Bared Blade (43 page)

Fire and sun!
Triss growled into my mind.
It’s gone, and I can’t tell whether that’s an effect of the sun or if Jax did something clever to break her trail.

I found it very hard to care about the answer when what I really wanted was to go back to the Gryphon and drink until the world went away. I couldn’t tell Triss that though, not with the way he felt about my drinking. Instead I just stood and stared at the passing parade, full as it was of walkers and riders, carters and rickshaws, even the odd palanquin. Sandals and boots and hooves and wheels, all of them grinding away at the dust and dirt and …

Wait. Back up. Think, man!

And there it was. So simple and elegant I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me before.

My guess would be she got into one of those.
I pointed at a passing oxcart.
If she made sure that her shadow didn’t spill over the edge of the bed, a cart would make a very good getaway vehicle. That or one of those closed palanquins. Hell, she could even have had a covered rickshaw waiting for her here.

I’m an idiot.
Triss sounded shocked.
The idea of a shadow trail is new enough to you that I can understand
why you wouldn’t have thought of that before now. But, why didn’t it ever occur to me?

For the same reason it didn’t occur to me probably. Blinkered thinking. We both knew fire and sun and running water can break a shadow’s trail, so it didn’t occur to either of us to think beyond the big and flashy to simpler means. That and the fact that Blades almost never travel by cart. Not fast enough, not versatile enough, not enough control. We prefer to run or walk when we can, or ride if we must trade control for speed. Is it any surprise that our Shades never get a sense of those other means of travel either?

I could count on the fingers of one hand the total number of cart rides I’d taken since I was big enough to straddle a horse.

So now what?
Triss asked me.

The Gryphon, I think. Maybe Jax will come back.
Triss didn’t say anything, but I could feel his disapproval as he thought about me having another drink.
I could also use some dinner, and it’s Jerik’s cooking or go home where we’ll have to deal with Faran and Ssithra.…

I guess one more whiskey won’t kill you.

I thought you might see it my way.

Faran was almost sixteen and a problem and a half. She’d been eight when the temple fell. A combination of talent, smarts, luck, and utter ruthlessness had allowed her to escape an attack that killed most of her peers and teachers. For six years she and her familiar, Ssithra, had lived completely on their own, spying and thieving their way across the eleven kingdoms to stay alive. Her last assignment had gotten away from her in a way that would probably have killed her if it hadn’t also brought her to my doorstep. I’d had to abandon my old face as part of fixing that mess.

Now she’d become my …apprentice? Ward? Surrogate daughter? Faran and I were still working out the details of what we were to each other. So far, the process involved a lot of snarling and baring of teeth and I desperately wanted another drink before I faced the next round. Though Triss’s relationship with Ssithra was harder to parse, the level of
hissing in Shade that went on between the two of them suggested to me it wasn’t any less fraught. In any case, the Gryphon sounded a hell of a lot more like home to me right at the moment than the rented house we shared with Faran and her familiar.

The Gryphon had started to fill up by the time I got back. Jerik just grunted and pointed me toward an empty seat at the end of the bar when I called out my order for whiskey and a bowl of fried noodles topped with shredded whatever happened to fall off the back of the cart today. His indifference stung a bit since I was used to being treated like a regular. A few minutes later, he dropped my bowl and a small loaf of black bread that I hadn’t ordered in front of me along with my glass, then turned away before I could say anything about getting my order wrong.

I was tempted to throw the bread at his retreating back, but just sighed and took a sip of my whiskey instead. It tasted smooth and silky, like liquid magic. Kyle’s eighteen, the special cask reserve, if I knew my whiskeys, and nothing like what I’d ordered. As I paused before taking another drink, Jerik spun around to drop a beer in front of the smuggler sitting three stools to my right. I raised my glass ever so slightly in Jerik’s direction as well as an eyebrow. Jerik responded with something that could have been the faintest ghost of a wink or perhaps nothing at all.

