Stalking Darkness

by Lynn Flewelling

  At week’s end the winds changed, shredding the clouds into tatters of vermilion and gold against the late afternoon sky.

  “Rythel will be going out soon. What’s the plan for tonight?” asked Alec, gazing out the window beside the workbench.

  Seregil looked up from a pick he’d been repairing and smiled. The slanting sunlight bathed Alec’s profile as he leaned against the window frame, striking fiery glints in his hair and casting his cheekbones and the folds of his clothing into fine relief. A painter should capture him like that, all light and eagerness.

  “What are we going to do?” Alec asked again, turning to look at him.

  “Since we don’t have any new information, I think I’ll shadow him this time,” Seregil replied, sliding the pick back into Alec’s tool roll and handing it to him. “Why don’t you go ahead with that papers job for Lady Hylia?”

  Alec grinned. “On my own?”

  “You’ve done all the legwork. You’re sure Lord Estmar will be away until tomorrow?”

  “That’s what his cook says. It looks like an easy job, too. Lady Hylia’s instructions to the Cat said the papers she wants are hidden in the wine cellar. The door leading down to it is in the second pantry, which has a decent-sized window.”

  “All the same, take your time and be careful,” Seregil cautioned. “The cook knows your face. You can’t afford to get caught.”

  “I know, I know,” Alec muttered happily, only half listening as he checked his tools and tucked the roll away in his coat. “I expect I’ll be done by midnight, in case you need me later on.”

  “I’ll look for you here if I do.”

  Either he’s following some plan, or he’s the most dismally predictable spy in Rhíminee, Seregil thought, watching from a discreet distance as Rhythel went into the Heron.

  A few coins to the doorkeeper, Stark, bought Seregil hourly reports on the goings-on inside. Rythel asked after Lord Seregil and expressed regret at not finding him among the company. He soon consoled himself by falling in with another young noble, the son of Lady Tytiana, Mistress of the Queen’s Wardrobe. They parted company early, however, and Seregil shadowed him to the Maiden’s Laugh, a moderately respectable tavern and brothel near the center of the city. Settling in with the tavern crowd downstairs, Seregil soon charmed a weary tap girl into confiding which girl Rythel had gone up with, which room was hers, and that he’d paid for the entire night.

  After giving the pair time to settle in, Seregil slipped through the boisterous crowd and made his way unnoticed up the stairs to a dim third-floor corridor. Waiting until he was alone in the passage, he went to the door at the end of it and peered through the keyhole.

  Inside, Rythel and his woman were attending earnestly to business. The tiny room had no window or other exit that Seregil could see.

  Paid for the whole night, did you? Seregil thought, stealing back the way he’d come.

  Outside, he unhobbled his mare and glanced up at the moon; just past midnight. Alec was probably back by now, waiting for word from him. Gathering the reins, he headed for the Cockerel.

  Alec was home. Seregil found him pacing morosely in front of the fire. He was still wearing his cloak, and there were twigs and dead leaves tangled in his hair.

  “Problem with the job?”

  Alec paused, scowling. “Lord Estmar is out for the night, but his new lady friend isn’t. Seems she decided to have a few hundred friends in while he’s gone. The whole damn place was lit up bright as noon. I skulked around the garden for hours, thinking things might die down. I gave up when fresh musicians showed up just before midnight. Anything new with Rythel?”

  “Only his choice of whores,” Seregil replied. “Come on. I’ve had enough of trailing around after this bastard. Show me this map of his.”

  “All right.” Alec arched an eyebrow knowingly, then went to his bed and pulled a coil of rope from beneath it. “And this time, I’m prepared.”

  • • •

  Galloping through the darkened city under a wan, lopsided moon, Alec felt a hunter’s thrill of anticipation. The seemingly fruitless days of stalking Rythel wouldn’t be wasted if they could use him and his map to bring down larger game. And for once, he was the one to lead. He was rather proud of himself for finding the hollowed bedpost on his own and was looking forward to showing Seregil.

