They broke into a run, slipping in the loose snow and the packed ice beneath it. Dante watched with half an eye as Raxa and her underling went downstairs and trudged toward the distant stables. Once it was clear he and Blays would beat her there, they got several blocks ahead and parked themselves at the corner of a major intersection, huddling down like a couple of drunks with nowhere to go.
Raxa left the main street, opting for a smaller one that would take her right behind the stables. Her enforcer stayed on the main road.
Dante stood. "The big guy's peeled off."
"Is she trying to make this easy for us?"
"Probably scouting their escape routes. Let's take her down."
They ran down the cross street. Nearing the intersection of her route, they slowed. There were no lanterns out and the only light was what little spilled from shuttered windows, but most of these were dark as well. The streets looked as vacant as the snowfields of the Woduns.
Dante hooked around the corner, squinting into the gloom. A lone figure stood out from the whiteness of the snow. He moved toward her, making himself sway and breathe hard, like he'd been out drinking. Beside him, Blays belched.
They neared. Raxa had both hands in her pockets. It was cold, but Dante was sure there was a knife in there, too. He bit the inside of his cheek and called to the nether. Black flakes swept between the white ones. Blays stumbled to the right, putting space between them to create a second angle on Raxa.
Dante came to a stop twenty feet away from her. "Raxa Dosse. You can try to run, if you like. But the only thing that will accomplish is getting more snow in our boots."
The woman had halted as soon as he'd spoken Raxa's name. He couldn't place the expression on her face, but he knew one thing: it wasn't fear.
He felt something in the darkness to his right. As light as a mosquito landing on his arm. And as unmistakable as their whine.
He whirled, going for his sword. "Blays!"
But the dark figure was already materializing in front of Blays, her dagger plunging for his heart.
13
Raxa lunged out of the shadows and into the cold darkness of the street.
The man who'd done the talking—Galand, had to be, a realization that turned her veins to ice—yelled, "Blays!
Her long dagger dived toward the blond man's heart. He was already turning, reaching for his swords, but it was too late. Yet he was smiling.
As abruptly as a man clapping his hands, Blays disappeared.
Raxa's blade speared through empty air. Her mind seemed to lock up. Galand's sorcery? An illusion?
Down the street, Anya had already turned and was running away as fast as the snow allowed, just like Raxa had told her to do. Nether bloomed in the priest's hand. He condensed it into a black dart and sent it streaking toward her head. Heart booming, she grabbed up a lump of shadows and whipped it toward his dart. The two forces met and dashed apart in black twinkles. Galand looked gobsmacked.
She waved at him and leaped into the nether.
She shouted out. Blays was right behind her—he'd probably been right about to shift back into reality and jab both of his swords through her back.
Seeing her, he grinned. "Ready to find out if we can die in here?"
The words sounded dreamlike, almost like they were coming from inside her own head. He should have been driving one blade at her throat and the other at her gut, but he seemed to be waiting on something. Giving her a sporting chance to speak her mind?
Okay then. She sucked nether to her hand and flung a dark blade at his throat, its edges shining silver.
His eyes flew wider than Galand's had gone. He skipped back, flicking instinctively at the bolt with his right-hand sword. The bolt should have passed right through the steel and into his flesh. Instead, the two objects met with a whopping sound not unlike slapping a wet pair of trousers against a flat rock. The nether dashed into a thousand little sparkles and poofed away.
He looked as surprised as she felt. Before she could make sense of what had just happened, something rammed into her side. Felt like a bag of sand wrapped in a down blanket. She staggered hard, flickering between worlds. Not good. If she had to stay in reality for longer than a few seconds, the priest would smear her across the snow.
She plunged back into the land of black and silver and took off at a dead sprint, putting distance between herself and Galand. Blays shouted out and gave chase. The two of them skimmed over the snow, the soles of their boots barely sinking in. Galand slogged through thigh-deep piles, quickly falling behind.
