TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Author's Note
Also by Tara K. Harper
Also Available
Copyright Page
For my beloved niece, Anne, who was brave enough
to go canoeing with me at midnight and
who loved forging through the big waves at dawn.
Wolf in darkness
Wolf in night
Wolf in shadow
Wolf in light
—from Resist the Mist
SPECIAL THANKS TO
My neighbor Karen Castro, who graciously let me pace irritably in her living room while ranting and writing out loud;
Ed Godshalk for our annual midnight-to-dawn discussions of bayonets and kings (our spouses are saints);
Tamara Hanna, for letting me paint whatever I wanted on her living room walls (talk about a big canvas), and then for saying she loved it;
Detective Amber Lewis, of the Portland Police Department, for excellent advice and suggestions, and for correcting my misconceptions;
My brother, Detective Kevin L. Harper, of the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, for pointing out all those pesky flaws, and for helping define the intrigue;
My father, Dan Harper, for the new computer, without which this story would not have been completed;
Peter Honigstock, of Powell’s Bookstore at Loehman’s Plaza (formerly the store at Progress, later known as something else, and now known by a completely different name that I’ve never figured out), for finding me marvelous, exactly-what-I-wanted books, although our wood floors are starting to sag because of the excessive weight of my library;
Artist Paul Missal, who lent me his cabin to write in during a fine coastal storm, and who helped me understand the first writer’s block I’ve ever experienced;
Dr. Karen Gunson, Medical Examiner, Portland, Oregon, for helping me refine the plague; Chief Engineer Mike Roset, of the SS Independence, for unexpected information about steam engines; and Dr. Ernest V. Curto, for the moons;
My readers Doug Hartzell (who gets killed off at the end, to his own great satisfaction); Rich Wilson, who pinch-hitted in a most excellent manner; Mike Fitzgerald, whose insight was invaluable; and Stephanie Castro, who never lets me down;
Cindy Bertelman for a completely unexpected and amazing book of old formulas for metal oxides, tints, and what have you;
My editor, Shelly Shapiro, who was more than gracious in not overpressuring me;
Sandy Keen, for friendship far above and beyond;
And my husband, Richard Jarvis, who rebuilt, rewired, reconfigured and restored everything I broke, fried, crashed and destroyed during the course of writing this story.
Prologue
South, on the coast, in a city called Sidisport . . .
The dark-clothed man watched the black, glistening bay with the patience of an oldEarth Job. His gaze flicked toward each movement in the dark, and his body was poised against the cold seawall with deliberate negligence. His well-trained ears were tuned to the slapping of water on the rocks and wall below, to the couples who strolled behind him. To the soft laughter and murmured words as lovers pried at shuttered hearts beneath six of the glowing moons. He noted and discarded each couple automatically as they passed the wall where he waited. Not them, and not those two. Not that couple, either . . . It was a constant mantra, a steadying of his heartbeat in the dank spring air. It wouldn’t be long now. An hour at most. The Tamrani woman liked dancing enough to stay late, even if she was with the dandy, but she was almost always home by two. He glanced at another couple who stepped up onto the waterfront. Too tall and thin, the hair too light . . .
His small boat waited in the slick water below. He had no worries that it would be seen. It was just another smudge against the seawall, a thicker edge in inky shadow cast harshly by the hovering moons. The only thing to draw the eye to his boat was the sea ladder that stretched down the stone wall. The ladder rungs glinted faintly, but since there were ladders all along the wall, no one paid attention. This one was even darker than the others. He’d sanded it himself to make sure his slide would be smooth, then had darkened it again with blackwash. No metal splinters there, though he’d have to watch his footing on the rocks near the boat. He could still get scraped up, and one didn’t go into the water with wounds. Not near the shore, anyway, not after the spring currents shifted. The parasites that bred in the bay would eat a wounded man alive, leave him screaming, begging for the death that could be days, even ninans away. He’d seen it before. It was a classic lesson-killing, to dip a slashed man in the bay.
A closed carriage pulled up to the left, waited a moment, then took two couples away while the Haruman stared out at the water as if lost in thought. No one spared him more than a glance. It was understandable. His coat was well cut but of chancloth, not of silk. His boots were shined but neither rich nor new. His gloves were white and spotless, but cut in last year’s style. Everything about him said acceptable but unimportant, not someone to notice. Even the city guard had done no more than nod as they passed him twenty minutes ago. They wouldn’t be back for an hour. It was a good time for the Tamrani to show. There were few people left on the waterfront to watch or interfere, and those he saw were drunks, not paladins. That was another luck of the moons. The first thing his father had taught him was how to avoid the eager heroes and blend in with the drunks and darkness.
