“How generous of you.”
“I thought so. My men are happy; you bagged yourself a ghost.”
“Specter,” I corrected him.
“Same thing.”
“One’s dead. The other is not.”
“Whatever. Either way, tonight was a win-win for me and Mychael.”
I turned to Mychael. “And you agreed to this?”
Mychael smiled slightly. “It seemed a small price to pay. I’ve got enough problems; I didn’t want to add ‘restless’ pirates to the list. It kept the peace.”
Phaelan grinned wickedly. “And we got a piece.”
There was a commotion at the entrance to the Satyr’s Grove.
“Stay here,” Mychael told me. “Phaelan, Vegard—”
Vegard stepped up beside me. “Keeping her here, sir.”
Mychael’s eyes met mine. “I’ll be right back.”
Phaelan’s civic-mindedness had helped snare one Saghred escapee, but there were five more out there—and one of them was Sarad Nukpana. The others appeared to be sticking to the goblin’s plan; and worse, they were saving their collective strength, or at least they weren’t wasting it in bordellos. All that power, millennia of intelligence—and it had a purpose.
I looked around us. At nearly two bells in the morning, the red-light district was a busy place. The entire city was busy, day or night. The Isle of Mid was home to the most prestigious college for sorcery, as well as the Conclave, the governing body for all magic users in the seven kingdoms. Thousands of students and mages, and somewhere among them were the specters of five escaped sorcerers, spirits without bodies. The one tonight had taken a body for fun; the others were stalking bodies for power. Mychael had safety measures in place for the students, though he thought that the students would be safe. The specters were after power, so a teenager sputtering through his or her first spells need not apply.
Mychael had made sure that everyone on the island was aware of the situation. But for the vast majority of those on Mid, it was school and business as usual. Public opinion split between not believing in what they deemed ghosts or believing they were qualified to protect themselves. They practiced magic, yet they didn’t believe in ghosts.
The public were idiots.
There was plenty of horse and coach traffic along the cobbled and lamp- lit streets. Many of the coaches clearly cost a small fortune, and no doubt their occupants were shopping for equally expensive company. The curtains on most of the coaches were closed. Rich men or women who couldn’t afford—or couldn’t risk—a house call didn’t want to advertise to everyone that they were anywhere near here.
A gleaming black coach stopped in front of us to allow another coach to cross at the intersection. It was pulled by four sleek, black horses. I didn’t particularly care for horses, and they didn’t particularly care for me, but I had to admire this team; they were magnificent animals. The coachman was cloaked, his collar pulled up, his hat pulled low.
“Bravo, little seeker,” he called out. “You deserve a gift.”
I froze. I knew that voice from dozens of nightmares. The coachman turned his face toward me: handsome and smiling.
And solid.
Sarad Nukpana. He wasn’t a specter. He was solid.
Oh
shit
.
The coach door opened and a dead body was pushed into the gutter at my feet. The goblin cracked his whip and the horses ran as if the devil himself had their reins. Sarad Nukpana’s taunt carried back to me.
“The first of many, little seeker.”
Chapter 2
The dead elf on the examination table was more of a dried husk
than anything that had once been a living man.
Mychael had the body taken back to the citadel. Considering its condition—but mostly that Sarad Nukpana was probably responsible for making it that way—the body was in one of the Guardians’ dozens of containment rooms in the lower levels of the citadel. Wards, spells, and iron-banded doors kept anything inside a containment room from getting outside a containment room. This guy didn’t look like he was going anywhere ever again, but considering who and what he had been when he was alive, Mychael wasn’t in the mood to take chances. Before something or someone had drained him dry, the man’s uniform had probably fit him very well. Identification had been all too easy.
General Daman Aratus was the fourth-highest-ranking commander of the elf queen’s army. That he was now a dried husk on a Guardian examination table had turned him from an elven general into a political and diplomatic nightmare.
And it had all happened in two blinks of an eye. Sarad Nukpana and his accomplice inside that coach had been that fast, and the coach had been warded. The Guardians fired at it, pursued it, but it still seemed to vanish into thin air. There were plenty of warehouses around the red- light district. Mychael had all of these searched. Nothing turned up, not even a trace.
