by Sam Sykes
I made my way down the shelf to the floor of the warehouse and glanced around.
Ten centaurs and a mess of wolves had made their way in here. They escaped with a few crates. Couldn’t have been too many. The problem would be discovering which ones they took and for what reason.
Among the various, shall we say, nonstandard humanoids of the Inner Sea, centaurs tended to get a lot more credit than the two-legged kind. With a few of them abandoning their barbaric ways and integrating with civilized nations, armies occasionally found them quite useful as scouts and cavalry. They were powerful, fearless, and proud.
But no one ever called them subtle.
Or clean, for that matter.
Fortunately, no one ever accused Taldans of being in a hurry to tidy up, either. Someone had made a go of cleaning the aftermath of the centaurs’ incursion, but they hadn’t made it very far. I could see gouges in the floor where hooves had trod and crates had been dragged. And here and there, spatters of dried blood.
I wondered if any of it was Gerowan’s.
That was just one more thing I wouldn’t be telling Dalaris, along with the possibility that his brother might have been the one to kill him.
I know, it might seem like a leap, but to me it seemed more like a hop. Family is all well and good until concepts like inheritances come up, and then murder starts to sound more efficient than dealing with lawyers and contracts.
But I wasn’t being paid for speculation.
My thoughts now were for following that trail of carnage to a nearby wall. There, I found some crates in relative disarray against the neat stacks of the rest of the warehouse, as though someone had reorganized them not quite as thoroughly as they had the others.
I leaned over one. Upon its lid were several painted seals, each depicting a different sigil: a long scepter upon a golden field, a pair of crossed bronze rapiers, a hand clenching an orb …
Hey, I knew that one!
I recognized House Helsen’s seal almost immediately. I supposed I would have had to, with how often I saw it around Herry’s manor while I was a “guest” there.
So, these were all noble seals, then. I supposed it made sense that they would all put their stamps on crates. It was a pretty common practice in Katapesh, too, for merchants to indicate their alliances to would-be looters. A message, spoken plainly: “Screw with one of us, you screw with all of us.”
Thieves’ guilds tended to do that, too.
Of course, we were doing it before it was fashionable.
I couldn’t tell by looking at the crate why the centaurs had gone after these ones in particular.
But that’s why I brought a knife.
I drew Whisper from his sheath, worked his blade under the lid. It took a bit of doing, but I managed to pry off the nails and crack the lid open a touch. I worked him around the lid’s edge, bit by bit, until I could ease it off with the faintest squeak of nails. When the time came to leave, I could just slide it back on, no one the wiser that I had been here.
That might seem a bit unnecessary. After all, all I had to do to not be noticed was be slightly less messy than a centaur raid. And truth be told, I wasn’t sure why they would go after crates in the first place.
Wasn’t sure, that is, until I opened the lid.
Two dozen longswords. Nine stout battleaxes. Two bundles of javelins. Six sheaves of arrows. All of them made with fine steel and polished to a high, glossy shine.
Yeah, I could see why a centaur might want this.
They might be mighty warriors, occasionally even decent soldiers, but they were still savages, which meant their best blacksmithing techniques probably began and ended with hitting metal with a hammer until it looked like it would hurt. Weapons this well made, a centaur would kill for. Mostly so he could do more killing.
And I guess they had killed for it. But how did they know to take these crates, specifically?
That thought hung around my neck like a lead weight as I reapplied the lid and banged it shut with Whisper’s hilt. I had just gotten halfway through the nails when I noticed it.
A red stripe, so dark as to be nearly black, ran along the outside of the crate, just beneath the lid. I would have thought it to be paint if it hadn’t been applied so sloppily. And it had been painted beneath the rim of the crate, as if someone didn’t want it to be noticed.
I leaned down and squinted at it, and that’s when something made my nostrils quiver. I could barely make it out, at first: a whiff, the ghost of a scent. It wasn’t until I had my nose right up against the wood and was inhaling deeply that I could place it.
Hog’s blood.
If you promised never to ask me how I knew that, I’d promise never to lie to you. At that moment, I wouldn’t have even been able to think of a good one to tell you, because, at that moment, it all made sense.
Hog’s blood. At the edge of the crate, applied covertly and faded. You wouldn’t notice it right away, maybe not at all if the lighting were bad. No human would be able to smell it.
But a pack of wolves …
That’s why they were here. Someone was sending them weapons. But for what reason? And how did it involve Gerowan?
“Wrong place, wrong time” was an answer that was quickly losing water. Back in Katapesh, there was no such thing as a wrong place or a wrong time. There was always a time and place for killing someone who knew something they shouldn’t.
Like Gerowan might have.
Gerowan. Who was here when his brother, Alarin, should have been.
Dalaris wasn’t going to like this.
“You hear something?”
I dearly hoped I would get to tell her.
“I hear you wasting time. Open the lock, you idiot.”
Voices. Outside. Men. Two of them, at least.
Keys jingling. Lock turning. Chains rattling.
Any time now, Shy.
