“We don’t even know what she looks like, you know,” Spirit confided, wiggling his fingers over the leaden amulet. Its face was covered in the runes he’d placed directly into my mind, immensely speeding up the process of carving the correct glyphs, and I’d scrawled my signature into the other side for the sake of Keyla’s neighbours. I watched his spells moving my force-lines, traced the patterns with my eyes.
“Dreamlaughter looked like a tiny woman, to me,” I said. “Silver robe, like Fang’s only, you know, richer… brown hair…”
He nodded. “That’s what she looked like to me, too, last time she popped up. But she could be a he, or, ya know, a dwarf…”
I eyed the enchanter, Bor. His face was drawn in concentration, the kind of concentration that still let you talk. But he had this morose distance in his dark brown eyes whenever he looked away from his work for a second that didn’t fit his brazen, chiselled features somehow. The way he’d looked when we’d discovered him in Zadhal, after Rosedawn’s death.
“You still mad about Neverwish? His betrayal?”
I hadn’t tried to put any mockery into what I’d said, but the tall, burly archmage straightened as if I’d slapped him.
“Nah, man!” He didn’t sound as offended as he looked, and cast his gaze back onto the amulet. “I just mean – if it was me, I’da made my seeming nothin’ like me, ya know?”
A ‘seeming’ was what he was calling it, then?
“I’ve heard of that,” Zel said quietly in confirmation.
“Yeah – but you’re smart,” I replied. “She’s unhinged – not even that – she’s, like, a door the carpenter busted that never left the shop…”
“She never even got a hinge in the first place,” he belaboured the joke in a distant-sounding voice, wiggling his fingers now in a particularly convoluted-looking pattern.
“Right. So, you really think she thinks that far ahead? Dreamlaughter?”
He broke off his spells, looked at me again. “I know she thinks far enough ahead to try makin’ illusions that can trick sorcerers. Never occurred to me.”
“Sure, but neither did forcing people to cackle while they sleepwalk into the Greywater, did it? It’s not like making illusions that can trick sorcerers is a good idea.”
“I know I wouldn’t have minded something like that once or twice. Heretics suck.” He glanced back down at the amulet, then to my eyes again. “Want me to add something so the woman starts a conga line whenever someone mentions frogs?”
He smiled tightly, and I grinned.
“Look, if you want to be able to drop the shield you said you put around that woman any time soon, you’re gonna have to let me finish up my part, Kas.”
I nodded, muttered, “Thanks, man,” and broke eye contact, letting him go back to it without making him feel he was being rude.
Truth was, he was right. Making illusions that could trick sorcerers, check. Using puppets to pierce sorcerer’s shields, check. What was next in the darkmage’s repertoire? Which would be the trick that would snare me, lay me open to a decisive strike?
I repressed a shudder. How someone so clearly in need of a brain-fix could come up with such ingenious ideas was beyond me.
I looked around. Timesnatcher’s ‘drawing room’ was far too big. Why anyone would want or need such an expanse in which to do a bit of drawing, I had no idea. Sofas lined with soft leather and suede dotted the area, seemingly with no purpose, no direction. There was no one focal point – over here, me and Spirit sat on high-backed chairs that wouldn’t have been out of place around a dining table, leaning across the small pine-carved table that stood beside the wall, beneath a lantern-lit mirror. Twenty feet away, Timesnatcher and Em were on a turquoise leather couch, talking in low voices – I could tell from the tension in Em’s arms as she sat forward, gripping her knees in her hands, that they were trying to iron out their differences. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, and it was difficult to mind my own business when Spirit stopped talking to concentrate on his enchantments.
Tanra – Killstop – completed the scene, wandering around the edges of the room. If the place had deliberately rejected the notion of centralisation, a focal point, Tanra had evidently found fifty. She studied every portrait, every landscape depicted in the pretentious paintings dotted around. Busts of Timesnatcher’s ancestors stood under some of the lanterns – but there was no bust of Irimar himself, he who would surely be the most illustrious, the most impressive of his line. Even in death, he might choose that his identity be kept secret, and the history books would never record that this scion of a lesser house was once the most influential man in Mund. His descendants would have little by way of great deeds to ascribe him, and he would be forgotten.
That was, if he lived long enough to have descendants. He’d probably have to retire, like poor Leafcloak had done, if he wanted to have a family. Hells, maybe me and Em would have to, one day… That was a long way off and far too far for me to even imagine, though. And I’d probably have nieces and nephews, my brother and sister’s kids, to hear about me from their parents, remember me. I couldn’t see any traces of siblings anywhere in Timesnatcher’s house. No one but him and the absent servants.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Now Lightblind was gone, would he find love again? Would the Nemmeneth line end here, as hers had ended?
It was strange, seeing his face again. He had aged, since that day I saw him on the edge of Hightown when he’d directed me towards the Diamond Mare. I imagined the changes had all taken place in the last two days, though. The thin face was thinner, the watery eyes waterier, the wavy hair unbrushed.
And it was even stranger, having him introduce himself by name. What did it portend, having us meet him here, having his mask off when he answered the door? (Tanra and Borasir – Spirit insisted we call him ‘Bor’ – were also unmasked when we arrived.)
I suspected, feared, that the arch-diviner was resigned to his fate, his vendetta, now. The smile on his lips wasn’t cold, exactly, but it was a mask of another kind, a mask of geniality to hide the unfeeling void within, the rage-horror that would only take one whisper of Duskdown’s presence to take spark, ignite into a conflagration of stupendous, unbelievable violence.
