“None of the Renegai know how!” She pushed herself up from the ground, craning her neck back to look up at him. “Taking magic from others is evil. Only the imperial sorcerers practice that sort of perversion.”

“Perversion? My, what strong language.”

“Hunting down those with power, breeding them as slaves, keeping them in cages, and harvesting them for their magic? That’s how the Empire gathers its power. We don’t—we would never—” She had to stop talking then, because she had run out of air and couldn’t seem to draw in another breath.

Irun laughed, a harsh triumphant sound. “I don’t believe you. When one of your sorcerers dies—of old age, of course—you let his power die with him? You don’t transfer it to another sorcerer, or into a lodestone?”

“No.” She had to croak the word out, but she was past caring. “We let our people die in peace.”

“You waste their deaths, you mean. And none of you are tempted, is that it? None of you ever think about what you could do with your power multiplied by two, or three, or four. . . .”

Ileni rolled over and sat up. “No.”

“You’re lying.” Irun leaned forward. Despite herself, she cringed. Irun noticed, and smiled. “But I suppose I’ll wait and see what the next tutor says.”

“The next one?” Again, she couldn’t quite hide the sob of fear. Not that it mattered. “Do you think my people will keep sending tutors if we all meet the same fate? The master won’t be happy with you if you cause us to break the treaty.”

His face twitched. With one stride, he stood over her. “You don’t understand much about us, if you think I would ever risk interfering with the master’s plans. Your people will do whatever we tell them, or risk annihilation.”

“Did your master command you to do this?” Ileni said desperately. There had been a slight hint of hesitation there, when she brought up the master. Very slight, but it was her only hope.

“The master expects us to think for ourselves. Most of our missions are half a world away from him. What he needs—what we strive for—is to understand what he would want even when he isn’t there to tell us.” Irun laughed softly. “When he commands, of course we obey. But the best of us obey even before he commands. I know what he wants. He brought me to these caves to do just this.” He leaned back slightly and kicked her in the ribs.

Agony exploded through her chest. She groaned and fell over on her side, curled up into a ball. Irun knelt beside her. “The pain makes it difficult to call up your power, doesn’t it?” he said, and closed one hand over her mouth, clamping her jaw shut. He placed his other hand on her forehead and slowly, inexorably, tilted her head back.

She struggled to open her mouth, to scream out a spell—any spell, to make him stop, even if it was only long enough for a breath—but she couldn’t.

She could have had all the magic in the world, and it wouldn’t have helped. The room went black around the edges, and the back of her neck was about to crack. She writhed and flailed, too panicked now to aim her blows. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard Irun laugh.

Then his hands were gone, and air came rushing into her lungs again.

She gasped and gagged and scrambled to her hands and knees. She tried to stand—run, run, RUN, her instincts screamed—and fell over, the room turning around her. Dizziness rushed through her, and the world went black.

But air kept coming in, and she concentrated on that, crouched on the ground like a beaten animal, breathing in long, desperate sobs. It was a few moments before she could see again.

And then she saw who had rescued her.

Sorin and Irun were locked in battle, moving so swiftly she could barely see what they were doing. There was nothing dance-like about this fight: it was fast and vicious and brutal. Sorin jabbed his thumbs into Irun’s eyes; Irun twisted his head beneath Sorin’s arms and thrust a knee at his groin; Sorin dodged low and grabbed Irun around the knees, and the two fell to the ground. They continued attacking each other as they fell. Aside from the crash when they hit the stone floor, and the thuds when their blows connected, they fought in absolute, eerie silence.

They rolled over, and then over again, their limbs in constant motion. Ileni could only catch the occasional move: Sorin’s arms encircling Irun’s neck, Irun’s elbow slicing into Sorin’s side, Sorin’s heel slamming against Irun’s jaw, the arc of Sorin’s body as Irun flipped him over his head. She should help Sorin somehow, but the idea was so obviously ridiculous that it barely formed a thought. She forced herself onto her knees and watched, trembling.

The sudden sickening crack of bone echoed through the cavern. The two assassins sprang apart and faced each other, and now she could also hear their quick harsh breaths. Blood spread across the lower half of Sorin’s face, dark red on his mouth and jaw. Irun’s hand hung limply from his wrist.

Irun made a movement toward Sorin, who stepped back and grabbed two knives from the nearest rack. Irun stopped.

“Dangerous,” he observed. Despite his broken wrist, his voice betrayed not a hint of pain.

Ileni didn’t see Sorin move. She saw a lock of Irun’s black hair flutter to the ground, and then the knife Sorin had thrown slid neatly into a crevice between two rocks and stuck there, quivering.

“Very,” Sorin agreed. For all the clipped precision in his voice, something wild ran in the tense lines of his body. Ileni had the odd impression he was on the verge of laughing. “But more so for the one who can hold only one knife. And what’s life without a little danger?”

Irun drew his lips back in a snarl, and Ileni was sure he was going to attack again. Instead he inclined his head, turned, strode right past Ileni, and vanished through the doorway.

Sorin didn’t waste a second before he whirled on her. “What are you doing here?”

