Sworn in Steel

Chapter Thirty

We both leapt to our feet and spun around in one motion. A darker patch of midnight was just visible among the trees.

“Grandfather!” began Aribah. “I didn’t mean-”

“Enough,” snapped the shadow. “No excuses. I heard what you said. I know what you meant.”

I took a step off to the side. My wrist knife was already in my left hand. My right was hovering out at my side, ready to reach for either my rapier or my dagger, depending on what he did.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

“He followed you,” said Aribah, answering before her grandfather could. “Followed us. He didn’t trust me to keep you safe, and didn’t trust you not to leave.”

“Leave?” I said.

“El-Qaddice,” said the elder assassin. “Although I didn’t expect you to try to take Aribah with you.” I heard him hawk, saw the flicker of his spit in my night vision. “Didn’t expect her to be so quick to turn away from her family, either, for that matter.”

Aribah snapped up straight. “No one’s trying to take anyone anywhe-”

“Silence, girl. You’ve already done enough damage to your mother’s memory for one night, let alone my honor. Don’t drive the blade in any further.”

Aribah seemed to shrink at that-to retreat into herself, the fire I’d seen moments ago dimming in the process. She shuffled back half a pace.

I turned my eyes back to the dark smudge before us. You old bastard.

“This isn’t about her,” I said, stepping to my left, trying to put the silhouette of one of the trees behind me. “It’s about you and your legacy.” Another step. Hand on my sword handle. “About using her, and my night vision, as a way to let your name live on after you die.”

He let out a soft chuckle. “Is that what you think, Imperial? That I’m so vain I can’t stand the thought of being forgotten? That I’d risk her life by having her watch over you, just so I could craft a legacy for myself?” His head shifted, turning, I assumed, to Aribah. “And you? Is this what you think, also?”

“I don’t know what to think right now,” she whispered.

“Then you’re a fool.” He shifted, facing me fully. Ignoring her. “I’m a Black Cord, Imperial-what use do I have for fame? Fame brings attention and death. My only wish is to preserve my family and revive my clan. To restore the status of my school and the neyajin. To make sure they’re strong.”

“Sounds very noble,” I said, drawing my rapier from its scabbard. The scrape of steel against leather and brass sounded loud in the night. “But you have to admit, being known as the one assassin who discovered the secret of dark sight after all these years? To be the Black Cord who single-handedly turns the fortunes of your school and tribe around?” I shook my head. “Heady stuff.”

“I won’t deny it has its appeal, but it’s not my primary motive.”

“If you say so.”

He moved now, and I caught the amber-touched glint of steel in one hand. Small sword, if I had to guess. There was something in the other, but I couldn’t make it out. Fine. I dropped my wrist blade and pulled my dagger, the better to parry and slash with.

“It won’t work, you know,” I said. “I already told you: I don’t know how to pass it on. Kill me, and the secret goes away; capture me, and all you get is someone who can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“So I thought, too,” he said, “but then I remembered: This is el-Qaddice, seat of prophets and scholars. . and magi-not all of whom are afraid to step into the shadows now and then. Especially if the incentive is right. And as a Black Cord, I have both the pockets and the presence to command their attention.” He took his own step back, slipping into the dappled, moonlit shadow of a tree. “There are learned men in this city, Imperial-men who know not only how to consult tomes and histories, but also creatures far wiser in the ways of magic than ourselves. Creatures who have long memories and carry great grudges.”

“Grandfather, no!” Aribah’s rune-dyed hands came up to her mouth, making the flesh of her jaw look mottled in my eyes. “Not the djinn. Don’t tell me you consulted with them.”

“If we want the secrets this one possesses, we need to walk the paths that were closed to us before now. We needed to make a choice,”

Her voice was tiny by now-the voice of a child in the night. “What have you done?”

“What I must.”

It wasn’t until after he’d spoken that I realized his voice had moved-was moving. That he was nowhere near where he’d been a moment ago.

Crap.

