Authors: Kelly McCullough
Bared Blade (2 page)
1
E
very
story has to start someplace, though it’s rarely at the beginning. I came into this one when it came into my office. I had two sips of good Aveni whiskey left in my glass when the woman walked into the taproom at the Gryphon’s Head. Women, really …or, well, it’s complicated. I believed there were two of them at the time, so we’ll go with that for now—two women walk into a tavern. My tavern.
The place I work out of is named after the skull the owner nailed up behind the bar. Jerik used to hunt monsters for a living. Poach monsters, really, but it’s not the kind of poaching that gets you arrested, because the royal game wardens don’t want the damned things around either. He retired when the one behind the bar nearly bit off his head. What the Gryphon lacks in elegance it more than makes up in character, every one of them dangerous and most of them wanted by the Crown. My silent partner and I fit right in, though no one ever sees him.
They call me Aral these days, or shadow jack. The one is my name, though not quite as it appears on all the warrants and wanted posters. The other is my new job. I’ve
become a jack of the shadow trades, a fixer of problems that you’d rather not bring to the attention of the law.
Anyone who knew me in the old days would call it a huge step down. But only if they missed the place in the middle where my world shattered. I may be nowhere near the man I used to be, but I’m infinitely more than the wreck I was a year ago. Someday I might even figure out how to bridge that gulf and get back in touch with the old me. There are some pieces that I’d like to collect for future use.
In the meantime, I work out of the Gryphon because it’s the kind of tavern that attracts people with shadowside problems. Well, that, and because my partner, Triss, likes the ambiance—it’s always dark in the Gryphon and he lives in the shadows. Quite literally.
He’s a Shade, a creature of living darkness and a legacy of the days before my fall. Triss is my partner, my friend, my familiar. Yeah, I was a sorcerer once upon a time. A sorcerer and what some would call an assassin, though I don’t much like that word. I never killed anyone for money.
But back to the women. I was trying hard to make sure my second drink didn’t turn into a third—I’d followed that road all the way to the bottom. The eighth hour bells had just rung when the first of the pair stepped into the Gryphon, briefly occluding the red gold light of the westering sun. The doors and windows were all open to help with the heat of high summer, which put me in a chair next to the empty hearth. It was the only windowless wall and it offered me a perch where I could keep an eye on front and back doors while staying as much in shadow as possible.
The first one came in fast and immediately stepped to one side, getting out of the light and putting her back to the wall while she waited for her eyes to adjust to the tavern’s gloom. Add in the way the woman moved—smooth and quiet, balanced on the balls of her feet amidst the dirty straw on the floor—and I marked her down as some sort of trained killer. Though whether that meant hunter, mercenary, black jack, or something more exotic, I couldn’t say without the closer study I proceeded to give her.
She was tall and broad shouldered, built like a farm girl or a soldier. Wide hipped and busty, she had thick muscle showing on her bare arms along with a number of interesting, if minor, scars. She had black hair and dark eyes, which was common enough in Tien, and golden brown skin almost as pale as mine, which wasn’t.
Her clothes were foreign, too, tight green breeches and knee-high brown walking boots below, with a short sleeveless cotton tunic the color of rust above. Over that she wore a heavy leather vest that hung to midthigh—too warm for this weather and closer to armor than clothing, though not as close to armor as she would have liked, if I was any judge. Her stance wanted chain mail or possibly plate. She had a pair of short iron-tipped rods hanging where another might have carried daggers, an interesting choice.
The woman who followed her in a few moments later was short and lean with almost no breasts or hips to speak of and the whipcord muscles of a dancer or acrobat. Her outfit matched the larger woman’s in style, though she wore blues and grays instead of greens and browns. She headed straight across the bar to a little table right in the center of the room, moving fast and without any of the hesitancy you’d expect of someone suddenly crossing from light into darkness. She even managed to avoid stumbling over a stray chair that had been left between tables, deftly stepping around it without actually appearing to see it.
When she got to the table, she took a seat facing back toward the front door and started idly tapping her foot. Between the dancer’s build and the nervous energy she reminded me of my fellow assassin and onetime fiancée, Jax. A lot. That would have been enough to focus my attention even without the sudden pressure Triss exerted on my back as he slid up to peer at the two of them over my right shoulder. A surprise, since he’s normally not that interested in strangers. Once she was in her chair, the larger woman headed across the bar to join her.
