Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (56 page)

Aidan couldn't understand it; not at first. He didn't expect to, though; the Kings had money, and no one who had a lot of money had to make sense if they didn't damned well want to.

And they had money all right. Aidan had meat for dinner that night, covered in weird sauce—he scraped his off—and after that, cream, sugar, fruit that was rare no matter what the season. Everything was pretty, and he regarded the food with a mixture of hunger, disdain, and curiosity before he was convinced that he wouldn't make an idiot of himself by eating it.

There were three boys his own age, and one girl; they sat together, ate the same way. and eventually went off to their rooms by some silent mutual agreement. The woman in charge of the guesthouse had put them all in the same stretch of hallway because, as she said, there was al least some chance that one of them was paying enough attention to remember it. Sam—funny name, for a girl—was.

So he found his huge, empty room, on the second floor of what was a huge, bustling building, and he sat in the center of a bed six times too large, wondering what it was going to cost him to be here. When she smiled. Kalliaris was the most wonderful god in the world.

But when she frowned, you kind of forgot what the smiles were like.
You beware
, his mother used to say,
of any luck you don't

make
. He'd wondered, then, how the Hells you were supposed to
make
luck. But he almost understood what she meant: Things could go just that shade
loo
well. Kalliaris liked the helpless and the downtrodden—and as long as you didn't forget just how helpless or downtrodden you'd been, she was fair.

But forget—just forget for a minute who you owed your life to, and she reminded you. If you survived it.

Things were going too damned well, that was the problem.

That and he'd eaten way too much.

Evening, 17th of Lattan

Avantari

The moon was high.

Devon ATerafin had nothing against the moonlight. But shadows had a way of gathering. He was always wary of the shadows, and tonight he'd spent almost an hour watching them. Instinct spoke with its own voice. If not for that voice, he would be sleeping in the relative comfort of his own bed. Instead he waited here, his eyes straying between window, balcony, and door; the doors to this particular set of quarters were notorious in a very small circle of men and women.

Devon disliked silent doors as a matter of principle, but the very particular Patris Larkasir insisted that they be well-oiled and otherwise perfectly maintained. Patris Larkasir's loyalties lay with the Kings, and in his job as the overseer of the Royal Charters and Trade, he was peerless. Devon had had the privilege of working with him for just over two decades, and he knew that the only security issue Patris Larkasir cared much about was that of his information. Whether or not someone could enter the office
quietly
was not a matter of concern; as far as Patris was concerned there was actually no such thing as too quiet.

Devon adapted. It was not one of the traits for which he was known in general, but it was one of the traits that he had found most useful in his long career.

The door, when it opened, opened, as expected, silently; had he not been watching for the movement he might have missed it, and he missed very little. But he swore under his breath when he saw who stepped through it.

And of course, being who it was, he heard; Kallandras of Senniel missed nothing that could conceivably be heard, distance notwithstanding.

"You were expecting me, I see. Did she summon you, as well?"

"She?"

In the darkness, the bard
was
dark, as much a part of the shadows as—as Devon himself. They were dressed for darkness, both of them, or rather, dressed to take advantage of it. Kallandras raised a fair brow. "If you did not see her, you must tell me one day what, exactly, you were waiting for."

"I'll trade," Devon said, with a smile that was slightly less sharp. "You tell me what on earth you thought you'd find here."

"You," Kallandras replied. He stepped back through the open door, leaving his voice behind. "I don't think we've much time."

"Time for what?" Devon followed him quietly; they moved, both men, as if movement itself were suspect.

The bard did not answer.

Aidan hadn't thought to tell his Da much: only that he was going to wait in the streets until the parade of champions had passed him by. He'd half-hoped his Da might join -him: they'd done it less than two years past. But his Da was working, and as he said, the parade was the best time to catch up on the work that needed doing, what with everyone gawping like farm boys.

Three days. Da. You take care.

1 will.

Three days, then.

He remembered this in the dark of night; the moon through open courtyard and half-closed glass—glass!—cast a weak shadow across the sheets as he sat bolt upright.

Da's going to kill me.

He lurched out of bed, hit the ground with a grunt. The beds were a lot taller here than they had been in the old house. In the rooms above the shop, bed was a flat mat that sat on the floor: didn't much matter if you rolled out of that. Cradling his arm, he got shakily to his feet. He'd bitten his lip to stop from shouting; everyone else was sleeping and besides, he didn't need them to think he couldn't even get out of bed without injuring himself.

He hadn't brought much in the way of clothing, and he'd spent the last of the evening trying to clean what he had brought. The shirt was still wet when he pulled it over his head. Nothing dried in weather like this.

But he hadn't taken off the medallion. Pulling it out from be-neath the damp folds of shirt, he made sure it would be plainly visible; the guards would ask otherwise.

What are you going to tell them? That you have to go home and tell your dad where you are
? That brought him up short. He stood there, hand on the door, sure he was going to look like a complete fool.

Better to look like a fool than to
be
one
. His grandmother's words. His mother's. His Da never said anything like that; looking like a fool, or feeling like one, always made him angry. Made Aidan wonder if he was getting to be too much like his Da.

And that made him open the door.

It was unexpectedly dark in the hall. The torches must've burned down. It surprised him; the whole place just reeked of money, and money meant light. Torches, oil, mage-stones, windows the length of a wall and the height of the ceiling. But down the long hall some lights were burning, and he shrugged, closed the door, and started toward them.

Until he saw that they were bobbing. Moving. They dropped once to the ground, or rather, seemed to bend that way. Beneath the glow of lamp, he could see an exposed back, laid out, facing a ceiling entirely absorbed with night. It shimmered under the pale glow of lamplight. The light rose again; the body did not.

