The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Hear what? That you're going to let me go back to sleep before I knife you?"

  He handed her a cup of lukewarm tea. Head aching, she sucked it down, then followed him to Kerreven's room. The doors to the balcony were open. A candle burned with the pleasant scent of melting beeswax, but there was an ugly smell lurking beneath it.

  Kerreven sat at his table, looking three times as haggard as when they'd delivered Dracks. He didn't look up. "Does she know?"

  Gaits gave a small bow. "I saved that honor for you."

  "Gaits, have you ever considered you may be in the wrong line of work?"

  "Sir?"

  "With such a refined sense of courtliness, I think you'd make a better knight than a thief." Kerreven turned to Raxa. "We went through Dracks' letters. Two were from Bennel. We questioned Dracks. He confessed. The Little Knives hired the Crows."

  Raxa blinked. "Why? What did we do to them?"

  "Say you're a…" He cast about. "Butcher. The town you work in supports five of you; you're all good enough at what you do. None of you are rich, but none of you will ever go broke. Then, one day, one of your rivals learns a new trick. Suddenly, everyone in town is going to them for meat. And you're starving. What do you do?"

  "Find a new line of work."

  "But you're a butcher. Do you think butchers mind getting their hands dirty?"

  "We'd gotten too good. They were afraid of us. They knew they couldn't compete, so their only choice was to take us out of the picture."

  Kerreven opened his palms. "In a twisted sense, it's quite a compliment, eh? In their position, I might have done the same."

  "What's going to happen to Dracks?"

  "Well." Gaits steepled his hands. "Now that he's dead, I imagine his next order of business will be to rot into various colors of goo."

  Raxa grasped the back of a chair, leaning on it. "So we're at war."

  "That's right," Kerreven said. "And wars need soldiers."

  She waited, silent.

  "You have a unique talent for getting into places without being discovered. So far, we've used that talent for larceny." He tilted his head forward, holding her gaze. "You've never had anything against taking jewels. How would you feel about taking lives?"

  "You want me to turn assassin."

  "Do you have something against that?"

  "Not if it means taking down the Little Knives."

  Kerreven thumbed his beard. "How much are you capable of?"

  "I can take care of anyone you want. But there are restrictions. I work alone. And nothing in public."

  "But public is the best way to send a message."

  She shrugged. "After the Little Knives are dead, I think the message will be loud and clear."

  "Why solo? Wouldn't you rather have a good man at your back?"

  "Take it or leave it."

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair until it clicked against the wall. "What choice do I have? I'll take it."

  "Wonderful." Raxa's heart began to beat so hard she was sure both men could hear it. "There's one more condition. I want a share."

  Kerreven smiled in disbelief. "A share?"

  "Gaits has one, doesn't he?"

  "Gaits has been a vital wheel of the Order for years."

  "And I'm about to wreck our worst enemy," she said. "If you can do that on your own, you're free to keep your money."

  Kerreven slapped his hand over his eyes, rubbing his brow. "Why did I encourage you to be ambitious? One twenty-fourth. Don't you dare ask for more."

  She forced herself not to smile. "I'll want that in writing."

  "I'm sure you do. Now go get to work."

  "I've barely slept."

  "And now you own a part of the business." He gave her a sardonic look. "You'll soon learn that, when you run the store, every minute you're not working is a minute you're not earning."

  ~

  Between the sword and her skills, it was almost too easy.

  She slept through most of the day. By the time she was up, Gaits had her first target: Jain Winks, one of the Knives' lieutenants. She was holed up near the docks with two of the Knives' muscle. Raxa took the three of them down without earning a scratch.

  She wasn't the only one out for the Little Knives. Wanting to take down as many of the enemy as they could before the Knives knew what was happening, Kerreven declared open war. Offered street bounties, too. Including Raxa's hit, by the end of the first night, they'd notched eleven Knives.

