BOOK 3: THE RUNEBEARER CURSE

The soft silver light from the runes in Camble Delakroy’s eyes played off the steam of her breath, turning her last ragged exhale into a specter that danced and shimmered before it died silent and lonely.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” the Watch Captain said. “He was torn apart, yeah. But it don’t look like no wild animal did it.”

The members of the Ninth Crucible followed behind the captain as they climbed the broad, slowly spiraling staircase, making their way upward, ever upward. Cam wasn’t sure how long they’d been climbing. She didn’t care that much. Cam found herself caring about very little these days.

Just ahead of her, Commander Raoul Cullen matched the captain’s paces effortlessly. Cam thought he might as well have been strolling along a perfectly level promenade in the middle of Caulspring for all the exertion it took him, rather than bulling their way into the thinnest, coldest air at the top of a frozen city on the Empire’s northern border.

She didn’t have to turn her head to know that Percy Bitters, their Keeper, was right behind her. Panting a little but by-the-Dragon’s-scaly-nutsack determined to show no weakness, never you mind his long, snow-white hair and aggressively forked white beard. She knew Flax and Jax kept pace with the group as well. The two blood lynxes rarely made a sound at all, and never while they were working.

The felines represented a welcome constant in Cam’s life.

The wheezing, grunting chorus from farther down the staircase signaled that Wallace Embry, the Ninth Crucible’s new Enforcer, hadn’t passed out yet. He’d never passed out, Cam admitted to herself, in open contradiction to his perpetually labored breathing, non-stop complaining, and a massive, barrel-like gut that she couldn’t help but think of as uncouth. The Thaumetallicon had assigned Embry to their Crucible less than a month after Nysska—

After Nysska left.

No one ever found a body, Cam had insisted, over and over. Nysska Stonegate jumped off the top of the falls at Dragon’s Pain and only suffered a few bumps and bruises. She could easily have survived this!

Except that at Dragon’s Pain, Nysska hadn’t just been shot with an arrow big enough to have come from a ballista’s ammunition stack. Even as Nysska’s body had disappeared into the waves, the arrow remained, lodged in the stone wall of Raoul’s cliffside home and coated slick with her blood. A fall from a balcony into the ocean a hundred meters below? Surviving that was possible. Doing so with a hole in her chest and all her blood poured out into the saltwater?

Cam realized she hadn’t taken a breath in some time and filled her lungs with the frigid air of Mount Stark. The atmosphere tasted bitter and metallic on her tongue. They passed a window, small and set deep in the tower’s grand stone walls, and she got a glimpse of the blizzard settling onto the walled city. The assignment had mentioned the possibility when it came in. Not to give them any choice in the matter. Just as a courtesy.

“All right, here we are,” the Watch Captain said. Cam remembered him introducing himself as Porter. The Ninth Crucible gathered behind him, bunching up in a short hallway that led to a massive wooden door. This far from Caulspring, this far from the Empire’s all-pervasive influence, not so much emphasis had been placed on bronze. Aside from things such as door hinges and, of course, weaponry, Mount Stark left a vast impression on Cam as a city of white and gray. White for the snow. Gray for the stone, cut from the nearby mountains block by block and stacked high. The citizens occupied much the same space in her brain, one of white and gray, white for the overwhelming alabaster skin tones she’d seen so far, gray for the furs everyone seemed to wear. She wondered which animals had died most commonly to provide the people of Mount Stark with warmth. Wolves? Otters? She hoped it wasn’t bears. Not after what had happened at Solace Canyon.

Raoul adjusted his Thaumetallicon-issued heavy coat as he stared at the splintered wood of the door. The supple, fur-lined brown leather, inset with strips of bronze, stood out in Mount Stark almost as loudly as the deeper brown of Raoul’s, Cam’s, and Embry’s skins. He said, “You and your men did this?”

The latch of the door hung loosely, the wood around it splintered. The City Watch had hammered a new bronze band into place and fitted it with a padlock.

Captain Porter nodded. “We had to. The smell—that was what the maid first noticed—it was getting pretty bad, and since the door was bolted from inside, well, we had to bust it open.”

Raoul looked Porter in the eye. “That was in the report, but I wanted to hear it from you myself. The door was bolted from inside the room?”

