I don’t think she’s quite so—
“Shut up!”
Variam stopped and looked back at me with a frown. “What?”
I breathed in, closed my eyes, breathed out. “I didn’t mean you.”
Variam gave me a sceptical look. “Starting to think you’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”
The rooms and hallways had been growing richer and more opulent the deeper we went. This hadn’t been some last-minute hidey-hole—Jagadev must have been preparing this retreat for a long time. Maybe he’d been using it as his base for centuries. Right now we were in what almost looked like a museum. Thick glass cases stood on marble pillars, each holding some odd item to catch the eye. A pile of small bones was within one case, an ancient handwritten diary within another. A wrought iron polearm was contained in an especially long case, while another held a dark brown cloak with a magic aura I couldn’t identify.
As I looked around I realised that unlike the last few rooms, this one had signs of battle. There was no blood, but a gilded chair had been knocked over and a leather pouch lay discarded on the floor. Concentrating, I could sense a faint magical residue. It must have been very strong to still be visible.
“Someone went through,” Variam said. He was staring at a set of gold-inlaid double doors at the end of the room.
“Yeah,” I said. I was focused on scanning for danger. There was no threat around the doors, no threat in the next room, but I didn’t like the look of the futures in the middle distance. “Let’s see who.” I strode to the double doors and pushed them open.
The room within was a bedroom, and dripped with wealth. Gold rugs and tapestries were scattered upon the floor, silks hung upon the walls, and the furniture was a dazzle of precious metal. The gaudiness made me blink: I’d been scanning only for danger, and anything that wasn’t a potential threat hadn’t registered on my radar.
Which was why I hadn’t realised that Jagadev was on the far wall, crucified against the stone.
The rakshasa looked like a humanoid tiger, as tall as a man but far more heavily muscled. Ornate spears had been driven through his hands and feet, pinning him against the wall, and all around him some kind of net of magical energy hovered, glowing a menacing black-green. The energy in the spell was so powerful that it made the rest of the room look dim. Jagadev’s eyes were closed and he didn’t move.
“Shit,” Variam said, staring at Jagadev. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said, frowning at Jagadev. The spell around Jagadev was incredibly complex. It was life magic, but with thick strands of the jinn’s power woven in, grey-black and opaque. It was interacting with Jagadev in some way, but I couldn’t figure out how.
Variam was staring at Jagadev like a dog at a hunk of meat, but he managed to tear his eyes away and look around. He ignored the gold and silver as though it wasn’t there. “Where’d she go?”
I swept the room with my diviner’s senses and nodded to one of the silk hangings. “Escape tunnel behind there.”
Variam looked at it, then back at Jagadev, clearly torn. “Can we catch her?”
“No,” I said with a sigh. I’d been searching for futures in which either of us caught up to Anne, and I hadn’t found a single one. “I don’t even know if she took the tunnel. For all I know she used that jinn to punch straight through the gate wards.”
“You got some other way to follow her?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Use that new hand of yours.”
“If it were that easy, I’d have found her already. Anne is at the top of the Council’s hit list, and she is taking a lot of care to be hard to trace.”
“You’re saying you can’t find her.”
“Yup.”
“Shit.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Well,” Variam said. “I guess we’ll just have to take him as the consolation prize.”
“Mm,” I said. I was wondering how long Anne had taken to overwhelm Jagadev and pin him like this. How long had we missed her by? My instincts said not long. Maybe no more than a few minutes. If I’d been faster, we might have been able to catch up with her . . .
. . . and do what? Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? “How long until you need to be back?”
“A while.”
I looked at Variam. Something about his tone of voice gave me the feeling that he was cutting things closer than that. “We should probably stop talking about this anyway. Jagadev’s been listening since we walked in.”
Jagadev opened his eyes. The pupils were golden and slitted like a cat’s, and they stared down at us without expression. Variam took a step forward. The fingers on his right hand twitched, and the futures of violence suddenly spiked.
“Vari,” I said warningly.
“Can he hear?” Variam said.
“And speak.”
“Why?” Variam spat.
“Because Anne left it that way,” I said. I wondered what she’d had to say to her old enemy, and how I could get Jagadev to tell us.
“Hey, asshole,” Variam told Jagadev. “Remember me?”
Jagadev stared down at Variam.
“You’re going to tell me exactly what you did,” Variam said. “And who helped you. If not”—he flexed his right hand—“we’re going to see how well that fur of yours burns.”
Jagadev didn’t so much as blink. The rakshasa’s features were hard to read, but even pinned to the wall and motionless, he somehow managed to look down on Variam as if the fire mage were some sort of insect.
There was a dangerous tone to Variam’s voice, and I could sense violence flickering very close now. “I’m not going to ask again.”
“He’s not going to answer, Vari.”
“Yes he will.”
“No, he won’t.” I was still sorting through the futures, snatching glimpses between the shifting possibilities. “Setting him on fire won’t make him talk. Burning pieces off him won’t make him talk. He’s not afraid of you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Variam said. “Let’s change—”
Jagadev spoke suddenly, his voice a purring rumble. “Your brother was a coward.”
Variam went very still.
“He died begging for his life,” Jagadev said. He raised one eyebrow slightly. “Would you like to know how?”
“Shut up,” Variam said.