“Get up.”
Slowly, Kaldar’s eyes opened. He sat up and rubbed his jaw. “Good hit.”
“You deserved it.”
A gray ball of fur dashed from the undergrowth, all but flying. Ling charged Kaldar. Her sharp teeth closed on his arm. Kaldar cursed in surprise, and the raccoon darted into the safety of the bushes. Ling the Raccoon Vigilante.
“What the hell?” Kaldar stared at the bite marks on his forearm.
“Don’t expect mercy from Ling the Merciless.” Audrey reached for him. He grasped her hand, and she pulled him up. “We better disinfect this.”
He shook his head. “How did you manage to train her like that?”
“Little bit of food and petting.” Audrey stepped over a fallen branch. “She is like a cat: she only does what she already wants to do. Something really bad happened to Ling when she was very young. When I found her, she was covered in blood. The vet said something bit her. I wasn’t even sure she would survive. She did, but she is a terrible coward. She’s scared of dogs, so she coughs when she smells them. She is scared of strangers, so when she smells or sees one coming, she will run and hide somewhere close to me. I’m surprised she’d gathered enough courage to bite you.”
“She must’ve thought you were in danger,” Kaldar said.
She wasn’t wrong. The theft of the cross hurt, but it hurt most because Kaldar had done it. She had thought that all of her inner warnings to herself and all of her careful reasoning would keep her out of trouble, but she had been wrong. She’d wanted to trust him, and a small, naive part of her desperately wanted him to be better than he pretended to be.
This is the precursor of things to come,
she told herself.
Learn from this. He treated you as a mark once; he will treat you like that always.
Kaldar looked at her. “Does this cross have something to do with why you stopped stealing?”
“The cross is mine, Kaldar. Everything else belonged to our family together. My clothes, my toys, all that stuff could be sold if we needed money or left behind if we had to leave in a hurry. I learned not to get attached to any of it. They were just things. Things changed hands a lot: I stole them from their owners and gave them to Dad, and Dad would sell them. Later, Alex would try to steal my take from me and sell whatever I stole to buy drugs. But the cross was only mine. Even my idiot father understood that. And then a violent man hurt me and took it from me, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt so helpless. Angry, scared, and helpless. It was like he violated something deep inside me. That was when I realized what it feels like to have something you cherish stolen. So I don’t do that anymore.”
Guilt nipped at her.
Except when my father goads me into it.
Well, she would set it right.
“So if I were to take something other than the cross . . .”
“I will set your hair on fire, Kaldar. You’ll be bald.”
Kaldar got up. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
They walked back to the clearing. “Friends again?” Kaldar asked.
“Partners,” she said.
“You don’t want to be friends with me, Audrey?” A seductive note crept into his voice. He said “Audrey” the way a man might say the name of a woman he had just made love to.
“I prefer partners.” She raised her chin and winked at him. “Let’s keep it professional.”
“Isn’t it too late for that?”
“Don’t we have a heist to plan?”
Kaldar sighed in mock surrender. “Yes, love.”
Audrey let the “love” go that time. He had to have some small consolation after being knocked out.
She was in too deep. If she wasn’t careful, she’d find herself waking up next to him, then she would be in for a hell of a heartbreak.
At their approach, Gaston hoisted himself up into the wyvern’s cabin and stuck his head out. “Is it safe to come out?”
“It’s safe,” Kaldar told him. “Audrey just explained to me that taking her things without permission is not allowed. Since I’ve never had anything taken away from me, I apologized.”
Gaston hopped back onto the ground.
“They’ll be taking us in a bus,” Kaldar said. Yonker had told them as much when they agreed to the camp visit. “Then they will walk us across one by one. Audrey is right—if things go sour, I’ll need you close. I’ll plant the tracker on the bus. Don’t take any chances, and don’t follow too closely. I don’t want one of Yonker’s goons shooting you.”
“Can do,” Gaston said.
A faint buzz spread through the air. Kaldar and Gaston looked up. A metal insect plunged down from the sky and landed on the ground between them. Gaston picked it up, extracted a narrow sliver of crystal, and pulled a gadget from one of the trunks. Shaped like a bronze flower bud, thrusting from a stack encrusted with tiny specks of crystal, the flower terminated in four delicate metal roots bent outward to provide a sturdy base.
