At her gesture of dismissal, Gharek bowed once more before strolling out of the throne room as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Outside, the summer sun blazed down on his head. He felt none of it, only the cold grip of terror mixed with fury. Dalvila had given him a task and a warning. If he had to tear down all of Domora stone by stone, he’d find the free trader and the mysterious mother-bond, haul the draga by its tail back to the throne room single-handedly, and cheerfully butcher the thing himself in front of the empress. There would be no failure.
CHAPTER FOUR
The woman with the rain-cloud eyes was prettier in person than in the vision the lightning had shown to Malachus. She possessed a soft, round face framed by wisps of curly brown hair that had escaped her braid, and long dark lashes that almost hid the flash of alarm in her gaze as it swept over him.
He hadn’t expected to find her this soon and certainly not by chance. Malachus had rubbed his eyes just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things when he first spotted her standing in front of a fruit stall purchasing a bag of plums. He’d followed her after that, keeping enough distance away that she didn’t sense his scrutiny.
There was a sense of purpose about her. The people who eddied around her meandered from one stall to another as if carried by the thinning river of humanity surrounding them. She, on the other hand, didn’t waste time browsing, stopping at certain stalls only long enough to ask the vendors a question, inspect an item, then moving on without lingering. He might not have caught up with her had she not stopped long enough to buy the fruit.
She’d nimbly avoided the stream of spittle a man dressed in rich robes spat at her as he passed, neither pausing to confront him nor speeding up to avoid another possible spraying. And while she exhibited no anger at the act, Malachus’s own temper flared at the unprovoked harassment.
He approached her as she stepped away from one of the market’s higher-end stalls, one that sold blank journals bound in embossed leather and filled with lower-quality parchment instead of vellum. Her slender hand had stroked the book she held under the merchant’s hawkish gaze before she put it down as if it were made of finely spun glass.
In his earlier musings, Malachus had assigned her a particular voice, one almost throaty and deep. When she replied to his inquiry, it was neither. Only a perfectly ordinary female voice lacking any raspy quality, and with overtones of mild surprise and a growing wariness the longer she spoke with him. Malachus wondered what about him beyond the fact that he was a stranger had spooked her. He had his answer as soon as he bid her good evening and led Batraza past her.
Sorcery, a familiar kind forged of earth and its eternal hymn, whispered across his skin. More than a hushed note, it had reached out to touch him, as if in recognition of a like entity. He paused, as did the woman, her eyes widening for a moment before she spun on her heel and strode away, lengthening her stride until she was nearly running back the way she’d come. Malachus watched the path she took until she turned a corner onto a smaller alleyway that led south from the market’s center.
He had walked a little more than half the Goban market today, scouting its lanes and stalls in a north-to-south direction, moving in a zigzag from east to west and back again. To the casual observer, he was simply a visitor browsing the goods he could buy with the coin he possessed. So far the lodestone power of his mother-bond had stayed true and stationary. Either the thieves he tracked remained unaware he was hunting them, or they’d pawned the bone off to another unwary buyer in the market.
Images from the lightning had hinted that maybe the gray-eyed woman was one of those buyers, but if so, she didn’t carry the mother-bond on her person. Malachus would have sensed it instantly.
Lightning was a gift from both air and earth, its ceraunomancy sharp in its imagery but not always accurate. When the bolt that shot through Malachus had shown him the woman, he’d assumed it had done so in relation to the mother-bond. Now he questioned his assumption. Whether she knew it or not, she was a servant of earth, just as he was. Judging by the brief glimpse he got of her wide eyes and alarmed expression, she knew and treated it as a secret too dangerous not to keep. Maybe the lightning had shown him her face simply because of a bond of common magic. If so, then searching out her camp in the market would be a waste of time. Still, he couldn’t risk not following a path that might lead him to the mother-bond.
He turned Batraza around to follow her, senses open to the wispy threads of earth song trailing behind her. He lost her track not far into his search, the notes fading to silence. Malachus didn’t fret. He’d find her again when he reconnoitered this part of the market tomorrow. Until then he’d use the time to take supper with a loquacious vendor hoping to sell him a costly bit of jewelry in exchange for information on a pair of traders who’d stopped at his stall to inspect his wares.
His luck so far favored him. If events continued in the same fortuitous vein, he’d have his mother-bond in hand in a matter of days and be on a ship returning home by the following week.
If only fate didn’t have a twisted sense of humor.
