A coldness that had nothing to do with the weather reached Tym, driving a numbing ache into his bones that left his hands as stiff and useless as an old man's. Still, it wasn't until the stench hit him that he began to suspect the sort of nightmare that was bearing down on him.
For the first time in his hard, rough life, Tym screamed, but the ignominious sound came out of his throat as a faint, futile squeak.
The thing came to a halt scant inches away from where he crouched and coiled upright again.
Instinct overrode terror. Still clutching his knife, though he could scarcely feel it in his fist, Tym lunged up and slashed at the apparition and felt his hand pass through a vacant coldness where the thing's chest should have been. The attack overbalanced him on the slick slates and he crouched again, wobbling for balance.
The black thing hovered motionless for a moment, radiating its icy stench. Then it laughed, a thick, bubbling laugh that made Tym think of rotting, bloated corpses floating in foul water.
The hideous thing raised long, wrong-jointed arms and he braced for a blow.
But it didn't strike at him.
It pushed.
Standing faithful watch in the shadow of the alley,
Skut saw a dark form topple from the roof.
Plummeting down, headfirst, the falling man struck the cobbled pavement of the yard with a dull thud.
Skut froze, waiting for an outcry. When none came, he crept out to the body, squinting down at it in the waning moonlight.
Tym was unmistakably dead. His head had been smashed into a terrible lopsided shape. His chest was caved in like a broken basket.
Skut stared down in shocked disbelief for an instant, then burst into tears of frustration. The bastard hadn't paid him yet!
Tym carried no purse, no valuables. Even his long knife was missing from its sheath.
Wiping his nose on his arm, Skut gave the body a final, furious kick and disappeared into the night.
21
Vargul Ashnazai moved restlessly around Rythel's tiny room while the smith was making his report to Mardus. So far the man's spying attempts had turned up little of any significance, for all his self-important airs. But his sabotage of the sewer channels had been brilliantly carried off and, more importantly still, his compilation of the map of sewer channels beneath the western ward of the city.
Mardus had it before him now, making a final painstaking check before paying the smith for its delivery.
Ashnazai's job was to maintain a cloaking glamour about the two of them; through Rythel's eyes, they were fair, heavyset men with Mycenian accents. He also had a dragorgos on watch, ranging the courtyard outside—an especially taxing task for a necromancer of his degree, but a necessary one, as it turned out.
Soon after their arrival, he suddenly felt a silent call from the dragorgos.
Closing his eyes, he sent a sighting through his dark creation and discovered the intruder on the roof overhead, a rough-looking young fellow with a knife.
Vermin, he thought.
A common thief.
With a barely perceptible smile, he mouthed a silent command. A moment later he felt the stalker lunge and heard a satisfying thud from the yard below.
Mardus glanced up from the document the smith was showing him.
"It's nothing," Ashnazai assured him, going to the window and pushing back one of the warped shutters. As he looked down at the body sprawled below, a small figure darted over to it from the deep shadows across the street. Ashnazai sent a quick stab into this one's mind: a child thief, too grief-stricken at the loss of his compatriot to notice the ripple of blackness flowing down the side of the building toward him.
The dragorgos gave a hungry, questioning call. Ashnazai was about to release it for another kill when his hand brushed something on the windowsill, something that sent an unpleasantly familiar tingle through his skin.
Incredulous, he forgot the child completely as he bent to scrutinize the sill.
There, so faint no one but a necromancer would ever have noticed, was a thin smear of blood. And not just any blood! Pulling out the ivory vial, he compared the emanations of its contents to these.
Yes, the boy! Known here as Alec of Ivywell, minion of the Aurenfaie spy, Lord Seregil.
That much they'd learned since their arrival in Rhiminee. Urvay had tracked the troublesome thieves as far as a villa in Wheel Street, where they acted the fine gentlemen as they consorted with nobles and royalty.
Ashnazai had seen them several times since then, could easily have had them at any point, but the two were still under Oreska protection; any move against them would alert the real enemies in the Oreska House. So he had stayed his hand and soon after the Aurenfaie and his accomplice had dropped maddeningly from sight yet again.
Vargul Ashnazai clenched a hand around the vial for a moment, using its power to detect other traces of Alec's blood around the room: droplets on the shutter, a smudge on the table by Mardus' elbow, a tiny brownish circle dried on the floor near the hollow bedpost that Rythel thought such a clever hiding place, and none of it more than a day or two old.
Standing there, surrounded by the essence of the hated boy, Ashnazai experienced a brief twinge of the fear a hunter feels realizing that the prey he's been stalking has circled to stalk him. In the midst of his silent fury, he was startled to hear Rythel speak the Aurenfaie's name.
Seated at ease across the table from the smith, Mardus was regarding his spy with polite attention.
"Lord Seregil, you say?" Mardus inclined his head slightly as if greatly interested, but Ashnazai saw through the pose; at such moments Mardus reminded him of a huge serpent, chill and remorseless as it advanced unblinking upon its prey.
"A lucky meeting, my lord," the smith told him proudly. "I happened across him in a gambling house one night last week. He has quite an interest in the privateering fleet and likes to brag about it. A puffed-up dandy, full of himself. You know the sort."
Mardus smiled coldly. "Indeed I do. You must tell me everything."
Ashnazai bided his time impatiently as the smith described how he'd courted the supposed cully, and the information he'd had from him. He made no mention of the boy.
Standing behind the smith, Ashnazai caught Mardus' attention, pointed to the window, and held up the vial with a meaningful look. The other gave a slight nod, betraying no reaction.
"You've surpassed all expectations," Mardus told Rythel, passing him a heavy purse in return for the sewer map, together with a packet of the sabotaged grate pins. "You've done an excellent job with the map, and I believe I can arrange an additional reward once you've completed your work in the tunnels."
"Another week and it'll be done," the smith assured him, eyes alight with greedy anticipation.
"If there's anything else I can do for you, you just say the word."
"Oh, I shall, I assure you," Mardus replied with a smile.
Unseen and unheard under the cover of Ashnazai's magic, he and the necromancer made their way down through the crowded rooms and stairways of the tenement to the yard.
The thief's body lay where it had fallen, twisted like a child's discarded doll.
Mardus turned the corpse's head with the toe of one boot. "The face is damaged, but it clearly isn't one of them."
"No, my lord, just a common footpad who blundered into the dragorgos by chance. But the boy has certainly been here within the past day or two. His blood is all over the room. He must have been wounded."
"But not by Rythel, I think. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest he was hiding anything of the sort."
The necromancer closed his eyes for a moment, his pinched face narrowing still more as he concentrated.