The Queen of Lies (20 page)

“The DiVarian estate. The widow DiVarian died from a harrowing, as did her heirs shortly after. It’s slated for destruction, but I have a friend on the Assembly who says it’s going to be months before anyone goes near this place. The whole city’s in a total panic. It’s beautiful here, really.”

“When I’ve finished my research, I’ll be able to stop the harrowings.”

She laughed and sat up. “Research? Is that what you call this? Buddy, you have the most hard-core drug habit of anyone I’ve ever met in my entire existence.”

“I see visions that can only be given on the precipice of death. I’m so close to unlocking secrets you couldn’t possibly imagine.”

“So close yet never actually there,” she mused. “There are no great secrets that are revealed to us when we die. Sometimes it hurts, and sometimes you don’t even notice, but when you go, there’s nothing. Just darkness and oblivion. Sometimes the fevered mind plays tricks. That’s all it is. None of this shit is real, Maddox.”

“How many times have you died?”

Esme smirked. “I’ve seen enough death to know it’s not a sacred transition—it’s just the machinery of the body failing to support itself. And I’ve done enough drugs to know what it’s like to see a false epiphany conjured from the fabric of my own imagination. Yes, it’s draped in meaning and significance and yet…what things do you really know that you can verify?”

“I know you’re not what you say you are.”

“Oh? What am I then?”

Maddox rubbed his chin and was surprised by the fullness of his beard. “I don’t know…but you’re way too intelligent to be a sixteen-year-old street orphan. And you’re not nearly traumatized enough by the shit you say you’ve seen.”

“You’re fucking insane, dude.” She tossed the dagger into the air and caught it in her hand. “But we need you to make fifty drams of the good stuff by tomorrow. So you can either get cracking on your own and do your little ritual with the pipe, or I can kill you so Gran can do her thing. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“In a minute.” Maddox grabbed the bottle of firebrandy and chugged. “Where’s Riley?”

“Do you care?”

He took another gulp of brandy. “Kind of. I mean, you’re like this ruthless murderess, and I wake up in a strange place with just you watching me. Maybe you two had a fight, and you cut him open. Just saying.”

“Fair enough.” Esme sighed. “But he’s busy. You have my word that when you wake up tomorrow, he’ll be here. If he’s not, then you’ll have no problem walking out of here, I’m sure.”

She tossed her dagger again, and it froze in midair, the point spinning toward her. She took a step back, but the hovering dagger kept its pace.

“Don’t forget”—Maddox smiled—“that knife can’t do shit to me.”

Esme snatched her blade by the hilt and nodded. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Maddox fired up the hookah and sucked in as much vapor as he could stand. It wasn’t as smooth as his original formula, but by the time he started coughing, he already was drifting off into the true reality.

THREE YEARS PREVIOUSLY…

The witch-hunter shook the rain from his cloak as he stalked into the White Trout Inn. The lightning from the storm outside cast him ominously in silhouette, a lanky shadow of a man with long curls of hair. The tables of drunken fishermen and farmers regarded him warily as he headed to the bar. He slammed his hands on the counter and peered at the bar owner. His teeth were rotten, and his gaunt face was cut by a long scar.

He looked the part.

“I’m looking for the priest,” he growled.

“Upstairs. Second door on the right,” the innkeeper stammered.

“Shitty weather,” the hunter commented offhandedly.

“Y-yes. The queen’s moods have been erratic as of late. But the farmers aren’t complaining. We need the rain.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t feel like finishing the conversation. The weather didn’t read like brontomancy either. Weatherly was a good fifty miles from Reda, and Satryn, empress’s brat or not, wouldn’t have the juice to maintain a squall this far out.

He headed up the stairs to the rooms and pounded on the door. “Priest! Open up.”

The door swung open, spilling warm light into the hallway. Heath leaned against the doorframe, bare from the waist up. His chocolate-colored chest was covered in old scars. He grinned. “Sword, we need to work on your manners. It’s impolite to intrude on a gentleman’s personal time.”

“You need to get dressed,” Sword snarled. “Unnatural theurgies are spilling out of the orphanage. You can rub one out when the job is done and this shit hole is behind us.”

Heath walked over to a battered old wardrobe and pulled out his leather jerkin. “How many warlocks?”

“Half a dozen to thirteen,” Sword said. “I watched the door for most of the day while you were doing Ohan’s work in the selectman’s office, thank you very much. No one in or out. Best entry point is a pantry door facing the shipyard. And partner, I don’t like this weather.”

“For your information, I was finessing the local authorities all day. This isn’t going to play well for the constable any way it goes down, but I did let him negotiate me into parting with two thousand ducats to fund a new orphanage.” Heath slipped on his jerkin. “So you think the storm’s related, or is this just another item to add to the growing list of your new host body’s dislikes?”

Sword grimaced and scratched his bony hand. “I wouldn’t mention if it wasn’t important.” His current skin suit was prone to irritation and paranoia, which were actually some of its more charming traits. After the untimely death of Lord Dalrymple, the abbess had dug this asshole up out of the bowels of the Invocari prison—life imprisonment, with no hope for execution.

“Noted,” Heath said, strapping on his springblades. “Did you happen to come up with a plan for once we get inside?”

“Kill everyone,” Sword said.

Heath rolled his eyes. “I was thinking a little more tactically. Your body still looks like it’s spent the last twenty years locked in a five-by-five cell. Are you able to fight?”

