Sworn in Steel (49 page)

The smile flickered on her face, vanished. “It’s not easy.”

“To think about?”

“To do.”

“So you
have
thought about it?”

She nodded. Of course she had. Who wouldn’t?

I let the silence sit there between us, waiting for her words.

“It’s frightening,” she said at last. “And exciting. The thought of leaving? Of being my own person, responsible only to myself? It both pulls and pushes me, feeling like
bravery and cowardice at once. But I don’t know which one is true, don’t know which one is right. They keep changing.”

“They’ll do that.”

She looked up, meeting my eyes in the moonlight. “How do you leave everything you’ve ever known?”

I thought back to the day Christiana and I had left Balsturan Forest, when I’d been half a decade younger than the woman before me now; thought back to when I had in turn walked away from
my sister and any hope of repairing the damage between us; back, closer, to turning my back first on Degan, then on what I thought it meant to be part of the Kin. It hadn’t been a noble or
glorious path, and Angels knew there’d been more than a fair amount of pain and heartbreak along the way, but at least it had been my path. I had chosen the truth of it.

“You start by taking one step,” I said, “followed by another and another, until you realize the road you’re following is your own and not someone else’s.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. But the best part?” I reached out and tapped the worn ring on her finger. “She can come with you. Inside.”

A relieved laugh. “That sounds good.”

“It is.”

Aribah was just opening her mouth to reply when a grim, harsh voice spoke from the darkness behind us. “It may sound good,” said the voice. “But it will never happen. My
granddaughter isn’t leaving el-Qaddice. And she certainly isn’t leaving with you.”

W
e both leapt to our feet and spun around in one motion. A darker patch of midnight was just visible among the trees.

“Grandfather!” began Aribah. “I didn’t mean—”

“Enough,” snapped the shadow. “No excuses. I heard what you said. I know what you meant.”

I took a step off to the side. My wrist knife was already in my left hand. My right was hovering out at my side, ready to reach for either my rapier or my dagger, depending on what he did.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

“He followed you,” said Aribah, answering before her grandfather could. “Followed us. He didn’t trust me to keep you safe, and didn’t trust you not to
leave.”

“Leave?” I said.

“El-Qaddice,” said the elder assassin. “Although I didn’t expect you to try to take Aribah with you.” I heard him hawk, saw the flicker of his spit in my night
vision. “Didn’t expect her to be so quick to turn away from her family, either, for that matter.”

Aribah snapped up straight. “No one’s trying to take anyone anywhe—”

“Silence, girl. You’ve already done enough damage to your mother’s memory for one night, let alone my honor. Don’t drive the blade in any further.”

Aribah seemed to shrink at that—to retreat into herself, the fire I’d seen moments ago dimming in the process. She shuffled back half a pace.

I turned my eyes back to the dark smudge before us.
You old bastard.

“This isn’t about her,” I said, stepping to my left, trying to put the silhouette of one of the trees behind me. “It’s about you and your legacy.” Another
step. Hand on my sword handle. “About using her, and my night vision, as a way to let your name live on after you die.”

He let out a soft chuckle. “Is that what you think, Imperial? That I’m so vain I can’t stand the thought of being forgotten? That I’d risk her life by having her watch
over you, just so I could craft a legacy for myself?” His head shifted, turning, I assumed, to Aribah. “And you? Is this what you think, also?”

“I don’t know what to think right now,” she whispered.

“Then you’re a fool.” He shifted, facing me fully. Ignoring her. “I’m a Black Cord, Imperial—what use do I have for fame? Fame brings attention and death. My
only wish is to preserve my family and revive my clan. To restore the status of my school and the
neyajin
. To make sure they’re strong.”

“Sounds very noble,” I said, drawing my rapier from its scabbard. The scrape of steel against leather and brass sounded loud in the night. “But you have to admit, being known
as the one assassin who discovered the secret of dark sight after all these years? To be the Black Cord who single-handedly turns the fortunes of your school and tribe around?” I shook my
head. “Heady stuff.”

