The Smoke-Scented Girl (20 page)

“No, if you rearrange the symbols, you get
the word
fathlon
,” Kerensa said, snatching the pencil out of
Evon’s hand. “I know that word. It means ‘enemy.’”

“Among other things, yes—”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s Murakot’s
title. In all the oldest stories, he’s Murakot Fathlon.”

They stared at each other. Evon absently
retrieved his pencil. “So what,” he said, “is a name out of
Alvorian myth doing in this spell?”

“You said it was old. Could it be
that
old? A thousand years?”

“I don’t see why not, given all the other
impossibilities it contains. Including this one. The spell becomes
active, and an ancient name for Murakot suddenly appears? It makes
no sense.”

“What if the other ones are names too? Alvor
and the rest, maybe?”

Evon scrabbled through his papers. “You do
these. I’ll tackle these ones.”

Piercy found them that way, seated side by
side on Evon’s bed, scribbling and rotating pages. “This is as cozy
a scene of domestic intellectuality as I have ever seen. I take it
there has been a breakthrough?”

“Yes, though not quite what I hoped for,”
Evon said. “We found names embedded in the spell, and one of them
is an old title for Murakot.”

“So is the spell an Alvorian conspiracist,
too?”

“Unfortunately, no. We were hoping to find
Alvor’s name, or his companions’ names, or
any
names related
to the myth, but there’s nothing.”

“Except we did find names,” Kerensa said,
laying down her pencil. “Just nothing we recognize. Leandrie and
Minta, Danior and Wadley.”

“And Haderon,” Evon said. “They at least
confirm that the spell is about a thousand years old. People in
those days didn’t use surnames, just words indicating where they
were from. Like O Dell or Der Lake.”

“I’m so disappointed. I was really hoping
Alvor might’ve had something to do with the spell,” Kerensa said.
Then, indignantly, she added, “But I would be so
furious
if
he had!”

“Some progress is better than nothing, given
what little time you may have left, Evon,” Piercy said. “There must
be some way to determine to whom those names belong.”

“What do you mean, what little time?” Kerensa
asked.

Piercy looked at Evon. “You didn’t tell
her.”

“This distracted me.”

“Tell me what?”

Evon said, “Miss Elltis has recalled me to
the city. I’m to return as soon as the Home Defense magicians
arrive here.”

“What? You can’t go!” Kerensa stood, knocking
papers and pencil to the floor.

“I’ll try not to, but if Home Defense tries
to press the issue, I may not have much choice.”

“I’ll refuse to cooperate,” Kerensa said.
“I’ll run away. You already said I was hard to find. I can be even
harder to find if I try.”

“Kerensa—”

“I’m serious. I absolutely won’t have
anything to do with a bunch of magicians who don’t care anything
about me except that I’ve got this spell bound up around me. If
Mrs. Petelter wants this spell so badly, she’ll have to do as I
say.”

“Kerensa, Mrs. Petelter has no interest in
what you want or anything you might have to say,” Piercy said. “She
has a task to accomplish and you are nothing more than an obstacle
to her getting what she wants. If she has even the slightest notion
that you might possibly be considering flight, she will lock you in
your room with a guard to watch you at every moment. If you fight
her, she will tie you to a chair in that locked room and risk the
devastation that will result.”

“But—” Kerensa’s jaw clenched. “I am not a
thing
,” she said. Evon couldn’t tell if she was close to
tears or shouting, but her voice was hoarse and her eyes in their
too-smooth mask furious.

“I’m not gone yet,” he said, “and we’re
looking for a way for me to stay. Let’s not worry about it until
the time comes.”

“Won’t Miss Elltis notice if you don’t show
up soon? Those magicians can’t be more than a day away.”

“I think I quit her employ yesterday.” Saying
it was like a load off his chest he didn’t know he was
carrying.

“You didn’t! Evon....”

“Not officially. But I do not intend to obey
her instructions, which is essentially the same thing.”

“But—I can’t let you do that!”

“I know I’ve told you that Evon is the most
stubborn man I know,” Piercy drawled. “When he sets his mind to a
thing, there is very little short of an act of Gods that can change
it. And he has gotten the bit between his teeth with this one.”

