The Smoke-Scented Girl (19 page)

Miss Elltis’s face grew redder, the creases
at the corners of her mouth deeper. “Mr. Lorantis, do not dare to
speak to me in that tone!”

“Then do not insult us both by making
allegations for which you have no foundation.”

“No foundation?” She leaned closer to her
mirror. “Home Defense has informed me that they are sending a host
of experienced magicians to take over the investigation. When they
arrive, you are to desist work on the spell immediately and return
to Matra. Then you and I will have a conversation about your future
here.”

Evon gaped at her. “That would set progress
back by days. Weeks, possibly. How are we—”

“Mr. Lorantis, I think you fail to grasp my
meaning. Elltis and Company no longer has the right to investigate
the fire spell. We are no longer in a position to develop it for
the government, let alone for commercial uses. We have been what is
euphemistically known as ‘let go.’ You should be aware that I lay
the blame for this entirely on your head. Be grateful that I do not
simply let you go as well.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t I? You are fortunate in having been
such a productive member of this cooperative for many years. I’m
told the government’s magicians will arrive in a day or two. I
expect to see you back in the capital in one week.” She broke the
connection, leaving Evon with his mouth open and a shout dying on
his tongue.

It was over. He’d failed Kerensa and he’d
failed himself. All those promises he’d made to her—how could he
ever face her again? Oh. Of course. He wouldn’t face her again
because he’d be gone. He raised his hand to fling all the papers to
the floor, but stopped himself in time; it was stupid to have to
reorganize everything again, after having just tidied up. Losing
his temper wasn’t going to help anyone.

Miss Elltis wouldn’t even let him stay to
instruct the new magicians on the research he’d already done. How
humiliated she must have been to have some Home Defense official
upbraid her on the failures of her subordinate— Mr. Terantis had to
be behind this, he was stupid enough not to realize that in getting
rid of Evon he was sabotaging the research he desperately wanted
completed. Perhaps he could appeal to Mrs. Petelter...no, she
wouldn’t go against her superiors’ wishes even if she did respect
Evon’s work, and even she believed the research would proceed more
quickly with more minds applying themselves to it, whether or not
Evon was one of those minds.

The door flew open and slammed into the wall.
“Evon,” Piercy said, and Evon turned to see both Piercy and Kerensa
breathing heavily, Piercy with his hand on Kerensa’s shoulders as
if supporting her, Kerensa twisting her hands together so hard her
knuckles were white.

“It’s started,” she said. “It’s pulling me
again.”

Evon met Piercy’s eyes. “How long?” Evon
asked.

Kerensa shook her head. “I can’t tell. It
feels close.” Her mouth trembled. “I can’t do this again,” she
said. “I thought—”

Evon stood and embraced her, pulling her
tight to him and feeling her arms clutch at him in desperation.
“There’s still time,” he said. “But we have to move quickly. If
those magicians—they’ll just want you to stop while they waste time
repeating all the work I’ve done. We’re going to tell Mrs. Petelter
that we have to leave immediately. Kerensa, Piercy and I aren’t
going to let you go through this alone, you understand? I’ll be
with you right up until it happens, and I will walk out of there
with you.” He stepped away and lifted her chin so he could meet her
eyes. “I promised I’d bring you a dress, remember?”

She laughed, weakly, but it was still a
laugh. “I’m counting on it.”

They left Calian at noon and pushed as far as
Belicath before night overtook them. Now the clear winter sky shone
with thousands of stars made dim by the ever-burning lights of the
city of the Gods. They’d passed the Twin Temples on their way into
the city, Cath’s a dark, sleek assemblage of narrow spires and
clustering towers, Belia’s squat and warm with glowing yellow
stone. They faced one another across a wide open space that in
summer was a garden lush with flowers and trees; now it was
dormant, though the temples’ auras kept it snow-free. Evon thought
it would have been less depressing had it been covered in snow.

