Doppelganger

6 Ravelle [Mirage]

Mirage awoke with a start, and didn’t recognize her surroundings.

She sat up swiftly, battle instincts leaping into readiness. No one else was in the small, plain room. It was sparsely furnished, with just the bed she had been lying on, a small wardrobe, and a chair. The wardrobe doors were closed.

Moving as silently as possible, Mirage rose and stepped over to the wardrobe. Then, after taking a single breath to steady her muscles, she threw the door open.

No one was inside.

Reassured that she was alone in the room, she turned to survey it once more. Her saddlebags were there, piled on the chair; their presence did not clear up her confusion in the slightest. Where was she? And how in the Goddess’s many names had she gotten there? Her blades were with everything else, so whatever had happened, she wasn’t a prisoner.

Did I get waring drunk, and just don’t remember it? I don’t have a hangover, though. Headache, yes. There was a mildly painful lump on one side of her head. Was there a fight? What happened?

There was a tiny window on one wall, but it only looked out onto a narrow alley and another building beyond. Nothing moved in the alley save for a stray cat. No clues there to help her figure out where she was.

Which left the door.

She belted on her sword and dagger before trying the handle. This situation might turn out to be harmless, but she’d rather be overarmed and laugh at herself than walk into trouble unprepared. The handle turned easily, and she stepped into an unfamiliar hallway.

Other doors lined its length; she put an ear to each one briefly, but heard no sounds from inside. When she came to the end of the hallway she found a staircase leading downward, curtained off by strings of enameled beads. Teria, then. I recognize the style. What am I doing in Teria? And where in the Warrior’s name is Kerestel?

The stairs threatened to creak, so Mirage took them slowly, shifting her weight onto each one with exaggerated care. The effort made her head pound. It took forever to get downstairs. When she reached the next-to-last step, she flattened herself against the wall and peered through the beads into the room beyond.

She was looking into the common room of an inn. It was filled with trestle tables, each flanked by a pair of benches. At the other end of the room, a few comfortable chairs made an arc around the hearth. The fireplace was cold and empty right now, but Mirage saw a familiar blond head over the back of one of the chairs.

Alerted by his own instincts, Eclipse rose and saw her through the beads. “Sen!”

Mirage relaxed her wary muscles. She pushed through the curtain and walked to the middle of the room, survey-ing it. “At the risk of sounding like a minstrel’s bad tale, where are we, and what happened?”

He gave her a careful look. “I can answer that, sort of, but not really.” Taking her arm, he pulled her gently toward a chair. “Come sit down, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“This isn’t reassuring me,” she said as she followed his pull.

“I bet.” They sat down, and he looked directly at her. “I can’t really answer your question because I don’t understand what happened. We were riding along, doing nothing special. It was pretty far into the night, but we were trying to get to Chiero, and neither of us was tired—or at least you said you weren’t—so we kept going. Then you pitched headfirst out of your saddle onto the road.”

Mirage’s eyes widened.

“I think you were unconscious before you hit the ground, but if you weren’t, the fall certainly put you out.” Eclipse shrugged. “We were almost to Chiero by then, so I tied you onto your saddle and brought you here to Marell’s. That was yesterday.”

Marell. A Silverfire agent, though not one Mirage had ever dealt with personally, hence the unfamiliarily of her surroundings. He owned this inn; it gave him a good means for gathering information that he could then pass along to the Hunters.

“Do you remember any of this?” Eclipse asked, worry lining his face.

Mirage leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, and stared at the floor. “We left Starfall. There was nothing else important in Tari-nakana’s house, not after the itinerary.” In her peripheral vision she saw Eclipse nod, but he did not interrupt her. “We went to Nasha in Handom; she told us Avalanche had last been seen on the road to Insebrar. On the way east, we wrote to our witch contact, because we wanted to ask about the new Fire Heart Key. She said she’d meet us in person in Ravelle. We agreed because it was on the way to Insebrar. She hadn’t known about Avalanche working for Tari-nakana.”

“What about the fall? Do you remember that?”

It was hard to pick any one day or night of riding out from the rest; the last five years of her life were a smear of roads, inns, towns, saddling her horse, unsaddling her horse, building campfires, being rained on, with only occasional landmarks to distinguish one bit of traveling from another. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help her memory. Riding, riding, then a blank. “No. I don’t.”

A short, tidy man came into the room then and introduced himself to Mirage as Marell. After reassuring him of her health—she felt fine, aside from the lump on her head—she asked about Avalanche.

Marell nodded briskly. “Bodyguard job in Vilardi. The Silk Consortium is there, negotiating with some of the major shipping companies. There’s a lot of bad blood, so the head of the Consortium hired Avalanche to keep poison out of his food and daggers out of his back.”

“How long are they there for?”

