Three Coins for Confession (10 page)

From his pocket, Chriani drew the bloodstone talisman. He tossed
it to Milyan without a word. He was certain he saw the mage’s eyes actually
light up as he snatched it in a long-fingered hand.

“And what is this?” Milyan asked before he whispered a word of
incantation. Chriani fought the urge to make the moonsign as the talisman
shimmered with its faint pulse of blood-red light — not because he
feared this particular magic, but because he understood it. Milyan’s casting
was a spell of detection, reading the dweomer in the talisman. What Chriani
feared was what might happen if that power passed over him to read the dweomer
of his two rings.

The black iron band was hidden in his belt again, in its secret
space lined with velvet over gold foil. That was a trick he had paid to learn
from one of the war-mage acolytes he trained with at the Bastion after taking
commission. Though the lowest ranked among the spellcasters who served the
prince high, even the acolytes knew how lead and gold would block the dweomer
of detection. Chriani had thus spent a considerable amount of his newly
commissioned salary sewing gold foil into certain of the secret pockets of his
belt, his jackets, his armor.

He had designed those pockets himself, and he was confident of
their security against anything but the strictest search. One held a set of
lockpicks that he hadn’t had any opportunity to use in the five months since he
came to the frontier. One of those picks had been his mother’s, who had taught
him to master it as a child. Likewise, he kept the black ring at his belt at
all times except when he wore it. A sense of wariness about its power, and a
subtle fear of that power somehow activating when he didn’t intend it.

He had a second ring tucked in beside the black band now. One he
normally wore, but which he had hidden away while he walked to the pavilion. It
was cast of plain steel — a token Lauresa had given him before the
end. He tried to not think of either of the rings now, or of what would happen
if Milyan’s power sensed them.

“Divination and revelation,” Milyan said thoughtfully as he
raised the talisman to his eye. “Ilvani magic. Tracking by blood. Where did you
find it?”

“On a dead Ilvani whose eyes turned from gold to green. Three
coins on him. One in the mouth, one in each hand.”

“A tale already heard. The others…”

“Didn’t see this Ilvani. I followed him into the deep wood. Found
him at some kind of shrine.”

Milyan twisted the talisman between his fingers, his expression
looking unnervingly to Chriani like he might be tasting it. “Tell me,” the
magus said.

Chriani told him. The flight through the woods, the dead grove
and its black trees. The crumbling courtyard and the stone altar before which
the Ilvani had died. When he was done, Milyan sat in silence for a long while.
From the corner of his eye, Chriani saw that Derrach had stopped her sorting,
was listening intently.

He told most of the story. Not all.

Chriani irnash! Lóech arnala irch niir!

The Ilvani had called his name.

Something caught at Chriani suddenly. He felt it, sensed it
tripping across his skin like a spider’s touch. A twisting in his gut, his
pulse rising. He was alert, glancing around the tent and behind him, but seeing
nothing there. His hand strayed to his dagger, his fingers trembling.

“If I can take my leave, lord,” he said, “I am ordered to the
healers.”

Milyan glanced up as if he had only just become aware of
Chriani’s presence. “I don’t suppose you had any more sense than your halfwit
companions to claim the coins you found?” Chriani shook his head. “But you
touched them? Saw them?” the arcanist pressed. “Describe them.”

“Ilvani. Old by their look, but clean like they were new. Lord…”

“More! When I stop listening, you stop speaking.”

Chriani felt the anger surge, but it was muted. Caught and
dragged down by the sudden unease. “Warm to the touch,” he said, trying to
focus. “Bright, not like the blood-gold. The same color as the Ilvani’s eyes
before they turned.” He pulled that image from his memory, even as he felt its
edges frayed by the fear that still carried over from that darkness.

No,
he realized as he spoke. Not that fear from the deep
wood. This was something else.

When he’d sat with Kathlan, seen her wounded, something had torn
through his gut like hot iron. That sensation of pain and nausea was coming
back now, no warning to it. No sense of where it had come from. “I need to take
my leave, lord. The healers…”

“Can wait. This shrine. You can find it again.” Not a question.

“Lord, I fear that I am not well. If we could continue this
conversation…”

“This is not a conversation, soldier.”

