I faced no common low pad with a knife. The sword master was skilled beyond average, more fluid than a fencer and much more refined than a simple shanker in the fog.
With every sense bent upon my assailant, I couldn’t spare any attentions for my surroundings. One sidelong glance might cost me a vital organ.
The figure in black leapt, the sword abruptly reversed in hand. Either a punch, bolstered by the hilt, was forthcoming, or a spin that would bring that blade along my unprotected side.
I had sensed no hesitation prior. There was nothing in the flat dark eyes framed by black wrappings to suggest anything of the sort would come now.
I had only a split second to decide.
The faintest flex of knees told me my opponent expected me to duck, as I had before. I feinted, bent mine in similar, but launched myself into a cartwheel without hands as my opponent slid towards me—sword edge slicing the air just under my face.
I snapped out a hand mid-turn, open-palm struck the flat of the blade at the height of my airborne spin. It was enough to push my assailant off-balance.
“Strike,” shouted a familiar voice. One that broke my focus. “End it!”
Ashmore?
I stumbled as I found my feet, braced myself when I realized the weakness I’d presented in so doing.
Another attack did not come again.
Silence reigned. Then, in the hush, a single sound.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
A pair of hands, palms striking in slow applause. All around me froze.
My heart, thrumming with barely leashed anticipation, stuttered.
As my vision swept back from the narrow focus of offense and defense, I realized that I stood in the midst of unusual signs of wealth. Chandeliers dripping with crystals, candles burning near strings of pearls hung like streamers from the walls, and rugs ornate enough to earn Society’s approval decorated the stone floor.
For all the air still stung my eyes, courtesy of sewage and smoke, the visual tableau was something I might have expected to see above the drift.
Although the people that occupied it would never pass muster.
I’d been baited into the center of a room ringed by men and women of similar garb—and similar expressions. Each wore whatever togs they’d come to suit, stained with the reminders of their lot in the Underground world they’d fled to.
A veritable band of merry thieves, this was.
And at its head, ensconced upon a wooden throne whose cushions had begun to fray, a single man in indolent repose applauded.
Ashmore leaned against the throne, one elbow propped upon the back as though he belonged there.
What nonsense had I been dragged into?
I glanced to my left. Four men and one woman watched me with deceptive lethargy. One worked the point of a blade under his fingernails.
To my right, three women and two men crouched, studying me as though I were a fine enough show to pass the time with. Two shared a flask among them. A dark-skinned woman with enormously stretched earlobes worked over a piece of string, a terribly complex game of Cat’s Cradle.
The man upon the throne looked like any one of them; a random character drawn from a hat, crowned king for the day and bid enjoy. He was round of belly and olive of skin, with eyes a deep brown that might have been mistaken for warm were I in a trusting mood.
As I’d already made that blunder once, I erred on the side of cautious anticipation.
Ashmore made no overt signals to me, but such was my faith in him that I reasoned there would be an answer as to why. Later. For now, aside from my own familiarity with him, he seemed like one of the lot that surrounded me.
I did not see Hawke.
That much, at least, worried me.
The man upon the throne did not rise, as a gentleman might, but he ceased his clapping to lace his hands behind his head. “So you’re the collector braving my door.”
“Collector, aye,” I replied tartly, “but unless you’re my quarry, I never set sights on your door.”
A murmur set up around me. The cove chuckled, throwing his arms wide. “Wrong! The whole of this Underground belongs to us, and woe the man…” He paused, and then tossed me a wink so salacious that I could only stare in bemused wonder. “Or lass, as it may be,” he added, “who doesn’t ken it.”
Well, I certainly hadn’t kennedit. And Ashmore, for his part, hadn’t warned me.
Was it because he had not known?
I set my hands upon my hips, thrust my jaw out and, ignoring his theatrics entirely, demanded, “And what do you want with me and my men?”
“Your men, you say? How intriguing.” This time, his laughter was met with knowing echoes from all around me. That the man slanted my tutor a suggestive appraisal earned Ashmore’s most smug smile.
I dared not blush.
“As you can see, at least one is well enough,” the man added, doffing a cap he did not wear as in mockery of politeness. “You bring interesting allies, my dear miss, make no mistake.”
“The only mistake I’d made,” I retorted, ensuring I carried rather more of the street in my dialect than usual, “was trusting in a chit and collector’s busi—”
I could not here say that something in Ashmore’s expression changed. Truthfully, it did not—or rather, not so obviously that I might call it what it was. Neither shape of mouth nor flicker of eyelash altered.
Yet in that instant, I would swear a signal flickered.
I dropped to my knees, once more obeying the prickle of awareness caught at my nape, and rolled forward.
That same figure wrapped in black—tunic and trousers and boots to the knee—pulled back from a graceful swipe that would have taken my head on the end of a long, straight blade. Red tassel danced from the hilt.
Black eyes touched on mine in the instant of our briefest of passing, and I darted up again before the throne.
“Enough,” Ashmore began, yet the man upon the throne countered with a dismissive wave.
My patience fled.
