Lightborn. Part 7

She lifted her eyes, looking across the garden toward the wall that enclosed the palace. Four or five centuries ago, before the crops and fields had been torn up for gardens, piazzas, and buildings, and while the palace and its staff were still small, this inner city would have been nearly self-sufficient. That was a time when princes still might expect to die in bed.

Mother of All, but she was wearier than she could ever show, here in the Lightborn court. Perhaps she could understand her father's mortal resignation, in the aftermath of the death of his own prince. But she did not think Benedict had ever charged Darien to look after Isidore, as Isidore had charged Floria on Fejelis's behalf.

She set a hat of broad-brimmed mesh on her head and glanced through its filter at the sun. Lightborn she might be, but the sun scalded her. Pale as a Darkborn, whispered the more fanciful of her enemies. But neither she nor they had ever seen a Darkborn, to know whether a Darkborn's skin was as pale as milk, as some speculated, or dark as onyx, as others did. The Darkborn themselves could not know.

She avoided the servants' common ways, disliking crowds, taking a series of open paths across open lawns and alongside still pools that reflected the stippled clouds overhead. He will never see them again, she thought, and the loss pierced her, daggerlike. Mother of All, whoever is responsible will not escape their own deserved and rightful deposition, and I will make it painful.

The red-clad guards on the side gate pa.s.sed her through without a word. The next breath she took seemed freer, and she did not look back until she had reached the corner. Turning then, she did, at the wall, at the wide- but blind-windowed upper stories of the palace behind it, and at the monolith of the Temple tower at its back, the white walls, balconies, and crenellations blazing in the sunlight. Every generation the tower grew in grandeur, until even the Darkborn, enthusiastic builders though they were, protested that it could not stand safely. The sight never failed to disquiet her, but she shook her head at the futility of dispute with the order of things and continued toward her own modest home, on a border between Lightborn and Darkborn districts.

She took careful note of her surroundings as she approached. Her home lacked shrubbery or statuary, or ornamentation. The stone was polished smooth and fitted close, and the woodwork and shutters were a glossy gray that would show any crack. When she was a girl, she had pointed to the Mages' Tower and whined about the drabness. A little later, her father had taken her with him to the death scene of a member of the Prince's Vigilance. The a.s.sa.s.sins had entered via a shutter left unlocked by the artist hired to decorate it.

Years later, Floria had learned that her father had arranged the a.s.sa.s.sination himself, and why. Corruption within the Vigilance could not be tolerated.

She wondered why that memory made her feel so cold. Perhaps because she could envision one type of person who might be so trusted, and so skilled, and so ruthless, as to kill a prince in such a manner.

She unlocked her front door with care. Just inside was a decorative curtain, a silvery mesh that was another Darkborn invention. Push it aside in the usual way, and the links would fall into a new and recognizable pattern. But the pattern was undisturbed; the mesh had not been touched.

Nevertheless, something was wrong.

She slid past the curtain and moved silently to the archway of the large front room. The mesh on the windows was undisturbed. The open back and mesh of furnishings offered no cover. Carefully placed mirrors exposed hidden corners. Another gliding step took her to the archway to the smaller side room. Again, nothing anomalous.

Upstairs, then, pausing to slip her key from within her belt and disarm the traps on the stairs. She knew, as soon as she reached the first landing, what was wrong. The familiar smell was subtly altered by the scents of Darkborn furnishings and Darkborn furniture treatments. Habit made her pause on the landing to check all rooms before she turned toward the half-open door of her salle, the room that, via a paper wall, ab.u.t.ted the home of Darkborn Balthasar Hearne. Discipline kept her eyes from fixing first on the huge rent in the paper wall and the mesh that reinforced it; she glanced over the room entire, seeing nothing else anomalous, and then back at the wall. A flap, like a doorway, had been cut away, and now hung curled under its own weight.

"Balthasar," she whispered. On three sides of the room, the mirrors returned her reflection, color drained to the verdigris pallor of a corpse.

