Bared Blade (19 page)

I smiled at Fivegoats and offered him a hand. “There, you just bought back a piece of what you owe me with no blood spilled. Not so hard, see.”

He took my hand, and I pulled him upright. “Then you’re
not
going to hurt me?”

“It’s not something I ever
wanted
to do, Issa. And now I don’t have to.”

Fivegoats edged backward to sit against the wall. “Then toss me that skin, if you will. I really need a drink.”

Stel hooked the cord with one of her rods, and flipped it through the air to Fivegoats. He opened it, filling the room with the floral bite that accompanied the better rice wines. It smelled wonderful. After taking a good pull off the skin, he offered it to me.

Regretfully, I shook my head. “No thanks, Issa, I’ve got business in Smuggler’s Rest just as soon as I get an address.”

“The place is down in the luff, next to a kip-claim and three doors to the right of the Spliced Rope. It’s got the usual sign in the window, and you never heard nothing from me, right?”

“Not a word, Issa, not a word.” I touched my finger to my lips.

“You’re a good man, Aral, and not so hard a jack as your reputation.”

I let my smile fall away. “Don’t you believe that last, Fivegoats, not for a minute. If I’m soft with you today it’s because you’ve given good value. I may not play the bonebreaker when I don’t have to, but when I have to, I can be a very hard jack indeed. Never doubt that, and you’ll get to keep wearing all your bones inside your skin.”

Fivegoats looked at me, swallowed hard, and took another long pull at his wine. He didn’t say another word as Stel and I departed, and neither did we. We collected Vala and were just heading back for the little trapdoor we’d made of the light well, when a sharp whistle came from that general direction, followed by the ringing of an alarm bell.

“I think they just closed the back door,” said Triss.

“Now what?” asked VoS—the Meld had visibly taken complete control the moment the alarm sounded, pushing Vala and Stel down beneath the surface.

As a matter of reflex, I’d started cataloguing escape
routes while we were on our way in. Assassins, even godly ones like Blades, spend an awful lot of time running away. Keeping one eye on the exits is nearly as deeply ingrained as breathing.

“How well do you swim?” I asked.

“Good enough to compete at the Kodamian games, but nowhere near good enough to medal.” VoS sounded as though that latter disappointed her.

“That’s better than me.” I reversed our course, heading for the nearest set of stairs up to the top level. The bay was a long way from the building and the Dyad would need more altitude to make the jump. “I don’t suppose you happen to know a good fast charm for breathing underwater that doesn’t need a bunch of diagrams and suchlike?”

“Actually, yes.”

I gestured for VoS to precede me up the stairs. “Excellent! Turn right at the top of the stairs and start running.”

Somewhere below and behind us another whistle sounded. A moment later, a quarrel thunked into the bottom of the stairs.

“Triss, cover me.”

My familiar pooled briefly around my ankles, then slithered his way upward, surrounding me in a cool, silken skin of shadow. When we got to the upper walkway, I turned and knelt with my hands on the stair supports. Taking full control of Triss through the bond we shared, I focused my nima and released a blast of magelightning into the wooden stringers. With a deep tearing noise and a shower of splinters, the stairs fell away beneath me. The smells of dust and freshly sawn wood filled the air.

VoS anticipated me, and by the time I caught up to her, she’d destroyed the stairs at the other end of the fourth floor walkway and moved on to the end wall. Several more quarrels thumped into the wooden planks beneath us as we ran, but the guards hadn’t yet thought to climb the opposite stairs to get a decent shooting angle. I was just about to tell VoS we needed to make a door when she raised Vala’s battle wands and let loose an enormous burst of magical force.

Masonry exploded outward from the point of the blast, sending a huge chunk of the wall crashing out into the dockside street below. The walkway sagged alarmingly as it lost its end supports, but the cantilevered beams that stapled it to the stalls kept it from collapsing. I spared a moment to hope that VoS had planned ahead for that and not just blown the wall apart without thinking about it. I stuck my head through the cloud of powdered mortar and shattered sandstone that marked the demise of the wall, and looked down. There was maybe forty feet of street and dock between us and the bay. Way too far for a normal jump.

“Can you make that?” I asked, but VoS was already moving, tossing one of her battle wands to Stel as she quickly backed up.

Before I could so much as hazard a guess as to VoS’s plan, Vala had already taken a running jump through the hole in the wall. Turning in midair, she aimed her battle wand at the building below me and let fly with another burst of energy. The backlash of the blast pushed her out and away to splash down in the bay. Stel followed her a moment later, using the borrowed wand and leaving me to summon up wings of shadow and bring up the rear.

Mine was a gentler descent. I glided out and down, crossing over the docks perhaps thirty feet above the water’s surface. I was trying to spot the Dyad, when a pillar of ochre light like a giant’s staff drove up from a spot maybe a hundred yards away along the bayside street and swung around to meet me. Firespike! The spell caster led my course perfectly, Elite work if I was any judge. He would have batted me neatly out of the sky, if not for Triss wrenching free of my control and collapsing his shadow wings to send us plunging toward the dark water below.

Even so, the swinging pillar of orange light slid along my chest, and clipped the side of my head as I turned away from the burning pain of that contact. It felt like I’d been grazed by the fiery tongue of a gigantic hunting salamander. I was already dazed from the sudden severing of my deep-channel connection with Triss when he’d broken himself
free of my command. Now the added pain and shock sent me to dance along the edge of unconsciousness as I tumbled through the air.

The surface of the bay slapped the right side of my body like the cold dead hand of a drowned titan but I barely registered the impact. Polluted water rushed into my nose and mouth as the weight of my equipment dragged me under, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to care. Fortunately, Triss was on the job and before I’d sucked down too much of the dreadful stuff, shadow hands pinched my nose shut and clamped down over my mouth.

