Chapter 43
CHAPTER
Azrian
Azrian and Caelen paused at the edge of a culvert, one bridge removed from the Spire’s main entrance. Azrian waited for a lull in the water taxis before speaking.
“Last chance to back out,” he said, looking at the mirrored surface of the canal. “If we’re caught, I can’t protect you.”
Caelen grinned, wolfish and sharp. “If I’m caught, you’ll be standing beside me. It’s whoever catches us that should worry about protection from you.”
“Very well, then.” Azrian crossed his arms. “Let’s see it. It’s time to put nine cycles of training to use, Thornevail. Show me what you’ve learned.”
Caelen summoned wisps of smoky, half-formed threads of Shadows, curling them into a loose loop, ends crossing over themselves like a ribbon laid carelessly, then wove another thread around the shape, beneath the loop, over one curve, under another.
The motion was slow, deliberate. It seemed as though the Shadows should not have been corporeal enough to be woven, but Caelen, like all the other spies in Azrian’s corps, made do with little effort.
When he tightened it gently, the weave drew together into a pattern.
The magic in it hummed, low and steady. Darkness flared around them.
Caelen smirked. “This should hold us long enough to get to the top. Unless you panic—Shadow affinity reacts to adrenaline.”
Azrian gave him a look that would have frozen boiling water. “I don’t panic.”
“Of course not.”
The shadows rolled up their bodies and pooled around their faces, darkening their features and smothering the sheen of their hair.
They crossed the bridge in silence, each step matched to the rhythm of the wind and the faint music drifting from a night barge downriver.
At the Spire’s base, the guard on duty—an older woman with the face of someone who’d survived at least two wars—stared right through them.
Azrian let Caelen steer, unsurprised by the subtle confidence in his protege.
He’d trained Caelen to infiltrate enemy strongholds, though he never expected they’d apply it against their own.
The High Binder’s office was at the very top, accessible only via a spiral staircase built of black iron and inset glass.
They took it two steps at a time, feet soundless against the treads.
Azrian’s heart beat slower, not faster, as the icy stillness of the hunt set in.
At the landing, Caelen paused and pressed his ear to the door. The wards on the other side were visible only as a faint shimmer, but Azrian could sense them—thin skeins of Stone magic, built to absorb or dampen any weaving cast against it.
Any but his own, at least.
Azrian pushed Caelen out of the way with a gentle hand to his chest. Normally, Azrian could perform this kind of weaving without so much as thinking, but since bonding with Sabine, the results had been a bit more…
unpredictable. He began the knot as a spiral, threads of blackened ash tightening, coiling as the spiral turned on itself again and again until each strand pulled against the last in almost violent tension.
The fibers caught. Frayed. Burned faintly where magic brushed magic.
The weaving lacked symmetry; it lacked grace.
Every pull made it worse, tighter, more constricted, until the knot felt like a clenched fist made of thread.
It was a surprise the weave held at all. But it did, and when it collided with the ward, it erased it as if it’d never existed, exactly as expected.
“You’ll have to create an illusion to replace that ward before we leave,” Azrian instructed Caelen as he worked to pick the chamber’s lock. “They weave them anew weekly, to guarantee their strength, so we only have to ensure the illusion holds until then.”
Azrian slid inside, Caelen behind him.
The High Binder’s office was an abomination of taste. The walls were lined with tomes bound in black and stamped with the Registry’s sigil, each volume a ledger of some horror or another. The desk was a single slab of obsidian, the chair behind it massive and throne-like.
Above the desk hung a painting of Their Eminence themselves, rendered in shades of grey and crimson. Despite no eyes being visible behind the ceremonial veil, it felt as though the painting followed their movements through the chamber.
Caelen wasted no time. He moved to the desk, running gloved fingers over the surface, then crouched to inspect the drawers.
Azrian circled the room, checking the periphery for hidden triggers or traps.
Caelen popped the false bottom off the top drawer with a flick of his wrist. Inside was a sheaf of correspondence, all marked with the Emperor’s crest. Caelen scanned the first page.
“Read this,” he murmured, passing the pages to Azrian.