Someone had tipped off Sarad Nukpana; he’d known we were going to be there. He dropped that body at my feet, and he couldn’t have made the delivery without knowing my destination. Only a few people had known about the raid on the Satyr’s Grove ahead of time. Myself, Phaelan, and Sid the necromancer were the only non-Guardians. Mychael had caught a traitor among his own men a few weeks ago. The young Guardian was the brother of the defense attaché at the elven embassy. The defense attaché had reported directly to the husk on the table that used to be General Aratus.
Mychael knew he had other traitors among his Guardians. I couldn’t imagine one of them selling information to Sarad Nukpana, but stranger things had happened. When someone sold out, it wasn’t always for money. Mostly it was for money or power; sometimes it was to keep a secret untold—or keep someone you loved alive. I knew from personal experience that there was no limit to what Sarad Nukpana would do to get what he wanted.
I’d seen it with my own eyes, but I still couldn’t believe it. “Nukpana was solid. How the hell was he solid?”
I’d asked that question more than a few times already, and I’d probably ask it a few more before I came to grips with the implication of Sarad Nukpana not being a body-hopping specter. The goblin black mage was solid, and he shouldn’t have been. When he’d been taken by the Saghred, his body had been consumed, his soul trapped inside the stone. I’d been surprised that the sadistic bastard had a soul to trap.
“I know he was solid,” Mychael said patiently, also for the umpteenth time. He was probably just as disturbed about the whole thing as I was, but being the commander of the Guardians—but mostly just being Mychael—he would never show it. I’d rarely seen him as anything other than the very picture of professional calm. “And we’re going to find out how he did it.”
“For starters, it looks like he took a few things the general won’t be using anymore.”
“But that doesn’t tell us
how
he did it,” Mychael pointed out.
And we definitely needed to know how he did it, because Nukpana had told me he’d be doing it again.
The door opened and Vegard stood aside for a robed man to enter. It was nearly four bells in the morning, and Archmagus Justinius Valerian was wide-awake and dressed in the robes of his office. Justinius was the supreme head of the Conclave of Sorcerers, commander in chief of the Conclave Guardians, Mychael’s boss, and quite possibly the most powerful mage, period. Since I’d known him, the old man had struck me as the type who didn’t give a damn what he wore and when, and what anyone said about it. But after barely surviving an assassination attempt within the past few weeks and the ensuing scramble for power, he wasn’t about to be seen as being anything other than fully recovered and completely in charge. Mid was home to some of the most powerful mages in the seven kingdoms, who also happened to be backstabbing, manipulative sons (and daughters) of bitches. As their leader, Justinius Valerian couldn’t afford to lower his guard for one instant. Not anymore.
Vegard came into the room and closed the door.
“Well, General Aratus hasn’t been seen since mid-afternoon at the elven embassy,” Justinius told us.
Mychael frowned. “Why weren’t we told he was missing?”
The old man chuckled dryly. “Because the elven ambassador wouldn’t admit that Aratus had been missing until I told him he was dead. If the general had been found dead behind the Satyr’s Grove with his trousers around his ankles, I could understand the ambassador not wanting to fess up.” Justinius looked at the husk of a body with clinical interest, then he looked at me. “So this is Sarad Nukpana’s idea of a present.”
I nodded once. “That’s what he said.”
“That goblin bastard did a piece of work on him.”
“Couldn’t agree more, sir.” I avoided looking at my gift. I had the distinct displeasure of knowing what a dead body smelled like. The general didn’t smell dead as much as, well . . . leathery. I wore leather; I’d always liked leather. Now I was trying to breathe and not use my nose—and was considering buying a new wardrobe.
“Does Markus Sevelien know?” Mychael asked grimly.
“That little weasel of an ambassador wouldn’t tell me where Sevelien was. Said he was ‘out.’ ”
The dried body on the slab also had the dubious distinction of being the middleman between an elven inquisitor, who I knew to be an evil son of a bitch, and an elven duke I had once worked for and trusted. Duke Markus Sevelien was the newly appointed chief of elven intelligence. Markus being “out” could mean anything, but he was never out at this hour unless he was working.