“I won’t deny it has its appeal, but it’s not my primary motive.”

“If you say so.”

He moved now, and I caught the amber-touched glint of steel in one hand. Small sword, if I had to guess. There was something in the other, but I couldn’t make it out. Fine. I dropped my
wrist blade and pulled my dagger, the better to parry and slash with.

“It won’t work, you know,” I said. “I already told you: I don’t know how to pass it on. Kill me, and the secret goes away; capture me, and all you get is someone
who can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“So I thought, too,” he said, “but then I remembered: This is el-Qaddice, seat of prophets and scholars . . . and magi—not all of whom are afraid to step into the shadows
now and then. Especially if the incentive is right. And as a Black Cord, I have both the pockets and the presence to command their attention.” He took his own step back, slipping into the
dappled, moonlit shadow of a tree. “There are learned men in this city, Imperial—men who know not only how to consult tomes and histories, but also creatures far wiser in the ways of
magic than ourselves. Creatures who have long memories and carry great grudges.”

“Grandfather, no!” Aribah’s rune-dyed hands came up to her mouth, making the flesh of her jaw look mottled in my eyes. “Not the djinn. Don’t tell me you consulted
with
them
.”

“If we want the secrets this one possesses, we need to walk the paths that were closed to us before now. We needed to make a choice,”

Her voice was tiny by now—the voice of a child in the night. “What have you done?”

“What I must.”

It wasn’t until after he’d spoken that I realized his voice had moved—was moving. That he was nowhere near where he’d been a moment ago.

Crap.

I crouched down out of habit, sword high, dagger low. An instant later, I heard a soft hiss, followed by the
tck
of something small sticking into the tree behind and above me. Dart?
Knife? Throwing crescent?

Did it really matter?

I tucked my shoulder and rolled, knowing that even as I did so I was telling the old assassin what I was doing, where I was going. But there was no way I could stay put: not with his knives
flying and him creeping closer. I had to move.

I came to my feet and kept going, ducking behind trees, staying close to their trunks in the hopes that an exposed root might serve to slow the
neyajin
down.

Another hiss, another
tck
, this time just in front of me. I jerked back and changed course.

This was
not
how I was used to fighting in the dark.

I ducked around another tree, putting it between me and where I’d thought the last attack had come from. I tried to slow my breathing, tried to will my heart to stop pounding in my ears,
but to no avail.

If I waited until I could hear him coming, I’d end up trussed and gagged before I knew what was happening. No, I needed to get close—to put myself in a position where I at least had
a chance of seeing the attacks coming. And that meant rushing a man who could track me by the sound of my approach.

Great.

“Aribah?” I called.

No answer.

“Aribah!”

“Don’t answer him,” called out her grandfather. “He’s just trying to use your voice to distract me.”

“I know what he’s doing!” she said.

“Then be silent.”

He sounded closer—off to the right. I peered into the darkness, my night vision turning the shadows of the trees blood red against the amber of the grass.

“Not for this,” said Aribah. “Not like this.”

“Dammit, child—”

“We’re
neyajin
,” she said. Nearly cried. “You taught me what that means. Taught Mother. Told us that to be feared, to be effective, we have to stand apart. That
we can’t let ourselves be known to those we would hunt. ‘By being the darkness, we become the fear that haunts the darkness.’ ”

“And we will be,” he said. He was on the move again, still on my right. “Once we have the dark vision, the
neyajin
will again be synonymous with justice and
death.”

I strained my eyes until they burned. There. Had that been the back of an arm? Maybe his whole back?

“Magi and djinn will cower at the mention of our name, and we will once more sit in the shadows on the right hand of the despot.”

As he spoke, I slipped out from behind my cover, moving low and fast. The leaves murmured in the breeze, shifting the moonlight and shadows around on the ground. Ahead, I could make out
slippery, amber-etched movement, just in the lee of a trunk. I squeezed the grip of my rapier, then let my fingers relax once more.
A double handful of strides, Drothe. Don’t tense
up.

