The Drowning City: The Necromancer Chronicles Book One (29 page)

“How—”

“I’ve run out of leash,” he said softly. “If I find you again, I must kill you or return you to the Khas. Try not to be found.”

The look on his face brought a sharp lump of pity to her throat. She swallowed it down and fled into the swamp.

T
hey stumbled into the Storm God’s Bride a few hours before dawn, slipping in the back to avoid the lingering patrons. Isyllt
expected Vienh to send them away, but instead she gave them a room upstairs and left. Isyllt was grateful for both reprieves.

She nearly collapsed on the bed, but rallied enough energy to ward the room and strip off her damp and filthy clothes first.
Her right arm itched and throbbed from wrist to elbow, and her left hand was stiff and near-useless. The red print of Asheris’s
hand circled her forearm, blisters bubbling where the tips of his fingers had dug in.

“Cute trick,” Adam said, inspecting her arm.

“I’m lucky he decided to talk first and incinerate me after.” She moved her hand, wincing as the burn stretched and stung.
Mud crusted in the creases of her skin and flecks of leaf and dirt clung to her. She could feel the fever rising again as
her magic and body strove to fight off whatever filth was in the bay.

Adam slipped out, returned a moment later with water, clean towels, and a bowl of crushed aloe. Isyllt fumbled with a damp
cloth for a bit before he took it from her and cleaned the burn.

“We need to find that ship and get out of here.”

Isyllt nodded, staring at the scuffed planks beyond her toes. She needed to leave. Especially if the thought filled her with
such ambivalence. Her work was dangerous enough without worrying about the men trying to kill her. If she lost her focus,
she’d end up like Vasilios.

“You won’t prove anything by killing yourself,” Adam said softly, smearing cool sap over her arm.

She frowned, then chuckled wryly. She might be a fool where Asheris was concerned, but at least it distracted her from being
a fool over Kiril.

“We wait for the ship,” she said. “It’s the best we can do—wait and pray that Siddir can accomplish what he claims.”

“Pity we keep killing the people we were supposed to help.” Adam wrapped the burn loosely and knotted the bandage.

“They tried to kill us first.” She leaned against the wall; the room was swimming, and she couldn’t bring it into focus. Maybe
she could blame the fever on the question that rose to her tongue. “Are you just going to leave her?”

Adam shrugged, lips tightening. “She made her choices. What’s the use in arguing?”

“No use,” she whispered. Her eyes sagged shut. “No use at all.”

He caught her as she slumped, eased her onto the mattress. His hand tightened on hers, a fleeting sympathy, and then sleep
pulled her away.

Zhirin came home aching and tired, weary to the bone in the absence of the night’s fear. As she eased the door shut and locked
it, she noticed a light burning in the kitchen. Mau was up very early, she thought for an instant, but no.

Her mother was waiting for her.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Fei Minh said. She sat at the table, a cup of tea at her elbow. Dark circles ringed her eyes and shadows
lined the weary creases on her face. “You’re running with the Tigers.”

Not tonight
, she almost said. But there was no point in childish equivocations. “Yes.”

Her mother shook her head, unbound hair sliding over her shoulders. More silver threaded the ink-black than Zhirin remembered.
“I prayed that Faraj was wrong, that you wouldn’t be so foolish.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“If I’m killed, it will be to protect your schemes. I’m lucky I’m not in the bottom of a canal already.”

Fei Minh’s lips pursed. “Zhirin, please. I understand that you want to help, but this isn’t the way. Look at how many are
dead already—look at what happened at the execution.”

“That wasn’t the Tigers. And do you really think paying off the Emperor is any better?”

“It doesn’t end in bloodshed.”

“Really? Do diamonds grow on trees, then, and fall like mangoes? Do those prisoners who disappear spend their days picking
gems in the shade and drinking hibiscus tea?”

Color rose in Fei Minh’s cheeks. “I don’t know which is worse—your misplaced idealism or your insolent tongue. I’ve worked
for our family’s future longer than you’ve been alive. Just because you’re infatuated with some forest-clan mongrel with more
mouth than sense, don’t presume to tell me what’s best for my clan or my country. I should have shipped you to the university
years ago, if this is all your Kurun Tam education has been good for.”

If she’d been any closer, Zhirin might have slapped her. The impulse made her hands tingle and stung her cheeks with anger
and shame. Her mother hadn’t struck her since she was five, and she’d never contemplated striking back.

