13
SILVER CITY
KINGFISHER
I WAS READY for the bloodshed.
Carrion Swift was not.
Scores of iron-tipped arrows tinged off the heavy shield I held in front of us as we emerged from the quicksilver. The sliver of metal that still clung to the rim of my iris cackled with delight as Swift let out a panicked yelp and grabbed hold of my leather backplate, almost unbalancing both of us and sending us back into the pool.
The Smart Mouth is not so smart now, it purred. The Smart Mouth sounds stupid.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit! We are definitely going to die.”
“You’re choking me, Carrion. Let go so I can move!”
The smuggler relinquished his hold on my armor. He staggered to the left, taking up position where I’d told him I would need him to stand earlier. We hadn’t had much time to make plans, so I’d made it very simple: “Stand right there, behind me, on my left. Follow me no matter what.”
This had been much, much easier the last time. Madra’s guardians hadn’t expected anyone to come bursting out of the quicksilver then. There had been only eight or so archers, and while that had been annoying, I’d overcome them quickly. Now, there was a whole unit of archers firing on us. And just to round things out so very nicely, I was also babysitting a jackass who was struggling not
to trip over his own fucking feet.
The heat in the air hit me like a physical blow.
I ground my teeth together, throwing my shoulder into the shield, and I pushed forward. The second we’d made it out of the pool and the soles of my boots had hit the sandstone floor, I threw the world into darkness.
“My eyes!”
“I can’t see!”
“Where are they? Keep firing!”
Cries went up throughout the Hall of Mirrors. My shadows filled the huge hall from floor to ceiling; the air hummed with my magic, blotting out the light, and suddenly, it didn’t matter that Madra had assigned an entire unit to guard the quicksilver pool. Her men were human, and humans couldn’t see in the dark. One of their many flaws.
In fairness, the Fae couldn’t see when my shadows flooded their vision, either. I’d warned Carrion of this before we’d entered the pool and had told him what to expect.
There would be shouting. There would be large-scale panic. There would be a lot of scrambling . . . and then the dying would start.
To my eyes, the room was in monochrome, the chaos unfolding before me in different tones of gray. Guardians fumbled around in their cumbersome armor, crashing into one another. Those who fell to the ground were taken out by their inability to find their own feet again. Archers shot at each other in the dark. Arrows cut through the air, aimed high, aimed at pillars, aimed at anywhere but us. I made sure of that.
It didn’t take much. A gentle nudge here. A little tap there. Bowstrings snapped. Guardians went down screaming, shot by their own friends. I led the way through the melee, deflecting any stray arrows that chanced to sail in our direction, and all the while, Carrion yammered away in my ear.
“What’s happening? What can you see?”
“Be quiet.”
“What’s that smell?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Ow! Oh, oh shit, I’m standing on something soft.”
“Pick up your fucking feet!”
“Fisher? Fisher. Are we nearly at the door? Ow, what the hell was that?
Something hit my arm really hard.”
“It was my fist. Now shut. The fuck. Up.”
We reached the door in one piece, which I was less than thrilled about. If Carrion had taken an iron-tipped arrow to the ass cheek, that would have definitely shut him up. Trouble was, it would have shut him up for good, and Saeris would not have been happy about that.
For whatever reason, my mate didn’t seem to want the smuggler dead, and I had no choice but to let him live as a result. Worse, I had to protect him now, and holy gods, wasn’t that just a kicker? I shoved him ahead of me as soon as we were through the door that led out of the Hall of Mirrors and into Madra’s palace. We didn’t need those gold-clad idiots busting down the door as soon as they realized we weren’t inside the hall with them anymore, so I urged a wisp of shadows into the lock and ordered them to stay. The keyhole would no longer accept its key. For a time, at least. The door itself was already triple reinforced, from what I remembered of it from my first visit, and there was no way they’d be able to kick it down. Not until we were long gone.
It was the middle of the night, but the long hallway ahead was washed in brilliant sunlight. Sunslight, I thought, correcting myself. I would never get over
the fact that Zilvaren had two su— What in all the gods’ names . . .
