Bared Blade (8 page)

“Are you quite sure?” asked Qethar and I realized his voice wasn’t cold and hard, but rather crystalline—pure and perfect as a finely cut diamond.

“Wha’?” My own voice sounded slow and thick, slurred, a very poor second to the beauty of the Durkoth’s.

“You’re shaking your head ‘no,’ but your eyes are saying ‘yes.’ And you haven’t moved your hand away. Quite the contrary. Which is the real impul—gluk!” he choked midsentence as Triss tightened the noose.

“I…” Even then I found it hard to focus on anything but the place where my palm now rested against the skin of his throat and chest. “I…”

A sharp pain caught me across the cheek as Triss slapped me. I staggered back involuntarily, breaking the contact between me and Qethar. It felt like I’d stepped straight out of an Aveni sauna and plunged into an icy pool. The fuzz in my head burned away in the sudden fiery cold, and I recognized it for what it was.

Glamour.

But even knowing what was happening, I had a hard time keeping myself from moving forward to touch the Durkoth again. The feelings had been so intense. I much preferred women to men as bed partners, but Qethar was so very …This time
I
slapped myself. It hurt. That was good. It helped remind me that it wasn’t me thinking those thoughts. It was the glamour. There’d have been nothing wrong with the impulse if it were mine. But it wasn’t.

“I don’t like it when people mess with my head,” I said quietly. “Cut the glamour magic.”

“It’s not magic, it’s just me.” His voice was still cold, but edged now with bitter contempt and loss. “Your Emperor of Heaven bound our magic after the death of his predecessor in the War of the First.
None
of the First may use magic beyond the borders of the Sylvain. We had to choose between magic and our ancient home under the mountains. Is not the history of the First still taught in your schools?”

“He’s not
my
Heavenly Emperor. And, yes it is.” But the Others—or, as they generally called themselves, the First—were so rare here in the lands beyond the wall that it had never seemed all that important. More mythology than history.

Besides, I wasn’t sure that it really mattered what you called what the Others did. No human could hope to
persuade
the earth or to cast a glamour without using magic. From my point of view the only real difference was that Other magic didn’t register in magesight. If anything, that made it
more
powerful than the human variety.

I wondered then how Siri had handled the glamour when she had been tasked with executing the Sylvani demigod whose death had made her the Mythkiller. But I pushed the question aside for now. It might matter later, if I had much more to do with the Durkoth, but at the moment I needed to focus.

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “I don’t really give a damn about First history. What I want to know is what’s between you and the Dyad. That, and more about the Kothmerk. So start talk—” I stopped as Qethar burst into wild laughter that made his whole body shake.

It looked
wrong
. A statue in the grips of an earthquake. Except there was no earthquake. It made my head hurt to watch him.

“What’s so funny?” I asked when the first tremors had passed.

Between aftershocks, Qethar forced out, “You say that you don’t give a damn about First history, then in the very same breath demand that I tell you about the Kothmerk.” He lost control again for a moment before continuing, “The Kothmerk
is
First history. The one can no more be separated from the other than the moon from the tides. At least not
for the Durkoth, though others among the First might argue the point, particularly the accursed Sylvani. It is a part of the soul of my people.”

“Could you give me the short version then?” I asked. “What is so important about this Kothmerk?”

“It’s a magic ring,” said a familiar voice from my right. Captain Kaelin Fei.

I winced. Partially that was because I’d let myself get so distracted that someone had been able to sneak up on me. But even more it had to do with
who
I’d let sneak up on me. Captain Fei was an officer of the watch and the perfect model of a corrupt cop. A sometime employer, sometime ally of mine, I’d been avoiding her for months because I owed her a really big favor. Several actually.

I sighed and turned so that I could see the captain—who emerged now from a gap between the tenement and its nearest neighbor—while still keeping an eye on the Durkoth. Fei was a big woman, broad shouldered and fit, a jindu master as well as a street fighter of ugly reputation.

You couldn’t see it in this light, but pale eyes and a spray of freckles marked her out as having non-Zhani blood in her ancestral line. That was probably why she’d turned into such a good brawler; the Tienese streets were hard on those of mixed parentage. Her face was round and would have been almost too pretty for playing the strong arm if not for the deep knife scar on the left side.

