Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Semner as the man with the rope moved to the chair and began uncoiling his burden. “Water?”
    “Eh. We’ll only be three or four days. Won’t kill them to go without food. Water … Just soak the gags every few hours, let them suck the water out of ‘em.”
    “And if they have to relieve themselves?” Clearly he was still nervous about the notion of having an unrestrained mage in the room.
    Semner just grinned. “It’ll cover the scent of Rhoka’s vomit.”
    Shoulders straight and head held high, Liliana strode across the room and sat in the chair herself, rather than allowing herself to be manhandled into it. Even as Errit and the woman—Rin, presumably—began wrapping the ropes around her, her eyes locked on Kallist’s own. Slowly, deliberately, they drifted down to indicate the ropes, and back up. Ever so slightly, he nodded in turn.
    Without the slightest hint of sound, Liliana’s lips began to move.
    In a matter of moments, she was tied as thoroughly as Kallist himself, Semner had offered them another handful of snide and threatening comments, and the house had slowly emptied out. All that remained, now, were two bound prisoners, two nervous captors, and the sound of the ever-increasing rain.
    A little knowledge, or so the saying goes, is a dangerous thing. And that’s what Semner, undisciplined and unstudied as he was in the ways of magic, possessed: a little knowledge. If he’d known just a bit more, paid slightly better attention to the mages with whom he’d worked or the few lessons he’d received, he might’ve known just how quickly simple magics could be worked; might’ve realized how thoroughly he was being played when Liliana intimated that binding and gagging would prove anything more than an inconvenience.
    The necromancer had rotted the ropes away to sludge before Semner had even departed the house—a fact concealed by Kallist’s own spell, a minimalphantasmagoria that made the bindings appear as solid as ever, even shifting and rustling with the captives’ movements. And then they waited, the prisoners fidgeting, Errit nervously pacing the room, Rin digging around in the linens for viable gags and blindfolds. She finally settled on a few strips of bed sheet and the sleeves torn off an old tunic.
    Kallist winced as the cloth was shoved in his mouth and draped over his head. Yet even as the room vanished behind off-white linen, he allowed his body to go limp, his mind and his focus to sharpen, as he drew upon the mana of the wells and cisterns beneath the district’s roads. Earlier, hungover and all but drowning in adrenaline, he couldn’t make the spell work. But now, now he cast his sight out from his head; it felt, if anything, even easier than he’d anticipated. The ragged sheet seemed to draw near and then vanish as he surveyed the room from a spot several inches in front of his face. From there he watched and waited for Liliana to make the first move.
    The sound of the downpour faded, resuming the gentle background rustle of the night before. The shutters over the windows glowed faintly with the first stirrings of a bashful dawn.
    Errit actually uttered a startled squeak when Liliana stood up from her chair, doffed her bonds and removed the makeshift hood and gag with contemptuous ease, offering him her most dazzling, seductive smile.
    And that was more than enough distraction for Kallist to stand up and smash the thug over the back of the head with his chair.
    The sound didn’t wake Rin, who had gone to sleep away Errit’s first shift. Thanks to the shadowy form that had lurked beneath the bed since the start of Liliana’s chant, run its hideous limbs across the sleeping woman, and vanished once more into the æther, nothing would wake Rin ever again.
    “You certainly took your time,” Kallist said as he stepped across the bleeding, supine form, dropping his gag on the fellow’s face, a cheap and contemptuous shroud. “We’ve been free for over an hour.”
    “I had to