Broken Blade (37 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

Maylien kicked the light into a nearby sewer grate, where it vanished, plunging us back into near-total darkness. No one opened any shutters to see what was going on, so I had to assume that we’d been quiet and fast enough to avoid any attention. Not a huge surprise given the hours and the noise of the storm, even with the flash and the sizzle of the magelightning, but not something to take for granted, either.
“I take it they were about to cause us some trouble?” Maylien asked.
I nodded. The man was unconscious but not dead. I moved on to the woman, scooping up the soggy sheet of paper and handing it to Maylien to look at, while I checked the guard’s pulse. She was out but not gone, too—a pleasant surprise. I’d expected to kill at least one of them. It probably had something to do with the rain and the wet street. I’d noticed that seemed to drain off some of the strength of lightning magic, dispersing it into the surrounding area somehow. Actually, now that I thought about it, that might well have been what kept the Kadeshi deathspark from killing me.
Maylien whistled. “This is a summoning rune. Touch it, and it’ll alert whoever’s at the other end and give them a trace to follow. What do you want to bet that if I tap this with my finger, a whole swarm of Elite will be along shortly.”
“Do you want to call this off?” I asked.
She tore the sheet in half, breaking the rune, then dropped it after the magelight. “No. If I walk away now, I’ll be outlawed. I’ll have to leave Zhan forever and surrender Marchon to my sister. If I can get through to her and challenge successfully, Thauvik won’t have any choice but to acknowledge my claim to the barony. He might try to have me declared outlaw anyway, but the other peers won’t like that, and I’ll have a damn good chance of fighting it off.”
She glanced at the fallen guards. “Are they . . .”
“Down but not dead.” I caught the man’s arm and pulled him into a sitting position, then up onto my shoulder. “We’d better get them out of the street.”
Maylien let out a little sigh of relief, then bent to lift the woman. “I’m glad of that, even if it is inconvenient for me. It’s not their fault my sister’s a monster, and the king is supporting her.” She got the woman onto her shoulders, and we headed back toward the alley. “I just wish we could erase their memories of the past few minutes, but that’s magic far beyond my skill. When they wake, and the last thing they remember is my face, it’s going to make it that much harder to fight any charges the king might bring.”
“I could . . .” I drew a thumb across my throat. I didn’t particularly want to kill them, but I’d do it if I had to.
“No. I’ll deal with it when and if I need to. There are way too many ifs between here and there to justify killing anyone we don’t have to. We might not even make it up the hill. If we do, we might not get past Sumey’s guards or Devin. If we manage that, I might be killed in the duel. If I win, Thauvik might choose not to try to have me removed. We’ll leave them as they are.”
“Good.” I turned into the alley and dumped my load in the shadows. “I hate when I have to kill people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Maylien dropped her guard beside mine, opening up a space on her shoulder that was quickly occupied by the return of a sopping-wet and very grumpy Bontrang. She soothed him a bit and quickly dried him off with a rag before coaxing him back into the bag. While she was doing that, I arranged the guards so that neither one of them was going to keel over and drown in a puddle before they woke up.
“So now what do we do?” Maylien edged back to look out the end of the alley. “It’s not getting any earlier, we’re still miles away from our goal, and I’m not seeing any way to make it up that hill. Not with the Elite blocking the high road and the Crown Guard blocking the low road.”
“Actually,” I said, “the guards are blocking the
middle
road.”
Maylien whipped around to face me, her face a pale blur in the darkness. “You’re not suggesting the sewers, are you? In the middle of a rainstorm? That’s insane.”
“It is. Which is exactly why I think we might able to make it work. Only three sewer lines coming down off the Sovann Hill are big enough to pass a person walking upright. In dry weather I’d bet money on all of them being covered by the Elite and the stone dogs, but with all this rain, no one sane is going into the sewers.”
“How do you know that much about the system?”
“Back when I was working out a plan to kill Ashvik, I had to learn enough about the basic layout of Tien’s main sewers to know whether they were a good option or not. There’ve been miles and miles of the things built over the last five hundred years.”
“Did you go in through the sewers then? I’ve never heard anyone talk about the details.”
“No. The sewers that lead to the palace are a nightmare for anyone trying to use them to get at the king. Full of dead ends and traps—many of Durkoth design—plus all kinds of patrols and checkpoints.”
Triss nodded from my shadow. “Which is why Master Urayal and Patiss died down there. Nasty place.”
“All right, but the palace is on the other side of the river. Why would you know the ones over here so well?”
“Because we’ve been living over here, and that’s what I was taught to do. But I really only know the mains. I’m sure there are at least another dozen lines coming down off the hill that would pass someone willing to crawl through sewage on their belly in the dark. Depending on how they’re connected to the storm drains, one of them might well provide us a better and safer route, but I couldn’t tell you where those were if my life depended on it.”
“Oh, how sad. Here I was thinking how much fun it would be to crawl through sewage on my belly, and now you’ve dashed my hopes. I guess we get to drown instead.”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all for it,” I replied. I decided not to mention the possibility of restless dead in the tunnels.
Maylien just shook her head.
It took us two miserable hours underground to travel the five short blocks I felt we needed to get past the cordon. We nearly drowned half a dozen times, but with ropes and magic and Triss’s help, we did finally make it. The only positive things I can say about the trip were: One, the rushing storm waters had cleared out the worst of the stench and all of the shit that wasn’t permanently glued to the bricks. And two, we didn’t run into any of the restless dead, risen or otherwise.
