When Demons Walk Read Free

doubtless she would have destroyed them all, but the Old Man’s gentleness had done its work. Certainly he would be upset about what little she’d managed to do—if he ever found out.
    It was enough for her that she exacted a price from them, a price they might never miss. The bad luck that would haunt them for a while was nothing akin to the pain the Old Man would suffer for the rest of his life. They would shrug it off and go on with their lives, but she would know that they had paid.
    The gold she took she kept safely hidden, and soon now she would have the resources needed to buy a small farm in the country. The Old Man had been born and raised in the fields of northern Southwood and he lived in the city perforce. He had given her a reason to live after her parents had been killed when the Castle fell: This was something that she, with the unknowing help of his destroyers, could give him back.
    She exited the mansion by the front door, using her magic to trip the locks behind her. Squeezing under the hedge again, she made sure that the street was deserted before completely leaving the protection of the shadows. With luck it would be months before anyone discovered the theft. She hoped no one blamed some poor servant, but that was their business and none of hers.
    This time she merely waved at the guard as she trotted past him, seemingly intent on the message she carried back to her employer. By the time a week was gone, he’d never remember her at all.
    She retrieved her bundle of clothing and stopped in the alley that marked the edge of the unofficial but understood border of Purgatory. Quickly she exchanged the expensive silk for worn cotton pants, a baggy shirt, and a stained leather jerkin that disguised her sex much more reliably than the courier’s garb. The undershirt, with its pockets, she left on.
    For most people, walking at night in Purgatory was a dangerous proposition. But Sham’s face was known andstealing from a mage was sure to bring ill luck to the thieves. That was protection enough from the Southwood natives, who already had more bad luck than they needed.
    Like the rest of the Easterners who had come after the initial attack on Southwood, the Cybellian gutter-thugs generally did not believe in magic. But they were wary enough of her skill with the knife or dagger that they didn’t attempt the well-known emptiness of her purse and pockets. If any of them had realized she was female, it might have been different.
    Sham walked a while to make sure that no one followed her, casually nodding to one acquaintance and exchanging warm insults with another. As she came down the hill to the old docks, she used her magic to gather the shadows to her until they hid her from a casual glance.
    It was strangely quiet at the docks without the constant murmurs that the waves usually made even in the calmest time. The sea was at Spirit Tide, leaving a mile-wide stretch of wet, debris-covered sand well below the lowest of the cliff tops.
    The daily tides dropped the ocean level mere feet down the timbers of the docks and allowed only the tops of the cliffs to be exposed to the air. Only once each month did the Spirit Tide expose the pale stretch of beach for a tenth part of a day. One month it would fall during the night and the next during the day.
    The support pillars of the docks rose high into the air, backlit by moonlight. The barnacles that covered them were drying for the few short hours that the tide was out. Years of salt water and tides had marred the thick wooden posts, and neglect had left the upper surface laced with missing and rotting boards.
    The long expanse of beach was covered with the litter of the ocean; barrels and broken bits of refuse lay between the cracked shells and swollen remains of sea denizens. Once in a while, the broken timbers of a ship that the sea had taken would appear, only to be washed out with the next turn of the tide. Once, it was said, an ancient