Bared Blade Read Online Free Page A
Author: Kelly McCullough
like a second skin made of icy silk. But the sensation only lasted for a moment before he expanded outward into a cloud of enshrouding night.
It was a bit like being wreathed in thick smoke. No one could see me and I couldn’t see anyone else. But that’s less of a handicap than it might seem. The priests that raised me as a weapon for the hand of a goddess now dead, had trained me from earliest childhood to operate comfortably in complete darkness. Moreover, while I can’t see in the conventional manner when I’m shrouded, I
can
borrow the senses of my familiar.
Triss possesses a sort of 360-degree unsight, focused much more on texture and differences in light and dark than on the shapes and colors that dominate human vision. It’s a very different way of seeing, and it took me years of practice to be able to make sense of it at all, much less use it effectively.
As I slipped out from under the table, the unsight provided a sort of confused view of turbulent motion as Crown Guards tried to hold the exits against the mass outpouring of panicked shadowsiders. I narrowed my attention to the slice of the taproom near the front door, where I’d last seen the third stone dog. It wasn’t hard to spot, not with the giant circle of completely empty space around it. People stayed away from it even in the dark and half mad with fear. Who could blame them?
Stone dogs are flat terrifying. Imagine one of those guardian statues that sits out in front of the bigger temples. You know the ones; size of a small horse, deep chest, broad shoulders, a head more like a lion than a dog. Now imaginethat one of them’s come to life and is sizing you up as its next meal. Figure in that it can swim through earth and stone like a fish through water, and then add in whatever protective magic its sorcerer-companion has wrapped around it, and …brrr. Just brrr.
This one was moving fast, charging toward Vala and Stel. I let it go past and headed back the way it had come, looking for its master. I didn’t have a lot of choice. None of the weapons I had on me would do much more than irritate the stone dog, and I’m only a middling good spell caster at my best. If I revealed myself, it’d tear me to pieces before I cracked its protections. No, the only chance I had of removing the dog from the equation was to take down its master.
A captain of the Elite, he was just coming through the front door then. Drawing a long knife from the sheath at my belt, I moved toward him as quickly as I could manage without making any significant noise. In the dark tavern, I was effectively invisible, and he didn’t know to watch out for me or my kind, not if they were there for Stel and Vala at any rate. But the Elite were very, very good and I would only get one free shot. I had to make it count. I was coming in from the front, because that was faster, and just about on top of him when the captain raised his right hand and pointed at the darkened chandelier, calling out a spell of illumination.
The room practically exploded with light as the old and faded magelights Jerik had bought secondhand suddenly kindled into eye-tearing brightness. The captain’s gaze flicked across the darkness surrounding me, flicked back, froze. He knew I was there.
Somewhere behind me, Stel screamed.
2
S hade invisibility has its strengths and weaknesses. Biggest strength? In the dark you are essentially invisible. Biggest weakness? The blind spot. In a brightly lit space—like the Gryphon’s taproom had just become—the Shade’s dark shroud registers as a sort of large moving hole in your vision. A lacuna, or void.
Most people will barely register it if it goes away quickly enough or, if they do take notice, they will dismiss it as a symptom of too much drink or incipient headache. But for people who have been trained to look for Shades and their companion Blades, people like the Elite captain I was trying to kill, it’s a clear sign that one of my kind is close at
It was a bit like being wreathed in thick smoke. No one could see me and I couldn’t see anyone else. But that’s less of a handicap than it might seem. The priests that raised me as a weapon for the hand of a goddess now dead, had trained me from earliest childhood to operate comfortably in complete darkness. Moreover, while I can’t see in the conventional manner when I’m shrouded, I
can
borrow the senses of my familiar.
Triss possesses a sort of 360-degree unsight, focused much more on texture and differences in light and dark than on the shapes and colors that dominate human vision. It’s a very different way of seeing, and it took me years of practice to be able to make sense of it at all, much less use it effectively.
As I slipped out from under the table, the unsight provided a sort of confused view of turbulent motion as Crown Guards tried to hold the exits against the mass outpouring of panicked shadowsiders. I narrowed my attention to the slice of the taproom near the front door, where I’d last seen the third stone dog. It wasn’t hard to spot, not with the giant circle of completely empty space around it. People stayed away from it even in the dark and half mad with fear. Who could blame them?
Stone dogs are flat terrifying. Imagine one of those guardian statues that sits out in front of the bigger temples. You know the ones; size of a small horse, deep chest, broad shoulders, a head more like a lion than a dog. Now imaginethat one of them’s come to life and is sizing you up as its next meal. Figure in that it can swim through earth and stone like a fish through water, and then add in whatever protective magic its sorcerer-companion has wrapped around it, and …brrr. Just brrr.
This one was moving fast, charging toward Vala and Stel. I let it go past and headed back the way it had come, looking for its master. I didn’t have a lot of choice. None of the weapons I had on me would do much more than irritate the stone dog, and I’m only a middling good spell caster at my best. If I revealed myself, it’d tear me to pieces before I cracked its protections. No, the only chance I had of removing the dog from the equation was to take down its master.
A captain of the Elite, he was just coming through the front door then. Drawing a long knife from the sheath at my belt, I moved toward him as quickly as I could manage without making any significant noise. In the dark tavern, I was effectively invisible, and he didn’t know to watch out for me or my kind, not if they were there for Stel and Vala at any rate. But the Elite were very, very good and I would only get one free shot. I had to make it count. I was coming in from the front, because that was faster, and just about on top of him when the captain raised his right hand and pointed at the darkened chandelier, calling out a spell of illumination.
The room practically exploded with light as the old and faded magelights Jerik had bought secondhand suddenly kindled into eye-tearing brightness. The captain’s gaze flicked across the darkness surrounding me, flicked back, froze. He knew I was there.
Somewhere behind me, Stel screamed.
2
S hade invisibility has its strengths and weaknesses. Biggest strength? In the dark you are essentially invisible. Biggest weakness? The blind spot. In a brightly lit space—like the Gryphon’s taproom had just become—the Shade’s dark shroud registers as a sort of large moving hole in your vision. A lacuna, or void.
Most people will barely register it if it goes away quickly enough or, if they do take notice, they will dismiss it as a symptom of too much drink or incipient headache. But for people who have been trained to look for Shades and their companion Blades, people like the Elite captain I was trying to kill, it’s a clear sign that one of my kind is close at
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