Wekesa’s valley pryde was the highest ranked in Bastiion, second only to Zaethan’s own, and he didn’t believe that the lack of progress in their investigation was a coincidence. The more he considered it, the more Wekesa’s delay seemed intentional. After all, once the killer was named, the valley pryde would be forced to end their investigation and, consequently, forfeit their permission to remain in the Proper.
Meaning, if Zaethan wanted to remove Wekesa from his city, all he needed to do was hunt down the reason the other alpha had been sent for in the first place. It was a strategy that directly defied his father’s orders, but Zaethan decided it was best to sort out the finer details on the backend.
Besides, if he allowed the Jwona rapiki to extend his stay in Bastiion, it might not be long before Zaethan could no longer claim the city at all. Or the pryde inside it.
“You don’t believe in the Fates, Ahoté. Or their imprisoned.” Kumo’s great shoulders shook as he laughed steps ahead. “Ano, we do this by might. Kwihila rapiki mu Jwona!”
“Victory can write over fate, cousin, but I’ll take all the help Àla’maia wants to give,” Zaethan retorted, dodging the clothesline. “Keep your eyes high. If what the hag says is true, that’s where victory will show itself.”
“Uni,” Kumo agreed, then jogged up the tight street to relay the same to Takoda.
Watching Kumo squeeze his breadth between the stalls, packed with hagglers and even stingier merchants, reminded Zaethan of years past. When they were cubs, his cousin used to visit Bastiion on occasion. The first time they’d explored these very streets, Kumo returned to the palace with two black eyes for the price of one. By Marketown’s standards, that was a bargain.
They followed Takoda down another, narrower alley, though no less crowded. Even nearing midnight, women dragged their children from one merchant to the next, bartering with fervor. The divergence of classes here in Marketown never ceased to amaze him. As Zaethan passed a booth of baubles, an off-duty kitchen maid screamed at a noble’s wife, who had just ripped a shiny object from a night-caller’s grasp. One dressed in soiled linen, the second in silk, and the third a combination of the two. It was remarkable how quickly the classes forgot their stations in a vendor’s tent, and how much more quickly they recalled them upon leaving.
Beyond Kumo, Zaethan saw Takoda duck when a broken bottle whizzed overhead. From a cloud of smoke, a ragged-looking man stumbled out of a dirty tent, bowling into several passersby. Another hunk of glass followed his departure, shattering across his yellowed, pipe marrow-stained tunic. Cloying vapors pooled in the street when a larger man, red in the face, erupted from the tent and hurled a bucket next.
Kumo’s forearm covered his mouth as they neared the bumbling fools. “Depths, that’s rancid!”
“Eh, break it up!” Zaethan pushed past his beta and through a group of gawking bystanders. “Uni, you!” He pointed to the second man. By the severe jaundice of his eyes, Zaethan didn’t know if he’d even comprehended the order.
“Ow! Shtàka!” Takoda flinched when something hit him. “He said break it up, you stoned scumbucket! This yancy’s puffed higher than dandi pollen. Depths!”
Blood trickled from Takoda’s temple. Zaethan grabbed the lowlife and twisted his arm, inspiring him to spew the contents of his stomach onto the cobblestones. Kumo doubled over once he saw the man’s vomit. Were she to ever challenge him again, Zahra should just eat a spoiled breakfast, and his beta would fold at the sight of it.
“A night in the guardhouse should sober him up,” Zaethen said grimly. “Come on.”
Zaethan reared back when the man’s head suddenly bobbed to the side with a crack, knocking him out. Releasing the unconscious bum, Zaethan knelt and picked up the clay tile that had landed near his boot.
“Kumo, Takoda!” he barked. “The roof—we’ve got movement!”
Without hesitation, Zaethan sprinted down the alley in the direction of tumbling tiles. He spotted a launder’s ladder and scaled the rungs to a second-story balcony, nearly tripping over a lady’s underskirt in the process. Climbing onto an awning, he hauled himself atop the clay roofing and scanned the patchwork of Marketown’s skyline. There, to the east—a dark smudge leapt from one building to the adjacent. Squinting, he realized it was not one smudge, but two.