  Just as they came within sight of the Sea Market, however, one of Nysander’s tiny message spheres materialized suddenly in front of Seregil. Although Alec could not hear it, he knew by the way his friend reined sharply to a halt that there was about to be a change in plans.

  “What did he say?” he asked when the little light had winked out.

  Seregil pushed his hood back and Alec saw that he was frowning. “He wants us at the Queen’s Palace immediately. He didn’t say why, just that I should come right away, and bring you if you’re with me.”

  “Damn! Look, you could go back and I’ll meet you—”

  “He asked for both of us.”

  “But what about the map? And what if Rythel does come back and then heads out somewhere else?”

  “I know, I know—” Seregil shrugged. “But Watchers can’t ignore a summons to the Palace. Besides, Rythel’s out for the night and Tym’s clever enough to keep an eye on things until we get back. Come on now. Back we go!”

  But Rythel did return to Sailmaker Street, and not long after Seregil and Alec turned back toward the Palace.

  What the bloody hell are you doing home on this fine night? Tym thought. More surprising yet was the fact that the smith was not alone. A lantern still burned over the door and by its light Tym caught a glimpse of the two men with him. They had their hoods pulled forward, but the gleam of their fine boots in the lamplight told him they were not denizens of the area. Reaching behind him, he gave a rough shake to the small ragged boy dozing against the alley wall just behind him.

  “Skut, wake up, damn you!”

  The child jerked up, instantly tense and alert. “Yeah, Tym?”

  “You ever see any gentleman types go in there?”

  “Naw, nothing like that.”

  Watching a house was child’s work, and it hadn’t taken Tym long to find a child to help him do it. Having survived to the lucky old age of nine, scrawny, gap-toothed little Skut knew all the Folk as well as he did himself and feared Tym’s wrath enough to be dependable. It was Skut, in fact, who’d spotted a gaterunner called Pry the Beetle late that same afternoon while Tym was off to his supper. The Beetle had shown up soon after the smith returned from work that evening and, by Skut’s estimation, stayed long enough for a decent conversation.

  Learning this, Tym had gone off again to track the Beetle down and soon found him already half-drunk in one of the filthy waterfront stews the runner frequented. A little silver loosened the man’s tongue and Tym judged the resulting information well worth the price. It seemed a certain tenant on the top floor of the Sailmaker Street house was buying information about the sewers, information only a Scavenger or runner was privy to, so to speak. Tym allowed himself a wolfish grin; that was just the sort of information Lord Seregil might loosen his purse strings for.

  Returning to Sailmaker Street, he’d settled in for another uneventful evening, but here was something else unexpected. And lucrative, no doubt.

  He waited until light showed through a chink in the shutters of the smith’s room, then turned to Skut again.

  “I’m going up for a listen. You keep your eyes open down here and give the signal if anyone comes along that might see me,” he whispered, punctuating his instructions to the boy with a light cuff over the ear. “You doze off while I’m up there and I’ll strangle you with your own guts, you hear?”

  “I ain’t never dozed on nobody,” Skut hissed back resentfully.

  Unwittingly following the same route Alec had taken several days before, Tym clambered up the rickety wooden stairs at the back of the house and crept over the slates to the edge of the roof just over Rythel’s window.
Stretched out on his belly, he peered carefully over for an upside-down view of the window below. A crack at the top of the left shutter showed only a thin slice of the room, but he could just make out scraps of the conversation going on inside.

  “Three more days.” That was the smith; Tym had heard him speak in the street.

  “Well done,” said another man. “You’ll be well rewarded.”

  “I have another letter, as well.”

  “Are you certain no one—” a third man broke in, and this voice carried a strong Plenimaran accent.

  Tym heard movement inside and the voices dropped too low for him to make out. Cursing silently, he kept still, hoping they’d move closer to the window.

  He was just wondering if he should chance opening the shutter a bit more for a peek when some inner alarm sent an uncomfortable prickle down his spine. Gripping the lead gutter with one hand, his knife in the other, he twisted sharply around, scanning back up the steep pitch of the roof.

