Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Angharad dropped to the ground as the shot sounded.

The stranger who’d stood in front of her was not so quick and his face exploded in a shower of gore – Sleeping God, she thought, sickened – as she reached for the long saber at her hip. There were a few screams at the grisly sight, but already the people of the street market were scurrying away into alleys. Angharad grit her teeth. This place was not like her home, like Peredur: there was no honour in Sacromonte, this horrid city of filth and rats. No one would help.

Slowly, so that the sound would not give her away, Angharad unsheathed her saber as she crawled towards the edge of the stall that was her sole cover. She should look now, before her would-be assassin could reload their musket, but Angharad instead kept staring at the corpse of the man she had come here to meet. She found herself avoiding the sight of the gaping red wound made by the ball, gaze shying away, and lingering on the dark skin so much like her own.

The stranger had been Malani, by his accent, not Pereduri like her. Not that the rest of Vesper ever thought of the Duchy of Peredur as anything but a petty province of the Kingdom of Malan – her thoughts were straying, she chided herself. Fear had a way of doing that to her. Angharad mastered herself, breathing in and out slowly the way she had been taught. This was no display duel, no tournament of skill where the violence would end when blood or surrender ensued, but she had learned to kill her fear there and she would kill it today as well.

Her breathing calmed, her hand steady around the grip of her saber, Angharad popped her head out to look and-

(The musket ball went through her skull.)

-and she kept rolling, a shot whizzing above her as a lightning-quick bite of pain tore at her shoulder through the dyed cloth of her jacket. She was bleeding, but she rolled all the way behind another stall even as she heard a man curse in Antigua. Angharad’s lips tightened as she felt disapproval waft out of that deep place within her. The Fisher had drawn on their pact when she had failed to, granting her that glimpse of what lay ahead, but the old spirit approved of neither fear nor recklessness. He would not twice extend his hand this way.

“Come out,” a man’s voice called out from her right. “If you do, I’ll make it quick. Won’t be that kind if you make it hard, girl.”

Angharad ground her teeth. She was a peer of Peredur, even her title had been struck down, and the last of the House of Tredegar. Did the man expect she would simply roll over and die when he asked? She drew on her pact, feeling as if she has touched cold water with the bottom of her feet. In her mind’s eye she saw herself rise, but to her surprise the shot that took her in the chest did not come from the right but the left. There were two assassins, not one, she realized as she released the pact. Both of them with muskets. She hesitated. The odds were uncomfortably steep against her. Attack, her mother had taught her. Defence is delay.

Angharad’s fingers stumbled across metal goblet, a cheaply made thing of iron, as she groped along the ground. It must have fallen when the peddler owning this stall fled. Closing her eyes, she tossed it to her right. Before it could hit the floor, she drew on her pact again and glimpsed the muzzle of the muskets following the sound. Without hesitation she rose, glimpsing two silhouettes in the dim lamplight aiming their guns at her bait. Shadows filtered through the banners and poles of the street market, hiding her for most of a heartbeat as she began to run. A click, a snap, a shot: a ball went whizzing past her as she ducked under another stall. She drew on the pact again, eyes turning unseeing as she moved, and coldly smiled. It was the nearest assassin that had shot, as she had hoped.

Angharad released the power, leaping over a clutter of pottery and keeping the killer now reloading her long musket between her and the assassin still ready to fire. The man of the pair shouted for his accomplice to move, but he was too late. Angharad kicked a stall of colourful ribbons into the woman’s knees and she rocked back with a shout of pain, dropping the ramrod she’d been using to reload. Angharad met her eyes, grey to brown, and saw the fear there. She did not relish it, did not allow herself to, and swung her saber in a clean stroke.

It ripped through the assassin’s throat.

Angharad drew on her pact, the Fisher’s quiet approval easing the coming of the glimpse. Smoothly the noblewoman caught the shoulder of the dying assassin before she could fall, keeping her body in the path of the panicked shot that followed from the other assassin. It didn’t pierce through, having hit the middle of the back, and Angharad let the body drop as she leapt over the stall before her. The man was a tall and thin Lierganen and his fear spread across his face like ink soiling water. He did not lose his wits, though and kicked the last stall between them towards her. It toppled piles of dyed cloth, but Angharad had been quicker and she was already leaping over it.

Her landing was off and she wasted a moment steadying her footing, long enough for the man to strike at her with the butt of the musket. Right into her shoulder, she swallowed a groan. That would bruise. She struck his chin in return, the guard of her saber crunching bone satisfyingly as the side of her blade bit into flesh, and with a hiss of pain the assassin dropped his musket. In his eyes Angharad saw the knowledge of his own death as the gun clattered on the floor, but she did not strike. Could not. The edge of her blade rested against the side of his neck.

“Pick up your weapon,” Angharad ordered, her Antigua crisp.

The man went still, eyes flicking to the blade and then back to her. The fear drained, replaced with a smirk.

