Magic Steps Read online

  Hearing that, Sandry and her guards followed the gossip past the alley where the fire was and onto Tapestry Lane. The Provost’s Guards had set wooden barricades there. Inside them a group of tavern roughs sat, faces sullen, roped together as prisoners under three Guards’ eyes. Another Guard questioned a young woman in a nursemaid’s cap and apron who sat on the steps to a house. She rocked back and forth, weeping, scarlet hands pressed to her face.

  The Provost’s Guards would have liked to keep Sandry outside the barriers on both ends of the street, but they couldn’t refuse a noble who was also a mage. Grudgingly they let her through. Passing the barricade, Sandry glimpsed dark smears on the steps and walkway before the house where the guard questioned the nursemaid. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

  She dismounted and took her mage’s kit out of a saddlebag. Then she backed Russet to the other side of the barrier, blocking Kwaben and Oama when they would have followed. “Stay there,” Sandry told them. “There’s something I need to see.”

  “My lady,” protested Oama.

  Sandry shook her head. “I’ll be within view unless I go inside — and there’s plenty of provost’s folk about, aren’t there?” Sandry looked at the female Guard holding the barricade, who nodded. “So inside I’ll be safe, too. The fewer people who walk around here, the better. Close up,” she ordered the Guard.

  The woman swung the barricade into place. “I don’t know that you should monkey about here, my lady,” she said, eyeing Sandry’s kit with mistrust.

  “Master Wulfric Snaptrap will vouch for me,” Sandry replied, though she wasn’t sure of that at all. What she was sure of was that those smears of darkness, if they were the same as those on Guryil and Lebua the night before, had to be protected until Snaptrap could look at them himself. Does this stuff rub off on people? she wondered, approaching the Rokat house slowly, inspecting the ground before her and on either side. Would it stick to anyone as it had to Lebua and Gury? She couldn’t take a chance on whether it might or might not.

  She reached the house without seeing any smears between it and Yanjing Street. “So far, so good,” she murmured.

  The Guard who spoke to the crying nursemaid turned away from the woman in disgust. He looked at Sandry. “Who let you in?” he growled.

  “I’m Sandrilene fa Toren, the duke’s great-niece,” she said, examining the steps for dark smears. A number of them stretched from the door along one side of the steps to disappear under the sobbing woman. Sandry glanced at her and swallowed hard. The woman’s hands, which from a distance looked as red as paint or dye could make them, were covered in blood. Her cap, apron, skirt, and blouse were splotched and her shoes nearly black with it.

  Sandry took a breath to clear her head of the giddiness of shock, thinking, I have got to get smelling salts. To the unhappy Guardsman she said, “Can she move? There are signs of magic here, and she’s sitting right on them.”

  “Of course there’s magic,” said the Guard bitterly. “Murdering beasts walk by twenty-four of us to hack up four people, two of them kids — you bet there’s magic in it.” He bent down and gripped the woman by the elbows, lifting her. “Up, wench — you’re sitting on magic.”

  Sandry stared at him. “Two kids?” she asked, horrified.

  “Two little ones. This girl was their nurse,” explained the Guard. “Says they all died in front of her, and she didn’t see what done it.”

  Sandry met his eyes. “She probably didn’t,” she whispered.

  “I know,” replied the man, grim-faced. “Story’s too stupid to be true, elsewise.”

  “You’ll have to take my word for this,” Sandry told him, “but I can see traces of the magic they used to hide themselves. It comes straight down these steps from the house, and goes that way.” She pointed down the street. “I’m going to cover it, to protect it, till your harrier-mages can see it.”

  The Guard raised his eyebrows. “That’s right sensible of your ladyship,” he said, his manner more respectful than it had been earlier. “Go ahead, do it.”

  In her kit she normally kept a number of spelled cloth squares she could use to handle things she didn’t want to touch with bare skin. She used some on the marks on the steps between the door and the street, then warned the Guards in the house away from the broad streaks she could see on the wall beside the door. They wouldn’t let her inside. Sandry accepted that and followed the marks down the street instead, covering each with a cloth square and murmuring the words that would start its protective spell. Anyone about to touch one of those squares would instantly want not to. They’d want to get away from the square and whatever it covered.

