Bared Blade (28 page)

There came a sudden scuttling sound in the dark beyond my feet. Triss answered with a sharp hiss and some large movement that I could feel through our link though I couldn’t see anything. That was followed by a thud like a dull blade hitting old meat, and then a long wailing shriek.

“That’s done it,” said Triss, coming closer. “It won’t be bothering us again soon.”

“Thanks, Triss. What happened? The last thing I remember is you telling me to swim for it.”

“The apartment building came down and collapsed part of the sewer. There was a big wave, and you got knocked around quite a bit but I couldn’t find anything broken. How do you feel?”

“Like the shit I’ve been swimming in, but I’m basically all right. Next question. What happened at the fallback? I didn’t get the chance to ask you anything before we had to bolt.”

“Elite, a half dozen of them led by Major Aigo, with a company of Crown Guard in support.”

“And Durkoth below. I don’t like that alliance at all, not even if it’s just a sort of truce of convenience.” My hand went reflexively to the hilt of a sword I was no longer wearing. “I don’t suppose you managed to save the bag with my gear in it?”

“I did,” he said, his voice more than a little smug. “I was bringing it back to you when the roof fell in and I hung onto it as our link dragged me along in your wake. I had to drop it when I fished you out and put you in here, but it’s on the
bottom not far from here. You haven’t been out long and the nightghast has been occupying my attention. Should I fetch it now?”

“Please. Any idea where we are?”

“Somewhere under Smuggler’s Rest,” he called over his shoulder. He was back a short time later with my bag. “If you crawl up the pipe behind you, you’ll come to a storm grate pretty quickly.”

I’ll
skip over the details of getting clean—relatively, and finding yet another set of new clothes—lifted but paid for, and move straight to the next stop on my tour of undiscovered Tien.

Sergeant Zishin was collecting the Mufflers’ share of a little sellcinders operation when I caught up to him just after sunset. I waited for him to finish his business and walk past the mouth of a tiny alley before I let him know I wanted a word with him. The polite thing would have been to give him a call as he went by, but I was fresh out of polite.

What I did instead was shroud up, slide out, grab him by belt and collar, and toss him head first into the darkness of the little snicket. I also kicked his feet out from under him as he went by, just for good measure. A jindu fighter and Fei’s longtime sparring partner, he reacted fast, turning the fall into a roll and spinning and drawing his boot dagger as he came to his feet. He dropped his watchman’s lamp somewhere in there and it fell at his feet, painting him with bright light while leaving me in darkness.

“Come on, bastard,” he said, “step into the light and I’ll gut you.”

But I didn’t have the patience for a dance, so I set Triss on him. Shadow teeth sank deep into a flesh-and-blood wrist, drawing a high sharp scream and forcing Zishin to drop the blade. Before he could even think about recovering it, Triss shifted shape and became a noose around the sergeant’s neck, lifting him half off his feet. As Zishin clawed at the shadow wrapped tight around his throat, I kicked the
lamp away down the alley. Then I stepped in close and touched the tip of my steel to the spot just below the point of his jaw.

“You’ve got your choice, Zishin. You can stop making a fuss and maybe get to walk away, or you can piss me off. Which is it going to be?”

He froze. “Aral?” There was real fear in his voice.

“Call me Kingslayer.” I still hated that name, but it was out there now, and I had been trained to use all the tools at hand. “You fucked me, Zishin, and that’s going to cost you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aral.”

“That’d sound a lot more convincing if your voice weren’t shaking, Sergeant. Let me refresh your memory. Me, you, a message supposedly from your missing boss…”

“Swear to Shan, Aral, that wasn’t a play. I know Fei’s supposed to be belly up in the bay somewhere with your knife in her back, but she isn’t. She was alive to give me that message I gave you. She’s got some kind of game going, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe the big retirement strike, or maybe something for the king. Whatever it is, she didn’t cut me in. Swear to Shan, Aral, that’s the straight. Swear to Shan.”

