Focusing on the task helped me ignore the mad tumble of emotions that kept trying to suck me under. Though I couldn’t read specifics from Triss, I could feel weird and wild echoes spilling over from his dreams that suggested an even-more-turbulent state of disorder than my own.
As I hurried along, I made several sharp changes of direction in the hopes of further confusing things, but I always kept moving toward the nearest corner of the estate. At another time, I might have chosen to hide within the grounds and wait for the pursuit to move out and away from the center of things, leaving behind a void I could exploit. But the combination of having a major contingent of the Elite so close and the unknowns represented by Devin’s presence decided me against the idea in this case.
The outer wall was in sight, and I’d just started to breathe a little easier when I crashed headlong into another of the baroness’s dogs. An opium-and-efik egg smashed across his nose put him out of the game a few seconds later, but not before he’d made noise enough to betray me to someone with Devin’s training.
That left me a major dilemma. To get out, I had to get over the wall. Since the estate was properly maintained for security, there were no trees close enough to the wall to jump from unaided by shadow wings, which meant dropping my shroud. If I wanted to maintain my lacuna of shadow I either had to climb out at the corner, where I could brace myself in the angle of the stonework and vault over the pottery shards on top—my original intent—or I had to use the same sort of magic I’d used to get in. If Devin was close by—and I had to assume that he was—I couldn’t do either undetected, and we both knew it.
Climbing the corner would make more than enough noise to allow Devin a free shot with dart or blade, and the active use of magic was visible to any practitioner who cared to use his magesight. That was a large part of what made the enveloping darkness Triss and his fellow Shades could offer so valuable. It was passive and innate to the breed, a near invisibility that would baffle even the eyes of a mage.
Moving a few yards away from the place where I’d left the unconscious dog, I put my hands on the hilts of my swords and settled in to listen and wait on Devin’s next action. I couldn’t afford to give him very long—no more than a couple of minutes—but I didn’t want to attack him without giving him the chance to choose another way.
Several seconds slid past. If he hadn’t been close before, he certainly was now. More time. Perhaps a minute. I silently slipped the loops that held my swords tight in their sheaths. I needed only to move my hands down a few inches more, and they would drop free.
Devin spoke then, his voice coming from a point some yards off to my left. “I don’t know who you are, but I know what you are, Blade of Namara.”
No one had called me that in years, and until that instant I’d had no idea how much that hurt me, nor how much more it would hurt to hear it now. I had never in my life felt a stronger desire to kill than I did then. If I’d had the slightest idea who it was I really wanted to kill, I don’t think I could have stopped myself from making the attempt. As it was, my knuckles burned from squeezing the hilts of my swords so tight.
“Actually, that’s not quite true,” said Devin. “I may not
know
who you are, but I bet I can make a very good guess. Let’s see, you’re no apprentice assassin.”
I had to suppress a hiss at that. “Assassin” wasn’t normally a word a Blade used when referring to his fellows—however true it might be.
“An apprentice I’d have caught before they made it off the balcony. I don’t think you’re one of the escaped journeymen either, not having gotten this far running free, though that stumble with the dog was very sloppy tradecraft. There are only four masters that are yet unaccounted for. Jax and Loris both refused the bargain the Son of Heaven offered to those that survived the fall of the temple. They called those of us who took the deal
traitors
.”
Deal? What deal? I knew nothing of any deal.
I wanted to shake Devin and make him answer that question, but I knew that moving against him physically would only stop the flow of information. I wondered, too, how the pair could both have been captured and yet remain unaccounted for, and played out what I knew of them in my head. Loris was of the previous generation, and I didn’t know him well, but I’d always liked Jax, who was a year or two younger than I. She had a good head on her shoulders.
Devin continued, “Though they later escaped, they both spent a certain amount of . . . time with the Hand of Heaven first. I think either of them would have moved to kill me rather than running.”
In that moment, I regretted that I hadn’t. The Hand provided the Son of Heaven with his enforcement arm, which included a lot of torture and burning of heretics. I didn’t move. Devin knew things that I wanted to, and he was still talking.
If your enemy is doing what you want, don’t interfere.
“That leaves Siri and Aral,” he said, “the shining stars of my generation. Both in the field at the time of the fall. Which are you, I wonder, my former sister or my lost brother? Mythkiller or Kingslayer? In either case, a potential adornment to the new order of the Assassin-Mage.”
This time I did hiss. A mistake.
Devin chuckled in response. “Oh, I didn’t like the name much the first time I heard it either, but it’s a hell of a lot more honest name for what we are than ‘Blade’ ever was, and it grows on you if you live long enough. I’m going to make you an offer. If it will make you feel better, you can choose to believe that’s because I don’t think I can take whichever of you I’m talking to in a fight. And you might be right, or then again, you might be surprised. It makes no difference to me what you believe. What matters to me is what you decide.
“Those of us who took the Son of Heaven’s deal have moved on from the ruin of the temple. We had no choice. The goddess really is dead, and there’s no bringing her back. The Blades of Namara are gone forever. But that doesn’t make us a spent force. We still have the Shades and the skills we learned from the temple. We can take on new apprentices, teach the assassin’s arts, summon more Shades from the everdark. We have the potential to be one of the most powerful mage orders this world has ever seen. To rule from behind every throne.”
And to betray everything we ever were. I slid my swords free of their sheaths and rolled my shoulders. I didn’t want to kill an old friend, but I couldn’t see any other way out.
“I know I speak for the order when I say we’d love to have you with us,” said Devin. “I won’t demand an answer this instant, but we can’t afford to leave you running loose for long if you won’t side with us. You have forty-eight hours from this moment to decide. If you want to join the future, send a note for me here care of the baroness. If you insist on remaining a part of the past, we’ll have no choice but to make sure your name is added to the list of the fallen. Goodbye for now.”
