"Take them."
The line of guards came forward, and Nathan’s hand closed on the dagger under his cloak, and every path out of the yard ran through Kira, and he had nothing.
Then the guard on the far left left the ground.
Something hit him from the side, a ball of churning dark that came out of nowhere and took him full in the chest, and he went off his feet like a kicked toy and slammed into the warehouse wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He slid down it and did not get up.
The line stopped dead.
"What—"
The cobbles split.
Vines came up through the seams of the stone, black, glistening, moving wrong, too fast and too deliberate, and they took the nearest guard around both legs and climbed him in a heartbeat. He got half a scream out. Then the vines sank into him, through cloth, through skin, like roots finding soft earth, and the scream changed into something Nathan felt in his teeth.
"MAGE!" the sergeant bellowed. "Dark mage! Shields, form on—"
He didn’t finish.
The torchlight bent. All of it, every flame in the yard, leaned sideways at once as if the fire itself were trying to get away, and the dark between the guards came alive.
Nathan stood with his back to the wall and watched eight armed men come apart.
It was fast and it was silent where it should have been loud. A guard raised his blade and the shadow under his own feet swallowed him to the waist. Another turned to run and the dark ball took him between the shoulders. The sergeant got his shield up, roaring, and the black vines wrapped the shield, and the arm holding it, and folded both backward with a sound Nathan chose not to keep.
Kira pressed into his side. Her small hands locked around his arm, gripping hard, and he could feel her shaking against him, and he put his hand over hers without looking away from the yard.
’What is happening.’
His heart was slamming. His eyes went from falling man to falling man, hunting for the source, finding nothing but leaning torchlight and moving dark.
’Who is doing this. Where are they. What in the gods’ names is—’
The last guard dropped.
Silence came down on the yard, total, broken only by the guttering of the bent flames and the small sounds of men who were down but not all of them done.
And then, between one blink and the next, there was a figure in front of them.
It didn’t walk in. It was simply there, an arm’s length away, tall and still in a cloak the color of the bottom of a well, hood drawn so deep there was no face in it at all. The cold that came off it wasn’t Nathan’s cold. It was something else, older-smelling, like turned earth and closed rooms.
Kira made a very small sound and got behind him entirely.
"Those whistles carried," the figure said. A man’s voice, low, unhurried, cultured in a way that didn’t belong in a warehouse yard. "The district watch you’ve just seen dealt with is the least of what answers them. The next to arrive will be Royal Guards. You have perhaps two minutes. Follow me. Immediately."
Nathan didn’t move.
’Royal Guards.’
The words went through him like ice water. He knew exactly what Royal Guards meant. Ledgers. Names. A report climbing the city’s spine to a man with crimson eyes who thought he was already dead.
But his feet stayed planted, and his hand stayed on his dagger, and his mind sprinted.
’Who are you. Why would you help us. Nobody helps us.’
He’d learned that lesson in a carriage, off men with warm smiles and bread. Kindness from strangers had a price, and the last time he’d paid it on a storeroom floor.
But.
He made himself look at the yard. Eight guards, down in the space of ten breaths, taken apart by a power he couldn’t see coming and couldn’t have answered. If this man wanted them dead, they were dead. There’d have been no warning, no offer, no two minutes. They’d simply have joined the sergeant.
’He didn’t have to help. He didn’t have to speak to us at all.’
’And if I stand here being careful, the Royal Guards do the king’s work for free.’
Somewhere, streets away, a whistle shrilled. Then another, closer, answering.
Nathan gritted his teeth.
’No choice. Move now, get answers after.’
He took Kira’s hand, firm, and gave the hooded figure a single hard nod.
"Go."
The man moved like the district belonged to him.
Not running. Never running. He went at a fast walk through lanes Nathan hadn’t found in his scouting, gaps between buildings that didn’t look like gaps until you were in them, a stretch of shadow along a wall that the lamplight somehow never crossed. Twice, boots hammered past on a parallel street, close enough to hear the men breathing, and both times the cloaked man simply stopped, and the dark around the three of them seemed to thicken, and the boots went by.
Kira kept pace without a sound, her hand locked in Nathan’s.
They went down. A stair behind a cistern, a door that looked like a wall until the man touched it, a passage of old cold stone sloping under the district, lit by nothing until the man raised one hand and a dim, sourceless grey light came up around them.
The passage opened into a chamber.
It was underground and it was old, older than the streets above it, dressed stone and low arches, and someone had made it comfortable in a way that made it worse. Shelves of books and sealed jars. Long tables with clean instruments laid out in rows. Lamps of that same grey, sourceless light. The smell of herbs over lye, and under the lye, something colder.
The door closed behind them on its own.
Nathan put Kira behind him and put his back near the wall and kept his hand where his dagger was, and the cloaked man crossed the chamber unhurried, as if none of that were worth remarking on.
"You can stop measuring the exits," the man said, mildly. "If I intended you harm, the yard was more convenient."
"Then what do you intend?"
"Introductions. To begin with."
The man turned to face them.
And he reached up, with both hands, and drew back his hood.
The face beneath was older than the voice. Sixty, perhaps, silver threaded through dark swept-back hair, a neat grey-shot beard, deep lines around eyes that were the flat grey of river ice, and those eyes went over Nathan the way no one’s eyes had ever gone over him, not the slavers pricing his organs, not the guards, no one. Slowly. Hungrily. Head to foot and back again, settling at last on the scarred line across his throat.
The man smiled, warm as a lamp, and it did not touch the ice at all.
"Well," Vane said softly. "Aren’t you a rare thing."