A drop of sweat slid with excruciating slowness down the bridge of Ileni’s nose toward the inner corner of her right eye. She knew it would burn when it hit but couldn’t summon up the strength to raise her hand and wipe it away. She couldn’t summon up the strength to lie, either.

“I was looking for your room.”

“Why?”

“The knife,” she whispered.

His black eyes narrowed into barely visible slits. Ileni tasted blood in her mouth; she had bitten her tongue. Now it would all come out, her lack of power, the trick her people had played. Now they would all know how helpless she was. Every single assassin in the caves would feel free to use his strength and skill against her, to reduce her to prey, as Irun had.

Or maybe she would be lucky, and Sorin would kill her now. He would do it fast, she thought. He wouldn’t enjoy it the way Irun would.

“There is a spell you can use to find out who threw it,” Sorin said tightly. “You wanted to use it without me watching.”

Her head came up. She said, slowly, “Yes.”

“Why?”

Suddenly it seemed she might live after all. Her hands still shook, her breath still hurt the inside of her throat, but Ileni’s mind started working again.

“I don’t trust you,” she said, as if it should have been evident.

Sorin laughed. Its harshness reminded her of Irun’s laugh, and she cringed despite herself. “I would say that was smart. But you’ve proven that you’re not very smart at all. Don’t you understand that my task is to protect you?”

Ileni sat back and pulled her knees into her chest. Her hands shook, and she pressed them against her calves to still them. Sorin rubbed a hand across his chin, smearing blood on his knuckles.

“I hope you understand now,” he said grimly. “Get up, and follow me. No more secrets. We’re going to find out who killed Cadrel.”

Chapter 9

“No more secrets,” Ileni agreed—as if she had a choice in the matter; as if Sorin cared whether or not she agreed. She forced her back straight, but didn’t get off the floor. “So tell me this. Did the master order Irun to kill me?”

Even locked in battle with Irun, Sorin hadn’t looked so angry. “No. If Irun was acting on the master’s orders, he wouldn’t have left until you were dead. Or he was.”

Ileni hugged her legs tighter. “He acted against the master’s instructions?”

“Of course not.” Sorin glanced at the blood on the back of his hand, then spat on his sleeve and, with a few practiced, efficient movements, wiped his face clean. “At our level, instructions aren’t always . . . explicit. Sometimes we don’t know we’re being tested until the test is over.”

“Why would Irun think the master wants me dead?” She rested her head on her knees for a moment, then raised it. “He said he was brought to the caves just for this. What does that mean?”

For a moment she thought he was going to ignore the question, yank her to her feet, and march her to his room. She wondered if her ward would interpret that as a threat, and doubted it. She knew, now, what it felt like to be truly threatened by an assassin.

Sorin glanced swiftly at the entrance to the cavern—still empty. Then he turned to her. “When the master ordered Irun taken, sixteen years ago, no one knew why. It was the most dangerous mission we had ever attempted, so daring I’ve heard the story even though it happened several years before I arrived. The master sent four assassins. Three of them died on the mission, and the fourth died of his wounds shortly after arriving here with Irun. It wasn’t until this year that part of the master’s plan became clear, when Irun was sent on a mission that only someone who looks like him—like one of them—could possibly accomplish.”

She lowered her hands slowly to the ground. “Killing the high sorcerer.”

Sorin nodded, a quick jerk of his head. “But the plan goes back farther than that. The master’s last kill, before he became our leader, was also a sorcerer.”

Ileni braced herself on the floor behind her. “The previous high sorcerer?”

Sorin’s eyes slid away from hers, then back. He reached out—unconsciously, she thought—and rested a finger on the hilt of one of the knives. “No.”

A few days ago, she would have thought his face blank. Now she saw the expression on it, but couldn’t tell what it meant. “Then who?”

“Not within the Empire,” Sorin said. He took a deep breath. Though his face was almost clean, there was still blood between his teeth. “The sorcerer he killed was a Renegai.”

Ileni started to push herself up, then thought better of it and remained on the floor. “That’s not—”

“It was many years ago,” Sorin said. His voice was almost sympathetic. He nudged the knife straighter, then turned away from the blades and faced her. “He pretended to be one of you, and he made it look like an accident. None of the Renegai ever found out.”

“One of us,” Ileni repeated numbly. Her fingers dug into the rock, gravel wedging beneath her fingernails. “And what was the purpose of that murder? How was killing an innocent Renegai going to help you bring down the Empire?”

Sorin rubbed his eyebrow. “None of us knew that at the time, either. But as it turned out, it was crucial. He showed that it can be done.”

Ileni blinked at him, remembering what he had said earlier about chipping away at the Empire’s foundations. She knew—everyone knew—what the true foundation of the Empire’s power was: sorcery.

If the assassins were able to bring down the imperial sorcerers—a ridiculous thought, but if they could—the Empire would fall with them.

Could it be a coincidence that while the assassins were targeting sorcery, the two sorcerers within their own caves had been murdered? Had Absalm and Cadrel been killed for practice?

“You knew,” she said slowly. “You knew Absalm’s and Cadrel’s deaths might have been part of some test, or some plan.”