Prologue

Sal sat at the back of the bar, holding a truly terrible drink with one hand and clutching the package concealed in his cloak with the other. It was Harvest’s End and the Dirty Bottle was doing a roaring trade. Half the small town had come out to celebrate the occasion. A grim bartender served sloppy drinks to sloppy customers. Whores paraded their wares to customers only too eager to partake. Braying laughter came from a table of men playing cards and leering at the bartender’s daughter. The men had a rough look to them that suggested that they could be soldiers, mercenaries or bandits. In Sal’s experience, the three were mostly separated by how tough the times were.

Then the Justice walked in. The man wore plate armour in the northern style, covering his legs and torso, but leaving his head and arms bare. His hair was the colour of straw and fell just past his ears. At a translucent sheath at his hip sat the symbol of his, now dissolved, office. The talix. The shape-shifting weapon currently looked like a short sword made of two blades twisted impossibly around one another. Completely impractical in a fight of course, but that was not the point. The point was to announce the Justice’s position, though in this case the man’s manner announced that as much as his talix. He looked imperious, resolute, like the Silent Tower itself held no fear for him. He surveyed the room quickly then approached the bar.

“I am looking for a skard,” the Justice said in a baritone that, though it was directed to the bartender, clearly addressed the whole room. “If you have seen any, I will pay in good coin for the information. If you are hiding any, you will pay in life’s blood for the crime.”

One of the men playing cards stood up. Grey was just starting to thread its way through his dark beard and if his stomach spoke of too many nights drinking, his arms spoke of beating men to death with heavy things.

“Listen friend,” the man said. “Some folks round here aren’t real fond of you Salitians. Since your king died we had four different highborn come through here with their men demanding rights of this or that. You’d be best advised to take your threats elsewhere and leave us to our celebrations.”

The Justice struck the man with an open-handed blow so quick and so powerful that calling it a slap would have been an insult. The man’s head hit the bar and bounced off. He was back up quickly and went for the Justice like he knew what he was doing. He came in low with a long knife in his hand.

Then the talix cleared its strangely translucent sheath and the rest of the fight was a formality. The man with the knife stabbed and hit the talix, which had shifted to a large, flat shield at a thought from the Justice. There was no time to recover before the Justice pushed the shield forward and it changed again, sprouting needle-fine spikes that pierced the man’s flesh like a ripe tomato. The Justice kicked the man, now just a corpse too stubborn to stop moving, off the talix and stared around the room.

“As I was saying,” the Justice said, sheathing his talix. “I am looking for a skard.”

The Dirty Bottle exploded into chaos. People clamouring to sell useless titbits and outright lies. Others looking to get out of the way before the Justice unsheathed his talix again.

Sal decided that this was a suitable moment to leave. But the Justice was by the door and he couldn’t help but notice that Sal wasn’t like the other Dirty Bottle patrons. His cloak alone was worth more than the average month’s pay in this town. If he left by the front door, things could get complicated and a straight fight with a Justice was just a messy form of suicide.

Sal waited until the Justice seemed suitably distracted with greedy townsfolk and slunk to the backroom where the whores took their clients. He opened the door and stepped into the darkened room. A waifish girl bent over the bed gave him an odd look as he entered uninvited. The blubbery man rutting furiously behind her didn’t seem to notice. Sal gave her his best reassuring smile and went straight for the window.

“Oi!” the blubbery man exclaimed, finally noticing Sal. “Wait your turn!”

Sal smiled and shrugged, not saying a word. His Lhintish accent a noticeable detail he didn’t want to leave behind if he could avoid it. When this man told this story, he would much prefer to be just an odd man who came in while he was whoring. He went to the window and pried it open. Getting through it was a tight fit but he made it and slipped out into the night air.

Sal made for the edge of town, having no intention of staying with a Justice about. Carved wooden statues of various northern gods marked the border between the outlying farms and the town proper. Sal smirked as he passed by the likeness of Ombadda, goddess of financial prudence and granaries. These northerners loved their gods. They had one for just about everything. And they didn’t even believe in the Cycle.