“No, lord. I mean, I don’t know if I could find it. Perhaps in
time.”

Milyan was on his feet, digging through one of the stacks of
papers Derrach had just finished sorting. “The captains and I have things to
discuss. An expedition to the deep wood. Derrach, see our visitor out.”

With that, the mage swept past him, Chriani feeling a pulse of
chill air through the door flap that set a shiver through him. He stood up from
the stool, stumbled forward to the table.

“What in fate’s name?” Derrach stared at Chriani’s erratic
movements in horror. “You come here drunk…?”

Chriani held a finger to his lips for silence. He looked around
him, watched the door. Tried to listen, but a roaring was rising in his ears.
“Healing draught,” he managed to whisper. “Quickly.”

Since Chriani had come to the camp, Derrach had become his
contact for life-magic, with her access to the stores of draughts and unguents
shipped out from the healers in Alaniver. They were troop-issue only, meant to
be held by sergeants and squad commanders and doled out in response to dire
need. Chriani had the coin to pay for them, though — and the need.
The shoulder that no healer could ever see.

“Stuff your draught,” Derrach hissed as she glanced to the door
in turn. “It’s not a week past the last time…”

“I need it,” Chriani whispered. “Something’s wrong. Something
happened today. Ilvani magic, or poison, I don’t know…” From the purse at his
belt, Chriani fished out a handful of coins, Ilvani blood gold and silver
siolans marked with the crest of Brandishear. “I can pay…”

“It’s not about the pay, you mindless ass. It’s about me getting
caught. Two draughts gone missing so quickly, Milyan will know something’s
going on.”

In all their brief and clandestine dealings, Chriani had never
seen the acolyte show anything but fear at the mention of the magus’s name. She
was skilled enough, to judge by her having been recruited for fieldwork under
Milyan’s direction. But Derrach never made any secret of how passionately she
hated that fieldwork, and all the myriad ways a person could die on the
frontier.

“Ten in gold.”

“Get out,” Derrach hissed.

“Fifteen,” Chriani said. Then something hit him like a body blow,
and he went down to the floor.

The offer was three times what the draught was worth, but he
suspected it was his collapse that swayed Derrach’s mood more than the money.
The acolyte dropped to her knees beside him, frantic. Fumbling through
uncounted pockets on her grey robes, she pulled out a black glass jar, quickly
tore through the heavily waxed paper that sealed it. She scooped a finger’s
worth of a thick salve from it, forced that finger into Chriani’s mouth and
onto his tongue. It tasted of summer herbs and burned sugar, sweet and dark.

As the warmth of the salve’s magic washed through him, Chriani
felt the pain at his shoulder ebb. Against the waves of nausea coursing through
him, he had stopped noticing that ache.

Breathing deep, he waited for the nausea to end, waited for the
shadow to lift from across his sight.

It didn’t.

He saw the black arrow then.

It was hanging on a rough wooden rack alongside a dozen other
Ilvani relics — arrows, long-knives, what looked like a horse’s
harness and reins. He recognized it without knowing how, other arrows of grey
alongside it looking nearly as dark beneath the haze that covered his eyes.

Standing, he lurched toward it. Had to fight to do so, feeling
the magic of the arrow repelling him, forcing him backward beneath the weight
of a spasm that made his limbs ache.

“The arrow,” he whispered. He had to look around to find Derrach,
standing still and pale behind him. “Do you feel it?”

But it wasn’t the power of the arrow that had frozen the acolyte,
Chriani realized numbly. It was the way the talisman’s blood-red light was
pulsing crimson, suddenly too bright to look at where the frantic Magus Milyan
had left it on the table.

“It wasn’t doing that before,” Derrach whispered. “It wasn’t
doing that…” She stumbled back to the table and dug frantically through the
papers there, scattering them to the floor in her haste and coming up with two
scrolls in hand.

Chriani heard her words as a dark hiss as she cast her spell, an
empty echo in his head. The talisman was tugging at him, the arrow’s power
feeding into him like the burn of a scorpion’s sting.

He was standing in front of the arrow in its rack, couldn’t
remember the three strides that must have taken him there. He could hear
Derrach shouting at him, but her words were lost in a shrieking wind.

