Bared Blade (7 page)

“Perhaps,” replied the Durkoth, and if he noticed the Elite’s anger it didn’t show in his voice. “You could draw me a sketch but I have trouble telling your kind apart by faces. This one was male and alone. He did not have the Kothmerk. I couldn’t tell you more than that.”

“But you won’t mind if Graf and I look around a bit, right?” There was a hell of a lot of tension between the two of them, the kind that required some history, and I found myself wishing I knew what that history was.

Qethar didn’t answer right away, though I couldn’t tell if that was from uncertainty or deliberate provocation. Finally he said, “…no, of course not, search all you want, though you won’t find anything.”

“We’ll see about that. Graf, seek.”

The giant dog began to sniff around. Between its hard stone feet and enormous bulk, you’d have expected the thing
to make at least as much noise as a shod horse. Instead, with nothing between it and the cobbles that were a part of its native element, its footfalls were nearly silent. I could only just make out the snuffling, but that was all.

What I
could
hear was my own breathing growing steadily thinner and more ragged, despite my best efforts to keep it under control. Triss gave me a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, but that really didn’t help. As the stone dog worked its way ever closer, I felt sure it would discover me. It took a huge effort of will to keep from simply blasting away the floor above me and leaping out to face my enemies.

Of course, the stone dog would rip my head off before I could get halfway out of my hole and I knew it—which is why I stayed put.
Your mind must always rule your heart.
I couldn’t even draw my swords in the available space. My only hope lay in concealment. I kept still, but it was brutally hard.

The dog got closer, and closer still. It was snuffling along the base of the little porch. I held my breath. It took one deep sniff and froze like it knew I was there. Then, miraculously, it moved off, still snuffling loudly. A few more minutes passed like hours.

“I told you that you wouldn’t find anything, Major,” Qethar said after a while.

“You did,” replied the Elite, his voice contemptuous and angry. “But sometimes you Durkoth have different ideas about the way the world works than we humans do. I don’t suppose you want to tell me which way he went?”

“Does it really matter?” asked Qethar. “He’s surely beyond your reach by now. Still, if it will make you happy, I can say with some degree of confidence that he was headed toward this very tenement when last I saw him.”

“Did he go inside?”

“I didn’t notice it if he did,” replied Qethar, and I couldn’t help but wonder why the Durkoth kept handing out obvious evasions instead of smooth lies. That was bound to put a twist in the Major’s tail. No one held out on the Elite. Not in Tien. Not if they had any sense.

“Well, I’d best rely on my own devices then, hadn’t I?” growled Aigo. “Be sure that I’ll inform my superiors of the very telling degree of your cooperation, Master Qethar. I don’t think King Thauvik will be at all pleased with your performance.”

Mention of the king made my ears prick up. His name wasn’t something you heard very often in my normal run of affairs, and not something you wanted to hear. In fact, I generally went way the hell out of my way to avoid situations that would bring his eye anywhere near me. If he was directly interested in this business with the Dyad …well I didn’t like to think about it.

“How very sad for His Majesty. You’ll have to tell him how deeply sorry I am that I couldn’t be of more help.” Qethar didn’t sound sorry. If anything he sounded like he thought pissing off Thauvik was something of a perk.

Triss whispered in my ear again, “The Elite and his familiar are turning and walking away now, but the Durkoth remains. He’s coming this way, so I’d better go quiet again.”

The porch creaked alarmingly above me and a swath of my very limited light vanished.

“Now, where were we?” the Durkoth asked.

“I’m pretty sure you were about to let me go about my business,” I said without much hope.

“No, I don’t think that was it. I think you were about to tell me everything you know about the Dyad so that I don’t call the Major back and give you to him.”

“Wouldn’t that be a bit awkward?” I asked. “He’d know that you were holding out on him.”

“He knows that now,” said Qethar. “Nothing would change except that I would have handed over a criminal he badly wants to get hold of. You’ve really nothing to bargain with except information, so you would do best to make my little misdirection of the ever-loyal Graf worth it.”

I filed that last bit away without remarking on it. “What if I don’t have anything useful to tell you?”

“Then you really won’t like the way the Elite go about asking you the same questions I want answered now. They
won’t take no for an answer and they won’t be gentle in the way they ask, not with Thauvik taking a personal interest in the matter.”

The way he said “Thauvik” made it sound like a curse word. Whatever he had against the king it was more than just business.

Qethar continued, “I’m giving you a chance to walk away unharmed. You’d do well to take it. Your own species will not be so merciful. They never are.”

“All right.” I needed to buy time while I figured a way out of this. “But how do I know I can I trust you?”

“You don’t and you can’t, but if I’d wanted to harm you I could already have done so.”

The earthen walls around my little hole squeezed in for a brief instant, trapping my arms at my side and pressing the air from my lungs in a great gasp. Then they relaxed again, and I could breathe.

“Point taken.” I used the sound of my own voice to cover the faint scrape as I drew a knife from the sheath at my hip. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

I tipped my head back, scanning the darkened area above me, trying to decide which crack to drive my knife through for best effect if it should come to that. I didn’t think I’d get more than one chance, and I was in a lousy position for delivering a killing blow, but I thought it’d make a marginally better opening move than a burst of magelightning that would mostly get soaked up by the planks. Maybe it would be better to just have Triss garrote him.…

“Do put the knife away,” said Qethar. “It wouldn’t get through my armor.”

I didn’t remember any armor, just a light tunic and trousers, with a cloak thrown over the top. How had I missed something as bulky as armor?

He continued, “Even if you did manage to kill me, you would only die a moment later. My sister holds you in the palm of her hand and she would crush you in revenge.”

