by K. Eason
And Veiko wanted her to go back to that. Fuck and damn. Better to take her chances with the God, yeah. With Ari. With the ghost she could just see, there, in the shadows. But not with Istel.
“Istel,” she murmured. “Do me a favor. I know Dek said watch me, but I’m asking: you turn around, go find Veiko. Watch him. He’ll be glad of the company.”
Istel’s eyes rolled toward her, gleam and flash in the dim. “You’re not going back to your flat.” Not asking.
“No.”
He hesitated. Then, in a rush, “Where, then?” And unspoken can I go with you?
“Got to see some godsworn. My people,” she said, which tasted like dust. “You’re in trouble if they see you.”
“And you? Are you in trouble?”
She put her hand on Istel’s arm. Flex and twitch of muscle that said he wasn’t expecting touch. Pressure as he leaned into her that said he didn’t mind it. No more or less than she’d suspected. Ask this man to throw himself into the Tano for her, he just might.
Instead: “Favor, Istel. For me. Please. Go to Veiko. Keep him safe.”
Istel frowned. Then he turned and went back the way they’d come, toward the open night sky. She tucked shadows in around him like blankets. He faded invisible like one of Veiko’s fucking ghosts.
And left one ghost behind, all hers, all unwelcome. Ghost-Tsabrak had his arms crossed, shoulders back: waiting beside her as the members of what had been his Illharek cartel picked their way up the Tano path. Their shadows sliced through him.
Snow folded her own arms and waited with him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Highborn houses followed a general pattern, however they’d been conjured or built. There was a bondie wing, separate from the main house, with its own entrance. A kitchen, close to that wing. There would be stairs nearby, or a hallway, that led into a formal area that might be for dining or entertaining. Off that there would be another, separate entrance, for people who didn’t wear collars, so that guests and owners need not see the comings and goings of servants. Offices, a library, and a larger room that had been a house-shrine to Tal’Shik before the Purge, which most families had turned into a room for entertaining guests. Sometimes it held a fountain that had been conjured into the walls, sometimes couches. Szanys Elia had turned hers into a garden, moss-covered walls and a mosaic-lined pond studded with darklilies.
Beyond those public rooms were the family quarters, which no one outside the House ever saw, divided male and female. In Stratka’s house, those quarters sat at the top of twisting stairs, a labyrinth of hallways that would have been easy to defend against invaders. The stair got brighter at the top, if not wider, the walls studded with candles that choked the place with a sweet waxy smell. Not cheap tallow, not oil, not for Stratka. That was wealth burning in the sconces, for the highborn.
House Szanys had invaded Stratka once, pre-Purge, and been stopped here, on the last landing.
Dek had gone through every Szanys account of the battle fought here, had sketched out a rough interior map from the descriptions. She’d had Sindri, too, for help—all too happy to describe this place, time and again. He had visited often as a child, being of an age with one of Stratka’s sons. That was fortunate, because the battle accounts hadn’t included any mention of the servants’ tunnels, or the clever panels in the walls, the latches concealed among carvings. Here: a man’s open mouth. There: a dragon’s third claw. And here, just where Sindri had promised: a Stratka matron’s ruby eye, winking out of a scene of battle and conquest. Twisted bodies around her, dark granite women in chips of colored glass. House uniforms, not legion. That was K’Hess blue, and Szanys orange. The Stratka matron, polished out of obsidian, stood above all of them, bare armed and bareheaded, with her palms spread. Amethyst streaked up and out of her fingers, to be lost in an onyx sky.
It was an old piece. Beautiful. And it should have been pried out of the wall, chip by chip, its glass melted, its stones cast into the lake. That had been the Senate edict after the Purge: that all Houses must destroy any reminders of godsworn. Maybe Stratka had argued that Stratka Gael had been a conjuror, that the amethyst was meant to be witchfire, that the artist had had a shortage of appropriate lapis to make the right color. But no one who’d seen godsworn fire could mistake it. The flames in that Cardik alley, where Ehkla had died, had been just that shade of violet.
