An awful lot of a Blade’s job involves sitting and waiting.
Killing someone is relatively easy if you don’t care about who sees it happen or about getting away. No security is so good that it can keep out a determined professional assassin willing to die to reach his target. Fortunately for the people who guard kings, there are very few professionals interested in dying for the job. Even among the Blades.
I know that the stories paint us as fanatical assassins totally devoted to the goddess and ready to martyr ourselves at Namara’s whim. That’s true enough, but it’s also beside the point. If Namara had ever asked one of her Blades to go on a suicide mission, I don’t think any of us would have refused the goddess, or even resented the order. But the goddess never asked. If you’d questioned me about that back in the day, I’d have told you it was because she loved her Blades and would never allow unnecessary harm to come to us.
Again, that would be true but largely beside the point, because it’s only one truth. Another is that children with the right sort of mind-set to become a Blade are few and far between. Those with the mind-set and both the familiar and the mage gifts are even rarer. The Shades are quite picky about who they will bond with—probably two-thirds of the children presented to them are turned away. Finally, it takes more than a decade of training to make even a novice Blade. The goddess can’t afford to throw a single one away.
Which is why Triss and I spent four hours hanging in a scrap of silk over a multistory drop, chewing carefully measured-out efik beans while I watched and listened. If we were going to get away clean after I killed the king, we needed to get in clean. That meant watching and waiting and thinking and planning. It also meant dealing with the permanent ward built into the tile mosaic of the balcony.
Permanent wards come in two types, keyed and unkeyed. Keyed wards react only to people who haven’t been spelled into their memories. Unkeyed wards react to everybody. In both cases, it’s basically impossible for a person to cross the ward without triggering it. That’s why people generally don’t bother to hide them; they’re as much a warning as a barrier. When people do try to cross them, what happens when the ward is triggered is limited only by the power and imagination of the wardcaster.
Permanent wards are very dangerous. They’re also stupid. They can’t be adapted to changing conditions without a lot of work on the part of the wardcaster. Even just adding a new person to the key takes time and a good deal of power. Beyond that, if they’re someplace like the balcony, where they’re exposed to wind and weather, they can’t be too sensitive.
You don’t want a fifty-foot column of magical fire shooting into the air every time a passing pigeon lands for a minute or a couple of leaves blow across the balcony. That’s hard on the nerves and trains guards not to pay attention to the wards when they trigger. If you do it enough, it drains the ward. At the same time, you don’t want some clever mage with a pigeon for a familiar landing his companion safely on the ward to spy on you. So you make compromises. You set the ward to have a nasty but not flashy reaction if something living and smaller than a cat lands on it. You also set it to ignore leaves and other wholly dead stuff.
Say, for example, a piece of silk with weights sewn in all around the edges so it can be cast like a net. If you’re really cautious, you’ll build some sort of magic detection into the ward so that something with an active spell on it like an eyespy or hearsay will get the pillar-of-fire treatment. But say your piece of silk doesn’t have an active spell on it, say it’s just been prepared to be magically sensitive itself, and say that it works slowly. Now, that is
very
hard to detect.
So, for the last hour we were hanging under the balcony, a silken net lay atop it soaking up a perfect mirror image of the ward. When we got back to our snug, I took that sheet of silk, attached it to a prespelled mat of felt with Triss’s help, and created a custom wardblack that would render the ward effectively blind.
That’s how you penetrate really good security without getting caught: slowly, carefully, one custom-built piece at a time.
The second time we climbed the tower, I spent a good half hour lying flat on the wardblack with a tiny ear trumpet pressed to the iron-bound oak door before pulling a cornerbright out of my trick bag and slipping the end under the door so that I could peer inside. Like every aspect of this job, it was a risk, but a calculated one.
Take a strip of silver an inch wide and a bit thicker than a sheet of parchment. Tarnish it dead black, then polish the two ends up into tiny mirrors. Enchant it so that what one mirror sees the other shows. Now you have a way to see around corners and under doors. The magic involved is small, passive, and inherent to the device, which means it barely glows to the sorcerer’s eye. The bigger problem comes from the mirrors. You can’t do it without them, and mirrors shine, but a cornerbright’s less risky than the alternatives.
Once the cornerbright revealed a dark and empty room, we slipped inside, where I pulled a tiny magelantern from my trick bag. I opened the directional shutters just enough to illuminate a narrow band in front of me. The stone was a dim one and dark red, so the light wouldn’t be visible from any distance—a thieveslamp.
The beam revealed a small council room with a heavy wooden table, a half dozen chairs—including one meant to evoke the throne—and a small side desk where a secretary could stand. A floor below the king’s apartments, the room provided a private venue to meet with a few trusted advisors. There were no windows, only the two heavy doors. The one leading into the tower was flanked by a pair of shallow alcoves for guards.
Not a good place for an ambush. I might, barely, have contrived to sling myself under the table and wait there for the king to arrive. But even on the incredibly tiny chance that I succeeded in hiding out till he arrived and killing him with a dagger to the groin, I’d never make it out alive.
It would have been tempting to try something fancy with the royal chair and poison if I didn’t know that Alinthide had been killed after trying a similar trick. There was no way the council room wasn’t being checked for poison on a daily basis.
I might, if I were very lucky and very stupid, be able to get Ashvik with a poisoned dart from the edge of the balcony, if the door happened to open at the right time, and I wasn’t spotted from below, and there was no one sitting in the nearer chair to block the shot. I couldn’t make my move here. So I spent another long span with my ear to the inner door.
