Page 55

Dom grumbled in annoyance. “Less conspicuous?”

The Amhara did not answer, eyes on the dock. Her thoughts were elsewhere—in a tavern, a gambling hall, a brothel, with friends in Ascal. Though Corayne doubted Sorasa Sarn tolerated friendship.Or she’s looking forward to getting rid of us. Her job is nearly done. We need only set foot on the dock and she’ll be gone. She didn’t agree to anything else.

With a sigh, Corayne nudged Dom in the side. It was like being a ship’s agent again, haggling a price between two opposing sides.If both sides despised each other, and one didn’t quite grasp the concept of currency to begin with.An exhausting proposition.

“You’re going to have to give her more money,” Corayne explained, “if you want her to get us into the Queen’s palace.”

“I’ve paid quite enough,” the Elder snapped. Corayne elbowed him again, shoving against the granite wall of his abdomen. He didn’t seem to notice. “We’ll find our own way.”

“Fine,” Corayne huffed. Then she put her hand to the Amhara, palm out in a gesture of goodwill. “I suppose this is goodbye, Sorasa Sarn.”

Sorasa eyed her fingers with distaste.

Just as Corayne suspected. She pulled her hand back, her voice sharpening, meant to sting. “Enjoy watching us blunder our way toward what could be the end of Allward, for the sake of your pride and few more coins to rub together while the realm crumbles.”

A hiss rattled past Sorasa’s bared teeth, her eyes dancing in the torchlight. The ship bumped into its berth with the groan of wood and snap of rope. The Amhara swayed gracefully as the deck bobbed beneath them. Again her mask slipped. Corayne saw anger. The useful kind.

“Well, when you put it that way,” she finally snarled, shoving off the rail.

Corayne grabbed Dom’s arm and pulled him along by his cloak, like a dog on a leash. They shouldered through the crowd together, nearly losing Sorasa in the scrum. Her face flashed ahead of them, rigid with frustration. She slowed, letting the other travelers break around her.

“Keep up,” she snapped, before muttering more Ibalet under her breath.

Corayne smirked. She’d grown up with sailors. She was no stranger to foul language.

“I am not a meddling monkey,” Corayne answered.

Sorasa startled. Even she could not hide her flush. “You speak Ibalet?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Dom what you called him.”

Behind them, Dom huffed along, his boots calamitous on the docks. “I do not care for a murderer’s opinion,” he said, a clear lie.

Corayne suspected he would care very much. After all, Sorasa had called him a stupid, stubborn ass.Although,she thought,my translation might not be accurate.

The Ibalet words forstupidandhandsomeare quite similar.

11

THE ASSASSIN’S BURDEN

Sorasa

She did not think herself a woman of conscience. Whatever morals she’d been born with had not come with her past the gates of the citadel. No Amhara could be made with such weights. And yet she felt the pull of something unfamiliar and sharp, tugging her off her path, like a hook in the gills of a fish. Sorasa wanted to rip it out, flesh and blood be damned. Be off with the current, to wherever opportunity might lead. Instead she found herself grinding her teeth in Wayfarer’s Port, assaulted on all sides by stink and noise, with two very persistent hooks buried deep. She dragged them along the streets against her better instincts.Certainly the Cor girl and the Elder can find their way to the New Palace without dying. Or, if they die, so be it.

But Corayne’s words gnawed at her.The end of Allward.

Those specters of another realm had certainly felt like it, fleeting as they’d been. Sorasa had seen men gutted, burned, crushed, poisoned, and devoured, in all states of death and decay. Killed for contract, practice, sport, or Mercury’s favor. Assassinations disguised as cult rituals or gruesome accidents. Corpses dismembered, scattered, or dissolved in lye. Bodies wrung out by torture or deprivation. She’d witnessed all and done most. But there was nothing, not from the snows of the Jyd to the jungles of Rhashir, that rattled her so much. This memory refused to be forgotten, the taste and smell of it sharp in her mind. Blood, rot, iron. Andheatlike she could not understand. For a woman born in the sands, that was the most unsettling piece of all.

She swallowed hard.There will be no Amhara Guild left if the realm shatters. This is just good logic. Simple business. A means to an end.

There were other routes onto the island that was the New Palace, walls and gates and bridges be damned. If the Elder did not want to be seen, despite all his preening, then Sorasa would make it so. She adjusted her cloak into something shapeless, a bland form of nameless color, smudged between sand and gray smoke in the torchlight. As a woman with a good face and a body carved by years of training, she was more likely to be noted on city streets. Sorasa had no intention of being noticed, let alone remembered by any guard in the street.

If we can even make it out of the port,she thought bitterly.Between the gawking girl and the sentient tombstone, it will be a wonder if we get there by midnight.

And Corayne did gawk, her mouth slack as she drank the city in. If not for Dom, she would have been a fine target for pickpockets and beggars. The Elder, hooded behind her, was a sentinel none would trifle with. Except, of course, the drunks, the brawlers, and the drunken brawlers. They clustered outside the dock taverns and free houses, half in shadow, waving flagons and shouting at the Elder in a spray of languages.

Dom faltered, his lips pursed beneath his hood. “I believe those men are asking to fight me,” he said, confused.