Writers of the Future, Volume 30 Read online

  “Nothing but poor folk out here; they wouldn’t risk hiding a stranger.” Costel said as his eyes flicked from one side of the street to the other. His fingers stayed wrapped around the grip of his blade, baring the steel a finger’s width or two every time they heard a cat skitter or a night soil bucket dumped from a window.

  “They’re working folk,” she explained. “And there are storage halls closer to the city’s edges which aren’t visited at night. I suspect that’s where we will find him.”

  Costel appeared dubious, but she ignored him. He was a good lad, but he didn’t know a thing about the underbelly of his own city, let alone the habits of criminals. Something Lacra herself was all too familiar with.

  Lacra choked back a sigh and shook her head to focus her thoughts. The man’s naïveté aside, he was loyal to the count and handy with that blade. Considering she hadn’t seen a speck of evidence that the constable was anywhere near the trail, she would be relying upon Costel’s expertise to handle any fighting. Back home her reputation as a mirrorpainter would have been enough to cow most, but not here. No, here they were more likely to skewer her for it.

  The tenement quarter backed up to a lazy river which turned the milling wheels and dragged the city’s waste away. By daylight the water was a disconcerting shade of brown. With her sleeve pressed over her nose, she sidled up to the edge of the bank and leaned over to get a look at the flat surface. The river was so sluggish that she managed to dredge up a few imprinted images from it. Though they were wildly unsteady due to the river’s stubborn trudge toward the sea, she pieced together that the man had taken the low footbridge out into the fields beyond.

  Not wanting to remove her sleeve from her nose to sketch the wavering image, she dropped the connection and hurried across. Once she was upwind, she propped her fists on her hips and surveyed the land. Paths of packed dirt and bits of gravel wound out into the cultivated countryside, crisscrossing amongst fields of grain and lower-growing vegetables she didn’t recognize. By day the fields filled with locals working, weeding, replanting, tending. By night nothing save the woodland fauna stirred, stealing bits for their burrows and bellies.

  Storehouses stood at the head of each field, massive stone structures with thatched roofs and entrances wide enough to ride two laden carts through. One had a lantern in the window.

  “There.” She pointed.

  This time Costel pulled his steel out all the way, and Lacra was surprised to see its shine had been matted with charcoal and wax. Even Boyar didn’t want her seeing some things.

  They circled the storeroom from a wide radius, Costel moving with grace that made her cheeks flare with warm jealousy. She had always been a flatfooted type of woman, her attempts at moving with any kind of elegance mocked behind manicured hands at every fête she’d ever attended. Too bad, really. She could use the gift of stealth now. Too late for regrets.

  All of the storehouse’s windows were shuttered, save the one that had let out a sliver of light. It seemed sloppy to her. Or worse, intentional. The muddled background she’d sketched rose in her mind, taunting her senses. She was missing something here.

  A single-horse carriage came clattering around the back of the storehouse, the hawk-nosed man bent over the reins. He leapt from the high seat and gave the horse a pat before opening a narrow door into the storehouse. The kidnapper disappeared within, leaving the door ajar.

  “Let’s go,” Costel said.

  “Wait—”

  He wasn’t listening. Costel crept toward the open door, blade low and ready, while Lacra slunk after him with nothing more than her wooden case clutched before her like a shield. What in the White Beyond was she thinking? She’d found the place; what happened next was no business of hers. And yet … The unquiet background, the noise in the charcoal. Her knuckles whitened on the case.

  She needed to witness.

  Costel crossed the threshold of the door, and for a moment his shadow was cast in sharp relief against the warm lamplight seeping from the room. Lacra froze, her painter’s eye admiring the stern contrast, before a vibrant clash of metal snapped her back into reality. Costel’s shadow disappeared into the maw of light and she followed it, not knowing what else to do.

