The Assassin's Curse

  Naji gathered up my dresses and my knife and handed them to me. "Come," he said, yanking on my shoulder, pulling me away from the scene.

  The crowd let us go.

  "What did you do to that man?" I asked. I tried to pull away from his grip but he wouldn't let go. "Did you suck the soul of his body? Why didn't you just kill him normal?"

  "I didn't kill him at all," Naji snapped. "He'll wake up in an hour."

  We walked the rest of the way in silence. My neck was still bleeding a little from where the knife had pricked it, and I kept wiping at it and looking up at Naji and thinking about the drunk's blood staining his fingers.

  When we arrived at the inn, its main room was mostly empty save for a couple of bedraggled-looking whores and a man I pegged as another pirate by the way he was dressed up in aristocrat's clothes. When Naji walked in, all three of them got to their feet and filed out without saying a word. And the innkeeper got the shakes when Naji told him he wanted a room. He kept glancing over at me, eyes all wide with fear. I wondered if it was cause he'd heard about the fight or cause the innkeep was just terrified of assassins generally.

  "And… and the lady?" he said, stammering. "Will she have her own room?" I wanted to laugh, him calling me a lady when I had blood on my arms and my dress.

  "No," Naji said. "She'll stay with me."

  The innkeeper went pale, like Naji had just produced the ghost of his dead mother or something. He tried to hand over the key to the room and dropped it on the counter instead. I didn't want to laugh anymore. It occurred to me that if this was how people were gonna act every time me and Naji came into a place – well, I could see that getting to be a problem. Maybe Tarrin would meet some pretty Saelini girl and the Hariris would just forget the whole thing and I could slip off when Naji was in one of his trances. Not that I thought any of that would happen.

  Naji finished the transaction and glided over to the stairs. I went up to the counter, leaned over it, and said to the innkeep, "Don't worry, you'll see me again."

  The innkeep's eyes twitched from me to Naji, who was leaning against the doorway and looking annoyed.

  "He won't do nothing," I said, but the innkeeper shook his head.

  "Run," he said, in a hoarse whisper. "Get away. I've seen what his type are capable of – what they'll do to an innocent like you."

  I wondered why the guy thought I was an innocent. Cause I ain't pretty? I decided to give it up then. I obviously wasn't going to sell the poor guy on my safety.

  "Don't feel the need to defend my good reputation," Naji said as we made our way up the stairs to the room, out of earshot of the innkeep. "I don't have one."

  "Oh, I'm sorry," I said. "Did you want me to act like your prisoner or something? Slip him a note to send for help?"

  "Please don't do that."

  "What'd he think you were going to do to me anyway?"

  Naji opened up the door to the room. It was smaller than the room I'd had on the edge of the city, and not nearly as clean. I thought of all the Confederation scummies that had passed through here and shuddered.

  Besides which, there was only one bed.

  "Blood magic, probably," Naji said, and I shut my trap at that, because I'd just seen how that part of the assassin stories was true and blood magic ain't nothing to mess with. Even Mama had warned me off it, before it became apparent my talents lie elsewhere.

  "You can sleep on the bed," Naji said. "And you should sleep." He gave me a look like he expected me to sass him. When I didn't, he said, "And no, it's not because of the, ah, the oath. It's because I need you alert tomorrow night."

  "What for?"

  "I have some things I'll need you to fetch for me, so I can determine what we should do next."

  He didn't expand on that, and I figured tomorrow I could make a case for our next step to involve convincing the Hariris not to kill me. I was awful tired, to be sure. I'd hardly realized it until we got to the room. Likely still running on the energy from the fight, the way you do during those sea-battles that go on for days and days. I collapsed down on top of the bed, not even giving any thought to the last time the sheets might have been washed. And, like any good pirate, I fell asleep immediately.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I slept straight on through till nightfall, and when I woke up my entire body ached so bad I could hardly push myself off the bed. Naji was sitting over in the corner, his eyes glowing. I waved my hands in front of him a couple of times and when he didn't so much as twitch I went ahead and peeled off my dress, stiff with sweat and blood and sand, and put on a fresh one. I transferred the bag of coins into my new dress. Just cause he was protecting me didn't mean he wouldn't steal from me.

  Then I sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for a few minutes. He didn't come out of his trance.

  "Hey," I shouted. "Sure would be easy for me to sneak out on you right now."

  That did it. The glow went out of his eyes and he stood up, unfolding himself gracefully like the fight hadn't affected him at all.

  "Not as easy as you would think." He had taken off his armor and his cloak while I slept, and his arms were covered in strange, snaky tattoos the same iceglacier blue his eyes got whenever he settled into a trance. He didn't say nothing, though I know he saw me looking at them.

  He walked across the narrow width of the room, to the rickety old table where he'd draped his cloak, and began to rummage through it.

