Ch. 31: Inventory and Ch. 32: What Remains

Chapter 31: Inventory

Marielle kept her fist closed.

The stone beneath her knees was cold. Her left arm was not. Pain ran from shoulder to fingertips, bright enough to make the room disappear around its edges.

Mael’s cuff was still in her right hand.

He had been alive when she left him.

A hand caught the back of her coat. Marielle jerked away, or tried to. The movement sent something tearing through her arm, and she made a sound she would have preferred never to hear from herself.

“Do not pull her by that shoulder,” the mage said.

The man behind her changed his grip.

Not kindness. An instruction concerning the condition of a thing they wanted intact. Marielle knew the distinction.

They put her on a chair.

Low ceiling. Damp plaster. One shuttered window, one door. A table against the wall, a narrow hearth without a fire. No sign of Aurrel’s shelves. No glass. No guards.

Three men.

The one who had fought Mael stayed beside her. Blood marked his collar, and his jaw was swelling where Mael had struck him. The mage knelt beside a strip of marked cloth on the floor, breathing through his mouth.

The third stood between her and the door.

Dark hair. Scar beneath one eye.

The dagger at his hip.

Corren had been looking at that face when he died.

Her stomach contracted.

“Open your hand,” the man beside her said.

“No.”

He reached for her fingers.

Marielle held tighter. An absurd resistance. She knew that. Cloth could not stop a knife or open a door or bring Corren back.

It was what she had.

The man pried her fingers apart one at a time. When he took the torn cuff, she could still feel the pressure of Mael’s hand around her wrist.

“Nothing,” he said, showing it to the scarred man.

Marielle stared at him.

He put it on the table.

She could not get enough air.

“Tairn. Search her.” The scarred man spoke in Solvari. For her benefit, presumably. “Everything.”

Tairn removed her coat.

She objected. He did not answer. He checked its lining, then her sleeves, waist, and the pockets sewn into her outer skirt. Marielle tried to keep her breathing steady while a stranger’s hands established what she was permitted to retain of herself.

He found her small utility knife first.

Then the narrow file. The replacement cord. Her folding rule, chalk, pencil, measuring clip, notebook, brass pins, purse, and handkerchief. The little screwdriver she had forgotten was in the reinforced pocket.

When he made her stand to remove the outer skirt, she caught the chair with her right hand. Her underskirt remained. So did her blouse. It was still too little, with her familiar layers folded across a stranger’s table.

He took her bootlaces last.

Marielle looked at the table. They had understood the cord. The file. The pins. They understood that a tool did not cease to be a tool because it was small enough to forget.

Her wrists were bound in front of her.

She tried turning them. The rope allowed a little movement and no useful separation. Tairn checked the knot, then stepped away.

Three men. One door. One window.

Her own breathing, too loud.

There had to be something else.

Marielle looked up.

The plaster crack above the shutter continued across the corner. The window frame had pulled away from the wall on one side. Old movement, judging by the dirt in the gap. Newer timber had been wedged beneath the ceiling beam, without correcting its angle.

“Your safe house is subsiding.”

The scarred man turned.

“It means sinking,” Marielle added. “Structurally.”

“Do not speak unless questioned.”

“You should question your foundation.”

His expression did not change.

The silence afterward was worse than she had expected.

Marielle looked down at her hands. They were shaking. She pressed them against her knees, which did not help because her knees were shaking too.

The mage gathered the marked strip from the floor. Something dark remained beneath it, spreading along a joint between the stones. He touched two fingers to the mark, and it faded.

She watched until he looked at her.

“Edrin,” the scarred man said. “Her arm.”

“Yes, commander.” The mage rose slowly.

Marielle did not like that he was tired. She had thought she might. Now he was coming toward her, and she disliked the possibility of mistakes considerably more.

“What are you doing?”

Edrin crouched beside the chair. “Examining the anchor.”

“That is my arm.”

“Yes.”

He caught her elbow before she could move it away.

“There is an injury,” she said. “You may have noticed.”

“I know.”

He cut the damaged sleeve farther open, then unwound Lia’s bandage.

Marielle watched it come away. The neat overlap. The knot Lia had placed where it would not rub. Familiar evidence of someone who had intended her to get better.

Underneath, the wound looked wrong.

It had looked wrong before. Not like this.

A dark line extended beyond the healing cut. She could not tell whether it was beneath the skin or something her eyes were trying to impose on it.

“How does the anchor work?” she asked.

He looked up at her. “You expect me to explain?”

“No. I am determining whether you understand it.”

