Ghost in the Throne (Ghost Exile #7) (42 page)

“Leave the child and her mother,” said Caina. “Unharmed.”

Kalgri grinned. “And if I don’t?”

“Then to hell with Istarinmul and to hell with Cassander,” said Caina. “Kylon and I will hunt you down right here, right now. Do you think you can dismiss your sword and draw on the Voice’s power fast enough to get away if you harm that child?” She gestured at Kylon. “Especially since he has been ready to attack since the moment you appeared.” 

Kalgri laughed. “Then Istarinmul will burn while you chase me in a futile quest for vengeance.” 

“Oh, yes,” said Caina. “You and I will burn together. As I intended at Rumarah.” 

She met the eyes of the Red Huntress for a long moment without blinking. Kalgri licked her lips, her tongue running over her teeth, but her cold blue eyes did not waver as purple fire and shadow pulsed behind them. She tilted her head to the side, as she did when listening to the counsels of the Voice, of the nagataaru that suffused her and granted her its terrible power. 

“As you believe me, I believe you, Caina Amalas,” said Kalgri, stepping back. The Istarish woman let out a terrified little cry. “Don’t try to follow me. You do not have the time to waste chasing me. Cassander’s spell is very nearly done.” 

“Fine,” said Caina. “Leave the child and her mother, unharmed, and go. We shall settle our differences later.”

Kalgri giggled again. “If you survive.” She rolled her shoulders. “Well, I…”

“Huntress.” 

Kylon’s voice was hard and flat and sharp as the valikon’s blade.

“He speaks!” said Kalgri. “Caina, you should put a tighter leash on him. He might start thinking for himself.” 

“This is not over,” said Kylon. 

“Of course it isn’t,” said Kalgri. “If you survive, I will come for you both one day, and…”

“No,” said Kylon. “If we survive, I am going to kill you.”

Kalgri laughed. “To avenge your pregnant wife?”

“The only reason you are alive right now is because that girl and her mother deserve life more than you ever have,” said Kylon. “The only reason I’m not going to kill you the minute you put her down is because there are hundreds of thousands of people in this city who deserve life more than you do. But once this is done, once you come for us again, I am going to kill you. To avenge Thalastre and my child, yes. And to avenge all the people you have murdered and to protect all the people you will murder if you survive.”

Caina stared at him, at his hard face and his unshaking hands, and for an instant was so proud of him that her heart felt as it if would burst.

“You?” said Kalgri, and there was something like a serpent’s hiss in her voice. “You think you can take me, stormdancer? Do you know how often I have heard such words? How often men have boasted such things to me? I have left their corpses in my wake and feasted upon their deaths. I have slain lords and princes and Master Alchemists and great sorcerers. And you think to kill me? You? A wretched exile far from his home, a man who failed again and again, and you think to kill me? You could not save your sister from her own folly. You could not save your pregnant wife from me, and I laughed to see your face when she died. You have taken a barren termagant into your bed to replace her, and you could not even protect her from me. Only a fluke in the laws of sorcery saved her, not you.” Kalgri let out a hissing laugh, her eyes flickering with shadow and fire. “And you, Kylon of House Kardamnos, you think you can kill me?” 

“Yes,” said Kylon, pointing the valikon at her. 

“Foolish boy,” said Kalgri. “I killed men mightier than you before your grandfather was born. What makes you think you can kill me?”

“You think so, too,” said Kylon. “Else you would not have kidnapped a child to use as a shield.” 

For a long moment Kalgri said nothing, the shadow-cloak stirring behind her in the hot wind. Caina wondered if she would attack, if she would kill the child and her mother in a fit of spite, of if she would fade away without saying anything. She looked so much like Caina that it was like looking into a distorted mirror. There was something of Claudia in Kalgri’s features as well, but…

Caina blinked.

Kalgri was Caina’s height. She was Caina’s exact height. 

And a plan blazed like lightning through Caina’s mind.

“Kalgri,” said Caina. “If you really want me to kill Cassander, there is one thing I need from you.”

“Oh?” said Kalgri. “Do amuse me.”

“I need,” said Caina with a hard, mirthless smile, “to borrow some clothes.”

Kalgri blinked, and then a malicious smile spread over her face as comprehension came.

Caina hoped she didn’t look like that when she smiled.