  She ran out of them where the marks turned onto the walkway. Now what? she thought, looking at the smears: they led straight toward the far barricade. The more she saw, the stronger was her urge to cover them, to protect others from them, but she had never imagined a situation where she’d need more than fifteen of her cloths. She supposed she could send her guards to a cloth merchant. The problem with that was that she would have to wait here idly, while anything might happen to the unprotected marks.

  Sandry turned to look at the house, and heard a rustle — her own clothes. Of course! she thought, triumphant. She wore a silk undershirt beneath her blouse and tunic, and long silk breeches under her wide-legged pants. They wouldn’t let her in the house to remove her underclothes, but there was no need to go indoors, if she managed things properly.

  She spread her magic into her underthings. It only took a breath of time to make everything she wore attuned to her and her power. Within a second breath, she felt material slide as stitches pulled out of seams. Her top slid under her waistband, rolling to form a snake of silk that wriggled down one leg of her breeches and out. Next she undid the stitches in her under-breeches, letting the cloth pull apart into its separate pieces. She felt silk gliding down her legs and bent over. The pieces crawled into her hands, one pant leg at a time. She looked reproachfully at them: the threads that secured her delicate lace to the cloth had refused to give up their treasure.

  Now, she told them silently. The threads resisted a moment longer, then glided out of the cloth. The lace bands rolled themselves up neatly, until Sandry could put them into her pockets. She could always sew the lace onto new underthings.

  There was a pair of scissors in her mage’s kit. Sandry used them to cut up the panels of her silk underclothes. She returned to work, placing the new squares over the marks on the ground, then sketching the signs for protection and avoidance that would keep them safe. It took a little longer than using the ready-made cloths had done, but it was basic magic. She worked it quickly.

  Her third rough-and-ready square was down when she noticed a black rim to the next mark on the flagstones. She drew closer, puzzled: what was it? This stuff was of the real world, not the magical one. It was just a thin stripe, outlining what looked like the side of a shoe. After a moment’s thought, Sandry covered the entire thing. She then made her silk arch and stiffen like a bowl over the mark. She didn’t want anything to touch that outline until the harriers saw it.

  The next unmagic smear was clean — no dark rim. The one after it was not. Again, Sandry protected it with raised silk, and went on to the next. It was clean; the one after showed a heavier outline. Now she was certain: this was blood. The killer who cloaked himself in the absence of all things — unmagic, Wulfric had called it — was hurt.

  On down the street she went, past the second barricade. The blood rim began to fade at that point: the killer must have bandaged his wound, though bloody traces still remained around the dark magic. Ten yards from the barricade, at the intersection with Silver Street, the marks ended. Sandry put her hands on her hips and glared at the last visible smear of unmagic. She didn’t think the traffic on this larger street would have rubbed out all trace of those marks, so what had happened?

  “Looks to me like he, or she, got took up — horse or cart,” a crisp Namornese voice said at her shoulder. Sandr
y looked up at Wulfric Snaptrap. “You did nice work here,” he added, pointing back down Tapestry Lane. Behind him two other Provost’s Guards who wore the white trim of mages nodded eagerly. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant. They both carried heavy bags over their shoulders.

  Sandry turned, to see a line of her silk squares dotting the walkway back to the barricade. “Oh, that,” she said.

  “Yes, that,” Wulfric told her mockingly. He raised bushy eyebrows. For a moment he reminded Sandry of Niko, the gray-haired mage who had brought her to Emelan and served as one of her teachers. “Are you worn out?” Wulfric wanted to know. “Or can you help more? I’d like to get all this collected, and go over the house.”

  Sandry hesitated. Did she really want to go in that place? Hadn’t it been bad enough, seeing Jamar Rokat in pieces?

