Authors: Kelly McCullough
I’m not sure what it was that aroused my suspicions. Certainly nothing so blatant as a scuffing sound or a change in the light, but I felt certain we were no longer alone. Reaching through the shadows that separated us, I found Faran’s shoulder and squeezed it once, before pressing gently to let her know which direction I wanted her to go.
Moving with all the exquisite caution that my years of training and experience could bring to bear, I rose and started moving toward that feeling of presence. Through Triss’s senses I could see the deeper patch of shadow that was Faran and Ssithra vanishing around the back of the tomb behind me, following my signal. When I got to the front edge of the tomb, I stopped and spent a long couple of minutes doing a slow scan of the area.
I focused all of my senses as well as Triss’s on the task, devoting a part of my attention to each sense in turn, as well as to the collective picture they painted. Touch was nearly useless at the moment, telling me little more than the hang of my clothes and gear or the way the carefully manicured lawns pressed into the thin soles of my boots. What it did give me was the direction of the faint and fading sea breeze—about a quarter turn to the right of directly into my face. And that led to smell.
Most of the news my nose brought me had to do with things rotting in the harbor and several hundred thousand people packed tightly together in the late summer heat. Underneath it all though was a strange and subtle touch like a ghost from some spice markets past. I rolled my tongue, trying to bring up the memory of a taste, but couldn’t quite establish it.
Hearing brought me a much more densely layered picture. Farthest and faintest I heard the sounds of the city proper, muted now while most of her denizens slept, but still there in the occasional scream or deep bellow. Closer in, the palace noises carried more nuance; the scuff of a guard’s boot on the wall above, a low moan that suggested an assignation in the shadows behind a convenient hedge, the metallic click of a groundskeeper’s shears as they tried to fulfill the impossible charge of keeping things perfect, while never getting in the way of their betters. Nearer still came the faint tinkling of the tiny fountains on the left side of each tomb’s door, balancing the altar fires on the right—part of the traditional display of the elements signifying that the very stuff of nature mourned the passing of each of Tien’s rulers.
The final piece of my collage view of the world came from Triss. Shades “see” in full round. They use a sense organ we don’t even have a name for, to pick up on changes in the texture of darkness in every direction. Bats “see” with their ears, screaming and listening for the echoes, or that’s what I was taught anyway. What Shades do is closer to that than any human sense, but it’s a passive process, with the dark-echoes provided by the interplay of light and shadow.
Each individual shadow takes on a sort of depth that isn’t quite color, but still possesses all the subtle shading of that palette. Where my own eyes might have perceived a simple block shadow where the edge of the tomb across the way cut off the light from several altar fires, I now registered a whole gradient of shadow flavors. It gave me an extremely precise sense of things, like the way the three magical tomb-fires that cast the bulk of that shadow sat, and how their intensity varied over distance and with the flickering of the flame.
No single part of my mosaic of the senses was enough to give me what I needed, but together . . . together was a different thing entirely. As I moved deeper into the graveyard, flitting from shadow to shadow, I followed my nose and that faintest hint of exotic spices until a change in the quality of the light drew my attention to a particularly tall tomb. There, the flames burned a little brighter in the reflection off a couple of faint scuff marks where the moss on the fountain had been displaced. Moving around the back, I put an ear to the wall and waited . . . there, the quietest of grating sounds came through the stone. Unless the tomb’s primary inhabitant was moving about, there was a lurker on the rooftop.
I squatted down to make an even smaller target and released my hold on Triss’s will.
Wake up, my friend. We’ve got company of an unexpected nature.
As I filled him in on what I’d learned so far I double-checked all of my gear. The pair of short straight swords I wore on my back in a custom built hip-draw rig hung light and loose. All I needed to do to release either of them was pop the catch with a thumb and let the blade drop a few inches to free the tip. Wrist and boot daggers were likewise properly aligned and ready to go, as was my little bag of tricks.
Who do you think it is?