I crouched down out of habit, sword high, dagger low. An instant later, I heard a soft hiss, followed by the tck of something small sticking into the tree behind and above me. Dart? Knife? Throwing crescent?

Did it really matter?

I tucked my shoulder and rolled, knowing that even as I did so I was telling the old assassin what I was doing, where I was going. But there was no way I could stay put: not with his knives flying and him creeping closer. I had to move.

I came to my feet and kept going, ducking behind trees, staying close to their trunks in the hopes that an exposed root might serve to slow the neyajin down.

Another hiss, another tck, this time just in front of me. I jerked back and changed course.

This was not how I was used to fighting in the dark.

I ducked around another tree, putting it between me and where I’d thought the last attack had come from. I tried to slow my breathing, tried to will my heart to stop pounding in my ears, but to no avail.

If I waited until I could hear him coming, I’d end up trussed and gagged before I knew what was happening. No, I needed to get close-to put myself in a position where I at least had a chance of seeing the attacks coming. And that meant rushing a man who could track me by the sound of my approach.

Great.

“Aribah?” I called.

No answer.

“Aribah!”

“Don’t answer him,” called out her grandfather. “He’s just trying to use your voice to distract me.”

“I know what he’s doing!” she said.

“Then be silent.”

He sounded closer-off to the right. I peered into the darkness, my night vision turning the shadows of the trees blood red against the amber of the grass.

“Not for this,” said Aribah. “Not like this.”

“Dammit, child-”

“We’re neyajin,” she said. Nearly cried. “You taught me what that means. Taught Mother. Told us that to be feared, to be effective, we have to stand apart. That we can’t let ourselves be known to those we would hunt. ‘By being the darkness, we become the fear that haunts the darkness.’ ”

“And we will be,” he said. He was on the move again, still on my right. “Once we have the dark vision, the neyajin will again be synonymous with justice and death.”

I strained my eyes until they burned. There. Had that been the back of an arm? Maybe his whole back?

“Magi and djinn will cower at the mention of our name, and we will once more sit in the shadows on the right hand of the despot.”

As he spoke, I slipped out from behind my cover, moving low and fast. The leaves murmured in the breeze, shifting the moonlight and shadows around on the ground. Ahead, I could make out slippery, amber-etched movement, just in the lee of a trunk. I squeezed the grip of my rapier, then let my fingers relax once more. A double handful of strides, Drothe. Don’t tense up.

“You said something about a choice,” she said. I glanced over, saw the flash of her exposed jaw and mouth as she moved among the trees now, too. “What was it?”

I wanted to tell her to stop moving, to keep talking, to get the hell back, but did none of them. It was too late for that. The slick amber of warded cloth was before me now, her grandfather lurking in the shadows of a pistachio tree. Six paces away. Five.

I raised my rapier, extended my arm slightly.

Keep moving, Aribah. Let him hear you instead of me.

Four. I shifted my weight, bringing it forward.

“What did you agree to?” she called.

Three.

Enough.

I lunged, my arm leading the way, my sword pulling the rest of me forward as its tip sought out the shadow before me. I let my left foot pass forward as my right landed, driving me forward, pushing my sword into the cloth-draped shadow and through it, dagger following after, in and out and in and out, working hard at turning a man into a corpse.

Only no blood spilled and no corpse fell. Instead, I found myself gutting a neyajin-tinted coat and a column of smoke that rose away, giggling, on the wind.

“I agreed to sell something,” said Aribah’s grandfather from behind me. “For a bit of help.”

I was still spinning, still lashing out with my dagger, when the fire wrapped itself around me. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like. All I knew is that my weapons dropped from my hands, my feet left the ground, and I tilted my head back and screamed. Or tried to.

“Ah, ah, little thief,” said a voice that seemed to burn itself across my mind. “No need for that. We don’t want to be summoning any of my chained kindred, now, do we?”

My scream died in my throat, coming out as nothing more than a strained gasp. Still, I huffed and choked on the agony, until finally the pain eased back a tiny fraction and I was able to draw a shaky breath. It felt like bliss.

