A Gathering of Shadows Read online

  But as Lila strode down the dock, she didn’t feel off-balance. If anything, she felt centered, grounded. Like a weight hung in the middle of her being, and nothing could knock her over now.

  It made her want to pick a fight.

  Alucard’s first mate, Stross, liked to say she had hot blood—Lila was pretty sure he meant it as a compliment—but in truth, a fight was just the easiest way to test your mettle, to see if you’d gotten stronger, or weaker. Sure, she’d been fighting at sea all winter, but land was a different beast. Like horses that were trained on sand, so they’d be faster when they ran on packed earth.

  Lila cracked her knuckles and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  Looking for trouble, said a voice in her head. You’re gonna look till you find it.

  Lila cringed at the ghost of Barron’s words, a memory with edges still too sharp to touch.

  She looked around; the Night Spire had docked in a place called Sasenroche, a cluster of wood and stone at the edge of the Arnesian empire. The very edge.

  Bells rang out the hour, their sound diffused by cliff and fog. If she squinted, she could make out three other ships, one an Arnesian vessel, the other two foreign: the first (she knew by the flags) was a Veskan trader, carved from what looked like a solid piece of black wood; the second was a Faroan glider, long and skeletal and shaped like a feather. Out at sea, canvas could be stretched over its spindly barbs in dozens of different ways to maneuver the wind.

  Lila watched as men shuffled about on the deck of the Veskan ship. Four months on the Spire, and she had never traveled into foreign waters, never seen the people of the neighboring empires up close. She’d heard stories, of course—sailors lived on stories as much as sea air and cheap liquor—of the Faroans’ dark skin, set with jewels; of the towering Veskans and their hair, which shone like burnished metal.

  But it was one thing to hear tell, and another to see them with her own eyes.

  It was a big world she’d stumbled into, full of rules she didn’t know and races she’d never seen and languages she didn’t speak. Full of magic. Lila had discovered that the hardest part of her charade was pretending that everything was old hat when it was all so new, being forced to feign the kind of nonchalance that only comes from a lifetime of knowing and taking for granted. Lila was a quick study, and she knew how to keep up a front; but behind the mask of disinterest, she took in everything. She was a sponge, soaking up the words and customs, training herself to see something once and be able to pretend she’d seen it a dozen—a hundred—times before.

  Alucard’s boots sounded on the wooden dock, and she let her attention slide off the foreign ships. The captain stopped beside her, took a deep breath, and rested his hand on her shoulder. Lila still tensed under the sudden touch, a reflex she doubted would ever fade, but she didn’t pull away.

  Alucard was dressed in his usual high style, a silvery blue coat accented with a black sash, his brassy brown hair pinned back with its black clasp beneath an elegant hat. He seemed as fond of hats as she was of knives. The only thing out of place was the satchel slung across his shoulder.

  “Do you smell that, Bard?” he asked in Arnesian.

  Lila sniffed. “Salt, sweat, and ale?” she ventured.

  “Money,” he answered brightly.

  Lila looked around, taking in the port town. A winter mist swallowed the tops of the few squat buildings, and what showed through the evening fog was relatively unimpressive. Nothing about the place screamed money. Nothing about it screamed anything, for that matter. Sasenroche was the very definition of unassuming. Which was apparently the idea.

  Because officially, Sasenroche didn’t even exist.

  It didn’t appear on any land maps—Lila learned early on that there were two kinds of maps, land and sea, and they were as different as one London from another. A land map was an ordinary thing, but a sea map was a special thing, showing not only the open sea but its secrets, its hidden islands and towns, the places to avoid and the places to go, and who to find once you got there. A sea map was never to be taken off its ship. It couldn’t be sold or traded, not without word getting back to a seafarer, and the punishment was steep; it was a small world, and the prize wasn’t worth the risk. If any man of the waters—or any man who wished to keep his head on his shoulders—saw a sea map on land, he was to burn it before it burned him.

