Darkborn Part 8

"I've a kidnapped child t'find."

"Kidnapped?" This in a metallic tone; languis.h.i.+ng no longer, Guillaume pulled himself upright. "Boy? Girl? How old? Sit down."

Whatever his vices and whatever his att.i.tude toward Ish, Guillaume's protectiveness toward children was relentless, for reasons preserved in crumbling broadsheets of twenty years ago and, Ish suspected, in Guillaume's nightmares and drugged dreams. Gil and his two younger sisters had been the victims of a Borders feud, kidnapped, and held for ransom. The kidnappers were killed in ambush, the children's whereabouts still unknown. When they were finally found, the little girls were dead of hunger and thirst, though the boy had, at the end, tried to feed them his own blood.

There had been a mage involved, who had entered the house as a nursery nurse. At the trial of the conspirators behind the kidnapping, she was accused of lulling the household into an unnatural sleep to enable the abduction, and of hiding the children's whereabouts from their rescuers. She was convicted of malignant sorcery and executed by blades of light.

Given that history, Ish could forgive Gil much.

"Girl, six years old. Her name is Florilinde Hearne." He paused, remembering that Vladimer had coupled Guillaume's name and Hearne's, while persuading Ish to seek Hearne's advice. "She's Balthasar Hearne's daughter."

A sharply indrawn breath. "I know that child. Where's Hearne? Does he know?"

"He's been beaten near t'death, and the child was all but torn from her mother's arms."

Guillaume said in a low growl, "Tell me."

Ish did not tender Tercelle Amberley's name, and omitted the fact that her child was twins, and that they were sighted. And, of course, he left out Telmaine's part in healing her husband. The rest he told as fully as he could without compromising any of his elisions. By the time he had finished, Guillaume was pacing and gulping coffee strong enough to rattle a skeleton's bones. Ish had set aside his own cup after a few mouthfuls out of regard for the lining of his stomach and his steady hand.

"Shame you didn't hear the other speak, because if he had maybe you'd likely have heard the sound of good breeding turned rotten. That description sounds like Melchisedoc di Palmar."

"I've heard of him," Ishmael said. A Shadowborn in Darkborn shape, by all accounts.

"I've never known him to prey on children, but I'd not think it beneath him. And I know where to find him, and that's a start." Guillaume drained the dregs and set the cup down with a thud. "Tell Hearne I'll get his Florilinde back if it's the last thing I do."

Even allowing for youthful dramatics, there was deep conviction in that vow. Ish judged it a good moment to ask, "How do you know Hearne?"

For a moment, he thought Guillaume would not answer. Then, "I fetched up more dead than alive in that clinic in the demimonde where he works. My family's physicians had long since given up on me, said I'd be dead in months. Hearne purged me, dosed me, and worked over me for the better part of three nights straight. Then he talked me into letting him try with me. That was three years ago. Some days now when I step out the door, I think there might be a future there. If there is, it's his doing."

"Then he's good at what he does?"

A crisp wash of sonn, a considering silence.

"I've a reason for asking," Ish said. "A personal reason."

"Aye, then, I'd say he's good." He turned away with another careless wave of that large, battered hand. "I'll be going out, but I'll tell Zacharias to make up the spare room. You'll do my reputation as a host no service, leaving here like misery incarnate."

How like Gil, Ish thought, regretting that he would never be able to call this man his friend. "Be careful," he said, bracing his elbow as he rose. "There are a few things I haven't been able to share with you. This could be bigger and stranger than we know."

Gil sneered. "Keep your mysteries, Magister Baron, if you must."

Magister, Ish thought, indeed indeed. The suspicion that Tercelle Amberley had been ensorcelled presented him with yet another problem, and one that belonged exclusively to the mage rather than the n.o.bleman or irregular agent. Aspects of Lady Tercelle's experience were too readily explained by magic: her abject enthrallment, and her conviction that her lover came to her through the day. By his visit, he might have set Tercelle Amberley thinking about magical influence, and if that happened, she had already proven herself ruthless in self-defense. If concealment of her childbirth were impossible, she would resort to counteraccusation, and if she did that, with her family and fiance, more mages than the guilty would fall. Society might disdain magic and shun its pract.i.tioners, but that did not mean that it would ignore the threat to its foundations of respectability and inheritance. Mage hunts and ma.s.s exposures might be in the past, but he did not want to test how far.

