Half the courtyard was taken up by a web of ropes knotted to pitons jutting from cracks in the walls. Cara balanced barefoot along one swaying hemp line. She wore threadbare trousers hacked off at the knees and a long sleeveless overshirt belted with a green sash. The smooth, strong muscles of her calves flexed, her hips shifting with easy grace as the rope moved. She’d pinned her long blonde braid up on her head so it wouldn’t affect her balance. A fierce grin split her tawny face, her pale eyes fixed on a wiry, balding male outrider who edged toward her along a second strand of the web. High above, a tarp stitched out of gossamer-thin prayer banners filtered the harsh summer sun into a hazy golden glow.
It wasn’t just the sight of Cara, lean and lovely as a sandcat, that closed my throat so tight I couldn’t speak. It was the memory of all the winter days I’d spent in this very courtyard, challenging friends to crazy feats of balance, laughing and planning future climbs, utterly free of the fear and anger that weighed my heart now.
A female voice called, “Twenty kenets says you can knock Vanik off before he touches a single piton, Cara!” I recognized the two other outriders who lay sprawled on their elbows beside a stack of scrap iron. Gevia, with skin dark as night and her beaded braids bound into a single thick tail; and Ikkio, who was Korassian-born and deceptively thin, his raven-black hair hanging past narrow shoulders that were pure corded muscle.
Cara balanced on one foot and stretched a leg out to kick Vanik’s strand of rope. He broke at the waist, arms windmilling, but arched backward in an improbable curve and kept his balance. Gevia hissed, while Ikkio whistled in approval.
I finally managed to summon my voice. “Cara.”
Cara twisted so fast she lost her balance. She leaped down to the flagstones, her blue eyes gone wide. “Dev?”
She sprinted across the courtyard and pulled me straight into a kiss whose passion and force left me feeling a hell of a lot better about Samis. Ah gods, the press of her slim, muscled body against mine, the spiced-honey scent of her hair…I held her tight with my throat choked all over again. At the mines, I’d dreamed of this reunion. But not like this, not with Kiran sacrificed to achieve it.
“Khalmet’s hand,” Vanik said, still swaying on his rope. He and the others were staring at us with their jaws hanging open. “Thought you had a rule, Cara. No outriders or convoy folk in your bed.” He sounded more than a little disgruntled.
“Didn’t you hear?” Gevia’s grin held an edge. She and Cara had been close ever since their apprentice days, but she’d never much liked me. “Dev’s no outrider, not anymore. Got blacklisted for life. Though, damn…looks a fair trade, doesn’t it? Cara, if I ditch an avalanche-struck convoy before they can even dig out, will you tumble me?”
I’d abandoned that convoy for Melly’s sake, and in doing so, saved Kiran from Ruslan. Yet even now, the reminder of the cost of my choice sliced deep. Insults crowded my tongue, but Cara spoke first, cheerfully mocking.
“Not likely, Gevia. Didn’t you bail off the east face of Vanadys Peak because you got too tired to hammer pitons? I like my lovers with a little more stamina.”
Gevia slapped a hand to her heart and groaned in theatrical anguish, as Ikkio and Vanik snickered. Cara dragged me back through the quartz-chip hanging into the cool semi-darkness of the house.
“Ignore her,” she said, and kissed me again, deep and slow. “I can’t believe you’re really here. I should’ve known you’d get yourself free.”
The mix of exultation and relief in her words twisted my gut. “I didn’t,” I admitted. “The Alathians brought us to Ninavel.”
“Us?” Cara peered at me. “You mean, Kiran too? But…I thought he couldn’t return, not with Ruslan…”
Gods only know what showed on my face. She sucked in a breath, her grip on my arms tightening. “Dev. What’s happened?”
“It’s that fucking Marten,” I snarled. “Didn’t I tell you he had a viper’s soul—” I checked, looking from the open door to the darkened hall. Cara, I trusted; Samis and the rest were another story. “I’ll tell you the lot, but not here. I know a spot nearby that’s safe to talk, but you’ll want some boots to climb in.” This time of morning, in full sun the city walls would already be hot enough to blister unprotected skin.