Her reflection had its rapier in hand as it crossed the floor. There was enough light cast through the rent for her to live by, and more than enough light to burn any Darkborn to ash. She drew a deep breath, and stepped through, entering Balthasar's home for the first and likely the last time. She noticed the mismatch of hues in the wood of the bookcase, the patched leather of the armchair, and the blank spines of the books. His utter sightlessness was borne in on her again. She took a deep breath and made herself look down at the carpet for the mound of fine gray ash amongst fragments of fabric and metal that marked a Darkborn caught by light. She saw nothing, except for dark stains of dried blood at the base of the wall. Here was where he had lain dying, the night two men came in search of Tercelle Amberley's twins. More blood spatters helped her reconstruct the ch.o.r.eography of the attack, to which she'd been condemned to listen, until she had had the desperate idea of attacking with a blade of light, a torch shone through a tiny slit in the wall. . . . There was the patch where she had driven the needle in.

In the doorway to the hall, pain and weakness warned her that she could go no farther. Slowly, staring through the half- lit hall, remembering the prince's dark room, she backed into the light. Balthasar must still be at the archducal palace, where she had suggested Ishmael di Studier take him, and his family, two-yes, two days ago. He must be.

She wiped her damp face with a sleeve, and turned to examine the damage. She would not have expected anyone to be able to cut through the wall, since on Telmaine's insistence Balthasar had installed Darkborn-made mesh, as strong as metal came without magic. A heavy knife with a serrated edge had been used, with a powerful shoulder behind it.

The edges curled toward her. The cut had been made from the other side.

She whipped round, at no sound, only a sudden conviction that now must be the moment that someone would step out behind her. There was no one there.

Then the intruder's object must have been to find, or to leave . . . something. Her eye went at once to the lights, blazing in their brackets. Of all the rooms in her house, this was the only one that had no window, was entirely dependent upon the enspelled lights, day and night.

She resisted the impulse to run from the room. She moved her eyes over the mirrors, the racked weapons and equipment. All was as she had left it four days before; all was as she had always left it. Disorder did not become a vigilant, who should be able to notice the least anomaly. She thought once more of the misplaced shoe, and the dream.

The thought guided her across the landing, into her bedroom, past the undisturbed bed, and to a tall cabinet with mesh sides and fretwork doors. In it, she kept family ornaments and memorabilia, and her own collection of inconsequential treasures. With the hilt of her dagger, she hooked the handle and drew open the doors.

The box was gone, the ugly but well-crafted little wood and ivory box that Balthasar had given her for her fourteenth birthday. The box that she had dreamed she was taking to the prince. Everything else was there. Bed, bedding, night vest, side table-all were unchanged from the state she had left them in.

From downstairs came the soft shivering sound of the links of the mesh cascading into a new configuration.

Whisper-footed on the tiled floor, she crossed the bedroom to look out and down the stairs. A flicker on the floor, a shadow briefly cast by sunlight against the lesser lamplight. A pair of feet, shod in mourning red, moved toward the stairs.

She sprang for the salle, but too late. "Mistress White Hand!" The voice was that of Tempe Silver Branch, of the vigilants' judiciary. Like the White Hands, the Silver Branches possessed a family a.s.set, theirs the ability to detect lies in the spoken word. It was by no means as sure an a.s.set as the ability to detect poison, Floria's father had said. Nevertheless, Tempe held considerable influence. "Floria, we need to talk to you."

There were three vigilants besides Mistress Tempe: Mortimer Beaudry, a captain she disliked, and two lieutenants. One she knew from the salle; his skill with a rapier equaled hers, although he was more temperamental and erratic than she. The other was unusually short statured for a vigilant, but had a reputation for mechanical artistry that some said approached magic. Talk? This was an arresting party, if ever she had seen one.

She locked the door to the salle as Tempe set her foot on the stairs. It would gain her only a little time, but that time should be enough. Two of the lights went into a mesh equipment bag, with a semiopaque sack over the outside. The first knock on the door interrupted her brief consideration of a third light, but the weight would hamper her. She slung the bag through the rent and dropped it on the floor.

"Floria?" said Tempe, from the other side of the door. "Why are you reacting like this?"

Everything she said would be weighed and judged through Tempe's a.s.set. She lifted down two of the four remaining lamps and pushed them into one of the closets. "Have you a warrant?"

"Do you expect one? Have you something to fear?"

Had she? Aside from a dead prince, an inexplicable dream, and a missing box.

"Floria, there are rumors around the palace that you visited the prince's rooms last night."

"You're coming to arrest me on rumors?"