This time I had something to listen to. Every few minutes someone, or rather two someones, passed the door. First one way, then the other. One of the few real disadvantages the Elite had was that the stone dogs made a lot of noise once they came up out of the earth. No matter how graceful and gentle-footed you are, when you weigh a thousand-plus pounds, and your feet are made of stone, sneaking is not your forte.
The noises from the guard rounds suggested a short hall lay beyond the door, one with stairs at either end and a few doors the Elite had to check. The latter probably magically, or they’d have rattled the handles. After an hour or so of the routine, I decided I’d have to risk the cornerbright if I wanted to learn anything more. I waited until the stone dog had just passed, then slipped the tiniest edge of the device under the door.
I could see a narrow band of hallway and another door as well as the retreating backs of a young Elite lieutenant and his familiar. By tilting the strip as much as the narrow crack under the door would allow, I was able to follow their progress as far as the base of a set of stairs, where they waved upward—probably at a second Elite on the landing above. Then I pulled back the cornerbright before they could turn around and spy it.
I rolled onto my back beside the door and waited for the pair to pass again. The heavy, grating footsteps of the stone dog got closer and closer. Even though I knew it couldn’t have sniffed me out, I had to work to keep my heart from speeding up.
Everything had gone fine so far. Everything was going fine. Everything would be fine. I repeated that to myself again and again. I even believed it.
Right up until the moment the stone dog’s head came through the wall two feet above my face. My skin burned with cold as shock rolled over me like a powder-snow avalanche in Dalridia’s mountains. Every muscle in my body went rigid—bone-deep reflexes that wanted me to jump and shriek warring with a lifetime’s training in stealth.
The training saved me. Mine and Triss’s. Rather than jerk away from those great stone jaws or reach for a knife to defend myself, I held my breath and froze. In that very same instant Triss burst outward from my skin, covering us both in his enshrouding darkness. The next few moments seemed to take as long as my entire life up to that point. I could hear the stone dog snuffling around a foot or two above my face, feel his cold, dank breath through the shadows that shrouded me every time he breathed out. I turned my head to the side so that he could not feel mine in return.
Moving as quietly as I possibly could, I slid a hand to the hilt of the eye of the goddess and slowly slipped it from the sheath on my chest, holding it ready. If I moved before it sensed me, I could probably drive the knife into the stone dog’s neck. The eye was a magical blade like my swords, and the only weapon I could reach that had any hope of killing a stone dog.
In my mind’s eye I pictured the positioning of the beast’s head, lower now than when I had first seen it sliding through the rough stone surface of the wall like a seal surfacing in Tien’s bay. My best chance for living out the night involved striking now, before it spotted me. But if I did that, my chance of completing the mission and killing Ashvik dropped to nothing, both because the Elite would be forewarned and because I would have profaned the eye of the goddess.
The snuffling grew louder as the dog’s head dropped lower. I squeezed the hilt of the eye tight. Tighter. Stopped. Relaxed my grip. Both on the knife and my fear. The goddess had sent me on a mission. If I killed the stone dog now, I might live, but I would also fail in my charge. If I held still and left things in Namara’s hands, she might see fit to allow me life and success both. More time slid by in heart-tearing slowness. The dog did not find me. Neither did it leave. Years seemed to pass. Then, with a noise like splashing mud, it was gone.
I slid the eye back into its sheath, drew my swords, and placed them at my sides. Then I reached a hand up and ran it across the stones of the wall where the dog’s head had come through. They were unmarked. The shakes took me, and Triss returned to dragon form.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice anxious.
I nodded though I couldn’t stop shaking.
“You’d better chew another bean,” he said. “Efik’ll help.”
“It’s too soon after my last one.”
You had to be careful with straight efik. Too much, and it’d level you instead of leveling your nerves. Do that too often, and you might get to like it. Maybe you’d end up sitting in a back alley with the rest of the sleepwalkers, cutting stripes in your arms and rubbing powdered efik into the gashes. Maybe it’d kill you. But even after I stopped shaking I couldn’t get my heartbeat to stop rabbiting. Finally, Triss opened my pouch and pulled out a bean. Holding it between claws of shadow, he offered it to me.
“Really, I think you need it.”
I nodded and took the bean. Dropped it into my mouth, chewed slowly. In moments I could feel my calm returning, my heart’s pace slowing. The stone dog and its master passed by on their rounds several more times, each without looking in. On the fourth round I rolled over again and slipped my cornerbright under the door though I did not resheathe my swords.
This time they were going the other way, down the stairs. They were gone for perhaps five minutes. Leaving the cornerbright exposed as I waited for the top of the returning Elite’s head to appear coming up the stairs almost had me shaking again, but I needed to know exactly how long the hall would remain open. On his next trek downstairs I examined the ward of alarm that hung in front of the door across the hall—a simple temporary spell.
There are a lot of reasons to avoid the hassle of using a permanent ward. There’s duration—you have a space you want warded only at night or only for a few hours each day. Creating a moving target—you want to keep changing things around so no one can make a wardblack. Adaptability—you want different results at different times, silent alert instead of immolation, or whatever. Timing out—you’re using it as part of a system that involves guards, and you want it to make all kinds of noise if they don’t check in with the spell every so often.
Whatever the reason, they’re much harder to deceive than permanent wards. Take the one on the door. It would probably trigger if the Elite took ten minutes instead of five downstairs. It would certainly trigger if I opened the door, and it was inaccessible if I didn’t. There were ways I could deal with that, but not without leaving signs of tampering.
That meant I couldn’t go beyond this point until I was ready to go all the way. So I turned away and went looking for a better route in. But three more rounds of spying over the following week proved what I’d already guessed—it was the balcony and the council room or nothing, and I wasn’t going to walk away without taking a shot. So, on a quiet afternoon in Harvestide I made my decision. It would be tomorrow.