“News from the Mirror,” Kaldar said.
Gaston pushed the crystals in a complex sequence. The flower bud opened, revealing pale petals in its center made of some strange material, paper-thin, but with a metallic sheen. Gaston set the crystal in the middle of the flower.
Magic ignited inside the crystal and shot out in four streams to the ends of the petals. An image appeared above the crystal, floating in thin air. An average-looking man in nondescript clothes from the Weird looked at them.
“Erwin.” Gaston’s thick eyebrows crept up.
“The woman in the shot is not a member of the Hand,” Erwin said. “Her name is Helena d’Amry, Marquise of Amry and Tuanin. She is a Hound of the Golden Throne. Spider is her uncle. Full file to follow. Be careful, Kaldar.”
“Shit,” Gaston said.
“What does that mean?” Audrey looked to Kaldar.
“The Hand protects the Dukedom of Louisiana, which is a colony of the Empire of Gaul. The Hounds protect the throne of the Empire. They answer directly to the Emperor,” Kaldar said.
“Who is Spider?”
“He’s the man I want to kill,” Kaldar said.
A piece of paper replaced Erwin’s image, covered with weird characters.
“What does it say?” Audrey tugged on Kaldar’s arm.
“It says that Helena likes skinning people alive,” Gaston answered. “Also says that the guy who threw that head at you is named Sebastian. He is her right-hand man. His kill count is at forty.”
“Fourteen?”
“No. Forty.”
Oh God.
“This changes nothing.” Kaldar swiped the buckets. “We stick to the plan. Right now, we’ll concentrate on getting the invitation and feeding the wyvern. We may have to take off in a hurry.” He headed down the path to the stream as if he couldn’t get away from the two of them fast enough.
“IT isn’t really true,” Gaston said quietly.
Audrey looked at him.
“What Kaldar said about nothing being taken away from him. It isn’t true.” Gaston sat down on the crate and checked the disks with the chain attached. “Kaldar has two brothers. Well, he had two brothers, Richard and Erian, but Erian was a lot younger than them and had a different mother, so they were never close. Their father was the head of our family. Their mother left. The family likes to pretend she died, but she didn’t. She left all of them, ran off into the Broken. The Mire is a tough place to live. People try to get out any way they can.”
Being left by your own parent as a child . . . Her mother had checked out on her emotionally more than once, but at least she didn’t leave.
“Then a rival family killed their father. Richard was sixteen, and Kaldar was fourteen. Erian was nine, I think. Aunt Murid, their father’s sister, took them in. She was tough. She’d escaped into the Weird when she was young and fought in the Dukedom of Louisiana’s army for years, until they found her out, and she had to escape again and come home. Murid was hard. I used to be really scared of her when I was little. Anyway, she raised Richard and Kaldar as her own. Richard was kind of already an adult, I guess. He’s very serious. Smartest man I know. Kaldar was always like he is now, funny, hehe-haha, oh look, I stole your money out from under your nose. The family didn’t starve because he and Cerise, his cousin, they hustled and sold things in the Broken. Don’t ever haggle with him. It’s a bad idea. Anyway, so Cerise and Kaldar did whatever they could to keep all of us fed. Kaldar always tried to impress Aunt Murid. He barely remembers his real mom, so she was as close to one as he ever had. Then Spider brought the Hand to the Mire, kidnapped Cerise’s parents, and it all went to shit.”
This Spider got around. “What did he want?”
“Everything,” Gaston said. “Most of all, he wanted the Box. It’s complicated. Just think of it as a really powerful weapon. We couldn’t use it, but we couldn’t let the Louisianans have it, either. The Hand declared war on us. Spider tracked my family down. My dad is a half thoas—that’s why I look the way I look—and we always lived apart from the main house. I was supposed to stand watch. I left because of a stupid errand. Spider got into our house and cut off my mother’s leg. Chopped it off at the knee with a meat cleaver.”
“Oh, my God!” The tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose. “That’s horrific.”
“The Hand plays for keeps,” Gaston said. “Anyway, we fought them and won, but in the final battle, Aunt Murid died. Kaldar watched it happen and didn’t get to her in time. He killed the Hand freak that murdered her. Ask him sometime, he’ll show you the scars on his arms. But it was too late.”
