“Can’t you make anything of those symbols?” asked Micum, impatient.
“No. This is something entirely new to me.” He paused, holding a bottle in each hand as if he were weighing them against each other. “The clouded one is definitely different than the other. Whatever has been done to them, this one has a stronger aura.”
They examined every bottle, but there was still no sign of Illia’s ring.
“Bilairy’s Balls!” Micum cried. “All this for nothing?”
“This isn’t the only place he might store something.” Seregil ran a hand back though his hair. “Elani’s ring and brooch are too great a prize to leave lying around. Maybe he thinks Illia’s ring is, too. Another person he’s gone after, who’s associated with Alec and me. Damnation!”
Seregil looked back at the rack, that niggling feeling back again. “Symmetry.” The others looked blankly at him. “These bottles. There are
“Atre’s house,” said Alec. “Or the Crane.”
“I doubt he’d keep anything anywhere so public as a working theater. He’d have too little control over who might be wandering around there. But we’d better look there anyway, just in case.”
Alec sighed. “By the Four, we’ve done all this work trying to stop the cabals, and the real threat was right under our noses all the time. But why didn’t Laneus show any signs of the sleeping death, or Kylith and Alaya and the other nobles?”
“Maybe that’s what the two different elixirs do, with their different seals,” said Thero. “We still know almost nothing of how these work. And we haven’t found any full, sealed bottles with anything belonging to a noble. It could be a different magic he uses. One he doesn’t have to do here. But why would he kill the nobles who have been generous to him, and could potentially give him more?”
“Out of spite, obviously,” said Micum.
“No, there has to be more to it than that, for him to take such a risk,” said Seregil. “We’d better clear up and get out of here.”
“But all these people!” Alec looked from the pile of jewelry to the box of poor items.
“We can’t afford to flush our enemies out yet, Alec. Not until we have Elani’s jewelry and Illia’s ring.”
Thero went to the bowl of used wax and examined each broken seal. “All of these have the central symbol.”
“Could it complete the magic?” asked Seregil as he scooped jewels back into the casket.
“That’s one possibility. Or they are different in purpose.” Thero knelt and passed his hand before the phials lowest to the floor. After a moment he drew out a few, examined them, and put all but two back. “I’m taking these. They’re less likely to be missed than the ones higher up,”
“It’s still risky,” warned Seregil. “Especially if I’m right about the exact numbers.”
“I can’t help that. If I don’t examine the contents, I won’t know what they do, or how to combat the magic they contain.”
“Then hopefully we’ll stop whoever is doing this before they notice,” said Seregil. “I think we’re done here. Back to your tower, Thero?”
“No, these might be noticed there. Can we go back to the inn?”
“Of course.” Seregil looked around the room, making certain everything was the same as they’d found it, apart from the two empty spaces in the rack.
Thero paused on the way to the door. “I feel like I’m missing something.”
“Can you do the finding spell again?” asked Alec.
Thero cast it and they watched the mist drift lazily over the bottles, curling around them like smoke. Nothing else in the room attracted it.
Kari and Elsbet greeted them anxiously on their return.
“Did you find her ring?” asked Kari.
“No, love,” Micum told her. “But we’re on their trail. It is the actors behind all this.”
While Micum and the others told the women of their night’s work, Thero took out the sealed bottles. That cold, crawling sensation was faint but unmistakable and they felt unnaturally cool in his hands. He’d need to work some protection magic before he delved too deeply into whatever magic they contained.
“Those are what you found?” Kari asked, and Thero saw the haunted look in her dark eyes. “Will this help you save my girl? Do you think you can take off the magic?”
“I hope so, but there’s no way of knowing until I examine these,” Thero replied as kindly as he could. There was nothing to be gained by raising false hopes. “Seregil, I need to mark up your floor.”
Seregil and Alec moved the dining table and chairs to one side and rolled up the carpet, baring a patch of floor large enough for Thero to chalk a suitable circle and the necessary symbols of protection.
“I need two bowls. Silver if possible.”
Elsbet fetched two silver wine cups from the sideboard. “Will these do?”
“Yes, those are quite suitable.”
Sitting down in the center of the circle with the bottles and cups, Thero spoke the sealing spell and felt the circle of magical protection close around him. Nothing could get in or out of it. Holding the milky bottle between his hands, he began the incantation of intent.
In his mind’s eye Thero was surrounded by a greasy black cloud. But as he’d suspected, it was simpler and less weighty; there was no trace of the necromancer’s dark god. No, this was something else entirely, and as alien to him as the magic of the Retha’noi had been. He concentrated harder, trying to get past the initial sensations to something solid.
Atre owned this. He’d owned it for a long time. A very long time. He’d handled it, filled it, sealed it many times. And drunk from it. Thero had a fleeting sense of the tall actor Brader drinking, too, but none of the others. He tried to catch a clearer memory of what Atre actually did with the phials, but it wouldn’t come, perhaps because of the magic itself.
While the physical sensations he was getting from it were mildly unpleasant, he felt nothing malevolent. Trusting that, he cut the wax at the neck of the phial with his ivory knife, then carefully worked the cork free.
Nothing happened, but a bitter smell rose in his nostrils. It wasn’t a physical scent, but rather a magical emanation.
“I’m not certain what it does, but I think they are elixirs of
some sort,” he told the others as he poured it into one of the silver cups.
“You’re not going to drink it?” exclaimed Alec. “What if it’s poison?”
“I doubt that. I saw Atre drinking from it.” Thero swirled the milky liquid around in the cup. “Still, I wish I had some creature to test it on.”
“You’re not using my cat,” said Seregil.
“I could check the rat trap in the kitchen,” said Alec.
Thero nodded. “A rat would do nicely.”
Alec hurried out, and returned a few moment’s later with the wire trap; there were three sleek brown house rats inside.
“Good, I’ll use them later, after I’ve looked at the second bottle.”
He set the bowl aside and cut the seal on the other bottle, the one without the central symbol.
As soon as the cork was out he felt a powerful surge of energy flow through his fingers. Startled, he managed not to drop the phial as a white mist shot up from the mouth of it and whirled around his head in a windless tempest, caught in the magic circle. It was cool and moist and in it he saw a child’s face, like a shape seen in a cloud. It was a young boy and he looked terrified. Thero also thought he sensed some more familiar magic, but he couldn’t be certain.
“It’s all right,” Thero whispered, but the face remained drawn with fear and the mist swirled more quickly. “Who are you?”
Thero blinked in surprise. He didn’t have experience with ghosts or spirits-it wasn’t his area of expertise-and hadn’t really expected an answer.
