by Jim Butcher
The Vord had taken the city.
Croach was growing within the walls. As the sun set, it threw up a sullen green light upon the grey-white stones of the city, making them look eerily translucent, like jade illuminated from within. From outside the walls, the city was eerily still and silent. No watchmen called. No bells tolled. No clip-clop of horses’ hooves rattled from the stones. There were no voices, no singing from the wine houses, no mothers calling their children in as the sky settled from twilight to night.
One could hear, very faintly, the murmuring of the city’s fountains, still flowing despite the Vord presence. And, every so often, the eerie, warbling call of one of the Vord echoed up from one of the streets or rooftops within.
Amara shivered.
She got close enough to Bernard to be seen clearly and signed to him. Quarry. Where?
Bernard pointed at what had been the High Lord’s citadel in the middle of the city and added the sign Maybe.
Amara grimaced. She’d been thinking the same thing herself. The citadel would be the most secure place in Ceres. If she were an Aleran among a horde of Vord, she would want the thickest walls and strongest defenses around her when she slept. Agreed. Proceed?
Bernard signaled agreement. Begin where?
A good point. They could do without walking in through the front gates, relying purely upon their furycrafted veils to protect them from detection. Amara, like most Cursors, knew about a dozen different ways to enter all of the High Lords’ cities unobtrusively. It was a far easier matter in a large city than in smaller towns, really.
She signaled Bernard to follow her and started for the slavers’ tunnels that ran under the west wall of the city.
The tunnels had been sealed prior to the Vord attack, of course, but as she had fully expected, they had been opened by panicked inhabitants of the city as they fled. The tunnel entries all showed the rough, outward-flung ripples of stone moved aside in haste by earthcrafters of mediocre talent, and were wide enough, just barely, for an adult carrying a heavy pack to slip through. Best of all, none of the three entrances within easy reach showed any sign of the Vord, either upon the ground outside or within the tunnels themselves. The only marks were the tracks of booted feet.
It was a good sign. The bulk of the Vord forces had pursued the First Lord and the Legions as they fled to the north. It meant that the city was probably only lightly occupied, rather than being a seething hive. They might be able to move with more speed once they were within.
Amara slipped into the dark mouth of the nearest tunnel. Furylamps were still burning inside, though they were of poor quality and spaced widely.
She drew close to her husband, once within, and crafted a globe of still air about their heads and shoulders that would not allow their words to escape into the close confines of the tunnels. “Lucky,” she breathed, her voice a whisper, harsh from disuse. “We still have light enough to move by.”
Her husband drew her a little closer to his chest and made a low rumble in his throat. “I’d think it was too convenient if I hadn’t lived the past week.”
“They can’t be strong everywhere,” Amara replied. “If there were that many of them, they wouldn’t have needed to pursue the First Lord so closely.”
Bernard frowned at that and nodded slowly. “He’s still a threat to them.” He glanced around at the tunnel, his eyes wary but more confident. “What is this place?”
“The slavers in Ceres had a problem,” Amara said. “A ready market, opposed by organizations of fanatic abolitionists, who would attempt to disrupt shipments of slaves and murder slavers as creatively as possible. The slavers created these tunnels as secure means in and out of the city.”
“Somehow,” Bernard said, a hint of a smile on his lips, “I think that whatever happens, that problem has been permanently solved.”
Amara found herself tittering on the edge of a half-hysterical giggle. “Yes, I suppose so.”
Bernard nodded down the tunnel. “Smells foul, though. Where does it lead?”
“The auction house, in the western city square. It’s less than five hundred yards from the citadel.”
“Excellent,” Bernard said. His eyes went back to hers. “How are you?”
Amara thought it was the simple humanity of the question, in the face of the horror they had seen, that made her chest pang so sharply. She was tired. She ached in every limb and every joint. She was hungry, shaky, and terrified on such a steadily ongoing basis that it had begun to lose its bite and fade into numb indifference. The reminder of a kinder, gentler world, of the times they had shared speaking quietly, or sleeping beside one another, or making love, flared up in a hideously bright, dangerous fire inside her.
