The Amethyst Angle Read online

  The Amethyst Angle

  (A Mageworks Mystery #1)

  by

  C. Ryan Bymaster

  1

  WALK THE LINE

  This city will be the death of me. Or, I’ll be the death of it. As for now, I just want to make it through another night.

  Wrought Isles is a city of mageworks splendor and political corruption, of heroes and villains, of hardworking citizens and backstabbing thieves. They all strive to carve out a future, slaying vile monsters or murdering innocent people, practicing family trades or brandishing blood-stained blades. Me, I wade through it all, trying to keep my boots clean enough to sleep at night. And right now, all I want is to get home without being harassed by any of them.

  I turn down Fermenster Street, my street, where the wan yellow light drooling from the few charged telektric lamps accentuate the pits and cracks in the worn cobblestones. Jagged shadows give way to inky darkness further down as the anemic glow fades to nothing. It isn’t the treacherous stones that halt my steps at the corner, nor is it the eerie yet impotent crackle from the crystals of the nearest uncharged lamps.

  It’s the definitive movement I catch out of the corners of my eyes, on either side of the street. It’s bad enough that I have to avoid the fetid garbage clogging the gutters, but now it looks like I’ll have to slog my way through the potentially lethal, breathing trash, too. I’m not in the mood for this. Hells, no one in the entire city of Wrought Isles would be in the mood for this.

  I roll my shoulders, not to relieve stress, but in a blatant show of “I see you, so let’s do this.” A precise adjustment of my overcoat allows the custom-crafted six-spell at my left hip to catch a bit of stale air. My wand isn’t my only form of defense, but it’s the safest for all parties involved. If it fails me and my true nature comes to bear, there’s no telling how much darker this night will get.

  I crack my neck and trudge forward, straddling the center of the street; I won’t gain anything by hesitating. As I do, two men step in front of the nearest lamp ahead to my left. Their tailored white-on-grey suits sport crimson splotches and smears like trophies, tokens from previous nights’ work.

  In tandem, the two men on my right shuffle a few steps closer to me.

  The mageworks lamp nearest them sheds no light as its crystal hasn’t been charged in weeks, but I don’t need the telektric glow to know who those two represent. What they represent. I’d been in their shabby boots before, a decade and more ago. Even in the cloying shadows I can imagine their black, silver-trimmed Watch uniforms: wrinkled, worn, and handed down, with a small brass bar pinned on the underside of a lapel of their overcoats.

  A salty tang, swept up from the bay, breathes against my back, down my neck, and on past me as Fermenster Street eagerly awaits my course of action. My boots echo as I veer left and the two lawmen from the Watch fold back into the shadows from whence they came. As much as the men and women from the Watch despise me for turning my back on them, they won’t risk harassing me in front of witnesses, even if those witnesses work for the Arcanium, the city’s training grounds for dark magic and ruthless killers. No doubt they’ll head back to the Watch Station to report to their captain, Triply Standard, that they’d missed an opportunity to “speak” with me. Trip and I have differing views on dealing with crime, and those differing views have led to blows on more than one occasion.

  And speaking of blows …

  “Gideon Knell,” the larger of the two white-suited thugs barks when my destination becomes apparent. He’s close to six and half feet—at least half a head taller than me. The dim lamplight casts his face in devious shadow as he leers at me, cracking his knuckles one at a time. The sound echoes in the silence, a warning of what’s to come.

  “Glad to be wanted,” I reply, stopping just outside the pool of light.

  “You haven’t paid your tithe in months,” the smaller thug says from behind the knuckle-cracker.

  I lean to the side to get a better view of him and wish I hadn’t. He bares his rotting teeth at me in a mirthless smile and my eyes water at just imagining his breath.

  “The Arcanium falling on tough times?” I say. “Seems so, if the two of you are all the dark academy can muster.”

  Sticking with a theme, the bigger of the two cracks his knuckles again, this time on my jaw. How someone as cumbersome as he appears to be could move with such blinding speed is beyond me. In fact, most thought is beyond me as another fist drives the air from my lungs and my kneecaps crack on the cobblestone.