The inn Mrs. Petelter chose was smaller and
less expensive than the one they’d stayed in in Calian, but she had
compensated for this by evicting the current tenants and hiring the
entire inn. She called it security; Evon thought it might be
paranoia, but he knew nothing about the subject and had to defer to
Mrs. Petelter in any case. If it kept Kerensa safe from Speculatus,
then he was in favor of paranoia, though he was beginning to
suspect that Odelia had lost them completely. The Home Defense
agents hadn’t seen anything suspicious at all, certainly nothing
they could attribute to Speculatus, but they maintained a readiness
that would have been more comforting had it not been so
restrictive. He looked out of the window in Mrs. Petelter’s suite
of rooms, which were on the second floor and gave an excellent view
of the wall of the pub next door. Security again, probably.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Petelter, but there’s no
time to wait for the magicians,” he said once again. He felt as if
their conversation were going around in circles, him making this
same basic point, Mrs. Petelter countering with some variation
on—

“I do not see,” Mrs. Petelter said, “how a
day’s delay will make any difference.”

“We don’t understand enough about the spell
to know how much the damage is increased by
any
delay,” Evon
said. “Up until this point, Miss Haylter has simply walked away
from whatever she was doing the instant she felt this urge. I think
we should allow her to proceed as she always has.”

“I don’t like the idea of allowing our
actions to be dictated by a murderous spell,” she replied. “It
cannot be right that we’re proceeding in a course of action that
will end with at least one person dead, possibly more. Standing by
and doing nothing runs counter to everything I believe.”

“I feel the same way,” Evon lied, “but I see
no alternative. I continue to make progress in understanding the
spell, and Miss Haylter doesn’t know how long it will take to reach
her destination; it’s possible we will unravel it before it comes
to a death.”

Mrs. Petelter eyed him narrowly, as if she
could read the difference between his words and his thoughts in his
face, but he maintained an innocently concerned expression, and
finally she said, “I’ll send word to our people to hasten their
journey. You should have all the assistance you will need very soon
now.”

So she didn’t know about Miss Elltis’s
ultimatum. “I hope it will be useful assistance, Mrs. Petelter,” he
said. He might be able to bluff a little while longer, pretend not
to have received Miss Elltis’s instructions, but if Mr. Terantis
knew the truth, he’d be on his way back to the city the second
those magicians appeared on the horizon.

He left Mrs. Petelter’s room and went
upstairs. Piercy and Evon once again shared a room, though the inn
was large enough (and, thanks to Mrs. Petelter, empty enough) that
they might have each had their own; they opted for the security of
being able to make their own plans without being observed. Piercy
sat up from where he was lounging on his bed when Evon entered, and
said, “Well?”

“She doesn’t like it, but she’s agreed,” Evon
said. “I don’t know how long we’ll be able to stay ahead of the
magicians, though.”

“How bad could that be, really? Even if they
aren’t helpful, they can’t possibly interfere with your work that
much, dear fellow.”

Evon drew in a breath. “Miss Elltis has
commanded me to return to Matra when the magicians arrive. I won’t
have anything more to do with the investigation.”

“No,” breathed Piercy. “She can’t do
that.”

“Apparently she can. So you see why it’s
essential to stay ahead of those magicians, so I’m not forced to
disobey her.”

“You’d stay anyway.”

“If I could. If Mrs. Petelter and Terantis
don’t learn about her ultimatum. I have no doubt that the
government doesn’t want me working on this either.”

“If you left, it would be disastrous,” Piercy
said. “It will take them days to understand the work you’ve already
done, if they don’t simply discard it and start over on the grounds
that you’re a mere stripling who could not possibly understand the
forces of magic you’ve been fumbling with. And Kerensa will feel so
betrayed. You know they’ll treat her like an experimental
animal.”

“Are you
trying
to send me into
despair?”

“I apologize, dear fellow. What can I
do?”

“Find a way to keep your superiors occupied
so they don’t care that I’m still here. I can ignore Miss Elltis;
the worst she can do is let me go without a reference, and I’d get
past that. But Home Defense has the manpower to escort me back to
Matra. In chains, if necessary. And I assure you it would be
necessary.” The idea of leaving Kerensa behind filled him with a
terrible anxiety. Piercy was right; she would feel betrayed, and he
couldn’t bear to do that to her.

“I’ll do my best, Evon, but you’ve noticed
that Mrs. Petelter doesn’t exactly respect my opinions or
contributions.”

