Magic Steps

Kwaben and Oama traded looks. They had heard her say that only once, on the day of the duke’s heart attack, when his servants had tried to keep Sandry out of his room. After she had lost precious minutes in argument with them, she had finally insisted, in just that tone of voice. When they refused, every thread in the hall outside the duke’s rooms—from tapestries, carpets, and even the servants’ clothes—unraveled and came to life, cocooning them all. Sandry had gone to her uncle and had spent the rest of that day with the healers, keeping him alive with her magic until they could strengthen his heart. Kwaben and Oama had never forgotten it.

Now, leaning out of the second floor window, the duke grimaced. He knew that Sandry had seen things girls her age were supposed to be protected from: the bodies of hundreds, including her parents, rotting from plague; people dying in battle of human and magical causes; the survivors of fire, flood, and other disasters.

“Admit her,” the duke said to his uniformed compan ion. The man began to argue as they closed the windows.

Sandry waited and tried not to drum her fingers on her saddle horn.

After a couple of minutes, the man who had tried to argue with the duke yanked open the door and spoke quietly to the guards. They looked at him, startled, then parted. The man, who wore a captain’s pair of concentric yellow circles on his sleeve, waved Sandry in sharply.

She dismounted and passed her mare’s reins to Kwaben. “Stay with the horses,”

she told her guards. “I think the rest of Uncle’s escort are on that side street.” They nodded.

The provost’s captain stood aside as she walked into the building, then closed the door and lowered the thick oak bar that locked it. To her eyes door and bar gleamed with the pale traces of magic. So did the dimly lit hall that went to the rear of the building on this floor, and the narrow stair that reached the upper stories.

“Please reconsider, my lady,” the man told her gruffly. This is not an occasion for noble sightseers.”

Sandry met his eyes. “You are Captain Qais?” she inquired.

He bowed stiffly.

“I will not reconsider,” she said flatly. “My great-uncle has been ill. He tends to forget it, so I remember for him—and, it seems, for you. Where is he?”

“Upstairs, my lady.”

Turning her back on him, Sandry climbed. The gleam of spell-signs lit her way; none of the stair lamps were burning. Since the captain didn’t have her power to see magic, he missed the next step—they were uneven, to trick robbers into banging their toes just as he did. He cursed; when she looked back at him, he waved her on.

When she reached the top of the stairs, two hallways lay before her. One led to the rear of the building; the other cut across it. In the hall to her right, she saw only a flagstone floor, lamps in wall sconces, and closed doors. In the section to her left, the hall sported complexly pat terned silk carpets—spelled, like everything else she had seen, with magic to protect and confuse anyone who was not allowed there. The lamps on this side were set in polished brass fixtures and circled with precious glass. Two mahogany benches were placed here.

On them sat the three surly bodyguards who had attended Jamar Rokat earlier that morning, all in manacles. They looked confused, bewildered, and angry. Three Provost’s Guards stood over them, baton weapons in hand.

“Why won’t you believe us?” demanded the youngest of the three when he saw the captain. “We heard nothing, nor saw it neither. He went in, the door was locked—we never so much as heard a scream!”

“And the evidence shows you as liars,” replied Captain Qais. “You’ll give up the facts when our truthsayers have a go at you.” To Sandry he said, “Why don’t you wait for his grace here?”

She walked ahead of him into the open room past the captives. He mustn’t know that she was nervous; she did her best to hide it. She was no hardened—what had Pasco called them—Harrier, that was it. She was not one of those, but if her great-uncle was in this mess, that was where she had to be as well.

Inside was a plain office belonging to Jamar Rokat’s secretary or assistant, it would seem. Sandry walked through the open door at the back of the room into the next office and halted. Her uncle sat on the window seat, keeping out of the way of the Provost’s Guards who were going over the room inch by inch. They each wore the silver braid trim on their sleeves that marked then as in vestigators, not street Guards.

There was blood everywhere. The hacked body of the man who had greeted them so smoothly that morning lay on the floor. His fine clothes were slashed and sodden ra gs. His jewels lay in a bloody heap atop his desk, as if whoever killed him had wanted to say they were too dis gusting to steal. Worst of all, the mans head had been placed in a sling made of his turban and hung from an overhead lamp.

A tiny woman in brown and blue stood by the dead mans feet, shaking her head.

For all her small size, she had the lightly seamed face of someone in her fifties. “I can only guess they were waiting for him when he come in, cap’n, your grace,” she said absentmindedly, staring at bloody slippers. “His guard spells never warned him.”

“You can see from the furniture he never put up a fight,” added another investigator as he went over a bookcase. “Even when his guards let them in. That don’t make sense, ‘less it was family done it.”

“But the spells weren’t released to let someone else in,” Sandry blurted.

Everyone looked at her. Sandry folded her hands. “Can any of you see or feel magic?” They all shook their heads. “Most spells like this, if you can see them, they turn colors, depending on whether someone broke through, or tried to erase them, or just released their effects for a while. Using a password just releases—it halts the protections, it doesn’t end the spell. And this”—she waved a hand to take in the spells all around them—,”it hasn’t been touched. I can tell that just by looking at it. Even though Rokat wasn’t a mage, he’ll have owned a key to these spells. He would have been able to look at that and know their status. The keys are usually made like jewelry-,”