Cast in Silence Page 26

  “We need their money,” Morse told her grimly. “So the rules are pretty damn simple. Don’t fuck with them. Don’t scare them off.”

  The streets didn’t open up as she approached the river; they were still narrow and in poor repair. Only by the river streets themselves had any effort been taken to insure that they were safe, and if you saw clean, well-repaired streets, you knew you were taking a chance. She’d never come this close to the river, not in Barren. In Nightshade, she and Severn had gone, on warmer days, to look at the bridge and to try to see what lay beyond it.

  But they didn’t belong there. They’d never tried to leave.

  And why? Why? As if to find an answer, she now followed the road that led to the bridge from Barren. It wasn’t the same bridge, of course; it didn’t even look the same. It was flatter, slightly wider; the height of the curve didn’t mark the midpoint between real life and dream. There were no guards on either side. There never had been, that she knew of.

  Two days, she lingered by the river streets, watching the big houses. There were three; they were probably brothels. Or some combination of a brothel and something else. It was true: men came from the bridge, crossing into Barren as carelessly as if the bridge were just another damn street. They came in the late afternoon; they would leave before it got too dark.

  At the end of the second day, pushing sunset, she finally caught sight of three men who didn’t look much like outsiders. Not like the other customers, and not like the guards who did keep an eye out for important people who might need to make their way back across the bridge to real safety.

  Promising.

  One man was clearly in charge. Hair and height were right. He approached the closest of the big houses, followed closely by his two men. Knocked on the door. She couldn’t hear what was said, but it didn’t take long before the door opened fully and he was let inside. His men trailed him like awkward shadows.

  She waited for them to leave. The sun sank. Sunrise and sunset marked boundaries for the ferals. Sorco—if it was Sorco—had two armed guards; he could afford to take risks. She couldn’t.

  Come on. Come on. She watched, feeling the air cool. Shadows lengthened; she could feel the minutes stretch; could feel her stomach begin to knot, not with the familiar pangs of hunger, but with an equally familiar fear. It was a long way home, and even at a dead sprint, she wasn’t going to make it.

  Sorco—if it was him—didn’t emerge. Clearly, whatever skimming involved it probably also involved partaking. She took a deep breath, counting days. She had some left, and if she wanted to keep it that way, she couldn’t stand here, watching as the street darkened around her. She marked the house. If Sorco was drunk or cocky, he’d leave before dawn. If he wasn’t, she might have a small chance of catching him on his rounds—but to do that? She had to be alive.

  She turned and ran.

  The moons were high and clear. The streets were deserted. She could hear the slap of her soles against cobbles, some of which were so poorly placed, they caused her to stumble. It didn’t matter; she injured nothing and rolled to her feet. Dignity wasn’t important in the night streets of the fiefs.

  A third of the way home, she heard them. She froze. It wasn’t just fear, although fear was sensible; she had to listen. Ferals had howls that meant, as far as she was concerned, boredom. Or hunger. With ferals it was pretty much one and the same. They had howls that meant other things. Anyone who had lived in a room with warped boards as a window shutter got familiar with the sound of their calls. They howled when they sighted—or scented—quarry; they howled in clashing voices when they were trying to run it to ground.

  Less often they howled in pain, because some of their quarry—at least in Nightshade—were Barrani, and were perfectly capable of taking down a feral or three without losing limbs. Or life.

  They did not howl when they were feeding. They snarled or growled, and Elianne had only heard that a couple of times, because it was a quiet sound. Occasionally those snarls turned into actual fighting; it was the only time the ferals seemed to work as less than a perfect team.

  She listened, trying to pinpoint direction. The one good thing about ferals—or the one stupid thing about them, depending on your point of view—was that they never seemed to shut up. They could howl all night. Severn had taught her how to listen, how to figure out which way was safe—or safer, at any rate—to run.