  Thus Sasenroche was a well-guarded secret on land, and a legend at sea. Marked on the right maps (and known by the right sailors) as simply the Corner, Sasenroche was the only place where the three empires physically touched. Faro, the lands to the south and east, and Vesk, the kingdom to the north, apparently grazed Ames right here in this small, unassuming port town. Which made it a perfect place, Alucard had explained, to find foreign things without crossing foreign waters, and to be rid of anything you couldn’t take home.

  “A black market?” Lila had asked, staring down at the Spire’s own sea map on the captain’s desk.

  “The blackest on land,” said Alucard cheerfully.

  “And what, pray tell, are we doing here?”

  “Every good privateering ship,” he’d explained, “comes into possession of two kinds of things; the ones it can turn over to the crown, and the ones it cannot. Certain artifacts have no business being in the kingdom, for whatever reason, but they fetch a pretty sum in a place like this.”

  Lila gasped in mock disapproval. “That hardly sounds legal.”

  Alucard flashed the kind of smile that could probably charm snakes. “We act on the crown’s behalf, even when it does not know it.”

  “And even when we profit?” Lila challenged wryly.

  Alucard’s expression shifted to one of mock offense. “These services we render to keep the crown clean and the kingdom safe go unknown, and thus uncompensated. Now and then we must compensate ourselves.”

  “I see….”

  “It’s dangerous work, Bard,” he’d said, touching a ringed hand to his chest, “for our bodies and our souls.”

  Now, as the two stood together on the dock, he flashed her that coy smile again, and she felt herself starting to smile, too, right before they were interrupted by a crash. It sounded like a bag of rocks being dumped out on the docks, but really it was just the rest of the Night Spire disembarking. No wonder they all thought of Lila as a wraith. Sailors made an ungodly amount of noise. Alucard’s hand fell from Lila’s shoulder as he turned to face his men.

  “You know the rules,” he bellowed. “You’re free to do as you please, but don’t do anything dishonorable. You are, after all, men of Arnes, here in the service of your crown.”

  A low chuckle went through the group.

  “We’ll meet at the Inroads at dusk, and I’ve business to discuss, so don’t get too deep in your cups before then.”

  Lila still only caught six words out of ten—Arnesian was a fluid tongue, the words running together in a serpentine way—but she was able to piece together the rest.

  A skeleton crew stayed aboard the Spire and the rest were dismissed. Most of the men went one way, toward the shops and taverns nearest the docks, but Alucard went another, setting off alone toward the mouth of a narrow street, and quickly vanishing into the mist.

  There was an unspoken rule that where Alucard went, Lila followed. Whether he invited her or not made little difference. She had become his shadow. “Do your eyes ever close?” he’d asked her back in Elon, seeing how intently she scanned the streets.

  “I’ve found that watching is the quickest way to learn, and the safest way to stay alive.”

  Alucard had shaken his head, exasperated. “The accent of a royal and the sensibilities of a thief.”

  But Lila had only smiled. She’d said something very similar once, to Kell. Before she knew he was a royal. And a thief, for that matter.

  Now, the crew dispersing, she trailed the captain as he made his winding way into Sasenroche. And as she did, Sasenroche began to change. What seemed from the sea to be a shallow town se
t against the rocky cliffs turned out to be much deeper, streets spooling away into the outcropping. The town had burrowed into the cliffs; the rock—a dark marble, veined with white—arched and wound and rose and fell everywhere, swallowing up buildings and forming others, revealing alleys and stairways only when you got near. Between the town’s coiled form and the shifting sea mists, it was hard to keep track of the captain. Lila misplaced him several times, but then she’d spot the tail of his coat or catch the clipped sound of his boot, and she’d find him again. She passed a handful of people, but their hoods were up against the cold, their faces lost in shadow.

  And then she turned a corner, and the fog-strewn dusk gave way to something else entirely. Something that glittered and shone and smelled like magic.

  The Black Market of Sasenroche.

