“News from the Mirror,” Kaldar said.
Gaston pushed the crystals in a complex sequence. The flower bud opened, revealing pale petals in its center made of some strange material, paper-thin, but with a metallic sheen. Gaston set the crystal in the middle of the flower.
Magic ignited inside the crystal and shot out in four streams to the ends of the petals. An image appeared above the crystal, floating in thin air. An average-looking man in nondescript clothes from the Weird looked at them.
“Erwin.” Gaston’s thick eyebrows crept up.
“The woman in the shot is not a member of the Hand,” Erwin said. “Her name is Helena d’Amry, Marquise of Amry and Tuanin. She is a Hound of the Golden Throne. Spider is her uncle. Full file to follow. Be careful, Kaldar.”
“Shit,” Gaston said.
“What does that mean?” Audrey looked to Kaldar.
“The Hand protects the Dukedom of Louisiana, which is a colony of the Empire of Gaul. The Hounds protect the throne of the Empire. They answer directly to the Emperor,” Kaldar said.
“Who is Spider?”
“He’s the man I want to kill,” Kaldar said.
A piece of paper replaced Erwin’s image, covered with weird characters.
“What does it say?” Audrey tugged on Kaldar’s arm.
“It says that Helena likes skinning people alive,” Gaston answered. “Also says that the guy who threw that head at you is named Sebastian. He is her right-hand man. His kill count is at forty.”
“Fourteen?”
“No. Forty.”
Oh God.
“This changes nothing.” Kaldar swiped the buckets. “We stick to the plan. Right now, we’ll concentrate on getting the invitation and feeding the wyvern. We may have to take off in a hurry.” He headed down the path to the stream as if he couldn’t get away from the two of them fast enough.
“IT isn’t really true,” Gaston said quietly.
Audrey looked at him.
“What Kaldar said about nothing being taken away from him. It isn’t true.” Gaston sat down on the crate and checked the disks with the chain attached. “Kaldar has two brothers. Well, he had two brothers, Richard and Erian, but Erian was a lot younger than them and had a different mother, so they were never close. Their father was the head of our family. Their mother left. The family likes to pretend she died, but she didn’t. She left all of them, ran off into the Broken. The Mire is a tough place to live. People try to get out any way they can.”
Being left by your own parent as a child . . . Her mother had checked out on her emotionally more than once, but at least she didn’t leave.
“Then a rival family killed their father. Richard was sixteen, and Kaldar was fourteen. Erian was nine, I think. Aunt Murid, their father’s sister, took them in. She was tough. She’d escaped into the Weird when she was young and fought in the Dukedom of Louisiana’s army for years, until they found her out, and she had to escape again and come home. Murid was hard. I used to be really scared of her when I was little. Anyway, she raised Richard and Kaldar as her own. Richard was kind of already an adult, I guess. He’s very serious. Smartest man I know. Kaldar was always like he is now, funny, hehe-haha, oh look, I stole your money out from under your nose. The family didn’t starve because he and Cerise, his cousin, they hustled and sold things in the Broken. Don’t ever haggle with him. It’s a bad idea. Anyway, so Cerise and Kaldar did whatever they could to keep all of us fed. Kaldar always tried to impress Aunt Murid. He barely remembers his real mom, so she was as close to one as he ever had. Then Spider brought the Hand to the Mire, kidnapped Cerise’s parents, and it all went to shit.”
This Spider got around. “What did he want?”
“Everything,” Gaston said. “Most of all, he wanted the Box. It’s complicated. Just think of it as a really powerful weapon. We couldn’t use it, but we couldn’t let the Louisianans have it, either. The Hand declared war on us. Spider tracked my family down. My dad is a half thoas—that’s why I look the way I look—and we always lived apart from the main house. I was supposed to stand watch. I left because of a stupid errand. Spider got into our house and cut off my mother’s leg. Chopped it off at the knee with a meat cleaver.”
“Oh, my God!” The tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose. “That’s horrific.”
“The Hand plays for keeps,” Gaston said. “Anyway, we fought them and won, but in the final battle, Aunt Murid died. Kaldar watched it happen and didn’t get to her in time. He killed the Hand freak that murdered her. Ask him sometime, he’ll show you the scars on his arms. But it was too late.”
Oh, Kaldar.
Gaston bit his lower lip. “He’s not right. Watching Murid die broke something inside him. He still pretends that everything is cool. You can’t tell by looking at him because he acts normal, but the rudder on his boat is stuck. He enlisted in the Mirror, supposedly because he wants to make sure what’s left of the family is well taken care of, but that’s not the reason. He wants revenge on the Hand, and he doesn’t care what happens to him or how he gets it. He will kill them any chance he gets.”
“Gaston,” she said gently, “I know that you care for your uncle, but Kaldar, he’s a grifter. He isn’t a killer.”
Gaston blinked. “We hold to the Old Ways in our family.”
“What does that mean?”
“Kaldar’s uncle, the head of our family, has a nickname.”
“Aha.”
“It’s Death.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They call him Death,” Gaston said. “Because when his sword comes out, people die. We train as swordsmen as soon as we can hold a sword and not fall over. We learn to stretch our flash out onto our swords and use it in fights. Kaldar isn’t as good as Grampa Ramiar. He isn’t as good as Cerise. Technically, he isn’t as good as Richard, his older brother, because Richard flashes white and Kaldar flashes blue. But aside from them, Kaldar has never met anyone he couldn’t beat.”
“Aha.” Tall tales must’ve run in the family.
“He’s killed dozens of people,” Gaston insisted. “Probably over a hundred.”
“I’m sure he did, Gaston.” Sure as the night is light. She couldn’t picture Kaldar with a sword. A crowbar, maybe. A gun. But not a sword. “And you are supposed to keep him from killing more?”
“I wasn’t even supposed to come. I’m not officially an agent yet, but Cerise talked her husband, William—he’s my guardian—into it. I’m supposed to keep an eye on Kaldar, in case he snaps. So he knows all about things being taken away from him. He just won’t admit it.”
“Gaston, if Kaldar doesn’t care if he lives or dies, how are you supposed to keep him safe?”
He shook his head. His face gained a lost expression. Suddenly, he seemed so young, just a kid really, about Jack’s age. “I don’t know. But I have to try. Most of my family acts like I don’t exist anymore. My dad banished me because of what happened to my mom. Kaldar always talks to me. He comes to all of my annual trials. He’s my favorite uncle. I don’t have many left anymore.”
“I will help you,” Audrey said. It came out as a complete surprise, but she didn’t regret it. “If he loses his head, I will help you hold him back.”
Gaston raised his huge hand, stained with the Mirror’s clay. “Deal?”
She grasped his fingers and shook. “Deal.”
KARMASH pondered the woman. She had small brown eyes and hair of an odd shade, unnatural bright red. Given that she hung upside down, her feet caught by a rope at the ankles, her hair dripped down from her head like a mop. For mid-thirties, she wasn’t roughly used, he reflected.
They’d grabbed her off the street, as she left Magdalene Moonflower’s building in the Broken, and brought her here, to the abandoned building in the Edge that Karmash had designated as their temporary base. Only he and Mura had managed to cross the boundary into the magicless world. Soma and Cotier had been too altered.