  She froze again, and tried to rid herself of the sudden memory of night streets in Nightshade. Severn had taken her by the hand, he’d led her into the middle of the street just beneath their one-room hovel, and he’d told her to close her eyes. Just that. And she’d done it.

  No more no more no more.

  But she stood in a totally foreign street, without the promise of safety a door and a few yards away, and she closed her eyes and did what she’d learned to do then. Listen. Just…listen.

  When she opened her eyes, she stared bleakly at the streets.

  The ferals were running between her and the only home she had. Had she known the streets—and the yards, the alleys, the doors with poor locks and no crossbars—better, she might have been able to run in a wide circle, coming up far enough behind where they were roaming that she could make it in one piece. She didn’t.

  But standing still was worse. She thought, briefly, and began to run again, moving at a diagonal—and away—from the howls.

  The only good thing about the run? Halfway through it, she developed a very strong dislike for Sorco.

  In the end, she wound up at a familiar street, with a familiar, fallen set of gates, a familiar opening through which she could slide, if she turned sideways. It was still cold, but she was better dressed for it now; Morse had money, and if she bitched about spending it, she spent it anyway. Elianne could hear the ferals at her back. She couldn’t tell if they were getting closer because she didn’t pause to listen; she just kept going until she passed near the ruins of an old tower.

  There, she stopped, found the opening in the fence, and slid into the stiff, dry grass. She didn’t lie flat, didn’t curl up on her side; she crouched, her knees coming up to her chin as she curled both arms around her lower legs. She drew a long knife and held it, more for comfort than protection; this lasted about ten minutes, because even in the grass, she could feel the air’s bite, the touch of wind.

  Here, though, she could close her eyes; she could listen.

  They were closer. She waited five seconds, counting breaths, and then she heard the sound she most hated: they had caught living scent. She prayed it wasn’t hers.

  The ferals were closer, now. They were howling like a storm. But a storm was just water and a light show; unless you were really, really unlucky, it couldn’t kill you. With the ferals, the opposite was true, and Kaylin had never been lucky. She waited silently, gathering and stilling all movement until she was barely breathing. Closer, yes. Closer.

  The howl suddenly shifted and changed.

  She didn’t see the ferals first, though. That was the worst of it. She saw Morse. Morse, sweating in the cold, her short brush of hair almost gleaming, her hands gripping knife hilts and pumping air as she tried to lengthen her stride. Morse was heading to this Tower, and the Tower’s fence.

  If Elianne were unlucky, Morse would duck in here, and the ferals would follow. Two against the ferals was better than one—but honestly, in a space like this, not that much. Elianne knew this. Knew it. If you’d asked her, she could have written a test on the smart thing to do when ferals were hunting someone else. And unlike most of Morse’s tests, she’d’ve passed that one, first go.

  But that would have involved thinking, and what she did next involved no thought at all. No memory. Nothing but instinct. She shot out of the grass like a startled animal, and she sprinted to the fallen gate, the slender passage that had led her, twice, to safety. She passed her knife from right to left hand—that much, she had the sense to do instinctively—and then she reached out, with hand and voice.

  “Morse!
”

  Ferals ten yards behind, Morse running full out. But Morse was good at picking up little details, even in an all-out sprint to save her own neck—because some of those details might be relevant to the saving. She saw Elianne, saw the arm she extended, and she zigged toward her, only barely losing speed.

  Elianne caught her wrist—Morse hadn’t dropped either knife, and wouldn’t—and yanked hard, praying that Morse would fit. Morse was larger, wider, more muscular—and being stuck in the fence for even a minute would be a gruesome death. But being heavier gave Morse momentum, and being desperate did the rest; she barreled through the opening and the fence creaked so damn loudly, Elianne thought half of it would fall over.

  “What the hells were you doing out at this time of night?” Elianne shouted. She had to shout, just to be heard. The sound of her voice drove the ferals into a frenzy of teeth and snarling howls. It would have chilled her blood, had any of it still been running.