The smuggler was standing frozen in the middle of the hall with his hands outstretched, knees bent, ass sticking out like he’d shit himself.
“Why the fuck are your eyes closed?” I demanded.
Carrion cracked one eye open, looking up at me. As soon as he realized we were on the other side of the door, he exhaled, standing up straight, brushing himself off. “I don’t know! It was weird, not being able to see anything. Closing
them helped.”
He was the strangest male. “Okay. Sure. That makes perfect sense,” I said.
“All right. No need for that tone. I’d probably have felt a little braver if I’d had Simon with me.”
Lorreth had called his god sword Avisiéth. A fine, strong name for a sword.
Carrion had called his Simon. Maybe that name meant something impressive in Zilvaren, but as far as I had been able to glean thus far, it did not. “For the last time, we could not bring two fucking god swords back into this realm. If Madra got a hold of one of them—”
“I know, I know.” He waved me off, pulling a face. “She could have used one of them to still the quicksilver again.”
“I don’t like being here without my sword any more than you do. Trust me.
But I am not getting trapped in this hellhole. Now come on. We need to move.”
I didn’t give him the opportunity to say anything else. I set off running down the hall, and to his credit, the smuggler kept up.
We passed door after door. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades as I
pumped my arms, pushing harder.
Ten.
Nine.
“Wait,” Carrion panted.
Eight.
“The plan. Why didn’t you tell me what came after the hall?”
Seven.
“Because I knew . . . you wouldn’t like it,” I grunted.
Six.
Five.
“Fisher?”
Four.
“Fisher, why are we sprinting straight for that window?”
Three.
He started to slow, but I grabbed him by the back of the armor Renfis had
lent him, and I held on tight.
Two.
“Pick up your fucking feet, Your Highness,” I snarled.
One.
I threw him out of the window.
Howling, dry wind ripped at my clothes as I launched out of the damned thing after him.
“Fuck you, Fisher!” Even hurtling toward the ground at a rate of knots, the smuggler still didn’t shut up.
I reached for Carrion and a rope made of smoke and flashing black sand erupted from my hand, zipping through the air and lashing around the male’s ankles.
Below, the tops of faded red tents rushed up to greet us. Grains of sand stung my eyes, but I kept them open so I could judge when to act.
The fall was easy.
Quick.
Sixty feet from the ground, I reached for my secondary magic and prayed that it answered. It was fickle and often off wandering when I called. Luck was on my side today, though. I pictured a vast net stretching across the wide street below, and the crosshatched rope began to lash and twine across the gap.
It anchored to the roof of the building on the left. One corner of it anchored
to the building on the right— Shit.
Carrion hit the net. The rope sagged in the middle, cushioning his weight.
By the time I landed after him, the anchor point on the roof of the right
building was hanging on by a thread.
It snapped.
I fell straight through the netting, through the canopy of the bleached red tent beneath it, and landed with a hard “Ooof!” on something very uncomfortable.
The sound of rotten, creaking wood reached my ears, and a second later I was deposited unceremoniously onto blistering hot sand. Stale bread rolls thumped down on top of me.
Swift appeared in my field of view, his auburn hair backlit and glowing like a sunset on fire. “That was not okay,” he said in a flat tone.
I blinked sand out of my eyes. “Ahh, quiet. I broke your fall, didn’t I?”
“My cart! Bastards! You’ve destroyed my—” The shout cut off when the old woman took in the two miscreants who had destroyed her property. Carrion had lived in Zilvaren for lifetimes, but he had done so as one of them.
Glamored. He’d been tall and broad for a human, but now he was hovering near seven feet and possessed the pointed ears of the Fae. As for me? I was a sight taller than Swift. Significantly better-looking, too, but that was beside the point.
I flashed my canines at the sunburnt woman, giving her a broad smile.
“Apologies, madam. We had a little argument with gravity. Looks like gravity won.”
I acted fast. It would have been smarter to glamor us as soon as we’d left the Hall of Mirrors, but there hadn’t been time. I dove deep into my magic and cast it over myself and the smuggler, the change taking effect in the blink of an eye. I didn’t feel any different, per se, but the layer of illusion clung close to my body like a second skin—an itchy one that I immediately wanted to shed. When I looked at Carrion, he was shorter again. Rounded ears. Shoulders narrower.
