By the time I staggered back to the Old Rail Yard, the Black Lotus-induced euphoria had faded, leaving me sick and dizzy. My head throbbed, and I had to pause every few feet to steady myself on the nearest fence. Luckily, over the past couple months the citizens of Coalridge had drawn their own conclusions regarding my extracurriculars, and no one attempted to mug or in any way molest me.
All of the windows of our railcar were dark, indicating that Ash and Faith were still at The Old Rasp supervising Morland’s demise. Tottering the last few feet, I leaned heavily against the doorframe for a moment, marshalled the last of my strength, and dragged myself into the common room, letting the door slam shut behind me. As I braced myself against the table and fumbled for the nearest chair, Grandfather – which was safely stashed away in my compartment – tsked inside my head.
And then a very familiar sword – his sword – was at my throat.
I stared at it dumbly for a moment. Then I put a finger on the blade and tried to ease it out of the way.
It didn’t budge.
From the shadows, an even more familiar voice said quietly, “You have led me on a merry chase, Signy. But this is where it ends.”
“Ummmm.” I groped for options but couldn’t push past the pounding in my skull. “That was kind of the point?”
Stray rays of light from the window played over the figure of “Finnley Tyrconnell,” obscuring his features and turning his hair an eerie silver. Somewhere during that walk back, my own hair had come loose and straggled messily about my shoulders, and I noted distantly that it glowed the exact same unearthly hue. But that was where the resemblance ended. He looked completely at ease in a sharply tailored black coat under a nondescript wool cloak. I, on the other hand, wore a patched brownish-greyish dress under a thin, frayed shawl. How many times had I dreamed of seeing him again? Of speaking to him again? And now it had finally come to pass, and I resembled nothing so much as the refuse of society that huddled around the well U’Du for warmth.
“Hello, Sigmund.” I spoke softly, echoing his resigned tone. “Would you like to have a seat?”
“No.” Sigmund – my brother, my lover, my hunter – sounded sad and regretful and incredibly weary. “No, I don’t think this will take very long.”
“Then…do you mind if I have a seat?”
“Go ahead.”
His sword point stayed at my throat as I hauled out a chair and collapsed into it, but he stepped sideways, and the bar of moonlight fell full across his face. In spite of everything – the fear, the drugs, the blade at my throat – my breath still caught at the sight. He wasn’t wearing any fake beards or wigs, hadn’t applied any makeup to alter his features. He was here as himself – the heir of House Anixis, who belonged in golden ceremonial robes on a dais at the center of a great hall. It made absolutely no sense to place him against the backdrop of an abandoned railcar.
Was I hallucinating from the Black Lotus? Futilely, I massaged my temples. “Is it really you?”
He gave me a wounded look. “Who else would it be?”
“I don’t know,” I retorted in exactly the way that used to annoy him most. “Given the amount of Black Lotus I took tonight – ”
It worked. “Oh, Signy!” he exclaimed. The blade lowered a hair as he waved his free hand in frustration.
“ – I could be talking to myself. Or maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t know.”
Bringing the sword point back up before I could try anything, he demanded, “What happened to you? What happened to your arm?”
“It’s a really long story. Do you really want to know?” Without breathing, I waited for his response, half-anxious and half-hopeful at the same time, because if he said no, he’d have that much less to use against me, but if he said yes, that meant he still cared….
He hesitated, a raw, torn expression in his eyes.
Stretching out one shaky hand, I reached past the sword. He let me poke his arm, his perfectly solid arm.
“It really is you,” I marveled.
My brother shot me another exasperated look. “It really is me. And the Patriarch has really commanded me to kill you. Which does not leave me with a lot of options.”
I cast about for a clever comeback, a snarky retort, any kind of response really, but nothing cut through the Black Lotus. In the ensuing silence, Sigmund glanced around the common room, as if incredulous that this was where it would all end for a scion of House Anixis.
His pity was too much. “If you’re going to kill me, then get on with it,” I informed him defiantly. “I have a horrible headache. Maybe death will fix it.”
He exhaled sharply. “If that’s what you want – ” he began in irritation, then bit back the rest of his sentence. When he spoke again, it was with heavy calm. “Listen, Signy, maybe you’re not in the best frame of mind for this offer…. I don’t see a lot of ways out of this, but I think possibly….” Then he broke off and glared at his drug-abusing twin. “How much Lotus did you take?”
