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Kaylin shook her off as soon as they’d made it out the doors. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not let the quartermaster see my face. He’s pissed off at Jenkins at the moment, and I’d like him to stay that way.”
“Jenkins has offended you? He’s a bit green, but—”
“No, he hasn’t. But it’s the first time in months that someone else has been the quartermaster’s official problem child.” Jenkins had recently lost a sword. “I’d just as soon not remind him that I exist.”
* * *
The Winding Path met Keffeer about a third of the way up the gentle incline on which the southern part of the city was built. It was well away from the Ablayne, although one small stream trickled down from the rocky heights of the unoccupied reach and fed into it.
The homes were not as fine as they were in the expensive districts around the Imperial Palace, but they weren’t as run-down as the buildings in the fiefs, either. There were fences and gates that fronted the street, but they weren’t uniform.
“Did he even give us an address?” Kaylin asked, as Keffeer came into view.
“You were there. You heard just as much as we did,” Teela said. She was, as Mandoran had said earlier, in a mood.
“Yes, but I remember less clearly.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Tain, silent, cast a sidelong glance at Bellusdeo. “You might want to sit this one out,” he told her.
She raised a golden brow. The line of the arch was almost identical to the line of the Arkon’s when he did the same thing. “Do you feel that I am in marked danger in this investigation?”
“It’s a distinct possibility.”
“And you think that I am likely to fall prey to this theoretical danger when two mortals will not?” She glanced pointedly at Kaylin and Severn, neither of whom were stupid enough to say anything.
Teela grinned. “Give it up,” she told her partner before turning to Bellusdeo. “The reason he’s attempting to be cautious is the lack of information we’ve been given. It implies—heavily—that the star of this leg of the investigation is going to be Kaylin.”
“Kaylin? Why?”
“Thanks,” Kaylin interjected.
“Kaylin is particularly sensitive to magic and its remnants. You’ve probably heard her whining about door wards?”
“I’m breathing, so yes,” Bellusdeo replied.
“It’s not just door wards. Any use of normal magic—”
“How are we defining normal?”
“Magic that might be used by a mage of the Imperial Order and most of the Arcanum. The Arcanum does have some branches— You know what, never mind. We can discuss this in a tavern on an off-night. The point is, Kaylin’s sensitive enough to see magic without using any of her own—that we can detect, anyway. The Sergeant doesn’t wish to influence what she might—or might not—see. He’ll have some inkling of what the Imperial mages discovered.”
“Inkling?”
“They’ll write a report, but it won’t come in until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Is everything in your city reliant on reports of this nature?”
“Yes. Paper is easier to lose than Records.” She turned to Kaylin. “What are you looking at?”
Kaylin swore under her breath. Mostly. “I think I know where we’re heading.”
* * *
Magic gave Kaylin hives. She’d gotten used to this in the West March, though the magic of the green didn’t cause the same reaction as the magic on the streets here did. The Imperial roads, such as they were, were well kept, from the merchant gates to the city’s economic center.
But the stones on the Winding Path were cracked.
Kaylin knelt.
“Did we get any witness reports?” she asked, as she touched the cracks she could see.
“Let me access Records,” Teela replied, and did so. Kaylin felt a twinge as the pocket mirror came to life in the Barrani Hawk’s hand. “Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“Marcus has put a hold on that information until you tender your first report.”
Kaylin was annoyed, but she tempered her reaction. “Do these cracks look strange to you?” she asked.
“What cracks?”
Which answered that question. “You know, when I first started training with the two of you, we had normal cases.”
“Technically, yes. Your first case—”
“Don’t mention it. I wasn’t a Hawk then.” She rose. The street, in her view, was cracked, the stones listing toward the crack as if something very large or very heavy had recently traveled on this road. But the cracks themselves felt odd. She stopped a yard up the path and knelt again.
At her back, she heard the familiar clink of metal against metal. Severn was unwinding his weapon chain. Neither Teela nor Tain told him to stop. “What does the road look like to you?” she asked him.
“Flat, for the most part. It’s a relatively smooth incline; there are patches of weeds to either side. You don’t see that.” It wasn’t a question, but Kaylin answered it as if it were, describing what she could see.
