Paul Kemp - Twilight Falling

Nothing for a moment, then the wail repeated. He tensed.

A dagger toss ahead of him, a gray alley cat sprinted across Sarn Street, screeching. Another darted after it.

Cats. Only cats.

He realized that he was holding his breath. He blew it out in a sigh.

I'm too on edge, he thought. I need to get off the street.

He decided to take to the rooftops. It would be harder work, especially for a tired man, but safer. He would take the heights for as far as Selgaunt's architecture allowed-a long way usually. In all but the Temple and Noble Districts, the city was amazingly uniform. Two story brick and wood buildings with gently pitched, tiled roofs predominated. A skilled man could cover a lot of ground in Selgaunt without ever putting his feet on the street.

Cale turned off the main avenue and jogged down an alley, startling a handful of cats. The damned things seemed everywhere. There, he melded into the darkness, blade ready. He waited a few moments to ensure that he was not being trailed. Nothing. He whispered a prayer to Mask and a globe of the darkness through which only he could see formed around him. A spy, even one with magically augmented vision, would not be able to penetrate it.

Casting the spell brought him the calm that working had not. He held the mask in his hand and remembered that he was not truly alone, even if his god generally was a bastard.

He ran his hands over the brick and wood walls behind him, found his grip, and climbed to the roof of the nearest building. The exertion further cleared his mind.

As he crested the top of the wall and slid onto the roof, he disrupted a roost of eave-doves. They cooed in aggravation, flapped angrily, and paced about, but did not fly away. He avoided stepping on any of them, crossed the roof and surveyed the street below. Still nothing and no one.

Feeling more comfortable, Cale headed uptown at speed. Sometimes he leaped across alleys, sometimes he was forced to descend to street level for a time before re-ascending another building. The process brought him back to himself. Anyone attempting to follow him would have had to have been very good or very airborne.

In less than half an hour, he reached the border of the Foreign District. Below him, an ancient stone wall, only thigh-high, separated the district from the rest of the city. From the rooftops it looked exactly like what it was: a granite line that symbolically divided the "inferior" foreigners from the native Selgauntans. Despite their thirst for commerce, most Sembians still regarded foreigners as backward and uncultured. Cale thought the Sembians had it exactly wrong. While Sembians, especially "noble" Sembians, worked hard to maintain a veneer of cultural sophistication, at their core they were little better than orcs. Cale had experienced firsthand the cutthroat politics of the "civilized" Selgauntan elite. At least orcs were forthright enough to put an axe in an enemy's chest. The Sembians smiled and stuck a punch dagger in a kidney.

Uskevren excepted, of course, he thought with a hard grin.

The streets in the Foreign District were wide enough to accommodate the larger ox wagons necessary to move shipboard goods from the wharves into the city. The alleys too were wider. Though even there Cale could have stuck to the rooftops, the longer jumps across the alleys would have been riskier. Instead, he descended from the roofs, hopped over the short, symbolic dividing wall, and took to the stone paved streets.

Unattended carts dotted the roads. Painted signs, designed to attract the attention of newcomers to the city, hung from shop fronts, the words barely distinguishable in the light of guttering street torches. Periodic reminders of the recently deceased Hulorn's strange artistic tastes loomed out of the darkness like malformed ghosts-here a bronze statue of a rampant chimera on a raised pedestal, there a stone fountain of a hydra spitting dyed water from the mouths of its many heads.

As Cale walked onward, the sky began to gray. Dawn. The dung sweepers would be about their business soon, collecting dried dung from the street and reselling it in the outlying villages for fuel and fertilizer. Lights started to peek through the slats of shop shutters. Sunrise was only a couple of hours away and the city's merchants were preparing for a new day.

Within a quarter hour, the smell of baking bread started to fill the still air-a wholesome smell. Cale savored it. In a few hours, the stink of horses, crowds, and fresh fish would overwhelm the tantalizing aroma of the city's bakeries.

Cale had always enjoyed the pre-dawn hours, both back in Westgate and in Selgaunt. Cities felt different at that hour. With night still hiding the filth, the quiet streets seemed almost pristine. For the few hours before dawn, the whole of the city belonged to the bakers, the fishermen, and the dung sweepers.

And the assassins, Cale thought.

He had killed more than a handful of sleeping men in those quiet hours. More than a handful….

With a shake of his head, he put the past out of his mind and headed for the flat that he and Jak rented.

Jak didn't maintain a permanent residence in the city and was notoriously difficult to find from day to day-a necessary trait in an independent thief operating in a guild-dominated city. After their encounter with the demon lord Yrsillar, Cale and Jak had established a system by which they could easily and quietly contact one another, in case the need arose. The device was a simple one. They had rented a small room in a two-story, wood-framed boarding house in the Foreign District and paid the landlord, a retired sailor from the Dragon Coast as old as the Netherese Empire and as scarred as a butcher's block, a bit extra to leave it and them undisturbed. He never asked questions as long as they paid. Neither Cale nor Jak ever actually stayed in the room, of course-it wasn't a residence or a safe-house. Instead, it was what professionals termed a "lighthouse." It provided a signal, nothing more.

In this case, Cale and Jak kept the shutters closed at all times unless they wanted a meet, in which case, they opened the shutters on at least two windows. Both were to pass by the flat at least once every two or three days. If the shutters were open, the other wanted to meet at the designated time in one of the three designated locations. The time was always sunset. The locations, in order of preference, were a quiet alehall and inn in the Foreign District called the Gilt Lizard; the Scarlet Knave, a gambling den on the wharves; or a dry well a bowshot outside the north gate of the city.

Currently, the shutters were closed, just as they had been two days before when Cale had walked past. He had not seen Jak in over two tendays.

From the street, the boarding house stood dark. Cale wasn't sure if the other six rooms were even rented. Even if they were, the type of tenants who took rooms there were not likely to rise with the dawn.

He crossed the street and trekked silently up the rickety exterior stair that led to their rented room. He stopped at the door, kneeled, and listened. Nothing. He examined the lock to see if it showed signs of tampering. It didn't. He took out his key, drew his blade-it still carried that odd, dark cast in the steel-and he opened the door.

The room was empty, just as he and Jak had left it. It smelled musty from the recent rains, like an old root cellar. Cale struck a tindertwig on the wood-planked wall and the room took shape in the light. It was a small square without furnishings or even a hearth. Had he actually stayed in the room, a hotpot would have been necessary to heat it in the winter.

Cale moved to the windows, opened the shutters, and secured them against the outer wall. When Jak saw them open, he would come in, close them, and head for the Gilt Lizard.