It gave Dek small satisfaction to jab her fingertip into that godsworn’s eye. The door’s mechanism clicked deep in the wall. The panel slid back on silent hinges, shattering the image along well-concealed lines. Dek put her face close to the mosaic. Scrubbed a nail along the grout, looking for the seam. Couldn’t feel it. You could admire that kind of craftwork. And you could still wonder how Stratka had got away with this thing in plain view for two hundred odd years. Grant that it ran up the staircase that led to the family wing, that no stranger would see it—but the Purge hadn’t got rid of politics, had it, and rival sons might spy for their mothers.
Confining those sons to the men’s harem might solve that, but according to all Dek’s sources, the confinement was a recent development, since the disappearances. So either Stratka truly didn’t care what anyone said, or Stratka was stupider than anyone reckoned, or everyone really thought that figure was a conjuror.
Or—hell and damn. Dekklis peered at her fingertips, at the color she’d gathered under her nails. Someone might’ve painted over the whole thing, for all those years, to hide it. And then someone—probably many, collared and fair-skinned someones—had scraped all that paint away again, chip by chip, stone by stone, very recently, and left only enough that a nosy interloper scratching at the grout might’ve noticed.
Stratka had reclaimed its heritage. Godsworn heritage.
Dekklis slipped behind the panel. Felt the tile shift under her foot, faintest sag, and the wall sighed back into place. It was solid black back here. A bondie would’ve come armed with a candle. Snow would’ve had her witchfire. Dek had her hands, spread flat on the wall. Had Sindri’s—
Count seventeen steps, then left.
—directions to guide her. They were shallow steps, worn and old. It would be easy to trip, fall and break a bone back here, or her neck. Let her mother explain that to Stratka. So she took small steps, precise, and ignored the pressing dark. It was her imagination that the walls were a stone throat swallowing her whole.
Seven, eight.
She wondered if her own house was so full of passages. Wondered how many of Szanys’s bondies came and went like this, and how many Sindris might be out there who knew the ways in and out. Something to investigate later. She supposed Sindri wouldn’t be so forthcoming then.
Eleven, twelve.
If she got out of this—no, when—she’d ask Snow to teach her to call witchfire. Or that thing she did with the shadows. Some way to drive back the darkness.
Breathe, Dek.
At least she met no one coming or going. That, too, had been part of her planning. The consul would be in the Senate. Her daughters, too. Which meant a good chunk of the household staff would be there, in attendance, and the ones left behind would have no reason to go running up and down a dark passage in the family wing.
She had just congratulated herself on her foresight when she felt a puff of cool air on her face. Then she heard a rasp, like leather on stone. She stopped. Flattened against the wall. Saw the soft yellow glow ahead that meant candle, growing larger as the carrier came down the steps. Dekklis crouched and worked her knife out of its sheath. She laid the blade back against her arm, edge curving out.
A foot on the stairs. A leg. Dekklis moved. Took an eyeblink to mark the face: Alvir, female. A gilded collar below the face, which meant she had value to the House.
The bondie was unarmed, unprepared, utterly surprised. And dead, very suddenly.
Her corpse would be impossible to miss in this narrow passage. Better hope no one used this stair, then, in the next few candlemarks.
Dek scooped up the n
aked candle, which had rolled on the step and was somehow still burning. Wouldn’t be if it got to the blood. She steadied the flame. Wiped her knife on the bondie’s robe and sheathed it again, one-handed. Looked at the woman. She was on the young side of middle age. Pretty enough. Probably taking the back passages because she was visiting places she shouldn’t.
It happened. A dozen songs Dek could name about one tryst or another. Most of the songs ended badly—the bondie whipped and sold, the Dvergir man dying of heartbreak. The reality was always less romantic. Before the Purge, the bondies died, but the men did, too, depending on their House connections. But in this enlightened age
that what we call it, now, Dek?
a man found bedding women below his station would be sent back to his mother and sisters. And what they might do, well. There were brothels in the Suburba who would buy a highborn contract, but more likely that man would end up in the legion, indentured first, and then as a free soldier. There were—had been—more than a few of those in the Sixth. The northern borders were more forgiving than Illharek.