That every body in the room tensed did not stop me from rushing the man who seemed to be the leader. His eyes widened—in delight, I’d swear, not in fear—but he did not reach for any weapons carried upon him.
The figure with the sword followed in startling speed, graceful agility earning great swaths of ground.
For his part, my tutor simply stepped aside.
I leapt high, utilized one wide, flat arm of the throne for leverage, and tumbled over the back. Twisting in midair ensured I landed facing correctly.
The leader of this merry band went still as my arm came about his head, wrenching it in the crook of my elbow.
That the sword’s razored edge, mirror fine and sheened to gold in the candlelight, stopped a mere hair from his skin—and a finger’s width beneath my arm—left us all staring in heartpounding awe.
Panting, a fierce knocking through my skull—legacy of the coshing I’d taken—I faced the sword master who’d tested me. Though we all froze in various shades of surprise, worry and admiration, that one did not seem to breathe at all.
The eyes framed in wrappings of black were tilted at the corners, dark in color. The suggestion of high cheekbones could not be completely hidden, though I could see little else by way of distinguishing feature with all the black and shadow.
Slim build, an often enough occurrence in the foreign blood made evident, and what little revealed by the wrap bore an obviousness that suggested more than one circumstance.
An Oriental. A woman.
And, I noted as the blade thrummed in something I might have called harmony were I the poetic sort, no real loyalty to the man whose neck served as obstacle between its edge and my flesh.
“Here, now,” the man began.
The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“It rather serves you right,” Ashmore countered.
The clamor our tableau caused was something of a roar, as the frozen men and women— that merry band caught by the scene laid out be
fore them—suddenly decided to join the fray. A roar of communal challenge, of protest, rose, only to be battered back down by the sharp reproach of my tutor.
“Damnation take it, settle yourselves!”
This blatant uncivility lashing from Ashmore was surprising in itself, but that the band hesitated was a downright mystery. He took this all on with a drollness that I found woefully out of character. Gone was my stern tutor, and in its place a rogue—a veritable rake who seemed well at home.
The woman I faced turned away, slipping the blade from the leader’s neck and moving aside as though she were water.
The man whose head I cradled tipped it to look up at me. “Say,” he said brightly, as though noneof this had happened at all. “You’re a bit of a looker, ain’t you?”
“Come off it, Meriwether,” Ashmore cut in dryly, waving aside the huddled gathering of the band that watched us play this out. “She’s beyond you.”
“She’s beyond you, you mean.”
I let the one called Meriwether go. The woman with the blade had sheathed it, and she stood as a silent pillar at the corner of the dais.
The bell-like sleeves of her tunic, streaked as it was with the unavoidable dust and worse of the locale, and the fit of her trousers seemed rather pointedly familiar.
I kept one eye on her as I rounded the throne.
The lackadaisical man who occupied it only slumped further into languor. “I suppose I lost.”
“Surprising no one,” Ashmore added.
“She’s pretty.”
“Shut it, Meriweather.”
“What,” I said with slow, careful calm, “is going on here?”
“Less colorful than you, though,” Meriwether told Ashmore.
My tutor snorted. He snorted.
In full view of everyone!
I stared at him.
He waved me away from the dais upon which Meriwether posed. “Pay no attention to him,” Ashmore told me. “He’s cocksure at the worst of times.”
“And cock-ready all the other times,” Meriwether called suggestively behind me.
Laughter, knowing jeers, rippled through the band. They’d merged, mingled and swapped places, but this time, I saw more weapons at the ready. Pistols tucked in belts, knives out. Which reminded me. Where had mine gone?
I didn’t bother blushing for the would-be king. “Wonderful,” I said, bemused but striving for steady. “Where’s Hawke? And my knives,” I added.
“Which is more important?” called a man to my right.
A girl, snickering, added, “I’ll take the one.”
“The prick or the point?” retorted a chortling young man.
Uproarious laughter followed.
Ashmore’s eyes, crackling with more than just humor, met mine. A twitch of his copper eyebrows was all he gave me. “I’ll take you to him,” my tutor said. “Now that you’ve won my wager.”
“And you?” I demanded. “Is everything well?”
His gaze slid over my shoulder. “That remains to be seen.”
I turned to find Meriwether watching us most carefully.
As was the woman.
Well, as has been said before, fortune does favor the bold. We would see how much. “Right,” I said, clapping my hands. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”
“Ooh, a biter,” said a woman whose voice was cut by gravel and stone.
Meriwether’s smile stretched ear to ear. “You do know you’re in my palace, right?”
“So you have assured me,” I returned, mimicking my tutor’s droll demeanor.
“And you’re surrounded?”
“So I am,” I agreed.
Ashmore sighed.
“And with a finger,” Meriwether continued, kicking a leg up on the arm of his throne, “that man behind you could turn you inside out?”
He meant Ashmore.
This time, a fierce sharpness seized my smile. “I’d like to see him try,” I replied, still reasonably for the challenge.
Meriwether’s expression brightened, and then cracked into raucous laughter that his band joined in.