Edrin pressed two fingers below the wound.

Marielle flinched.

He moved them a little farther down.

This time the pain pulled inward, toward the bone.

“Stop.”

He looked at her face, then back at her arm.

He was not ignoring the response. He was measuring it.

Marielle’s mouth went dry.

“It held,” Edrin said.

The Commander came closer. She knew his rank, at least. She would have preferred a name. Names were things she could take home.

If she went home.

She stopped that thought before it finished.

“Can you move her again?” the Commander asked.

“Not yet.”

“How long?”

“Hours.”

“We may not have hours.”

Edrin looked up. “Then you may have a corpse.”

Marielle went still.

Neither of them looked at her.

“The first translation disturbed it,” Edrin continued. “I need to settle the connection before I put her through another.”

“You said it was ready after yesterday’s tests.”

The pulling at the wall. The men Harrek’s people were tracking.

“I said the anchor is viable. It brought her here.”

The Commander considered that answer.

Marielle did not care whether he found it satisfactory. Hours. Hours meant she would remain in this room. Somewhere in Myrae, probably. Somewhere people might look.

They would look.

Daravan would—

She looked at the cuff on the table instead.

“Settle it,” the Commander said.

Edrin’s fingers tightened around her elbow. “Do not move.”

“That instruction would have been more effective before you hurt me.”

He glanced at her. “You can make this worse.”

Marielle believed him.

She hated that too.

A low exchange came from outside the door. Tairn answered in Naeric, too quickly for her to separate even the few words she might have known.

The woman entered.

Marielle recognized her coat from the street beyond Aurrel’s window. Dust clung to its hem.

“Vaelis?” the Commander asked.

“No one followed.” She shut the door. “The Watch is spreading from the shop.”

Marielle raised her head.

The woman saw. “They do not know where you are.”

“They know where I am not.”

Vaelis removed her gloves. “That leaves rather a lot of city.”

An accurate objection.

This chapter was lifted from without the author's consent; the real version is waiting there.

Marielle wished it had not been.

Edrin drew something out of a pouch and marked a short line beside the wound. Her skin prickled. The ache changed, becoming narrower and deeper.

She tried not to watch his hand.

“Why?” she asked the Commander.

“Why what?”

“You killed my guard. You attacked a shop. You brought me here.” Her voice caught on the first statement. She forced the next one through. “I would like to know what you think that accomplishes.”

He studied her for a moment.

“Where is Princess Serali Xuiven?”

“At the palace, I imagine. Surrounded by people smarter than you and angrier than me.”

“She will be told what happened to you.”

There it was.

Marielle looked at Edrin’s fingers beside the cut. At the dagger. At the three men who had come through the floor with her.

“This was for her.”

The Commander did not answer. He did not need to.

First Sun. The wound that would not heal properly. The little pulls she had tried to explain away. Lia frowning at bandages that should no longer have been necessary.

Marielle could not assemble the spell from those pieces. She could assemble the intention.

“Queen Allandra will not trade her Royal Mage for me.”

“The Queen may not,” he said. “Princess Serali might.”

Marielle’s fingers tightened against each other.

“She cares about you,” he continued. “I saw that at First Sun.”

“She is not going with you.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“She is our Royal Mage.”

“Not to Lyehira.”

Marielle wanted to tell him that Serali knew better than to trust them. That she had finally found somewhere she could live without being afraid.

Neither statement guaranteed that she would stay there if these people began hurting Marielle.

Allandra would refuse. Daravan would keep looking. Serali might decide that surrendering herself would make both unnecessary.

Marielle’s stomach tightened.

Edrin’s thumb moved. Pain caught beneath her ribs, and she bent over her bound hands before she could stop herself.

“Keep her upright,” he told Tairn.

Tairn caught the back of the chair and her uninjured shoulder. Marielle tried to breathe without making another sound.

The Commander watched.

She understood, suddenly, that telling him what Serali would never do was information he could use. That fear for Serali could tell him where to press just as effectively as Edrin’s fingers told him about her arm.

Marielle shut her mouth.

“Better,” Edrin said at last.

It was not better. The pain had eased. Those were different statements.

“And if she does not come?” Marielle asked.

The Commander glanced at her notebook on the table.

“You work on the city’s defenses,” he said. “Its walls. Its Crown’s buildings. You have been trusted with a great deal.”

Marielle looked at him.

“Lyehira would have questions for you.”

Wall stresses. Water systems. Maintenance passages through buildings designed to keep intruders out.