Within the door, she heard a click. A gap appeared between door and lintel. Fingers probed, blanching as they took the strain. The gap widened, opening on Tempe standing with the lieutenants flanking her and the captain at her back.

"Prince Fejelis ordered your arrest." She held out a long, narrow, cream-hued fold of paper. "Read it, if you would."

Her eye, drawn to the paper, caught in pa.s.sing a glint of metal in the shadow of their bodies, as Captain Beaudry cleared a revolver.

She lunged through the rent into Balthasar's study. s.n.a.t.c.hed up the bag and let her momentum take her through the door, across the landing, into the curtains across an alcove on the far side. She knew terror then, floundering against fabric that, in the half- light, was black as death itself. She rolled out of the alcove, curled around the sack containing the lights.

"Beaudry, what are you doing?"

A shot punched into the fabric above her.

"It's not a death warrant! Floria! "

Floria scrambled out of the view of the doorway, holding the bag against her ribs, panting with the shadows. She swung her feet onto the stairs and, with a hand that slipped on the smooth uprights of the banister, heaved herself up.

She heard footsteps in flight down her own stairs next door, all stealth abandoned, and a step in the study behind her. They had divided their numbers, thinking to cut her off. She fell, more than ran, down the stairs. At its foot she took the briefest moment to choose between front door and side door to the tiny garden-and heard someone stumble on the shadowed landing above and begin to scream for light. She herself was close to the limit of her endurance of shadow and pain, hardened though she was by vigilant's training, and her own explorations of her limits. Those explorations told her she had no more time-she grabbed the front door handle, tore open the door, let in the streaming sunlight that made the gray unfinished wallpaper beautiful, and the well-varnished parquet radiant.

She staggered down the steps into the deserted street. At the curb stood one of the products of the Darkborn's obsession with machinery, Baron Strumh.e.l.ler's chemical coach, abandoned in his flight days ago. She pa.s.sed it at a run, angling across the road to a shadowed lane that Darkborn traveled freely and Lightborn, seldom. She prayed that there had been no new construction since the last time she had explored these lanes. The next street, too, was Darkborn, with only a few pa.s.sersby. She plunged across the road, down another lane, onto a street that bordered a park. At this time in a late summer's day, the shadows of the bordering trees had spread halfway across the gra.s.s, and the park goers had followed the sun. She dodged into the shadow, across the gra.s.s, and down the steps into the moist, thick shadow of one of the creeks that laced the city. Stopped, gasping, to drag the translucent covering off the mesh, and release the full strength of her lights. She could not hear any pursuit. Few Lightborn came down here, even in daylight, while the trees were in leaf. But the boardwalk-a fashionable stroll for the Darkborn at night-led upstream to the gardens of the archducal palace itself.

Four.

Telmaine Telmaine caught herself drowsing, not for the first time. The coffeepot on the table at her side was cold, the thin sandwiches dry and unappetizing. Balthasar's lower-cla.s.s tastes had affected her, she thought wryly; she liked her sandwiches cut thick, with abundant moist filling, each a meal in itself.

She stood up in penance for her lapse, and began to circle the library again. Unlike the ducal summerhouse, the city palace had never been a place for childish exploration and games of hide-and-seek, even for the children of dukes. So she had not previously been in the botanical library. It smelled of resin and dried flowers. Three walls were shelved from floor to ceiling, to house old monographs and journals from natural-history societies. The fourth wall was given over to a bank of small drawers, each containing desiccated samples of leaves, flowers, or seeds. When this was all over, she must arrange permission for Bal to visit, even if she would not see him again for days. When this was all over . . .

The archduke had retired hours ago, and was deep in an untroubled sleep. She supposed a man with his cares had to learn to set them aside, or let care wear him out. Vladimer had been sleeping and waking throughout the day, his vitality marred by his wound. Around her, the palace was sunk in its daytime lull, only the day staff awake.

Throughout the day she had been thinking about magic.

Ishmael had been deeply concerned about the hazard her untrained power posed to others and to herself. Should she do harm, she would come to the attention of the Lightborn mages, who, being far more numerous and powerful, determined the use and abuse of magic on both sides of sunrise. Then she risked having her magic, and perhaps her mind, destroyed.