  By morning, the streets had dubbed the conflict the War of the Gutters. Gaits had a new assignment waiting for her as soon as she woke up. A tenement not four blocks from where Kerreven was holed up. The walls were pinewood harvested from the outer city during Narashtovik's recent renaissance. With midnight behind her, Raxa crouched in the shrubs across the street, waiting for someone to enter. After an hour, she got up, went to the front door, and picked the lock.

  The inside smelled like musty urine. She climbed to the third floor and counted down to the seventh door on the left. She knocked on the door with the code Gaits had given her.

  Footsteps shuffled on the other side. "He left one hour ago."

  One hour ago. Code that her knock was a day old. But if they were using the code, that meant she was in the right place.

  And in another second, if she didn't knock the right code, they'd know she was in the wrong place.

  She drew her sword. It cut through the door's hinges like they were made of parchment. She burst inside, hacking through the man stumbling away from the splinters of wood. Three others jolted to their feet, playing cards fluttering from their hands as they drew swords. Hers cut right through the steel. The men fell in halves, mouths gasping like fish as their heels kicked the floor.

  The apartment went silent. She blew out the lantern and slipped into the shadows, silver light springing around her. Two minutes later, the back door swung open. A man crept forward, eyes wide, dagger in hand. Raxa walked up to him, emerged, and swung her sword through the crown of his skull.

  The second night of the War of the Gutters claimed the lives of eight Knives and three members of the Order of the Alley. Their people reported that the city guard's presence in the rich neighborhoods had doubled, but that they'd vacated the poorer areas altogether. No surprise. Thieves paid no taxes.

  They'd taken down two lieutenants, but so far, the Little Knives' king—Cane Dreggs—remained out in the wind.

  "I want the job," she told Gaits.

  He chuckled. "I want you to have the job. The problem is that Cane is highly motivated to allow none of us to have it."

  "Then do your job better than he does his."

  He dropped to one knee before her. "I swear to do my best, Lady Raxa."

  On the third night, she walked through a manor's walls and found it empty. The Knives had abandoned it. The story was the same across the city. Realizing silent war had been declared, they'd withdrawn from their houses and gone underground, same as the Order. That night, neither side suffered any casualties.

  On the fourth night of the War of the Gutters, Gaits fed her the location of one of the Knives' new safehouses.

  "This is different from what you've done before," he said. "Are you up for this?"

  "Have I failed you yet?"

  "Against noblemen who think their gates and locks can keep out the rabble? You're invincible. But this time, they'll have guards. Eyes open all night. Whatever black magic you've been using to steal jewels and stab men in their beds isn't going to work this time."

  She made herself laugh, doing her best to sound natural. "There's no blood rituals or human sacrifices, Gaits. Just a hell of a lot of patience."

  "Be sure that patience doesn't slip away from you. Better to fail lightly and try again later than to let your frustration get you killed."

  The Knives' hideout was deep in the Sharps. Three-story row house. Wooden walls. She'd have to get in the old-fashioned way. That afternoon, she made up her face and hair like a Galladese merchant, th
en killed time in a teahouse across the street from the safehouse. During the two hours she spent watching, no one came or went.

  With twilight on its way, she left to change and arm herself. She didn't return until after midnight. Gaits had located a neighboring row house whose resident was happy to let someone up to the roof in exchange for a pouch of silver. Raxa knocked and was allowed inside. She ascended to the third floor, got out her grappling hook, and slung it up to the roof. She swung out onto the side of the building and climbed the rope.

  As she rolled onto the rooftop, she dived into the shadows, uncertain if the Little Knives had a spotter up top. She got to her feet, trotted up to the peak of the roof, and took a quick jaunt in both directions. Nobody but a pair of pigeons. She flattened herself to the roof, returned to the world, then went back for her grappling hook.

  Stepping lightly, she came to the eave above the Knives' safehouse, grabbed the gutter, and stuck her face over the ledge. The windows were dark. She secured the hook to the gutter and lowered the rope down the side of the building. The third-floor shutters were closed. Given the heat of the summer night, this would have been suspicious if Raxa hadn't already known the house was full of thieves, thugs, and killers.