She knew what those questions could become. Where to concentrate an attack. Where something introduced into a water supply would spread. Which repairs had left a defense weaker than its drawings suggested.

They would not need her to design anything new. Some of the answers were already in her notebook.

“I will be a poor gift,” she said.

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you will resist?”

“Obviously.”

The Commander’s expression did not change. “You will have time to reconsider.”

Marielle wanted her coat. Her tools. Her office with the window she forgot to close. Lia complaining about her work schedule. Someone asking a question because they wanted her answer, rather than because they intended to take it from her.

She wanted Corren standing at the door.

Her eyes burned.

She looked at the plaster crack until it became a crack again, instead of a blurred white line.

The Commander turned away. “Tairn stays with her. No one opens that shutter.”

He and Vaelis spoke near the door. Marielle could not follow them. Edrin wound fresh cloth around her arm, less neatly than Lia, and left the torn sleeve hanging.

“Against the wall,” Tairn told her.

He helped her stand by her uninjured arm, moved her beneath the shuttered window, and made her sit on the floor. The plaster was cold against her back. Above her shoulder, the lower edge of the frame stood a little proud of the wall.

Tairn checked her bindings again, then carried the chair nearer the door and sat where he could watch her.

Marielle kept her hands in her lap.

There was a nail working loose from the window frame. A dark gap behind the lower hinge. The new support beneath the old beam had been cut too short and packed with scraps.

Not an escape.

Things that might become one.

The cuff remained on the table, beside her notebook.

Mael had been alive.

Harrek and Daravan would be looking.

Marielle drew a slow breath and began counting the sounds beyond the shutter.

Cart wheels. Two voices. Something being unloaded. A bell, distant enough that she could not place it.

Then her arm pulled.

She stopped counting.

This felt different. A small pressure moving against the ache, as though something had caught on the other end of a thread.

Edrin lifted his head.

His hand went still over the cloth he was folding.

Marielle looked from him to her bandage.

She did not know whether to be frightened.

She was frightened anyway.

Chapter 32: What Remained

Serali was in Allandra’s office reviewing the plans for testing and the safeguards for the wards. Halal had sent a response to Marielle’s schematics with what Serali believed could qualify as a book about his proposed order of the testing.

He had also sent a primer on Wardwork and Arcane Theory with a note attached that Serali read once and then threw in the hearth. She did not throw the book in the hearth. Unfortunately, it was probably useful.

“The plan was for four diagnostic arrays. That way we can send multiple teams out to check different convergence points. It will take weeks instead of months.”

Allandra looked up from the proposal. “Will you be attending the inspections? Marielle is not one to delegate easily.”

“Halal and Marielle are adamant that we must personally check what he calls, ‘the most likely points of failure.’”

“That doesn’t sound optimistic.”

“It’s not. He apparently means ‘the junctions of the wall where interference could propagate a failure into adjoining sections.’” Serali pointed to one of the dense paragraphs where Halal described at length the intricacies of ward interdependencies.

Allandra started reading, then looked back up. “I will want Daravan and Harrek to agree on additional security measures before you go out again.”

Serali considered this. “You think yesterday’s precautions were not enough? I could wear a full set of armor if you prefer, though it might make crouching to look in panels more difficult.”

Allandra narrowed her eyes, but Serali could see her fighting a smile. “Yesterday was a singular event. If you are going to the wall regularly, that establishes a pattern. Daravan has strong feelings about patterns our enemies can learn.”

Serali held her hands up in mock surrender. “Fine, we shall allow the Captain to make the inspections more inconvenient for everyone.”

Allandra was about to respond when there was a sharp knock at the door.

It opened before Allandra could grant permission, and Ivelle appeared with a guard. “Your Majesty, an urgent message from the city.”

Serali looked up from the papers on Allandra’s desk.

The guard was breathing too quickly. Not badly enough to have run all the way from Myrae. Badly enough to have forgotten how to walk once he reached the palace.

Allandra addressed the guard. “Report.”

“The resin shop was attacked, Your Majesty. Corren is dead. Mael is wounded and receiving treatment. Lady Marielle has been taken.”

Serali’s hand stopped on the page.

The words would not settle into anything she understood.

“Have Captain Daravan and Commander Harrek been informed?” Allandra asked.

“Commander Harrek and Captain Daravan are at the scene.”

“Who took her?”

“Three men inside the shop. A fourth person obstructed the Watch observers. The men removed Lady Marielle by magic.”

“Lyehiran agents?”

“Suspected, Your Majesty. No confirmed identities.”

Marielle had been here yesterday.