For the moment, however, an old Shadowhunter's common sense prevailed, the wisdom that had taught him that a tired hunter could waste more time by missing a fresh trail than he did by letting it get a little older. He'd had no sleep, he'd been expending magic, and he was injured. He prepared an urgent message to Vladimer's second in the city, asking that a watch be kept on the Hearne home, had it dispatched, and then asked to be shown the spare room. Guillaume's manservant did so, straight-faced. Alas, he and his master were to be disappointed in any mischief meant; it wasn't until Ish woke three hours later that his sonn focused well enough for him to appreciate the bed. The wood of the bedposts was expensive, the carving technique exquisite, and the carvings themselves obscene. That and the memory of that importunate kiss given-shared-in the carriage, were considerable distractions to his efforts to heal his shoulder, although the extra injection of vitality served him well in the end. He washed, pulled his freshened clothes back on, and let the sober Zacharias serve him what he supposed to be this household's idea of a light luncheon, of which he ate half and still felt overfed. Guillaume had not returned.

A cab took him to the edge of the Rivermarch and the household of Magister Farquhar Broome, most powerful of the Darkborn mages. A man of different temperament would have been archmage of the Minhorne mages, but Magister Broome had no talent for leaders.h.i.+p whatsoever, and barely enough practical sense to have escaped simple starvation in his early years. His immense natural gifts took him out of the world. Such leaders.h.i.+p as there was for the mages of the Rivermarch was provided by Broome's natural-born daughter, Phoebe, and adopted son, Phineas, two fourth-rank mages of strong character and decided-and often contentious-views. What united them, and the two or three dozen permanent members of their community, was a commitment to their kind, as teachers, guardians, and, if need be, judges.

Generations ago this part of the Rivermarch had been an exclusive area for the aristocratic Lightborn. The Broome household occupied two of those houses and still had the plain-to Darkborn senses-frontage and large, framed windows that marked the architecture as Lightborn rather than Darkborn, though the windows had been long since sealed. The front garden, well cultivated and decorous, sloped gracefully down to the river's edge, though it was constant work to keep the sh.o.r.e free of litter from the heavily used waterway. The rear garden, behind very high walls and hedges, was a shambles of experiments in cultivation and manipulation of trees, plants, and flowers, beautiful and grotesque, fragrant and rank, which pressed close around the paths and left Ishmael, even now, thoroughly spooked. Some were too reminiscent of the bizarre and dangerous vegetation that grew in the rare moist areas of the Shadowlands. On his very first visit to the household he'd emptied both revolvers into a bank of semianimate plants, thereby earning the fury of their creator and the wors.h.i.+p of the children, who talked for days about how swiftly and thoroughly he'd demolished his targets-and got him labeled a bad influence.

Therefore, he restrained his reflexes as he crossed the garden, waved to the one gardener he recognized-who, he was sure, would rapidly tell the others the essentials, plant ma.s.sacre and all-and climbed the long stairs to the back door. All across the garden, he had been sensing magic, which for him was accompanied by vertigo, though he'd heard others describing it as heat, a drone, a hum, a sense of lightness or heaviness-how the body translated the sense was entirely individual. As a weak, untrained mage, he had found the vertigo intolerable; he couldn't s.h.i.+eld himself against it, and after years as a Shadowhunter, the perturbation of his senses unnerved him. Between the intrusive sense of magic and the distraction of living in a large, roiling household after years of solitude, he had been a poor student, and the more sensitive of his fellow students were aware of the Call, and of his violent dreams, and were disturbed by both. It had been a relief to all when Phoebe Broome introduced him to the man who would become his preceptor, a phlegmatic, misanthropic mage who lived on the far side of the Rivermarch, in the old Darkborn district. Magister Perrin had explored the Shadowlands himself in his youth. He had seldom had a student, had not much idea how to teach a student, but Ish, for his part, had little idea how to be be a student, so they had improvised together. a student, so they had improvised together.

The big front hall was much as Ish remembered, walls and ceiling draped with ornamental hangings and rugs, tasteless in their abundance and smothering to sonn. Higher-rank mages forgot what it was to have to rely upon the common senses. He climbed the stairs, keeping away from the hangings: He had heard that the younger mages' love of mischief had crossbred with the prevalent fever for automata. He didn't want to enhance his reputation by a.s.sa.s.sinating a nest of mechanical spiders.

