I leaned in even closer, placing one hand against the wall to keep from toppling over. I couldn’t be sure without an enlarging lens, but I would have sworn that the cephta on the bindings was legible, even at that size.
I looked down at Ivory. He was reclining now, his head crooked in Degan’s elbow, eyes regarding me from beneath heavy lids.
I wasn’t a White. I was a Paragon.
The sly old bastard.
“It’s not a clue, is it?” I said. “The laws are here, in her study.” I pointed at the figure. “You somehow glimmered the books into the fan, didn’t you?”
A relieved—or was it tired?—smile split his face. More blood trickled out.
“Eh,” he gasped. Yes.
“So how do we get them out?”
Ivory’s hand was still trying to lift itself off the floor when Degan spoke for him. “The sword,” he said, without looking up. “His sword holds his soul, which means it also holds the key to his magic. And to the laws.”
I stepped down off the chair. “His . . . ?” Of course. Ivory had been a Paragon before becoming a degan, and Paragons focused their power through their souls. Just because Ivory didn’t have his soul in his body anymore, it didn’t have to mean he’d lost his ability to—
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Does that mean Steel can use Ivory’s glimmer?”
“I wouldn’t think so. It’s Ivory’s soul after all, not Steel’s. Just having the sword doesn’t give him control over it, let alone the knowledge of how to use that magic.”
“But you don’t know.”
Degan looked back down at Ivory. The old degan’s eyes were closed again. His chest seemed to be barely moving.
“I’ll try to find out,” said Degan. “In the meantime, you should gather up Fowler and get out. We can meet up in the Lower City and see about picking up Steel’s trail there. There can’t be that many Azaari tribesmen leaving el-Qaddice; we shouldn’t have a hard time finding someone who saw him leave.”
“Assuming he didn’t dust all the witnesses,” I muttered.
“Then we’ll follow the vengeful mob on his tail instead.”
“I’m less worried about losing Steel than I am in getting out of here,” I said. I jerked a thumb back the way we’d come. “In case you forgot, it’s almost light out there. Between that and the pile of bodies at the gate, just getting off the grounds is going to be tricky.”
“Which is why I told you to leave now.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll go when Ivory’s gone.”
“That’ll be too late.”
“When he’s gone.”
I thought about arguing, didn’t. Degan had already been too late to save Ivory; it wasn’t right to try and talk him into walking away before he’d said his good-byes.
But I wasn’t ready to leave just yet.
“Degan,” I said. “Why does Wolf want the laws so badly?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you have a suspicion.”
The briefest pause. Then, “Yes.”
I waited. The wheezing, bubbling sound of Ivory’s breathing filled my ears.
When Degan spoke, he didn’t look at me. “There’s an old story,” he said, “that when Ivory took our original Oaths, he bound them in such a way that we could be held to account. That we could be made to serve the holder of that Oath much the same way degans used to be able to compel those who swore to us. Not just by honor or threat, but by magical bonds.”
“And let me guess: The holder of that Oath was the emperor.”
“No,” said Degan. “Most said it was Ivory.”
“You mean he made you all . . . clients? Just like anyone who swore an Oath to you?”
“‘Oath-bound’ is the term we use, but yes, that’s the idea.” Degan wiped a fresh bubble of froth from Ivory’s lips. “I have no idea if it’s true, but I can see why he might have done it. We were new, trying something new, and had no idea if it would work, if it would last. And Ivory was a Paragon. It was his duty to watch over the emperor before all else. Who knew what a group of undying warriors would get up to in a hundred years? Better to have some way to rein us in.”
“And no one confronted him about this?”
“Oh, some of us confronted him when the story came out, all right—especially Steel. He said he’d sworn himself to the emperor, not to Ivory, and that he wouldn’t have a sword like that hanging over his head. Said it dishonored him.”
“So what did Ivory do?”
“Do? Nothing. And neither did the rest of us.”
“What?” I said. “Why?”
“Because we were young and still had too many fresh memories of being White Sashes to think about arguing. And because he was a Paragon. And because the Oaths were already sworn. Besides, it was only a rumor: true or not, there were other things to keep us busy back then.”
“So you served?”
“We served,” said Degan. “But from that point on, the debate over whether we were sworn to serve the empire, or an emperor who may have lied to us, began. It’s been with us ever since.”
“And the laws of the Order?”
Degan looked to the fan in my hands. “Some theorized Ivory wrote down a ritual on how to call in the Oath. Or to renew it. Or to destroy it. No one knows for certain. All I know is that while having the sword gives you sway over the emperor and the Order via the Oath, having the laws might give you complete control.”
“And Wolf wants them both,” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Degan. “Maybe. But my guess is that as long as Wolf has Ivory’s sword, he can accomplish what he wants. After all, there was no way to know the laws had survived until now. Going after the sword would have been the more certain bet.”
“You came for the laws,” I observed.
“I came for whatever I could find, to do whatever I could to help my former sword kin. There’s a difference.”
I looked down at the dying man in Degan’s lap, then at the ruins of the study. Pieces of the story were still missing.
“Why do you think Wolf left him alive?” I said.
