The Queen of Lies (44 page)

“They’ve used the bodies of my subjects for their foul necromancy,” Jessa protested. “These crimes must be answered.”

“Well”—Riley looked a little embarrassed—“we had this deal with the shelters. You see, we’d trade the silver we lifted from houses to the refugees in exchange for their dead. They was just droppin’ ’em in the river, love. Figured we could do a little quid pro quo exchange of goods for charity. You need to think small to think big. That’s right, innit?”

“Not all these deaths were natural,” Heath accused, indicating a slain revenant behind him. “Some of their eyes are burned out.”

“Well…I didn’t have complete control over it,” Riley admitted sheepishly.

“An ancient monument known for brokering dark bargains gives you a power you can’t control? That’s a shocking revelation,” Sword muttered.

“But still kind of unexpected, right?” Esme retorted.

“This plan has your fingerprints all over it.” Sword glared at Esme. “It was your idea to bust old lady Pytheria here out of the asylum and convince Riley to make a pact with the dark powers in the dolmen. Then you used the harrowings to destabilize the government and frighten people while convincing Riley it was for…?”

“For the school.” Riley’s eyes lit up. “There’s going to be a new college, better than the one we got now, and right here where we’re standing is going to be a giant statue of you, Maddox—Architect of the Grand Design. They’ve got you with a beard and staff, and your cloak is billowing behind you dramatically. This is all for that, mate.” His hands motioned wildly as he described the scene.

“I used to teach at the school,” Pytheria said wistfully. “I miss my old office.”

“I’ll prove it to you!” Riley’s eyes went wide with excitement as he threw off his fur coat and spun around. Over his back was a large intricate seal. There were rings within rings, like nested sundials. He craned his head so he could talk to them over his shoulder. “I did it, Maddox. I attained the Seal of the Grand Design.”

“Guides preserve us,” Sword gasped.

T
RUE ART IS
not the mindless puppet of its creator, no more than a child is the extension of her family’s aspirations. God may have forged us for His own reasons, but our true purpose is ours alone to choose.

—THE ARTIFEX, TRAVELER’S PROVERBS

S
WORD REMEMBERED EVERYTHING
in his hosts’ memories as they remembered the events. Most people only recall 2 percent of the events in their lives and use their imagination to fill in the blanks. Sword looked at the unedited version. Some people were dutiful and objective when narrating the course of their lives. Maddox was what you might call an “unreliable narrator.”

How much of what he saw in his visions was real or fabricated was impossible to determine. Sword cross-referenced every memory he could locate for any information about the Grand Design. Maddox believed it was real, but there was little to no evidence from the ancient scholars that such a thing really existed.

“What the hells is that?” Heath asked, pointing to Riley’s seal.

“It lets him see the future.” Sword blinked out of his recollection. “Which obviously doesn’t work…because he’d have known you were my friend. He’d have known we were coming, and he’d certainly know Esme is being controlled by the malignant intelligence in that dagger.”

“She’s not so bad once you get to understand her, mate. She’s a misfit, like us.” Riley pleaded.

She elbowed him playfully.

Sword whispered, “If that seal is bound correctly, nothing can change the future he sees. He can see every move and countermove before it happens.”

“Not like that, mate. I can only see one day five hundred years in the future. The world’s an unrecognizable place, but you’re still in it, and by proxy so am I, even if only because my school helped you make the greatest discovery in glyphology to ever happen.”

“How long ago did you have this vision?” Jessa asked pointedly.

“A few weeks.” His shoulders slumped a little, and he turned back to face them.

“And when was the last time you…purchased a body from the refugee wharfs? Was it more recent than that?”

“Um…I…yeah.”

Jessa stepped forward. “Then if this seal reveals what will happen, will not those events come to pass regardless of which actions you take? So you didn’t need to claim bodies. You could have offered your ill-gotten spoils to the refugees and allowed their bodies to be cremated or properly buried.”