Correcting something. Explaining why a measurement someone else considered close enough was not close enough at all.

“Captain Daravan requests Lady Serali and Mistress Lia, with their escorts,” the guard continued. “The existing palace posts remain.”

“I will go,” Serali said.

Allandra’s fear struck through the bond before she spoke. “No.”

Serali looked at her.

Allandra’s fingers had closed around her pen. She put it down carefully.

“Have Mistress Lia informed,” she told the guard. “Tell Captain Daravan we have received his report. Wait outside for further instructions.”

He bowed and withdrew with Ivelle.

The door closed.

“Allandra.”

“I know.” Allandra stood. “I heard myself.”

Serali pushed back her chair. “They took Marielle.”

“I heard that too.”

Neither of them moved for a moment.

Then Allandra came around the desk.

“They failed to take you at First Sun,” she said. “Now someone takes a woman who helped stop them, using magic we don’t yet understand.”

“Daravan sent for me.”

“Yes. Daravan, who wants her found.”

So did Serali. The thought hurt in a way she did not have time to examine.

“That does not make his request wrong,” she said.

“No.” Allandra looked toward the door. “It means we need to think about what might still be there.”

Serali felt her own shadow creeping toward the passage and called it back.

Allandra noticed.

Of course she noticed.

“I am not proposing to run through Myrae alone,” Serali said. “Lia will be there. Daravan is there. Harrek has the scene secured.”

“And whatever they left may react to you.”

“Then I need to know that.”

Allandra’s expression tightened.

Serali stopped, then tried again. “Before we find it somewhere worse. Before someone brings it into the palace without knowing what they are carrying.”

That reached her.

Not enough to ease the fear. Enough to give it something to do.

Allandra looked at the papers on the desk. Marielle’s name appeared halfway down the top sheet, beside a request for materials.

“You examine it with Lia,” she said at last. “You keep your escort. And if it does react, you stop long enough to understand what happened.”

Serali opened her mouth.

Allandra lifted a hand. “Long enough, Serali. I am not asking you to decide Marielle can wait.”

Serali closed it again.

“Yes.”

Allandra’s shoulders lowered slightly.

Only slightly.

Serali stepped closer and took her hand. “I know why you said no.”

“That does not make it better.”

“It makes it different.”

Allandra held her hand tightly. Serali could feel the effort it cost her not to hold tighter.

“Come back,” Allandra said.

Serali wanted to promise.

Instead she pressed her forehead briefly against Allandra’s.

“I will be careful.”

Neither of them pretended it meant the same thing.

Pell and Orran remained close throughout the journey.

Lia said very little. She checked the contents of her satchel twice, which Serali found considerably less reassuring than an argument would have been.

At the lane, Watch officers held back a crowd that had already learned enough to be frightened and too little to be satisfied.

Harrek met them at the entrance.

“Mael?” Lia asked.

“At the district infirmary. Stabilized before they moved him.”

“Who treated him?”

Harrek gave the healer’s name. Lia nodded and followed him inside.

Serali smelled resin first. Sweet, thick, clinging to the back of her throat.

Then she saw the blood.

Broken shelves. Glass across the floor. A cleared space beside the counter where someone had lain, and another near the front entrance.

Corren was no longer there.

That did not improve the space he had left.

Daravan stood beside the ruined counter. His attention moved over them, counting guards and checking Lia’s satchel before settling on Serali.

“Lady Serali.”

Too formal.

No. There were people around. Formal was correct.

Something in his face was too still.

“What do we know?” she asked.

He told them.

Mael’s account of the three men. Aurrel seeing Marielle’s arm trouble her before the attack. The Watch officer reaching the doorway in time to see Marielle and the men disappear.

“Mael saw light beneath her sleeve while the mage worked,” Daravan finished. “He could not identify the spell.”

Lia looked toward the counter. “The same arm.”

“Yes.”

Serali remembered Marielle holding it at the wall. Her irritation at an injury that kept interrupting her work.

“Show me where they vanished,” Serali said.

Harrek indicated a patch of floor beyond the counter. “The strip remains where it fell. We have kept people clear.”

A folded length of marked material lay beside a darkened line. Resin had spread across part of the shape, trapping glass in its surface.

Serali crouched at the edge.

Her shadow gathered close to her feet.

She had seen magic like this before.

Not this spell. Not this arrangement.

But enough to dislike the way her body recognized it.

“There is shadow in it,” she said.

“Lyehiran?” Harrek asked.

“Consistent with it. That is not an identification of the caster.”

“Understood.”

