“So … okay,” he said. “The tower might not be as empty as the locals think, but we don’t know what might be in there.”

  “Correct.”

  “And I have a pendant of a sea god I’ve never believed in.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m looking for this Chest of Algion that might or might even not be there and which you have no actual description of,” continued Kagen. “Which, even if it is there, may either be guarded by a werewolf or something …

  “Yes.”

  “Or might be hidden, perhaps in a secret compartment or with some kind of spell.”

  “A glamour,” supplied Tuke. “Exactly.”

  Kagen narrowed his eyes. “There are times, my friend, when I wonder if this is an elaborate ruse for which I am falling.”

  Tuke spread his hands. “I am covered with sword cuts, an arrow wound in my hand, and a few very nasty stab wounds. If I am so clever as to construct a plot like that to lure you here, would I risk my own life and willingly accept these injuries?”

  Kagen sighed. “When you put it like that…”

  “Either we trust each other or we don’t.”

  “Yeah, well, I once trusted the Harvest Gods.”

  “There is blood on—”

  “The ground between us. Yes, I know.”

  They ate the rest of the fruit in silence.

  “I have to tell you, Tuke,” said Kagen later. “I’m not sure I believe any of this.”

  “I can tell.”

  “But I’ll give it a try, as I promised.”

  “Thank you,” said Tuke.

  “The imperial coronation is coming up fast,” Kagen mused. “I should be out recruiting a handful of good fighters to help me kill the Witch-king and instead I’m spending days on what is likely to be a complete waste of my time.”

  “Or not,” said Tuke vaguely. “Once we’re done here, I will help you find some Unbladed willing to die for a cause. If we ply them with enough drink and convince them they’ll be famous and mentioned in songs for the next couple of centuries, we should manage to hire a few.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kagen.

  “Perhaps if we do manage to get the chest and make it to Argentium,” mused Tuke, “we can see about that rumor of refugee Argonians in their tent city. Perhaps a few of them might take up your cause. Though, by now, most will have moved on. Still, there are some who might have taken up the Unbladed path, likely as Unseen, so they can move more easily among the Hakkians there in Argon.”

  “That’s a long shot,” said Kagen. He changed the subject. “What exactly did that old woman, this Frey person, tell you about the chest? How will I even know if it’s the right one?”

  “I asked her the same question, and she gave me this.” He reached into the small pouch in which he kept his pipe and tobacco and withdrew an object wrapped in silk. When he opened it, Kagen saw a very strange silver key.

  “And you’re just telling me now?” asked Kagen sourly.

  “You haven’t needed it before now,” said Tuke. “But here, take it. Keep it safe. Mother Frey said she went to considerable extremes to obtain it.”

  Kagen took the key and held it to the light. It was short-barreled, with a complexity of teeth at one end and an oval loop at the other. The metal felt cool in his hand and did not warm up with handling. There was writing cut into the shaft, but he could not make it out.

  “What does it say?” he asked.

  Tuke smiled. “It’s a word. A name perhaps. Maralina. Mother Frey said the language is not a human one.”

  “What then? The language of house cats?”

  “The language of the faerie folk,” said Tuke in a fake-mysterious voice.

  “Oh please…”

  Kagen examined the key. It looked ornate and pretty, but it felt strange. The persistent coldness of the metal troubled him. And the scrolled writing seemed to shift and change, though that was probably just the sunlight filtered through trees, he judged.

  He put the key in his own purse.

  They sat and looked at the tower.

  “Sunset,” said Tuke.

  “Sunset,” agreed Kagen.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE

  Kagen climbed the tower, making no sound at all.

  Even his weapons were silent, each wrapped in sheepskin with the wool turned inward. He was a cautious thief, as Tuke had instructed him to be. He still hated heights, but now he was driven more by desire to get this over with and focus entirely on his plan to return to Argentium and kill the Witch-king.