8th of Iverne, V.E. 402
To His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Tharion, Supreme Ruler of the Velyarian Empire,
It is with both gratitude and a grave sense of duty that I write to you from my trip to Velmarch.
The Registry’s trust among the Gilt continues to bear fruit. We have found another.
The lady came to us, as they are meant to, because we are the authority to whom all things unknown must be surrendered.
The complication, Your Majesty, is that she was already blood vowed.
And her mark’s match was not her husband.
I need not explain to you the implications of this, should it become known.
Whatever force is causing the soulmarks to resurface does so without reverence for the order we have built. It mocks the ledgers themselves.
We have seen this lady handled. Her official diagnosis was early signs of the Fade. Her husband will receive word of her passing within the fortnight.
The Registry holds. But I would be failing in my sacred duty were I not to bring to your attention the urgency of this matter. The marks appear with increased frequency, and each one is a thread pulled loose from the fabric we have spent centuries weaving tightly.
I await your wisdom, as always, in faithful service to the order that sustains us all.
Your obedient servant,
The High Binder, Imperial Magistrate of Bonds
15th of Iverne, V.E. 402
Your Eminence,
The situation you describe is intolerable.
I will not have the foundations of this Empire quietly undermined by whatever ancient superstition has seen fit to resurface under my reign.
I shall instruct the Hand to hunt each soulmarked individual in the Empire, no matter how far, and bring them to their end.
23rd of Iverne, V.E. 402
To His Imperial Majesty,
I would sooner remove my own veil than question the judgment of my Emperor. Yet the Registry exists to counsel as much as to obey, and I would be a poor steward if I failed to offer the full measure of my counsel now.
The Hand is without equals. But even the Empire’s sharpest weapon cannot be everywhere at once.
Quiet deaths, one by one, across forty-seven protectorates, will not remain quiet.
Fear spreads faster than any single operative can travel, and a frightened populace is a populace that talks.
You and I know better than most the power of the word.
What I propose is a more elegant solution, one which turns the soulmarks’ return to our advantage rather than merely containing the damage.
The Gilt does not remember. They have no frame of reference for what soulmarks truly are.
They only know that the Registry is the sole authority on all things magical and bonded.
Let us use that. Let the marks be presented as Registry innovation. They will believe it. Our people are most docile when they feel chosen rather than managed.
They will come to us willingly. They will report their marks with pride. And we will decide, in perfect privacy, what becomes of each one.
Your obedient servant,
The High Binder, Imperial Magistrate of Bonds
28th of Iverne, V.E. 402
Your Eminence,
I see the merits of your suggestion, though I remain firm that the soulmarked need to be hastily eradicated.
They pose a threat to both our legacies.
Your strategy buys us time and information.
It does not solve the problem. There is also the matter of what has already been done.
Those we have already eliminated did not disappear in silence.
What of the witnesses? They will know whatever cover you might create is a lie.
1st of Duskell, V.E. 402
To His Imperial Majesty,
The witnesses present a tidy problem with a tidy solution. They are few, and they are scattered. That, I think, is precisely the kind of work for which the Hand was made. I shall prepare a list, so that you may order him to
act on it.
Your obedient servant,
The High Binder, Imperial Magistrate of Bonds
Azrian didn’t have to guess who those witnesses might’ve been. He still remembered each one he’d brought in on charges of conspiring with the Children. Enemies of the Empire, the Emperor had called them when he’d asked Azrian to find them.
Perhaps, in a way, that hadn’t even been a lie.
It didn’t make Azrian feel any better about having carried out that specific order.
The next page was a list. Several names had been struck through: the Bennetts’, Virelle’s cousin Marianne and her husband, the debutante Sabine had found dead.
Azrian was not surprised to find his own name, and Sabine’s, several lines below.
What did surprise him was the note in the margins: Contain, do not eliminate.
Empire cannot lose its strongest weapon.
The words tasted sour even as Azrian realized, with practical detachment, that they ensured both his and Sabine’s survival, at least as long as the Empire saw him as a useful weapon and not a liability. He continued scanning the list for Caelen’s and Virelle’s names but did not find them.
He allowed himself a single, slow exhale. Keeping their marks secret had worked, after all. Thank the threads.
“We need the names. Everyone not yet crossed out.”