Pathfinder Tales - Shy Knives

by Sam Sykes

  And I assure you, if I hadn’t felt a knife digging into my neck, I would have reflected more on them.

  But this wasn’t a time for thought. This was a time for instincts. And all of mine told me to scream.

  So I did.

  “There’s another way,” I gasped out.

  And Chariel paused. Those big, pointed ears of hers started quivering, listening.

  “The Brotherhood doesn’t forgive,” I said, “but it does do business. It trades, Chariel. And I’ve got a trade I can make it.”

  “You robbed them of a senate seat,” she said. “An Opparan senate seat.”

  “One seat in Oppara,” I said, “compared to the whole of Yanmass I could give them.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but made no other move.

  “I’m onto something, Char. Something big. And it involves some of the biggest houses in Yanmass. Dirty business they’d keenly like to keep anyone from knowing.”

  “And would pay to keep it that way.” Chariel hummed thoughtfully. “There’s old money out here in Yanmass.”

  “Old money, old power.” I eyed her knife. “The Brotherhood can’t turn that down.”

  “They can turn it down from someone who’s burned them before,” Chariel muttered.

  “But not from one of their top assassins,” I shot back. “You run this to them, tell them you vouch for me, they’ll listen.”

  “And if this is a lie, they’ll cut my ears off along with yours.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “It’s always a lie, Shaia.”

  She had me there.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’ve never lied when you could get hurt, too.”

  And she just stared at me for a moment.

  Like I said, everyone in this line of work has more than one face. Me? I had a dark, nasty closet full of them. But there was one of them that I kept buried deep, one I rarely took out, one that I had only shown three times before.

  Once, when I met Sem.

  Again, when I met Chariel.

  And right now.

  And she looked at me. And what she saw in my eyes, looking dead into hers, was enough to get her to drop her knife.

  “If you stay in town,” she said, “and where we can see you … I can get you a few days.”

  “A few days?” I sounded slightly more incredulous than a woman in my position ought to.

  “Maybe a week,” she replied. “And if you can’t get us something by then…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. “I know.”

  She eased her arm off my throat, drew away from me. That cold face, the face she showed so many others, returned as she looked me over.

  “Stay here,” she said. “Give me a minute to talk to the Brothers out front.”

  She began to stalk away and paused, casting a single glance over her shoulder.

  “I’m going to tell you this exactly once, Shaia,” she said. “Do not try to screw me.”

  And I simply smiled sweetly at her as she disappeared into the darkness.

  Ah, Char-Char.

  I never once had to try.

  14

  Empty Bottles

  All right, so, the good news is that I don’t think that Alarin’s behind Gerowan’s murder. I recommend you hold onto that bit, because that’s about all the good news you’re going to get. What is this? Whiskey? I thought I finished this bottle.

  “Anyway—woo, that stuff packs a kick, doesn’t it?—I found a note in Alarin’s study from one Lady Vishera Stelvan. Apparently, he’s been pushing rather hard for a marriage between her son and a cousin of his. That in itself isn’t too interesting, unless Alarin thought Gerowan was a problem for some reason, which isn’t too likely.

  “Sorry, did you want any? No? Well, don’t say I didn’t offer. Anyway, the note I found there completely matched the penmanship of the note I found in Halamox’s stable—I mean, his camp. Hah. Sorry. Long night. Anyway, I was going to come back down and tell you about it when someone smashed me in the back of the head with a dagger hilt.

  “I’m fine, for the record. Nothing another few sips of this can’t cure. Now, I don’t want to bore you with the details, but it turns out I have maybe … four days to solve this thing before someone cuts me into little pieces and feeds me to sharks—or rats. Sometimes it’s rats. Naturally, if I die before solving it, you can keep the latter portion of my payment, no worries.

  “So, long story short, I’m thinking I’ll break into Stelvan’s manor tomorrow night and see if I can’t find anything explaining if she’s behind Gerowan’s murder and, from then, we can use it to accuse her in a court of law. Then you pay me, I ride off into the sunset and—and this is crucial—we don’t spend a lot of time asking questions.”