“That’s right, Commander.”

“And there’s no other way to access this place?”

“Well—you’ll see, sir. When we get inside. Just, ah, give me a second.” Porter began picking through a massive ring of keys.

Cam was about to say something to Percy, but changed her mind and reached out to turn his face toward hers. Percy frowned and pulled away. “What’re you doing?”

Cam said, “Hold still. You’ve got another aggressive eyebrow hair.”

Percy rolled his eyes. “Why bother? I’m hideous.”

She put her hands on both sides of his face in a Hold still gesture and smoothed the errant hair down with her thumb. “Because it was sticking straight out, and I didn’t like it pointing at me.” As Percy chuckled, she said, “And you’re not hideous, what’re you talking about?”

Percy gave her a tuned-down version of his normal face-splitting grin, put his hands on her wrists, and gently pushed them away from his face. “It’s not as if I have anyone to impress. Or as if I ever will have anyone to impress.”

Without looking at Cam or Percy, and in a tone drier than dust, Raoul said, “Whether that’s true or not, if those eyebrows get any more out of control I’m going to have to cite you for a uniform violation.”

Cam and Percy looked at each other, both wide-eyed, and burst into laughter.

“Here we go,” Captain Porter said, the padlock clicking open.

The door swung easily on well-oiled hinges, and the laughter died as the lingering scent of decay pushed its way into Cam’s nostrils. Flax the blood lynx let her jaw hang open, getting a good purchase on the odor, but her brother Jax hissed and backed away from the door.

Single file, they entered the chamber. It occupied the entirety of the top of the square tower, a single large space cosmetically divided into living room, bedroom, and study. Cities as large and wealthy as Mount Stark tended to have indoor plumbing, but Cam’s understanding of the mechanisms’ workings was limited, so she didn’t question the absence of a toilet. The porcelain-covered shit bucket sat behind a torn, blood-smeared privacy screen in one corner. Cam didn’t envy the maid who’d had to climb all those stairs three or four times a day to attend to it.

The chamber looked as if someone had taken a bucket of dark reddish-brown paint and spun all over the room with it, sloshing it everywhere, trying to stain and spatter every surface. Cam placed her feet carefully so as not to tread in any vile, sticky puddles.

“All of a sudden I’m glad for the fucking cold,” Percy said, eyeballing the room with his face creased up. “Imagine this kind of scene down near the border.” He poked at a broken chair with the toe of his boot.

Glancing around, Cam saw that every piece of furniture in the place had been destroyed, as if a furious bull had been set loose in it. She frowned, looking more closely. The damage seemed to her to rise above and beyond what would result from one man’s murder. As if the killer had been trying to make some sort of brutal, chaotic point.

Only two of the walls had windows, both of them stained with multiple dripping red stripes. 

These were a good bit bigger than the functional one Cam had glanced through on the way up, meant to afford the room’s occupant a grand view, rather than simply allow a soldier to fire a crossbow through it. Captain Porter gestured at the broad panes of glass one at a time.

“There’s the only other way anybody’d could’ve gotten in here,” he said with an apologetic note in his voice. “Except nobody did.” He put a hand on the back of his neck. “I mean to say, nobody could’ve. It’s, uh…well…it’s a lot like the others.”

Raoul grunted. “Yes, we’ll get to that. For now, let’s see if we can make short work of this.” He turned to face Cam. “You ready?”

“Ready for more disappointment? Sure.”

Cam didn’t miss the tight, fleeting frown he tossed at her as he raised his arms. “All right, Percy, Wallace, you know the drill. Captain Porter, have you witnessed a Sensor taking in a crime site before?”

Porter dipped his head. “I have, sir.”

“Good, then you’ll have no objection to giving ours the room.”

The blood lynxes hadn’t entered the room yet at all. They moved aside as Raoul ushered Percy, Wallace, and the Captain out into the hallway. Turning back, Raoul asked, “Would you like the door closed?”

“Yes, please.”

Raoul pulled the shattered door back into its frame, and Cam moved to one corner of the large room. She wanted to turn back to the door and see Nysska there. Hear her voice, the words singing with her brilliant, alien accent. Listen as she joked around with Percy or teased Raoul.

