Bared Blade (24 page)

“You don’t sound very happy about it,” replied Triss from within my shadow.

“I’m not, but I can’t put my finger on why. I just feel uneasy.” I looked at the Dyad. “Maybe you should stay back here while I go in with Triss.”

“I don’t think so,” said VoS. “This has to be about the Kothmerk, and I’m not getting shut out.”

I shrugged. “You’re the client.”

As VoS slipped back into the depths behind the faces of Vala and Stel I couldn’t help but wonder how much of their reactions and emotions reflected on their Meld. VoS was clearly more cautious of me than Vala, who looked somewhat embarrassed by VoS’s comments. Stel was harder for me to read, but I think she now trusted me more than VoS did as well, though she’d started out leaning the other way.

Who was my client, really? Vala? Stel? The pair of them? The Meld? All three? I couldn’t sort that out in a way that satisfied me, but the better I got to know the Dyad the more I knew that I didn’t think of them all as one unit. Which was maybe craziness on my part, but true nonetheless. They had different wants and needs and possibly even slightly different agendas.

Triss nudged me then. “Let’s get this done before the sun finishes coming up. It’s going to be a bitter-bright day and that will limit what I can do for you. Besides, we’re almost past Fei’s meeting time and she’s going to be pissed if we’re late.”

In seeming response to Triss’s words, the great bells in the tower below us began to toll the hour. I made a “follow me” gesture to the Dyad, and headed for the back of the tower where we’d climbed up.

As had become our habit, Vala accompanied me to the door of the Nonesuch, her hand tucked into my elbow, while Stel trailed behind pretending she wasn’t with us. It put a distance between the bond-mates that they found uncomfortable, but Stel was actually the one who’d originally suggested it. The Elite were looking for Aral the jack, and/or the female Dyad he’d last been seen with. The fact that
Dyads virtually never came in mixed sex pairs meant that the simple act of having Vala and I play the couple, with Stel substantially out of the picture made us all much less visible.

The sign over the narrow door showed a chimera-like creature made up of impossibly mismatched parts. Six legs, each from a different animal and each a different length—horse, lion, spider, monkey, rabbit, and a seal’s flipper. Four heads on four contrasting necks—hippo, salamander, raven, and mole. Two tails, one a snake, one an elephant’s trunk. The body of an enormous aardvark. The Nonesuch. I opened the alley-knocker’s door and exposed a rickety set of steps leading down into the dark—more ladder than stairs.

Vala eyed them dubiously. “There’s really a tavern down there somewhere?”

“A pretty big one actually. There’s another door at the bottom and it opens into a series of galleries that were a part of the old sewer system before they hired in Durkoth to dig the whole thing deeper down into the bedrock.”

“And they serve food there? In the sewers?”

I laughed. “It’s been high and dry for five centuries, plenty of time to clean things up. This is one of the few parts of the city where basements make any sense because we’re above the water table but not yet so high that they have to be cut out of stone.”

“All right.” She started down the ladder. “But I’m glad we ate before we came, and I’m not drinking anything that doesn’t come in a sealed bottle with a familiar label.”

“That’s always a good idea at an alley-knocker,” I called down, having decided it was better not to test the steps with two people at the same time. “You never know when a shadowside distiller might decide to cut the product with a little wood alcohol or add in some of the more interesting sorts of mushroom.”

She looked back up at me. “Well,
that’s
reassuring. Why don’t—” Vala’s expression went suddenly far away.

Her voice shifted and it was VoS looking through her eyes. “Aral, it’s a trap. Durkoth. They’ve grabbed Stel.” She
whipped out one of her battle wands and pointed it straight at my face.

Before I could move, she’d blown the ceiling out of the little staircase. “Run!” she cried and then the earth opened beneath her.

I leaped straight up and caught the jagged lip of the floor above, hauling myself up into someone’s parlor. I didn’t want to leave her behind, but the familiar link meant that if they had Stel, they had Vala, too. All that my staying would do was add another name to the list of prisoners. Triss slid upward, sheathing me in shadows as I looked around for my next step, a door leading to the stairs perhaps.

A chair toppled over as the building began to shake. It felt like a giant was pulling at the foundations. I opened my hands and pointed my palms at the ceiling. Triss handed me the reins of his will, and I let loose a burst of magelightning, shattering plaster and lath and opening another hole. Up I went. And again. Through an attic crawlspace and onto the roof with a red summer sun rising over the bay. Its angry rays turned the water to blood. Flames fell around me as a sorcerer of the Elite ran out into the street in front of the Nonesuch, lashing at me with his magic. Major Aigo!

Triss screamed and my shirt began to smolder where the fires had touched it. I felt the heat like a slap along the injured side of my face and had to fight down the urge to strike back—more for Triss’s sake than my own—because we couldn’t afford the delay. Instead, I pushed Triss outward to form a cloud of shadow around me and I ran, leaping across a cramped wynd that ran between the Nonesuch and its nearest neighbor to the southwest.

Fire bloomed red and raging in the roof of the building that held the Nonesuch, sending smoke clawing skyward. A fountain of sparks went up somewhere behind me and whistles began to sound, calling the watch and any other forces the Elite might have in the area. A stone dog howled its deep hunting cry.

The shaking that had battered the Nonesuch followed me to the next building over and I stumbled, almost missing my
jump across the narrow street that divided the block holding the Nonesuch from the next one that bordered on the main street between the Magelander’s Quarter and Little Varya. I turned more south there, knowing I couldn’t make the leap across to Little Varya without spinning shadow wings and exposing myself to any eyes that chanced to look up. I wanted more distance between me and my pursuers before I took that kind of risk.

