Shadowborn (6 page)

Lavender Stranhorne folded her hands before her plate and shifted in her chair, as though she were tucking her feet beneath her. “Then if you don’t care to shoot beyond sonn, you cannot care much to sail the Islands, Lord Ferdenzil,” she said in a silken tone.

“On the contrary, Baronette,” Mycene said, carelessly, “I find the islanders’ methods of addressing the problem of navigation most ingenious.”

“But, alas, controversial,” Bal murmured, drawing the attention of both parties. He took a well-timed sip of wine. “I have served several terms on the Intercalatory Council that mediates where the common affairs of one race impinge upon the other. The choice of shore sites for the signal bells and message drums can be contentious; after all, the Lightborn
sleep
at night.”

“It’s always seemed t’me to be a brave thing t’do,” Ish remarked. “To sail in these waters, trusting knowledge of the seas, skill in reckoning speed and direction, and the sound of the bells. A man’s sometimes glad to be too preoccupied with his belly t’worry about the rocks.”

“And what,” Lavender said, “would you say of a man who goes Shadowhunting at sea?”

“I am well aware,” Ferdenzil Mycene said, coldly, “that di Studier is a folk hero in the Borders. But I am here with a warrant for his arrest for the murder of my betrothed, Lady Tercelle Amberley, so you will forgive me if I do not share your admiration.”

“Lord Mycene,” Lavender said, “
Baron
Strumheller is more than a folk hero. He’s the man who organized the baronies to
stop
this scourge of generations from preying on our towns and villages, when all your fine northern dukes and lords gave us were distrust and suspicion and threats to rule us in rebellion if we raised the force we need.”

“Lavender,” said Ishmael, “the warrant for my arrest is signed by the archduke, with the law of the land behind it. As is the ducal order enabling the raising of the Borders.”

“Yes,” said the baronette bitterly, “now the Shadowborn have come to the city.” She stood up. “Excuse me, Father, Lord Mycene. If I stay, I will say something I will regret. Though not nearly as much as I should.” She left, skirts swinging with her long stride.

On their way back to his shared suite with Balthasar, Ishmael continued the twins’ account. He had done his utmost, as he promised their father, to keep them to less-risky duty, escorting noble visitors on the inner Borders roads. Their single encounter with a Shadowborn had occurred on an illicit jaunt into the highlands while Ishmael himself was far down in the interior, helping organize the Odon’s Barrow troop and reserve. “Never came quite so close t’fainting on my feet as when I read that letter,” he admitted. “I was glad t’leave the hide stripping to their father.” Who had, Laurel had assured him, done a superb job of it, one quite worthy of Ishmael. “It was Laurel’s shots took it down. Lavender’s better on the range, but Laurel’s got the cooler head.”

Once they were in the suite and the door closed, he said more soberly, “The way the ladies are pleased t’tell it, the troop’s an adventure. I didn’t know the rest until months after. . . . The year before my father died and I was still Shadowhunting for hire, I’d been hired on by a lady in a little manor on the boundary between Stranhorne and Strumheller. Her son, fifteen years old, the lord of the manor, had vanished off the road. We were nearly four weeks in the Shadowlands but we found no trace. . . . The boy and Lavender had known each other from childhood, and were set on marrying when they came of age.”

“And the young ladies didn’t tell you.”

“No. It was from their father I learned it.”

F
or the second night in a row, Ishmael awakened to the sound of dripping and running water, though this time the sound was coming from high overhead, and not from rain drumming on a day hide stretched above his face. He could not hear birdsong, only the voices of a manor very much awake. He had overslept. He started to sit up and abruptly became aware of another presence. He snatched for a revolver that was not there—Mycene having thoroughly disarmed him—before his sonn resolved the form of the man reading in the chair across the room. “Hearne,” he noted, drawing his arm down. “What’s th’hour? I’d have thought Mycene would have had us on the road as soon as the sun was down.”

“He would have,” the physician said, laying his book aside, seemingly oblivious to the meaning of Ishmael’s abortive movement. “But there’s nearly two feet of snow outside.”

If Balthasar had snatched off his warm quilt, it wouldn’t have brought him upright as effectively. “Two feet?” He had had no sense of magical weather-working whatsoever. Sweet Imogene, he must have slept like the dead. Balthasar, too.

“It stopped snowing just after sunset, I’m told. Baronette Lavender has sent some parties out on skis and snowshoes, to determine how wide the effect is.”

