by Jon Sprunk
Fists banged on the door.
“You'd better hurry,” Kit said.
Caim tried to ignore her as he pressed his back against a wall in the darkest part of the room. There amid the shadows, he closed his eyes and shut out the outside world. He focused on the sliver of fear quivering at the center of his core. Fear was the key. It was always there, hidden beneath layers of denial and repression. Caim hated this. He had to tap into that feeling, allow it to possess him. At first, he didn't think he could. There were too many distractions. The pain was too far removed. But then a memory seized hold of him. It was an old memory, full of pain.
Raging flames painted the night sky in hues of orange and gold, and threw shadows across the yard of the villa where the tall bodies sprawled. There was blood everywhere, pooled in the gravel, splattered across the face of the man kneeling in the center of the yard, running down his chest in a great black river.
Father…
Caim opened his eyes as the dark came alive.
It gathered around him like a cloak. By the time the guards battered down the door, he was hidden within its inky folds. Just another shadow. The soldiers flitted about like bees from a jostled hive. Some dashed into the tunnel with lit firebrands. Others stood over the corpses of the duke and his son. None of them detected the shade that glided out the door and down the stairs.
Once outside, Caim scaled the keep's curtain wall and disappeared into the countryside. Dappled moonlight splashed over him like a gossamer rainstorm. A quarter mile away from the stronghold, he released the cloying darkness. He grabbed the trunk of a sapling to hold himself upright as a wave of disorientation overloaded his senses. The darkness swam before his eyes in a thousand shades of gray and black. Something lurked in the distance, just beyond the limit of his vision. He didn't know how he summoned the shadows. The power had resided within him for as long as he could remember, lurking within him, threatening to erupt whenever he was frightened or angry. He had learned to control those feelings over the years, but he never got used to it.
After a minute, the weakness passed and the normality of the night returned, and Caim resumed his trek through the fog-strewn moor. Kit danced ahead of him in the distance like a will-o’-the-wisp. The faint tune of a tavern song reached his ears. Same old Kit. Nothing fazed her. Yet he couldn't share in her frivolity. Not even the prospect of the sizable bounty he would soon collect lifted his spirits. Apprehension welled up inside him, rising up like the deep arm of the sea, dragging him into unknown depths. His steps slowed in the fog.
Overhead, a lone star pierced the cloud cover. Like a man grasping a lifeline, he stumbled toward it, following its shimmer through the gloom.
CHAPTER TWO
Josephine rushed from the carriage and into the house faster than the footman burdened with her purchases could follow. Her cheeks stung from the brisk autumn chill.
As she brushed past Fenrik, their family steward, she shed her jacket and the new hat she'd bought. He collected her garments with his usual aplomb.
“Welcome home, mistress. I trust your excursion was pleasant.”
“Marvelous! Is Father upstairs? I must see him right away. I have amazing news! Anastasia is to be married this Yeartide Day and to such a dashing man. His name escapes me at the moment, but he's very tall and handsome. Did I mention he was an officer in the Sacred Brotherhood?”
“No, mistress. But—”
She flew past him without waiting for another word. Father would be ensconced in his study with his books and papers. Retired from his government post for four years, he still maintained his connections in political circles, a thing for which she was especially grateful. Someday those connections would net her a smart match like Anastasia had just made.
Josey paused on her way to the stairs. An unfamiliar overcoat hung from the brass rack on the wall.
“Fenrik, who visits with my father?”
“A man from the palace, milady.”
“From the palace?” She raced up the wide marble steps.
“He does not wish to be disturbed.”
Of course Father would want to see her straightaway. A visitor from the palace could only mean one thing. Her father was finally making a match for her hand, and to a man from an outstanding family. Her heart was ready to burst from her chest. Just to think, she and Anastasia could both be married by this time next year.
