Bared Blade (29 page)

I’d placed a couple of minor aversion spells on the tank when I parked my cache there. That had kept anyone more desperate than I was from moving in. What the magic hadn’t done, as I now discovered, was prevent some of the more enterprising squatters living on the floors below from simply knocking the thing off the roof and putting up a new tank on top of the old supports.

“Now what?” I asked Triss. As if to emphasize my question, a single drop of water plinked free of one of the freshly tarred seams on the new tank and splattered itself across my forehead. A momentary kiss of cold soon lost in the muggy summer night.

“I don’t know. I don’t like any of the one-nights under the circumstances.”

I didn’t either. A silk hammock hung high in the branches of an ancient oak in the royal preserve might provide a decent place to grab a few hours’ sleep on a dark night when Triss could be relied on to keep watch. But full sun and high summer would render Triss mostly blind, and the place would be teeming with petty nobles taking to the park on the Sovann Hill as a refuge against the city’s heat. That
would seriously increase the chances of someone deciding to climb the wrong tree.

The one-nights in Backpast and down behind Spicemarket weren’t much better, and all three were far enough away that we’d be doing most of our traveling under a new-risen sun. There was only one place I could think of that was close which might serve as a refuge.

“What do you think of going back to the brewery?” I asked reluctantly.

“I hate it,” he grumbled. “But I hate it less than cracking into someone’s attic and hoping they don’t notice or laying up in the sewers with the Durkoth hunting us.”

I sighed. None of the neighborhoods within dark-time traveling distance were affluent enough for the attic option to have any real chance of success. Only the well-to-do could afford the amount of empty space that play needed to succeed, and Triss was right about the sewers. We simply didn’t know enough about Durkoth capabilities to make that a safe choice. I ran through the options in my head again and finally nodded.

“That’s pretty much where I’m at.” Going back to a fallback that was known to someone who’d been scooped by the enemy was the worst sort of tradecraft, but sometimes you have to go with the least bad option.

In this case, I figured the brewery would be safe for a few days more. It would take at least that long for anyone to crack the Dyad, assuming they could do it short of killing her. Like a Blade or one of the Elite, Dyads were protected from magical questioning and thoroughly trained to resist the more mundane sort of interrogation. She couldn’t hold out forever if her interrogator was good enough, but she didn’t have to for our purposes. She just had to keep her mouths shut for a day and a night. Then we could abandon her safely if we had to.…Yeah, I didn’t think much of me just then either.

I turned away from the water tank. “I was really hoping you’d come up with a better alternative, my friend. As far as I can see, it’s the brewery or the Ismere, and I’m not willing to involve Harad in my business when I’m this toxic.”
The Ismere was an independent library, and Harad, its head librarian, was one of the only people in the whole world who I could still call a friend.

“No,” agreed Triss. “I’d rather we chanced a one-night than bring our poison into the house of a friend. Let’s go scope out the brewery and see what’s what. It’s that or give up on the city and our Dyad client right now, and I’m not quite ready for that.”

“
It’s
getting light,” said Triss.

I nodded. It was, and, as far as I could tell, the brewery remained undiscovered and abandoned. Or, at least, I couldn’t spy any watchers, and the dustheads who squatted in the lower levels weren’t acting any more paranoid than usual. After working our way completely around the building twice, we’d settled in atop a nearby tannery to give things a longer eyeball—businesses that stank tended to cluster in the worst neighborhoods.

“We need to get under cover,” Triss said. “Now.”

I nodded again, but maintained my perch in the angle where two sections of roof came together. Everything seemed all right. It even
felt
all right, but going back to a snug that might have been burned really rubbed me the wrong way. I ran through the alternatives in my head for perhaps the dozenth time, but none of them looked any better from this angle than they had earlier.

“I really don’t want to do this, Triss.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “But the sun’s coming up and the city is against us.”

“Aral Kingslayer?”

The voice that whispered in my ear was so gentle and quiet I barely registered it at the conscious level, but that didn’t stop my hands from flying to my swords. I drew them in the same motion that spun me out and away from my perch, bringing the blades up into a guard position between me and …nothing. There was no one above me on the roof and no obvious opening in the tiles through which the voice could have come.

“What the…” I trailed off as I turned slowly around again.

“There’s no one here, Aral,” hissed Triss. Then, before I could respond, “But I heard it, too. Show yourself!”

“You
are
Aral!” Right in my ear again, and louder, but still little more than a whisper.

This time as I spun I sliced the air with my swords, but air was all I cut.

“My mommy sent me to find Aral! And I did. I found you right where you were supposed to be! She’ll be
so
happy with me.”

“Your mommy?” I asked.

“Aral, I’m sorry about yesterday morning. I had no choice.” This time the voice sounded firmer and stronger, urgent but still little more than a whisper. “They forced me to it.” It also sounded
very
familiar.

“Fei?”

“My mommy!” The weaker voice again.

“I think it must be a qamasiin,” said Triss. “One of my cousins of the air, sometimes called the whisper on the wind.”

Oho! “And Fei’s familiar, if I don’t miss my guess. Which would explain a great many things about our captain.” An unfaced sorcerer with an invisible familiar could learn an awful lot about all sorts of things in a city like Tien, things that would do someone in the captain’s business a world of good. “Fei
is
your mommy isn’t she, little one?”

“Uh-huh. Scheroc found you for Mommy Fei. She will be so happy with Scheroc.”

“Found us for what?” I asked.

The qamasiin squeaked in alarm, then said, “Bad Scheroc! Bad! Forgets to deliver rest of message.” The voice shifted to mimic Fei’s once more. “The Elite have me and your Dyad friend VoS. They’ve got some foreign Durkoth helping them.”