“It’s true, then, about you Malani nobles,” he said. “All about honour. Won’t strike an unarmed man.”

Angharad did not answer, simply withdrawing her blade and taking half a step back.

“Fucking fools you are,” the man mocked. “Worse than an infanzon. I’ll just leave, and what are you going to-”

The point went through his eye and into his skull, Angharad snapping her wrist to withdraw the blade cleanly. There was some debate among scholars whether a ‘fair chance’ to take up one’s weapon should be considered three or five breaths, so she had waited a full five. She did not like to walk too close to the line in matters of honour.

“I am not Malani,” she coldly informed the corpse as it toppled.

She was of Peredur, and the people of the High Isle had their own ways. She knelt to wipe the blade on his tunic before sheathing it, idly going through his pockets. A few copper coins, powder and shot. She took the coin, as she would need them for the corpse price and it had been won cleanly by blade. The other assassin bore even less coin and a small dagger. The noblewoman returned to the cooling body of the man who had died trying to pass a message to her, the forever nameless Malani, and set the copper coins above his heart in a circle. It was an old custom: the coin was for anyone to take who would be willing to see the body properly burned or buried.

Feeling dirtied for putting her fingers to a corpse she had not made, Angharad forced herself to look through the dead man’s pockets for a message. To her relief, a pocket within his blood-splattered coat contained a folded letter. It was from Uncle Osian, there was no mistaking it: the small red seal keeping the letter closed displayed the two-tailed snaked of House Tredegar. Osian, her mother’s youngest brother, had been allowed by her to keep using the family arms even though he had gone into exile to join the Watch. Though they were estranged, Mother had always said it was more by reason of distance than bitterness.

That distance was also why her uncle was the sole surviving member of Angharad’s family, for the Sleeping God moved in mysterious ways. She took the letter, not yet breaking the seal, and tucked it away beneath her coat. She looked around warily, still alone for now. The city guard might be hopelessly – and infamously – corrupt, but even they would not simply ignore killing in the streets of Sacromonte. Best be gone by the time they arrived.

Angharad took to the streets, going back the way she had come. Cortolo District was a maze of slender canals and curved bridges, its stone facades painted in shades of red and yellow that looked vivid in the warm light of the great pillars of palestone. Those relics had been laid down every few blocks back in the days of the Second Empire and she had found them a wondrous sight at first, for her homeland had nothing like them. Only the Lierganen at their height had been able to afford the luxury of letting stone pillars soak in the Glare for decades. She had since shed the wonder: the warm glow of the pillars had weakened over the centuries, and now there were always shadows between their reach.

The glories of the Second Empire were long gone, broken by great wars with the devils of Pandemonium and the even more brutal wars between the powers that had emerged to claim primacy after the fall of Liergan. Another century, Angharad thought as she passed through a grove of orange trees, and the Glare in those pillars would fade entirely. Sacromonte was far fallen from the peerless jewel of the Trebian Sea it had once claimed to be, and it fell a little further every year. The young noblewoman ignored the few street merchants who called out to her as she found the street she had been looking for, recognizing the painted eyes in red and blue on the side of a baker’s shop.

It made her uncomfortable that people – commoners – would call out to her in such a way. And there were so many of them… Angharad had visited many cities in Malan, when she duelled still, but not even the capital of the kingdom was so thick with people as Sacromonte. It made her feel cramped, somehow. The inn she was staying at was one her uncle had directed her to by letter, a small but clean establishment where she was assured of the hostess’ discretion. The middle-aged matron, a stout woman by the name of Luna, welcomed her with a smile as she passed the green-painted threshold.

“Lady Maraire,” the hostess said. “You’ve returned early. Will you be in want of a meal, then?”

Angharad’s answering smile was stiff. It was not a lie, the name she had given. No peer of Peredur could be recognized in the rolls of the kingdom’s nobility without first taking a Malani name, her own being Anwar Maraire. It had been the compromise honour allowed her between the secrecy Uncle Osian had urged her to and the dishonour inherent in deceiving one whose roof you stayed under. It sat ill with Angharad, for all that she knew it was necessary, and Luna’s graceful manners in referring to her by the name and title were as a little twist of the knife every time.

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“I do not yet know,” Angharad replied. “I have correspondence to attend to before I can give you answer. Is the solar vacant?”

“It is, my lady,” Luna nodded. “And I tidied it up this morning too. Enter as you please.”

Angharad thanked her hostess and went up the stairs. She slipped into her room, long enough to shed her jacket and grimace at the red staining her pale shirt. The ball had nicked the back of her shoulder, deep enough to bleed her if not to touch muscle. Mother had shown her how to dress a wound when she’d been a girl and still dreamed of her following in her footsteps as a sea captain, so she clumsily cleaned the wound and wrapped a bandage from her trunk around her shoulder. The dark-skinned noblewoman still had two clean shirts and she wasted no time putting one on, but that’d been her last jacket. There was nothing left now but a formal dress and an overcoat, the latter of which she decided on.