The soldiers weren’t watching, didn’t even look up as Narina led the ratters and their dogs out of the rice paddy and into the open. Andras’s heart pounded, waiting for the moment when it all turned violent.
The sky and their surroundings darkened, and he glanced skyward, thinking that volcanic clouds must have shifted in front of the sun. But the sky was only a little hazy, the winds pushing in from the coast toward the mountains. The sun seemed dimmer, somehow. Everything looked muted except Narina, Ruven, the dogs, and their immediate surroundings.
The soldiers looked distorted, their faces like clay that had been stretched. The ruined farmhouse bent at a strange angle. The voices of the men, now close enough to pick out, sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a well.
Narina stopped a few feet away from the soldiers and sniffed at the air, turning about on her heels even as she paid the men little attention. For their part, as soon as she stopped nearby, the soldiers began to edge away or turn their backs. A spearman came walking through, and he bent his path without seeming to notice what he was doing until he was around them.
“He came this way,” Narina said. “He or she, I’m not sure.” Her voice was normal, as if they weren’t surrounded by enemies.
“Are you doing that?” Andras asked. “You are, aren’t you? You’re making us invisible somehow.”
“What a fool I was to think I’d mastered the sowen. I was a child, staring at the birds in the sky without realizing that I had wings of my own.”
A trio of riders trotted over the rise to their right, and the foot soldiers abandoned their relaxed posture, with men grabbing for boots or packs, even as some of them grumbled that it was too soon. The riders, moving at a good clip, came right at Narina and the ratters. The bladedancer sohn dropped her hands to her sides as if to snatch up her weapons. But of course they weren’t there.
At the last minute, the horses bent away and went around the knot of people and dogs in their path, like a brook flowing around a stone. The riders began shouting orders at the soldiers, who stopped their grumbling and scrambled to obey.
Narina’s posture relaxed, and she ignored their movements. She turned around again, giving another sniff, and her eyes narrowed. “The warbrand has gone this way.” Narina pointed north, beyond the soldiers and the ruined farmhouse at their back.
“Is it Miklos?” Andras asked. “Is that who you’re sensing?”
“Yes, the villain is still lurking about. I thought he’d gone into the mountains, but no, here he remains, hunting me.”
“And we’re looking for him?” Andras asked. “Why? To fight him, is that your plan?”
“What else is there? I will kill this warbrand sohn and take his sowen. Then you will see power.”
Chapter Two
Lady Damanja Whitebreak lay in bed sometime after midnight, wondering what had become of Miklos.
Her engineers had breached the walls of the river town two days earlier, but unexpectedly fierce resistance had temporarily driven back her assaulting troops. Belingus’s crowlord may have been dead, cut down by a bladedancer sohn, but Zoltan retained a hold on his former lands even in death, and the town garrison kept fighting long after prudent resistance would have collapsed and the commanders sued for peace.
When she finally broke through, fighting continued block by block until several dozen enemies managed to lock themselves behind the walls of the town keep on a spit of land next to the river. She’d been bringing up her engineers when the remnants of the garrison finally raised a white flag.
Now she was lying in bed, unable to sleep. The room was the largest in the small castle, with a fireplace for winter, tapestries of crows and dragons and sea monsters on the walls, and silver torch sconces that had somehow avoided being looted by her troops. The bed was made of a dark wood shipped from sweltering lands far to the south, carved with intricate geometric designs in a style she’d never seen before. It was all luxurious, including a down-stuffed bed that should have been comfortable, but was too soft and giving. She was used to a stretched cot in a military tent, feeling stiff and perhaps a little cold while the comforting sound of blowing horses, the murmured voices of guards, and other camp sounds soothed her while she drifted into sleep. Not this deep, profound silence behind stone walls.
What about Miklos, anyway? Damanja had sent him off to find the bladedancer three weeks ago, thinking to get him out of the way while she consolidated her hold. She hadn’t trusted him that day he’d offered to bring Zoltan’s troops and lands under control in return for being her field commander, but neither had she suspected him of outright lying. Yet over the next few days, something had niggled at her every time she looked at him. Once, he’d come into her command tent for a consultation, and the light caught his face at a strange angle. For a moment it seemed as though she were looking through his flesh to see his skull underneath.
And then she’d dreamed of a crow. It had been a talking bird with demon blood and dragon feathers, who’d told her that Miklos was a servant of her enemies. She’d had no idea what that meant, but had learned to trust crow dreams since they’d first started coming to her as a child. The following day, while preparing the siege of Belingus, she’d sent Miklos after the bladedancer to find out what the woman was doing on the plains. He’d never returned.
“I suppose I’m rid of him, then,” Damanja said aloud.
The thought was vaguely disappointing, though she couldn’t say why. He hadn’t delivered on his initial promise; she’d taken Belingus on her own, and was gradually swallowing Zoltan’s fiefdom in spite of resistance from remnant forces and Balint’s invasion from the north. She didn’t need the warbrand, didn’t need his scheming. All she needed was the temple-made sword, and he’d given that to her already.