She looked away from him and spoke with a shaking voice. “I . . . I can’t. Not yet. We still have work to do.”
His hands rose to her upper arms and squeezed gently. His voice came out warm, quiet, steady. “It’s all right, love. Let’s be about it. We need to consider—get down!”
She froze in surprise for an instant, even as her husband’s arms drove her to her knees. She lost her balance and would have toppled to one side had he not caught her.
At his curt gesture, she dropped the interdicting windcrafting and they were immediately assaulted by the sounds they would have heard had she not been holding it in place.
Voices echoed in the tunnel. Feet thudded in a careless clatter. Someone—perhaps even their quarry—was in the tunnels with them, and they were crouching in a narrow corridor like perfect fools. No amount of concealing furycraft would do them any good if one of the Vord sympathizers physically blundered into them.
The volume of the voices rose. The tunnels rendered them completely unintelligible, but their tone was clear: an argument. Then a pair of shadowy forms backlit by a dingy furylamp emerged from a cross tunnel ahead of them and turned to proceed farther into the stinking depths of the tunnel that led toward the auction house, away from Amara and Bernard.
She traded a look with her husband. Then the pair of them rose to their feet and began stalking after the retreating figures.
The tunnel widened and became much higher after only a few more yards, its shape far more regular, sloping gently upward as it moved farther into the city. Their footing was good. It was not difficult to move more swiftly than they had in days, their feet, long used to silence, making no more sound on the stones than they had over the soft earth. Amara felt a fierce surge of exaltation spread through her limbs, making weariness vanish, and found her hand upon her sword. She wanted to punish these men, whoever they were, who had turned against their own kind, to butcher them as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible. She wanted to strike back at the horrors who had overrun the Vale and visited so much pain and destruction upon its holders.
But vengeance wouldn’t bring anyone back. Indulging her own need for action would not assist the First Lord in stopping the Vord. No matter that it felt right. She had to be cold, rational, just as Fidelias had always taught her. Or tried to teach her, at any rate. Crows take his treasonous eyes.
She took her hand slowly from her sword. There was still a job to do.
“. . . and you know what she’s going to say when we get back,” snarled the voice of a man in the group in front of them. They had drawn close enough to the sympathizers for their discussion to be understood. “That you should have brought them all back here to be processed.”
“Crows take the highborn bitch,” snarled another man’s voice. “She said to find out what the Cursors were up to. She never said anything about recruiting them.”
The first man’s voice became plaintive, blending frustration and anxiety in equal amounts. “Can’t you explain it to him? Before we’re all killed for incompetence?”
A woman’s voice—a familiar one, though Amara couldn’t place it immediately in the echoing tunnel—answered him. “It doesn’t matter to me either way. He’ll kill the two of you. I have something else to offer him.”
; “Whore,” spat the second man.
“One can retire from whoredom,” the woman replied, her tone cool. “Idiocy is for life—which, in your case, is probably about thirty minutes.”
“Maybe I should just enjoy myself in the time left to me, then,” the man said in an ugly tone. There was the sharp sound of an open-handed blow on skin, followed by scuffling feet and tearing cloth.
“Ranius!” barked the first man, his voice high and panicked.
“She’s just a whore,” Ranius growled. “One who needs to be put in her place. You can have a turn after I’m d—”
There was the sharp, sudden sound of snapping bone.
It was followed instantly by a heavy thud.
“Oh, crows,” the first man screamed, his voice rising to a falsetto shriek.
“Apparently he’s done, Falco,” said the woman, her voice perfectly calm and polite. “Do you want your turn?”
“No. No, no, no, look,” Falco babbled, his voice quick and shaking. “I never had a problem with you. Okay? I never tried to lay a hand on you. I never said a thing to you while you were . . . questioning the prisoners.”
