Page 14 of Time's Fool

“Then why deliberately make revenants?” Rodrigo asked. He’d been sitting to the side, watching all of us with sharp brown eyes and cleaning his nails with a pen knife. “Why take out a whole town?”

Liam frowned and Lucha echoed it. The question did seem to contradict his theory. “Perhaps they . . . did the wrong spell?”

“They looked incompetent to you?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“Then what are you saying? You’ve been going on about it all night.”

“I’m saying, they left her alive.” Lucha gestured at me with a thumb. “And one of them did the same to me. I was following a witch, when another came at me from the side. She had a spell in her fist—an offensive one, all red and gold, like the flames of hell. But when she saw that I wasn’t a mage, she just ran off. Left me standing there in the rain.”

“Doesn’t make any sense,” Liam commented, still leaning against the wall. Which must have felt more comfortable than it looked, because he gave up and closed his eyes.

“That is what worries me,” Mircea said, causing me to jump slightly because I hadn’t heard him walk up. That was unacceptable, even if he did move like smoke sometimes. The vamps didn’t look like they were any better prepared, with Liam abruptly straightening back up and Dolph giving a bleat like a startled sheep.

Everyone politely ignored this.

Mircea sat down and the proprietress, who must have figured out who was paying the bill, bustled over with the first glass goblet I’d seen, along with a flagon of decent looking sack. She poured a generous measure of the dry amber liquid and fussed over him for a moment, before he sent her off with a wave of a hand. He drank imported Spanish wine while the rest of us downed more piss and tried not to look like we minded.

“You’re the only one who spoke with the leader,” Mircea finally said, looking at me. “Tell me you have something.”

“Other than the fact that she’s quick, and does silent spell casting under pressure?” I shrugged, and put a ring on the table. “Just this.”

It was the sapphire the witch had been wearing, which had come off when I was shaking the supposed spell out of her hand.

“Thought it was a spell at first,” I explained in between bites of eel. “It glowed so bright. Only realized the truth when I spotted it in the weeds after I crawled out of the ditch she left me in before collapsing.”

The vamp picked it up and looked it over quizzically.

“This was glowing?”

I nodded. “Bright as fire, but so was everything else. A crater was flaming nearby, where that huge spell hit down that almost took out both of us. So, I suppose she didn’t notice.”

Dolph leaned over to have a look at the markings incised into the flat surface of the stone. “Can you read it?”

The master’s hand tightened into a fist. “No. But I know of someone who might.”

Chapter Four

In the middle of a London back alley, between a tavern and a shop, on the way to nowhere in particular unless you counted a small, boring square, Mircea stopped. The alley was damp as it had been raining all day, and unseasonably cold, just a lot of mud and mildewed brick and horse droppings, so I didn’t see the attraction. But I guessed there was one, because he’d paused suddenly, although not as a human does.

There was no tilting of the head to catch a faint sound, or wrinkling of the nose at an unknown scent. There wasn’t even the sudden stillness of an animal, tensing at the barest hint of danger. Instead, it was a purely vampiric pause, a predator’s innate sense that what he sought was nearby, and abruptly reminded me of who I was dealing with.

It also made me unhappy, because I sensed nothing at all.

There was a rat, snuffling some cabbage leaves, a dove cooing from somewhere overhead, and a bit of wind ruffling my hair from the bustling street behind us. I expanded my senses some more, and heard a couple of men arguing in the tavern over a wench and then a fist hitting flesh; a bunch of hawkers crying out advertisements for their wares; horses whinnying and clip clopping by; and above it all, the constant rush of falling water and the cries of the boatmen who plied the river. Because we were only a short distance away from the famous London Bridge.

It was the pride of the city, being the longest inhabited bridge in the world, and spanned nearly a thousand feet, with nineteen arches built on a bunch of boat-shaped berms known as starlings. They were raised bits of ground and rubble into which the pilings that supported the arches had been driven, and they took up a lot of space in the river, restricting the flow and creating dangerous rapids as the current forced its way through. All of that falling water was deafening, and it didn’t help that the bridge was the only way over the Thames into London unless you wanted to take a ferry, so there was a constant stream of traffic.

Merchants, actors, milkmaids and minstrels rubbed shoulders with sailors, blacksmiths, tourists and wide-eyed farmers from the sticks. Magicians, jugglers, beggars and con men vied for the attention of artisans of all types, as well as bejeweled ladies and gentlemen. There were doctors returning from seeing patients in the countryside, overly important types from some village about to get their pride pricked, adventurers, workmen, hawkers, and people on the queen’s business, riding horses through a lane barely twelve feet wide at some points and carelessly trampling anybody who got in their way.

It was barely controlled chaos, and dulled the senses even at this distance. But all of that wasn’t the problem. Nor were the customers, eager to peruse the high-end luxury goods available on the bridge, which groaned under the weight of the shops and houses that lined it on either side.

No, the problem at this time of day were the revelers.

Southwark, the area across the bridge, was outside of the direct control of the strait-laced city fathers, and had therefore become the main pleasure district for the city. Bear-baiting and bull-baiting rings were everywhere, dog fights and cockfights were plentiful, comedy shows, bowling alleys, gambling dens and brothels abounded, and taverns and inns choked the streets. The Rose Theater had even opened up to show plays in more comfort than the usual method of crowding into an inn’s courtyard, and I’d heard that other such theaters were planned.

As a result, all day people had been heading out to the amusements to be found at Southwark, and they would soon be returning, swarming the bridge like a human tidal wave and swamping anyone who got in their way. I wanted to be gone before that. And before they filled the streets around here with a drunken, boisterous mob, easy pickings for the host of cut-purses, con-men and thieves waiting for the tide to break.

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