Shadowcloaks Read online

Lucinda squares her shoulders, ready to fight all twenty-one herself. I don’t dare move for fear Rose will take control of our shared magic and pin me to the floor again.

  The trap to end all traps, and no way out. There’s no trick bookcase, no collapsing roof. There’s no Magnus wielding a fiery sword. Just Lucinda and me standing alone at the end of everything Tom built. I hope Grippy, wherever he is, will have the sense to take his thugs and run.

  Behind me, Jimmy the Snake bares one hand. A small, blue flame jumps to life in his open palm. The only thing holding him back is the Dreadlord on the balcony above.

  “How did you slip past our sentinels, Mr. Steeps?” rumbles the Dreadlord on the balcony. “With the company you keep, I’d half expected you to come through the front door.”

  I decide not to give him any information, but Wisteria betrays me. She whips through my hair and Red’s, trying to pull us apart. She’s weaker here. Or weaker now. I don’t know which.

  Maggot-Face cocks his head and then chuckles. “Ah. Yes. The beastie. She must be guarding a tunnel. I should have thought of that.”

  Jimmy advances until Lucinda is literally back-to-back with me. Behind him and his shadowboys, I see Grippy flanked by the two thugs, their cautious approach masked by the drama around us.

  I shake my head “No” at him. Go. Get the hell out.

  It’s hard to head-shake that sort of nuance. Red’s head twitches also, confusing the signal. Grippy bares his teeth like a young wolf about to make a dangerous ploy. He can’t see the crowd on the balcony.

  We don’t all have to die.

  I try again. I mimic the sound of a crossbow bolt whistling through the air. Rose mimics the sound as well, before she can stop herself.

  This time he gets it, holds up a fist to stop his thugs from advancing into the trap.

  I play for time, because there is nothing else I can do. I watch the echoes of every movement from two angles, growing accustomed to the extra pair of eyes.

  “Little, little Nightshades,” I say, nodding first to the Dreadlords, then to the ones in ritual black.

  “Little Nightshades,” Rose repeats.

  Maggot-Face raises an evil eyebrow, noticing what I’m noticing. Somehow, I have the upper hand in the real world, though Rose still holds the magic at bay.

  “Infesting my city,” I chatter, “vexing my friends and citizens.”

  “Infesting my . . .” Rose echoes.

  I close my eyes. I don’t need them. I can feel every heartbeat in this room, can see through Rose’s eyes if I need to. I feel brave for once, knowing that I’m going to die and still feeling power in it. “You think you can take my city with force? You think you can contain me, when each breath you take is a gift I give you?” My voice echoes in the room. Fills it. “I don’t give gifts twice. This is my city. This is my home!”

  There is a slight movement as the sixth robed ‘Shade shifts slightly so the lamplight penetrates his deep cowl. A tanned eyelid unshutters an orb the color of cobalt glass. I see through Rose how the broad shoulders stretch robes too small for him.

  It is Cobalt. How he is here I cannot understand. His stance is rigid and nervous, and he looks exhausted and gaunt. He’s afraid.

  I turn my attention back to Maggot-Face, who is laughing. He sees the humor in my bravado. “So the The First Nightshade of Ector, The Keeper of Silent Rings is a thimble-sized jester?” His humor has a sharp edge to it, an edge much sharper than my empty threats. “I’d expected a more suitable replacement for The Black Cat himself, Destroyer of Stables.”

  He examines me with a critical eye for a few more seconds. “I think I need beg no gifts from you, Mr. Steeps.”

  I press on. There is nothing else I can do at this point. “You will. You will beg me for the gift of death,” I whisper.

  My lips don’t move, but the sound comes through Red, whose voice sounds unusually strong and imposing, like two voices forged in one. “What’s your name, Maggot-Face, before I kill you?”

  Maggot-Face sighs, my theatrics wearing thin. He ignores my question, snaps his fingers like a whip, and somehow breaks the connection between Rose and me. I stumble, but she falls to the ground.

  I open my own eyes, suddenly needing them again.

  “His name is Ragus,” Rose whispers, coming to her knees. “Ragus Karesma. He will kill us all.”

  Ragus fixes her with a piercing, pale eye.

  There is silence for two heartbeats.

  “You can still save your sister,” he says to her. “You can still walk the lesser path.” His eyes flicker to Jimmy, to this lesser Dreadlord. The weak one.

