Chapter 38 Two Letters
· · · ·
Two Letters
For the second time that night, Levan studied the ajar window on the second floor of Silvercloak headquarters.
Any other sound of mind person might have taken Saffron’s intrusion as a sign to perhaps forgo their achullah habit in lieu of more comprehensive security measures—i.e.
, shut the fucking window—but Nissa Naszi was clearly not sound of mind.
Leaning against a tall oak tree, Levan lifted his wand.
“Et vocos, Grand Arbiter Dematus.”
A shuffle, then a grunt. “Who is it?”
“Edmer Thain.” A code name, plucked from a classic vampire novel. At the sound of it, Dematus sucked in her breath. “Can you talk?”
“Yes.” Her mid-sixties voice danced over the knife-edge between fearful and indignant.
“Hypothetically speaking, if I were caught trespassing on Silvercloak property, could you have the charges dropped?”
A dark silence. “You’re planning a raid on the Order?”
“Less bloodthirsty than it sounds. I merely want to retrieve an object that’s fallen into the wrong hands.”
“It’ll look very bad if I block an arrest warrant following a targeted attack.”
“I’m not particularly concerned about how you look.”
A pinched sigh. “If I make my compromisation too obvious, we both lose.”
“And so we’ll turn the next Grand Arbiter. You weren’t particularly difficult.”
Some of Lyrian’s finest work. He’d threatened Dematus’s daughter into running darkseed for them, then made sure a drop turned violent, forcing the daughter into taking a life.
Lyrian had secured evidence of the criminal activity, then taken it to Dematus herself.
Said that unless Dematus followed their every order henceforth, he would turn the daughter over to the Silvercloaks, make sure she rotted in Duncarzus. As most parents would, Dematus obliged.
Dematus sounded exhausted as she said, “I won’t be able to do a thing if you leave a trail of dead Silvercloaks in your wake.”
“I intend to remain a ghost. No lives taken. But if I’m caught—”
“Nothing I do or say will lead to your release,” Dematus snapped.
“I was going to say that if I’m caught and then flee, will they still come for me?”
“Depends, once again, on how you flee. Violently or otherwise. If the only crime you’ve committed is breaking and entering…they won’t want you on such a petty charge. They’re looking for organized crime. Treason, not trespassing.”
“Great slogan. I’ll have badges made.”
A confused beat. “Did you just crack a joke?”
“No.”
Why did people keep asking him that?
Hells. Silver’s sarcasm was rubbing off on him. A veritable contagion.
“When does this end?” Dematus’s voice was a coarse whisper, cold and sad and tired.
“When you’re dead.”
The connection between their wands fell silent.
Levan plucked an invisibility potion from his tincture belt and drank it. His body wavered and then vanished, leaving only a vague smear against the night as he strode toward the open window.
Saffron didn’t have long to search Levan’s office for the letter from the Steel King.
If she was going to share the truth with Levan—that she was a Timeweaver, that she wanted to turn back time far enough to save both their parents—she had to have a powerful bargaining chip in case everything went south.
Something to hand to the Silvercloaks if she needed to be extracted, and fast. Something undeniable enough to buy her freedom, her survival.
How long would it take Levan to infiltrate the Order and retrieve her father’s note?
A sour pit of fear roiled in her belly.
Fear that he would be hurt or killed. Fear that he would hurt or kill.
Fear that she would be caught snooping.
Casting a muffling charm on her boots allowed her to slip silently to the kingpin’s office door.
The cells branched off the hallway to the left of it, and she thought of the night she’d freed Levan from the shard of deminite with a crude amputation spell.
That awful roar, its cavernous reverberations, the way it left the air ragged.
Feeling the echo of it tolling deep in her heart, she muttered the password to the kingpin’s office, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Levan leapt from Nissa’s windowsill more loudly than planned.
He’d tried to cast a silencing spell on his boots, but his magic must’ve sensed his nefarious purposes, and simply rewarded him with a high-pitched shrieking noise instead.
Fortunately, none of the patients on the hospital wing woke—Healers in Vallin tended to be overzealous with sleeping tinctures, since deep rest was considered the holiest of cures.
