind free of the board for a moment, turning his attention instead to the
question. It was not as if chess required a hurried decision. "I suppose
most of them come down to being responsible for my own choices. The Inner
Circle has made a muck of so many things. Even if it is just a few of them, all
get spattered with the same ink. For good or ill, people see my actions and
judge them, but at least they are mine."

"Those creaky old men thought they ruled the
empire instead of serving it. With the exception of Fenris, they are gone now.
It is a new day for the Circle," Rashan countered.

"Like every new day, the sun rises and sets. It
is as likely to bear storm clouds as any other. Just look at the character you
are seeking among the new blood: four thinkers, likely as not to be scheming
behind every action they take; four power-hungry, with just as many schemes but
no subtlety to hide them; four would-be bullies, strongest in the empire. Oh,
there is overlap among the groups, but that is the sum of it. Why should you
expect them to do better than the last group? It just might take them longer to
create their tangle of lies and plots."

"You seem young to be so cynical. It serves you
well as the emperor's proxy, no doubt, but you might worry yourself to an early
death in the process. The Inner Circle could help bear some of the weight you
carry," Rashan said.

Kyrus let the comment simmer a while as he looked
once more to the chessboard. The simplicity of the unquestioning pieces seemed
to drain his worries away. The knights wanted nothing more than to jump a space
over and one to the diagonal. The bishops only needed a path along one color of
squares. The rooks ... did not go running off to get themselves killed.
Iridan
called me "rookish" once. It fit him better. A piece with too high an
opinion of its own power. Not a queen, but more than a knight.

"Why does it matter so much to you?" Kyrus
asked. He moved a rook, a play he had in mind for some time. "You could
run the empire without them. You might manage it better without dubious help
you got from the last bunch."

"Well, that much is certainly true. I suppose
if this lot does the same I can replace them as well."

"There you go," Kyrus pointed across the
board. "Another perfect reason not to throw my lot in with them."

"Come now, what sort of fool do you think
me?" Rashan asked. "I would sooner try my luck in the Dragonlands.
Once we get you to the point where you are more a danger to our enemies than
those around you, you will be the best weapon the empire has."

What if a weapon is too dangerous
to you to keep alive?
Kyrus somehow doubted that Rashan would take well to a subordinate role. With
the emperor, Rashan could always refuse an order with no real threat of
consequence. Were Kyrus to become the more powerful, Rashan would grow to
resent him.

Despite improvements in his game, Rashan was still
no Lord Harwick. Kyrus had been initially caught off guard by the new style of
play, but he had worked the game so that he could force a draw, and lock the
game up hopelessly. A new game would be required to resolve the contest of who
would go to Ghelk.

Kyrus took a deep breath. He stared unfocused at the
pieces on the board.
I am trying to win but why? Do I
want
to go to
Ghelk? The best I could hope for would be to kill Jinzan.
As much as he
distrusted the pirate and wanted the staff, Kyrus could not bring himself to
compete for the chance to slay him.

Kyrus made an aggressive move that would keep the game
from stagnating. He devised a convoluted attack that would be brilliant if
Rashan made two or three key errors. He trusted that either the demon would
fail to make them, or that he could find some way to make a blunder himself
without being obvious about it.

"Well, that felt good," Rashan said a
while later as Kyrus tipped his king over in admission of defeat.

"So is there anything you need me to see to
while you are away?" Kyrus asked.

"Nothing that I can think of offhand. I am sure
you can manage well enough without me for a few days."

"Just in case, bring Faolen with you. You can
send messages through Varnus," Kyrus said. Rashan had been gazing down at
the army of defeated white pieces, still gloating to himself. Kyrus's
suggestion brought his focus back to the matter at hand.

"You," Rashan shook a finger toward Kyrus,
"are starting to think like a twinborn master of spies. Very well, we can
keep in contact via Faolen and Varnus."

"Good," Kyrus replied.

