Nothing overlapped, except the papers themselves.
I was starting to regret the moment of mercy I’d shown Athel in the warehouse.
“Damn you, Athel,” I grumbled as I tucked away the slips and the token and reached out for the doorknob. “Why the hell couldn’t you have given me more than a damn na-”
“Drothe!”
Fowler’s yell came the same instant she launched herself into me, sending us both tumbling to the ground. A fraction of a second later, I heard the solid thunk of something driving itself deep into my door.
“You moron!” she yelled into my ear, still on top of me.
“Ow,” I said, feeling her on me, me on the floor, and all my bruises between the two.
“Damn straight, ‘Ow’!” she said, climbing off. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” I said as I came up off the floor more slowly. “That’s the problem. Too tired to think.”
Sticking out of the door at chest level, its head buried so deep I couldn’t see it, was a short crossbow bolt. It had come from the shadows above the stairwell behind us. I had positioned the firing mechanism more than a year ago and run a trip wire through the wall to the door. When I’d started to open the door without first releasing the tension on the wire, I’d set it off.
Stupid, stupid mistake.
“Damn it, Drothe!” said Fowler. “If you think I’m going to lose people just so you can dust yourself with your own fucking trap, you can find another Oak! If I hadn’t been here, you’d be pinned to that door like some firstnight Eriff. Angels! I’ve told you before that you don’t need to be so damn paranoid, but will you listen? No. And now-”
I didn’t bother pointing out that if she hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have been distracted by thoughts of Athel and Sylos and pieces of paper. Instead, I held up a placating hand and said, “Fowler, you’re right. Thank you. I owe you. More than ever. But right now, will you please just lock the inside floorboard for me? I don’t trust myself at this point.”
“You, either, huh?”
“Fowler…”
“All right, all right.” She took a few deep breaths to get her own hands to stop shaking. Then she knelt, cracked the door open, and reached inside to turn the small handle on the wall that locked down the loose floorboard just past the entry. Stepping on the board without locking it would get us both a face full of quick lime from the air bladder installed underneath it.
“When’s the last time you slept, anyhow?” she said as she stood up.
“A day? Two?” I said. “I don’t even remember at this point.”
“Well then,” she said, pushing open the door. “I suggest you… Fuck.”
Even if it had been an invitation, I doubt I would have been able to take her up on it just then. Inspiring as she could be in bed, I just didn’t have it in me at the moment. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about coming up with an answer. The catch in her voice and way she froze in the doorway told me more than I needed to know.
I reached out without thinking, ready to pull her back and slam the door shut against whatever was waiting for us inside. Then I saw what she saw, and I froze as well.
There was a woman in my bedroom-a dead woman; a dead floating woman, held a foot off the floor by nothing I could see.
“We’ve got trouble,” said Fowler Jess. “Big trouble.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Who is she?” asked Jelem as he walked slowly around the floating corpse.
“She’s a Blade named Task,” I said from the edge of my bed. “A good one. A very good one.”
“So whoever did this did you a favor,” he observed.
“Lucky me.”
Jelem smiled and continued to circle the dead assassin. He was still wearing the cream-colored robe from last night, but the vest had been replaced by a long, lightweight coat of blue linen. A matching cloth was wrapped around his head. Even though I was sure he had not slept, Jelem looked fresher than half the people I had seen on the street while coming home.
I had sent for Jelem immediately-this was his specialty, not mine. Besides, it had direct bearing on the matter of Tamas and his rope: Task had an identical rope hanging from her belt.
“When can we get her down?” I asked. I wanted to see what else she had on her besides the rope-like maybe some bits of paper.
“Soon,” said Jelem. “The glimmer holding her up isn’t impossible to unravel, but it’s no simple thing, either.” He pulled out a small calfskin pouch, drew an ahrami seed from it, and slipped the seed into his mouth. Jelem sucked thoughtfully as he moved. “This is well-done,” he said after a moment, gesturing at Task’s body. “The magic’s of a higher quality than I usually see on the street. The anchors are strong, tapped directly into the Nether. That’s a lot of work just to float a corpse in the air. A simple repulsion spell on the floor would have done the same thing, but it would have faded after a few days. Done this way, the body could stay here for years.” Jelem looked at me meaningfully. I stared back blankly.
“I assume you’re making a point besides, ‘This isn’t small-time,’ ” I said, “because I figured that much out myself.”
“What I’m saying is that there is glimmer, and there is glimmer.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “This isn’t going to be good news, is it?”
“You can ask me that with a dead assassin floating in your bedroom?”
He had a point. “Let’s hear it, then.”
“How much do you know about magical theory?”
“Probably as much as you know about picking a Kettlemaker lock.”
“Indeed,” said Jelem. “I’ll keep it brief, then.
“At its most basic,” he said, “magic gets its power from what we call the Nether. Most magicians agree on this basic premise-the differences come when we start to talk about what exactly the Nether is. I won’t bore you with all the various theories on the nature of the Nether-”
“Oh, damn,” I said.
“Although if you insist on interrupting me, I could.” Jelem paused to take a meaningful breath. “The main point is that while the Nether is a separate thing from our reality, some of its energy manages to cross over into our world. Whether it accumulates naturally, is drawn here by other powers, or is some sort of cosmic or religious ‘gift’ isn’t really important for our current discussion.
“Most street magic, as you know it, is powered by energy that has already seeped into our world from the Nether of its own accord. This means the average Mouth doesn’t summon the energy for his spells so much as gather up a portion of what is already here and form it to his needs. Furthermore, how he collects, channels, and forms the energy ultimately decides not only what it does, but how long it lasts.”
“You make Mouths sound almost like garbage pickers,” I said.
Jelem looked down his nose at me. “I prefer to think of them as tailors, taking in raw fabric and fashioning something useful with a cut here and a stitch there.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So, my good ‘tailor,’ what does this have to do with Task over there?”
“Ninety-nine out of one hundred Mouths would have used a basic repulsion spell to suspend her in the air, as I said. It’s a straightforward enchantment that uses the available energy in a simple manner. Not to mention that it’s the only way most Mouths know how to power any kind of glimmer.” Jelem gestured at the dead Blade. “This caster, though, did something different: He opened up a small tap into the Nether and tied his spell to it. Instead of using the magical energy that has accumulated around us, he opened up a direct link to the Nether itself.”
“How hard is that to do?”
“Very.”
“Could you do it?”
“I’ve done it on a total of four occasions,” he said. “All back in Djan. And each of those times required days of preparation, in a controlled setting. Doing it here, in someone else’s home, on a tight schedule? No, I couldn’t. Nor would I want to.”