Sworn in Steel (34 page)

“I think the
neyajin
hold their secrets tight,” she said—no, recited. “We walk in darkness by respecting the darkness; we possess the night by emulating the
night.”

“True,” he said. “But I didn’t ask what you’ve been taught; I asked what you
think
. If I wanted rules parroted back to me, I’d train a bird. Or ask
Faysal.”

A tense pause from his granddaughter, then, “He’s Imperial. Beyond
neyajin
, beyond even Djanese. He’s an outsider.”

“But he has something we want, and he’s not stupid. What, then?”

“We take it.”

“And how do you take that which you can’t touch and don’t understand?”

No answer.

The old man’s expression soured. “With something this rare, you don’t turn to the blade or the foot, not unless you have to. Think, girl! Sometimes you have to give secrets to
get them.” He made a soft,
tsk
ing sound, added softly, “Your mother would have understood this without needing to be told.”

I saw Aribah catch the comment, saw her eyes harden and her shoulders droop ever so slightly. An old complaint on his part—and an old wound on hers.

The old man might be a damn good assassin, I decided, but that didn’t stop him from being a bastard of a grandfather.

“When we waken the power of our robes,” he said, “we also dull the power of your dark sight.”

I took another look at his and Aribah’s drapes, as if I could somehow see the magic in them. Clothing that functioned as portable glimmer wasn’t unknown—I’ve seen cloaks
stiffen themselves against attacks and a scarf that could unravel and reknit itself into a fine rope—but drapes meant to work against night vision? That was beyond rare: That was fucking
personal.

“How’s that possible?” I said. “If you can’t use the . . . ‘dark sight,’ then how do you know how to foul it?”

“I don’t know how a man lives and breathes and makes shit, but I know how to kill him; is it so different?”

“Yes.”

The old man snorted. “Maybe you’re right. But it’s worked for us for generations, so who am I to argue, eh?”

“Generations,” I said. “And in all that time, you’ve never gotten one of the . . .” I waved a hand, pretending to have forgotten the name, pretending to be only
mildly interested.

“Lions of Arat,” said Aribah.

“One of the Lions of Arat? You’ve been skulking around for generations, and yet you’ve never managed to capture one and gotten them to tell you about the dark sight?”

“Captured? Of course. We’ve taken many.”

“And none have talked?”

The old man looked away.

I slipped another seed into my mouth. “Tell me about them.”

The old assassin regarded me for a long moment. “What do you know of the
neyajin
?” he said at last.

“I thought we were talking about the Lions.”

“To speak of one, you must understand the other.”

I shrugged. “Fine. I know that you’re hard to see in the dark.”

“And?”

“And you do a hell of a job on magi and their shadows.”

The flicker of a smile on his face. “That bothered you?”

“It inconvenienced me. I had business with them. Also, one of my people got hurt.”

“And you stabbed Aribah,” he said. “What happened in the tunnel was business. We are both what we are.”

“And what, exactly, are you?”

He pulled the cork and took a long draw on the water skin. “Long ago? We were demon hunters . . . djinn trackers. Under the Caliphates of Brass, and on into the reigns of the early
despots, we were charged with bringing judgment to those magi who trafficked with darker spirits.”

“‘Judgment’?”

“Judgment. Death, yes, but other things as well. We brought the laws of heaven and man into the warrens of spirit and smoke. My tribe long ago learned how to write enchantments into the
warp and weft of their robes. Magic couldn’t see us, and because magic couldn’t see us, neither could its servants.”

“You mean the djinn,” I said, remembering what Raaz had told me.

“I mean the spirits of the air and the sands and the heat and the night: the djinn and the ifrit and the angels of the barren places—”

“Angels?” I said, sitting up.

The assassin smiled and shook his head. “No, not the figments your people worship. I speak of the real thing: of the spirits who haunt the forgotten places, shredding the minds of men so
they can use their empty husks to come back and wreak havoc among the living.”

“You have different angels than we do.”

“As I said, ours are real, and we hunted them and the sorcerers who brought them down from the skies and up from the earth. We are the
neyajin,
the scythe that harvested the
djinn. Or at least we were, until they learned to make the bindings.” He took another pull from the skin, then spit off into the shadows. “Just as the sorcerers had learned to bind the
dark spirits, so the despot and his magi learned how to bind magicians.”

