Bared Blade (3 page)

Her voice was low and sweet, gentler than I’d have expected from her appearance, and carrying only the faintest trace of some foreign accent—Kvanas maybe, though I couldn’t place it firmly. Her companion froze. It was the first time I’d seen the smaller woman hold still all evening.

“The two of you together in one of the rooms upstairs,” replied Boquin. “I like the look of you. How much?”

I don’t know whether he was serious or just messing with them, but it didn’t really matter. Either way, things looked like they were escalating. The tall one dropped her hands down to rest on her fighting rods, while the short one slipped
a hand inside her vest then went still again. Perilously so. That air of precisely focused danger
really
reminded me of Jax. What was going on with these women?

“Why don’t you go away before you get hurt,” said the tall one.

It was a challenge, and Boquin took it as such, flipping back his light jacket to expose the hilt of a short heavy sword. He didn’t yet put his hand on the blade, but the implication was there.

Normally at that point, my impulse would have been to slip back even deeper into the shadows while I waited to see what happened next. I didn’t have a stake here. Somebody else’s problem, and all that. Not to mention that the action to come might well serve to reveal whatever it was about the women that kept hitting my sense of something off.

But I still hadn’t so much as moved my chair back when Triss’s voice whispered in my ear, “Help them.”

Since he was incredibly careful about not breaking cover under anything but emergency circumstances, I’d already popped to my feet and crossed half the distance to the women’s table before I had time for second thoughts or even first ones. By then, of course, it was too late. Boquin had spotted my move-in—his eye likely attracted by the suddenness of my actions.

He turned and gave me an appraising look. “These two with you, Jack?”

I nodded, but made no other move, and it hung there for a moment. I could almost hear Boquin weighing up my reputation against the possible loss of face from backing down. I didn’t have a hard name, not as Aral the jack anyway—no major notches on my sword hilts, no history of playing the enforcer, but not a single lost fight or turn-tail moment either. My reputation was all about getting things done on the quiet and without costing large. It was close, I could see that from his eyes, but in the end he made the right choice.

He shrugged and let the jacket cover his sword. “Well, keep ’em on a shorter leash in the future.”

I nodded again and snagged a nearby chair, sliding it over to the women’s table. It put my back to the bar and to the door into the kitchens, which made my bones itch, but I didn’t have a lot of choice.

“I don’t recall inviting you to sit down,” said the tall one, and again I wondered about her accent.

Her companion remained still and quiet, though she had removed her hand from her vest. The change in the character of her actions didn’t fit with my original assessment of noble and bodyguard, but so far I hadn’t come up with anything I liked better, and she wasn’t giving me any more clues.

“I’m only planning on staying long enough to convince Boquin I wasn’t just twisting his dick for the fun of it.” I spoke as quietly as they had earlier because I didn’t want Boquin or any of his friends to overhear me. “Name’s Aral.”

“Stel,” the tall one said grudgingly after a long thoughtful pause, though she too spoke quietly. “And we didn’t need your help with this little problem.” Her companion ignored me, or pretended to.

“Actually, you did.” There was something about the way she said that they didn’t need help with
this
problem that made my business ears prick up, but I decided to come back to it in a bit. “Boquin’s a lieutenant in the Cobble-runners, and several kinds of bad news.”

“What’s that, some Tienese gutter gang?” She shook her head. “We could have handled him.”

“Physically, probably—you look like someone who knows how to use those Kanjurese fighting rods you’re carrying. But you wouldn’t have been able to do it without seriously injuring or killing him. That would have bought you a world of hurt when you tried to get out of the Gryphon. His Cobble-runner buddies would have been all over you before you got fifty feet.”

“We can deal with gutter slime easily enough.” There was a sneer in her voice now, like she’d taken my measure and found it wanting. “Even in numbers.”

“Can you deal with a crossbow quarrel in the back of the neck? Because that’s how they’d do it if they saw you
take down Boquin too easily. They’re mean bastards, not stupid. You wouldn’t do your boss much good then.”