  But there was the matter of the unmagic smears. Every fiber of her being protested leaving them where they were. She rubbed her temples. “I need to send a note to Uncle,” she finally said. “And if there’s any tea about, I’d appreciate a cup.” The lieutenant took a flask from her belt, opened it, and offered it to Sandry; fragrant steam scented with rosehips and lemon curled from it. “You’re a lifesaver,” Sandry told the mage-lieutenant, who grinned shyly.

  “She’s Ulrina,” Wulfric said, tearing a sheet of paper from his notebook and giving it to Sandry. “He’s Behazin. They’re my team for this sort of work.”

  When she had drunk her fill of Ulrina’s tea, Sandry told Wulfric, “If I have to do for each spot what I did for that unmagic on Gury and Lebua, I’ll collapse from exhaustion before we get near the house.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he admitted. “Here’s my idea: instead of you weaving magic to bind this stuff, let’s use these cloths you’ve put down as well as our own. Then we could mix up a blend of sweet pea, patchouli, and ylang-ylang oils—”

  “Equal parts of each,” suggested Captain Behazin. “So they’re in balance.” Lieutenant Ulrina nodded.

  “And we work that into these cloths,” Wulfric continued. “They’re all attractors.”

  Sandry nodded. “That might do it. This unmagic is sticky to begin with. It wants to hold onto things.”

  Wulfric sent Ulrina for the supplies they would need. Behazin offered Sandry a bottle of ink and a brush for her note to Duke Vedris. As she wrote it, Wulfric ordered two watching Provost’s Guards to move the barricade out to the intersection at Silver Street. All of Sandry’s cloth squares were safe from the onlookers who gathered there now that the fire was under control.

  When Sandry finished her note, she looked up. Wulfric was crouched by one of the bowl-shaped cloth guards — he seemed immune to Sandry’s avoidance-spells. He was smiling. “What’s so funny?” Sandry asked as she blew on the paper to dry her ink.

  “I’m not laughing, my lady. I’m pleased at the turn in our luck. Our killer slipped up here, bleeding on the stones.”

  Sandry looked at him with interest. She’d been taught that things like hair, blood, and even clothing still had a magical connection to the person they came from. The kind of tracking that Wulfric could do was considered to be advanced, specialized magic — she had yet to learn how it was done. “Is there enough blood to use?” she wanted to know.

  His grin broadened. “There wouldn’t have been if everyone and his auntie trailed through before I got to it. Your quick thinking may have weighted the balance in our favor. We’ve enough here, and it’s almost untainted. I should be able to track him quite nicely with this.”

  The image of Pasco dancing to call up fish rose in her mind. “Isn’t there something else you could do?” inquired Sandry, her note forgotten. “Call him to you, if you have some piece of him?”

  Wulfric shook his head. “It don’t work that way. People don’t want to regain whatever part of themselves they’ve lost — unless it’s a limb. I could do it if he’d left a hand or foot behind. Otherwise it’s the part that wants to go back where it came from, blood or hair or so on. Spelled right, and put in a kind of compass, I’ll hunt this lot to their lair.” His grin broadened unpleasantly. “Then they’ll answer for what they’ve done.”

  With the arrival of their supplies, the four mages — Sandry, Wulfric, and his two assistants — got to work. Wulfric and Behazin mixed the oils and called on their powers for attraction. While they did, Lieutenant Ulrina cut fresh squares so precise that Sandry knew she had spent hours learning to do just that, as Sandry herself had learned to make squares and circles. Once the mixed oil was ready, Sandry applied it to every fiber of her squares, and Ulrina treated the new ones.

  When everything was ready, the assistants took a pile of cloths and headed for the site of the stable fire. Like Wulfric, they had spelled lenses that would help them to see the dark smears, now that they knew what to look for. Their job was to see if the fire had been set by an accomplice — “Elsewise,” Behazin informed Sandry, “it’s just too convenient” — and to gather up all the unmagic that he’d left there.

  “Too much to hope the accomplice got hurt and is bleeding, too,” Wulfric remarked, watching his assistants hurry off. “Still, no sense in overlooking the chance.”

