Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 by Ian C. Esslemont Read Free Book Online Page A

into the dark. ‘Don’t you want it?’
    ‘You can leave it there.’
    ‘We’re even, then?’
    From the far gable, she turned her face to him, her expression unreadable in the shadows. ‘Yes. Even.’
    ‘All right, then. I guess I’ll go.’
    ‘Very well.’
    He came to the gable’s open window. Her face was lowered. ‘Good eve,’ he offered. ‘My thanks.’
    She looked away, blinking. ‘Good eve.’
    He paused, then, thinking he should go, yet something held him back. He felt that he ought to do something more, but didn’t know what that should be. He cleared his throat instead, nodding, and stepped out on to the roof.
    ‘Be careful,’ she suddenly called after him and he stopped where he crouched at the roof’s lip.
    ‘Careful?’
    ‘The rooftops are crowded these days,’ she whispered.
    ‘Crowded?’
    ‘The Nightblades of Kan are here.’
    He laughed – quietly – at that subject of song and stories. It was said that the fearsome Nightblades, servants of the kings of Itko Kan, flew through the dark at a word from the king, penetrated the very walls, and slew his enemies. He waved a hand. ‘Those are just stories.’
    Her warning gaze was fierce. ‘No, it is true! Kan is coming. They are here. I have seen—’ She stopped herself, glanced back within the attic and lowered her face once more. ‘That is, I have – heard – in the market.’
    Dorin knew he spent too little time listening to the talk in the streets below. He knew this was an unavoidable flaw deriving from his strengths – and weaknesses. By nature and preference the rooftops were his territory. And he was a solitary hunter. He shrugged, allowing, ‘Well . . . I have heard nothing. But . . . my thanks.’ He ducked over the lip and began lowering himself down the wall.
    Knowing he would not hear, Ullara murmured, ‘Have a care, my Dancer,’ then retreated within. She tightened her arms about her chest as if fighting to keep some vast explosive force constrained. She fell heavily on a crate and rocked herself, her head lowered. Finally, as if no longer able to suppress a burgeoning eruption, she flung her arms outwards letting loose a great cry and at once every bird of prey leaped to the air, echoing her call with their shrill hunting shrieks, and sped off into the dark. Alone now among the churning dust she fell to the timber floor and curled herself up into a protective ball to lie panting and weeping.
    *
    Dorin traced the rooftops of the Outer Round. This was not as difficult as perhaps in other large cities such as Unta or Cawn, for space within Heng’s walls was at a premium and every building pressed up against its neighbour – most, in point of fact, shared common walls. At one moment he ran the knife-edge of a lead-sheathed roof crest and here he paused, thinking he heard the call of a raptor. This troubled him, as most night-hunters, he believed, were silent. He studied the star-dusted night sky, the bright sickle moon, then ducked and hurried onward. He knew his path was taking him once more to his usual night-haunt: a compound a good third of the way round the walls, close to the north gate. Here, a large warehouse and yard carried out a seemingly aboveboard trade in timber, clay for bricks, and other such mundane building materials.
    But this compound was the property of the black marketeer Pung the child-stealer. Here children captured from across the lands were held, and here they were assigned to their various fates: to work chained in mines where almost none would live to see their fifteenth year; to be cast among the poisonous chemicals of the leather-curing and dying vats where most choked out their lives even sooner – or to be broken to the sex trade where many met their ends in even worse manners.
    This compound Dorin now overlooked from the flat brick roof of a three-storey tenement across the Plains Bourse, a sprawling smoky marketplace specializing in leather goods and metalworking that wound its