Bared Blade (26 page)

“Captain Fei?” he said, very quietly.

“Nope.”

Anjir’s shoulders slumped. “Didn’t think so. I presume that I’ll get something sharp and fatal between the shoulder blades if I make any loud noises or sudden moves.”

“That’s very perceptive of you, Corporal. Keep thinking that clearly and there’s an excellent chance you’ll get out of this room alive.”

“Best news I’ve had in the last thirty seconds,” said the corporal. “Should I keep standing as I am, or would you prefer me to move someplace?” He sounded almost calm, but I could see the trickles of sweat starting to run down the back of his neck.

“Just stay there if you please. I’ve got some questions for you, and I’d rather you didn’t see my face.”

“You could bind my eyes if you like. I’d really prefer not
to see your face either. Improves the odds of you leaving me alive and all.”

It was a good idea, so I signaled Triss to put a hood of shadow over his head.

The corporal twitched a bit when Triss first covered his eyes, but then seemed to relax. “Nice little spell that, thank you.”

I leaned back and put my ear against the door behind me. There was a distant clamor from the front of the building, but it didn’t sound like anyone was moving around in the hall. That meant I probably had a little time. If anyone had seen the corporal come into Fei’s office and close the door, and found that at all suspicious, he’d already been in here long enough to draw more focused attention. Now it was a question of how long it would be before anyone missed him doing whatever he was supposed to do next.

“You’re welcome,” I said. And then, because I was curious, “You don’t seem nearly as alarmed as I would have expected.”

“I work for Captain Fei. This isn’t the first time I’ve had my head bagged on the job. It’s always come out all right in the past.”

“Speaking of the good captain; where is she?”

“No one knows. She’s been missing for two days. That’s why the office is in such an uproar.”

“That’s funny. I talked to Sergeant Zishin no more than eight hours ago and he acted like he’d seen the captain recently.”

“Maybe he had,” said the corporal. “But if so, he hasn’t told the rest of us about it.”

“Do you know where the sergeant is now?”

“I imagine he’s at home.”

“And where is home for the sergeant?”

“Somewhere on the Kanathean Hill, though I couldn’t tell you closer without looking it up. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me go out to the front desk and ask, would you?” He didn’t sound hopeful and I didn’t bother to answer.

I snarled mentally. So far I hadn’t gotten anything useful out of a very dangerous game and I was running out of time fast. The sand in the hourglass had started to empty the moment the corporal came through the door.

“I presume the captain’s house has been searched?” I asked.

“Several times, and there are men stationed there now waiting for her to come home.”

That was something at least. My original plan had called for me to try Fei’s place next if I didn’t get anything here, and that removed a stop from my list. I decided to allow myself about three more questions before I put the corporal to sleep for a while and got the hell out of there. No Fei, no Zishin, and no hope of finding either one easily. So, what to ask next?

“What do you know about the operation at the Nonesuch?” I was guessing the answer was nothing, but it was the next most important thing on my mental list.

“Only that it happened and that it failed to get its primary target. At least, that’s what the gossip is saying. That was an Elite operation, Major Aigo’s people with some unofficial help from the local Durkoth. The Howlers don’t much like us down here at Silent Branch, so rumor’s the best I can do there.”

I felt a little slithering spot of cold moving upward along my spine, like someone running an icy feather across my skin.

“If the Dyad wasn’t the primary target, who was?”

The corporal half turned and held out the scrolled paper, opening the roll with a flick of his wrist.

There, looking back at me was as nice a likeness of my face as I’d ever seen this side of a mirror.

“
T
he
main target was the famous assassin, Aral Kingslayer, of course,” said the corporal. “Captain Fei found him!”

I took the poster. It had a much better drawing of me than the one the Elite had put on the posters for my jack face. Fei had clearly paid serious money for her sketch artist. Guessing from the level of detail, she’d also arranged for them to spend some time watching me at the Gryphon’s Head. The reward was much higher as well, having doubled my old Kingslayer numbers. I was now worth fifty thousand gold riels. Or, my head was anyway. All you had to do was deliver it to the palace with or without the body attached.

That was enough to buy a palace and staff it. A single gold riel would have paid the rent on my little room over the stable for half a year, or bought ten fancy dinners at the Spinnerfish with drinks and dessert. The king was offering
fifty thousand
for my head. It was hard to even conceive of that kind of money, much less imagine it being paid out for my death. And now that the poster was out there with my old name attached, the likeness would spread.

Before you knew it, the Aral Kingslayer reward posters that the Son of Heaven had up all over the eleven kingdoms would have a picture of me on them as well. If a bounty hunter could figure out some way to deliver my head to both secular and religious rulers, they could add another ten thousand to their potential take—the high church of the eleven kingdoms being a bit more parsimonious than Thauvik IV. I had a brief wild moment of wondering how one might go about that, since I didn’t think either one of them would want to part with my head. There was too much cachet to be had by putting it up on a spike somewhere. But that way lay madness, so I pushed the thought away.

“How do you know that’s really the Kingslayer?” I asked.

“You’d have to ask Captain Fei. Funny thing really. It turns out the Kingslayer’s been hiding here in Tien since the true gods put down his crazy goddess. Just pretending to be a plain old shadow jack, if you please.”

I’d already overstayed my time, but I couldn’t help ask one last question. “So, no one knows how Fei figured it out?”

“No, though it’s supposed to have been quite a recent discovery.” He dropped his voice. “They think he probably killed Fei when he found out she’d identified him, and that’s why we can’t find her, though we’re acting as if she’ll be coming back. That’s why I came in here, actually. Leaving the captain a copy of this new wanted poster the Elite have been putting up everywhere since the thing at the Nonesuch went bad.”