But if they were so cursed all-knowing, Telmaine thought, where were they when the Shadowborn ensorcelled Lord Vladimer? Where were they when the Shadowborn set the firetraps that killed those men in the warehouse and nearly killed herself and Vladimer at the station? Or since the victims were Darkborn, were their fates a matter of indifference to the Lightborn?

Ishmael would have helped her, had intended to help her work with her strength, even at a remove. He had not realized how dangerous the use of any magic would be to him. Perhaps-as Bal would say-he had not wished to realize it.

But when Malachi Plantageter's agents had seized upon him for the murder of Tercelle Amberley, he had given her a gift, overextending himself to convey to her his understanding of his own magic. She had not yet fully unwrapped that gift; it lay, warm with that dimming-ember sense of him, quietly in her mind and magic.

As did the far more malevolent bequest of the Shadowborn mage she had fought at Lord Vladimer's bedside. Not even Ishmael knew all the details of that encounter; not even he knew that the Shadowborn had begun to impress upon her his structure of his own magic at the moment at which Ishmael killed him. She could feel that also in her, like some obscene seed.

But surely, it, too, could be used. Unlike Ishmael, the Shadowborn had been a mage at least as powerful as she. He had been able to set traps-like the firetraps in the warehouse-that did not need him to be present to trigger. She liked the idea, indeed she did, of the Shadowborn ensnared in traps of their own design.

She returned to the least comfortable of the chairs in the room, a straight-backed wooden chair that her deportment mistress would have approved. Settling into it, she leaned her head back, muted her sonn, and brushed the sleeping archduke and the restless Vladimer. She reached farther, sweeping her mage sense over the palace and finding all as she hoped it would be. A little longer stretch, a little greater effort, let her touch her daughters. Rea.s.sured, she returned her attention to Ishmael's gift.

He had given her, indeed, a sense of how he had learned to extend and manipulate his own vitality to achieve insights and effects beyond the physical. It was an unsettlingly masculine vitality and there was a pleasurable indecency in contemplating it. As she had once told Ishmael, had she met him at the age of seventeen, she would have fled. Innocent virgin that she was then, she would not have been able to name the feelings that so disconcerted her-though she would have been well aware of their impropriety. As a married woman, and one with a thoughtful and-sometimes embarra.s.singly-curious husband, she was well able to name them-and was still well aware of their impropriety.

What she had not expected was the memories. She had forgotten the strange dreams she had experienced the first day after his arrest. She was not sure whether the sharing was intended, or accidental, but she tiptoed delicately amongst them: that rock-hewn old man must be his father, though surely Ishmael in forty years would be of warmer humor. That lovely woman must be his mother. Younger brother and much younger sister-both inheriting from their mother. Sister . . . Ishmael's first unwitting working of magic, emptying himself into the fluttering chest of the tiny, premature baby. If this was how he had been born as a mage, little wonder he would not let it go. Memories of other healings, many desperate and some less so. The odd magical mischief. The curmudgeonly mage who had taken him on as a student. Phoebe Broome, mageborn daughter of the only seventh- rank Darkborn mage living. She wouldn't-she hadn't-mages had no morals.

She sat a moment with her hands pressed to her heated face. Sweet Imogene, now she had further reason to hope never to encounter Magistra Broome.

Composing herself, she checked upon her charges once more, and turned her attention back to examining Ishmael's magic. While they plotted Florilinde's rescue together, she in a carriage on the streets and Ishmael in a prison cell, she had sensed him thinking how well they worked together. And indeed, his use of his magic, the way he used it to shift vitality throughout his body and into the body of another, seemed natural to her. He was primarily a healer, limited to the manipulation of living flesh, which had a pliability far exceeding inanimate matter. Even then he was able to help only a few at a time. But by that power he had defined himself, and she could weep for its loss, as she would never have wept for the loss of her own. Oh, Ishmael.

Sounds in the corridor recalled her to self and place, the first sounds of stirring of the great household. Reluctantly, she turned her attention to the other mage's gift. There were memories there, too, but fragmentary and repellent and inexplicable. Bal had tried to explain to her how the eye could see much, much farther than sonn could be cast and return, by the light of a sun immensely more powerful than anyone's sonn. He had tried to describe horizon, clouds, stars. She had listened resentfully, knowing he had these descriptions from Floria White Hand. But that line there was horizon, where the earth curved away from the sky-or ended, as some said. And those, those were houses, windowed houses like the houses of the Lightborn. And faces-the face of a boy with features-features very like Lysander Hearne's. The faces seemed to rearrange themselves as they moved-were they all shape-shifters? But no, Bal had talked about shadows. A woman's face, as proud and remote as that of any dowager d.u.c.h.ess-evoking in the mage a sense of worship, fear, and hatred. Who was she?