“My boss?” She looked puzzled.

I glanced at the shorter woman for emphasis, wondering why she hadn’t added anything to the conversation, but she continued to look past me as if barely aware of my presence.

“You think I’m working for Vala—” But whatever she was about to say, she never finished the sentence.

Instead she leaped to her feet, drawing the rods from her belt and spinning toward the door. In almost the same instant a big man in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Elite came striding in with his huge stone dog behind him. Preset spells wrapped them round in a network of multicolored light like dew-hung spider webs catching the reflections of a shattered rainbow—beautiful and deadly for those with the eyes to see it. Mage’s eyes.

The shorter woman, Vala, kicked her chair over backward and somehow turned the motion into a back handspring. I twisted up and out of my chair with vague intentions of heading out through the kitchen, but even as I turned that way, a Crown Guardsman came in—one of perhaps a dozen entering through various doors and windows.

I had one of those brief moments of clarity then, the kind you sometimes get in the midst of incipient chaos. I realized that I could turn my lunge out of the chair into a drunken-seeming fall and hope that the Guard was there for someone else—Stel and Vala most likely, though Boquin or a score of other possible offenders of one degree or another offered other options. That seemed likely enough given the numbers, only a dozen guards and one Elite. If they’d come for me they’d have come much better armed.

If I played the drunk and they were here for someone else, there was an excellent chance I’d get lightly roughed up and then thrown back as a small fish. After all, the wanted posters with my name on them didn’t yet come with a picture—a leftover gift from the goddess, if you will. Of course, if I was wrong, and they
were
here for me, they’d
have my head nailed up over the traitor’s gate by this time next week.

Though I have to admit Vala’s resemblance to Jax weighed on my decision, it was Triss’s “help them” that made the difference. I still didn’t know why my best friend had taken such an interest in the women, but it was enough for me that he had. I reversed course then, moving away from the bar and back toward the lieutenant and his stone dog. I was lightly armed, daggers only, but there was no other possible choice. The Elite mage-officer, with his stone dog familiar and his network of powerful spells, was a greater threat than the rest of the soldiers combined.

He shrugged his right arm now, sending a golden loop of spell stuff sliding down off his shoulder into his hand—some sort of entrapment magic by the look of it and one of his presets. With a snap of his wrist he lashed the golden line at Stel. Good. Tying her up might keep him distracted long enough for me to get in close and—
blood of the goddess!

Instead of being caught by the line, Stel dropped under the ensnaring spell while simultaneously lunging toward the Elite lieutenant in a fencer’s extension with her right-hand rod. Far more startling was the way she brought her left-hand rod up and back, using it to snag the spell-line. Looping it quickly around the tip a half dozen times, she brought it down and around behind her back, jerking the lieutenant off balance and into her other rod. The iron tip caught him in the floating ribs with an audible crack of breaking bone.

His stone dog lunged forward then, and would probably have bitten her arm in half if a blast of raw magical force hadn’t caught him squarely in the chest, spinning him half around. A second blast hit him in the shoulder and threw his thousand-plus-pound bulk into the wall just to the left of the door frame, scattering stone chips in his wake. The wall came apart in a cloud of shattered boards and plaster and I turned a quick eye toward the source of the blast. Vala.

She held a pair of short wooden wands, hilted like
fighting daggers and likewise positioned. Both glowed with an intense green light in my magesight and I wondered what had gone into their making. But I didn’t let that distract me from my main goal—the lieutenant was still alive and that meant he was still a threat.

For about two more seconds. Stel let the spell-line she’d caught fall across her shoulders. Then she pivoted, using her own body as a sort of spool to take up the line and pull the lieutenant in closer before she crushed his throat with her right-hand rod. She was terrifyingly fast, completing the whole maneuver before the Elite had time to even begin the process of unweaving his spell. Somewhere outside the stone dog thrashed and gurgled as its own life boiled away in sympathy with its dying master’s.