“I have faith in your ability to confuse and
bewilder everyone around you. Though Terantis shouldn’t be hard to
confuse or bewilder or both.”

“I am fairly certain that both those words
mean the same thing, but I take your meaning. How early do you
think we can be out of here?”

“Not until a few hours after sunrise,
unfortunately.”

“Doesn’t traveling all day interfere with
your examination of our favorite research subject?”

“Don’t call her that, Piercy.”

“I was hoping to lighten the mood. My
apologies. Well, doesn’t it?”

“I can read and ride just as well as I can
read and walk at the same time. I’ve copied out every rune I could
see, so it really is a matter of figuring out where the secret is
hiding.” Evon blew on his fingers. “I’m for bed, though I’m too
keyed up to sleep, I think.”

“You could ask Kerensa to tell you another
story.”

“I can hardly bear to meet her eyes, I’m
keeping so many secrets from her.”

“She needs to know there’s a possibility you
might be dragged away,” Piercy said. “Imagine the shock that would
be.”

Evon grimaced. “You’re right. I’ll go talk to
her. Are you going to bed?”

“I’m going to have a drink in the taproom
first. I’ll be up shortly.”

Kerensa’s room was down the hall from theirs,
and Evon missed the convenience of their all being in close
quarters. Mrs. Petelter had posted a guard outside Kerensa’s room
and two more on a rotation below her window. Evon would have been
more grateful for this if he hadn’t suspected that Mrs. Petelter
had made the arrangements the way she might have planned security
for a valuable museum exhibit. He passed the guard, who didn’t so
much as look at him, and rapped on the door. “It’s me,” he said in
response to her query, and let himself in.

Kerensa was standing next to the window,
looking down. “They aren’t very subtle,” she said, and Evon went to
her side to see two men in Home Defense cloaks and hats moving in a
regular pattern from one end of the inn to the other. She wasn’t
yet dressed for bed, though her hair was loose and she held a brush
in one hand. Her hair gleamed warm gold in the lamplight and Evon
was seized with a brief, irrational urge to touch it, to see if it
felt like hair or flowing metal. He closed his fist on the
impulse.

“I was about to come find you,” Kerensa said,
turning away from the window, “because I thought you should maybe
look at the spell, see if it’s different now that I’m...being
pulled by it.”

“I should have thought of that,” Evon said.
“Go ahead and sit down.”

Kerensa sat on the edge of her bed—there was
no chair in the room—and Evon brought the spell into view and froze
it. It was glowing more brightly, though not as brightly as the
memory of it had in Coreth, and Evon suspected its brightness would
increase as they drew closer to the target. She sat very still as
he examined it. “There
is
something different,” he murmured,
“but I can’t tell—would you mind standing and turning around?”

“I feel like a life-sized doll,” she said
with a smile, and did as he asked.

Evon bent to look more closely at the
spell-ribbon hovering just above the small of her back. “It’s a new
set of runes,” he said, “but it looks familiar, too. I know I’ve
seen this kind of configuration before.” He stepped back and rubbed
his forehead. There were five or six others that were written this
way, all of them impenetrable to decipherment, and now a new
one.... “I need to take some notes,” he said, and took her hand and
drew her out of the room and down the passage, ignoring the
startled noise the guard made when Kerensa, wreathed in blue, went
past. In his own room, he rooted through his things for paper and
pencil and made a copy of the new runes. He showed it to Kerensa,
who’d been craning her neck watching him, then impatiently
dismissed
epiria
so he could see her clearly.

“What’s the thing around them?” she asked,
pointing at a squared-off arc that cradled the runes.

“Something that binds them so they won’t be
used by the other spells. This is—here,” he said, showing her
another page. “There are more of these, but I don’t know what they
do.”

“If you turn this one upside down, it looks
like a bare tree with two branches, or a T,” she said, rotating the
page.

“And from this angle, this one looks like the
old form for the letter F.” Evon snatched the page from Kerensa,
then quickly apologized. He rotated the page to several different
angles. “They’re not runes, they’re letters,” he exclaimed. “Where
did I put—thank you. If they’re all oriented the same way, like
this—” he rewrote the symbols in a row—“it says...damn.
Gibberish.”