Fact was, Stratka would’ve killed this bondie for being where she shouldn’t. Fact was, they’d’ve done it slower than Dekklis had, and more publicly.
That make you feel better?
It didn’t. But Dek wasn’t a squeamish woman. Wasn’t sentimental. She didn’t like killing unarmed civilians, but that hadn’t stopped her in Cardik, or here, or ever. She banished the knot in her gut. Stepped over the body and kept climbing.
Fifteen, sixteen.
Much easier with a candle.
She came to a small landing, where the passage branched right and left. Dekklis took Sindri’s directions. The left branch ended in another panel, where stone gave way conspicuously to plaster and wood. Dek set the candle into a niche on the wall. Blocked the flame with her hand and tried the latch.
The door rolled out and sideways. Oiled hinges, hardly a whisper. A well-used door, this. Well maintained. Well hidden, too, if Sindri’s stories were right, which they had been so far. Dekklis stepped into the back of a very large wardrobe. The air was dusty and thick with wool, linen, the lingering stale waft of bodies clinging to fabric. The floor felt like wood, too, not stone. She rubbed her toe across it. Not quite smooth, not quite even. Parquet tiles. Not cheap. Not too slick, either, if she had to move fast.
She paused to let her eyes adjust. There was light bleeding in, yellow and warm, that told her the wardrobe doors were already open, that said Stratka didn’t mind spending money here, either, for perfume and wax candles. She wormed between the clothing. Pulled a pair of city trousers off a rack, and a plain shirt, and hoped they would fit K’Hess Soren. Got to the door and cocked her head. This room was empty. But she could hear not-too-distant voices, low enough to be male. Heard a higher one, too, fluting over the others. Please, that it was a boy or another bondie, and not one of Stratka’s daughters.
She moved into the room. There were carpets on the parquet floor, and couches meant for sitting, not sleeping. A mirror stood in the corner nearest the door. Dek eyed her own reflection, growing larger the nearer she came to it. She was a small woman, for a Dvergir, almost man-sized. Endless source of harassment, in her pre-legion youth. Endless mockery in the Sixth, too, when people thought she wouldn’t hear it. Calling her Istel sometimes, pretending they looked alike.
Today there was some truth to that. The bulky northern clothing blurred her near shapeless. She reached up under the sweater. Took out the scarf she’d stashed there and wound it around her head. Told herself that was a man’s face staring back and not Szanys’s youngest daughter.
Except men didn’t stare, did they? Not in Illharek. Men kept their heads down and their eyes on the floor.
Laughter stabbed down the corridor. Several voices, all male, rose out of it, battling for volume. One shouted the others down finally.
“—hear the rest or not?”
Another swell of sound. Dek tucked the ends of the scarf into its own folds and settled it around jaw and cheek. Be lucky if she didn’t suffocate in the wool, too hot in these motherless chambers—
A flicker of light in the corner of the mirror warned her. There was someone in the hallway. Dekklis flattened against the wall. Dropped her hand to her knife. Waited as the shape grew in the glass until the man stepped into the room. Household and highborn, from the open-necked shirt, the loose breeches, the unbound hair. He stopped in front of the mirror. Leaned forward, examining something up near one eye. His shoulders blocked most of his face. She got a smeared glimpse of his House sigil, distorted by glass and angle. It wasn’t K’Hess. Wasn’t Stratka, either. One of the rounder sigils, maybe Dasskli or K’Haar.
She unfolded. Two steps to cross the distance, to get one arm across his shoulders and rest the dagger’s tip near his throat. It was a stupid hold against anyone with training, or anyone larger than she was. This poor toadshit was neither.
His eyes met hers in the mirror. Wide, terrified—foremothers spare her, had he just pissed himself? He had. Rot him. Well. Boots would dry. If she stepped back now, she’d risk her balance and he might discover courage. She eyed his sigil. Dasskli. She dredged memory, couldn’t summon up the House politics or whether one dead son might matter to that woman’s vote.
“Please,” he whispered.
“K’Hess Soren,” she murmured, rough and low as she could manage. “Where is he?”
He shivered against her. “Down there. Down the hall. With the others.”
“Call him.”
“What?”