Triss silently asked me when I had finished both narrative and preparations.
I can’t say for sure, but I’ve got a suspicion. It’s the spice scent. I’ve only ever smelled it secondhand myself, but Master Kelos mentioned once that some of the Hand of Heaven’s sorcerer-priests use a special ritual soap. It’s supposed to help keep them pure in the face of the corrupt world out here beyond Heaven’s Reach.
Triss let out an angry mental hiss when I mentioned a possible Hand presence.
Should I slide up and take a look? Maybe tear out a throat while I’m at it?
Much as I’d love to let you, I don’t think we can risk it yet. If there’s one finger of Heaven’s Hand trying to push the scales down here, you can bet there are more close by. Killing this one could all too easily alert the others.
Point. So, what’s the plan?
Finish scouting. If it is the Hand, I want to know how many more of them are around and where they are before I make a move. I just wish we had some way to warn Faran. She’s damn good, but the Hand are the people who destroyed the temple. They’ve killed a lot of Blades.
Faran and Ssithra survived then, they’ll be all right now. When she’s playing it smart that girl is one of the most promising young assassins I’ve ever seen.
And if she’s not playing it smart?
Triss just hissed. Faran was good, but also ruthless and prone to kill first and worry about the consequences later. And she
hated
the Hand. It was a bad combination, but we couldn’t do anything about it without giving ourselves away. Not for the first time, I wished that my kind had better methods of communication. But our powers simply didn’t work that way, which was part of why Blades had always worked solo far more often than in concert.
What if it’s
not
the Hand?
asked Triss.
It would still be nice to know if there are more of them around before we start slitting throats. Either way, we’ll have to come back and pay a quiet visit on our friend up there before we head down to meet Jax. What do you want to bet that rooftop has a clear view of Ashvik’s tomb?
You know it does.
Triss sent back, and there was a strong undertone of anger to his mind voice. He didn’t like the way this was going any more than I did.
I’d rather say that I’m
sure
that it does, but yes, I agree with you. Somebody set us up. The question is who and why. I have a hard time imagining Jax doing something like that, but two years ago, I’d have told you Devin would never turn away from the order or our friendship either. Look where trust got me there.
My best friend’s betrayal of everything I’d ever held dear was a wound that would never stop bleeding.
I took control of Triss again and went hunting. But while I did verify the sight lines to Ashvik’s tomb and my meeting place with Jax, I didn’t turn up any more signs of watchers on the tomb-tops over the next twenty minutes. Nor anyone else for that matter. Whether that was because my first target’s companions were that much better at concealing their presence, or because there was only the one, I couldn’t say. Process of elimination wasn’t much help either, there were just too damn many tombs with good sight lines for our meeting point.
I had circled most of the way back around to my starting point, so that I could make sure of my original target and that I hadn’t hallucinated my initial impressions, when I crossed a Blade’s shadow trail heading toward Ashvik’s tomb. Two actually. Bringing Faran into my life had given me the opportunity to use my borrowed senses to focus on what was—for me—a newfound Shade skill, as we practiced trailing each other around the city.
But I wasn’t yet good enough at parsing the nuances of Triss’s shadow-tasting ability on my own to identify these traces fully, or tell which came first or how far apart in time the two had been made. I was pretty sure one at least belonged to Faran, and I guessed the second was Jax, but I had to call up Triss to verify my assumptions.
Faran and Ssithra, with Jax and Sshayar trailing along behind—probably following the youngsters, though there’s no way to be sure,
Triss opined.
I still didn’t know what Jax might be up to, but the fact that she was on Faran’s trail worried me. Doubly so in light of our unexpected guest on top of the tomb, which meant it was time to make a ghost of the latter. This was going to be that very rare kill that I could truly take pleasure in. After what the Son of Heaven’s people had done to mine, I felt not the slightest bit of pity for any of them. I planned my approach as I hurried back toward the tall mausoleum.