  She ducked into a world of chaos, light glinting off blackened blades in patchworked sparks as every strike exposed naked metal. Having no blade of her own, Lacra rushed deeper into the storehouse to find Boyar’s daughter. The brown-cloth bundle lay prone beside a pyramid of white root vegetables. Lacra dropped to her knees before the girl to roll her over. Lacra’s hands sank down, collapsing the bundle to scatter crumpled cloth and white root across the floor.

  Tatya had never been that bundle.

  Lacra leapt to her feet and clasped her case tight against her chest, struggling to quell the panic which threatened to override rational thought. Deep breaths; look around.

  The harvest season had not yet begun, so only a few meager stacks of white root obscured her view. A table sat before the window that had been left unshuttered, a warm lamp near the opening. She tried to ignore the squealing metal and grunts and curses coming from near the door and hurried over to have a closer look.

  On the table was a notepad, slightly wider than the one she preferred. A charcoal pencil lay beside it, the remnants of torn-out pages sticking from the top like crooked teeth. There was also a small wooden box, the lid tipped up, revealing a set of pastel chalks. Color! She went cold all over. Hawk-nose was a mirrorpainter. She tucked the pad under her arm and shoved the pencil through her hair, then tipped the box of chalks out on the floor and ground them to dust under her heel. One last glance around told her what she’d suspected. There was no food here, no sign of a sleeping place. This room was a decoy or trap, and she didn’t fancy sticking around to find out the truth the hard way.

  Costel’s abilities were strained to their limit, but it was the hawk-man who drew her attention. Seeing him now, in the full flush of color and without the shadow of his hood, she knew him for what he was. He may have some Katharnian blood in his veins but he was from much farther away than Costel had feared. An Alrayani then, and she did not give herself the luxury of dreaming his presence here a coincidence.

  But then where was Tatya?

  Using the white root stacks for cover she slipped up behind the Alrayani and cracked him over the back of the head as hard as she could with her wooden case. Her teeth chattered and her joints ached but the man went down without so much as a whimper. Costel stared at her, wide-eyed.

  “Tatya?”

  “Not here.”

  The hawk-man groaned and twitched an arm, eyelids fluttering.

  “Hurry,” she urged as she kicked the downed man’s blade away. “This man is a mirrorpainter; he tricked us. Tatya is elsewhere.”

  Costel opened his mouth to protest, but she dug her nails into his arm and dragged him out into the cover of night. Together they ran, Lacra trying to explain what she could with broken words and gasping breath. They ducked off the gravel path to cut through the tall stalks of wheat, hoping to obscure their path. A crash sounded in the night; the sound of wood cracking on stone, and Costel grabbed at her, pulling her down to the hard earth. She grunted, all the air whooshing out, and he pressed a hand over her lips. She went very, very still.

  In the distance she heard the squeal of leather harnesses tightening. Then hoofbeats, tramping away down the road that ringed the city. Costel took his hand away, and eased into a crouch to peek through the grain-grasses. He waved for her to stand.

  “We could take him now, make him tell us where Tatya is.”

  “No. He would never talk, and you cannot best him.”

  “How could you know, witch?”

  She narrowed her eyes and took a step closer to him. He stepped back. “I know,” she said.

  “Then we follow.”

  “Another trap.” She shook her head,
“I know where to find what we need. But we must hurry.”

  He frowned. “How could he trick you?”

  She tried to look nonplussed, but terror made her throat scratchy. She’d gotten too complacent here in the Katharnians, where mirrorpainters were rarer than lapis blue. “He drew the real images out, and put new ones in using colored chalk.”

  His mouth was open, white teeth shining in the moonlight, “Can you do that?”

  “If I must.”

  Whether he was silent to hide his horror or conserve his breath, she couldn’t say, but it didn’t matter. The hawk-man would soon realize she wasn’t following him and then return to wherever the girl was kept to hatch a new plan. She needed to figure out his hiding place before he could move again.

  Back across the footbridge, up past the tenement housing. She was only a little winded by the time they reached the lamplit intersection, and she wasn’t sure if it was fear masking her fatigue or the general haleness she’d felt ever since she’d crossed the mountains into this land. There were health benefits to being a fugitive, it seemed.