Sal snorted at his own hypocrisy. Condemning these heretics while he had one of the most holy relics in the world—stolen from the monks of the Silent Tower—secreted in his cloak. He gripped the Frozen Dagger tighter, as if the very thought of the monks might cause them to appear. He was likely to be reborn as a worm for this. But like his father used to say, better to be rich in this life than human in the next one.

Sal reached his horse—well, not strictly his horse, but the horse he had gone through considerable effort to steal—and he was on the road.

Sal hated riding at night. The occasional necessity of it was one of the few things he truly detested about his life as a thief. For one thing there was the very real danger that his horse might break its leg on some unseen obstacle in the road, particularly on the sorry excuses for roads that went between small towns in the middle of nowhere. And for another, highwaymen seemed far more common after dark than they did during the day. Which Sal had always found strange. It makes sense to steal things at night if you live in a town. But waiting until nightfall to rob people on the road requires either living out in the middle of nowhere or a significant commute to work every night. Neither of which sounded at all appealing to Sal. Then again, anyone who had to threaten people with violence just to steal things clearly wasn’t that bright.

Sal hadn’t been riding much more than an hour when he came across a pair of larcenous dullards in the road. The moon wasn’t providing much in the way of illumination, so he was almost on top of them by the time he saw them, and there was no way to avoid the ambush. Before he knew it, Sal had a crossbow pointed at him by one thug while another explained the situation.

“We aren’t looking to kill ya,” the lead thug explained, gesturing with a long knife he held in one hand. “So just hop off that fine-looking horse you got there and give us everything you got, and we can all be on our way.”

“Fellas, fellas,” Sal said, smiling roguishly, though it probably wasn’t noticeable in the darkness. “I’m a thief, just like you. We can’t be stealing from each other, can we?” Sal wasn’t holding out much hope for that tactic, but it had worked once in the past.

“I don’t care if you is a thief, ya not leaving here with that horse. Get off or get dead.”

Sal dismounted and decided to try the truth instead. “Look, guys, I know you’re just trying to make a living here, but I can’t let you rob me. I stole something very valuable from the Silent Tower and by now the monks will have figured out that it’s gone and sent Hunters to look for it. This thing I have means a great deal to the monks, and it will be worth the life of anyone who has it. So believe me when I say that you don’t want what I have.”

The lead thug didn’t seem convinced and approached with the knife held cautiously in one hand.

“Um,” the thug with the crossbow said. “Maybe we should listen to him. I don’t want nothing to do with Hunters. Those things just ain’t natural.”

“Relax. I think he’s lying. But if we find anything that looks like it belongs to the Tower, we can leave him that and take the rest.”

“Hmm,” Sal said. “Figure that out, did you? Okay then, last warning. My name is Saladeen Hadon and I am the most powerful forceshaper either of you have ever seen. Leave now or I will be forced to kill you.”

The lead thug laughed. “See,” he said to his partner with the crossbow. “I told you he was lying.”

Sal sighed. They never believed that one.

Oh well.

Moments later Sal was cleaning blood off his new crossbow.

*******************************************************************************

Kalissa sat in the back of the class as a pompous professor professed something pompous.

“Now of course, for the Lhintish people there aren’t any gods at all. For them there is something called the Cycle.”

Kalissa fumed. The Academy was a place of great knowledge, more so than anywhere else. But, unfortunately, it was also a place of great pretention, and this buffoon exemplified that attribute proudly. He was one of these new relativist quacks who had decided that because different cultures believed different things, that those things were all true relative to the people that believed them. Rather than the much simpler explanation for groups of people who disagree with one another; that some or all of them are wrong. He had been promulgating his particular brand of nonsense for the last hour, and Kalissa was getting mightily bored of it.

The old fool droned on for the better part of another hour and then, eventually, finished with a pretentious flourish and asked, “Any questions?”

In a lecture hall of dozens, only two hands were raised. One was Sandrar, who liked the sound of his own voice so much he could scarcely resist asking a question on any matter at all. The other was Kalissa. Everyone else looked like they were ready to slip into a boredom-induced stupor.

“Yes, you,” the professor said, indicating Kalissa.