Another vocal shift. “Aral, Triss, I think you can trust the captain, at least until we’re out of this.” It was Vala’s VoS voice. “She’s not been treated well down here.”

Back to Fei. “Get me out of this and all debts are paid.
Hell, I might even owe
you
one. Scheroc can carry a message back to me and—shit! Guards are coming back—Scheroc, go!”

Well, well, well, Fei must have been all kinds of desperate to send Scheroc to ask me to bail her ass out. It was pretty much equivalent to putting a noose around her own neck, handing me the other end, and hoping I wouldn’t pull it tight. Being an unfaced mage in Crown service was very nearly as dangerous as being a hidden Blade. The Crown didn’t like officers who kept secrets.

“That’s all Scheroc has.” Scheroc sounded sad. “Will you help my mommy?”

“I might,” I said, flicking a hand signal to forestall any interruptions from Triss. “But I need to know some things first.”

“Anything!” it said.

“How did you find us?”

“Scheroc went right where the two-faced lady told him to and waited. Scheroc waited and waited and waited, but you never came!” The qamasiin sounded quite cross about that. “No one came, and it was boring. But then Scheroc saw you slinking around the edge of the place, and Scheroc came to listen for the voice of the Aral. You spoke in that voice, and Scheroc thought it must be you, but you were not where you were supposed to be, so Scheroc asked. And Scheroc was right!”

“That’s good, now—”

“Aral,” interrupted Triss. “If we don’t get off this roof in the next few minutes, the sun is going to finish coming up and then we’re going to have a hell of a time getting into the brewery unnoticed.”

“Point. Were you waiting for us over there?” I pointed at the brewery.

“Yes,” said Scheroc. “Where the big magic drawing is. It was empty and boring.”

“I guess we’ll have to count that as verification that it’s still uncompromised. Come on, Scheroc, we’d best finish this conversation inside, out of the light.”

I
leaned my head back against the half barrel and closed my eyes. “Triss, have I told you recently what an absolute treasure you are?”

“I take it you’re getting tired of trying to draw sense out of our little qamasiin friend?” Triss dropped his head into my lap with a sigh.

I idly scratched the divots behind his ears. “You could say that. Or you could say that I’m just getting tired. How many times has it had to go back to Fei to get us an answer now?”

“Believe it or not, this is only the third, but I’m sure there’ll be more. Spirits of the air are neither very focused nor interested in the dealings of the fleshed, not even the mightiest of the mystrals. Scheroc is a qamasiin, a minor eddy born of a lesser breeze, barely one step up from the natural winds of the world.”

I opened my eyes just to keep from falling asleep. “I understand that, but it would make things so much easier if it could at least …I don’t know, tell us exactly where Fei and the others are being kept.”

“It has, and in some detail. It’s just that neither you nor I can make any sense of its referents. If I tried to tell you how to get someplace using only a shadow’s view of the world I don’t think you’d get much out of that either. For all that Scheroc speaks the tongue of Zhan, I don’t think it actually understands much of what it’s saying. So it’s no surprise that it makes no sense to us.”

“Which is a long way of telling me to suck it up and get ready to spend tonight following an invisible spirit who cares nothing for the limits of the fleshed as it makes its weird way across the palace compound, right?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes. Don’t forget the part where we have to break into what Fei called ‘an impregnable fortress buried deep under the roots of the palace’ and fight our way past the Elite guarding the place.”

“No fight!” came the sudden whisper in my ear.

“Oh, good, you’re back.” I sat upright again, though I’m sure the qamasiin wouldn’t have cared if I’d been hanging by my ankles from the ceiling. “What do you mean, ‘no fight’?”

“Mommy says no fight, guards will kill her and the Dyad. Aral must bargain them out.”

“Yeah, I’m having trouble seeing how that’s going to work. We’ve got nothing and nobody to bargain with.”

“Crush the pebble, summon Qethar.” This last was said in Fei’s voice. “You can trust Qethar. They hate him here. Offer him the Kothmerk and he can make us a back door. It’s the only way to get past the foreign Durkoth I’ve seen around the place.”

“In case your mommy hasn’t noticed, I don’t
have
the Kothmerk. I’ve got no leverage, and if I do crush the pebble, I’m pinpointing my location. Not smart when half the city is looking to turn me over to the Howlers and pick up the reward. Doubly so when I’m not sure whose side Qethar’s really on, no matter what Fei says.”

“Scheroc doesn’t understand, what does Aral want?”

“What I want is out of this fucking box that fucking Fei’s fucking poster put me in.” I started to rise, remembered the
height of the ceiling, and settled back to the floor with a growl. “Dammit dammit dammit, I feel like a wolf caught in a trap, with those wanted posters out there everywhere. No. Worse. If I were a wolf at least I could gnaw my leg off and get free. Gnawing your own face off is a much harder…”

“What are you thinking?” demanded Triss. “I don’t like it when you go all quiet like that.”

But I barely heard him. My eyes had fallen on the diagram left behind by Vala and Stel, the remnants of the bonewright spell. “Maybe I
can
gnaw my own face off.” I rose to hands and knees and made my way over to the edge of the nearer hexagon.

“That’s madness, Aral.” Triss put himself squarely between me and the diagram, spreading his wings wide in warning. “You heard what Vala had to say after they finished performing the spell, how painful it was, how no ordinary mage could hope to handle it alone.”

“I am no ordinary mage, Triss. I am a Blade. Fallen perhaps, but still a product of the temple of Namara. From my first days in the order I was taught how to master and control my pain through will alone, disciplines of mind and body that no other school of magery ever taught because they simply didn’t have to.”

Triss didn’t move.

“Other mages have always had their magic to fall back on, spells to heal and spells to numb. But we could never be certain that magic would be an option, not when magesight might spy a spell’s light. You know I’m right, Triss.”

“No. I don’t.”