The Empire's Ghost

by Isabelle Steiger

  The last man was the one with the spear, and it was taller than he was; he stabbed at her again and again, but Almasy danced away from each thrust as if he were moving through water. As Deinol parried a stroke of his own, she finally planted her feet, seeming to slow for one moment, and the spearman set all his weight behind his next blow, lunging as far as he could. The reach was impressive, but it didn’t matter, since Almasy was no longer in front of him. She was at his side, within his reach and too quick for him to pull the spear back in. The knife snapped out as if it were part of her arm, so fast his eyes couldn’t even follow the movement; he hadn’t even seen her draw it. And then the spearman was falling, throat opened in a harsh red line.

  She moved immediately back toward Deinol, forcing the swordsman to step away from him to engage her, and he surprised himself by feeling grateful. The one with the knife, seeing his comrade fall, moved to help the other man attack Almasy, but Lucius whirled and planted himself once again in his way, scoring a brutal cut across the man’s shoulder. Deinol was half embarrassed by how far the lout with the ax had been able to press him, but the man was bigger than he’d looked from back among the trees, and not half as slow as he ought to have been.

  The swordsman tried to strike Almasy through the shoulder, but she had already moved, as if she’d known it was coming. While he was still frowning in puzzlement as he stabbed through air, her arm shot out again, the knife piercing leather and skin once, twice, three times. He groaned but didn’t immediately go down, just staggered back a few steps. Her fourth strike buried the knife to the hilt in the hollow of his throat, and this time she twisted it so savagely that Deinol was glad to look away.

  Lucius and the man with the knife both turned, distracted by the swordsman’s fall. But Lucius recovered first, and that was all the opening he needed. His next stroke sliced under the other man’s arm and took him in the side, cutting almost halfway through his chest. Deinol’s axman was the only one left, and Lucius and Almasy both turned in his direction, but Deinol was damned if he wasn’t going to take at least one on his own. He parried the man’s next swing with as much force as he could, driving him back just enough to make room for the stroke he wanted. It cut the axman’s leg clean out from under him, and then Deinol planted his sword through the man’s chest, wrinkling his nose at the blood spatter.

  Once they were sure none of the looters would be getting up again, Lucius glanced around the clearing. “You can come out now, Seth.”

  Deinol winced. “Not with all the—”

  “We don’t have time to bury them,” Lucius insisted. “What’s he going to do, close his eyes?”

  Seth took a long look at the bodies, but he made no noise, just drew close to Lucius and Deinol again. “A-are we … Can we get moving now?”

  “Aye,” Lucius said, and touched his shoulder. “Good hiding.”

  Seth shook his head, but he didn’t brush off Lucius’s hand, just stood there for a moment, his shoulders slightly hunched.

  Almasy was looking almost contemplatively at Lucius, her brow furrowed. “That was the second school, wasn’t it?”

  Deinol didn’t think he’d ever seen Lucius’s eyebrows shoot up so fast. “Ah. Yes, it was. I’m surprised you know of it.”

  “I certainly don’t know of it,” Deinol broke in. “What the hell is it?”

  Lucius pursed his lips, but Almasy spoke up. “As I understand it, those who learn to wield a tsunshin may be taught in one of two schools. Many of the techniques are similar, but the most important difference is the starting position of the sword before combat. The first school, so called because it is more commonly taught, uses techniques that rely upon a drawn sword. But in the second school—”

  “—you begin combat with the sword still in its sheath,” Lucius finished. “That’s correct, yes.”

  “Oh,” Deinol said. “You never told me there were schools. I thought all shinrian fought like that.”

  “Hardly,” Almasy said. “They say the second school is the more difficult of the two by far—even most shinrian never master it.”

  Lucius shrugged. “I heard that, too, but this always felt more natural to me. Did you have a point in mentioning it?”

  It was Almasy’s turn to shrug. “Not particularly. It’s simply that you’re not an ordinary swordsman—or even an ordinary shinrian.”

  “I wouldn’t call you ordinary either,” Lucius said, “but I’m afraid that when it comes to knife techniques, I am sadly ignorant.”

  Almasy’s face was expressionless. “Even if you weren’t, you would not have seen mine.”

  Neither one said anything more, but Deinol didn’t feel any anger between them; they just stood there, staring at each other. Almasy finally broke the stillness, striding forward without so much as a follow me, and Seth broke away from them, hurrying to catch up with her.

  Deinol hung back once again, and again Lucius waited for him, walking by his side. Once he was certain Almasy was no longer paying attention to them, he said, “She’s good.”

  “She’s very good,” Lucius replied.

  “She’s … better than me, I think.”

  “Yes,” Lucius said. “I think so too.”

  It was one thing to guess that she was talented—quite another to actually see her skill for himself. She wasn’t just better than he’d imagined; she was better than he was comfortable with. Whatever else she might have been or done in her life, it was clear fighting—killing—was a significant part of it. You didn’t get to be that good at it without a formidable amount of practice.

  He kept his voice low. “Could you beat her, if you had to?”