  I took a deep breath. I smiled across the table. I swirled the whiskey in my cup and took another sip.

  “So,” I said, “how was the rest of the party? Did you have a good time?”

  To her credit, Dalaris, as she stared at me and blinked once, looked like she had taken the news rather well.

  “WHAT?”

  For about a second.

  “Okay,” I said, holding up my hands, “I know that technically, just screaming ‘what’ is more of an exclamation, but I still count it as a question and I was quite clear in—”

  “No! NO!” Each of Dalaris’s words was punctuated with a flail of her fists that I might have found petulant, were they not also accompanied by bright bursts of light from her eyes. “You can’t just come in and tell me this! You can’t drop this … this madness on me!

  “Which part? There was a lot of mad stuff I just told you.”

  “All of it! Any of it!” Dalaris shrieked. “I was mostly willing to explore the possibility of Alarin because I was largely convinced he wasn’t at fault!”

  “And he’s not. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that not only are you telling me that you suspect House Stelvan, a house so far beyond mine that it could have me expelled from Yanmass with a harsh word, to be involved in Gerowan’s murder, but there are also assassins after you for looking into it and that I shouldn’t so much as care?”

  “Oh, now I see where you’re upset.” I laughed, took a sip of my whiskey. “No, see, the assassins are totally incidental to the fact that House Stelvan had your husband killed. Really, they’re my problem, no need to worry about them at all.”

  “No need to worry about them,” she repeated flatly.

  “Right.”

  “No need to worry about the assassins.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No need to worry about the hired killers connected to a larger network of hired killers, each of them hungry for your blood and perfectly willing to kill you and anyone who knows you should you take one wrong step.”

  “Okay, see, if I repeated everything like that, I could make you sound awfully foolish, too.” I shook my head. “But trust me when I say your safety hinges on you not worrying about it. The less you know about my business, the better.”

  “Trust you? Trust you?” She shot to her feet, sending a cloud of dust rising from the sofa. “Trust the woman who disappears and almost gets herself killed on a nightly basis? Trust the woman who finds conspiracies behind every curtain and has a new suspect every night? Trust the woman—”

  “Trust the woman who you paid to get the job done.” I had cut off peoples’ hands with more kindness than I cut off her sentence, but these hysterics had begun to grow tiring. I looked at her coldly over the rim of my glass. “You hired me to find Gerowan’s killer. That is precisely what I’m doing, Lady Sidara.”

  Sem once told me I had a habit for needling people. Said it was what made me so good with a knife. I just had some instinct for figuring out exactly where I could hit people to make them hurt.

  I never really believed it. I had always thought I was just lucky.

  And, indeed, maybe it was just my bad luck that made me say exactly the right words to exactly the wrong
person. But in the very brief moment that occurred after Dalaris’s mouth fell open with disbelief and before her eyes suddenly went aglow with bright, angry light, I had a moment to think that maybe Sem had a point.

  She screamed a word. I felt a wave of force roil over me, knocking the table and the couch over and sending me rolling backward. I was stunned—so stunned I didn’t even think to shed a tear for my poor, innocent spilled whiskey. When I staggered to my feet, my thoughts weren’t for fleeing or fighting. Rather, my eyes were locked onto the creature before me.

  Her eyes burned. Brighter than any crude pyre or earthly flame, her anger was that of twin suns, searing and painful to look at. It painted her skin in a bronze glow, making her look more molten metal than flesh and bone. Her body held itself tense, her jaw clenched, her hair whipping about her with some unseen force. The timid little noble I had met was gone, and I was left with some terrible creature from beyond.

  So I guess maybe I did needle people a little too much.

  “Dalaris, I—”

  “Dalaris?” she spoke, her voice given terrible resonance. “You want to call me by that name now? No desire to call me ‘lady’?”