Cara glanced down at her bare feet. “Yeah, give me a minute.” She retreated down the shadowed hall. Voices drifted back. Samis’s started off sharp, then faded into plaintive grumbling. Cara reappeared wearing a longer pair of pale cotton trousers, a thin, long-sleeved shirt, and her leather outrider boots, firmly laced.
She followed me out Samis’s door and down the narrow street past warded doors and shuttered windows. Both of us stuck to the shadows beneath balconies where we could to avoid the glare of the sun. Sweat soaked my shirt and shone on Cara’s brow. The street was empty of all but little gold-speckled whiptail lizards splayed unblinking on the pavestones. The emptiness was deceptive. As we passed the mouths of alleys I heard the occasional rustle of movement from behind makeshift shelters built of tile fragments and tattered cloth. Streetsiders too poor to pay for both water rations and living quarters wouldn’t venture out in midday heat, but they’d listen eagerly enough to any conversations in hopes of catching some scrap of information worth a coin or two from the local ganglord’s shadow men.
I ducked around the corner of a charmseller’s shop into a slit of an alley, so deep and narrow the sun didn’t penetrate. The heat remained smothering in intensity, but the walls wouldn’t burn our fingers off when we climbed. Ten stories above, one wall ended in a crumbling line of stone silhouetted against a sky seared white by the sun. This area of Acaltar district had sustained some serious damage in the mage war twenty years back, and unlike similar spots highside, nobody’d ever bothered to repair it.
“Up here,” I told Cara, and scrambled up the wall. Enough cracks marred the stone the climb was easy as breathing. Beyond the walltop, a sea of blinding white rooftops rose toward the thin spires of Kulori district. Overhead, the stone supports of a bridge that had once spanned the gap up to the lower terraces of Kulori’s towers arched to end in mid-air. The underside of one support had a dark gap where stone blocks were missing. I pulled myself into the gap and squeezed up through a crevice in the floor of an open-air cupola that’d been the province of the bridge’s tollkeeper. Broken mosaic tiles lay scattered over the cupola’s floor, the waist-high walls slimed by the droppings of rock swallows, but the roof was intact, providing blessed shade.
Cara grunted up through the hole in the floor; her height made the crevice more awkward than it’d been for me. She mopped sweat from her face with a sleeve and took in the excellent view the cupola afforded of Kulori’s towers. “Let me guess. This is one of your haunts from your Tainted days.”
“Yeah.” I’d spent many a night here with my Tainter crew, taking turns watching the highside dwelling Red Dal wanted us to hit, playing skipstone with colored bits of glass or making racecourses for roaches to pass the time. Until our minder gave the signal, and we’d swoop like bats through the cool night air up to Kulori, ready to pit our Taint against highsider wards. I kicked aside a broken tile with more force than necessary.
Cara dropped to sit cross-legged against a wall. “All right, Dev. Nobody but the damn swallows can hear us now. What’s going on?”
I slid down the wall next to her and drew my knees up to my chest, gripping them as if I could brace myself against the tale I had to share.
“I figured a way free of the mines, but then came an earthquake…” I told her of the disaster at the mine, my return to Tamanath, and how Marten had convinced Kiran and me to come to Ninavel, adding plenty of side commentary about Marten’s ancestry and character along the way. When I got to our audience with Sechaveh, I stared at the cupola wall’s ragged lip of stone and forced myself to keep going, though the memory of Kiran’s horror and the possessive lust in Ruslan’s eyes brought nausea so strong I could barely speak.
After that, it wasn’t as har
d as I’d feared to tell her of my last conversation with Marten. To admit the way he’d used me despite my caution, was still using me, and I had no choice but to let him. I told her everything—well, everything except the part where I tried to kill Marten. The thought of his dry amusement afterward was too infuriating.
Cara listened to it all in silence. When I finished, she slumped against the wall. “Shaikar’s innermost hell, Dev. This isn’t a nightmare? You’re truly here, telling me this?”
I huffed out a short, unamused laugh. “Believe me, I wish this were a nightmare.”
The white sun-lines around Cara’s mouth and eyes deepened. “Martennan…I liked him. When you were wary, I thought you were jumping at shadows, because of—well, because of your childhood. But to give Kiran to Ruslan like that…” She looked down. “I can’t believe I misread him so badly.”