As she neared the end of the block, she slowed. Blays closed on her. Without warning, she stopped, skidding over the snow, and whirled on him, jabbing for the base of his neck. Blays was sliding straight toward her blade, trying futilely to slow his momentum. Seeing it was hopeless, he threw his feet out from under himself, smacking down on his back. The knife passed over his head.
Lying on top of the snow, he lashed at her ankle. Raxa hopped over the horizontal strike and dropped to a knee, stabbing down at his ribs. He rolled to the side, long coat flapping, and popped to his feet.
He was good. Faster than anyone she'd ever fought. Had the reach advantage on her, too. Raxa fell back a step, tossed her dagger to her left hand, and drew a small knife with her right. She hurled it at his chest. He spun to the side and swept out his coat, catching the knife in its folds.
She felt something nudge into her side. Galand was getting closer. She took off again. Blays swore and followed, dropping out of the nether for a moment to yell directions at Galand. Rada slipped another small knife into her hand. She saw another way for her to win: see if she could outlast him, and then when Blays was forced back into reality, gut them both.
Thing was, she had a deep-down feel like he had more juice than she did. Even if she had more, every time Galand tried to bump her out of the nether, it took serious energy to stay put.
The Order had been around for years. Enough time to assemble its own codes and lore. Like Urt's commandments, none of these were written down. You had to be initiated. Ironically, it was Gaits who'd taught her the four rules of surviving an encounter.
First, don't get in one.
Second, if you absolutely have to fight someone, hit them before they know what's happening.
Third, think ahead so you can recognize when the fight isn't going your way.
And fourth? Always have a route out.
As they danced over the snow, Galand was falling further behind, but Blays was making gains. Raxa adjusted her grip on the knife. With Blays closing on her, she spun and feinted a throw. As he sidestepped a knife that wasn't there, she threw it for real. He twisted his shoulders, but the blade punched through his sleeve and into his forearm.
Raxa had never fought anyone inside the darkness before. Hadn't even been sure they could hurt each other. That question was answered definitively as blood leaked from his arm, as bright as molten fire, bright silver flecks of nether racing toward it as thickly as a swarm of locusts. The light from his arm was dazzling, hypnotic in a way that made her want to drift to a stop and gaze deeply into the full glory of the gods.
She wrested her mind away from the awe of the blood, turned her back on Blays, and broke into a sprint. She raced around a corner and pressed herself to the face of a stone building. Inside the netherworld, living bodies gleamed like moving moons. It was all the nether in them. Your average slab of stone or chunk of dirt had a little bit in it, too, but compared to something alive, they were as dull as…well, dirt.
She reached inside herself, gathering up great handfuls of nether. When her body was as plain as the rock behind her, she flung the shadows into the night air, sending them whirling away.
Blays veered around the corner, boots whispering over the snow. A tight spiral of glowing shadows trailed from his wounded arm. He passed by without so much as glancing her way. After continuing for a hundred feet, he came to a stop, staring down the street. Chips of snow spun in the breeze. G
aland came around the corner, scowling as hard as he was breathing. His trousers were crusted with snow past the knee.
He came to a stop just up the street from Raxa. "Blays? Is that you up there?"
Blays popped out of the shadows, going hazier, the glare around his arm dimming to the glow of a candle. "Don't suppose you've seen an invisible crimelord come through here?"
"You lost her?"
"Wrong. We lost her. Now help me search."
Blays sharpened as he reentered the darkness, light blooming once more from his arm. He jogged down the street. Galand wandered a few steps further away from her. Pressed against the wall, Raxa could feel his mind questing through the shadows, rustling them like a dog crawling beneath a blanket. She had the feeling that if she tried to move, his attention would snap to her in an instant.
His focus wiggled from one side of the street to the other. When it reached the end of the block, Galand turned around, frowning at the way they'd come in. His mind reappeared. Coming toward her.
