Shadowbane

and misfortune. She closed it in her hand and put her hands behind her back. She shuffled the coin around.

She looked-with her one eye-toward the larger of the two sellswords. He was far uglier than the other: a long scar reaching from one eye down to his chin curled his face in a perpetual hanging sneer. “Choose,” she said. “Quickly, please. If you choose the coin, you will be forgiven-even rewarded.”

The man looked to his compatriot, shrugged, and pointed to her left hand.

The Coin Priest smiled and drew out her left hand. When she opened her fingers, they held a shiny platinum coin, turned so that the homely, smiling face of Tymora shone in the candlelight. It glowed with golden light, which wafted over the ugly brute. Of a sudden, his wounds vanished-the bruises on his face smoothed over like sand under an ocean wave.

“You are well beloved of Lady Luck, sir,” the Coin Priest said.

The man loosed a tense breath and smiled.

The Coin Priest drew her right hand out, leveled the hand crossbow she had drawn, and shot the second man between the eyes.

“That one, not so much,” she said.

The sellsword stared in shock at his friend twitching on the floor, blood spurting into the air. His thrashing lasted only a breath or two. The Coin Priest gazed on her platinum coin-such a beautiful thing. It brought life with one side and death with the other.

“I shall say this once,” she raised her voice to the room, “and I shall use small words so you are all certain to understand.”

She lowered the crossbow to her desk and smiled at them.

“I-as your mistress and servant to the great smiling goddess-can put up with much. Brutality, murder, pillage, torture-these things are nothing to me. Indeed, I offer great reward to those who undertake them in the light of the goddess’s smile.”

She gestured to her coin, which gleamed in the candlelight with a radiance that matched her smile. Then her smile turned and she frowned at them.

“Then again, my goddess frowns upon those who fail me-or, worse, question me and her great works. And the reward of such disfavor, well … I shoot you in the godsdamned face. Thus.” She gestured to the body of the man on the floor, around which a pool of brackish blood was spreading. “Now. Are there any questions?”

The room was silent.

She smiled. “Go then, and bask in the smile of the goddess.”

The men crowded out of the room as fast as they could.

“Not you, however,” she said, to man who’d chosen the lucky coin. He jerked straight as though she’d stabbed him in the spine.

“Oh, don’t fret,” the Coin Priest said, rounding her desk. “That one fully deserved it, for bungling the mugging. That’s how Beshaba smiles.” She seized his arm and squeezed, her nails digging into his flesh. “But you won’t fail me again.”

The scarred man shook his head sharply, fear in his eyes.

“Good.” She leaned in and grasped the lucky sellsword by the chin, stroking his stubbly jaw. Dealing death always gave her an appetite. He trembled as she drew close enough to kiss him on the lips.

“Now, about that reward,” she said, and she pulled him into her embrace.

She loved the taste of fear.

CHAPTER TWELVE

23 KYTHORN (NIGHT)

The port of Luskan, it was said, hadn’t seen active service since the reign of the pirate kings of the old world, and Kalen could well believe it. In his childhood memories, it had been wretched, but what lay before him was worse: a graveyard for the hulks of ships murdered in century-old conflicts. Its headstone was Luskan’s chief landmark and the former power in the city, the legendary Host Tower of the Arcane, with its four spires like the trunks of an eldritch tree. It lay in rubble on central Cutlass Island, as it had for a century.

During summer nights such as this, a foul, humid fog gripped the bay, choking off breath and irritating the lungs. Anyone foolish enough to row out on such a night-like the two men in the shallow-bottomed skiff, with their pack behind them-would cough and sneeze and choke and generally suffer through a miserable journey.

At least his spellscar had grown quiescent, seemingly content in a way it had not been since he’d traded harsh words with Myrin in her chambers. Had he really avoided her all this time? He put that concern aside and focused on how much he hated Luskan-every dripping, moldering, disgusting finger-length of it.

“Tell me again,” Kalen said between oar strokes, “why we’re in this boat, braving these waters to climb aboard a derelict that’s been floating in the bay for a month?”

“Because a dead body told us to,” Rhett said. “Rather, the corpse said he-that is, the necromancer speaking through him-thought there was, how did he name it … a ‘source of corruption’ in the bay. Then the man the corpse had been mugging-back when he was alive, that is-he was the one who told us about the derelict.”

“This is the man”-Kalen coughed-“without his own face.”

“The same.” Rhett snuffled. “Which I didn’t realize until after the corpse talked-hmm.” He grinned. “It didn’t sound much better the second time, did it?”

“At least it’s a lead.” Kalen coughed again, harder this time.

Kalen’s inquiries that day told him the derelict in question had drifted into Luskan’s harbor a month gone. It had borne black paint, which meant plague, so no one had touched it for twenty days-long after anything could be alive inside. Eventually, the desire for loot had gotten the best of several Luskar, who’d raced to get to the ship to pilfer what they could.

Kalen would have done the same fifteen years past. If he had and the plague had come from this ship, he might have been its first victim.

Now he and Rhett were in a rickety skiff, rowing through the sickly fog toward what could possibly be the source of Luskan’s scourge. This they did on the word of a dead man and at the suggestion of a man who’d been wrapped in illusions.

They drew up on the derelict and Kalen hammered a stake into the barnacle-encrusted hull. He was unconcerned with the damage. The ship would never again be seaworthy and they needed to tie the skiff off, lest it drift away while they were about their business.

“Saer Shadowbane,” Rhett said. “I’ve a question.”

Kalen knew what he would ask and feared it. “If you must.”

“Why did you make me Lady Darkdance’s guardian, when she clearly wants you?” Rhett cleared his throat. “For her guardian, I mean.”

“You’re the one with Vindicator,” Kalen said.

“That’s another question.” Rhett fingered Vindicator’s hilt. “This sword is yours- clearly yours. And yet I’m the one carrying it.”

“So it would seem.”

Kalen’s body ached from his earlier fight with Sithe, up on the roof. She’d thrashed him again, then walked away in silence.

“Saer, you’ve set me about those things you should be doing yourself.” Rhett visibly mustered himself. “And yet-”

“I won’t take you for my apprentice,” Kalen said.

Gloom enclosed the little skiff, filling the air between them and choking off their words. Silently, Kalen looped the skiff’s mooring rope around the stake.

Ultimately, Rhett gave up with a sigh. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“This isn’t the life you want. And even if it is …” Kalen’s eye fell on Vindicator-on the long flaw that ran through the steel. He remembered Vaelis and the words turned to dust in his mouth. “I am no master for you. I know that, even if you do not.”