Sorasa eyed her fingers with distaste.

Just as Corayne suspected. She pulled her hand back, her voice sharpening, meant to sting. “Enjoy watching us blunder our way toward what could be the end of Allward, for the sake of your pride and few more coins to rub together while the realm crumbles.”

A hiss rattled past Sorasa’s bared teeth, her eyes dancing in the torchlight. The ship bumped into its berth with the groan of wood and snap of rope. The Amhara swayed gracefully as the deck bobbed beneath them. Again her mask slipped. Corayne saw anger. The useful kind.

“Well, when you put it that way,” she finally snarled, shoving off the rail.

Corayne grabbed Dom’s arm and pulled him along by his cloak, like a dog on a leash. They shouldered through the crowd together, nearly losing Sorasa in the scrum. Her face flashed ahead of them, rigid with frustration. She slowed, letting the other travelers break around her.

“Keep up,” she snapped, before muttering more Ibalet under her breath.

Corayne smirked. She’d grown up with sailors. She was no stranger to foul language.

“I am not a meddling monkey,” Corayne answered.

Sorasa startled. Even she could not hide her flush. “You speak Ibalet?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Dom what you called him.”

Behind them, Dom huffed along, his boots calamitous on the docks. “I do not care for a murderer’s opinion,” he said, a clear lie.

Corayne suspected he would care very much. After all, Sorasa had called him a stupid, stubborn ass. Although, she thought, my translation might not be accurate.

The Ibalet words for stupid and handsome are quite similar.

11

THE ASSASSIN’S BURDEN

Sorasa

She did not think herself a woman of conscience. Whatever morals she’d been born with had not come with her past the gates of the citadel. No Amhara could be made with such weights. And yet she felt the pull of something unfamiliar and sharp, tugging her off her path, like a hook in the gills of a fish. Sorasa wanted to rip it out, flesh and blood be damned. Be off with the current, to wherever opportunity might lead. Instead she found herself grinding her teeth in Wayfarer’s Port, assaulted on all sides by stink and noise, with two very persistent hooks buried deep. She dragged them along the streets against her better instincts. Certainly the Cor girl and the Elder can find their way to the New Palace without dying. Or, if they die, so be it.

But Corayne’s words gnawed at her. The end of Allward.

Those specters of another realm had certainly felt like it, fleeting as they’d been. Sorasa had seen men gutted, burned, crushed, poisoned, and devoured, in all states of death and decay. Killed for contract, practice, sport, or Mercury’s favor. Assassinations disguised as cult rituals or gruesome accidents. Corpses dismembered, scattered, or dissolved in lye. Bodies wrung out by torture or deprivation. She’d witnessed all and done most. But there was nothing, not from the snows of the Jyd to the jungles of Rhashir, that rattled her so much. This memory refused to be forgotten, the taste and smell of it sharp in her mind. Blood, rot, iron. And heat like she could not understand. For a woman born in the sands, that was the most unsettling piece of all.

She swallowed hard. There will be no Amhara Guild left if the realm shatters. This is just good logic. Simple business. A means to an end.

There were other routes onto the island that was the New Palace, walls and gates and bridges be damned. If the Elder did not want to be seen, despite all his preening, then Sorasa would make it so. She adjusted her cloak into something shapeless, a bland form of nameless color, smudged between sand and gray smoke in the torchlight. As a woman with a good face and a body carved by years of training, she was more likely to be noted on city streets. Sorasa had no intention of being noticed, let alone remembered by any guard in the street.

If we can even make it out of the port, she thought bitterly. Between the gawking girl and the sentient tombstone, it will be a wonder if we get there by midnight.

And Corayne did gawk, her mouth slack as she drank the city in. If not for Dom, she would have been a fine target for pickpockets and beggars. The Elder, hooded behind her, was a sentinel none would trifle with. Except, of course, the drunks, the brawlers, and the drunken brawlers. They clustered outside the dock taverns and free houses, half in shadow, waving flagons and shouting at the Elder in a spray of languages.

Dom faltered, his lips pursed beneath his hood. “I believe those men are asking to fight me,” he said, confused.

“I can’t blame them,” Sorasa muttered under her breath.

“Why would they want to do that?” the Elder asked. “I’m twice their size.”

He scrutinized the taverns again, looking over rat-faced men in greasy clothing. They looked back, jeering, showing yellow teeth if they had teeth at all.

Sorasa waved him on with a tug of her gloved fingers. “Boys do stupid things to feel like men, no matter how old they are.”

Inns and taverns sprouted like weeds all over Wayfarer’s, its streets narrow and overcrowded. Most people left the port quickly, creating a steady tide into the city. Sorasa kept them deep in that current, snug within a group of robed pilgrims more slack-jawed than Corayne. She breathed a sigh of relief when they escaped the jostling island and crossed the Moonbridge, named for its smooth, half-circle arch over the Fifth Canal.

Corayne’s gaze snagged and she slowed to stare at the monstrous Fleethaven, just as intimidating as the navy it harbored. It was dug into the next island, with a long channel leading to an interior circle. There were berths for each ship of the fleet, stalled like a horses in a stable.

“It’s a cothon,” Sorasa said, shoving the girl along. “And not much to look at. A shadow to the war ports of Almasad and Jirhali, a bad copy.”

Both flashed in her mind, the cities of Ibal and Rhashir thick with heat haze and palm shade. Where Galland could dock twenty warships at a turn, the others could hold a hundred with ease. The streets of Almasad went gold in her memory, glittering like they never had before. Sorasa forced another breath, the air sour with the beer stink of the northern capital. It was like a bucket of cold water.

“Such is the way of Galland. Everything stolen well and poorly remade,” she added, keeping her grip on Corayne’s arm. “If you insist on stopping to look at every cobblestone and corner ditch, I’m going to make Dom carry you.”