Kalev Shadowfall was having a bad night.
It had started out well enough. Gaining entrance to Duke Arisor’s palace had proven trivial. This was peaceful, ordered Fairhaven, after all. The duke trusted the queen’s law and the governor’s vigilance. Kalev only needed to bribe one guard to leave one gate in the outer wall open. After that, he had scaled the palace’s ivy- covered wall so swiftly not even the nesting sparrows stirred. The laughter and music from the grand reception in the ballroom covered any stray sounds he made, and the hired patrol tromping through the gardens had completely failed to look up to see the extra shadow moving across the stones. Duke Arisor had become too cavalier about his own safety of late. He was not the first of Fairhaven’s prosperous citizens to assume that because the city was well-ordered, it was essentially safe. It was but one of his mistakes.
Another was selling information too sensitive to be allowed out of the capitol.
A few drops of oil and a thin blade had popped the next-to-useless lock on the study’s window. Velvet draperies blocked off the sight of Kalev slipping down from the sill.
Kalev remembered thinking it was too easy as he stepped lightly down, not even rippling the drapes. He remembered wishing for a little challenge to add zest to the evening.
He also remembered thinking, Be careful what you wish for.
Because when Kalev peered between the drapes to make sure the study was empty, he saw a sprawling wreck of overturned furnishings and scattered papers surrounding the mutilated remains of a man dressed in emerald silk lying facedown in a large pool of blood.
Kalev swallowed his shock and made himself wait for a slow count of one hundred. No movement disturbed the gory scene. Kalev crept into the darkened room and crouched beside the man to ascertain that he was in fact as dead as he looked. That didn’t take long. The back of the corpse’s scalp was torn open, exposing the bloody skull beneath. The neck and shoulders had been shredded, leaving strips of flesh and silk dangling across the floor. The man’s arms were broken. The smell of fresh slaughter coated the inside of Kalev’s nostrils and left its sick, sweet taint on the back of his throat.
Kalev reached out and prodded the stiffening hands, checking the rings until he found the one he was looking for: the sigil of peridot and onyx that belonged to Duke Arisor.
Snickt.
Kalev spun to face the door, drawing his right-hand dagger from his sash, and found himself face to face with a dark-haired, bejeweled woman wearing a formal gown of topaz silk.
Her startling violet eyes darted from Kalev to the dead duke, the ransacked study, and to Kalev again.
The woman opened her mouth. Kalev crouched, ready to spring across the corpse and muffle her scream.
“Blast!” she exclaimed.
The woman shoved the door shut and strode into the chaos, kicking up papers around her ankles. Kalev, for one of the few times in his life, found himself startled past the ability to move.
The woman went straight to a massive bookshelf that, like the unfortunate Duke Arisor, lay toppled on its face. She dug her fingers underneath its edge and strained.
“Help me!” she snapped.
Kalev blinked. “Aren’t you concerned I might be the murderer?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “If you’d done that”-she jerked her chin toward the duke’s gruesome remains-“you’d be covered in blood. You’re not. If you were one of that lot downstairs, I’d’ve noticed you.” She looked Kalev pointedly up and down. His long black coat, black breeches, black tunic, gloves, and boots would indeed have stood out sharply in the ballroom. “And you’d’ve summoned the guard. You haven’t. So, you’re probably here to steal, which doesn’t bother me, as long as we’re not after the same thing.”
“Admirably practical.” Kalev bowed his head. She was wrong about his reason for being there, but there was no immediate need to point that out. Kalev stowed his dagger, stepped lightly to the other side of the shelf, and crouched down.
“On three, then,” he said. “One, two, three.”
A blur of midnight dropped down between them.
Kalev fell back, rolled over his shoulder, and came up on his feet, his dagger in his hand once more and a flush on his face for failing to look up in time like some lazy guard.
A stinking, humanish creature dressed in rags sewn with bones landed beside the duke’s corpse. One hand brandished a notched short sword, the other clutched what looked like a golden statue of a cyclops. It bellowed wordlessly, revealing a mouth full of black teeth.
Skulk! Kalev leaped backward.
“Grab it!” shouted the woman.
“What?” cried Kalev, his voice embarrassingly shrill.
The woman snatched up a broken chair to swing at the skulk’s head. The skulk ducked, howled, and raised its blade.
Then it jerked around and jumped head-first out the window.
The woman dived after it, arms outstretched. She missed by bare inches and sprawled full-length on the floor, sending up a flurry of papers.
A heartbeat later, shouts rose through the open window. Kalev shoved the curtains open and looked down at the crowd of guards gathered below. Some hared off into the darkness, presumably on the trail of the skulk, which had already vanished. The rest stayed put, probably waiting for orders.
“We need to clear that lot away, or we’re never getting out of here,” Kalev reasoned.
The woman understood at once. She scrambled to her feet.
“Help!” she wailed at the top of her lungs. “Duke Arisor is attacked! Oh, help!”
Attacked. Not murdered. The guard will come check the study. Smart. Below, an officer barked orders. Half the patrol headed for the walls, the other half sprinted toward the main doors, leaving the space under the windows clear.
The woman wasted no more time. She leaped onto the sill. There came a loud ripping noise and Kalev suddenly found a mass of topaz fabric flying at his head.
He knocked the bulky missile aside. When he could see again, the window sill was empty.
The sound of running feet in the corridor was very loud.
Kalev swung himself onto the sill, grabbed the ivy, and climbed down until he could safely let himself drop to the ground. He landed in time to see a faint flash of jewels in the lamp light as the woman scaled the outer wall.
Kalev set off at a run. He seldom lost his way, even in the dark, and quickly found the side gate again. It was still open. He was through and out into the street in time to draw a look of startled fury from the woman-now clad in breeches, boots, and a tight, dark tunic-as she gazed down at him from the top of the wall.
Before he could say anything, two massive hands yanked him off his feet and slammed him against the wall.
When his vision cleared, Kalev found himself pinned against the wall an inch off the ground, staring into the brutish face of a battered warforged. Essentially a living suit of armor, the creature had one massive fist cocked back and ready to punch Kalev’s unprotected head.
“Sheroth!” The woman dropped lightly to the cobbles. “The target’s this way!”
The warforged-Sheroth-growled, let Kalev drop, and lumbered after the woman. Kalev hit the cobbles, staggering a moment before he found his footing.
He stared after the retreating pair. What was going on?
The only way to answer that was to follow the woman and the warforged. Choosing the thickest shadows, Kalev ran.
Fairhaven was a city of wide avenues and tall spires, famed for its beauty. Duke Arisor controlled the majority of the spice trade on the river and, contrary to convention, had built his main residence close to the docks to keep an eye on his ships and his warehouses. Outside his palace, the district was low, mean, and twisted. The alleys Kalev ran through had more in common with a dungeon than a Fairhaven thoroughfare, and all of his senses