* * * * * * *
*

The
Starlit Marauder
hung in the sky, a blot
against a starry night, too high for any arrow to reach. Only Juliana was
aboard; Tiiba’s family had been delivered safely to a remote village in the
hills where they could hide until the war ended.

In the captain's cabin, a magical light pushed the
darkness back into the corners of the room. Juliana sat with a book in her lap,
open to the first page. She stared at the page a long while, trying to come up
with an excuse not to follow through on her promise to read it. She could feel
Brannis's arms around her as he lay in bed with Soria, both of them awake and
waiting. Every reason she could think of for Soria to give Brannis as to why he
should not hear the contents of the book sounded pitiful, even to her own ears.
Brannis would see them for what they were; he knew her too well.

Juliana closed her eyes and took a few long, deep
breaths. She opened them again, and directed them down toward the first words
on the page, hand-written in an ancient dialect, still recognizable as Kadrin,
though just barely. As her eyes observed, Soria's lips spoke aloud:

Whosoever readst these wordes,
knowe thou that they be true. I hast borne witness to thee grate deedes of
Mightee Tallax and taken to accounte the wordes and lettres of he who hast
spake true to mine selfe. Herein I removed all falsehoode and deceit that I
hast founde and left naut butte truth.

Thee birthe of Mightee Tallax
hast been of such legende as I canne trace unto truth. He was a firste sonne of
two low borne folke...

"...he was a first son of two low-born
folk." Soria stumbled over the words just a bit as she spoke them.

"Is it even written in Kadrin?" Brannis
asked. Soria's Kheshi accent was coming through clearly. While it sounded
charming and exotic most of the time, it did not make her any easier to
understand.

"Well, after a fashion. It's really old, and I
don't think they had the language quite figured out back then. I think they
were making up spellings as they went along."

Brannis smiled. He had come across older works
during his ventures into the Tower of Contemplation's libraries, and had had
the same troubles slogging through them, reading familiar words spelled rather
more phonetically than properly in modern Kadrin.

"Go ahead, keep reading. I won't keep
interrupting," Brannis said. He lay propped on one elbow beside Soria, who
lay back with a vacant look in her eyes. Brannis knew she was seeing Veydrus
more than the cabin around her.

"Three brothers had he, and two sisters after.
The land in which they lived exists no longer. In their day it was called
Rreise and was ruled by dragons. It was common in those times for the dragons
to cull they who showed too strong a Source among their mortal subjects.

"The parents of Mighty Tallax, who had yet to
earn such glorious title, saw early the peril of the power that grew within
him. Before the agents of the dragon had found out their nascent doom, Tallax
was taken in flight and brought to live among the forest spirits. Among the fey
of the woodlands did he first learn the rudiments of the aether ..."

Soria read on for much of the morning, pausing
frequently—sometimes because a spelling was just too bizarre to read at a
glance, other times just to quench the thirst of lengthy oration. Though the
biography read more like a fairy story for children than the life of a real
person, its veracity had been endorsed by two who knew him and whose purported
ages lent weight to their testimony.

The book went into the minor details of Tallax's
childhood before describing his rise to power. It told of his rebellion against
dragonkind and how he single-handedly slew so many of the great beasts that
they sued for peace, offering vast lands and gold in exchange for their lives.
Thus were established the earliest of human kingdoms, all under Tallax's
protection.

A student of history, Brannis found it all
fascinating. To his chagrin, he would not hear the whole tale in one night.

"Sorry," Soria apologized, "Juliana
is about ready to plant her face in that book and I don't want to be
responsible for damaging a hundreds-of-years-old copy of a
thousands-of-years-old book. I can feel it too, but it's her eyes that are
burning and going blurry. I ... I need to walk out on deck and get some
air."

"Fair's fair. You've done more than enough. We
can pick back up tomorrow," Brannis assured her.

She cocked her head and gave him a sidelong look.
"Maybe aftermorrow. I can't do that everyday. It's exhausting keeping my
attention in both worlds like that."

"You sure you just don't want me to hear it
all?" Brannis teased. He reached out and touched her arm as she rose to
get dressed.

