Rudra Muralin had come through that mirror into the citadel, and he hadn’t been seen since. Tam’s source in the goblin embassy said their new ambassador had come home. What I needed to know was had he come home alone. I was betting he hadn’t.
“What will happen to the people he infests?” I asked Arlyn.
“When he leaves them, they’ll be disoriented for a day or so; or insane if they weren’t emotionally stable to begin with.”
I could see where being possessed by Sarad Nukpana could do that. And Rudra Muralin was already nuts.
“No trail of dead bodies to follow?”
My father shook his head. “Sarad will be careful. He has everything to gain, and too much to lose. He will be cautious until he is ready to make his move.”
And when he made that move, we would all know about it.
I looked back up at the dais where a line had formed to welcome Piaras into the Guardians.
“Piaras is safe,” Arlyn assured me.
“How do you know that?” It came out a little sharper than I’d intended.
“Sarad would possess Piaras for spite, but it is too great a risk for him. As a cadet, Piaras will be living in the citadel, and he will be closely watched. Sarad will not risk capture to satisfy a petty vengeance.”
He was right, and I knew why. Sarad Nukpana wouldn’t waste time or strength on anything petty, most of all vengeance. No doubt Nukpana thought that revenge was best served in cold blood and up close and personal. And when he came for me, I wanted to have a fitting welcome waiting for him. I said I wanted to; I didn’t have a plan yet. I told myself that brilliant retaliation takes time. Too bad my time was running out.
Mychael was walking toward us, and I knew it wasn’t for a casual hello. We hadn’t had much time to talk in the past two days and had had absolutely no time alone. Mychael had the Guardians’ best spellweavers secure the Saghred as well as they could, and they’d done a fine job with no objections from the rock. The Saghred had been cut open; apparently it needed some time to heal. The spellweavers had likewise secured the Scythe of Nen, which was being kept in an undisclosed location. Undisclosed was good; hopefully spellweavers were good at keeping secrets-and hopefully elven intelligence hadn’t recently bought itself a Guardian spellweaver.
When Mychael got close enough, I asked the inevitable question. “Your office?”
“Please.”
The Guardians we passed in the wide corridors had smiles and salutes for their paladin. They’d heard that Mychael had closed the Hellgate. That was the story we’d told, and that was the story we were sticking to-and with Mychael’s report, that version had become official. It wasn’t a lie. It was more like a simplification of an entirely too complicated truth. Mychael had been the one to hit the Hellgate and the demons on the other side with more white magic than they could survive. My and Tam’s roles had been reduced to no role at all. Officially, I’d been too injured from my catfight with the demon queen, and Tam’s strength had been exhausted keeping the Hellgate stable until Mychael could take over. It was Mychael’s magic that had closed the Hellgate-that Tam and I had helped fuel that magic didn’t bear mentioning.
Vegard and Arlyn walked a few paces behind us. They were my bodyguards, but Mychael was their commander. I knew it had to feel strange beyond belief for Mychael with my father’s soul being in the body of one of his junior knights, but he handled it well, better than I would have in his place. I had to hand it to Mychael; he would have made a fine actor. No one watching or listening to him would suspect that Arlyn Ravide was anything other than one of his young knights.
Mychael told Vegard and Arlyn to stand guard and see to it that we weren’t disturbed, and then he closed his office door behind us.
Blessed silence, and no sense of anything outside of the room. Mychael’s office had always been warded, but he’d recently laid on a couple of fresh layers. Very recently.
“Just being careful,” he told me.
“There’s no way we can have too much of that.”
Mychael almost laughed. “You? Careful? I would say I couldn’t believe you broke into Carnades’s house and attacked the demon queen, but I can believe it. The last one I saw with my own eyes.”
“It wasn’t like I had a choice.”
“I will admit that even if he hadn’t already been kidnapped by Rudra Muralin, Carnades would never have turned over the Scythe to anyone. But attacking-no wait, that would be too dignified-tackling the demon queen was not-”
“Again, I had no choice. Tam needed a distraction, so I-”
“Tam is perfectly capable of causing his own distractions.”
“So I wanted to take down the bitch,” I snapped. “She sent her spawn to feed on students. The kids they would have eaten would have been the lucky ones.” I stopped and exhaled slowly, forcing myself to calm down. I spread my hands. “You do your job; I do mine,” I said in as much of a level tone as I could manage. “I’m a Benares. I can go places and do things that you can’t. Since you had no prior knowledge of my actions, your nose is clean. And since we weren’t caught at Carnades’s house, so is mine.”
“You could have been caught.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“What happened to sending for help? I could have gotten a search warrant.”
“I didn’t have time to wait for help, backup, a cheering section, or anything else. The fact that the Scythe had just been snatched only confirms it.”
Mychael gave me a look; you know the one. “You didn’t have time to wait, or you just didn’t want to?”
Coming clean is good for the soul-and sometimes the temper. I managed a crooked grin. “Both.”
“I assumed as much.” Mychael shook his head, the barest shadow of a smile on his lips. “I should arrest you, if just to save you from yourself. Worse yet, you talked five of my best men into going with you.”
I held up a hand. “Only two came into the house with me. Vegard and Herrick insisted. Vegard wasn’t going to leave me; Herrick wasn’t leaving Piaras.”
“That’s another thing-you took Piaras.”
“He’s a virgin. I had to.”
Mychael blinked. “Excuse me?”
I told him about virgins and the Scythe, purity finding evil, and all that.
Mychael didn’t laugh; but he didn’t need to, those blue eyes of his were doing a fine job of both. And it did an even better job of taking the tension right out of the room.
“Then it was a good thing that you knew about Piaras,” he admitted, trying to keep from smiling. “Finding a virgin on this island on short notice would have been a challenge.”
I snorted. “To say the least. And I suspected about Piaras; I didn’t know for sure.”
“How did you-”
I winced. “I had to ask him.”
“I hate I missed that.”
“I don’t.”
“Sora told me you had gone to Carnades’s and why,” Mychael said. “And Herrick told me you’d gone into the tunnels under the house. I’d just received confirmation that the Hellgate was in the Assembly. Knowing where those tunnels led-but mostly knowing you-I assumed the worst and went straight to the Assembly.”
“I’m glad you did,” I admitted. “Things weren’t going quite as I planned.”
Mychael raised one eyebrow. “What I witnessed was the culmination of an actual plan?”