“Mira—” She forced her hands open, stepped farther into the room. “Please, I don’t want to fight with you. Everything’s gone
so wrong, so ugly.”

Her mother’s face softened. “Oh, darling. I know.” She rose and took Zhirin in her arms, pausing as she touched her damp clothes.
“What have you been doing?”

She considered a lie for an instant, but what was the point anymore? “Rescuing the Viceroy’s daughter.”

The look on Fei Minh’s face was almost worth everything that had happened tonight. “You aren’t serious—Ancestors, you are.
You found Murai?”

“Yes. She’s safe, I think. I sent her home with Asheris.”

“My daughter…” She pulled Zhirin close, heedless of damp and filth. “I’m very proud of you, then, even if you’ve been terribly
foolish.” She drew back. “I doubt there’s much Faraj wouldn’t forgive you now. Just stay at home, out of trouble, and everything
will be fine.”

They were the same, Zhirin realized, her mother’s schemes and her own. Both born of a blind and desperate hope that if they
only did enough, did the right thing, everything would work out. She blinked back tears and swallowed the words that she needed
to say.

“Yes, Mira,” she lied. It grew easier and easier. “I’m home now, and everything will be all right.”

Fei Minh smiled and caught a yawn with one delicate hand. “It’s been a long time since I stayed up till dawn. Shall we make
some tea and see if we can manage?”

Their fragile conviviality lasted through tea and breakfast. Mau arrived just in time to save the day’s bread from Zhirin’s
inexpert baking; if she was disconcerted to find her cousins giggling and silly from lack of sleep, she hid it well.

The respite ended with a messenger’s knock less than an hour before the dawn bells. Fei Minh answered the door, but Zhirin
heard enough of the murmured conversation to send her heart to the bottom of her stomach. The
Yhan Ti
was leaving dock.

A moment later her mirror—carefully replaced after she’d bathed and changed—shivered in her pocket. She ducked into the hall
to respond, but by the time she pulled it out the bronze was empty and silent. She whispered Isyllt’s name, but there was
no answer. A second time, and a third, and still nothing. Something was wrong.

“What is it?” Fei Minh asked when she returned to the kitchen.

She swallowed. No use in pretending any longer. “I have to go.”

She ignored her mother’s angry questions and demands as she tugged on her shoes. As she opened the door she paused and risked
a backward glance. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back when I can.”
If I can.

Isyllt woke to a sharp knock on the door and the jangle of her wards. The bed creaked as Adam leapt up; her skin prickled
with the sudden absence of his warmth. She scrubbed gritty eyes, but it only made them ache more. It felt as if she’d only
slept a few hours, and from the darkness beyond the shutters that was probably true. Sweat dampened her hair, pasted her undershirt
to her skin, and her burned arm itched fiercely.

Adam eased the door open and Vienh slipped in, rain dripping from her oilcloak.

“The
Yhan Ti
is leaving port,” she said, “bound for Assar. Izzy’s ready to slip dock, and your friend Bashari is waiting on the
Dog.
Come on.”

Isyllt stumbled up, groping for her still-damp clothes while Adam tugged on his boots. It took her three tries to pick up
her shirt and her hands shook as she fastened the buttons. If the saints were merciful, she could sleep on the ship.

The hall was dark, only one lamp by the staircase left burning. Isyllt dropped to the back of the line, pulling out her mirror.
Zhirin was probably asleep. She whispered the girl’s name as they started down the stairs. An instant later, she heard a loud
crack in the common room, followed by a heavy metallic clang. Adam paused and Isyllt nearly ran into him.

“What was that?”

A thunderclap shook the room, shivering the stairs and throwing them against the wall. She lost the spell and her grip on
the mirror. Isyllt grabbed for the rail, gasped as she hit it with her bad hand, and fell. The rush of pain drove away the
last fatigue-fog. Smoke billowed, reeking of gunpowder.

“Bombs!” Vienh shouted; her voice was distant and hollow through the ringing in Isyllt’s ears. “Out the back.”

Doors opened along the hall as they scrambled back, wary faces peering out. Another explosion echoed and someone screamed.
Down the narrow stairs to the door behind the storerooms, but when Adam unbarred the door and flung it open a bullet shattered
the wood inches from his shoulder.

