The blue fire was too strong this night, too strong even for the mournful moon. Darujhistan itself was a sapphire, blazing in the torc of the world.
And yet its beauty, and all its delighted pride and its multitudinous voice, could not reach her tonight,
This night, Lady Vidikas had seen her future. Each and every year of it. There on her husband’s hard arm, And the moon, well, it looked like a thing of the past, a memory dimmed by time, yet it had taken her back.
To a balcony much like this one in a time that now seemed very long ago.
Lady Vidikas, who had once been Challice Estraysian, had just seen her future. And was discovering, here in this night and standing against this rail, that the past was a better place to be.
Talk about the worst night yet to run out of Rhivi flatbread. Swearing under her breath, Picker pushed her way through the crowds of the Lakefront market, the mobs of ferociously hungry, drunk revellers, using her elbows when she needed to and glowering at every delirious smile swung her way, and came out eventu¬ally at the mouth of a dingy alley heaped ankle-deep in rubbish. Somewhere just to the south of Borthen Park. Not quite the route back to the bar she would have preferred, but the fete was in full frenzy.
Wrapped package of flatbread tucked under her left arm, she paused to tug loose the tangles of her heavy cloak, scowled on seeing a fresh stain from a care¬less passer-by-some grotesque Gadrobi sweetcake-tried wiping it off which only made it worse, then, her mood even fouler, set out through the detritus.
With the Lady’s pull, Bluepearl and Antsy had fared better in finding Saltoan wine and were even now back at K’rul’s. And here she was, twelve streets and two wall passages away with twenty or thirty thousand mad fools in between. Would her companions wait for her? Not a chance. Damn Blend and her addiction to Rhivi flatbread! That and her sprained ankle had conspired to force Picker out here on the first night of the fete-if that ankle truly was sprained, and she had her doubts since Mallet had just squinted down at the offending appendage, then shrugged.
Mind you, that was about as much as anyone had come to expect from Mallet. He’d been miserable since the retirement, and the chance of the sun’s rising any time in the healer’s future was about as likely as Hood’s forgetting to tally the count. And it wasn’t as if he was alone in his misery, was it?
But where was the value in feeding her ill temper with all these well-chewed thoughts?
Well, it made her feel better, that’s what.
Dester Thrin, wrapped tight in black cloak and hood, watched the big-arsed woman kicking her way through the rubbish at the other end of the alley. He’d picked her up coming out of the back door of K’rul’s Bar, the culmination of four nights positioned in the carefully chosen, darkness-shrouded vantage point from which he could observe that narrow postern.
His clan-master had warned that the targets were all ex-soldiers, but Dester
Thrill had seen little to suggest that any of them had kept fit and trim. They were old, sagging, rarely sober, and this one, well, she wore that huge, thick woollen cloak because she was getting heavy and it clearly made her self-conscious.
Following her through the crowds had been relatively easy-she was a head taller than the average Gadrobi, and the route she took to this decrepit Rhivi market in Lakefront seemed to deliberately avoid the Daru streets, some strange affectation that would, in a very short time, prove fatal.
Dester’s own Daru blood had permitted him a clear view of his target, pushing purposefully through the heaving press of celebrants.
He set out to traverse the alley once his target exited at the far end. Swiftly padding at a hunter’s pace, he reached the alley mouth and edged out, in time to see the woman move into the passageway through Second Tier Wall, with the tunnel through Third just beyond.
The Guild’s succession wars; following the disappearance of Vorcan, had finally been settled, with only a minimum amount of spilled blood. And Dester was more or less pleased with the new Grand Master, who was both vicious and clever where most of the other aspirants had been simply vicious. At last, an as¬sassin of the Guild did not have to be a fool to feel some optimism regarding the future.
This contract was a case in point. Straightforward, yet one sure to earn Dester and the others of his clan considerable prestige upon its summary completion.
