Tracing the Shadow Read online

  An enigmatic smile appeared on the stranger’s face; he nodded. “Very good. Our predictions were accurate: I see there is no deceiving you, Rieuk Mordiern.”

  Rieuk took a step back, fearing a trap. “How do you know my name?”

  “Your contact was obliged to leave on urgent business; I offered to make the delivery in his stead.” He held out a casket. “I believe this is what you came to collect.” Rieuk noticed how long and slender the man’s fingers were, not gnarled and stained with chymicals like Magister Linnaius’s.

  “How do I know that you haven’t tampered with the contents?” Rieuk stared suspiciously at the casket, then at the smiling stranger.

  “Check the seal. You’ll find it’s unbroken.”

  To his relief Rieuk saw that it was true. The horloger’s mark was intact; the contents must be undamaged.

  “We’ve been watching you, Rieuk.”

  Alarmed, Rieuk began to back away.

  “You’re nearly at the end of your apprenticeship, aren’t you? Your seven years will be up by summer’s end. And then what will you do?”

  Rieuk shrugged.

  “You’re dissatisfied. Frustrated by Magister Gonery’s restrictions. Disappointed when others take the credit for the fruits of your hard work.”

  Even though Rieuk’s head was lowered, he was listening now with ardent attention.

  “And if I were to tell you that I belong to another order, one which welcomes gifted young magi like yourself and encourages them to develop their talents? We know that you have been investigating certain…skills forbidden to Gonery’s students.”

  Rieuk’s face began to burn. “Who are you? And why all the secrecy?”

  The stranger smiled at him again, a frank, winning smile that made Rieuk want to trust him, even though he knew he dared not. “At least tell me who you are,” he said warily.

  “My name is Imri. Imri Boldiszar.”

  “Imri,” repeated Rieuk softly. “Not a Francian name.” That explained the hint of a foreign accent.

  “I’ve risked a great deal in coming here to see you, Rieuk Mordiern. Your masters are very powerful and they would not treat me kindly if they discovered me so close to the heart of their mysteries.”

  “So why risk discovery just to see me, a mere apprentice?”

  “Have you never wondered where your gift came from? Have you never longed to discover your true parentage?”

  “My true parentage?” This was getting far too personal, and Rieuk began to wish he had taken the Vox parts and run. “What’s that to you?”

  “It can make for a lonely childhood. Rejected by the other children because you’re different. Cornered one day, driven too far by the other children’s goading—and discovering your gift in one moment of sheer, transcendent rage…”

  Rieuk slowly raised his head to stare into the stranger’s face. “How did you know?” he whispered. But Imri Boldiszar just raised one hand and removed his spectacles, revealing dark brown eyes that glimmered with an unnatural golden radiance.

  “That’s how it is for all of us born with the gift.” And Rieuk caught the briefest shadow of pain tainting the warmth of Boldiszar’s gaze. “Destined to be misunderstood, rejected by our own flesh and blood, we seek out those rare individuals who understand us…because they share the same heritage.”

  “You are—” began Rieuk, then stopped. If this man was indeed another magus, then he was not one of the college’s alumni. He had never seen the name “Boldiszar” inscribed in any of the college records. Which must mean…

  “We want you, Rieuk. Join us.”

  “You w—want me?” stammered Rieuk.

  “I’ve been sent to find you. To bring you to us…if you wish to come.”

  “But who are you?” Rieuk knew that he should have terminated this conversation long ago. He was straying into treacherous waters, but the stranger was speaking the very words he had longed to hear all his life.

  Suddenly, Boldiszar reached out, hands cupping Rieuk’s face, drawing it closer to his own. Rieuk found himself staring into black-lashed brown eyes, flecked with dark gold, like tortoiseshell. Terrified, he tried to break free but found he could not move. The magus’s power held him helpless. And then his terror slowly began to melt into another, quite different feeling.

  “Oh Rieuk,” whispered Boldiszar, “don’t fight me. I can give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of. I can initiate you into our mysteries. I can even help you awaken your true power.” The magus’s breath was warm, like a caress, aromatic, with a hint of bittersweet spice.

  “My true power?”