  A lesser path.

  Then Ragus drops a metal claw at her feet, a weapon from her mother’s past. Red doesn’t wait for more encouragement. She charges me desperately, stone knife and metal claw her only two weapons. There’s only one way for her to survive, now she’s been caught trying to free her sister. She has to please this man, this maggot-faced Dreadlord. I know equally there is only one way I can save my wife and friends. I yank Tom’s stone soul-knife from its borrowed harness, ignoring the horror on Lucinda’s face and the hint of a smile on the Master Dreadlord. The knife hisses and crackles, twice as loud as it was in Tom’s portrait room.

  Someone grabs Carmen, pulling her away from Rose and me as we collide.

  Rose is fear, cunning, and madness. Her strokes are trained and her movements graceful. The metal claw, double-bladed, rips through my vest, slicing away buttons and scoring my chest. The real threat misses my cheek, hissing as it passes. I feel the soul-knife’s hunger, sucking at my skin from an inch away. We dance and spin, all echoes, headaches, and knives.

  Rose slashes and hacks. Reverse grip, forward grip, side, side, under. The knife spins like a beautiful jewel in the hands of an expert thief. She’s done this all her life and knows it, confidence in every motion.

  I barely hear Carmen screaming, though she is, or feel the Dreadlord’s laughter as Rose desperately tries to reach me.

  Instead, I breathe.

  I feel.

  I move.

  My ring tells me how to move, but moans in pain. My daughter. Not my daughter. Please, not my daughter. I am its master, and the wind that whips at my face is even less convincing. As my power grows, their power falters.

  I feel the dance, remembering Fortrus, remembering the rings I’ve worn, and remembering her thoughts. I feel the pulse of every Nightshade in the room, and I understand Rose in a way she cannot understand me. She has seen my mind, but she hasn’t lived enough to make sense of what she’s seen. She knows only Nightshades, while I have lived with goblins, raised children, and fought and dined with paladins. I have been a husband, a thief, and a father. Someday I will wait patiently for death, but today is not that day.

  She cannot stop me. I feel the thunder building between us again, that headache that took a wrong turn when I rejected her. I know her intent, though she tries to hide it. When she makes her move, I am ready.

  Wisteria and Tom scream together, claws on slate, and time stops.

  I see Rose’s face, lips trembling, soul-knife recoiling from an over-thrust, pulling toward my ear, so full of our magic that all it will take is a nick. She is the only one moving in this moment, the only person besides myself not frozen. I feel her fragility, how little of the world she understands, how much she hates. I am as solid as the oaken throne beneath the city, while she is nothing more than a wisp of cloud in the sky. I take the power she gathers, just as Yessy taught me.

  I feel the earthen thunder and lightning gather around me as Rose folds under, waves pounding against my fleshy heart, tainted with the frays and echoes of rejection. She rises from the floor, chest to the sky as I pull the magic through her, legs and head dangling. The peaceful expression I’ve seen before in magii sleepers is absent. Instead, Rose howls out the pain I feel in my thigh. We are a broken vessel, but we are enough.

  I catch her soul-knife as it falls from her hand, oblivious to the frenzy of th
e cold wind in the room.

  Kill me, Red’s golden eyes say at last, echoed by her voice in my head. Let my suffering be done. Promise me you’ll make them pay.

  I promise.

  Red’s damaged knife, in my hand, pierces her other thigh like the sharpest stitching-pin into an overripe peach. Her soul gasps, unbelieving, draining away, as the greyness takes her, inch by inch, creeping across her like the shadow of twilight.

  Time stands still for us, as if cruel Tenebrous, the dark god of the Nightshades, wants us to feel every millisecond of what we’re becoming. Of what Rose and I are becoming.

  Carmen’s time-frozen scream is a solid note in my now-eternal ears. Cobalt’s arm is outstretched, too far away to stop me. Tom’s undead voice weeps “Traitor” in my ear. Above all, I hear the frozen silence between Dreadlord Ragus Karesma’s clap of laughter, silence like thunder in the room.

  He is between laughs, between intentions. His face is a mask of pale triumph as that same white stone creeps up my arm from where I hold the dagger. Slow for me and Rose, but a flitting moment for everyone else. Every inch of white wraps me tightly in an ancient oath of duty and hatred, exactly as Maggot-Faced Ragus intended.

  Here is the real trap. A trap within a trap. To turn me against my friends.