I took another sip. It was top-shelf Kyle’s all right, the spirit old Aral the jack had drunk whenever he felt deep enough in the pockets. Since I’d ordered nothing but Magelands whiskeys at the Gryphon since I changed my face, and the Kyle’s wasn’t sitting somewhere you’d get them confused, I had to figure the switch was intentional. But why? To cover my confusion I took another sip of my excellent whiskey and then followed that with a mouthful of noodles. The hot pepper sauce almost covered the aging vintage of the fried bits of meat and vegetables. Almost.

I considered my bread then. Jerik makes a hard black loaf that will keep you alive for a long while if the effort of chewing it doesn’t kill you first. It’s cheap and awful, and
over the years I’ve spent almost as much time living on it as I have avoiding it. This loaf looked more battered than most of its fellows, with several dents and dings and a wide crack splitting it nearly in half along one edge. Hmm. I jammed a thumb into the crack, then broke off a tiny corner of the loaf when I felt a bit of paper shoved deep into the bread.

As I was twisting the scrap of bread in my pepper sauce, Jerik slid back past. “Tab?”

I nodded and he left. Jerik only runs a tab for serious regulars, and the face I was wearing now simply hadn’t been around long enough. He knew who I was, he had to. I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was.

Jerik’s a damned clever man. He used to hunt monsters for a living, and mostly on Crown lands, which adds dodging royal patrols to the long list of dangers involved in the trade. The dumb don’t last long, and the smart can get rich if they live long enough. There’s a good deal of money to be made by selling the bits off to various magical supply houses, and he was at it long enough that he really didn’t need to work for a living anymore.

He retired from the business after the gryphon he ultimately named his bar after ate about half of his scalp and one of his eyes. The scars are terrible and a good part of the reason he keeps the lights low I think, but I think he missed the thrill of it all. It wasn’t too many years after he got mauled that he first opened the Gryphon’s Head and nailed the damn thing’s skull up behind the bar. I’ve always figured he bought an inn down here in the Stumbles among the shadowside players when he could have afforded a better location because he missed spending time around dangerous predators.

Despite a burning desire to read my little note right then and there, I just nibbled another corner off my bread. Then I finished my noodles and sipped my Kyle’s down nice and slow before scooping up the loaf and heading out into the Gryphon’s yard. I used to rent a room over the stables back there and now I took advantage of long familiarity to slip
into the lower level and find an empty stall before I cracked open my bread envelope.

By the time I’d got it split in half, Triss had defied the conventions that light normally enforced on shadows by sliding up the wall to a place where he could read over my shoulder and changing his shape. Most of the time he pretends to be nothing more than light would make him, a darkened copy of my form, but when we’re alone he will often reshape his silhouette to assume the outline of a small dragon complete with wings and a tail. When he does that he assumes some of the other aspects as well, and now I reached out to give him a light scruff behind the ears where his scales always seem to itch.

He made a happy little noise at that, but then shrugged me off and jerked his chin at the tightly rolled piece of paper I now held.
What’s it say?

Unrolling it revealed a folded sheet with a small blob of black wax sealing it. There was no imprint in the wax and no name on the outside of the letter, but magesight revealed the faintest glow of magic on the seal. I held it up to Triss and he reached out with one clawed finger and touched the seal. There was a hiss and the wax dissolved. I raised an eyebrow at Triss and he nodded. As I had expected, it responded only to the touch of a Shade. Any other attempt to open the thing would have resulted in the whole thing burning instantly away to ash.

I opened the letter. Inside it said:
Ashvik’s tomb. Two hours past midnight. The anniversary of the day you broke my heart.
And that was all. No names. No signatures.

Clever, just a location, the time, and a date no one but I would know. The day I told Jax I wasn’t going to marry her. The fifth of Firstgrain, one week in the future. The whole thing was smart. There had been six kings of Tien with that name, and their tombs were scattered widely through the royal cemetery. Anyone who intercepted the message and didn’t know it was intended for me would have to guess not only the date but which one was the intended meeting place. The tomb of Ashvik VI, the man who had died to give me the name Kingslayer.