Chapter 23: A Commission

Kylon cut the slave woman’s bonds and helped her to stand. The valikon’s blade was dim, the white fire fading from the sigils. 

The Huntress had indeed departed after handing over the item Caina had requested…or she had simply donned the shadow-cloak and watched them unseen. Though Kylon suspected the former. Istarinmul was about to burn, and the Red Huntress would flee to escape the firestorm. 

The slave woman let out a little cry and snatched up her daughter, who started to wail as she clung to her mother. The story tumbled out of her in a rush. The woman’s name was Kirzi, and she was a kitchen slave in the household of some merchant or another. The circle of golden light had ripped through her master’s palace, and she and her daughter barely escaped with their lives as the palace collapsed around them, hoping to join her husband where he toiled in their master’s forges. 

Then the demon-woman had found them and brought them here.

Somehow, Caina realized that Kirzi had helped several slaves deliver their own children, and she sent Kirzi to help Annarah. The news that a woman was giving birth seemed to steady Kirzi, and she pulled herself together, taking her daughter along, and vanished into the shop.

Maybe Caina’s old teacher had been right, and work was the best cure for sorrow. 

“Lord Martin,” said Caina in a quiet voice. “I need to ask something of you.”

Martin nodded, his emotions a mix of fear for his wife, rage at Cassander, and a grim, steely determination to do his duty. “You want me to take the Guards to attack the Umbarian embassy while you go to the Brotherhood’s dock.”

“Yes,” said Caina. “I think Kalgri was telling the truth…but she has fooled me before, more than once. It could all have been a twisted game upon her part. We might get to the dock and find it empty. Or an Umbarian trap waiting for us. But you are right here. The Umbarian mansion is no more than a few blocks away, and there aren’t any cataphracti in the way. We can look in both places at once.”

“There isn’t time, is there?” said Martin. “To get the Imperial Guards across the city to the Cyrican harbor.”

“I don’t think so,” said Caina.

Kylon looked at the sky. The rift had doubled in width since they had left the smoldering wreckage of Fariz’s palace, covering the city in its eerie, flickering glow. It did not quite look like the rift the Moroaica had opened in New Kyre, not quite yet. But it was still growing, and Kylon did not know how much larger the rift had to grow before Cassander could summon the ifriti. 

“So be it,” said Martin. “Go. My men will attack at once. May we meet again on a field of victory.”

“I hope so,” said Caina. Martin gave orders to his men, who formed up and started for the far end of the Bazaar. Caina hurried back towards the ruined shop to where Nasser, Morgant, and Laertes waited. 

“I assume we are headed for the Brotherhood’s dock?” said Nasser. 

“Where else?” said Caina. “The five of us can cross the city far more quickly than Lord Martin’s Imperial Guards. We can sneak into the dock, ambush Cassander, and kill him.” 

“Once again,” said Morgant, “I seem to be following you into certain death. The Craven’s Tower, the Inferno, the Tomb of Kharnaces…this is getting to be an appalling habit.”

“I’m the madwoman who keeps going to these places,” said Caina. “You’re the one who keeps following me. What does that say about you?” She took a deep breath, adjusting the shadow-cloak that now streamed from her shoulders. She had missed the thing more than she cared to admit, along with the ghostsilver dagger at her belt. “Let’s go.”

###

Caina turned and ran from the Bazaar, the others following. They raced through the streets, keeping close to the line of the circle and its blazing wall of golden fire. The panic did not subside as they passed through the city. If anything, it seemed to have gotten worse, and Caina heard the sounds of fighting and shouting. She hoped Damla and her sons and Agabyzus were safe. The House of Agabyzus should have been far enough from the circle to avoid destruction, and she hoped the looters stayed away. There was no way to know, and Caina did not dare stop, not with the rift crawling its way through the night sky. 

Fortunately, the streets near the burning circle itself were deserted, and Caina and the others made good time, following its curve from the Alqaarin Quarter, through the Tower Quarter and the Old Quarter, across the northern edge of the Anshani Quarter, and then to the Cyrican Quarter and the Cyrican harbor. Caina hurried down the streets sloping to the harbor proper, past the rows of brick warehouses. Wraithblood addicts cowered in the alleys and against the walls, staring at the fire in the sky, though some of them paused to gape in terror at Caina, likely seeing the darker shadow that Nerina had mentioned. She remembered walking through these streets on her first day in Istarinmul, exhausted and full of despair, looking with loathing at the miserable city around her. 