The woman’s voice took on a hard, contemptuous edge. “Those people died for Alera. The least you can do is say the words. Ranius and I weren’t questioning them, Falco. We were torturing them to death. And you did nothing. Bloody crows, you’re gutless.”
“I just want to live!”
“Everyone dies, Falco. Scramble all you want, but in the end you wind up like Ranius, there, no matter what you do.”
“You shouldn’t have killed them,” Falco said. “You shouldn’t have killed them. He’s going to be furious.”
“They died hard,” the woman said. “But it was a cleaner death than they would have had if we’d brought them back. Cleaner than we’re going to get.”
“Why didn’t you stop Ranius?!” Falco whined. “You could have stopped him. You know what’s going to happen to us when we tell him what happened to the Cursors. You’re smart. You knew . . .”
Falco’s voice trailed off into tense silence.
“You’ve still got half an hour,” the woman said in a level tone. “You want to be quiet now.”
“You did it on purpose,” Falco blurted. “You wanted the Cursors dead. So they couldn’t talk. You’re betraying him.” He drew in a breath and his voice turned horrified. “You’re betraying them.”
There was a low sigh from up the tunnel. “Crows take it, Falco . . .”
“You lied to him,” Falco continued in a dazed voice. “How the bloody crows did you lie to him?”
“Lying is easy,” the woman replied quietly. “Getting people to believe what you want them to believe is considerably more difficult. It helps to be able to distract them with something.”
“Oh, crows,” Falco moaned. “Do you know what’s going to happen to us when he finds out?”
The woman’s voice was calm—almost compassionate—and Amara finally placed it. “He isn’t going to find out.”
“The crows he won’t!” Falco retorted. “They’ll know. They always know. I’m not going to have my guts ripped out for those things to crawl in!”
“No,” she said. “You aren’t.”
Falco’s voice turned panicked again. “Get away from me!”
There were running footsteps. Then a hissing sound—a knife’s blade cutting the air as it was thrown, Amara judged. Falco let out a scream of agony and, from the sound of it, stumbled and fell. There was the sound of quick, light footsteps, then a gurgling sigh.
Amara moved forward until she could see the woman clearly.
She wasn’t pretty, precisely, but she was fit, her features strong and appealing. She wasn’t particularly tall, but her stance was confident, her motions brisk and sure, blending into a sense of competence that permeated her entire presence. She wore leather flying trousers and a dark blouse. The latter was silk, and it was torn, revealing a swath of smooth skin. Her eyes were the color of rich earth after a rain. Blood speckled her face.
A large man’s body lay on the tunnel floor, his head twisted at a grotesque angle, his tongue protruding from between motionless lips: Ranius. A second man lay prone at her feet. He wasn’t dead yet, technically, though the blood pumping from his slit throat into a pool on the stone floor was beginning to slow. A small throwing knife protruded from the hollow of one of his knees, precisely centered, sunk to the hilt.
The woman crouched down over him and smoothed the man’s hair with her hand. “I’m sorry, Falco,” she said quietly. “I can’t let you give me away. I’m sorry you had to be afraid for so long. But your life ended weeks ago.”
The man on the floor let out a small moan that ended in a little rattle. There was a terrible finality to the sound.
The woman bowed her head for a moment, then took her hand from the man’s hair and spoke, her tone a quiet eulogy. “There are worse things to be than a coward. It was cleaner than anything they’d have given you.”
She then began cleaning the bloody knife in her hand on his clothing. Once that was done, she jerked the throwing knife from the corpse’s leg and cleaned it as well. She rose, her motions still brisk—then froze.
Amara hadn’t made a sound or moved, but the woman shifted her grip on her knife and turned to face back down the tunnel, toward her, her body moving into a ready crouch, one hand held out in front of her, the little weapon lifted and ready to be thrown. Her eyes were narrowed, questing up and down the hall, her head tilted slightly, one ear a little forward, and her nostrils were wide as if questing for a scent.