Kalissa had sat through four of the most pretentious, arrogant or otherwise moronic professors the Academy had to offer blather through their pet theories over the last month, and then systematically ripped them to shreds. One had become so flustered he had simply stormed out of the lecture hall to a chorus of snickers.

Unfortunately, that was not today’s task.

“But sir,” Kalissa said, pitching her voice up an octave and furrowing her brow in confusion. “I thought there weren’t any gods?”

The professor, whose name was Atticus or Archibald or something equally ridiculous, chuckled in a way that someone might have mistaken for good-natured if they were a long way away and a bit simple, but which was actually condescending to the extreme. Sandrar chuckled along with him as did one girl who had a reputation for seducing professors in an attempt to get an appointment to a research position. If the rumours were true, then she had gotten into several positions, but none of them were of an academic nature.

“My dear girl,” the professor began, “we may not believe in any gods here in Inveritus, but the world is a big place with many diverse people in it. How arrogant would it be for us to think that we know better than the people of Lhint about what they should believe in? Or the northerners? Or the delkin?”

Counterarguments flashed through Kalissa’s mind, but she kept her tone even and a little confused and simply said, “Very?”

“Precisely,” the professor said, his eyes sparkling at what he probably thought was a good point he had just made. It wasn’t. It was barely a point at all, but this man seemed to suffer from a serious, possibly terminal, case of being an idiot. He used Kalissa’s question as an excuse to talk for another fifteen minutes, after which Sandrar asked a long and meaningless question which the professor wrung out into another twenty minutes of lecturing.

By the time she left the lecture hall, Kalissa was practically shaking with rage.

She stormed over to her instructor’s home near the edge of the Academy proper. The house looked like little more than a shack, but the walls were thick, and the door was reinforced. The front room served as an office, so it needed to be secure enough that not just anyone could walk in.

Kalissa picked the lock on the door that, as far as she knew, didn’t have any actual key and entered to find her instructor sitting smugly in an old chair behind a desk covered in reports, files, and what looked suspiciously like a two-bit romance novel.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Congratulations on completing your assignment Kalissa,” Master Vondash said with a knowing grin. He had obviously had someone watching the lecture.

“You are a consummate bastard,” Kalissa said. Then, in deference to proper etiquette she added, “sir.”

“It is important to learn to control your emotions and guard your tongue,” Vondash chided. “No one said becoming a Shadow would be easy.”

“No they didn’t sir,” Kalissa agreed. “Though had ‘pandering to buffoons’ been listed as a requirement, I may not have signed up.”

Vondash chuckled. “Pandering to buffoons is good diplomacy training. The Shadows of Inveritus are more than just spies and assassins. We must also engage in some truly unpleasant activities, like politics.”

Kalissa snorted. “Well I suppose the life of a Shadow is a life of sacrifice.”

“That’s the spirit. Now let’s discuss your next assignment.”

*******************************************************************************

In a large brothel in a medium-sized city, a good man had just killed his employer. Denison Briggs, flabby and silk-clad, lay dead and bloody on the floor of his office. Carrus, long-haired and shaking, stood over him, bloody knife in hand, wondering how things had gotten this bad. He had just come in to talk about one of the girls that had fallen pregnant, and now he was a murderer.

“Excellent,” Denison had said. “Make arrangements for one of those Academy folk to help with the delivery.”

Carrus had been pleasantly surprised. Denison usually wasn’t such a good boss, or a good person for that matter. Carrus was expecting to have to convince him not to throw the girl out.

“And contact Philious Bracken, tell him I am going to have something that might interest him.”

Carrus frowned. “The crime lord? Why?”

Denison smiled the way he smiled when he thought himself clever. He smiled that way a lot. “Philious is a man of uncommon appetites. He will pay very well to sate them.”

“You mean… the baby?”

“Obviously,” Denison said, sounding annoyed. “We will need to sell the girl too of course. Send word to the slaver’s guild in advance, I don’t want to be stuck with her here after she’s popped out the ba—”

Denison had never finished that thought. Carrus had taken the knife from his belt and stabbed his employer several times in the neck in quick succession.

Carrus felt he might be sick. Guilt sat heavy and cold in his stomach. Not guilt from the murder, though he didn’t feel good about that either, but guilt from the years leading up to it. He hadn’t been so naïve as to think that the life of a whore was a good one, the pay was crap and the risk of catching a disease or a beating was high, but he had always thought it was a free one.

