Hushed (26 page)

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.

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.