“Why?” The word was a rumble that reminded Kaylin of the thunder that sounds almost immediately after lightning has flashed.
“Because if we avoid it, there’s not much cleanup done. We can run,” Morse added.
“Your one-offs come out of that shadow?” he asked her.
“I’d guess that’s exactly where the one we fought today came from.”
“You’re expecting more?”
Morse’s expression was unexpectedly grim. “Not like that,” she finally said. “I hear swords up ahead.” She took a sharp breath and then drew a long knife in either hand. She glanced at Kaylin, who had daggers equipped, and nodded before she headed directly for the base of what had once been a watchtower. “You’ll see.”
Kaylin glanced at Tiamaris.
Tiamaris shook his head. “You and your friend—and her compatriots—may well be able to weather what lies at the heart of that shadow. I, my kin, and the Barrani, would not necessarily do as well. I will wait for you,” he added. “I will not prevent you from following. What you see, remember.”
It was a reminder. Her hand ached briefly as she remembered the memory crystal the Arkon had placed into her palm. She nodded.
But he hadn’t quite finished. Glancing at the sky, seeing whatever it was his spell allowed him to see, he said, “This is what we feared.”
Morse said, “So there are things even a Dragon is afraid of.”
“Looks like.”
“What about you? What are you afraid of?”
“You know me,” Kaylin said with a grimace.
“Too damn stupid to be afraid.” Morse grinned. It was an ugly expression, but it held no anger; it held what some strange alchemy of emotion made anger from. Pain, maybe. “You’ll need the throwing knives here,” she told Kaylin, forcing that glimpse of the abyss from her face. “And you’ll need to be able to move.
“Don’t let them touch you. If it comes to that, kill them first.”
Kaylin nodded.
“Eli.”
“What?”
“I mean it. No stupid shit here. Whatever you see, whatever the hell you think you see—it doesn’t matter. It’s all shadow, it’s all a mind-fuck. What comes out of that shadow, whatever it is that comes for you—kill it.”
“If it’s a mind—”
Morse slapped her. Kaylin raised a hand and a knife glinted in the sunlight; it was inches from Morse’s throat, but Morse didn’t raise a long-knife to block it; she stood there as if she were made of stone and the worst Kaylin could do with the damn knife was blunt it.
“Welcome to the shadows,” Morse snarled. “What you see can be killed. Whatever you see, kill it if it won’t keep its distance.”
“Morse—”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll have to kill you.”
The shadow that had seemed so dense and confined grew amorphous as they jogged down the street. If Kaylin had wondered where Morse was leading them, she had her answer: there were men at the end of the street, in the more natural shadows cast by the overhang of taller buildings. These men, in workaday armor, with weapons that would never have passed inspection in the Halls, looked up as Morse slowed.
“Morse,” one said, “get your ass out of the street!”
“Good to see you, too, Killian. Where’s Seeley?”
The man, older than Morse by a good five years, lifted a hand and slid it across his throat. Morse swore.
“We were late,” Killian said grimly.
“How many we lose?”
“Those buildings,” he replied, pointing. There were two, facing each other, the watchtower—or what was left of it—in between them. There was nothing remarkable about either building; each was tall, and it was separated from its neighbors by dead grass and weeds.
“Many people in ’em?”
“It’s the watch border. Not many. No one smart.”
“What about the men on the tower?” Kaylin broke in.
Killian glanced at her, and then back at Morse. “She’s new,” he said. No question.
“Hasn’t been in these parts for a while, at any rate.” Morse added, to Kaylin, “They were dead before the shadow started to take hold. Trust me.”
“How many?” Kaylin asked.
“Four per tower. We can’t spare more. If they’re paying attention instead of playing dice, they’ve got a good chance to get out with their lives.” She shrugged. “Killian, word from the Southwest Tower?”
“Not yet, but that’s looking good. Compared to this.”
“Yeah, well. So is hell.”
