Bared Blade (6 page)

That let me pick up the pace to a fast jog and reach the alley at the end of the breezeway just as the pursuing guards got the necessary angle to send more quarrels my way. They were still effectively shooting blind, and the majority of the quarrels stuck in the walls somewhere behind me, but even a blind shot can kill you if your opponent gets lucky. There was more light in the alley proper, so I had to close my eyes as I approached it. The overlay of the two different ways of seeing becomes especially confusing in situations where my own vision moves back and forth from useless to barely helpful.

I turned right as I moved out into the alley, away from the original direction of pursuit and started really laying down boot leather. The guards weren’t stupid, so I had no doubt they would already have sent runners to try to close off both ends of the little alley. That wouldn’t stop me. I could always head up to the rooftops or have Triss shroud us up and fade away into shadows. But neither of those options would draw attention away from our Dyad friend, so I preferred to avoid them as long as possible.

I could hear pursuit in the alley behind me by the time I reached the street. Triss’s senses picked out the bright points of the guards’ magelanterns as they chased after me, but I couldn’t actually see the ones carrying them. Not without
turning around and using my own eyes. Triss’s unvision just doesn’t work that way. The lanterns washed out his view of the area immediately behind the lights.

In some ways, Triss’s analog to our vision is more like touch than sight, or maybe hearing. The Blade masters at the temple taught us that bats see with their ears. They scream and listen for the echoes to come back and tell them about the world around them. Texture is important and edges, soft and hard, rough and smooth, colors not at all.

I don’t know how the masters knew about the bats—probably from quizzing mages with bat familiars—but it’s not really important. What is important is how that relates to the unsight of the Shades. Triss and his fellows see by reading …well, call them dark-echoes that they feel rather than hear, and you’ll be as close as anyone can get to describing it using the human vocabulary. All you really need to know is that the darker it is the better he can perceive things, and that it never ever looks like what you or I would see through our human eyes.

Whatever the mechanism, it makes for a surreal view of the city. Doubly so since the human mind just isn’t properly equipped to see equally well in every direction. You have to sort of keep your main attention focused on where you’re going, while at the same time setting aside a part of your mind to constantly flick through a rotating view of the entire circle.

I’d
lost the last of my pursuers maybe a quarter mile ago and had just turned to head back to the Dyad, when the street rose up to meet me. And not in any wind-at-your-back, traditional-blessing kind of way. No, this street was decidedly hostile. The muck-covered cobblestones under my back foot dropped away as I was about to push off, robbing my running stride of all its power. At the same time, the street in front of me rose like a low stone wave. I was already off balance when it caught me in the thighs, and I flipped over it like I’d run full tilt into a stone fence.

I landed more or less on my head, and then slammed down onto my side, driving the breath from my body. On a cleaner street I’d probably have broken a couple of ribs and maybe my neck, but the accumulated filth of years cushioned my fall. Even so, I was stunned half unconscious by the impact and lost my grip on Triss’s mind and senses. Then Triss did something he almost never chooses to do.

Normally, when Triss encloses me with a shadowy second skin, it feels as though I’ve got a thin layer of cold silk covering my entire body. Now that skin tightened and hardened, becoming something more like chitin. Then it started to move, first rolling me over and up onto hands and knees. Picture an empty suit of plate armor moving of its own accord. Now picture a person inside that armor, moving with it, but not out of any volition. That was my situation as Triss started us scrambling toward the nearest building—a dilapidated tenement.

I was still pretty dazed and didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that it had to be urgent and dangerous. Otherwise Triss would never have seized control like that. I was just about to ask him why he didn’t stand us up and run if it was that bad, when the ground dropped out from under my hands and we tumbled forward. My forehead hit the cobbles hard, but Triss’s rigid presence saved me from the worst of the impact. This time I was looking directly at the ground when it started moving. I felt a feather of cold touch the back of my neck when I noticed that whatever was happening, it didn’t show up in magesight.