He opened Denison’s safe and began looking through his records, getting bloody smears on the pieces of paper, and what he found only made things worse. Contracts with slavers, bills of sale for babies and receipts for something called “Terminal Services”.

Carrus hadn’t known. He had been working for Denison for three years, the last managing his largest and most successful brothel, and he hadn’t seen anything like this.

But then, he hadn’t looked. He had heard rumours of terrible things happening, obviously. But there were always rumours. He had taken them to be just that and kept working at making the Snake Pit as profitable as possible.

And in doing so he had apparently been complicit in slavery, rape, murder and the sale of babies to men of “uncommon appetites”.

The real question was, what did he do now?

*******************************************************************************

Darrian sat down at a table across from Gregor Atland, widely known as the best Dance of Swords player in the country, possibly the world.

“Care for a game,” Darrian said, motioning at the board that sat on the table between them.

“Depends,” Gregor said, his voice a resonant bass. “What are the stakes?”

Darrian produced a small box from his coat and placed it on the table. Gregor opened it and let out an appreciative murmur. Inside sat a gold hexagon emblazoned with the royal seal of the late Good King and engraved with the words: For outstanding service and bravery.

“Who’d you steal that from?” Gregor asked.

“It was my father’s,” Darrian lied. “I’ll put it up against twenty brightmarks.”

“Fifteen,” Gregor countered.

Darrian said nothing about the horrendous lowball offer. The gold alone was worth nearly fifty brightmarks, and there were unscrupulous collectors who would pay a fair bit more for the medal. Instead, he simply nodded.

“Bone or wood?” Gregor asked. His was a traditional Dance of Swords board, not the cheap kind where half the pieces were just painted white to represent bone.

“Wood,” replied Darrien. Wood, being the side that started, was generally considered to have the advantage.

Gregor nodded and sat back in his chair, the wood creaking under his significant mass, waiting for Darrien to make a move.

Darrien set up his pieces in the Vanguard Configuration and played the first move of the Dudonesky Gambit, a strategy that relied on advancing one of his skard under the protection of his sparkshaper, then took advantage of the skard’s ability to become any other piece once it reached the opponent’s side of the board. Gregor’s eyes gleamed in recognition, having famously lost to this strategy when it was employed by Dudonesky himself in the first game of their legendary three-game match. It was quite the upset for the old Lhint, but Gregor had come back to win the next two games and take the match.

Gregor countered by positioning his own sparkshaper to take the skard in two moves if Darrien continued its advance, with his cavalry in support to prevent Darrian from manoeuvring his sparkshaper into position to threaten it.

Darrian abandoned that advance and began moving his cavalry into a position to threaten Gregor’s other pieces while advancing his king out from the cover of his soldiers with his painshaper to support it.

Gregor moved to counter, using his forceshaper to force Darrian to move his cavalry back or lose it, then moving two soldiers up under the cover of his justice to meet Darrian’s advance.

Darrian took the first piece, moving his knight to take Gregor’s unprotected skard. It looked to be a good move on the face of it, but it allowed Gregor to advance his heatshaper and two moves later Darrian found himself in a situation where he could save either his cavalry or his painshaper, but not both. He let the cavalry be taken and then took one of Gregor’s eight soldiers with one of his own. Gregor responded by taking it with his own cavalry which was then taken by Darrian’s justice. What followed was a flurry of moves, both players making exchanges and vying for board dominance. Darrian got the worse end of the deal, losing five of his soldiers, his heatshaper, his forceshaper and his justice, taking only three of Gregor’s soldiers, Gregor’s cavalry and his painshaper.

However, the exchange did remove the threat to Darrian’s skard.

Darrian began to move his skard up again, with his sparkshaper in support, able to move much more freely now that the board contained fewer pieces. Gregor responded by moving in for Darrian’s king, positioning his own sparkshaper to support his justice as he used it to harry Darrian’s king and force it into the waiting jaws of Gregor’s small army of remaining soldiers. Darrian was able to move his king out of the way momentarily, forcing Gregor to spend another two moves setting up the trap and giving him the time to move his skard up to become a justice and be in a position to take Gregor’s own king, which was too far from his other pieces for them to provide any support.

