Shadowborn (23 page)

“Lysander!” Olivede cried out.

“No!” the man said.
“Shadowborn.”

Bal recognized Phineas Broome, the fourth-rank mage who was one of the co-leaders of the commune that Olivede belonged to. “Kill them!” shouted Phineas.

And Balthasar heard the thunder of revolver fire from behind him as Sebastien
lifted
both of them the length of the hall. Shouts, an explosion. His wild backward cast of sonn caught the guards as they spilled aside, thrown or throwing themselves away from a figure who was simply falling amidst a feathery echo that Balthasar knew as spurting blood. He started back down the hall in trained response, and behind him he heard Phineas Broome groan deep in his throat. The mage stood with arms outspread as though to bar the door, face contorted with extreme effort, the muscles in his neck like ropes. The smell of smoke thickened the air, though Balthasar did not know where from. He gasped, “No, Sebastien.
Remember how it smelled!
”

A backlash of heat seared his face as Sebastien fleetingly wavered and the weaker mage prevailed. And then Phineas cried out and fire flashed up his clothing, from trouser cuff to collar. The door to the main chamber slammed open and a revolver boomed. Sebastien lurched; the flame unwrapped from Phineas like a cloak, and then Balthasar heard a man’s mortal scream, felt the heat, and heard and smelled, for the second time, a man being incinerated alive by Shadowborn fires.

In the move he had rehearsed in his mind a dozen times, he pulled cloth and bottle from his pocket; twisted out the plug; dropped it, freeing his hands to sluice the chloroform onto the cloth; and discarded the bottle in turn. He caught Sebastien around the chest, clamped the rag across his mouth and nose, and held him with all his strength in a travesty of an embrace. He could feel, against his wrist, the warmth of the boy’s blood. In Sebastien’s ear he rasped his half-deranged babble of justification:
“I can’t let you do this. I can’t let you destroy yourself. You would destroy yourself. It is because I care for you that I am doing this, because you demanded I care. . . .”

The boy wailed something unintelligible, muffled by the rag. Bone and muscle rippled and swelled beneath his arm; claws dug into his wrist. Heat mounted around him; he could smell the acrid stench of singed wool and hair, and pressed his face to Sebastien’s neck, praying that the mage could not turn the fires on them both. With one last uncoordinated rake at his hand, Sebastien slumped against him. Balthasar half collapsed, half guided him down to the floor, and then squirmed urgently out of his smoldering jacket. In unconsciousness, Sebastien had shed his borrowed form, and Balthasar, panicked by the memory of the Shadowborn who had transformed as he died, tore open his collar until he had exposed the bleeding wound at the join of neck and shoulder, and sonned the pulse in his throat.
“Olivede,”
he said,
“help me.”

“Busy,”
she gasped, from inside the council chamber. “
Sweet Imogene
—
”

He heard, then, a pistol hammer being drawn back. He dropped forward onto his hands, shielding the unconscious body. Two men dragged him to his feet, their expressions murderous. Both wore the livery of the Duke of Mycene. “No,” he shouted, trying to struggle free, as a third man went down on one knee and laid his revolver behind Sebastien’s ear.

And then, blessedly, the archduke’s voice cut through it all. “Hold.”

The moment teetered; Balthasar sonned the tension in the finger that rested on the trigger. Then one of the men who held him rasped, “Aaron, wait. This is too cursed quick.”

Balthasar felt, more than heard, a growl of approval from the gathered men.

Olivede said, breathlessly, “Please, someone give me a hand here—”

Of Phineas Broome, he could sonn only his booted feet. The archduke gave some quiet orders; someone in the rear ranks dragged him clear.

“Balthasar Hearne,” the archduke said.

“My lord archduke.” The expression on the archduke’s face killed his last hope that Sebastien had lied. He could not imagine any other reason why he should sonn shame as well as raw-nerved suspicion on that face.

At his feet, Sebastien moaned. Revolvers leveled. Balthasar crouched and held the chloroform-soaked rag over Sebastien’s nose until the boy stopped twitching. He could not even say “I’m sorry,” in case regret weakened him fatally. “I’m going to stop the bleeding,” he said, asking no one’s permission.