The time for words was over.
I started toward the place where I thought Devin’s voice was coming from but had only taken a couple of steps when the world came apart with a blinding flash and a tremendous boom. For a good ten seconds, I couldn’t see anything but a lavender pattern of branching lines left on my retinas by one of the most violent bursts of magelightning I’d ever encountered. It was well beyond what Devin should have been able to manage without a more formal spell. If he’d wanted to kill me then, there’s a good chance he’d have managed it. Instead, he vanished, leaving me alone beside the giant hole he’d blasted in the baroness’s wall.
I briefly contemplated looking for him, but I had no doubts that the display was going to draw a lot of the wrong kind of attention, including the Elite. Promising myself that this thing with Devin wasn’t over, I slipped out through the hole in the wall and headed back toward the city proper.
I picked up a bottle of Kyle’s as I passed through the Gryphon on my way back to my room over the stables. It had been an excruciatingly long and nasty night, and I really needed the drink. I set the bottle carefully beside a borrowed glass on my little table before I started to strip off my gear.
Triss flowed up the wall and into dragon form. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
I yanked off my hood and dropped it on the pallet. “I do. In case you weren’t paying attention back there, my old friend Devin’s become some kind of fucking assassin for hire along with who knows how many of the others. Not to mention that he wants us to join him in his abomination. If that’s not the best reason for getting drunk this side of Namara’s murder, I don’t know what is.”
Triss let out a loud, hissing sound and reared back, but didn’t say anything. The purpose of a Blade of Namara was to bring a just death to those who deserved it. Killing was part of our job, and both Triss and I had once been damned good at it; but even the idea of doing it for money seemed the most horrible sort of perversion of what we had once been. I shrugged out of my poncho, throwing it down beside my hood. As I unbuckled my swords, I nodded toward the trunk.
“Open that for me, would you?”
Triss slid down from the wall and briefly covered the trunk in shadow. With a sharp clicking noise, the lid popped open. I flipped the poncho from bed to trunk with the toe of my boot. It landed in a lump guaranteed to leave creases. The hood followed, then my shirt.
“You normally put your swords on the bottom.” Triss’s voice came out quiet and worried.
“Fuck normal.” I grabbed my sword rig off the bed and rebuckled it over my bare shoulders. “In fact, fuck everything.”
“What are you doing?” Triss sounded more than a little alarmed as I crossed to the door.
I didn’t answer, just grabbed the handle and wrenched the door open. Triss dove back into my shadow as the magelight threw it across the floor of the hayloft. As I strode over to the hay pile, my shadow slid across the trapdoor that led down to the stables. When it did, one dark arm stopped mirroring my own movement long enough to flip the door shut—a sensible precaution on Triss’s part though I barely registered it.
I pulled a half dozen of the rough bundles of hay free of the pile, and started leaning them against various of the roof posts. Two fell apart at once when the dried loops of braided grass that held them together for transport to the city gave way under my rude handling. The others held, more or less. I added more, putting a couple along the walls and two against the hay pile itself.
Stepping out into the middle of the big open room, I rolled my shoulders and fixed the positions of the bundles in my mind. A deep breath in, and . . . I let the rage free with my breath. Seemingly of their own accord, my swords dropped into my hands and flicked out, the left taking off the top of a hay bundle in a beheading stroke, the right going home in a heart thrust that sank the tip deep into the post behind it. Pivot and wrench my right blade free while back-cutting with my left to split the beheaded bundle. Stomp and cross swords in a blade-breaking parry. Turn, lunge.
I sliced and chopped and parried and thrust until every bundle was destroyed. Until the sweat rolled down my sides, and the air grew thick with chaff. Until I could barely breathe for coughing. Until my eyes streamed tears from the dust, and I could no longer see Devin’s face even in my imagination. It wasn’t enough.
With a snap of my wrist, I sent one sword flying down the length of the loft to embed itself in the door of my cubby. Then the other. An utterly useless little trick and suicide in combat, but it felt good, and it freed my hands to collect more bundles. When I was done, there were no more bundles, just a big loose pile of hay and a thick cloud of dust, like smoke. And it still wasn’t enough. So I cleaned and resheathed my swords and closed myself up in my little room and reached for the bottle again.
And again, Triss said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
And he was right. So when I twisted the cork stopper free, I only poured two fingers into my glass and sealed the bottle again. Then I knocked back the whiskey and set the glass aside. My poncho came back out of the trunk and got folded properly on the bed. My hood and shirt, too.
I put my swords neatly away beside my knives and laid the trick bag down on top. That’s when I remembered the letter and my failed courier’s commission. Another in a long string of failures. You’d think I’d be used to them by now, but they never got any easier to face. I reached for the poncho.
“Aren’t you going to take another look at the letter?” asked Triss. “There are stronger measures we might try, more destructive perhaps, but—”
“No.” I laid the poncho down over the bag.
“You know there might be some clue in there about Devin, don’t you?”
“Of course.” I didn’t for a second believe that the near-simultaneous arrival of Devin and me on that balcony was a coincidence. “Maybe after eight or ten hours of sleep, I’ll even care enough to look Maylien up and rake her over the coals about the whole thing, but not tonight.”
Or then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d just have a drink or six and forget about the whole thing. I added the hood to the pile in the trunk, then my boots. As I changed pants, I could feel Triss glaring at me, so I took extra time and care in putting the grays away—I’d had all I could take of pushing for one night. He made a little hmmphing noise when I closed the lid, but he didn’t grouse. I reached for the lock . . . and stopped. I just couldn’t do it.