Broken Blade (25 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

I’d just turned toward the pitch-black gap on the flophouse side when Triss slapped me sharply in the soles of both feet to let me know he’d tasted Devin’s trail. I kept walking as if nothing had happened, though it took a huge effort of will not to look around or reach for my second sword. The narrow gap ahead suddenly seemed twice as dark, a perfect place for an ambush. As I walked, I edged to my left, steadily shifting my practically invisible shadow so that it reached out toward the gap ahead of me.
As soon as my shadow’s head touched the near-absolute darkness of the space between the buildings I felt Triss flowing out and away from me, extending himself to invisibly check the whole of the narrow passage. A moment later, I got a reassuring squeeze on my left foot. The way was empty, both of Devin and his traces, but I didn’t relax. He could still have set up with a crossbow in the courtyard that backed the Dead Man. The open area outside the main entrance provided a secluded place to park extra tables in the stifling heat of Midsummer and Sunshammer.
“We’re clear,” Triss whispered, when I stepped into the deeper shadows.
“The trace in the street out front, coming or going?” I asked.
“Going, and quite recently. It got stronger as it moved away from the Dead Man’s Pouch, but I couldn’t sense any hint of his arrival here.”
“Let’s circle round the main door then and see if Devin came in that way before we decide whether to follow him or see where his back trail leads.”
A quick slide around the courtyard revealed that Devin had arrived by coming north across the roofs from the direction of the nastiest part of the Downunders. Looping back to the front of the alley-knocker, we checked Devin’s departure trail, which headed north and west toward the Palace Hill and the bulk of the city.
So, follow Devin? Or see if we could find out what brought him to the Downunders? I didn’t have time to do both, not with dawn less than two hours away. It was the hint of a double cross that decided me. If Maylien had told me the truth about being the true heir, then she represented a major threat to Baroness Marchon. That was a card that might come in damned handy for Devin in the event of a falling-out. The Downunders were very nearly as far away from the Marchon estate as it was possible to get without leaving Tien, well outside the baroness’s easy reach. It was a perfect place to stash a backup plan.
Over the next hour, Triss and I painstakingly backtracked Devin two-thirds of the way across the rooftops of the Downunders looking for where he’d come from. It was slow, frustrating work. Between the many breaks in the trail made as Devin jumped across lanes, the various aches and twinges coming from my cuts and bruises, and the dilapidated nature of the buildings, I spent a lot of time swearing.
I must have put my foot through a half dozen roofs, and only just avoided doing so at least twice that many times more. Maybe the most annoying part of the whole thing came from knowing that Devin had probably made the trip in about ten minutes. At this point he could easily have finished his errand to the north and gotten back around in front of us again.
We’d come to a temporary halt atop a tiny temple tucked in tight against the base of the western bluff of the Channary Hill. Dedicated to Govana, goddess of the herds, the temple was built of sandstone blocks and much sturdier than the buildings around it. Devin’s trail had come to an unexpected dead end on top of its small tower. We’d checked every roof within sail-jumping distance and found nothing but the trail we’d followed to get there.
“It’s like he came up through the roof of the tower.” Triss was flitting back and forth across the close-set stones, sniffing and tasting with his tongue. He’d shifted back to dragon form when we returned to the tower after our fruitless search of the surrounding buildings, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with him about the wisdom of that. “That, or he simply dropped out of the sky.”
“Now there’s an unhappy thought.” I glanced up at the bluff. “And one that should have occurred to me before you said something.”
Seven or eight aging and out-of-fashion great houses hugged the cliff edge a hundred and fifty feet overhead, and that only counted the visible ones in easy sailing distance given the height. There were probably a dozen more out of sight that would have allowed Devin to make the jump to the temple. Unlike the houses around the palace or the Marchon estate, where the nobles and merchant princes kept the neighborhood exclusive, the Channary Hill great houses could belong to practically anybody.
All four of the hills of Tien had been colonized by the nobility over the thousand-plus years of the city’s existence. The Palace Hill held the bulk of those still in use, with the Sovann Hill, where House Marchon stood, coming in a distant second. The abandoned great houses on the equally abandoned Kanathean Hill had long since been torn down, and their stones incorporated into the streets and homes of the Old Mews, Dyers Slope, and a half dozen other neighborhoods.
The Channary Hill was much more of a mixed bag. On the eastern slopes overlooking the ocean and the harbor, you could find quite a number of country nobles who didn’t want to venture too deep into the evil city, intermixed with bankrupt city nobles clinging to these cheapest of Tien’s great houses by their fingernails. While on the western bluff the remaining houses had a dusty popularity among social climbers who wanted to claim a palace view or shadow captains who needed a whiff of legitimacy for portions of their business.
In short, the place provided a perfect environment for a renegade Blade looking for a snug, as long as he had the funds. Knowing the money I could have made as a black jack, I had no doubt that the freelance-assassin business kept Devin solidly in funds. Time to start looking for the fastest way up the bluff.
“Come on, Triss, we’d better climb up and have a look.”
“We don’t have enough time to check even half of the houses before the morning sun burns off Zass’s trail.” Triss sounded gloomy.
“So we’ll do what we can and hope we get lucky.”
We didn’t get lucky, at least not in terms of tracing Devin’s trail back to its source. There were just too many jumping-off spots on too many great houses for us to have any reasonable chance of checking them all. Every third-story window on the bluff side provided a potential point of departure. It would have taken hours to search any single house and days to search them all, possibly longer. No, finding Devin’s snug that way would have been virtually impossible. Finding the Crown Guard watching Devin’s snug on the other hand . . .
Them, I practically tripped over. The first pair lay hidden in a hollow carefully excavated under the thickest part of a huge patch of imperial roses gone feral. I’d never have seen them if first light hadn’t started me nosing around for someplace I could lie up for the coming day. I’d wanted to stay close and keep an eye on several of the better candidates for Devin’s base of operations.
The dense rose thicket provided a good vantage on three of the five best choices, and I’d actually started to crawl into its depths when a small noise ahead warned me to freeze. The Crown Guards wore mottled green from head to toe, and green and brown paint on their faces. The only way I could even tell they were Crown Guard was by the dragon-crown insignia engraved on the deliberately verdigrised guard of the sword strapped across the nearer of the pair’s back. It was clearly visible even in the predawn light, so close had I come before I saw them.
If not for Triss’s enshrouding presence and the fact that I’d approached them from behind and with a good deal of stealth, they would certainly have seen me well before I spotted them. Even just crossing in front of them might have given me away if they were there waiting for Devin—and I had to assume they were. Trained soldiers actively lying in wait for a Blade would certainly have picked out light-colored sight points, and would be watching for any telltale obscuring darkness to pass between them and their marks.
They’d be just as happy to nail up my skin as Devin’s—might not even know they’d gotten the wrong man. That made for a very cautious exit on my part. It took me fully three times as long to back my way oh-so-carefully and even more stealthily out of the rose thicket than it had to sneak in. Which, I suppose, gave me plenty of time to admire the fragrance.
As soon as I’d retreated to a safe distance, I set out just as cautiously to look for other likely hiding places around the area. I wanted to see how many of them held similar surprises. Their placement and numbers could tell me a lot about what the target was.
I found a round dozen, including a command post a fair distance back from the main perimeter on the upslope side. It held a captain of the Elite and his stone dog along with three more Crown Guards. Cold sweat started all over my body when I spotted them. I found it all too easy to imagine the consequences if I’d tripped over the stone dog and his master instead of the pair of guards in the rose thicket.
The smart thing to do at that point would have been to go home. Better yet, I could follow Triss’s original advice and leave town entirely and permanently. Trying to slip past a cordon of watchers set up for the express purpose of spotting a shadow-shrouded Blade was a lousy recipe for even short-term survival. On the other hand, if this
was
Devin’s snug—and the presence of a surrounding troop of Crown Guards commanded by an Elite captain sure as hell suggested it was—then Maylien might be in there somewhere. I really hated decisions like this.