  “You don’t pay the tithe you owe,” the smaller one says over the ringing in my ears, “and the Arcanium will keep sending us to collect what we can.”

  Still on my knees and doubled over, I try to keep my swimming vision focused on the stones and the insanely large boots situated inches from my fingers. A few strands of blood splatter to the ground and the sight triggers my instincts. Something primal, something locked deep inside me for years boils to the surface, urging me to get up and end this now.

  The boots shuffle closer. “Well? What’ll it be, Knell?”

  I ball my fists and cage my inner demon, winning the battle by only a fraction of a heartbeat. I spit blood at those boots, the only thing I can possibly offer as tithe at the moment. No surprise, then, when the thug wraps his paw around the back of my neck and slams my face to the street.

  Smaller boots fill the area of vision afforded me by the only eye not shoved against the rough stone. “You’ve got ’til the end of the month, Knell.”

  “I’m sure I can come up with this month’s coin by then,” I dribble out, the coppery taste of my own blood thick on my tongue.

  He drives his boot into my side; apparently, that was the wrong answer.

  “That’s three months’ tithe, Knell,” the smaller thug growls as I gasp for breath. “I don’t care if it’s in coin, information, or even the key to your office. The time you spent training at the Arcanium doesn’t come free. If you knew you couldn’t pay the monthly tithe after leaving, you shouldn’t have sought our help in the first place. Even you aren’t exempt from the rules, no matter who your father was, how great he was.”

  I suck in enough air to grunt an agreement to the terms and the pressure on my neck disappears. By the time I manage to make it to my hands and knees, the two thugs are walking away, heading out of Fermenster’s maw.

  The pain wracking my body is nothing compared to the roaring of the dark beast within me, urging me to call them back, to show them what I really am. They may have respected my father, but if they knew what curse I inherited from him, they would fear me. My father’s blood boils in my veins again, churning like an autumn tempest sweeping in from the bay, and my fingers press painfully against the stones of the street in anticipation.

  The nearest lamp flickers as the charged peridot crystal inside the warped glass succumbs to the draw of my curse. With a testament to my bullheadedness, I gather my will, rein in my dark thoughts, and slowly push myself to a standing position. The telektric lamp resumes it feeble glow as the tempest within me ebbs. I wipe the blood from my busted lip and nose with the back of a sleeve and risk a glance over to where the two watchmen had been standing. Thankfully, they didn’t linger in the shadows, didn’t witness the beating I’d just allowed myself to take.

  The last thing I want is to have Trip see me as weak. Hells, I don’t want anybody to view me that way, but the alternative would be far worse. Perhaps if the two thugs had come upon me in the isolated confines of my office, the outcome would have been different and the Arcanium would be short two collectors in addition to three-month’s worth of my tithe.

  I limp down the rest of Fermenster, passing six close-set buildings before reaching mine. Only one of those buildi
ngs is kept relatively clean; the rest appear to remain standing only out of respect to their neighbors because they have no room to fall. I head up the steps to my dismal stoop and whisper the incant to unseal my front door. A tiny keyhole appears, mundane and there only because I like the feel of physically unlocking the door to my place of business and residence.

  I close the door behind me and face the abysmal darkness of an entry hall just wide enough for me to spread my arms out. A few steps ahead, just after my small bathroom, a set of narrow stairs leads up to my office on the second floor, then turns back on itself to continue on up to my third-floor bedroom. Past the stairs is the narrow door that opens to what I generously call my kitchen. With business being slow, I rarely have enough coin to stock the pantry, and the old-fashioned stove burns wood because I can’t even afford to charge a ruby to use as a heat source. At least the rusted wash bin, tapped into the city’s water pipes, works.

  Fresh blood drips from my nose and I duck into my bathroom to wash it away before making my way up the stairs. My steps are sure, even in the pitch black, as I push my office door open and head straight for the shelf that holds my dwindling supply of liquor.

