The Queen of Lies (32 page)

“Now,” Heath said, “as a duly appointed agent of the Inquisition, you were given a pass phrase to identify your rank within the Order. What is it?”

“Clever.” She smirked. “There isn’t a passphrase. You can find the black coin in my left pocket. Your friend can dig it out.”

Sword reached into her trousers pocket and pulled out a folded square of parchment and a black disk bearing the seal of Ohan. He tossed the coin to Heath and unfolded the parchment. It was stuffed with green crystal shards.

Heath caught the coin. It was legit. She still could have come by it through dishonest means, but if she had called bullshit on the pass phrase, she knew enough about the Inquisition to pass. She was thin, a little too thin, but pretty enough to stand out. And if she were a street rat, she’d be prime Inquisition recruitment material.

Sword dipped his finger into the green crystals, held it to his nose, and sniffed. He shook his head and tipped back a bit. “Fuck! That’s some good shit.”

“You mind, asshole?” Esme said. “That’s gotta last me all week.”

“What was your assignment?”

Esme blew a few stray strands of hair out of her face. “I was infiltrating hedge-wizard circles, looking for evidence of warlocks or pact magic and reporting it back to the church. Daphne wanted me to stay close to this guy…He’s nothing big, but he’s well connected. My job was to stay close, observe, and report.”

“How did she contact you?”

“I only met her once.” She frowned. “My last pimp liked to get his girls hooked on dragonfire so he could…” She shook her head. “One of her agents said she could cure my addiction if I worked for her; in the meantime she hooked me up. That was two fucking years ago, so I figured this whole offer was bullshit, but it beat the brothels. Besides hedge wizards aren’t so bad. When I saw the shards, I saw an opportunity—one of those will pay for an education at the Lyceum. “

Sword added. “Very convenient.”

“I know who you are, Heath,” Esme said. “You’re already rich. I didn’t think it would hurt to make off with the shards.”

Heath calmly asked, “Why were you here?”

“It’s a big empty house full of shit. There’s a lot of them since all the high and mighty bailed and left us to the Harrowers. And the Inquisition hasn’t exactly been paying me.”

“You ever heard of Evan Landry?” he asked.

“Who?”

Sword threw her against the wall again. “He asked you a fucking question!”

“Sword!” Heath said emphatically.

He looked at Heath almost in surprise. His eyes glittered with bloodlust. “Oh, for Ohan’s sake…what particular part of this fabricated bullshit are you buying? She’s a fucking warlock, and for all we know she
is
Evan Landry. These nobles name girls after anything these days. She tried to fuck us, and she deserves to get fucked. “

Heath looked at her. She was scared but masking it with an attitude of defiance. He searched her eyes; she was hard to read.

He waved his hand. “Let her go.”

“The fuck I will!” Sword said. “She’s going to die tonight, mate.”

“What the hells is your problem?”

“Gut feeling,” Sword said. “Besides, if she does work for Daphne, which I don’t believe for a second, then she also overheard our little conversation about offing the bitch. And if she was being truthful with us with a minimal amount of coercion, how’s she going to keep that information from a ruthless psychopath with a Veritas Seal?”

Sword had a point. The story didn’t add up. Even so, Heath reiterated, “Let her go now.”

“You fucking idiot!” Sword shouted, and punched his hand into the bookshelf behind her.

Esme ducked under his arm and darted toward the door. Sword lunged after her, but she stopped, crouched, and reached her arms back, grabbing his waist and tossing him over her head. With his force and momentum suddenly turned against him, Sword smashed into the floor. Esme furled her cape back, grinned slightly at Heath, then bolted out to the foyer.

“The fuck!” Sword gathered a book from the floor, ripped it in half, and chucked the pieces across the room. “You let her get away!”

“The fuck happened to you?” Heath challenged. “That was unprofessional. When I tell you to stand down, you do it.”

