Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

“There’s a fight breaking out,” she said. “Looks like the anti-Sarthe crowd are stirring up trouble. The Vigilants will be along any moment.”

“That’s all right. We’re done here,” said Andreyen easily, though Kel could see that he was far from easy in his mind. “Kel was just leaving.”

Kel clambered down out of the carriage. Ji-An had been right, of course; he could hear a dull roar from the direction of Valerian Square, coming closer. It sounded like waves surging in on the tide.

Ji-An handed him Asti’s reins; the horse nuzzled at Kel’s shoulder, clearly puzzled by all the goings-on. “So, will we see you again?” she said.

“If I learn anything interesting. That remains to be seen.” Kel stroked Asti’s neck as Ji-An turned away, starting back toward the Ragpicker King’s carriage.

“Kang Ji-An,” he said, without being able to help himself.

She froze but did not turn around. “What did you say?”

“What’s this I hear about a bloodbath between noble families in Geumjoseon? A girl who climbed a garden wall and slaughtered a whole family, then escaped in a black carriage?”

Still, Ji-An did not move. It was as if he were looking at a statue carved from obsidian: black hair, black cloak. Without turning around, she said, without a touch of mockery or humor, “If you mention that to me again, I will kill you.”

She said nothing else, only climbed up onto the driver’s seat, leaving Kel to watch the carriage vanish down the street.





With the Great Word gone, all the works of magic were undone. Suleman cried aloud in despair, his body crumbling into dust, for magic had kept him alive far beyond a human life span. And thus it was that the other Sorcerer-Kings, too, became dust, and the workings of their hands were destroyed: The great creatures of magic that they had created, the dragons and manticores and winged horses, all vanished like smoke on the air. Their weapons of war turned to ash, and their palaces fell away, and the rivers that they enchanted into being dried up. Islands sank beneath the sea. Magicians tried to speak the Great Name of Power, but they found they could not. Every book that had contained the name now had a blank space where it had been.

And this was the Sundering.

—Tales of the Sorcerer-Kings, Laocantus Aurus Iovit III





CHAPTER NINETEEN


Flames licked up the sides of the stone tower. All around was burning. She could see the remains of the great city, thousands of feet below.

All blackened stone now, and wood petrified by fire.

Above, the stars. Glimmering, untouched, they burned but could not be burned. She yearned to reach out to them, within them, and take hold of it. That which she knew hovered in the emptiness. The Word.

But he was almost here. He was climbing the tower’s side, clinging like a shadow to the uneven stone. She had to wait. Until he was here, his glimmering Stone set in the cross guard of his sword.

She saw it then. A movement at the lip of the tower, where stone met sky. Two pale hands, flexing and grasping. Lifting his big body up, until he had hauled himself over the edge, was on his knees with all of it behind him: the sky rising above, the city fallen below. She heard him hiss her name as he rose to his feet, hand on the pommel of his sword, his long black hair falling to hide his face, but still she could see his eyes. Still, she knew him. Would always know him—

“Lin?”

Lin jolted awake, a sharp pain darting through her hand. She blinked at Merren Asper, sitting across from her at his worktable in the Black Mansion, his pale eyebrows uplifted.

“Did you just fall asleep?” he said.

Lin looked down at her hand; she’d been clutching her brooch, the edged setting digging into her skin, leaving faint red lines. She slipped it into her pocket and tried to smile at Merren, who was stirring a thick black concoction with a glass pipette. The images from her dream still clung to the perimeter of her vision: shadow and fire.

“I haven’t been sleeping much lately,” she said, half apologetically. It was true enough. When she did sleep, she was troubled by wild dreams. Often she stood atop the tower of Balal and looked out upon the burning plains: Over and over she watched dream-Suleman approach her, and felt herself racked by a desire that left her body aching when she woke.

Sometimes she dreamed that she flew among mountains in the shape of a raven, and watched an old man hurl books into the sea. She had not dreamed again the dream she’d had at the Palace, where she had crawled into a cave halfway up a mountain and seen a blinding, fiery light. She’d asked Mariam the meaning of the words hi nas visik, and been surprised when Mariam had told her they meant: You are real.

“It is a sort of expression of incredulity,” Mariam had said. “As if you cannot believe what you are seeing.”

And Lin was troubled. How had she known Malgasi words in her dreams that she did not know in her waking life? But she could not think too much on it. Ever since the night she had healed the Crown Prince—so thoroughly, it seemed, that it was as if he had never been whipped at all—her whole mind had been focused on the way she had seemed to be able to use Petrov’s stone (no, she should not call it that; it was her stone now) to accomplish something beyond anything she had ever accomplished before. Beyond anything she had heard of gematry accomplishing before.

She could still recall the image that had appeared before her mind’s eye as she stood by Prince Conor’s bedside: the swirl of smoke inside the stone, the appearance of that single word: heal. She could feel the pulse of the stone in her hand.

And she could still feel the stone go cold in her hand. Ever since that night, it had lost all its color and life. It had gone a milky, flat gray color, like a dull pearl. No matter how she angled it, she could no longer see depth in the stone, nor the suggestion of words.

She had tried again, with Mariam, regardless of the change in the stone—asking Mariam to lie down as the Prince had done, and concentrating on the healing talismans Mariam wore at her neck and wrists. But nothing had happened. It was driving her mad. Why had it worked on the Crown Prince, but not Mariam? And it had worked on Kel, too, she knew now, speeding his healing, though not as impressively as it had done with Prince Conor. She still remembered the feeling that the stone wanted her to use it, the burn it had left on her skin after she had treated Kel. Yet it had done nothing like that again with any other patient, though she always wore it when she did her rounds.