He tapped his fingers against his chin, head tilted back, apparently doing mental calculations. “They broke up recently over some argument, I believe, but it was a temporary halt only. They’re aiming for an agreement within the next week.”

That gave them just enough time to meet the witch in Ravelle before heading on to Vilardi. Mirage was relieved; she had been afraid her mysterious blackout would make them miss Avalanche. He was their best hope for figuring out the motive behind the assassination. “What time is it now?”

“The temple rang Light an hour or so ago.”

More than half the day wasted. Mirage wanted to swear, but restrained herself; Marell looked too proper for that. “Well, we can still get a few hours of riding in.”

Eclipse shook his head before she even had the words out. “No. You need to rest some more.”

“I’ve just slept for a full day. That’s plenty of rest.”

“You don’t know that you’re well yet!”

Mirage brushed one hand against the opposite wrist, drawing his gaze. Her sleeve covered the scar, but he understood. They were blood-oathed to their Hunt. Catching Avalanche in Vilardi was more important than pretty much anything else.

Eclipse sighed. “We’ll saddle our horses ourselves, Marell. Thanks for your help.”

They camped along the road that night, having ridden as long as they could without endangering Mist and Sparker in the poor light; the road here was not well-maintained. Mirage toasted bread as Eclipse saw to the horses, then passed him food silently when he sat down at the fire.

“What do you think caused it?” he asked between bites of bread and cheese.

She didn’t have to ask what he was referring to. Her blackout had been on her mind all afternoon, too. “I have no idea.”

“You might have been poisoned,” he said. “I can’t figure out how, though.”

“Not poison,” Mirage said, shaking her head. “Can you think of anything that works like that, delaying for however long, and then taking the victim down between one breath and the next? I know I didn’t feel myself fading. It was sudden.”

Eclipse considered it for a moment before shaking his head as well. “No. I don’t know anything that would do that.”

“Not to mention that there’s no good reason I can see to poison me like that. What did it accomplish? It delayed us for about half a day. That’s it.”

“Maybe delay was the point.”

“But only half a day? I can think of six different ways to slow someone down, every one of them more effective than that.”

They ate in silence for a while, listening to the crackling of the fire and the small noises of the horses shifting around. The weather was hot and still, with scarcely a hint of a breeze. Mirage suddenly missed Silverfire, far to the west; it generally had cool evenings, with a breeze off the nearby river.

“What if it was a spell?” Eclipse said.

Mirage stared at him. “What?”

“A spell. That would explain the speed, and also why neither of us noticed anything. A witch might have knocked you out.”

“And why would she do that?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t say I had it all figured out Again, maybe someone wants to delay us.”

“Kerestel, we’re working for the witches. One of them has been killed. They want to know who did it. Why would they slow us down?”

Eclipse put his hands up. “Fine, fine. It was just a random idea. I never said it would clear everything up.”

Mirage took a deep breath. Snapping Eclipse’s head off wasn’t fair, even if he should have known that was a sore spot. His suggestion of magic had touched a nerve already raw from her discovery in Tari-nakana’s house.

“Sorry,” he said, before she could say anything. “I should’ve thought before I said that about a spell.” He paused, and looked down at his hands. “It is something we should keep in mind, though.”

Mirage touched his shoulder. “It’s all right. We have to consider this from every angle. If the plausible explanations don’t make sense, it’s time to look at the implausible ones. And I’m going to have to stop twitching at every mention of magic; I’m working for a witch, for crying out loud.”

He grinned. “Old habits die hard.”

“But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be killed.” Mirage stretched and tossed the heel of her bread into the fire. “You want to take first watch?”

They settled themselves for the night, but Mirage did not fall asleep immediately. She couldn’t. Lying with her back to the fire, she stared into the shadowy underbrush and brooded.

Fine talk you make. “We have to consider this from every angle.” And yet you don’t tell him the whole story.

It was easy to rationalize her silence. She herself didn’t understand what she had felt in that instant before she fell from her saddle. It had flashed in her mind and then vanished without a trace, leaving her unsure she’d felt anything at all. But the memory had branded itself vividly enough in her mind that she couldn’t quite dismiss it as imagination.

Lying in the darkness, she closed her eyes and retreated into her mind, summoning the memory back. What had she felt?

The closest analogy she could find was the feeling she’d had a few weeks before, riding to Corberth with Eclipse. For the briefest of instants, it had felt as if an old and well-known friend, absent for many years, had been at her side again, as Eclipse was. There and gone, all in a heartbeats And then, before she could do more than register the flash, she had blacked out.

And I suppose it’s too much to hope that the two are unrelated.

Could it possibly have something to do with Eclipse? He was the one person she would consider an old and well-known friend. There was no one else, either from Silverfire or the years before that, whom she had felt particularly close to. Certainly not her parents, whom she had seen only a few times since being sent to the temple at the age of five; and they were dead now anyway. Maybe I was visited by their spirits. Wouldn’t that be a neat trick.