They were moving too fast to catch up from behind, but he wouldn’t need to. These streets wove an intimate network Zaethan learned long ago. Tracking their trajectory, he ran north, skidding along old tiles as they buckled beneath him. He briefly lost his balance on a section of unstable framing, slashing his shin on a makeshift gutter. Panting, Zaethan pushed forward with the last ounce of his endurance as the dark smudges became cloaked figures and continued their race over the rooftops.
Jumping off a higher platform, Zaethan caught his arms around the second body. In an awkward barrel hug, he gripped the figure’s torso as they rolled down a slope of loose slats and rickety tilework. When their combined weight hit a particularly weak spot, he and the masked figure fell together through the planks and onto the floor of an abandoned upper room.
Zaethan groaned, cursing as a pang shot through his elbow. Blinking, he readjusted his hold. He’d landed on the perpetrator.
“Get off me, you clumsy buffoon!” a husky feminine voice wheezed under the weight of his body.
Immediately Zaethan sat up and ripped the hood off a head of ashy hair, the moonlight overhead revealing the y’siti’s delicate features.
“You really are a cockroach!” he snarled, drawing a blade and whipping it up under her chin. “Everywhere I look, I find you scurrying about. And to think, your act the other night with Salma almost had me fooled.”
“You just let him get away! I’ve been tracking him for weeks, and tonight I nearly had him!” the witch shrieked, disregarding the knife he held to her throat. “Weeks of progress, for nothing! Are you really so delusional? I was chasing him, you fool!”
“Why should I believe—”
“Ahoté!” Kumo called in search from the roof.
“Ah, Alpha Zà!” Takoda’s head manifested through the hole in the ceiling. “You catch a—uh…Alpha Zà?”
“Uni, I’ve caught an al’Haidren.” Zaethan’s confirmation echoed through the vacant space.
“Huh. Bit problematic, yeah? What’re you going to do with her?”
“Get off me!” The y’siti bucked under his hold. “Every minute you waste, we invite another slaying. Do you want that on your conscience, Kasim?”
“Right…” Panting, Kumo joined Takoda above. “…right behind you, Ahoté.”
“She insists she’s innocent. Same search as we,” Zaethan yelled back without taking an eye off the wriggling witch. Even with his knees pinning her limbs to the floorboards, her efforts boosted him inches off the ground. She wasn’t fatigued in the least.
“Na huwàa tàkom lai na huwàa. Same with y’siti, yeah?” Kumo called through the busted slats.
Zaethan glared down at the y’siti and considered his cousin’s counsel. Wekesa’s threat to both his position and his pryde in Bastiion was imminent, and trusting her again could be his undoing—or perhaps his salvation.
Her lustrous eye flicked to Kumo overhead. “What did he just say to you?”
“He said, ‘It takes a hound to hunt a hound.’”
She swallowed. “What does that mean?”
His blade inched off her ghostly flesh. Rolling back on his heels, Zaethan eased to his feet.
“It means you are either with us or against us.” He clutched the knife in his hand. “So, which will it be…Hound?”
TWENTY-FOUR
Luscia
Considering the coveted view from Luscia’s private terrace, a stroll through Bastiion’s illustrious Drifting Bazaar was long overdue. Merchant rafts draped in bright hues and mixed textiles littered the murky waters. The scent of foreign spices h
overed in the air, the source of each sharp aroma tucked under tarp and canvas as their peddlers slumbered in the bowels of each buoyant stall. Though the bay was sleepy and the hour dark, the industrious grid of floating booths looked much how she’d imagined.
Present company excluded.
Fortunately, the three Darakaians kept their distance, and while Luscia hardly appreciated playing the hound, it was the better alternative. Kasim had been crushing her lungs when posing the two options—neither preferable—and the lack of air hadn’t assisted her decision-making skills. Climbing over a snug swing bridge to the meager gangway of another stall, Luscia hoped she’d chosen wisely.
“We already passed this booth,” one of his men grumbled—the one with shoulder-length braids. His beads chattered as they crossed the crude bridge behind her. “Shtàka, is she just taking us in circles?”
