Bared Blade by Kelly McCullough Read Free Book Online Page A

back of my neck when I noticed that whatever was happening, it didn’t show up in magesight.
    Triss quickly got me back up onto hands and knees, but by then it was too late. The cobbles beneath my hands lifted and twisted at the same time the ones under my knees dropped and parted. The street set me neatly on my feet in a knee-deep hole in the ground, while simultaneously turning me to face toward my left. Then the cobbles closed back in, gently but firmly pincering my calves, all without any visible sign of magic. To make matters even more confusing the street was empty.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “Durkoth,” said Triss, his voice a bare whisper in my ear. Then he relaxed his hold over my body.
    “Interesting,” said a cold, perfect voice, and it was only then that I saw my first Durkoth.
    I knew that a score or more lived in Tien, but they mostly dealt with the outside world through emissaries. I’d never encountered one in the flesh before, and I really didn’t know much about them. Subterranean, though I didn’t know if that meant they lived in caves or castles or just swam through earth like the stone dogs. Like their Sylvani and Vesh’An cousins they were inhuman and beautiful, demi-immortal creatures of a much older breed than ours.
    Or that’s what the legends said at any rate. I only knew of one interaction between my order and any of the Others in the last hundred years—the assignment that had earned Siri her second name of Mythkiller. That was the big stuff. Beyond that? What I didn’t know about the Others would have filled books.
    The Durkoth was crouched in the middle of a shallow hole in the street, his bare hands and feet pressed against the roadbed. He was utterly still in a way that no human could ever achieve, and I would have mistaken him for a statue if the earth hadn’t been bringing him swiftly and steadily closer.
He
wasn’t moving, but the hole in which he crouched was, with the cobbles parting around it like water around the hull of a ship, complete to filling in behind him.
    At first, he was the exact color of the cobbles, skin and cloak and all, but when he finally came to a stop a few feet away, it all began to shift and lighten. By the time he stood up to face me, he had returned to his natural coloration, looking like a statue fresh hewn from white marble. Only no statue in Tien had ever been so clean, not even as it stood in the sculptor’s studio. No scintilla of dust or misplaced chip of stone marred his perfection.
    Zhan had a long artistic history, including the previous century’s heroic school, a movement dedicated to the artistic embodiment of the human ideal. Chang Un was considered the greatest of all of Zhan’s heroic sculptors. The Durkothlooked like what Un’s wildest dreams might have looked like if he’d had the skill to chisel them out of stone. I couldn’t help but stare.
    The impression of perfection extended to every facet of the Durkoth’s appearance. His face was human in layout, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, etc. But no human had ever possessed such symmetry of feature, or fineness of line. Each pale round ear perfectly mirrored the other in every detail, including an ideal flare and height that seemed intentionally designed to balance and highlight the shape and placement of his other features and his hair. He was slightly taller than the human norm and muscled and proportioned like the realized ideal of what an athlete
should
look like. A typical example of the breed if the legends spoke true.
    While I studied him, he studied me. At least, I thought he did. It was hard to tell. In living under stone, the Durkoth have become like stone themselves—taking some of its stillness and hidden depths into themselves. His eyes were blank white spheres that did not appear to move. Neither did he seem to breathe, though I knew that was something of an illusion. The Durkoth do breathe, just far too slowly for the human eye to see. After a