The brief mental touch was one of the children, taking liberties, and regretting them. Ishmael might lack the raw strength to s.h.i.+eld himself against mental intrusion, but he could certainly conjure up the imagery to repel intruders, and did so now as an automatic response. Aside from his own preference for keeping his unspoken thoughts to himself, his work for Vladimer brought him into possession of state secrets. If there were any capacity he envied his stronger fellow mages, it was their ability to speak to one another without touching, and without crippling themselves-an ability that would have saved lives in the hunt. When he used it, it laid him flat for days.

He heard a whisper of clothing overhead, and sonn rippled over him. He smiled, recognizing the soft step, the whisper, and the sonn. "Magistra Broome."

"Magister di Studier. Up to your usual tricks, I gather."

She alluded, he hoped, to his moving with a minimum of sonn. He imaged her standing in the doorway to the main hall, which had become the center of the household. She was a tall woman, nearly a foot taller than Ishmael himself, and extremely thin, with a long, narrow chest, and hips that were only slightly broader than a lean man's. Her head was small for her body and surprisingly delicate in its features. In her own household, her preferred attire was a man's jacket and trousers. Ish occasionally wished he could introduce her to a former transvest.i.te burlesque star he knew; Ruther would be enchanted. He hadn't dared; Magistra Broome was not one to offend, and mage or no mage, she had her own brand of conventionality.

Which, it had warmed Ish to discover, did not include hypocrisy about s.e.x. The day before he left the city, returning to the Borders for his father's last rites, she had appeared on Magister Perrin's doorstep. "I don't know when I'll get the chance again," she announced, and made the first move in what he had-embarra.s.singly belatedly-recognized as a seduction. It was the first time Ish had ever lain with a fellow mage, and it had been even more of a revelation than when he first shed his virginity.

The recollection threatened to bring Telmaine Hearne to the forefront of his mind. That must not happen in this household. The senior mages' control was exquisite and their behavior scrupulous-neither Phoebe nor Phineas would tolerate it any other way-but there were still the students, testing their boundaries. . . . He tucked the memory of her securely behind his barrier image.

Phoebe Broome took both his hands in hers. Like him, and as an example to the younger mages, she wore gloves. In her case, delicate silk gloves, sheathing her slim wrists and long tapering fingers. "I hear you've been moving in elevated circles these days."

He could not help but hear envy in her voice. Of the mages' leaders, she was the one who aspired to recognition from society, while her brother advocated separatism. Ish was quite certain that she would not have seduced him if he'd been a n.o.body from the provinces.

He didn't begrudge her her ambitions, and at times like this he regretted that he'd never be respectable enough to host a house party and let her inspect the n.o.bility for herself.

"Aye," he said. "Lord Vladimer's done some smoothing of my way, and I've been minding myself."

"No shooting out the shrubbery," she teased. A pause. "You have that air about you that tells me you haven't come to socialize," she said. "We've a problem."

"Why we we?" he said after a moment.

She gave him a mischievous smile. "Ishmael, Ishmael. As long as I've known you, you've thought it your prerogative to keep your troubles to yourself. Sometimes unwisely so. So, if you're bringing me a problem, it's one that's shared."

"You have the right o' it," he said. "Has Magistra Hearne spoken to you?"

"Olivede? No . . ."

"I'd think she might, eventually," he said, as she showed him into her receiving room. In this huge, haphazard house it was a model of taste and fas.h.i.+on, an expression of her aspirations. She, in her jacket and trousers, might have inhabited a set in an avant-garde comedy. "But there's more parts to the matter that have come to me since." He sat down on an elegantly designed and decidedly uncomfortable chair. "There's been sorcery worked on a highborn lady, causing her t'compromise herself. There may be trouble over it; there may not, since she's bent on keeping it to herself. I've touch-read her, and since she's no mage herself, she had no sense of magic. But her thrall to her lover was unnaturally powerful, maybe, and she believes he came t'her through the day. And I could take no impression of his face."

"Touch-read her unwilling and unwitting," she said, without expression.

"At the time I thought her more villain than victim. There's a kidnapped child that's part of all this, and a man near beaten t'death." He paused. "I think you need to hear the whole of it."

"I think I do."

He began, once again, with Vladimer's instructions to him-which she greeted with some dismay-and his arriving on Balthasar Hearne's doorstep to be met by the stroke of a sap, a felled physician, and Floria White Hand's extraordinary account. He continued through to the interview with Tercelle, and his mandate to Guillaume. He omitted, of course, all mention of Telmaine's magic. There'd surely be consequences if she misused her magic again, but he found he simply could not expose her.