“You’re a child!” Sword puffed out his chest and stood in Heath’s way. “I’m ancient, and I’ve been fighting for centuries. This body here was crafted as the perfect weapon. I’m stronger and faster than anything on two legs. A little girl shouldn’t have been able to dodge me. It’s impossible.”

“Easy now.” Heath smiled and leaned into Sword’s ear, whispering, “I have her blood on my springblades. We can find her any time.”

“You fucking brilliant fucker, you!” He threw his hands around Heath and squeezed.

Heath continued, “We pretend this never happened, bring Maddox’s head to Daphne, and see what she knows. There’s a fair bit of my blood here, so we need to burn the room. You still remember how to set fires?”

“Psssh.” Sword waved his hand. “Burning a library isn’t pyromancy. You want to get food after this?”

Heath surveyed the wreckage, the forgotten shards on the carpet, Maddox’s corpse. “I could eat.”

I
’VE SAT THROUGH
183 sermons in twenty-five temples of Ohan and listened to forty-two priests’ homilies on the life of Saint Juliette. She’s unique among the saints in that her exploits are well preserved in both the Cantos and the dry military logs of the Patreans.

Saint Juliette was, by general account, a farmer who, in defiance of Thrycean authority, led a brief and ineffective revolt in Fishers Bay, a former settlement in Gorin. The Patrean records objectively tabulate the slaughter of the recalcitrant villagers (127) in a ledger against Patrean casualties (three) to arrive at an invoice for the counterinsurgency.

We’ve never been given reason to doubt Patrean accounting practices when it comes to death gratuities. Saint Juliette was killed and her head presented to the presiding legate of Thrycea, who proffered a bounty of thirty and thirty crowns for her bones, which were lashed to the prow of the Dragon Wind.

No serious student of history can lend any credence to the story of Saint Juliette’s miraculous ascension into Radiance as described in the Cantos, while her bones are on display in Thelassus. It isn’t unexpected for the public to believe what they’re told, but priests receive a comparable education to most learned scholars, including those of history.

Yet never once in all 183 sermons did I hear a single telltale reverberation of deceit, even from men who were well acquainted with the evidence. The Veritas Seal isn’t infallible. While it is sometimes accurate in detecting lies, it is far less so in detecting truth. Particularly in matters of faith. A mage’s own sound judgment is always the final arbiter.

—
MAGUS ARCHIBALD TURNBULL,
VERITAS: CERTAINTY VS. COMPLACENCY

T
HE WINDOWS TO
Badlands’ Philters were boarded shut. The door had been painted with a chalky white face with hollow eyes and a mouth frozen in a scream. A parchment with a wax seal hung from the doorway:
WRIT OF FORECLOSURE
. Maddox pulled his ragged cloak tightly around himself and turned down one of the shop’s alleys.

Most of Beaker Street was asleep during the day, save for some strung-out-looking shop boys carrying crates of dragonfire to the day laborers who would bring it up to the city. Aside from a mangy, partially mutated stray cat, the alley was clear, although a soupy runnel of opalescent slime had coalesced along the footpath.

Maddox picked his way across it as best he could in boots that were a size too large for him. Whatever had happened to his boots during his time in the Seven Signs was better left out of mind. The back entrance to the shop was locked and boarded, with a similar writ posted on the planks.

He popped his hand in a largely unnecessary arcane gesture, and the boards neatly pulled themselves free of the doorframe, floating freely in the alley. The hard part would be remembering where they went back in. Maddox shrugged and let the planks tumble into the disgusting alchemical runoff. He wouldn’t be here long enough for anyone to report it anyway.

Someone of reasonable skill had warded the lock on the door against tampering. The mechanisms resisted his telekinesis. Maddox started to dismantle the door plank by plank before he remembered Riley had given him a key. It worked.

The back of the shop was where the ovens and bulk alchemical solutions were kept. The oven was new; one of Magus Aurius’s students had pioneered a new form of convection that was all the rage. The oven wasn’t one of those, but it was a later model, probably a secondhand unit from the Lyceum.