  Fortunately, the safehouse was a piece of junk. The shutters were as warped as the rest of it. Supporting herself against the wall, Raxa got out a length of wire and bent a hook into its end. She stuck it through the gap between the two shutters and felt around until it bumped into the shutters' hook latch. She snagged this with the wire and jimmied it open.

  She swung apart the shutters, entered the shadows, and leaped through the window. The room was filled with empty cots. A few cups were scattered around the floor. Most still had moisture in the bottom, glinting silver from within the nether.

  Drawing her sword, she moved to the door and exited the shadows. Pressing her ear to the door, she heard nothing. She tossed open the door and winked back into the nether. There were three other rooms on the third floor. Like the first, there were signs they'd been recently occupied, but they were now empty.

  By the time she'd cleared the second floor—it was the same story as the top floor—she was starting to feel the weight of the real world increasing, trying to drag her back out of the darkness. Raxa descended to the first floor, which housed the kitchen, a pantry, and a communal room.

  And no people.

  "The hell, Gaits?" she muttered. She made a second circuit of the ground floor, poking around for trap doors or secret panels in the walls. Nothing doing. Was she in the right house? Had to be, she'd counted the windows from the spot where she'd climbed to the roof.

  One explanation: someone had tipped them off. Rather than walk out the front door and straight into whoever was waiting for her, she went back to the stairs. As soon as she stepped on the first tread, something whipped past her head and clapped into the wall. She dropped her feet from under her. Pain seared across the top of her shoulder; another arrow smacked into the wall. She tumbled to the ground and rolled away from the doorway.

  Her shoulder was bleeding. Deeply grazed. On the stairs, men yelled to each other. Multiple steps of shoes thumped around. Her shin burned where she'd scraped it on a step. Ambushed. An unknown number of the enemy alert to her presence. And she was low on shadows. She turned and bolted for the front door. As she threw it open, an arrow rattled into the wall beside her.

  Raxa sprinted outside and into the nether. As she neared the end of the block, it felt like her feet were sliding beneath her. She barely made it into an alley before she was ejected back into the mundane world.

  Footsteps rang out behind her. She crouched behind a set of stairs and drew the bone sword. Two men jogged north past the alley, swords flapping on their hips. Others called to each other, voices distant. She backed down the alley. As it fed into the next street, she put away her sword and walked west, meaning to put the Sharps behind her and find a tavern to hunker down in for a few minutes.

  After two blocks of walking, steps echoed from the intersection ahead. She moved into the shadow of a building and watched a pair of men jog past. The two men who'd passed her in the alley. But they weren't looking down side streets or questioning the drunks sitting against the sides of buildings. They were just running.

  They weren't hunting for her. They were going somewhere.

  That late at night, there weren't many other people out. Her boots would be as loud as hammers. She unlaced them and yanked them off, allowing the two men to get another another block ahead. She followed them at a jog, staying as close to the buildings as she could. Dressed in her thin hose, her feet made no sound at all. She watched the back of their heads like a hawk. Each time one of them glanced over his shoulder, she stopped.

  Four blocks later, as they came to the door of a tenement not unlike the one Kerreven was hiding out in, she still hadn't been made. She took a seat against the front of a rug shop and watched them knock on the door. A candle lit on the third floor. A few seconds later, the door opened and the men went inside.

  Keeping one eye on the tenement, Raxa rolled up her sleeve. The cut on her shoulder oozed blood. She unrolled one of her hose, brushed off the worst of the muck, and tied it tight around her shoulder.

  Five minutes later, the door reopened and the two men walked back the way they'd come. One glanced at Raxa, then moved on.

  She sat there another hour. No one else came or went. She got up and returned to Kerreven's tenement.

  Gaits was still awake, waiting for her. Seeing her, he grabbed her forearm. "Are you all right? What happened?"

