Excerpt

It's amazing how long it can take someone to die.

Or to be exact: how long it can take someone to die if you're careless. Most people like to talk about the human body like it's a piece of glass . . . breathe on it the wrong way and it'll shatter. Not that I mind; talk like that makes my work a lot easier. But it's all nonsense, honestly, children's stories and drunkards' rantings, often from people you'd think would know better.

The worst are the soldiers. Get them home from a war, and most will swear to you they saw friends of theirs get cut in half by a single arrow, fall stone dead after one knife thrust to the knee. This while sobbing into mugs of mead, making apologies about what bad people they are, this is what war does to you, you ain't seen it, so you can't know.

Nonsense—and boring nonsense, too. Everyone talks about how many people die in war—but I've always been more impressed with how many live. Oh, soldiers know how to kill. Some of them have gotten so used to hacking at strangers for king and country they don't know how to do anything but kill. But they forget how hard it actually was when they were doing it, how the body kept going on a long time after the brain should have shut down and the person with it.

Yes, people die slowly, if you leave them to it. The body doesn't want to die. It's made to heal, to adjust, to get better. So it pays to be careful, to do the job right the first time. Details matter. "You can only put together the large puzzle with the small pieces," Caoesthenes always said, and like everything he taught me it seemed silly at first, a child's rhyme. But he was right, of course; Caoesthenes was always right, except once . . . and that time was my fault.

A slight clatter echoed in the street to my right, and I lowered myself into a crouch as I turned my head toward the disturbance. For the past two hours, I had been standing in the shadows, concealed behind a series of wooden crates stacked across the street from the Ashenzas' home, just past the intersection of Velman and Commerce Streets in the Merchant District of the great city of Cohrelle. This was early for the guards to change their shifts, but I was in no mood to take chances.

Yet as I peered around the crates, I saw nothing more than a man stumbling down the street before lurching out of sight into an alleyway, a slurred tune drifting from him as he went. I vaguely recognized it as one of the newer tavern songs—something about loose-fitting clothing, though that sort of music isn't my stock in trade—and frowned. Concealing myself from some wine-drenched worker stumbling by after wasting his week's pay on a few hours of forgetfulness wasn't necessary, after all; his own sorrows were more than enough to drown out my presence.

I must admit that there has been more than one time I wouldn't have minded trading places with one of those workers, at least for a little while. Their lives might have seemed empty, but at least their issues were their own. What would they have done if they had to solve everyone else's problems but theirs? Who would they have turned to for aid? The fences who lent them money for another spin of the birussi wheel? The courtesans who pretended to be more interested in their worries than their wallets? The bartenders who listened to them pour out their failures over just one more flagon, one more drink added to an unpayable sheet of debt?

I shook my head in annoyance. "Self-pity is the least helpful indulgence," I remembered Caoesthenes telling me once; "No one can help you with a problem you only tell yourself, and you can't help yourself solve the problem if you're wasting time complaining about it." It was true, and weighing everything together, I wouldn't have lasted long drinking myself into oblivion every night. But that didn't make it any easier to dismiss my worries.

With a faint sigh, I turned back to the task at hand. It had been a while since I had been near the Ashenzas' residence, but it looked much as I remembered it; four ornate wooden columns supporting the roof, which extended from the second floor over the ground below, while two rows of four windows each, each window lit with its own lantern, outlined the two floors of the house.

Two guards stood watch outside the main door, facing opposite directions. Four columns, two rows, four windows, two guards; typically symmetrical of Ashenza, who had founded his reputation on care and precise calculation. Ashenza was not a merchant, but an accountant—a money-tracer of sorts, one whose skill in following trails of currency had garnered him favor with Cohrelle's rulers, and some negative attention from those whose intentionally labyrinthine schemes he had managed to unwind. His elevation to the Governor's Circle had helped both the Governor to assert his authority over the merchants in his city and Ashenza to protect himself and his family from the ire his talent raised.

But all that had happened some years ago, and I hadn't heard much about the man for some time. Lady Verencia Ashenza was probably better known now than her husband—because while he avoided attention whenever possible, she sought it like a bee seeks the flower. No party was truly an occasion without her presence, and hosts often found themselves abandoned in favor of the raven-haired beauty who, while flitting from this small group of nobles to that gathering of merchants and city officials, seemed to make every move in the hope of attracting more interest.

Still watching the motionless guards, I put my hand within my cloak and drew forth a small cylindrical case made of wood. Carefully unsealing the rubber stopper, I pulled out the rolled piece of vellum within and unrolled it to read, for probably the fiftieth time, the two words written on its surface:

Lady Ashenza.

Yes, Lady Ashenza, socialite, gossip, by all accounts a vapid buffoon—and, as the rumors now suggested, the head of the sect of Rael. I only knew about any of this from secondhand reports, of course; I didn't spend much time at socialite affairs, and information gathering wasn't my line of work. But still, nothing I knew of Lady Ashenza marked her for a spy or power broker.

The sect of Rael had indeed been more troublesome of late; its adherents, who always had a distressing habit of publicly denouncing all gods but their own, had recently added assassination to their crimes. Only a month ago, a minor city official had been found dead under suspicious circumstances—not unheard of, but unusual, as it had been some time since a member of Cohrelle's government had been involved in anything more public than a scandalous flirtation, or perhaps thieving from the city's coffers. Rael's sect was soon implicated—a dangerous escalation of activity for them, and impossible for some, including the leaders of my Order, to tolerate any longer.

Yet despite this escalation, the Order had, as usual, been waiting for the right moment to correct the imbalance, and I hadn't heard that such a moment was imminent. Sending me without further explanation or preparation was a risky proposition, since I hadn't been involved with the Rael business in the first place. Why, then, had I been sent here?

A shadow brushed by the farthest right window on the top floor and stopped, as if whoever cast it was looking out on the street below. The outline was a little indistinct, but as the shadow turned for a brief moment before vanishing I saw the figure's profile—perhaps a woman, though not necessarily Lady Ashenza herself. What had she seen? Had she sensed something, gazing at the house from the shadows below? Had she heard a whisper of mortality in the air outside her window?

As if she were a character in a cheap bard's song, I thought, irritated. I had work to do, and distracting myself with romantic fairy tales wouldn't help. I silently settled back down into a more comfortable crouch. I would be here at least until daybreak; my survey had just begun.