The kitchen and living area had two doors, one that should lead to the hallway, and the other to a bedroom. A two-room flat: extravagant for the neighborhood. A rumpled blanket lay on a couch. He made a note to proceed with extra care. Someone else might be sleeping here, and if the other opponent was half as skilled as the first, he could have a difficult encounter ahead.
Soundlessly, he slipped into the room. He glided across the knotty pine floor, avoiding old boards that might creak, and headed for the bedroom door. He tested the knob. Locked. Not surprised, he slid out his picking tools. He listened at the door before starting, aware that an alert assassin would detect the faint scrapes of those tools being used. Through the thin boards, he heard the soft regular breathing of someone sleeping. Or pretending to be asleep. If there was a second person, might this be a trap? With one person acting as bait and the other behind the door, ready to pounce?
He resolved to remain aware of the possibility but set to picking the lock, regardless. The simple mechanism did not take long to thwart. After listening again, he opened the door slowly, ensuring it didn’t creak. He slid inside, putting his back to the wall. He found himself gazing at a blanket-shrouded figure in a small bed. The room lacked a window, and the lamp on the table was out, though a book lay on the pillow, where it had apparently fallen from the sleeper’s fingers. If she had fallen asleep reading, then who had turned out the lamp?
Sicarius eyed the rest of the room, but didn’t catch any figures crouched in the shadows behind the faded wardrobe or old dresser, its paint peeling in great curls. He did spot two different sized sets of shoes next to the wardrobe, and two empty clothing bags hung on pegs by the door. His gaze drifted from the shoes—that set on the left was oddly small—to the figure in the bed. Unless his Nurian assassin was slighter than he had realized, this wasn’t she.
He took a few steps inside, so he could see the sleeper’s face and confirm his suspicion. Yes, a child of six or seven perhaps. The bundle of blankets had made it hard to tell at first, but it was definitely a girl.
His first thought was to leave in disgust, realizing that he had been fooled somehow, that the assassin had come and gone—impressive considering he had been watching both that window and the front door of the building. But the gears started clicking into place. Two people were living here, the child and the woman, as evinced by the clothing. He padded over to the wardrobe, picked up one of the larger pairs of shoes, and sniffed. Yes, those shoes had visited a sewer recently. He considered the girl’s face again. The wan light seeping through the crack he had left in the door did not show much, but he could make out dark hair and thought the skin more yellow-brown than olive-bronze, more Nurian than Turgonian. If she were to open her eyes, they would probably have the same almond shape as a Nurian’s. As... her mother’s?
Sicarius couldn’t fathom why an assassin would bring a child on an assignment, especially one that involved crossing oceans and continents, and he didn’t know what to do about it. The logical move would be to kidnap the girl and use her as a bargaining piece to stop her mother’s work in Turgonia, but he had fought too long and too hard to protect Sespian to use a child that way. Besides, if this was the same person who had shot an arrow at Sespian’s head, intentionally missing, then she had already set the ground rules for leaving children out of this.
Interesting. Had that been her intent all along? To set this up so Sicarius would feel compelled to leave her daughter alone if he stumbled across the child? Perhaps not, since she had claimed Sespian owed her some favor.
But what was he to do now? Leave an arrow sticking out of the headboard with a note attached? To send a chill of terror down her spine when she realized he had been here, in her home? He decided to search the room while the child slept, to see if he could find some clue as to the woman’s mission here. Perhaps she would return home while he worked and solve a problem for him. Kidnapping her child might be off limits, but he would have no trouble kidnapping her.
You had more than kidnapping in mind earlier, he reminded himself. Hadn’t he been considering her too dangerous to attempt to subdue? He had been planning to kill her, to make sure the president wouldn’t fall to her hand, if he was indeed her target. And now that he knew she was a mother?
That didn’t change that she had killed Deret Mancrest’s father and might be the one who had tried to kill Amaranthe and Sicarius. Or did it? What would he do with the child if he killed her mother? Turn her over to an orphanage? He wished Amaranthe were here. She would know... the right choice.
While he pondered the questions, he searched the bags and the pockets of the clothing. He kept his ears open as well, doubting a mother would have left her child for long, especially when she must know she was being hunted. By scent, he found the clothing she had worn the night before. As with the shoes, it smelled of the sewers, and he found a few spots of blood on the cuff of her sleeve. If there had been any doubt that she had committed the murder, it was gone now. He delved into the pockets and was rewarded with an envelope that had been folded into quarters. Fingers light, he checked it for signs of a booby trap, though such devices were rare on paper. With this woman, he felt he couldn’t be too careful.
The bedroom was too dark for reading, so he slipped back out into the kitchen. He pulled out a single sheet of paper to find a page full of gibberish. An encrypted message? Orders for the senior Mancrest’s death? Or for her next mission? If so, she ought to have a key somewhere in the room as well.