“This isn’t your usual paradigm,” Teela said.
“No. And I see no magical sigils, either. It’s not strong magic, but it’s definitely there.”
“Records,” Teela said. “Record.”
Kaylin described what she saw for a third time, and Teela moved the mirror so that it captured the street. She then handed the tiny captured image to Kaylin. Kaylin, well aware that her head would be on a pike if she dropped or damaged this mirror, took it gingerly. The image in the mirror was what Severn had described. She handed it back to Teela.
“What do you normally see?” Bellusdeo asked, as Kaylin rose again.
“Sigils and words,” Kaylin replied. “They’re often splashed against walls or doors like random paint. The larger the sigil, the greater the magic that produced it.”
“Not cracks.”
“Not usually, no. I think one or two of the mages in the Imperium look at magic as dimensionality, though. They see containers. Where magic has been cast, they see the type of shards you’d see if you dropped a vase. The greater the shattering, the larger the magic that caused it. One of them sees particular colors of glass or glaze—his version of my sigils.
“The crack—it’s mostly one—veers at the gate three houses to the left of where we’re standing.”
“The short, wooden gate?”
Kaylin nodded. “Why are you making that face?”
Severn coughed. “I don’t think that that’s the house with the bodies,” he said.
Sometimes Kaylin’s entire life felt like a game of gotcha. “Which house is it?”
“Three down,” he replied, “and on the other side of the street.”
* * *
Teela didn’t head to the aforementioned dwelling immediately. She began to cast instead. Her spell was much stronger than the afterimage of magic left on the road; Kaylin’s skin goose-bumped in protest. The Barrani Hawk handed the mirror to Tain as she knelt in the center of the road.
“Honestly, kitling,” she said, passing her hands over the crack that Kaylin could still see. “How bad a teacher can Lord Sanabalis be?”
“He’d say the quality of the student is the determining factor,” Kaylin replied. “Are you getting anything?”
“My initial response would usually be no.”
Kaylin, having worked with Teela for years, waited as the Barrani Hawk rose and retraced Kaylin’s exact steps. She was frowning; her eyes, which had been as green as they ever got at work, were shading toward blue. It was a green blue, so she was concerned, but not overly worried. Tain, on the other hand, was definitely worried.
Kaylin raised her brows at him, and he shook his head. “If you teach me nothing else in your short life,” he said, “you have forced me to reevaluate boredom as a concept. There is definitely such a thing as too much excitement.”
“This isn’t too much excitement,” Kaylin quite reasonably pointed out.
“Not yet. Are you betting?”
“Is she breathing?” Teela cut in. “Shut up, both of you. I can’t concentrate.” Severn—much more quietly—asked Tain what the bet, stakes and odds were. Teela did not tell Severn to shut up.
The Barrani Hawk straightened. “There is something. I wouldn’t have noticed it—I’m only barely detecting it now.” She glanced at Tain, who shrugged.
“Magic was never one of my strengths.”
“Bellusdeo?”
“Yes, it was considered one of mine.” The Dragon was frowning. She looked at Kaylin. Or rather, at the small dragon sitting on her shoulder. “Well?”
The small dragon was silent.
“Bodies, or house across the street from the bodies first?” Tain asked.
“House,” Kaylin said.
* * *
“Let Teela do the talking,” Severn suggested as they followed the path of this indeterminate magic to what appeared to be its source. “Records indicate that this house is occupied, that the taxes are paid up and that the owner is not a person of political significance.”
Kaylin said nothing. That lasted for five seconds. “Is it too much to ask,” she said under her breath, “that I not be shoved out in the dark with zero information whatsoever and asked to find something?”
“We’re in the same dark. If you hadn’t been arguing with Moran—how did that go, by the way?—you would’ve been in the office when the request came in.” When this failed to appreciably lighten Kaylin’s mood, he added, “You know that magical precepts are both individual and susceptible to suggestion.”
“I bet Ironjaw has more information.”
“The Sergeant is not a mage.”
Neither am I. She kept this to herself, aware that she was cranky in part because of her discussion with Moran. She was old enough not to be treated like a child.
Teela approached the gate, raised a hand, then lowered it. The frown she wore seemed etched into her otherwise perfect face. “Kitling?”