Stubby, ineffective teeth. He looked human. I tried not to think about what I looked like, masquerading as one of them . . .
The stall owner righted her lopsided hat, rubbing her forehead. Was she about to pass out? She had just seen us morph from Fae to human, which accounted for the confusion on her face.
“Hah. Looks like gravity won. That was almost funny,” Carrion groused. He thrust out his hand, offering to help me up. Loath as I was, I accepted; my ribs were on fire, and I was so caught up in the debris I’d made of the woman’s bread cart that I kind of needed the help. The smuggler looked far too pleased with
himself as he hauled me to my feet. “Where to now?” he asked.
“You tell me. The whole point of you coming back to Zilvaren was because you know this city. Better than anyone, you said.”
“And that’s true,” Carrion snapped back. “But I need to know what you want to take care of first. The silver, the infected feeders, or the brother?”
“There! Down in the square!”
Through the gigantic hole we’d ripped in the tent’s canopy, we could see three guardians leaning out of the window high above, peering down onto the street. They’d already spotted us. It wouldn’t be long before they were on top of us.
“The silver,” I answered. “We’ll take care of the silver first. Now let’s move.”
“You’re too pale,” Carrion hissed. He charged headfirst through a network of winding side streets, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tops of his boots. I followed, hand resting on the hilt of the dagger at my hip.
“What do you mean, too pale?”
“I mean, even the dead in Zilvaren have more color in their cheeks than you do. The suns are pretty intense here. Everyone’s burned or tanned, or both. You look like you’ve lived underground all your life. It’s making people stare.”
I glanced around and saw that he was right. People were staring. “And?”
“And it would be better if we went unnoticed right now. We don’t fit in here as it is.”
“I’ve already glamored us. I can’t do any more than that. My magic needs time to replenish.”
Carrion’s pace slowed a fraction. “Replenish? What does that mean?”
“It means to refill, refuel, re—”
“Saints and martyrs, do you have to be so literal? I know what the word means. I want to know why your magic needs to replenish.”
I bit back a sigh, eyeing the crowd from deep inside my drawn-up hood.
“I’m not Zilvaren-born, Carrion. My magic isn’t of this place. I can’t draw from it as freely as I would back in Yvelia. We’re lucky I can draw from it at all. There are realms and worlds amid the void of this universe that are entirely barren of magic. If a seed of magic didn’t still cling for purchase somewhere within the bowels of this miserable place, I’d be completely cut off from my gifts. I just exhausted a good portion of the magic available to me back in the hall. It’ll be a while before I have full access to my magic again. Glamoring us might not demand much of my resources, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sacrifice precious energy by giving myself a fucking tan.”
Carrion didn’t say anything for a beat. But then a thought occurred to him.
“If you exhaust all of your magic, you’ll be as powerless as me, then?”
I scoffed at that. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll still know how to hold a fucking sword.”
“All right. There’s no need to be rude about it. Can you—look, can you just stop scowling at people? This is the Hub. Zilvaren’s elite live here. Everybody knows everybody, and we do not look like we belong to the city’s rich and well- to-do. If you keep glowering like that, they’re definitely going to notice us.”
This is the nice part of the city?”
“Believe it or not, yes. Quickly, we’re going this way.” Carrion squinted up and down the street before darting down a side alley. I grumbled, following, not liking any of this one bit.
We had three days until Saeris awoke the quicksilver again, though. There was a lot to be accomplished in that time, and Carrion’s knowledge of Zilvaren was already paying off. He seemed to know where he was going. Or . . . wait a minute. “We’re heading away from the palace, Swift. Do you know of some secret way into the treasury?”
Rats skittered out of narrow gaps between the buildings, screeching as they bolted away from us. There was nothing back here but a few ancient-looking sandstone houses that looked like they would crumble with the smallest shove.
“We’re not going to the treasury,” Carrion said, forging ahead toward the
end of the alley.