  God-puke and excrement. And Pan’s beard. Here is where Tom went wrong, and I have followed him. Curses are the best prayer I can offer.

  “Pick the locks!” Tom screams in my mind, his usual sneer gone. “Please, not my daughter, too.”

  Have you ever done this?

  Silence.

  I try again.

  Magnus help me, I think. But Magnus is half a continent away, and he can barely hear me when we’re in the same room.

  Tom?

  Wisteria?

  Anyone?

  I see the horror in Cobalt’s eyes again, and I remember seeing him make that face before, moments before crushing a stone knife beneath his boot in an alley months ago. I remember it hissing out its dying breath in the darkness.

  “Yes,” Tom whispers, caught in time.

  “Yes,” Wisteria whistles in my ear.

  “Yes,” Magnus prays, miles away, still in Fortrus.

  Can’t drop the knife, or she dies.

  Can’t leave the honeytrap, or she dies.

  Can’t use my boot. Too far.

  Thoughts only. Reasoning.

  The maggot-white stone reaches my wrist, passes it slowly. I swim in memory, sorting frantically through everything I know about Dreadlords.

  A Nightshade stabbing his beloved. I see her turn to dust before his eyes, as he turns pale.

  Tom dancing through the alleys of Ector, searching.

  Magnus down on one knee in The Black Cat, plucking out darts, while Tom is killing Nightshades, his finger punching through armor.

  I see Tom, through Wisteria’s eyes, crushing bone and metal, wishing to undo himself. Crushing a man’s skull with his bare hand, his gripping hand, his Wisteria-killing hand.

  I see the hole.

  Built right into the ‘Shades own ceremony, a hole not even Tom could see. But I’ve always been good at finding backdoors.

  Thought races faster than time down an arm now white to the elbow. My grip tightens like an iron vise on the porous, stone knife. The knife howls in pain, slurps viciously at Rose, pushing white up my arm, nearly to the shoulder.

  My grip tightens faster, choking it off.

  The stone knife shatters in a cloud of dust, smoke, and light as time returns. My hand crushes the remnants of the knife into a tiny bead as my empty, pallid fist finishes its thrust, slamming into Rose and throwing her across the room.

  My left arm is as white and hard as bone, but the rest of me is still . . . me. I am no Dreadlord.

  I am something else. Something in-between.

  I hear crossbows unburdening, but I am faster, moving between them as they clip toward me. I call upon the magic in my arm and collapse the plaster ceiling on top of the crossbowmen. Across the room, Rose, who was beginning to rise, collapses too, as still as a stone-grey statue. A chill of white creeps across my left shoulder.

  At last Ragus’s face shows something beyond arrogance. Confusion fills his hateful eyes as he leaps from one banister to the opposite. He sees the whiteness in my power-arm but doesn’t understand why it hasn’t taken the rest of my body.

  Grippy moves, too. He buries a dart in Jimmy’s back. The thug with Magnus’s twisted, old sword drops the nearest shadowman like a stone.

  From the second level, Cobalt inhales deeply and explodes into motion. His black blade swims through cloak and neck of the unexpecting Nightshade next to him.

  The chief Dreadlord, Ragus Karesma, decides to handle me himself. He leaps from the balcony and floats to the floor in front of me, fast as a falling stone but light as a feather. I stab my white hand toward his eye, but he catches my wrist, above the glove, and lifts me off the ground as if I’m nothing more than a small cat. His hand is more stone than mine, and I feel cracks forming in my wrist. I can hear them pinging out like cooling ceramic from where he holds me.

  “What have you done?” he growls, staring at the transition line that creeps too slowly across my neck as I draw power through Rose’s unconscious body, trying desperately to keep his superior strength from crushing my hand clean off. “What have you done?” he shouts, shaking me.

  Outside there is thunder. Outside there is rain and lightning. And magic. It smells like smashed ship-roaches and dusty tax-summons.

  Ragus can feel it, too. He cocks his head as the rain begins to fall, shakes me again as the fight rages on around us. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” he bellows.

  Outside, against the manor wall, a shout goes up, and then a clash of blades. A large stone crashes through the top of a window, ripping down its rod and curtain. Rain and clouded light fill the room. Another stone follows the first, clattering to a halt against Carmen’s open cage.