Soon, soon. Footsteps faded off to the right: a gentleman walked quickly, nervous in the night, his thick cloak flapping in the chill marine air. The Haruman dismissed him with a glance. The Tamrani lady, she was out with someone like that: slender, aesthetic, concerned with his clothes. Fentris the Fop, they called her dancing partner. Rumor said he’d killed his older brother in an alley, stabbed the man in the back with his own knife. The word was that the fop had backed away from every challenge he’d received since then. Gossip also had it that the fop was lucky the Tamrani’s brother hadn’t caught the two of them together, but that if the brother had, the fop would have run like a hare before worlags. A coward like that would be no trouble.
The Tamrani lady, now, she was a different piece of work. He’d have considered negotiating other terms for her, but the Tamrani were powerful, they protected their own, and her House wasn’t one in decline. He had no wish to bring that down on his head. Quick kill, quick silver, that’s what his father had said, and his father had managed more than four dozen targets before he was taken down. Whatever the lady knew that had bought this kill tonight, it would die with her in the dark.
In the distance, a carriage let another couple off on the elegant waterfront and drove away. In
the night, the Haruman glanced their way and felt himself tense. Ah, there were the two he sought. He turned back to the bay and made himself breathe slowly, softly as he heard them strolling toward him. He timed the steps and the soft murmur of her voice. His heart rate was up, but it made him poised, not skittish. Fast heart, fast reflex; fast hands, fast catch. His father had known all the old sayings.
They were almost on him when he sighed as if bored, straightened, and turned. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and made as if to step past them. The knife in his left hand came out of its sheath like a silent snake. His arm moved smoothly, swinging up as he turned, and the razor steel slid into her heavy clothes, unopposed and unseen, like a needle through layers of lint. And in, in, cutting the bodice, the tip on her ribs, starting to sink in, slick as sweat, so easy, so fast, and the woman made no sound. She stiffened like a doe caught in light. He didn’t look, but he knew her eyes had shocked wide as the tip slid into flesh. He started to press the thrust in and out to cut through her lungs as he slipped past—
Something clamped around his wrist and jerked before the steel could sink in halfway. There was a sting on his arm, and his body reacted before thought was formed. He tried to twist the blade out to rip flesh as much as possible, but he couldn’t hold on to the hilt. Sloppy. Too much blood; his fingers were nerveless. He went for his other knife. Then he choked out a scream. His left hand was half severed at the wrist. It was the Haruman’s blood that spurted out, not that of the Lady Jianan.
Lamplight bleached the motion like a black-and-white drawing. The fop slashed the Haruman’s upper arm like a flash of light, then back-cut across his neck in the other fraction of a second. The carotid vein split like an overripe plum. Rich, red blood arced out. Kerien staggered back, clutching the hand that dangled by a strip of tendon and flesh. Gods—the fop? The fop was cutting him again, shoulder, arm, chest. He kicked out desperately, twisted and flailed back in defense, slashed hard and fast, but it was already too late.
With one steel hand on Jianan’s arm, Fentris jerked her out of the way and side-kicked the other man’s knees. He back-slashed at the blader’s arm even before the man started to fall. Then he spun Jianan back and hilt-punched the Haruman’s face as the blader began to drop. Bones splintered; the assassin screamed again.
Jianan’s green eyes were wide and frozen, and she was sagging onto his arm. “Jianan,” he snapped. He dragged her back farther. The assassin was on his knees, crawling, his good hand pressed over his carotid. Blood washed out in pulses from between the man’s fingers, but he could still be a danger. It would be seconds before he was fully unconscious, minutes before he was dead.
Fentris cradled Jianan, his hands over hers to keep her from jerking the knife free. “Leave it,” he said urgently. “It has to stay. Let the healers take it out.”
“It . . . hurts,” she whispered.
“I know. I’m going to set you down now and try to stop the bleeding.” The knife hadn’t gone all the way in, but she was a slender woman. It could have pierced her heart.
“Assass . . . sin.”
“A robber,” he soothed. “A second-rate blader. Don’t talk.” He yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and wadded it over the wound. He looked quickly around. “Help us,” he shouted. “Guards, anyone!” The two couples in the distance didn’t even glance back.
Jianan cried out as he shifted her, clutched his black jacket weakly. “Not . . . robber.”
“We’re on the boardwalk, late on a Pendian night, strolling around like anyone’s prey.” His handkerchief was soaking through. Her dress was silk and useless as tissue for stopping the blood. He said sharply, “And if he isn’t just a robber, what could you possibly have been doing to make yourself a target?”
“Don’t be . . . angry,” she whispered. She was having trouble seeing. And cold. She was icy cold. She forced her lips to make the words, but they came out at a great distance. “Did you . . . hurt him? Is . . . he dead?”
He glanced at the other man’s body. The assassin was weak enough now that his left arm lay limply across the sidewalk, and his other hand barely covered his neck. “Yes.” There was a cold note in his cultured voice. “I’d say he’s well on his way to the moons.” He shrugged quickly out of his jacket and rolled the tailored garment into a pillow for her head.
“Oh, gods,” she gasped as he shifted her. “Hurts.”
“Lie still, love. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
“You’ll ruin . . . jacket.”