Cam had dreamed of feeling Nysska’s lips on hers again. Of sliding her arms around Nysska’s fearsome, powerful body. Of raising her own silver eyes to gaze into Nysska’s perfect yellow ones.

Cam had told herself over and over that she and the towering, perfect sethyd could never have worked. She had even made the case to Nysska herself at one point, more or less, when Nysska suggested running away from the Empire’s forces to live together in the wilderness. Virtually every human in the Empire hated sethyds. And two women living together the way a husband and wife would was flatly illegal, with punishment up to and including execution. What kind of a life would that be? Cam had said. The two of us, in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the rest of the world?

It would have been a life.

That’s what Nysska had said to her.

How many nights had Cam lain awake, crying silent tears, wishing she could run away with Nysska? In the middle of nowhere, on some uninhabited island, it didn’t matter. Cam had said the words—had told Nysska how much she loved her—but only after Nysska vanished from her life had she realized how inadequate they were. For days upon days, weeks upon weeks, Cam fantasized. If only she could get a second chance… She’d spend the rest of whatever life she had left showing Nysska the meanings of “love” and “devotion.”

But fantasies weren’t real, and now Cam felt something very close to nothing at all.

She powered up the runes implanted in her corneas.

In the last few weeks, her eyes had begun to sting. Just a little. Not even enough to mention to the rest of the Crucible. But she knew what it meant.

The toxin in the argonium was finally beginning to make itself felt.

The rune poisoning affected every Sensor differently. Some suffered for years, stubbornly refusing to give up the position in the Empire that afforded them respect and security and, yes, a bit of power. Others gleefully used their runes pain-free until the argonium consumed them all at once.

The only constant was that no Sensor had yet to live past the age of forty.

Cam had celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday alone. Silently mourning the death of the only woman she’d ever truly loved. That was as close as she’d come to a “silver lining”—she’d never have to have that argument with Nysska again. No more defending her everyday use of her Sight Runes, no more listening to Nysska warn her off of them, no more hearing Nysska say that she wanted to squeeze each second of Cam’s life for every bit of juice she could.

Cam meant to live the rest of her life to the fullest. Whether she had fourteen years left or ten or five.

Every bit of it aimed at the day when she could confront the bastard who’d shot Nysska and sent her plummeting into the cold, dark, unforgiving sea.

Cam shook her head, dislodging the distractions, and focused on the crime site in front of her. Under normal circumstances—which seemed to come along more and more rarely now—Cam could bring the power of her runes up to maximum and use them to see what had taken place, who had done what to whom.

She called her gift “Ruby Tears,” since it only allowed her to see the blood of recent victims and perpetrators. Not skin nor flesh nor bones, only the arteries and veins, animated in the shape of the human that owned them—bizarre, bodiless laceworks of hot, pumping red liquid, paired with the cool, motionless ribbons of the deceased.

Ordinarily, once she witnessed the commission of the crime, drops of the killer’s blood spilled from her tear ducts, scalding their way down her cheeks for Flax and Jax, the tracking animals, to lock onto. That was supposed to be the way a Crucible functioned. The Sensor observes the crime, the tracking animals and the Keeper hunt the perpetrator down, the Commander pronounces judgment by the authority of the Imperial Tribunal, and the Enforcer uses the huge bronze headsman’s axe to mete out the punishment.

Cam could muster no surprise when the normal process failed.

Ever since the introduction of the new metal, chervoxite, from the mysterious land across the ocean—ever since the face-changing insurrectionists known as the Gemini had alloyed it with argonium, thereby creating an entirely new branch of thaumaturgy—the intended use for Cam’s runes had proven less and less useful, or even applicable at all.

She recognized the sensations as they prodded and seeped into her mind. The horrendous emptiness, as if a hole in the world had opened that only she could see, and which threatened to pull her in. The excruciating sense of wrongness, tearing through the fabric of everything she had always understood to be the world itself. The obscene nature of it—the foul sacrilege—the vile affront to everything the Great Silver Dragon had ever created.

If I believed in the Great Silver Dragon, Cam muttered to herself as she brought the runes back down. When the dancing silver flames had receded, leaving her with glimmering silver eyes that did no more than allow her to see in the same way as a woman who had not been born blind, she went back to the door and pulled it open.