I was nearly there when a rather sharp darkening of the skies above drew my attention. Great reefs of cloud began to form in the skies above, blotting out the stars, while the wind from the sea kicked up sharply, cooling the steamy air over the city and bringing with it the lightning-burned air smell that always came with the truly brutal thunderstorms. If I was any judge, we were all going to get very wet before the night’s business got much further along.
It might just have been the weather shifting with that shocking speed you sometimes get in coastal areas, but I made a dash for the tomb at that point because of the other possibility. The elementals most commonly known as the Storms or the Heavenly Host. They took a myriad of shapes, lightning bladed swords, lucent wheels, whirling cones of darkness, but they all shared two features. They all had dense wings of cloud, and they only ever companioned the priests of the Hand.
The polished black granite blocks of the tombs were tightly fitted with no finger or toeholds. I could still have climbed the back or side walls of one if I reduced my shroud. But I thought it better to keep it at maximum extension under the circumstances, so I took the same route the Hand had: fountain, doorframe, entablature, lip of the roof.
I chinned myself on the edge at that point, peering across the flat top of the tomb before moving forward. My target was right where I had expected her to be, kneeling in the shadow of the low wall that encircled the rooftop, and she was indeed a member of the Hand.
There was nothing particularly distinguishing about the loose dark robes the slight figure wore. Nor the long spell-lit rod she held like a crossbow, braced on the wall and sighted in on the front of Ashvik’s tomb in the distance. But the cord holding her ponytail in place was tied with the ritual knot of those who served the Son of Heaven, and she had a Storm at her side.
This one took the form of a huge gemstone, like a star sapphire with wings the exact green of the swirling clouds that gave birth to whirlwinds. It was of middling size for the breed, with a central body maybe three handspans wide by five long. Its wings were furled at the moment and most of it lay concealed below the level of the parapet.
That would slow the thing down if it spotted me before I could kill its master, which was good since I didn’t know how well my shroud would hide me from it. It had no eyes and no obvious way for me to tell which direction it was facing, but I knew from my training that its most important senses belonged to a family other than sight anyway. A creature of sky and storm, it relied primarily on the movement of air currents to bring it information.
I was downwind, which would help conceal me, and was another reason I’d chosen to come in from the direction I had. But I didn’t honestly know whether that would be enough. Silently, I slipped over the edge of the parapet and started toward the Hand.
That’s when I heard Jax’s voice, low but clear and sounding far too close. “Aral, is that you?”
Reflex put my hands on my swords as I shifted my attention from the Hand’s back to focus my unvision beyond her to Ashvik’s tomb. Jax stood there, silhouetted by the altar flames just to the right of the door, her shroud lowered to pool around her feet. Dammit! What was she thinking?
With a flick and a twist I released my swords. Dropping them down and around to point at the roof just in front and to the outsides of my smallest toes. That kept them within my shroud but ready to use on the instant.
Jax spoke again, and I realized that the Storm must be picking up noises from the area of the tomb and making them louder somehow, or I could never have heard her that clearly. “I see a Shade there,” she said. “Just beyond the fountain and—”
I never got a chance to hear what Jax would have said next. As the Hand in front of me started to shift her aim toward the place Jax had indicated, a slender lance of brilliant white light speared out from somewhere off to my right. It punched a neat hole through Jax’s left side before it carved a deep pit in the granite face of Ashvik’s tomb.
3
L
ove
may burn away to ashes, but it never lets us go. Despite all the years and all the pain that lay between us, it felt like I’d taken an arrow in the chest when Jax let out a quiet little cry and crumpled to the ground.
The sapphire Storm snapped its wings then, popping straight up into the air before diving toward Jax, and Ashvik’s tomb. That was an opening I’d never expected, and I leaped forward to take advantage of it. But even as I moved, the Hand whispered a word of power.
The long rod she cradled in her arms flared and sparked in my magesight, briefly surrounding itself with a blazing azure halo. As I brought my right-hand sword around in a beheading stroke, the rod spat forth a lance of fierce white light, like lightning smoothed and shaped into the form of a bright spear.