Sicarius started to hunt for it, but his instincts went off like a bell. He couldn’t have said that he heard a noise or smelled something or sensed a change in the atmosphere, but he darted for the window, certain someone would walk in the front door in a few seconds. He slipped past the curtains, steadying them with his hand to keep them from swaying, and checked the alley before climbing onto the wall. The slumbering drunks remained inert, and nothing moved except for a stray cat sniffing at trash. Inside the flat, a dark figure walked inside without making a sound. Though she had changed clothes, he recognized the form of the woman he had followed through the night.
He could leap in and attack, perhaps catching her by surprise, but to what end? To kill her? He had not decided if that was a suitable course, given the child’s presence. To capture her, that would be ideal. She and the child could be brought to the president or a magistrate for judgment.
A rare thrum of nervous energy charged his limbs. This fight, he suspected, would not be easy, especially if she was fighting to kill while he simply wanted to render her insensate, but he accepted the challenge. He was ready.
Sicarius prepared to spring inside.
A door creaked open, and he paused.
“Matera?” a young voice asked softly. The girl.
Sicarius recognized the Nurian word for mother. The woman responded in the same language, common every day Nurian, not the special mage hunter dialect. That might only be used for writing. Sicarius had never heard it spoken by the man Hollowcrest had brought in to train him many years ago.
“Yes, I’m back,” the mother said. “Are you ready to take a trip? We need to leave this place and find another spot to hide.”
“Do we have to hide again? Can’t we go home? I miss Teelu and Morlanie.”
“I know, but we’re not welcome at home any more. Not unless...” The woman sighed. “Maybe not even then.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, and I pray you never do, Mu Lin. But Mother has to finish her mission here and then... we may be able to stay. I’ve been promised... well, we shall see what a Turgonian promise means.”
It crossed Sicarius’s mind to attack now, while the woman was distracted, but violently subduing the mother in front of the daughter would not please Amaranthe. And, he admitted, it did not please him, either. Once, he might have done it anyway, choosing logic and efficiency over any sense of feeling or morality—indeed, he had killed some of the Forge leaders the year before, not caring what witnesses were
about, but he had been filled with cold rage then and the need to protect Sespian. Now... he regarded this fellow assassin with dispassion but not vehemence. If she tried to kill President Starcrest, that might change, but thus far, the assassination attempts on Starcrest had all been thwarted—that bombing had been particularly clumsy and inept—and he doubted a Nurian mage hunter had been involved. Whatever she had been there for that night, it hadn’t been to slay Starcrest.
“I don’t want to stay here, Matera. It’s cold and I miss my friends. This place is scary at night, and you’re always gone, and I’m alone, and...” Something muffled the voice—the child leaning into her mother for an embrace perhaps.
The woman murmured some nonsensical reassurance.
Sicarius fought the urge to shift his weight and flex his muscles. Even the slightest movement could make noise, a rustle of clothing, a piece of mortar falling free from the bricks. If he could not remain stationary, clinging to the wall for at least two hours, he had not been training enough of late.
Voices came from the street behind the alley. All of the sounds inside the flat halted.
The speakers were more than a block away, but he made out several snippets of conversation and detected the soft clanks of gear—weapons.
“This building?”
“That’s the one?”
“...said the second floor.”
Sicarius struggled for dispassion, but right away he had a feeling whose voices these were—and that they would thwart his attempt to capture this woman. Six men walked past the front of the alley, heading toward the front door of the tenement building. They wore rags and had grime smeared on their faces, but the short haircuts, shaven faces, and bulges of sword hilts beneath their cloaks gave them away: soldiers pretending to fit into the neighborhood. They managed to keep from walking in step with each other, but barely. Were these more of the intelligence office’s troops? He supposed he should be impressed that someone was doing a good job tracking down threats to the president, but he was mostly irked that they were interfering with his plans—even if his plans had been nebulous at that moment.
He eased an eye around the edge of the window, wondering if he might yet salvage the situation. If the girl had gone back into her room, Sicarius could attack the woman. Or maybe he would even catch her standing next to the curtain, peering out at the disguised soldiers. She must have heard their approach too. Someone higher up in the intelligence command might be bright and capable of locating threats, but these goons were even less discrete than the spy from the night before.
The woman wasn’t by the window; she wasn’t in sight. Sicarius guessed she had gone into the bedroom to pack, but then a hint of smoke reached his nose. Not the burning of wood or coal from a stove, but something less common. Cloth? Canvas? Clothing or furnishings?
“Fire!” someone cried from the first floor.
The soldiers had disappeared from Sicarius’s view, and the building’s front door banged open. Footsteps pounded old wooden floorboards. A window was thrown open below Sicarius. Smoke roiled out.
Familiar with the use of fire as a distraction, Sicarius waited calmly in his spot on the wall, thinking the woman might grab the girl and try to come out this way. Aside from the flat’s front door, there weren’t any other ways out.
Shouts sounded inside the building, the soldiers’ voices mingled with the surprised cries of tenets learning their abode was catching flame. Sicarius wondered how the woman had managed to start a fire on another floor so quickly. It couldn’t be a coincidence. If she was indeed a mage hunter, she wouldn’t have studied the Science, though she could have Made artifacts with her. Or she could have prepared mundane traps all over the building, anticipating this circumstance.