“No luck.” She moved out of the way as the rest of the Crucible and Captain Porter came back in.

“Rust?” Raoul asked. They had discovered, to their combined stress and annoyance, that metallic flakes composed of the ruby-red argonium-chervoxite alloy—flakes which had become known as rust, for red dust—completely disrupted a Sensor’s ability to perceive the crime when sprinkled around a crime site.

Cam nodded, but Captain Porter cleared his throat. “We, ah, we already looked for rust. Swept the entire apartment. Found nothing.”

Wallace Embry, who still hadn’t quite caught his breath from the climb up the stairs, spoke to Porter. “It doesn’t have to be rust now, Captain. We’ve caught a few people with red amulets—made from the…” Embry spoke carefully, getting each syllable right. “…chervoxite alloy. Turns out, if you wear one of those while you’re committing a crime, it’s just as good as using the rust. Or, uh, or as bad, I guess you could say. Would say. It’s bad, is what I mean.”

Raoul gazed around at the dead man’s belongings. “And you’ve got the body stored?”

Porter nodded. “We went back and forth, actually, about whether we should just leave it here, since the storm’s coming in and it’s prob’ly going to be plenty cold, but I made the call and had him taken down to one of the root cellars. I hope I didn’t fuck anything up.”

Raoul said, “No, that’s fine. We’re going to search this room ourselves, top to bottom, but before we do, I’d like to hear about the victim.”

Porter’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh—you mean from me? I—it’s not—I mean, me and him weren’t close or nothin’, I—”

Raoul made a placating gesture with one hand. “Just in your own words, Captain.”

While Porter began describing the murder victim—a bookkeeper who’d been in charge of monitoring and replenishing the food stores for Mount Stark’s Imperial garrison—Cam wandered over to one of the windows. It had a broad, deep sill, and Flax jumped up onto it and peered at her with the startling silver eyes that marked her and her litter-mate as seraphic animals.

“All that argonium in your veins doesn’t seem to bother you,” Cam said, barely above a whisper. “Guess it’s just humans that have to put up with the not-so-great effects, huh?”

Flax purred and nuzzled against her, and when Cam stroked her head, the big cat pressed her face into Cam’s palm.

Rander Borley, the dead man who’d lived and worked here, had had quite the view of Mount Stark. The tower capped off one wing of the Mayor’s residence, which could only have been described as a castle, and looked out and down on the snow-covered roofs of the city stretching away below. Cam followed them, structure after structure, until everything brought up short at the massive city wall. That was a good word to describe Mount Stark as a whole: fortress.

Cam picked Flax up in her arms—something the blood lynxes occasionally tolerated—and scratched her chin as she drifted over to the second window. Unlike the first one, this window did not give her an awe-inspiring view, but rather showed her another tower, twin to the one in which they all stood. Wind howled outside and the snow thickened, but she could still see the other tower clearly enough to gauge its distance from Borley’s top-floor flat. A gap of ten meters separated the two.

Something Captain Porter said caught her attention, and she set Flax down on the floor and rejoined her teammates, who stood clustered near the room’s cold, empty fireplace.

“That’s what I was sayin’ earlier,” Porter went on. “There ain’t no ledges or nothin’ on the outside of the tower. So, yeah, somebody could’ve got in through one o’ the windows, but if they had, we would’ve found marks from the climbing equipment. And every bit o’ that stone is smooth as silk.”

Percy went to one of the windows, popped the clasp free, and tilted it outward in its frame. “Well, fuck,” he said softly.

Raoul joined Percy at the window, and closed it again as a frigid blast from outside blew snow and bits of ice into the flat. Raoul appeared as if he were about to say something, but Percy beat him to it. “Could some fucker have jumped across? From that other tower, I mean.”

Porter made a sound sort of like a chuckle. “Ain’t nobody doin’ that. For one thing, there ain’t room on the other tower’s roof to get a runnin’ start. For another, even if you had a runnin’ start, ain’t nobody strong enough or fast enough to make that kind o’ jump.”

From the apartment’s doorway, Nysska Stonegate said, “A sethyd could do it,” and Cam’s knees buckled and collapsed underneath her.