  “Your masters fear you. Why else would they have held you back, confining you to menial tasks? But I can sense your potential.” Imri Boldiszar’s mouth touched his in a brief kiss, light as the brush of a bee’s wings, yet Rieuk felt a current of dark energy reverberate through his whole body. “I can taste your potential,” Boldiszar murmured. “There is so much I can teach you, Rieuk. So many secrets that Gonery and Linnaius will never let you share.” The dark, tortoiseshell gaze held his until he felt as if he were floating in a star-studded sky. Rieuk closed his eyes, surrendering. Fear and excitement were pulsing through him. He knew he was being seduced—and he wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted in his whole life.

  The moon is rising, casting its clear, verdant radiance over dark forests. A tower looms high above them, its jagged turret stark against the pale disc of the emerald moon. Faint, keening cries echo high above the trees. Shadows soar across the moon’s brilliance, winged creatures, graceful and swift as hawks. Rieuk is suddenly overwhelmed by a yearning so strong that it makes his whole being burn with longing…

  Rieuk opened his eyes to find that they were standing beneath the willows on the riverbank in the warm darkness of the summer night, the plashing of the gently flowing water almost drowned by the shrill chorus of frogs. He had no recollection of how they had come to be there. The moon was rising but its chill light was silvered white, like the pure flame of burning magnesium, not the emerald green of his vision.

  Imri Boldiszar let his hands travel slowly down from Rieuk’s face to rest on his shoulders. And Rieuk, who for so long had hated to be touched, no longer shied away.

  “Do you plan to stay at the college all your life? Or would you rather break free and take your chance with me?”

  Rieuk had not wanted the dream to end. He craved more. “The emerald moon. The tower.” The words came spilling out of his mouth like fast-flowing water. “Where was that place? And the winged ones? What were they?” Nothing else mattered to him anymore. Since Imri had touched his lips to his, Rieuk had been in a daze, unable to think of anything but that eerie moonlit landscape. It had awakened an aching hunger, and he knew he could not rest until it was assuaged.

  The church clock rang out, chiming midnight. Rieuk blinked. Where had the last four hours gone?

  “You must be thirsty,” said Imri casually. “Why not share a bottle of wine with me before you go back to the college? I can have the landlord bring it up to my rooms.” His smile was so open, so friendly, that Rieuk found himself following without a second thought.

  Imri’s rooms were on the top floor of the old riverside inn, up three flights of creaking stairs. Rieuk carefully placed the casket containing the Vox parts on the table. A pale wash of moonlight shone in through the casement window.

  “There’s a tinderbox on the table,” said Imri. “Unless you know some mage-trick to light the lamps?”

  There were two oil lamps; Rieuk lifted the glass bowls and struck a flame, coaxing each wick in turn to a gentle glow. When he looked up, he saw that Imri was unfastening his coat, shrugging it off his shoulders, casually draping it over the corner of the bed. He had his back to him so that all Rieuk could see was the silky sheen of his long black hair against the white of his shirt…until Imri slowly let slip the thin linen of the shirt, turning around to face him.

  Rieuk took a step backward toward the door. What did
Imri intend? And then a soft, wondering gasp broke from his throat. “What is that?” For painted or tattooed in intricate detail into Imri’s honey-brown skin was a bird of prey. Its serrated wings were spread wide open across Imri’s breast, its proud head nestling at the base of the magus’s throat.

  “This,” said Imri quietly, “is an Emissary. My Emissary.”

  Rieuk’s fingers were reaching out before he was aware of it. The ink that had etched the feathers was black as shadow, and each feather looked so real that Rieuk was certain that it would feel like stroking the glossy wing of a living creature. As the tips of his fingers connected with the warmth of Imri’s skin, he sensed a faint crackle of energy.

  “It’s…alive?”

  He had been about to snatch his hand away but Imri moved the more swiftly, grasping it, pressing it against his ink-mottled breast.

  “B—but how? It’s only a tattoo.” Rieuk’s natural skepticism refused to allow him to accept the physical evidence. But now, touching the etched skin, he could feel not only the strong pulse of Imri’s heart but another throbbing heartbeat, wild and fast, as if striving to break free.