People screamed and ran this way and that in the streets below me as the very surface of the earth heaved and twisted beneath their feet, shaping itself to the will of the Durkoth moving in the deeps. The smoke from the burning building rose ever higher, telling a tale of fire unchecked in the face of panic. My impressions of the world, filtered through Triss’s unvision, read even stranger than usual, faded as they were by the hammering of the sun.

I traveled through a war of the elements. Air was my ally, buoying me up as I made one mad leap after another across the rooftops. Earth and fire bayed at my heels, closing off the north and west. Shadow held and hid me from the rising light in the east as it tried to betray me to my enemies. Time blurred away into a series of distinct but somehow unconnected moments, as I moved south. Before I knew it, I was racing toward the edge of a building with an unbridgeable gap beyond. I sped up, throwing out wings of shadow as I leaped into space.

T
he
war of the elements continued. Out and down I fell, dropping through empty air until water enfolded me when I plunged deep into the Channary Canal. Full morning had come and the stagnant waters of the canal were a madness of boats of every size and description. I swam a long way through foul water before surfacing in the shade of a small pleasure boat—some noble’s fancy, fast and fit and heading out to the river proper. I sank a shadow-pointed dagger silently into the hull well below the waterline to provide me a hold.

I pulled a length of my broken-down blowgun from my trick bag then and put it in my mouth with my free hand. Submerging myself in water and shadow, I clung to the boat like a lamprey battened on the side of some fat sea serpent, letting it drag me along beneath the surface. Breathing quietly through my slender length of reinforced bamboo, I left my enemies behind. Earth and fire and light momentarily defeated by darkness and deep water.

I had a lot of time to think there in the warm shadows beneath the little yacht. About what had just happened and
what came next. About the betrayed look on Vala’s face as VoS cut me an escape route—another vision of failure to add to the many that haunted my nightmares. About Fei and Sergeant Zishin, and whether I’d been set up by one or the other, or if they’d been betrayed as well.

The answer to that question was the next thing I had to find out. I needed to find and free the Dyad as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t do that until I knew who had her and why. Until then, I would force myself to box up my concerns for her and lock them away in the back of my mind. I had to. Whether it was just or not, the Dyad had come to matter to me, especially Vala, and I’d failed her.

If I didn’t put that aside for the moment, the guilt and distraction might kill me, and that wouldn’t do her any good at all. So, when the canal disgorged itself into the Zien River, I pried my dagger loose and swam to a barge heading upriver toward the Palace Quarter and Fei’s office, focusing wholly on what I had to do next instead of why.

Moving out into the main river was a huge relief at first. Tien had good sewers and horrendous penalties for not using them, but people still dumped trash and chamber pots into the waters from time to time. On the river the ordure was quickly swept out to sea by the currents, but the waters of the canals were still and stagnant, and the waste lingered there stinking things up.

In summer, the sun made the canals blood warm, and that heat had combined with my exhaustion to spin my head full of cobwebs. The colder waters of the river came as a relief at first, bringing me back to full alertness. But I’d already been in the water for quite a while by then and it didn’t take long for the chill to start seeping into my muscles, bringing a deep ache and shivers with it. Ironic to be so cold with brutal summer lying barely a foot away, just the other side of the interface between water and air.

Though Triss remained deep down in the dream state necessitated by the various feats of magic that had allowed us to escape, I could feel a growing sense of impatience from him. It was rare for me to keep him under for so long, but
we were still in too much danger of discovery for me to give up my moment-to-moment control quite yet. I tried to think him a message of reassurance, but couldn’t be sure it got through. The difference in the minds of Shades and their human companions was such that we’d always had to rely on the spoken word for most of our communication, a fact that had frustrated the sorcerers of my order for centuries.

Just a little longer, my friend,
I thought,
just a little longer.
But of course, there was no response. I patted myself on the shoulder in the vague hope that he would feel the reassurance somewhere down there in the depths of my dreams, but I didn’t have much faith in the effect.

A few hundred yards after my barge passed the palace docks, I slipped free once more and swam to the western shore, maybe half a mile below Westbridge. The river had cut away the base of the Palace Hill here, exposing the underlying bedrock in sheer bluffs that prevented the estates above the palace complex from spilling all the way down to the river’s edge. I took a risk then by climbing the dark limestone cliff in broad daylight, trusting to shadow to shield me from all but the most dedicated observer.

It must have worked, because there was no hue and cry raised, nor any greeting party waiting for me when I chinned myself on the low wall that crowned the bluff and peered over the top. That wall marked the practical boundary of the estate of the Duchess of Tien, titular ruler of the city. Even though it looked down on the river from the top of a hundred-foot bluff, someone on the ducal staff had made sure to keep the wall’s defenses in beautiful condition.

The stones were all clean and well laid, the joints freshly tuck-pointed and nearly seamless. One of the predecessors of the duchess had even gone to the expense of having the top liberally studded with silver nails, a sovereign protection against both the restless dead and intruders who couldn’t glove their hands in an armor of shadow. They’d interspersed them with a smaller number of iron spikes, an unusual precaution in a great city like Tien where the creatures of wild magic rarely ventured.

I wondered if that was down to tradition, or if it was meant to address the proximity of the river, which provided one of the few conduits for the wild ones to enter the metropolis. In either case, I thought them a bit much. There were simple alarm wards as well, but the maintenance sorcerer had done inferior work there. They were so obvious that even a mageblind burglar could have avoided them if he were halfway competent at his craft. I loosed Triss briefly then, signaling for him to withdraw the enshrouding shadow from in front of my face.

The morning sun that now rode high in the sky behind me had more than half blinded Triss’s unvision. I needed to take a look with my own eyes before committing myself to the next step in my plan. I also wanted to give him a chance to voice any concerns that he might have. I hung there for perhaps ten minutes without spying any patrols or having Triss collapse himself down to a speaking shape, though I could feel something like a silent grumble coming through our magical link.