Bared Blade (37 page)

Neither Vala nor Stel would meet my eyes, though I saw Vala glancing uncomfortably at Triss.

I think you might have made a mistake there,
he sent.
With the Meld if not the motes. They’re embarrassed, but
she’s going to be thinking very hard about what you just said, and it’s not going to take her long to start wondering about how little Faran was keeping body and soul together during the missing years.

You think she was spying in Kodamia?
I crossed to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a large glass of Fei’s Magelander whiskey. My throat felt like I’d eaten a bottle instead of drinking from one.

I do. Though whether she was freelance or someone’s Crown agent I couldn’t say. It’s the perfect job for someone like her. That or thieving, and she wouldn’t have stayed so long if all she wanted to do was make off with a few choice items from the Citadel. Oh, and just so you know how I feel, it’s far too early for whiskey.

I agreed with him, but that didn’t stop me. I needed the help in calming down.

“You realize that none of that matters, don’t you?” Once again Qethar’s entry into the conversation startled the piss out of me—this time I slopped whiskey all over my hand.

“The only important question is whether the idea will work or not,” continued Qethar. “Whether the girl lives or dies and who ends up with her if she does is immaterial. Only the Kothmerk matters. It’s the most important thing in your whole world.” He turned his hard blank eyes on the Dyad. “Your Archon would surely say the same thing if he were here now, Valor of Steel.”

Vala and Stel went very still at that. “How do you know our name?” she asked through both mouths. It was a deceptively quiet question.

“I know the names and specialties of all the Dyads that set out with the Kothmerk as well as the pass codes for your mission. I would have thought the reason was obvious. My king sent me that information when the delivery went bad. It went out to all of his chief agents in every city that lay within a couple of week’s travel of the ambush. You didn’t really think your failures would go undiscovered by the rightful King of the North or that he’d trust humans to get the Kothmerk back for him, did you?”

“Why should I believe you?” asked VoS, again through both of her mouths.

Qethar pulled a thin plate of rock loose from the arm of his little throne and placed it on the table in front of him. Seemingly of its own accord it slid across to Stel.

“Flip it over,” said Qethar. “Look at the other side, but show it to no one else if you don’t want your Archon’s precious secrets leaking out to the rest of the world. No offense, Captain Fei, Blade Aral, but you’re both known shadowside operators and Valor of Steel never should have trusted either of you.”

“None taken,” said Fei as Stel lifted the stone. “We all know what I am, and I’m sure Aral feels the same way.”

“Those are the mission pass codes, all right,” said Stel. “I guess you are what you say you are.” She set the stone back on the table and slid it back to Qethar. “We really are all on the same side.”

“Of course we are, and if you’d been more than just muscle for your delivery mission you’d have known enough to send word to my offices when you got into the city instead of bringing in the broken Blade here. Though, now that you’ve finally hooked up with me, I might be inclined to overlook your failures in my report. Assuming, of course, that we can recover the Kothmerk and get it back to its rightful owner.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said VoS through Stel. She sounded completely sincere, too, though I couldn’t help noticing the way Vala’s knuckles had gone white as she clenched her hands together out of sight of the Durkoth. Somehow, I didn’t think they trusted him any more than I did. “I look forward to working together more closely to make sure that happens.”

“Good,” said Qethar. “I’d offer to shake on it, but my recent …contact with Aral has reminded me of the way my touch affects you children of the later gods.”

Qethar turned a smile on me then, a beautiful smile full of promise that I felt all the way down to my knees. It made me simultaneously want to take him in my arms and punch him in the face.

“I
am
sorry about that and the other awkwardness at our first meeting,” he said to me, “but I didn’t know what your true place in all this was then. I still don’t trust you, of course, but I do see the merits of your current plan and how much we need you. I’m sure that my government will agree with me when I say that once this is all successfully concluded you can expect a very handsome reward from the Durkoth.”

This is an interesting development,
sent Triss.
Do you believe a word of it?

I don’t know. A good deal of it fits in with the facts that we have available, but somehow I can’t help but feel there’s one sure sign he’s lying.

What’s that?