In the distance I heard Faran’s familiar voice yelp and say, “Motherfucker!” And then, “Somebody’s gonna die for that.”
I continued forward. Blood fountained from the Hand’s neck as her head fell free, bouncing off the lip of the low wall before dropping to the grass below. It splashed my left leg, hot and sticky, as I leaped past her slumping body and put one foot on the parapet before launching myself out into the darkness beyond.
A giant flash of lightning ripped the air between me and the tomb, temporarily blinding my unvision in midleap. The death spasm of my target’s familiar as its life spilled away with its master’s. It left a brutally painful afterimage burned into my borrowed senses; like a splintered crack in the very stuff of the universe. With no other choice, I tore aside the veil of shadow in front of my eyes so that I could see the ground.
I touched down briefly on the balls of my feet before letting my knees go loose as I collapsed into a forward roll to bleed off some of the speed of my fall. Holding onto a pair of drawn swords added a significant element of risk to the maneuver, but with at least one more priest of the Hand about, I didn’t dare let them go. Fortunately, the turf of the royal cemetery was deep and exquisitely tended. Instead of the badly ripped up knuckles and separated shoulder I half expected, I came back to my feet with little more than grass cuts and a few fresh bruises.
I’d taken barely two steps when a lance of white light speared past my head. The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils and I felt Triss shriek in his dreams as the light tore a hole in his substance. I threw myself sidewise into a cartwheel that cost me my left-hand sword when it stuck deep in the earth and I was forced to let it go.
More lightning hammered down from the sky, half blinding my mortal eyes at the same time that it burned away my returning unvision for a second time. Another cartwheel put the edge of a tomb between me and the source of the white beams—another Hand obviously. This one more powerful by far than the one I’d killed.
“Faran!” I yelled. “Get Jax clear!”
Then I turned and dashed along the wall of the tomb, sheathing my remaining sword as I went, to free my hands. The bastard clearly knew where I was, shroud or not. I needed to make my next move fast. I was just getting ready to dive into another roll when shouts came from the compound wall above, and the palace alarm bells began to ring. Not unexpected, but damned inconvenient. I froze for a moment. Go back to help Faran with Jax? Or ghost the remaining Hand and clear the field of at least one of the opposing forces?
That’s when the wet hand of a god smashed me back against the wall of the tomb. Rain and wind as I had never even imagined them wiped away vision and unvision alike, blinding me utterly even as they deafened and washed away all scent, leaving only touch and memory to guide me. I turned back the way I had come, abandoning any hope of finding the priest as I dropped my shroud and my control over Triss.
He let out a series of sharp hisses, swearing in Shade as he awoke.
Fire and sun but that hurts. What happened? It feels like I had a starshine chewing on my left wing.
I couldn’t see Triss in the darkness, but I imagined him stretching out on the wall beside me, obviously wincing as he extended his wings.
One of the Hand clipped you with some kind of tightly focused lightning blast or something, but we don’t have time to go into it or go after him. We need to find our way to Ashvik’s tomb.
I pointed in the direction I’d last seen Jax.
I’m utterly blind in this, the alarms are going off, and the Crown Elite are certainly on their way.
The Elite were warrior mages whose stone dog companions could swim through earth like a fish through water. The storm wouldn’t even slow them down, and we had minutes at best to get clear of the area before they arrived along with several hundred of the less magical but more numerous Crown Guard.
Go.
Trusting Triss to guide me, I began to lope in the direction I hoped was the right one, moving quickly, though I had to bend nearly double to fight the wildly shifting patterns of the buffeting winds. Through our bond, I felt my shadow stretch out ahead of me, spreading himself thin as he searched out the path. I hated to go unshrouded like this, but I didn’t have a choice.
Stop,
Triss mindspoke.
Bend over, your sword’s a few inches to the left of your forward foot.
