CHAPTER SIX
Harvin’s skin pulled away from his bones, nerves unspooled and signaled their alarm. He breathed through the pain and twisted until the pull centered on only one side of his body. Where?
North, slightly west. Somewhere in the Terraces, or Ossington. It faded as fast as it had registered, left only a phantom prickle of overstimulated pain receptors, and once he was sure the sweat had cleared along his hairline, he rubbed a hand through his beard and strode into the hall. He didn’t bother to lock the door to his suite of small rooms—the other members of the Eye were as skilled as he in opening doors that were meant to be closed, and he kept no secrets from his colleagues.
He left the quarters behind, and two floors and three connecting hallways later, his strides took him down the hall outside the Council meeting rooms. Pacil, another of Harvin’s colleagues, stepped out of one of the working offices with a uniformed Watcher he recognized but didn’t know by name, their heads ducked in low conversation.
Pacil came to an abrupt halt and lifted a hand, the tension in his posture easing with the gesture. “Harvin! Lucky you’re here—Ilirod had an alert and wanted a quick check in Terraces. Can you take Council duty so Solin and I can go?”
Harvin slowed his pace and frowned slightly. As though he’d been going somewhere, and it wasn’t that he’d felt the shift somewhere in the depths of his city. He didn’t have to be the one to take every job, he reminded himself.
“Of course,” he said, which was the only answer he could give. He shifted smoothly and walked into the room Pacil and Solin had just exited.
Taben Ilirod, seated on the Smeaton desk, turned toward the sound and grinned. “There’s my boy,” he called, as though he and Harvin hadn’t grown up together. “Thought you were somewhere out on the deep seas.”
“Returned not long ago,” Harvin replied while he secured the door. Once it was locked, he shifted to lean his back against it. Three of the Councilors were present, and whatever they were discussing they had dismissed all their aides and secretaries to do so. Not so uncommon, this late in the night, but it was an odd group. Taben kept much the same last hours as members of the Eye, but Berrin Coradon was the oldest Seat, closing on her eighth decade, and preferred sleep to endless pontificating. Melnier Arvyle hated Taben and endeavored to never be locked in a room with him unless it was a full Council meeting.
“Just in time to guard, eh? Doesn’t Smeaton usually give your type a break, when you’ve been away on a job for some time?”
“I am simply lucky in my timing,” he replied, summoning the sort of grin that usually worked on Berrin and annoyed Taben. “I would have thought you’d be at the merchant houses, given the fleet of ships I saw at anchor.”
Taben made a disgusted noise deep in his throat. “Fleet, is it? Four, and three of them still only halfway through quarantine. Don’t suppose you want to go with the Harborwatch and speed it up?”
“You’d need half the Eye to be thorough enough to do at speed what the chains do with time.” Not entirely, technically true. Harvin himself could clear a ship in a handful of hours. Unless there was a magical artifact of some sort hidden in a shielded container. Quarantine worked on multiple levels. If the magic were wild, leaving the ships to sit allowed it to have its way with the ship’s crew, but go no further. If there were any magic at all, the harbor chains would slowly leach it away. The risk was best managed that way. Once the quarantine was passed, the Harborwatch went through each ship’s inventory with their Council-provided amulets, charged to spark only once and shock their wearers if something triggered the nullifying pool in the center of the gem. Should that happen, then the Eye was called to clean and clear the ship and all its contents, living and inanimate.
“We’re lucky anyone trades with us at all, given the inefficiencies of our infrastructure.” Taben knocked his fist on the edge of Smeaton’s desk, as though calling attention to the Council Seat that currently held that responsibility.
“Don’t be an idiot, Ilirod.” Melnier flashed a conspiratorial smile in Harvin’s direction. “Golsias, Mountain’s Rest, and Encaulo are all as dedicated to the ongoing eradication of magic as we are. They have their own safety measures.”
“And let us drown with the gods should one of us infect the others.” Berrin tapped her stylus with such force Harvin was reminded of Nuret’s deadly hair sticks. “Then off to war with the rest of us, and so much for all your trade prowess then, Ilirod.”
“Oh excellent, thank you both for the reminders.” Taben rolled his eyes. “Here’s the thing, Harvin, I’m glad you’re here. You’ve got insight on this, having just come back from—”
“I’ll make my formal report to Smeaton in the—”
“No, no you misunderstand.” Taben waved a hand, shot a look at Berrin along with a smirk that helped Harvin understand this was a very informal gathering indeed. Harvin decided to meet the attitude in kind.
He crossed to the left side of the room, grabbed a chair, and brought it back to the door. With his focus ostensibly attentive and aimed at Taben, he spun the chair to face the door, straddled it so he sat with his back to the door, arms on the top of the chair’s back, and tilted his head welcomingly for Taben to continue.