  "Ambush," Raxa said. "Who else knew where I was going?"

  "No one but Kerreven and myself. Do you think we have a mole?"

  "They were waiting for me. You tell me."

  "I'll make sure no one else knew. Did they hurt you?"

  "Just a scrape. There's something else. I need a spotter." She gave him the address.

  He cocked an eyebrow. "What've you got?"

  "I don't know and I can't find out until tomorrow. Just get someone to watch the door."

  Exhausted and sore, she went to bed. The next afternoon, she waited for Gaits to come back from the streets.

  "No one else knew about your job," he said. "Unless the Knives have someone hiding in our floorboards, there's no way they knew you were coming."

  Raxa moved to lean against the wall, but her shoulder twinged. "After the last two attacks, they knew they'd be in for more of the same. They purposely tipped us off to where they'd be last night. To make sure I'd walk into a trap."

  "I can buy that. If so, your next move should be to take a few days off. Break up the pattern."

  "Maybe," she said. "Anything from the spotter?"

  "Quiet all day. Ready to tell me what's in there?"

  "I'll find out tonight."

  "Careful out there, Raxa. You're our blade. If we lose you, we'll be trading punches with the Knives until one of us drops."

  He smiled, but like everyone, he looked battered. Weary. Raxa felt it, too. For the first few days there, she'd thought they'd chew through the Little Knives like a bowl of hominy, stomping them out with no more than a handful of losses. But the Knives were getting smarter. It was about to get ugly. Both sides trapped in a bitter war that could take months to shake out. At the end, even if the Order of the Alley won, they'd be crippled by it.

  Raxa met the spotter in the late hours of the night. He'd seen a few people come and go from the tenement. She grilled him for descriptions. None stood out, but that was exactly what she was looking for.

  She paid her way up to the tenement's top floor and climbed to the roof the same way she'd done the night before. This time, there was a spotter hidden among the chimneys. Raxa popped from the shadows and cut him in half. She secured his pieces against a chimney, then stuck her head over the ledge. The room where she'd seen the candle light up the night before was dark now, but the shutters were open.

  She drew her sword and swung inside.
>
  A man sat in the darkness. His eyes shined like silver coins struck fresh from the mint. "You're him. The Ghostmaker."

  "Hi, Cane." She took a step forward. "So you've heard of me."

  "They said you were a man." The leader of the Little Knives laughed dryly. "Then again, you've killed everyone who ever got a good look at you."

  "Doesn't bode well for you, does it?"

  "I'll be fine. You won't be killing me tonight."

  "Afraid that's my job, Cane. And I'm very good at it."

  "Wrong, woman. Your job is to kill those who wronged the Order." Cane tilted back his head. "You have the wrong man. I didn't hire the Army of Crows—and I have proof."

  17

  As towns went, Tanner wasn't especially big. Likely no more than four thousand people. Dante had seen dozens larger. However, Tanner was far and away the narrowest town he'd ever seen. Across its lengthier dimension, it was a good mile long. Yet across its meager dimension, it was less than a bowshot wide.

  The cause of this irregular shape was the canal that ran down its center and watered the town. To either side of Tanner's tips, farms fought the desert for survival. The green fields had staked a small claim, but against the wide miles of gray and yellow, they didn't seem to have much hope.

  The morning of their arrival, Cord set up a meeting with the Small Senate, the town's governing body. As their group of five walked to the shrine, they drew any number of looks from the locals. Unlike the unfriendly stares Dante had gotten on first coming to Collen, these ones were questioning and grim. They'd heard of the attack, then.

  The shrine of Tanner stood on a low hill. A T-shaped structure of basalt, its long end was open-walled, black pillars supporting a high roof. The six members of the Small Senate stood inside on a dais carved with the twelve sigils of the Celeset.

  "Senators of Tanner!" Cord approached the dais. With her wheel angled across her back, she drew her sword and cast it to the ground. She kneeled beside it. Tears slipped from her eyes. "Collen has been taken."