I reached out a hand and found the blade. I cut my finger in my hurry as I slid it along the wet steel, searching for the hilt in the still blinding downpour. As soon as I had a grip I started moving again. Faster now, as Triss spoke directions into the silence of my mind.
Left a bit, or you’ll hit a tomb. You’ve a free twenty yards in front of you, go. Watch out, there’s a divot here where the gardeners missed a slink’s burrow, jump. There, just ahead is the line of the cliff where Ashvik’s tomb lies. Let me slide left and right to find the way . . . got it! Jax is gone, but there’s a shadow trail.
Lead on.
We caught up with Faran and the unconscious Jax atop a long low tomb built half into the wall of the bluff.
“Faran,” I called, “I’m coming up, try not to stab me.”
I dragged myself up beside them, fighting against the teeth of the wind all the way. Jax lay in a heap on her side, her face pillowed on her limp arm—presumably to keep her from drowning in the rapidly puddling water that was overwhelming the drains in the low parapet.
“She’s alive?” I asked.
“Barely,” replied Ssithra, invisible in the darkness. “The lightning lance pierced the bottom of her lung. Sshayar is very worried. We need to get her someplace warm and dry.”
“First, we need to get the fuck out of the palace compound before the stone dogs show up,” I said.
“That’s why we’re up here,” said Faran. “I thought they might have more trouble spying us out through the elemental muddle of the tomb.”
“Good thinking,” said Triss.
It was, too. The stone dogs were creatures of earth with powers of and over their element. The Zhani custom of invoking all the elements to honor their fallen mighty created a multielemental barrier between the earth under the foundations of their tombs and the air above. Fire and water came in the shape of the altar flame and the fountain; air and shadow surrounded the bier where the embalmed bodies lay in their sarcophagi within their tombs. Of the six great elements only light was not included separately, though light’s great ally, fire, made sure it was not totally excluded. A stone dog would have to be right underneath us to sense us through all that, an all too likely circumstance if we didn’t get out of there fast.
“Sshayar,” I said. “It’s Aral. I have to get Jax out of here unless moving her will kill her.”
“You do not look as I remember you, but there’s no mistaking Triss.” A barely visible patch of darkness lifted itself up from Jax’s side and I knew from long experience that I now faced a shadow tiger, its stripes formed by subtle difference of shading and texture—Sshayar. “It’s good to see you both alive after so many years when we had feared you dead. Do what you have to do, I will see to Jax’s wounds. They aren’t nearly so bad as I first believed, but I still need to pack them with cool shadows if they are to heal as quickly as possible.”
Then the shadow collapsed, falling back down to wrap itself tightly around her stricken mistress. I bent and lifted Jax onto my shoulders, glad of how tiny she was. With her wounds, I would have preferred to cradle her like an infant, but that would have left me defenseless. None of us could afford that.
“Faran, you’re going to have to lead the way back to the wall and over.” I opened my trick bag and started digging for a couple of leather straps to bind Jax in place. “Kill anyone who gets in the way.”
“Of course,” she said, and a feral smile flashed briefly in the rain. “I’ve already ghosted my first ever priest of the Hand tonight—I think that’s when the storm started. It sure as hell got worse when you killed that second one. Maybe I’ll get lucky and bag a third to give us a triad. Let me just make sure the first stage is clear. I’ll have Ssithra signal you when I’m ready.” She dropped over the edge of the tomb and vanished in the dark and the rain.
I’d barely gotten Jax fastened in place when Triss spoke into my mind.
Faran says to follow now and hurry. She doesn’t want to get too far ahead of us in case a stone dog comes up from below.
That was a sentiment I could heartily support, though the steady worsening of the storm helped us there. The brutal pounding of the earth by wind and rain—or water and air, if you preferred to think in magical terms—would do much to cover both our passing and our trail. It made an unanticipated but welcome secondary payoff for eliminating the two Hands and their companion Storms.