He was joking. Had to be. “Say that again?”
“Madra stripped this whole city of all metal, precious and otherwise, a long time ago. She’s paranoid as hell about people having access to it. So what do you think her treasury is going to be like, Kingfisher? Is she likely to store all of her metals in the kind of place that would be easy to break into? Or is she going to put them someplace not even the gods themselves would be able to access?”
We had reached the end of the alleyway. “Your point?”
“No one has ever broken into Madra’s treasury. No one even knows where it is. And believe me, I spent a good part of the last thousand years trying to figure that out myself. We don’t have time to solve that mystery right now, so I’m taking you to the next best source of silver I can think of.” He cut me a roguish grin. “The Brigand’s Bank.”
“Why am I not surprised that you have an account at a place called the Brigand’s Bank?”
“Oh, I don’t have an account, Lord Cahlish.” He winked at me. “I own it.”
He arced his boot over the ground between us, sweeping back waves of sand to reveal a worn wooden hatch with no handle beneath. The bastard was unbearably smug as he squatted down and pressed his palm against the splintered wood. I heard the inner workings of a lock being opened from the other side, and then the small hatch popped up just enough for Carrion to wedge his fingers into the gap and lift it open.
An act of small magic.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was capable of such things. Even uneducated and untrained in his powers, Carrion must have noticed he could do things that other people couldn’t. The Daianthus line possessed more magic than many of the other houses in Yvelia.
“That smells like a sewer,” I observed, peering into the dark hole.
Swift laughed. “It does. But you’ll be relieved to know that this is actually how the Hub’s supply of clean water is delivered. Delightful, right?”
Zilvaren was an ancient city. It had existed long before Madra ascended to the throne. A feat of engineering, it had once been the seat of a council of magic users. Laws had been passed here. There had been hanging gardens, and beautiful water fountains large enough for the city’s children to play in. The history of this place was well documented in Yvelia. It had always been circular, shaped like a wheel, yes, but it was Madra who had segregated it into wards.
The huge walls that divided Zilvaren—and its people—sank deep underground.
When you wanted to build high on an unstable foundation, you had no choice but to dig deep for purchase. The dank tunnels Carrion guided us through were tall enough for a man to stand at his full height, but not a Fae male. I habitually ducked my head along most of the route, forgetting I was shorter than normal.
Whenever we hit one of the walls’ buttresses—Carrion using magic I hadn’t known he possessed to open heavy wooden doors in the meter-thick stonework —we did have to double over to make it through the gap.
Carrion had found a torch that he’d apparently left at the tunnel entrance for this exact purpose. Its orange glow threw a halo of light up the walls and gave off just enough light for us to see by as we sloshed through the ankle-deep water.
The smell had gone from unpleasant to downright foul as we’d passed beneath one ward, then another, then another. I had smelled fields of corpses after a battle that were less offensive than these tunnels. I started breathing through my mouth after the fourth door we passed through . . . and then quickly reverted back to inhaling through my nose. Breathing through my mouth meant I could taste it.
“I admit, this was a whole lot less disgusting when I was glamored before,”
Carrion groaned. “You might have changed the way I looked, but I think I retained my Fae sense of smell this time around.”
I kept my mouth shut and glowered at the back of his head.
Eventually, he announced that we had come far enough and gestured to yet another wooden hatch overhead. “I can’t reach it. There’s nothing for me to stand on,” he said. “You’re gonna have to let me boost up on your shoulder.”
“No.”
“All right, then, you boost yourself up on my shoulder. Either way, one of us has to get up there, and unless you can grow your arms or something . . .”
“For fuck’s sake.” I made a cradle for his boot out of my hands. “Just get it over with already.”
The next few minutes were very annoying. I had Swift’s ass in my face for at least thirty seconds, which were thirty seconds I would have to remember to blot from my memory once all of this was done. Then I had to help push him out of the fucking hole. And then I had to jump up and grab the sides of the hatch and pull myself up anyway because he couldn’t find anything long enough
to lower down and pull me up.
Useless.
The light from the twin suns had somehow gotten stronger while we’d been navigating the tunnels. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the brightness as I stretched my back and brushed off my leathers.
