Unlike elementary runes, secondary runes can only be stimulated by theurgists, as it serves merely as a channel between the human realm and the epperstrom, thus feeding on the power of the applying theurgist. Thus a secondary rune will never expire unless destroyed.

—Of Runes and its Crafte, by Remminsk
                                                       

24

↝ INTO THE DARK ↜

Pepper was curled up and warming her bed. It stirred when Isla approached, leaping to greet her, blissfully ignorant of all the damage it had done.

'You've been a naughty daemon.' But how could she be angry when she had a hot bed to return to? The wind outside was wild, lashing against their window. Isla checked the runes she had earlier carved. Still in tact. I'll need to set them before sleep.

'Have you been working again?' Tran blinked out from her bed.

'Don't worry, I didn't forget to bring cakes.' The platter lay upon the new table that had been brought in to replace Phrae's ruins.

Isla lay down and shut her eyes, enjoying Pepper's heat against her chest. It was the last night she would have the salamander's company. She thought of the waterwights. The creatures had almost drowned Phrae. What would a corrupted salamander be capable of?

'I need you to trust me, Pep,' she whispered. 'I only want what's best for you.'

Pepper chirruped.

She did not remember falling asleep, Pepper coiled around her shoulder, but somewhere between her silent weeping, she must have dozed off. The next thing she knew was a painful screeching in her head, and a bright light flashing from the window.

Someone had triggered her rune.

Isla snapped up, heart racing, her body taking action before her head had fully wakened. A shadow stumbled from the window. Startled by the sudden light, it crashed over Phrae's table, scattering Isla's cakes and flinging its platter towards her.

She ducked. Pewter crashed into wall. Tran muttered something, but Isla could not hear her words. The shadow had leapt atop her, something glistening in his hand. She caught his arm as he stabbed, pushing back against his weight.

He was wrapped in black. Linen masked his entire face but for the holes cut into its eyes. Holes that stared down at Isla, impassive, as his knife edged closer and closer towards her throat.

She reached for her theurgy, but her mind was far too clouded from sleep, and her energy drained from the overnight setting of her runes.

'Get ... off ... her!' She could scarcely make out Tran kicking, punching him from behind, but with a flick of his hand, a gust sent her flying across the chamber.

Pepper landed on his shoulder and burst into flame. The man did not even flinch. Neither did his clothes burn. Red calligraphy shimmered alive across his attire. Runes. Isla cursed. But Tran and Pepper had distracted him, and Isla had a free hand to reach down and grab the kitchen knife she kept by her thigh.

With a cry of satisfaction, she rammed it into his side.

The man's scream was muffled beneath his mask. He tore away from her and rolled off the bed, giving Isla time to think.

They know about Pepper. Rajini Chei had seen the salamander. There was no wonder the assailant came prepared. But it did mean one thing – he, too, would soon become exhausted from sustaining his runes.

Isla whispered the words and let her own runes die.

A weight lifted off her chest. The flashing light disappeared from the window. Isla clambered to her feet, body bent and ready to lunge from the bed.

The man had risen, knife clenched in hand and blood oozing from his right rib. Tran was unconscious beyond him. 'You'll pay for that.' Isla lit her core and gathered her theurgy.

As swift as a breeze, the man pulled something and sent it spinning towards her. It scraped her arm as she leapt aside, tearing through sleeve and skin. There was a sharp sting. It should hurt more, but Isla was too on edge to notice. She launched into the man, crashing against his walls like a flooded dam. His core was weakening, his defences along with it.

She felt him struggle against her, the way a spider senses a fly struggling against its webs. Futile, inevitable. She pushed harder. The hand holding his knife trembled. But before she had him wrapped in her silk, he pulled the blade fast against his own neck and dropped in a pool of blood.

Isla gasped for air, still trying to fathom what had just occurred.

She half stumbled, half climbed off the bed, stepped over the corpse on the floor, and bent over her unconscious friend. Still breathing. Save for a darkening bruise on Tran's forehead, she seemed to be unharmed.

'I'm sorry, Tran.' She lifted the girl onto her bed, wrapped her in her blanket. There was no time to dwell on her friend, though.