“Twenty one years, three months, two weeks, and five days….” Sword shut his eyes. “In a hellishly cold ice prison in the lightless bowels of the Invocari dungeons. Sometimes without food or water for days at a time. The only thing that kept me alive was the thought that I didn’t deserve the mercy of death.”

“Uh-huh.” Heath crossed his arms. “Those were all horrible things…that happened to someone else.”

“Didn’t need to know about them.” Sword stared him dead in the eye.

Heath leaned in, his expression softening. “I need to know I can rely on you. So can you get that scrambled head of yours together enough to pull this off?”

“Appreciate the concern”—Sword cracked a smile—“but the abbess ain’t no fool. I’m deadly as ever.” He extended his hand and flexed his fingers, willing a ball of fire into existence. The flames were mesmerizing as they danced, bending the air around them. The crackle of the blaze was like a song.

“I’ll never get used to that.” Heath flicked his eyes briefly down to Sword’s flame.

“I know lots of magic,” Sword replied cagily, “more than anyone’s probably forgotten. Just don’t like to use it. The whole point of being a sword is to cut, but this body’s still too stiff. Try spending two decades in a cell too small to stand in.” It was different having seals again; the binding schools of magic were most closely related to the one that had forged him.

“Spell-casting sword, assassin priest…a little different from our normal routine. But this could work.” Heath rubbed his chin.

With great effort of will, Sword extinguished his hungry, beautiful flames. The world felt emptier without the presence of all-consuming fire.

Heath grabbed a length of rope out of his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. He secured one end to a metal grappling hook. “I’m thinking we come at this a different way. We don’t know what we’ll face once we’re inside. So let’s not go in.”

“Burn it down?” Sword smiled gleefully. The house was old and weathered, the wood in need of treatment. The thatched roof would dance in a pageant of fire…if only it weren’t wet from the storm. Maybe that was why he hated rainy weather. “Too wet.”

“So we burn it from the inside,” Heath suggested. “What’s the best way to burn down a house?”

“Seriously?”

“Yes,” Heath reiterated. “It’s not classy, but we can’t take on six or more warlocks, and I don’t want to wait for the abbess to send backup and cut our bounty. The local clergy are true believers—they would have a crisis of faith over this.”

Sword rubbed his bony hands together. “Start in the basement. That’ll seal off the exit through the tunnels, if there is one. Some lamp oil on the support beams could bring the whole thing down on itself. The fire will work its way upward, so if we can have fuel there, the blaze will engulf the place fast. What about collateral damage?”

“The fire should stay contained if you actually know what you’re talking about.” Heath shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone in that house is a fair target. We have total absolution on this one in any event.”

“Tonight?”

“There should be pine pitch at the shipyard. Barrels of it. We’ll get it into the cellar first. Then I’ll bring it up through the house as far as I can go without being spotted. I’ll give the signal, and you start the blaze downstairs. A jump from a second-story window is a broken leg at worst—nothing I can’t heal. I’ll take out stragglers as they come. You can join me and help finish them off.”

“The locals?”

“I explained the situation to the mayor and constable. The citizens can’t know this was sanctioned by the Orthodoxy,” Heath explained. “If we need a scapegoat, you take the fall as usual. I’ll pretend to be a concerned senior officiate of the Orthodoxy ready to offer my healing services. You get a speedy execution, and I carry the blade back to Rivern.”

“Every time I think Daphne can’t find a worse body, she finds one.”

“She won’t.” Heath smiled. “You’re ugly even for you. And you’re even more uncouth than usual. And frankly you scare me a little.”

“You sure about this?” Sword asked, “It’s an orphanage. Some people would have a problem with that.”

“Why do you think I had you verify the accusation instead of just laying waste to the target the second we got to this miserable hamlet?” Heath said testily.

“In my day they had actual witch trials,” Sword affirmed.

“What’s the point of a trial if the verdict’s always guilty?”

“When do we start?”

S
AINT
L
UCIAN’S ORPHANAGE
was a simple two-story building on the outskirts of Reda.

In the days of the early church, before the Orsini Council, the real Saint Lucian was a healer of impressive talent known for his predilection for young boys, especially those who had no home. The Cantos remembered him as a protector of lost youth. The council either had a very short memory or a keen sense of irony.

Sword had been tempted to take two barrels of pitch from the shipyard, but his body was still feeble, and Heath, naturally, refused to carry anything. Sword’s Seal of Movement dragged one barrel along as they made their way through the driving rain to the orphanage.

Heath took only a few seconds to pick the lock on the back door. Sword tapped the doorframe with his blade to dispel the warding enchantments. He had been forged to cut through magic as well as flesh, and modern theurgies were weak at best. They broke like glass.

The door led to a darkened pantry and a set of stairs leading down to a cellar. There were no lights on the first floor. The sounds of children chanting echoed from upstairs, like simple rhymes of playground in a language long forgotten. Heath moved quietly as he found a stout metal pot and held it out in front of him.

Sword waved his hand, and the lid on the pitch barrel pried itself off and silently floated near a pile of firewood next to an iron stove. He willed a tendril of the viscous substance to collect in Heath’s pot.

They shared a nod, and Sword went downstairs, the pitch barrel hovering in tow. In his early life, he had been joined with mages of incredible power, so the novelty of his host’s seals gave him only the slightest bit of pleasure. He doubted his vessel could even pull off a basic Sarnite hex, but one made do with the tools one was given.