“Explain, please,” said the archduke, “how you come to be here? Who is this . . . boy?”

“I have heard,” Balthasar ground out, “what happened to my wife.” He went on before anyone could speak. “Whether I shall ever”—
forgive
would have been the honest word, if not the most politic—“reconcile to it is . . . a question for another day. I am still a servant of the state, still
your
servant. But this boy is my brother’s son, and I claim his life.”

No one questioned his assertion, but, then, the proof was there in the resemblance. Nor did they respond to his claim. It was enough for the moment that they not interfere. He opened the boy’s jacket and shirt to expose the narrow, childish chest, pulled off his own shirt, and tore strips from it to make a compress and bind it down. It was awkward, clumsy work, but he got it done.

“Lysander was living among the Shadowborn,” he said as he worked. “He fathered a child by a Shadowborn mage. There are at least two factions of Shadowborn. Lysander and his wife fled from one to the other, but they did not succeed in taking their son. I first met him, though I did not know it, at Strumheller Crosstracks; he arrived in the guise of a member of Mycene’s troop. In Stranhorne . . . do you know that Stranhorne was overrun by Shadowborn?” Stark, and not the way to break such news, but he was past delicacy.

“We do. The details are scant and we don’t have time; the Lightborn should be here very soon, unless it pleases them to make us wait. Go on.”

“With the help of another mage who survived the destruction of the manor, he brought me here.”

“As what? His collaborator or his captive?”

“His captive.” He paused to wind a strip of bandage around his wrist, and from his pocket fumbled the morphine and syringe. He cleaned his hands as best he could, and with still-tacky fingers he filled the syringe and used his knife to slit Sebastien’s sleeve and expose the thin arm.

Sebastien moaned and rolled his head weakly. Balthasar placed the tourniquet, braced his arm, slipped the needle into the vein, and injected the drug. He released the tourniquet and hung over the boy until sure his breathing was steady. He could hear men moving past him, three men carrying another, and Olivede giving steady instructions despite the strain in her voice, to the accompanying drone of a prayer from Duke Kalamay.

“You seem most concerned for someone who has held you captive,” the archduke observed.

“The boy is sixteen at most, and has been cruelly used,” Balthasar said. “Ill taught—fire and shape-changing seem to be the magic he knows best. The other mage, the one Ishmael di Studier killed at Vladimer’s bedside, was the elder and the dominant partner.”

“You will have to keep him drugged,” the archduke said, “and if that does not kill him, and he does not die of thirst or hunger, we shall—”

For almost the first time ever, he heard Sejanus Plantageter fail to complete a sentence. He was glad of it: his desperate accommodation with the ensorcellment would not survive a threat of execution for sorcery. He shuddered, the ensorcellment racking him. “I know,” he gasped, “that this situation cannot pertain indefinitely.”

“Indeed,” said the archduke, grimly. “The situation will assuredly change, and possibly not for the better. Let me be plain: is your will your own?”

“As long as I believe that I am acting in
his
interest”—a desperate belief, held fast, despite accumulating evidence of harm—“then I believe my acts will be my own. I am quite certain that permitting him to continue on his planned course would only lead to his destruction.”

“So ensorcellment is amenable to solipsism.”

“He is a
boy
, Your Grace, uneducated, unsophisticated, abandoned, and abused. He has the emotional maturity of a young child. He demanded first of all that I love him as I love my own children—impossible, but it gave me latitude to act for him as a father would. As his father,” he said harshly, “
should
have.”

Sejanus Plantageter pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am under the impression that the Lightborn could not sense this ensorcellment,” he said, slowly. “Thus your acquaintance, Floria White Hand, was able to deliver the ensorcelled talisman to the prince’s room.”

Balthasar realized a beat too late that the statement had been a test of what he himself knew, and his reaction had betrayed him. “I was not thinking . . . about that, Your Grace. About other things, but not that.”

“Mistress Floria was, I understand, quite unaware of her own ensorcellment. That was why I permitted your wife to be condemned to death. I had no other way of being certain that my mind was my own.”

Balthasar said, in a voice that shook with repressed feeling,
“You were wrong.”