  Lucius hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  * * *

  Not standing watch was out of the question after their encounter earlier in the day, but even though Seren had offered to go first, Seth found he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t because of the bloodshed—whatever the others thought, he’d seen men killed before, though admittedly not for a long time. He’d forgotten just how messy it could be, but he doubted it would haunt his dreams. It was something else that weighed on him—he couldn’t say exactly what, but he felt it had something to do with Seren, and the way she had approached the fight.

  She surprised him by turning to face him, her mouth unsmiling but not unduly stern. “You want to say something, boy, then say it. You’re not in prison any longer.”

  Seth picked at the grass at his feet. Lucius and Deinol seemed deeply asleep, but he watched them for several more moments to be sure. Finally he said, “What happened today … what you said about those looters…”

  “I wanted to kill them from the beginning,” Seren said. “It wasn’t a difficult decision for me—I didn’t hesitate. And that bothers you.”

  “Yes.”

  She laid her arms atop her knees, nodding at Lucius and Deinol. “You must know that those two have killed plenty of their own.”

  “Yes, and I have other friends who’ve done the same. I know.” He paused. “But it’s different with you. Lucius and Deinol live by robbing people, not killing them—they do kill people sometimes, but only when it can’t be helped. And they never steal from people like those farmers—people with nothing to spare. You wanted to kill those men because—because it was convenient.”

  “Yes, I did,” Seren said. “And Lucius and the other one helped me. And you didn’t make any objections—not while it was happening, anyway. That’s all true.”

  It was, but he didn’t like it when she put it like that. “Lucius and Deinol didn’t want to, not at first.”

  “But they still did it.”

  “Because those men were murderers! But if they’d been innocents—”

  She shook her head. “Boy, there’s no such thing as innocent people. If they’d been harmless, it wouldn’t have been, as you say, convenient to have killed them, so I wouldn’t have suggested it.”

  Seth frowned. No such thing as innocent people?

  She sighed. “Li
sten. The kind of business your friends do, they’re not naïve about it. They don’t think that if they do their job well enough, no one has to get hurt. They know people will get hurt—people will get killed, and it’ll be their fault. And they go ahead with it anyway, because that’s how they live. I can tell they think they’re different from me, just like you do. But it’s an illusion. It rings hollow.”

  Seth rested his chin on his knees. “I’m not angry at you for what happened—I don’t think you did anything that was so terrible. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I just want to understand … the way you think about it.”

  “The way I think about it?” But it wasn’t scornful; her expression was open, thoughtful. “It’s not some taste for battle or anything like that. It’s just … something that happens sometimes.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather fix it so that it didn’t have to happen?”

  “No,” Seren said. “I’d rather live the way I choose, without leaving anything I want undone because I’m too weak or scrupulous to accomplish it.” That sardonic half smile crossed her face again, just for a moment. “I doubt I’m someone you want to take advice from, boy, but if I were, I’d tell you this—if you find yourself thinking you’d rather anything be different, you’re going about things the wrong way. You ought to correct it, if you can.”

  Seth thought about it for a moment, just to be sure, but he already knew what his answer would be. “No, I didn’t want to change anything. I was happy, before all this happened.”

  Seren stared at the grass, and this time her expression was closed, unreadable. “Perhaps you will be happy again.”

  * * *

  “All clear?” Morgan whispered over her shoulder.

  Braddock nodded. “All clear.”

  She turned back to the wall, poking at the cracks between the stones. The strange mark they’d found was a circle split into fourths by two slender diamonds, one horizontal and one vertical, with a smaller circle inscribed where they cut across each other. She and Braddock had no idea what it meant, but it had been deliberately done, and too carefully to be the design of a madman. They’d started examining the wall around it, when they were sure the guards weren’t around, but it hadn’t yielded much. There was nothing promising near the mark itself, so Morgan had started looking at other parts of the wall, following the cracks where the mortar had worn away.

  “Hmm,” she muttered, half to herself. “It is loose—that is, it ought to come loose. The cracks are small, but there’s nothing to fill them, nothing to hold the stones in place. Just wiggle it enough, and it should move. I know it’ll move.”

  “Aye, but is it moving?”

  Morgan bit her lip. “If I push too hard, part of the wall might cave in.”

  “Right,” Braddock said. “Isn’t that what we want?”

  “Not if it collapses just enough to draw attention but not enough to crawl through. You’re not tiny, you know.”

  Braddock sighed. “Fair enough. What now, then?”

  “Now I … hmm.” She traced the widest crack with her fingertip, following it up and around. “I think someone had the same thought—the stones in this specific area are meant to come out, but then we should be able to put them back in. It’s the entrance to a passage, and the way to hide it.”

  “Aye,” Braddock said, “but that’s assuming there is a passage. It’s assuming we can get to the other side of that wall in the first place.”

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble of fixing the wall like this if it didn’t lead anywhere?”

  He shrugged. “I was surprised enough to find one passage out of the Citadel. You really think we’re lucky enough to get two, and the second right at our feet?”

  “I don’t know about luck,” Morgan said, “but this is either the most poorly built wall I’ve ever seen, or it’s meant to hide something. Roger is occasionally right, and he was right about this. The Citadel is centuries old; it’s lived through the collapse of Elesthene and who knows how many other corrupt regimes before then. People escaped all the time back then; we’ve all heard the stories. There had to be many passages—probably far more than two.”