Maddox searched for the ingredients he needed to make more euphorium. It was a fairly simple recipe, and Dad’s system of organizing hadn’t changed much, but the back had been picked clean of any substance that could even remotely be used to get high. He went to the front to check for more reagents.

A woman in white church robes sat, legs crossed delicately, in a shabby chair that had been placed in the center of the room. She had dark skin and a mildly amused expression; her hands thumbed idly through a copy of the Doctrines.

“The fuck are you doing here?”

“I’m Abbess Daphne, anointed hierarch of the Order of Penitent Martyrs.” She stood up, removed a long silk glove, and offered her hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”

“Fucking Inquisition.” Maddox shook his hands in exasperation. “You’ve had an unlicensed
magus
necromancer raising revenants and slinging drugs right under your nose for the last month. And you decide to show up here of all places? You people are fucking useless bureaucrats.”

“We only know things if people bring them to our attention, but your concerns are duly noted,” she said casually. “I’d be more than happy to take your statement and have it handled through the official channels. However, we’ve been just a bit busy trying to liaise with a rogue Traveler, identify the cause of these Harrower killings, and of course verify some disturbing claims that a mage from the university has violated one of the cardinal laws of the natural order and risen from the dead as one of the living.”

Maddox laughed. “If you came here to kill me, you’re shit out of luck.”

“I admit I was skeptical,” Daphne said. “There are probably a hundred thousand people in Creation with a longer-than-average lifespan—more and more wizards are putting their souls in artifacts every day. Of those who keep their flesh, perhaps five hundred are truly ageless. But every single one of them can be killed. It might not be easy, but once they die, the only way they get up again is with the aid of necromancy.”

“Funny you should mention that.”

“Funny indeed. I have something of yours.”

The abbess sat back in her chair and pulled a thick leather bag from beneath it. She slid the bag toward him.

Maddox kept one hand trained toward her. The gesture was unnecessary for taking her out, but he felt it was a useful reminder that he could at any moment turn this room into a cloud of burning acidic death. He bent down and flipped open the backpack. A large glass jar rested inside. Carefully he slid it out.

“That’s my head,” he stated flatly, examining his dead visage sloshing around in a amber liquid. Strands of his brown hair floated in the viscous preservative as the head lolled around inside. Dead milky-brown eyes stared back at him. No matter which way he turned the jar, the head gazed directly at him, like the needle of a compass. “You tracked me with blood magic.”

“The head was cut off a revenant by one of my votaries. The tracking spell works only when you’re alive, which apparently isn’t that frequent these days. It’s undeniable evidence. Blood magic can’t work on the dead, and necromancy can’t reanimate the living, yet there you are.”

Maddox dropped the jar to the floor beside him, not taking his eyes off her. The jar thunked but didn’t break as it rolled over the uneven slats of the floor. The head’s eyes remained fixed on Maddox as the glass spun around it.

“You’ve returned Deaddox,” he said. “Was there anything else?”

“Deaddox? We called it Headdox.” She shrugged. “I have a bit of a problem. Obviously my Inquisition mandate is clear, but I’m in a bit of a quandary about what to do with you. You aren’t like most heretics. In fact we know through eyewitness accounts that you obtained this ability through an accident of glyphomancy, not some dolmen or pact ritual. It doesn’t mean you aren’t dangerous, but…you seem like someone who can be persuaded.”

“You aren’t seriously trying to convert me.” Maddox laughed. “I haven’t prayed to your bullshit god since I was five.”

“See?” Daphne smiled. “I knew you were reasonable. Most people believe that nonsense their entire lives. Oh? You thought I’d be offended by your off-color remarks and casual sacrilege? I know the Doctrines are a sham. They were cobbled together inside of a month from faiths of every part of Creation by the Orsini Council in 32. Any student of history can put that together. Faith is just a lie that serves a higher purpose.”