“You mean those things on their wrists are real?” I said, thinking back to the iron shackle Raaz had shown me on the way to the disaster in the tunnel. “I thought they were
just symbolic.”

“They are now, mostly, but originally, the shackles were truly enchanted. The despot Inaya—”

“May her name be three times cursed, and three times again,” said Aribah, clearly following some kind of formula.

“—and her High Magi—”

“Sons of three-legged dogs, all!”

“—set the
neyajin
the task of finding and binding the various sorcerers and magicians of the Despotate. And we did. It was neither easy nor pleasant, but as more magi were
bound to the despot, she began to gather them into
tals
, or schools. Each received her patronage, but she never kept it constant—one year one school gained more favor; another year,
a different
tal
saw its star rise. And always, as more magi took the bracelet, so they joined the
tals
.”

“She used her favor to keep them off balance, to keep them plotting against one another rather than herself,” I said. Oh, Christiana would have liked this despot, I could tell.

He nodded. “Yes. And, over time, as the
wajik tals
became established and the magi became used to turning to the despot for favor and advancement, the need for the shackles
diminished. Shackles of iron and silver became shackles of promises and tradition—symbols that held the magi and their students stronger than any precious metals or spells. Shackles of
honor.”

“Honor the despots heaped upon the magi even as they stripped it from us,” snapped Aribah. This didn’t seem part of the recitation. “We, the
neyajin
, who had
once counted our robes of merit by the roomful and been presented with turbans of the greatest size by the hands of the caliphs themselves, were reduced to prostrating ourselves for ribbons from
ministers and minor chains of favor from secretaries.”

Her grandfather glanced over his shoulder at her again, but this time there was a glint of pride in his eye.

“She speaks the truth,” he said. “We who hunted djinn and and their summoners for the despots were cast aside. As the magi gained favor, they remembered the
neyajin
as
the serpent remembers the hawk. We thought ourselves too valuable, grew too secure in our standing, but when—”

“You were kicked to the gutter,” I said.

“We were hunted and driven into it,” said the old man, glaring at the interruption.

I shifted my seat and grunted as circulation resumed in parts of it. Bits of me had begun to settle as the old assassin spoke, and I could feel my fatigue building like a wave on the horizon.
Ahrami
could only do so much, and between the darkness and the fight and the miles I’d covered in the last day and a half, I was starting to realize just how little I had left in
me.

“Listen,” I said, leaning forward onto my thighs. “I love history. Really. Especially this kind of thing. But I’ve had the shit knocked out of me today, and not just by
you. So if you could get to the part about the Lions of Arrat and my night vision, I’d be grateful.”

I watched as the old man glowered and the young woman seethed, and tried to get worked up about having pissed on the treasured tale of two assassins. I couldn’t. Instead, I swallowed a
yawn and rubbed my face.

“The Lions,” said the old assassin, “are those who were sent to hunt the hunters. Guardsmen and agents of the despot, granted the powers and sight of the djinn so they might
move through the night where we were blind. They tracked the
neyajin
for generations, using their newfound favor to hunt us down, first to break our tribes, then to scatter and slaughter
our clan. When they finally stopped—when we finally became too few, and thus too much work, to track down—there was little more than a handful of families and households left to us.

“By then, we were so used to the shadows, we remained there, turning our hands to killing for hire. No more did we dream of swaggering down the streets or sitting on great councils: We
knew where we were safe.” He worked his jaw for a moment, chewing on his history and his anger. Then he looked up at me. “But you can change that.”

“Me?” I said. “How? You’re already nearly impossible to see in the dark. And you can blind-fight better than anyone I’ve ever heard of. Seeing is nice, sure,
but—”

“Useless,” snapped Aribah. “He’s useless, Grandfather.”

“He doesn’t understand, is all.”

“What’s to understand? He can see, we can’t.”

“Yes, but he couldn’t see you in the tunnel,” growled the old man. “Think. What’s he used to? How could we, who move unseen to his eye, be at a disadvantage? See as
he would see it; think as he would think.”