I needed to get out of there. “I’m going to have to put you to sleep for a little while now, Corporal. Don’t struggle, and I promise you’ll wake up. If you do struggle, or make any loud noises, I won’t have time to do anything but kill you. Now, turn around.”

He tensed, but then nodded and did as he was told. Reaching into my trick bag, I opened a small brass case and pulled out a robin’s egg. It was filled with a powdered mixture of efik and opium, which made a powerful and fast-acting soporific. I set my sword aside and wrapped my free
arm around his neck. Again, he tensed briefly before relaxing.

I squeezed hard, lifting him off the ground and cutting off his air. He instinctively tried to fight me then, but Triss had slipped down to pin his arms, and there wasn’t a lot he could do. I could easily have broken his neck. Instead I let off the pressure after only a few seconds. When the corporal took a deep gasping breath, I slapped the little egg against his face, shattering it and sending the powder deep into his lungs. Within seconds he went limp in my arms. Nothing short of magic would wake him for at least several hours.

I draped him artistically across the desk, where anyone looking in from the doorway couldn’t possibly miss him. Then I unlatched Fei’s window before climbing back up into the ceiling. From there, I gave the window a shove, opening it wide. Next, I made my way across the rafters to a place just in front of the door. Sticking my head back down into the room, I screamed like a man being murdered.

I barely had time to drop the panel back into place before a half dozen officers of the watch crashed into the room below. From their hurried shouts, I could tell they’d made the obvious connection with the open window and sent men leaping out to see what had become of the corporal’s attacker. While that was going on, I hurried across the rafters to the office opposite the captain’s and flipped up a ceiling panel. As expected, it was empty now, so I dropped down into the space behind the wide open door.

By then, the pandemonium had grown to such a degree—with Stingers running every which way—that it was a trivial matter for a man in a sergeant’s uniform to slip out through the front offices and into the street. As I made my way down through the Highside toward the river and the Magelander’s Quarter, I found myself losing track of little stretches of time. One moment, I would be looking toward a familiar landmark like the King’s Head tavern. The next, I’d find I’d passed it without noticing.

I was operating on nerves and nothing more and I
desperately needed to get off the street before I got myself killed. Death by stupid is a terrible way to go. Somehow, I managed to keep things together long enough to get down off the Palace Hill and into the streets of Little Varya without falling asleep on my feet or getting caught. At that point, my watch uniform started to draw more attention than it deflected. Since I’d already seen more than a dozen copies of the Kingslayer poster, that meant it was time I ditched it. I couldn’t afford to have anyone looking at me too closely. So I turned into the first tailor’s I passed and walked straight up to the woman behind the counter.

“I need a change of clothes,” I said.
“Something simple.”

Her face went unnaturally pale. “I …uh …yes, my lord. Anything you say, my lord.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Since nobody wearing a sergeant’s swords on his sleeve has any right to a ‘my lord,’ can I assume that you’ve seen the wanted posters?”

She swallowed and nodded miserably. “Please don’t kill me, Lord Kingslayer. I’m only a poor tailor and I promise no one will hear you’ve been here from me. No one. You did us a great service by putting the sword to old King Ashvik, and that’s no mistake. I’ve said that afore now, and I’ll say it again.”

“You’re as safe with me as you would be in your own bed,” I said as gently as possible. “I swear it. If you know who I am, you also know what I am. No Blade kills the innocent. Not if there’s any way to avoid it. But I can’t have you running off to the watch the second I leave, and I can’t trust your word that you won’t, so I’ll have to tie you up before I go. Hold on a moment.”

I crossed back to the shop’s entrance and flipped the little sign to closed before shutting and latching the door. When I turned around, the tailor was already pulling out several suits of clothes and laying them out on the counter. I chose a loose sleeveless shirt and pants of a second grade silk, blue bordering on gray, and I paid more than they were worth. I also bought a nicer bag for my swords and other gear, something more appropriate to the clothes I was wearing. It was all on Kodamia’s kip anyway, so what the hell.

I left the shop a few minutes later with my fresh change of clothes on my back and the tailor unbound behind me because I couldn’t bring myself to do the sensible thing. Not in the face of so much fear. And especially not with Triss whispering in my ear about it.

The streets of Tien had never seemed so crowded nor the people so curious and prone to stare. Every water seller and kebab vendor from the Weavery to Backpast seemed to have wedged themselves into the Magelander’s Quarter intent on getting me to stop and buy their wares. And every one of them seemed to have set up under another copy of that damned wanted poster. I moved as fast as exhaustion would let me, fending off the hawkers and gawkers with an occasional thrown up hand and a frequently barked series of “nos.”

I also kept my hat low, risking the telltale of having no personal shadow in order to keep an unusually heavy one across my face. Triss stayed wrapped tight around me in case we had to fight. I figured the crowds were so dense that my shadow never would have touched the ground anyway, so the chances of anyone noticing it when I didn’t block a share of their sun were pretty slim. At least, that’s what I told myself, and in my ragged state I believed me.

Whether it was true or not, I did eventually make it across the Zien on the Low Bridge, which led to the Stumbles and Smuggler’s Rest. And I did it without getting bagged by the Stingers, the Howlers, or some freelance bounty hunter. That put me back on my home ground, where I knew every nook and every cranny. There it was much easier for me to fade into the background, even with all the damned posters nailed up every which where. But I was pretty much out on my feet by the time I made it to the best of my fallbacks, a gutted out old tenement that had been ravaged by fire.

The inside of the ruined building was an unstable maze of broken rubble and charred debris. I normally went up the
one remaining outside wall that still had any structural integrity, but there was no way I could have climbed it in daylight without being seen. Not even fully shrouded. Instead, I slipped through a trick board the local kids had rigged, and risked life and limb by threading my way across the shifting wreckage inside on my way to the back tower.