It had felt familiar. But Eclipse had been there, just a few steps behind her on the road. And it hadn’t felt like him anyway.

Mirage shivered, then made herself lie still. She heard Eclipse shift, but he said nothing. I don’t want this to have anything to do with the witches. Bad enough that I have red hair. Worse still that Tari-nakana was tracking me. I’ll work for them, but that’s the extent of my involvement. I don’t want them interfering with my life. Any more than they have already.

She took a long, slow, deep breath, and exhaled it carefully. Then, putting such thoughts firmly aside, she cleared her mind and went to sleep.

They pressed their pace to Ravelle. Eclipse still showed worry for Mirage’s health, but her only concern was getting to Vilardi before Avalanche left. They’d already been weeks on the road since taking the commission, and she didn’t want to waste more time chasing their fellow Hunter across the land.

Before they continued on, however, they had to talk to their witch contact. So Mirage and Eclipse dressed once more in uniforms and masks, and slipped through the nighttime streets of Ravelle.

The house they went to this time was smaller and less wealthy than the one the witch had used in Corberth, though the town itself was larger. It had no retaining wall, and also no guards; Mirage and Eclipse went directly up to the back door, where they were met once more by a Cousin. It was a different woman from before, Mirage noticed, but she was no more surprised at their arrival than the first one had been.

The witch rose when they were conducted into the slightly shabby parlor. The lighting in here was brighter; the witch had been writing, but Mirage could not see the page clearly enough to read it. She took a closer look at their contact, though, as the room in Corberth had been too dim to afford a good examination. Her hair was darker than most, more of a red-brown than a true red. Wide-spaced, large eyes gave her a perpetual look of surprise, but it was betrayed by the harder set of her mouth. If she controlled her expression, though, she could trick people into thinking her less than shrewd. Mirage wondered if she knew that.

“Sit down,” the witch invited, gesturing to the hard-backed chairs.

“We have several questions,” Eclipse said as he seated himself. The witch nodded for him to proceed. “First, is it possible to knock someone unconscious from a distance? Is there a spell that would do that?”

Mirage would have cheerfully strangled him. She clasped her hands in her lap instead and vowed to have a little “chat” with him later.

The witch seemed confused by the question. “From a distance? It depends on what you mean by distance. You have to be able to see them with your own eyes. It can’t be done from across the city, or from a different domain. Why?”

If you tell her, I’ll break your elbows, Kerestel. This is my business, not yours.

“It might be useful for capturing the assassin,” he said smoothly.

“Oh. Well, it could be done, if I were close enough. Have you found the assassin, then?” A hint of eagerness crept into her melodious voice.

Eclipse shook his head. “Not yet. We’re getting closer, though. As I wrote to you, we’re fairly sure he was trained at Wolf star. That narrows the field considerably.”

“And what about the employer?”

“That’s what we wanted to ask you about,” Mirage said. “Who succeeded Tari-nakana as Key of her Path?”

“Kekkai-nai. I mean, she’s Kekkai-nakana now.”

“What was she doing before she became Key?”

“She was the regional coordinator for the north—Askavya, Liak, and Miest.”

Mirage remembered the name now; she had seen it on no small number of papers in Tari-nakana’s study. Closing her eyes, she thought back to those reports; had there been anything of note in them? Nothing came to mind. “Has Kekkai-nakana made any noticeable changes in the policies of her Path since she became Key?”

“Not that I can think of. But she hasn’t been in office for very long, of course.”

“What about Tari-nakana?” Eclipse asked. “What projects was she engaged in before she died?” The witch hesitated, and he lifted his hand in reminder of the blood-oath. They had every right in the world to know.

The witch nodded. “I’m sorry. In truth, though, Tari-nakana wasn’t doing anything at all—nothing significant, that is. She was doing her job, obviously.”

“Not ‘obviously,’” Mirage said. “Was there something she wasn’t doing? A duty she was neglecting, or a request she was ignoring? Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to remove her from office for ineffectiveness or incompetence?”

“She was quite competent,” the witch said, her voice sharp.

Mirage made a conciliatory gesture. “The assassin’s employer may have been unhappy with her failure to do something. Or perhaps he expects her successor to take a particular action that Tari-nakana wouldn’t.”

“Do you know of any projects Kekkai-nakana has been working on?” Eclipse asked. “Tasks assigned to her by Tari-nakana, or by her Prime? Did she have a pet project that might gain in importance now that she’s a Key?”

Their contact shrugged, looking slightly hunted. “I don’t know. Really. That’s the kind of thing you’d really have to ask Kekkai-nakana.”

“Then we need to meet with her,” Mirage said.