Killian snorted; it was his version of a brief laugh. “When we get there,” he told Morse, “they’re going to have to come up with something good, ’cause compared to this, they got nothing.”
“Only if you listen to priests,” Morse snapped. She didn’t.
But Kaylin wasn’t done yet, and she wasn’t—quite—content to be a passive observer. “How do you fight it?” she asked them both, gesturing at the mass of shadow.
“We don’t. We kill anything that comes out of it, and we wait. We wait long enough,” Morse added, “and either something big comes out and kills most of us, or it shrinks and goes back to hell. Something big came out, but it didn’t stick around here. We’re left with the waiting and the cleanup.”
“But you don’t just pull back.”
Morse shook her head. “Cleanup’s necessary. Learned that the hard way. Heads up, Eli.”
Kaylin settled instinctively into a fighting stance and turned toward the shadow, the wall of the building at her back. She expected to see ferals, or something similar, coalesce out of the shadows that moved as if caught in the heart of a storm; she’d seen shadow this dense beneath the High Halls, and she’d seen what it produced.
But she was wrong.
Struggling her way out of the shadows, its tendrils wrapping themselves around her legs and arms as if they were webbing, was an old woman. Kaylin grimaced and almost sheathed her knives; Morse barked a single word that was so harsh Kaylin didn’t recognize it as anything but a command to stay her ground.
It’s the watch border. Not many. No one smart.
No one smart, Kaylin thought, with sudden, bitter fury, or no one mobile. No one who had somewhere else to go. Who did that leave? The elderly, certainly.
Morse darted forward, right arm raised. Right, left—with Morse, it didn’t matter. You could arm her with a damn spoon and it was deadly. Kaylin, knowing this, couldn’t stop herself from moving ahead of where Morse had chosen to stand. “Morse, don’t—”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Morse snarled. “Wrap your empty outer-city head around it. There’s not one fucking thing you can do.”
“She’s hurt—”
Morse laughed. “You have no clue,” she said. But she didn’t kick or strike Kaylin, who now watched the woman weave her way slowly up the center of the street. Her hands were curved in the way old hands often were, and her shoulders were hunched, as if to ward off blows. She was not screaming for help—she was in Barren, after all—but she didn’t speak, either; she was keening softly in distress.
Because Morse was at her back, Kaylin didn’t relax her stance; she didn’t sheathe her weapon, although the weapon was hardly likely to make her look like less of a threat to a panic-stricken old woman. All of the Hawks were required, in their first year, to take riot training with the Swords; they were required to take classes—classes which Kaylin had even passed—in handling people made mindless by either fury or fear.
Barren’s men—and women—certainly weren’t.
Kaylin took a step forward; Morse stayed where she was. Kaylin should have known, then. She should have remembered what Morse’s idea of lesson meant. Morse didn’t have the Halls behind her; she didn’t have their experience, and the laws that governed them. The only law that Morse understood, the only one that mattered, was survival.
And if you couldn’t survive, you were obviously too damn stupid to learn fast enough
for Morse.
The old woman moved closer, and she moved slowly; she appeared to be alone; there was no one else for her to lean on, no one else to hide behind. It wasn’t suspicious, not to Kaylin—she’d seen that a lot, growing up in Nightshade. She’d almost been on the other end of the spectrum: five years old, nowhere to go, no one to ask for help.
But she’d had Severn, in the end. Severn, who had hurt her more than anyone, or anything, that she had ever faced.
She took a step forward slowly, and then another, and she sheathed one dagger; the other, she let fall to her side. Holding out a hand, she approached the old woman; she heard Morse’s sharp breath, but Morse didn’t speak.
Yes, she should have known.
The old woman sensed her standing there alone, and raised her pale, white-crowned head.
Her eyes were the color of black opals in the lined mask of her face.