  “Being a fucking idiot,” Morse shouted back.

  She looked at the fence—at the precariously leaning fence—for a minute, and then sheathed one of her long knives. Bending, she started to root around in the grass. She came up, after a minute punctuated by snapping jaws and howling, with a rock the size of her palm.

  Elianne stared at her.

  Grinning like a madman, Morse headed closer to the fence; the ferals began to try to leap it as she cleared the thickest of the grass. She snarled back at them, and then she threw the rock. It smacked one of the ferals square in the middle of the face, and he howled in rage. Real rage. In the moonlight, his eyes looked red.

  “Morse, what the hell are you doing?” Elianne screamed.

  “Pissing them off. Here, grab a rock!” Morse shouted back, in obvious delight.

  Elianne stared. Morse repeated this, ranging a little farther for heavy enough rocks as she did. On the fifth throw, she paused. “What the hell are you waiting for?” she shouted, grinning.

  Elianne hesitated for another minute, and then she heard Morse laugh. It was an odd, high laugh, unlike any other laugh she’d ever heard from Morse, and she found herself hefting a rock that seemed to have leapt from the ground to her hand as if by magic. She had to get nearer to the fence to throw hers; she didn’t have Morse’s bulk or musculature.

  Over the snapping and snarling and howling of enraged and frustrated ferals, Elianne watched Morse bend, lift a rock and throw it. Morse had to shout to be heard, but after a while, it didn’t sound like shouting; she was giddy but calm, and she was precise.

  Elianne cleared the fence on her fourth attempt. It was hard to tell whether or not the rock did any damage when it hit—but it was also impossible not to hit something; the ferals didn’t seem to care enough to get out of the way of the rocks.

  “What the hell,” Elianne said, grunting as she threw, “were you doing outside at night?”

  “Taking a walk,” Morse answered, notably grunt-free as she also let a heavy stone fly.

  “Taking a walk where?”

  Morse cursed, and turned, pausing as she did. “You didn’t come home, idiot.”

  Elianne closed her eyes. She wanted more, and she knew Morse would never give her more. So she grabbed stray words instead, making a sentence out of them. “I found him,” Elianne said, her voice dropping.

  “Found who? Oh, Sorco?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s dead?”

  Elianne grimaced, and bent and found another rock.

  “So he’s not dead,” Morse said, bending to do the same. The rocks flew over the fence in unison; Morse was definitely the better throw.

  “Barren’s going to be pissed, isn’t he?”

  “Probably.”

  “What’ll he do?”

  For a moment, the gift of glee deserted Morse’s face. Elianne had no words to describe what was left in the gap before her expression closed into the familiar sneer. “Sorco’s not dead. I didn’t kill him. He didn’t say much about ferals. Let’s see if we can kill one.”

  Elianne found her laughter. The fence was going to hold. They were going to make it. In the morning, they’d eat, and they’d plan. She’d find Sorco. She’d worry about his guards later.

  Morse had come out—at night—for her.

  Elianne would have bet against that ever happening. She would have bet that Morse, seeing the last of the sun, would have shrugged and gone to sleep. One less mouth to feed, if Elianne was gone. One less test to worry about passing. But she was here, now, and she was teaching Elianne how to throw rocks the size of her fist.

  Elianne’s arms tired long before Morse’s did. But although it was cold, and the breeze was biting, she felt the echo of familiar warmth at the base of this deserted Tower, the ferals singing their raging, chaotic chorus. She couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want to sleep.

  Here, they played like the children they weren’t.

  In the morning? The ferals retreated, their howls dropping to whining as the sky steadily paled. Only after they’d gone—and Morse was certain they weren’t coming back—did they leave the overgrown grounds that had provided such unexpected safety—and such unexpected joy.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Kaylin?” Severn touched her shoulder and she jumped.

  Sorco’s body—and it was Sorco—lay in front of her. The last time she’d been this close to it, she’d been checking to see if he was still alive.