The space behind me filled, and the warmth of Ashmore’s body leaned into my back. It might, for all the world, look like a warning—or a caress. But his voice, lowered to my ear, said, “’Tis a long story and one I can’t tell here.”
Of that I had little doubt.
“Trust me.”
Of course. To a point.
I stepped away.
The Oriental woman watched my every move. Her hand never strayed far from the blade at her side.
I pointed at her, but stared at Meriwether. “Are you allied with the Karakash Veil?” I demanded.
The room fell utterly silent.
“Or do you simply enjoy the company of its servants?”
The woman’s head tilted, birdlike. If she felt anything at all—fear, amusement, challenge—it remained hidden behind her mask.
“I believe,” boomed a voice that had not been heard among the masses prior, “I can answer that.”
I did not have the strength to startle, or to jump as quickly as I should have. The energies I’d been forced to maintain were flagging with every new addition to this odd theater.
At this rate of attrition, I’d tire long before the parade of strangers would.
A large man stood within the frame of a far door, only somewhat smaller than the mountainous presumption of Ishmael Communion’s girth. He was gray-haired and creased at the face, with eyes of a steady green darker than mine. He gave every impression of a kindly grandfather—at least until one’s intellect noted the brace of knives caught about the wide chest, the pistols at his hip, and scars like calluses crisscrossing his bare arms.
All that crowded around us stepped aside, giving him clear passage to me. He strode through as though expecting nothing less.
If Meriwether was king, then this man would be his god.
What tomfoolery played out here?
When the large man offered a hand, I took it as a street man might, with a grip firm and eyes direct. “Who are you?” I demanded.
The craggy line of his mouth slanted into a smile that appeared to fail at one side. Not so much crooked by muddled intent but by a large pale scar mottling one portion of his cheek. “My name’s Uriah.”
I almost gave in to the skeptical rise of my eyebrows. At the last moment, I managed a furrow instead. “And you are what, then?”
Ashmore clapped him on the shoulder with far more familiarity than should be expected. “If I may,” he cut in. “Uriah, this is our collector. We call her—”
“Black.” His large hand tightened over mine, as though to make clear a point I had not asked. “Miss Black. Aye. I know.”
“Uriah’s King of Thieves down here,” Meriwether called behind me. If he’d stepped off the throne that was not, after all, his, I didn’t turn to look. “Emperor of Earnings, the pick of the litter.” A deliberate pause. “’Cos he ate the rest.”
“Shut it, Meriwether,” the man said, not so much a lash as a sigh.
The lackadaisical man shut it.
I stared at Uriah while his fingers strained over mine. It hurt, cramped from digits to wrist, and certainly it was a symbol of what he thought my stature to be. I was a collector, autonomous by nature, and therefore a threat.
I would never match his strength, certainly not his size, but I would overcome it. “Nobody said I’d meet bloody royalty,” I said flatly. As much for Ashmore’s benefit as Uriah’s.
The man’s grin carved deep grooves into his cheek. “And so you won’t.” When I did not cringe or complain, he let go. It wasn’t my win, but I hadn’t lost, either. “But make no mistake. You so much as fart in my territory, and I’ll smell it long before the sound escapes.”
Charming. The lot of them.
“I shall remember,” I said. “And Meriwether’s role?”
Uriah only smiled.
Very well. He could keep his secrets.
I glanced
at the crowd. “What was all this, anyway? A wager?”
Meriwether’s chuckle drifted lazily across the common room. “A test.”
“For what?” I demanded, rounding on him.
No, he hadn’t moved. I didn’t have the energy to be surprised—it was my assumption that the throne meant anything at all. One I quickly reassessed.
If Uriah was the leader, as his very presence seemed to indicate, then he cared little for the symbol.
Did that make Meriwether a challenger? A jester?
An irritating gadfly?
The man I studied kicked his hefted leg idly. “For who, you mean.”
Whom, I wanted to say, but did not. “For me?”
“And her,” Uriah answered, cutting us all off.
The sword master bent at the waist; faint, but discernible.
“Now come,” Uriah told me, giving to me his back. “Your pet is getting difficult to handle.”
“Hawke?” I took one step closer—Ashmore caught me ’round the waist, ensuring I pushed that challenge no farther. It did not stop me from thrusting my face out far as possible and demanding in tones of menace, “What did you do to him?”
Uriah paused, turned back to me with an expression of curiosity. He met my gaze with a forthrightness that assured me I did not factor into his conception of danger. “Nothing.” A pause. “Yet. Come, too,” he barked, and the Oriental woman slipped off her step to follow.
“Trust me,” Ashmore whispered again.
I would. But I would make him pay for it later.
I stalked after Uriah, my tutor between me and the woman who had tried to take my head.
“You lot,” Uriah boomed, each word a rolling clap of thunder. “Get to work! I want your earnings by daybreak.”
The band scattered like rats before a sudden light. When I looked back again at the threshold, only Meriwether remained, watching us go with a languorous smile and no small amount of shrewdness in his eye.
That one, I decided, was a creature possessing of far more cunning than he cared to show.
Chapter Eleven
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