Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

I do, Kel wanted to say, but was it true? He kept his promises to Conor, but he would break a promise to anyone else for Conor’s sake, in a heartbeat.

Merren was still looking up at him. The firelight burnished his hair to gold, outlined the curves of his mouth, his collarbone. In that moment, Kel knew he could kiss Merren, and Merren would let him. He’d kissed both boys and girls before, though never anyone whose time he hadn’t paid for. He could still find oblivion in it, he guessed, and perhaps even a new sort of oblivion: For the first time in his life, he would be kissing someone without Conor’s knowledge, in a place Conor did not know he had gone.

And yet.

“I should leave,” Kel said abruptly, and half flung himself away from Merren and toward the door. He heard Merren call after him, but he was already out of the flat, racing down the stairs into the darkness of the unlit street. He glanced back as he turned the corner, but could see nothing, only a square of light where Merren’s balcony was.

What the hell was I thinking? Kel wondered. His encounter with Merren had not gone at all as he had planned it. He had meant to blast him with righteous indignation, but instead he had felt a painful longing—for Merren’s flat, his life, his surprising lack of guile.

Perhaps it was because he had spent the afternoon in the Dial Chamber with a group of people who delighted in tricking each other and the world, who traded vast sums of money they could never spend back and forth to burnish their own self-importance, who discussed Conor’s future as if the only thing about it that could possibly matter was its impact on them.

Not a one of them, save perhaps Falconet, had ever treated Kel as if he were a person in his own right. Not a one of them had ever given him as much thought as Merren Asper had when he had told Kel he deserved better.

Kel soon found he had wandered down near the harbor, where the air carried the heavy scent of smoke, brine, and damp wood. He stood on the Key, looking out at the deep roll of the sea, blue-black and shimmering: the same view that had been his in the first years of his life, gazing out from the Orfelinat. The rough hush of the waters was his cradle song, instinctively comforting, like a voice calling his name. Whose voice, he did not know. It had been so long.

The tide was low, revealing the island of Tyndaris, partway between the harbor and the mouth of the sea. Once it had been a spit of land at the mouth of the harbor. A city had grown up there: Tyndaris, small sister of Castellane. Then came the Sundering War, scorching earth and sky with searing bolts of magic. One plunged into the Castellane Sea, which roared like a lion and gathered itself into a massive wave. The people who could fled to the hills, but Tyndaris had no hills, no mountains. It floated at the level of the sea and so the sea reclaimed it. Shattered by the tremor, drowned by the ocean, Castellane’s sister sank beneath the waves. Now only its highest points were revealed at low tide: the jagged tops of the tallest towers and the hill on which rested a temple of Aigon, now called the Church of a Thousand Doors.

The temple remained a pilgrimage site, and boats set out from the harbor daily, ferrying the devout. At night, when the crocodiles hunted beneath the black gloss of the waves, deserted Tyndaris seemed to glow upon the ocean’s surface, its Sunderglass towers reflecting the light of the moon.

A ghost city, Kel thought. For cities could die. Even Castellane herself would not last forever.

Enough morbid thoughts, Kel told himself. He was done with all this. He would return to Marivent and the life he was used to. He would forget about the Ragpicker King and everything that came with him.

He started back along the Key, where open tavern doors cast patches of light on the cobblestones. Groups of drunken sailors walked arm in arm, singing. As he passed a closed warehouse, its ground-floor windows painted black to block the view of the goods stored inside, Kel felt a stir of unease.

He glanced around. This part of the Key was less crowded; he was surrounded by warehouses and customs offices. Down a narrow alley between a sailcloth-makers and a rope factory, he saw a flicker of movement. He backpedaled immediately, but it was already too late. He was seized, a hand clamping itself over his mouth as he was dragged into the alley.

Jolivet’s training kicked in. Kel bent double, twisted, and kicked out. He heard a gasp and a curse. The grip on him loosened. He yanked himself free and darted toward the mouth of the alley, but a figure dropped from above, blocking his way—and then another, and another, like spiders shaken free from a web.

Kel looked up. At least half a dozen more dark figures—all in black, save for strange white gloves—clung to the brick wall of the warehouse. Crawlers.

“That’s right.” Someone grabbed him by the front of his jacket, spun him, and slammed him up against the wall. Kel stared at the figure in front of him: medium height, dressed in a rusty black military jacket. It had to be a century since Castellani soldiers had worn black. This jacket had brass buttons down the front and a hood, pulled up to hide the face beneath. The voice coming from under the hood was a man’s, gravelly with the accent of the Maze. “No point running.”

Kel took quick stock of the situation. More of the Crawlers surrounded him on either side; there must have been a dozen of them. Their clothes were dark and ragged. Their hands were powdered with a chalky substance, no doubt to make climbing easier. They had rubbed black greasepaint along the tops of their cheekbones, along their noses and chins. The intent was to make them less visible in the moonlight. It also made their faces look like a child’s drawing of a skull.

“What do you want?” Kel demanded.

“Oh, come now.” The Crawler who had slammed Kel against the wall shook his head. Silver flashed in the shadows; the left upper quarter of his face was covered by a metal mask. His skin was pale, his brown hair cut short. “Did you think we wouldn’t recognize you, Monseigneur? You wear this cloak every time you come into the city, thinking it disguises you. A foolish consistency.” He flicked the edge of Conor’s cloak with his finger. “We know exactly who you are.”

Monseigneur.

They thought he was Conor.

“Just because I am alone,” Kel said, in his haughtiest tone, “does not mean you can freely lay hands upon me. Not unless you want to die in the Trick.”

There was a quick, uneasy murmur, swiftly covered by a bark of laughter from the silver-masked Crawler. “Prosper Beck sent us, Monseigneur. And I’d guess you know why.”

Prosper Beck? Kel held himself still, hiding any reaction, but his mind was racing. What business did a minor criminal like Beck have with the Crown Prince of Castellane?