“Call him. Get him down here, yeah?” She poked red out of his neck, just a drop. The knife was sharp, the flesh was soft. She watched him watching the blood run down his reflection’s neck, too shocked to even squeak.
“Call K’Hess,” she repeated. “Not for help. Don’t you raise the alarm. You savvy me?”
Another shiver, like a dog shaking water. He nodded. And yes, that was piss, another round, but not only. Dekklis was glad of the scarf for a layer between her and the stink.
The man—boy, really, he might be all of Sindri’s age—turned his head. Opened his mouth. His ribs stretched against her. Then an indrawn breath and a wobbly “Soren!” dragged out singsong and treble.
Dekklis winced. Only her eyes narrowed, over the scarf. There was sweat on the man’s face. Bright beads against skin gone waxy and damn near grey. She’d seen happier corpses.
The voice down the hall stopped in its storytelling. Lifted and flung back, “What do you want, Birkir? We’re busy.”
“I need Soren.” Birkir’s voice cracked. Quick swallow, eyes wide in the glass. “I need an opinion.”
“What, now?” The storyteller’s voice moved. Getting louder, hell, probably standing up and coming into the hallway. Dekklis jabbed Birkir under the chin. Drew him backward, away from the door, out of the mirror’s angle.
“What is so important, Birkir?” Definitely closer.
“Let it go,” came another voice. This one was softer. Lower. Eerily familiar. An echo of Rurik’s bellow in the resonance and chiseled consonants. “I’m coming, Birkir. Keep your pants up.”
Dekklis rolled her forearm against Birkir’s throat. Bent her elbow and applied pressure. Didn’t take long, no, Birkir’s eyes bugging and mouth flapping before he went limp. She swung him sideways. Dropped him onto carpets and pillows. Turned back as K’Hess Soren stepped into the doorway.
“Birkir, where—”
He stopped, openmouthed, as Dekklis stepped over Birkir’s unconscious body.
There was no question of identity, not at all. Soren was taller than Rurik, and slimmer, more like Kenjak had been. But all three had the same blade of a nose, the same too-large eyes that Rurik was forever narrowing into slits. Soren’s were round and wide, like Kenjak’s had been when she’d last seen him.
With a pole shoved through him crotch to gullet.
She blinked the memory aside. Soren was alive, and she meant him to stay that way. She tugged th
e scarf aside. Bared her face and held up her hand.
Sharply, softly: “Quiet. Birkir’s not dead. Won’t be unless you shout. You savvy?”
Be thankful for trained passivity. Be thankful K’Hess Soren had at least a glimmer of his other brother’s wits. He did not, she noted, piss himself, or shit, or begin shaking. He only nodded. She thrust the trousers at him. “Put these on, yeah? Can’t have you in silks in the street. Then you come with me. Quickly. For your life and safety, K’Hess Soren.”
He stared down at the trousers. “I—”
“Soren! Birkir!” Oh foremothers, coming closer. Footsteps now to go with the voice. “What—”
“Toad’s tits,” Soren snapped, and now he sounded exactly like Rurik. “Birkir needs my opinion, not yours. Wait, can’t you? Entertain everyone else.”
A moment’s quiet. Then a subdued and sullen “Fine” and a retreat of footfalls.
Dek let the air out of her lungs. Met Soren’s eyes. He licked his lips. Shaped who at her as he unlaced the house silks and stepped out of them.
Headshake. “Quick.” And as he pulled the other breeches over his hips: “Through the door in the back of the wardrobe. Move, K’Hess.”
“What do you want?” Still quiet, this one, not prone to hysterics. His hands were open. Spread. Dekklis reckoned he might have reach on her. Reckoned he wouldn’t know that. This wasn’t a fighting man. But he had a light in his eyes she didn’t like, which looked a little like panic and desperation.
The hell you expect, Szanys?
“You’re not safe here,” she told him. “I came to get you. Now turn around—”
He pushed a hand at her, more warding than attack, and took a step backward. “Who are you?”
She resigned herself to delay and damnation. “First Scout Szanys Dekklis. Second Legion, Sixth Cohort. I serve under Rurik.”