A curtseying maid passed on her way to the study. Josey paused for a moment at the door. She couldn't remember it ever being closed. She glanced down the hall. The chambermaid was gone. On an impulse, she pressed her ear against the wooden panels. The voices of two men murmured on the other side. A tendril of guilt knotted in her belly, but she didn't pull away. If this visitor was here to discuss her matrimonial options, it concerned her more than anyone. But she couldn't make out what was being said. She wished they would speak up.
The voices ceased and Josey jumped back as the door opened. She smoothed the front of her dress and did her best to look as if she had just arrived. The guest was a tall gentleman, younger than she imagined. A sigil of crossed keys was emblazoned on the breast of his gray mantle, which he wore over a suit of the same color. He had a sallow face with a nervous look about him, a look that amplified Josey's anxiety. Had their discussion not gone well? Had Father not offered an adequate dowry? She was bursting with questions. The man bent in a stiff bow before striding past her to the stairs.
Josey peeked inside. Her father sat at his perennially cluttered desk with a hand pressed to his forehead. The light from an open window illuminated his pate, bald save for a halo of sparse white hair around the crown. He would be sixty-two this winter. She remembered how strong and tall he had looked when she was a child. Now, he spent most of his time in this study, surrounded by the trappings of his former power. The room was stuffy and warm, but he kept a blanket wrapped around his legs.
He straightened when he saw her. “Josey. I didn't hear you return. How was your shopping? Did you find Anastasia well? I want to hear everything.”
“Father.” She entered and sat in the leather chair beside his desk. “Who was that man? Fenrik said he came from the palace.”
He reached out to take her hand. His fingers were thin and cold.
“His father was a friend of mine. In younger days, the two of us were powerful men. Members of the Court vied for our attention and would give much for our patronage, but now he's dead and buried and I am an old man.”
“You are still a great man. I just had this notion your visitor was calling about something…more auspicious.”
“Ah.” He placed a finger alongside his nose. “You thought he came with a betrothal offer.”
She tried to blush, but it was a trick she'd never mastered. “It was silly of me. I'm only seventeen, I know.”
“Seventeen and as lovely as a rose in bloom. I wish I had such an offer, Josey. Sadly, the news is not so gay. There are rumors of strange troubles in the north. Banditry and worse. Envoys have gone missing and things are deteriorating here in Othir. How would a voyage suit you?”
His question caught her off guard. “Suit me? Father, I can't leave Othir. Anastasia is to be married. That's what I've come to tell you. She's asked me to be her maiden of honor.”
“I'm quite serious, Josephine. The political tide is shifting faster than I anticipated. I had hoped we could weather the storm, but I fear it's not safe anymore.”
“Not safe? Why not?”
He eased back in his chair, suddenly looking old and feeble. “Affairs on the Capitoline are in disarray.”
Father still used old-fashioned terms like the Capitoline, even though the Nimean Empire had died out ages ago and everyone else had taken to calling it Celestial Hill.
“There is unrest in the streets,” he continued. “And the prelate's ability to contain it grows weaker. Just the other day, a man was killed not three blocks from our doorstep. Suffice it to say I wish you to adjourn to a safer location until these problems pass.”
; “I was out the whole afternoon and I didn't see anything amiss. The city is as calm as a summer day. Anyway, Anastasia is my best friend. I can't miss her wedding, Father. Not for anything.”
“Josey, my dear. I promised your mother I would always see to your well-being. And I act from my own selfish desires. I couldn't bear to see you come to harm. You possess the key to my heart.”
She placed a hand on her bosom. Under the lace fronting of her dress, the cool hardness of a pendant pressed against her skin. She knelt before him and folded her hands on his lap.
“Mother wasn't afraid of anything. She wouldn't want me to leave your side.”
He brushed a rogue curl from her face. The corners of his eyes drooped amid folds of wrinkles. “She would want you to trust my judgment and obey my wishes. Please, Josey, pack your things. I have arranged for a ship.”
“Father, please!”
“No, Josey. My mind is adamant on this. You will go to Navarre and remain there until I send for you. The new exarch is a good man and as trustworthy as we'll find in times such as these. He will see you safe—”
Josey jumped to her feet, her entire body trembling. “I won't go! You cannot make me.”