“Wewe huwàa…na y’siti tàkom lai na y’siti, yeah?” The huge one, Kasim’s second, answered the other warrior.
Luscia understood little Andwele, but the bits she pieced together were not flattering. She couldn’t decide if being called a dog, as opposed to a member of the undead, was an upgrade or a demotion with the Darakaians.
Kasim shifted restlessly in her periphery when Luscia paused and assessed a stack of crates. She needed a higher vantage point. Encumbered by their ordinary limitations, she’d tried to chart a path the Darakaians could follow, but it was like hauling a sack of opinionated potatoes through the maze of makeshift waterways.
“You’re trying my patience,” Kasim warned in her ear. “I can still revise the terms of our agreement. You already failed to fulfill your end of one bargain—don’t make this the second.”
The hilt of his kopar pressed into her lower back, just above the crest of the trousers she’d procured for tonight’s outing. Apparently, Kasim was still cross from their dispute that morning, when he’d again howled to use the wraiths. Instead, she’d handed him a curved staff and tied rocks to his ankles.
He’d floundered miserably.
Kasim really had a hard time letting things go.
“I failed at nothing, Lord Darakai.” Luscia heaved a sigh and reached around to ease the cool metal back toward his middle. “I cannot speed your own rate of learning. That—” She peered higher, toward a potential landing. “—is your own affliction. You requested I lead this party, yet are proving to be a terrible follower.”
“I lead, witch. You are just my means to an end.” Kasim pivoted in front of her, puffing his chest out at her chin. A pleasing, smoky tang of camilla and cedar doused her nose.
“This continued infatuation with semantics is exhausting.” Luscia retreated and inhaled the briny odor of the bay. “If you wish to succeed tonight, silence your sounding alarm and do shut up.”
She twisted away, putting her back to Kasim. Cocking her head, she listened to the sounds of the night. The tide lapped the docks, bins and boxes creaking in the routine sway. Beneath the rudimentary layers of sound, emerging snores carried a rumbling baritone through the darkness.
With an impatient huff, the other al’Haidren murmured something under his breath.
“I asked for quiet,” Luscia repeated sternly.
“Shtàka. No one said a word!” he barked, folding his arms. “Some y’siti ears you’ve got.”
Luscia stretched her neck and tried once more, but the rapid whispering increased. She spun in place. The big one, Kasim’s beta, shrugged to the slender Darakaian in front of the gangway. Neither man’s lips were moving.
Low voices swarmed her ears when the relentless buzz engulfed her mind.
“Niit. Niit, heh’ta!” She shook her head violently. Luscia scrambled for a vial inside her cloak, but it slipped from her fingers with a tremor, shattering across the planks underfoot. “Heh’ta! Make it stop!”
Clutching her temples furiously, she tripped into the leather folds of Kasim’s jacket. This couldn’t happen, not here. Not with witnesses. Panting, Luscia gripped the buttery, weathered arms of his coat as the buzzing grew to a roar.
“Ahoté!”
“Alpha Zá!”
Through the whirring symphony, she recognized the measured, high-pitch whine as Kasim released the kopar from his hip. She felt his shoulder rise under her fingertips. Luscia lifted her face and met his gaze, tense under each puckered brow. Her lips parted, to ask for aid, when a loud pop jolted her limbs. Her head snapped toward her spine. Ringing flooded her ears.
Kasim’s eyes widened as he stumbled away from her on the narrow platform. “Depths…”
Suddenly, her vision erupted in threads of light.
Energy from the Other shimmered throughout the Drifting Bazaar, dancing faintly on a gentle breeze. A single source of brightness in the shadows captured Luscia’s focus. The thread, brilliant against its brothers, shivered around her torso and into the distance. Hesitantly, fearfully, she turned to watch it slither past the two Darakaians at the edge of the swing bridge.
Sensing her attention, it twitched erratically. An eerie light that she alone could see flickered over the waters.
Instinctively, her limbs rebelled and leapt to the call. Luscia dove past Kasim, toward the stack of crates, and vaulted overhead after the pulsing guide. The ball of her foot grazed the beta’s shoulder for balance when she crossed the bridge in midair. Landing, Luscia rolled into an explosive sprint. She hardly heard the Darakaians yelling in her wake.