As much as I found myself caring about him, what would happen to him, I knew I couldn’t trust him.
It wasn’t the fake smile. It wasn’t the overblown gesture of revealing his identity.
It was the way he’d hidden the book from me. It was the way he would invariably lie to me to get me to do what he wanted, needed me to do.
Spirit had been right about Dreamlaughter – and Em was right about Timesnatcher.
I stared across at him, and saw the killer sitting there beside my girlfriend. And if he was willing to lie to better himself in my opinion, how could I even trust his explanations of events? What he’d done to Rosedawn – what he’d done to set up Redgate – did I even know Redgate was as bad as he’d said, really? Direcrown had certainly been different to the caricature of him I’d built up in my head based on Timesnatcher’s words. Perhaps Redgate was an innocent-enough arch-sorcerer… Perhaps Rosedawn hadn’t even been plotting to destroy the Maginox, enchanting the guards, any of that stuff.
Could it be that Timesnatcher was dark? Even without knowing it?
Could it be I was immeasurably lucky to have an anti-mind-invasion amulet that stopped my suspicions getting back to him somehow?
But when he turned his face to mine, his discussion with Em having drawn to a close, I looked into his shining blue eyes, and I saw only the friend whose beloved had been broken, stamped to the wall by a killer a thousand times worse than he was.
“Patience, Kas,” he said quietly, as if taking my probing gaze for a show of frustration. “You won’t find him without a druid’s help, I’m pretty damn sure of that.”
That was another thing entirely, and the whole purpose of us meeting here tonight.
We’d all searched for Nighteye in our own ways. Yesterday I’d sent out imps with descriptions to scour the city, but they’d turned up nothing. The diviners had been retracing his steps, trying to puzzle out where he might’ve stepped off the path destiny carved for him. Druids whispered to the grass and rats, enchanters plumbed minds, and I knew for a fact that Em had spent four hours straight last night just sitting there in the air above the city, drawing sounds to her ears, listening for a scrap of conversation that might lead somewhere. (I’d been sitting in the air opposite her for most of it, reading my sorcery textbook, waiting for her to send me off on another wild goose chase.)
Individually, we’d turned up nothing, but Timesnatcher had appeared in the glyphstone this morning requesting my presence at five. When I got back in touch and had a conversation with him, it transpired he wanted us to pool our resources, head out in force tonight.
I understood his motives, or at least thought I did. With Shadowcloud out of commission – the deaths of Lightblind, Leafcloak, Rosedawn, Dustbringer, Smouldervein – the loss of Neverwish – the ranks of the champions had drawn perilously thin in the last weeks. Only one champion had arisen since Tanra to help replace the lost archmages, a gnomish wizard of Hilltown named Copperbrow, who’d apparently met up with Mountainslide on two occasions.
We couldn’t afford to lose Nighteye, one of our most adept healers, a fierce fighter… that was how Timesnatcher would be thinking.
Would he think of all the young druid’s admirable qualities? His enthusiasm, his steadfastness? His care, his worrying nature? Would he see a person, or a pawn to be moved here and there as fate decreed?
I checked Spirit – Bor – was still engrossed in his work, then stood up wordlessly and walked over to join my girlfriend.
“So are you two best buddies again?”
I took a seat on the other side of Em from Timesnatcher and leant forwards so that I could look at them both.
“It may be that I was a little hasty the other night,” the arch-diviner said. “It’s good that you brought Emrelet with you today.”
“Well, you knew I would.”
He gave a minute nod. “I apologise, for my frustration –“
Em raised a hand to halt him. “You don’t need to apologise to Kas – only to me, and zat has been done. You have been forgiven.” She turned to face me, smiled wryly. “He trusts zat I’m not just about to – vot is it? – blab his secrets to Zakimel.”
Timesnatcher spread his fingers and affected a pained expression, as if to proclaim his innocence.
Too much pain in it.
“Irimar,” Tanra said suddenly, halting right by us, garish robe flapping, “would you like me to get the door again?”
He nodded to her. “If you please.”
She nodded back, but didn’t leave the drawing room as I’d expected. She just folded her arms across her chest and stood there smiling, facing us.
“I’ll still get there in time,” she chided me, catching my gaze.
Timesnatcher went on, “It’s not that I mistrust Emrelet, you understand – it’s only certain… individuals,” he gave his own wry smile, “and we’ve come to an agreement that, providing Emrelet keeps her amulet on at all times, I can permit a magister into my confidences. She is a champion, after all.”
“I voz hardly planning to remove it in any case,” she complained.
There was a flash, a whip-snap of colour I saw out of the corner of my eye as Tanra vanished – less than a second later she was back, nose waggling in irritation.
“How did you do that?” she moaned at Timesnatcher.
I looked from him to Tanra, back again.
He moved too?
I shuddered. I’d been looking right at him.
“Practice,” he demurred with a one-shoulder shrug.
I smirked despite myself.
“If that’s all it is, I’m so gonna move faster than that one day.” She smiled sweetly. “I’ll show up all the new arch-diviners one day, just you watch me. Oh, except you won’t be able to.”
Her superior just shook his head, but he wore a mysterious smile on his narrow lips.
Once Fangmoon and Lovebright arrived, wearing their coverings just like me and Em had been, they strode purposefully into the drawing room – both of them would be able to sense us in here, surely – and stopped when they saw us, unmasked, staring at them.
They stared back in obvious shock.
“You knew it was coming,” Timesnatcher said into the stunned silence.
The women turned their heads to regard at each other in unison, then Lovebright sniggered softly.
“Well – it’s about time!” she said.
* * *