Degan shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s a reason. With Wolf, there’s always a reason. And I plan to find out what it is.”
I didn’t argue. Instead, I got up and went back to where the fan had hung on the wall. I undid the two silk ribbons that had wrapped around the fan’s supports, straightened them out, and used them to tie the fan closed.
When I turned back around, I found Degan hunched over his sword brother, his lips almost touching the other degan’s ear, whispering. Ivory’s own lips moved in silent time with Degan’s, rhythm matching rhythm, pause matching pause.
I laid the fan at Degan’s feet, along with Ivory’s letter of passage, and left. Degan didn’t look up as I went.
Chapter Thirty-five
The eastern horizon was showing hints of purple when I walked out Ivory’s front door. An hour to sunup, maybe a hair more. Degan had best not dawdle.
I dragged the guard’s body into the house—he was heavy—and closed the door. A few handfuls of sandy soil kicked across the boards didn’t exactly cover up the trail of blood he’d left behind, but they kept it from being glaringly obvious.
I stayed off the paths and tried to act normal. A messenger on a mission; a functionary on an errand; a lover coming back from a late-night rendezvous with his mistress—anything other than what I was: a thief leaving his best friend and a dead body behind in the night.
There were a handful of servants and guards about, but their lanterns made them easy to avoid. Still, it wasn’t until I came to the gate and found the dogs gnawing on the remains of the guards that I let myself breathe easier. That they were here meant no one had discovered the breach yet. We still had a chance, albeit a shrinking one.
The hounds had done their work well: The gate was a bloody mess, with bits of flesh and bone scattered across the paving stones. I’d had vague notions of trying to hide
the bodies on my way out—maybe move them into the guardhouse, or at least deeper into the shadows—but between the puddles of gore and the bloody paw prints, not to mention the sullen glares of the feasting hounds, I knew it was hopeless. Damn Wolf for leaving the bodies out in the open in the first place, let alone keeping the gate open.
I skirted the hounds, creaked open the gate slightly, and slipped out into the piazza. Compared to the charnel house behind me, it smelled almost fresh out here. Almost.
I resheathed my blade and drew out the patronage token from around my neck. That was when I realized I had a problem, or rather, another problem. What had been a bright brass lozenge only hours ago was now a lump of blue-green verdigris—a glowing lump of verdigris.
Clearly, my patronage had been revoked.
It’s not that I hadn’t been expecting it—the events at the play had all but guaranteed it—I just hadn’t realized the cancellation would be quite so . . . visible. Then again, this was Djan.
I held the lozenge up against the night. The light coming off it wasn’t a radiant glare, but it was still bright enough to mark me, noticeable enough to make me an easy target in the dark, or even in a crowd. Enough to keep me off the main routes, which was exactly where I needed to be to make haste.
Hell.
I dropped the token down a drainage grate and headed for the nearest side street. As expected, it ran like a snake, twisting and turning until I wasn’t sure which way I was headed. I ignored the looks I collected from shadowed doorways and windows, pretended not to be bothered by the whispers that ran in my wake. I moved quickly, but without haste, keeping my chest from easy view as much as possible to hide my lack of brass.
A stairway took me up to another street, which quickly turned into an arched alleyway. That in turn led to a small walkway that ran over the first street I’d come down. I paused, noting the reassuring lack of lurking shadows, then made the short leap onto a nearby roof. A dog woofed in the rooms below me, but I was on to the next building before the owner had time to yell at the beast. It ignored him and kept barking.
I smiled grimly as I left the noise in my wake. If the hounds in the piazza beyond the Dog Gate had been anything like the one behind me, there was no way Degan and I could have gotten in to find Ivory, let alone out again. For that matter, Wolf would have had a harder time of it as well. Not that he’d seemed to care: Leaving a pile of dead men and an open gate wasn’t exactly the height of subtlety.
I hopped a low wall and wove my way among a jungle of empty laundry lines. Ahead, I could see a gap coming up, indicating a broader street to cross. I looked left and right, spied what appeared to be a narrowing of the way a block or so on, and adjusted my course.
I wondered briefly how the meeting between Wolf and Ivory had played out. Had they begun with talking, or was it steel and blood from the start? I could see Wolf wanting to take his time, to taunt his former brother, maybe even offer Ivory a way out, all the while knowing it would come to blows. That seemed to be Wolf’s style: He liked to show how clever he was, to let the mark know just how much he’d been played. Angels knew he’d enjoyed it enough with me. I couldn’t seem him not pausing to twist the knife when it came to confronting Ivory—the temptation would have been too great to miss.
The rattle of stone on stone to my right brought me up short and put me in a crouch. I hadn’t seen anyone else up here so far, but that didn’t mean I was alone. A curse followed the rattle, and after a moment, a figure pulled herself up onto an adjacent building. She paused to dust her hands against her robes and scan her surroundings; then she was off, crossing the roofs at an easy lope.
I waited until she was out of sight and then continued on, my own pace frustratingly less certain by comparison.