His mouth is open and words are coming out.

Triss chuckled knowingly in my mind.
There is that.

While we were having our little side discussion, Qethar looked at Fei. “There will be a reward for you as well, Captain. Never fear. It’s clear to me that Aral’s plan will require the extensive use of your contacts in the shadow world if we’re going to make it work, as well as my own, since Aral’s are denied to us by his …loss of face. Shall we get started?”

“There’s one little problem,” said Fei. “I’m officially dead, and I need to stay that way for a bit.”

“That is a problem,” I said. “But not an insurmountable one. I figure the easiest way to start the rumors we need is for me to trot over to the Old Mews and let myself be seen, repeatedly.”

“Aral!”

“It’s all right, Triss. I’ll be wearing a hood, and a mask of shadow. No one’s going to see my actual face, just a man who can vanish into a cloud of darkness. Though it would be nice if we could use Fei’s contacts to amplify the effect on the shadowside and get it to spread faster there. That would allow me to take fewer risks.”

“Oh, I think I can manage that,” said Fei. “I didn’t mean to say I wouldn’t help, just that it wouldn’t be simple. I’ll have to work through an agent. Aral, can you deliver a
message to Sergeant Zishin and then escort him to someplace private for a meeting with me? I can’t send Scheroc without revealing what I am.”

I nodded. “Let’s get to work.”

My
entire back itched in that way it does when you’re expecting someone to put a big fat arrow between your shoulder blades, and the sweat trickling down my spine didn’t help. I’d been at this for a week and two bottles of whiskey, and the neighborhood had filled up with Crown officers and bounty hunters of both the professional and amateur variety. To keep the rumors going, I had to keep sticking my hand in the bear trap.

It didn’t help that even a year on, the Old Mews still stank of smoke and ashes. The faint sickening miasma kept swirling up to my perch atop Tien’s newest temple to Shan—why is it that the temples always come back first? Fresh reminders of the fire that had murdered the entire neighborhood were kicked up every day, as the long slow work of rebuilding broke open the old scabs of burned-out building after burned-out building. Somehow the optimistic smells of fresh-cut lumber and raw plaster just couldn’t make up for the occasional whiff of burnt meat and charred bone. At least for me.

Even knowing I’d killed the woman responsible for that fire was cold comfort. It wouldn’t bring a single one of the dead back. Nothing would. I shivered then and wished I could pull Triss more tightly around me, or at least talk to him. But once again circumstances required that he sink himself into the dream state that gave me maximum freedom to use both his powers and my magic.

I was lonely and miserable and it would have been better on an emotional level if I’d picked any other neighborhood. But the combination of burned-over rubble fields scattered amidst all sorts of new construction and temporary structures created an ever-changing maze that made it much easier to lose even the most determined pursuit. That had
saved my ass more than once as the number of hunters had gone steadily up over the last couple of days.

I could see at least a dozen different groups and singletons from my current location, every one of them out for my blood. Most notable was the Elite mission under Major Aigo, who had temporarily evicted a well-off merchant from his new mansion to set up headquarters.

There was nothing official to mark the place out as belonging to the Elite, but the constant stream of Crown Guards running in and out in their civvies at all hours of the day was unmistakable. I’m not sure what it is about the military mind that thinks that dressing career soldiers in civilian drag is going to somehow make the arrow-straight backs, battle scars, and drill field muscles invisible, but I’ve seen it time and again.

The
official
Crown Guard presence had taken over a three-quarters-finished apartment building a few hundred yards up the road, and it was particularly funny watching the out-of-uniform folks ostentatiously not saluting their officers as they went by. The bounty hunters were more circumspect, mostly taking rooms at nearby inns or squatting in burned-over basements. The number of genuine civilians had dropped off steadily starting on day two. Most of the lanterns moving about on the streets below belonged to one faction or another of the hunters now.

About the only set of lights down there that didn’t belong to someone who wanted to sell my head to the king were the green lamps that marked those selling their asses to the hunters. Given the character of the new neighbors, there was plenty of work down there for the sex trades. Which reminded me, it was about time for me to dangle my own ass out in the breeze again.