He brushed his gloved hands across the pommels of his daggers, the weapons slung on baldrics beneath his arms. Ever reassuring, those twin blades of Daru steel with their ferules filled with the thick, pasty poison of Moranth tralb.
Poison was now the preferred insurance for a majority of the Guild’s street killers, and indeed for more than a few who scuttled Thieves’ Road across the rooftops. There’d been an assassin, close to Vorcan herself, who had, on a night of betrayal against his own clan, demonstrated the deadliness of fighting without magic. Using poison, the assassin had proved the superiority of such mundane substances in a single, now legendary night of blood.
Dester had heard that some initiates in some clans had raised hidden shrines to honour Rallick Nom, creating a kind of cult whose adherents employed secret gestures of mutual recognition within the Guild. Of course, Seba Krafar, the new Grand Master, had in one of his very first pronouncements outlawed the cult, and there had been a cull of sorts, with five suspected cult leaders greeting the dawn with smiling throats.
Still, Dester had since heard enough hints to suggest that the cult was far from dead. It had just burrowed deeper.
In truth, no one knew which poisons Rallick Nom had used, but Dester believed it was Moranth tralb, since even the smallest amount in the bloodstream brought unconsciousness, then a deeper coma that usually led to death. Larger quantities simply speeded up the process and were a sure path through Hood’s Gate.
The big-arsed woman lumbered on.
Four streets from K’rul’s Bar-if she was taking the route he believed she was TAKING-there’ll he a long, narrow alley to walk up, the inside luce of Third Tier Wall Armoury on the left, and on the right the high wall of the bath- house thick and solid with but a few scattered, small windows on upper floors, making the unlit passage dark.
He would kill her there.
Perched on a corner post’s finial at one end of the high wall, Chillbais stared with stony eyes on the tattered wilds beyond. Behind him was an overgrown garden with a shallow pond recently rebuilt but already unkempt, and toppled columns scattered about, bearded in moss. Before him, twisted trees and straggly branches with crumpled dark leaves dangling like insect carcasses, the ground beneath rumpled and matted with greasy grasses; a snaking path of tilted pavestones leading up to a squat, brooding house bearing no architectural similarity to any other edifice in all of Darujhistan.
Light was rare from the cracks between those knotted shutters, and when it did show it was dull, desultory. The door never opened.
Among his kin, Chillbais was a giant. Heavy as a badger, with sculpted muscles beneath the prickly hide. His folded wings were very nearly too small to lift him skyward, and each sweep of those leathery fans forced a grunt from the demon’s throat.
This time would be worse than most. It had been months since he’d last moved, hidden as he was from prying eyes in the gloom of an overhanging branch from the ash tree in the estate garden at his back. But when he saw that flash of movement before him, that whispering flow of motion, out from the gnarled, black house and across the path, even as earth erupted in its wake to open a suc¬cession of hungry pits, even as roots writhed out seeking to ensnare this fugitive, Chillbais knew his vigil was at an end.
The shadow slid out to crouch against the low wall of the Azath House, seemed to watch those roots snaking closer for a long moment, then rose and, flowing like liquid night over the stone wall, was gone.
Grunting, Chillbais spread his creaking wings, shook the creases loose from the sheets of membrane between the rib-like fingers, then leapt forward, out from beneath the branch, catching what air he could, then flapping frenziedly-his grunts growing savage-until he slammed hard into the mulched ground.
Spitting twigs and leaves, the demon scrambled back for the estate wall, hear¬ing how those roots spun round, lashing out for him. Claws digging into mortar, Chillbais scrabbled back on to his original perch. Of course, there had been no real reason to fear. The roots never reached beyond the Azath’s own wall, and a glance back assured him-
Squealing, Chillbais launched back into the air, this time out over the estate garden.
Oh, no one ever liked demons!
Cool air above the overgrown fountain, then, wings thudding hard, heaving up ward, up into the night.
A word, yes, for his master. A most extraordinary word. So unexpected, so incendiary, so fraught!