Kaylin shrugged off her resentment and came to stand by Teela’s side. She also poked the small dragon, who squawked quietly, but lifted one transparent wing. He tapped her face gently, to make a point, but kept the wing extended so it covered her eyes.
To Kaylin’s vision—with the added interference of a translucent dragon wing—the gate looked weathered. It was slightly warped. The nails that held it in place had rusted a bit, but that was it. “It’s a gate.” She turned to glance back at the road and froze. After a second, she lifted her hand to gently catch the small dragon’s wing. He expressed his appreciation of this loudly, but stopped short of biting her fingers.
“We’ve got a problem,” Kaylin said.
Chapter 3
Hawks were not generally armed for lethal combat. Severn was an exception, and the exception had been made because he was, in theory, a Wolf. Teela and Tain, on the other hand, didn’t require the usual edged implements to be deadly. Bellusdeo didn’t, either.
Everyone turned toward Kaylin and then looked beyond her to the stretch of imperfect, inclining road.
“I want one of those,” Tain said, to no one in particular. The small dragon squawked anyway. “What do you see?”
“Shadow,” Kaylin said, her voice flat.
Bellusdeo stiffened on a single, sharp inhale. Her experience with Shadows had defined—and almost destroyed—her. She spoke a sharp word. The hair on the back of Kaylin’s neck rose in protest as the Dragon moved to stand slightly ahead of her, without impeding her view.
“I can’t see it. Tell me what you see.”
“It’s a very narrow line,” Kaylin said. “Similar to what I saw as magic; it’s not solid, and it’s not—that I can see—active.”
“Active, meaning?”
“It’s not opalescent, and it’s not—quite—moving. But it’s there.”
“In the heart of the city.”
“To one side of the heart of the city, but yes.”
“And the line of shadow goes into this house.”
“Or through it, yes.”
Teela cursed in Leontine. Leontine coming from a Barrani throat was strangely musical. In this case, the phrase she’d chosen was entirely appropriate. “There’s nothing going to the house across the street where the murders took place?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Are you sure the idiots reporting this didn’t— Never mind. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had a transcription error,” she added darkly.
Severn hadn’t set his chain spinning, but he carried one of the attached blades in hand. “Mirror back.”
Teela nodded. She glanced at Bellusdeo again.
“I am not leaving, if that’s the suggestion you intend to make,” Bellusdeo said. “I have been given Imperial permission to accompany Private Neya on her patrols.”
“This isn’t exactly patrol material.”
“No. But it is part of her usual duties.”
“If anything goes wrong and anything happens to you, you’re likely to lose that Imperial permission instantly. And Kaylin—”
“The Emperor would not dream of harming Kaylin.” The Dragon’s eyes had descended into orange; the orange was now tinged red.
Given that his first reaction upon hearing about Kaylin’s existence almost eight years ago had been to order her execution, this wasn’t exactly accurate. But given Bellusdeo’s current mood, accuracy was irrelevant.
“No one in Elantra has more experience with Shadows than Bellusdeo does.” Kaylin folded her arms. “If you’re worried about me, don’t be. I’ve had enough worrying-about-me to last ten lifetimes. The only thing we might want is Maggaron.”
Bellusdeo opened her mouth.
Kaylin continued quickly, “He fought by your side against the Shadows that consumed your world. He knows them as well as you do—probably better. He was there for a long damn time.”
The Dragon snapped her jaws shut. Normal-sized jaws shouldn’t have made that much noise. “We should destroy this part of the road—and that house.”
“It’s not as simple as that. If the house isn’t contaminated—and you know what that looks like—we’ll be destroying someone’s home. It’s—among other things—against the law, unless the Emperor orders it done.”
“You don’t understand the risk you’re taking.”
Kaylin wanted to argue, but she understood what Bellusdeo had faced in the past. “Let’s just check out the house.”
* * *
Teela did, indeed, take point. It wasn’t always smart to have Barrani be the lead investigators when dealing with mortals. It wasn’t always smart to have any lead investigator cross racial lines. In the very, very few instances when the Halls of Law were called in to deal with the Leontine quarter, Marcus took point. It was always the best—and smartest—approach.