She tapped silk-clad fingertips against her teeth. "Sighted children . . ." she said, with a dread that only now, having walked through the garden, did he understand. There had been early efforts to restore sight to the Darkborn, all failures, and nowadays the manipulation of tissue, other than for healing, was sorcery. Manipulation of plant life was itself barely acceptable. He had not thought of that possibility before. "Oh, Ishmael, you have brought me an ugly one." She leaned forward suddenly. "Promise me you'll carry this no farther. Speak of these children nowhere else. If a mage is responsible, it's worth our peace, everything we've built, maybe even our lives to have it known."

"I cannot promise," he said after a moment. "I don't know where this investigation is bound; I don't know how much of it may need t'be taken to Lord Vladimer. The best I can promise is t'delay if I can, t'let you find the one responsible-if it is a mage."

"Sweet Imogene, what else could it be? This woman, Tercelle Amberley, will she lay accusations?"

"Not unless it would cost her less t'lay them than to keep still. She'd be as much ruined by it as by th'other. But y'need to hold it close. For your own sake, as much as hers."

"I will, believe me." Her face went briefly still. "I've called in my brother, and two or three others."

"I'll leave you to't then," Ish said, rising. "Y'know where to find me."

"Coward," she murmured sardonically.

He shook his head. "Your brother won't believe me; he'll want me touch-read. I'll not allow that. I've told you what I know; you'd best confirm it with others, Magistra Olivede first. I've my own errands to pursue. One thing, though: Florilinde Hearne. I'd be grateful if one or other of you higher-rankers gave a thought to finding her. Magistra Olivede would likely be asking for herself."

"Where are you bound now?"

"Magistra Olivede's clinic. They tried t'set on her yesterday, and failed."

"Take care," she said. "You've nowhere near the power to match yourself against a mage who could alter a child in the womb, and anyone that perverted will not hesitate at murder."

"Nor will I," Ish said. "And I've been hunting perversions these twenty-five years. Good day, Magistra."

"Is it?" she said sourly. With a hand on his arm, she stayed him at the door. "I mean it when I say 'take care,' Ishmael. I've heard about the way you overspend yourself. Mages die doing that. Or their magic never recovers."

He stooped to lift her hand and kiss it, which spared him from having to answer. He knew she was right; he also knew he could be no other way.

He pa.s.sed Phineas Broome on the stairs. The other ruling mage, being no relative of Phoebe's, was her physical opposite: compact, broad, and muscled, with a face as sculptedly male as hers was delicately female. He was a trained acrobat and dancer, and moved with a compact, springy agility. His sonn was harsh; he scowled as he recognized Ish, but did not speak. He was ferociously republican in his politics. Shortly after Ish had arrived, Phineas had made an attempt to drive him away that had left Ish unconscious for a day and Phineas, to his horror, afflicted by an echo of the Call. His peers had considered that just punishment and imposed no other. Phineas had not left Minhorne since.

No, Ish thought, he'd sooner be out of range before the shouting-audible and otherwise-began.

Back in the old Darkborn section of the Rivermarch, he began his inquiries at Olivede Hearne's clinic, where the abortive attack on her had taken place. Amongst people familiar with mages, he could also ask to receive touch-impressions and swiftly compiled descriptions of the men involved. He didn't know them, but he had little doubt he, or Gil, would find them.

No sooner had he left the clinic than he was accosted by a lanky young rogue who he was sure would have sapped him in a back alley as soon as fulfill his charge.

"I've been half the night finding you," the youth said sullenly.

Ish doubted that; this appearance was much too convenient. But, "Good," he said, "I'd hate to think I was becoming predictable. To what end?"

"Got a note." The youth held up a small envelope, pinching it between his fingers, well out of Ish's reach.

Ish plucked a coin from his purse; they jousted briefly over who should yield and who should receive first. The transaction was completed, and Ish carefully observed the youth's departure. That done, he withdrew to the doorway of a Lightborn shop, closed for the night, set his back against the painted shutter, drew off his glove, and traced his fingertip over the note: I need your help. Come to where we met before. TA. I need your help. Come to where we met before. TA.

