Shadowborn (25 page)

“The Shadowborn have used the guise of Lysander Hearne in the past; perhaps they did so again. That would certainly disturb his sister—it did his brother.”

“Yes,” said Phoebe. She put out a hand, groping, and after a moment, her father took it.

Vladimer braced himself as the train shook and rattled over uneven tracks. “When we arrive in Strumheller Crosstracks, I will immediately wire north for information. But if you learn more by other means,” he said through his teeth, “I need to know.”

Duke Mycene was dead, despite Olivede’s efforts. Phineas Broome was still alive, but barely so, his heartbeat irregular and his blood pressure very low. They had no stimulants for him. One of the archduke’s guards had been gravely injured when his revolver exploded; only his fellows’ quick work with tourniquets and pressure bandages had kept him from bleeding to death. The others were all burned, lacerated, and half deafened, but still standing. The archduke had left two with the physicians and casualties in a side hall, and taken the remaining three with him into the main conference room. Balthasar could just hear the voices from there, the words themselves indistinguishable.

“Balthasar,” his sister said, lifting a face that seemed to have aged twenty years in minutes, “I am so sorry about Telmaine. I had no idea that she was mageborn. If she had only trusted . . .” Her voice faded.

For Olivede, there had never been any question of not following magic, or any expressed regret at the life and place in society that she gave up to do so. But the open, sensitive girl had become a guarded woman, bruised by the many hurts the world dealt her kind, and Balthasar was not certain that she knew how much she had changed. He did not think she could understand—could have understood—his wife.

Olivede pushed herself to her feet and came along to where Balthasar sat beside Sebastien, whom he had made as comfortable as possible on a long, padded bench. The bleeding had almost stopped; the boy snored slightly in his drugged sleep. There was a suppressed revulsion in Olivede’s face as she sonned the boy, though whether it was at his magic, his actions, his resemblance to their elder brother, or all three, he could not know.

She took Bal’s bandaged arm—he had strapped it properly with the help of one of the guards—in hers, checked it, and let it go. Wasting magic on so minor an injury was out of the question. “I can’t annul the ensorcellment on you,” she said in a low voice. “I haven’t the strength, even if I had much left after”—a twitch of the head toward where the body of Duke Sachevar Mycene lay in an improvised shroud. Even so, the smell of his death tainted the air. “He so
willed
to live. He gave everything to the struggle. How could I give less?” Her smile twisted in a peculiar mingling of compassion and repugnance. “To him, the only profanity in magic was that he had none himself. He liked power.”

“Be careful,” Balthasar breathed. “If Kalamay—”

“Between Mycene and Kalamay and the Shadowborn, they murdered dozens of Lightborn mages,” Olivede said, as though she had not heard, her head still turned toward the dead duke. “But that death was obscene.” She sonned him. “Balthasar, you’re in as much danger as I am from Kalamay. You
cannot
protect this boy.”

“I
must
,” he said, throwing all the weight of meaning he could into the two words and imploring her to understand.

She masked her face with her hand, denying him the chance to sonn her expression. “The Lightborn are preventing me from reaching anyone, but I don’t suppose Master Kieldar could come, until the curfew is raised.” Even in here, they could hear the warning bell. “Phineas needs more than I can do for him, and Phoebe must be frantic. I didn’t respond because I . . . didn’t want to explain.” She sighed and sat down beside him, her worn skirts folding almost silently—unlike Telmaine’s starched, scented rustlings—and slipped her arm around him. “My poor little brother,” she said quietly, “you’ve sustained a dreadful loss. I cannot imagine what you have been through. But you have your daughters to think of. Just remember—”

She brought up her hand as though to draw his head against her shoulder. He sonned the bare skin, thought of the ensorcellment, and ducked out of her embrace. And then realized what she had meant to do: spend the last of her magic in rendering him unconscious. “I am not distraught with grief,” Balthasar said angrily. “At least not distraught beyond reasoning.”

“Balthasar,” she said. “Please let me—”

From the main chambers, they heard a shout: “Will you listen to me!” Balthasar’s experience of the archduke was slight, generally gained as part of a large audience to Sejanus’s masterful public performances. He had never heard the veteran statesman even raise his voice in anger, much less shout. He took a step toward the door.