She held one hand above the floor.

Nothing moved.

For a moment she thought the spell had spent itself completely. The marks might be all they had: something to study, something to compare, nothing that could tell them where Marielle had gone.

Serali let a narrow thread of shadow extend from her fingers.

It stopped short of the residue.

The ache began behind her teeth.

She went still.

Lia saw. “What happened?”

“Something responded.”

Daravan stepped closer. “To you?”

“I think so.”

“Withdraw,” Lia said.

Serali pulled the thread back.

The ache eased.

She remained crouched, staring at the floor.

“The transport is over,” she said. “This should be what it left behind.”

“Instead?” Harrek asked.

“Instead, I feel as though I have knocked on a door.”

Lia crouched beside her. “Did anything try to enter?”

“No.”

“Did it pull?”

Serali considered that. “Not yet.”

Daravan looked at her sharply.

She disliked the answer herself.

“There is blood involved,” she added. “I cannot tell you how much of what I am feeling belongs to the spell that moved her.”

“And how much belongs to her arm,” Lia said.

“Possibly.”

Lia stood. “Then we examine those separately.”

Aurrel had returned from speaking to a Watch clerk. Lia asked her to show where Marielle had been standing when the pain began, then where she had fallen.

They moved along the counter, taking care around the glass.

Serali stayed beside the mark.

Daravan stayed beside her.

“Can it be followed?” he asked.

She looked up.

He had asked quietly. As though quiet might make the question smaller.

“I do not know.”

His gaze returned to the floor.

“Captain.”

He looked at her again.

“I want the answer too.”

Something moved in his expression.

Then Lia called them over.

She had found a small smear near the broken resin jars, separate from the larger pools. She wore gloves now and held a narrow probe above an open vial.

“Likely Marielle’s,” she said. “From the position Aurrel described. Likely is all I can give you until I compare it.”

The sample clung to the probe in an uneven strand.

Lia tilted it toward the light.

Her face changed.

“What?” Daravan asked.

“It is behaving strangely.”

“Because of the resin?”

“That is one possibility.” She transferred it to the vial, then took another from the cleaner edge of the smear. “Which is why I am taking both.”

Serali watched the second sample settle.

Her shadow shifted toward it.

Barely.

She caught it before it touched the glass.

Lia noticed. “The same response?”

“Weaker.”

Daravan’s hand closed against the edge of the counter.

“The wound,” he said.

Lia sealed the vial. “We have reason to suspect it. We do not yet know what was done to it. We compare this sample with the dressings I retained for study before we decide what happened.”

Marielle’s dressings.

Weeks of them.

Serali remembered sitting beside Marielle’s bed. Listening to her complain. Bringing her work she should probably have left in the engineering office.

Close enough to touch.

“This was meant for me,” she said.

Lia paused over her satchel. “We do not know the whole purpose yet.”

“They came for me. Marielle stopped them.”

“Yes.”

“They cut her. Now someone used that arm to take her.”

Lia looked at her. “None of those statements become more accurate if you add therefore I should do something catastrophically stupid.”

Serali’s mouth tightened.

Daravan said nothing.

She suspected he disliked the applicability.

“We find out what this is,” Lia continued. “We do it somewhere I can examine the samples without people stepping over broken glass.”

“Where?” Daravan asked.

“My rooms at the palace,” Lia said. “The saved dressings are there, and so is the equipment I need.”

Daravan nodded. “And we can secure the examination there. You return with your escorts. I will have the duty officer informed.”

“I will arrange for the spell material to follow once we have recorded its position,” Harrek said.

Daravan turned to give the palace guard the instructions.

Tasks. Samples. A room.

Serali wanted them to be enough.

She looked back toward the transport mark.

Her shadow had remained close. Obedient, for once.

Something in the dark line seemed to stir.

She did not extend her hand this time. Only let her attention settle on it, seeking the edge of the response she had felt before.

A pressure caught at her magic.

Not toward the floor.

Through it.

Serali withdrew immediately.

Lia turned. “Serali?”

“It pulled.”

Daravan stopped speaking to the guard.

“Toward her?” he asked.

“I cannot tell.”

She hated saying it.

But somewhere Marielle was sitting with that wound in her arm, and Serali had felt something answer from beyond the ruined shop.

An answer meant a connection.

It did not mean only Marielle could feel it.

“We need to assume the mage may have noticed,” Serali said.

Harrek’s expression hardened. Lia closed her satchel.

Daravan looked at the floor as though there ought to be a person there he could seize.

Serali kept her shadow at her feet.