Riley looked at Esme. “I dunno…that sounds kind of right, don’t it?”

“Destiny assumes people work toward it,” Esme stated.

“If the seal works as intended,” Sword said slowly, using small words, “the thing it showed will happen because it’s inevitable. If the seal was incorrectly transcribed, then whatever it shows you may or may not happen, but you’ll be dead by then, Riley. So it doesn’t really matter. “

Riley frowned. “I were never as smart as you was, Maddox. You was something special and everyone knew you’d be great. I were a fucking bastard put through school by a guilty arsehole of a father I only ever met once. I were never gonna amount to nothing more than a wharf rat nohow. What did I have to lose by saying some words at a big pile of rocks in the forest, yeah?”

“You killed a lot of people.” Sword added for emphasis, “For very meager gains. Did you kill Tertius too?”

“Fuck him,” Riley spat, “He tried to kill you, he did. If anyone ever tried to hurt you I’d do the same. Just like I did your dad. Maddox, I’d— ”

Esme stabbed her dagger into Riley’s throat.

Riley clutched at his neck as he fell to his knees. His pained expression stared into Sword’s eyes. Blood spurted all over Esme’s face as she watched him fall. For good measure she punctured his kidney and threw him to the floor. Otix, Pytheria, and Themis backed away nervously. The Patrean Crateus pulled a vial of some substance out of his bandolier.

“What?” Esme laughed. “This was getting way too sentimental.”

Heath’s square jaw dropped.

Jessa blinked but recovered herself more quickly. She lashed a bolt of lightning toward Esme, who flickered out of sight. Her attack was straightforward, and she telegraphed her moves with her body language. The Razor had adjusted to Jessa’s speed.

Jessa screamed surprise and grabbed her arm. Blood flowed between her fingers. Esme stood next to her, holding the Thunderstone. Its edge was drenched in the crimson of Jessa’s blood. Esme tossed the stone on the floor. “I don’t need it anymore anyway.”

Jessa’s spine stiffened, and she punched Esme in the face. She stumbled backward, and Jessa fired a torrent of electricity that knocked the girl backward against the wall.

“I was going to do that,” Sword protested. “I had the whole fight planned out. We were going to trade blows. I was going to let her cut me—you know, for dramatic effect. Then, when it looked like she was going to beat me again, I was going to rally my telekinetic powers in an unexpected way. You know, make it a fair fight, but then let her stab me again. And then I was going to unleash my
coup de grace
by breaking her neck.”

Jessa lowered her hands, shutting off the stream of electricity. Esme’s charred corpse fell to the floor, still clutching her pristine silver dagger. She glanced back at Sword. “My apologies. Were you saying something?”

Heath ran to her side. “Your arm. Let me see it.”

“It’s just a scratch,” Jessa fumed. “
Literally
a scratch. The Thunderstone is a fake, probably glamoured sodalite.”

Sword looked at the rock on the floor. It had broken into several pieces. “Well, shit.”

Pytheria knelt over Riley’s body. “Evan, you need to wake up. It’s a beautiful day, and I won’t have you spending all day in bed.” Her bony hands pressed against his chest. Sword would have wanted to chop off her head, but the Maddox part of him was fascinated. If a senile old woman could still perform necromancy, how hard could it be?

“Please tell me you know where the real Thunderstone is,” Heath said to Jessa. “If not, we’ve wasted our time here.”

Jessa sighed. “My aunt Sireen obviously gave me a fake Thunderstone. She evidently has a peculiar sense of humor, but attempting to understand the rationale for her subterfuge will only squander more of our precious time.”

“We need to flee this city before Satryn destroys it completely,” Sword told Heath.

“You can’t give up so easily,” Jessa said. “I’ve seen both of you smile in the face of death. There must be another way to defeat her. Her life should be forfeit for her actions.”

Heath placed his hands on her shoulders. “Jessa, I’m the best assassin in the Free Cities, but I can’t kill someone who can’t be stabbed. And I can’t heal someone to death.”

