23 #3
“I’m no judge of that,” she replied, “but he said that if you’d taken that injury by, say . . . mirroring a powerful arcanic blast, it’d make sense of the shatter-pattern. If so, a good surgeon could probably put you back together.”
The words sent lightning through his brain. It took him several moments to find his voice again.
“Repair my faculties?” he said. The sound seemed to come from a distance.
“He thought so,” Myria replied, “and I’ve learned to trust that man’s judgment.”
Six months ago, he’d have given anything to hear it. Now, the news thrust a blade between the armor plates he’d donned since then and levered hard. Pantheon above, he was a fool. He’d lied to the surgeons and never wondered if it might mislead them.
Then, Myria came to her feet and took his hands.
“It’d cost a lovely lyrin, no mistake,” she said. “Still, that centurion of yours might help.”
By the empire, no, he thought wildly. He couldn’t prevail on Gloriana, but what did it matter? He’d be himself again. What did he care for the price?
The price, a small voice interrupted. Win your powers back, and the price of your silence goes up.
He shook away the absurd thought in an instant. Gloriana would be glad for him. She’d know he’d keep the secret.
Would she? Rather worried when she thought you might be hunting for black market transplants, wasn’t she? Oddly keen for you to accept that you’d lost your powers . . .
Quiet. He’d spent too long in the company of thieves. He was starting to think like them.
“Perhaps,” he said with millpond calm. Myria cocked her head. He managed a smile and pressed her hands. “I daren’t hope.”
“Of course. Talk to a surgeon. Get a second opinion,” she said. “We’ve the next three days at liberty, so you might as well use them.”
“Trying to get rid of me?” he asked, saying the first thing to come to his numbstruck mind.
“Suspicious blighter, aren’t you?” she muttered, half tease, half reprimand.
“I can’t imagine why, given what’ll happen if you decide to run.”
“Pish. I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he said with half a smile, “I suppose you are.”
“Well, Master Aurelias, it would’ve been simpler if you’d said it was a casting wound in the first instance,” said Dr. Tyras, frowning at the image of Felix’s broken faculties.
“Imperial secrets,” he said, nerves tight as coiled springs. “Well?”
“Whoever you spoke to, I believe he’s right. With a great deal of patience, a good surgeon could reconstruct your channels.”
His whole soul tensed with fearful, desperate hope. Even now, he didn’t dare believe it. The chance seemed certain to dissolve like vapor the moment he grasped for it.
“And they’d be usable? Not just brittle, prone to damage?”
“They’d be delicate at first, but the cracks would fuse naturally over time,” the doctor said. “It’d be an extremely long surgery, though. And—”
“Expensive. Yes.”
“Excision would be cheaper.”
So would jumping off a forty-story building.
“I understand,” said Felix, somehow managing to keep his voice under command.
“Oh, speaking of which . . .” Dr. Tyras turned to his desk and flicked through his papers. “You asked me to put you in touch with that soldier I mentioned.”
“Soldier?”
“The one with shattered faculties, from the Arcani Corps. Fifth Company?” Tyras prompted, handing him a calling card. “Here. She said she’d be pleased to talk to you, if it’d help.”
“Of course,” he said, stowing the card in his pocket. Dash that.
“Would you like me to sound out a few surgeons? Ascertain the prices?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
With that, Felix shook the doctor’s hand and hurried from the office. Ten lyrin lighter, he struck out onto the street with his mind in a tumble. Six months of struggling, aching, fighting to resign himself to the facts, and out of nowhere . . .
Damn. Why now? he thought, trying to force his mind onto a steady track. Right in the middle of the game . . .
His spirit urged him to grasp that lifeline and haul himself frantically to the end—yet he didn’t have the time, and he certainly couldn’t afford the distraction.
And the wheels of the therical profession won’t turn any faster for your sake. While they inched on, he had a job to do.
Vixius. The grayside, he told himself, forcing his scattered mind back to the moment. You need to tell the centurion.
“So that’s where the graysiders have been hiding,” Gloriana murmured as he finished his account. “No wonder we could never find them, if they could just step into this silver lining and vanish.”
“And Vixius controls the gateways in and out,” said Felix.