As she bounded across the rickety planks to another stall, the ringing eased and opened to pages of sound. Abruptly the shining thread convulsed and switched to the east, pulling Luscia through an open window of a vacant booth. Frantically, she skidded overtop a cluttered counter and through a swath of stale, moldering curtains, tumbling into the open.
A scream fractured the haze in her mind.
Luscia jumped to her heels. With a spark, the lumin shuddered fitfully toward a floating ghetto across a vast waterway. A system of rigging connected posts on either side of the channel. In a rush, she ran up the nearest post, freed Ferocity, and cut loose a cable. Cording it around her forearm, she swung and, with eager footwork, treaded the side of a freighter until she met the roofing.
Atop the unstable structure, the threads flashed in and out of focus. Between eroding, clustered stalls, the lumin pulsed around a circlet of darkness, even under the abundance of a full moon. The darkness shifted aside in the form of a cloaked figure to reveal a whimpering child. The pale hue of the young boy’s hair shone as he struggled to escape his captor’s grasp.
A sound of fury broke through her lips. Luscia abandoned the freighter and carved her Najjani blade through the air. Despite her speed, the cloaked figure whirled responsively, tossing the boy aside and catching the tip of Ferocity at their shoulder instead of the throat. Luscia’s knee cracked as it made impact on the platform before she clumsily rolled to a crouch.
Tightening her grasp around the hilt of her blade, Luscia sprung after the figure. A gloved hand released their bleeding shoulder and they ran west. Lurching in the figure’s direction, Luscia stopped at the cross-caste’s wail of pain. Looking back, she saw a pool of dark blood soaking the planks beneath his little body where it escaped a deep gash along his arm.
Luscia growled in frustration as she watched his captor disappear in the distance, only the glint off a pair of fine boot buckles under the moonlight marking their departure. Hurriedly, she moved to the boy, who was no more than six or seven, judging by roundness of his scraped, tear-streaked cheeks.
“Shh.” Luscia tore a strip off the hem of her undershirt and bound his arm tightly. It was so small. “Shh, waedfrel. We are safe now. Wem, yes, it’s going to be all right.”
Within minutes, the Darakaians tore through the alley of freighters, stopping short at the sight of them.
“Wh—” Kasim panted, bending over to catch his breath. “Which way did he go? Depths, why di
dn’t you follow him?” His tied locs swished erratically as he gestured to the emptiness.
“Because he’s losing blood—a lot of it.” Luscia scooped up the boy, caressing the back of his shivering head. “I made a call. Deal with it.”
Kasim all but snarled at her, though she knew his malice was misdirected. He wanted to catch the cross-caste killer almost as much as she did, if for different reasons—reasons she suspected had more to do with the scarred man in Salma’s tavern than the lives of Boreali innocents.
“Give me the boy.” He reached out, but Luscia tightened her grip. Kasim motioned angrily to her distinctive eyes. “You create complications by being here! How will you hide those from your own cross-caste?”
Luscia chewed her lip. He was right. In their political climate, the Boreali al’Haidren could not be seen stalking the Bazaar in the middle of the night with a bleeding child in her care. And unlike her visit to The Veiled Lady, there was no amount of cocao powder that could mask the truth from one of Boreal’s own descendants.
Slowly, Luscia relinquished the boy into Kasim’s stiff arms. They wrapped around his little body possessively—protecting him from Luscia. As if she would ever even dream of hurting this child, or any other.
“Where are your parents, little one?” she asked, but he only whimpered into Kasim’s chest. “Your mother?” Luscia stroked his hair. “Yeh Mamu? Mamu ou Fappa?”
“Fappa!” The boy sobbed and pointed toward the eastern slums.
Luscia nodded and looked warily to Kasim. “When you find their vessel, instruct his father to stitch the wound and make a paste of pure kaleo flower and gilead leaf. He’s likely a Boreali trader if the boy calls him that. He will understand.”
House of Bastiion (The Haidren Legacy, Book 1) Page 23