Aidan didn't know much, but he wasn't stupid.

He held his breath, backed down the hall. In the distance he could hear first knocking, muffled slightly, and then a creak. The whole hall wasn't in use. It wasn't. He told himself that. And maybe they weren't going to open every door. Maybe they were just—just looking to steal something. Something like that.

But he didn't breathe. He didn't put the full force of his weight on the flat of his feet, choosing instead to place heel down steadily and let the rest of the foot follow. Quietly, quietly. He didn't want to be seen, and he knew that if he was heard at all, he would be.

Had he wondered why there were so many damned guards?

He stopped. Wondered, instead, where in the Hells they'd all gone. And then he heard the first scream.

And then he began to run.

Kallandras froze for a moment, stopping in mid-stride as if men normally stopped that way, and at that, completely gracefully.

Devon was a second behind him and attuned to him; he stopped as well. The grounds were silent if the normal noise of the grounds could be disregarded—and during the Festival season, that was difficult.

"We're late," Kallandras said softly. He began to move again, quickly.

He recognized the boy; Valedan's witness. He hadn't spoken to him, of course; he'd observed him from a polite distance. All affairs that related to the politics of the realm were observed from a distance of one sort or another, but they were observed. The boy's white hair caught what scant light there was through the window of the guesthouse's upper storey. His hands were not so striking as his hair, not so pale; they came up, struck the glass, palm first.

Devon's eyes narrowed.

"Kallandras!" he cried.

The bard stopped, crouched low to earth, turned, all in a motion. "What?"

"Tell the boy to get away from the window."

Anyone else and Devon would have had to explain. What boy? What window? Why?

Kallandras raised his head slightly in the silence.

The boy disappeared.

Do not touch exterior glass.

The words came from nowhere and hung in the air like a sword. Like a sword wielded by no one, but sharp enough to kill, and suspended a little too close to the neck at that.

Aidan pulled his hand back from the window and turned his back to it instead. In the darkness, the torches were swaying. The hall was a long hall, beginning to end, but it was suddenly becoming a lot shorter.

They didn't shout for him to stop. That was the weird thing. They made almost no noise as they ran; if it weren't for the lights, he might not have heard them at all.

And he knew that was bad.

There was a bend in the hall, and stairs.

He took both.

The doors would not open.

In Devon's left hand was a completely useless ring of keys. Oh, the keys slid into the lock, all right; they even turned. But the click of authoritative opening did not follow that movement; it was as if the lock and the key had been somehow sundered, as if they had lost the ability to speak the same language, although they retained the same outward appearance of compatibility.

Not bolted: not barred; not locked. Anything as simple as that would have been visible immediately in the light that Devon carried. Kallandras waited at his side in silence—and Devon knew it was the silence of the listener. He thought, as he rose from his slow crouch, that not all bards could listen well, even if they were born with the voice—but those men and women born to the voice who could listen, he was certain, could hear heartbeats and interpret them.

"Who are they after?" he asked, when the bard's gaze met his.

"I'm not… sure."

"What do you hear?"

"Nothing." he said. "Nothing except the feel of heavy men in the hall above."

"The guards?"

"Dead." Kallandras said, in a tone that held only fact, no emotion. "Or sleeping. I would definitely say sleeping," he added, again dispassionately. "Were it not for the scream."

"They can't all be dead."

"No. I concur." Kallandras surveyed the door.

"There's this door, three servants' entrances, and the main set of doors." The door that they stood before was the door by which the priest left and entered.

"Let us pretend that whoever our enemies are. they have the same dislike for the priests that they are once rumored to have had. I would try the servants' entrance closer to the Northern stairs."

Devon didn't ask Kallandras how he knew the lay of the building so well. They ran.

When Aidan tripped down the stairs, he wasn't even surprised: he
had
had it too good, and Kalliaris had noticed him and started to frown.

But when the blue light fanned out above his head, when it splashed the wall in a flare of light that was—he couldn't think of a different word for it—
sticky
, he figured she was just smiling with an ugly edge. Because the light dripped down like some sort of heavy liquid.

The fall hadn't hurt him. Hadn't really slowed him down; he'd actually gotten to the bottom faster. He rolled up. made damned sure that whatever was dripping didn't touch him, and threw open the stairwell's swinging doors.

Above him he heard cursing.

He couldn't understand a word of it, but he'd listened to enough of the language over the past week to know it for what it was: Annagarian. He offered a breathless curse—in Weston—which was all he had time for. He had to get out.

Whoever they were, they didn't bother to trip down the stairs; they came down it like full-shod horses; heavy and loud.

Where in the Hells are the guards?

As he flew clear of the doors, he tripped over his answer.

And this time, he
did
lose time.

If it hadn't been for the circumstances. Devon would have laughed. This door, simple and almost featureless—inasmuch as
any
door that stood on the grounds of the Kings' land could be said to be either—would not come down. Both he and Kallandras, in his own modest opinion, had had the training required to use their strength to advantage; the door was heavy enough, but it was hinged; there should not have been any way that it could stand—completely unperturbed—against two such men working, as it were, in concert.

But it wouldn't budge.

On the best of days, Devon could find two good words to say about mages if he struggled. This was not the best of days. Kallandras stiffened; his eyes, even in the darkness, took on that peculiar flatness that meant he was listening, he was giving something beyond Devon's hearing his full concentration.

"I think," he said softly. "I have an answer."

"To which question?"

"You wanted to know who they're after."

Devon took in some of the bard's stillness.

"They're after Valedan's witness. Aidan."

The guards were dead.

Or at least he thought they were dead; living men didn't usually lie in wait across the length of the floor. But these did. His foot caught on the unexpected underside of ribs, and he fell flat across two men.