The witch’s control of her expression was greater than Mirage had thought; she quelled the flicker that ran across her face to the point where its nature could not be identified. Surprise? Unease? “Perhaps,” the witch said slowly. “I’ll have to write to her and ask. Heart Keys don’t travel often, and Kekkai-nakana is particularly busy right now, as you can imagine.”

They should have tried to set this up while they were still in Starfall. “Perhaps some magically arranged audience,” Eclipse suggested. “Is there any way to do that? Talk to her at a distance, and not through one of those sheets?”

“Maybe,” the witch said. “I’ll have to ask. When I get an answer… I’ll send the answer to your paper. You do still have that?”

“Of course,” Eclipse said, and to his credit did not sound irritated by the question.

“Good,” the witch said briskly. “I’ll write to you, then, when I know about Kekkai-nakana. Until then, do keep looking into other clues. The Hunter bodyguard, for example.”

They stood and saluted her, then left without another word.

“That wasn’t the same woman,” Mirage said as they rode out of Ravelle’s eastern gate in the predawn light.

Eclipse glanced at her. “You think so?”

“She looked the same. And her voice was the same. But the way she spoke was entirely different.”

“Much faster, and less formal. I agree.” He fell silent for a moment as they prodded their horses into a trot to pass three empty wagons trundling along the road back to their farms. When they were alone once more, he picked up where he had left off. “Why, though?”

“Depends on which one that face really belongs to. If the first witch looks like that, and the second was using an illusion, it may just be that our real contact was occupied elsewhere. Since she couldn’t meet us on our way to Insebrar, she delegated someone else to take care of it.”

Eclipse pondered that for a moment. “That makes sense, I guess.”

“Unless neither one of them really has that face. That could be blamed on simple, standard-issue witch paranoia. If we can’t identify our contact, that’s one less bit of information we have.”

“Did you get the feeling this second witch wasn’t a member of the Fire Ray?” Eclipse said suddenly.

Now it was Mirage’s turn to ponder. She hadn’t considered that at all, but now that she did… “I think you might be right. She knew precious little about what was going on with Tari-nakana and Kekkai-nakana. Not that I expect leaders of any stripe to tell their subordinates everything they do, but she seemed particularly clueless. Which could be her natural state of mind. Or not.” A thought struck Mirage then, and she pulled one glove off, cuing Mist with her knees to stop in the road.

Eclipse circled Sparker back to her side. “What is it?”

She extended her right wrist to him. “What color would you call that scar?”

“Sort of a faded brown—but there’s a bint of green in it, too. Which is how it’ll be recognizable as a blood-oath scar. It doesn’t look natural.”

“Now, I might be wrong about this, but I seem to remember a conversation back when we were trainees, where Talon mentioned that you can tell the Ray of the witch who cast the blood-oath spell by the color of the scar it leaves.”

Eclipse looked at the scar again, then at her. “Greenish brown. Earth?”

“That would be my guess. It’s certainly not a fiery color.”

“So if our second witch wasn’t Fire Ray, neither was our first.”

Mirage pulled her gauntlet back on and kneed Mist forward; they couldn’t afford to waste all day sitting on their horses in the middle of the road. “We thought she might be Void Ray, remember. And maybe we weren’t wrong. But if she was Earth, and this second witch was something other than Fire—why are so many witches of other Rays involved in this investigation?”

“Tari-nakana was an important woman. Her assassination might mean trouble for all of them.”

“Maybe. But it seems too pat.”

More silence as they rode. Mirage kept quiet, for she could feel Eclipse was working through something in his mind. Morning had come in full by the time he had his thoughts together. She looked up sharply when he spoke again.

“Do you remember anything odd about those papers and letters in Tari-nakana’s study?”

“I assume you mean the ones besides the itinerary.” Mirage considered it, then shook her head. “Nothing jumps to mind. It looked like routine paperwork and correspondence.”

“Who was she receiving letters from?”

“Witches, mostly. Also Lords and Ladies of domains, of course, and some of their more important ministers and governors. But the bulk of it was from witches.”

“Which makes sense, given that she was a Key, and of the Heart Path to boot. She was responsible for coordinating the activities of her Ray, and sending out orders that came down from her Prime. But what I want to know is, why were so many of those letters from witches—un-ranked ones, no less—outside her Ray?”

Mirage closed her eyes and summoned to mind as many of the endless sheets of paper as she could recall. She supposed Eclipse was right, but still—“Most of those letters were unimportant. Personal in nature. Like the one about the cat.”

“They looked unimportant.”

“You think they were in code?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. We may have to ask our contact—or whoever it is we’re dealing with now—to send us the papers from Starfall. I think I’m going to want another look at them.”

The thought of having to cart the contents of Tari-nakana’s study with them across the land made Mirage cringe. “Let’s at least wait until we’ve spoken to Avalanche. If there’s something hidden in those letters, he may know about it.”