Like her companion, the little dancer type wore her black hair short—cut just above the collar on the sides and back
with bangs in front. Her skin was darker than the taller woman’s, though still light for Tien, and her eyes were a shockingly pale blue. Really, she looked nothing like Jax, and yet there was something about her bearing that made me think back to soft lips and whispered words of …I shook my head. Those days were gone. Focus on the now and the woman in front of me. From the way she kept rolling her shoulders and neck I didn’t think she liked the heavy leather vest any more than the bigger woman did, though for reasons I guessed to be pretty much the opposite of her friend.
Or, should I say bodyguard? Because that’s what I made them initially—some foreign noble and her minder. Which meant I could safely ignore them. And I tried, really I did. But Triss kept peering over my shoulder, and somehow I found I couldn’t take my eyes off them either. Oh, I didn’t make it obvious—the priests who raised me had taught me better than that. But I did watch them as close as I’d have watched one of my goddess-assigned targets back in the old days.
A lot of that was Triss, of course. What he cares about, I care about. He’s all I’ve got left of the old me and these days he has to spend the vast majority of his time hiding in my shadow and pretending he doesn’t exist. When the Emperor of Heaven murders your goddess, orders his head priest to burn your temple to the ground, and then declares your entire order anathema, it kind of puts a cramp in your social life.
It didn’t help that the goddess Namara had made herself and her followers deeply unpopular with the world’s secular authorities. Seeing to it that justice applies to kings as well as to commoners is not a recipe for making those kings love you. Quite the contrary. But that was my life once upon a time: a Blade of Namara, bringing the Unblinking Eye of Justice to those too powerful to find it in the courts.
Torture the innocent? Foment wars of aggression? Murder your way to the throne? Namara would send me or one of my fellows to have a few words with you. Usually “rest
in peace.” Occasionally “burn in hell.” In either case, we arranged an immediate interview with the lords of judgment and a chance to ride the wheel of rebirth. For that, some lumped us in with paid assassins, mostly the sort of people with guilty consciences and high titles attached to their names—king, general, Son of Heaven.…
But those days were gone, destroyed with the temple, or buried with the goddess, or simply hiding in the shadows like me and Triss. Hiding or lost. It’s hard for me to tell the difference between those two things these days. Once I was a Blade of Namara and I knew my purpose, believed in it absolutely.
Now? I’m not sure. I think I can be more than just a jack, or I hope so at least. But is it even possible to be a Blade without the goddess? To serve Justice when its avatar has left the scene? Those were the questions I’d been asking of late. But with Namara gone there was no one to answer me but me. And who could trust the word of a shadow jack? I sighed and once again tried to focus on the moment.
The Gryphon is full of dim corners and mysterious smells and even on summer days when the sunlight spilled in at doors and windows, it seemed to hold onto more of the night. That affinity for shadow allowed Triss considerable extra freedom of movement. He used it now as he studied the two women from his resting place on the wall behind me.
After the big woman stopped at the bar to place their orders, she’d taken a seat at a right angle to her fidgety companion, which meant that neither of them could see both doors. Overconfident or foolish—it was hard to tell the difference. They split a bottle of wine, with the taller one doing the opening and pouring while they waited for our host Jerik to send someone over with the specialty of the house—fried bits of anonymous meat and lightly bruised vegetables served on a bed of brown rice.
They weren’t doing anything but eating and drinking in the most casual fashion but there was something about them that kept drawing my eye, and it wasn’t just the way that the smaller one reminded me of Jax. There was something off
about their body language and I couldn’t figure out what. That was irritating enough, but I might have been able to drop it if Triss hadn’t been equally fascinated.
The only obviously strange thing about them was how quiet they were. They spoke only rarely and then barely moved their lips, speaking so softly I hadn’t been able to hear a word from where I sat despite the relative emptiness of the tavern when they arrived. They also moved with a sort of intermittent dance-like grace, though I hadn’t yet figured out the pattern. For a while I’d thought they might be a couple, but they didn’t have the right sort of interactions, so I went back to my original guess.
By the time they’d finished eating, the sun had well and truly gone to bed, which meant the Gryphon started to wake up as the night crowd rolled in. I ordered another Kyle’s somewhere in there, just to give me a reason to stay in the bar and keep an eye on the women. I could feel Triss’s disapproval, but I watered the whiskey heavily, so it hardly should have counted.
It wasn’t long after sunset that the trouble started. Boquin, a young shadow lieutenant—about third in the hierarchy of the gang that claimed the Gryphon as part of its turf—swaggered in the door and almost immediately headed for the table with the two women.
“How much?” he demanded.
“For what?” replied the taller of the pair, speaking loudly enough for me to hear her for the first time.