Shadow's Son (8 page)

Shouts and curses filled the wineshop. Glassware shattered. Shutters
banged open as someone scrambled out a window, or was tossed out.
Throaty mews whimpered from the direction of the bar.

Caim sidled over to the back door and found it ajar. With one hand
on the hilt of a knife, he ducked out, and left the taproom cloaked in darkness like a covered grave.

aim leaned into the Vine's dingy whitewashed siding as the sickness washed over him. Black lines wriggled before his vision.
His stomach tried to squirm up into his throat, but he fought it back with
firm determination.

Twilight's veil was drawing over the city. Angry shouts resounded
from inside the wineshop. What had happened inside? His talent had
never reacted like that before. It usually took every ounce of concentration
he could muster to conjure a few flimsy shadows, but this time they had
flocked to him like flies to a corpse, and whatever else had emerged from
the dark ...

He took a deep breath.

Stars filled the darkening sky. No light shone from the new moon,
hidden as it crossed the heavens. A Shadow's moon, a night when the
shades from the Other Side could cross over to walk in the mortal world.
He shivered. The sweat under his shirt had turned cool. Gods-damned
legends. Stories to spook little children.
Then why are you shaking?

Caim pushed off from the wall and started walking. The alley was
empty. Kit, as usual, was nowhere to be found. Neither was Hubert,
which was a good thing.
Maybe he's learning.

Kit appeared over his head. Her violet eyes shone in the twilight
gloom. "Fun night, huh?"

"Sure. A little more fun like that and I could be enjoying the comforts of a pinewood box."

Caim glanced over his shoulder. An uneasy sensation had settled in
the pit of his stomach, the feeling he was being watched. He tried to pass
it off as his imagination, but it refused to leave. There was something in
the air tonight. The city, never a safe haven for fools, seethed with barely restrained frustrations. Like a boiling kettle, the steam needed to vent
before it exploded.

"Oh, Caim. I'd never let that happen to you."

"I'm serious. Something happened in there."

"Yeah. You finally let loose. Felt good, didn't it?"

He shook his head. It had been terrifying to feel that much power
flowing through him, out of his control. "That's never happened before,
Kit. Why this time?"

Her dainty shoulders lifted in a shrug. "How should I know?"

"You're supposed to know about this kind of stuff, but you never tell
me anything useful."

"Well then, since I'm not useful ..." With a mighty huff, she disappeared in a shower of silver and green sparkles.

Caim sighed and continued on his trek.

Three streets later, he turned a corner and stopped before a monolithic structure. The dark mass of the city workhouse eclipsed the skyline like a colossal black glacier. The building had been closed years ago,
but the specter of its presence hung over Low Town like a bad dream.
Among the Church's first creations in the chaotic years following its rise
to power, the workhouse had been heralded as an opportunity for the
unlawful to repay their crimes against society. Thousands of convicts
had entered its iron doors. Most of them died before their sentences
were complete, killed by either sadistic guards or the miserable conditions. A mournful wail rose from behind the weather-stripped walls. It
was the wind, no doubt, blowing through a broken window, but it was
unnerving nonetheless.

Caim picked up his pace to put the unpleasant edifice behind him. He
wished now he'd been smart enough to turn down Mathias's offer. With
the city in such a state of turmoil, the last thing he wanted was to risk his
neck doing Ral's secondhand work. This job had better be the easiest he'd
ever done or someone was going to regret it. Hell, he regretted it already.

A pair of painted slatterns called out to Caim with promises of earthly
delight from the mouth of a cramped alley and flicked their chins at him
as he walked past. The street branched ahead of him, both lanes crowded
with street-level shops and sprawling tenement houses above. Murmurs of
life filtered through their faded, whitewashed walls, sounds of laughter and tears, talking voices and wordless moans. The city was a living creature, hungry and untamed beneath its thin veneer of civilization.

In the kaleidoscopic days and weeks after the attack on his family's
home, he and Kit had trekked across the countryside like hunted animals,
moving at night, holing up during the daylight hours under whatever
cover they could find. He ate whatever came his way-wild berries and
nuts, the few animals he was able to catch or knock down with well-aimed
stones, stolen goods from the occasional farmstead. Chicken coops were
his favorite. He became adept at pilfering eggs without disturbing the
sleeping hens.

The towering gray walls of Liovard, the first real city they encountered on their flight south, amazed him. They stretched up to the sky several times the height of a grown man. Beyond those mighty stone ramparts protruded the peaks and turrets of more buildings than he had ever
seen in one place. His father's estate, including the fields and bordering
woods, would have been lost inside the walls, and Liovard, as he would
learn later, was petite compared to the great cities of the south: Mecantia,
Navarre, and Othir were all larger and more diverse. Yet, walking
through the iron-shod gates was like passing into another world, a realm
of noise and commotion where everyone hustled on vital business.
Business
was a new word he'd learned in Liovard. Just the sound of it quickened his pulse. That's what he wanted to be reckoned: a man of business.