“Not with that ensorcellment about you! If any of them can sense it—”

There was real fear in her voice, but, still angry with her, he disregarded it. “I know more about the Shadowborn than anyone here. I’m used to conducting business with Lightborn—six terms on the council, Olivede! And if there
is
someone who can sense it, my ensorcellment would be proof—”

“Of further Darkborn involvement.
Don’t
, Balthasar. There’s at least one high master in the building—I can sense the strength. It’s important—it’s vital—that this is dealt with as a matter between earthborn. If the Lightborn mages decide
we
had anything to do with it, they’ll crush us like cockroaches. Phineas—”

“If it were to be dealt with earthborn to earthborn, would they have a high master with them?”

“Archduke’s orders were that none of you were to leave,” one of the guards said civilly from his station beside the door. In deference to his injuries—his face was bound with cloth torn from a pennant—it was a seated station. But if his hand on his revolver was not quite steady, it was purposeful.
Brave men,
Balthasar thought,
knowing what they guard here.

Olivede wrapped her arms around her ribs. “Phineas went to warn Dukes Kalamay and Mycene about Vladimer’s mage, who was your own Telmaine. But because he was involved with them, he might be accused of ensorcelling the munitions that destroyed the tower.”

He could not keep his temper; she sounded so frightened and forlorn. He lifted his scorched jacket and put it around her shoulders. She leaned against him with a sigh, and he rested his cheek cautiously on her hair. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you have to fear your own people as well as the Shadowborn.”

She pulled away, wrinkling her nose. “Ugh, Bal, that ensorcellment is revolting.”

She had worn exactly that expression at twelve when he had run to her in outrage after Lysander had pushed him into a pigsty. Though the muscles of his face moved like clay, he smiled at the memory.

They heard the door to the main council chambers slam open, and a moment later, Sejanus Plantageter swept into the room, a brace of Mycene’s guard scrambling ahead of him. Balthasar found himself up and standing between them and Sebastien before he was aware of having moved.

Dukes Imbré and Rohan followed the archduke together, Rohan lending an arm to the oldest duke. Then came a young man who, by his resemblance to Xavier Stranhorne, was surely Maxim di Gautier. At his shoulder was a stout older man who steered his young baron with the gentlest of touches and cast a challenging sonn over Balthasar and Olivede. In his other hand, he held a staff in a grip that dared anyone to menace his baron. Duke Kalamay followed, fingers kneading an amulet that Balthasar recognized as one distributed to followers of the Sole God as a shield against magic. Behind Kalamay came his heir, whom Balthasar knew as a clever man of malicious wit and considerable theological knowledge, and one who took as much pleasure in demolishing the fallacies of faith as those of skepticism. He stumbled on the threshold, caught himself against one of the benches, and lifted a face sagging with shock. “You said there was nothing to it. Nothing,” he said, to his father’s back.

Imbré laid a hand like a gnarled root on the archduke’s shoulder. “Well, Sejanus, now we know.”

“W’can’t yield, of course,” said a stocky man in a Borders accent, setting his stance before the archduke.

“You shall not treat with mages,” Kalamay said.

The archduke ignored him. “Lord di Gruner, while yielding is as repugnant to me as it is to you, I cannot ignore the fact that, should they choose, they could trap us in our homes, day and night both, with their lights. I doubt most households have more than two weeks’ sustenance to hand, and the poorest will have less. Not to mention the havoc it would cause for business and trade.”

“Are they,” Maxim di Gautier spoke up, hesitantly, “a legitimate government? Is this princess a legitimate ruler, or does authority still properly vest with Fejelis?”

“Of whose whereabouts we have no idea,” said Rohan.

“I got the impression,” the archduke said, “that neither did they.” He started to pace. “I should not have let myself be thrown by the fact that they brought forward a woman. I think even Vladimer stopped keeping a dossier on Perrin when she dropped out of the succession. I thought if Fejelis went down, it would be Orlanjis. And his mother, likely—Odon’s granddaughter, indeed. I wonder if this order of expulsion was her idea.”

“Our people won’t stand for it.”