“And I don’t desert my friends,” Evon added,
not happy at how Piercy had made him sound. He wouldn’t have left
Elltis and Company merely for the sake of an intellectual problem;
he was doing it for Kerensa’s sake.

“Oh, you most certainly desert your friends,”
Piercy objected hotly. “You deserted this friend one sweltering
summer night ten years ago, when he was unfortunately detained by
the housekeeper during a daring raid on the Houndston pantry. She
was three inches shorter than I and gave me a hiding that had me
standing up for a week.”

“You certainly whined about it enough. I
don’t desert my friends except for Piercy,” Evon said with a smile,
but Kerensa didn’t respond in kind. She walked to the window and
looked down.

“It’s like they know where I am,” she said.
“They march under these windows too.” She looked back at Evon, her
lips trembling. “What next? Piercy loses his position because Mrs.
Petelter thinks he isn’t detached enough? At what point do they
decide the simplest thing is to cut me apart and see what part of
my body this damned spell is tethered to?”

“Kerensa,” Evon began.

She cut him off. “None of us has any power
over this thing, do we? I’m going to bed now, and I’m going to pray
to the Twins that those magicians get permanently lost. Maybe the
Gods will listen to me now that I’m in their city. It’s not as if
they ever have before.” She pushed past Evon and Piercy to the
door. “And I’m not promising I won’t run away. If I do, don’t
follow me.” The door slammed behind her.

Evon walked to the window and leaned on the
sill. Below, the Home Defense agents stopped in their paths to
speak to one another. By the gestures, one needed to relieve
himself. “I’ve already let her down,” he said.

“You’ve done more for her than anyone else,”
Piercy said. “I’ve never seen you come so close to tearing yourself
apart over anything like this before.”

“And it’s not enough.”

“It’s not over yet, dear fellow.”

“It
is
over, Piercy, it was over the
minute Miss Elltis told me to return.” Evon went to sit on his bed
and covered his eyes with one hand. Then he sighed and stood to
gather the papers Kerensa had scattered. “I’m not tired. Do you
want me to go to the taproom so you can sleep?”

“You’ll never be able to concentrate down
there. All the Home Defense agents are in there having an argument
I’m not sure even they know the purpose of. I can sleep with the
light on.” Piercy yawned and began removing his clothes. “Try not
to exhaust yourself. We’ll need to make an early start.”

Evon turned the lamp as low as he could bear
it and sat on his bed, spreading out his notes. Knowing that those
grouped symbols were names changed his perspective. If these five
were names, then the surrounding runes...the names were like
signatures, binding the larger parts of the spell. He found a piece
of clean paper—he was so tired of looking for paper—and scrawled
out the five names. They had to be the magicians who’d created the
spell, and he was a fool for not realizing before that a spell of
this complexity could never have been devised by only one magician,
however powerful the magician. Haderon, creator of the resurrection
spell. Minta, creator of Kerensa’s immunity to fire, and Leandrie,
responsible for Kerensa’s being drawn to the next victim. And
Wadley, whose tangle of runes caused the spell to activate when it
reached its victim. What Danior’s work did, Evon wasn’t certain,
but it had to be the fire—there was nothing left.

Now, the word
fathlon.
Enemy. It had
other meanings, but none so accurate. Evon held his notes close to
his eyes. He was going to go blind from eyestrain one of these
days. There was a marker each name had in common that he was fairly
sure indicated a proper noun. If Kerensa was right—and no one knew
more about Alvorian myth than she did, he was certain—the word’s
appearance in the spell was meant to indicate
the
Enemy,
Murakot. Evon chewed his pencil and made a face at its bitter
taste. Murakot. The spell was old enough that it could have been
contemporary with him. But even Evon, with his limited knowledge of
history, knew that no one had ever attempted to kill Murakot with a
spell of this magnitude.

He needed an expert.

“Where are you going?” Piercy muttered.

“I just need to discover something. Go to
sleep.” He slipped out of the room and went down the hall to where
the guard drowsed in front of Kerensa’s door. The guard came to
attention and glowered at him.

“She’s asleep,” he said.

“She’s not asleep yet. I need to talk to
her.” He reached past the guard to rap on the door.