  "I'm hungry."

  "I'm sure you can get something downstairs."

  "I don't have no money," I said, trying my hand.

  "Nonsense." He peered over his shoulder at me. His hair fell in dark ribbons over his forehead, and I felt silly for noticing. "You have a pouch of pressed metal in your pocket."

  Immediately, I forgot his hair. "How do you know that?"

  He smiled, touched one hand to his chest in the manner of the desertlands, that gesture that's supposed to stand in for an answer you don't want to give. Then he said, "I would like you to go to the night market for me. I'll give you money for that, but I expect you to return with everything I request. And I will bind you to me if I feel it's necessary."

  I scowled at him. "You can't go to the night market yourself?"

  "No vendor would sell to me." He didn't look at me when he spoke. I got a weird feeling in my stomach, thinking about the innkeep from the night before, and blood magic I'd seen Naji perform out on the street. The threat of Naji tying me to him.

  "What exactly are you going to do?" I said. "With the, ah, the things from the–"

  "Nothing that'll hurt you." He pulled out a stack of pressed metal, gold and silver both and worth much more than what I had in my pouch. I took a more or less involuntary step forward, trying to see where he'd yanked them from. One glare stopped me.

  "And what about the Mists lady?" I asked. "Don't you think she might come back after me?"

  "No." But there was a gap in his voice, some information he was leaving out.

  "You don't think she's going to try again?"

  "Not her, no."

  "But someone."

  Naji rubbed his head. "They won't come after you," he said.

  "They came after me before."

  "No, you happened to stumble across them. It's not the same thing."

  I watched him, trying to decide if I wanted to tell him that I didn't get the sense that I'd stumbled across anything. I'd almost made the decision to say something when he turned away from me and said, "Run downstairs and ask the innkeeper to borrow some paper and ink."

  "You don't need to write it down. I'll remember." I tapped the side of my head. My stomach rumbled.

  When I didn't move he glared at me again, and I did as he asked. It was a different innkeep from the one who tried to convince me I was about to die. Too bad. I kind of wanted to reassure the poor bastard, or at least see the expression on his face when he saw I wasn't dead.

  The new innkeep gave me the paper and the ink without too much fuss, though he said he'd charge
me if I didn't bring the ink down after I finished with it. I waved him off and then bounded back upstairs. The smell of food rolling in from the kitchen, spicy and warm and rich, made my mouth water. That didn't incline me toward screwing around with Naji just cause it would annoy him. The sooner he got me his list, the sooner I got to eat.

  Unfortunately, he took his time writing it out. He had this special quill that he produced from out of his robes, long and thin and the kind of black that sucks the color out of everything. I sat down on the bed while he puzzled over his list, scratching things out, shaking his head, muttering to himself.

  "I'm hungry," I said.

  "So am I," he said. "But this is far more important than either of our appetites at the moment." He held the list at arm's length, squinting a little in the lamplight. Then he pressed it up against the wall and wrote one more thing.

  "There," he said. "That should be it."

  I jumped off the bed and snatched it out of his hand and scanned over his sharp, spiny handwriting. It was all in Empire, and most of the items were plants. Rose petals, rue, dried wisteria vines. Soil-magic stuff.

  "Midnight's claws," he said. "You can read."

  "Of course I can read." I folded the paper down as small as it would go and slipped it into my pocket. "And why would you give me a list if you thought I couldn't read?"

  "I assumed you'd hand it over to the vendors."

  "Oh, that's wise," I said. "Let them give me some fountain grass when I paid for swamp yirrus. Whatever that is." I shook my head. "How'd you get your supplies before you met me, anyway?"

  "Not from a night market."

  I let him have the last word, cause I was so hungry I could hardly think straight. I stuck my hand on the doorknob and was halfway to turning it when he roared, "Stop!" like a troop of Empire navymen were about to come bursting through the door. I froze, all my aching muscles preparing for yet another knife fight. But Naji just slouched toward me, the heel of his hand pressed against his forehead. "Curses and darkness," he said.

  "What the hell's wrong with you?"

  He reached into his robe and pulled out the charm from the battle and tossed it at me. The minute it was in my hands he straightened up.

  "I hope that'll stave it off," he muttered, more to the air in the room than to me.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Wear that charm." He pointed at my chest. "Keep it on you at all times."

  "Why?"

  "It's for protection."

  "I know what it's for. I'm more curious what it's protection against."

  He glowered. "Probably nothing. But I… I don't like sending you out alone."

  "You sent me downstairs."

  "That was different. You were still in the building."

  "So? You can look through walls or something? What if someone snatched me when the innkeep wasn't looking?"

  "No one was going to snatch you."

  "But someone's gonna snatch me at the night market?"

  "Probably not."

  "But you still need to give me protection?"

  "Stop asking questions!" he roared. "I thought you were hungry!"

