Lisa Shearin - Armed & Magical

Piaras arched an eyebrow. “Talon?”

The bad guys already knew, so why shouldn’t Piaras? “Talon is Tam’s son.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“He doesn’t know. People in Tam’s past would come after him if they found out.”

“People like Nightshades and Rudra Muralin.”

That brought up a thought I didn’t want to let inside my head, let alone ponder. Tam had to have known Rudra Muralin long before he showed up on Sirens’s doorstep. Tam had readily admitted that Muralin had threatened Talon.

Too readily.

“Yeah, people like them,” I muttered.

I could’ve kicked myself. Tam had done it to me again. Goblins didn’t give up information that easily unless it was a diversion for something they didn’t want you to find out. Tam had been the queen’s chief shaman, a master of the black arts. And from what I’d heard from Mychael and witnessed firsthand, Tam hadn’t forgotten a thing. He’d known all about the Saghred when we had found it in Mermeia last week. He’d known what it was, what it did—and he had to have known what it reacted to.

He’d known full well how he would react to it.

He already knew how he reacted to me.

And he followed me here from Mermeia.

Passion set the Saghred off. There were all kinds of passion. Rage was one of them. Vengeance was another.

Once Talon was safe, Tam had said he was going after Rudra Muralin, then any Khrynsani or Nightshades he and his boys could get their hands on. Tam would have enough rage and vengeance to kick any evil stone of power wide-awake.

Talon was still tightly locked in that cell.

One of Tam’s bouncers was dead at my feet.

That meant Tam was down here and he was hunting. If Tam’s black magic got its hooks into him and it got wind of me, I couldn’t be all that certain that Tam would be able to limit his elf hunting to just Nightshades.

Tam had known that, too. He’d told me that some things were beyond mortal control. He knew what his breaking point would be.

Dark power calls to dark power. Always has, always will.

I felt Piaras watching me. “Tam’s one of the good guys, right?” he asked quietly.

A couple of days ago, I would’ve answered that question without much hesitation. When it came to me, Tam had been one of the good guys. When it came to me and the Saghred, I wasn’t so sure.

I opted for noncommittal. “Mostly,” I said.

“How about now?”

“Good question.”

I put my blades in my hands where they belonged.

What had happened between me and Tam in that alley was still fresh in Tam’s mind. I certainly wasn’t going to forget it anytime soon.

Tam had embraced black magic his entire life until A’Zahra Nuru helped him kick his addiction. Now Tam was down here after a shaman darker than he had ever thought about being. Maybe. I tried not to think that Rudra Muralin and Tam might have had more than a few atrocities in common.

I pushed that thought out of my head. I didn’t care what Mychael said; Tam would never do that.

Sarad Nukpana’s voice came back to me.

Once a dark mage, always a dark mage.

I told Sarad Nukpana’s voice to shut up.

I’d felt black magic before the Saghred. When you find stolen objects and missing people for a living, a dark mage has been behind the pilfering more than once. The safest way to confront a dark mage was not to confront him at all. Stealth and smarts had kept me from getting myself roasted on more than one occasion. You didn’t want to run into a dark mage in the dark, or in blazing sunshine, either. My family said that if you can avoid it, you can survive it. Other people called it running. I didn’t care what other people called it.

My link with the Saghred was my first personal encounter with black magic. I had felt the seduction, innocent at first, to use my new powers for good to help others. I knew that desire could just as easily twist into using the power for power’s sake, to revel in the feel of it, the rush, the certain knowledge that you could take on anyone and anything, and utterly destroy them.

Just like Rudra Muralin and Sarad Nukpana.

Just what I’d told Piaras I was prepared to do.

Walking down a dark tunnel while Death did some heavy breathing down the back of my neck wasn’t the best time or place to have a moral debate with myself.

My morality would have to wait. Piaras and I had a more immediate problem.

Every elf or goblin we found was dead. I didn’t mind dead Khrynsani or Nightshades; more dead ones meant less live ones for us to deal with. I just didn’t trust it. Just because we hadn’t found them yet—or they hadn’t found us— didn’t mean they weren’t down here waiting. Any surviving Khrynsani or Nightshades were perfectly capable of shielding themselves to avoid detection.

Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

Piaras and I were shielded, and Piaras had a deadly ditty ready. The ditty itself wouldn’t kill; it’d just paralyze anyone he intended it for. The blades in my hands would take care of the rest. Another Benares family rule was: leave no living enemy behind you, receive no dagger in the back.

Khrynsani and Nightshades and daggers that went whoosh in the dark were bad enough, but they weren’t what had scared the crap out of me and put a twitch in my left eyelid. I didn’t like where we were, and I liked even less where we were going.

The Saghred was thrilled.

The more bodies we found, the heavier the pressure grew beneath my breastbone. Coiled and hot, quivering in anticipation. Maybe the Saghred knew I was prepared to use it. It might also know that Rudra Muralin was down here. Like a really big, very hungry dog that recognized who had kept it well fed in the past, it was eager for its next meal, and was pulling on its leash. Rudra Muralin had used the Saghred to lay waste to civilizations. If he got the rock back under his control, he’d use Piaras and me to pick his teeth.

Maybe the Saghred would refuse to bite the hand that had fed it—and would turn on the one holding its leash. That would be me.

I hadn’t considered that.

My intuition had never lied to me. Right now it was in my face, in a panic, telling me that I was in way over my head, I was going to die, and it was really going to hurt. But I knew if I screwed this up, I wouldn’t be the only one dying. Rudra Muralin was nearly a thousand years old. He’d been patiently searching for the Saghred all this time. His search was over, his work almost done. The Saghred was awake, its containment wards probably now a joke, and an arrogant and deluded elf mirror mage was in charge of the entire freaking island. Rudra Muralin was probably damned near giddy.

He’d probably make the Isle of Mid his first playground.

The air shifted.

That was all the warning I got.

“No songs, spells, or movement,” Rudra Muralin said quietly from behind us. “And the half-breed gets to keep breathing.”

A pair of Khrynsani stepped out of the darkness ahead of us with a tied, gagged, and blindfolded Talon Tandu between them. One of the guards yanked off the blindfold. Talon’s aqua eyes blinked in the sudden light.

A sound started low in Piaras’s throat.

“Khali!” Muralin snapped.

Instantly, one of Talon’s guards put a curved blade to his throat.

“Your voice is splendid, Piaras,” Muralin said smoothly.

“I’ve heard it once this evening.” The goblin’s voice was quiet, but the menace was clear. “I do not want to hear it again. If you make one sound, or so much as clear your throat, he dies—and it will be as much your doing as if you had slit his throat yourself. Do you understand?”

Piaras hesitated and nodded mutely. There was no fear in his dark eyes, just rage. I was going to do everything possible to give him a chance to use it.