With his belly full of cold sludge, which might have been imaginary, might have been the dormant bore-grubs, Shadrak left the grounds of the Academy, where Arecagen had held him in a concealed sub-basement. One week he had. One week to find Bekra Cy and return with the Witch Queen’s ring. And even if he succeeded, even if he gave Arecagen what he wanted, and assuming the sorcerer kept his word about removing the bore-grubs, he was still neck-deep in shite: the Stygian would not take kindly to someone else taking what he’d paid for. It was unlikely Xultak Setis would come after such a high-profile and powerful mage as Arecagen. He’d vent his ire on Shadrak.
Just thinking about what the Stygian would do to him put a twist in his guts, or was it the bore-grubs already active? Had Arecagen lied to him? He clapped his hands to his belly and waited for something to happen: a writhing beneath his skin, mandibles bursting forth amid a spray of blood. But there was nothing. Nothing but a twinge of very natural anxiety about his predicament. Just the acknowledgement that he was scared hardened the anxiety into anger. He was going to find this Bekra bitch, all right, and when he did…
But there was the thing: where to start looking? The taverns? With Bolos dead, that was bound to be a waste of time; virtually every other rogue in New Londdyr would shop him to the Senate, and those that wouldn’t were probably working for Ilesa. Now there was a thought. What if he went back to the theater, teamed up with Ilesa and her goons? She had to have some idea where Bekra could have gone, but the shame of asking for her help was almost as bad as the thought of insects eating him from the inside out. And then he had it: Magwitch. The meddling mage might be able to find Bekra using his wizard eye, with a bit of persuasion.
“How can I find her if neither of us knows what she looks like?” Magwitch said, whipping off his spectacles in a show of frustration. He winced and gingerly touched his broken nose. The furry poultice had done wonders for the redness but nothing to set the nose straight again. He’d been sending the wizard eye all about town and observing through his viewing crystal for the better part of an hour, but besides an accidental look inside the brothel on 62nd Street, there was nothing of interest to see. “I must say, I find this all rather tendentious. You’d have been better off mending bridges with Ilesa and having the guilds track this Bekra. It’s probably too late now. Ilesa’s hardly the sort to sit around and do nothing. Chances are, she has the ring once more and is working out who to sell it to.”
Shadrak was inclined to agree with him. “Wait,” he said, an idea suddenly thrusting its way into his mind. “Ilesa has a crystal like yours, for viewing what the wizard eye sees?”
“Obversely,” Magwitch said, before popping a chocolate truffle in his mouth.
“So, the crystals and the eye are linked somehow.”
The mage grunted as he chewed.
“Can you move the eye to the location of Ilesa’s crystal?” Shadrak asked.
Magwitch looked momentarily stunned. He raised a trembling finger, and his cheeks turned scarlet. A weak choking sound escaped from his lips. Shadrak started toward him, fearing the mage had been poisoned, that someone was determined to prevent him from helping find the ring. Ilesa? Bekra? Someone yet to reveal themselves?
But then Magwitch swallowed. Thumping his chest, he said, “Went down the wrong way.”
Shadrak almost hit him then. In an instant, anger gave way to relief, and relief to inspiration.
He felt about in a belt pouch till he found the last remaining vial of deadly “sausage poison”, the greatest achievement of his erstwhile partner, Albert. Irony was, the very same poison had been Albert’s undoing. Shadrak felt no shame about being the one to administer it. Their working relationship had broken down to the extent that it was kill or be killed.
He rolled the vial between thumb and forefinger but didn’t remove it from his pouch. Could it prove an equalizer in his spat with Arecagen? It was a long shot. Arecagen was no fool. He was hardy likely to drink anything Shadrak offered him, and he’d already indicated he had sorcery that could detect lies. It made Shadrak wish he’d explored his homunculus nature rather than continued to act as if it weren’t true, as if he really was a human freak rather than a creature of deception begotten by the Demiurgos.
Arecagen had said something about homunculi having an innate ability to deceive not only their victims but themselves as well, and yet, when the moment presented itself, they would slip innocently into whatever betrayal they had initially planned. That would be a hard form of trickery to detect with magic or any other way. Presumably why the homunculi had been so devastatingly successful with their schemes over the centuries.
Magwitch was watching him, one eyebrow raised. He reset his spectacles on the bridge of his nose and asked, “What is it?”
Shadrak was about to tell him to mind his own business, when it struck him he had nothing to lose asking the mage’s advice. After all, Shadrak was the only one maintaining the pretense that he wasn’t a homunculus. Everyone else had assumed it for a very long time.
“If you… If you had a friend who was something by nature but who’d become something else—”
“You’re talking about shifters, like Ilesa?”
“No,” Shadrak said. “I’m not. Say this friend was, I don’t know, a dwarf, but he’d never lived with other dwarves. Say humans brought him up.”
“The height would be a dead give away,” the mage said. “Not to mention the infant facial hair. And he’d cry incessantly till his wet-nurse’s breast milk was augmented by her drinking a gallon of mead every day.”
“Just hear me out,” Shadrak said. “If this dwarf grew to manhood believing he was a human freak, but then someone revealed the truth of what he was, how could he undo all the human behaviors and customs he’d learned over the years? How could he get in touch with the essence of his dwarven nature?”
Magwitch chewed it over for a moment before saying, “Get drunk?”
Shadrak sighed and was about to give up, when the mage said, “I’m not being feces-itious. The alcohol would relax him, perhaps to the point any socially learned inebriations—or is that inhibitions?—sloughed away. We are what we are when free of the tyranny of thought and custom.”
“So, all I’d—he’d—have to do is get drunk?”
“Or take certain medicusinal herbs that calm the nerves and muddy constipation—I mean, cons… thought.”
“Like somnificus?”
“Indeed.”
If that was the case, Shadrak must have been acting like a homunculus for months now. Years, even. Ever since Kadee’s death. And yet when he’d tried convincing Arecagen of his trustworthiness, he’d failed, even without the sorcerer using magic to detect the lie. Maybe he wasn’t smoking enough somnificus.
But he was getting ahead of himself. First things first: he needed to get the ring back. If he didn’t stop acting like an amateur and start to focus, he was going to be a bore-grubs’ banquet by this time next week.
“Well?” he said, referring to the question he’d asked just before Magwitch nearly choked on a truffle.
“Very, thank you,” the mage replied. “Except for my nose.”
Shadrak gritted his teeth and asked again. “Can you move the wizard eye to the location of Ilesa’s crystal?”
“Of course I can.”
Magwitch gestured with his hands and muttered some cants, then sat back so Shadrak could see the image that formed within the viewing crystal.
Nils and Jeb running across overgrown grass in between cracked and weatherworn sarcophagi, winged statues, and ancient crypts surrounded by rusted iron fences. They were seen from above, a bird’s-eye view.
“The Wayist Graveyard at Templeton,” Magwitch said, “from the time of the earliest settlers, before the religion was suppressed by the Senate.”
Shadrak squinted at the crystal. “Where’s Ilesa?”
Magwitch pointed to a blur of movement ahead of Jeb and Nils—a cat, by the looks of it, prowling through the long grass as if it had picked up a scent. Suddenly, it darted forward, and the wizard eye shifted position to keep her in view.
And there it was, the thing she was chasing: a woman in a sleeveless robe of black velvet running lithely toward one of the crypts, shaven scalp covered with swirling tattoos, same as her exposed arms. As she passed down the moss-covered steps and disappeared into the darkness inside, the air around the cat shimmered, until Ilesa stood in its place. Jeb and Nils caught up with her, and the three of them followed the woman into the crypt.