 

14
Devin
had co-opted a decaying great house of ducal size and state, a massive pile of badly pitted sandstone leaking rotted mortar from a thousand joints in need of repointing. It still looked sturdier than most of its neighbors, perhaps because it had further to fall before it finally hit bottom.
The tallest tower stood a bit over five stories, which gave it between one and two floors on the other four. A virtual maze of steeply angled roofways connected the five towers into a figure with several more sides than it had any right to.
I couldn’t see any lights or other evidence of anyone’s moving around the house or grounds. That was one benefit of a house run on assassin’s hours. In a normal great house, the kitchen and pantry staff would certainly be preparing breakfast at this time of day. They might be doing the same here—impossible to tell since great houses never had windows below the second floor—but the odds were much lower.
I could only see two doors, both clearly in view of several of the watching posts, which observation pointed up my primary dilemma. Go in or walk away? The problem was that I didn’t
know
Maylien was inside. If she wasn’t, breaking into an unknown great house under these conditions was profoundly stupid. Maybe even borderline suicidal. If she
was
in there, I could at least cross off the stupid part. I didn’t see any way around suicidal.
The funny thing was that if this were a mission for the goddess, I’d have walked away right then. That might sound counterintuitive, but really it’s just part of the job.
Mind before heart.
Namara taught her Blades to treat assignments professionally, not emotionally. That meant balancing risks and rewards honestly and walking away more often than you might think.
On the walking away side of the table there lay the Elite and his stone dog, a heavy argument even without the Crown Guard. Add to that the admittedly slim possibility that they were here after someone other than Devin. Alternatively, if they
were
hunting for him—as I believed—there was a decent chance they’d solve my Devin problem for me. Conceivably my Maylien problem, too, if they chose to release any prisoners their target might be holding.
Balance that against the argument for going in. Maylien might be there. She might be alive. And it was barely possible that if both those things were true, I could sneak her out in one piece past the Crown Guard and the Elite.
That’s the point where you walk away if you’re looking at things professionally. Emotionally, on the other hand . . . Maylien had saved my life. More importantly, she’d saved Triss’s life. I owed her whatever I had the power to give. I also kept coming back to the fact that Colonel Deem had been under pressure from a royal baroness. A baroness whose name seemed all too likely to be Sumey Marchon, who would certainly prefer that Maylien died in the coming crossfire.
But who did I think I was kidding? Of course I was going in. The real question was how. The Elite captain had placed his teams very well. The only thing that made it even remotely possible was the combination of knowing they were there and the fact that they’d had to choose their positions more in terms of concealing themselves than for perfect surveillance. They couldn’t afford to scare off the target. With a target who could make himself invisible, that meant playing things very conservatively.

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