  Imri murmured into his ear, “Can you sense it? It’s one with me…and yet I can also send it to do my bidding.”

  “Show me.” Rieuk was surprised at his own boldness. A slow, enigmatic smile spread over Imri’s face and Rieuk felt his own heart begin to thud faster, too. This was raw magic, the kind he had always secretly craved, and it was acting like a drug, awakening his senses.

  “Tabris,” Imri commanded. “Tabris, come forth.”

  The air shuddered, and a gust of wind whipped Rieuk’s hair across his eyes. Blinking, he looked again and saw the fierce flame of amber eyes staring haughtily back into his. Perched on Imri’s forearm was a great hawk, its inky feathers dully shimmering, trembling like shifting moonlit shadows.

  “It’s—it’s real.” Rieuk’s mouth had gone dry and his voice was husky. “It’s…beautiful.” He could still just make out the pearlescent outline on Imri’s skin where the hawk had been etched.

  “Show Rieuk what you can do.” Imri raised his arm. “Fly, Tabris.”

  Rieuk ducked instinctively as the hawk lifted off Imri’s arm and flew straight toward the window. Rieuk let out a cry of warning, certain that the hawk would crash into the glass and injure itself. But it passed straight through the pane and flew on into the moonlit sky outside.

  “Tabris is a shadow hawk, not of this world,” Imri said gently, placing a hand on Rieuk’s shoulder and steering him toward the casement so that he could watch the hawk’s graceful flight across the silver disc of the moon, skimming above the ramshackle roofs of Karantec.

  “Tabris,” repeated Rieuk mechanically.

  “And now I can see what Tabris sees.” Imri’s eyes had become clouded as he scanned the streets of the town and the roads beyond. “That’s far enough. Return.”

  The air rippled like fast-flowing water and Tabris flew back through the glass, melting like a fading shadow into Imri’s body. Rieuk stood transfixed. He had never wanted anything so much in his life before. He looked at Imri with awed respect. “Tell me,” he said, finding his voice at last. “Tell me how I can get an Emissary of my own. I’ll do anything. Anything.”

  “We practice a different form of apprenticeship in my order,” Imri said, his voice low, intense. “The bond between us will be far closer, far more intimate than that sterile vow of obedience you made to Kaspar Linnaius. A bond that is strongest when two with the gift are drawn together.”

  A wave of heat seared through Rieuk’s body. Even though he stood apart from Imri, it felt as if he were drowning in the warm depths of those golden-brown eyes. “You mean…” And then his innate skepticism reasserted itself, and he said dryly, “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

  Imri smiled. “No one has fully awakened you. What were your masters thinking of, letting such incredible latent power as yours stagnate?”

  “Is it too late, then?”

  “Come here,” said Imri, “and let’s see what I can do.”

  Long black hair, silkily soft, brushed across Rieuk’s chest. Slowly, lazily, Rieuk gave a sigh and opened his eyes and saw that Imri Boldiszar was bending close over him, holding a clear phial to his lips. All the previous night’s golden warmth had faded from the magus’s eyes, to be replaced by a look of such ruthlessness that Rieuk felt his heart stop with fear. He tried to move and found that his limbs were paralyzed.

  Tabris, hovering overhead, alighted on his chest. Rieuk felt as if a dark weight was pressing down on him, forcing the life from his body.

  “Imri? What are you doing to me?” He tried to speak but his tongue was frozen and no sound came out. His eyes filled with tears. I trusted you. For the first time in my life, I trusted someone. The tears spilled down his cheeks and he could not even lift his hand to wipe them away.

  Imri stared at him. Through the blur of his tears, Rieuk stared back, hurt and uncomprehending. And then Imri turned away. “It’s no use,” Rieuk heard him say in an anguished whisper. “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. There must be another way. Tabris, return.”

  The crushing weight lifted as the Emissary faded into his master’s body. Rieuk took a breath…and heard his own voice faintly asking, “The phial…what did it contain? Poison?”

  “It’s called a soul-glass.” Imri sat, shoulders hunched, head lowered. “It is used to contain a stolen soul, so that the stealer may use the empty body for his own purposes.”

  “Soul-stealing?” Now Rieuk realized the extent of his own gullibility. “You wanted my soul? Or my body? But why?”