It was a trap. The move before Darrian could exchange his skard for another justice and almost certainly win the game, Gregor used his sparkshaper’s ability to shoot diagonally down the board and took Darrian’s skard from a distance.

“I should have seen that,” Darrian said as Gregor removed the needle that stuck into the sparkshaper—yellow to identify it from the other shaper pieces—and took Darrian’s skard piece off the board. “That was stupid.”

“The key to this game is making a smart man make a foolish mistake,” Gregor said, spreading his hands.

Darrian nodded and looked back down at the board.

A bright-orange imp was sitting on the board, picking its nose with one long claw.

“Hey boss,” the foul creature chirped.

Not now, Darrian thought. I’m busy.

“Looks like you’re busy losing,” the imp commented.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said a miniature bear, no more than four inches long from snout to tail, that plodded across the board giving each piece a curious sniff.

Could you two move? Darrian thought. I’m going to feel weird if I move a piece through one of you.

The imp made a rude gesture, but scurried off the table and onto Darrian’s left shoulder. The bear nodded amicably and vanished, rematerializing on the right one.

Thanks.

“Don’t mention it,” the bear said, yawning a long and languid yawn.

The imp blew a raspberry.

Of course, Gregor saw none of this. Darrian’s madness was his own affair. To the outside world, he was just taking a long time to think about his next move, as well he might after the blow Gregor had just dealt him.

Darrian advanced his king, moving to threaten one of Gregor’s soldiers. Gregor responded by moving another to support it, forcing Darrian to move his king back to where it had been. Gregor pressed his advantage and the noose began to tighten around Darrian’s king.

The imp on his shoulder had produced an actual noose from somewhere and had put its scrawny neck through to demonstrate what it thought of Darrian’s chances.

Darrian ignored the imp and removed the green needle from his painshaper, using its ability to move all of Gregor’s pieces back from Darrian’s king. Then, as Gregor was forced to reposition them, Darrian attacked with his king, taking two of Gregor’s soldiers and his heatshaper.

“Attacking with the king is the move of a desperate man,” Gregor said.

“I’ve always thought that kings should fight with their subjects,” Darrian replied. “Fighting together breeds loyalty much more effectively than any amount of oaths or kneeling.

Gregor snorted. “This is not a game of politics. It is one of tactics.”

“What does he think politics is, if not tactics?” asked the bear.

Darrian allowed himself a small smile at the remark, even though it had been made by a figment of his imagination.

Gregor’s counterattack hit Darrian’s remaining forces hard. Once he got his pieces away from Darrian’s king, he was able to take full advantage of the manoeuvrability of his justice to wipe out two of Darrian’s remaining soldiers. Then he advanced his forces to crush Darrian’s king, currently protected by only one soldier and a painshaper that no longer had an ability. Darrian moved his painshaper to a vulnerable position, trying to bait Gregor into taking it and leaving him open to losing his forceshaper to Darrian’s last soldier. Gregor didn’t take the bait, and instead positioned his forces in a staggered pattern that forced Darrian to move his king towards the edge of the board where there would be no escape. He was one move from losing.

Darrian removed the yellow needle from his sparkshaper.

The sparkshaper piece could take up to three enemy pieces at a time, so long as they were diagonal from it and no more than one space away from one another. It, like all the shaper pieces, could use its ability only once per game as indicated by the removal of the needle from the hole in the top of it. But in this case, once was enough. Gregor had completely missed the fact that he had lined his pieces up in such a way as to let Darrian take his justice, his forceshaper and one of his two remaining soldiers in one move.

Gregor’s face fell.

“Well played,” the bear said.

The imp made a rude gesture towards its crotch.

Without the other pieces supporting, Darrian was able to take Gregor’s sparkshaper with his king and then, four pieces to two, winning the game was little more than a formality.

Gregor handed over the fifteen brightmarks with an expression on his face like he was handing over his manhood to an angry dog.

“I got careless at the end there,” he grumbled. “It was lucky for you.”