  As he climbed, though, he distracted himself by thinking about that plan. Or the complete lack of same. Now that his head was not stuck inside a vat of wine, the logical part of his mind became clear. Clarity brought with it a lot of doubt. There were so many things that needed to be done in order for this to even have a chance. Finding men and convincing them of the merits of the mission. Financing the mission—the money he had was melting away already. Getting his team from Vahlycor to Argon without being arrested or killed.

  If he could manage all of that—and he had no specific ideas about how any of those steps were to be managed—then getting into the palace was the easy part. He’d grown up there and, along with the merry pranksters Jheklan and Faulker, had found a half dozen ways in and out. Some were so obscure that he doubted the Hakkians would have found them.

  Once inside, the plan became virtually impossible again. Nor did he have the ghost of an idea of how to manage it. He cursed himself for the weeks wasted mooning around the countryside feeling sorry for himself.

  “Kagen the Damnfool,” he muttered as he climbed.

  The Tower of Sarsis was two hundred feet high and the windows were near the top—four of them, looking in each of the cardinal directions, with a narrow balcony encircling the building. Every eight hours a basket was lowered on a boom, allowing one sentry to leave and another to be hoisted up. There were no doors at ground level, and the sentries never saw more than the upper chamber, where they ate, rested, and sheltered from bad weather. Those sentries never saw who operated the boom or cranked the pullies to lift them up and down. There was some kind of lever system that allowed someone inside the tower to perform those tasks.

  A guard walked in a slow circle around the balcony all through the day and all through the night. Five minutes to make a complete circuit. It could have been done more quickly, but there was no need for haste. The sentry had a full quiver of arrows and a stout longbow.

  The garden that surrounded the tower was strange enough to put Kagen on edge. It was choked with wildflowers and herbs of every kind, but when he scaled the outer wall prior to climbing, Kagen tripped over something hidden amid creeper vines and old roots. He knelt to feel for what it was, quickly, afraid that it would be some kind of snare laid to foil burglars. But as soon as he picked it up, he could tell that it was a length of bone. Kagen held it up to the moonlight and saw that he held the cannon bone from a horse’s front foreleg. The bone looked positively ancient, as if it had lain there for a century or even longer. He felt around and found more horse bones. Quite a large number of them. And when he found the skull of one animal, he was surprised to discover that it still had the faded remnants of the bit, cheekpiece, headpiece, and all the rest. The leather was cracked and dusty, the metal fittings nearly rusted away.

  He found the bones of three more horses, all of them with bridle and saddle. And a large mound that he at first took for a pile of undistributed mulch was actually the shattered and rotted remains of a carriage—and a rather elegant one.

  Kagen felt a tingle of apprehension. The horses were dead, but there were no marks of spear or sword on them. What then had killed the four big animals, and more to the point, why do such a thing? It was a mystery, and a rather unnerving one. It called to his imagination, trying to coax him into solving it, but Kagen had not tarried.

  And so he had climbed.

  The tower rose like a spike of polished platinum, gleaming silver-white beneath a leering moon. Climbing it was even harder than it looked, but not as hard as Kagen had expected. And he was fit. Since easing off of the booze and training with Tuke, he’d leaned himself down to a rock-solid thirteen and a half stone. The acid no longer burned the back of his throat and his head was clear. For the first time since the morning before the fall of Argentium, he felt like his old self. He swore to himself that if he somehow survived this and the attack on the coronation, he would never let himself become a wine-soaked slob again.

  Muscles that could be awakened for the occasional fight with the Ravens were now taut and strong, rubbery and efficient. How the hell he’d survived those battles was a mystery to him, because he could remember how clumsy and awkward he’d been. Now he felt as dangerous as he used to be.

  That, of course, brought with it a fresh set of regrets. Had he been sober the night of the attack, he felt he could have saved some of the Seedlings. Maybe even saved his family as well, not to mention the empress. How the hell had he allowed himself to get that stupidly drunk that evening? Most of that night was a faded blur.