Seeing it close up for the first time, Chriani could mark the
black arrow as an Ilvani shaft only by its fletching. He thought at first that
its head must have been snapped off when it was drawn from Kathlan, but the
arrow bore no head. Only a steel cap at its gently pointed tip. It was designed
to pierce leather, to strike and stick, but not to kill. He might have mistaken
it for a practice shaft, if not for the red-black stain of Kathlan’s blood that
still clung to it, speaking to a strength in its magical construction that
would have shattered wood.

With all his strength, Chriani seized the arrow in both hands. He
felt it burning him, felt it impossibly heavy as he drove it down into the
platform of the floor. It stuck there hard, the dark steel of its tip
disappearing into the wood.

He tightened his hands around it and pushed. He felt the shaft
bend, heard it splinter.

There was only darkness after that.

He awoke to the sound of Milyan looking at him.

The magus wasn’t screaming. Wasn’t speaking. Just staring through
the storm of wind-sound that was slowly fading from Chriani’s mind. He was on
the floor, the red-faced mage looming above him. One half of the black arrow
was embedded in the floor where he’d sunk it. The other half lay beside his
numb left hand, the shaft black to the core where it had shattered cleanly,
cracking more like stone than wood.

The pain was gone. The nausea had passed like it was never there.
Like it had passed when Chriani walked away from Kathlan and the arrow earlier
that day. Easy to see that now, even if he still didn’t understand.

He sat up slowly, so weak that it took all his effort to move.
Milyan took a step back as if to give him space to rise, but the staring didn’t
stop.

“Attuned to him… An offering of blood…” It was Derrach’s voice,
but Chriani thought she might have said something more. It was hard to focus.

There was a long silence before Milyan spoke. “Remarkable.”

Chriani sat there for a long while, unable to do anything but
watch. He thought he saw Derrach grinding something in a stone bowl, saw Milyan
drink wine from that bowl when the acolyte was done. He heard the whispers of
incantation, saw both mages vanish to reappear across the room. Fear twisted
through him before he realized dimly that this wasn’t magic he was seeing, but
his own senses slipping momentarily to darkness. The scene before him blinking
in and out.

He forced himself to move, rising to stumble to the magus’s
chair. Not asking permission to sit, but determined not to slip to
unconsciousness on the rough wooden floor. Milyan was at the dark table, two
leather-bound books open before him. He arched a gnarled eyebrow at Chriani but
said nothing.

Where the larger of the two tomes half-faced him, Chriani saw not
just words but illustration. An intricate sketch of black trees washed with
green. A gleaming light broke like lines of fractured glass through shadows
that masked the forms of swirling crows. He tried to focus on it, but his
vision blurred, his stomach churning.

The Ilvani had called his name.
Chriani irnash…

An offering of blood.

“The arrow,” Chriani said at last. “What is it?”

“Broken, you half-wit. And its magic all but dispersed, thanks to
you.” Milyan slammed one of the books shut and threw it at Derrach. The acolyte
caught it awkwardly, passed another to the magus. “You make my work difficult.
I do not forget…”

“…a dweomer of seeking,” Milyan was saying. He had moved again,
Chriani losing the thread of his senses. He squeezed his hand tight to dig his
fingers into his palm. A point of pain there to concentrate on.

“Say that again.” Chriani focused on the pain, focused on the
edge of anger threading his voice. Not an ideal reckoning, but he’d take it.

Milyan sighed, waving Derrach in as he returned to his books. The
acolyte stepped close to Chriani, thrust a flask of water into his hand.

“The Ilvani enchanted a dweomer of seeking,” she said quietly.
“Attuned to a singular living essence. Your essence. The magic is shaped with
some aspect of the creature to be targeted. An offering of blood made.”

The chill that rose up Chriani’s spine was like a cold blade
caressing his back. Slowly, he stood, holding onto the chair back for the
moment it took his head to clear.

“Sergeant Thelaur,” Chriani said. “She was shot. They hunted her
too.”

“No.” The timbre of Derrach’s voice spoke to a level of anxiety
in her that eclipsed even her day-to-day fear. “The arrow taken from her was
magic, to be sure, but of the simplest kind. It was a lucky shot, no more.”