She shivered. She had no idea why the Shadowborn had forced this on her, save to triumph somehow over Ishmael. She had been unwillingly privy to more than one man's fantasies about the daughter or wife of an enemy. But why such hatred? Because Ishmael was a Shadowhunter, scourge of Shadowborn? Because he was a mage? Some other, as yet unknown reason?

Had their enemy intended to enslave her to his will? He-or another of his kind-had certainly demonstrated himself capable of it; Tercelle had yielded to the lover who had ruined her. And Vladimer . . .

She sensed-she knew-that she should take this information to someone who might be able to infer from it what she could not. But Balthasar and Ishmael were beyond her reach, and Vladimer-Vladimer was the last person to whom she could confess. And surely his agents or Vladimer himself would read any letter she tried to send.

No, she was alone with her magic and the knowledge it brought her, as she had been alone with them all her life. Brief, illicit intimacy did not alter that.

Tentatively, she examined the Shadowborn's magic. Were those bizarre manipulations of vitality to reshape tissue the basis of their shape-shifting? It was repugnant to imagine such corruption of the healer's magic that Ishmael practiced so diligently. . . . She remembered the moment, after she had secretly granted Guillaume di Maurier a chance of life, when she had finally understood why Ishmael had thought his home and inheritance fair exchange for his meager powers.

Could she, with this knowledge, with her power, reshape herself? She raised a hand, and sonned its familiar shape, remembering the claws that had raked Balthasar's face as he and the Shadowborn struggled together in Vladimer's bedroom. Almost, almost, she knew how to do it. Revulsion at the very thought stopped her from full realization. How could anyone, anything, reshape his flesh into something monstrous? Even the speculation tainted her with corruption, as had the speculation that she could change the archduke's mind. She shuddered.

No, she merely wished to learn how the Shadowborn set their traps, so that she might neutralize them if she met them again. Vladimer's idea that she learn to quench their fires was a sound one. She carefully did not consider what Ishmael might have thought, or said.

But to quench a fire, she might light a fire. In one of the drawers she found several sheets of loose writing paper, and walked over to the unlit fireplace, folding the paper into a small, neat fan. Holding it over the hearth, she concentrated on the sense and essence of fire. With that sense came the memory of the warehouse. Searing heat washed up her face; she barely stifled a shriek and dropped the blazing paper, and staggered back from the hearth clutching her hand, her nostrils full of scorched lace. On the hearth, fire utterly consumed the paper, leaving a smudge of ash.

Several minutes pa.s.sed before she could compose herself enough to heal her hand and tuck her burned glove up her sleeve. With a trembling hand and a hearth brush, she swept the ash into the fireplace. She wondered what the housemaids would think. Secret messages. Or more likely, love letters. She should disturb the stylus and frame before she left.

She folded another sheet and this time set it down on the hearth, touching it only with a finger. She carefully held in her mind the sense of an unlit fire, then a flame no larger than an orange blossom, and s.n.a.t.c.hed back her hand as the entire paper burst into a bounding blaze. This was more difficult, more unnatural, than she had thought. She would have to lay hand on a supply of paper, one other than expensive palace stationery. Frugal Bal would be appalled. Carefully, she extended her magic, and m.u.f.fled the blaze into a small flame, the flame into embers, the embers into smoke.

Three sheets of paper later, each of which had flared up like the one before, she heard the sunset bell with a sense of relief she remembered from the schoolroom. She cleared the last of the ash into the fireplace, and replaced the cleaning equipment. She had done what Vladimer asked, tested her ability to quench flame, but she was vexed and dissatisfied at her tenuous control in the lighting; she would need more practice. At the desk, she took care to shift the position of the stylus and writing frame. If only she dared write to Bal, and to Ishmael . . . but no. A few hours' sleep, and then her vigil would resume.