The stricken note to her voice made me glance at her, surprised. I hadn’t thought she’d seen much of Marten. But then, Cara prided herself on her keen eye for character. Her skill at assessing people was what made her head outrider on convoys when she was only six years my senior. She’d seen straight through Jylla, who fooled me blind right up until the day she stole every kenet I owned and cast me to the winds.
I scowled at my knees. “The only thing I can’t figure is how Marten knew about Melly. If he hadn’t realized how to use your letter as leverage, I’m not sure Kiran would’ve come.” I’d certainly have made a hell of a lot stronger effort to talk him out of it. Instead, I’d let myself get all caught up in the idea of Kiran saving Melly for me, and ignored my instincts. “Maybe Kiran told Marten while I was stuck at the mine. If he was that stupid after I told him not to speak of her—once I get him free of Ruslan I’ll kick his skinny highside ass from here to the Whitefires!”
“Dev.” Cara’s voice was oddly choked. “It wasn’t Kiran. It was me.”
“What? No. You were careful in your letter,” I assured her.
She drew in a slow breath, her shoulders set as if braced for a blow. A cold hollowness spread within me like a crevasse yawning open.
“That wasn’t the only letter I sent,” she said.
I waited, the crevasse growing deeper.
“The week after I sent the first letter to you…I found people here in Ninavel who claimed to work as shadow men, but they all laughed at me when I said I wouldn’t spill my tale to them, only to a ganglord. One even tried to force it out of me. I sparked a bane charm and got free, but it made me think twice about trying again. I kept thinking, if only I had a mage’s help to find Pello, or get me in to see Sechaveh…so I sent Martennan another letter, asking if he could arrange any help from the Alathian embassy. He told me when he escorted me through the border that he regretted the Council’s decision about you. He said if I ever needed his help, he’d give it. I thought if I explained we were trying to save an innocent child, he’d be sympathetic. I was sure he’d see that if Melly ended up a brain-burned taphtha addict, it was the Council’s fault for taking your money and sending you to the mines.”
Pain stabbed my palm as my hand clenched on a broken tile. “You told him about Melly. After you promised your silence. When you knew I’d rather throw myself off a cliff than give him that kind of leverage over me.” All that time in the mines, I’d been so certain I could trust her. That unlike Jylla, she kept her promises.
“I’m sorry, Dev! With you stuck in the mines and Melly’s Change coming so soon, I had to do something. You’re not the only one who cared for Sethan. Hell, I was friends with him years before you! You think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t try everything I could to save his daughter?”
I knew her desperation. How could I not, when I felt it beating in my own blood every damn instant of the day? Yet the hurt still went as deep as if she’d cut the rope between us while belaying me on a climb. “I warned you Marten couldn’t be trusted.”
Cara raised her chin, her pale eyes fierce. “Telling him was a bad move. I admit it. But gods, Dev—you should understand how it’s possible to misjudge someone despite warnings.”
The breath left me as if from a blow. How dare she compare this to Jylla? I’d had years’ worth of reasons to believe Jylla sincere, not one brief conversation at the border. Besides, even for Jylla, I’d never broken my word.
I wanted to tear into Cara, spit out a vicious stream of words that might vent some of the darkness boiling within. Instead, I squeezed the shard in my hand all the harder, struggling for control. I’d given in to anger time and again this season, and what good had it done me?
Better to take the lesson I should’ve learned from Jylla’s betrayal, and shut out all but cold practicality. She’d always said feelings had no place on a job. I wouldn’t be feeling half so gut-stabbed if I’d had the sense to stick to the easy, uncomplicated friendship Cara and I had shared until that one night in Kost. I sought out the dark, frozen crevasse inside and sank into its emptiness until I could speak without shouting.
“Oh, I know all about mistaken trust.” I couldn’t stop an acid smile. “So. Marten fooled you the same as he did Kiran. No help for it but to deal with the consequences.”
Cara looked all the more unhappy. “Like Melly. What now, since your original plan won’t work? I talked to Liana just this morning. She says Melly’s Taint remains strong, but she warned me Red Dal’s already got a bid in from Karonys House for her.”
I winced. Karonys was just what I’d feared. They catered to highsiders with nasty kinks, and used taphtha to turn their jennies into empty-eyed, compliant dolls. “How much is the bid?”