“The key to this game,” Darrian said with a grin. “Is making a smart man make a foolish mistake.”

The bear let out a chuckle.

“Best two out of three?” Gregor asked, a hint of desperation in the big man’s voice.

“Depends,” Darrian said. “What are the stakes?”

The tension seemed to visibly drain from Gregor. “Double or nothing, another fifteen brightmarks.”

“Well that hardly seems fair.”

Gregor gave Darrian a questioning look.

“You have a lot more to lose than I do.”

“I don’t—” Gregor began.

“People say,” Darrian said, cutting him off. “That you haven’t lost a match of Dance of Swords in fifteen years. If I walk away now, you lost to me, a man off the street nobody has ever heard of. It will destroy your reputation. You are essentially trying to win back your reputation, and for that, you will need to wager more than fifteen brightmarks.”

“How much,” he growled.

“A thousand brightmarks. Against my fifteen and the medal.”

Gregor looked like he was going to be sick. A thousand brightmarks would not be a stingy offer on the tavern they were playing in. Gregor could afford it—he made a lot of money taking rich fools’ money at Dance of Swords—but barely. It would all but bankrupt him. He would have to sell his horse just to eat.

“Five hundred,” Gregor countered.

“A thousand,” Darrian repeated.

Gregor knuckled his brow with one meat fist. “Fine. But I play as wood.”

“Deal.”

The game was over quickly. Darrian didn’t let him take nearly so many pieces this time.

“I’ll be by to collect the rest of my winnings tomorrow,” Darrian said as he loaded the golden coins Gregor had kept on him into the many pockets of his coat.

“Who are you?” Gregor asked, looking like he had spent the night in the Silent Tower.

“Darrian Rane. I used to do this for a living, except with bigger pieces.”

*******************************************************************************

Lukas woke up burning. His entire body was in agony. He tried to scream but it came out as a choked gasp. A slave noticed he was awake and came to offer him a cup of water. Lukas took the cup but when he tried to sit up to drink he was overcome with dizziness and had to lay down again. He drank the water messily, his hand was shaking and his muscles didn’t want to move the way they normally did.

The pain only got worse the longer he was awake. His skin got hotter by the moment. Lukas had seen more than his share of men burn to death and he didn’t want to join them.

“Help,” he managed to the slave.

The man didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Lhintish slaves routinely have their tongues removed, as a penance for whatever sins they committed in their past lives that had them reborn as a slave. He just stared at Lukas with pity in his eyes.

The heat intensified further. He could feel it in every part of him. He felt like a fool. He had been so eager to be chosen, to become the instrument of the Silent Tower and bring the Cycle to those heathens in the north. The monks had told him the procedure to enlarge his Siphon would hurt, but he hadn’t known it would be like this. How could he have? No one had ever done this before. The monks had cut into his very soul and torn it open. Now he was dying. He was absorbing too much heat. He couldn’t stop and it was going to cook him alive.

Unless.

A sliver of coherent thought snuck through the pain and self-pity and Lukas had an idea. He reached out his right hand, the simple movement almost unbearably painful, and splayed his palm.

Lukas was in so much pain that it was difficult to even open his Channel, which would normally require no more effort than winking an eye. He concentrated fiercely, focussing desperately on the space in his vis network that corresponded to his right hand. For a moment nothing happened and Lukas let out a little frustrated whimper. Then his Channel opened and he only had enough presence of mind to direct the energy away from him before it turned back into heat.

Then a blast of heat ripped through the air in front of his splayed hand. The slave that had brought Lukas the water caught fire and Lukas could see his skin burning and melting from his body. Heat kept pouring out into the air, causing it to shimmer like a mirage. It was more than Lukas had ever channelled before. The backlash seared his skin but the awful heat that had been killing him moments before vanished as it passed out of his body and into the air before him. Compared to that agony, the pain of burned skin was a soothing balm, and Lukas found himself laughing.

He walked through his recovery rooms, shooting blasts of superheated air. He found that if he tried, he could easily reabsorb much of the thermal bloom safely and continue channelling out heat constantly without searing his skin.

The monks had given him all they had promised and more. He had more power than any shaper had ever known. Soon the heathens would know his power, and then they would burn.