I leapt to my feet, hurried to a crate beneath the shelf on the far wall, and ducked behind it. I pressed my back against the crate, slowed my breathing. Whisper was in my hand, close to my chest, ready to be used if I needed him.
Which I dearly hoped I wouldn’t.
I don’t know if it’s obvious by the way I hid like a coward, but I was rather unhandy in a fight.
5
Well-Dressed Blades
Killing, I was fine at. Lying, even better. But like most professionals, I didn’t like doing anything I was good at for free. I wasn’t being paid by the body to begin with, let alone the bodies of a couple of porters hired to lug crates.
Rusty hinges creaked as the doors swung open. Daring to poke my head up as much as I was able, I saw the two men enter. And as soon as they stepped out of the afternoon light and into the shadows of the warehouse, I felt my heart drop.
I would have killed a hundred porters to avoid having to deal with these men.
Their hair was nicely oiled. Their beards were stylishly trimmed. Their clothes were finely cut silks that fit each of their long, lean forms perfectly, and their black-and-red trim was a perfect match for the rapiers hanging at their hips. One of them moved to brush stray dust from an otherwise impeccably clean outfit and I ducked back behind the crate and held Whisper a little closer to my chest.
You could be forgiven for thinking, at that moment, that I had a fear of men in fancy clothes.
But only if you had never heard of the Brotherhood of Silence before.
All of this—the sweat forming at my temples, the way I held Whisper—might have seemed a bit much for a couple of thugs. After all, every country had its thieves’ guilds—and I knew a number of them quite well. But to say Taldor had a problem with thieves’ guilds was like saying a plague victim had a runny nose.
In poor countries, your average guild is a rut of urchins picking pockets and bashing peoples’ heads in dark alleys. In nicer countries, your guilds are into smuggling, heists—all the classics. But only in Taldor did you find a thieves’ guild that actually held political office.
; Because that’s what the Brotherhood was: the whisper in every greedy noble’s ear, the knife in every honest king’s back, the face in the crowd you couldn’t quite pick out, and that made you wonder why your blood ran cold when it looked at you. It’d be a misnomer to call them thieves; really, they were just straightforward politicians.
You might have wondered how I knew all this.
Just like you might have wondered why I was hiding in Herevard’s manor.
Just like you might wonder why it was my heart was hammering like it was going to burst out of my chest.
And I would have promised to answer you, if I ever made it out of there alive.
“It reeks in here,” one of them said. “I don’t think they’re ever going to get the smell of horseshit out of the wood.”
“I don’t think they even tried,” the other one replied. “You’d think they’d take a little professional pride in their work.”
“That’s the problem with the world today. No gods-damned standards.”
“Norgorber’s truth, that.”
Silence fell. All I heard from them was the shuffling of feet as they went about their business. I slowly leaned out as much as I dared.
They had clipboards in hands, going down the line of crates and boxes and inspecting them. They would glance them over, make a note on their parchments, occasionally mark one of them with a piece of white chalk, probably to let a smuggler in Yanmass know what crates to look for. Standard, if low-rank, stuff.
But I wasn’t interested in their activities. My eyes were on their clothes. In other countries, thieves occasionally identified themselves by scars, tattoos, what have you. But here in Taldor, they had class. And the classier a Brother, the more people would be pissed if you killed him.
Fortunately—or as fortunate as could be, given the circumstance—these particular associates didn’t look too classy. They had nice clothes, nice hair, but their poise was stooped and their hands callused from honest labor. These were thugs that had climbed the ladder through violence—and in the Brotherhood, that ladder didn’t go very high at all. The Brotherhood liked muscle just fine, but valued diplomats and thinkers. These two would be missed, but only as long as it took to replace them with another pair of idiots.
I let out a low breath, already running over how I’d kill them. They were on opposite sides of the room, slowly making their way around. Once one of them got close enough, I could get the drop on him: come up behind, clamp a hand down, cut his throat. Minimal fuss. That’d give me maybe ten seconds before his partner noticed, during which time I could put Whisper in his kidneys.
It would have to be a straight kill, though. They both looked like they spent a lot of time beating up people much bigger than I was. Like I said, I was no good in a fight.
I took up Whisper, tightened my grip, and waited for one of them to get close. But just as I was about to spring, the doors swung open again.
And whatever god had been watching over me up to this point promptly turned its eyes away.
A woman walked in; my breath died with every step she took. Her long, pointed ears twitched, and suddenly the sound of sweat sliding down my temple was deafening. She came to a stop, and I had one long moment to appreciate just how much shit I was in.
An elf. Tall and thin, her body a spear wrapped in black silk. Her face was full of iron-hard edges, her mouth a thin scar beneath a long nose. Her hair, the color of fresh snow, was neatly trimmed around her giant ears. And she had those eyes: those big, freaky eyes that all elves have.
Cold as a gods-damned night.
She didn’t do a damn thing more than step into the warehouse, hands folded neatly behind her back, and stare at the thugs.
She didn’t have to. I cold feel my blood run cold at her presence, like the world had just collectively held its breath. And in the gravelike silence that followed, my worst fears were confirmed.