  After the third attempt, I find a bottle that isn’t just for show and pour the last of its contents into a silver chalice. Swallowing a fiery gut’s worth of the stuff, I finally meander over to my desk, where I pull the striker from the top drawer and spark the lamp to light up my little world.

  I adjust the flame to a modest size, not wanting to waste more oil than necessary, and plop into my chair, chalice in hand and blood drying on my lips. I slosh the liquor around, knowing full well the weight of the silver would easily buy me at least one month free of the dark academy’s cursed extortion.

  The flickering glow of the lamp scantly reaches the walls of my spare office. Where it does, it catches and reflects off various tools of my trade and a motley collection of trinkets that have served as payment for my services, much like the silver chalice in my hand. While those men and women of the Watch can depend on a steady income from the city, I tend to manage by getting paid in baubles and cheap family heirlooms … if that. The only reason a client handed over the chalice in payment for finding his brother’s killer was because the fool thought it was made of tin.

  Hells, I’ve been paid for my services in home-sewn quilts.

  Twice.

  If sentimental value ever becomes common barter, I’ll be a king among peasants, these dusty shelves my overflowing coffer, this creaky chair my throne. For an instant, I’m almost content with my lot in this life. Then the soft fluttering of leathery wings sends the lone flame on my desk dancing. I heave a resigned sigh, my battered chest protesting as I exhale through swollen lips.

  From the depth of the shadows above, a wry voice comments, “That looked painful, Giddy.”

  I sit up straight and narrow my eyes at the pinpoints of light glinting off feline eyes in the darkness. “You watched the whole time and didn’t lift a claw to help, Durmet?”

  My brown-furred morph-imp partner, a demon capable of changing his shape at will, flaps into the light and lands on the edge of my desk, all three and a half feet of him. As he settles on his haunches, his forked tail lashing about behind his high-riding wings, Durmegon’itilz’athizea—or Durmet, for those not graced with a tongue from one of the Lesser Hells—clicks six of his eight nails together as he cocks his elongated feline head to the side. If Durmet were a man, I imagine he’d be drumming his fingers on the table or chewing his nails, both in nervousness and embarrassment.

  “Well?”

  “I watched from the bedroom window, boss,” Durmet admits. “I didn’t think you wanted any help. Then again, I didn’t think you’d let them paint the street with your blood, either.”

  I wave my empty hand his way, both in acceptance of what he likely meant as an apology as well as the incident as whole. “The Arcanium would have just sent more slack-jaws and ham-fists if I’d done anything … extreme.”

  “See, boss? I knew you wouldn’t need my expertise. Besides, you could have taught them a lesson with—”

  “Durmet,” I say softly, keeping the lesser demon from going on. “Stop. Just stop.”

  He ducks his head and something loosely related to a purr claws its way from his throat. “You didn’t bring anything back with you,” he points out, as blunt as a brick to the temple.

  He’s referring to my latest case, one in which a sop of a husband, my employer, has gone and lost his wife. The wife has—or had, perhaps—a mageworks shop in the Quay, a little place where she overcharged for under-charging crystals. I know firsthand of her dubious deals because I went to her shop once, to get my six-spell raring to go. One of its “charged” fire crystals didn’t hold enough power to singe a fly. Granted, she was one of the few mageworks shops willing to charge my illegal weapon without notifying the Watch, but that was no call for short-charging me like that.

  “She’s either in chains or at the bottom of the bay,” I say.

  Durmet’s wings twitch. “You should have asked for payment upfront.”

  He’s right, but I still have some sense of morality—a blessed reminder of my mother’s blood, no doubt. My father may have been a powerful arcane mage, but my mother was as pure as they came. She was spirit mage who practiced healing, both with magic and with words, and because of her I couldn’t bring myself to take the husband’s coin when I knew it was a lost cause from word one.