How was I supposed to remember? “I don’t know,” I replied irritably. “These things depend on the purity level.” He just waited, eyebrows raised. “Oh, fine. I assume Mylera wouldn’t have stiffed me on quality, given that I work for her….” Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have let that slip. Too late. I ran some calculations of the concentration of Black Lotus I’d mixed into the drinks, then re-ran the numbers when I lost track halfway through.
Increasingly dismayed, Sigmund was doing his own math, trying to determine just how lucid I was. “Good enough,” he growled at last. “Look, Signy – I think I might be able to convince the Patriarch that I killed you. But you could never go back to Iruvia, and I would need Grandfather and your right hand.”
“What?” I cried. “No!”
“Then I really don’t see any other options.”
“No! You can’t have either! And I’m going home!”
After everything that had happened, this was what took Sigmund aback. “You can’t!”
“Remember everything we planned?”
“Yes, I remember everything we planned. How could I forget everything we planned, Signy? But – ”
“We were going to change everything! Now you’ve become just like them,” I accused bitterly.
Drawing a deep breath, he retreated behind the façade of the heir of a great House. With a merciless compassion that echoed the Patriarch’s, he said, “Signy, we were naïve children when we thought we could immediately upend the system.”
“We never planned to immediately upend it,” I protested helplessly, even though that was precisely what we’d fantasized for so many years. “But you’re not planning to do anything at all.”
“No. I’m not,” he stated, the admission like a coup de grâce. “There were a lot of things we didn’t understand at the time that I have since learned.”
That was what they all said – all the members of House Anixis who stayed (and survived) – and nothing ever changed. I refused to let my brother off so easily. “Then enlighten me,” I bit out. “What have you learned since we were naïve children to make you abandon everything we cared about?”
Out of force of long habit, he began to answer. “For a start – ” Then he hesitated, suddenly unsure how much to tell a traitor to the House he would inherit.
Hands folded demurely in my lap, I waited patiently while he wrestled with his own conscience. After all, he wasn’t the only one trained in interrogation techniques.
At last Sigmund struck a compromise with himself. “Surely you’ve been paying some attention to the political situation, even in – ” With his free arm, he gestured broadly, encompassing the railcar, the Old Rail Yard, all of Coalridge, really.
“Well, yes,” I flat-out lied. (Here Grandfather inserted a very pointed silence into my head.) Probing for more information, I inquired, “What does that have to do with anything?”
My brother wasn’t fooled any more than the fragment of Ixis inside the sword, but he’d already made his choice. “The Imperium is poised to invade,” he explained simply. “There is literally a fleet massing at Bright Harbor.” That was Iruvia’s most important port, on the northernmost tip of the isle, and even if it couldn’t match Doskvol for leviathan hunter berthing capacity, control of it would provide a base for military operations against U’Duasha. I opened my mouth to ask how the Immortal Emperor had justified such an aggressive move, but Sigmund continued passionately, “We are not strong enough to drive them back without the aid of the Demon Princes. We need the strength of Serekh. We need the swiftness of Khuset. We need the wisdom of Khayat. We need the cunning of Ixis. Badly.”
I took a moment to sift through potential counterarguments. There was no point in questioning his intel; if House Anixis believed that the Imperium was poised to invade, then the Imperium was poised to invade. The only weakness I could discern was his analysis of the facts. Surely the Demon Princes couldn’t be our only hope. Surely threatening the Imperium, which was still recovering from the thirty-six-year-long Unity War, with the prospect of a fresh civil war waged on two battlefronts would deter even the Immortal Emperor. “What about Skovlan?” I proposed.
“What about Skovlan?” Sigmund retorted, completely belying his activities of the past month. “Skovlan is broken.”
For now, I let it slide. “What about Severos, then? Or the Dagger Isles? Surely someone can help.” Unlike Skovlan, Severos had no metropolises whose capture would compel surrender, while guerilla warfare in the black jungles of the Dagger Isles would prove nightmarish for the Imperial Army.
Sigmund, who I was sure had already debated those options in conjunction with House leadership, gave me a dubious look. “Perhaps we could pursue a tenuous alliance with another isle….”
“Isn’t that what you’re already doing?” I demanded, accidentally giving myself away.
He was too experienced an operative to react – or more likely, he’d already detected my surveillance. Probably I’d missed something while putting his bedroom and office back together and Grandfather, being Grandfather, had decided to teach me a lesson. But Sigmund didn’t cast any accusations at me. Instead, he wavered, torn between newfound duty and lifelong trust. Lowering his voice, he confided, “Sort of.”