  He and Sandry began to gather up the spots that Sandry had already covered. They worked their way back from Silver Street, entering the Rokat house and tracing the killer’s movements inside. They did not enter the nursery. Instead they followed the set of tracks that led into that room on up to the roof, and to the building next door. They backtracked the killer further still, across a succession of rooftops. The trail led to another stable, down through a loft, and out onto the street, where it ended in a pool of unmagic.

  “End of the road,” Wulfric said gloomily. “Here’s where our killer at least got all bespelled. I’m betting an accomplice set the stable fire, but he wasn’t magicked here. If he’d been, his prints would be here, too.”

  “We’d better get all of this,” Sandry remarked. She sent a goggling boy to a nearby draper’s for a silk sheet, and paid him and the draper well.

  That seemed to amuse Wulfric. “Provost’s work’s easier with you around, my lady,” he told her as they waited for the sheet to soak up all of the unmagic. “If it’d been just us harriers, we’d’ve had to send back to the coop, and explain the expense to bookkeepers. With you, it’s, we need it? Here it is. Let’s get on with the job.”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” she retorted. She was tired. Only when she felt herself reaching for her friends did she realize they had fallen into the habit of borrowing strength from each other. No matter how hardworked any of them might be, at least one of the others would be rested and strong. Now she couldn’t do that, and she missed it.

  “I’m as grateful as I am amused, my lady,” Wulfric said quietly. “Every time you make something like this a bit easier, that gives us more time and strength to deal with the real problems.”

  With the pool cleaned up, they returned to the Rokat house. Now they had to face that nursery. Though she wished that she could leave Wulfric to do this bit, Sandry knew she could not. The unmagic had to be cleared from the room so Wulfric could get information about the killer, and so that she would not have the creeping sense that it might blight anyone who touched it. Another team of harrier-mages, with lenses like those carried by Wulfric and his assistants, got orders to inspect every Guard who had entered the house. Those who showed marks were to be held until Wulfric could cleanse them. During the afternoon he’d told Sandry that Winding Circle’s mages were working on something to get the stuff off human flesh harmlessly; clothes could be burned.

  The blood-stink in the nursery was as bad as it had been in Jamar Rokat’s office. Sandry told herself to be grateful that the bodies had been removed, but long splashes and puddles of blood told their own nightmare story. The pool of it in the crib was the hardest to bear.

  By the time they were finished, long shadows told her that night was coming on. Sandry was so weary she could hardly see as they left
the house for what she devoutly hoped would be the last time.

  Wulfric beckoned to Oama and Kwaben, who had spent the afternoon at the barrier, helping to keep out the curious. “Take her home,” he told them as they brought the horses. “She’s done good service for the realm today.” He helped her up behind Kwaben: Oama would lead the horse Sandry was too exhausted to ride. “Don’t you worry, Lady Sandry,” Wulfric said. “Soon as I extract that blood from the unmagic, we’ll be on these murdering animals like red on roses.” He grinned fiercely and patted Kwaben’s horse on the rump, sending them on their way.

  Sandry napped during the ride to Duke’s Citadel, but the clatter of metal on stone woke her. They were passing through the tunnel that was the short cut between the Arsenal and the palace. The noise did not end or even lessen once they rode through the outer curtain wall, which confused her. She looked around, bleary-eyed. Each of the baileys was ringed with torches, and there seemed to be an incredible traffic of wagons and people on horseback. She expected it to get quieter as they passed through the protective walls, but instead the noise grew. The innermost courtyard, before the main residence, was littered with animals, people, and baggage. She even heard babies crying.

  “Kwaben?” she asked, peering around the Guardsman’s back. “Where did all these people come from?”

  He dismounted. When she slid from her seat, she staggered and would have fallen if Kwaben hadn’t scooped her up in his arms. “I’m fine, you know,” she told him sleepily.

  She thought she saw a trace of a smile on his normally expressionless face. “You just can’t stand up, my lady.”

  “What is this?” demanded Erdogun’s familiar voice. “Is she ill? Make way, you people!”

  Sandry roused. Here came her uncle with the baron. They were frowning. “It’s all right, Uncle,” Sandry assured the duke. “I’ve been working magic, and I’m a little tired. Didn’t you get my note?”