Suddenly, Stel dropped to the floor. I had an instant to wonder why before a beam of bright blue light passed through the space she’d just been occupying. About as thick around as my thigh, it came from the door behind her and punched a hole through the dust and debris from the broken wall. It likewise punched a hole through Boquin, the post he was leaning against, the guy across the table from him, an unknown drinker near the fireplace, and the fireplace itself.

A moment later, a second stone dog charged into the room through the wreckage left by the first, and a third came in through the front door. Panic ensued as everyone, including several of the Crown Guards tried to find someplace else to be. One particularly clever shadowsider took a moment to throw his shirt over the mage-light chandelier, plunging the already dimly lit room into near blackness. I left the second Elite by the back door to Vala and her friend and headed toward the one coming in through the front.

I went by way of rolling under the nearest empty table, picking up the gods-alone-know what kind of vermin from the filthy straw in the process. An odd choice perhaps, but one that came out of a lifetime of hiding what I am. In the dark and the chaos, the table provided plenty of cover as I called on Triss to cover me with his darkness. In a world
where spells shine bright in magesight, there’s no such thing as true invisibility, at least not from your fellow mages. Triss and his Shade cousins can, however, provide a very effective substitute.

Triss is both a part of my personal shadow and apart from it, a creature of elemental darkness. With the table and the madness around it hiding us from most eyes, he flowed up from the floor to encase me in a thin layer of condensed darkness like a second skin made of icy silk. But the sensation only lasted for a moment before he expanded outward into a cloud of enshrouding night.

It was a bit like being wreathed in thick smoke. No one could see me and I couldn’t see anyone else. But that’s less of a handicap than it might seem. The priests that raised me as a weapon for the hand of a goddess now dead, had trained me from earliest childhood to operate comfortably in complete darkness. Moreover, while I can’t see in the conventional manner when I’m shrouded, I
can
borrow the senses of my familiar.

Triss possesses a sort of 360-degree unsight, focused much more on texture and differences in light and dark than on the shapes and colors that dominate human vision. It’s a very different way of seeing, and it took me years of practice to be able to make sense of it at all, much less use it effectively.

As I slipped out from under the table, the unsight provided a sort of confused view of turbulent motion as Crown Guards tried to hold the exits against the mass outpouring of panicked shadowsiders. I narrowed my attention to the slice of the taproom near the front door, where I’d last seen the third stone dog. It wasn’t hard to spot, not with the giant circle of completely empty space around it. People stayed away from it even in the dark and half mad with fear. Who could blame them?

Stone dogs are flat terrifying. Imagine one of those guardian statues that sits out in front of the bigger temples. You know the ones; size of a small horse, deep chest, broad shoulders, a head more like a lion than a dog. Now imagine
that one of them’s come to life and is sizing you up as its next meal. Figure in that it can swim through earth and stone like a fish through water, and then add in whatever protective magic its sorcerer-companion has wrapped around it, and …brrr. Just brrr.

This one was moving fast, charging toward Vala and Stel. I let it go past and headed back the way it had come, looking for its master. I didn’t have a lot of choice. None of the weapons I had on me would do much more than irritate the stone dog, and I’m only a middling good spell caster at my best. If I revealed myself, it’d tear me to pieces before I cracked its protections. No, the only chance I had of removing the dog from the equation was to take down its master.

A captain of the Elite, he was just coming through the front door then. Drawing a long knife from the sheath at my belt, I moved toward him as quickly as I could manage without making any significant noise. In the dark tavern, I was effectively invisible, and he didn’t know to watch out for me or my kind, not if they were there for Stel and Vala at any rate. But the Elite were very, very good and I would only get one free shot. I had to make it count. I was coming in from the front, because that was faster, and just about on top of him when the captain raised his right hand and pointed at the darkened chandelier, calling out a spell of illumination.

The room practically exploded with light as the old and faded magelights Jerik had bought secondhand suddenly kindled into eye-tearing brightness. The captain’s gaze flicked across the darkness surrounding me, flicked back, froze. He knew I was there.