The sight before us registered like a punch in the stomach.
The guard’s body filled the staircase. Blood pooled beneath her and crept over the edge of the stairs. She lay backward as she’d fallen, her head hanging over the edge of one step, eyes staring wide and sightless like a grotesque doll. Tain sprang toward her, but I caught him.
“Wait,” I whispered, my heart rate accelerating. “Look how she died.” I crouched, trying to source the blood. “Stabbed or struck from behind.” My voice sounded thin, squeezed past the tightness in my throat.
“From downstairs,” Tain said, eyes wide. Whoever did this came from inside the jail, not outside. As one, we turned and raced down the stairs and back into the corridor. We’d passed by the Darfri prisoner’s cell on the way in and out without noticing anything. Surely he couldn’t have escaped. He had nothing in there to break out with. But dread gripped my chest.
We reached the cell and stopped short. He hadn’t escaped. In fact, he’d never be leaving that cell, at least not the way he came in.
He lay facedown in front of the pallet, as though he’d risen to meet whoever had opened the door. A lake of blood soaked the floor under his head, dark and glimmering. I felt numb as Tain pushed open the unlocked door. We picked our way over to the sprawling corpse and Tain crouched to check for signs of life. He tentatively moved the man’s head, exposing the massive, ugly wound across his throat. I turned away, my stomach roiling. His killer had nearly sliced his head off. Death had become a commonplace sight in the last few weeks, but somehow the savagery of this one, this murder of a nameless, unarmed prisoner, unsettled me more than all the rest.
Tain dropped the man’s head back down and stood, fists clenching. By unspoken consent, we left the cell and moved out of sight of that horror, back to the main chamber. The empty desk and chair, which should have been filled by a warden, mocked us. It had seemed like such an obvious idea to pull the jail staff onto more important duties. That decision might have cost us critical information, and two people’s lives.
We found the keys to the cells abandoned on the guard’s body on the stairs. Her killer must have dropped them there as they fled. The jail logbook she’d carried was gone—I’d expected nothing else, of course. Our enemy didn’t make mistakes. Indeed, our enemy could do whatever he or she wanted, without fear of us bumbling into their path. They had come in, stolen the keys, waited until we had gone to speak to Varina, then killed a prisoner and the guard on the way out, all without us hearing a thing.
I sat in the empty warden’s chair, feeling more pathetic, more incompetent, than ever before.
* * *
Anger and frustration drove me as I headed to our apartment. We’d released Varina and Hasan—there hardly seemed any need to keep them locked up, and their fear of being exposed to their Guild had made them practically volunteer to keep the whole matter silent. A certain stiffness and pride had been missing when they had left the jail through the Manor exit.
I rounded the last corner and saw a silhouette outlined against the light from our side window; just a glimpse as the figure slipped through our gardens. Heart thumping, I flattened myself around a corner and watched as the figure crossed the road and disappeared into the far side of the Ashes’ garden.
As I’d hoped, he’d used the garden as a route back to the smaller lane that ran parallel to the road, lower down the hill. Having cut through there many times myself, even in the gray moonlight, I knew the best place to climb the wall and slide down the other side, and I was closer to that point than my quarry. I ducked behind the fair lady bush by the wall and waited.
Beyond the fat, silvery leaves he flitted wraithlike across the overgrown lawn, a hooded shadow. I waited until he had two hands and one knee on top of the wall, then slipped out from behind the fair lady, grabbed his free leg, and pulled.
With a grunt he fell backward, landing hard on his backside. I might have been stiff and exhausted but it took little energy to drop my knee down onto the base of his sternum, then twist an arm around behind him, forcing him to his side as I sat on his hips.
He bucked and wriggled, but my knee had winded him and he wheezed feebly.
“What were you doing at my house?” I used my free hand to pull the hood off his head, and was completely unprepared for what greeted me.
“He” was a “she”—tall and wiry, with unruly hair half-obscuring a face twisted in a combination of scowl and pant.
She gasped in pain, then abruptly stopped struggling. Between sucking breaths she spat her hair out of her mouth and glared up at me, still but for the unsteady rise and fall of her chest.
“Who are you, and what were you doing at my house?”
She muttered a curse.
“Let’s try again,” I said. “I think you know my name. What’s yours?”
“None of your concern,” she spat.
I gave her arm a fresh twist and she arched her back, hissing in pain. This time I clearly understood the word she called me. “It rather seems like it is,” I told her. “Why were you at my house?”
After a moment of meeting her scowl with silence, she unclenched her jaw and spoke, more civilly, but with apparent distaste. “I was delivering a message.” The long vowels and lilting cadence of her voice were similar to the Darfri prisoner’s.
“You’re from the estates,” I guessed aloud, and relaxed my grip, a little. “You left your necklace at my house.” I looked at her more closely. “And I’ve seen you before. You’ve been watching me.”
“So he is not as thick as he looks,” she replied, contemptuous. Her eyes raked over me. They were faintly green in the moonlight. “It would not be hard, I suppose.”
“This isn’t the best time for insults, given your situation.”
“Ha!” She blew another chunk of errant hair out of her mouth. “You think I do not know you need us? We have seen you floundering about trying to talk to Darfri in the city. I even followed your clumsy tracks through our catacombs.” She twisted to see my reaction, and laughed at my shock.
“You? You were following me in the caves?” I thought back. The figure behind me had always been hidden by shadow. I had glimpsed the knife, but only my assumption had painted my assailant as male. “You tried to kill me?”
“Kill you?” If possible, her contempt intensified. “I strolled after your lame-bird tracks to see where you went. Why would I try to kill you?”
I stared at her, confusion rising. “You had a knife.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I always have a knife. You would too if you were Darfri living in this city.” She smirked. “I did not realize how close behind you I was. You saw me and feared me, then? Good. Perhaps it felt like our people feel when they are hunted down through the streets of their own city like vermin.”
There was satisfaction but no deception in her expression. Remembering my abject terror during that dark chase, humiliation flooded me. It had all been in my mind, fueled by my own fears and projections. “Suppose I believe you. What’s the message? You’re here, I’m here. Why don’t you deliver it?”
“Let me up first.”
I hesitated. But, honor-down, she wasn’t wrong—we did need the Darfri. Now more than ever, since we had been so wrong about Batbayer and Varina. Releasing her arm, I stepped back, wary. She rolled to a sitting position and rubbed her upper arm and shoulder. Now that I could see her properly, I wondered how I could have mistaken her for a man. She was as tall as me, or taller, and her shoulders were broad, but her scowling face, painted with shadows and swathes of dark hair, was undeniably feminine. The gray cloak had fallen open, revealing a red cotton blouse, stitched with bright contrasting colors.