Ward Against Death Read Free Page B

grate and see where we are in regards to the city.”
    “There’s a grate ten feet that way.” He pointed down the pipe. “But I can’t lift it and carry you at the same time.”
    “Oh.” Did thoughtfulness counterbalance his possible attempt to manipulate her? She didn’t think so.
    He jumped down and reached out to help her. She ignored his hands, landed beside him, and slung her rucksack over her shoulder.
    “Maybe you could suggest a hiding place,” he said, sloshing through the muck. “Someplace we can hide for a day. I think I’ll need the whole day.”
    “What for?”
    “The Jam de’U. If you factor in finding the components, plus preparation for the spell, and—”
    “I get the point.”
    Reaching the access pipe, she grabbed the ladder. Above glowed the soft yellow light of a lantern, which meant they were still in the second ring of the city or the palace ring, since they were the only rings that could afford street lanterns. At least alns. At he’d said something right. He hadn’t gone far.
    She climbed to the grate, quieted her breathing, and listened for possible dangers. Wherever they were, it was quiet, with only the odd chirp of a cricket and the hiss of a few dead leaves dancing along the cobblestones. It might be too late in the evening for anyone to be up in the Nobles’ ring. She could only hope.
    Bracing her legs on one side of the pipe and her back on the other, she reached up to grab the grate.
    “What do you see?” he asked, startling her.
    She clung to the grate to keep her balance, contemplating one of many possible nasty retorts. It was so difficult to remember it could all be an act. If she was smart, she’d get rid of him after he’d done his spell. She couldn’t risk that her death wasn’t real.
    “What’s out there?”
    She had to keep manipulating him if she wanted to discover if he was after something. “Nothing,” she said in her sweetest voice.
    The grate complained like the last one and she cringed. Please let no one have heard that. Thankfully, the street remained silent, so she poked her head out of the pipe and glanced around.
    Sure enough, they were still in the second ring. The street lanterns looked like the ones at the bottom of her family’s driveway. Across from her rose a high brick wall with a massive coat-of-arms of crossed swords above an open goddess-eye built into the brick. Her mouth went dry and she concentrated on keeping her mind blank.
    The idiot had taken her right to the front gate of the Collegiate of the Quayestri, home of the highest law in the principalities. All it took was for her to let her thoughts wander and for some inexperienced Inquisitor apprentice to lose control of his abilities and accidentally read her memories. Everything she’d done would be projected into the air with that Goddess-awful seeing-smoke, and every officer of the law would know what she was guilty of.
    And with the way her evening had gone so far, it would be one of her first assassination assignments projected. Every Tracker in residence would be after her and if caught, she’d lose her head—and that was a death no necromancer could bring her back from.

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    It would be a perfect end to a perfect night: to have both of the principality’s most powerful forces chasing her. And no one but a two-bit necromancing player on her side.

THREE

    Ward gazed up the access pipe at the outline of Celia’s shapely bottom. She was just so beautiful, and he was just so dumb when it came to women. A little pout, a few tears...
    She was using him. He knew it the moment she’d disappeared into the sewer, but she’d called on the Oath and he had sworn it, even if the Society of Physicians had forsaken him. And, as always, he found himself ankle deep in—
    It was like Bantianta all over again. Except then he’d been well rested and—his stomach growled—he’d had a full stomach. His head throbbed at the memory of the Inquisitor ripping into his mind to project him