Void's Tale by Christopher Nuttall (ebook reader wifi txt) 📕

and stood in front of her shop.  It was a two-story building, standing alone instead of part of a larger apartment block.  That wasn’t uncommon amongst the more interesting alchemists, who tended to prefer some distance between themselves and their neighbours, but it didn’t fit what I’d been told of her.  My lips quirked in sour amusement.  Lord Ashworth was too ignorant of the real world to realise when he was being scammed.  He probably thought no one would dare to try.  Someone might have simply told him what he wanted to hear ...

I pushed the thought aside as I stepped up to the door and tested the wards.  My first impression had been correct.  The wards were common, too much so.  The design was just too well understood for safety, not when there were hundreds of magicians who knew how to break them.  There were none of the little tweaks that would have made cracking the wards far harder, even for me.  They were either shielding something more complex - and dangerous - or they’d been thrown together by someone who didn’t give much of a damn.  I didn’t like the implications, if the latter was true.  An alchemist’s shop could be very dangerous.  Her stockpile of ingredients might be on the verge of exploding.

The wards glittered around my fingertips as I pressed them against the door.  It was easy to insert my magic into the spellware, then weaken them enough to unlock the door.  The mundane lock was tougher, but I had no trouble casting a spell to mimic a key long enough to get inside.  I expected the interior wards to snap at me, the moment I pushed the door open with my foot, but there were none.  I was almost disappointed.  The apothecary was a magician’s place of power, her home.  She could have spent the last few years weaving every possible defensive spell into her wards.  Didn’t she care, in the slightest, about her own safety?

I muttered a night-vision spell and looked around.  The ground floor seemed to be no different from any other apothecary.  There was a solid wooden counter, the wood scorched and pitted, in front of a place for the shopkeeper and shelves that should have been groaning under the weight of countless ingredient jars.  They were empty, the jars taken away by ... by who?  My eyes narrowed as I inched forward, keeping a wary eye out for traps.  Mistress Layla had lived and worked alone, without even a shopgirl.  She could have made sure that anyone who crossed the counter wouldn’t have had a chance to regret it.  But there was nothing.  I checked the cash drawer underneath the counter and frowned.  There was enough money in plain sight, utterly unprotected, to feed a family for a month.  And yet it had been left untouched?

Strange, I thought.  Who would steal the potions ingredients, but not the money?

My puzzlement grew as I pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the rear chamber.  It was a brewing room and a spellchamber, wrapped into one.  Mistress Layla had carved runes and spell circles into the stone floor, then covered them with wooden brewing tables.  It was careless, to say the least.  The risk of an accident was just too high - and she was experienced enough to know it.  And yet ... my eyes wandered the room.  The shelves of ingredients had been emptied, too, jars carried away by ... by who?  There were a handful of scrolls on one of the shelves, but no books.  It was unlikely Mistress Layla had owned anything really interesting, yet ... I inspected the scrolls, quickly.  There was nothing new or dubious amongst them.  The apothecary didn’t seem to suit her at all.

I worked my way through the room, careful not to step into any of the circles.  It was hard to escape the impression that the chamber had already been searched once, by someone who had known precisely what they were doing.  They might not have touched the money, but they’d certainly taken anything they deemed useful.  And they’d done it without making a terrible mess.  Mistress Layla herself?  Had she left of her own free will?

She didn’t stay in touch with Lord Ashworth, I reminded myself.  I knew the man.  He was the sort of man who’d ask for a progress report at the worst possible time, heedless of the fact that giving the progress report would take time from actually working.  Mistress Layla might have known it too.  If she’d gone elsewhere, surely she would have told him something.

I finished searching the ground floor, then found the stairs and slipped up to the living quarters.  Mistress Layla had slept there.  There should have been an entire web of wards, designed to deter everything from spies to kidnappers.  And yet, the door was unmarked by magic.  It crossed my mind to wonder if Mistress Layla had lived somewhere else.  It wasn’t impossible, given how little effort had been put into warding the apothecary.  But it would have been odd ...

The bedroom loomed in front of me.  I tensed, remembering the spells my female cousins had been taught to protect their privacy as well as their property.  The female students at Whitehall had learnt a great many more.  And yet, there were none.  I gritted my teeth as I pushed the door open, peering into a room that looked as if the occupant had got up, prepared for a perfectly normal day ... and then simply never came home.  I inched inside, looking around carefully.  A handful of dresses and tunics hung from a rack, twinned with basic underclothes.  They looked very simple, wool and linen rather than furs or velvet.  Mistress Layla clearly couldn’t be bothered wearing the clothes appropriate for her rank.  My lips quirked.  I had the feeling I would have liked her ...

You might still, I reminded myself.  You don’t know