“The ambassador said that he would ‘convey the tragic news to the appropriate individuals,’ ” Justinius told us. “He came here in a coach that looked more like a damned hearse.” He snorted, a sort of laugh. “Thought he was going to be taking the general here with him. I told him he could have Aratus’s body when we were done with it.” He looked closely at the folds of loose skin shrunken against the general’s face, and grimaced. “We’ve got a murderer to catch; Aratus sure as hell didn’t do this to himself. Is Vidor Kalta on his way?”
Mychael nodded. “He will be. He’s extracting a nest of banshees from the basement of the old Judicial Building. He said he’d come as soon as he was finished.”
The old man whistled. “Wouldn’t want him to do a halfassed job of that.”
“No, sir.”
I looked from one of them to the other. “Him having the same last name as Lucan Kalta is just a coincidence, right?”
Mychael lips quirked in a quick grin. “Afraid not. They’re brothers. Lucan is the baby.”
“A baby what?”
I’d had an up-close and unpleasant encounter with Lucan Kalta within days of arriving on the island. He didn’t like me then, and I thought it highly unlikely that he’d warmed to me since. He was the chief librarian of the Scriptorium, a massive repository of nearly every magic- related book, scroll, or stone slab. He didn’t like me because I’d defied his authority in front of his staff. The rule I broke was stupid to begin with, so I saw nothing wrong with going around it.
“Is Vidor Kalta a necromancer or a nachtmagus?” I asked Mychael.
“Nachtmagus. In my opinion, one of the best.”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Like my skin hasn’t crawled enough tonight.”
Most people thought a necromancer and a nachtmagus were pretty much the same thing. I guess you could say that, if you thought there wasn’t much difference between a garden snake and a cobra. Necromancers could communicate with the dead. They did séances, detected hauntings, and could tell you if you had a frisky poltergeist or an ancestor who simply refused to leave.
A nachtmagus could control the dead—in all of their forms. Communicating with the dead was the least of what they could do. I’d heard that given enough time, money, and motivation, they could raise the dead. I never wanted to meet anyone that motivated.
In my opinion, no one majored in necromancy unless they were just plain weird. In theory, the Conclave college had a way to weed out the weirdos. I don’t know what that said about the department’s graduates. They wanted to work with dead things, but at the same time they couldn’t be weird. Had to be the college’s smallest graduating class.
“He’s an odd bird, and quite frankly a creepy bastard,” Justinius agreed. “But he knows his business, and best of all, he’s discreet.” He inclined his head toward the body. “How many people got a good look at the general here?”
“Few, if any,” Mychael assured him. “The section of street he landed in is between lampposts. The shadows helped. Vegard throwing his cloak over the body helped the most.”
“Quick thinking,” Justinius told my bodyguard.
Vegard nodded. “Thank you, sir. I saw his uniform, and knew nobody else needed to.”
“Other than the fact that pure-blooded goblins hate any and all elves, why would Sarad Nukpana . . .” I fumbled for a way to describe what was on that table. “. . . do this or have this done to an elven general? Was Aratus a magic user?”
Justinius shook his head. “Not a spell to his name.”
Something occurred to me and I didn’t like it at all. In fact, the sudden realization made me a little sick.
I felt Mychael’s hand on my elbow. “Raine, are you all right?”
I didn’t answer. My mind was too busy running in panicked circles. I thought I’d hit on why Sarad Nukpana had killed General Aratus and then given what was left of him to me.
Mychael’s grip tightened. “The air isn’t good; you shouldn’t be in here.” It was his paladin’s voice, the one that gave orders I usually didn’t take. “Vegard, escort—”
I waved them both off. “I’m fine. Actually, I’m not, but it’s not because of him.” I indicated Aratus. “Well, it is indirectly, or it could be.” I put my palm to my forehead. “Crap. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
Mychael’s hand stayed right where it was. “Not yet, but you’re getting there.”
I looked up at him. “What if this actually
was
some sort of twisted gift for me?” I asked quietly. “
And
a setup?”