  IV

  The market rose up around Lila, sudden and massive, as if she’d stepped inside the cliffs themselves and found them hollow. There were dozens upon dozens of stalls, all of them nested under the arched ceiling of rock, the surface of which seemed strangely … alive. She couldn’t tell if the veins in the stone were actually glowing with light, or only reflecting the lanterns that hung from every shop, but either way, the effect was striking.

  Alucard kept a casual, ambling pace ahead of her, but it was obvious that he had a destination. Lila followed, but it was hard to keep her attention on the captain instead of the stalls themselves. Most held things she’d never seen before, which wasn’t that special, in and of itself—she hadn’t seen most of what this world had to offer—but she was beginning to understand the basic order, and many of the things she saw here seemed to break it. Magic had a pulse, and here in the Black Market of Sasenroche, it felt erratic.

  And yet, most of the things on display seemed, at first glance, fairly innocuous. Where, she wondered, did Sasenroche hide its truly dangerous treasures? Lila had learned firsthand what forbidden magic could do, and while she hoped to never come across a thing like the Black London stone again, she couldn’t stifle her curiosity. Amazing, how quickly the magical became mundane; only months ago she hadn’t known magic was real, and now she felt the urge to search for stranger things.

  The market was bustling, but eerily quiet, the murmur of a dozen dialects smoothed by the rock into an ambient shuffle of sound. Ahead, Alucard finally came to a stop before an unmarked stall. It was tented, wrapped in a curtain of deep blue silk that he vanished behind. Lila would lose all pretense of subtlety if she followed him in, so she hung back and waited, examining a table with a range of blades, from short sharp knives to large crescents of metal.

  No pistols, though, she noted grimly.

  Her own precious revolver, Caster, sat unused in the chest by her bed. She’d run out of bullets, only to find that they didn’t use guns in this world, at least not in Arnes. She supposed she could take the weapon to a metalworker, but the truth was, the object had no place here, and transference was considered treason (look what had happened to Kell, smuggling items in; while one of those items had been her, another had been the black stone), so Lila was a little loath to introduce another weapon. What if it set off some kind of chain reaction? What if it changed the way magic was used? What if it made this world more like hers?

  No, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  Instead, Caster stayed empty, a reminder of the world she’d left behind. A world she’d never see again.

  Lila straightened and let her gaze wander through the market, and when it landed, it was not on weapons, or trinkets, but on herself.

  The stall just to her left was filled with mirrors: different shapes and sizes, some framed and some simply panes of coated glass.

  There was no vendor in sight, and Lila stepped closer to consider her reflection. She wore a fleece-lined short cloak against the cold, and one of Alucard’s hats (he had enough to spare), a tricorne with a feather made of silver and glass. Beneath the hat, her brown eyes stared back at her, one lighter than the other and useless, though few ever noticed. Her dark hair now skimmed her shoulders, making her look more like a girl than she cared to (she’d let it grow for the con aboard the Copper Thief), and she made a mental note to cut it back to its usual length along her jaw.

  Her eyes traveled down.

  She still had no chest to speak of, thank god, but four months aboard the Night Spire had effected a subtle transformation. Lila had always been thin—she had no idea if it was natural, or the product of too little food and too much running for too many years—but Alucard’s crew worked hard and ate well, and she’d gone from thin to lean, bony to wiry. The distinctions were small, but they made a difference.

  She felt a chill prickle through her fingers, and she looked down to find her hand touching the cold surface of the mirror. Odd, she didn’t remember reaching out.

  Glancing up, she found her reflection’s gaze. It considered her. And then, slowly, it began to shift. Her face aged several years, and her coat rippled and darkened into Kell’s, the one with too many pockets and too many sides. A monstrous mask sat atop her head, like a beast with its mouth wide, and flame licked up her reflection’s fingers where they met the mirror, but it did not burn. Water coiled like a snake around her other hand, turning to ice. The ground beneath her reflection’s feet began to crack and split, as if under a weight, and the air around her reflection shuddered. Lila tried to pull her hand away, but she couldn’t, just as she couldn’t tear her gaze from her reflection’s face, where her eyes—both of them—turned black, something swirling in their depths.