“Mrs. Petelter doesn’t approve of
hanky-panky,” the guard said.

“Just talking. No hanky and no panky.” Evon
remembered that fall of golden hair and wondered if thinking about
running his hands through it met Mrs. Petelter’s definition. He
blinked hard to rid himself of the vision.
Never mind how
attractive she is. You’re supposed to be helping her.

The door opened a crack. “I need to talk to
you,” Evon said to the sliver of Kerensa’s face that was visible.
“About Alvor.”

Kerensa opened the door wider. “Tell me
you’re not looking for another bedtime story,” she said.

“This is important.”

“All right.” She held the door open for him,
then shut it, leaving both of them in darkness. “Don’t move, I’ll
get the light,” she said, and after a moment in which she bumped
into something and swore softly, light kindled and grew in the lamp
beside her bed. Kerensa was in her nightdress and had her hair
braided up. She sat on the bed. “Did you learn something?”

“I hope to. Are there any stories of someone
making a spell to kill Murakot?”

“Is
that
what you think this spell
is?”

“It’s old and I think you’re right that
‘Fathlon’ in the spell means Murakot. And it’s definitely targeting
Fathlon, whoever that is.”

Kerensa swung her legs up onto the bed and
sat with her back against the headboard, her knees pulled up to her
chest. “There are no stories like that,” she said. “Nothing like
that is even hinted at. Maybe that’s because it’s
Alvorian
myth, and that would be—I mean, even Dania never made a spell this
complicated. So if it’s really meant to kill Murakot, it would have
been made by—”

“—Some magician, or magicians, no one ever
heard of,” Evon finished. “But Murakot’s dead, isn’t he? There
aren’t any legends about him returning the way there are about
Alvor?”

“Definitely dead,” Kerensa said. “There’s one
really gruesome story about what they did to his body that I wish I
didn’t know. It was what the Four Talismans were for, to defeat
Murakot because he couldn’t be killed by normal means.”

“If that’s what this spell was for, it would
explain why the fire is so potent. I can’t imagine anyone coming
back from it. Except—”

“I know,” Kerensa said tonelessly. “Don’t
apologize, Evon, this is just the way things are.”

Evon sat at the far end of the bed. “I’m
sorry,” he said. “For everything.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “You’re as
trapped by this as I am, though in your case at least you chose to
be here.”

“I’m not leaving,” he insisted.

“Even if I tell you to?”

“Even then.”

She smiled. “Piercy’s right. You’re too
stubborn for your own good.”

“I hope I’m stubborn enough for
your
good.” He leaned back against the bedpost. “So why is this spell
trying to kill someone who’s a thousand years dead?” he mused.
“Tell me about Murakot. What was he like?”

“Oh...he’s the model for every villain of
every melodrama written in the last thousand years. Pure evil.
Liked to watch people suffer. Destroyed things just because he
could, sometimes even when the destruction went against his own
interests. I think he’s the least believable part of the stories.
Nobody’s
that
evil.”

“Except the Despot,” Evon said, and stopped.
They looked at each other. “No, the spell is clearly targeting
Murakot, not the Despot. And you said there was no way Murakot
could be back from the dead.”

“Could his soul have been resurrected? No,
that was what Wystylth’s Claw was for, to pin Murakot to the
Underworld, never to return.”

“Maybe it means Murakot’s spiritual
successor? If he...what did you just think of?”

Kerensa wore a strange, distant expression.
“There
is
one story,” she said, “but it’s not really part of
the lore. The woman who told it to me said it was a late addition
to the canon and most people wouldn’t call it Alvorian myth. It was
about Murakot and his shadow, or rather his other shadow, because
according to this story he had two. One of them was a normal shadow
and it did what all shadows do, show the way toward the Gods,
because if you can see your shadow then you know which way to turn
to face the light. But the other shadow pointed where Murakot was
already inclined to go, into dark places, and it taught him strange
magics and protected him against his enemies. The story says, when
Alvor came to kill Murakot, he had two shadows, but when Murakot
was dead, only one remained. It’s sort of a horror story, I think.
You know—is Murakot’s shadow still out there, looking for someone
new to whisper evil to. I thought it sounded made-up, myself.” She
didn’t sound very certain now.