Still, Levan gritted his teeth at the cacophonous sound. This rebellious magic was one of the biggest problems his impromptu raid faced, and so he decided to get back on its good side before he proceeded further.
Nissa Naszi slept soundly—an ugly sleeper, snoring through her mouth and drooling onto the pillow—and so he parted the curtains around her bed and took a stroll around the rest of the hospital wing.
There were a handful of patients he recognized from the docks and the Havenwood, and he was surprised they were still recovering.
Advances in healing magic meant that most injuries were either fatal or instantly curable, so why were so many still bedbound?
He couldn’t see any missing limbs, like his own, and surely they weren’t all grappling with blood loss, which was difficult to fix with a simple spell.
Illnesses of the mind are hardest to mend, he thought. You know this all too well.
Trauma. These mages had seen so much in their careers, but the docks and the woods had been a bloodbath. Many had fallen, including their captain.
It was a month to the day, maybe to the hour, since that last altercation.
Perhaps the Silvercloaks mandated a certain amount of time to rest and regroup after such a thing—though judging by the fact Auria Marriosan was still working in the field, still sniffing around the Broad Row murders… the respite must be optional.
He crossed to a bed where a middle-aged mage with graying brown hair and sallow skin lay sleeping.
Intravenous tubes pumped fluid into her veins.
A clip chart hung over the brass railing at the foot of the bed.
Levan scanned it. There was a lot of medical jargon, but the gist was that she’d sustained massive blood loss during a botched arrest two months ago.
Her organs had been gently failing ever since.
A Healer had jotted down a whole array of tinctures and remedies they’d attempted, but though some had shown initial promise, the organ function slipped again hours or days later.
Transfusing blood was difficult, because the patient had a rare blood type and they hadn’t been able to find a match.
They’d also tried a complex procedure to amplify blood volume, but since this required a combination of advanced enchanting and healing, it had proven beyond the scope of the resident Healers.
Levan’s molars gnawed at the tender inside of his cheek.
Technically, he was familiar with the procedure they’d attempted.
T?lun, the old friend responsible for Levan’s remarkable golden hand, had once wondrously described it to him over a bottle of honeywine, and the kingpin’s meticulous mind had stored the information away.
All the component parts seemed simple enough.
The spellwork was similar to transmutation, an admittedly difficult sub-branch of enchanting, only it required an in-depth knowledge of the human body and the composition of blood itself.
Rolling up his scarlet cloak sleeves, he raised his wand and uttered the complex string of spellwork. His magic obeyed, thank the Saints. He felt the tug and flow of it, but he wasn’t sure anything was truly happening.
He vividly visualized every part of the process, pulling fluids from the body’s interstitial spaces and transmuting it into blood, picturing all the different types of cells and making sure he created enough of each, sweat pouring down his temples and slicking down his spine from the exertion.
To bolster his power, he slammed the bone of his wounded wrist against the brass bedstead, sending a hideous bolt of pain shooting up his arm and into his neck.
The patient stirred at the jostled bed, but did not wake.
Eventually, he had done all he could.
It was impossible to tell whether it had made a difference, whether the patient’s organs would heal under the fresh influx of blood and oxygen, whether the jaundice on her face was pinkening already or whether it was simply a figment of his imagination.
Though the initial purpose of the healing was to mend his own connection with his disillusioned magic, he found himself caring about the outcome.
The patient. Hoping that he had done something, anything, to counterbalance the damage he and his ilk had done to this city.
He thought wistfully of another life he might have led, a life in which he’d become a Healer like T?lun.
He might have dedicated his ruthless intellect to working similar magic on the mind, on the emotional well-being of his patients, if such a thing were possible.
Then again, would he have been motivated into such a thing were it not for the trauma he’d experienced in this life?
Would his magic have been this powerful without the countless hours of the torture curse, the painmakers, the brands?
He swallowed away the idea of this other life like a bad taste, and moved on to the next patient.
Saffron moved through the kingpin’s office like a ghost haunting her own past.
Everywhere she looked, she saw her own suffering.
The spot on the rug where Neatras had fallen dead at her hand.
The shackles on the wall where she’d been manacled in place, the row of pokers by the sputtering hearth, all of it sending fresh fire through the skin Levan had healed back in Aredan.
A curious kind of sadness curled in her belly at the thought.