"I just want this whole business done with. If
you think it's going to take hearing every last bit of that dratted book to do
it, so be it. I'm not going to fly around in that airship all by myself forever
you know. Sooner or later I'm coming back to get you. I just want you ready to
go," Soria said. Sliding away from Brannis, she resumed her belated
morning routine.

"Well, sooner or later, I will be. Then you can
have me all to yourself," Brannis said. He smiled at her and she mirrored
him. "That, or I'll end up dead."

A crosswind raked the deck of the
Luminous
,
sending her crew to grab for the nearest handholds in the overhead netting
draped there to keep them from flying overboard. Though his hair whipped and
his cloak snapped, Rashan appeared oblivious to the conditions. He clung by one
hand to the outside of the netting, leaning well over the side of the airship
to view the ground below.

The countryside was green and fresh, and the trees
had thinned since passing over the Ogrelands and into Ghelk. Tall prairie
grasses waved in the same wind that buffeted the
Luminous
, following the
roll of the hills. The wind brought everything to life.
And somewhere down
there is a man who would kill every last bit of it if it killed me as well
.

Rashan watched shadows shrink into valleys as the
morning progressed. Bits of faded geography played themselves out in the
demon's head as they advanced toward Lon Mai—the Ghelkan capital. He tried to
estimate the time it would take them but could do no better than
"soon."

When the noontime sun settled above them, Rashan
watched with amusement as the ship's shadow cavorted over the hillside,
frantically keeping pace as it hugged the ground. The distraction diverted his
attention such that he was not the one who first saw the skyline appear ahead
of them. "Ahead, the city!" came the cry from the lookout. Rashan
turned his attention to the thin, delicate spires of Lon Mai, a city he had
once feared to approach. Heavens Cry itched in its scabbard.

No longer
, Rashan thought. He swung about
on the netting, facing the crew stationed on deck.

"Bring us in fast and low," he ordered.
"Below the tops of those towers and just above the rooftops, if you can
manage that. Once I am clear, head skyward and do not return for me until
nightfall."
That ought to be long enough to settle things
.

The city wall of Lon Mai was a border more than a
defense. It stood but twice the height of a man and was quarried of some
pinkish stone. The
Luminous
hurtled toward it, not bothering to slow.

Rashan had spent the morning distracted by the
scenery, lost in the light vision. The wall defenses being more than a simple
shield around the stone caught him off guard. Lightning crackled along the hull
of the
Luminous
and vine-like tendrils lashed out at her rigging,
catching hold and trying to tear the ship to pieces. Ropes snapped and sails
tore as every piece of aeronautical equipment Kyrus had devised was subjected
to forces far beyond what he had anticipated.

The
Luminous
lurched in its flight, momentum
alone enough to tear it free of its entanglements, but at a terrible cost. The
airship was not so far above the rooftops of the nearest buildings when it
cleared the wall. Crippled and hurtling out of control, there was little hope
of avoiding a crash. All about him, men screamed, though it did them little
good. Rashan was far more practical; letting go of the rigging, he hopped away
from the doomed craft.

The warlock lighted on a conical rooftop of red clay
tiles, one of a thousand or more that spread across Lon Mai, and watched as the
Luminous
slammed into a residence. "Why do we even bother naming
the things anymore?" Rashan shook his head.

The streets of Lon Mai were far less crowded than
Zorren had been when Rashan had first crashed an airship there and practically
deserted by the standards of Kadris. Still, the sudden appearance of a Kadrin
airship, followed immediately thereafter by a spectacular crash, was enough to
set off a panic. Citizens ran from the area: some screaming, others managing to
flee with rather more decorum and practical haste. Another group, a dozen or so
lightly armed city guards, rushed toward the wreckage.

Rashan watched for a moment before moving.
This
is beneath me
, he thought. But there was something galling about leaving
the ship's bones to be picked over by Ghelkan vultures. Before further
introspection threatened to bog him down, Rashan stepped from the roof,
dropping three stories to the ground, and slid Heavens Cry free of its sheath.
He hit the ground in stride, and set off at a jog, eager to interrupt the
search of the
Luminous
before anything of use could be found.