“Th-thief?” I gasped, my head still back, my eyes tight shut. I could feel the heat enveloping me, could sense the tickle of flames held just at bay against my body. No way I was getting an eye full of fire. “I. . haven’t stolen. . from. . you.” I think I would have remembered lightening someone who could do something like this.

“No?” burned the voice. “Then how do you explain this?”

Suddenly my eyes were open and I was looking down into the grove from twice my normal height. Everything glowed with a brilliant amber-gold light, brighter and sharper than any version of night vision I’d ever experienced before. Not only every leaf, but every vein of every leaf, every fold of bark and blade of grass, shone under my gaze, cut with details so sharp I feared they might slice my eyes.

Below me stood Aribah’s grandfather, the sharpness of his smile cutting through his veil like a razor. I got the feeling it would have been hard for me to make him out in his robes even now, save for the fact that he had a rope of fire rising from his hand. The fire came from a small vial he held in his palm and snaked up and around me, wrapping me from toes to throat in bands of pain. As I watched, smoke rose off the burning rope and coalesced in the air to form a thin, vaguely man-shaped cloud. It would have been tempting to write that last bit off as a coincidence, save for the burning eyes in its head. Eyes that made a point of staring at me.

“You see with the eyes of the djinn,” said the cloud, its words scribing themselves in fire between me and the assassin. Like the rope, they didn’t seem to bother my night vision. “Eyes stolen from one of my kind.”

“Wha. . what?” I said through the pain. Eyes stolen from a djinni? Just what the hell had you done, Sebastian? “I don’t-”

“Your dark sight,” said Aribah’s grandfather, reading the fading flames. “It didn’t sound right, your gift never going away. Even the Lions lose their sight after a day and a night. So I began to ask around, to seek out the old sufis and the mystics who claimed to be able to speak with the darker spirits.” He lifted the vial, causing the rope to sway, me to drift, the djinni to waver. “Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only were there tales about a lord of the djinn being tricked out of his sight, but of that spirit still thirsting for revenge.”

“But I didn’t steal its sight,” I gasped.

“Maybe not,” said the elder assassin, “but from what I can tell, djinn have a different way of looking at these things.” We will dine on your soul. “They don’t so much care that you took it as that you have it now.”

“And your price?” I asked, already guessing the answer.

The old assassin smiled. “They teach us the secret of the dark sight, of course.”

“No!” The word exploded from Aribah’s throat as she stepped into the glow of the djinni’s rope. No, not stepped-stalked-her mother’s dagger in her hand and a hard set to her jaw. Streaks of skin were just visible beneath her eyes, the dye washed thin by the tears rolling down her cheeks.

I’d never been so happy to see an assassin in my life.

“No,” she repeated. “We are neyajin. We don’t make deals with the things we hunt. We don’t bargain with the things we kill. We don’t accept rewards from. .” She gestured at the cloud. “Them. We are neyajin.”

“We are shadows,” snapped the old man. “Shadows of what we used to be, and pale reflections of what we might become. Think, Aribah. Think what this will mean for our clan, for our school. For us. One small bargain, on small infraction, and we begin our climb back into the light.”

“But you yourself said we belong to the shadows, not the light.”

He made an impatient gesture. “You know what I mean, girl.”

Aribah looked at her grandfather, looked at the rope, looked at the cloud with its burning, merry eyes. The only one she didn’t look at was me, but I wasn’t part of the equation at this point anyhow-not really. She bit her lip.

“It’s not neyajin,” she said at last.

“Enough! You forget your place. I determine what is and is not neyajin, what serves the school and the clan, not you. After we have the dark sight, after we are respected and feared as in the days of old, you have my permission to come to me and argue about what is or is not neyajin, but until then, your place is to obey. And you will obey.”

Aribah’s head snapped back as if she’d been struck. She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward.

Fiery laughter sounded in my head.