She bobbed a nod at me. “The Kothmerk is a ring, carved from a single massive ruby and magically hardened to make it tougher than steel. It’s priceless.”

Qethar hissed at that. “It is neither carved nor was it
magically
anythinged.”

“Yeah, I know.” Fei rolled her eyes. “One of your supersmith gem cutter forebears “persuaded” it to assume its present form back before the dawn of history, or some such crap. Well, that’s more than close enough to magic for a simple old street cop like me.”

I snorted. The captain was anything but simple. If there was a significant shadowside operation anywhere in Tien
that she didn’t have her fingers in, I had yet to hear about it. She was as crooked as crooked could be, and somehow she’d convinced her bosses all the way up to the king himself that it was all for the best. Where most watch captains had a regular district assigned to them, Fei’s beat was the whole city. Her job was peacekeeping in the sense of making sure the criminal element didn’t significantly inconvenience anyone important.

“What does this Kothmerk do?” I asked. I didn’t like the direction this was going. Magic rings tended to attract nine kinds of trouble.

“Nothing,” said Qethar.

“It starts wars,” replied Fei.

“It
does
nothing,” said Qethar. “It simply
is
. The Kothmerk is nothing more nor less than the living heart of the Durkoth.” Fei raised an eyebrow at Qethar, who conceded, “Though, sometimes, that is enough to start a war.”

“Well, it is not going to start one here,” said Fei. “From what I’ve been able to find out, the damned thing leaves a trail of bodies wherever it goes. The massacre at the Gryphon’s Head is only the latest and gaudiest killing since the thing hit Tien. I want that fucking ring out of my city, and I want it done yesterday.”

“There we are in agreement,” said Qethar. “I want to find the Kothmerk as quickly as possible and return it to its rightful master.”

Fei turned a hard look on me. “Which is where you come in, my jack friend. Large scale incidents of slaughter like the Gryphon’s Head are
very
hard to explain to my bosses. So, I’m calling in a favor. Make the problem go away.”

“You want me to find the ring for you?” I asked. This was going to complicate my dealings with the Dyad, I could just tell.

“If that’s what works, great. But I really don’t care how you do it. All I care about is that it stops killing people on my streets. You understand me?”

“I think so. How long do I have?”

“Like I said, I want this thing done yesterday.” Fei sighed.
“But I know that shit like this takes a while. I’ll give you a week.”

“You expect me to wrap this up in just eight days?” I asked, and Fei nodded. “Not a lot of time. I may have to cut some corners.…”

“I don’t care if you have to cut throats. Just get it done.”

“I thought you didn’t want any more bodies found in the streets,” I said.

“So make sure they don’t end up there, Aral. Or, are you going to try to convince me that you can’t make a body or two vanish if you need to?”

“I can help you there,” said Qethar. “I can make any body vanish forever.”

“Why would you do that for me?” I asked.

“Because we’re going to be working together, of course. We do have the same goal now, don’t we, human?”

I looked a question at Fei, who shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t care what happens to the damned thing as long it stops being my problem. If swapping sweat with the Others is what it takes, by all means swap away.”

Qethar looked at me and raised a stony eyebrow the tiniest fraction of an inch. I shuddered.

“I think I’ll pass,” I said to him. “I don’t trust you. I don’t like you. And, I prefer to work alone.”

“Funny definition you’ve got of alone.” Qethar touched the shadow at his throat.

“Fine, then let’s say that I already have a partner, and leave it at that. Either way, I’m not working with you.”

“You’ll never find the Kothmerk without me. Even if you did, what would you do with it? If you want the killings to stop, it has to go back to my people. It is the most precious thing we own and it should never have come anywhere near your filthy human hands. You can’t get it where it must go without dealing with me or another of my kind. You need me.”

I turned to Fei. “How about if I make and get rid of another body right now?” Qethar was really beginning to irritate me. “Would that be all right?”

“You’d better not,” said Fei. “He’s got something going
with the Elite right now. And he’s well known in certain circles here in Tien. If he vanishes, it’ll generate the kind of heat that would get a lot of light shone into a lot of shadows.” Fei shrugged apologetically. “I might even have to remember what you look like if that happened. I wouldn’t want to, of course, you’re too valuable to give away if I can possibly avoid it. But business is business.”