  “I only meant that—”

  “You only meant to mock me,” she spat. “You only meant to goad me, to make me feel like I don’t belong here, like all the others.”

  “The other nobles?”

  “No, you’re worse than them.” Dalaris stalked toward me, tall and menacing and narrowing her burning gaze upon me. “They scheme, lie, steal, cheat, but because they’re fools with more money than sense. But you.” She thrust a finger at me and I held my breath, wondering if a spell would follow it. “You should know better.”

  I felt something a bit like anger prick at the back of my neck. “I should, should I?”

  “Someone like you,” she growled, “you’ve seen what becomes of the victims of crimes. You’ve seen the children who starve when their food is stolen and the widowers who weep when their wives are never coming home. You lurk in shadows, with your blades and secrets, and you watch the people you hurt and you don’t even care.”

  If it was her angelic bloodline that enabled her to channel sorcerous powers, I wondered if the ability to also channel insufferable sanctimony was a necessity to doing so or merely a perk.

  Regardless of the fact that she probably could have made me burst into flames with a flick of her finger, I stood my ground. I balled up my hands into fists, stalked forward to meet her. And though my glare wasn’t, you know, fiery, I liked to think it conveyed my displeasure.

  “And you think you know me?” I asked. “Tell me how you came about this delightful insight into my character, hm? Been reading my thoughts? Or was that whole spew about shadows and secrets just something you read in a steamy novel?”

  “Do you deny it?” she asked. “Do you deny doing any of those—”

  “Of course not, you idiot. I wasn’t born rich. Or with powers. Or because my great-aunt whatever had an ass so sweet the heavens themselves parted. I was born to slaves in a shitty little corner of a shitty little city of a shitty little country and I had to fight to get out of it.”

  “Fight,” she said, sneering. “Like you’re so noble.”

  “Not noble. Never. You can’t eat honor, and virtue won’t keep you warm at night, sister. I had to earn those things, carve them out of the city’s hide with the tip of my knife. But you’re wrong when you said I didn’t care.” I leaned forward, forced every word through clenched teeth. “I loved every minute of it.”

  She recoiled, as though struck. “I should never have hired you. I should never have—”

  “Then what would you do?” I pressed my luck, reached out and shoved her a little with one finger. “Go run to the guards? Find a noble knight? You’d get a lot of platitudes and good intentions and never hear so much as a gods-damned word of what happened to Gerowan. People like you want to believe that justice is all shiny paladins and sweeping proclamations, but it’s as ugly and dirty as anything else that comes out of civilization, sweetheart, and I’m the girl who doesn’t mind getting down into the dirt.”

  She opened her mouth to retort, but I had heard enough. I held up a hand, spoke forcefully.

  “I’m in too deep to get out now,” I said. “You don’t want to pay me, fine. But if you ever hope of finding justice for your lost love, I—”

  “I NEVER LOVED HIM.”

  It might seem a bit odd that that statement should be what rendered me speechless, as opposed to all the, you know, fire and magic and stuff. But I couldn’t help it.

  “What?” I asked.

  The fires dissipated from her eyes, fading into nothingness. What was left behind were her wide, bright eyes, brimming with tears. The molten glow of her skin, the regality of her poise, all vanished.

  What was left behind was a girl. Even smaller and more scared than the one I had met way back in Herevard’s manor.

  I could hardly blame her for running.

  Hell, I didn’t even blame her for shoving me aside as she tore up the stairs and disappeared down the hall.

  I don’t live with regrets. Any rogue worth the coin in her pockets doesn’t. The sole regret you’re permitted is the one you feel just after the floor drops out from under you and the noose tightens around your neck. And so I certainly didn’t regret telling her what I did. She should know—she should have known—the dirty business she asked me to do.

  And yet, sometimes …

  Do this job long enough, you stop noticing things. You don’t see a nice tree brimming with apples, you just see cover you can duck behind. You don’t see sunshine, you look for the shadows it casts where a knife might be lurking. You forget the nice things in life.

