For just an instant, I felt the threat of the everdark in his touch though Triss had not put it there. Then I pushed the feeling aside, relaxing into the embrace of my dearest friend. He was a trained killer and plenty frightening, but then, so was I. We were both of us products of a system designed to create living weapons.
“It’s all right, Triss.
I’m
all right. We need to get out of here and find out what happened to the girl.”
Of course, by this point, whatever had happened to Maylien was almost certainly over. There had been neither sound nor sign from outside since her first outcry, which suggested she was dead or taken. I couldn’t do much about either of those things naked and unarmed, so I figured I’d better take a few seconds more to do something about both conditions.
All the gear I’d had on me when I got deathsparked was lying in a rough pile, but that didn’t help much. They’d cut my clothes and boots off me, probably after they hung me on the rack of the glyph, and most of my knives had stayed behind with the dead Kadeshis. I didn’t have a lot of other options either. Three of my four captors had gone from the world entirely, taking all their belongings with them. The fourth had burned.
Grabbing the wreckage of my pants, I started to tie myself a breechclout. I’d gotten it just about to the point of addressing Tien’s decency laws, when a nervous voice called from somewhere beyond the partially opened door to the dungeon.
“Lok!” it said. “Are you all right? What the hell happened?”
“Shit.” I picked up my remaining knife and something that looked like a vicious cross between a fireplace poker and a bone saw and quickly crossed to the doorway.
A hallway lay beyond, with another prison door at the far end. A torch in the passage reflected off a pair of eyes peering through its little barred window at me.
“Lok?”
Triss hissed something in his own language and stretched down the hall, reaching for the far door. Before he could get there, the eyes vanished with a muffled curse and the sound of the viewing panel slamming shut. A moment later, an alarm bell started to clang.
That accelerated the schedule.
I closed and locked the door at my end, then broke the key off in the hole and wedged it before heading for the window. It was narrow, but if we could cut a few of the bars loose, I’d fit through all right, and it was a better bet than fighting our way out through an unknown building. I called to Triss and made my hand into a knife shape to let him know what I wanted, but he kept sliding back and forth along the surface of the door, either not listening or ignoring me again. He wanted more blood.
I did, too, but this wasn’t the time.
“Triss!” I snapped. “Do you think you can drop that for a minute and help me with these bars? We’ll come back later and we can kill them then. For now, we need to get clear and see what happened to Maylien.”
He turned his head my way and hissed something angry and unintelligible.
“Triss, please. Let it go for tonight.”
With a sigh, he came back toward me. I made the knife-hand gesture again, but rather than settle around my hands and shoulders, he threw his wings wide, hiding the window and a good bit of the wall around it. For nearly a minute he hung there like a leaf pressed in a book. With a brutal effort I could feel through our bond, he flexed his shoulders and snapped his wings forward, contracting into a pinpoint in an instant. The section of wall vanished into the everdark along with the window it contained. It left behind a hole in the shape of a man-sized dragon. Then Triss collapsed back into my shadow for a moment in exhaustion. This newly revealed talent took a lot out of him.
“That’ll work.” I climbed up into the hole, using the outline of a hind leg as a step.
About half the hole lay below the surface of the ground. Between that and my still-rocky condition, I ended up slithering my way up and out, smearing myself with dirt and nearly losing my breechclout in the process. I came up in a narrow stone-flagged alley, quiet, dark, completely empty.
No girl. But then, I hadn’t expected her to be there. No girl’s corpse either, which was a relief.
Though I didn’t recognize the alley, I could tell by the paucity of trash in the corners and the lack of sewer smells that I was in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. Maybe professional, maybe residential, but still not rich enough for street lighting. Tailor’s Wynd or the Underhills or someplace like that. By the stars, it was still a couple of hours short of dawn, which explained the quiet.
Glancing back at the hole I’d just climbed out of, I wondered briefly why anyone would put a dungeon someplace like this. But the very affluence of the neighborhood would provide good cover. And someone who could keep even a petty mage like Lok in their pocket could also afford the spells that would keep the screaming and stink from passing through the window. That reminded me again of the girl, who must have broken the spell to find me. The fact that I needed a reminder said very bad things about my general state.
I took a quick look around for signs of what had happened to her though I didn’t hold out much hope on that front. I’m no tracker, and even if I were, deep city is no place to go hunting without a hound. When I didn’t find anything in the brief time I figured I had before my new enemies started to be a problem again, I turned to leave. That’s when Triss, who had recovered enough to look around the alley behind me, made a noise like a kettle boiling over onto the coals.
“What is it?”
Triss circled an apparently unmarked spot on the cobbles. “Zass was here. He came from above. I can taste him in the stones where he and Devin landed.”
I could feel my eyebrows heading for my hairline in surprise. Zass meant Devin, but that wasn’t what had startled me. I’d more than half expected his involvement if for no other reason than my current run of luck—all bad. No, what startled me was the fact that Triss could tell Zass had been there. I’d never so much as heard a rumor of any such ability among the Shades.
Before I could ask him about it, a noise from the nearer end of the alley suggested we’d overstayed our safety margin. I glanced briefly up toward the rooftops whence Devin had come and whence he had probably returned. But even with Triss’s help I knew I couldn’t make it up the smoothly stuccoed wall in my current condition, much less run the rooftops. My nima was overtapped already. If I pushed my magic any further, I’d die and take Triss with me. Even if I’d been up to it, Triss wouldn’t have been—I could feel the pain and exhaustion leaking down the link between us though he tried to shield me from it.
Part of being a professional is knowing that sometimes you have to let go, no matter how much you might want to keep trying.