Carrion sat on top of a low, crumbling wall, watching me with that telltale glimmer in his eyes that meant he was about to say something that would make
my blood boil. And sure enough . . .
“Y’know, I’ve just realized something.”
“What?”
“You are completely at my disposal right now, aren’t you. This next step in our plan relies entirely on me taking us somewhere and securing us an inordinate amount of silver. Which I think is probably worth something, no?”
“No.”
“And that got me to thinking that I could probably leverage the deep gratitude you must be feeling toward me right now by suggesting that we go and visit an old haunt of mine along the way.”
“We don’t have time, Carrion.”
“I beg to differ. It should take us no more than a couple of hours to load up with the silver. Once we’ve done that, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to go and fetch Hayden, anyway.”
“You could just point me in the direction of Saeris’s brother and go about your business, Swift.”
Carrion looked off down the side street we had stepped into, the corners of his mouth tugging down as he thought about this. The sight of his face like that, in profile, stirred a long-dead memory from the archives of my mind. A memory that was faded and moth-eaten at its corners.
The courtyard in front of the apartment back in Ballard.
My mother had been speaking with someone, and I had been tugging on her skirts, pestering her for Bettell biscuits. In that gentle way of hers, she had urged me to go and buy the biscuits for myself since I wasn’t a Faeling anymore and had pressed a coin made of brass into my hands. A whole cröna. An old one, worth twice as much as the new ones among the right circles. The piece of brass had been the most money I had ever held in my hands back then. I had marveled at it, stroking its surface reverently as I’d walked barefoot down the pathways of Ballard, on my way to Wendy’s to spend my fortune.
The face stamped into the coin had been regal and proud.
The face of Rurik Daianthus.
It took me by surprise, in that moment, that Carrion Swift bore a striking resemblance to his father.
He turned away from the street and looked back at me, his eyes clear and sharp. “I know I’m not very useful to anyone in Yvelia, Fisher. But I want to be.
And I can be useful in this. I told Saeris I’d help. I told her I’d come back. So, no.
I can’t just leave you.”
A pang of something spasmed in my chest, but I pushed it away, for once annoyed with myself for letting the past work its way under my skin. There was no denying it: Yes, Saeris had slept with the smuggler. But she wasn’t sleeping with him now. And she was entitled to her past, as I was entitled to mine. There
was no sense regretting events that had helped form us as beings. And she was my mate now. My mate. She was beautiful, fierce, clever, independent, and strong. It made sense that even Carrion Swift—a seasoned thief and well versed in the art of duplicity, by all accounts—wanted to keep his word when he gave it to her. He was her friend, much as it irked me. And I would accept that.
“All right.” I set my jaw, huffing unhappily. “Fine. Where is this old haunt of yours?”
Swift leaped up from the wall, kicking up a cloud of powder-fine sand when he landed on the ground. He clapped, crowing. “You are going to love this place.
They have this ale that, well, yes, it is distilled from rat urine, but—”
“Carrion!”
“I’m joking, I’m joking!” He held up his hands. Still grinning, he turned and started walking up the alley. “Seriously. Can’t you tell when someone’s joking, Fisher?”
The beer tasted so bad that I feared Carrion had not been joking. He was putting it back so enthusiastically that I figured it wouldn’t kill me, though. I sipped on the contents of my tankard, watching the humans as they came in and out of the tavern. The woman behind the bar had recognized Carrion immediately. She obviously knew him well, too, given that she warned him to behave himself or else she would toss him out on his ass.
A line of questionable-looking individuals stopped by our table. They all greeted the smuggler and asked him where he’d been, and Carrion came up with a new—and even more unbelievable—excuse for his absence every time. I hid my face in my beer, ignoring the stares from Swift’s compatriots. Their curiosity had them loitering at the table for longer than felt polite as they waited for Carrion to introduce his new friend, but Carrion was only loosely acquainted with the universal rules of etiquette and tolerated the awkward silence while he waited for them to leave without breaking a sweat.