“I’m not—” I began.

The old man held up his hand without looking at me. “Please,” he said. “Let the girl learn.”

I bit back my annoyance but didn’t push my luck.

“I think I see,” said Aribah after a moment.

“Then explain it to the Imperial, so we can all understand.”

Aribah turned dark eyes in my direction. “The Lions of Arat may not be able to see us,” she said, “but we see even less. Not the uneven ground, not the overturned chair, not
the pile of garbage lying in the middle of a pitch-black alley. They can see on a cloudy night in the darkest of rooms, while we’re limited to starlight and the grace of the moon. We’re
only as good as the darkness allows us to be, while they . . .” She paused, sorting her words. “They are as good as their vision makes them.”

The grandfather smiled at her and turned back to me. “When we were favored by the despot and hunting renegades, our tricks and minor magics were enough. But with the magi and their pets
organized and under the protection of the Despotate? On our best days, we manage a stalemate; on the rest, we try to not cross paths with the Lions. But if we could see as the
ak’ker
jinnim
see?” He smiled: It was a cold, ruthless thing. “Then we could remind the High Magi why they feared us so long ago, could stir the heart—or at least the
bowels—of the despot once more. If the
neyajin
possessed the dark sight, our path toward redemption and the revival of our tribe would be that much clearer before us.”

I looked back and forth between them—between the murderous gleam in his eyes and the stern, judging look in hers—and weighed my options. None of them were good. There was no way in
hell I was going to fight my way out of here, and there was no way in hell I was going to be able to do what they wanted. I considered lying, but there wasn’t any angle I could think of that
would get me out the door, or at least not in one piece. I was the answer to a prayer they hadn’t even known they could ask. But now that they’d found me?

No, reassuring—and habitual—as lying might be when it came to the subject of my night vision, I knew the only thing that was going to get me out of here in one piece was the truth. I
didn’t much care for the notion, mind, but what can you do?

“I can’t help you,” I said.

Aribah’s hand slipped from her lap to linger near a curved bit of darkness on her belt. I let my own hand drift to my boot, felt the absence there. Yup, she’d taken her dagger
back.

“Can’t,” she said, her fingers touching the handle, “or won’t?”

“Can’t. The price is too high for me to pass it along.”

“Price? What price? Either you know how to prepare the oils of the djinn, or you know someone who does. If it’s a matter of—”

“No,” said the grandfather. He was regarding me now the way a thief might regard a locked strongbox. I didn’t much care for the sensation. “Listen to what he
said—that the price would be too high for him to
pass
it along. That means it’s not a matter of teaching, but rather one of giving. Isn’t that so, Imperial?”

I nodded. “If I give it, it’s gone.”

He ran a finger over his beard. It sounded like pumice scraping over vellum. “Your sight doesn’t fade, does it? Doesn’t leave you after a day and night, like with the
Lions?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t have the dark sight—or at least, not as we’ve been discussing it.”

“No.”

More scraping, more staring. Then an abrupt nod. “You’re not the answer I was expecting.” He rocked back, then leaned forward and sprang to his feet. “You’re of no
use to me like this.”

I climbed, with less grace and speed, to my own feet. “Which means?”

Grandfather drew the edge of his kaffiyeh back across his face. “Aribah, you will see to it?”

She bowed low to the ground. “I will.”

Shit. I’d just become disposable.

I took a step back. The room was lit now, which made it harder for me since we were all on the same footing. Still, he was old and she was seated; if I could duck around him and manage a quick
blow to Aribah’s face as I ran for my weapons, I might—

“Aribah will escort you back to your inn,” said the elder assassin, his jackal’s smile clearly evident in his voice.

“She what?” I said, sounding nothing like what a Gray Prince ought to.

“We’ve shared water and secrets,” said the elder assassin. “Two of the foundations of life. And you’ve seen my face. That leaves me one of two choices, and I think
you too valuable—and resourceful—a man to waste on the edge of a blade. I would see you safely back to your fellows.” I must have looked as dubious as I felt, because he bowed and
extended a hand toward the door behind me. “Please, for my honor as a host.”