  Stop fighting yesterday’s battles, you idiot, he told himself. Today and tomorrow are all that matter.

  That was a great philosophy and would be very inspirational on the wall of a training hall. Even so, it was sound advice.

  He climbed.

  His chosen route up the tower was an even split between the most scalable access and the approach best hidden by the structure of the guard’s patrol platform. It was also one that faced a baker’s shop that always closed at sundown, on the dot, and would not open until dawn’s first light. The odds of anyone seeing him this late at night were virtually nil.

  A dry rustling sound made him freeze, and as he hung there like a spider, he tried to make sense of the sound. The noise was odd, as if a breeze were riffling the pages of some old book. But then he looked up and saw movement directly overhead, and there, perched on the handrail, was a crow. Skinny and weatherworn, its wings dulled by age and hard use. However, its eyes were as black and vibrant as a piece of polished obsidian. The bird looked down at him with those wise old eyes.

  Kagen waited. He watched and endured being watched.

  The bird looked familiar, and although there were countless crows and other black birds, this one seemed to know him. Following an impulse he did not then, or ever after, understand, Kagen raised one hand toward the bird, stretching his fingers up to touch the bottommost of its tail feathers. Not to chase it away. Merely to touch.

  The touch did not startle the crow, did not chase it away. Instead, it lowered its head and opened its mouth. With incredible delicacy, the bird closed its beak around one of Kagen’s fingers. Not a peck or a bite. Something else.

  The contact lasted only a few moments, and then the crow toppled from the railing, snapped its wings open to catch the air, and flapped into the night in an eerie and unnatural silence. Kagen watched it vanish, a fragment of darkness consumed by shadows.

  Then he continued climbing. His fingers and toes were sore and his muscles ached from the difficulty of clinging to meager edges of stone. He achieved the bottom of the walkway and clambered over, silent as the lofty stars. He crouched there, listening for the footfalls of the guard, judging where in the revolution the man was. Then Kagen began moving, following the direction the sentry took. He slipped a small ivory tube from inside his dark clothing and used his thumbnail to remove wax plugs at either end. Then, creeping forward, he came up behind the guard.

  When he was close enough to touch the man, Kagen made a single sound—the soft rattling call of a nightjar. The guard turned, a smile beginning to form on his face. Kagen put the tube to his mouth and blew very hard. A puff of nightflower dust shot into the man’s face, and in the space of one heartbeat to the next, the sentry was transformed from an alert guard to a smiling dreamer. His eyes glazed and lost focus and he puddled down. Had Kagen not grabbed him, the guard would have pitched over the rail.

  Kagen lowered the man to the walkway, pulled precut lengths of silk from a belt pouch, quickly bound the sentry’s wrists and ankles, and stuffed a knot of cloth into his mouth. Then he lashed him to the rail lest he roll over and through the rails.

  Satisfied, Kagen straightened and crept to the closest window, which was unlighted and open to the stars. A pair of cats sat on the top step, and when he approached, they moved away with absolutely no show of haste, moonlight glittering in their yellow eyes. Kagen drew a long knife, careful not to let that moonshine strike bright sparks from the blade.

  Thus armed, Kagen Vale, newest member of the Unbladed and contracted thief, entered the Tower of Sarsis.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

  Filia alden-Bok steered Dog through the narrow streets of Arras, with Horse trotting beside her, tongue lolling and wagging. Woman, horse, and dog were all dusty from the long roads they’d traveled. The lurid glow of the setting sun turned dust to gold, and whenever they paused, the three looked like statues.

  The evening sun had already dropped over the horizon and purple clouds were gathering in the east. The air was heavy with seawater and salt, and a cold wind was blowing from the ocean. Filia wore her leather trousers and tunic, but there was a chill in the air, so she had her travel cloak pulled tight against the cold. As she rode, she noticed something she’d seen in other towns: the first thing people did was glance at the color of her cloak. The Ravens and their mercenary hirelings all wore yellow cloaks, though some of these were trimmed in blue or black. Filia’s was as gray as the clouds. Although Filia often worked as one of the Unbladed, she carried a warrant allowing her to own a sword, and as she rode into town, she left the sword handle exposed. The image she wanted to present was that of a knight or agent of some noble house. It reduced the chances of anyone accosting her.

