Shadow's Son (24 page)

"I know," she said. They hurried through the slick, black streets. "I
know where we have to go to find the next piece to the puzzle."

Caim regarded her with an amused expression. Something flickered
across his eyes, too quick to follow. A blossom of heat spread through her
chest as she realized she trusted him.

She turned her head as the warmth spread into her face. She gazed
into the sky, into the rain and gloom, to the heights of Esquiline Hill.

"I have to go home."

shadow crouched by the riverbank where a gentle breeze pushed
through the riparian jungle of rushes and cattails. Dark masses
of silver-black clouds scudded across the starless sky. Somewhere an owl
hooted, and the shrill howl of a coyote carried on the wind.

Amid the Memnir's sleepy currents, where the river slid past the fortified walls of Othir, Castle DiVecci perched on a spur of bare rock. The
castle's white parapets loomed over the water like cliffs of alabaster in the
waning moonlight. Banners hung slack from the sturdy towers.

A stone span joined the isle to the mainland, guarded at both ends by
a gatehouse manned by soldiers of the Prelate's Guard. Othirians called it
the Bridge of Tears for all those who had crossed and disappeared into the
dungeons beneath the castle, never to return.

The shadow had no need of bridges. One moment it stood on the
riverbank. The next, it appeared inside the castle's mighty donjon, in a
hallway on the top floor.

The shadow listened as its sandals touched down. The rhythm of the castle
was slow and steady, like the heartbeat of huge slumbering beast, broken only
by the discordant groans of the damned far below in the catacombs.

Content, the shadow began to hunt. It crept past rows of closed doors
and paused as it came around a corner. Firelight spilled from a doorway at
the end of the hall. Two bodyguards in white-and-gold livery stood outside, leaning on the polished shafts of their immaculate halberds.

One of the guards looked up as the shadow approached, but too late
to give warning as a swarm of inky globules dropped from the ceiling.
The men jerked and tried to shout as the shadows wrapped them in tight
cocoons, but nothing emerged from their straining mouths. The little
darknesses devoured them in silence.

The shadow stepped over the dying men, through the doorway.
Shelves of books lined the chamber walls from floor to ceiling. Logs
crackled behind an iron grate in the broad hearth. A water clock on the
mantelpiece dripped out time's passage. Above the fireplace was mounted
a graphic bronze sculpture portraying the Prophet of the True Faith. The
half-starved demigod hung by a noose on a twisted rope with an expression of supreme sorrow etched on his long, pained face.

The crackle of paper drew the shadow's attention as a thin hand,
spotted with age, appeared over the arm of a massive cushioned chair
beside the fireplace. It turned the page of a large tome before sinking once
again out of view.

Levictus pulled back his cowl. There was no one else in the room. The
darknesses, finished with their meal, pooled around his feet. He shivered
as they scaled the hem of his long black robe and vanished within the garment. A long knife appeared in his hand. For many long years he had
waited for this moment. He wanted to make it last, to savor this thing
that had consumed his thoughts since the day, long ago, when armed soldiers came to his family's home and took them away, depositing them into
cells under this very castle. His parents, both elderly and in failing health,
had died under torture on the first night. His brother expired a few days
later. Only he had survived.

A voice rose from the chair. Perhaps once strong with authority, time
had left it weakened and wavering. "Gunter? There's a chill in the air.
Could you bring us another warm brandy?"

Levictus crossed the intervening distance as a bald pate leaned around
the side of the chair, followed by rheumy eyes and a wide nose. He made
no attempt to hide, but strode purposefully toward his prey. The old
man's rubbery lips formed a hollow 0 as the knife rose. The blade's dark
surface drank in the light of the fire.

"Mercy!" the prelate cried. "Mercy in the name of Almighty God."

But Levictus had none. The knife sliced through the man's wrinkled
flesh. Thick streams of blood poured down the breast of his snowy robes.
It splashed on the book that fell from his hands. The firelight caught the
spine and illuminated the golden words printed there.
By Fire and Blood:
Bringing the True Faith to the North.

As his victim tumbled to the floor, Levictus opened the folds of his robe and brought out a wooden box. He set it on the floor as he knelt
beside the prelate's corpse. Blood pooled beneath the body while he
worked.

When the deed was done, as Levictus stood and put away his prize, he
studied the man at his feet. No archangels had rushed in to defend His
Sublime Holiness; no thunderbolts had fallen from the heavens. For all his
majesty, the prelate had died like any other man, less well, in fact, than
most. So much for the vaunted power of the True Church.

A strangeness passed over Levictus while he stood over his victim.
Something buzzed in his ear like a flying insect. He made a pass with his
hands, whispered a sibilant phrase, and the sensation fled on soundless
wings.

Levictus went to a cabinet on the wall and rifled through its contents.
Leaves of parchment fell to the floor. Then, he held up a sheet to the flickering light. His eyes followed the neat handwriting down to the surprise
at the bottom, stamped in a blob of old wax. He stuffed the paper into a
pocket. Then, he stepped into the dark space between two massive bookcases and vanished.

He reappeared inside the city, speeding through the slumbering
avenues, just another shadow under the sequestering cover of the night.