Amara felt a second of sharp amusement. In any tunnels other than those leading to slave pens, she supposed her odor, anything but charming after weeks in the field, might well have given her away.
She put a hand on her husband’s chest to warn him back, and took two steps forward, letting her feet strike the stone, slowly lowering the veil around her as she did.
The woman froze for a moment, then her eyes widened in recognition. “Countess Amara?”
“Hello, Rook,” Amara said quietly. She stepped forward, lifting her empty hands, and faced the former head of the late High Lord Kalarus’s Bloodcrows, the mistress of his personal assassins. Rook’s defection and subsequent cooperation with the Crown had been responsible, as much as anything else, for Kalarus’s downfall.
But what is she doing here?
After a moment, Amara asked, “Are you going to throw that knife?”
Rook lowered the weapon at once, rising out of her crouch a bit more slowly, letting out a long, steady exhalation. Then she slipped the weapon away and averted her eyes. “Don’t talk to me.”
“It’s all right,” Amara said slowly. “I’m a Cursor. I understand what you did. I know you aren’t the enemy.”
Rook let out a low, bitter croaking sound that might have been intended as a laugh. Then she lifted her chin, still without looking at Amara, and tugged the collar of her torn blouse back from her throat.
A simple steel band gleamed there, a familiar slaver’s device.
A discipline collar.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Countess,” Rook said quietly. “I am.”
CHAPTER 28
Isana met the tribal chiefs of the Icemen two days later, at the same place she had spoken with Big Shoulders.
“This is ridiculous,” Lady Placida said, pacing back and forth in the new snow. She was huddled beneath layered cloaks and shivering. “Honestly, Isana. Over the centuries, don’t you think someone would have noticed if the Icemen were watercrafters?”
“Don’t let the cold make you cross,” Isana said, struggling to ignore it herself. There was a certain amount watercrafting could do to mitigate the cold, by keeping blood flowing steadily throughout her own limbs, and by convincing the snow and ice not to be quite as chilling to her flesh as it might be otherwise. Combined with a good cloak, it was enough to make her comfortable, but just barely. She doubted Aria had ever had need to practice the co
mbination of techniques before, and despite the fact that her skills were almost certainly greater than Isana’s own, the High Lady was the one being forced to pace back and forth.
“It’s a simple bit of f-f-fieldcraft,” Aria replied, shivering. Several tendrils of red hair slipped from beneath the green of her hood and danced back and forth over her face in the chill northern wind. “So simple that every single legionare in the northern Legions can learn it. And it takes someone of your skill at watercraft to even notice it’s being used from five feet away. Surely you aren’t saying that not only are the Icemen capable of furycraft, but that they’re as skilled as Aleran Citizens, to boot?”
“I don’t believe anyone using that firecrafting to stay warm is capable of thinking very clearly when the Icemen are nearby,” Isana said calmly. “I believe there is some sort of unanticipated side effect occurring—one that caused you to be provoked quite easily at the first meeting.”
Aria shook her head. “I think you’re exaggerating the fact that—”
“That you nearly assaulted Doroga, an ally who was there to help us and who had offered us no harm?” Isana interrupted gently. “I was there, Aria. I felt it with you. It was not at all in character for you.”
The High Lady pressed her lips together, frowning. “The Icemen hadn’t yet arrived.”
“Yes, they had,” Araris put in gently. “We just didn’t know it yet.”
Aria lifted one hand in a gesture of concession. “Then why doesn’t it happen constantly? Why only when the Icemen are near?”
Isana shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps there’s some kind of resonance with their own emotions. They seem to be able to project them to one another in some fashion. Perhaps we’re experiencing some of their reaction to us.”
“So now you’re saying that they’re firecrafters as well?” Aria asked—but her eyes were thoughtful.
“All I’m saying is that I think we’d be wise not to assume that we know everything,” Isana said evenly.
Aria shook her head and glanced at Araris. “What do you think?”
