Bared Blade by Kelly McCullough Read Free Book Online

That wouldn’t stop me. I could always head up to the rooftops or have Triss shroud us up and fade away into shadows. But neither of those options would draw attention away from our Dyad friend, so I preferred to avoid them as long as possible.
    I could hear pursuit in the alley behind me by the time I reached the street. Triss’s senses picked out the bright points of the guards’ magelanterns as they chased after me, but I couldn’t actually see the ones carrying them. Not withoutturning around and using my own eyes. Triss’s unvision just doesn’t work that way. The lanterns washed out his view of the area immediately behind the lights.
    In some ways, Triss’s analog to our vision is more like touch than sight, or maybe hearing. The Blade masters at the temple taught us that bats see with their ears. They scream and listen for the echoes to come back and tell them about the world around them. Texture is important and edges, soft and hard, rough and smooth, colors not at all.
    I don’t know how the masters knew about the bats—probably from quizzing mages with bat familiars—but it’s not really important. What is important is how that relates to the unsight of the Shades. Triss and his fellows see by reading …well, call them dark-echoes that they feel rather than hear, and you’ll be as close as anyone can get to describing it using the human vocabulary. All you really need to know is that the darker it is the better he can perceive things, and that it never ever looks like what you or I would see through our human eyes.
    Whatever the mechanism, it makes for a surreal view of the city. Doubly so since the human mind just isn’t properly equipped to see equally well in every direction. You have to sort of keep your main attention focused on where you’re going, while at the same time setting aside a part of your mind to constantly flick through a rotating view of the entire circle.
    I’d lost the last of my pursuers maybe a quarter mile ago and had just turned to head back to the Dyad, when the street rose up to meet me. And not in any wind-at-your-back, traditional-blessing kind of way. No, this street was decidedly hostile. The muck-covered cobblestones under my back foot dropped away as I was about to push off, robbing my running stride of all its power. At the same time, the street in front of me rose like a low stone wave. I was already off balance when it caught me in the thighs, and I flipped over it like I’d run full tilt into a stone fence.
    I landed more or less on my head, and then slammed down onto my side, driving the breath from my body. On a cleaner street I’d probably have broken a couple of ribs and maybe my neck, but the accumulated filth of years cushioned my fall. Even so, I was stunned half unconscious by the impact and lost my grip on Triss’s mind and senses. Then Triss did something he almost never chooses to do.
    Normally, when Triss encloses me with a shadowy second skin, it feels as though I’ve got a thin layer of cold silk covering my entire body. Now that skin tightened and hardened, becoming something more like chitin. Then it started to move, first rolling me over and up onto hands and knees. Picture an empty suit of plate armor moving of its own accord. Now picture a person inside that armor, moving with it, but not out of any volition. That was my situation as Triss started us scrambling toward the nearest building—a dilapidated tenement.
    I was still pretty dazed and didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that it had to be urgent and dangerous. Otherwise Triss would never have seized control like that. I was just about to ask him why he didn’t stand us up and run if it was that bad, when the ground dropped out from under my hands and we tumbled forward. My forehead hit the cobbles hard, but Triss’s rigid presence saved me from the worst of the impact. This time I was looking directly at the ground when it started moving. I felt a feather of cold touch the