  “They wouldn’t still use the dungeons if that were true.”

  Morgan shook her head. “Little people remember when the bigger ones forget.” She squinted at the wall again. “Remind me to thank Roger’s gran, if we ever get out of this.”

  Braddock chuckled softly. “I’m starting to think maybe she was half as sharp as the swindler always says.”

  “There’s truth in Roger’s stories; you just have to sift for it.” She scraped at the highest and thickest crack she could see, but the blocks still wouldn’t move. Morgan gritted her teeth and tried the next one down, and the next, and the next—and it moved. She pressed on it again, and heard the scraping of stone. “And there we are.”

  “Well?” Braddock asked.

  “We’re going to need time,” Morgan said. “We’re going to need a lot of time. I have to make sure I can get more than just one block loose. Even then, they’re heavy, and they’ll move slowly, and I don’t know what kind of a hole we’re going to get in the end. But it’s like I said: there’s nothing holding them in place, and I think there’s something on the other side.”

  Braddock was silent for a while, but then he finally asked, “You don’t suppose there’s any way to get my ax back before we leave, do you?”

  “Don’t test your luck,” Morgan said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “So you’ve never actually been to the shrine,” Deinol said, for the third time.

  Seth was surprised Seren was still answering him at this point. “Once again, I’ve passed through the town before. But I never stayed there, and I never had any cause to visit the shrine. So no, I can’t tell you what sort of tapestries they have hanging in there.”

  Lucius snorted, and Deinol sulked in his general direction. But then Seren brushed her hair out of her face, catching the ends between her fingers and frowning at the length, and Deinol turned to her again. “Why don’t you just cut it, if it bothers you so much? We’ve got more than enough blades between us.”

  Seren didn’t even look at him. “No.”

  Lucius laughed lightly. “A bit of vanity after all, eh?”

  Him she looked at, but her expression stayed the same. “No,” she said again. But then she seemed to bestir herself, and added, “Your hair’s even longer than mine, but I don’t see you in a hurry to cut it.”

  Lucius just laughed again. “Ah, well, that is because of vanity, I assure you.” Seth could swear to the truth of that; Lucius took so much trouble about his hair, you’d think he was attending a ball every evening.

  “To be honest,” Deinol said, striding quickly forward so as to minimize the distance between him and Seren, “I’m surprised you didn’t dye it. Unless that is dye.”

  “It isn’t,” Seren said. “What on earth would I want to dye my hair for?”

  Deinol shrugged, but he was watching her carefully; Lucius was watching both of them. “Hair that color’s going to make you stand out—more likely you’ll stick in people’s minds, maybe. I figured that was the last thing an assassin would want.”

  Of course he was hoping for a reaction, but Seren didn’t give him much; she finally turned to look at him, but she didn’t flinch, and her mouth stayed a thin line. “I’m not an assassin,” she said, calmly and clearly.

  “Is that so?” Deinol said, his mouth twisting wryly. “And I suppose if you were, you’d tell me, would you?”

  “Of course not,” Seren said.

  “Of course not,” he echoed. “So you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care whether you believe me,” Seren said. “You’re only making a fool of yourself.”

  “What are you, then, if you’re not an assassin?”

  Seren rolled her eyes. “You certainly love to ask the same questions over and over. Why don’t you tell me what you are?”

  “
That’s easy enough—I’m a common bandit, I suppose, and a Sheather, and a bastard. You see, I ask so much because normal folk don’t balk at the question.”

  “Perhaps I can’t name myself as easily as you,” Seren said. “Or perhaps I merely prefer to keep the answer to myself. It makes sense for us to work together for the present; that doesn’t mean we will always have the same goals, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I owe you any explanations.”

  “So, what, you’re not answering because you don’t like me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, what do you say? Can I be blamed if I’d prefer to talk?”

  Seren sighed. “I am not accustomed to talk overmuch, so I suppose I am not very adept at it.”

  That seemed to surprise him, but Seth couldn’t have said why. “You might get better at it if you practiced.”

  “I might,” Seren agreed. “I just don’t see the point.”

  “You’d earn a lot more friends that way,” Lucius offered. “What happens if you need someone’s help again in the future?”

  “I don’t need your help this time,” Seren said. “It’s just more convenient this way. And it would get you to stop bothering me—or so I thought at the time.”

  “You still won’t tell us what you’re having us do for you, though, eh?” Deinol asked. “Helping out on one of your contracts, maybe?”

  “I am not an assassin,” Seren repeated. “And even if I were, you would make the worst assassin’s accomplice I could think of.” She moved to avoid a low-hanging branch, then added, “It doesn’t involve killing anyone. Or … I should say it’s rather like the kind of undertaking you’re used to: no one needs to die, but it might inadvertently become necessary. I doubt that, though.”

  Lucius frowned thoughtfully. “But it’s still … something dishonorable?”

  Seren looked straight ahead. “You may find it so.”

  “So when are you going to tell us what it is?” Deinol asked.