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Authors: Kelly McCullough

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BOOK: Broken Blade
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I released my hold on my familiar’s will and tapped the parchment sheets. “Triss, what do you make of it?”
He slid off my shoulders and onto the table, shrinking into the shadow of a dragon perhaps ten inches from nose to tail. As I passed my hand back and forth between the sheet and the light, he spread his wings and flew across the surface in tandem with my motions. Then he settled beside the paper and extended a shadow tongue again and again until he’d tasted every inch. Finally, he shook his head.
“Not only can I not tell you
how
any words might be bound away from prying eyes, I’m not at all certain there’s a real letter here to be read. The spell is either too clever, too strong, or too absent to unravel.”
“That’s what I thought, and I don’t like it. Not even a little bit. It’s magic out of proportion to the scope of the job, and more expensive by far than my courier fee. Though, if our Maylien’s a mage, it’s possible she managed it herself.”
Triss shrugged. “Possible but unlikely. This is specialist’s work, and I don’t see a noble devoting herself to the necessary study. I wish I could show this to Serass or Malthiss or one of the other old Shades. They might have done better, and Serass in particular would have enjoyed the challenge. But they all faded into the great black when the temple fell.” His wings slumped.
I ran a fingertip along the shadow of a spinal ridge from Triss’s neck to his tail, but I had no soothing words for my familiar. Only shared pain at the loss of so many of our friends and fellows. Names slipped through my mind. Master Kelos, Devin, Sharl . . . beloved teachers, close friends, lovers, all gone, and with them their Shades, Malthiss, Zass, Liess. Triss and I were virtually the last of our kind. A four-hundred-year tradition would end with us.
I pushed anger and grief aside for perhaps the ten-thousandth time and resealed the letter, tucking it into my trick bag along with the copper strip. We had a job to do, and the prospect of action offered distraction if not comfort.
“Triss,” I said.
“Yes.” He didn’t look up.
“We ought to go.”
“You’re right.”
He relaxed into my shadow, his dragon shape fading into a dark mirror of mine. But only briefly. A moment later, he was flowing silkily up my body, covering me from toes to top in a soft skin of darkness. No sooner had he finished that transformation than he began another. This time he extended himself outward in every direction. As he grew in size, he became ever more diffuse, like cream stirred into a fine froth. By the time he reached maximum size, I could no longer feel him as a physical presence at all.
The blackness that enclosed me was absolute. I could see nothing and no one, and no one and nothing could see me. Not even with magesight, because the effect wasn’t a spell. It was a part of Triss’s nature.
From the outside we would appear as a sort of dark moving hole in the vision, a lacuna, like the blind spot some headaches bring. As long as I stayed away from bright lights and places where no shadow had any right to go, we could move about virtually unnoticed by normal eyes. And as long as I kept from using magic, magesight couldn’t see us either. That was why we Blades so rarely made use of actual preset spells. The glow negated our biggest advantage.
It wasn’t quite invisibility, but it was the nearest thing available and vastly superior to what any other order of mages could achieve. The powers of the familiar defined and shaped the powers of the master. A barely gifted hedge witch with a snake for a companion might be able to do a lot with poisons and potions, things that even a master sorcerer would find nearly impossible if he happened to be bound to a fire elemental.
I stood in the dark until Triss again subsumed his will to my own, giving me control over our joint actions and allowing me to take in the world through his senses. Though I had given up my eyes to the darkness, Triss now provided me with a sort of unvision tuned far more to textures and the interplay between light and darkness than the shapes and colors so central to human sight.
Through Triss’s senses, I could feel the level of light in the room as almost a physical presence, a painful sort of pressure against the skin that faded away as the sun slid below the horizon and left Tien to the night and to those whose work required darkness. The housebreakers, the smugglers, the night watch, and me.
I opened the shutters over my window and slipped through onto the narrow ledge. Once I’d closed and set the spell-lock on the shutters, I leaped and caught the edge of the stable’s tiled roof, pulling myself up on top. A spring breeze coming in off the sea made me shiver and briefly long for a warming drink in the tavern below, but I pushed the thought aside. Exercise would heat my blood faster than any whiskey and leave me feeling better the next morning to boot.
Standing astraddle the roof’s peak, I ran through a series of quick stretches while I reset my expectations of the world around me to accommodate my enshrouded state. With the very different range of Triss’s unvision distorting my visual picture of the city, I had to rely more on my other senses, and I wanted them operating at their peak.
The sounds of the streets below gave me clues about the immediate vicinity. A boot scuff could speak about cobblestones or packed dirt. The way it echoed and traveled said things about alleys versus wider streets or even open squares. The sudden flutter of a bird’s wing might warn me of the arrival of another traveler in the chimney forest—a thatch cutter or burglar perhaps. Or, more dangerous, a hunting ghoul or some other strain of the restless dead. Though they mostly stayed out of the open, this moon-dark night would allow them more freedom to haunt the streets.
Smell provided a broader sort of map of the city. Here in the heart of the Stumbles, the odor of badly maintained sewers blocked out most other scents. Farther along, I would find spicy sauces designed to cover the flavor of elderly meat, which would in turn give way to the perfumes favored by the better-off merchants. And that would shift to the floral aromas of the ornamental gardens only the truly wealthy could afford.
Touch didn’t matter as much up on the rooftops, but it might become critical if I had to move inside later, so I made sure to attune myself to the messages sent by skin and bones. I let myself really pay attention to the way the rounded ceramic tiles of the roof felt through my soft-soled boots, the roughness of my woolen poncho as it rubbed against the backs of my hands, the sharp cold touch of the sea breeze on my cheeks and neck.