In some instances, though, Barrani were the most effective. Most mortals didn’t believe that a simple thing like a hawk on a tabard guaranteed good behavior from immortals. Kaylin attempted to point this out, but Teela pulled rank. Literally.
She opened the gate more or less carefully, glanced at Kaylin and waited. Kaylin nodded. “The thread goes to the door.”
“Beneath it?”
“It’s hard to say. When I looked at the road normally, it looked as if something very, very heavy and very thin had just landed. There was a V-shaped indent and a crack at the bottom of it. The path to the house isn’t made of the same stone, but it’s staved in the same way.”
“The stairs?”
There were only two steps up to the door. “Same as the road. The door doesn’t appear to be damaged, though. I’m not sure whether the line goes into the house or beneath it.”
“Is it active?” Bellusdeo asked.
“I don’t know. It’s Shadow.” She hesitated and then said, “It’s like what we might see—the Shadow part, not the staved-in stone—if a living person had been deeply cut but could still keep moving. I think it might be the equivalent of—”
“Bleeding?”
Kaylin nodded. “This is not an expert opinion,” she added, as Teela lifted the mirror. “And I’d just as soon not enter that opinion in Records if I can avoid it.”
“You’ve got far stupider opinions entered in Records.”
“I was thirteen, Teela.”
* * *
The home itself was not large; it was not one of the grand manors nestled in the heart of the wealthy district. It was modest in size, but seemed to be in good repair. The stairs were stone, and the foundation appeared to be stone as well—but in Elantra, that wasn’t entirely unusual. Kaylin had been told that it was, farther away from the city, but her only experience outside of the city had been the West March, which didn’t count.
The front door was not warded. That was also unusual, but not unheard-of; Kaylin’s previous home had been without door wards, as had almost all of the other apartments in the same building. Door wards were expensive. Even if they didn’t make her hand numb and her skin ache, she would have had a decent excuse for not having one.
Teela knocked on the door. Given Kaylin’s description of the stairs, she chose not to stand in the center of them. They would have carried her weight, regardless. Bellusdeo stood back, beside Kaylin.
“You can’t see anything?” Kaylin asked.
Bellusdeo shook her head. “We have some methods of drawing Shadow out—of forcing it out—of its inanimate hiding places. But many of those methods are complicated; they can’t be done in an instant. To do it, the Norannir would have to come, and that would probably cause panic. You might recall the war drums?”
Kaylin nodded.
“They’re very effective, but definitely not quiet. I think Imperial permission would probably be necessary; at the very least, we would want to clear the drumming with the Swords. It is likely to cause some...unrest. Besides, your marks aren’t glowing.”
“How can you tell?”
“When they glow, they’re visible, even through your sleeves.” She glanced at the small dragon. “And Hope is alert, but not yet worried.”
The small dragon crooned. It was not one of his regular noises. He then glanced at Severn and made the same sound. Severn nodded as if he understood. It was very frustrating. The familiar, in theory, was hers, and she seemed to be the only person who couldn’t understand him.
Teela ignored them and knocked again, this time with more force. Tain lifted Kaylin—literally—and set her to one side; he then joined Teela in the space he’d cleared. Bellusdeo clearly found this amusing.
“She’s not furniture,” Teela pointed out, as she waited for some sort of response from the resident of the house.
“No. She’s too bony and too loud.”
Teela knocked a third time. Nothing. Kaylin knew there wouldn’t be a fourth attempt.
True to form, Teela raised her voice to let the occupants of the house—if they were present—know that Hawks were standing on their doorstep and were about to enter. This still elicited no response.
It wasn’t completely unheard-of for a house to be empty at this time of day, but it was rare. The streets often felt as if they were full of small children and their elderly minders, but many actually stayed home if they had yards or a small space outdoors—something Kaylin had never had in her childhood.
Teela tried the doorknob. The door was locked. Placing a hand on the door itself, the Barrani Hawk closed her eyes. “Bolted,” she murmured.
“We can kick it in,” Tain offered.
Teela, however, shook her head, her expression shifting. To Kaylin’s wing-masked eyes, the door looked entirely normal. “Kitling, the door?”
Kaylin reached up and pushed the dragon wing aside. “No magic that I can see.”
“None?”