Raxa clenched her teeth. He was forty feet away. Too far to try charging at him; he'd strike her down before she was halfway there. Think. Think, or in another thirty seconds, he'd find her, eject her into the real world, and cut her into a thousand pieces.
As his focus moved to the other side of the street, Raxa delved into the nether in the building at the far end of the block. Her hold was shaky. Threatening to collapse at any moment. She clamped down with everything she had, pulling the shadows out into the open and shaping them into a loose oval the height of a person.
Galand spun, snow crunching beneath his heels. His attention flew down the street. Raxa sent the oval of nether darting around a corner. Galand headed for it in a dead run. Keeping herself tight to the building, Raxa headed the opposite way down the street, hooking right at the intersection.
She ran as fast as she could. She didn't let go of the shadows until they were on the brink of spitting her out like a bite of bad fish.
~
Vess rose from the low stone wall she'd been seated on. In the darkness of the snowy courtyard, her teeth shined white, but Raxa wasn't sure it was a grin.
"Made it back," Vess said. "That mean you got them?"
Fresh anger pulsed up Raxa's spine, spilling into her head. "It started off exactly like I planned. They thought Anya was me. Tried to jump her. Instead, I jumped them. But they had powers I wasn't expecting. Spotted me before I hit either one. I barely made it out with my skin still attached to my body."
"Shit." Vess made the oath sound like a sigh. She sat back down on the stone wall. "They make you?"
"There's no doubt."
"Shit again."
"That's my assessment."
"How you know where to jump them in the first place?"
Raxa kept her gaze steady. Vess knew she'd made a breakthrough with the book, but didn't know about Raxa's ability to blink on and off. Unless Vess did know, and was hiding that knowledge from Raxa for the same reason Raxa was hiding her ability from Vess: because you always kept a final knife hidden up your sleeve.
"Galand sent beetles to the safehouse," Raxa said. "They were full of nether. I could feel them trying to get inside the shutters. At the time, I didn't know exactly what they were, but I had a hunch. I had Anya pretend to be me. Fed them a false story about how she was headed to some meet. When they showed up to take her down, that confirmed the beetles were spies."
"Quick thinking you got."
"I'd heard Galand was looking for me in person. That's the only reason I put things together so fast. And all for nothing. Now that they know what I can do, ambushing them's going to be ten times as hard."
"Third shits." Vess flicked snow from the top of the wall. "They're hunting you. They know who you are. And they got powers to hurt you before you can hurt them."
"Is this going somewhere? Or are you just rubbing it in?"
"If I look at a fight with those odds, I drop it like I picked up a turd."
"That's disgusting."
"And so is the splatter they are going to make with your pretty little face." Vess narrowed her eyes. "Leave town. Soon, they'll go back to their stupid little war. That's when you come back, and we continue our war on them."
Raxa paced across the courtyard. Snow was sifting from above, but at least they were out of the wind. "Can't. I've only been in charge of the Order for a few months. If I leave now, somebody who thinks they got screwed at the election will take over."
"You come back, you kill them too. Good chance to take out the trash."
"Not if they resume the war with you in the meantime."
"Citadel won't stop hunting you. They kill you, someone else takes over the Order anyway. Only there's no you around to take it back and set things straight."
Raxa tipped back her head, blinking at the snowflakes sticking in her lashes. Maybe she should go. Or turn herself in. They'd kill her, but if she confessed, and told the others to lie low, maybe she could avert a war between the Order and the Citadel. Running away wasn't going to cut it. The Citadel wasn't going to be happy until they had a body.
Then again, who said it had to be hers?
"You're smiling," Vess said. "Why?"
"How would you like to go back to war?"
"With the Citadel? Right now? That's your funeral."
"Not with the Citadel," Raxa said. "With me."
~
Finding a body would have been a snap. Finding a body that resembled Raxa closely enough to fool somebody who'd only seen her from within the eerie glow of the shadows would have only been slightly trickier: as a commercial and religious hub, Narashtovik had drawn a non-trivial population of foreign merchants, pilgrims, and refugees, but most of the population was as pale and dark-haired as Raxa.