“It is settled. Chide me no more on this subject, Daughter.”
Cheeks wet with tears, she dashed from the study, brushing past Fenrik in the hallway loaded with wrapped bundles from the carriage. She slammed the door to her room and stood at the foot of the feather bed, hands clenched at her sides. How could he be so cruel? Why couldn't he see that she couldn't leave? They needed each other. She had no other family. Only him, and now he was sending her away. What would she tell Anastasia?
Josey took deep breaths and composed herself. Tears wouldn't get her anywhere. She sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her hair with short, hard strokes. She needed to think, to devise some argument to sway her father. She had to convince him to let her stay. She had to.
Raging flames painted the night sky in hues of orange and gold, and threw shadows across the yard of the villa where the tall bodies sprawled. Caim peered through the wooden slats of the fence.
“We have to go,” a voice whispered behind him.
Caim wanted to turn away, but his limbs had turned to stone. The frigid wind flogged his small body. The cold slid through his veins like ice water. There was blood on his hands. He wiped them on his shirt, but they wouldn't come clean.
The world shimmered and he was standing in the yard. A large man slumped at his feet. Strings of red-black blood ran from the wound in his chest. A tremor ran through Caim as the corpse opened its eyes, black spheres without irises or whites. A whisper issued from blue-tinged lips.
“Justice…, my son.”
Caim opened his eyes and was greeted by a razor-sharp moonbeam that pierced through the slats of the window shutters. A cool breeze flitted over his chest as the last vestiges of the dream—the images of fire and death—sifted through his mental grasp. He settled back into the fabric of the cot under him and stared at the ceiling, debating whether to get up or try to fall back asleep for another hour.
With a sigh he threw back the woolen blankets and dropped to his chest on the cold floorboards. His muscles stretched and contracted through a routine of exercises: push-ups, stomach tighteners, lunges, and handstands. Thirty minutes later he was sweating freely. After splashing his face with water from a chipped clay pitcher, he stood before his only extravagance, a full-length cheval glass in a bronze stand. Hard eyes stared back at him from the wavy depths of the mirror, chips of granite set in deep cavities beneath his thick, black brows. He ran his hands across his torso, examining the damage; a few scrapes and cuts, broken skin at his elbows and the backs of his hands, but all in all he was in better shape than he probably deserved. Fragments of the dream scudded through his mind. The words of his father's ghost haunted him. Justice. Had it been served in Ostergoth?
He pulled a clean chiton and breeches from his footlocker and went out into the kitchen. The rest of his apartment lacked for furniture: a plain table stood with a single chair, a coldbox and small brick oven in the kitchen, and a pantry. The living area was bare except for a wide mat and assorted pieces of exercise equipment, sand-filled bags suspended from the ceiling. A charcoal etching of a lighthouse drawn by a street artist hung on the wall in a plain wooden frame. In the picture, black frothing waves battered at the rocky base of the lighthouse as its beacon shone bravely in the face of the storm. Tiny lights flickered in the distance. They made him think of Kit.
He put on a pair of scuffed leather boots and wondered where she was. Kit came and went as she pleased. Sometimes he wouldn't see her for days, and other times he couldn't get rid of her. He didn't know what Kit was, not exactly. When he was a boy he had thought of her as an imaginary friend, but as he grew older and she did not leave, he began to suspect something else. No one else had invisible friends who tagged after them. But she was real. She knew things he didn't, things he couldn't know. Countless times she'd warned him of danger before it materialized.
His ability to meld with the shadows was another mystery. He had always been good at going about unnoticed, even as a boy, but where did the power come from? Had he been born with it or was he cursed? More trouble than anything, it was another quirk of a past he remembered only in murky fragments. Maybe he didn't want to.