“That’s not my truth,” she said.

“What?” Her grandfather peered at her in the night. “‘Your truth’? What does that mean? What do you know about truth?”

“I know that it doesn’t involve working with djinn. Or. .” She rubbed her thumb over her mother’s ring. “Or obeying you. Not when it comes to this. Not anymore.”

His eyebrows crawled so far up his head, I expected them to come squirming out the back of his kaffiyeh. “You disobey me? Again?”

“I. . disagree with you.”

I more than half-expected him to hit her right then. Instead, he made a fist with his free hand and turned away.

“Go,” he said. “Leave me. I disown you and all you do. You are neyajin no more.”

Aribah’s eyes went wide. She raised a hand and took a step toward him, then stopped. “Grandfather,” she said. “Listen to me. Please. These things you bargain with, that you accept payment from-they’re the same spirits we’ve been fighting for generations. The leopard doesn’t allow the fox to buy its freedom, and we don’t spare the djinn. Do you think the creature that killed your daughter offered her the chance to buy her life? That it asked my mother if she would like to make a bargain? No. It killed her and stuck her-”

The old man spun around. “You think I don’t know that?” he cried. “That I didn’t consider it? That I didn’t sit up nights, wondering and weighing?” He reached up and wiped at his face with the back of his sword hand. “The djinn took her, yes. But we need what this one has to offer, to make the neyajin strong again. To be proud again.”

“But at what cost? The cost of her memory? Of her honor?”

“She would have understood!”

Aribah’s head came up, the rest of her straightening with it, until she was staring her grandfather in the eye. “No,” she said. “No, she wouldn’t. She would have told you you were wrong.”

The elder neyajin considered her for a long, cold moment. When he spoke, his words were ice in the middle of the desert. “Leave her ring and her dagger, leave your robes and your name. You don’t deserve to carry any trace of what you once were.” He showed her his back again. Then, almost under his breath, he added, “And you don’t deserve to have been born her daughter.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

When she struck, it wasn’t with a yell of rage or a scream of defiance: It was with cold and silent efficiency. One step, two, and then she was in the air, her dagger raised, its edge trailing smoke or shadows or whatever the hell they were behind her.

Still, her grandfather hadn’t earned his Black Cord for nothing. He was already dodging, already spinning and raising his sword to counterthrust when she landed where he’d been standing.

Only, that wasn’t where Aribah had been aiming. Instead, she landed a good three feet away, gathered herself on the turf, and sprang into the air again, her dagger overhead.

When she slashed through the burning rope, three things happened at once. First, the djinni screamed. Second, her grandfather cursed. And third, I started to cheer, but was interrupted by my falling out of the air.

By the time I recovered from my awkward landing and had rolled onto my back, the flames were gone and the cloud that had been the djinni was already dissipating. I thought I caught the final hints of some smoky mutterings on the wind, but couldn’t be sure because of the sounds of combat that were now filling the grove. I scrambled to my knees and then into a crouch, only remembering at the last moment that my sword and dagger were lying somewhere on the ground.

I scanned the darkness, thanking the Angels that my night vision seemed to be back to normal again. No more polished gold and brilliant rubies glinting in the night for me-now it was all blacks and blood and dirty brass. Which was just fine.

The only problem was, I was looking for two people who were all but invisible to me. The sound told me roughly where they were, but-ah, there: a flash of uncovered chin, a hint of oily red cloak, a dulled gold glimmer of steel. Not a clear picture of the fight, let alone the combatants by any means, but I at least had a better fix on them.

Now, what the hell was I going to do about it?

I reached down into my boot and drew the long knife I kept there. Then I moved forward, listening as much as looking for my prey.

Grunting and grasping. The dull thump of feet on grass, of flesh on flesh. They’d moved past blade work, into the realm of punches and holds and trips. Not surprising, really: There was so much anger there, so much fury, that I don’t think mere steel could have sufficed. It was down to raw things now: blood and bone, teeth and sweat.