Sword retrieved the chintzy Razor of Setahari from the floor and levitated it in midair. Its sharp edges gleamed. “We need to find somewhere to put this. And find my notebooks. If Satryn doesn’t smash this dilapidated eyesore, and someone else finds it, that would make this disaster look small.”

Crateus stepped forward, head bowed toward Maddox. “You want me to fetch them? I mean, with Riley dead, you’re the dean. It’s in the bylaws.”

As if on cue, Riley’s still-warm corpse gurgled a raspy sound of assent through his destroyed throat as Pytheria’s magic reanimated him.

“Don’t look at me. I was better at teaching.” The disgraced necromancer who had tarnished the Lyceum’s reputation for half a century shrugged.

“Of course,” Sword said to himself, “Riley saw it in his vision. There’s going to be a statue of me right here. Founder of a fucking school for magical rejects. This was my true destiny the whole time. Some mages get Archea—I get this. Yes, Initiate Crateus, fetch my notebooks.”

The Fodder trotted off, his bandolier of potions clinking. The black wolf and Otix retreated with him.

“I fail to see how mere notebooks could be more important,” Jessa said. “This very moment my mother rips this city apart.”

“Your mother was right—you
are
strident sometimes.” Sword didn’t mean to say that out loud, but he was kind of an ass. He winced uncomfortably. “Sorry. It sounded funnier in my head.”

If her eyes could shoot daggers they would have; he saw a visible effort to restrain herself from shooting lightning. “My apologies. You saved my life, and I ask more than is my right,” Jessa said. “You should go while you can. Nasara’s army will sweep in from the east, and Mother will hand the city to the Red Army. I can’t protect you from her.”

“We can’t leave,” Heath muttered. “I swore I would stop this.”

“We did!” Sword exclaimed. “The harrowings are done. It was my fucked-up sibling and stupid Riley who were the cause. They had
nothing
to do with the towers or the Harbinger’s antivision of the future. Even Riley didn’t see this coming.”

Heath protested, “We save our fucking city. I’m dying anyway, and I don’t want to spend my remaining years being a coward.”

Sword grabbed his shoulders. “I’m immortal. Let me do this.”

Jessa shook her head. “We do this together.”

“Fine.” Sword sighed. “Gran?”

“Yes, Charlie?” she said brightly.

“I need to borrow your undead army.”

T
HE WORLD WAS
crumbling around her, and despite the horror that her mother had unleashed, the chaos and uncertainty excited her. Politics were unpredictable, full of compromise and inaction. How grand it felt to swagger in and smite according to what her heart knew to be justice. It wasn’t negotiation or trade agreements—it was thunder that flowed through her veins.

More than anything she felt elation that Sword was going to join the fight. “Again I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.”

Sword blushed a bit. “I mean, what’s the worst she can do to me? She killed me once already. And then you had to go upstage my epic fight with Esme. I have a visceral need to show off.”

Jessa went to throw her arms around him then froze when she saw the Razor of Setahari floating over Sword’s hand. It was intricate, almost too thin to be any good in a fight, but she knew better. “We must get rid of that before we face my mother.”

“Agreed,” Heath said. “If there’s even a chance the Razor can get control of Satryn…”

“I’m not leaving it with Gran,” Sword stated. “Besides, Satryn wouldn’t pick up a dagger and I’m the only person who can carry the thing without getting my brain hijacked. Again, that is.”

“I’m coming with you two,” said Heath.

“It’s too dangerous,” Jessa urged. “You’re generous to offer, but my conscience couldn’t bear to see you slain after what you’ve done to protect me. Mother won’t kill me while I bear the heir to her bloodline, and Sword is doubly immortal.”

“You’re squishy, Heath,” Sword said. “You’ve used up most of your Light, and you can’t talk your way out of a fight with Satryn. You’re smooth, but I think the Queen of Lies could take notes from her.”