“Then what have you been doing?” I pressed. Lounging back in my chair, I stretched out my legs and crossed them comfortably at the ankles, deliberately adopting the position I used to take while he recited history lessons at me.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Face inscrutable, he simply stared at my legs until I uncrossed them and sat back up. Only then did he surrender to old habit. “Well…trying to stall things. Mostly.” His next words he selected with great care: “At this juncture, it would be extremely – unwise – to dispense with some of our most powerful tools.”
Tools indeed. I sincerely doubted the Demon Princes would agree with that classification, although Ixis would probably be amused and feign harmlessness. Never mind me in my cracked spire; I’m just a bound, obedient, ancient magical being with powers beyond mortal comprehension; wouldn’t you like to learn more…? “Are you positive they’re on your side? Demons aren’t exactly known for being forthcoming,” I reminded him drily. “Or loyal. Or steadfast. Or anything you want in an ally, really.”
“But we’re useful to them.” For the first time, my brother sounded a little defensive.
I pressed the advantage as I would in a fencing match. “For now. As far as you know. And the instant they decide Akoros is more useful, they’ll desert Iruvia.”
I actually scored a touch. Sigmund’s eyelashes flickered once, as if the possibility had never occurred to him, but before I could speak again, he counter-attacked. “What would you have me do, Signy? Abandon the family?” Like you? his tone accused.
Caught off guard, I shot up – or started to. In a flash, his blade was there, cutting me off. “No! I never abandoned the family! I’m just – ”
I stopped short. What was I doing? The Imperium was on verge of invading my homeland, and instead of participating in House councils and advising my brother and generally helping to guide the course of events, here I was buried in a slum, ignorant of and isolated from political currents, and focused entirely on murdering people for street thugs and smugglers.
In a small voice, I finished, “I’m just trying to figure out how to fix things.”
My brother’s silence weighed and condemned me.
In a tinier voice, I protested, “And I couldn’t do that in U’Duasha, where people kept trying to kill me.”
Sigmund didn’t say a word. He had condoned – if not ordered – the sending of people to try to kill me. In fact, he himself was here to kill me.
“I always planned to go home. I miss home.” So softly I wasn’t sure he could hear me, I breathed, “I miss you.”
He heard, of course, and sighed. “I miss you too.” Shaking his head, he glanced around the railcar as if searching for answers among the dust and torn carpeting. “Signy, I – ” Suddenly, as if driven past his limits, he exploded, “What would you have us do?” In his agitation, he waved his sword, and the blade caught the light from the window and blazed blue-silver, nearly blinding me.
“I don’t know!” I cried, blinking away the spots in my vision.
“Kill the Patriarch? Storm the spire?”
“I don’t know!”
Somehow, his blade had come to rest against the side of my neck, a hair’s breadth from splitting skin. He registered that at the same time I did, but made no move to change it. Instead, his jaw clenched and his fingers tightened around the hilt until the blood drained from them.
Swallowing hard, I stared up into his icy eyes and pleaded, “We never planned that far when we were kids, did we?”
“No,” he agreed remorselessly. “We had no plan at all.”
“I – I thought we had time to figure it out. Together. But – but then you became heir and – you started changing.”
Something I couldn’t quite name – bitterness, perhaps, even blame – flitted across his features. “I am increasingly convinced that it could have been either one of us, and the Patriarch chose me arbitrarily.”
So did he resent me for not having been chosen? For having the freedom to steal the sword, flee the city, desert him? Forcing him to hunt me down to execute me to prove his own loyalty? With as much mercy as he was showing me, I spat out, “I wouldn’t have changed. I wouldn’t have abandoned our goals.”
“You think that.”
“I know that.”
There was another tense silence as Sigmund processed my words and their challenge to him, and for one split second, I really thought he would slit my throat and be done with it.
Then all the fight drained out of him, like life’s blood ebbing from a wound. His blade drooped to rest against my collarbone, and he appealed to me, “Oh, Signy, what are we going to do?”
If I knew, would I be hiding out in Coalridge? “Stay here,” I whispered, stretching a hand towards him. “Stay with me.”
He stared at it in agony, desperate desire etched into every line of his body. “I can’t. Signy, I’m on a mission. I mean, not just the one to kill you. I have other missions that are important.”
That rejection, with its implication that my death didn’t even rank among his important duties, struck me like a casual backhand across the face. What a fool I’d been to believe that he still loved me, that the first eighteen years of our lives meant something when power and politics were at stake! Reeling, humiliated, I dropped my hand and muttered petulantly, “Well, I see where your priorities lie.”
