“Yes,” I said. I didn’t envy them their positions; nonetheless, I wished we were with them already.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ALCIBIADES
So. There I was, with my only ally, Lord Temur—someone who hadn’t been an ally up until a very short time ago, and maybe it said something about the state of my mind that I trusted him as much as I did, but I did. And there we were, about to be causing a whole lot of trouble for everyone, including ourselves. If Greylace had been around, he would have said something like “Any famous last words, Alcibiades my dear?” Or “I’m so very happy to be sharing this moment with such dashing figures. Oh my!” It was much nicer to be with someone who appreciated the solemnity of a moment like that one: about to go against an emperor by breaking into a veritable holding cell while all his guards, who were a whole lot better equipped than you were, came rushing at you with only one charge.
Kill.
“You seem nervous,” Lord Temur said in such a wry tone of voice that for a moment I didn’t even believe it was him. Gallows humor, I guess they called it. Even the Ke-Han must’ve had a word for it, too.
“Just feeling practical,” I said, trying not to smash my head against the ceiling as the walkways got smaller and smaller. I’d done it twice already, and the last thing we needed was to alert our enemies to our presence because I was hitting my head on things. Places like this just weren’t built for men like me. Little snakes like Caius Greylace were another story entirely.
“Your friend is very resourceful,” Lord Temur replied. “I would not worry about him. I think he can survive anything.”
“We’re not actually friends,” I began to explain, trying to find some patience within me. “In point of fact, I can’t stand the little bastard.”
“Hm,” Lord Temur said. “Time for that later, I suppose, if all goes well.”
He turned to look at me, and I could see his eyes in the darkness, black for the most part but with a flash of light. Sheer determination. I felt it too, coming up to knot in my belly; the way I always felt right before a fight broke out. A real fight, a fight that mattered.
“It is an honor to fight beside you,” Temur went on. They were like the words to some kind of ritual or prayer, and I felt awkward not knowing what my part in all this was, and even more awkward because of all the horseshit that had already gone down. “You are a worthy enemy; this makes you a worthy ally.”
“I don’t take stock in any of that,” I muttered. “Just so you know, I think all this honor and duty and fealty isn’t worth the ground a horse pisses on.”
“About as much as you do not consider the Lord Greylace your friend, I would wager,” Temur replied. “The door is only big enough for one. Who shall go out first?”
“Pardon me,” I said, with a little flourish that would’ve made Caius happy, “but I think I will.”
We could have done this better, maybe; more subtly, definitely. But that wasn’t the point. The point was keeping them from worrying too much about the two who were missing. The point was distraction.
So I put my shoulder against the door, which was too little for me anyway, said a hearty fuck your mother to the element of surprise, and flung myself out into the mirrored hallway where, as Temur had explained, at least six men would be waiting for me.
They were quick. One lunged right at me before he’d even got over looking surprised, sword raised to kill, and this was no wooden blade made to look like the real thing. I was expecting it, of course. The sneaky bastards always had been quick, right up until the end when they’d gone and poisoned us all without our knowing it until it was too late. Lucky for both of us—the country lord and me—it was too close quarters for anyone to be using those murderous longbows that could punch through a horse, not to mention a man.
I braced my sword against the first guard, shouting bloody murder all the while because I was completely finished with sneaking around.
I heard Lord Temur directly behind me, and had a minute of feeling like we’d maybe done a terrible thing to him and his