I nodded. I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood. “All right, I’ll let him walk away, but you can’t make me work with him. Triss.”

The noose slipped from Qethar’s neck and my shadow resumed the appearance of a plain old shadow—all but invisible in the darkness. Qethar rose to his feet and tipped a bow my way.

“This one is yours, human, but rest assured that we
will
speak again. You do need me.” He reached into a pouch at his side and pulled out a small white pebble. “When you see it my way, crush this under your heel and I will come to you.”

He held out his hand with the stone on his palm. I would have preferred to simply turn and walk away at that point, but I knew he might be right. Reluctantly, I reached for the stone. As I took it my fingertips brushed the hot silk skin of his palm for the barest instant, and I had to fight to finish the original gesture instead of taking his hand between my own. Qethar raised an eyebrow at me again. Then the ground at his feet opened up and swallowed him whole. A moment later, the cobbles closed over the bare earth, erasing the last mark of where he’d stood.

“Now”—I turned a sharp eye on Fei—“tell me more about this ring.” I could feel Triss’s interest, though the Shade stayed hidden.

“Not much to tell. You’ve seen Durkoth work, intricate, beautiful, inhuman. Unmistakable. Especially when we’re talking about a ring carved from a ruby as big as your eyeball.”

“What about the bodies? You said this thing has killed more people than the ones at the Gryphon. Tell me about those.”

“The official count is four incidents, though I’m thinking
it’s really five, maybe more.” Fei sniffed loudly and glanced around as though double checking that we were alone. “First, two dead Durkoth just inside Northgate, throats cut. Outsiders, you can tell by how they dressed. You’ll have noticed Qethar’s gone native. So have the rest of the locals. Nobody heard or saw anything, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Second, and this is my maybe,” continued Fei. “Anonymous teenage girl, young, very well dressed, took a crossbow quarrel through the left eye right out in the middle of the square on Sanjin Island. Nobody saw the shooter. Very professional job. High-end black jack work, if not government.”

“Government?” I asked. “Whose?”

“That’s where it turns into a maybe, at least formally. Two off duty Elite just happened to be walking across the bridge from the palace when it happened, a captain and a lieutenant. The official report says they hurried over to see if they could help the girl but found her already dead, and then they searched her to see if she was carrying anything that could be used to establish her identity.”

“Which she wasn’t.”

“Nope, at least nothing our good Elite friends wanted to share with the rest of the children. The watchmen who first arrived on the scene didn’t want to push them on that, or anything really. I wouldn’t even have their names if Sergeant Zishin hadn’t happened on the scene before they could get away. Maybe wouldn’t even know they’d been there.”

“Ah, and what did the good sergeant find when he searched the girl?” Zishin was Fei’s right hand man.

“Well, under the fancy clothes she was half starved and dirty, though her hands and arms were freshly washed. The only other thing he could find was a purse with twenty-five gold riels in it. No other possessions whatsoever.”

“The Elite didn’t seize the cash and write up a receipt?”

“Nope.”

“Then they weren’t off duty.”

Twenty-five gold riels was a lot of money. Like a year’s rent on a house in a decent neighborhood kind of money.
The Elite were incorruptible and that sort of money on an anonymous corpse with no obvious next of kin would normally have had them pulling rank on the watch. They’d have gone all official about the whole thing so that the money didn’t vanish into the watch’s pockets, which it would have. No question. Leaving it like that was tantamount to offering the watch a bribe to forget they’d ever seen the pair of Elite.

“So you think the Elite killed this girl?” I asked. “And that it was on orders from someone higher up the feeding chain?” The Elite don’t do anything without orders, and those orders generally come down from the king one way or another.

“You tell me.” Fei lowered her voice. “The next official death was an officer of the Elite, throat slit in his own home. The same lieutenant who found that girl’s body. The captain was reassigned out of Tien about four hours after that. I never got a chance to talk to him. That makes four dead Elite now, which is going to have the Crown sounding like a kicked-over beehive very shortly.”