Bared Blade (27 page)

Looking up into that chimney-like void, it was impossible to tell that the very top floor of the old tower was still sound and in place eight stories above. In fact, the careful enlargement of a couple of windows on the floor below increased the light in ways that made it seem as if there was nothing but shattered beams and a scrap of old roof between the ground floor and the sky.

I hopped lightly over the ruin of a door that lay on the floor just inside the tower’s entrance and crossed to the far wall. The slab of charred wood covered a big hole where the floor had collapsed into the sewers. I’d long ago burned away what little strength the original fire had left the door, so that the weight of anything much bigger than a cat would break it in half.

It took me more than an hour to make my way up the well of the tower, a route I’d only ever been forced to use once before. I had to take frequent rest breaks, perching on rotting window ledges or the stubs of old beams, and I’d never have made it at all without Triss’s ability to make me fingerholds no normal human could have used.

Eventually, I climbed up to just beneath the top floor. There, rather than take the risk of being seen slipping out a window and up the last few feet, I got Triss to unlatch the trapdoor I normally used for a privy so that I could crawl through from below. The tiny room above was an oven, so I cracked the shutters as wide as I dared—too much obvious change might draw attention to the tower. Then I stripped off my outer clothes and flopped down on the old straw mattress.

When I woke, the sun had moved the shadows a few feet, making it early afternoon. My rough sheet was soaked with sweat and I had a pounding headache, but no one had
beheaded me in my sleep, so I had to count that as a win. The two or three hours of shut-eye I’d gotten weren’t nearly enough, but hunger kept me from just rolling over and trying for a couple more. It’d been ages since the Spinnerfish, and I’d long since run off all of my dinner. When I blearily sat up on the narrow mattress, Triss flowed out from under me and up onto the wall.

“What now?” he asked.

“Breakfast, or lunch. Whatever the hell meal you have when you wake up groggy at …What time is it?”

“A bit past the second afternoon bell,” said Triss. “And don’t think I didn’t notice the way you dodged the question.”

“It wasn’t a dodge so much as a delaying tactic while I wake up and think things through. I don’t suppose you want to fetch me that breakfast?”

Triss sighed, then slid down the wall and across the floor to the place where my amphorae were racked. For a moment, the nearest was covered in shadow, then the big ceramic stopper thudded gently to the floor. Two beats after that Triss pulled out a small clay pot and brought it to me before going back to open another amphora.

I broke the seal and pried off the lid, exposing a dense brick of a cake and filling the air with the smell of orange liquor. The cake was mostly made up of dried fruit and nuts baked in just enough rice flour to hold it together, then steeped in liquor to preserve it. As long as you left them in the pot they came in, the things would last virtually forever. Or, for traveling, you could wrap them in oiled paper and stow them in the bottom of a pack and expect it to still taste pretty good after a month or three of bouncing around.

I broke off a piece and started chewing. Heavenly stuff, but expensive. Which is why I hadn’t had any at the other fallback. While I was munching on my orange cake, Triss brought me a jar of excellent small beer and a tiny ham wrapped in oiled paper—likewise much better fare than I had been able to offer Stel and Vala. That thought gave me a little pang of guilt now. But the only thing I could do about it at the moment was to get out there and find them, and
eating a good meal would put me in a much better state to achieve that.

Triss didn’t open the amphora that held my Kyle’s twenty, and I didn’t ask him to, though I would very much have liked a sip or two of something stronger than small beer and the liquor in my orange cake. I’d finished about half of the ham and all of the cake when Triss suddenly whipped his head around and looked sharply at the open trap door.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, hang on.”

Triss slipped down through the door, leaving only the thinnest thread of darkness to connect him back to me and the place the sun would have put his shadow. I set the ham quietly on the floor and reached for my clothes. My hand had just touched the rough silk of my pants when I felt a thrum of alarm run back along the line of shadow that linked us. It was the most urgent sort of warning, so instead of putting my clothes on, I just hooked them through the carrying strap of my new bag and grabbed my boots.

Triss reappeared through the trapdoor as I pulled the first boot on. He came up slowly and carefully, slithering over the edge rather than popping back up. I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong, but before I could speak he touched my lips with one claw and shook his head. Then he handed me my remaining boot before wrapping my bag in shadow and lifting it silently to my shoulder for me while I slipped on the boot. For the first time I realized how quiet the world outside my tower had gotten. Shit.

As I rose into a crouch, I lifted my head back and mimed a wolf howling. Triss nodded and held up five fingers, making a circling gesture to let me know they were all around us. That meant we couldn’t sail-jump, especially not midafternoon when Triss would be at his weakest. I pointed down through the trapdoor and he nodded. This was going to get seriously nasty.

A very quiet scuffing sound, as of someone stealthily climbing a stone wall, came in through the window. I leaped and caught hold of one of the cross beams, quickly swinging
my feet up so that I could hang by my heels and free my hands. Triss wrapped himself around me as I pointed my palms at the edges of the floor, submerging his will within my own. I drew a deep breath, then closed my eyes and released the lightning as I let it out. The blast chewed through the wooden planks, igniting them at the same time it severed the two main supports for my little aerie.

With a terrible rending noise, the whole floor fell away beneath me—a burning wheel dropping into darkness. The tower shook, and clouds of dirt blossomed everywhere as bits of brick shattered and burst under the stress, but it didn’t collapse. Not quite. I counted to three then let go of the beam, following the floor down into the dense pall of smoke and dust. Extending my arms, I shaped the shadow-stuff of my familiar into huge twinned claws, pushing them out to drag along the walls, slowing my fall while simultaneously adding to the general noise and destruction.

