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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jon Skovron

  Excerpt from The Tethered Mage copyright © 2017 by Melissa Caruso

  Excerpt from Age of Assassins copyright © 2017 by RJ Barker

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover illustration by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map copyright © 2017 Tim Paul

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: November 2017

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  ISBNs: 978-0-316-26820-2 (mass market), 978-0-316-26819-6 (ebook)

  E3-20170826-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Three Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Tethered Mage

  A Preview of Age of Assassins

  By Jon Skovron

  Orbit Newsletter

  For my stepmother, Doctor Sandra Skovron, who never draws attention to her good deeds, so it took me far too long to notice them. Thank you.

  PART ONE

  My fellow brothers strive to avoid doubt. They think doubt makes them weak. They do not understand that doubt is the beginning of true understanding, and therefore true strength.

  —from the private journal of Hurlo the Cunning

  1

  They say he spawned from the blackness of night itself, and that he oozes in and out of the dark like he was part of it.”

  Old Turnel the mason put down his tankard of ale, wiped the foam from his bushy mustache, and fixed the other three wags at the table with a knowing look. They all nodded into their own tankards. They’d heard similar things.

  The Wheelhouse Tavern was crowded that night, as it had been nearly every night the last few weeks. Folks in Stonepeak didn’t feel safe lately, so it was natural for them to gather. And yet they couldn’t stop talking about the thing that filled them with such dread.

  “Someone told me that he makes no sounds and has no mouth,” said Mash the ink maker.

  “No, I heard he had three mouths,” disagreed Trina the cobbler. “One mouth spits acid, one spits poison, and one screams so loud, it makes your ears bleed.”

  “I seen some of his handiwork myself, and them poor gafs weren’t burned or poisoned or anything like that,” said Old Turnel. “Every last one of them had the life choked out of ’em, but without no finger marks on their necks.”

  The people had given this new killer the nickname Stonepeak Strangler. His victims had been turning up every night, from Artisan Way all the way down to the docks. Not just men and women, but children, too. That Shadow Demon from a few months back had been bad enough. But he’d always targeted dissidents and troublemakers. This Stonepeak Strangler seemed to have no motive or pattern, and he was all the scarier for that. Parents had started keeping their children indoors at night, and even the mildest mollies carried a knife with them when they were about town. Over the course of the last month or so, the capital city of the Empire of Storms had become gripped in a fear that seemed very close to boiling over into citywide panic.

  “I heard he can’t abide the sun, though,” said Mash. “That’s something, ain’t it?”

  “If it’s true,” said Trina.

  “My tom heard a funny thing down at the docks,” said Hooper, the dressmaker. He was a quiet wag, but greatly respected by the others as the most successful among them. He’d even made dresses for Lady Hempist and Archlady Bashim, two of the most fashionable nobles in the empire. “You know that old warehouse along the west bank of Trader’s Fork?”

  “The one slowly falling in on itself these past ten years?” asked Trina.

  “That’s the one,” said Hooper. “Anyway, my tom was down there bartering with Jacklow the fisherman. You know him?”

  “He’s my cousin!” Mash said, always eager to impress Hooper any way he could.

  Hooper gave the youngest member of their group a steady look, then said, “Be that as it may, my tom and I have known Jacklow to be a truthy wag who always speaks crystal. And he said someone’s been lurking down in that warehouse for the last month or so. Someone who ain’t entirely … natural.”

  “That’s about the same time these killings started,” observed Old Turnel.

  Hooper nodded gravely as he drank from his tankard.

  “How does he know someone unnatural’s been lurking?” asked Trina. “He seen ’em?”

  Hooper shook his head. “He only hears him, just around sunset, crying and moaning like some kind of beastly thing. Happens nearly every night, he said.”

  Mash shuddered. “Like to give me nightmares, we keep talking in this direction.”

  “Don’t be a ponce,” said Hooper.

  Mash turned to Trina with an appealing look. “Don’t you think so, Trin? This one’s even worse than that Shadow Demon.”

  Before Trina could reply, a new voice cut in:

  “You think so?”

  The speaker sat at the next table over, leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed. He wore the fine jacket and cravat of a lord, which made him a little out of place in the Wheelhouse. But even stranger, he wore glasses that were tinted so dark, they hid his eyes. “And who would win in a fight, do you think?”

  The artisans all looked at each other.

  “Between the Strangler and the Shadow Demon?” asked Hooper.

  “Personally, my money would be on the Demon,” said the newcomer.

  “Why would they fight?” asked Mash.