  He heard Imri sigh. “I need to be the semblance of Rieuk Mordiern to get close to Kaspar Linnaius.”

  “To learn his secrets?”

  There was another pause. Eventually Imri said, in a flat tone, “To get my revenge.” He turned around and Rieuk saw again the ruthless fire in his eyes that had so terrified him.

  “But if you took my body, what would happen to your own? Wouldn’t it just lie here, wasting away, without you inhabiting it?”

  “If the soul is parted from its original body for too long, the soulless body dies. But my soul stays within me, and my Emissary enters the victim’s body to do my will.”

  “And my soul?” Rieuk had to know everything that Imri had intended to do to him.

  “When the soul-glass is crushed, the imprisoned soul is set free…but, unable to rejoin its body, it becomes one of the Lost Souls that wander the Ways Beyond, preying on others for all eternity…”

  Rieuk gazed at Imri. “You’d do that…to me?”

  Imri gazed back at Rieuk. No one had ever looked at him in that way before. “I had my orders. I was ready to do it. But that was before I met you.” Imri bent over him, a curtain of black hair falling on either side of Rieuk’s face, and lightly kissed Rieuk’s eyelids. Rieuk felt sensation flood back into his paralyzed body. He sat up slowly, dizzy with the thought of how close he had come to annihilation.

  “Go. Go before I change my mind. I can’t imagine that you would want to stay with me now.”

  Rieuk pulled his shirt on; but when he tried to do up the buttons, his hands were shaking so much that he could not manage it.

  “Here. Let me.” Imri’s deft fingers took over, as if Rieuk were a child. This small, intimate gesture brought back sensual shivers of how Imri had undone those same buttons the night before.

  “You spared my life.”

  “Huh. The more fool me.”

  Rieuk was struggling with violently conflicting feelings. Somewhere deep inside him, he was aware that he had gone from being the victim to the victor. “What did my master do to you, Imri?”

  “He stole something from my order. Something that was not his to take. And I was charged with getting it back.” Imri’s voice had become very quiet but Rieuk could hear an intense anger charging every word. “I must return it—or suffer the consequences.”

  “What will t
hey do to you if you fail?”

  Imri Boldiszar gazed steadily at Rieuk, a darkness shadowing his tortoiseshell eyes. “They will strip away my Emissary. And as we are bonded, body and soul, we will both be destroyed.”

  Imri was telling him plainly that he would be executed by his fellow magi. He’s only saying this to make me feel beholden to him. If I fail, he’ll die—and horribly. What better way to persuade me to do his will?

  In the silence that had fallen between them he could sense that Imri was still looking searchingly at him.

  “It’s called the Lodestar. The sacred Lodestar of Ondhessar. It’s a crystal unlike any other in this world.”

  “A crystal? And my master stole it?”

  “You’ve seen the Lodestar?”

  Rieuk nodded. It pained him to hear that raw eagerness in Imri’s voice. How could he tell him that he had not only seen it, he had let loose the power it contained? “It was—it was my fault.” Rieuk turned his head away; he could not look Imri directly in the eyes. “Don’t hate me, Imri. My master was working on an invention to carry voices through the aethyr. He went searching for crystals that were in tune with each other to use in the machine. I—I used the crystal and—”

  “You set Azilis free?”

  “Azilis?” Rieuk repeated, his thoughts in confusion. “You mean the aethyrial spirit? I heard it calling to me. I thought it was trapped. So I—”

  “Aethyrial spirit? Is that what Linnaius called her?” Imri spoke slowly, bleakly, as though not able to come to terms with what had happened. Rieuk sensed a dangerous change in Imri’s mood. Only a little while ago, the magus had been on the point of stealing his soul. How would he deal with him now? “So the crystal is empty and the spirit is at large?”

  “No, no, Magister de Maunoir bound it. It’s in a book.”

  “A book? Where is this book?”

  “At the college, most like.”

  “Then all is not lost.” There was a reckless glint in Imri’s eyes. He smiled suddenly at Rieuk, and Rieuk felt himself helplessly drawn back, entranced. Imri Boldiszar was a powerful magus and Rieuk would protect him.