  And you forget not everyone sees the same things you do.

  I looked up the stairs and sighed. I knew I should go talk to her.

  I mean, she spilled all the whiskey, so it wasn’t like there was anything else to do.

  I trudged up the stairs, turned down the hall. The living room of House Sidara at least kept up a vain attempt at remaining dignified, but the upper reaches of the manor had given up all pretense. The walls were cracked and bare of portraits. The floors splintered at the edges where the carpet had frayed. It all seemed less like a home and more like a rich man’s tomb.

  The door to Dalaris’s room was at the end of the hall. I knocked once, heard no reply. Slowly, I eased it open and slipped in.

  I almost felt uncomfortable being in her room. Not for any sense of decency, mind you—“decency” is just one of those fancy words they made up to keep anything productive from getting done, like “virtue” or “law”—but because it was so … so … not where I should be.

  It was not decadent. Not grand, like I imagined a rich woman’s room would be. It was big and had a big bed to match, but it was a comfortable-looking affair with a heavy quilt, two large pillows, and a well-worn stuffed rabbit given an honored position in the middle. The wardrobe was modest, the sofa was threadbare, and the portraits weren’t the grand, ancestral homages of downstairs. Rather, they were small, intimate things: painted memories meant for just one person.

  I had never known a home bigger than a shack. A place like this felt weird, alien to me. Too warm, too close, too … bright. I wanted nothing quite so much as to leave.

  Well, almost nothing.

  I slunk to the bed, where Dalaris sat, staring through teary eyes at the wall. She said nothing as I sat down beside her and stared with her. I was fine with that. A lot is said when no one’s talking.

  But when she finally broke the silence, it was with a whisper.

  “When my mother died, my first thought was to run away,” she said. “I wanted to get away from Yanmass, from Taldor, from anything political or made of gold. Maybe I’d join a wizard’s college or become an adventurer.”

  Now would have been a good moment to have whiskey to sip, if someone hadn’t ruined that.

  “There wasn’t anything f
or me here,” she continued. “Anything that wasn’t dead, anyway.” She sighed, and her eyes drifted to a portrait hanging over her bed of a well-dressed woman with a gentle smile. “But it feels like people only get louder when they die. At least in Yanmass.” She looked down at her hands. “So I chose to stay. I had a duty to House Sidara. I had to continue things.”

  “And you picked Gerowan,” I said.

  “He was polite, gentle, kindly…” Dalaris closed her eyes as she recounted. “He was … fond of me. We were good friends. But there was always something between us, the knowledge that neither of us would be doing this if it weren’t necessary. And if it was a choice between Gerowan and one of those swine at Alarin’s party…”

  I nodded appreciatively. “Smart.”

  “So, when he died … when he was murdered … I was horrified and sad and … and…” She swallowed hard. “I felt something almost like … relief. Gods, how horrible is that?”

  “Eh.” I shrugged. “Not like you wished it upon him.”

  “He was my betrothed.”

  “‘Betrothed.’ He was more a word to you than a person. And it’s not like you’re not trying to do right by him now.”

  “It was a mistake,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten you involved. I should have handled it myself.”

  “If you could handle it yourself, you wouldn’t have found me. But you did find me. And now we’re both in a hole so deep that the only way out is to just keep digging.”

  “How does that make sense?” She looked at me, puzzled. “Do we … dig up?”

  “All right, that? That thing you just said? Stuff like that is why you couldn’t handle it yourself.” I smiled at her. What I thought was an encouraging smile. “Were it me, I wouldn’t have done it. But you’re not me, are you? Even if your grandma hadn’t porked an angel—”

  “Shy, please.”

  “—you’d still be who you are. And I know that, because you are who you are, you’d hate yourself far more if we didn’t find who was behind Gerowan’s murder.”

  She looked down at the floor again. “You really think it was Lady Stelvan?”