So she had ignored his advice to leave. He sniffed the note, trying to screen out all the pungency of the city. He recalled that she had been wearing a heavy scent when they met, either out of habit or to overlay the lingering taint of blood from the birth. No perfume clung to the note, though no smoke did either. He thought he smelled a little grease, perhaps from his gloves, from working on the car. Touch told him nothing, beyond that the paper was expensive; he wasn't mage enough to gather impressions from the inanimate. The note was forcefully punched, but agitation might be sufficient to make a woman's hand heavy. Nonetheless . . .

He made his way to the rooming house on the edge of the Rivermarch where he had fetched up when he first came to the city, and where he still kept a room. The house was home or sometime home to a random mix of intractable bachelors, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, bit-part actors, and the occasional fugitive husband. The two old men who owned it were as long married as any elderly couple he'd ever met, and happier than most. And much more interesting, with a life in burlesque and theater behind them, and a keenly scatological interest in politics and gossip. Not to mention their other talents.

"I need to get up to, if not into, a house in the Lagerhans district," Ish explained, sitting in a receiving room crowded with theatrical memorabilia. When he had first washed up here, he was constantly starting, catching movement off to the side as his sonn triggered some s.h.i.+mmering display.

"Lagerhans, eh?" said Ruther di Sommerlin, born Roberd Sommer, once famous in the best cabarets as the Minhorne Lily. In the stooped old man there was still the wraith of the tall, languid stage beauty. " 'Tis a pity you've the body of a troll, my boy. It limits you so."

"Alas, I take after my father, not my mother."

"Most men do." He clucked. "And you don't want one of us to do your errand for you. Poppy could use a little distraction." He shook his head. "The boy's been into the drug again. He's got a terrible hunger."

What the nineteen-year-old had was what might prove a fatal inability to reconcile himself to his own nature. "I'll speak to him when I come back," Ish said. Though he didn't share Poppy's particular affliction, his Drunken G.o.d knew he'd tried any number of methods of self-immolation before settling properly into his own skin. Maybe he'd have a word with Balthasar Hearne, too, once the physician had recovered. "It's not that I wouldn't want him on the job, but I don't know what I'd be sending him into."

"You're a good man, for a woman-loving mage," Ruther said. He sonned him once more, with a disgruntled expression. "Best leave you a man. If you were a woman you'd have to be a fat crone."

Ish departed the house in the guise of a lowland provincial n.o.bleman in robust middle age, his hair extended and tied back, and a fas.h.i.+onable tricorne hat perched on his head. He wore a coat with a high waist to hide the length of his torso, and padding to give him corpulence to match his shoulders. Theatrical putty hid his scars, his cheeks were full, he had jowls and a double chin-the better to mask the shape of his jaw-and his hair covered his ears. "Not many people properly notice teeth and you're not in the habit of smiling unless you're at ease. But be mindful." Ruther would not let him choose his own shoes. "You are a prosperous provincial. You'll have shoes that suit fas.h.i.+on and please your vanity, even though they pinch a little. Above all else, they'll remind you not to move like a Shadowhunter on the hunt."

The shoes definitely pinched a little, and with wearing they would pinch a lot. He caught and paid for a cab, though the provincials he had met tended to be parsimonious in small things, and had it let him off at a circular park two or three blocks from the house. Then he started walking, reminded by his nipped heels to put some mince into his prowl. At least as a sightseer he had an excuse to lay about liberally with his sonn, imaging not only the street ahead of him, as a local might, but the housefronts with their main and understairs, the cabs and carriages. He allowed himself to stop and study an engine-drawn carriage as a countryman would, puffing out his thickened cheeks with disapproval at the thought of such a newfangled gadget affrighting the livestock. He also took note of the people who were out and about, though he had to catch himself before he let his sonn become too penetrating for politeness; it would not do to let himself be caught up in some quarrel with an irate male escort accusing him of compromising a lady's modesty. He felt as though he were hunting in dense undergrowth.