  There, just to the left of a chimney pot, the black outline of a head was visible above the roof peak.

  More of the figure rose up, moving with uncanny silence.

  There’s something wrong about him, was Tym’s first thought.

  The other stood in full view now, a long black stain against the starry sky. He looked unusually tall, and he didn’t move right, either. There was none of the ungainliness of a cripple—and what in hell would a cripple be doing up here?—but a queer set to the shoulders of the silhouette, the crooked thrust of the torso over the legs—

  The other suddenly jerked his head in Tym’s direction. The thief could still make out no more than the stranger’s outline, but he knew instinctively that he’d been spotted.

  The figure stooped, bent down as if making Tym a ridiculously low bow. But that was not the end of it, and Tym’s mouth suddenly went dry.

  The other somehow curled himself downward, arms still at his sides, until his hooded head touched the roof slates below his feet. Down he went, and down, sinuous as an eel—chest, belly, legs, all bent at angles chillingly wrong. And like some huge and loathsome eel, the long black shape began slithering down toward him.

  A coldness that had nothing to do with the weather reached Tym, driving a numbing ache into his bones that left his hands as stiff and useless as an old man’s. Still, it wasn’t until the stench hit him that he began to suspect the sort of nightmare that was bearing down on him.

  For the first time in his hard, rough life, Tym screamed, but the ignominious sound came out of his throat as a faint, futile squeak.

  The thing came to a halt scant inches away from where he crouched and coiled upright again.

  Instinct overrode terror. Still clutching his knife, though he could scarcely feel it in his fist, Tym lunged up and slashed at the apparition and felt his hand pass through a vacant coldness where the thing’s chest should have been. The attack overbalanced him on the slick slates and he crouched again, wobbling for balance.

  The black thing hovered motionless for a moment, radiating its icy stench. Then it laughed, a thick, bubbling laugh that made Tym think of rotting, bloated corpses floating in foul water.

  The hideous thing raised long, wrong-jointed arms and he braced for a blow.

  But it didn’t strike at him.

  It pushed.

  Standing faithful watch in the shadow of the alley, Skut saw a dark form topple from the roof. Plummeting down, headfirst, the falling man struck the cobbled pavement of the yard with a dull thud.

  Skut froze, waiting for an outcry. When none came, he crept out to the body, squinting down at it in the waning moonlight.

  Tym was unmistakably dead. His head had been smashed into a terrible lopsided shape. His chest was caved in like a broken basket.

  Skut stared down in shocked disbelief for an instant, then burst into tears of frustration. The bastard hadn’t paid him yet!

  Tym carried no purse, no valuables. Even his long knife was missing from its sheath.

  Wiping his nose on his arm, Skut gave the body a final, furious kick and disappeared into the night.

  21

  BLOOD TELLS

  Vargûl Ashnazai moved restlessly around Rythel’s tiny room while the smith was making his report to Mardus. So far the man’s spying attempts had turned up little of any significance, for all his self-important airs. But his sabotage of the sewer channels had been brilliantly carried off and, more importantly still, his compilation of the map of sewer channels beneath the western ward of the city. Mardus had it before him now, making a final painstaking check before paying the smith for its delivery.

  Ashnazai’s job was to maintain a cloaking glamour about the two of them; through Rythel’s eyes, they were fair, heavy set men with Mycenian accents. He also had a dra’gorgos on watch, ranging the courtyard outside—not an especially taxing task for a necromancer of his degree, but a necessary one, as it turned out. Soon after their arrival, he suddenly felt a silent call from the dra’gorgos. Closing his eyes, he sent a sighting through his dark creation and discovered the intruder on the roof overhead, a rough-looking young fellow with a knife.

  Vermin, he thought. A common thief. With a barely perceptible smile, he mouthed a silent command. A moment later he felt the stalker lunge and heard a satisfying thud from the yard below. Mardus glanced up from the document the smith was showing him.

