When Shadrak reached the thief’s crumpled form, he glanced up at the wizard eye. It juddered as it swiveled this way and that, relaying all it observed to whoever controlled it. With a curse he lifted his goggles and set them atop his head. It was too late for stealth now. He’d already been seen.
The thief had fallen on his back, but his cowl still covered half his face. A narrow chin tufted with soft stubble had the ring of familiarity to it, and coupled with the gait and the height, Shadrak was only surprised he’d not come up with a name. Maybe the somnificus had rotted his brain, ruined his perfect memory. It wasn’t till he yanked the hood up and over the face that he saw who it was, and kicked himself for not putting it all together earlier.
“Nils scutting Fargin. Son of the lousiest, whiniest dirtbag ever to disgrace the Night Hawks.”
He half drew a dagger to slit the unconscious lad’s throat, hesitated. Nils was barely out of boyhood, a man but not quite, if that made any sense. Shadrak cursed. He was growing as soft as Big Jake’s belly, and not for the first time he wondered if that was due to Kadee’s absence from his life. He used to hear her voice in his head, chastising him, more often than not; but these days, nothing. Maybe she didn’t need to speak any longer. Maybe he carried her with him now, in his desiccated heart.
Bollocks! Who was he kidding? Kadee didn’t speak because she was dead, dissolved into oblivion, gone. You had to face facts, be realistic. The recognition filled his veins with fire, and stinging tears welled at the corners of his eyes.
Nils Fargin had just run out of luck.
A kick to the ribs, and the scut grunted, rolled to his side. One to the arse, and he whined like a petulant four-year-old. But when Shadrak crouched beside his head and poked him in the eye, Nils came to with a yelp.
“Tell me she didn’t take my ring,” Shadrak growled.
Nils didn’t seem to know whether to rub his eye or his throat, where Ilesa had choked him. He coughed and spluttered, tried to sit up, but Shadrak slammed him back down again.
“My ring.”
Tears spilled down Nils’s face from his poked eye. He tried desperately to blink the other into focus, even as he rummaged about in his pockets, voice shrill with panic. “Oh, shog, I’m dead. Shogging dead.”
“Shrewd of you to realize.”
Nils froze, hand still jammed in his pocket. A few more rapid blinks, and he was staring Shadrak in the face, one eye bloodshot and streaming, the other wide with horror.
“You followed me? How’d you—”
Shadrak whipped his dagger fully out, pressed it to Nils’s throat, atop the welt left by Ilesa’s arm.
“For the third and last time, my ring. I can’t count to four.”
Nils licked his lips, removed his hand slowly from his pocket. “Gone.”
Shadrak glanced up at the top of the wall, where he’d seen the bitch fly. “Scutting, shogging bollocks.”
“It weren’t you? Weren’t you that got my back?” Nils said.
“Are you a complete pillock?”
Nils frowned, concentrating, trying to remember. “They was bigger, and there was this smell, kind of musky. I’ve smelled it somewhere before.”
“In your shogging dreams. So, if you were her, where would you take it? Who’s buying crotch-creeping relics from the Desecrated City these days? Some reclusive scut in the Wizards’ Quarter? A noble with perverse tastes? An Academy wizard gone over to the dark side?”
Nils visibly blanched, tried to disguise it by sticking out his bottom lip and giving a shrug.
“Something you want to tell me, Fargin?”
“Me? Nope,” Nils said.
“No point stringing this out, then.”
Shadrak put pressure on the knife at Nils’s throat. The skin popped and blood trickled onto the blade.
“No, wait!” Nils squealed. “You know me, Shadrak. You knew my dad.”
“You really think that’s gonna make a difference?” Shadrak grabbed a fistful of Nils’s hair, then took the knife from his throat, and instead aimed its tip at the eye he’d poked earlier. His blood was on fire for the first time in ages. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed this kind of thing. How much he used to crave it.
“Last I saw of you,” Shadrak said, “you were a scholar, teaching kids at the Academy.”
“I am. I was.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t say no more. I’m dead if I do.”
“You’re dead if you don’t.” Shadrak touched the tip of his knife just beneath the eyeball.
Nils squirmed and whimpered, but Shadrak held him firmly by the hair.
“All right,” Nils said. “I don’t teach no more. I was told not to.”
“You were fired? That why you went back to thieving?”
“I weren’t fired,” Nils said. “Other duties. I was gave other duties.”
“By whom?”
Nils’s chin began to tremble. “I can’t say. I can’t—”
“Stab!” Shadrak yelled.
Nils screamed.
“Skewered eyeball. I know a Stygian in Pellor who’d pay a shogging shitload for a delicacy like that.”
“Arecagen!” Nils blurted out. “Master Arecagen.”