She pushed her way past Tain and looked again, bringing her eyes inches away from Teela’s resting palm. She frowned. “...Maybe.”
“Best guess?”
“Someone may have bolted the door from the outside. It wouldn’t be difficult for most mages.”
“Not diligent students, at any rate.” Teela opened the bolt. Magically. She pushed the door inward and entered.
* * *
The house appeared to be empty, which wasn’t Kaylin’s immediate concern. As she once again lifted the dragon’s wing, she looked down at the floor. The crack they’d followed to this particular door couldn’t be seen; the wooden floor was worn in some areas, but solid. The sense of magic was absent.
Teela walked into the house, announcing her presence loudly without actually shouting, a trick Kaylin had not quite mastered. The Barrani Hawk’s voice almost echoed. The house appeared to be empty. For one long beat, Kaylin felt that the house had always been empty.
The building had two stories. They searched the first floor. Aside from the accumulated mess any house gathered and displayed when visitors weren’t expected, there was nothing that caught the eye. Teela headed upstairs, Tain in tow. Severn, Kaylin and Bellusdeo headed toward the back door to investigate the yard.
The back door, like the front, was bolted; the windows that faced the yard were glassed and barred. The bars appeared to be new. Kaylin studied the bolt, first with small and squawky’s translucent wing, and then without; it appeared to be exactly what it was.
“The bolt looks new,” Severn said.
Kaylin nodded. She opened the door and looked down the few steps into a fenced yard. The fence, like the bars on the window, appeared to be newly constructed—and in this area of town, fences were rare. The yards were generally like one great common.
The steps just beneath the door bore cracks similar to the road and the front steps of the house. They also—in winged view—looked as if they’d been broken instantly by too great a weight. The line led out into the yard. Kaylin followed it; it seemed to bisect one of the paths between cultivated vegetables, heading toward the distant quarries that provided the city with stone, among other things.
No, she thought, as she slowed an already crawling pace. “Severn, does this look like normal yard to you?”
“Yes. Except for the fence.”
“I think there’s a...hatch. Up ahead.”
“I can’t see it.”
“Right. There’s obviously a basement here; let’s assume the invisible hatch and the basement are connected.”
“I think it’s time we paid a visit to the house where the murders took place.”
“Basement first.”
* * *
Teela and Tain had found nothing of importance upstairs. There were two obvious bedrooms and one sitting room; the sitting room was so pristine it was clear it wasn’t used for much. The bedrooms had small, shallow closets that were filled with clothing and linen, and dirty laundry had accumulated in the usual places—at least in Kaylin’s experience.
The basement, however, was different.
The moment Kaylin opened the door, her arms began to tingle. Teela, moving slowly and scanning carefully, sucked in air; when Kaylin glanced back at her, the Barrani’s eyes were a much darker shade of blue.
“Teela?”
“Be careful here.” She glanced once at the Dragon.
The Dragon nodded, and the tingling across Kaylin’s marked skin grew sharper, though it was not yet painful. “What do you see?”
“Magic” was Teela’s curt reply. She didn’t bother to draw a weapon; Kaylin drew a silent dagger. Severn had not let go of his blade.
“I’ll go winged,” Kaylin said, as the small dragon huffed.
“I’m not sure wingless wouldn’t be more useful at this point,” Teela said. She gestured and light appeared to her right, in about the position a lantern would hold if she’d been using one. The light bounced off the walls as they began their descent. Teela had once again taken point, and once again, Kaylin let her have it, choosing to take the rear instead.
There was no trail of shadow on the stairs by which they made their descent. The narrow, steeply inclined steps were whole, if more obviously worn than the stone that girded the front and back of the house. The width forced Bellusdeo and the Hawks to move in single file.
Kaylin nearly leaped out of her skin when she heard clanging bells. It was only when Teela cursed—in Leontine—that she remembered the portable mirror. “Are you going to answer that?”
“No,” Teela replied. “It’s Marcus.”
Kaylin hesitated.
Teela, accustomed to Kaylin’s hesitations, said, “Marcus doesn’t normally have the ability to communicate with us in the course of a regular investigation. The lack of snarling has not notably harmed us, and he remains in a mood that can only charitably be called foul.”