27 #2
“Wipe out the grayside?” he said mildly. “Quite the feat.”
“The silver lining’s always been unstable, that far down. One good push would flatten it, and you’ve stolen just the thing to give it a shove.”
That subtle smile betrayed itself again.
“Whyever would you imagine such a thing?”
“Well,” she pointed out, “you’ve plastered it in foot-high letters on every second playbill in Carintheum.”
That smile turned veritably sunny. “Curious,” said Vixius. “The graysiders thought it a very fine joke. Perhaps some things are writ in letters too large to read.”
“But to the point,” she went on. “Once you win the seat and lose the grayside, you’ll have enemies in high places, and no one left to do your dirty work. While you’re busy being the right hand of the law, you’ll need a left hand.”
“And you could fill the post?”
“Oh, not just me. You’ve racked up a debt to the whole crew. I want a place for them. Leo. Cassia. Lysander.”
“Ah.” The first shade of hesitation crossed his face. “They all survived.”
“You just can’t get good executioners, these days.”
“And all that fuss at Haideum . . . I did wonder.”
“First in history to crack the defenses, if I say so myself.”
“You, I might accept,” Vixius said slowly. “Them, I have no use for.”
“Tough. Those are the terms,” said Myria, clapping her palms down on the desk and coming to her feet. “In any case, you’re mistaken, and I’m going to prove it. We’re going to break the hardest target in Carintheum.”
“Are you, now?”
“Call it an audition,” she said, stepping back. “Our skills, for a place in your new regime. In the end, though, there’s a simpler reason you’ll say yes. You want to.”
Vixius watched her for a moment longer. Then, he stood, set down the pistol and took up a paper knife.
One hand in his pocket, he began to pace the room, carving a slow circle about her.
He started tossing the blade, once, twice, thrice.
She turned with him, unwilling to let him behind her back for a second.
He paused at the gesture, frowning, then glanced to the knife and seemed to realize.
The little hypocrite. He was surprised she didn’t trust him.
“Ah, Myria,” he murmured. “Tell me truthfully. You’d as soon run a blade through my spine as look at me, wouldn’t you?”
There it was again, that strange softness; and when his eyes met hers, she saw something almost sad.
Well, well. After all that time, it seemed the lord of the grayside wanted the honest truth—or wanted her to think he did.
Either way, she’d play the right tune. She kept the frivolity in place, but turned it brittle.
Brittle enough that a spark of anger flickered through the cracks.
“I won’t pretend I didn’t spend a good part of that first year imagining what you’d look like with your skin peeled off,” she said, her jaw set. “When I remembered Hadria . . . yes, I could’ve strung you up with your own sinews and sung.”
She snapped into step with him, forcing him to stop that predatory circling.
“Time and hardship, though. The great teachers. I had a stern course from them both. The truth is, we all play by the devil’s rules.” She raised her chin and fixed him in a long, unflinching stare. “But we should’ve played by them together.”
Myria stopped, and so did he. The spinning knife fell still. Slowly, Vixius set a hand on her arm, and she drew breath against her will.
Keep your head. It’s working.
“We should have,” he said. “We still can.”
“Against all Carintheum?”
“Against everyone,” he replied, his gaze fixed on the far wall, as though he dared not look at her for what he was about to say. “It’s wretchedness, you know. One soul against the rest of the world. But two?”
She said nothing, offered nothing. Those words came with such feeling that they must be false; they had to be.
“Myria, you were right on every score as to what I mean to do,” he went on suddenly, “but as for why . . .”
He tossed the knife over his shoulder and turned to face her. The blade struck the wall and quivered into stillness. Then, he reached out and met her eyes.
“Come with me, and I’ll explain.”
“Wearing that face?” said Myria; but nonetheless, she took his hand.
The moment their bare fingers touched, a static shock jumped between them.
She flinched, but didn’t draw back. Something speared into her nerves like quick, hot needles.
Suddenly, her pulse was quickening. There it was again—that nameless force, which drew her to him like a compass needle drawing north.
“You feel it?” she asked without thinking. Vixius closed his eyes for a moment.
“I used to. Before I took so many powers. I’ve too many arcanic signals inside me to sense it any longer.”
“What is it?”
“The reason,” he said quietly. “Come.”
He swept his hand across the air, carving out a gateway in a shower of steel-gray sparks, and pulled her through to the silver lining.