Taben’s smirk edged briefly into a grin, and then tucked itself away. “No specifics, then. You’ve been abroad, more recently than any of us. What is the mood, would you say. Of the other cities?”
“All four cities in our corner of the ocean flourish, to one degree or another.” Encaulo had not yet spread its city limits, but it had built more ships than any of the other cities. Like Broadside, Mountain’s Rest was steadily reclaiming portions of its long-abandoned outskirts, and Golsias had constructed ingenious floating boardwalks to build residences and shops deep into their wealth of marshland. All, like their own Broadside, had found a balance between keeping trade alive and magic’s creeping tendrils out.
“And have any of them mentioned new trading partners?” Arvyle asked, and Taben groaned so loudly Harvin figured that must have been what they were discussing before whatever alert had sent Pacil and Solin out.
“Arvyle, even if any of them did, it’s of no concern to you—”
“A new trade partner, even one only connected to us through one of our established three, would absolutely require the attention of the Councilor who is responsible for the health and safety of the city’s people, Ilirod, as any fool would—”
“Sirs,” Berrin raised both hands, though the way she gripped the stylus in one made it more an implied threat than a peaceful gesture. Harvin had spent enough time on the harsher streets of Broadside not to underestimate a tired old woman with nothing left to lose.
“There are as many rumors in other cities as there are here—as many puddles as you’ll find in Muckers,” Harvin replied, letting a bit of his excellent dock-influenced accent bleed into his tone.
Tabin visibly restrained another grin and Arvyle gaped a bit before recovering and leaning forward. “No wonder the Eye gets in anywhere, I could swear you’re from the muck itself, Harvin, and not one o—”
“I’m from anywhere I need to be,” Harvin interrupted smoothly, and Berrin snorted in approval. All Eyes were born to Council families, but no Eye was from any particular Council family once they were formally accepted—and though they owed their loyalty to the Council as a whole, they reported to Smeaton. If other Councilors could tweak family connections and pull their focus or favoritism, the carefully managed process would fall to pieces. All it would take was the smallest of charged amulets to end up outside of the Council Seat hands, and the city would fall, once more, to the vicissitudes of magic.
Unlike the Watchers, he didn’t have to stand on formality with any of the Seats, or any of their higher ranked family members. The Eye stood ever so slightly apart, because at any given time they might need to remove any threat of magic in Broadside, whether that be a Councilor’s sister or second cousin or a favorite uncle. Or a Councilor themself.
“But what I’m saying, Arvyle, is that we shouldn’t assume four is all our coalition ever will be, and should in fact take steps in case it should need to grow. I’ve heard Tansipos, foremost in the peninsula across the sea, has been stable for a full two generations, and it’s possible—”
“And where have you heard such a thing, Taben? Certainly not from one of those rumored rogue ships—”
“Well I haven’t heard it from the Watch, though you wouldn’t know it if I did, would you? Your sister, though, I bet she hears all kinds of—”
The door creaked behind Harvin, and the latch trembled. He cocked his head, and a moment later a series of firm knocks echoed through the wood, muffled by its thickness but clear enough. Two, pause, two, pause, one.
Smeaton, as they hadn’t changed the signal upon his return. How did she know he was on duty here? He stood, swung up the small metal screen to peer into the hall, and nodded in confirmation before he straightened and unhitched the locks.
“Why are you all here?” she asked from the doorway, glaring at the three Councilors. “You said you were retiring an hour ago.”
“There was an alert, Smeaton—”
“Oh no, was there?” Nuret Smeaton snapped sarcastically. “Please do not deign to lecture me on my area of expertise and responsibility, Ilirod.”
“We are all of us responsible for the safety of our city, Smeaton,” Taben returned smoothly, and pointedly shifted to wink at Harvin. “Is that not so?”
“Harvin, with me. You three, go to bed.”
“Yes mother,” Arvyle murmured, and while Nuret did not seem to hear him, Taben covered a faint laugh with his hand. Harvin didn’t know what would happen to the dynamics on the Council if those two began to get along, but thankfully that was not his catch and not his nets.
“You’re taking our guard, Nuret,” Berrin said, her tone mild as though the younger men in the room weren’t trampling her last nerve. Maybe she liked them—as mysterious a reaction as the drowned gods could have imagined. “Did you happen to bring us another, after we sent our originals off for your alert?”
“The day I worry that someone might carry you off, Berrin, is the day I give my Seat to Tannaful’s infant granddaughter.”
“Isn’t she your second cousin, Smeaton? Oh never mind.” Taben hopped off her desk and made a show of brushing off his pants. “Do what you have to do. I’ll walk Berrin home.”
