Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

Lin, who knew this was not true, glared.

“I came the next day to collect the rent—Petrov’s gone. Blood all over the floor. I mopped it up, but as you see, it stains.” She shook her head. “I had to sell his furniture to pay off the cleaning. And his back rent. Filh de puta.”

Ignoring the obscenity, Lin said, “I see you pried up the floorboards.”

Albertine narrowed her eyes. “They were like that when I got here.” She smiled, but it was an unpleasant smile, full of cold contempt. “I know why you’re here, feojh,” she said. It was a nasty epithet for Ashkar, and it made Lin’s blood freeze in her body. “You want his books—nasty little magic books, full of illegal spells. I could have reported him to the Vigilants, at any time, but he was an old man and I felt sorry for him. But you, prancing all around the city with your dirty little talismans.” Her mouth worked, and whitish spittle gathered at the corners. “They ought to get rid of all of you. Burn out the Sault, like they did in Malgasi. Cleanse it.”

Lin clenched her hands at her sides. “We do no harm,” she said, her voice shaking. “You know nothing—”

“I know enough.” The landlady’s tone was venomous. “Magic is a curse. Your people carry it, like a sickness. Like a plague.”

Lin swallowed bile. “I could make a talisman that would make every bone in your body ache,” she said, in a low voice. “You would never sleep a peaceful night again.”

Albertine recoiled. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Just tell me what you did with Petrov’s books,” said Lin, “and I’ll leave.”

Domna Albertine’s hand tightened on her broom handle. But there was fear in her eyes, a sickly sort of fear that was worse than anger. “I sold them to a dealer in the Maze. One of those that buys old junk. Now get out.”

Lin caught up her satchel and ran. She could hear Domna Albertine shouting obscenities after her as she sprinted down the stairs and out into the Fountain Quarter.

She was some distance away when she slowed to a walk, her mind whirling. What had happened to Petrov? Who were those men who’d claimed to be his friends, and what had they done to him? She felt hot and sick all over, thinking of the blood on the floor, the amount of it. One could not survive losing that quantity of blood.

Petrov had known those men were coming. He might well have known they planned to kill him. And yet his first thought had not been to run. His first thought had been to preserve the stone.

She began to make her way toward the Sault, a bitter rage still pulsing inside her heart. She wished she could have flown at Domna Albertine, smacked her across the face. But the woman would only have called for the Vigilants, and they would have sided with the Castellani woman, not the Ashkari girl.

Lin slipped her hand into her pocket, touching the stone’s cool surface. Calm flowed into her from the point of contact. She wished she could take it out and look at it, but she dared not do so on the public street. It was hers now, and she felt a responsibility to protect it—for Petrov’s sake indeed, but also, puzzlingly, for the sake of the stone itself.


Castellane at sunset. Kel walked through the streets; he had borrowed Conor’s black cloak, the one that allowed him to enter the city incognito. Its hood was pulled up, his talisman safely stowed in his pocket. It was good to be no one: nameless, faceless, a figure in the crowd.

And it was a crowd. He had come down the Hill through the East Gate, down the path that led into a tangled maze of outer streets, and finally to the Ruta Magna, the city’s main thoroughfare.

During the day, the Ruta Magna was an elegant shopping street, where the wealthy purchased their goods: fine furniture, bolts of silks, embroidered gloves from Hanse, rugs from Hind and Marakand. At night, the shops bolted their doors, hiding their glass windows behind painted wooden screens, and the Broken Market appeared.

The Broken Market wove its way down the Ruta Magna, eventually disappearing into the shadows of the Maze. While the weekly market in Fleshmarket Square was heavily regulated by the Council, the Broken Market was a lawless event. It had been born as a place to off-load broken or imperfect pieces of merchandise. Chipped cups of Shenzan porcelain, edged in gold; chunks of shattered glass with the edges sanded down, transformed into bracelets and dangling pendants; clock parts and unrepaired doorknobs; ripped lace gloves and torn curtains whose fabric could still be repurposed into dresses and coats.

A place for unwanted things to find new homes, Kel thought, ducking under the sagging awning of a stall selling three-legged chairs and tipsy tables. And, if one grew bored with shopping, there were performers—jugglers and musicians, and the itinerant Story-Spinners who could always be found on a different street corner, recounting the most recent installment of their tales. The most popular tellers gathered large and adoring crowds, desperate for the newest update of stories that sometimes carried on for years.

Having bought a bag of sweet calison, a sugary-almond paste beloved by Castellani sailors, Kel made his way northeast, toward the Scholars’ Quarter. He passed the gray walls of the Sault as he went; atop their ramparts, he could see the lines of silent Ashkari watchmen, the Shomrim, standing guard. They were motionless as statues, gazing down on the crowds below. Two more Shomrim guarded the metal gates set into the walls through which the Ashkar could pass between the hours of sunrise and sundown.

Kel had known those gates all his life. Into them were etched words in the language of the Ashkar—a language he could not read. As far as he knew, it was not spoken by any outside the Ashkari community. Around the words were carved leaves, fruits, flowers, and small animals. The gates were things of beauty, though they existed to keep the world out—and the Ashkar inside.

As the market receded, Poet’s Hill rose above Kel, with the Academie and the Student Quarter clustered around its base. The night was cloudless, the moon bright as a beacon. Hadn’t Fausten said something about an eclipse? Or perhaps it had been a politic lie; perhaps he had been equally frantic to get the King out of the Dial Chamber.

I do not find them very talkative, myself.