Only after I felt fully settled within Triss’s enshrouding darkness did I begin my run through the city’s chimney forest. Tien was ancient and had accreted rather than growing to any real plan. In most places, the roofs stood so close together that I could actually pass more easily from place to place on the chimney road than in the twisting and often crowded mess of the streets below. Even when I hit the broad canyon of Market Street, which separated the decrepit maze of the Stumbles from the saner Dyers Slope neighborhood, it didn’t slow me much.
I simply spread my arms and had Triss spin himself into great wings of shadow like sails. Then I took a run and launched myself into space to glide across the open area. Sail-jumping was more than a jump, if less than true flight, and could be extended by magic if necessary or if you weren’t worried about being spotted. The one real drawback of the technique was that there wasn’t enough of Triss to both enshroud me and make wings. For the brief seconds of flight, I was exposed to watching eyes.
But that seemed a small price to pay for the joy of the experience. It always made me feel fifteen again, when Triss and I used to sneak out onto the temple roof at night just so we could leap off the edge and make the long, giddy glide down into the lake. When I landed on the far side of Market Street, I felt a brief stab of jealousy for the birds. They got to feel that way every day of their lives.
Racing across the rooftops with Triss made for a weird dichotomy of experience, at once dual and singular, familiar and alien, Shade and human. In moments like this, with my familiar surrounding and overlapping me, we were more one being than two, living within each other’s skin if not actually mixing our minds in the way some familiars did with their companions.
The powers Triss wielded became an extension of my will, his senses mine to use, and yet there was still a fundamental separation. It wasn’t just that Triss floated in dream while I controlled our conjoined bodies. The Shades interacted with reality in a manner wholly alien to human experience. Even if Triss could have approached the melding of our beings fully awake and aware, we had no common frame of understanding. If we wanted to share thoughts or even the sort of simple abstract ideas that a human familiar-bound to a cat might have easily managed, we would always have to resort to speech.
Twice more as we moved across the city, we had to cross a too-broad gap, and I got to be a bird for a few shining seconds—both times for canals coming off the Zien River. The nearly three-mile run took us from the ugliness of the Stumbles to the skirts of the Sovann Hill and up along the western edge of the carefully crafted faux wilderness of the royal preserves. There we had to descend to ground level for the first time.
It was the long way round. If I’d wanted to make my way along the east side of the park, I could have gotten much nearer my target before I left the shelter of the rooftops, but that would have brought me very close to the secret chapter house maintained by the Crown Elite. Not the sort of risk I wanted to court under any circumstances. Alternatively, I could have stayed concealed by taking to the sewers then, but I preferred to avoid shit’s highway if I possibly could, and I didn’t see the need here.
Making my quiet way across the parkland to the Marchon estate seemed almost childishly simple, needing little more than the occasional freeze in place when routine patrols passed by. In this one thing, the death of my goddess eased my way, for most believed that the fall of her temple had destroyed or driven into deep exile all of my kind. That meant that certain measures the patrols might once have taken had been much relaxed in recent years.
And why not? Though it hurt me to think it. In the five years since the fall of the temple, I had seen only one other of the Blades of the goddess alive, and Kaman had been nailed to a cross, with his shadow staked to the ground at his feet. When I offered to try to free him, he spat at me and cursed the goddess’s name before begging me to make an end of him. I’d used an arrow from a distance and spent the next month playing a game of death tag with the Elite who’d hung him up there.
A ten-foot stone wall surrounded the Marchon estate. The wall was far too long to ward or guard effectively, but the owners had done what they could. It had shards of broken pottery set edge up along the top to deter human intruders, along with sprigs of dried mistletoe to keep out the restless dead. Silver nails would have answered better for that second purpose, but those tended to be stolen faster than they could be replaced, even in this sort of neighborhood. They hadn’t bothered with slivers of iron, though I expect I’d have found those at the Marchon country house, where the creatures of wild magic posed a greater threat.
Getting over the top unharmed drained a bit more of my nima away as I had to use a minor sort of spell to protect me from the sharp edges. The baroness had dogs roaming the grounds, big vicious brutes who hunted as much by scent as sight. Triss’s enshrouding presence was no help there, but I only met four, and in each case a snoutful of hollowed robin’s egg loaded with powdered opium and efik worked the trick nicely. I made a mental note after the last to use some of the funds from this job to buy more of the finely ground and very expensive powders needed for their making. The slender brass case I kept them in was nearly empty.
Like most freestanding great houses, the Marchon place was built more than half as a personal fortress. It had no outward-facing windows on the ground floor, showing the world a blank limestone face. A dense hedge of imperial bush roses grew tight against the building as a further defense, with climbers growing up the wall as far as the second story. That cost me in blood lost to thorns, and I wished I dared use magic to push them aside, but the heavenly smell of fresh blossoms paid for at least some of the pain.
The third-floor balcony was broad and deep, supported by four thick columns faced with slick marble. Had I climbed one of those, I could have avoided the roses but only at the cost of facing an overhang deeper than I was tall—far more trouble than it was worth. Especially since the decorative stonework at the corner of the building was more than half a ladder for my purposes. So I went up the corner and across the top of the second-floor windows to the edge of the balcony, where I froze for several minutes while I checked the current state of things against my memories from earlier visits.
There I found more roses, some on a central trellis that would serve to provide a shaded area for dining outside in the brutal Tien summer, others scattered about in planters of various sizes. These were of more gentle varieties than the vicious imperials of the guardian hedge below. When you combined the roses with a small grove of decorative oranges that topped out just below the level of the balcony, the overall effect was of a floating garden sailing on a sea of blossoms. Quite lovely, even in the dark, and much as I’d remembered it. But I wasn’t there for the view, so I soon slipped over the railing and crossed to the small window where I was supposed to meet the recipient of the letter.
BOOK: Broken Blade
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