He was terrified of me, that was plain enough, and he sounded sincere. But I’d been lied to by frightened men before. That’s the problem with going hard on someone. If they were scared enough, or hurt enough, they’d say just about anything to make it stop even for a minute. It didn’t help that truthsay is all kinds of tricky, like any mind magic. Zishin was no sorcerer, which was the biggest confound, but I figured Fei had probably paid to have him counterspelled. Question was: how much protection had she laid out for, and could I break it in the time I had?

“Triss, I need you. Zishin, move and die. You know what I am, you know it will happen.”

Triss let go of Zishin’s neck and flowed back into my shadow. Then up and around, wrapping me in the thinnest skin of darkness, like the first skim of ice on the surface of a pond in fall. As his will faded into an extension of my own, I put my free hand on the back of Zishin’s neck. He
shivered at the cold of my shadow-gloved hand, but didn’t move otherwise. He wanted to live, and that held him long enough for my magic to take hold.

I hated to go quick and dirty, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. Extending the penumbra of my shadow, I covered Zishin’s head with a hood of living night and whispered a word of command. Light flared under the shadow, and I felt a brief but sharp burn across the skin where my palm rested on the sergeant’s neck—the charm of conditional silence coiled around the root of his tongue rising to the surface to strike at me. Zishin whimpered and a brief convulsion rippled the length of his body from head to feet, but that was all the movement my hood allowed him.

The charm that sealed his lips against unbidden truths was strong, but not strong enough. Now that I knew how much opposition I faced, I knew the cost of breaking the spell. I spoke the word again, louder. This time, when the burn came, it felt as though someone had wrapped my entire arm in a fiery blanket, and the pain lasted much longer. When Zishin whimpered and convulsed, I whimpered with him. Closing my eyes, I took a series of deep slow breaths, forcing the pain to bend to my will.

As it faded away, I braced myself for what was to come. I was pretty sure that I
could
have unraveled the charm if I’d had a bit more time, and I desperately wished that I’d had the leisure for the less painful option. But even here in Smuggler’s Rest, tossing a watchman into a darkened alley would draw comment and, eventually, investigation.

Bracing myself, I repeated the word one last time, yelling it this time. The world dissolved in fire and pain drove me to my knees. Zishin followed me down, bound as he was by my magic. I managed to hold onto consciousness, Zishin, and my knife, though I only barely kept my grip on that last. My point nicked the sergeant’s skin just above the big artery in his throat, drawing a tiny trail of blood droplets in its wake like a scarlet inchworm.

“Tell me true,” I said. “Did Fei send you to me with that note?”

“Yes.” The sergeant’s voice sounded weak and thready. “Or, if it wasn’t her, it was one like enough to be her twin.”

“And why didn’t you let any of your fellow watchmen know about that?”

“She made me promise not to tell anyone, not even the rest of the Mufflers, and you don’t cross Fei if you want to keep breathing.” His face twisted into a frown. “I think she might have been afraid of something. But that’s really all I know.”

“Thank you,” I said, then struck him across the base of the skull with the pommel of my knife.

The blow was gentle, barely enough to stagger a healthy man. But the sergeant had just suffered through the breaking of a spell housed inside his own head, and now his eyes rolled up and he slumped to the ground. He would be out for a good hour if I was any judge of spell backlash.

I held onto my control of Triss, using his shadowy fingers to find extra holds amongst the stones of the nearest building as I ascended once again into the chimney forest. Then I shrouded up and put some distance between me and the unconscious Zishin. The rooftops were crowded, thick with sleepers and creepers both.

I finally found us a nice secluded little perch at the intersection between a corner post and a huge beam nine stories off the ground in a tenement going up in a lot cleared by fire. In this part of town, that probably meant arson and insurance fraud. And, judging by the sloppy work on the joins and the fact that none of the beams looked like they’d been properly cured, neither the owner nor the construction crew was planning on this building lasting beyond the next convenient fire.

It made me wish I had the time and freedom to track down the bastard. I didn’t much care about the insurance company getting screwed or the property damage, but I’d never yet seen an apartment fire that didn’t kill someone poor. That shit pissed me off royally. Nine times out of ten, the kind of owner that would burn a building like this had been born to money and claimed blood as blue as the sky. Not that they sullied their precious noble hands with the
actual details of things. They usually did all their business through agents and cutouts.