Using that touch point to tell me where I was relative to the height of the tower, I was able to let go and draw the shadows back in a few feet from the ground, dropping free for the last few feet. That was my intent anyway, but the fall was longer than I anticipated. This latest abuse had been too much for the floor. The whole thing had caved in, collapsing into the sewers below. I hit hard, and had to ditch my bag as I rolled across the debris to soak up some of the impact. Rough edges jabbed at my bare back and legs, opening ragged cuts and driving splinters deep into my flesh.

If Triss had been free, he might have armored me from the worst of it. But I had chosen to keep control, reaching for his senses in the same moment that I wrapped him around me now. That saved my life, because it meant that I felt the presence of the Durkoth a split second before he spotted me. Two staggering steps, pivot, and a flick of the wrist as I extended my arm. The dagger in my right wrist sheath slid into my hand and I continued the swing, dragging the edge of my steel across the Other’s throat.

Blood hotter than any human’s fountained across my hand and sprayed my face and chest. Deep purple according
to VoS—the same as their Sylvani cousins if the stories Siri had told me about them were true, and she ought to know after the assignment that earned her the name “Mythkiller.” She’d also told me that Others were damned hard to kill and the Durkoth proved her point by not going down immediately as a human would have.

Instead, he lurched forward, slamming into me and knocking me over backward. As I fell, I remembered Qethar’s stone cloak and willed my wrapping of shadow-stuff into a stiff, barrel-like configuration to protect my chest and ribs from the impact. But instead of landing on hard debris as I’d anticipated, we plunged into the main flow of the sewer.

I felt a moment of disorientation as our progress slowed. Then the crushing pressure of five hundred or more pounds of dying Other and long stone robe—this one was dressed in foreign manner—pushed me deep into the muck at the bottom of the channel. For a few instants I could feel the stone fabric of his robe writhing against my shadow armor, trying to catch and crush me.

Then the Durkoth went limp and his clothing froze in place—the half-open hand of a stone giant gripping my chest. I hadn’t had time to draw an extra breath before we went in, and now I thought my lungs might burst before I worked my way free of that great weight. Only the fact that my shadow armor had kept the grasping stone from getting a tighter grip saved me. I had just enough room to slither free of the dead Other, though I lost some skin doing it.

When my head broke the surface, I drew in a huge lungful of air, then swam to the side of the channel. It ran deep and fast here under the Stumbles, where the many outflows off the Sovann and Kanathean Hills came together before making their conjoined way out to the bay. I dragged myself up onto the narrow access ledge and released my hold on Triss, letting him go as I collapsed onto my side.

For a good minute I just lay there in the dark, gasping raggedly and trying to recover. The stench should have been unbearable, but after my recent time without any air at all,
the simple fact that I could smell
anything
made it seem almost sweet. An occasional dull crash or sudden splash spoke of the continued disintegration of the tenement above. I found that vaguely reassuring since I didn’t think the Elite would be in any hurry to enter a building in the midst of collapse.

Triss slipped away up channel, moving back toward where we had fallen in for reasons he didn’t bother to share. Just as earlier, he left a thin thread of shadow to connect us, and just as earlier he hadn’t been gone long when I felt a thrum of alarm run back along that connection.

“Aral, downstream, now!” Triss’s voice rang out shrill and harsh from the darkness up channel, riding over a sudden increase in the noise coming from above.

Reflex rolled me off the ledge, and long years of training designed to keep my body moving well past the point of physical endurance got me paddling, though my arms felt like lead and my soggy boots kept trying to drag me under. But I couldn’t have gone more than a dozen strokes before the world fell on me.

It began with a sound like chained thunder, or the hands of a god beating a mad dance on the drum skin of the sky. Then came the dust, a great, blinding, choking wall of it that rolled down the tunnel from behind me like an avalanche filling a high pass. It clogged my nose and rimmed my mouth with mud in an instant, forcing me to close eyes against the grit. I ducked my head under the surface of the sewage-filled water and scrubbed at my face to clear the worst of it, because it was that or suffocate.

That’s when the wave hit. Somewhere behind me the old apartment had given its final gasp and fallen in on itself, dropping nine stories of brick and stone down into the sewer all in an instant. Tons of water and the waste it carried were suddenly displaced, a veritable river of sewage thrown out and away from the point of impact all in an instant. It hit me like a liquid hammer, tumbling me over and over until I lost all sense of direction or self.

T
he
hissing registered first, a low dangerous stream of sibilants like the world’s largest asp venting its rage. It should probably have frightened me, but it didn’t. Instead, I found it comforting, and so I focused my fragmented attention on the sound. Slowly, it shifted from senseless noise to words spoken in some alien vernacular …the language of the Shades. Triss! Angry or frightened or perhaps both, and swearing violently in his native tongue.

Something was wrong then, beyond the fact that I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. I knew only that it was dark and chill and that I felt as though someone had stuffed me into a barrel half filled with rocks and rolled me down a long and bumpy slope. I struggled to sit up, realizing only in the moment of action that I had been lying down. Before I could get much more than halfway upright, the top of my head smacked into something hard and I let out a tiny yelp.

As I fell back I threw out both arms, striking curving stonework on either side of me. I was in some sort of stone pipe, probably a side run into the main sewer where my last memories left me. That would explain the smell.…

“Don’t move,” hissed Triss. “You’re safe, but only if you hold still until I’ve dealt with the nightghast.”

I froze. The words came from somewhere beyond the ends of my feet and I did as Triss ordered. Nightghasts ate human flesh when they could get it. They weren’t the worst of their kind, not by a long road. But even the least of the restless dead could be plenty dangerous and they didn’t have to kill you outright to make an end of you. If the nightghast clawed or bit me I might well survive the immediate damage, but succumb a few days or weeks later to the curse that animated it, becoming one of the restless dead myself.