  “Like as not, they’d be in league,” agreed Trina.

  The newcomer shrugged. “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “
But see now,” said Old Turnel, finger and thumb rubbing his mustache thoughtfully. “They could be competing, you know. For territory.”

  “Could be,” said the newcomer. “Or maybe they’d fight because the Shadow Demon wants to make amends for his past crimes.”

  They all looked at each other again.

  “Ain’t seen you around here, stranger,” said Old Turnel finally. “You got a name?”

  The man grinned. “You can call me Red.”

  Red went down to the docks the next evening. The sky had that peculiar gold color of twilight that made things seem not quite real as he walked past small, one-masted sloops being loaded or unloaded. He wore the soft gray clothes the biomancers had given him when they’d forced him to be the Shadow Demon. His lacy clothes would have stood out in the dockyards, and if he ran into trouble, they would have hindered his movements.

  He’d always considered the docks of Paradise Circle big, with over twenty piers, and upward of fifty ships coming and going at any given time. But the docks of Stonepeak stretched all the way down the Burness River from the heart of the city, through the remains of the Thunder Gate, to the coast. There were even piers built up on some of the larger tributaries that fed into the Burness. And where the Burness met the sea, docks stretched for miles along the southern coast. All told, there were nearly eighty piers and over a hundred warehouses. Red couldn’t even guess the number of ships that came and went.

  Thankfully, Trader’s Fork was one of the smaller tributaries, mainly used as a trading post between artisans for items unrelated to the needs of the nobility. That meant it wasn’t well policed, or nearly as crowded. It was, Red decided, a perfect place for a monster to hide. Red hoped that Jacklow the fisherman had been right about hearing something “unnatural” coming from the abandoned warehouse. Lady Hempist had assigned the mission to him weeks ago, and this was his first promising lead.

  He made his way along the riverbank, skirting the people still working on the docks. There were more than he’d expected this close to sunset, and that worried him a little. Merivale had made it crystal that this mission was to be carried out unobtrusively, like a proper spy mission should be. He wasn’t supposed to draw any unnecessary attention or increase the panic of a city already on edge. He also had to hide his identity by wearing a gray scarf over the lower half of his face. Apparently, it wouldn’t do if anyone recognized the lord of Pastinas Manor out hunting monsters. At first it had seemed silly to keep his mouth and nose covered, yet leave his eyes visible. They were by far his most distinguishing trait. But Merivale had pointed out that, as Lord Pastinas, he was hardly ever seen without his tinted glasses, so most people didn’t even know his eyes were red.

  Red finally reached the warehouse around sunset. That cobbler hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the place was collapsing. Most of the roof was gone, and the walls were beginning to cave in on one another. There were two entrances. One at the riverbank, where goods had likely once been loaded into the warehouse from boats. The other entrance was on the opposite side, where those same items might have been loaded onto wagons for transport into the city. Given the fact that all of the victims had been inland, Red decided to approach from the landward entrance, cutting off the escape route that led directly to innocent people.

  Red had been trying to construct an image of what this creature might look like in his mind, but the various descriptions he’d heard had all been so conflicting, he still had no idea what he would find inside. The only thing he was fairly certain of was that it had been made by a biomancer, with their usual lack of compassion or basic decency.

  As he drew closer to the warehouse, he heard an unsettling keening sound from inside. It was somewhere between the cry of a child and the whine of a wounded animal.

  He saw a large window above the entrance. The glass had already been broken, and he decided it would be a little better than just walking in through the door. He climbed up the wall, his heightened sense of touch allowing his fingers and soft-shoed toes to find any crack or ledge that would help his ascent.

  He perched on the window ledge and surveyed the inside of the warehouse. His red, catlike eyes worked especially well in the dim light. It was a large, open space cluttered with rusted boating equipment, coils of rotting rope, and chunks of roofing that had already fallen. There were windows near the ceiling that let in the last faint rays of sun, drenching everything in crimson.

  The painful cries came from beneath an upturned rowboat by the wall. There was enough space under that boat to allow for a fairly large creature, but whatever it was would have to flip the boat over to get out. That would leave it vulnerable for a moment, giving Red the perfect moment to strike. So he settled in to wait.

  It wasn’t the most comfortable thing, perched up there on that ledge. He had to shake his legs several times to keep the circulation going. And when the last rays of sunlight did finally disappear, the boat didn’t flip at all. Instead, Red watched with sick fascination as something pale and veiny oozed out through the small gap between the boat and the floor. It spread across the wooden floorboards like a lumpy pool of flesh, only occasionally pushing the edge of the boat up as one of the larger chunks passed through.