His sister? Oh, right, he claimed kinship with the earth around me. That changed things. I didn’t know whether that
was some sort of Durkoth mystical gobbledygook way of talking about their own special magic or if he meant it literally. If it was the former, a quick enough kill might still get me out of this in one Aral-shaped piece. But if it was the latter, I’d have a problem of the fatal variety. Not a question I wanted to settle the hard way.

I was rapidly running out of good options. I didn’t want to give up what little I knew about the Dyad, and even if I did turn nose on her, my meager information was unlikely to satisfy the Durkoth. Which meant I was going to have to bluff my way out of that hole in the ground.

“It’s hard to know where to start.…” I began.

“Start with the Kothmerk. Has the Dyad recovered it?” Qethar asked impatiently, betraying the first sign of emotion I’d yet heard from him. “Did she have it with her?”

I wished once again that I had some idea what the hell the Kothmerk was. This was going to be damned hard to pull off without that knowledge, and I couldn’t be too obvious with my fishing. “Well, I didn’t exactly
see
it.…”

Which was the truth—when you’re spinning a lie it’s always best to steer as close to the truth as possible where you can manage it. It’s much harder to get tripped up later if you keep things simple, and nothing’s simpler than the truth.

The Durkoth caught my implication. “But you do think she had it, don’t you? I can tell.” More impatience, and just a touch of eagerness.

So, whatever it was, a person could conceivably carry it concealed. Small enough to fit in a pouch, then. What else could I get?

“I don’t know,” I said. “She seemed mighty nervous. She could have left it hidden somewhere.”

“No.” Flat and cold. “If she’s recovered it she won’t have let it out of her sight. Not after her great failure earlier. Where is she now? Tell me! If you can help me catch her, you’re a free man.”

“If I tell you, what’s to keep you from killing me?”

“Nothing at all. You have no power in this situ— Ack! What?”
he asked, his voice going suddenly harsh and tight. “How are you doing that?”

The walls suddenly pressed in sharply all around me, pushing my pack into my back and driving the air from my lungs. Spots of white light started to eat away at the edges of my vision.

“Stop it or I’ll crush you!” husked the Durkoth.

I wanted to tell him that I would happily stop whatever it was if I could, but I didn’t have the breath for it. I didn’t have the breath for anything.

Then, faintly through the roaring in my ears, I heard Triss saying, “If he dies, you die. Back it off right now.”

“I don’t know what you are, familiar, but if I kill your master, you die, too, and that frees me.”

“No,” said Triss. “I have set my will. If you kill me, I behead you as I die. Everybody loses.”

“So be it,” replied the Durkoth. “My life means nothing.”

“
M
y
life means nothing,” repeated the Durkoth. “Not when weighed against my sacred duty to the Kothmerk …but I can’t find it if I let you kill me.”

As suddenly as it had come, the pressure around me eased, and I could breathe again. I wasn’t aware that I had started moving until the night opened up around me when the earth very gently spat me out onto the street.

Qethar was sitting on the stoop of the old tenement perfectly motionless. If I hadn’t known what he was, I would have taken him for a particularly bizarrely placed piece of public art. A Chang Un masterpiece sitting unguarded in one of the city’s worst shitholes.

Qethar’s expression was cruel and hard, making a sharp contrast with his relaxed, almost indolent, pose. He sat with his upper body leaned way back, supporting himself on his elbows as though he had settled in for a long spell of watching the street go by. He wore the loose flowing trousers and sleeveless shirt that is the summer uniform of the people of Tien—every detail seemingly rendered in impossibly
clean white marble—fully visible now that he had shed his concealing cloak. That garment had fallen away to lie across the rough planks like a carven shroud. His bare feet were firmly planted in a patch of dirt that sat amidst the hard cobbles like a sunken island.

I imagined the plaque that would have gone with the apparent sculpture saying something like “the god of dark passions watches the death of the maiden,” or some other equally disturbing fancy. The only thing marring the image of a statue at rest was the thin loop of utter blackness that wrapped his neck like a shadowy hangman’s noose, its tail trailing down to disappear between the cracks in the porch.

It should have been invisible there in the deep dark of the empty streets. But the Durkoth was so pale that he seemed almost to glow with an inner light, and that cast the slender loop of blackness binding his throat into stark relief. The shadow looked so fragile and insubstantial against the heavy stonelike weight of the Durkoth. Even I, who knew exactly what Triss was capable of, could hardly credit the danger that dark thread represented.

“Well played,” said Qethar through lips that didn’t so much move as jump from one position to the next without passing through the intervening stages. It was unnerving. “You have me at a fatal disadvantage. What are your demands, Blade?”

“Start with not repeating that last word,” I replied, suppressing a pinch of worry over having my identity exposed yet again. With the death of Namara I had lost so much, not least the freedom from complication. At least the street was empty. “The Blades are as dead as their goddess.”

The Durkoth said nothing, but he knew he had scored a hit, and his expression shifted without actually seeming to move. One instant he looked worried and angry, as though he had always looked that way. The next, a feral smile turned up the corners of his lips, and again, it looked as though it had always been there. It made me want to slap him. Instead, I leaned in close to tap a finger against the base of his throat, just below Triss’s shadowy presence.

“I don’t know what your game is…” But I trailed off as I touched him.

I’d been expecting him to feel the way he looked—flesh like marble, cold and smooth and lifeless. Instead, his skin was feverishly hot and softer than silk. The contact jolted through me like a tiny charge of magelightning and I couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like to take him in my arms and …I shook my head, trying to clear away the images that had arisen there seemingly of their own volition.