The Secret Texts Page 4

  he kept on living

  and a voice that cut through his screaming like that claw had cut through his belly, and silenced him.

  “We can do much, much more to you without killing you outright,” Crispin Sabir said. “So unless you want us to prove that, shut your mouth and watch. We’re doing this for your benefit.”

  Marcue opened his eyes. He didn’t look down. He knew what he would see there, and he couldn’t look. Couldn’t. He couldn’t keep his eyes from the scene in front of him, either. His supply of courage was gone. He hung in the shackles, his back against the wall, and watched, wishing he could die quickly, wishing he could die right away. He watched the demon and the two men who were no better than demons, and he tried not to look at the girl. He tried not to hear her. Because he lived to know that they had killed him, that he was a breathing dead man, and that was terrible.

  Terrible.

  But the things they did to her were worse.

  Chapter 3

  It was a scent in the hallway that did it, that almost threw Kait into an uncontrolled Shift; a scent at once as familiar as family and as alien as the far side of the world. One instant she was dragging Tippa down the long, empty side corridor toward the yard where the driver had parked the carriage. The next, she was leaning against a wall feeling her bones going liquid in her body, feeling her blood bubbling like sparkling wine, while exuberance filled her and colors and sounds grew sharper and cleaner and the very air she breathed became a rich, full-bodied, intoxicating beverage.

  Tippa struggled to free her wrist from Kait’s grasp, and bleated, “Kait? Kait? What’s wrong?” in that timid, frightened voice Kait loathed.

  Kait wiped tears of frustration and longing from her eyes with the back of a hand, checking the appearance of the hand at the same time. Normal. Thank the gods, thank all the gods, it was normal. If she could just get herself under control, she might still be all right.

  I want to run, she thought. I want to fly, to race against the wind; I want to feel my muscles burn from exertion, I want to hear my blood pounding in my ears. I want to taste the wind and feel the cut of the tall grass against my skin. I want to hunt. I want fresh, hot meat, the iron tang of blood—and she pushed what she wanted away from herself. Far away. Far down in the dark places inside, her hungers fought against her and she struggled to lock them away where they belonged. She said softly, “I don’t want any of those things. I want to serve my Family and earn my independence.” Her voice sounded raw, husky, far too deep. Bad. Very bad. Her vocal cords had already slipped. She turned to Tippa, and gripped both her cousin’s shoulders, and stared down into her eyes. Tippa swallowed, looking suddenly sober and very frightened. “Go to the carriage,” Kait said. “Tell the driver to take you home. Wait with the Family—tell whoever meets you that I sent you because three Gyru princes were up to something and your chaperones had disappeared. I’ll . . . be along when I can.”

  Tippa shivered. “Kait, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing that I can’t take care of.” She wished that were true. Control, always elusive, now felt as if it slipped through her fingers like quicksilver. “Go,” she snarled. “Run.”

  Tippa stared at her an instant longer, then turned and fled. When she disappeared through the archway at the end of the corridor and thundered down the steps to the carriage, Kait moved to the first dark side passage she could find, hid behind an enormous statue, and sank to the floor. Her silk skirts rustled, and the laced bodice of the damned party dress grew looser, then tighter, then looser, then tighter.

  Her blood pounded in her wrists, in her temples, behind her tightly closed eyes—her blood burned in her veins and fizzed like the water of a sacred spring. The unbearable desire grew worse. She smelled him, this stranger—one of her own, an adult male, in the prime of life. Like her, pushed too close to the knife edge of control; like her, hungry for a hunt. She opened her mouth and wrinkled her nose slightly and inhaled, and along the back of her palate she tasted the scents of him that were both wonderfully familiar and wonderfully strange. That bottled exuberance threatened to burst free, to become the wild exhilaration of total Shift.

  She couldn’t let it take her. She couldn’t let that other Kait loose. Not in the Dokteerak House, not surrounded by hundreds of potential enemies. She had to stop herself, and fast.