There was a silence. “I am truly sorry,” the archduke said, and his face twisted as he heard his own words. “I said that to your wife—”

“Wait,”
said Balthasar, forcing himself to reason through numbing grief. “Sebastien said . . . Sebastien said that none of the Lightborn could sense Shadowborn magic—he believed that no one could. But Ishmael di Studier could. Phineas Broome could—sense it and fight it. And when the attack was launched on the tower, Sebastien reacted as though the Lightborn had somehow counteracted or annulled it—”

“They demolished the gun emplacements.”

“But there was also an ensorcellment on the munitions, Sebastien said, to make them . . . to increase their harmfulness. The boy’s vitality had been used to support the magic—”

“Only that?” said the archduke, very still.

“I don’t know,” said Balthasar, “but I do know he suffered a seizure immediately after the emplacements were destroyed.”

“Sejanus.” Claudius Rohan, the archduke’s closest counselor and friend, shouldered through the group of guards. “Sejanus, the Lightborn have arrived.”

The archduke turned away, paused. “I’ll spare the boy’s life for the moment,” he said, his back to Balthasar. “I will not promise more.”

So this is life after the worst has happened,
Telmaine Hearne thought, as the Borders-bound train rattled south across an uncertain landscape toward an uncertain end. Across the train compartment from her, an old man sat kindling a taper made of newspaper with the touch of his fingers, a delighted smile on his imp’s face. Even with her inexperience, she could sense his magic delicately eliciting a fine rill of flame along the edge of the paper, like a feather stroking sand.

A feather plucked from a very dead bird,
she amended. Farquhar Broome was himself Darkborn, but the magic he was toying with had originated with the Shadowborn themselves. And though Shadowborn magic did not actually smell, it left her with the unsettled conviction that she
had
smelled something thoroughly foul.

“Father,” protested Phoebe Broome, but resignedly.

Her father quenched the flame with a belch of that nauseating magic, and held out the taper to Phoebe. “Try it, dear girl,” he invited. “Just do as I did.”

Dutifully, Phoebe took it. She was a tall, switch-thin woman several years older than Telmaine, her dress so plain as to be masculine, and her manner awkward and self-conscious—except when she forgot where she was and who her traveling companions were. Her father, too, was tall, of an indeterminate age, with a wizened-apple face that wrinkled into merriment at the least invitation. His suit and coat had to be at least four decades out of date. Had Telmaine encountered them under other circumstances, she would readily have typed them: difficult father with long-suffering daughter; he charming in his disregard of social convention, and she carrying a double burden of it. But had someone been so indelicate as to mention the name Broome to Lady Telmaine, the duke’s daughter, she would have cut the speaker dead. Mages, even the leaders of the largest and best organized commune of mages in Minhorne, were not discussed in polite society.

And yet here she was, sharing a train compartment with Farquhar Broome, said to be the strongest living Darkborn mage, and his daughter. Here she was, a condemned sorceress, spared execution by the archduke’s last-minute, secret orders, carried out by Vladimer with imaginative scrupulousness. Would anyone, even the archduke, know that that heap of ash in the execution room was not hers, with her own wedding rings and Balthasar’s silver love knot cushioned on it?

She imagined some footman or courtier laying the jewelry in Balthasar’s hand. She imagined her husband’s face—imagined what she would sense if she touched him—and bit her gloved index finger until it hurt. She had not even dared leave Balthasar a message—save an oblique word to Floria White Hand, of all people, safe on the other side of sunrise and accomplished in keeping secrets—for fear she might compromise the ruse. But when would Floria be able to pass the word on, if she even would? How long would Balthasar think her dead, and what would he do in the meantime?

Phoebe Broome slipped her gloves from her long hands and laid the gloves aside, and then unwound a thin, controlled ribbon of magic, quenching the flame almost as soon as it came into being. Farquhar Broome beamed approval. “Not nearly as unpleasant when you do it yourself, is it, now?”

Phoebe smiled back, reluctantly. “No, Father.”

Telmaine sank a little deeper into her seat, determined not to attract their attention. Earlier, she had demonstrated Shadowborn fire setting to them—having learned it, entirely against her will, from the Shadowborn themselves—but even her most tentative and careful coaxing had created a burst of flame that had instantly burned the taper to a strip of ash. She had just managed to quench it, leaving their compartment reeking with smoke.