“The day I require . . .” Berrin trailed off rather than finish echoing Nuret’s sentiment, and Harvin didn’t hear if she replaced it with something else.
Thus cleared from temporary guard duty, Harvin followed Smeaton’s rapid stride through the halls of the Council building. He’d assumed they would go to the basement, but Nuret stopped short at a stairway that only went down. “I need you in Cavella.”
“Cavella,” he repeated, showing none of his confusion.
“Several more blocks were opened for reclamation, and it’s come to my attention the inspection was not as thorough as it should have been.” Smeaton frowned, reached for her hair, and dropped her hand again, empty. He recognized the motion—she was reaching for her deadly hairsticks. They were required to be left in the Box, but habits were hard to break.
“How—”
“I’ll deal with that. You go to Cavella. Take through dawn, if you need to, walk the entirety of it. Then report directly to me on your return—not whoever is on guard, not Ilirod—me.”
Harvin inclined his head and would have snapped his heels before leaving, but he tipped his head toward the stairway. “Do you need me to get something downstairs?”
“What?” She blinked, stared at the stairway as though she’d just now understood where they were, and physically shook herself like she’d come in from a rainstorm. “No. I’m going there. You go to Cavella.”
He didn’t cast another glance in her direction, but filed it for later. Whether or not she was on the path to corrupting herself, she had not done so yet. There was nothing else he could do there, and he had orders. He left to follow them.
Harvin stood across the street and watched a dozen quirl birds walk in a spiral, vertically up the front wall of a mostly intact three-story building. While quirls often ran in spreading spirals when disturbed, that was flat on the ground. Horizontally. They flew in the air or walked on the ground, like most birds. They did not climb walls like they were particularly mobile vines. As a rule, quirls did nothing in such blatant defiance of gravity.
The house itself had recently lost its porch. Undergrowth had crushed under the chunks of stone, not grown around it, and from the unmuddied surfaces collapsed around the entrance, Harvin placed it within the last few nights. Odd for it to have simply collapsed without a storm or other cause, but not impossible.
If quirls hadn’t been walking straight up the front of the house in deliberate, repetitive fashion, Harvin could mark that as a coincidence. Instead, it was likely what—or who—ever had knocked down the porch had also set off the magical reaction before him.
Dark shadows of fall-shriveled vines made interesting shapes in the house’s façade, but not nearly so fascinating as the crystallized trails that sprung up behind the quirls. The small facets glinted with their own light, definitively blue, purple, and pink despite the unrelieved dark of the long-abandoned district.
He considered burning the building, but just because the birds hadn’t taken to the air, didn’t mean they wouldn’t, and each was currently a compact, head-sized package of incipient magic. Send twelve feathery incendiary devices into the city and his job would intensify in a matter of minutes.
He didn’t have twelve knives on him, and they were too high along the building for him to hold out a blade and see if they would mindlessly run into it. As for his small crossbow, he did carry twelve bolts—exactly twelve bolts, and while he was an excellent shot, it would be smarter to have a cushion.
Besides, Harvin didn’t know if taking out one would set the others to flight, which returned his thoughts to his, “can’t burn the place down and send them flying off” problem.
Cavella’s far northwestern edge, bordering the Mountain River and only several dead streets from the Liddow, carried a strong odor of low tide despite being on the far side of the city from the ocean. He sniffed again, and caught a more subtle layer underneath the brine, something sharp and bright that stung the inside of his nose.
Nothing he’d smelled before in his various hunts, but it tingled some spark of familiarity in the back of his brain. Citrus, almost, like the strange orangey red fruits that grew along the southern side of Mountain Rest’s lower foothills.
Harvin took an exploratory step forward, and the quirls continued forming their pattern along the wall without so much as flicking their wings. As though the force of the world had ceased to exist, and he and the quirls were locked in their own small, separate fold of space.
The ache that spread through his limbs edged into pain, then faded from awareness as he blocked it. Another step, no reaction from the birds, and he kept the slow, smooth pace—one step, pause, one step, pause—until he’d successfully crossed the street, the small front yard, and reached the building itself.
The spiral had taken on new dimension, offshoot swirls that crossed to where the porch had ended. Keeping his motions easy and regular, Harvin lifted his hand and placed it on the corner of the building—and locked every muscle in place to halt his immediate urge to wrench himself away.
The house was cold, brutally frozen like the high broken peaks of the Clasm Mountains, the lack of warmth leaping from his hand to his shoulder between one blink and the next. The shock of it, or the feel of the energy thrumming through the wall, twisted his spine in three different directions, each individual section bowing its own way, and the top of his head pulled backward toward the ground.
After a minute or an eternity, he had enough control to force himself straight, open his eyes—when had they closed?—and regard the quirls. They were still running in their spiraled loops, still defying the grasp of the earth, still undisturbed by what had happened to him.