Gedamon the jeweler had served a fine meal to his guests—if one disregarded the faintest whiff of a sleep nostrom in both the wine and the stew. Curious as to what the man hoped to achieve by drugging his supper companion senseless, Malachus pretended to drink the wine and blunted the drug’s potency in the stew by using bread as a sop. His lips and tongue tingled from the effects, but he staved off the somnolence, adopting the behavior of a man teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. His host’s eyes gleamed in the lamp’s ambient light, and he subtly gestured to his wife while pouring a steady stream of distracting chatter into Malachus’s ear.
Malachus watched with a slitted gaze as she crept toward the satchel he’d brought with him, her movements stealthy even as she pretended to clear away dishes and pick up items from the floor. She nudged the bag away from his side with her foot, moving by small measures so he wouldn’t notice. The jeweler’s voice rose in volume to cover the sound of her furtive movements. When she bent, ostensibly to move a tray of cups from one spot to another with one hand, the other reached for the satchel’s flap.
Malachus set his goblet down with a thunk, uncaring that half of the drugged contents sloshed over the rim. “Madam,” he said in a flat voice. “If you put your hand in there, I will break your husband’s hands as punishment for putting you up to such mischief.”
They froze at his words, and Gedamon’s wife blanched, still bent with her hand on the flap. She darted a terrified gaze to her equally pale husband. He did a better job of mastering his shock and fear than she did, blustering his way through the tense moment by adopting indignation.
“Here now, get away from there, you foolish atwiten. What do you think you’re doing?” She leapt away from the satchel as if it had tried to bite her and scurried behind Gedamon, hiding her face behind her shirt’s draping sleeve. The jeweler turned an innocent look to Malachus and raised his hands as if shocked by her actions. “Forgive me, serdah. I don’t know what to do with her sometimes.”
Tamping down the urge to sling the dregs of contaminated wine in the man’s lying face, Malachus pushed the goblet and the mostly uneaten food away from him. “Save your breath for an honest explanation,” he said. “You’re a rich man without the need to pilfer off someone else. There’s nothing about my appearance to indicate great wealth, and you went through a lot of trouble here in the hope of searching my belongings and picking me over once you thought I was too stupefied to notice. You did all this for more than a chance at robbing me of a few belshas. Tell me why, and I’ll be a lot more forgiving regarding your trickery.”
He suspected he knew the man’s answer before he gave it. Gedamon, goaded by his wife’s elbow in his back and her furious whispering in his ear, proved him right.
“I swear, serdah, it was a chance thing. I’d seen you earlier in the day walking the market, dressed like the folk of the northern Winosia prefectures.” He offered a strained smile. “I’ve visited there. Beautiful country.” As if that somehow made him and Malachus compatriots of sorts. “Not long after, two men of similar dress stopped by my shop. I mentioned that if they were looking for their friend, I’d just seen you no more than an hour earlier.”
Malachus groaned inwardly. There went any element of surprise. The jeweler had verified he was alive and well and not at the bottom of the sea. “What did they say? And did they buy anything from you?” Gedamon dealt in real gold, silver, and gems—not the cheap bits of tin and copper worn by most people. Malachus’s blood sang with the feel of precious metals and jewels nearby, a tiny hoard that his hidden heritage recognized and yearned for. The smallest bauble came with a high price. If the thieves had bought something, it meant they’d sold the mother-bond, and he’d have to look for a new quarry. A vision of the gray-eyed woman flitted across his mind’s eye.
Gedamon shook his head. “No,” he said, adamant in his denial. “They didn’t buy a thing, though they asked what you looked like and offered a . . . generous deposit on a ring if I’d invite you here and learn more about you.”
“And you felt the need to drug me to do so?”
The merchant went even paler. “They said you were no friend of theirs, though they knew you. A wealthy nobleman’s son in possession of an artifact prized by collectors of the rare, the magical, and the outlawed.”
Malachus snorted. He truly wished his mother had thought to lay some sort of revulsion spell on the mother-bond she’d left with him. Maybe then fewer people would be so motivated to try to steal it.
If Gedamon only knew how he’d been tricked. Malachus was tempted to tell him except that the real joke was on Malachus. His mother-bond, so close now, yet still maddeningly elusive.
“What are you going to do now that you know?” The merchant’s pupils were fully dilated with fright, his wife’s gaze just as black as she peered over his shoulder at Malachus.