“It’s for a good cause.” He tore the sleeve off his shirt and folded it into a thick pad over the handkerchief. “Dik-spawned street scum,” he cursed, not quite under his breath. “I’ll see him rot in the seventh hell.”
Jianan almost fainted as he pressed the pad down on the wound. She barely had breath to speak. “Fentris, he was an assassin. Not . . . robber. Have to know . . . who hired him. Find out. It’s important. Promise.”
He packed the cloth tightly around the blade. “If he was an assassin, I’ll find out.” His usually calm face hardened. “You can trust me on that.”
There had been no bubbling in the blood on her chest, and she wasn’t bleeding from her mouth, but it could be free-flowing inside. He looked desperately around. There was a carriage in the distance, but it had turned away down the street, following the path his own carriage had taken to the lot where it would wait. The waterfront businesses were closed, and the few apartments over them were dark. Four blocks away, the city guard had just stepped around the corner as they circled the blocks farther and farther away. “Guard!” Fentris shouted. “Help us! Guard, she’s been stabbed—”
The two men looked his way, seemed to peer through the dim light, then finally broke into a run as he waved urgently with one arm. One stopped for a moment at the lamppost to release a warning bell, and the peals clapped out across the stone streets like the pulse of the gods of the dead.
Jianan’s fingers clutched his wrist weakly. “Fentris. Listen. Papers, notes,” she breathed. “Secret place.”
He felt a chill. “The lockbox in the courtyard?” If she was hiding something important enough to kill for, that was the worst place to put it. He himself could count six people who knew which bricks to move.
But she surprised him. “Bedroom,” she whispered. She breathed raggedly for a second. “Closet . . . door.”
He stared down at her. They had talked once of hiding places. He’d been twenty-five, he remembered, two years ago. The month before his brother had died, the month before he’d become an outcast in his own family. He recalled every detail of that time with the clarity of glass. It was only in the two years since that he’d ceased to care about remembering anything.
Two years ago, they’d been in the courtyard, and Jianan had showed him the lockbox hidden in the bricks beneath her window. He’d scoffed and said that if he had something to hide—papers, letters, deeds—he’d put them someplace obvious. Inside something that everyone looks at but no one sees. The closet door, perhaps. Or inside a handle. People look into the spaces beyond such things, not at such things themselves. He said lightly, “You have six closets, Jianan.”
She couldn’t smile. “Fourth closet, fourth door. Lift it . . . off the tracks. Hollowed out from the bottom. Papers there. Take them to . . .” But each breath she drew in was a blast of crushing pain. “Oh, it hurts. Fentris, it really hurts.”
By the moons, how long did it take two men to run two hundred meters? The lights had gone on in an apartment over a milliner, and in the distance another pair of city guards appeared. “Get a healer,” he shouted at the first two. “For moons’ sake, get a healer.” He didn’t ease off the pressure on her ribs. “The pain is a good sign,” he told her firmly. “It means you’re going to be fine.”
“How . . . would you know?” She smiled weakly. “You’ve . . . never been . . . stabbed.”
He had—twice—but it wasn’t something he spoke of. “I’ll find the papers,” he said instead. “Stop talk
ing now.”
“Feels like . . . being crushed.”
He hid his unease. That could be a sign of heart damage. “Help is coming. You’ll be with the healers soon, and everything will be fine.”
“Listen,” she whispered. “Get the papers to my brother. No one . . . else. Promise me.”
“To Ero? He’s at sea. It would take me months.”
She started to shake her head, went bone white even in the pale lamplight, and barely managed, “Con.”
Crap on a stickbeast, Fentris cursed silently. Condari Brithanas had been one of his brother’s best friends. Brithanas had been out in the western counties for the past two years, but he would have heard every story and rumor before he left Sidisport again. The man’s one day in town had been short enough that Fentris had easily avoided him. Fentris had already sent his secretary ahead to listen in on the Ariyen councils, just so he wouldn’t have to face the other man. After all, according to everyone down to the tailors and the cooks in the poorest homes in town, he’d murdered Condari’s best friend. To seek him out deliberately, after Jianan had been stabbed in his care?
“I don’t think—” he started.
“Yes.” Her nails dug in. “Promise. Catch him . . . Deepening Road. Stay with him till he . . . gets to Shockton. Fentris.” She clutched him weakly now. “Keep him safe.”
It was Fentris, not Condari Brithanas, who would need safety. Fentris looked down at his bloody gloves. He said flatly, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I’ll . . . do it myself, then.”
She struggled to sit up, gasped, and he barely had to press her down before she collapsed back onto his jacket. “Don’t be an idiot,” he snapped.
“Promise.”
“I swear, by the rust on a silk hat, you’ll be the death of me.” He looked skyward for a moment. “Alright, I’ll do it, though after your brother finds out how I’ve left you, I’ll come back as a ghost, not a man.”
“You’ll . . . go tonight.”
His lips tightened as he felt the heat of her blood.
“Sw-swear,” she whispered.
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