Love had fallen off the knife’s edge, leaving hate’s well-honed blade unimpeded.

Then I saw them a dozen steps away. A mass of half-seen shadows, shifting and straining, both against each other and in and out of my vision. Someone had someone else down, holding fast while the other bucked against them.

I rushed forward. Either the old man was on top, which gave me his back, or he was on the ground, which meant I had time to angle for the kill. I just hoped I’d have time to tell who was who before the question became moot.

I was maybe five feet away when the figure on top jerked up, rammed what I guessed to be a hand down onto the other assassin’s exposed, stain-free and visible throat, and then tumbled away and into the darkness. That gave me a good idea of who had been who. It was confirmed when I found Aribah lying on the ground, half-conscious and gagging for breath.

“Easy,” I whispered, crouching down beside her. “I think-urk!”

The old man had moved fast. Where I thought he might have moved off to regroup, or was just putting some distance between himself and two opponents, he’d circled around and come up behind me-all in the space of a handful of breaths. Now he drew the garrote tighter about my neck.

I gagged. My boot knife fell away in the surprise of his attack. Instead, I clawed with my fingers at the cord, at his arms, at the ground, trying to establish some sort of hold, some sort of grip on the world around me. All I succeeded in doing was getting dirt under my nails.

He jerked back on the garrote, pulling me away from Aribah. I staggered a pace or two, then fell to one knee. He stayed with me the entire time.

“Not to worry,” he hissed in my ear. “I still need you alive, Imperial. You’re just going to sleep for a bit, is all.” Another tug on the line. “Can’t be having you interfering in family business.”

I would have said it was like having a line of fire across my throat, but I knew from firsthand experience what that felt like now. This wasn’t that. This was sheer pain and panic-a sensation that there was something wedged in my throat, and if only I could get it out, I could breathe again. A desperate need, not to end the pain, but to simply pull air into my lungs.

The garrote was too tight to get a finger under, let alone a hand. I reached back and over, feeling his cloth and skin and stubble behind me. I raked and pulled with my nails, came away with his kaffiyeh, threw it aside, tried again. He drew his head back, held me at arm’s length, and leaned a knee into my back.

I looked frantically at Aribah. The moonlight was shining down through the leaves, painting her in the amber of my sight, shimmering on her face even as it cast a bloodred shadow beneath her. She was on her side now, hands at her throat, drawing a ragged, desperate breath.

Her eyes met mine, and we both knew: She wouldn’t recover in time. Not even close. Her grandfather would strangle me into unconsciouness, possibly kill her, and then cart me off to whatever cellar best suited him to renegotiate his deal with the djinni.

And yet Aribah shifted. She moved on the ground, reaching out, clawing at the dirt-no, clawing in the dirt, for something. For, I saw as she lifted it and tossed it my way, a shadow-edged blade.

I didn’t catch it, didn’t even come close, but I did manage to jerk my body enough that I was able to fall over, the nearly deadweight that was me pulling the old assassin after. I flung my arm out, feeling for what I couldn’t see.

A ring of black had formed at the edge of my vision and was working its way in. All I could make out was the grass before me, the tops of tree roots just cresting the surface of the ground. I blinked, but the circle only got bigger. Sparks fired in my vision. My head felt ready to fall off. My lungs were filled with the fire of need.

I don’t remember finding the blade so much as feeling it in my hand-one moment, nothing, the next, a hard, smooth thing in my quickly weakening grasp. I gripped it tight, hefted it. It was heavy, so much so that I was amazed I could get it off the ground.

I didn’t swing for him. Even then, I knew better than to try; knew that the angle was wrong, that I wouldn’t be able to generate enough power to do anything meaningful. No, instead I swung at the ground-at the blotch of bloody blackness that was our combined moon-cast shadow, praying that what had happened in the cellar, what I had seen Aribah do to the magi’s shadow with her mother’s blade, would work on her grandfather now. That the Angels or the Family or whoever was watching would let me cleave into his shadow. That I would kill either him or me, or both of us. Because I’d be damned if I’d die the way he wanted.