CHAPTER 12
But it was an old woman’s face that surrounded those horrible, unnatural eyes. There were no extra eyes, no stalks, no ears, no sudden tendrils of dark, roiling shadow contained in the shape of flesh. Her mouth, when it opened, contained the normal set of teeth—where normal, in the fiefs, meant a lot of extra gaps—and those teeth were the yellow, flattened teeth you could find in any underfed, old woman’s mouth.
They weren’t fangs, and her mouth didn’t suddenly stretch and distort so it was double the length of her face. But she didn’t speak; she keened. It was almost an animal sound.
It was also a sound of distress, of fear, shorn of something as sensible or intelligible as words.
Kaylin froze as the woman stumbled toward her.
Behind Kaylin—not so far behind that she was inaudible, Morse cursed. “What did I fucking tell you?” she said, her voice not nearly distant enough.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.” Kaylin was in stance now; she was set to move, if movement was necessary. But to, or away, she wasn’t certain. Her dagger—Tiamaris’s dagger—was cool in her palm, and her hands felt dry and cold. She wanted the Dragon, not his gift of knives, but he was gone.
The woman reached for her, and Kaylin moved, sidestepping, dancing away from both her arm and Morse’s voice. She could throw the dagger, in theory. But in practice? It was hard. Her arms ached; her legs, where cloth brushed them as she shifted her feet, felt raw.
“What will she do?” Kaylin said, moving again. The old woman did not move quickly.
“Grab you, if she can.”
“I got that.”
“I should let her,” Morse spit out. “It’d serve you damn right.” Light flashed; Morse had raised a long knife. She moved toward the old woman with both speed and caution.
“It spreads,” Morse told her. “It spreads.”
“It’s like a—like a disease?”
“Fuck, listen to you. No, it’s not a damn disease. It’s worse. It’s instant. It gets you, you’re not the fucking same.”
“Does it leave?”
“What?”
“Does it leave when the shadow leaves?”
Morse, still moving out of range, managed to stare at Kaylin as if she had, in an instant, turned into a total, dribbling moron. “What the hell do you mean leave?”
“When it—when it goes away—” Kaylin froze for a second. It was only a second, but Morse, sliding under the restraining force of Kaylin’s words, lunged suddenly in, toward the woman’s throat. One stab, quick, knife pulling up and out. Blood followed in an arc, a brief flash of vivid red, and the woman suddenly staggered and fell.
Morse didn’t clean her dagger, and she didn’t sheathe it. But her expression was dark and, for Morse, angry. “You don’t play games here,” she told Kaylin evenly.
“It doesn’t go, does it?” Kaylin asked quietly.
Morse said, “You’re still pretty damn slow on the uptake.” She turned toward the shadows that were now far more menacing to Kaylin than they had been when they had released the old woman.
Kaylin sheathed her second dagger and knelt at the side of the body. She didn’t ask Morse if it was safe to touch the woman; she didn’t speak to Morse at all. Instead, she caught still shoulders, and she turned the woman over.
She was already dead. Morse was good, had always been good. Kaylin could have killed easily—almost anyone could—but not with the speed, not with the efficiency, that Morse had. Morse didn’t hesitate; she never really had. There was an art to this, and it was all hers.
The woman’s eyes were open.
Kaylin watched as the moving opalescence slowly dimmed, fading at last into a dull, gray-black. There were no irises, no whites. Only when it was done did she reach out to close the woman’s lids.
“I take it back,” Morse said, as Kaylin rose. “You were never this stupid.”
Kaylin managed to shrug, but it was costly. “Soft living,” she managed to say. “Does that to a person.”
Morse’s laugh—and she did laugh—was black.
“How many of your own were in—were up there?”
“Should have been two,” Morse said. She looked past Kaylin.
“Four,” the man who had first stopped them said. Kaylin had already forgotten his name.
“How many have come out?” Morse asked, eyes once again on the velvet of shadow.
“Two.”
“You’ve got crossbows?”
The man nodded, and then, when Morse failed to acknowledge the gesture she couldn’t see, given she hadn’t looked at him once, said yes.
“Get ’em out.”