* * * * * * *
*

Rashan climbed over the splintered remains of the
ship's hull and the fresh corpses of Ghelkan city guardsman. It had been
unsporting slaughtering men better armed to quell marketplace brawls and haul
drunkards out of taverns than to face off against real soldiers, let alone a
warlock. Still, they had needed to be killed, and no one else was about to do
it for him.

Rashan had been surprised upon eliminating the last
of them, to find a live Source about. In the commotion, he had overlooked a
survivor amid the remains of the
Luminous
.

"Come on out of there. Is that you,
Thearax?" Rashan asked as he tossed aside timbers. The broken wards, still
glowing weirdly in their misshapen arrangements, obscured a proper view, but
the Source was strong without a doubt. It had to be the ship's sorcerer, one
Thearax Dellanter, Fifth Circle.

"Yes. Is that you, Warlock Rashan?"
Thearax responded. "You know I cannot see you in the aether."

"Who else carries a rune-forged blade
about?"

"Point taken." In the ensuing pause, the
only sounds that could be heard were the shifting of debris and the citizenry as
they fled.

Rashan found Thearax huddled under a beam with a
hand shielding his face from the light that had suddenly intruded on his
shelter. The boards dripped with blood. As if only just realizing his
situation, the rescued sorcerer swiveled his head back and forth, taking stock
of his surroundings with eyes wide in horror, and then vomited.

As Rashan watched, Thearax, an esteemed member of
the Imperial Circle, emptied his stomach, overcome by the carnage around him.
The warlock was still supporting a section of the hull that he had lifted in
his search. With a sigh, he dropped it and climbed back down the wreckage.

"Useless ..." he muttered, and left poor
Thearax to his fate.

* * * * * * *
*

The streets of Lon Mai were deserted along Rashan's
path. It was a large enough city, especially by Ghelkan standards, and the
demon found himself impressed by the organization and discipline that it must
have taken to evacuate so quickly. Little round houses stood with doors ajar,
with not a Source to be found larger than a housecat. Stables were emptied.
Market stalls were vacant. Rashan found himself strolling, looking about for
signs of what might have become of the populace, his greater task set
momentarily aside.

Occasional glimpses of the hilltop palace spires kept
him wandering in approximately his intended direction. Old maps in Kadris had
described the city much the way he was finding it to be.

"Have I become predictable?" Rashan
wondered aloud. There was no one else about to overhear him so it seemed safe
to voice his musings. "They were prepared for an airship to cross the
wall. They cannot have had a city full of people when I arrived; any magic that
could have gotten them away so quickly would not have escaped my notice."
Unless
she
was helping them
. He could not bring himself to voice the
thought that other immortals might be taking sides in the war.

By the time he arrived at the manicured archway
hedge that opened into the graveyard, he had put aside his more fanciful fears
in favor of the practical reality that he was perhaps walking into a trap. By
whatever means, be it espionage or deduction, his arrival had been anticipated.
I suppose spying on the boy might have been too blunt. It appears to have
shaken them more than I had expected.

Though the graveyard was well tended with white and
pink flowers growing between the graves, the graves themselves were freshly
disturbed. Rashan had not been around when Loramar's works were demolished, so
he did not know who had been interred in the graveyard near the Palace of Four
Hills. He suspected that the cultists who kept the traditions of the Grand
Necromancer had laid in a stockpile of willing slaves for the next necromancer
to follow the old master's path.

Aether around the graveyard was scant. The foul,
dead aether that wafted from fresh corpses had long since faded from the place.
Somewhere below, Axterion had told him, lay the only known crypt of Loramar's
followers that the Imperial Circle had spared. Rashan was searching for the
mausoleum that housed the entrance when a glimmer in the aether caught his eye.
It was faint but he knew it to be a Source. Someone was playing hiding games,
the old trick every child learned playing on the Academy grounds: hiding your
Source by matching your draw with your own output of aether. Someone was trying
that very trick not far from him.