  His scent was like a drug in the air, like incense made of caberra spice, which clouded the mind and filled it full of visions; his scent could lead her knowing and almost willing toward her own destruction. First she needed to block that.

  She had perfume. A little bottle, always with her. Stinking stuff, like all perfume—she hated it because it ruined the taste of the air the way spices and sauces ruined the taste of meat. But scents had caught her off guard before, and she’d learned. She pulled the little bottle of perfume from her waist-purse, slopped some of it onto a corner of her skirt, and wiped the reeking stuff across her nostrils and her upper lip.

  The effect was jarring. Painful. Like being wakened from the midst of a pleasant dream by being pitched headfirst into an icy spring. Her eyes watered and she needed to cough and sneeze at the same time, and she didn’t dare do either. Her bones hurt. Her blood churned. The thrill of Shift cooled, but not pleasantly. Her skin became a layer of lead smeared over muscles that ached as if they’d taken a hellish beating.

  I can hold the other back. I am in control.

  I want to run

  The world is cool, blues and greens and icy whites, silent and scented with flowers and spices. My heart beats slowly; my feet remain firmly on the ground; I seek tranquillity.

  the world is red and hot and scented with earth and blood and the rich raw taste of meat and sex

  I have given up everything for this chance to be human. I told my parents I could do this, I promised I could take on the responsibility, I told them if they wouldn’t give me work within my Family I would find work outside of it where they could never be sure I was safe.

  you’re a fool

  I’m more than you would let me be. I’m more than instinct, more than running and hunting and rutting. My parents sacrificed just to keep me alive to adulthood. They gave me the keys to be human.

  you’re Karnee . . . you’re a freak . . . you’re a Curse-touched monster and in the end you will never be more than an animal

  Kait opened her eyes and looked at her hands. Human hands. She smelled the flowery stink of perfume, and ignored the salt taste of her tears on her lips, and the wet heat on her cheeks. She would not give in to the voice of the hated other. She could be more than the Curse-trapped beast she’d been born as. She would be more.

  The cool smoothness of the polished marble wall felt good through the thin layers of her silk dress. She pressed back against the wall, catching her breath, letting the stone caress the skin at the nape of her neck. The crystalline perfection of the world that had been within her reach had been erased, swathed in the dull, lifeless tones that characterized everything when she came out of an attack. She was already drifting into the Crash phase. She felt the moodiness setting in. Not too terrible this time—the near-Shift hadn’t materialized, and the price she paid for the wild, joyous abandon of Karnee was always proportional. But the Crash was coming, and with it the ravenous hunger, the lethargy, and the other symptoms. Worse, this time she would have to pay the price knowing that she would still have to deal with a pending episode . . . and soon.

  This time she had solved nothing. She had simply postponed the problem. Her body demanded the Shift once within each forty days that passed, no matter how inconvenient or dangerous such a Shift might be. She planned and she accommodated . . . or she got caught out.

  “. . . and in spite of that, you let him in here. Tonight.”

  She raised her head and opened her eyes. Voices. From down the hall, hidden behind the closed doors of one of the rooms. She’d been hearing them for a while, but she’d been too lost in the morass of her own problems to really be aware of
them.

  “He insisted on seeing you immediately—said that what he had to discuss with you might alter the Sabirs’ plans.”

  Sabirs? Kait thought she recognized the first voice as belonging to Branard Dokteerak. The second she had no idea about, but if she was right about the first, then what in all the demon-spawned hells was he doing talking to Sabirs? Especially with the Dokteerak alliance to the Galweighs pending . . .

  “He wanted nothing more than my reassurance that we’d be ready to move the night of the wedding. Gave me some vague line about his people needing to know if anything had changed, if they were going to need more men or if they were going to need to bring them down by another route—but he didn’t want anything real. He didn’t have any genuine reason to speak with me at all, and less than none tonight of all nights.”