Tercelle Amberley's tall house appeared no different than it had earlier, graceful arc of front stairs to wide door, intricate stonework that created s.h.i.+mmering sonn chimeras, frill of growth from the roof garden decorating the upper story. Of late, the fas.h.i.+on was to suspend a decorated fan in the doorway to indicate a willingness to receive visitors, and the private codes conveyed by such fans had helped many an intrigue, both personal and political. The door at number twenty was devoid of ornament, and there was no evidence of anyone being home. He inspected it only slightly longer than he did the house next to it, and then continued his stroll. Two houses down he reached the corner and paused to unfold and finger a piece of paper at some length. A provincial countryman might be prosperous and locally well regarded, but he need not be a great reader. Meanwhile, he listened to his surroundings. That done, he turned and with some perplexity sonned the houses he had just pa.s.sed, as though it were just entering his head that he might be lost. In doing so, he caught the movement he had heard-someone ducked down on the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs of number twenty. Too swift a movement, he thought, for him to go bustling up with an, "I say, might you be able to direct me . . ." He felt the same stilling within him that was familiar from the Shadowlands, when he sensed danger. It clarified his thinking. He tucked the paper into his waistcoat and went up the stairs to number twenty-four, which did have an ornamental fan mounted and swaying gently in the breeze. He was aware that, shoes or no shoes, he was stepping soft and smooth.

A housekeeper answered; they sized each other up, he, Ish thought, probably deriving less information from the exercise. She was a stout, worldly body who he would have said was proud to know her place and prouder still to have everyone else know it. He produced his laboriously punched paper, and said-in his best provincial accent-that he sought friends who he thought lived in this street, but he must have had their number wrong. He thought it might be twenty. Oh, no, she said, number twenty was a lady who had just arrived, a lady in not very good health.

Ish brushed that aside with his preoccupation with his wish to find his friends. No, number twenty-two was empty; that young family had not yet returned from the seaside. And they were number twenty-four and-No, she did not think anyone in the street had that name, though she did not know number twelve. Had he come so very far?

Indeed he had, Ish said, but he still had time to try to trace his friends, only he must now worry about the sunrise bell; people were not so willing, here, to let distressed strangers across their threshold.

Indeed not, said she, because it was a favorite trick of criminals to obtain admission under pretense of being caught outside at sunrise and then sack the household. Even though this was supposed to be a good neighborhood, some of the visitors were enough to make one think. Only this afternoon she had met a man going into number twenty who was a ruffian if ever she knew one, with great burns across his face.

He was glad that she did not sonn his face in time to catch his expression before he had mitigated it into innocent shock. "Madam, you alarm me," he said, and made his fl.u.s.tered good-byes, bustling down the stairs and heading up the street with his rubber-tipped cane pattering on the pavement. Now he was sweating. Either Tercelle Amberley was a villain, or she was a victim; whichever way the cards fell, this was surely a trap for him.

He never had had any sense. So his father told him, and about that he could not argue. A sensible man would have rattled on out of there in the first cab he called, switched cabs, shed the disguise, gone to ground. A sensible man would have decided Tercelle Amberley was a villain and left her to her well-deserved fate. Ish veered around the end of the row, confronting the stone wall around the rear gardens. He unfastened his padded jacket to free himself for movement, jammed the cane into his belt like a sword. Jumped to get his arms over the top of the wall of the end-row garden and heaved himself up and over into the bushes at the rear. He circled the garden, keeping behind the screen of bushes. On the far side, a small tree offered him a leg up. He imaged the garden with a single cast, this one a mazelet of low hedges and skirt-wide paths around several shallow ponds. He dropped into the garden and ran across it, flicking his sonn before him, skipping over the hedges and jumping the paths. This time, he took the wall at a run and vaulted onto it, coming to a deep crouch at the top. He paused there for no longer than needed for a swift, light lick of sonn, which revealed no one, and he dropped to earth in Tercelle Amberley's rear garden. He drew gun and cane and used the cane on the edge of the garden path to guide him toward the door. His shoes clicked like a soft, soft sonn as he climbed the stairs.

The door was not quite closed. As he eased it open, he smelled blood, and feces spilled in terror or terminal spasm. He eased the door closed and propped the cane against it, and sketched in the room with a bare whisper of sonn.

Tercelle Amberley was lying on the floor, on her back, her legs splayed beneath their heavy, proper skirts in the lax impropriety of death. He went quickly down beside her, pulling off a glove to touch bare skin. She was still warm, newly enough dead as to let him sense the last fading impressions of life. There was no stain or residue on her chest, no sign of a wound from knife or bullet. As his fingers pa.s.sed over her throat, he felt a sudden intense pressure in his own. Strangled, then.