“Thus controlling them. But what is it? Arcanically, what do you suppose it’s made of?”
Felix gathered his thoughts, still unsure how to make sense of those strange sights.
“All around that arcani’s gateways—a silverwalker, they call him—I could sense arcanic draining,” he said slowly. “The same as you found in Carysium Street.”
“Stands to reason,” she said. “The graysiders have always flocked there.”
“Yes. In therical terms, though, I think . . . they’ve cut through the boundaries of the fabric, and dragged pieces of it from our side through to theirs.”
Gloriana frowned. “But that’d be horrendously unstable.”
“Yes. The deeper you go, it’s as though it’s constantly falling apart and being pulled back together. I think the fabric’s always trying to right itself, by nature, but something’s forcing it to stay in place.”
“If it’s half a step from collapse, though, the boundaries should be porous,” Gloriana said. “I don’t see how one man could lock all the gateways. The sheer power it’d take . . . he’d need therical machinery. Industrial-strength stuff. Mightily large, with half a dozen private generators . . .”
“Not necessarily,” Felix said. “They have a mercurial, and her disguise collapsed while we were down there. Her face vanished. She’s somehow had the top layer stripped off her powers. Reading between the lines, Vixius stole it the night they robbed the Elysius Vault.”
“I see,” she said, eyes narrowing. “And several powerful artifacts went missing that night, didn’t they?”
“I’d wager Vixius heard of something archived in there. Something capable of transferring arcanic power, be it from one person to another—”
“Or one realm to another,” Gloriana finished.
Her voice was low, her eyes intent with fascination.
“Well, well. I’ll ask our honored Magister-General.
See if he knows what was in the vault. If you’re right, and it’s some kind of arcanic weapon .
. . I’d be pleased to take it off the grayside’s hands. ”
Felix nodded. Somewhere beneath the surface, though, a note struck wrong. He shook himself, thrusting the amorphous feeling back into the mist it came from. Those thieves were definitely infecting him.
“Of course, ma’am,” he said. “I look forward to it.”
Felix crossed the city, his thoughts in a tumble. Cutting through the Divitorium, he spied a beggar at the fountain and fished into his pocket for a coin. As he searched, his fingers met the calling card the doctor had given him.
He glanced automatically across it. Then, a hook of recognition jerked his eyes back to the name written there.
Livia Marina.
It rang a bell. The night he’d escaped from the silver lining, there’d been a woman in the centurion’s office. Prefecta Marina, Gloriana had called her. An old comrade. She’d worn the sigil of a breaking wave.
The bell gave a warning toll. Dr. Tyras had said the woman was from the Fifth Company, hadn’t he?
Gloriana used to command the Fifth, he thought. You asked her, though. You asked her if she knows anyone who’s had the excision, and she said no.
He dropped the coin into the beggar’s hat by automation. Another, heavier coin dropped in his mind. It was there in the name. Marina. Sea. Like Aurelias, it wasn’t an ancestral name, but the kind of ancient Carinth cognomen they gave arcani for their powers.
Tyras had said the woman was injured at the battle of Seawyck Cove. That was the day the centurion had turned the Celadon Sea to glass. A woman with command of the waters, an arcanic injury like his, and Gloriana had pretended not to know . . .
It thudded into his mind like a loose arrow.
She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t claim another arcani’s victory.
This time, though, that instinctive rebuff didn’t come with its usual certainty. She’d done it once. Why not twice?
Why not a dozen times?
His stomach began to sink. His instincts urged him to turn back and ask the centurion at once. There had to be an explanation. He’d offered her the bargain; perhaps Marina had done the same.
Then, on the brink, a newer caution halted him.
You know the victory in Hjelvak wasn’t hers. You know she’s blackmailed criminals to destroy a political rival. You’re already a risk. If she thinks you know an even worse secret, what then? All she needs to do is break Myria’s spine, and that vow kills you where you stand.
He was tied to the centurion by loyalty, by weakness, by poverty . . . but if he won his powers back, those levers lost their strength. Stack it all up, and breaking that vow might start to look like a sound way to kill two rats with one trap.
A strange sensation skittered down his spine. For the first time, it truly struck him that his life hung on the worth of two women’s vows.
And you might’ve been guarding your back against the wrong one.