Bared Blade (5 page)

The Dyad was trailing along at a safe distance behind me. They had arranged themselves so that the Stel mote could lean heavily on her smaller counterpart. She’d put away her rods but now held one of Vala’s battle wands in her right hand while Vala held the other in her left. Both had reversed the short wands so that they lay mostly concealed against their wrists, but as I turned toward the stables, Vala flipped hers around again, pointing it loosely in my direction.

“I don’t think I like the idea of letting you out of our sight,” she said.

“Well, it’s that or use that thing,” I said over my shoulder as I kept walking. “My gear is in the hay loft and I’m going to go get it now.”

“I could come with you.…”

“But Stel couldn’t, not up the ladder. Besides, I don’t want you to. There are certain protections I have to disarm and I don’t want you watching.” More importantly, I wanted to talk to Triss, and for that I needed privacy.

“But I don’t know what you are!” This time the voice came out of both throats and the second wand slid around to point at me. “You killed an Elite and that’s no mere jack’s work. You’re a mage at the least and much more than you seem. It makes you a serious potential threat.”

“Or a potential ally. It’s your choice which you want to make me. But if you’re not going to try to kill me,
stay here
. I’ll be right back.”

Since no blast of magic followed me through the door of the stable, I had to assume they’d opted to continue our protoalliance. I dashed to the ladder and hurried up the rungs—time was getting ever more precious, and I had things to do.

“Triss?” I said as I got to the door to my little room.

“Here.” In the darkness I couldn’t see my shadow-companion, but something about the tone of his voice told me he’d reassumed dragon shape.

“What’s the plan with the Dyad?” I asked.

“There isn’t one.” Triss sounded a little abashed.

I groaned. “Why am I not surprised? Did you at least know what they were when you asked me to help them?”

“No, only that they didn’t move like anything human and that they were in trouble. They were foreign and alone in Tien, as we were when we came here after the death of the goddess. They needed help. What more did I need to know?”

I gently smacked my forehead against the door.

Triss said, “You have said that Namara is dead and you are a man without a people or purpose, no longer a true Blade. But also that you hope you can still do some good in this world. Here was an opportunity to do just that.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“But nothing. You told me that was the path you wanted to walk going forward,
and
that I should help you stay on it. Consider this helping.”

Somehow I was losing an argument with my own shadow. Again. “Later, you and I are going to have a long talk about exactly what helping me means.”

“But there is no time now,” said Triss, and rather smugly in my opinion.

“No there isn’t, so if you’ll just …” But I could already feel him flowing up my legs to encase me in a second skin of cool shadow.

A moment later, he released his will to me. Using the part of myself that was temporarily Triss, I touched the lock on the door and extended a tendril of shadow-stuff into the keyhole. From the outside the lock looked simple enough, the sort of crude iron mechanism you might expect to find in the stable of a run-down inn, but it was more than it seemed. Much more.

The inner workings were of Durkoth make, though not their best, nor even the best they sold to humans. I couldn’t begin to afford the finest the Other smiths had to offer. What I could and had done was add spells devised by the priests of Namara to reinforce and enhance the Durkoth workings. It would have been far easier for an intruder to break down the thick oak door than to pick the lock.

Shaping and hardening the shadow-stuff into a key—the original, I had long since destroyed—I sent a pulse of magic through the lock and twisted. The door opened inward. The room beyond hardly seemed worth the effort, tiny and tucked into the wedge where the roof met the wall of the stable. It barely had space enough for the pallet and low table that were my only real furniture—a small trunk provided a rough bench as well as storage for my more precious possessions.

I closed and latched the door behind me before I reached for the shaded magelight fixed to its lintel. Closing up wasted time, but not much, and it was hard to push aside the cautious habits of a lifetime. With a touch I moved aside the shade, filling the room with an intense and expensive white light. A mosaic of threadbare rugs would prevent it shining through to the stable below and I’d chinked all the cracks in the walls long ago.

I released Triss then and he dropped to the floor, briefly providing me with a normal sort of shadow before shifting to dragon form and extending himself across the room. While I applied the tip of a knife to the socket holding the magelight, Triss cracked the spelled lock on my trunk and popped the lid. I was going to miss the trunk, but it was too bulky to move quickly.

I tipped the trunk up on end, dumping its contents across the rug, then grabbed my sword rig off the top of the resulting pile. The arrangement of leather straps and steel rings held two short straight swords in a matched set of hip-draw back-sheaths as well as several smaller sheaths for knives and other tools of the Blade’s trade.

Fixing a heavyweight canvas pack to several of the rings was the work of a few moments, as was filling it. I tossed in the best of my clothing, a few durable items of food, a tucker bottle of Aveni whiskey—Kyle’s fifteen—and finally the magelight, plunging the room into darkness once more. Put that on my back, add my much worn trick bag, and the pouch that held what little money I currently possessed and I was ready to go. Figure five minutes total, and back out to the ladder.

I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me. It wouldn’t have slowed down the sort of searchers I expected to come once some witness connected me with the Dyad. There was also the slim possibility that if no one had to deal with the lock, no one would look at it closely enough to see that it was more than it ought to be. There were clues there as to what I was for those with magesight and the training to see them, so that would be for the best.

I was almost disappointed to find the Dyad waiting for me in the courtyard. Since they didn’t look very happy to see me, I guess that made us even. Vala in particular looked as though she’d bitten into a rotting pastry, as she stood there angrily tapping one toe. That they hadn’t bolted while I was out of sight told me that whatever else the pair might be, they were pretty desperate. They
needed
me. And that, more than anything else, was why I was going to help them, because Triss was right. My goddess might be gone, but I was ever and always her Blade, and even if I didn’t entirely know what that meant in her absence, part of it had to be helping those who really needed me.