  “It’s nothing,” Ashnazai assured him, going to the window and pushing back one of the warped shutters. As he looked down at the body sprawled below, a small figure darted over to it from the deep shadows across the street. Ashnazai sent a quick stab into this one’s mind: a child thief, too grief-stricken at the loss of his compatriot to notice the ripple of blackness flowing down the side of the building toward him.

  The dra’gorgos gave a hungry, questioning call. Ashnazai was about to release it for another kill when his hand brushed something on the windowsill, something that sent an unpleasantly familiar tingle through his skin. Incredulous, he forgot the child completely as he bent to scrutinize the sill.

  There, so faint no one but a necromancer would ever have noticed, was a thin smear of blood. And not just any blood! Pulling out the ivory vial, he compared the emanations of its contents to these.

  One of them. Yes, the boy! Known here as Alec of Ivywell, minion of the Aurënfaie spy, Lord Seregil.

  That much they’d learned since their arrival in Rhíminee. Urvay had tracked the troublesome thieves as far as a villa in Wheel Street, where they acted the fine gentlemen as they consorted with nobles and royalty.

  Ashnazai had seen them several times since then, could easily have had them at any point, but the two were still under Orëska protection; any move against them would alert the real enemies in the Orëska House. So he had stayed his hand and soon after the Aurënfaie and his accomplice had dropped maddeningly from sight yet again.

  Vargûl Ashnazai clenched a hand around the vial for a moment, using its power to detect other traces of Alec’s blood around the room: droplets on the shutter, a smudge on the table by Mardus’ elbow, a tiny brownish circle dried on the floor near the hollow bedpost that Rythel thought such a clever hiding place, and none of it more than a day or two old.

  Standing there, surrounded by the essence of the hated boy, Ashnazai experienced a brief twinge of the fear a hunter feels realizing that the prey he’s been stalking has circled to stalk him. In the midst of his silent fury, he was startled to hear Rythel speak the Aurënfaie’s name.

  Seated at ease across the table from the smith, Mardus was regarding his spy with polite attention.

  “Lord Seregil, you say?” Mardus inclined his head slightly as if greatly interested, but Ashnazi saw through the pose; at such moments Mardus reminded him of a huge serpent, chill and remorseless as it advanced unblinking upon its prey.

  “A lucky meeting, my lord,” the smith told him proudly. “I happened across him in a gambling house one night last week. He has quite an interest in the privateering fleet an
d likes to brag about it. A puffed-up dandy, full of himself. You know the sort.”

  Mardus smiled coldly. “Indeed I do. You must tell me everything.”

  Ashnazai bided his time impatiently as the smith described how he’d courted the supposed cully, and the information he’d had from him. He made no mention of the boy.

  Standing behind the smith, Ashnazai caught Mardus’ attention, pointed to the window, and held up the vial with a meaningful look. The other gave a slight nod, betraying no reaction.

  “You’ve surpassed all expectations,” Mardus told Rythel, passing him a heavy purse in return for the sewer map, together with a packet of the sabotaged grate pins. “You’ve done an excellent job with the map, and I believe I can arrange an additional reward once you’ve completed your work in the tunnels.”

  “Another week and it’ll be done,” the smith assured him, eyes alight with greedy anticipation. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, you just say the word.”

  “Oh, I shall, I assure you,” Mardus replied with a smile.

  Unseen and unheard under the cover of Ashnazai’s magic, he and the necromancer made their way down through the crowded rooms and stairways of the tenement to the yard.

  The thief’s body lay where it had fallen, twisted like a child’s discarded doll.

  Mardus turned the corpse’s head with the toe of one boot. “The face is damaged, but it clearly isn’t one of them.”

  “No, my lord, just a common footpad who blundered into the dra’gorgos by chance. But the boy has certainly been here within the past day or two. His blood is all over the room. He must have been wounded.”

  “But not by Rythel, I think. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest he was hiding anything of the sort.”

  The necromancer closed his eyes for a moment, his pinched face narrowing still more as he concentrated. “There’s blood on the eaves above the window. He must have cut himself breaking in.”