Page 185 of Turncloak

Beside him, Karvas’s body was a hard line of tension. He smelled of stale sweat and something dankly earthen, like rotting trees. Whenever they passed another detective, the captain offered a nod so brittle it was as though his neck might snap.

The Silvercloaks had a portari gate housed in a small, functional room not unlike the one in Bloodmoon mansion—there is no longer a mansion, Levan had to remind himself. The walls of the gate room were pale creamstone, hung with perhaps two hundred different town maps and diagrams of Vallin’s portari network.

With a final strained nod at the streetwatcher, Karvas grabbed Levan by the forearm and hauled him over the threshold of the gate.

Levan closed his eyes, trying desperately to banish the image of Miret’s corpse. When he opened them again, they were not in Duncarzus. They had arrived, bodies squashed together, in an unfamiliar gate—in a very familiar city.

The tang of brine, the clamor of a marina. Tall creamstone buildings, a glittering blue sea.

Aredan.

The street was almost deserted. Judging by the pale pink of the sky, it was only just gone dawn. A second figure stepped out from beneath a shop’s indigo-and-silver awning.

Grand Arbiter Dematus wore not her purple highcloak, but a pale blue scholar’s robe. Graying hair fell around her face in limp locks, and she wasn’t wearing her distinctive violet lipstick. She seemed pale and sickly without it.

“There’s a boat waiting for you in the dock, ready to take you to Mersina.”

He stared at her, through her.

“This was always the plan, was it not?” She looked at him with a tortured expression.

Levan dimly recalled the night he’d broken into the Order to retrieve Saffron’s letter. He’d told the Grand Arbiter exactly what to do if he was caught, and now she was making good on her word. She would do anything to save her daughter, after all, and obviously assumed the kingpin still had the power to ruin her from inside Duncarzus.

Karvas unlocked the deminite manacles, first wrists, then ankles. Still the kingpin did not move, did not react. That numbness was back, that oblivion, a sense of watching events unfold from another plane of reality.

“This is the end of me now,” the Grand Arbiter whispered, her words punctuated by the garish caw of seagulls. “My career, my life. You cannot ask any more, because the card has been spent. Burned. All I ask, all I have ever asked, is that my daughter remain unharmed.”

“You have my word,” Levan croaked, ears ringing, limbs still leaden. The thought of hurting Dematus’s daughter seemed foreign, absurd, even though he had slaughtered sixteen mages not two days earlier.

“Nobody need know of your involvement,” Karvas said to the Grand Arbiter. “I’ll say the kingpin overpowered me at the portari gate. You can still emerge from this unscathed.”

Dematus stared at him for several long, penetrating moments. Levan dimly registered that her grip had shifted, tightened on her neat yew wand.

“Atherin and its various institutions are rotten to the core,” she murmured. “An orchard growing more spoiled fruit by the day. It’s time to carve out the corruption at the root.” She rose her wand, aimed it at Karvas’s widening eyes, and incanted, “Sen ammorten.”

Karvas fell dead, and Levan was jerked free of his reverie by the shock of it.

“What—?”

“It ends here.” The Grand Arbiter turned her wand on him. “With me. With you.”

For a moment, Levan felt nothing but relief.

True oblivion at last.

And while the young, innocent boy at the heart of him might have pleaded, no, don’t hurt me, I want to live, the ruined mage he’d become welcomed it. He closed his eyes and waited for the sound of the killing curse, for the ravaging fork to find his chest.

It didn’t come.

He opened his eyes warily, only to see that Dematus was standing still, trembling, her lips moving around inaudible words, as though trying and failing to cast the curse.

As though compelled.

Realization struck Levan then.

The young, innocent boy at the heart of him hadn’t just pleaded.

He’d commanded.