I, on the other hand, was sweating. My shirt was plastered to my back. My hair was damp. It was hotter than the fifth level of hell in the tavern, and the temperature showed no signs of abating anytime soon.
“I fucking hate it here,” I murmured into my cup.
Carrion huffed out a breath of laughter. “Ahh, the Third grows on you after a while.”
I shot him an incredulous look. “Which part? The children starving in the
streets? Or is it the hot beer?”
“Isn’t beer supposed to be hot?”
“No. No, it is not.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.” He shrugged, downing another huge mouthful of his drink.
The magnanimous mood that had struck me earlier had fled a while back, and now I was getting restless. I threw back what was left in my tankard, wincing as I swallowed, and then slammed it down onto the table. “We’re done here, Carrion. Time to go.”
“No, we’re not. We’re nowhere near done!” He looked like a Faeling who’d been told he had to go home early from winter fair.
“I get that you’re popular. I’m sure it must be nice to see your very interesting friends, Carrion, but we have things to take care of. I want to leave this godscursed place and get back to my mate, and there is literally nothing you can say that will change my mind on this. So let’s go.”
“Fisher, Fisher, whoa, whoa, whoa.” He grabbed my arm and yanked me back down into my seat. “Okay, all right. So I might not have been one hundred percent honest earlier back in the alley. I didn’t just feel like stopping by here for a drink. I kind of had to come by Kala’s.”
Gods alive, this male. He was something else. “Explain.”
“Well, as I said before, I am the owner of the Brigand’s Bank. But I’m the joint owner. I have a business partner. We have a vault where we store our items—”
“Contraband.”
“All right, yes. Our contraband.” He pulled a sour face at me. “The door to that vault requires two keys to open it. I have one. Eric has the other. But since I disappeared some time ago and he probably spent a long time scouring the city for me and came up blank, I’m betting Eric employed the services of a vault breaker and has subsequently gone to ground with our goods.”
This was precisely the kind of nonsense I’d been expecting. I shoved the
table back so I could stand up.
“Wait, where are you going?”
I hoped my expression communicated my feelings effectively, because I didn’t have the words. “I’m going back to the palace. I’m going to find Madra’s treasury, even if I have to tear the palace down brick by brick. And then I am going to find somewhere hopefully a little less hot to wait until Saeris reopens the quicksilver. And then I am going home.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Carrion whispered loudly. “We just need to wait for the vault breaker. Once he gets here, we’ll have him tell us where Eric has taken our stuff and we’ll be in the clear. We’ll go and pick out what we need, nice and quietlike. I keep the silver. Eric can keep the gold and all the jewels. I get to help Yvelia. We find Hayden. We go home, and everyone’s happy.”
I was going to have no teeth left by the end of this excursion; I would have ground them all to dust. “So your plan is entirely contingent on this vault
breaker showing up here?”
“Yes. But he is going to show.”
“And how the hell can you know that?”
“Because he always comes here once his dealings are done for the night.”
“How can you even tell what time it is?”
“There are clocks everywhere, Fisher. Look.” He pointed at a metal prong jutting out of the wall over by the door. It was bathed in light and casting a thin finger of shadow perpendicularly across the stonework.
“That isn’t a clock—”
Carrion jumped to his feet, nearly upending his beer in the process.
“Vorath! Vorath Shah!”
A man stood in the tavern doorway, half in, half out. His black hair was wild, tinged with gray at his temples, sticking up in all directions. His dark brown eyes rounded with surprise when he looked in our direction.
“Where d’you—no,” Carrion sputtered. “Don’t you do it. Don’t you run!”
The man ran.
Carrion hurdled over the table, knocking both our beers over.
“Carrion fucking Swift! If that’s another of my tables broken because of you!” hollered the woman behind the bar, but Carrion didn’t waste any time checking the furniture. He was sprinting after the man in the sun-stained shirt and dusty pants who had just fled the tavern without a backward glance.
I had no business chasing vault breakers through the streets of Zilvaren.
And clearly that was who this Vorath Shah was. But I followed Carrion all the same, because the vault breaker Vorath Shah hadn’t been looking at Carrion when he’d bolted.
The stranger had been looking right at me.