  There’s something funny about the way it moves, something padded and slightly muffled. It’s not a stone, it’s a bale of parchment. Or rather, it’s the lintel stone from the collapsed Tax Watch Headquarters wrapped in a litany of tax summons. I’ve seen that red string and grey seal far too many times not to recognize it.

  “Beard of my chin and crotch,” Jimmy swears, forgetting for a moment the dart between his shoulder blades.

  I grin, still dangling as Ragus “Maggot-Face” Karesma tries to puzzle out the papered stone. He obviously doesn’t know Eastmarch.

  “There are two sure things in Eastmarch, you bastard,” I whisper. “Taxes, and retribution for not paying your taxes.”

  Ragus turns his once-handsome face back to me, not yet understanding.

  “Get out of my city,” I say, spitting directly into his eye. “My friends are here.”

  He hurls me to the ground and I feel the stones move beneath me.

  “You could have been like me,” he roars. “You could have been untouchable.” He lifts a boot, which I see now is covered in steel spikes. “Now you will be nothing.”

  His foot never descends. A heavily armored man flies through the window, leaping from a floating paving stone. He hits Ragus square in the chest with an enormous hammer, knocking him back. Ragus coils to riposte, giant, black sword appearing from a shoulder sheath, but he is buffeted by a boulder the size of Lucinda. It rips the sword from his grasp as it tumbles away. And then the room is full of flying men.

  I smell the magii working, and the heady scent of river weed as Santé lands between the Dreadlord and me.

  “Full-disclosure, indeed,” he snorts, watching Ragus swat aside an enormous armored man with a bare arm. “Who the hell is that?”

  “An Untouchable,” I say, though I don’t really know what that means.

  “We’ll see about that,” Santé says, winding up.

  I want to watch, but years of scrapping have taught me to move. I hear the sound of Sante’s hammer on stone behind me.

  I roll
away, catching a glimpse of one of Grippy’s thugs pooling blood on the floor. I hear the clatter of bolts, and the crank of reloading crossbows. Jimmy has been pinned to the stone floor with Magnus’s twisted wreck of a sword. His ruined foot pushes weakly against the pavestones as if trying to dislodge himself, but he doesn’t seem to be making progress.

  There’s only one person in the room with the strength and will to do that. Now she stands over a pile of red hair and bloody dress. Lucinda’s fighting three ‘Shades all at once, eyes closed, a pair of two-handed swords spinning like broken windmills in a gale.

  Over Carmen.

  Over blood.

  Over too much blood.

  I’ve never lifted a full-grown woman before, but I find an opening and pull Carmen away. “Teacup?” she asks, clutching her stomach as I hoist her. Her eyes are glazed through with shock. “I think I got stabbed.”

  She feels light and airy to me, thinner than she should. The entire world feels thinner. “Don’t talk,” I say gently. “Let’s get you someplace safe.”

  There aren’t many options. We can’t escape through the windows, because the fight has spread to the rooftops outside, and because the rain is now so heavy I can’t see our way clear.

  I’m vaguely aware of Cobalt hoisting the unconscious Rose and catching a bolt on the buckler fixed to his bracer. It punches through the edge, driving his arm toward his eye, but he doesn’t flinch.

  “Opening!” Cobalt shouts, and I see two Grey Mules clearing the hallway. I lurch forward, stumbling forward with Carmen in my arms, stumbling through the gap even as Lucinda spins to defend my flank. Then Cobalt is on my other side, a sword that is half shield in one hand and Red’s comatose form over his other shoulder. Crossbow bolts rain down from the balconies, but I don’t dare collapse the ceiling. If I push too far Rose may die, if she isn’t dead already, as grey and stony as she looks on Cobalt’s shoulder. Tom wouldn’t have wanted that.

  Cobalt deflects another bolt meant for me as I clear the main doors from the Merchant’s Gallery, friends following as best they can.

  The room behind us is a maelstrom of flying roof-tiles and exploding furniture. Carmen’s cage begins to melt and spark in a magical storm. Lightning strikes at Ragus’s flanks. At least six magii are working against him. Each pair has a distinct scent: riverweed, dusty parchment, and another smell I can’t place. Probably every single magii the Tax Watch has. Silver chokehold manacles wrap around Ragus’s wrists and feet, chokeholds of power I can see now, frizzy and electric in the growing storm. His familiar, a shadow writhing on the floor, cannot strike, while Ragus seems to be coated in little bits of metal that stick out like iron filings on a lodestone.