Even so, killing an innocent young woman to take the blame for Raxa's crimes felt like the kind of sleaze that would bring down the wrath of the gods. Not just on her head, but upon her entire house. Rather than taking the easy route of finding a lookalike and killing her, they had to wait for one to drop dead.
Then again, their plan was going to need a few days to unfold anyway. Raxa relocated to an old cabin the Order kept in the pine forest outside the city. There, she spent every waking moment focused on the nether. Partly to try to learn more than the couple of minor tricks she'd put together, but mostly to watch out for any more nether-bearing bugs.
While she was away, Vess reopened the war between her Little Knives and the Order. It would be a thin bridge to walk down—they could only trust their inner circles with the knowledge the war was a fake—but after two falsified skirmishes, the two groups ordered their people into hiding. Meanwhile, agents on both "sides" fed a steady stream of gossip to the pubs.
Within days, the entire city knew about the resumption of the war. In the meantime, the agents they'd installed in the bodywagons that picked up the dead for the carneterium found their mark: young woman, dark hair long enough to be tied behind her head, bit of muscle to her.
Raxa was called in from the cabin to take a look. Disguised under a bundle of scarves and coats, she walked into the city with a heavy limp, coming to a rickety old house on the outskirts.
Vess' two guards let her inside the front door. Vess sat at a long table drinking something steamy. The body rested on the table. Its throat was cut wide open.
Raxa frowned. "I thought you said she died of greencough."
Vess gave her an irritated look. "We have to make it look real, don't we? The Citadel's going to believe you happened to drop dead of greencough?"
"She doesn't look anything like me."
"She not as pretty as you think you are?" Vess reached out and patted the dead woman's leg. "She'll fool 'em. You wait and you see."
Using the various oils and powders that were typically used to hide facial flaws, but which outfits like the Order and the Knives used to disguise themselves, Vess made a few small adjustments to the woman's face, then dispatched a messenger to the Citadel and Raxa back t
o the pine forest.
A day and a half later, the crunch of snow woke Raxa from her pallet. Someone knocked on the door. Good sign. A murderous High Priest wouldn't knock. Raxa opened the door. Vess strode inside, smirking. She went straight to the stove, stoking it and placing a metal cup of spiced rum on top of it to warm up.
Raxa moved behind her. "Well?"
"Well what? Never seen a woman celebrate selling a corpse before?"
"They believed you?"
Vess removed a heavy pouch from inside her coat, jingling the coins inside. "Paid me for it, see? Either they believe it, or they want me to think they believe it."
"How did they seem? Happy? Reserved?"
"Pale one was smug. Cute blond one was happy. Or maybe just drunk."
"What about the war between us? Think they bought it?"
Vess gave her an exasperated look, then sighed and got out a cloth to pick her cup up from the stove. "I told them all that I was supposed to tell. You broke the peace, I took out your throat. The Citadel's reward was just a happy bonus. I don't know what they bought and what they sold."
Raxa found a second cup and poured herself a slug of what Vess was having. When the drinks were properly heated, they bonked their cups together and drank to Raxa's freedom. Could it be as simple as that? Feed them a plausible body, then keep her head down until they dropped their guard? If she was smart, even when it was safe to move against them again, she wouldn't come in flashy and violent. No, she'd poison them slowly. Arrange accidents. Make it look like it wasn't her that hated the Citadel, but the gods.
To be on the safe side, she stayed in the cabin for another week. Before returning to the city, she cut her hair short and choppy, and got Gurles to bring her one of the heavy hooded dresses worn by the women who pushed sledges of firewood through the winter streets, delivering their goods to houses and manors, or simply selling them to passers-by. When she actually tried the dress on, with its heavy folds weighing down her arms so badly she could hardly swing her blade, let alone throw one, she immediately sent Gurles back to a tailor to rush-order the same cut in a lighter fabric.
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 109
