28
Felix leaned against the alley wall, pretending to peruse the evening scroll. Fully half the news was devoted to the election, and Evander’s face commanded most of that. Word of the man’s misfortune splashed vividly across the print. His days were numbered.
And so are theirs.
Dread gripped his stomach with rotten hands. The thought wouldn’t release him. Take that box, and he’d scupper whatever plans Myria had for revenge.
They’ll still get what they want, he told himself. Gloriana will stop Vixius, and by rights, she should return Cassia’s powers.
If only he still trusted that she would. The centurion had created the illusion of a might that could ravage armies. What if it didn’t have to be an illusion any longer?
Stop that. You know her. If that were in her nature, she couldn’t hide it. Not in battle, not for all that time. There’s an explanation.
He closed the scroll and opened his senses.
The previous day’s storm had cleared. The tang of shattered pine speared through the muggy air, and a breeze shivered the gloss of water on the street.
The far-off rumble of the hustings had replaced the roar of traffic.
Somewhere out there stood the centurion, waiting with her brother for the debates to begin.
Beneath his feet, the arcanic grid hummed to life as lights began to wake across the city.
He flooded his mind with the sensations. Better to feel than to think.
Now.
Gloriana’s signal came like a flare in the fog of his arcana, and a lifetime of obedience moved him. In moments, he stood in the empty street where they’d cut the gateway. He reached out with the nerveless hand of his old powers, and a blurred world flooded in upon his senses.
There it was—the draining on the air, and at the heart, something like a chalk outline half washed away by rain. Now that he was more familiar with the silverwalker’s arcana, he could almost see it. That gateway had been designed to let him out, so by rights, it should let him back in.
No more dithering. He pressed his hand to the air, felt it giving way, and pushed on through.
The depraedeon still stood on the bench at the center of the workshop. He shook out the sack that the centurion had given him, took the box and set down the simulacrum in its place.
Within moments, he was back out in the cooling evening. Then, his mind still shuttered against thought, he set off for his commander.
The fervor of the crowd sent a frisson through the air as he approached the Praetorium. Exhilaration trembled through an audience some fifty thousand strong. Amid the faded fires of their arcanic signals, Gloriana’s drew him like a silver lodestone.
The masses pulsed across the auditorium, where the debates would begin within the hour. He’d have liked to take their numbers as a sign of civic interest, but he knew nine-tenths of the people there weren’t even eligible to vote.
The first law of Carintheum, he thought. Where the intrigue is, there shall the people be also.
Enterprising traders had set up stalls among them, while buskers worked their instruments and circus acts threw fire against the darkening sky. The shadow of the Praetorium lengthened over them. A balcony swept out from the middle floor, set with speakers’ podiums for the coming battle.
Felix cut through the servants’ entrance and up to the candidates’ gallery.
The place was divided into camps for each nominee, but their retinues were spilling over the lines.
Aides hurried back and forth around Valorus’s and Evander’s quarters.
The former’s men were looking smugger than he’d seen them in a while, and the latter’s, decidedly more sober.
Hot winds of gossip stirred the air. Evander had been swindled. Had he handed over his money like a fool? He was the wronged party—but no, how could he be trusted with affairs of state if he couldn’t guard his own fortune?
Felix reached the candidates’ private corridors and turned for Valorus’s temporary office.
He stepped inside to find the four thieves sitting around Gloriana’s table.
The centurion hadn’t broken out the victory champagne just yet, but a pot of strong Safaran coffee simmered in the center. Myria raised a cup in greeting.
“Felix! Gossipmonger after my own heart,” she said. “Sit ye down.”
Long years of discipline bid him return his ordinary smile. He bowed to the centurion, sending her a silent message with his eyes. I’ve got it. She nodded, and he knew she’d understood. With that, he joined the table between Myria and Lysander.
“What’ve you been up to?” he asked.
“Menacing the public order,” she said cheerily. “Not to worry, old boy. We’ll soon be out of your hair. We’re just discussing the terms of separation.”
“Miss Cadessa’s expressed an interest in the pleasures of Iseus,” said Gloriana. “I believe thirty thousand lyrin of the fifth lord’s money may precede her there.”
“Oh, I really couldn’t say, ma’am. It might’ve simply vanished. Seems to happen to a lot of praetors, come tax time.”
“Bleeding shame the phaeton had to vanish too,” Cassia said gloomily. “Melting down an Imbrium Caelestis! Blimey, if anything deserves to land a girl in Haideum . . .”
Leo patted her arm, evidently struggling to conceal a smirk. “There, there. We’ll buy you another one.”
“Buy?”
“Well . . . steal. Same thing in the end, isn’t it?”
“Not entirely,” Felix answered.
“Pfft. Takes a thief to know one,” said Myria.
A smile leapt to his face, and it took him a moment to snatch it back.
The weight of the stolen box doubled at a stroke.
All of a sudden, the mere sight of that woman twisted barbed wire around his conscience.
Her life hung on two threads as thin as spider’s silk—the box and the vow.
Gloriana was an inch from cutting both. Out of nowhere, unreasoning instinct overrode him.