We came up out of the sewers in a narrow street lined with the walled homes of the lesser well-to-do. From there we dragged ourselves into an even narrower alley, where we collapsed against some wealthy merchant’s or minor noble’s back wall. Unspeakable muck coated the bricks beneath us, but it couldn’t be significantly worse than the unspeakable muck we’d had to wallow through to get there, so it probably all equaled out.
Beside me, Maylien poked at her ruined clothes and sighed ruefully. “So much for going into the duel looking like the rightful baroness.”
“Don’t worry about it. We can always stop by your sister’s rooms on the way in and steal you something more appropriate.”
“I wish we could, but someone might recognize the outfit. As much as I hate it, the manner of my defeat of Sumey is going to have almost as much to do with whether I can hold the barony successfully as the fact of the defeat itself. Which means we
will
have to do something about my clothes, I’m just not sure what or when yet. Maybe I can find something of my mother’s at Marchon House, though that doesn’t solve the immediate problem.”
Before I could respond, an utterly soggy Bontrang dropped out of the sky and into Maylien’s lap. He didn’t bother to complain about the weather this time. When she scooped him up, he just tucked his beak under her chin and started purring frantically. The little fellow had practically gone berserk when Maylien insisted he stay aboveground while we went into the sewers, but it was safer for both of them that way.
In the darkness of the alley, I couldn’t see Triss, but he must have felt some of the same sympathy for Bontrang and Maylien that I did. He shifted into dragon shape and draped his head across my lap affectionately. I scratched him behind his invisible ears and wished we could just stay like that for the next four or five hundred years. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. I could already feel the warmth of exertion losing the fight to the cold and wet.
“Maylien?” I dragged myself up out of the muck.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you and Bontrang stay here while I hunt us up that change of clothes. I can do it quicker alone.” I stripped off my sodden woolen hood and vest and draped them over Maylien and Bontrang. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to offer.
Maylien pulled them around her gratefully. “Thank you. Bontrang’s freezing, and I’m starting to get cold, too.”
I nodded. “I noticed the way he’s shivering between the purrs. We all need to get dry and get moving, and that starts with clothes. You’ll need something to carry Bontrang in, too. That bag’s no good anymore.”
I’m not, in general, a big fan of theft, though I’ll do it when I absolutely have to. So, I promised myself to leave a couple of Maylien’s silver riels in the bottom of whatever petty noble’s wardrobe I ended up raiding for our clothes. I also prefer not to scare the life out anyone who hasn’t earned it. Which is why I intended to pick a wardrobe in an empty bedroom.
Here on the lower slopes of the Sovann Hill, people couldn’t afford the extensive magical protections and alarms that I’d have found up closer to Marchon House. It was relatively simple to pick a large house that felt mostly empty and use Triss and a bit of minor spellwork to open the delivery door that led into the dark kitchen.
From there it was a short jaunt up the servants’ stairs to the upper floors, where Triss found me an empty guest room. Of course, it being an old house, there was a certain inevitable amount of creaking and squeaking as I moved around, no matter how careful I tried to be. But the wind and the storm seemed more than adequate to cover it, and since no one showed up right away to disabuse me of the notion, I went about my business.
As was often the case in the smaller noble houses during spring and the switchover from winter wardrobe to summer wardrobe, a guest room had been pressed into service for temporary storage. It held the winter clothes that had to be kept handy for a few more weeks yet in case of cold snaps as well as little sachets of fleabane and worrymoth.
As I dug around through the clothes spread across the bed, I found a moment to be thankful I was in Tien. Here loose silks and cottons provided the outfit of choice for the upper class, a marked contrast to someplace like Aven, where everyone favored tailored wool and fitted leather and lots of boning and laces. It meant that I could manage with stuff that was merely near my size, and also that if it worked for me, it’d probably work for Maylien. I did make sure to pick out women’s clothes of the best fabrics for her given that she might have to use them for the duel. The divided skirts were fuller than the pants I nicked for myself, but only a little.
After changing my own clothes, I wrapped up a bundle for her, using the bed’s top blanket as my sack. I was just finishing that up when Triss gave me a sharp poke in the ribs. I’d had him watching the hall, and that was the signal that someone was out there now. I doused my thieveslight.
“Window,” hissed Triss, and I started moving. “Now! It’s the steward, and he’s got an axe. I think he must have heard something.”
That was when the door to the guest room burst open. Damn all old houses with their creaky floors, and damn efficient servants, too, the bane of the housebreaker’s existence. I’d intended to at least open the window first, but I didn’t have the time, so I just put Maylien’s bundle of clothes in front of my face and crashed right through the shutters. I suppose the fact that they were light summer shutters and not the heavy winter storm shutters counted as a point in the favor of efficient staff, but I didn’t feel it really balanced out.
I hit the ground running. With Triss providing a shroud of darkness to hide me, I knew the man would never be able to spot or follow me. On the other hand, the way he started screaming for the watch was going to present a real problem in fairly short order. The window was on the front side of the house, and Maylien was out back and a few houses down. So I doubled back around the house as soon as I had shed the impetus provided by the drop.
When I vaulted over the back wall, I found Maylien already waiting for me, with Bontrang hissing angrily on her shoulder. “What the hell went wrong?”
“I picked the only house in the neighborhood where they pay the servants well enough to care, apparently. Now, come on!” I turned and started running, and Maylien fell in behind me. “We have to get out of here.”
Normally, I wouldn’t have been that fussed about it. Put a couple of blocks between us and the break-in, and we’d be set. But normally the neighborhood wasn’t crawling with Crown Guards and—a deep grating howl went up from somewhere behind us, punctuating my thought—stone dogs.

 

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