Caim strapped on his knives and covered them with a fustian cloak as he went to the door, its olive green paint peeling away in strips to reveal the slab of old wormwood underneath. He peered down the hallway in both directions. As he secured the door's rusty latch, a small, pale face stared up at him from across the hall. He had seen the girl a few times before, playing alone in the hallway at odd hours. Her wheat-colored hair hung down across her thin shoulders in tangled skeins. She couldn't have been older than six, or maybe seven. Angry voices echoed from beyond the door beside her. Caim walked away.
He descended a flight of creaking stairs and passed through the dirty foyer. The tenement building might have been a stately manor house in its former days before the neighborhood took a turn for the worse. Still, he liked its location and found the current owner's policy of studied indifference toward his tenants convenient. As long as the rent was paid on time, the old geezer never asked questions.
As Caim reached the street, a stench assaulted him like a wet sock full of rotten eggs, a combination of sea air and human refuse that clogged his head and clung to the back of his palate. It was worse in the summer.
The ancient stone buildings of Low Town, once the heart of the city according to the local salts, were stained with centuries of weather, soot, and foul air. Over the years, the inner city had grown upward as well as outward. Buildings four and five stories tall hung precariously over the narrow streets. With the defeat of the pirates of the Stormcatcher Islands fifty or so years back and the subsequent expansion of trade on the Midland Sea, those with the means to capitalize on the sudden influx of new goods left the neighborhood to build bigger homes on the hills above the Processional. So High Town was born, eventually to become the glowing jewel of Othir. Things had only gotten worse for the Low Towners in recent years, such as increased taxes to pay for distant wars and expensive public works like the new cathedral under construction in the city center, and food shortages. The poorest families were put out on the street by landlords feeling the pinch. He saw them every day, begging on the main thoroughfares, selling their children in back alleys.
As he hopped over a fetid puddle on Prior's Cross, Caim caught a glimpse of the horned moon, perched over the roof of an abandoned dyer's factory like a silver sickle. Its otherworldly beauty, forever out of reach, always made him uneasy in a way he couldn't rightly describe. It was like being homesick, but for a home he had never known.
Othir had been his home for six years. He had originally begun plying his trade as a sellsword in the western territories. He'd done time in various mercenary crews during his teen years, earning his silver with one hand
and spending it with the other. But after a bit of nasty business in Isenmere, his gang was run out by a posse bent on revenge. He drifted from town to town, always watching over his shoulder. When no lawmen showed up to arrest him, he passed into a new life.
A right turn onto Serpentine Way brought Caim to a tangle of back streets and alleyways known as the Gutters. Here the buildings were built of old, crumbling brick covered in dingy whitewash. Their sooty slate roofs tilted sharply, with tall steeples and shuttered gables. The Gutters were home to every sort of crook and deadbeat imaginable. It was a place to tread lightly, where anything could happen and often did.
Caim strode down the center of the street. Footpads slunk deeper into their hidey-holes as he passed by. Muggers found business elsewhere. He'd drenched these cobblestones in blood more than once. Still, he kept his cloak tight around his shoulders and one hand on a knife.
His first contract had been right here in Othir. Dalros was a luxuries trader whose business had suffered a turn of bad fortune. When he couldn't cover his debts to the local usurers, they decided to make an example of him. Caim was tapped for the job. It was a simple break-and-stab, nothing fancy, but Caim would never forget the shakes he'd suffered that spring night as he scaled the low wall surrounding Dalros's home. He was in and out in less than fifteen minutes. With the merchant's blood on his hands, he'd crept past a lounging sentry, slipped back over the wall, and gone on his way. He was paid twenty gold soldats for that job, a fortune to him in those days.
A shout from behind made Caim spin around. His knife slid out of its sheath as a squadron of soldiers on horseback rode down the street. On their bloodred breastplates gleamed a blazing sunburst in gold, the symbol of the Sacred Brotherhood, or the Knights of the Noose, as they were called behind their backs—a jest about the manner in which their patron saint had gone to meet his Maker. Some in Othir said they were the real power behind the prelacy, but Caim paid little heed to politics. It made no difference to him who ruled as long as he could count on them to sow discord and corruption; unrest made for good business in his line of work. And over the past few years, business had been extraordinarily good.