“With saving Iruvia?” he snapped. “Yes!” I didn’t know what sort of look I gave him, but guilt flickered in his eyes, and his sword tip came back up to stab at my nose like an accusing finger. “Don’t pout at me. I was willing to risk becoming one of the Gualim for you.”
“What?” I cried, forgetting all about my hurt. “No! You can’t do that!”
“Well, obviously, if I go back with your hand and the sword and the Patriarch figures out you’re still alive, that’s what will happen!”
“Then don’t go back!” I pleaded. I couldn’t bear the thought of him in chains, dragged by hard-faced House guards to Ixis’s spire where wizened priests would rip out his mind and soul and everything that made him him and animate his empty husk with demon-craft to serve as a warning to traitors, forever. Never cross the Patriarch, my family would whisper, darting glances at what remained of my brother while the old man smiled enigmatically from his high seat. No one is safe from Hollowing, not even his heir….
Sigmund, clearly, considered himself safe from Hollowing, or perhaps deemed it the more attractive fate. “What – and stay here?” he demanded, repulsed. “In Akoros?”
“Yes! It’s not so bad!” The thin drizzle chose that moment to turn into a downpour that rattled the railcar. Raising my voice over the racket, I urged, “It’s colder and it rains all the time and they don’t maintain an artificial day-night cycle, but you get used to it!”
“Ghosts in the city. Everywhere.”
After two years, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to live in a city where a giant spirit well at the center sucked in all the specters. Given enough time, ghosts and possession simply became a fact of life, just one more factor – like the rain – to plan around while you went about your daily business. Hardly believing that I of all people was defending Doskvol, I assured my brother, “You get used to that too. I got used to it. And there are good people here.”
He looked taken aback. “Are there? Because that’s not what I’ve seen.”
At his reference to the Tartan Posse, jealousy flared in me. “Well, think about the circles you’ve been moving in,” I pointed out cattily. “Minor nobility with delusions of distinction.”
“Yes,” admitted one of the future rulers of Iruvia with a rueful arch of his eyebrows, “that is, more or less, where I’ve been.”
Irked at the thought of my brother wasting his time on those silly girls, I rolled my eyes at him. “I know.”
“I know you know.” Sigmund rubbed his temples as if he were the one with the headache. Then he pronounced with a decisive authority I’d never heard from him before: “All right. If you can come up with a feasible plan for saving Iruvia before I fulfill my other missions, I will do whatever I can to help you with it.”
That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d hoped for…but then again, it was a much better offer than I’d expected or, for that matter, deserved. “What other missions do you have?” I tested. “What’s my time frame?”
“As long as it takes me to arrange things with Skovlan – ” here, he had the grace to look slightly embarrassed – “and to locate Ronia Helker’s battle plans.”
My injured pride spurred me to taunt him, just a little. “I can tell you where they’re not.”
He inclined his head regally. “That would be helpful.”
“They’re not in the canal between Six Towers and Nightmarket.”
“I know.” His tone was very dry. “We’ve checked.”
I couldn’t help it. I burst into laughter.
“Why do you know that?” he asked suspiciously. Then, fitting all the pieces together – “Oh, stars above, Signy! Did you kill her?”
It took a while, but eventually I squashed my hysteria and squeaked out an extremely convincing, “Ummm, no?”
He didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. “Signy, speaking of your extracurriculars, why did you kill Na’ava Diala? Because I will tell you that after that happened, the Patriarch sent me a very strongly worded letter on how I needed to step up my timetables.”
Oops. Even after Grandfather claimed the Hadrakin as its assets, I genuinely had not considered how Irimina’s score would affect Sigmund’s position – not that it would have stopped me from supporting my crewmates to the best of my ability. In that respect, my brother and I were very much alike.
Sigmund was still waiting for my answer.
“Because we were paid to?” As he’d just pointed out, I was, after all, an assassin.
“By whom?” he asked, all focus and intensity now.
I glared at him, indignant that he’d ask me betray my employer. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Yes you can,” he said flatly, taking two steps closer and looming over me, his face dangerous.
A nervous shudder ran through me, but I met his glare and said stubbornly, “There’s something called client confidentiality.”
“Yes,” he responded, distant and implacable. “There’s also something called helping the House destroy its enemies.”
“The person in question is not our enemy.” Not unless House Anixis had decided to stamp out smuggling across the Shattered Isles, which I highly doubted given how crucial a role smugglers played in our spy networks.
“They hired you to kill our assets.”
My response was immediate. “Not for that reason.”
“What other reason could they have had?” Sigmund pressed. “How did they even know the Hadrakin were in Doskvol?”