“You said something about a choice,” she said. I glanced over, saw the flash of her exposed jaw and mouth as she moved among the trees now, too. “What was it?”

I wanted to tell her to stop moving, to keep talking, to get the hell back, but did none of them. It was too late for that. The slick amber of warded cloth was before me now, her grandfather
lurking in the shadows of a pistachio tree. Six paces away. Five.

I raised my rapier, extended my arm slightly.

Keep moving, Aribah. Let him hear you instead of me.

Four. I shifted my weight, bringing it forward.

“What did you agree to?” she called.

Three.

Enough.

I lunged, my arm leading the way, my sword pulling the rest of me forward as its tip sought out the shadow before me. I let my left foot pass forward as my right landed, driving me forward,
pushing my sword into the cloth-draped shadow and through it, dagger following after, in and out and in and out, working hard at turning a man into a corpse.

Only no blood spilled and no corpse fell. Instead, I found myself gutting a
neyajin
-tinted coat and a column of smoke that rose away, giggling, on the wind.

“I agreed to sell something,” said Aribah’s grandfather from behind me. “For a bit of help.”

I was still spinning, still lashing out with my dagger, when the fire wrapped itself around me. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like. All I knew is that my weapons dropped from my hands,
my feet left the ground, and I tilted my head back and screamed. Or tried to.

“Ah, ah, little thief,” said a voice that seemed to burn itself across my mind. “No need for that. We don’t want to be summoning any of my chained kindred, now, do
we?”

My scream died in my throat, coming out as nothing more than a strained gasp. Still, I huffed and choked on the agony, until finally the pain eased back a tiny fraction and I was able to draw a
shaky breath. It felt like bliss.

“Th-thief?” I gasped, my head still back, my eyes tight shut. I could feel the heat enveloping me, could sense the tickle of flames held just at bay against my body. No way I was
getting an eye full of fire. “I . . . haven’t stolen . . . from . . . you.” I think I would have remembered lightening someone who could do something like this.

“No?” burned the voice. “Then how do you explain this?”

Suddenly my eyes were open and I was looking down into the grove from twice my normal height. Everything glowed with a brilliant amber-gold light, brighter and sharper than any version of night
vision I’d ever experienced before. Not only every leaf, but every vein of every leaf, every fold of bark and blade of grass, shone under my gaze, cut with details so sharp I feared they
might slice my eyes.

Below me stood Aribah’s grandfather, the sharpness of his smile cutting through his veil like a razor. I got the feeling it would have been hard for me to make him out in his robes even
now, save for the fact that he had a rope of fire rising from his hand. The fire came from a small vial he held in his palm and snaked up and around me, wrapping me from toes to throat in bands of
pain. As I watched, smoke rose off the burning rope and coalesced in the air to form a thin, vaguely man-shaped cloud. It would have been tempting to write that last bit off as a coincidence, save
for the burning eyes in its head. Eyes that made a point of staring at me.

“You see with the eyes of the djinn,”
said the cloud, its words scribing themselves in fire between me and the assassin. Like the rope, they didn’t seem to bother my
night vision.
“Eyes stolen from one of my kind.”

“Wha . . . what?” I said through the pain. Eyes
stolen
from a djinni?
Just what the hell had you done, Sebastian?
“I don’t—”

“Your dark sight,” said Aribah’s grandfather, reading the fading flames. “It didn’t sound right, your gift never going away. Even the Lions lose their sight after a
day and a night. So I began to ask around, to seek out the old sufis and the mystics who claimed to be able to speak with the darker spirits.” He lifted the vial, causing the rope to sway, me
to drift, the djinni to waver. “Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only were there tales about a lord of the djinn being tricked out of his sight, but of that spirit still thirsting
for revenge.”

“But I didn’t steal its sight,” I gasped.

“Maybe not,” said the elder assassin, “but from what I can tell, djinn have a different way of looking at these things.”
We will dine on your soul.
“They
don’t so much care that you took it as that you have it now.”

“And your price?” I asked, already guessing the answer.

The old assassin smiled. “They teach us the secret of the dark sight, of course.”