Miranda sighed. “Well, it seems like an overly elaborate setup to me.”
“It is,” Lelbon said. “But my Lord Illir enjoys it immensely. Plus, it keeps the winds busy. They can be a handful if left to their own devices.”
Miranda thought of Eril and agreed heartily. “So,” she said, scooting to the edge of her chair. “Now that we’re on the subject, how do the big looms work? Since the brokers are spirit deaf, I’m guessing the machines help them interpret the winds without hearing them? Do they read combinations from the symbols on the cloths?”
“That I certainly could not tell you,” Lelbon said. “Industry secret.”
“Seems like a lot of hassle,” Miranda said. “Why not just use wizards?”
Lelbon closed his eyes as the warm sunlight drifted over his face. “Because that would defeat the whole purpose.”
Miranda flopped back into her chair. “Are you deliberately being infuriating?”
“Quite the contrary,” Lelbon said. “I’m being very open. More open than I should be. You, however, seem to be making an effort to be thick.”
Miranda glared at him and said nothing. Finally, Lelbon sighed. “I’ll add this, and no more. The Shepherdess watches her spirits closely and her wizards when they catch her fancy, but she completely ignores the spirit deaf. They are beneath her notice altogether, and she certainly would never take the time to learn any sort of code a wind or other spirit could devise to communicate with them. With that in mind, consider, if the winds wanted to pass on information they usually couldn’t say without attracting her anger, what would be safer? Whispering to a wizard or flipping a piece of cloth?”
Miranda’s eyes went wide, but before she could say anything, Lelbon cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Let’s leave it there.”
She nodded, and they lapsed into silence, listening to the howling wind on the other side of the wall.
CHAPTER
8
After five minutes of listening to the wind howl in the broker’s room, the urge to get up and peek was almost overwhelming. Miranda desperately wanted to see with her own eyes how the pieces of cloth on ribbons worked, but she stayed put, fingers locked on the battered arms of her chair. The West Wind was already doing her a lot of favors; now wasn’t the time to press her luck.
To get her mind off the sound, Miranda leaned back in her chair to contemplate what she’d learned of Illir. She’d always known he wasn’t a spirit that did things in the normal way, but using the spirit deaf to pass information right below the Shepherdess’s nose was brilliant, and the more she thought about it, the more brilliant it got. How many other events had Illir influenced through his brokers, feeding the right information to the right people at the right time?
She sighed loudly, causing Lelbon to look up in alarm. Miranda shook her head. No need to tell him how much it stung to finally realize how little she actually knew about the spirit world she’d given her life to. If Illir was secretly behind both the brokers and Morticime Kant and she hadn’t known, how much else was she missing? She didn’t even want to think about it, but it all came down to the same mistake: underestimating the spirit world.
Every time she thought she had spirits figured out, they did something that turned her on her head. Even seeing the truth of it in her servant spirits every day, it was easy to forget in the rush to do her duty that spirits weren’t some faceless mass to be saved but a complex network of individuals all trying to make their way in the world. They had their own ambitions, their own wants and needs and likes. Thinking of it like that, the fact that she could control them, overpower them with her will, just seemed… wrong.
For some reason, that thought sent her back to the vision the Shaper Mountain had shown her, his memories of the world that had existed before the Shepherdess. There’d been no wizards then, no people at all, just spirits and the demons who preyed on them. The spirits had been awake then. All of them, even the little ones. Miranda closed her eyes, trying to imagine a world where everything was as awake as her own spirits. A time when the world was enormous, and spirits fought their own demons. A world of free, independent souls without a Shepherdess or her stars to watch over them. Unbidden, Miranda’s hand sank down to brush her rings. If such a world existed now, would humans have any place in it?
She was still mulling this over when the wind on the other side of the wall died out, falling from a roaring gale to nothing in less than a breath. Miranda blinked and turned to look at Lelbon. It couldn’t be time yet. They’d been sitting here less than half an hour, but Emma was already walking through the door with a surprised look on her face and a sheet of paper in her hands.
“Luck is with you today, Spiritualist,” she said, handing the paper to Miranda. “Here you are, names and locations, just as requested. The ones missing are marked with asterisks. I think you’ll find everything to your satisfaction.”
Miranda snatched the paper from her hand. As her eyes ran frantically over the scribbled names, the first thing that struck her was how long the list was. There must have been hundreds of names, each with a place listed beside it, just as Emma had said. The only star without a location was the one at the very top, Eli Monpress.
Reading that name was harder than she expected. All at once, she was back in the Tower at Osera, staring across the dark, still water as the white arms tightened around Eli’s throat, pulling him out of the world. Miranda shook herself out of the memory, scrubbing her blurry eyes with the back of her hand. There was no sense worrying about the thief. If there was one thing Eli Monpress excelled at, it was looking out for himself. Setting the past firmly out of her mind, Miranda plunged ahead, reading as fast as her eyes could move.
All the names from her own investigations, the Shaper Mountain, the Great Ghosthound, and so on, were listed, with one exception. The Immortal Empress’s name was missing. Miranda read the list twice over, searching for Empress or Nara, the name Mellinor had mentioned on the ride down to Osera, but she found neither. That confused her, but Miranda didn’t have time to worry about the Empress.
As she read the list through again and again, a realization began creeping over her mind. From the very beginning, she’d known there must be several stars. A few dozen, maybe a hundred, but the list in her hands was well over that. And then there were the missing stars. Coming in, she’d expected to see the Deep Current and the Allva’s tree, plus a few more. Now, staring at the paper between her shaking hands, Miranda felt like she’d stepped off the edge of a bottomless pit.
“How is it?” Lelbon said, peering over her shoulder.
Miranda shoved the list at him. He took the paper from her shaking hand, his wispy eyebrows climbing. Of the nearly two hundred listed names, a full thirty had the sharp, black asterisk beside them.
“I thought four, five at the most,” she whispered. “Ten at the very worst. But thirty? How do thirty stars vanish without our knowing?”
Lelbon’s pale face went a little paler. “Look,” he said, pointing at a cluster of names marked with the black asterisks. “They’re mostly stone spirits, or spirits involved with the sea.” He glanced at Emma, who was still hovering. “Have there been reports of earthquakes?”
“Aye,” she said. “Several, mostly down south.”
Lelbon shook his head, muttering under his breath.
“Look here!” Miranda cried, pointing at one name toward the bottom of the list. “It’s the coral reef I sent Eril to check on just this morning.” She looked up at Emma. “Are you sure this one’s missing?”
“Everything you see there is correct as of five minutes ago,” the woman said, insulted.
Miranda mumbled a quick apology and turned back to Lelbon, who was reading the list over again. “Sea spirits, corals, a rain forest, bedrock, the humans,” he muttered, resettling his spectacles on his long nose.
“Is there a connection?” Miranda said.
“There must be,” Lelbon said. “These are all spirits whose loss won’t be felt by the world at large immediately.” His frown deepened, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s like she’s picking off the hidden ones, the stars whose spirits are either isolated or locally clustered. And since human souls can’t dominate each other, we wouldn’t feel the loss of Eli or the Empress.” The paper list fluttered as his hands began to shake. “She’s taking