  “Had I been able to force a response from him, I wouldn’t have let him in to see you, but you said—”

  “I haven’t changed my mind, either. Until the Galweigh holdings in Calimekka are ours, we do nothing to anger the Sabirs. That includes using force on their envoys. Once we’re firmly entrenched within the House, however, I want the envoy killed. He’s Sabir, even if it is by distant blood, and he was disrespectful to me.”

  A pause. “I’ll take care of that, Paraglese.”

  “Good. Meanwhile I have left my own party and my guests, and I must give them an appropriate reason when I return—one that will stand up to scrutiny. Have any messengers arrived?”

  “None.”

  “A pity. That would have been the easiest of excuses. Well, then—who among our current list of houseguests have not attended my party?”

  “Castilla and her children . . . your nephew Willim, who has a touch of grippe . . . the paraglese Idrogar Pendat—”

  “Stop. Idrogar is here and hasn’t shown his face at my party?”

  “Just so. He arrived yesterday and is awaiting a moment of your time.”

  “He’s been causing me problems in the Territories. He wants more control over affairs in Old Jirin.”

  “I must assume, Paraglese, that his mission this time will only be to continue with his earlier demands. He brings many bodyguards, but no gifts.”

  Kait heard Dokteerak begin to chuckle. “At last, a benefit from this long and expensive night. What apartment is he in?”

  “The Summer Suite, in the North Wing. The best quarters for . . . what I suspect you have in mind.”

  “They are indeed. Please make sure my beloved cousin Idrogar’s fatal illness doesn’t inconvenience him too much. Or leave any marks on the body. We’ll have to produce the corpse tomorrow for my story to hold . . . but what better reason could any man ask to leave his own party, at least for a while, than an urgent visit to the bedside of a beloved and dying relative?” A pause. Then, “Find out exactly what he came here for before he dies, Pagos. I don’t want to destroy valuable information by accident.”

  “As you will, Paraglese.” Kait heard the sound of stone sliding, and recognized it as the same sound that secret panels in Galweigh House made. The paraglese’s man Pagos heading off to do his master’s bidding, no doubt.

  She had no time to get out of the hallway; the door at the end opened, and the paraglese came out. She couldn’t see him from her position behind the statue, but she could hear his heavy footsteps and his labored breathing. He wasn’t an old man, but he was a sick one.

  He went past her without looking either left or right, turned down the larger corridor toward his party, and met a few guests there. “My dear cousin came suddenly ill . . .” she heard him say, his voice dwindling as he moved away from her.

  Kait waited another moment to be sure he didn’t come back, then rose and slipped out from behind the statue, and hurried out toward the street. She had to get to the embassy to tell her Family what she’d heard. Keeping Tippa out of trouble was nothing compared to making sure the diplomats discovered the game Branard Dokteerak was playing at, but just as important was deciding which member of the Family to tell. If she chose poorly, she would have the awkward task of explaining why she was able to crouch behind a statue at one end of a corridor and hear a conversation that took place behind heavy closed doors at the other end of it—and for that matter, she might have to explain how she came to be hiding behind the statue in the first place.

  And even within her own Family, she suspected that if the truth about her got out, she would be regarded as an abomination by most of her clansmen, and as a dubious asset at best by the remainder.

  * * *

  The evil that seeped into the city of Halles and crawled through the streets and the homes had its beginnings in an ancient room deep in the heart of the Sabir Embassy, which sat at the far northern edge of the town. In the subterranean chamber, the Sabir Wolves moved through flickering light and the curling smoke of caberra incense, raising magic; they approached each other and then retreated in bewildering patterns, following the path of a complex design carved into the stone floor. Swirl and arabesque, move forward, move back, circle clockwise, counterclockwise; and all the while they whispered.