Myria opened her eyes to a dark room. It was almost ominously plain: a circular emberyn chamber, empty and unmarked, lit by a strange diffuse gloom that came from nowhere.
Vixius clicked his fingers. Gray lines shot through the emberyn, cutting it into hundreds upon hundreds of square drawers. They opened to a wave of his hand, revealing a glass sphere inside each one. Then, some invisible barrier fell, and horror cascaded in on Myria’s spirit.
It seethed out in malignant waves, pulsing like a dying heart.
She recognized what hung suspended in those spheres—arcanic faculties, twisted and frozen within the glass, slowly rotting like corpses.
Corpses, though, had rest in their decay.
The spirit fled the body. Here, it lingered, traces of it clinging like rotting flesh to the stolen magic.
Gods below. Are yours in there?
Her stomach lurched, and her balance betrayed her.
She seized Vixius’s arm, forgetting who it was she touched.
The colors from the spheres cut over her in blades of infected light.
Where living magic glittered pure and sharp, this was rusted, tainted, sickly as bile. Her skin shuddered where it touched.
“It was a long fight, Myria,” Vixius said quietly. “Long fights need fuel, and anger burns the longest of all. When I needed it, I came here.”
He swept his hand down, and the drawers slammed shut. Myria choked and hauled in a breath.
“Arcanic faculties?” she managed to say. Fever heat still coursed through her body, but at least the putrid touch of that light had gone.
“Hundreds. Children’s, mostly, stolen by the harvesters. They’d snatch them off the streets, cut them open on the slabs . . . rip out their teeth, claw out their memories. Scrape out their souls.”
He flicked his fingers, and the air split into a gateway. She stepped through at his pull, into the twilit world she’d last seen three years ago. The fifth lord’s watchtower.
Myria staggered away from her companion. She braced herself against the window, but the sight beyond it almost drove her to her knees. The world decayed like flesh before her, its boundaries dissolving into smoke.
Vixius’s hand settled on her shoulder, light as silk.
“Fifteen years ago. The crimson summer,” he said. “The grayside was savaging itself to death. Fighting in the alleys, in the sewers . . . We needed so much arcana to see us through the battles, and the harvesters couldn’t keep up. So they experimented.”
“By taking children’s faculties?” Myria said unsteadily.
“And putting them into our own men. Doubling their power.” His hand tightened on her shoulder. “But it didn’t work. No wonder. They did it like butchers. No one survived. Not until you.”
Her gut seized. There was anger in his voice—real anger. It split through the fog in her head and sharpened her wits.
“You . . . you said you found me with the corpses, after they’d done it,” she murmured. “But you were there already, weren’t you?”
“We were called in to take infusions before a fight,” Vixius replied, quiet and brittle. “They were behind schedule, so we went straight to the bloodshop. They wired me in directly to the source. A little girl.”
“They gave you my arcana.”
“Yes. I . . . believe that’s what you feel. The draw. Your power inside me, calling to you. Calling me to you.”
Myria slammed the doors of her mind. She dared not think of it, not even for a moment. If she did, she feared that feelings more dangerous than hatred would break through. Still, she sensed him searching her eyes, searching for a yes.
The plan. She forced a nod.
“But that child . . . they were working on her like a dead animal. Shearing her hair, melting down her jewelry, draining her memories. Right in front of me, they ripped open her magic and cut it out.”
Something jolted from his hand to her body, and memory slammed like a bolt into her head.
The stench of rust and formaldehyde, the white-hot sickness, and an awful dread and fear that rolled over her like death.
Her lips were crying for a mother she couldn’t remember, not understanding, only begging, begging that those cruel hands would stop—but they ignored her like she had no voice, and her magic drained away to the man with silver eyes—
“I should’ve done something,” he said, cutting short the ribbon of memory.
“I didn’t. I took your arcana and went out to the fight.
Then, after we’d won, and I stood in the blood .
. . something snapped. Saved by a power that wasn’t mine, fighting for a power that wasn’t mine? No more. I went back.”
The empty workshop, dissolving back into oblivion. The records locked away. The strange sense that something had happened there, something she didn’t want to remember—
“I . . . tidied up, afterward,” he went on, words coming now as though by automation. “Cleared away the bodies. I thought you’d be dead. Knew you’d be dead. But when I went to the corpse pile, I felt it. Felt that pull . . . and there you were. Clinging to life.”
Myria drew a careful, even breath. “Hadria always said . . .”