The blade bit. The assassin screamed. So, for that matter, did I.

“Get up!”

“Wh. . ” I paused to cough, rubbed at my neck. “What?”

Aribah tugged hard on my arm, pulling me to a sitting position. “You have to go,” she said. “We have to go. We made too much noise. Someone will be coming.”

Her voice was throaty and rough, and I noticed that she was pausing to swallow between each sentence. Blood trailed down her jaw from the vicinity of her ear, and the left side of her mouth was already starting to swell. Her turban was gone, revealing a tightly braided nest of raven-black hair set with brass pins. I wondered if the pins had steel tips to them, then decided it didn’t much matter at this point.

She looked about as shaky as I felt. But her eyes were hard and her grip was solid, so I didn’t argue. I knew all about the value of staying quiet, let alone of becoming a memory when that failed to work out.

I moved to put my legs under me, felt resistance. I looked down and found her grandfather lying across my right foot. He didn’t have to worry about being quiet anymore.

“Yes,” she hissed. “He’s dead. Now come on. It does me no good if I get him out of here and leave you lying about for the guards to find. Get up!”

I did as she said, wincing at a sharp pain along my right biceps. I looked down to see a clean slice in both the fabric and the skin below.

I grimaced. Only I could manage to cut myself with a knife on the same arm that was wielding it. Fucking shadows.

Then I stood fully and nearly fell over again. I gasped at the roaring pain in my head.

“Here.” Aribah stuck a small bottle in my hand, then stepped into the darkness. “Drink it.”

I did as ordered, nearly choking from the bitterness as it seeped over my tongue and forced its way past what felt like a permanent dent in my throat.

“Angels, what is that?” I gasped as she came back. She had my rapier and dagger and boot knife in her hands.

“Herbs, brewed ahrami, spices, a bit of kaffa-we use it to keep alert and dull pain.”

I traded the empty bottle for my weapons, spitting all the while. The flavor stayed with you. Still, I could already feel the storm in my head beginning to ease.

Aribah took my face between her hands and studied me in the moonlight, turning my head this way and that. She slapped me once, twice, then tilted my head back. “How many moons do you see?”

“Two?” I said. “One and a half?”

“Good enough.” She let go and bent down. When she straightened, she had her grandfather’s kaffiyeh in her hand, her mother’s knife at her belt. “Do you think you can make it to where you were headed?” she said as she draped and then tied the cloth around her head.

I took a step aside and looked out over the expanse of ground between us and the next hill. It looked farther away than before, but was still empty. For the moment.

“If there are no surprises, yeah.” I turned back to find her no more than a whisper in my vision.

“Good. Then do so.” I blinked, realizing that the shadow before me had been just that. Aribah was already kneeling beside her grandfather, adjusting his clothes and using her own turban to bind and cover him in darkness. “I can get Grandfather and me past the guards if I hurry.”

I considered her, considered the body. “Are you sure?”

“I must be.”

“I could-”

“No,” she said, her voice both brittle and sharp at once. “You can’t. Not with this. He’s mine to bear. Alone.”

There was no room left for argument in her voice, and I didn’t try to make any. Instead, I stalked over to where we’d been first talking and looked through the shadows until I found my wrist knife. When I turned back, she had pulled the body into a sitting position and was arranging him across her shoulders. She stood with a grunt, staggered a bit, then found her footing. I was just able to make out her eyes in the darkness.

“I. . I’m sorry,” I said, not finding any other words just then.

“No more than I.” I watched her eyes blink wetly once, twice. Then, “Good luck finding your truth, Imperial.” And she turned away. I watched, but after a moment, she was little more than a blur. Two steps farther on, and she was gone.

I stood there for a moment, watching the darkness. Thinking.

The eyes of a djinni?

Damn you. Damn you twice over for being dead, Sebastian.

I turned and headed off down the slope. Like it or not, there was still more to do.