Triss quickly got me back up onto hands and knees, but by then it was too late. The cobbles beneath my hands lifted and twisted at the same time the ones under my knees dropped and parted. The street set me neatly on my feet in a knee-deep hole in the ground, while simultaneously turning me to face toward my left. Then the cobbles closed back in, gently but firmly pincering my calves, all without any visible sign of magic. To make matters even more confusing the street was empty.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Durkoth,” said Triss, his voice a bare whisper in my ear. Then he relaxed his hold over my body.

“Interesting,” said a cold, perfect voice, and it was only then that I saw my first Durkoth.

I knew that a score or more lived in Tien, but they mostly dealt with the outside world through emissaries. I’d never encountered one in the flesh before, and I really didn’t know much about them. Subterranean, though I didn’t know if that meant they lived in caves or castles or just swam through earth like the stone dogs. Like their Sylvani and Vesh’An cousins they were inhuman and beautiful, demi-immortal creatures of a much older breed than ours.

Or that’s what the legends said at any rate. I only knew of one interaction between my order and any of the Others in the last hundred years—the assignment that had earned Siri her second name of Mythkiller. That was the big stuff. Beyond that? What I didn’t know about the Others would have filled books.

The Durkoth was crouched in the middle of a shallow hole in the street, his bare hands and feet pressed against the roadbed. He was utterly still in a way that no human could ever achieve, and I would have mistaken him for a statue if the earth hadn’t been bringing him swiftly and steadily closer.
He
wasn’t moving, but the hole in which he crouched was, with the cobbles parting around it like water around the hull of a ship, complete to filling in behind him.

At first, he was the exact color of the cobbles, skin and cloak and all, but when he finally came to a stop a few feet away, it all began to shift and lighten. By the time he stood up to face me, he had returned to his natural coloration, looking like a statue fresh hewn from white marble. Only no statue in Tien had ever been so clean, not even as it stood in the sculptor’s studio. No scintilla of dust or misplaced chip of stone marred his perfection.

Zhan had a long artistic history, including the previous century’s heroic school, a movement dedicated to the artistic embodiment of the human ideal. Chang Un was considered the greatest of all of Zhan’s heroic sculptors. The Durkoth
looked like what Un’s wildest dreams might have looked like if he’d had the skill to chisel them out of stone. I couldn’t help but stare.

The impression of perfection extended to every facet of the Durkoth’s appearance. His face was human in layout, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, etc. But no human had ever possessed such symmetry of feature, or fineness of line. Each pale round ear perfectly mirrored the other in every detail, including an ideal flare and height that seemed intentionally designed to balance and highlight the shape and placement of his other features and his hair. He was slightly taller than the human norm and muscled and proportioned like the realized ideal of what an athlete
should
look like. A typical example of the breed if the legends spoke true.

While I studied him, he studied me. At least, I thought he did. It was hard to tell. In living under stone, the Durkoth have become like stone themselves—taking some of its stillness and hidden depths into themselves. His eyes were blank white spheres that did not appear to move. Neither did he seem to breathe, though I knew that was something of an illusion. The Durkoth do breathe, just far too slowly for the human eye to see. After a little while—a very little while by Durkoth standards—I broke the silence.

“What’s interesting?”

“You are not what I expected to catch,” said the Durkoth, and again I noted how cold his voice sounded. The only thing about him that moved when he spoke was his mouth, and even that looked wrong and unnatural, as though stone had decided to flow like water.

“Then perhaps, having mistaken my identity, you’ll be so kind as to release me.” I was in an incredibly bad position, with my legs held in a stone clamp. If I could avoid a fight I would.

“Perhaps, though not at once, I think. I can sense that you do not have the Kothmerk. And you are obviously not the Dyad. But you did run from the guards when they pursued that creature. Why?”

“Maybe because they were shooting at me?” Then, because I had no idea if Durkoth even understood sarcasm, I continued. “I feared for my life.” I let my mouth run on by itself—I needed to keep the Durkoth occupied while I tried to think of some way to convince him to let me go. I was pretty sure that knowing what a Kothmerk was would help there, but it didn’t ring any bells. “The guards were using crossbows. Running away from them looked like the best way to keep them from killing me.”