  Once it was completely free of the boat, Red realized that it wasn’t a blob or pool exactly. There was a shape to it. A human shape. But it was malleable, as if all the bones had been turned soft and pliable. This person lay on their belly, drooping and heavy, arms and legs bowing out to the sides like rubbery insect legs. Then Red saw the mashed-in face.

  “Brackson?”

  Red remembered Progul Bon casually mentioning that Deadface Drem’s old lieutenant had been punished after prematurely revealing Red’s vulnerability to high-pitched sounds. Red had assumed it was something terrible, but even so, he hadn’t expected them to keep him alive afterward.

  The thing that used to be Brackson turned sluggishly when Red called out his name. Instead of walking, or even crawling, the creature had to squirm and undulate across the floor like some kind of human-octopus hybrid. With such a soft rib cage, the weight of his own flesh must be pressing down on his innards. Red guessed it had to hurt like all hells. And the way Brackson’s head sagged to one side like a deflated pastry suggested his brain wasn’t getting much protection either.

  “Brackson, can you speak?” Red had always hated Brackson. But nobody deserved this. He pulled down his scarf to show his face. “Do you recognize me?”

  Brackson made a grunt that didn’t sound particularly friendly. His mouth flapped around. Maybe he was trying to speak, but his jaw was too soft to form the words.

  “Listen. I know we ain’t ever been wags, but what’s been done to you is plain wrong. Let me help you.” He had no idea how, but he knew the prince and the empress. There had to be something he could do.

  Brackson shuffle-slithered toward the door like he was ignoring Red. Or maybe there’d been so much brain damage, he didn’t understand. Either way, he seemed intent on getting out of the warehouse, probably back into town where he could mindlessly strangle anyone he came across with his rubbery arms.

  Red sighed and pulled his scarf back up. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t make things easy for me even now.” He jumped down from the windowsill, blocking Brackson’s exit. “Sorry, old pot. Your murder spree ends tonight.”

  Brackson’s rubbery face stretched into something that might have been a frown, and he gave a low, gurgling growl.

  Red drew a throwing blade in each hand. Brackson paused when he saw the gleaming steel and scrunched back into himself.

  “There, now,” said Red. “You may not understand much, but you still know danger when you see it. Maybe we can settle this peacefully after all.”

  Brackson scrunched even farther into himself. Then he shot forward like a spring, slamming into Red’s chest and knocking him over.

  Brackson trampled over him, and would have escaped, but Red plunged one of his blades into the creature’s soft shoulder a
nd used it as leverage to get on the creature’s back as it passed him. He then stabbed his second blade into the other shoulder and held on tight. He was grateful he still wore his leather fingerless gloves, or the blades might have cut right through his palms.

  Brackson made a warbling sound of protest and took off faster than Red thought possible. It was a strange sort of lurching gait in which Brackson compressed himself, then shot forward, his rubbery arms and legs scrabbling at anything in reach for additional purchase. By this point, Red’s plan was to put a blade or two in Brackson’s soft skull, but at their current frantic, uneven speed, he’d get thrown if he let go of even one of the blades planted in the creature’s shoulders. For the moment, it was all he could do just to hang on.

  Red and his unwilling ride smashed right through the rickety door and down the wagon path toward town. Town was the last place Red wanted this to go, so he leaned hard on the blades in Brackson’s shoulders, steering them in a wide arc through tall grass back toward the docks along the west bank of Trader’s Fork. Brackson had some trouble moving in the grass, and Red thought he was about to get his opening. But before he could take advantage of it, they reached the docks. Brackson’s rubbery fingers and toes hooked on to the widely spaced planks of wood, and the pair lurched forward with even greater speed.

  “Clear the way!” yelled Red as they neared a group of dockhands unloading something from a small sloop that, at this hour, was probably smuggled goods.

  The dockhands dodged to the side, and Brackson smashed through the crates, sending the fine pink powder of coral spice into the air.

  “No loss there,” muttered Red. He still held a grudge against the drug that had claimed his mother and nearly killed him as an infant. He was sentimental that way.

  The dockhands stared incredulously as the bizarre pair raced past them. The dock stretched along the banks of Trader’s Fork for a quarter mile or so. Red saw that there were four or five other groups of workers ahead of them, all blocking the way. He had to end this before every drug runner in Stonepeak saw it. It was time for some risky, and possibly ostentatious, acrobatics.