Telmaine Vladimer's summons roused Telmaine two hours into her craved- for sleep. Sweet Imogene, but the only other time she could remember being this tired was the last weeks before Amerdale was born. With her maid's help, she put on a moderately formal evening dress and set her hair in good order. By the time she arrived at the botanical library, she was walking more or less straight and wishing that Vladimer were not himself ailing; archduke's brother or no, he was due a piece of her mind for treating her like some clerk to be ordered to his whim.

"Your husband's letter case was delivered to me," he said, by way of greeting. "One of them was ciphered." He had read them, read her husband's heart openings to the people he loved. "Can you interpret that cipher?"

It was too much to hope that Vladimer be ashamed of himself. "No."

"What is your husband's relationship to this Lightborn woman?"

"They are friends from childhood," she said. Only her mother and her closest friend, Sylvide, knew what she felt about Floria White Hand. Vladimer certainly did not need to.

"She was highly placed in the Lightborn Prince's Vigilance, was one of Isidore's special agents. What," Vladimer said, "would he tell her?"

She caught herself, realizing that there was more staked on this than her womanly pride. "He would tell her," she said, carefully, "everything he thought she needed to know as a servant of the Lightborn prince."

"Did he not trust the official channels of information?"

Vladimer might distrust her, but he must not distrust Balthasar. "My husband has served several terms as an Intercalatory Councilman. He is part of the official channels of information."

Vladimer braced his cane and pushed himself to his feet. "We have an unexpected visitor. I trust you will tell me if she is who she claims to be."

He led her through a labyrinth of stairs, halls, and corridors, all the time providing steady commentary on the history of the palace. Merivan's two eldest sons, reluctant students and with the gruesome tastes of young boys, would have been enthralled. For herself, she found Vladimer in the role of history tutor disconcerting, even without his recital of treachery, villainy, and horrific death.

They turned into a corridor as wide as some dancing halls she had seen, whose finish did not disguise its rough construction. Two ma.s.sive doors separated it from the rest of the palace; at the moment, both stood open, but the aspect was not inviting. This was no wing for guests, even unwelcome ones. Vladimer jerked his head toward a plain door. "Execution room," he said, and she thought-with relief-he would not elaborate, but he said, "The skylight can be opened from outside. Been more than a few traitors who've ended there, quietly. And a number of criminals."

And for those he had sent there himself-for he surely had-he showed neither pride nor regret. Something she would not have understood before these last days.

"It's not always a boon in law to be wellborn," Vladimer added. "The common-born have protections that may be denied us."

Any explanation he might have offered was preempted as they turned a corner and arrived at another narrow door. "This needs two hands," Vladimer said. Telmaine pressed where he indicated, and pulled as she was bidden, until the door opened. She followed him into a tight vestibule, and waited as he struggled one- handed with the mechanism of the inner door. Grudgingly, he yielded up that secret, too, and let her open it.

The room they emerged in was small, and, like the study in Bal's family home, the far wall was no more than paper reinforced with mesh. She caught her breath in visceral alarm.

"Lord Vladimer," she hissed. He gestured her to silence and pointed to the wall. She sensed a familiar vitality on the other side. And an equally familiar taint, faint, but detectable.

"Mistress White Hand?" said Vladimer. His sonn, and his frown, prompted Telmaine to nod in confirmation, of that ident.i.ty at least.

On the far side of the wall, a body stirred. "Balthasar?" Floria's voice said.

"No. But I have with me his wife."

"Telmaine?" Telmaine had no desire to respond; she had never accepted that she and Floria should be on first-name terms. And with that taint about her . . . "Telmaine," Floria persisted, "is Balthasar all right? Where is he?"

"Balthasar is quite well," she said, politely. "Thank you for inquiring."

The woman on the other side of the wall gave a choked laugh. "This is hardly a social call, not at this hour, Telmaine."

"Mistress White Hand invoked the law of succor," Vladimer said, neutrally. "Arriving at the palace as the sun-bell was tolling. She is in one of the rooms we keep for the purpose. It goes without saying that she brought a light source with her."

"Who are you, sir?"

"I am acting in the interest of Lord Vladimer Plantageter," Vladimer said. "You may regard everything you say to me as being said to Lord Vladimer himself." There was a small table with recording materials against one wall. He set his cane across the table, and eased himself down into the chair. Telmaine stood beside him, her mage sense extended through the wall.