I opened my mouth to defend Irimina, then snapped it shut. How had she known that her old nemesis was in Doskvol? Had her agony over a friend named Taji – a friend, I now recalled, of whom Ash and I had found no record whatsoever – been an act worthy of Spiregarden Theater? No, no, Irimina didn’t have that sort of performance in her. She was a smuggler, not a Slide. “They had personal reasons,” I said at last, weakly.
Sigmund looked entirely unconvinced. “You’re certain.”
“Yes,” I insisted, resolving to double-check with Ash. After all, what better cover for an Imperial counterspy than a cross-isle black-market operation that required the strategic removal of “obstacles”? “It was bad luck. And – and Ruka was an unfortunate necessity.”
As if to punctuate Sigmund’s weary sigh, the death bells pealed in the distance, reminding me of a very important clarification.
“Also, I will point out that I technically did not kill Na’ava Diala.” In fact, I hadn’t even been in the cupola when Ash extracted her life essence, because I was too busy hunting down her partner.
My brother’s head tipped slightly to a side in his signature skeptical gesture. “That seems like an extremely fine distinction, given that the message sent back to Iruvia said, ‘The traitor Signy Anixis is here and she is going to kill me.’”
That hadn’t been Na’ava’s or Ruka’s exact wording, but even a paraphrase more than damned me. “Notice the future tense – ”
“And now she’s dead,” he overrode me. “So I feel that you were at least present when this happened.”
Depended on your definition of “present.” “Well, not exactly….”
“Signy.” His tone held a warning note.
“Not technically….” After all, I’d been several feet away by then, skidding over the rooftops in pursuit of Ruka.
“Signy!”
“It’s true!” I insisted. “I didn’t kill her!”
He threw up his free hand. “You’re impossible!”
“And so are you,” I retorted, “given that you still have this sword at my throat.”
He looked down at his blade as if he’d forgotten all about it. Then he sighed and slid it into its sheath. Sounding exhausted, he answered my earlier question: “Two, three weeks, perhaps. That’s how long it will take me to finish my other missions.” He looked at me expectantly, as if I should get to work right now developing a feasible plan to save Iruvia.
How had we come to this? How had we wound up bargaining like a spymaster and his asset in a derelict railcar an isle and a half away from home? Softly, I repeated my plea, “Stay with me.”
“Like here?” He cast an incredulous look around the common room, his gaze lingering significantly on the scuffed paint, the chipped furniture, the ripped wallpaper.
Although I hadn’t meant my invitation quite that literally or specifically, I decided to play along. “It doesn’t have to be here here. Although – we do have spare rooms.”
He actually didn’t reject that out of hand. Taking a gamble, I rose from the chair slowly, partly so I didn’t topple over, but mostly so I didn’t alarm him into any regrettable stabbing. When his sword stayed in its sheath, I swayed forward the last few steps and twined my arms around his waist. As expected, my fingers found the outlines of a pair of daggers, a revolver, and a strangling wire concealed beneath his fine wool coat, but I avoided those and carefully laid my head against his chest.
At first he stiffened.
Then, all of a sudden, he melted, clasping me and crushing me against him as if he could merge us into one. My cheek fit perfectly into the hollow beneath his shoulder, just as it always had.
His breath stirring my hair, he said, “Okay. But not in this ridiculous railcar.”
I mumbled into his chest, “I’ll have you know, I set plenty of nice traps around this railcar. It’s one of the safest places in Doskvol.” Except against him, apparently. That was the challenge of warding against someone who knew exactly how you thought.
Sigmund’s chest rumbled in a little chuckle before he objected, “But your crew.”
That was a good point. I wasn’t sure I wanted to subject him to Faith just yet. Our little détente might not survive the encounter. “Where do you want to go?” I asked softly.
He had a reply ready. “There are hotels. In Charterhall. Brightstone’s too public, and we really can’t be seen together.”
“Okay,” I agreed obediently.
“But first, you need to change. Go put on that short red dress in your closet.”
“Okay,” I agreed again.
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After just two months in Doskvol, Sigmund already knew Charterhall better than I did, and he checked us into a hotel that he assured me was very discreet. Based on its location a couple blocks off Imperial Avenue, I guessed that it catered to government officials and the, er, individuals of negotiable affections hired for them by lobbyists. I did bristle a little when Sigmund passed himself off as the former and me the latter, but the hotel staff didn’t bat an eye, and in any event, he didn’t give me a chance to complain. In the morning, I woke in a wonderfully soft, clean bed and rolled over, meaning to cuddle up against him.
But he was already gone.
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