  "I am hungry! I just want to know I ain't walking into a trap is all."

  Naji rubbed at his forehead, his eyes closed. "You aren't walking into a trap. As long as you swear to me that you won't take off the charm, you'll be safe."

  I stared at him.

  He opened his eyes. "I need you to swear it."

  "I don't swear," I finally said. "But I'll promise." I looped the charm around my neck. That feeling of safety drizzled over me. I thought the whole thing was off, like I'd just been handed a key to something I shoulda understood, but I was so hungry I didn't much care. I was out the door and into the kitchen before Naji could say another word.

  The night market in the pleasure district was a lot bigger than the one where Naji had almost killed me. It stretched from the row of brothels all the way down to the docks, and I could make out the outline of ship sails in the distance, blocking out the sky's bright stars. Vendors crowded onto the street like weeds, shouting at me to come buy their charms and enchantments as I walked past. Mostly love potions and the like. I ignored them.

  It took me less time than I expected to gather up all the things on Naji's list. Those plants I recognized – the powdered Echinacea, the rose petals, the hyacinth root – I picked up first, going from vendor to vendor so none of them would ask after what spells I planned on casting.

  That left the weird stuff. Like an uman flower. Never heard of that before, and as it turned out, it was extremely rare and extremely expensive, and only grew in a particular swamp in the southern part of Qilar. I had to ask five separate vendors after it, and I eventually got sent to an old man tucked away behind a stand selling vials of snake blood. He was all shriveled up like a walnut, and he peered up at me through the folds of wrinkled-up skin around his eyes. "What you needing a weed like this for?" he asked.

  "Magic."

  "Don't sass me, girl." But he rummaged underneath his table for a few seconds and produced a plant that reminded me of a body wrapped in burial shrouds. It wasn't like any flower I ever saw, what with its twisted wooden stem, all deformed and grotesque, and its long, fluttering white petals.

  "Be careful with her," the old man said. "You can call down the spirits, if you don't know what you're doing."

  I thanked him, so as to seem polite, and then tucked the uman flower away in my bag so I wouldn't have to look at it again.

  There was one rarity on the list that I did recognize: le'ki, which Mama had used sometimes in the tracking spells that helped us sift out the best merchant ships. I figured I could find that at the stands set up on the docks, and I was right. At the first one I went to, the vendor had a half-inch left, dried out and powdered like Naji had requested. Naji only wanted a quarterinch, but I bought all the vendor had, cause it reminded me of home, that briny sea scent and opalescent pink sheen, like the inside of a shell.

  I'd been half-avoiding coming down to the docks, but once I was there, I didn't want to leave. I had everything on the list but the swamp yirrus, and it wasn't even midnight yet. So I followed a dock away from the lights of the city, all the way out to its edge. Boats thumped against the water, that hollow wooden sound I always found so reassuring. Nobody was out but a single dock-guard, and he didn't pay me no mind. Not like one person can steal a boat anyway.

  I sat down on the pier, the bag filled with Naji's supplies in my lap, my feet dangling out over the ocean. Mama used to tell me the sea had an intelligence all her own, though I'd never been able to feel it like Mama could. I loved the ocean, don't get me wrong, but for me and Papa it was just water, huge and beautiful and strong and bigger than everything in the whole world, sure – but never something I could sit down and chat over my problems with.

  When I was younger I'd get up early sometimes and climb to the top of the rigging so I could watch Mama work her magic with the sea. Sometimes she stripped naked and swam in it, and the waves would buoy her around like a jellyfish. Other times she sang and threw offerings from our merchant runs – small things, like a few coins of pressed metal, or a necklace, or a bangled scarf. And the offerings wouldn't float away like jetsam, neither. The sea sucked them down to the depths, leaving a wisp of foam in their wake. Once Mama lowered a jar into the water and scooped that foam up and then drank it down. Three days later, we defeated the Lae clan in a battle everyone, even Papa, thought we'd lose.

  Thinking back to my childhood, and to Mama and her magic, and even that horrible battle, I started getting real sad. And I didn't want to be on the docks no more, sea spray kicking up along the hem of my dress. So I gathered up my bag and made my way back to the twinkling lights of the night market. My melancholy left me feeling distracted and confused, and I didn't know I'd taken a wrong turn until I realized I was back in the city proper – not the night market.

  I cursed and turned around, intending to follow my steps back to t
he docks. But the buildings all looked the same in the dim light of the magic-lanterns, and when I started going one direction I was sure it was the wrong way, so I turned and went another – and after doing that a couple times I realized it was hopeless. I was lost, and in a city, unlike the open ocean, it's best to just ask somebody for directions.

  Course, all the buildings were locked up tight for the night. I wandered for a while, kicking at stones in the street, fiddling with Naji's charm at my throat. Nothing.

  Then I caught the scent of incense.