It didn't take him long to learn about the messy underside of city life.
For a young boy with no family and no prospects, the city was a frightening place. He slept in alleyways and inside piles of garbage. A stack of
discarded shipping crates provided shelter for almost a month until the
street cleaners took them away. He moved from place to place, always
hungry, always searching for his next meal. If he thought he was safe from
harm amid the bustle of the city, he learned better the first time he
encountered a street gang. He'd been rooting through a barrel of halfrotten apples when cutting laughter erupted behind him. A dozen older
boys surrounded him. As a lesson for trespassing on their territory, they
beat him bloody. After that, he learned to avoid them. He snuck like a rat
through the slums with Kit, his only companion.

But if the street toughs were dangerous, the tinmen were worse. The
bully boys only wanted your food and whatever you had hidden in your pocket, and maybe to rough you up a bit. Yet when he was dragged into
a backstreet by two looming guardsmen after stealing a pomegranate
from a vendor's stall, he knew with sinking certainty they wanted more
than to thrash him. While Kit swatted ineffectually at their heads, one
held him fast while the other ripped open the laces of his breeches. He
struggled, but they cuffed him hard across the face, knocking him to the
ground. A white-hot ember of rage burned in the pit of Calm's chest as he
remembered that day, but also a thread of euphoria, for no sooner had the
guards begun pawing at him with their big, clumsy hands than something erupted inside him. At first, he thought he was going to be sick as
the feeling bubbled in his belly. Then, the colors of the waning day faded
before his eyes. As he was turned onto his stomach, a new spectrum of
shades emerged from the bleak drabness of the alley, blacks and grays of
marvelous, vivid tones. While his tears mingled with the dust beneath his
face, something extraordinary happened.

A shadow moved.

He had seen shadows move before, when a cloud passed in front of the
sun or the object casting the shadow shifted, but this shadow stretched
out from under a heap of broken boards like a black tentacle of tar.
Strangely, he wasn't afraid as it oozed toward him, and the guardsmen
were too distracted to notice. One held him down by the shoulders while
the other tugged down his pants. Caim didn't recoil; he wanted to know
what it was, this crawling, amorphous darkness. When it touched his
hand, he yelped as a sensation of burning cold slid over his skin, like dipping his hand into a bucket of ice water. More shadows crawled into the
light, swarming over the alleyway until Caim couldn't see the ground
under his nose. The guardsman holding him down shouted and let up
enough for Caim to wriggle. He kicked and scratched. When a hand
seized his face, he bit down hard until warm, salty blood filled his mouth.
A strangled scream pierced the gloom, and then he was free.

He didn't hesitate, but hitched his breeches around his waist and ran.
Fear thundered in his ears with every stride.

Caim let the memory fade away as he turned his footsteps toward
High Town. Two things were clear to him. First, he couldn't risk using
his powers until he figured out what had happened at the Vine. He
couldn't risk losing control. And second, he would avoid contact with the Azure Hawks for the time being. Those decisions made him feel a little
better. Then he remembered that he'd left his cloak back in the taproom.

Caim hunched his shoulders against the night's chill and hurried
through the umbrageous byways of the city. Yet the haunting images of
his past followed him down every street.

aim awoke to the faint glow of dawn. Long shadows crept across
the floor of his bedroom. Two plum pits and a crust of rye bread
lay on the nightstand.

Remnants of a dream lingered in his head. The same old dream. The
burning house. The corpse-strewn yard. The same questions without
answers.

Caim blew out a long sigh and got up. After his ablutions, he went
to the cabinet and pulled out his work clothes.

Kit appeared behind him as he climbed into his breeches. "I like the
view. Ready yet?"

"Almost."

Caim tucked a black hood and a pair of soot-blackened gloves into his
belt. He didn't anticipate any difficulties tonight. He had studied the
workup supplied by Mathias. An old man with no guards; a simple enterand-kill and he'd be gone before the clock on Septon Chapel struck midnight. He strapped on his knives and settled a medium-length cloak, the
color of old dishwater, over his shoulders. He'd let his whiskers grow; the
stubble would make his face more difficult to distinguish in the dark.

He turned around to see Kit, levitating above his bed. She wore a
short emerald dress. Sparkles danced across her chest.

"I confess," she said. "I still don't understand why you're going along
with this. Even after throwing most of your money away, you've got
enough to last for weeks, maybe months the way you live." Her eyebrows
rose in wry disapproval as she looked around the apartment.

He didn't feel like a debate. His mind was already working the job,
combing through the details for anything he might have missed,
checking every angle for flaws.

"Mathias was in a bad spot. I took the job as a favor. What else is there
to say?"

"And when has that overstuffed bladder ever done you any favors? He
treats you like a half-trained wolfhound. He snaps his fingers and you
jump to do his bidding."

Caim grabbed the rest of his gear and headed for the door. "You know
better than that."

Kit flipped her hair as she followed after him. "All right, I don't want
you to go out tonight. There's a strange vibe in the city."

Caim paused at the door. He had felt something when he first woke
up-a raw, indeterminate feeling of dread. He hadn't dwelt on it,
chalking it up to anxiety about tonight's work, but now it returned,
stoked by Kit's words.

"What kind of vibe?"

"I don't know. It's just a bad feeling, okay? It doesn't matter. Let's just
go. I'm tired of watching you fidget."

"I wasn't-" He took a deep breath. "Fine, I'm ready."