Rashan paused a moment, dismissing the shielding
spell he kept by force of habit about his person. He stuck Heavens Cry into the
soft soil of a bed of tulips and left it behind. "You want to see a
champion at hiding in the aether?" he asked in a whisper. "Play
against a demon."

He stalked toward the mausoleum where he had caught
sight of the stray hints of aether betraying a Source. The door was closed but
worn. Many hands had handled it—too many for a common tomb. He ripped the door
open, tearing it free of its hinges and tossing it aside. Within he saw a
sickly Ghelkan cringe and turn away, raising his arms to fend off a foe he
could not see.

"Ah, I see the eyeless servants have not passed
into history quite yet," Rashan said, looking into the vacant sockets that
stared up in vain.

"What manner of monster are you?" the
eyeless man asked, crouching low and leaning against the wall.

"I suppose your new savior failed to mention
that I am a demon. A pity. There were already going to be so many nasty
surprises for him even with all his minions prepared." Rashan reached down
and grabbed the man by the throat. Primal instincts cause any man thus caught
to grapple to free himself. As the man clutched at Rashan's hand, trying to pry
loose fingers that dug deep enough to threaten his life, Rashan used the grip
to haul him to his feet.

There was a stairway down to the crypts below, and
Rashan wasted no time in dragging his captive down them. The man gasped and
sputtered and tried to get his feet under him, but Rashan kept up a pace down
the stairs that made doing so impossible. The eyeless captive's heels bounced
along at each step.

At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor was filled
with eyes dangling like bloated grapes from their chains. "Quite the place
you have here. I can only imagine the restraint Axterion must have needed to
leave it standing. I would have gutted it with fire, caved the walls in and
felt all the better for it." With a wave of his free hand, Rashan sent a
wash of flames over the chains and burned them clean of their gory ornaments,
which hissed and popped in protest.

The eyeless man was trying to speak. Rashan eased
his grip just enough for him to draw breath. "What is it you want here?"

"To satisfy my curiosity, mainly. It is clear
there is no necromancer here at the moment, so I plan to see what
is
here
before I revert back to the plan I mentioned earlier," Rashan replied.

"Grand Necromancer Jinzan will destroy you.
Mark my words!"

"Unlike you, I have actually met the Grand
Necromancer. I have also met your Councilor Jinzan Fehr. Do not conflate the
two. No one could gain that sort of mastery in less than a season. You sully my
greatest victory by the implication," Rashan said.

"No matter—"

With a crack, Rashan cut the eyeless man's boast
short. He dropped the corpse-worshipper's corpse to the floor.

"I quite agree: no matter."

The door at the end of the corridor was open and
looked like it had remained so since being blasted into that state. Rashan
stopped to examine the remnants of the wards that had once guarded it.
"Kadrin work," he pronounced. "Most likely Axterion's doing.
Loramar was an artisan in flesh and Source only, this is nothing like his crude
rune-work."

The insides of the crypt were ransacked, whatever
treasure had been stored within plundered. The smears of blood on incompletely
cleaned tables and floors told him that the looting had been recent, that the
facility had been in use until a day or two before. Rashan shook his head.
"I scared him off. I imagine 'Grand Necromancer' took his workshop onto
his stolen airship and fled."

Rashan raised his hands to begin burning out the
crypt when a sudden thought made his lips curl. "Oh, he had best not run
himself into Brannis's path. The last thing I need is for him to get that staff
in his hands with time alone to ponder what to do with it."

Flames roared forth all around him then, consuming
all the scraps and remnants too insignificant to have been gathered in haste.
Blasts of aether cracked the walls, sending shudders through the structure as
Rashan backed out, destabilizing everything as he left.

When he reached daylight once more, he found that
Heavens Cry had been found. Another pair of the necromancer's lackeys had
discovered it when he went below and had used the same aether trick to hide
themselves while he was distracted.