  Filia found the inn where Kagen and Tuke were staying and slid from her mount. She tied the horse to the rail set aside for customers, below which was a trough.

  “Don’t go wandering off to find some flirtatious mare, you big goof,” she said.

  Dog blew softly and rubbed his nose against her cheek.

  Filia clicked her tongue for Horse, and with the brute of a hound at her heels, she walked inside. There was a patio filled with tables and chairs, but few customers.

  Nothing like an invasion to kill the tourist trade, she thought as she took a seat in the corner, with good sightlines to the entrance.

  A teenage girl with frizzy red hair and masses of pimples came over to take her order. Local beer and a steak, plus a bowl of water and a beef bone for Horse.

  When the girl came back with the order, Filia said, “Couple friends of mine are staying here. Big Therian with tattoos and a lad from the north. Blond hair and pale blue eyes.”

  Mother Frey had told her about the disguises. Filia couldn’t wait to see Kagen as a blond.

  “Oh, sorry, miss,” said the girl. “They left right after dinner.”

  “‘Left’ as in checked out of the inn?”

  “Oh, no, miss … They went for a walk,” said the girl brightly. “They often do that.”

  “Thanks,” said Filia, and waved her off. She dug in to her steak while watching the street outside fill with shadows. She glanced down at Horse. “Went for a walk. Hm. What do you think? Should we go looking for them or wait?”

  Horse gnawed his bone and appeared disinterested in everything else in the world.

  “Wait it is, then,” said Filia.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

  The room he entered was, as he expected, the guards’ quarters, but that only took up a small section of the top floor and was empty except for a chair, a table, and a commode. Behind a partition was a set of stairs that coiled downward into shadows. Up from that darkness rose the smell of exotic incense and strange, sad music. And the distinctive smell of cats. A lot of cats. From below, it was impossible to see the ceiling of the tower, and Kagen was surprised to discover that it was made from panes of clear glass ten feet across. Dozens of them, each fitted into a domed frame made of copper. This was a very surprising thing, because the glazier’s art was still relatively new, and clear glass was uncommonly rare and very expensive. He’d never seen a pane of clear glass bigger than a foot square. A network of metal wires was attached to various panes, and it seemed to Kagen that this was some device for opening them.

  In the center of the glass room was a device of a kind Kagen had never seen before—a huge barrel easily thirty feet long and made from steel and brass. There were all manner of levers and dials on it, though what their purpose was, Kagen could not even guess. The tube squatted on a platform set with gears and levers to turn it, and the top of the contraption pointed through one of the open panes.

  Crowding the room were large and ornate worktables, and scattered on the floor were charts, pieces of parchment, and even painted canvases showing stars and constellations. He wondered if that barrel contraption was somehow used to study the stars.

  There was no one in the room except a large tabby cat who lay on one of the star charts, watching him with unreadable green eyes. Kagen put a finger to his lips and very quietly said, “Shhh.”

  The cat yawned and turned away.

  Kagen turned back to the stairs.

  The music drifting up from below was sweet and strange, like nothing he’d ever heard before. Kagen wasn’t even sure he could tell which instrument played it. Some kind of exotic flute, perhaps. The sound had a plaintive quality, like a lonely gull out over the sea. Threaded through it was a note of keening of unutterable sadness. Kagen found himself swaying as he listened to it, and his mind wanted to yield to the call of his strange dreams.

  “No,” he told himself, firmly.

  I must have sniffed some of the nightflower powder, he thought, and that made him nervous. The drug could cause dizziness and hallucinations, which was the last damn thing he needed.

  The fragrance from below was also enchanting. Mixed floral scents and something else. A metallic odor, not at all unpleasant.