Something warm and sticky crept under her feet. Blood, spreading away from its pool in thin tendrils. Red footprints marked the tiles when Isla returned to the man to inspect him. She wrenched his mask, his rigid head lifting and thudding back to the ground as it tore off. It was no man she had ever seen before.

Isla wiped her feet on a fallen blanket and tied on her sandals.

She did not need to know the man to know who had sent him. But why now? What changed? My second blooding? She had hoped Pepper's fire would have stalled things a little, but it seemed Master Usman had been prompt in rewriting his report.

Sir Edric was right, at least. I've run out of time. She pulled on the liveries from Kiet. Paused to lean against her bed and breathe. There's no knowing how many more men Chei would send, and when. I have to see him now.

It was still dark when she climbed out the window and scaled down the grappling hook her assailant had left. Isla was not fond of heights, but she could not risk being seen on her way out. Her arm where the blade had struck was beginning to ache. A shallow cut, but bleeding all the same.

She jumped when she was still a few feet off the ground. The trees around her hid nothing but a scatter of birds and a scampering stray. It would be some time yet before the rajini realised her assassin had failed, and it seemed she had not bothered sending a second man for support.

She thought one man would be enough to kill a bungling dhayang.

Pepper scurried up Isla's shoulder, and they were off, under the guise of night.

The palace was quiet but for the guards, strolling along the wall walks above and the footpaths below. None of them looked to the bushes, though, or between trees.

Almost there. The consortial estates rose in the distance; a silhouette made of perri tales. Rajini Amarin's stood at the centre of the three. Its main entrances would be guarded, that on top of the guards making the rounds of the hedge paths.

Isla waited until the first pair strolled past, lanterns fading along with the crunch of their boots. They turned a corner, and she dashed against the hedges. Pepper squeezed into the brambles, burning an ember just enough for Isla to squeeze through.

She crawled into the rockery connecting to Rajini Amarin's northern wing, in which Kiet's chambers were located. He had told her how to find his quarters, up on the fourth floor, with a clear view of the canal from his balcony and the academy bell tower from his bed.

'It must be that one.' Isla pointed to a wide balcony. 'Hurry, Pep. Find him!'

The salamander scuttled up the wall, Isla quickly ducking against a large fountain whilst she waited. She caught her reflection in the water. Wind-strewn hair. Eyes wide and alert. A streak of blood that was not hers.

I can't meet the maharaj like this. She cupped her hands into the water and washed her face. Something nipped at her fingers the second time she dipped into the pond, and when the ripples calmed, she saw a school of brightly coloured featherfish.

More of the rajini's collection. Now that it crossed her mind, she noticed other strange beasts around the rockery. The whistle of feathers. A giant lizard landlocked in a stone island, a golden peafowl nesting in the hollow of a tree, a cat darting around the corner. Perhaps she could use the beasts to create a diversion, if it came to that.

Light fell from above, illuminating a pocket of the rockery. Isla ducked and whisked deeper into the shadows. A figure stood upon the balcony, eclipsed in the backlight of the lantern he held. He lowered his light, and once her eyes adjusted, Isla recognised Kiet's searching gaze.

She stepped out of the shadow. Kiet retreated into his chamber and returned a moment later, a coil of rope around his shoulder. He whispered something down at her, but it was too far for Isla to hear. The rope was lowered nevertheless, and Isla took it uncertainly. I am not climbing another rope this night. She wrapped it around herself and tied it the way she saw the sailors aboard Tempestorm had done their knots.

Isla held on as Kiet pulled her up. He was not even short of breath when he lifted her onto the balcony. 'Is everything well?'

'No.' They were too visible this high up. Isla pulled him into his chamber. 'I apologise to come like this –' She turned to face him, but Kiet was already heading into his wardrobe.

Perhaps to find a shirt. Isla wandered aimlessly through Kiet's bedchamber in his absence. It was absurdly luxuriant, with paperhangings and carpets only his mother could have selected. Large panels decked the ceiling, each panel depicting scenes off the Holy Anthology.