“Where to?” grunted Stel.

“Follow me.” I headed for the little gate that led from the courtyard out onto the streets.

“Not till you tell us more about yourself,” said Vala.

“How about this then?” I asked without slowing down. “I’m leaving. And I’m leaving right now, because the fucking Elite and their Crown Guard minions are going to be crawling all over this place in something between ten minutes and half an hour. If you want to stay and meet them, that’s your lookout. But if you want my help, you’ll be coming with me. It’s your choice.”

Vala said something in a gutter Kodamian that I didn’t understand, but it sounded rude. Then they fell in behind me.

“We’re not used to being treated so high-handedly,” said Stel.

I didn’t answer and I didn’t stop moving. I’ve never held any sort of noble in all that high of esteem, and I wasn’t
about to make an exception for Dyads just because they did a better job than most of a bad lot.

In the ruling houses of Kodamia the mage gift and familiar gift ran in different bloodlines, and a mage with no familiar was no mage at all. The lack of proper mages to defend them could easily have led to the ruination of the city-state.

Instead it had become one of Kodamia’s greatest assets. As it turned out, it wasn’t having a familiar that was the important thing, it was having a
familiar bond
, a pairmate of some sort who could act as a lens to focus your magic. So the children of Kodamia’s mage-gift-bearing sorcerer caste became the bond-companions of the children of the warrior caste who carried the familiar gift.

Because both halves of the pairing were human, the bonding was the tightest of any mage/familiar coupling in the whole of our world. Too tight by my standards. The two literally became one. But that, along with intense training, allowed them to accomplish things no other school of magery could even hope to manage.

The streets of the Stumbles were quiet and unnaturally empty and dark. Normally at this time of night, you couldn’t have gone ten feet without fending off a couple of half-a-riel-a-lay whores, three caras snufflers, and a slit-purse pretending to be a sleepwalker, most of them carrying their own lights. But even the beggars and other gutterside players had vanished. News like three dead Elite traveled fast in a place like the Stumbles.

Windows were closed and doors barred on houses and taverns alike, and everywhere lights were out. The only illumination came from the stars and the half-full moon, but that didn’t make me feel one jot less exposed. I could feel eyes looking out from the cracks between shutters and various other peepholes. Not to mention the fact that the lack of light would make an ideal hunting environment for the restless dead. They were rare in the city proper, but this sort of deep darkness would draw them out of their lurking places if there were any around.

Taking the Dyad back to one of my fallbacks instead of simply vanishing into a cloud of shadow seemed ever more dumb. For perhaps the dozenth time I glanced over at the laboring Stel and considered how much simpler my life would be if I just walked away right now. If it weren’t for the part where I knew I’d have to look at myself in the mirror to shave, I might even have tried it. I sighed.

“What is it?” asked Vala, sounding suspicious. “Why do you keep looking at us that way?”

“It’s this—” I waved an arm to take in the whole neighborhood. “There’s no one around, which means we can’t pull a decent fadeout. Not on the streets anyway.”

“What would you do if you didn’t have me to carry?” demanded Stel.

I couldn’t tell her I’d vanish into shadow, not without admitting what I was, so I offered my second choice. “I’d head up onto the chimney road.” I pointed toward the rooftops. “There’s never much of a crowd up there to begin with, and we pretty much all agree not to see each other when we do meet. But there’s no way you’re going to make it up there, so we need to think of something—”

A sudden brief blast of light and sound cut me off. What the…

“Stel, you idiot!” It was Vala, who was glaring up toward the nearest low rooftop—a tannery. “That hurts,
and
you could have killed yourself, us…” She trailed off into a string of obscenity as she started up the wall after her pairmate.

It was only then that I realized what Stel must have done. She’d aimed the battle wand at the ground, triggered it, and ridden the resulting shockwave up onto the rooftops. I was just about to follow the Dyad roofward when I heard a shout from somewhere behind me.

“Look there’s one of them now, by the tannery! Get him!”

L
ater
, if we lived through the next couple of hours, I was going to strangle Triss for getting us involved in this.

“Go,” I called up to the Dyad. “Head north until you run up against a big street with square stone cobbles and actual lights. Then find someplace to hole up for a bit. I’ll draw them off and catch up to you there.”

That was when the first crossbow quarrel stuck itself in the wall a few feet from my head. There was a slender gap between the tannery and its nearest neighbor, providing a narrow breezeway. I ducked into it and started to feel my way into the pitch-black depths.

Another quarrel followed me in, but the angle was too steep and it didn’t come anywhere close to me by the sound of it. The lack of any hostile magic thrown after it suggested that I was going to be spared further Elite attention at least for a little while. That greatly increased my chances of pulling pursuit away from the others without getting myself killed in the process.

Every cautious step I took involved the sorts of crunching and squishing sounds that make you happy you can’t see
what you’re stepping on and depressed that you can smell it. Mostly rotten food and dead rats, if I had to guess. I’d gone less than ten feet when I felt the familiar sensation of Triss wrapping me in a skin of shadow, like that moment of welcome transition when you step from the hot street into a cool tavern on a sunny summer day.

“Shroud up?” he asked.

“Not yet, we have to give the guard something to follow. I will need your eyes, though.”

“Done.”

With that Triss put himself into the dreamlike state that allowed me to use his senses as my own, expanding my “view” of the immediate surroundings to a full 360 degrees of Shade-style unvision.