That was a good part of the problem, really. They didn’t know a thing about the lives their tenants lived, and they didn’t really see them as people, just silhouettes, ghosts of the lower classes. That was the true tragedy of Namara. With the death of my goddess, the people who didn’t matter to the mighty had lost their divine champion, the one member of the Court of Heaven who was willing to see justice done on the nobles and landholders. I salved my guilt at surviving my goddess’s fall with a promise to look into this if I lived through the next couple of weeks.

When I finally released Triss, he stretched himself out into dragon form on the beam at my feet. Then wrapped around it snakelike, curling back to look at me. “Tell me what the sergeant had to say.”

So I did.

“What an interesting conversation,” he said after I’d finished.

“Wasn’t it just,” I agreed.

Zishin was no mage, so it was possible he’d been played by someone using an illusion and pretending to be Fei, but that felt like the wrong answer to me. It’d be one thing if Fei’s body had turned up, but failing that, I would be very reluctant to count her out of the picture under any circumstances. After hearing what Zishin had to tell me, I was going to assume she was still with us. But what was her play in all this?

“Do you think Fei set us up?” asked Triss.

“I don’t know. I’d like to believe she didn’t.” Triss cocked his head to one side skeptically, and I continued. “Oh, not because I’d put something like that past her. Just because I’m having a hard time seeing her angle. If all she wanted was to bag the reward for turning me in, she could have done it any old time. No, there’s something more going on here, and we need to find out what.”

“That’s not going to be easy, not with the entire city knowing exactly what you look like now. The whole of
Tienese officialdom is going to be yammering after us like they haven’t since the week right after you killed Ashvik. Add in that every single one of our shadowside acquaintances will be measuring you for a coffin and counting the various rewards up, and that we’ve lost our best fallback, and I’m thinking we’re real close to having to head for parts elsewhere.”

“What about our Dyad friends? And all that talk about duty?”

Triss shrugged his wings. “You’ve just named the only reasons I haven’t been pushing hard to leave town since we first saw that damn poster. But frankly, I’m at a loss as to how we can help the Dyad when we can’t even find out who took her. I’d hate to abandon VoS, but I don’t see how us dying for her without accomplishing anything advances her cause any. Or our duty for that matter. I’m willing to sleep on it and see what we can come up with, but if nothing occurs between now and tomorrow night, I think we may have to walk away.”

I didn’t like it, but he had a distinct point. We didn’t know who had VoS and Vala and Stel, much less where they might be keeping them. Or, if I was going to be completely honest about the whole thing, even if they were still alive. It had been twenty hours since the ambush at the Nonesuch, plenty of time for the worst to have happened.

I rubbed at my burning eyes and tried to think of a decent counterargument, but I had nothing. Possibly because I’d gotten all of three hours’ sleep since the ambush, and little enough in the twenty-four before that. Exhausted, covered in cuts and bruises, still stinking of shit despite my best efforts to get clean …I was all out. Once upon a time I could have relied on my faith to carry me forward when wit and will had failed me, but that faith had long since failed me, too. Maybe it
was
time I gave up.

“Maybe you’re right, Triss, but I hate the idea.”

“So do I, Aral. So do I.”

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say at that point, so I dragged myself upright. Much as I would have liked to
go to sleep right there on the beam, I needed to get under cover before the sun came up, ideally someplace where I could find a drink. With my face glaring out of posters on every wall in the whole damned city, the harsh light of day had become as much my enemy as it was any vampire’s.

Unfortunately, I was running mighty thin of good places to lay up and sleep, a fact that was hammered home when I reached the location of my third-tier fallback, a ruptured water tank atop a condemned tenement in Quarryside. The whole building should have been leveled long since, but the owners had gotten tied up in legal battles, and squatters had taken over until things got settled.

It was a shitty spot, both in terms of the state of the tank and the fact that if the owners ever solved their differences the place would be gone in a matter of days. But I no longer had temple funds covering my fallback expenses, and that meant I had to live with squats.