But he shook his head. “They’re already gone,” he said grimly. “Corben’s gone with Walton and Messer. They’re headed down the streets, setting up quarantine.”
Morse swore again. She turned to Kaylin. “You’ve seen enough,” she told her. “They’ll stay.”
“We’re going to look at a quarantine?”
“No point. There’ll just be a lot of dead people.”
“But the shadow—”
“It’s there. People don’t go near it, they don’t change. If they do, they’re gone. Most are like this one—they can’t speak. Some speak, and if you hear ’em, you know damn well they’re not the same. They touch you, the shadow seeps into you, same as them, and you’re gone. You might as well be dead.”
She nodded in the direction of the base of what had been an observation tower. “Once the shadow opens up, it spits out whatever came with it, eats whatever was nearby, and then sits there. It doesn’t grow and it doesn’t move.” She cursed again.
“Do you have any warning—any warning at all—when it’s about to open up? When it’s about to appear?”
Morse shrugged and glanced at her. “Us? No. But you and your fancy scaly friend might. What we’re hoping for, anyway. The rest of us see it form, and we know where it’s going to shed creatures and kill us. We send our cleanup crews, we kill the things that come out, and we move people back. That’s it.
“We’re going to have to set up a makeshift watch on one of the roofs while we build. We can’t afford to be down one, and we’ve lost two today.” She wiped her blade clean and sheathed it. “Go home. Go back across the river.”
Kaylin nodded slowly.
“I’ll pick you up at the bridge in the morning.”
She started to tell Morse she could find the White Towers on her own, and then, remembering the creature on Capstone, thought better of it. Heading down the street, she met Tiamaris. He took one look at her face and closed his mouth.
“We’re leaving,” she told him grimly.
To her surprise, Severn was waiting for them at the bridge that crossed the Ablayne. It was not the usual bridge, but seeing him on the City side made it feel almost the same. He was leaning against one post, arms folded across his chest; he looked up as she began to cross, Tiamaris in tow.
“Bad?” he asked, as she paused in front of him. He eased his arms to his sides and glanced at the Dragon Lord.
“Bad,” she agreed, understanding both
halves of the single syllable question. “Barren was—Barren. But, Severn?”
He nodded.
“I think he used to be an Arcanist. Tiamaris implied as much, and further implied that he took his sorry ass to the fiefs some ten years ago to avoid being hunted down by Wolves.”
Severn raised a brow, and then nodded; he made no other comment. He wasn’t technically a Wolf anymore. It was just possible he wouldn’t consider this his problem. Then again, in a magical world, it was also possible that he’d suddenly grow wings and fly. He wouldn’t, however, say anything else about it to her, not now; she’d never been a Wolf, and even had she, she’d never been a Shadow Wolf.
“Home,” he told her softly.
Tiamaris cleared his throat. “We are not yet done.”
Kaylin was done. She glanced at the Dragon Lord, saw the color of his eyes, and bit back the words that would tell him just how much she was done. “What’s left?”
“I believe the Arkon and Lord Sanabalis will be waiting for our report.”
“I hope they’re waiting with food,” was her sour reply.
Severn walked with them to the carriage that was waiting. It was an Imperial carriage, to Kaylin’s relief. He joined them, taking the bench beside Kaylin. She sagged against the cushioned back.
“You saw fighting.”
She nodded.
“How bad?”
“Remember the cavern beneath the High Halls?”
“The one that you’re not supposed to mention outside of the High Halls?” he asked.
She grimaced and glanced at Tiamaris. “That one.”
“Kaylin—”
“I know, I know. I just wish—”
Tiamaris raised a brow.
“If people would actually just talk, without all the need for this stupid secrecy, it would make defending any part of this damn city a hell of a lot easier, you know?”
“It would,” Tiamaris replied gravely. “On the other hand, you would probably find yourself in need of a job. Think of the difficulty as a mixed blessing.”
He had a point. She tried to appreciate it as she turned back to Severn. “It was like what we faced there.”
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