My guess, if I had to make one, was that Ivory hadn’t stood for any of Wolf’s baiting. He was too practiced at politics, had lived too long with an eye over his shoulder, to fall for the Azaari’s bluff and bluster. I could almost hear the old degan telling Wolf to get on with it as he took his long sword off the wall; could practically see the glint in his eye as they crossed steel. As for how he handled himself once he’d lost, well, I didn’t have any doubt that the old degan had told Wolf to go fuck himself when it came to the Order’s laws.
I smiled at the thought. That would have been something to see: Wolf coming up short, his plans brought to an abrupt halt by one man’s defiance. To watch as he realized there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to make Ivory give him the laws.
Yeah, I would have paid for a seat to that performance.
I came to the edge of a gently sloping roof. It was a short jump down to an adjacent one, followed by what looked like a nice long run over closely set buildings. In the distance, I could make out the gray-black line of the wall that separated the second ring of the city from the third. Fowler would be in the shadow of that wall, in a basement tavern we’d picked as our Black Ken, waiting for me. From there, it would be a small matter of putting the proper bribes in the proper hands and joining the traffic leaving the Old City. True, the turned tokens might make things more expensive, but we’d been prepared for that possibility and laid down contingencies. Guards could always go blind for enough money.
No, the tricky part wouldn’t be getting out; it would be catching Wolf and stopping him. I didn’t relish trying to track him through the wilds, but at least we knew where he was headed. And besides, if worse came to worst, we could simply put on the miles and try to beat him to Ildrecca. After all, it wasn’t as if we didn’t know what he was planning. We had the laws; he had the sword: It wasn’t as if his options were limitless.
I adjusted my footing, eyed the drop to the next roof, and . . . stood up.
No.
It didn’t make sense. The path was too straight, too predictable. Too easy to see it laid out before me.
I looked over my shoulder, back toward the padishah’s estate and the Dog Gate and the guards lying on the stones. Back to the papers on the floor and Ivory dying in his study. Back to Wolf’s failure.
None of it made sense.
Why leave Ivory alive? If Wolf had shown anything, it was that he did everything for a reason. From killing Crook Eye to manipulating Nijjan to putting me on Degan’s trail, every move had been made with one goal in mind: to get his hands on Ivory’s sword and the Order’s laws. As plans went, it was beautiful—he hadn’t wasted a single motion, hadn’t missed a single step. Every action, every conversation, had been a setup for the next phase, a prelude to the next step in the dance.
It was the kind of execution any Gray Prince would have been proud to call his own.
Had Wolf thought the old degan would bleed to death before anyone got to him? Or had he simply wanted to make sure that Ivory died a slow, lingering death—a kind of grim payback over their falling-out so many years before? Angels knew Wolf was vicious enough to do that.
But then why leave the guards lying out in the open? I didn’t know whether he’d dusted them coming or going, but either way, Wolf must have known that even if the padishah’s men didn’t find them, Degan and I would. And that if we did, we’d . . .
Oh. Of course.
Shit.
I turned and began sprinting back the way I’d come.
Fool! We’d been meant to find them. And not just the guards—he’d wanted us to find Ivory, too. Alive. So we could talk to him. Comfort him.
Talk the dying degan into telling us where the laws were hidden.
Bastard.
Wolf had to be back there, had to be somewhere in or above the piazza, watching the Dog Gate even now, waiting for Degan to step through the gate. Just because I hadn’t seen him didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding, wasn’t waiting to spring once we were off the grounds and away from despotic interruptions. He’d gotten into my rooms under Fowler’s nose: If anyone could place himself without being seen, even by my night vision, it was him.
And why let me go? Why let me stroll away from the ground unmolested? Because h
e was after bigger fish. Wolf wanted the Order’s laws, and he knew that if anyone was going to have them, it would be Degan.
And that he’d have to kill him for them.
I flew back the way I’d come, scrambling and leaping where before I’d moved with a more cautious pace. The dog barked again, but this time when its owner shouted, it was because of the tiles I sent crashing to the street as I jumped down off his roof.
I ran back along the covered alley and practically tumbled down to the street in my haste. Amber-limned shapes drew back as I rushed past, shouting curses in my wake. I didn’t care: didn’t care about gathering attention, didn’t care about my missing token, didn’t care that I might be drawing ready blades after me. All I cared about was getting back to the damn gate before Degan stepped into whatever Wolf had planned for him.
I raced around the final turn and jerked to a halt, my feet skidding on the dusty stones beneath me. A lone figure stood where the street opened onto the piazza. The figure had a drawn sword in his hand and a smile on his face.
He was a degan, all right—just not the right one.
“I was wondering if you’d put the pieces together,” said Wolf. He was dressed in the Djanese style, with loose pants and a short tunic, all under a flowing burnoose, all spattered in blood.
“It wasn’t that hard,” I lied.
Wolf raised a dubious eyebrow. “Oh?”
“No,” I said. Talk. Buy time. Let Degan walk out the gate and hear you, find you. Maybe take Wolf from behind. “Remember what I used to do, why you brought me. I poke at things until they make sense, collect pieces until I can see the picture through the puzzle.” I rested an easy hand on my sword. Wolf didn’t react. “You broke your pattern.”
“My pattern?”
Sworn in Steel Page 45