  She strode straight to the center of the intersection and let her eyes unfocus. Turning, bit by bit, she scanned the area directly across from the brass plate from which she’d taken the last drawing. Back and forth, up and down, eyes seeing little more than muddled smudges of color while Costel hovered just out of her periphery. Ah! She grinned up at the lamp itself, seeing the bottom edge of its copper casing glinting in the right direction.

  “Bring me something to stand on.”

  Costel dragged over a barrel tall enough to reach her ribcage and helped her step onto it. He asked no questions, but incessantly drummed his fingers over the wide leather of his weapons belt. Lacra knelt a bit so that the angle was just right, and held the notepad she’d pilfered in the crook of one arm. With the stolen pencil poised above it, she let her vision blur and drifted.

  Distorted light, brilliance from behind filling all directions. Nothing. Nothing. The man walking forward, a bundle on his back, he crouches before the door across the intersection and pulls a pad out. His box of colored chalks is out, his fingers dusty with their mingled hues. He draws. Lacra grabbed the image and held on tight. Her fingers moved.

  When she was finished Costel helped her down from the barrel and they pored over what she’d drawn. She’d honed in on the pad in the hawk-man’s hands the best she could, and it took up the center of the page. Her shoulders slumped with relief when she saw the pilfered details. She’d never sketched another mirrorpainter’s work through an imprint before, and hadn’t been sure the conceit would work.

  But there it was. The detail was fuzzy, but she could make out a man shorter than hawk-nose walking down the center road. He was cloaked, a bundle strapped across his back. He would have looked just the same as the hawk-man as he ran down the lane, but below the height of the windows he was hand in hand with a girl about Tatya’s age and height. They were just passing through the intersection, and appeared to be going straight on.

  The hawk-man had removed this image from the obvious spot, and replaced it with the one of him veering off toward the tenements. She would have been impressed, if she weren’t so pissed off that she had fallen for it.

  “You should send for the constable while I run them down,” she said, hating herself for asking for help.

  “No time for that. If we see ’em on the way we’ll enlist ’em, but we have to get to Tatya before that man realizes we didn’t chase after him.”

  The heat of the chase burned in Costel’s eyes, and she knew there would be no coercing him to go for help. It would just be a waste of time, and who knew what the kidnappers would do with the girl once they realized they were exposed? They won’t hurt her. They don’t want her, now, do they? She’s just bait, effective bait. Her fingers itched with the desire to scope the area further, to dig up any imprints that might give her a better idea of just what was waiting for her at the end of the lane.

  No time for it.

  “This way.” She strode off down the lane somewhere between a walk and a jog, allowing her eyes to dip in and out of reflective surfaces as they passed. The hawk-nosed man had been rushed, or just plain sloppy, because he hadn’t bothered drawing out and replacing the imprints of reflections along this route. He probably assumed they’d never discover this to be the true trail.

  The lane emptied into a little courtyard ringed with inns. She froze, surveying the terrain, and let her mirror-sight drift in and out of blank panes of glass and still puddles. These were inns meant for travelers, and the images she filtered through were a dizzying array of merchants and vagabonds, touring nobles and cutthroats looking to spend their ill-got coin on a warm bed. Even in the heart of night half the windows of each inn were aglow with lamplight, and the occasional laugh burbled up through the murmur of idle chatter.

  With every fruitless probe into a reflection her irritation grew until she clenched her fists so tightly her nails carved half-moons in her flesh. It was an ideal place to hide out from a mirrorpainter. The bustle of day-to-day life in places like these crippled her ability to come to any conclusion in a hurry. She lamented this as she flicked her gaze from memory to memory, and never did see the bag come down over her head.

  Lacra opened her mouth to cry out, but a cloying aroma filled her nostrils and gagged her. The world around her feathered, fractured. Though she could not see, her mirrorpainter’s eye conjured up mingling colors of panic until darkness encroached, and her panic faded into bliss.