Cara shook her head. “Liana doesn’t know, but she says Red Dal’s been looking awfully happy, so it must be high. She doesn’t think he’s taken it yet, says he always likes to wait ’til the Change to sign a contract.”
Yeah, Red Dal wouldn’t sign early and lose the chance to hear competing offers. If only the Council hadn’t taken the fortune I’d earned smuggling Kiran across their border, I could have given him a bid Karonys could never match. Weariness washed over me.
“Maybe if I can get Kiran free quickly enough, he could still help,” I said. “If I can’t…” I dropped my head to my knees and mumbled into them, “No doubt Marten will help. For a price.” One far steeper than coin, if today was any guide.
Cara said, “I know how you must hate him. But even if he took Melly hostage, that’s a far better fate than she faces now.” She laid a tentative hand on my shoulder.
I twisted away and shoved to my feet to stare out at the damaged bridge. “I know.”
Tiles rattled behind me as Cara stood. The erratic tock-tock-tock of a drillbird hunting spar beetles on the cupola roof was loud in the silence. At last Cara sighed and said, “And Kiran? What will we do about him?”
“We?” I laughed sharply. “We aren’t going to do anything. No point in letting Marten get his claws into you, too. You’ve seen how good he is at it. You want to help me, fine. Keep your eye on Melly for me, make sure Liana tells you the instant her Taint weakens. It’s safer if Red Dal doesn’t catch me sniffing around Melly before I try and get her free, whether that’s with Marten or without him.”
“While you do…what? I’m guessing you think Marten was lying when he said he’d get Kiran away from Ruslan.”
A spike of anger threatened to fracture my tenuous calm. I snapped, “Of course he’s lying! He wants me to play shadow man for him, so he dangles a nice fat carrot. ‘Oh, I’ll help Kiran, once you’ve danced to my tune’…yeah, right. Besides, I’m not going to wait around for weeks. Suliyya knows what Ruslan might do to Kiran in the meantime.”
“You mean to go against Ruslan without another mage’s help?” Cara’s hands twitched like she wanted to shake me. “I know you survived Ruslan and Simon before. But the way you told it, that was thanks to Kiran and that Taint charm his mage-brother gave you.”
True. Simon had been scary enough, but Ruslan? Might as well take on Shaikar himself. If I thought too long on my
chances, I’d break and run. But I’d learned long ago in the mountains how to deal with insane levels of risk. Narrow the focus, take the ascent one step at a time, and it’s amazing what odds a man can beat.
I said, “This time I’ve actually got a hope of killing Ruslan. If I can make him break his vow, he’ll get blasted to a cinder.” Better yet if Ruslan broke the vow by killing Marten. “No question I’ll need Kiran’s help, though. That’s why I’ve got to play along with Marten, so I can get the chance to talk with him. Kiran knows Ruslan better than anyone. If there’s a way to trick Ruslan into casting, he can help me find it.”
Cara frowned. “Wait. Kiran’s bound to Ruslan, right? If you make Ruslan break his vow, and the confluence destroys him…might Kiran die too?”
Fuck. Now that was a complication I hadn’t considered. “I don’t know. So yeah, all the more reason I’ve got to talk to Kiran. I might know wards, but I don’t know shit about active casting.”
Cara’s frown remained. “When are you going back highside?”
“I told Marten I’d go back to the embassy tonight.” A prospect I wasn’t looking forward to. Maybe I could keep calm talking with Cara, but I doubted that’d last with Marten. The thought of his infuriating smile already brought bitterness to choke me. “Marten claims he’ll have a plan to reach Kiran ready by then. I have a few things I want to get beforehand. Right now I haven’t so much as a warding charm.”
“If you need coin, I’ve some at Samis’s place,” Cara said.
“Keep your money for water rations. I’ve a feeling they’re gonna get expensive soon.” I didn’t have a single kenet to my name, but that was easily solved once the night markets opened. I hadn’t spent years as a Taint thief for nothing.
“I’ll keep on meeting with Liana. But this mess with Kiran…” Cara hesitated, watching me. “I know you’re angry. But damn it, Dev, you don’t have to face this alone.”
The Tainted City Page 13