“But none of the regular sweeps,” Ishmael said. “Is that what you’re telling me?” He threw back his covers. Balthasar started to lever himself stiffly out of his chair, intending to return to his own room. Ish waved a casual hand at him. “Stay,” he ordered. “I’ve nothing y’haven’t sonned a hundred times before. You understand what power’s needed t’influence th’weather.”

“Yes,” Balthasar said. “That kind of working would take several Lightborn high masters, and is probably beyond the reach of living Darkborn mages.”

“Stranhorne will understand that,” Ishmael said.

“Will he have shared that understanding?” Balthasar said, in sober assessment.

“That is likely, considering. The man’s no fool.”

Ishmael lifted clothes laundered of the odors and grime of the road, and went into the adjacent dressing room to wash and dress. Clad, he padded past Balthasar to the outer wall and lifted the bar and opened the shutter of the narrow, light-sealed window. It was unglazed, since its purpose was defensive. He propped a foot on the low bench on which a rifleman would kneel, and pushed his head through the gap—it would not pass his chest or shoulders—then inhaled deeply and listened. The doubled walls were wide, but the gap widened to the outside, allowing a sniper a better-than-sixty-degree arc. Snow: there was no mistaking the scent of it, but the air was warming and he could smell the grass and scrub of the Borders rising on the wind. The thaw would not be long in coming. Could he console himself that the mages who had called the storm down on them lacked the strength or commitment to keep the cold? Or had it already achieved its purpose, pinning them down, preventing the Stranhornes’ sweeps?

He could hear voices from his left—children, screeching delight at this novelty, and two or three adults—and swung his head to better place them. They would be within the enclosed garden to the east, since there was nowhere else for children to play in time of high alert. It had been the baronelle’s garden before she died. He was fully oriented now, and unnerved by more than the snow. He jerked his head back in, closed and tested the shutter automatically, and turned to face his traveling companion. “Hearne,” he said, “I need your help.”

“Anything,” the physician said.

He would rather, he admitted to himself, be facing down a scavvern with a butter knife. “Y’know the reason we were t’meet in the first place.”

“Lord Vladimer thought my skills might be useful to you,” Balthasar said. “In dealing with the Call.” Balthasar Hearne had a growing reputation in the treatment of addictions and other irrationality; his success with one of Vladimer’s other irregular agents, Gil di Maurier, had attracted Vladimer’s attention.

“Aye. You’ve an interest in the treatment of compulsions.” He passed a hand down his face. “I’ve th’strongest urge to go straight downstairs, out the door, and start walking southwest as fast and far as my feet will take me.”

“That is all?” Balthasar said.

Of course he would miss the significance of the direction, not knowing that for as long as it had ridden Ishmael, the Call had pulled him due south, not southwest. “Yes,” Ishmael said, fighting impatience. “That’s all th’Call is—an urge t’go into the Shadowlands and not come back, even knowing it would be the death of me.”

“Is there any basis to this compulsion—a sense that someone important is waiting for you there, or that you have something to do?”

“No,” Ishmael said. “It’s just th’urge t’go. Southwest.” He almost felt as though he had lurched in that direction, but sonned no reaction in Balthasar’s intent face.

Balthasar said, “Sit down, if you would, Baron.”

He waited until Ishmael had sat down and then said, “Have you ever lost control to the extent that you started to move in that direction without intending to?”

“Not waking,” Ishmael said through a tight jaw. “I’d sleepwalk when it was at its worst. Wanted a guard, sometimes chains.”

Balthasar’s lips compressed, whether at the implications of someone sleepwalking during daylight or at Ishmael’s measures. “And are you close to losing control now?”

“No, but it’s strong, and th’direction’s changed. All these years, it has pulled south. Now it’s pulling southwest.”

“Southwest, but still into the Shadowlands.” He paused. “How do you interpret that?”

“That whatever or whoever is holding th’Call on me is moving. Likely moving north.”
Toward Strumheller.
He sank his fingertips into the arm of the chair.

“And what have you tried to break the compulsion?” the physician said.

“What haven’t I tried, Hearne? Magic, of course; overspent myself often enough to drive th’futility through my thick skull. Phoebe Broome tried. She’d have asked her father, but her brother Phineas tried t’send me off the first months I was in their commune, and wound up taking a mild case of it himself. She was afraid her father’d get in too deep and suffer worse. The mage who’d had me as student tried. I downed various potions and medicines, too, though it was as well I’m hard t’poison, or some of your colleagues would have done for me.”