Through the gloom of the rain-soaked alley, Isyllt saw a red handprint on the opposite wall. Vienh swore as they retreated
from the door.

“Dai Tranh! It’s an ambush.”

Smoke eddied from the front of the bar, and orange light flickered at the end of the hall. Through the fire, or into the bullets.

“They’ll be waiting in front too,” Adam said, checking his pistol.

A shot cracked before she could answer. Isyllt ducked—in truth more a startled stumble—and saw a masked man crouching on the
other side of the door. He fired again and Vienh slammed into her, knocking her down. Isyllt landed on hip and elbow, eyes
blurring from the pain. Adam fired back and the man vanished.

They ducked into a storeroom and Isyllt called witchlight. Vienh gasped as she slouched against the wall. Red spooled down
her right arm, feathering across her linen sleeve.

“Not bad,” she hissed as Isyllt reached for her. “Just grazed.”

Isyllt touched her arm anyway to be sure and promptly jerked her hand away with a curse.

“Lead bullets. Bastards.” Isyllt shook her head. “They’re not Dai Tranh.”

Adam pulled out his mirror, used it to glance around the doorframe before he leaned out to shoot. “How do you know?”

“The Dai Tranh used copper bullets at the execution, even though they were shooting at mages. And they used rubies to blow
up the other buildings, not powder grenades.”

“Can we solve this somewhere else?” Vienh snapped as she pressed a fold of sleeve against her wound.

Another blast shook the front of the bar; a lamp fell from its hook and shattered, splattering the floor with oil. The building
would collapse on their heads soon. More shots sounded in the hall and someone screamed. Adam took another look through the
mirror.

“They’re shooting anyone who comes down.”

Isyllt crept closer to the door. The air tasted of blood and smoke and approaching death. She risked a glance outside, saw
a man’s sandaled foot and a thread of blood leaking across the floor. A bullet splintered the doorframe above her head and
she jerked back inside. A moment later her ring chilled as the wounded man died.

“We’re going to make a break for it soon,” she said to Adam and Vienh, “but I’ll be distracted, so cover me.”

She reached into her ring, letting the cold wash away her fatigue and pain. Her magic crept out in icy tendrils, licking toward
the corpse, oozing into his cooling flesh. It wasn’t something she liked to do—most people didn’t understand the difference
between a demon and a corpse controlled by a necromancer, and didn’t care to learn the particulars before they started screaming.
But this might be the best opportunity she had before the building came down.

Magic settled into dead flesh, save for the ruin of his chest and the lead ball lodged there. But she didn’t need his heart.
She felt the body like a glove on ghostly hands. And like a glove, it moved when she flexed those hands. The man rose clumsily,
driven by memory and will.

“Ancestors,” Vienh whispered.

A shot struck her stumbling shield and she flinched from the ghost of the impact, but the corpse only shuddered.

“Let’s go.”

Adam and Vienh fell in close behind her, in the dubious cover of the dead man. The walking dead discomfited even trained soldiers,
and the assassin outside was no stauncher. He stumbled back with a cry as the bloody corpse staggered toward him, and fell
with a gurgle as Adam’s bullet caught him in the throat.

Isyllt paused at the doorway, forcing more of her awareness into the body. Through rain and death-blurred eyes, she saw more
people crouching on either end of the alley. Also masked, like no Dai Tranh she’d seen. A bullet flew past her puppet’s head;
another hit his shoulder, splattering congealing blood.

To their left, the alley led to a narrow canal—to the right, the street. The light had paled from coal to iron. How long would
Izzy wait for them, with Siddir already aboard?

“Take the left,” she told Adam. “Kill as many as you can, then get to the docks. Don’t wait for me.”

“What?”

“I’ll distract them. Find the stones and make sure Bashari doesn’t try to double-cross us. Come back and find me and then
we can get the hell out of here.”

“And if you’re dead?”

“Then go back to Erisín and tell Kiril what’s happened. It will be his problem then.”

He balked a heartbeat longer than she expected him to. “Can you manage a distraction?”

Isyllt grinned, cold and sharp, and stroked her ring. “I think so.”

“I’ll find you.”

She nodded. “On my mark.” The dead man turned to the right and stumbled down the alley. Her ears still rang, but she heard
the assassins’ frightened shouts and smiled. She reached deeper into the diamond, calling the cold till tendrils of mist writhed
around her. “Ready—”