The sun was blazing down from the clear, afternoon sky as I stumbled out, and I squinted against the sudden brightness. The heat in the open square was intense and heavy, but at least it felt clean. I wanted to throw up my hands and shout, “Freedom!” Only I was worried the Ash Guard might take it personally and arrest me again.
I couldn’t just bust Benny out of gaol. I would end up straight back in the Guard fortress. I needed to think this through. Getting out of the heat would be a good start. I headed for the nearest street.
A group of old men looked up from under an awning where they were playing a noisy game of High Ground as I ducked into the shade beside them. I gave them a friendly wave, and they went back to their game, shaking their heads. Yep. Everyone thinks you’re a loon. Hey, any mage dragged into the Ash Guard fortress would be the same.
Counters clicked as one of the old men moved his piece around the board, demolishing several citadels on his way, to the outraged cries and curses of the other men.
High Ground was called the Game of Conquerors, and apparently Agate Blackspear, the self-proclaimed founder of Agatos, the Godkiller himself, had been a big fan. I had never really taken to it, because it required at least four players and I couldn’t think of three other people I could stand to be around for the seven or eight hours it took to play. That was a joke, but in all honesty, every game I had played had descended into bitter arguments by halfway through.
Whoever had set me and Benny up was playing their own game of High Ground. Prepare the field, line up your moves, strike. But it didn’t always play out the way you expected. With a shout of disbelief, the old man lost his emperor to an unexpected counter strike.
That’s right, you bastard, I thought at my unknown antagonist. The power of fucking analogy.
The smell of cinnamon drifted from a coffee house on the other side of the street, and the only reason my stomach didn’t rumble was because the cinnamon was cut by the fragrant stink of the small herd of goats making its way up the street, followed by their shepherd. I assumed they were on their way to the slaughter houses by the docks, but it never paid to ask too closely.
With a nod that no one noticed, I left the old men to their game before something could happen that would ruin my analogy.
Despite my protestations and my apparently well-known lack of magical power, the Ash Guard still thought I was involved. I was used to being an idiot, but this was the first time I’d been someone’s useful idiot. I didn’t like it.
Then there was Benny. I had always known that his stealing would catch up with him one day, but I hadn’t known it would happen when we were on a job together, and somehow that made it more personal. I didn’t have many friends — like I said, I pissed people off — and none had hung around as long as Benny. I wasn’t going to let the Watch chop off his hands. In a way, I had got lucky. The Ash Guard had no interest in common or garden thievery. If they cleared me of murder, I’d be a free man. Benny wasn’t so fortunate.
The Senate could pardon him, of course. Maybe if I’d been more respectable, if I’d followed the normal path for a mage and risen through society, I might have had contacts who could have a quiet word. My little sister, Mica, had taken that route. She had stayed with the Countess when I’d left and was now one of the Countess’s senior mages. But I had sworn long ago that I was never getting drawn into the Countess’s schemes again. The price was just too high.
The only other people with the leverage to spring Benny were the other high mages, the Wren and Carnelian Silkstar. The idea of being indebted to the Wren filled me with immense unease, and Silkstar wasn’t my or Benny’s biggest fan at the moment, seeing as he (rightly) thought we’d tried to rob him and (wrongly) thought we had murdered his servant.
But if I could track down the actual murderer and turn them over to Silkstar, maybe that would be enough to get him to overlook the burglary. High mages to a man and woman were proud and unforgiving, but this was all I had.
Yeah? I thought. Or are you just coming up with excuses to concentrate on clearing yourself of murder rather than helping Benny?
I swore, startling a priestess of Narth the Sleeping who was walking a couple of steps ahead of me. I was pretty certain Narth was dead, not sleeping, so I wasn’t particularly worried about the dirty look she shot me.
The obvious place to start would be the person who had hired Benny. Benny wasn’t getting released any time soon, but he should be able to tell me who his contact had been.
I had one other thing to take care of first, though. Benny might be a lowlife thief, but he was a good father, and he would be worrying himself stupid about his daughter. He would expect me to check that she was all right before anything else.
Benny owned a small house on the edge of the Warrens. Unlike the better parts of Agatos, and even unlike much of the Grey City, the Warrens hadn’t been planned. It had grown like fungus behind the western docks, narrow, dark streets and damp, crowded houses. Benny’s place was part of a cluster of houses no more than twenty yards from the true Warrens, and if I had to be honest, it was a whole lot nicer than my rundown apartment in the Grey City. There were no grand plazas here, but this borderland between the impoverished and respectable parts of Agatos didn’t slump under the weary poverty of the Warrens.
Benny’s house was a two-storey, whitewashed stone building, part of a block that enclosed a shared courtyard. Neat shutters were closed against the heat. Pots of carefully tended flowers stood on either side of the door. If you hadn’t known Benny the way I did, you would never have marked this as his home. The solid cedar door itself was locked, but a quick spell sprang it, and I eased the door open. I knew Benny didn’t have any magical wards against intrusion, because I’d offered to set some and he’d turned me down flat. Apparently, he couldn’t believe anyone would actually rob him, which, bearing in mind he spent half his nights rifling through the possessions of the wealthy, seemed touchingly naïve.
The house was dark inside, with only the open door throwing a sharp wedge of light onto the wooden floor. I drew in magic to enhance my senses.
It didn’t do any good. I had scarcely taken three steps into the house when a long, sharp blade touched my throat, and a voice whispered directly into my ear, “Hello, Uncle Nik.”
I managed to catch myself as a I stumbled, which was a good thing, otherwise I would have impaled myself on the knife.
“Bannaur’s balls,” I cursed. “Do you have to do that, Sereh?”
“You didn’t knock.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“No.”
The knife slid away from my throat, stroking over my skin as gently as a feather. I shivered, then turned slowly to look down at Benny’s daughter. She stared back up at me with wide, innocent blue eyes. The knife, I noticed, had disappeared.
Sereh was eleven years old, and small for her age. I had known her since she’d been a baby. Depths, I had even helped raise her when Benny had needed help. But she still absolutely terrified me sometimes. It was partly those innocent blue eyes and the fact that she never spoke louder than a whisper, but it was mainly that knife of hers. She was also the only person I never heard coming. I thought she liked me, in her own way, but she was ferociously, dangerously loyal to Benny. Sereh would take on an incarnate god if she thought it was a threat to her father, and I’d put even money on her being the one who walked away. Being around Sereh always felt like tiptoeing through broken glass. If broken glass could leap up off the floor and stab you through the eye before you could blink.