Bared Blade by Kelly McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

little while—a very little while by Durkoth standards—I broke the silence.
    “What’s interesting?”
    “You are not what I expected to catch,” said the Durkoth, and again I noted how cold his voice sounded. The only thing about him that moved when he spoke was his mouth, and even that looked wrong and unnatural, as though stone had decided to flow like water.
    “Then perhaps, having mistaken my identity, you’ll be so kind as to release me.” I was in an incredibly bad position, with my legs held in a stone clamp. If I could avoid a fight I would.
    “Perhaps, though not at once, I think. I can sense that you do not have the Kothmerk. And you are obviously not the Dyad. But you did run from the guards when they pursued that creature. Why?”
    “Maybe because they were shooting at me?” Then, because I had no idea if Durkoth even understood sarcasm, I continued. “I feared for my life.” I let my mouth run on by itself—I needed to keep the Durkoth occupied while I tried to think of some way to convince him to let me go. I was pretty sure that knowing what a Kothmerk was would help there, but it didn’t ring any bells. “The guards were using crossbows. Running away from them looked like the best way to keep them from killing me.”
    The Durkoth didn’t respond immediately. He might have been thinking about what I said, or he might have simply forgotten I existed. His expression didn’t change at all, and I had no way to tell what was going on inside his head. It was maddening. Deception and misdirection are a significant part of the Blade’s job. You have to be able to sneak in close to a target if you want to kill them. In many ways it’s like running a successful skip or con, which involves learning to read physical and facial cues. Cues that the Durkoth simply didn’t provide.
    “Could we move this along a bit?” I asked, but the Durkoth held up a hand.
    “Bide.” It knelt and touched the ground with its fingertips again. “One comes.”
    The cobbles let go of my knees, but before I could do anything about it, the ground caught hold of my feet and pulled me under. For a brief moment I stood at the bottom of a hole just big enough for one. Then the cobbles closed above my head, cutting off the light and imprisoning me under a roof of stone. I reached up and started hammering on the underside of the street, and found that the stones were moving. Or rather, as I discovered a moment later, when the cobbles above gave way to the underside of a rough plank floor, that I was.
    The Durkoth’s voice spoke into the darkness then, saying again, “Hush. I will release you when our business is done, but the guards come now. Bide in silence if you want to remain free.”
    “Triss?” I whispered.
    “Just a moment.” I felt him flowing off my skin and up through the wide cracks in the floor above. “There, I can see now. We’re just under the lip of the tenement’s porch.”
    “Oh good.” The words came out higher and tighter than I’d planned. The narrow space reeked of piss and rot.
    “It’s all right,” whispered Triss. “These planks won’t even slow us down once we decide to move.”
    I forced myself to breathe deeply and evenly despite the smells, as I had been taught:
Calm the body and the mind will follow.
It would have helped if I could have borrowed Triss’s senses, but that trick only worked when he held me within himself.
    “What’s the Durkoth doing?” I asked.
    “Looking at a spot on the stree—oh.” His voice grew even quieter—a shadow of a whisper, audible only because he spoke directly into my ear. “A stone dog has just swum up through the cobbles …and here comes his master.”
    I froze. The stone dogs are elementals, creatures of the earth at a level even more fundamental than the Durkoth, and I didn’t know what might draw its attention when I was in its element like this. I’d never felt more vulnerable.
    I tried not to think about the smoky-sweet burn of a