I nearly sprained an ankle jumping down from the tomb with Jax on my shoulders, and had to drop to one knee to prevent it. Forcing myself back upright I pushed on into the storm, with Triss whispering words of encouragement and guidance into my mind. Even with all of her gear, Jax couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. But a hundred pounds gets heavy fast when you’re jogging along with it on your shoulders in a giant thunderstorm.
By the time we reached the low wall separating the cemetery from the palace gardens, I was sweating despite the cold rain. Climbing up that wall with Jax on my shoulders made me feel about twice my age, as did climbing back down the other side. I normally would have jumped, but I’d learned my lesson there.
Maybe fifteen feet on, Triss had me edge over against the palace compound’s outer wall to avoid tripping on the bodies of a pair of fallen Crown Guards Faran had slain. They lay at the base of the stairs leading up to the ramparts. By luck or fate or Faran’s skill, those were the only agents of the Crown that I encountered. The first pellets of hail started hammering down around me soon thereafter, stinging when they hit scalp or skin.
Faran was waiting for me at the great tower that marked the corner where the wall bent sharply to the northeast, as it followed the spur of rock that footed the compound, a denser shadow in the murk of the storm. “You sure you still want to go out this way?” She’d already slung a rope over the outside wall.
“No,” I replied, “but I don’t think we’ve got a good alternative.”
I glanced over the edge. Somewhere down there in the darkness was the river Zien. The plan had always been to make our exit via the Zien, though I’d originally expected to sail-jump off the wall and glide down to the river on shadow wings. The running water was supposed to do double duty, helping us to shake off any possible pursuit by the Elite and their stone dogs as well as breaking our shadow trail in case Jax had taken up with Devin and the other rogue Blades. Now . . .
“There’s no way she can swim like this,” said Faran.
“No,” agreed Sshayar, speaking up for the first time since the tomb, “but I can keep her face out of the water and cover her nose and mouth when needed if you can tow her along behind.”
“I still don’t know,” said Faran.
“I suppose we could—”
“Stone dog!” yelled Ssithra, cutting me off. “Coming up through the wall. Go!”
Dammit!
I leaped up onto the nearest crenellation and jumped outward, spreading my arms as I cleared the wall. It was that or face a stone dog biting and clawing at me through the stones while I tried to climb down a wet rope in a thunderstorm. Triss spun himself into great dark wings, extending outward from my arms. It was only the second time I’d ever attempted a sail-jump while carrying a passenger—a dangerous proposition—though at least I was able to use my arms to reinforce my wings this time.
As I glided clear of the palace wall, I heard a faint roaring coming from below and realized it must be the river, angry with all the water pouring down off the hills of the city. Again I regretted the necessity that drove us to this escape route.
Fresh lightning splintered the air less than a spear’s throw in front of me. I was still blinking away the afterimages when the lightning came again, closer. This time it very nearly struck Faran, who let out a startled yelp, followed by swearing.
“Fucking Storm!”
It wasn’t until the next bolt fell between us and I saw the cloud-winged scythe, hovering above like some blade-headed ibis, that I realized Faran had spoken of the elemental rather than the elements. The last Hand must have set their familiar to hunt for us, and when we entered the heart of its domain it had found us. Much easier here, since sail-jumping kept us from shrouding up—there simply wasn’t enough Shade to manage both sail and shroud. More lightning fell around us and Faran folded her wings, dropping away into the roaring murk below.
Hoping that we had cleared the riverbank I mindspoke Triss,
Let us fall, it’s our only hope of shaking the damned thing off.
Then we, too, plunged into darkness.
We fell perhaps forty feet before the snarling of the river filled the world and the waters swallowed us up. We plunged deep, cutting straight through the icy surface currents generated by the storm into the blood-warm waters washing off the sun-bitten plains beyond the city. Slowing but still moving down, we passed into the cool shadowed depths the sun never warmed, coming to a stop only when my feet hit the bedrock beneath the half yard of muck that floored the great river. I felt the impact all the way up to my teeth, but pushed off again immediately.