Ghost in the Maze Read Online Free Page A

work. He paid my brothers of the Kindred to kill Vaysaal, and we obliged. But you, Ghost…I knew you would come here. For I know what you want.”
    “And that is?” said Caina, edging closer to the window. If she could keep Anburj talking, that would give her more time to escape. And perhaps the assassin might reveal some useful information.
    “Secrets,” said Anburj. “You want to know about the Apotheosis. I’ve studied you.” He stepped forward, his cold smile sharpening. “All those slavers you robbed? They were not chosen at random, were they not? They were cowled masters who sold slaves to the Grand Master. The Widow’s Tower? One of the chief wraithblood laboratories. Some of the survivors saw a man in a shadow-cloak fleeing the inferno. I know you were there. So when one of Grand Master Callatas’s chief lieutenants was assassinated…what a perfect chance to look around his laboratory, to learn something useful about wraithblood.” He waved a hand at the flickering Mirror of Worlds. “It was a gamble, to be sure…but here you are. Walking so obligingly into my grasp.” 
    “You’re mistaken,” said Caina, taking one final step toward the shutter. 
    “Oh?” said Anburj. “Why is that?” 
    She lifted her left hand. “I came for this.”
    Anburj glanced at the strange ring and spat out a laugh. “Indeed? Then you truly are a fool at the end. So you found a pyrikon? What good will that do you, I ask? You will not leave this room alive. And even if you did, you would never live long enough to reach the Maze. The defenses would make certain of that.”
    “Are you so certain?” said Caina.
    “Entirely,” said Anburj, gesturing to his Immortals. “Take him alive. Maim him if you must, but leave him able to speak. Before we grant him the mercy of death, he is going to tell us everything he knows.”
    The Immortals strode forward, chain whips ready in their hands. Caina had seen them use those weapons in Marsis, and she knew what they intended to do. The whips would curl around her arms and legs with enough force to break bone, and after they crippled her, they would interrogate her. 
    There was no way she could survive that.
    She threw herself backward with as much strength as she could manage.
    Anburj snorted. “Fool! Take him before…”
    The shutters popped open, and Caina fell out the window. 
    And as she did, she saw the gleam of the grapnel.
    Anburj and his men had not spotted her rope.
    Caina grabbed at the rope, the shadow-cloak billowing around her. For an awful, agonizing instant the rope seemed just out of reach, and she was certain that she would fall to her death. But her fingers tightened around the cord, and it uncoiled as she fell. 
    Caina kicked out with her legs, her boots slamming into the stone wall below the window. The impact pushed her away from the wall, and she swooped like a clock’s pendulum over the garden.
    “Rope!” roared one of the Immortals. “He has a rope!”
    “Stop him!” bellowed Anburj in fury. “Now!”
    She heard a click and saw the gleam of steel as an Immortal raised a crossbow, and Caina reached the end of her arc. She swung toward the wall, a steel quarrel hissing past her ear, and saw that her momentum would take her near a closed window on the palace’s fourth floor. Another crossbow bolt hurtled past her to plunge into the garden. Caina braced herself as her swing accelerated, driving her toward the closed window.
    “Fool!” said Anburj. “Cut the rope!”
    The rope suddenly went slack in Caina’s fingers.
    She flung out her arms, and her right hand barely managed to grasp the windowsill, the rough stone rasping beneath the leather of her glove. For an instant she hung by her arm, grateful for all the endless hours she had spent practicing the unarmed forms and building up her strength. Her scrabbling boots found purchase on the wall, and she hauled herself up to the sill. Caina yanked one of the daggers from her boot and jammed it