The Durkoth didn’t respond immediately. He might have been thinking about what I said, or he might have simply forgotten I existed. His expression didn’t change at all, and I had no way to tell what was going on inside his head. It was maddening. Deception and misdirection are a significant part of the Blade’s job. You have to be able to sneak in close to a target if you want to kill them. In many ways it’s like running a successful skip or con, which involves learning to read physical and facial cues. Cues that the Durkoth simply didn’t provide.

“Could we move this along a bit?” I asked, but the Durkoth held up a hand.

“Bide.” It knelt and touched the ground with its fingertips again. “One comes.”

The cobbles let go of my knees, but before I could do anything about it, the ground caught hold of my feet and pulled me under. For a brief moment I stood at the bottom of a hole just big enough for one. Then the cobbles closed above my head, cutting off the light and imprisoning me under a roof of stone. I reached up and started hammering on the underside of the street, and found that the stones were moving. Or rather, as I discovered a moment later, when the cobbles above gave way to the underside of a rough plank floor, that I was.

The Durkoth’s voice spoke into the darkness then, saying again, “Hush. I will release you when our business is done, but the guards come now. Bide in silence if you want to remain free.”

“Triss?” I whispered.

“Just a moment.” I felt him flowing off my skin and up through the wide cracks in the floor above. “There, I can see now. We’re just under the lip of the tenement’s porch.”

“Oh good.” The words came out higher and tighter than I’d planned. The narrow space reeked of piss and rot.

“It’s all right,” whispered Triss. “These planks won’t even slow us down once we decide to move.”

I forced myself to breathe deeply and evenly despite the smells, as I had been taught:
Calm the body and the mind will follow.
It would have helped if I could have borrowed Triss’s senses, but that trick only worked when he held me within himself.

“What’s the Durkoth doing?” I asked.

“Looking at a spot on the stree—oh.” His voice grew even quieter—a shadow of a whisper, audible only because he spoke directly into my ear. “A stone dog has just swum up through the cobbles …and here comes his master.”

I froze. The stone dogs are elementals, creatures of the earth at a level even more fundamental than the Durkoth, and I didn’t know what might draw its attention when I was in its element like this. I’d never felt more vulnerable.

I tried not to think about the smoky-sweet burn of a sip of the Kyle’s in my pack hitting the back of my throat, or about how much better I would feel with a glass inside me. But that only turned my mind to efik, and how very nice a couple of roasted beans would go down, or better yet, an entire, properly brewed pot of the stuff. Faster than alcohol and more reliable, efik soothed the nerves at the same time it cleared the mind. I hadn’t wanted it this bad in a very long time.

“Master Qethar,” the Elite called—the first syllable of the Durkoth’s name coming out something between “hch” and the sound of someone clearing their throat. “Have you found something?” I could hear him quite clearly through the many gaps in the battered old porch. “Graf heard you working your earth-magic and he led me here.”

“It is not magic, Major Aigo,” said Qethar, his voice as flat and cold as ever. “I do not compel, I persuade. I am
Durkoth. The earth and I are children of the same house. I need no conjurer’s tricks to convince my sister to help me.”

“Of course,” said Aigo, his voice soothing, though I could hear strain under the surface. He was clearly under orders to play nice with the Durkoth. “My apologies. Graf heard you
speaking
with your sister. What did you find?”

“Nothing,” said Qethar. “I thought I had found the Dyad, but I was mistaken.”

“That’s odd,” said Aigo. “Graf told me that your …conversation was quite extensive. It seems a lot of effort if there was nothing to find.”

“I saw someone running from your men,” said Qethar. “But it was not the Dyad, so I decided that I had no need to keep him for you.”

“Did you then?” I could hear anger in the Elite’s voice. “We’ve learned that they had help at the tavern, a man named Aral. A jack, and one who works the shadowy side of the business. We think he might have been fronting for someone who wanted to buy the Kothmerk.” There was that word again. “He’s wanted for questioning. You’re telling me you just let him go?” The Elite’s voice rose with the question.