“Oh, hell,” one of the thugs all but whimpered. “Madame Longstride.”
Chariel Longstride.
Hell.
Damn.
Shit.
No, no, no, no, no.
My heart pounded. My blood froze. Any thoughts I had of fighting my way out of there grew legs and ran right out of my head. Any thoughts I had of leaving there alive followed. And if I’d had any voice left in my throat, I’d have been screaming.
So yeah. Not great, this situation.
“Well?” Chariel spoke in the soft, lilting tone that had been a lullaby for the hundreds she had put in early graves. “What did you find?”
“None of our stash is missing, madame,” the other thug, just slightly less intimidated, said. “Whatever the beastmen were looking for, we didn’t own it.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Long enough for me to realize that I had been holding my breath this entire time.
This probably seems a bit dramatic. You might have found it weird that I should be acting that way at the sight of an elf. You might have found it weirder that two men of that size were terrified of a woman that slight.
But then, you didn’t know Chariel Longstride.
Nobody knew Chariel Longstride.
She was a ghost. A ghost that the Brotherhood called upon when they needed someone dragged down to Hell. For the list of people on the Brotherhood’s bad side was long, and as of very recently the name “Shaia Ratani” had gotten bumped up somewhere uncomfortably close to the top.
Hence, you’d understand when I clenched everything at the sound of her sighing.
“A raid. Fantastic,” she said. “I was called all the way out here to see a centaur raid.”
“That’s … that’s good, right?” the first thug asked. “No harm to us, Madame Longstride?”
“My dear,” she replied, “does it make sense to use two-hundred-year-old wine to water a potato farm?”
A long pause. “Uh … no?”
“I permit people to say exactly one stupid thing around me before I get irritated,” Chariel said. “Were I you, I’d hedge my bets and just stay silent.” She snorted. “If everything else is in order, I see no reason for us to linger.”
Feet shuffled. Floorboards creaked. If I weren’t terrified, I’d have started laughing.
Leaving.
She was leaving. Just like that.
I heard them walk toward the door, heard the door swing open. All I had to do was wait for them to be gone and make a break for it. Norgorber’s nuts, but I felt a bit stupid for being so worried. All that fear and it was going to be this easy?
“Wait.”
Apparently not.
Floorboards creaked. I heard Chariel’s light step stride over to the corner of the warehouse where I had just been. I glanced out the side of my eye, saw her lean down beside the crate I had inspected, the crate whose lid I had pried open …
… and hadn’t finished securing.
Chariel slipped a finger under the lid, tilted it up a little, heard the nails squeak.
“Someone has been here.”
From somewhere inside her sleeve, a short blade leapt to her hand like an overeager puppy. I dared a little movement and slunk back further against the crate, clutching Whisper tightly. I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could feel those big, freaky eyes as they swept across the warehouse.
Just as keenly as I’d felt them the last time I’d seen them.
She drew closer to me, her footfalls going soft as she realized she wasn’t alone. I was left with silence. Silence in which I could hear my heart pounding. Silence in which I could hear every creak of wood as the elf slowly searched her way closer toward me. Silence in which, if you strained your ears, you might hear me praying to any god to answer me.
“Hello?”
I blinked.
Usually, gods didn’t answer quite so promptly.
“Is someone there?”
Nor with quite so much uncertainty.
I heard footsteps again—Chariel rushing toward the door. The two thugs were taking up positions
in case they needed to back her up. I glanced up, saw one of them standing just behind her, the other standing not far from my hiding spot. Their eyes were locked on the doors as the unluckiest man in the world entered.
“No one’s supposed to be here,” the guardsman said as he walked in. “Haven’t you heard there was an attack?”
My heart stopped pounding just long enough to sink into my belly as I recognized the voice. I glanced over the crate and saw him standing there: boyish face peering out from under his helm, boyish hands on his sword.
Sandan gods-damned Klimes.
Ah hell, kid.
“We have.” Chariel’s body was rigid as a viper, and though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew they’d make a snake’s look kind in comparison. “We’re simply taking care of some business. Walk away.”
“Business needs to be cleared with the captain,” Sandan said, eyeing the elf. “We’re on high alert.”
“Boy,” the thug behind her said, “take her advice.”
One thing I’d never accuse the Brotherhood of being was dumb. I found myself desperately wishing that Sandan would listen to them, that he’d turn around and pretend he never saw this.
But he was an honest boy. An honest boy who had an honest job, an honest sword, an honest life.
And really, really bad luck.
Sandan seized his sword. “By order of Yanmass and Grand Prince Stavian, I order you to—”
His sword was about halfway out of its sheath when the dagger’s hilt reached his jugular. His voice died in his throat and his eyes bulged out like they didn’t believe what had just happened.
Chariel had that effect on people.
She walked over to his corpse to retrieve her dagger. I took a moment to mutter a two-word prayer for him. No time for anything more. Whatever cruel god had sent Sandan through those doors did so as a gift to me.
And as I took Whisper in hand, I knew it’d just be rude to waste it.