He considered the connection of the house—could he sever it? Clean it, like he had the merchant’s letter opener in Encaulo? He flattened his palm, spread his fingers, every motion slow; frozen muscles reluctant to answer his commands.
There . . . beneath the cold, beneath the surface, the magic spun. Harvin felt it, the shock of it under the skin of the world, leashed potential building, folding, deepening, over and through the paths of the quirls above him. But the quirls and the spiral were different from the house, slightly. As the prism in Encaulo had been from the coffer, and both from the letter opener. Cleansing each one was a separate proposition, and if he severed the house, the quirls were still in play.
He craned his head back, saw the edge of one of the outflowing spirals was in reach of an empty wound of a window. Harvin calculated—twelve perfect, flawless shots, not a single pause in reloading, not a miss of a single small, moving object? Or should he hurry through the wreckage of a house and chance touching the glittering spiral, the connection between birds and house?
An easy decision, without backup in reach, but harder to execute. He yanked his hand off the house, skin resisting, reaching away from tendons and muscles and nerves and toward the cracked surface of the wall. He didn’t look at the hand—it was bleeding or it wasn’t, and that wouldn’t change his next steps. Better to move. Through the irregular opening that had been shielded by a porch, over the sagging wooden floorboards. Up the uneven stairs, darker than the floor, two of which were entirely black because the treads were simply gone, now shadows gaping into nothingness.
Harvin turned sideways, kept his back to the wall, and distributed his weight deliberately with every step, testing each tread without fully stopping. Reoriented at the top of the stairs to guess which room had the window. The cluster of doorways, most with their doors, did not match the outside of the house, and as he examined them, another formed out of shadow.
He hadn’t missed it before. It hadn’t been there. Whatever the quirls’ spirals were doing, they were changing the house. It shouldn’t work that way—magic infected people, people did things with it either willingly or unconsciously. Animals used as containers only spread the taint further, they didn’t . . . They weren’t supposed to cause changes otherwise.
But magic had been unreliable long before the Council had found a way to drive it out, and records—those he’d been allowed access to—were for people familiar with its regular use. Incomplete, to say the least, and not entirely helpful to those who inherited the broken and patched-together world almost four hundred years later.
Hardly the issue of the moment.
He scanned the options, pictured the façade of the house, and lined both up with the burn tearing on the other side of his skin. Picked a door, kicked it down, stayed on the edges of the room to avoid the void in the middle of the floor. Gaze locked on the window. But the world warped, reality pulling apart around him. The closer he moved toward the window, the further it pulled away from him. Space lensed, and his careful, creeping pace combined with the increasing distance made his approach last at least an hour. Though his sense of time was as detached from actuality in that same awful surreal nausea raw magic was so good at creating.
Where did this come from? Not the quirls—they were captive, not creators. No, the search for cause would have to wait. Finally he reached the wall, and didn’t risk glancing behind him to gauge how far he’d come. The only way out was through.
Harvin leaned out the window, caught himself on the edge of the wall as the sill tumbled to the ground. Dust and rot left him more room. The spiral glowed dully, but its light increased with each quirl that passed over it.
He tightened his hand around the window frame and grasped the spreading flames from his power. Drove the mass of pain into one arm, then concentrated it further—down from his shoulder, past his elbow, until pain raged through his free hand. The hand he slammed to the side of the window, connecting with the edge of the spiral, sinking into the spiral, each angled crystal slicing through him too neatly for pain, but then spreading, following his veins, meeting the place pain finally registered.
For a moment, for a year, he hovered on a cliff’s edge. The fire of his ability met the crystalline pulse of magic. The neat blade of severing crashed against a branching, growing, spreading, pulsing energy that pulled from him. For an instant, less than an eyeblink, Harvin caught sight of something hovering on the other side, and then it vanished.
In rapid succession the magical pressure he resisted disappeared, the quirls tumbled from the wall in boneless unison, the facade of the house separated from the structure with an eerily silent ease, and Harvin nearly tumbled into the street after it.
He wrenched his hand back, twisted, and rode the momentum to fling himself away from the front of the house. Harvin fetched up at the edge of the hole in the middle of the room but didn’t fall through.
His nerves calmed immediately, only a low, normal ache in the bones of his arm to tell him he’d done something—nothing on fire, nothing stretched out from under his skin with the urge to entangle with magic and sever it at its root.
For another handful of moments, Harvin crouched and breathed, unfocused his eyes and reached . . . but there was nothing to touch. The quirls were dead, crushed beneath the front of the house. The spiral had disappeared, or been crushed to inert pebbles. The house no longer thrummed about him with a rising threat.
Success.
He hadn’t had a moment of doubt. But also . . . what in the drowning depths had that been?