Somewhere a million miles away, I thought I could hear Triss shouting at me. But for some reason I couldn’t make out the words. My chest hurt both inside and out, and I lost all track of direction as I kept feebly trying to turn my face away from the burns on my cheek. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think, and more than anything I wanted to sleep. Just a little nap, a few minutes of blessed darkness to put me right again, but Triss wouldn’t let me sleep. I could feel him yanking at the connection that bound our spirits, like he was shaking my soul. Or maybe that was just the tug of the currents.

Then things changed, though it took what felt like several thousand years to register the difference. I’d stopped moving, or maybe the world had. It was hard to tell, because it was all fading farther and farther into the distance. Triss was still trying to keep me with him, but it mattered less and less.

I
had just about surrendered to the sea and the night when the lightning fell on my lips. It jolted through my face and ran down my throat to ignite my lungs. I screamed and tried to turn away from the pain, but it was already inside me. In the wake of the scream, foul water rushed in, freezing the fire and filling my lungs. I was drowning. Only, I didn’t die. Instead, the awful stuff that now gurgled inside my chest brought cool relief and the first flush of returning awareness.

As my thoughts began to flow again, the strangeness of the situation slowly wrote itself into the pages of my mind. I was lying in the dark with thick cold slime pressing against my back and sides. It provided a marked contrast to the warmth that lay along my chest and thighs. I was blind, too, or nearly so, seeing only a few dim and scattered lights through my magesight. The nearest were slender lines like paired worms, with a pair of dots above them. Breathing felt
wrong
, as though the air had gone thick and gelid, but at least I
was
breathing. In and out, in and out, the rhythm of life.

I concentrated on that, focusing first on breathing, then on its implications. I was alive. Alive and underwater. On
the bottom of the bay by the feel of the ooze that held me tighter than any lover. And I was breathing. But how? I blinked and blinked again trying to make sense of the lights I saw with mage’s eyes. Worms became lips and nostrils. Vala’s, a few inches from my own and Stel’s farther away, up and back, behind Vala. The spell that allowed them to breathe had lighted the portals of the lungs.

In turn, that meant the warmth that lay its length upon me was Vala’s body, and the spell that had saved me was hers as well. I pulled my arms up and out of the clutching muck and slid one hand up along her side and neck to touch those glowing lips—a question, though not voiced. She smiled and leaned in to give me a quick kiss, and I felt the faintest echo of the lightning that had touched me there before. Then she put her hands on my chest, pushing herself up and back, freeing me to rise.

I wanted to follow her, but I was weak and weary and couldn’t at first break myself loose of the grip of the mud. Fear shocked through me then, as returning coherence brought with it memories of our situation and a renewed sense of urgency. I began to thrash. I hadn’t been without air for long, or I wouldn’t have been able to come back from the land that borders death, but every second counted right now.

The Elite who had tried to burn me out of the sky would not willingly follow us into the bay—water was no friend to the stone dogs. But he could send that hound down and under the bay’s floor. Even now it might be rising up through the layers of sodden earth beneath me, jaws agape.

Before I could panic, I felt Triss’s reassuring presence as he slipped around underneath me. Pressing himself against my spine, he pushed, forcing me up and out of the muck. Long habit made me check my swords and trick bag then, making sure I hadn’t lost my most important tools to the horrid stuff. But now what? We had to get up away from the bottom without rising so high as to become visible to the inevitable Elite presence on the shore and docks above.

“What now?” It was Vala, echoing my own question, though it took me a moment to recognize the distorted words
for what they were in that medium—still, it was clearer than I would have expected. An effect of the magic, perhaps.

“Up a few yards and out where it’s deeper.” Tien’s bay was a deep one and dredged regularly to keep it open to the largest ships, but this close to shore the water couldn’t be much over twenty feet, not enough depth to hide in if they managed to light us up. “We need sea room. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“Follow me.” Triss tugged at my hand to let me know where he wanted me to go. “We’ll cross the bay in deep water.”

As I started swimming in the indicated direction, I called up a tiny bit of magic, the precursor to a spell, and let it play about my hand to provide a guiding light for VoS. Swimming a level course with all my gear was hard work. I don’t think I could have managed it without the occasional push or pull from Triss. It didn’t help that I was still more than a little dazed, and that the side of my face where the spell had touched felt like someone had taken a hot vegetable grater to my skin.

We had gone perhaps a dozen yards when I thought I felt something big moving from right to left down below us, a presence almost more imagined than sensed. At first I hoped that it wasn’t a stone dog. But then, after thinking about what else might be moving around in the dark waters, I decided that maybe I hoped that it was.

A few moments later, a brilliant and now familiar pillar of ochre light stabbed down through the waters off to my left—the direction I thought the stone dog, or whatever it was, had taken. The spell briefly lit up the waters around it, but then the bubbles from the steam it created blotted out everything. In the instant of clear sight I got a hazy impression of something big and dark and sinuous getting hammered by the firespike. Something that had been looking our way with an open mouth and lots and lots of shiny white teeth.

My first thought was a shark, or maybe one of the smaller sea serpents that had been spied in the bay from time to time. For an instant I was almost glad to have the Elite up there trying to kill us if it meant he’d saved us from whatever that was. That’s when the pressure wave hit, sending me tumbling
back and away from the thing the spell had touched, and slamming me into Vala.

I got the confused sense of something vast and pissed off rising up from the floor of the bay.

Then Triss yelled, “Water dragon!” and started tugging me frantically back the way we’d just come.