She threw back the heavy blanket and slipped out of bed. So much for sleep. Her feet touched the cool floor, which felt pleasant after the stuffy warmth of the blanket. She drew open the shutters and welcomed more cool air from outside, ignoring the mosquitoes that were sure to come in on the night breeze. It was late summer, and while the daytime heat was still oppressive, there was relief at night, at least. Unfortunately, the air still smelled of sulfur and ash from distant fires and volcanic eruptions.
Belingus stretched below the tower keep. The outer edges of the town lay dark, the quarter nearest the city walls. Those had been the roughest, dirtiest parts of town, where tanners worked and fishmongers lived, and their refuse couldn’t easily be tossed into the river. A place of taverns and whores and cutpurses.
It was there that the fighting had been fiercest, as the raging armies fought through the dark corners and tight alleys, one side desperate to slow the enemy’s advance, the other desperate to break into the open where they could bring their superior numbers to bear. Fires had burned much of it, and had threatened at one point to torch the entire town before the invading troops put them out at Damanja’s orders.
Lights winked to the left of the keep and stretching toward the river. That part of the town had largely survived the onslaught, and Damanja had convinced the cloth merchants, artisans, and rice traders to stay by promising a reduction in river tolls and amnesty for those who’d resisted. Apart from the revenue, she needed Belingus to ship men and supplies down the river toward the delta to take hold of the eastern stretches of the fiefdom before Balint could invade from the northeast.
A pair of towers rose above the low-slung tile roofs in that direction, the temples of the dragon and demon cults. Most of the priests had vanished in the fighting, but after the battle ended, relieved townsfolk had broken down the doors to pray at the shrines and give thanks to the demons and demigods for sparing their lives. To beg for a quick and peaceful end of the war.
Ah, the poor fools. These lesser sorts with their wishful thinking and futile prayers thought they could turn back the tide of violence. Matters had only just begun. They would know that soon enough. Few would survive the coming years of bloodshed and famine.
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br /> Damanja’s thoughts turned from Miklos and the captured town to wondering about Lieutenant Davian’s raising of levies from the densely populated rice lands to the east. She couldn’t expect much from peasants with spears shoved in their hands, but perhaps if she threw enough of them into battle she could plug gaps in her armies and defeat Balint by sheer attrition.
She was turning over how best to use these peasant troops without harming discipline in her army when a low scraping sound caught her ear. In the past it might not have drawn her attention. Maybe she’d have dismissed it as one of her guards scuffing a boot, or a pair of rats fighting.
But her senses had sharpened lately. Her attention, too.
She was instantly on alert, and her ear attuned to the noise and its exact location. There was a low, shuffling sound, and a mental image formed in her head through the darkness of the scene behind the door to her chambers. It was a man sliding along the wall. Sliding down the wall. Then, a wet, slurping sound, like a dagger being drawn out of flesh, dripping with blood.
Damanja had a mental image as if she were seeing it instead of hearing it. Her guards were lying in a pool of blood on the flagstones outside her room. A cloaked figure stood over them. There was a second figure behind the first, a shadowy blur in her mind. This second figure drew a weapon.
She had no time to be stunned at how her hearing had given her such a clear picture of what was happening. The first attacker was already working at the lock with something that scratched at the brass tumblers within, so very quiet that she might not have heard it, awake or no, had her hearing been less sharp.
She moved swiftly from the window toward the bed, her feet soft and padding. At that moment, the door opened and the two figures slipped inside. It was dark, but she could see them clearly from just the sound they were making and the disturbance to the surrounding air. They moved across the room with knives in hand.
The warbrand temple-made sword that Miklos had given her lay beneath the bed, and she dropped to her knees, grabbed it, and had it out of the sheath at the exact moment that the first figure stabbed at the blankets where it was supposed the crowlord would be sleeping.
Her sword was a falchion, long and heavy and meant to be wielded with two hands, but she swore that it weighed less every time she drew it. Tonight it was light and easy in her hand, an extension of her arm. In the darkness, it seemed even blacker than its surroundings, as if made of shadow.
The second assassin hissed a warning before the first seemed to have noticed that the bed was empty and the blade had penetrated nothing but goose down. By now she was coming around the bed with the sword drawn behind her shoulder. The two figures ducked away as she swung.
The blade zipped past the ear of her target—the one who’d been stabbing her bed—and struck the bedpost. It severed the wood like it was a stalk of green bamboo, and the post toppled over. One of the assassins had been coming up from the floor with a blade aimed at her belly, but was forced to duck away when the post came crashing down, which slowed him. She easily dodged his stabbing attack.
Damanja’s first fear had been assassins from one of the sword temples. If that had been the case, she’d have died already. There would be almost no point in fighting back. A sohn, or even one of their lesser fighters, would have left her gutted before she had time to realize there were enemies in the room. This pair, however, were unable to move so swiftly.
Damanja, on the other hand, felt as if she were in a dreamland, with her movements accelerated and her enemies slowed. These were trained assassins, she could tell by the way they instantly recovered and moved swiftly to attack from two sides, but they simply weren’t fast enough for her suddenly quicksilver reflexes.
She jerked her head to the side to avoid a slash at her throat, then jumped into the air to get away from a simultaneous cut at the back of her leg that was an attempt to hamstring her. She brought her sword back around as she landed, and the blade seemed to stretch to meet the body of the assassin bending backward to avoid it.