Oh, Kaldar.
Gaston bit his lower lip. “He’s not right. Watching Murid die broke something inside him. He still pretends that everything is cool. You can’t tell by looking at him because he acts normal, but the rudder on his boat is stuck. He enlisted in the Mirror, supposedly because he wants to make sure what’s left of the family is well taken care of, but that’s not the reason. He wants revenge on the Hand, and he doesn’t care what happens to him or how he gets it. He will kill them any chance he gets.”
“Gaston,” she said gently, “I know that you care for your uncle, but Kaldar, he’s a grifter. He isn’t a killer.”
Gaston blinked. “We hold to the Old Ways in our family.”
“What does that mean?”
“Kaldar’s uncle, the head of our family, has a nickname.”
“Aha.”
“It’s Death.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They call him Death,” Gaston said. “Because when his sword comes out, people die. We train as swordsmen as soon as we can hold a sword and not fall over. We learn to stretch our flash out onto our swords and use it in fights. Kaldar isn’t as good as Grampa Ramiar. He isn’t as good as Cerise. Technically, he isn’t as good as Richard, his older brother, because Richard flashes white and Kaldar flashes blue. But aside from them, Kaldar has never met anyone he couldn’t beat.”
“Aha.” Tall tales must’ve run in the family.
“He’s killed dozens of people,” Gaston insisted. “Probably over a hundred.”
“I’m sure he did, Gaston.” Sure as the night is light. She couldn’t picture Kaldar with a sword. A crowbar, maybe. A gun. But not a sword. “And you are supposed to keep him from killing more?”
“I wasn’t even supposed to come. I’m not officially an agent yet, but Cerise talked her husband, William—he’s my guardian—into it. I’m supposed to keep an eye on Kaldar, in case he snaps. So he knows all about things being taken away from him. He just won’t admit it.”
“Gaston, if Kaldar doesn’t care if he lives or dies, how are you supposed to keep him safe?”
He shook his head. His face gained a lost expression. Suddenly, he seemed so young, just a kid really, about Jack’s age. “I don’t know. But I have to try. Most of my family acts like I don’t exist anymore. My dad banished me because of what happened to my mom. Kaldar always talks to me. He comes to all of my annual trials. He’s my favorite uncle. I don’t have many left anymore.”
“I will help you,” Audrey said. It came out as a complete surprise, but she didn’t regret it. “If he loses his head, I will help you hold him back.”
Gaston raised his huge hand, stained with the Mirror’s clay. “Deal?”
She grasped his fingers and shook. “Deal.”
KARMASH pondered the woman. She had small brown eyes and hair of an odd shade, unnatural bright red. Given that she hung upside down, her feet caught by a rope at the ankles, her hair dripped down from her head like a mop. For mid-thirties, she wasn’t roughly used, he reflected.
They’d grabbed her off the street, as she left Magdalene Moonflower’s building in the Broken, and brought her here, to the abandoned building in the Edge that Karmash had designated as their temporary base. Only he and Mura had managed to cross the boundary into the magicless world. Soma and Cotier had been too altered.
Karmash winced at the memory. Entering the Broken was always painful for him. A few months ago, he wouldn’t have even contemplated it, but times changed.
The woman made a tiny noise, like a frightened cat.
Karmash pulled up a filthy chair and sat on it, so their faces were level. “You work for Magdalene Moonflower.”
“Please let me down. I didn’t do anything. Please let me down . . .”
“Shhh.” Karmash put his finger on her lips.
She closed her mouth.
“Let me explain a few things,” he said. “I’m a member of the Hand. I’m a spy for the Dukedom of Louisiana in the Weird. That tells you that I don’t care about your life. That also tells you that I’m magically enhanced enough to crush your skull with a squeeze of my fingers. Make a note of that; we’ll come back to that point later.”
She stared at him in terrified silence.
“I was very successful as a spy. I made a nice name for myself. Then, twenty months ago, my officer became a cripple. Some Edgers severed his spine, you see. The Hand chose to view my performance in that affair as less than satisfactory. I lost my assignment, my prestige, and my paycheck. I have expensive tastes, and I hate to compromise on luxury. Now I have a new assignment, a very prestigious assignment with a famous officer. But I’m very new in this crew. You understand how that is, right?”