Not likely, there would always be some magi with debts to pay, me for example.
“I had thought that somebody might have eliminated the competition,” she continued, “to hold back the supply and inflate the price. But that appears not to be the case.”
I chewed on my lip. “Somebody must be stockpiling it then. But why? And how is that linked to the murders?” I took a deep breath before broaching the next subject. “Charra, blood sorcery is said to be more powerful if you use the blood and flesh of close kin in the same ritual. About Layla…”
She coughed, then noisily cleared her throat. “Somebody already tried to abduct her. Coincidence perhaps. They failed, of course; I had her trained by the best weapon masters gold can buy. More people than usual have gone missing in the last few years.”
It was as I’d suspected, and explained all her guards. Coincidence be damned, Charra was taking no chances.
She looked me straight in the eyes, trying hard not to cry. I couldn’t remember Charra ever seeming this vulnerable before, but when I first met her she hadn’t had much to lose. “Walker, you can’t help us. You are a swindler and a trickster. If the Arcanum can’t do anything to stop it, then what help can you be? I lost Lynas. I refuse to lose you too.”
I had never given Charra an honest idea of the horrors I could unleash if I really let myself go, and even I didn’t know the full extent of my power. Nobody would feel comfortable around somebody who could rearrange their mental furniture at will, and I’d always felt the fearful eyes of other magi on me, waiting and watching for me to slip up and reveal the corrupt nature they all thought I had. I had always kept my Gift reined in, refusing to give them a reason to destroy me.
“You think I haven’t learned anything these last ten years?” I said. “I’m not the same man I was back then.” New hope kindled in her eyes. Sadly, I’d barely used any magic in my exile, just a few subtle suggestions and adjustments when absolutely necessary. Still, Charra didn’t need to know that, and in any case she really did not need to worry about me. The deal was off and I was done holding back, done pretending I was weaker than I really was. I hoped for the Arcanum’s sake they stayed out of my way.
I sniffed and swallowed, cleared my throat. “I’ll need to see where Lynas’ body was found,” I said. It was too unsettling to say “skin”. A twinge of pain burned up my arm, right where the knife cut into him.
“I’ll take you there myself,” she replied.
“Don’t suppose the Arcanum and the wardens have found any clues yet?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“The lying wardens tried to claim that the Skinner strikes at random,” Charra replied, kicking an old bucket clear across the floor. “As if he wasn’t purposely targeting people with magic in their blood. And Lynas’ three assistants just happened to go missing the next day?” She scowled. “They didn’t get off their fat arses to investigate his death properly. The Arcanum is supposed to regulate magic and punish its abuse, and yet they sent along a sniffer and a magus just graduated from the Collegiate. Mewling children with fuzz on their cheeks! I pulled some strings and called in a favour to get Old Gerthan himself down there to take a look.”
I nodded. “Old Gerthan is skilled.” Not the best, mind, but a well-respected mid-level magus in the hierarchy of the Arcanum. It was a higher rank than they would ever have allowed a political cesspit like me to reach even if I had the might. He was old right enough, both in looks and actual age, but unless things had changed in my absence then he wasn’t yet an elder or an adept who had mastered multiple paths of magic like most of the Inner Circle.
“He found little,” Charra said. “No evidence or any identifiable traces of magic, just a general feeling that blood sorcery had been used nearby.”
Looking back to the open chest I licked my lips and stared down, hand poised to reach in deeper. A few bits of junk, a stack of leather-wrapped journals and a wicked knife of what looked like black iron, but was nothing so innocuous. Dissever was a torturer’s wet dream, a thing of black twisted barbs and serrated edges, and somehow it had escaped its leather sheath. There had been times during my exile when having such a dangerous weapon would have saved me a lot of pain, but I hadn’t known if the Arcanum sniffers could track down the magical signatures of such a unique weapon, and I couldn’t take the risk of being found and dragged back. My hand still hovered over the chest, part of me torn, wanting to leave it be.
I felt sick, but I would need every weapon I could lay my hands on to avenge Lynas. I wrapped my fingers around the hilt. Pain stabbed through my hand, bloody welts and cuts bursting across the skin. It felt strangely familiar, almost like… I grabbed a hold of the slippery memory, another missing fragment of my deal, and ripped it from its prison:
The blade jars against bone and I have to brutally wrench it up and down to saw my way through, working the cut down the centre of the god’s chest until a ragged red trench splits it in two…
The mounting agony drove it back into the secret places inside my skull. I gritted my teeth and lifted out the squirming knife, feeling like the skin was being flayed from my hand. I supposed I deserved a little pain after locking it away in a box for ten years. Charra gasped, but again wisely kept her distance.
“Nice to see you too, Dissever,” I growled, as rivulets of blood wound down my fingers and seeped into the hungry hilt.
The pain receded, leaving my hand stinging from a multitude of abrasions and shallow cuts. It was a strange feeling to be chastised by a knife, but then Dissever was not any kind of normal blade. It didn’t even behave like any other spirit-bound object I had heard of. Powerful enough, perhaps, to kill a god?
Forging spirits into objects was on the level of godly powers and the oldest and greatest of spirits. Oh sure, with objects like my old coat, certain supremely skilled magi artificers could, with almost-prohibitive effort, give it a sort of crude mechanical reaction, but not actual life. Spirit-bound objects required a pact with the spirit involved and that bargain usually expired with their human owners, freeing the spirit once more. But not with Dissever, oh no! My thoughts drifted back to childhood, to two terrified boys exploring bone-crusted catacombs and a knife that had been buried hilt-deep in a corpse for ages unknown. A shiver rippled up my spine as my mind veered away from the darkness below. It was not something I wished to dwell on. Whoever created Dissever clearly had brutal murder in mind.
“Hope you enjoyed your rest,” I said to it. “Because we’re going to kill somebody.”
A wordless hunger answered me, followed by actual words: Feed me, you odious cretin. Dissever always had been an exciting conversationalist. Which was another interesting discrepancy: I’d never heard of spirit-bound objects talking to their owners.
I very carefully sheathed the knife and looped it onto my belt, mentally urging it to behave. Then I retrieved the loaded dice from the front of my trousers and the lock picks from my boot, squirreling them away into the much more comfortable hidden pockets of my coat.
“Now I’m ready to go,” I said to Charra. But I wasn’t, and the thought of walking those streets where Lynas had fled in terror from daemons and then died brought me out in a cold sweat.
Chapter 7
The Warrens was not a place to venture at night, not unless you were suicidal or had a full gang at your back. Charra led the way, a lantern illuminating the narrow winding paths between buildings. Normally this would be the height of idiocy, something that would end up with you being bundled into a doorway with a knife at your throat. Not tonight. Not for us. The closer we came to where Lynas was murdered, the hotter my anger burned. I wanted somebody to step out and try something, to give me an excuse. My head was thumping and Lynas’ death was an unbearable itch deep in my blood and bones, one I couldn’t scratch. If any would-be thieves got in my way tonight then they would end up smeared across the walls of their mouldering homes.