A sharp cry—a woman’s cry—came from the assassin as the falchion slashed across her chest. The assassin fell clutching the wound, and her dagger clattered to the stones.
Before Damanja could finish her, the second assassin threw something into Damanja’s face. There was a blinding flash of light and the sharp smell of charcoal and sulfur. The room was suddenly brighter than day. The assassin throwing it had lifted a forearm to shield their eyes against the effect, but Damanja had done no such preparation.
The sudden light should have blinded her. By all rights, she should have been stunned and unable to see anything for several seconds, giving her assassins a critical moment to strike her down before she could recover. Indeed, the one who’d thrown the powder was already moving to the left, away from the bed, to come at her at an angle.
But the ruse didn’t work, as Damanja’s vision adjusted instantly to both the blinding light and its rapid absence. In the moment before the light faded, she saw the two assassins clearly. They were dressed in tight black cloth. The one lying on the ground with a cut across her chest was indeed a woman, her eyes and nose exposed, while the second had a heavier jaw beneath a black cloth, and seemed to be a man. Both had pale skin and hazel eyes flecked with gold.
Not from the sword temples, that was even more certain, yet trained assassins all the same. The pale skin meant they were from the north. She’d heard word of assassins that were male-female pairs, experts in slitting throats at night, poisonings, and other ways of settling crowlord conflicts off the battlefield. They had some ability to bend auras to disguise their paths, yet with Damanja’s heightened senses, their little tricks hadn’t been enough.
The first assassin, still lying on the floor with one hand across her chest where the falchion had gashed her, flicked the wrist of her other hand. Something small and sharp and lethal came spinning toward the crowlord. Damanja twisted the sword, and the thrown weapon clinked off the flat of her blade.
She brought the sword around while taking a leap toward the second assassin, who was attempting to get beneath her weapon once again to come at her belly with his dagger. He ducked, his reflexes incredible. Damanja’s sword looked like it would miss by inches, but again, the blade seemed to stretch, like a shadow against the wall when the sun is low. It touched the assassin’s arm, and the man cried out and dropped his weapon.
There was a sharp scent in the air. Not blood, more like burned flesh. The way the man clenched his wounded arm it seemed as though it had been caught in flame, not cut.
Damanja didn’t have time to wonder about this. She was already on top of the assassin as he scrambled for his weapon. Her sword came around again, and this time her enemy didn’t have time to move. The sword caught his neck, neatly severing his head from his shoulders. Before he’d even slumped dead, she was astride the woman she’d struck earlier. She lifted the sword, its point down, and rammed it home. The force of the blow and the strength of the warbrand-forged sword were enough to penetrate the stone and pin the woman to the ground.
With both assassins dead, Damanja let out her breath. She was too stunned to think about how and why she’d suddenly turned into a killing force capable of slaughtering two highly trained assassins that should have caught her unaware. In fact, they should have taken her easily, armed or no. The two assassins had, in fact, cut the throats of the two alert, trusted guards who’d been posted at her door.
She left her sword impaled in the ground, quivering, and fetched her lantern. She lit it with trembling hands.
The room was a mess of blood, as the man she’d beheaded had spread a puddle across the floor. The one still skewered on Damanja’s sword bled, too, but it was a slow trickle, not a flood. Through the open door she glimpsed her two guards lying at awkward angles where they’d fallen. Four bodies in all, and only the crowlord herself was alive. And not just alive, but unharmed.
She collected herself and felt calm enough to grow angry. It was Balint Stronghand.
It had to be. The rival crowlord must have hired these northern assassins to take at night what the man was incapable of seizing on the battlefield during the day. She vowed to make him pay.
Damanja pulled the sword free from where it had pinned the female assassin to the ground. As she did, she noticed that while the killing of the pair had left a lot of blood, the initial gashes had not. The first assassin had a blackened streak across her chest, and the fabric around the wound had curled and scorched. The man’s arm was withered and charred where she’d struck it.
It was the shadow that had cut them both, she realized. Stretching from the blade, from her hand, it had reached beyond the sword tip and struck the assassins in spite of their quick reflexes. She turned the sword over in her hand, but it looked normal at the moment. Nor was a shadowy extension any feature of the warbrand weapons that she’d ever heard of.
Together with the other changes—seeing sounds somehow, and her heightened reflexes, strength, and speed—there was only one likely answer. The burning shadow had come not from the sword, but from her own hand.
Chapter Three
It was a visit to the sea and a dream of crows that first let Damanja know she was different, chosen, even.
She’d been twelve years old, and her father had taken her to the edge of the sea cliff on a blustery winter day. Gulls wheeled and cried over a rough, churning sea. Fishing boats tossed about in the waves, perhaps following shoals of fish, and the gulls dove in to steal from the nets. Much farther off shore, a whale spouted.
But here at the cliff edge was the domain of crows. They tossed about in the same wind that flapped her father’s cloak and tugged Damanja’s hair loose from its silver wolf head clip to whip it about her face.
Shadow Walker (The Sword Saint Series Book 3) Page 2