  In the center of their path, a man branded with the mark of the convicted felon hung limp and unresisting against the bonds that bound him to the carved stone column. At the beginning of his ordeal he had sworn, he had begged for mercy, he had fought and screamed and cried—but the beginning of his ordeal was hours behind him, and he had nothing left in him with which to fight. He had withered to half his size, had sunk in on himself as the life drained out of him. Now he hung in silence as the Wolves moved around him. From time to time he roused himself enough to stare in terror at the shapes of ghostly others who trod the path between the men and women he knew to be there. Sometimes he heard other voices that emanated from the air around him. He didn’t understand what he was watching, but he didn’t need to understand to know that what they did was killing him quickly.

  The Wolves paid little attention to him. Their focus was on the path, and on their precise placement on the path; they moved in relation not only to each other, but to their colleagues leagues away in Calimekka, who followed the footsteps of the path with them and who chanted as they chanted, linking the two places, raising magic.

  A handsome young man stepped through the doorway into the room, and two of the Walkers looked up. He nodded to them. They kept moving around the path, but signaled to Wolves waiting along the wall, and as they reached the set point of a particular arabesque, each stepped off the path, to be immediately replaced by those to whom they had signaled.

  The young man slipped out of the room and halfway down the corridor outside, where he waited. Both Wolves joined him there.

  “How did it go?” The woman who asked the question, Imogene Sabir, was about fifty, with pale skin and rich golden hair just beginning to show some gray. Her eyes were slightly milky, and though she looked at the young man—her son—she gave the impression that she focused on him more by listening. She was nearly, but not entirely, blind; the magic that had stolen most of her eyesight had replaced vision with second sight, and she was satisfied with the exchange. And aside from the increasing opacity in her eyes, her visible Scars were still few enough that she remained beautiful.

  “Dokteerak was furious that I showed up in the middle of his party.” Her son, Ry, had her slenderness combined with his father’s height, dark gold hair he’d inherited from both of them, and a predatory cast to his features that was entirely his own. “I wasn’t obvious, but I know at least two of the Galweighs recognized me.”

  His father, Lucien, smiled—a thin, tight-lipped smile that hid his teeth. “Excellent. Were you overheard?”

  “I can’t be certain. I couldn’t hear anyone outside the doors. Dokteerak closed them when we went in, and he had a man hidden behind a panel who made so much noise breathing and shifting from foot to foot that I almost couldn’t hide the fact that I knew he was there. It shouldn’t matter. If the Galweighs know I was in Dokteerak House, they’ll get suspicious.�
�

  His mother said, “Hid a man behind a secret panel in the same room, eh?” She laughed. “The Dokteeraks have no one like you or me, and do not, I imagine, believe that anyone like us could still exist in these days. I’m sure the two of them thought they were being quite circumspect.”

  Ry started to agree with her, then stopped himself. He frowned and said, “Now that you mention it, I should have realized that was wrong when I was there.”

  “Wrong?” His father’s voice grew sharp. “What was wrong?”

  “Mother said they have no Karnee. But I crossed through the garden behind a guardsman on my way to find Dokteerak, and I caught the scent of one of us.”

  His mother said, “You can’t have. None of our Karnee were there, and the Dokteeraks have no Karnee. I know this.”

  “One was there. I didn’t have the chance to find her—”

  “Her?”

  “Yes. Female, young, a complete stranger . . .” He closed his eyes, remembering for an instant that bewitching scent that had caught at him as he moved between the milling mass of human sheep in the garden, and how difficult he had found it to keep moving, to follow the guard, instead of breaking free and finding her. Finding her. Gods, he’d almost slipped right then—she’d been at the edge of her control; he was due and probably overdue; and her nearness to a spontaneous Shift had almost taken him over the cliff with her. And wouldn’t that have been a mess?

  “She has to be one of the Galweigh Karnee,” his father said.

  His mother frowned. “We killed them all.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “They’ve kept her hidden, then—and if they could hide one from us, they might have hidden others.”

  “Perhaps.” Lucien sighed. “Well, she isn’t hidden anymore. They’ve decided she’s strong enough to take care of herself and they’ve realized how beneficial she can be to them. We’ll have to kill her—”

  “Of course. But we can do that during the attack—”