“The Principal?”—The most powerful mage at the Academy.
“He’s gone crazy, I tell you. Obsessed.”
Shadrak released the pressure from the knife. “So, he got a sniff of the ring Jankson Brau unearthed and sent you to steal it?”
“I didn’t know you was after it, honest I didn’t.”
Shadrak waved him quiet. He was trying to think. The Stygian had detected the ring’s discovery, but he’d chosen not to say how. If it had lain hidden all this time, it figured something had to have changed. Maybe Brau had tried using it and given off the scent. Shog knows. Shadrak didn’t know the first thing about magic. If the Stygian had sensed the ring, it stood to reason the head of the Academy could too. But that didn’t explain the third interested party.
“How do you suppose Ilesa Fana knew about the ring?”
“Ilesa?”
“You know her, right?”
That brought the color flooding back to Nils’s cheeks. There was a moment’s pause as he dealt with whatever he was dealing with, then he put it all together.
“After Mal Vatès… when you left my dad in charge of the guilds, there was chaos. They was at war with the Senate, but mostly with each other. Dad… well you know what he was like. He didn’t last long. Big Jake ran things for a while after that, but—”
“He got out as soon as he could. Moved to Brink,” Shadrak said. That much he’d discovered when he fled to the shithole of a town with a posse of Maresmen on his tail, all because of a little husk trafficking incident.
“Guild lords came and went,” Nils continued, “most of them bobbing down the sewers before they could get anything done. No one had your gift for unifying the guilds, Shadrak, not until—”
“Ilesa? She’s running my Night Hawks?”
“What’s left of them. She took them out in a single night, they say. Claimed she was with the Dybbuks, even though they was supposed to have been wiped out. And that’s how it’s been since: the Dybbuks controlling everything, bringing the other guilds onside one by one, same as you did, only…”
“Only what?”
“Only, she’s better at it.”
Shadrak slammed the knife back in his baldric before he slammed it into Nils’s face. He could almost feel Kadee’s approval. Her voice in his head had been bad enough, but this was worse. She was yeast, permeating every aspect of his character and making it her own. But that was all right by him; he’d do anything for Kadee, even if it meant growing soft in her memory. Even if it got him killed.
“What I mean,” Nils swiftly said, “is no one’s got a clue where the Dybbuks have their headquarters, and she’s got eyes and ears everywhere.”
Shadrak threw a look up above the curtain walls. “In the sky?”
Nils frowned. Clearly he couldn’t see the wizard eye. “Everywhere, I says. Even at the Academy. She approached me once, about getting some dirt on Master Arecagen. She was angry as the Abyss when I turned her down.”
“Turned her down, why? You were scared?”
“Shogging right I was. Arecagen keeps threatening to turn me into all manner of things. I ain’t risking what he’d do if I betrayed him.”
“Like now.”
“Eh?” Then Nils’s expression grew alarmed. He’d cottoned on to the fact he was divulging his master’s secrets at this very moment, albeit under duress.
“How’s he gonna take to you returning without the ring?”
Nils dropped his chin to his chest. “I’m shogged.”
“I’d say,” Shadrak said. “But you help me find the shapeshifting slapper, and maybe I’ll take care of your little problem.”
“It ain’t little. Arecagen’s the greatest wizard in the city.”
“Good for him. How’s that gonna help when I blow his brains out?”
Nils looked up, a glimmer of hope in his good eye, the other too red to tell. “So, I help you, you’ll fix things with Arecagen? We have a deal?”
Shadrak offered his hand, and Nils took it. Not that such gestures meant anything among assassins and thieves, but it was the expected thing to do.
“Ho below!” came a holler from atop the barbican. “Prepare for inspection. Follow instructions at all times. The gates are about to open.”
Shadrak cursed. “They still have the street markets in the shade of the walls?”
Nils nodded.
“Meet me there. I’m shogging starving.” All he’d had to eat was the squirrel he’d shot on the trail. “I need to grab a turkey leg or something.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
Shadrak glanced up. “Over the top. I ain’t going through their checkpoints and bullshit ever again.”
“Over the walls?” Nils said, as the barbican gates began to grind open. “You can fly?”
“Climb,” Shadrak said.
“Yeah, right. That’s impossible.” Nils puffed out his pigeon chest. “Even I couldn’t do that, and I’m the best there is.”
Shadrak had heard the same thing a thousand times, how the Cyclopean Walls were unscalable, but he no longer believed that. He’d once climbed down the walls of the dwarven city of Arnoch, which made New Londdyr’s seem like a rugged rock face in comparison.
He set off at a jog around the side of the barbican and made for the buttress at the base of the curtain walls, angling a call back at Nils.
“Last one to the grub stall is a scut-sucking shogwit.”