  When consciousness returned, she opened her eyes to darkness. For a moment, she wondered if she had died. Then she felt harsh rope chafing her wrists and ankles, and a sharp chill settling into her bones. Light denied her, she shifted and felt a wooden cot creak beneath her. Someone had drawn a blanket up to her chin, and the wool scratched her exposed flesh. She supposed it was the only thing keeping her from death by exposure. Katharnian winters showed no one kindness.

  She eased her bound ankles over the edge of the cot and wriggled her way into a sitting position. Her head spun, unused to being upright, and she squeezed her eyes shut even though it was already too dark to see. Someone had pulled thick woolen socks over her feet, and that was a relief. It meant she was probably wanted alive and in one piece, at least for now.

  There was a knock at the door and she jumped, then let out a ragged laugh. What jailer knocked? The man must have taken her laugh for permission, because the door swung inward. For a moment, she was blinder in the light than she had been in the dark. Lacra flinched back from the radiance of the lamp and brought her bound wrists up to shield her eyes. She blinked and squinted, tears falling, but forced her lids open.

  The hawk-man set the lamp on a small table and shuttered all but one side.

  “Where’s Tatya?”

  “The girl?” He spoke in the smooth language of the Alrayani, “She has been safely returned. She was not harmed.”

  Lacra swallowed. It was good that Tatya was safe, but his blithe dismissal of the girl painted a clearer picture of Lacra’s future. “And Costel?”

  He stepped over and cut her bindings with a thin blade, “He was glad to trade you for the girl, when we told him you were a murderer.”

  She bit her lip. He was testing her resolve, trying to see if being accused would conjure up the memories of that day. A good mirrorpainter could steal the imprints from your eyes if you shuffled them up for them to steal. A good mirrorpainter could also keep his memories to himself. She kept her mind centered, focused only on the current moment.

  “Boyar will send people for me.”

  “No, he won’t. We told him you killed a king and stole a prince’s memories of it.”

  She flinched, and felt the hawk-man’s eyes attempt to dip into hers. Lacra stared hard at him as she imagined bits of the room they were in, parading them through her foremost thoughts. He grunted, and she felt hi
s attention slip away.

  “You’re going to have to give it up eventually, you know.”

  “Do you think I would have come all this way if I had any intention of giving it up? I am the stronger of the two of us. You feel that. I will die before I let the memories go.”

  “Funny thing to die for, staving off an execution.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  He left her there with the lamp and a pot of hot somal tea. Her fingers trembled as she poured a cup and gathered the warm porcelain into her hands. She felt the heat of it leech into her flesh and bones, warming joints stiff with cold and disuse. A mirrorpainter’s hands and eyes were her most valuable assets; she feared frostbite more than she did death. When her hands warmed, she gave it a careful sniff. The brew was weak enough, the honeyed sweetness of the somal leaf muted by dilution. Better to risk the mind-lulling effects of the somal leaf than dehydration. She sipped and looked around.

  The little table had only the lamp and the tea, but her cot had a trunk at the foot. She opened it and discovered more blankets, in which she wrapped herself. A chamber pot hid beneath the cot, and a washrag rested next to a half-filled basin. They expected her to be here awhile. There were no windows.

  There was no food.

  They’re going to starve me out. Mirrorpainters could be coaxed into giving up their memory imprints if they were severely weakened, and the fastest way to do this, save a beating, was starvation. She put her cup back in its saucer, unable to calm the tremble that had returned to her fingers.

  On the second day of her captivity, the hawk-man brought her a pad and a pencil with her tea. When he had finished his morning interrogations and left, she brushed her finger pads over the smooth, blank surface. It was good paper, made from waxbark mash if memory served her, which it always did. She tugged a sheet out of the pad and looked at the little scraps left behind in the stitched binding. A whole sheet gone he would notice, but those scraps, those he would not miss.