  The image suddenly let go, and Lila wrenched backward, gasping. Pain scored her hand, and she looked down to see tiny cuts, drops of blood welling on each of her fingertips.

  The cuts were clean, the line made by something sharp. Like glass.

  She held her hand to her chest, and her reflection—now just a girl in a tricorne hat—did the same.

  “The sign says do not touch,” came a voice behind her, and she turned to find the stall’s vendor. He was Faroan, with skin as black as the rock walls, his entire outfit made from a single piece of white silk. He was clean-shaven, like most Faroans, but wore only two gems set into his skin, one beneath each eye. She knew he was the stall’s vendor because of the spectacles on his nose, their glass not simply glass, but mirrors, reflecting her own pale face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking back to the glass, expecting to see the place where she’d touched it, where it had cut her, but the blood was gone.

  “Do you know what these mirrors do?” he asked, and it took her a moment to realize that even though his voice was heavily accented, he was speaking English. Except that no, he wasn’t, not exactly. The words he spoke didn’t line up with the ones she heard. A talisman shone at his throat. At first she’d taken it as some kind of fabric pin, but now it pulsed faintly, and she understood.

  The man’s fingers went to the pendant. “Ah, yes, a handy thing, this, when you’re a merchant at the corner of the world. Not strictly legal, of course, what with the laws against deception, but …” He shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? He seemed fascinated by the language he was speaking, as if he knew its significance.

  Lila turned back to the mirrors. “What do they do?”

  The vendor considered the glass, and in his spectacles she saw the mirror reflected and reflected and reflected. “Well,” he said, “one side shows you what you want.”

  Lila thought of the black-eyed girl and suppressed a shudder. “It did not show me what I want,” she said.

  He tipped his head. “Are you certain? The form, perhaps not, but the idea, perhaps?”

  What was the idea behind what she’d seen? The Lila in the mirror had been … powerful. As powerful as Kell. But she’d also been different. Darker.

  “Ideas are well and good,” continued the merchant, “but actualities can be … less pleasant.”

  “And the other side?” she asked.

  “Hmm?” His mirrored spectacles were unnerving.

 
“You said that one side shows you what you want. What about the other?”

  “Well, if you still want what you see, the other side shows you how to get it.”

  Lila tensed. Was that what made the mirrors forbidden? The Faroan merchant looked at her, as if he could see her thoughts as clearly as her reflection, and went on. “Perhaps it does not seem so rare, to look into one’s own mind. Dream stones and scrying boards, these things help us see inside ourselves. The first side of the mirror is not so different; it is almost ordinary….” Lila didn’t think she’d ever see this kind of magic as ordinary. “Seeing the threads of the world is one thing. Plucking at them is another. Knowing how to make music from them, well … let us say this is not a simple thing at all.”

  “No, I suppose it’s not,” she said quietly, still rubbing her wounded fingers. “How much do I owe you, for using the first side?”

  The vendor shrugged. “Anyone can see themselves,” he said. “The mirror takes its tithe. The question now, Delilah, is do you want to see the second side?”

  But Lila was already backing away from the mirrors and the mysterious vendor. “Thank you,” she said, noting that he hadn’t named the price, “but I’ll pass.”

  She was halfway back to the weapons stall before she realized she’d never told the merchant her name.

  Well, thought Lila, pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders, that was unsettling. She shoved her hands in her pockets—half to keep them from shaking, and half to make sure she didn’t accidentally touch anything else—and made her way back to the weapons stall. Soon she felt someone draw up beside her, caught the familiar scent of honey and silver and spiced wine.

  “Captain,” she said.

  “Believe it or not, Bard,” he said, “I am more than capable of defending my own honor.”