She had never dreamed that two years later she would be sprinting along these streets, desperate to save that same city. 

They dodged into an alley between two warehouses, making their way through the gloom, and stopped to look at the fortified dock of the Slavers’ Brotherhood of Istarinmul. Kylon used a burst of the sorcery of wind and air to scramble up the wall of the warehouse, likely to examine the dock from a higher vantage point. 

Laertes grunted. “Doesn’t look good.”

Caina nodded. 

She had contemplated breaking into the dock several times over the last few years, but had always discarded the plan simply because the Brotherhood’s private dock and mansion were simply too well fortified. A tall stone wall encircled the mansion, crowned with spikes, and a fortified tower rose from the center of the mansion. Fiery light flickered and danced from the windows of the solar atop the tower, likely from whatever spells Cassander worked within. 

That was something, at least. Kalgri had not lied to them. 

Yet Caina glimpsed the dark forms of men upon the roof of the mansion’s wings, likely Adamant Guards. Four men stood guard at the gates, swathed in heavy robes, but she caught the glint of metal at their collars. More Adamant Guards, likely. 

“Can you see anything?” murmured Nasser. 

“No,” said Caina. “The whole place is wrapped in concealment spells.” She saw them shimmering over the entire dock like a veil of gray mist. “The sight of the valikarion can’t penetrate them. Likely Cassander wanted to keep his plans secret until it was too late to stop them.”

Kylon landed again with a grunt, a bit of icy mist swirling around his hands from his climb.

“There are at least a hundred Adamant Guards in the courtyard,” said Kylon. “Maybe more. Some sort of spell to block divinations is over the entire compound. I couldn’t sense anything.”

“It appears our best course of action,” said Nasser, “is to use the harbor. We can swim to the dock and enter through stealth.”

Kylon shook his head. “There are Adamant Guards at the piers. They must have anticipated the danger. And do any of you know how to swim quietly?”

“No,” said Caina. She knew how to swim, though she hadn’t practiced much. Certainly she could not swim in silence, not while carrying her weapons. 

“We’ll have to fight,” said Laertes.

“A hundred Adamant Guards?” said Morgant. “And Silent Hunters? And maybe a few more of those bear creatures? If you want to kill yourself, there are far less painful ways to do it.” 

“We need a distraction,” said Nasser. “Something to hold their attention while we enter.”

“A splendid idea,” said Morgant. “That means we just need to find something more distracting than a giant glowing crack in the sky.” 

“Perhaps you could try offering a useful suggestion,” said Nasser with genial calm. “My heart might stop from sheer shock if you did not have a smart remark ready at hand.” 

Caina ignored them, staring at the darkened mass of the Brotherhood’s mansion, at the fiery light in the top level of the tower. 

“A distraction,” she muttered. “Something to hold their attention. Something they don’t expect.”

The others fell silent, looking at her.

“They think I’m dead,” said Caina. 

“No,” said Kylon at once. “You’re not distracting them so the rest of us can get to Cassander.”

“They would kill me on sight and then overwhelm you,” said Caina. “That wouldn’t be much of a distraction.”

She thought for a moment, an idea coming together in her thoughts.

“Do we have anything that might serve?” said Laertes.

“We don’t,” said Caina. “But I know where we can hire one hell of a distraction. Come on!”

She led the way, running down the alley away from the dock.

###

Kylon vaulted over the low wall and landed in the courtyard of the Inn of the Crescent Moon. 

Chaos ruled in the inn’s courtyard, but it was controlled chaos. Cronmer, Tiri, and Tozun stood near the stables, directing traffic as the carpenters and the laborers toiled to load the wagons. The Circus Of Wonders And Marvels was preparing to flee the city. They would not get away before the ifriti descended from the sky to set Istarinmul ablaze, but Kylon could not help but admire their determination. 

“The circus?” said Morgant, incredulous. “We’re going to the damned circus?” 

“Oh, yes,” said Caina. 

Kylon had seen that look on her face at the Craven’s Tower, at the Inferno, at the spell-cursed ruins of Caer Magia. She had that look when her brilliant, buzzing mind had seen a path to victory.