Caim pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as he hunched on the
rooftop. Below him, a blanket of silver fog shrouded the street in front of
the Frenig mansion. Moisture dripped from the iron spikes atop the walls.

At least the rain had stopped.

Josey sat beside him, her arms propped on upraised knees, her chin
resting on her forearm. He watched her in silence, studying her profile,
not wanting to break the spell of her beauty. After Parmian's interrogation, Josey had been convinced that the answers to their problems lay
within her father's house. Caim had given all the reasons they couldn't
return to the scene of the crime-it wasn't a smart move, the place would
likely be guarded, it was precisely where he would expect them to go if
he were behind this whole charade-but his arguments had withered
under her intense stare. Somehow she convinced him.

He almost suspected witchcraft.

Since then, she hadn't said much. Sitting beside him in the dark, she
could have been a thousand leagues away.

Caim tried to put himself in her place. To find out that her late father
had been the ringleader of a rebellious cult couldn't be an easy thing to
swallow. It was simple for him. You lived and you died. What you did in
the time between was your own business. And yet, how much of what he
believed had been shaped by the uncaring world into which he had been
thrust, a world that ground the weak and helpless into grist beneath its
colossal wheels? Would he be so nonchalant about existence if his own
past weren't so mired in brutality?

Caim sighed and concentrated on the silent house across the way. By
his reckoning, they had been hunched up here for almost two hours.
Dawn would come soon. If Josey was serious, they had to go now or never.

He whispered her name. When she didn't respond, he nudged her
shoulder. She blinked as if coming out of a deep sleep.

"You sure you want to do this tonight?" he asked. "We could come
back tomorrow."

"No." Her gaze returned to the spaces below. "Is this where you
watched our house before coming to kill my father?"

Caim swallowed. He would have rather not answered, but figured he
owed it to her. "Here and a couple other places." He indicated a flat-roofed
brownstone down the street, and a pair of alleys with good vantage points
of the mansion.

"Have you killed many people?"

"I suppose."

"Tell me how you do it. How do you kill people day after day, without
regard, without feeling?"

He took in the meager offering of stars strewn through the overcast
sky and the gulfs of darkness between them. "You think I like what I do?
I didn't ask for this life."

"Then why-?"

"Because killing is the only thing I've ever been good at." The answer
rung hollow in his ears, but damn her. He didn't owe her anything, didn't
care a whit for what she thought of him.

"How old were you when you first ... did it?"

A cloud passed across the moon, hiding Josey's expression, but he felt
her gaze in the dark. "I'm not sure. Fifteen, maybe sixteen."

"What happened?"

"I was passing through some little thorp in Michaia. I forget the name."

He wasn't sure why he lied about that. The town had been called
Freehold. It looked and smelled just like any of another score of settlements scattered across the dusty plains of Michaia, just a place to wash the
road from your gullet and maybe find a woman before moving on.

"Anyway, some men started a fight in an ale hall. Things got out of
hand. By the time it was over, I'd killed two of them."

"So you were defending yourself."

"I guess. I had to run after that, but I learned a lesson. There's always
someone looking for trouble. You try to avoid it when you can, but-"

"But sometimes it finds you anyway," she finished for him.

"Yeah, well. Now it's just another trade to me, the same as a butcher
or a carpenter."

Josey's face lifted out of the shadow. Her skin gleamed like polished
ivory in the moonlight.

"But pigs and wooden beams don't have feelings," she said. "People
do. Everyone you've killed had a family who cared about them, who
grieved for them after they were gone."

He shifted a foot that had fallen asleep under him. "That makes no
difference to me. I do a job and I get paid."

"Don't you ever want more from your life? Something bigger?"

"Like Hubert? You've seen his band in action. A bunch of shopkeeps
and pot-boys spoiling for a fight they can't win. That's not me."

"Why not join the army? You're good with your hands. You could
lead men."

He didn't try to hide his disdain. "Why is it that if a lord or a king
sends you to kill a man, it's somehow noble? But if you do this for yourself, it's murder. Explain that to me."

Josey's eyes glistened. Was it the onset of tears, or just the way the
light touched her emerald irises?

"If you asked me, I'd say you were afraid."

He recoiled as if she had stabbed him. The soles of his boots scrabbled
on the hard shingles as he got his feet under him.

She kept going before he could muster a reply. "You're afraid to let
people get close to you. So you keep them at a distance, pretend that they
don't matter to you. But it's just a ruse."

He peered over the side of the roof. "You don't understand the least
thing about me or what I do."

"Fine."

She pulled away and sank into herself like a flower folding its petals
after the sun went down. For a moment, she sounded just like Kit and he
realized how much he missed his friend. Where was she?

"Look," he said. "I'm-"

She reached up and pulled a something out of her collar. It shined in
the muted starlight, a golden medallion in the shape of a key.

"Keep it," he said. "I don't want payment."

"It's not payment. It's the answer to the mystery."

"How's that?"

Josey told him the story of her childhood, how she had stumbled into
a secret meeting in the cellar beneath her father's house, and how her
father had given her the talisman years later.