“Did you ever approach a Lightborn mage?” Bal said.

“Had some correspondence with one, but we’d never th’intimacy for me to raise the question with him. Darkborn mages tend not to want t’attract their attention that way—they’ve the greater power and they think to rule magic on both sides of sunrise. I’ve always wondered if they weren’t the more vulnerable to th’Call, though if Lightborn were lost in numbers in the past, we’ve no record of it.”

“Floria never seemed to have any difficulty talking about Shadowborn.”

“Mistress Floria’s not a mage,” Ishmael said flatly.

A thoughtful pause. “What do you know about therapeutic hypnosis?”

Ish shrugged. “Not so much.”

“Most important, in this instance, is that it has nothing to do with ensorcellment or subordination of the will. I am not a mage—as you well know—not a fairground magician, and definitely
not
the hypnotist in a sixpenny melodrama.” That emphasis suggested past trying experiences. “I could not induce you to do anything that you might not wish to do.” He paused. “If you wish to touch-read me to know the truth of that, you may.”

Ishmael did not move. It was a generous offer, given that Ishmael’s presence, as well as Telmaine’s confession of magic, for which Ishmael was also responsible, had perturbed Balthasar’s happy marriage. Ishmael and Telmaine had at no point acted improperly, but there was a warm, mutual attraction between them. “I’ve got many wishes best not acted on,” Ishmael said, truthfully.

“I’ve never known anyone who didn’t. But I’m not talking about impulses, although hypnotism can be very useful in subduing impulses, even quite compelling ones. Will you let me attempt to hypnotize you, Baron? It may be that I can augment your resistance to the Call.”

“Aye,” Ishmael said. “Have at it.”

But now, as years ago, when he was trying to elicit the fullest strength from his magic, Ishmael was hampered by his hyperacute senses and keen, worldly awareness, the consequences of years of vagabondage and Shadowhunting. He knew there was danger outside; he knew danger had to be attended to. Every voice or closing door, familiar or otherwise, snapped him from his trance.

“Hold,” he said at last, and leaned forward, rubbing his temples to coax away an incipient headache. Balthasar sat silent, his expression a professional mask.

“Maybe I should have said t’you that I was not that good at th’exercises that mages use. The mage who took me on when I couldn’t stick in the Broomes’ commune had th’idea t’overwhelm my vigilance. He had me down at the fish market when the barges docked.” Balthasar’s grimace proved that he, too, had visited the fish market at that time—probably as a cash-strapped young student after cheap, fresh fish. Ishmael grinned. “It seemed t’work, Hearne. So maybe—”

Telmaine’s silent scream, the sear of magic across his awareness, caught him completely unguarded. He felt his body spasm with the shock of it, and then he lost all sense of himself as the reverberations shuddered along his nerves. Their passing left him in a state of desperate uncertainty. He willed a silent voice to speak, longed for a whisper or even a wisp of vitality that would tell him if she prevailed, whether that was a shriek of mortal injury or a battle cry. He could not endure—He must—He must not try to—The crushing pain in his chest nearly caused him to black out, and left him sweating and shaking and afraid he had groaned aloud. His teeth were locked, hard enough for his jaw muscles to spasm, and he felt chilled and nauseated. Balthasar’s fingers probed his pulses, felt for his stuttering heart; through his touch, he felt the physician’s recognition and concern at this second episode. He lifted his head groggily, finding himself propped half in, half out of the armchair. “Cursed . . . habits,” he managed, and, struggling to think, let his head fall back.

He had sensed Shadowborn—he could not mistake them. Sweet Imogene, had another Shadowborn found her? They knew there were at least two in the city. If so, had Vladimer been there? Judging by what she said of her encounter with the first Shadowborn, her best chance—perhaps even her only chance—of survival was to have someone present with a ready hand and a revolver, and Vladimer was as good as Ishmael at close quarters. But there had been Lightborn magic in that sear, too. Had she run afoul of the Lightborn mages, despite his best hopes that his warnings and her own aversion would restrain her from contravening their laws on the use of magic? Or were the
Lightborn
in league with the
Shadowborn
, as Stranhorne had suggested? It would explain the magical taints, and why she fell under attack.