Minutes dragged past, and more windows leaked smoke. It filled the alley and rose in plumes toward the gray sky, the soft rain doing little to squash it. Flames soon poured from the first floor window alongside the smoke. The air grew thick with soot and chary air that now smelled of wood as well as cloth and other materials. The core of the building was on fire, and even the brick wall was growing warm beneath his fingers. And yet the woman did not come out of the bedroom.
A crack sounded inside the flat. The front door flew open, and two soldiers burst inside, rags pulled over their noses and mouths. Sicarius didn’t move, knowing they would be unlikely to see him through his spy hole, the quarter inch gap between curtain and wall. They charged inside, swords drawn, and ran straight for the bedroom. Sicarius might have anticipated the clash of steel as they met the assassin, but by now he had a feeling she wasn’t inside any more. How she had slipped out without him hearing—especially with the girl in tow—he didn’t know, but he was forced to admit that she might simply be that good. He hadn’t detected the telltale gooseflesh-stirring prickle of the mental sciences being used, so she had escaped by mundane methods.
Crashes and thumps sounded—furniture being shoved around and searched in and behind.
“Blast it,” someone growled. “There’s a trapdoor behind here.”
Sicarius pulled away from the window and climbed down to the alley, then up to the roof of the building next door. He jumped from tenement to tenement, watching the alleys, streets, and roofline as he went, thinking he might yet chance across the fleeing woman. With her daughter in tow, she wouldn’t be as fast as usual. But he didn’t see anyone except for the people milling in the street, some fleeing the burning building and others coming out to see if the flames took it to the ground. He avoided them, and they never noticed him.
With little other recourse, Sicarius set a route back to the hotel. He accepted that he had wasted his time—he had spent countless thousands of hours stalking some prey or another, and sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t—but he did chastise himself for not finding the trapdoor himself. Granted, moving furniture around without waking up the girl would have been difficult, and he hadn’t had much time, but there might have been signs on the floor. A telltale draft, a few particles of sawdust left from the creating of the exit, uneven dust from a piece of furniture being moved after holding the same spot for countless months or years...
You were busy searching pockets, Sicarius reminded himself. He had failed to capture the assassin, but he would not return to the president empty-handed.
Chapter 14
Amaranthe said little as she, Maldynado, and Sergeant Yara headed into the quirky metal-crafting neighborhood where Ms. Sarevic’s Custom Works was found. Yara’s shift had been nearing an end, and Maldynado had convinced her to join them for this excursion, filling her in on the suspicious goings on at the construction site. Yara commented occasionally, though she seemed more thoughtful than talkative as well. Not surly and silent, the way she often was, but thoughtful. Was she, too, contemplating the religious zealots and what that demonstration might mean for the new government and the people in Stumps?
Amaranthe wished she had been back in town for longer and had more of a feel as to what was going on in the capital. To her eyes, these religious people had popped up out of nowhere, but maybe they had been here all winter. Or all... of forever. That priest had implied they had existed all along and had been in hiding. With religion having been forbidden since the reign of Mad Emperor Motash and magic for centuries longer, it was hard to imagine some underground cult surviving, but she couldn’t think it impossible.
“Which street is it on?” Yara asked, ignoring Maldynado who had trotted over to take part in a common custom—rubbing the metal breasts of a female sculpture mounted in front of one of the shops. The gesture brought luck, supposedly. The old bronze statue had darkened to a smoky hue with time, save for certain areas that were rather bright and shiny. A copper top hat lay upturned at the statue’s feet, inviting “tips for the lady” to further the likelihood of receiving good fortune.
“Molten Street.” Amaranthe pointed to the intersection ahead where the brass street sign was attached to a stout gas lamp.
“And this
woman makes illegal wares?” Yara rested her hand on the hilt of her short sword, as if she meant to enforce the law, whether this district was hers or not.
“I’m not sure the wares are technically illegal, though many of the people who order them are the nefarious sorts who don’t always pay their taxes.”
“You ordered some,” Maldynado pointed out.
“Yes, and when I was a homeless outlaw, I found it difficult to pay my taxes as well. I tended to get shot at whenever I showed up in public buildings.”
“And the nefarious part?”
“I’m sure there are some who would have classified us that way,” Amaranthe said, thinking of all the Forge people she had vexed. At some point, she would have to check in with Deret Mancrest and see if he was still getting on with Suan Curlev. At the least, she would have to give him her condolences about his father, even if the two hadn’t been close.
“Are you paying taxes now?” Yara asked.
“Er.”
“Yes, Amaranthe, why don’t you tell us about that?” Maldynado smiled as they turned the corner onto Molten Street. “Now that you’re no longer an outlaw and staying at the same now-private hotel as the president, you must be an upright citizen again.”
“I haven’t been in the country for months. Or earned any income unless you count trading fish and octopus for supplies on remote tropical islands.”
“The government taxes barter,” Yara said.