  Not that I had explicitly hoped, but when the missing woman’s husband had come knocking, hat in hand and tear in eye, to hire me to find the charlatan of a woman, I’d assumed she’d run afoul of one of the gangs in town, or possibly the Watch. More likely though, the Magician’s Aristocracy, with their stiff-necked, downward-gazing members of the College, finally caught wind of the woman’s closed-door dealings and paid her a visit.

  A final visit.

  The Aristocracy governs Wrought Isles with an iron first. The people look to the Head Magistrate to keep them safe, to protect them from crime, to banish evil creatures and to keep the Arcanium and its unholy practices at bay. I’ve seen firsthand what the Aristocracy does to those who threaten their authority. Sometimes I wonder if they’re as bad as the Acranium. At least the Arcanium doesn’t hide behind laws.

  Durmet takes flight as I pinch the bridge of my nose and drain my chalice. By the time I put it down, he’s back, hovering above my desk with today’s newspaper clutched in a rear paw. It flutters to my desk and he lands atop it, looking at me as though his purpose is obvious.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You need to start looking for cases, boss. Can’t keep waiting for them to walk in the door.”

  I pull the paper out from under him, his claws rending it like a tailor’s scissors through fine silk.

  As I peruse the tattered front page, Durmet points a claw toward an article. “More disappearances. Like the case you should have demanded payment upfront for.”

  I spread the paper open after reading page one’s headline about how the College is accepting even fewer candidates this year. Fine by me if the Aristocracy is training fewer and fewer magicians. If you ask me, they have too much influence and power in Wrought Isles as it is. A government should be run by the people, not the other way around.

  I pretend to scan the paper, instead gazing through the slits in page one to catch Durmet practically dancing on my desk. “Is there something in particular I’m looking for?”

  His eyes gloss over as he blinks. “Page four, boss.”

  I sigh and fold the paper as directed before setting it down between the two of us and reviewing the reports of more missing people. “You read the entire paper?”

  “You were gone a while this time.” His knobby shoulders rise and fall, a rippling effect that carries to his wing tips. “And since you don’t approve of me venturing out …”

  The last thing I need is to have someone link the morph-imp to me. A demon, even a lesser one like ol’ Durmet he
re, walking around free as a nymph in a glade would lead to questions about who’d let him loose on this plane. And how. I may have inherited the morph-imp from my father, and our relationship may not be as straightforward as some would think, but we work well enough together. Which means he needs to keep his cursed head out of public view. As a morph-imp, he does have talents that allow him to go about this plane looking much less demony, but if someone were to see through his ruse, that’d be it.

  For the both of us.

  “I was thinking,” he says, punctuating his words with clicking nails, “that you maybe find out what’s going on. That you find out what’s happening to these missing people and collect a handsome fee.”

  I spread my hands, taking in our meager accommodations, our obvious lack of telektric lights that even the poorest of the poor could afford on occasion. “We can barely keep above water chasing one case at a time, Durmet. What makes you think we could take on an entire city’s worth of cases all at once? We don’t have coin enough to last that long. Besides, who’s going to pay us up front?”

  He takes flight, the caustic bite of my words driving him to his perch in the far corner, in the deepest of shadows. I turn up the flame so I can make out more than the sheen of his gold-then-green eyes. As the light finds him, it’s with his tail wrapped around his ankles, his arms around his knees. How a demon can look like a pouting orphan without a toy to call his own is beyond me. It may be a show, but still I fall for it.

  “Durmet,” I say, the birth of an apology on my tongue. He lifts his head and I open my mouth to continue but my office door swings open, the hinges screaming for attention, and I snap my mouth shut.

  That’s when she steps into my office, dimming the lamplight with her own brilliance as she smiles demurely at me.

  If I had known what would come of this unexpected visit, well, let’s just say I would have made sure to have locked the cursed front door behind me.

  Hells, maybe I’d have made a right instead of a left earlier that night as I walked down Fermenster Street to my place. I’d rather have spent the night in jail with Trip demanding answers from me than have stood up from my chair in that moment and smiled back at the beautiful disaster standing in my office.