The cane clattered. The very walls rattled with sonn, the shot that pa.s.sed overhead as he dropped no less shattering. He fired without turning. The shot struck with the meat-bone thud of a heavy bullet and a punched-out shriek of agony. He heard footsteps in the hallway, and a bullet staved in a panel of the inner door. He threw himself at the empty door, catching up the cane as he went, swung around the lintel, and leaped up onto the wall from the upper step. As another bullet exploded the wall beneath him and sent stone splinters into his arm and wrist, he rolled off the wall into the next-door garden, breaking the cane in two. From the room he had just left, a woman's voice rose in a shriek, "He's killed her, he's killed her." He did not recognize the voice, but she sounded authentically terrified, or well rehea.r.s.ed. Bent low, he sprinted along the wall, imaging his way to the rear gate with swift, precise sonn. Bullets cracked on walls; over his head, foliage burst. He ducked into the shelter of the gate, briefly paused, tallying bullets fired and time to reload, and then burst out of the gate and down the rear lane in the shelter of the wall in a flat-out sprint. He heard shouts; a last bullet split a flagstone at his heels, and then he turned the corner and was, for the moment, clear. Two more turns, and he was once more mincing down the street in his fas.h.i.+onable shoes, his jacket b.u.t.toned and a moue of vexation on his face at the cheap workmans.h.i.+p of the modern cane. Perhaps pa.s.sersby would mistake the sweat on his face for that of an unfit man on a warm summer's night. He seemed reputable enough to bring a cab to his whistle; keeping his bloodied arm hidden, he climbed aboard.

Ishmael A brothel on the Rivermarch was an excellent place to go to ground. Men would rather not know their neighbors, and if the ladies gossiped and speculated among themselves, they were an insular little community who seldom felt a need to share their speculations, and certainly not with strangers. Ish had used the Rainbow House before, for those very reasons; and in this case it was close to Olivede Hearne's clinic. He paid for a room to himself for the day, and for hot water and bandages, tea and bread rolls. When he was alone he pulled off his gloves and s.h.i.+rt, and soaked and dressed his bleeding hand and arm. After that he worked off his shoes, inspected his raw heels, wrapped himself in the quilt, and leaned back against the headboard-not nearly as evocative a one as in Guillaume's spare room-to drink, chew, and brood.

This whole grim matter was tangled beyond his wits. He disliked the way it was making victims of people who were not usually victims, the innocent or the privileged. The learned Dr. Balthasar Hearne and his daughter were both, and Tercelle Amberley, whether innocent or otherwise, had been the bride-to-be of Ferdenzil Mycene. The fact that Tercelle had just given birth would certainly be evident to even an incompetent examiner. It would be . . . interesting to track what became known. a.s.suming Ish survived in freedom to do so, since he had been so carefully dropped into a frame of Tercelle's murder, if not his own. Before he did anything else, he needed to report to Vladimer. He needed Vladimer's wits; he needed Vladimer's protection; and whatever larger game was being played out here, Vladimer needed to be advised.

Eventually the house quieted. Still in his clothes, he rolled himself in the blanket, in the manner in which he had learned to sleep in camp, beat down the overstuffed pillow, and slept.

He woke coughing, smoke acrid in his throat. Rolled from his bed, to thud onto all fours, almost strangling with the force of the cough. Sonn shuddered with the coughing, but beneath the shuddering, everything in the room s.h.i.+mmered in the layered smoke and heat.

He snared the shoes from under the bed, spilled the water pitcher from his table down over his head and s.h.i.+rt, and pressed the soaked s.h.i.+rt to his face to filter the smoke. He was already disoriented. No point feeling the door before he opened it; to open it might be to burn, but to remain was to suffocate.

He did not burn, and the smoke was thinner on the landing. He heard women coughing; men, too. Sonn laced the stairwell. He worked his way down the stairs, halting above the mill of two dozen partly dressed wh.o.r.es and overstayers.

Someone shrieked overhead, a cry far too brief for its intensity. The house shook and scattered stinging debris. A man said near him, in a remarkably calm voice, "Next door's roof must have gone. Whole row must be ablaze. We don't have long."

One of the women said shrilly, "If we go outside, we'll burn."

The man said, "We need to get into the bas.e.m.e.nt. These old row houses used to connect through the bas.e.m.e.nts. Maybe we can make our way ahead of the fire; surely the Lightborn will come to our aid."

There was a moment's desperate babble of hope and despair that the Lightborn were their only hope of succor. Ish did not add to it. The Lightborn fire service would a.s.semble to fight the fire, and the mages themselves would intervene if they could not control the blaze, but it would take time for them to ready the magical forces needed to damp the fire or conjure a rainstorm. Working with the elements was extremely demanding.