The Curse of Chalion Read Online Free

chance of a short word, three times repeated on the page, handed him his key. The merchant had chosen the most childish of ciphers, merely shifting each letter one position and not troubling to shuffle his pattern thereafter. Except that…this wasn’t in the Ibran language spoken, in its various dialects, in the royacies of Ibra, Chalion, and Brajar. It was in Darthacan, spoken in the southernmost provinces of Ibra and great Darthaca beyond the mountains. And the man’s handwriting was dreadful, his spelling worse, and his command of Darthacan grammar apparently almost nonexistent. This was going to be harder than Cazaril had thought. He would need paper and pen, a quiet place, time, and a good light, if he was to make head or tail of this mess. Well, it might have been worse. It might have been ciphered in bad Roknari.
    It was almost certainly the man’s notes on his magic experiments, however. That much Cazaril could tell. Enough to convict and hang him, if he hadn’t been dead already. The punishments for practicing—no, for attempting —death magic were ferocious. Punishment for succeeding was generally considered redundant, as there was no case Cazaril knew of a magical assassination that had not cost the life of its caster. Whatever the link was by which the practitioner forced the Bastard to let one of his demons into the world, it always returned with two souls or none.
    That being so, there should have been another corpse made somewhere in Baocia last night…. By its nature, death magic wasn’t very popular. It did not allow substitutions or proxies in its double-edged scything. To kill was to be killed. Knife, sword, poison, cudgel, almost any other means was a better choice if one wanted to survive one’s own murderous effort. But, in delusion or desperation, men still attempted it from time to time. This book must definitely be taken back to that rural divine, for her to pass along to whatever superior of the gods’ Temple ended up investigating the case for the royacy. Cazaril’s brow wrinkled, and he sat up, closing the frustrating volume.
    The warm steam, the rhythm of the women’s work and voices, and Cazaril’s exhaustion tempted him to lie on his side, curled up on the bench with the book pillowed under his cheek. He would just close his eyes for a moment…
    He woke with a start and a crick in his neck, his fingers closing around an unexpected weight of wool…one of the laundresses had thrown a blanket over him. An involuntary sigh of gratitude escaped his throat at this careless grace. He scrambled upright, checking the lay of the light. The courtyard was nearly all in shadow now. He must have slept for most of the afternoon. The sound waking him had been the thump of his cleaned and, to the limit they would take it, polished boots, dropped from the laundress’s hand. She set the pile of Cazaril’s folded clothing, fine and disreputable both, on the bench next to him.
    Remembering the bath boy’s reaction, Cazaril asked timorously, “Have you a room where I might dress, ma’am?” Privately.
    She nodded cordially and led him to a modest bedroom at the back of the house, and left him. Western light poured through the little window. Cazaril sorted his clean laundry, and eyed with aversion the shabby clothes he’d been wearing for weeks. An oval mirror on a stand in the corner, the room’s richest ornament, decided him.
    Tentatively, with another prayer of thanks to the spirit of the departed man whose unexpected heir he had become, he donned clean cotton trews, the fine embroidered shirt, the brown wool robe—warm from the iron, though the seams were still a trifle damp—and finally the black vest-cloak that fell in a rich profusion of cloth and glint of silver to his ankles. The dead man’s clothes were long enough, if loose on Cazaril’s gaunt frame. He sat on the bed and pulled on his boots, their heels lopsided and their soles worn to scarcely more than the thickness of