Ilona Andrews: Fate's Edge

Seamus looked at the image of her bruised face in the photo album.

She waited. Deep inside her, a little girl listened quietly, hoping for the answer that the adult in her knew wouldn’t come.

“I’ll see you at the end of the road tomorrow at seven,” he said, and walked out the door.

The disappointment gripped her so tightly, it hurt. For a few short, pain-filled breaths she just stood there, then she grabbed the pan, burned pancakes and all, burst out the back door, and hurled it over the cliff.

KALDAR Mar stepped back and critically surveyed the vast three-dimensional map of the Western Continent. It spread on the wall of the private conference room, a jeweled masterpiece of magic and semiprecious stones. Forests of malachite and jade flowed into plains of aventurine and peridot. The plains gave rise to mountains of brown opals with ridges of banded agates and tiger eye, topped by the snowy peaks of moonstone and jasper.

Beautiful. A completely useless waste of money, but beautiful. If it somehow could be stolen . . . you’d need a handcart to transport it and some tools to carve it to pieces. Hmm, also a noise dampener would work wonders here, and this being the Weird, he could probably find someone willing to risk creating a soundproof sigil for the right price. Steal a custodian’s uniform, get in, cut the map, wrap each piece in a tarp, load them on the handcart, and push the whole thing right out the front door, while looking disgruntled. Less than twenty minutes for the whole job if the cutter was powerful enough. The map would feed the entire Mar family for a year or more.

Well, what was left of the family.

Kaldar’s memory overlaid the familiar patterns of states over the map, ignoring the borders of the Weird’s nations. Adrianglia took up a big chunk of the Eastern seaboard, stretching in a long vertical ribbon. In the Broken, it would have consumed most of the states from New York and southern Quebec to Georgia and a small chunk of Alabama. Below it, West Egypt occupied Florida and spread down into Cuba. To the left of Adrianglia, the vast Dukedom of Louisiana mushroomed upward, containing all of Louisiana and a chunk of Alabama in the south, rising to swallow Mississippi and Texarcana, and ending with the coast of the Great Lakes. Beyond that, smaller nations fought it out: the Republic of Texas, the Northern Vast, the Democracy of California . . .

Kaldar had grown up on the fringes of this world, in the Edge, a narrow strip of land between the complex magic of the Weird and the technological superiority of the Broken. Most of his life was spent in the Mire, an enormous swamp, cut off from the rest of the Edge by impassable terrain. The Dukedom of Louisiana dumped its exiles there and killed them when they tried to reenter the Weird. His only escape had been through the Broken. He traveled back and forth, smuggling goods, lying, cheating, making as much money as was humanly possible and dragging it back to the family.

Kaldar stared at the map. Each country had an enemy. Each was knee deep in conflict. But the only war he cared about was happening right in the middle, between the Dukedom of Louisiana and Adrianglia. It was a very quiet, vicious war, fought in secrecy by spies, with no rules and no mercy. On the Adrianglian side, the espionage and its consequences were handled by the Mirror. He supposed if they were in the Broken, the Mirror would be the equivalent of the CIA or FBI, or perhaps both. On the Dukedom of Louisiana’s side, the covert war was the province of the secret service known as the Hand. He had watched from the sidelines for years as the two organizations clashed, but watching wasn’t enough anymore.

First, the Mirror woke him up at ten till five, and now he spent fifteen minutes waiting. Puzzling.

The heavy wooden door swung open soundlessly, and a woman entered the room. She was short, with a sparse, compact body, wrapped in an expensive blue gown embroidered with silver thread. Kaldar priced the dress out of habit. About five gold doubloons in the Weird, probably a grand and a half or two in the Broken. Expensive and obviously custom tailored. The blue fabric perfectly complemented her skin, the color of hazelnut shells. The dress was meant to communicate power and authority, but she hardly needed it. She moved as if she owned the air he breathed.

Nancy Virai. The head of the Mirror. They had never met—he had not been given that honor, poor Edge rat that he was—but she hardly needed an introduction.

He’d spent the last two years doing small assignments, challenging but nothing of great importance. Nothing that would warrant the attention of Lady Virai. Anticipation shot through Kaldar. Something big waited at the end of this conversation.

Lady Virai approached and stopped at the desk four feet away. Dark eyes surveyed him from a severe face. Her irises were like black ice. Stare too long, and you’d veer off course and smash into a hard wall at full speed.

“You are Kaldar Mar.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“How long have you worked for me?”

She knew perfectly well when he had started. “Almost two years, my lady.”

“You have open warrants in two provinces, which we quashed when you were hired, and an extensive criminal record in the Dukedom of Louisiana.” Nancy’s face was merciless. “You are a smuggler, a conman, a gambler, a thief, a liar, and an occasional murderer. With that résumé, I can see why you thought the Mirror would be the proper career choice. Just out of curiosity, is there a law that you haven’t broken?”

“Yes. I never raped anyone. Also, I never copulated with animals. I believe Adrianglia has a law against that.”

“And you have a smart mouth.” Nancy crossed her arms. “As per our agreement with your family and the condition of extracting the lot of you from the Edge, you are now a citizen of Adrianglia. Your debt is being paid in full by the efforts of your cousin Cerise Sandine and her husband, William. You are allowed to pursue any profession you may like. Yet you came to work for me. Tell me, why is that?”

Kaldar smiled. “I’m grateful to the realm for rescuing my family. I possess a unique set of talents that the Mirror finds useful, and I don’t want to rely on my lovely cousin and William for the repayment of my debt. William is a nice chap, a bit testy at times and he occasionally sprouts fur, but everyone has issues. I would feel rotten being indebted to him. It would be taking advantage of his good nature.”

Nancy’s cold eyes stared at him for a long second. “People like you love taking advantage of others’ good nature.”

He laughed quietly under his breath.

“You lie with no hesitation. The smile was particularly a nice touch. I imagine that face serves you quite well, especially in female company.”

“It has its uses.”

Lady Virai pondered him for a long moment. “Kaldar, you are a scoundrel.”

He bowed with all the elegance of a blueblood prince.

“You were born smart but poor. You view me as a spoiled, rich woman born with a gold coin in my mouth. You feel that I and those of my social standing don’t appreciate what we have, and you delight in thumbing your nose at aristocracy.”

“My lady, you give me entirely too much credit.”

“Spare me your bullshit. You revel in sabotaging the system, you hate orders, and you break the law simply because it’s there. You can’t help yourself. Yet two years ago you came to me with a bridle and a set of spurs, and said, ‘Ride me.’ And in two years, your record has been strangely law-abiding. You’ve been good, Kaldar. Within reason, of course. There was that business with the bank mysteriously catching fire.”

“Completely accidental, my lady.”