“Indeed they won’t—and I wonder if theirs will, too. Oh, there’s feeling against the Darkborn—the riots and the vandalism tells us that—but there are sectors of the economy and parts of the city that owe their prosperity to trade with us.” He paused, his expression one of concentrated thought. “We are vulnerable to the light, but we have other, subtler means to hand. But I think I do not want to discuss
any
of our options until we are well out of this building.”

Balthasar got stiffly to his feet. “Your Grace,” he said, “am I to understand that the Lightborn still insist this is a matter between Lightborn and Darkborn—that they do not accept the part played by Shadowborn?”

Sejanus hesitated briefly—whether because of Balthasar’s insignificant status or his involvement—and then said, “You understand correctly, Dr. Hearne. As far as the Lightborn are concerned, the attack on the tower was entirely Darkborn. As to what happened just before their arrival—they didn’t even acknowledge that.”

But even lineage mages should have been able to sense Phineas and Olivede’s efforts, and the injury and deaths of Darkborn on this side. So how much of the denial was authentic and how much politic? First and foremost, the Mages’ Temple served its own interests, and those interests would not include admission of so profound a vulnerability. Mages contracted to the various members of the Lightborn nobility would obey the letter of their contract—no more. But what of the princess herself? She was born outside the lineages, to a family with no known magical members. Was her magic of the sport form?

He said, slowly, “My ensorcellment makes me immune to daylight. As long as that ensorcellment lasts”—as long as Sebastien was allowed to live stood implied, he hoped—“I would be able to go into the courts of the Lightborn and act both as envoy and as living proof of the existence of the Shadowborn. To my best knowledge, even the high masters would not be able to reproduce the feat of allowing a Darkborn to survive in light, or a Lightborn in darkness. If they cannot sense my ensorcellment, yet there I am, alive, they must ask themselves why.”

“Bal—,” Olivede began, and fell silent at a gesture from the archduke.

“If they do not simply kill you to restore congruence to their worldview,” Plantageter pointed out.

“I believe that I will be sufficiently intriguing and offer sufficient possibilities that they will keep me for study.”

“Why should you take the risk? ”

Because I hope the Lightborn will spare the boy,
he told the ensorcellment. “Your Grace,” Balthasar said, “I have served several terms on the Intercalatory Council, as my father did before me. I know about and care about the relationship between Lightborn and Darkborn. I have a family connection to the Shadowborn. I have been their victim—it was only by my wife’s and Ishmael di Studier’s doing that I did not die twice over. I have lost my wife to a series of events that
they
initiated. Regardless of what happens to me, I do not want my daughters—or even my brother’s twisted child—to live under Shadowborn rule. By their acts, I know them. I can do this. I am
uniquely
qualified to do this.”

“How much of this is your own will, and how much . . . his?”

“He has never intimated that I should cross the sunrise, but as long as I believe that I am acting in
his
interest, then I believe my acts will be my own. As I have demonstrated, I believe.”

“And how is your crossing over in his interest?”

Balthasar swallowed; he had not wanted to be asked that question, much less answer it truthfully. “Because I believe that Lightborn law will be more lenient to his crimes than Darkborn, and that the Temple mages have the strength to train and discipline him properly, which we do not.”

There was a pause. He could not tell, from the archduke’s face, what he was thinking. “We have received what amounts to a demand for complete submission to Lightborn rule and a surrender of the city itself. The Lightborn deny that Shadowborn exist, and blame Prince Isidore’s death on us, though they cannot say how we might have achieved it. Mycene’s and Kalamay’s guilt in the destruction of the tower and the deaths of mages is inarguable. One more offense, and I do not think they will refrain from tearing down our walls. How am I to know you will not be the agent of that offense?”

“It is my belief,” Balthasar said, “that Floria’s ensorcellment was the work of the other Shadowborn mage, who was also the one responsible for ensorcelling Vladimer.” A muscle ticked in the corner of the archduke’s mouth at the mention of his brother’s name—Bal wished he knew more about Vladimer’s condition. But what was said was said. “That Shadowborn could keep Floria unaware of what had been done to her. The boy does not have that ability. I have been aware of my actions all along.”