So, instead of going after Devin, I asked Triss to hide me within himself and started walking. We left the alley by its farther mouth and turned left, plodding downslope in what I hoped was the direction of the sea and the docks. After a block or two, I figured out where I was—the Old Mews, which meant I needed to reverse my course and go over the top of the Kanathean Hill to get back home.
I paused a moment to set my position in memory so I could find the alley and dungeon later, after I’d had both rest and food. Then I turned toward the Stumbles and the Gryphon and began my slow walk again, letting Triss relax back into my shadow after a little while to preserve his strength against emergencies. It was a slog, and I desperately needed about fifteen hours of sleep and a triple portion of breakfast.
The few people I encountered along the way gave me a wide berth. Who could blame them? I must have looked like a holy beggar, clad only in a breechclout and covered in scrapes and bruises. When the first of the street vendors started setting up, I was half-tempted to actually try to beg a few coins here and there so I could buy a bit of breakfast. The boiling congee and frying sausages smelled like a little slice of heaven. But I couldn’t afford the trouble freelance begging would buy me with the real guttersiders, so I let it go. Gutterside had a most ungentle way of settling quarrels.
I’d just reached the edge of the Stumbles when it finally occurred to me to wonder about how
exactly
I’d ended up in that dungeon. That’s when I realized that going back to the Gryphon might not be the best idea I’d ever had since I had no answers for some very important questions. Most notably: How had the parties who put me there known right where to find me and exactly how to take me down? Parties as yet unnamed who might well try to pick me up again. It probably should have struck me earlier, and it might have if I’d been more than half-alive, or less focused on Devin and what he might be doing to Maylien.
Maylien. Dammit!
If Devin killed her, I’d have no choice but to kill him, and probably the baroness as well. Debts owed to the living can be negotiated. The dead can only be paid with absolutes. Justice. Revenge. Redemption.
I shook my head. Worry about it tomorrow. For now, I needed to worry about making sure I had a “tomorrow.” So when I passed a certain alley, I turned into it. This one didn’t smell nearly as nice as the one up in Old Mews had, and I tried very hard not to think about the stuff squelching over the tops of my bare feet. Triss had sheathed the soles in a toughened layer of shadow stuff to keep me from injuring myself when we got close to the Stumbles, but the muck was ankle-deep here.
About fifty feet in, I found the crumbling stone wall I remembered and used it as a ladder to take me up onto the rooftops. From there I made my slow way to an old brick-faced tenement that had burned two years ago. Most of the place was a dangerous ruin, but one old turret on the southern corner had survived mostly intact, and I’d set it up as a fallback.
You always have to have a fallback in case the plan goes bad, even when the plan is as simple as drinking yourself to death.
It was nearly eight stories up, and the stairs were gone. The only way in involved a thirty-foot vertical climb followed by a short diagonal traverse to get to a slightly canted window. Even so, it would have attracted summer squatters had I not spent considerable time and magic making the climb look worse than it was and the floor appear as if it had gone in the fire. In winter, of course, it would have been deathly cold and a complete nightmare to heat, and even I would have been hesitant about making that climb with the bricks iced up.
It took everything I had left to make it up a wall I could normally have managed in my sleep. At the end, I literally fell in through the window of my hidey-hole and crawled to my little straw tick. I barely had the energy to wrap myself in one of the worn woolen horse blankets I’d stashed there before I tumbled into the ocean of sleep and sank into the depths.
I had evil dreams and woke from them both too early and gladly. My everything hurt, and I was as stiff as boiled leather though I’d escaped with no serious injury. Lok’s beaters had been very good at their job, and I was glad they were dead though the satisfaction that gave me did nothing for the pain.
Wind woke me, a chilly blow coming in off the sea and whistling through the myriad cracks in the ruined old building. Fortunately, the warm afternoon sun pouring in through the shutters I’d forgotten to close offset the worst of the wind. I’d slept a good ten hours. I could have used ten more, and I really didn’t want to move, but I needed a piss.
As I rolled off the straw mattress, most of my fresh scabs stayed behind with the blanket they’d stuck to, and I had to bite back a scream. A couple started bleeding again, though none badly. Not even the long gash Weasel had left on my ribs, which looked shallower than I’d expected—though I’d have to get Triss to double-check it for me.
Getting to my feet made me feel about nine hundred years old, but I managed it. I staggered my way over to the open hole where the stairs had once been. I undid my filthy breechclout and dropped it into the opening, then followed it with the contents of my bladder. It was only when I was done that I realized Triss hadn’t said a word yet. Turning back toward my bed, I saw a thin line of shadow stretching from me to an irregular patch of darkness where I had lain.
If you sketched our connection as a tail, the patch looked rather like a dragon with its nose tucked under one wing. I stepped closer, and called Triss’s name. The shadow didn’t even twitch. Triss was dead asleep, and that told me just how awful yesterday had been for him. In the twenty years since we’d bonded when I was seven, he’d outslept me less than a dozen times, and only twice had he slept through my getting out of bed.
I left him lying there and crossed the little room to my supply cache, a big, lidded earthenware amphora sealed with spelled wax. I’d lifted it special for the purpose from among an upscale tavern’s empties. There wasn’t anything better for keeping the rats and other vermin out of your goods, not that could be scavenged on the cheap anyway. Inside, I’d left a worn but still wearable change of clothes, a couple of battered daggers, a smaller jar full of rice, and a bottle of Kyle’s. I set one of the daggers where I could reach it, ignored the clothes and the rice, opened the whiskey, and took a long pull—purely medicinal.
At least, that’s what I told myself, that the Kyle’s was the best way to file the sharpest edges off my collection of aches and pains. I’d just had my third hit off the bottle when Triss made a sort of unhappy clucking noise.