Get rid of her.
“Speaking of praetors, the debates should begin any minute,” he said. “You ought to leave before Evander turns up.”
“Yes. Mustn’t be seen with scum like you. Might damage our reputation,” said Myria, then smacked her hands on the table and rocked to her feet. “Come along, chaps.”
Gloriana shot him a quizzical look. He ignored it. Sending them packing was no answer, but it bought him time. He saw them to the door, then shut them out and turned to his commander.
“Is something wrong?” she asked at once. “We hadn’t rescinded the vows.”
“No good in doing that until the victory’s secure,” he said, “nor until you’re confident that you can break into this.”
He took the shrunken sack from his pocket and drew it out to its full size. Gloriana’s eyes lit bright. She reached half-reverently inside and took the box, then turned it in the light, scrutinizing it like a jeweler examining a diamond.
“Just like that,” she murmured. “Pantheon above, the things I could do with this . . .”
Good. You’ll do such good. He pressed the thought into his mind as though he were trying to stamp sheet iron.
“Could take a while to break in,” she added. “Still, no time like the present. Come.”
“You’re not staying for the debates?”
“Damned if I’ve ever had a better excuse not to.”
She strode out into the corridor, and Felix hurried in her wake. He could feel the euphoria radiating off her, flowing out behind her like a slipstream. How he remembered that sensation—everything in balance, arcana gathering like tension down a spring, utterly unassailable.
They turned from the private corridors into the upper gallery. Felix was almost running by the time they reached the stairs.
Then he looked down, and his stomach plunged. Evander was climbing the staircase, serene amid the journalists who harried him like gulls.
Any other night, Felix might have guarded himself better—simply walked on by without a blink and blurred into the crowd.
That hour, he failed. His eyes fixed on the praetor’s face, and the alarm of discovery betrayed him.
There he was, in uniform, two paces behind the centurion, without the thinnest of disguises.
He saw it all with ethereal slowness. The recognition—the suspension—then, the click.
Evander looked away. In moments, the praetor was at the head of the stairs, and they were at the foot. Already, though, he knew it was too late.
“Ma’am, he saw us,” Felix whispered, cutting after her into the back corridors. “He recognized me.”
“What does it matter?”
“He’s bound to suspect I had a part in the theft. Now that he’s seen us together, he might connect it to you!”
“Let him,” she said brazenly. “I have his power. We’re safe.”
We might be. They’re not.
Whatever Myria had in mind for Vixius, it wasn’t over. There was no telling what kind of spanner he might’ve thrown into the works.
You’ve got to warn them.
He looked to the centurion, striding through the corridors as though she were running down a fleeing army. In one grim beat, he knew she’d never help. If Vixius killed the thieves, she’d be rid of them without ever breaking her vow.
They stepped out into the hot spring night, and the exhilaration of the crowd struck him like a thunderhead. The roar of cheers and shouts rose from the audience as the speaker’s bell rang. The debates were about to begin.
“Well, they sound excited,” he said, feigning a yawn. “Will you have need of me, ma’am? It’s been a long—”
“Yes,” she said at once. “Come. I want your help.”
Damn.
Half his mind had seen it coming from a mile off, but it somehow still caught him unawares. It was time to choose a side. The balance teetered wildly by the moment, veering between the weight of old loyalties and new fears.
Then, any chance of refusal vanished. Gloriana took his wrist. Her arcana spun them both into a silver torrent, and they thrust up and out across the sky.
The feel of flight would once have thrilled him. Now, there was nothing but the ticking of the clock inside his head.
Choose a side, said a voice in his mind, and choose it tonight.
“It isn’t working.”
Gloriana stood in her office, glaring at the box. Even a full combat blast hadn’t touched it. In testament, a few singed curls of crimson leather lay where the desk had been, and a smoking gash rent the patrium spells that lined the room.
The depraedeon rotated slowly in midair, suspended by the centurion’s powers. Felix watched her plucking at the arcanic fabric around it, working the fibers like the strings of a harp. Thick bolts of silver crackled over the device.
“Do you need to open it, ma’am?” he asked with careful innocence. “Surely having it away from Evander is enough.”
Please say it’s enough.
“It’s some kind of arcanic lock,” she muttered, as though she hadn’t heard him. “It won’t respond to me at all.”
“Perhaps Cadessa knows how to break in,” said Felix, scenting opportunity. “She wouldn’t have stolen it if she hadn’t some notion of how to make it work.”
“If you can coax an answer out of her, then try,” said Gloriana, eyes intent. “If you can’t, bring her here. We’ll release you from your vows, then . . . you can take the air. I’ll manage the rest.”
She swiped an orange from a fruit bowl nearby and tossed it in her hand. The skin peeled off it in a spiral, falling singed and silvered to the floor—and somewhere in his mind, the balance tipped.
“Very good, ma’am,” he said, then turned and left.
He had to warn Myria before she came face-to-face with Vixius again. If disloyalty it was, his conscience had nothing to say on the matter. For the first time in a long while, he knew exactly what he was going to do.
He was going to protect a friend.