True to his word, Kiet's bed had a direct view of the window, from which Isla could see the glimmering lights of the bell tower. Pepper was perched, shivering atop Kiet's beside table. 'Why are you –'

'You're wet and trailing mud on my floor.' Kiet returned, and evidently had not gone for a shirt. He knelt before her, cloth in hand, and proceeded to towel the dirt from her feet.

She had not even noticed. 'There are far more pressing matters –'

'Is this blood?' He lifted Isla's leg, sending her tumbling back into an armchair, and searched for a wound.

'It isn't mine.' Isla snatched his hand away and forced him to quiet. 'Please, Kiet. I need your help, and it cannot wait until tomorrow.' Or, tonight. A clock above the commode told her it was already three in the morning.

'What do you mean it isn't yours? What happened?'

'Someone ... someone came in and tried to ...' She let her sentence hang, but the look on her face should have been more than enough.

'Who?'

'I don't know. A silver-servant.'

'Why would anyone send a silver-servant for you? What could you have done?'

Isla shrugged, sank back in her seat. Pepper's shivering unnerved her.

Kiet searched her face. 'I can't help you if I don't know how. You would not be here if you did not trust me.'

He was right. There was no use keeping things from him. 'I'm an early-bloomer. I was a fourth-rank and still growing when I absconded my scheduled blooding. I returned to Surikhand after a silver-servant was sent to Elingar to kill me.'

Kiet sniffed. 'So you should have belonged to the White Asraam. A crime so trivial does not warrant the effort of sending men across the Ters Altum.'

'That's what I came here to discover! They have my sister, and now they know who I am. Please, we need to go to the labyrinths now!'

'Not until I fix that bleeding.' Kiet nodded at her arm.

'Did you not hear a word I said? They will send another one after me –'

'Isla.' He rose, taking her hands. 'You are safe here. You're agitated – and rightly so – but no good decisions are made while anxious. Let me clean your wound and get you something warm to drink, and then we will go to the labyrinths.' He went to his bed and pulled thrice on a chain beside it. 'Which rajini do you suspect has your sister?'

'Chei.' Isla winced as Kiet smeared a salve over her cut. He dressed it with the deftness of a therapeut and had just finished with the binding when a knock came by the door.

Isla hid in the wardrobe while he received his servant. The room was filled with large chests, which she dared not touch. Silks draped the wall, ceremonial robes hung over a partition; and in one corner, a partially-complete portrait of the maharaj stood in its easel.

'Master Vinn would have my hide if he knew someone saw his work undone.' Kiet nodded at the portrait from where he stood by the door frame.

'I've seen this before ...'

'Perhaps last year's portrait. In the Maha Rama's private audience chamber. You served us, did you not?'

Isla did not know he had noticed. 'I did, once.'

'Allow me to return the favour.' He lead her back into his chamber, where his servant had laid out their drinks by the bed-foot table. 'I've found the map of the labyrinths shortly after the feast last night,' he said while he poured out their drinks. Isla took a seat, noticing said map beside a tiered tray of delicacies. 'From my mother's estate, the entrance lies through the menagerie.'

The galleries. Isla remembered the series of marble archways framing the court. 'But which one?'

Kiet unrolled the map and laid it out before her, pointing out a small section in its corner. 'If my calculations are correct, this entrance here should be just east of where the mooncat is caged.'

Isla took the map reverently, studying its inked turns and passages. 'Kiet,' she whispered, 'you are the most brilliant man I've ever met.'

'Save your praises 'til after we've found your sister.' Kiet smiled and took his cup. 'Drink. Eat something, if only a bite. I will first need to dress, and then we will be off.' He drank quickly and returned the empty cup to its platter.

'I do mean it, though,' said Isla. 'You have helped me much and I owe –'

Kiet shook his head and started to say something, but the words caught in his mouth. The smile froze off his face and twisted to something of confusion and alarm.

'Kithrel?' Isla lurched off her seat. 'What is it?'

'Isla –' It was barely a croak. Kiet clutched at his throat, his eyes urging on some secret message Isla could not decipher. She caught him as he fell, but his weight pulled them both to the floor.

He bent forwards, retching blood and foam. Isla grasped him from behind, calling his name. It was all a quick haze, and before she ever fully understood what was happening, he slumped back into her arms and stilled.