“How’s my route look?” I whispered to the wind.

“Give it two minutes from when you hear this, then go,” the wind whispered back after a bit.

The ability of the qamasiin to blow words halfway across the city was coming in very handy for our little operation. In this case, the wind sounded an awful lot like Vala, who
was down on the streets, carrying an intricately inscribed green lamp. The shadows it cast suggested that what she was offering was very specialized and staggeringly expensive.

That helped keep the number of customers she had to turn away to a minimum, but Stel, who had taken on the character of a bounty hunter, had still had to cover for her bond-mate by getting rid of two bodies. The corpses in question belonged to individuals who’d rather forcefully refused to take a whore’s “no,” at least until it was delivered with the crude battle wands Vala had created to replace her old ones.

After I’d counted off the requisite number of heartbeats, I dropped down the back of the tower and made my way along the spine of the temple. At the end I jumped across a ten-foot gap and down a story to land on the roof of a partially rebuilt tavern. As I moved on from there, I opened a tiny hole at the top of my shroud to give Scheroc a way to find me, the first of many such instances. Since the tactic exposed only the top of my head and that only to someone looking straight down from the skies above it seemed a small enough risk.

After about a four-block run across the hot rooftops, I reached the outer edge of the neighborhood and released Triss. It would have been safer for me if I could have kept control over him through the whole exercise, but Triss needed to be fully awake for the next bit since he would be the one doing the real work. Working carefully and quietly, we made our way back and forth along the perimeter we’d established for our operations, dancing an intricate and risky snake-step with the many hunters who were also quartering the area.

As we went, Triss kept “tasting” for any traces left by another Shade. We worked both on the rooftops and the streets below since I had no doubt that if Ssithra and Faran came a-visiting they’d do it fully shrouded. That was all part of the plan. When a shadow was strengthened by the presence of a Shade within it, it left behind what Triss called a
“flavor” in the shadows it passed over and through. Fire and sunlight quickly destroyed such traces, as did moving water, but at night, one Shade could always tell where another had recently passed.

The more present a Shade was in the shadow, the stronger the flavor and the easier it was to both trace and identify. Full-on shroud mode left the strongest trace short of some sort of shadow-magic work, and that’s what we’d been looking for since day one. So far we’d found shit, which was pretty damned disheartening considering how much we’d all risked to try to lure Faran here.

Dammit,
I thought at Triss, as we came to the end of our run.
This is getting us nowhere, and it’s getting more dangerous with each passing hour. I’m starting to think Faran’s not coming.

I was shocked at how much that thought depressed me considering that a mere two weeks ago I hadn’t spared so much as a passing thought about her, or any of our lost apprentices for that matter—I imagine I felt a bit like a man who suddenly finds out years after the event that he’s a father.

I think you might be right,
Triss replied glumly.
But I don’t have any ideas for what we might try next if we have to give up on this.

I don’t either, so I guess we’d better get ready to let some idiot bounty hunter get a look at us again. If we don’t keep showing our colors, everyone’s going to assume we’ve gone elsewhere.

“Hide!” The whisper in the wind was in Scheroc’s own voice this time. “Elite coming this way!”

As if in punctuation of the qamasiin’s warning there came the distinctive howl of a stone dog on the hunt. The labyrinthine nature of the Old Mews construction came to our aid once again, as three long steps took us from the center of a recently cleared and cleaned street to the edge of a large pit. There, charred debris from all over had been mounded up, filling in much of what must once have been a huge and multilevel cellar. A gap between two blackened
beam ends was just big enough for me to slip through on my belly, though I tore a long rent in the hip of my pants in my haste.

A few yards farther in I came to a place where I could worm my way down into the deeper levels below the street. I would have preferred to make my escape up and out with the stone dogs involved, but haste had directed a different choice. With Triss to guide me, I made my way down toward the sewers and the bedrock where I could break another of Qethar’s pebbles to summon him if I needed a pick-up. At the cost of several more rips in my clothes and a couple in my skin, I finally reached a floor grate that opened into a large pipe, which, in turn, presumably led down into the sewers.