  You can botch things, you get too nervous. You can think you’re done, when you’re not. You need to think and be aware.

  He’d been alive enough that his eyes, wide with shock, searched for some sign of her face, but not alive enough to understand what they saw when they hit it. He wasn’t alive now. But…he wasn’t dead by much. She’d seen enough corpses over the past several years to know.

  He certainly wasn’t seven years dead.

  “Kaylin?”

  She looked up from her crouch, her hand still against his cold skin. “Sorco,” she said roughly. “He was one of Barren’s collectors.”

  “Seven years ago?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever that means, now.” She glanced up at the Tower, as if to make her point.

  He nodded as she rose, wiping her hands on her thighs. Too much memory, here.

  “How—or why—do you think they’re here?” he asked. Tiamaris and Nightshade had retreated from speech entirely.

  Kaylin snorted. “How else?” was her despondent—and angry—reply. “Magic. As usual.” Her arms ached.

  Sorco was dead. On the surface of things, she was fine with that. She’d been fine with it the minute she was certain it had happened, although the reasons then had been different. He would have killed her—or sold her—just to alleviate boredom. He’d probably killed countless others before she’d been sent to take him out. He wasn’t worth tears or nausea or guilt.

  But then? She’d felt the stillness of that nausea as it grew with the realization that she had done this: she had killed a man. The blood on her hands had been—mostly—his. She had taken him down by surprise, Morse’s advice; he had never really seen her as much of a threat. Scrawny street urchin, too much fief in her.

  She had cut off his ring finger. Because it had a ring on it, and Barren wanted the ring as proof. That was it. The body, she’d dragged all the way to the Ablayne. She’d meant to push it into the water. She hadn’t. She wasn’t sure what the corpse would do there. Bodies in wells made the water undrinkable. Maybe it worked the same way for rivers.

  Maybe it didn’t; maybe it only poisoned them subtly.

  She left the body by the shore. It wouldn’t be the first corpse to turn up there, and even had it been, Barren would only laugh; there, by the one symbol of freedom the fiefs had for anyone whose only experience of power was fear, she’d left proof of his strength. But Morse wasn’t pleased.

  She had the apartment door open before Elianne had even cleared the stairs.

  Morse took one look at her and stepped out of the way. Elianne swallowed, ope
ning her mouth to tell Morse what had gone down—but Morse didn’t ask. Instead, she pointed toward the large room in which they both ate and strategized, and nodded to the table; it was more or less empty. So was the chair.

  Elianne took the chair; Morse remained standing. She didn’t, however, remain still; she picked something up off the table, glanced at Elianne and shrugged. She handed Elianne a glass full of amber liquid.

  “Drink.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just drink it, Eli.”

  Elianne took the small glass in both hands, waiting. Waiting for questions. Waiting to make a report. Waiting for pride or joy or even anger. For something. Morse gave her silence, and this damn glass. At any other time she would have asked Morse where she’d picked it up—it was heavy, clear, entirely unscratched. Worth money.

  Today, money belonged in another life.

  She drank.

  And choked. She managed not to drop the glass, but the same couldn’t be said of the contents, which spilled down the front of her shirt, mingling with dried blood. It had been too cold by the river to try to wash it out.

  Her eyes watered. She was half afraid that she’d just let Morse poison her. But Morse wasn’t smug enough. She wasn’t even amused—and Morse usually found people’s discomfort amusing.

  “Drink.”

  This time, she sipped. Morse nodded. After a few minutes, she left and returned, carrying a tunic. Holding out her hand for the glass, she handed it to Elianne.

  Wordless, Elianne took it and changed, abandoning her chair. Her face felt flushed and warm; her hands were shaking. She untied strings, loosened sleeves, stood for a moment in half-naked silence before she remembered what she’d been doing. Then she pulled the clean clothing over her head and her shoulders, letting it fall. Morse took the old clothing away.