Excerpt Thursday: GHOST IN THE BLOOD

It’s Excerpt Thursday! Today we have an excerpt from GHOST IN THE BLOOD.

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A man in his middle fifties sat there, staring into his wine. His lank gray hair had been pulled into a tail, and he wore the rough clothes of a common laborer. Muscle corded his arms, and ugly red scars marked his hands and forearms. His disguise was perfect, but Caina recognized him at once. She would have known him anywhere.

She sat across from him.

His gray eyes narrowed. Then a corner of his mouth twisted.

“Should I fear the shadows?” he muttered, speaking in High Nighmarian, the formal language of the Imperial court.

“There are Ghosts in the shadows,” said Caina, reciting the countersign in High Nighmarian, “and let the tyrants tremble in their beds, for the shadows are ever watchful.”

“Indeed,” said the Halfdan, circlemaster of the Ghosts, Caina’s oldest teacher. He switched to Caerish. “Let take a walk along the beach. The air will do me good.” He downed the rest of his wine. “Vile swill. And the fewer secrets our friendly innkeeper knows, the happier we all shall be.”

Caina nodded, left her wine on the table, and followed Halfdan outside. They walked in silence down the bluffs until they reached the shore. The air here smelled of salt and seagull dung, and the constant roar of the surf would stymie any eavesdroppers.

“That is a good disguise, girl,” said Halfdan. “I didn’t recognize you at first. Though you make for an ugly man.”

She laughed. “That is the point.”

“By the by,” said Halfdan, “last night I saw a fire to the north. Sometime after that, I saw the master of the White Road Inn making for Marsis as fast as his legs could carry him, with his family and all his servants.” He looked at her. “You smell like smoke.”

“Things got a little out of hand,” said Caina.

Halfdan said nothing.

Caina sighed. “I burned down the Inn.”

“Did you? That’s a shame,” said Halfdan. “Old Oscar kept an excellent wine cellar.”

“Naelon Icaraeus was there,” said Caina.

Halfdan’s eyes sharpened. “He was?”

“In the flesh,” said Caina. “I thought that Icaraeus would have a courier there, maybe Tigrane or one of his other lieutenants. But Icaraeus was there, along with Tigrane and a dozen men. They’d taken over the Inn, kept Oscar and his family as captives in that excellent wine cellar.” Caina made a fist. “I almost had Icaraeus’s head. I should have had Icaraeus’s head.”

“What went wrong?” said Halfdan.

Caina reached into the satchel, handed Halfdan the twisted throwing knife. “The stories were true. Icaraeus has access to some level of sorcery. That’s how he’s been able to evade capture for so long. A brother of the Imperial Magisterium is aiding him.”

“Or,” said Halfdan, examining the ruined throwing knife, “a renegade, or a foreign sorcerer. Not every incident of illegal sorcery in the Empire is the fault of the Magisterium.”

“No,” said Caina, her hand twitching towards the ring on its cord, “just most of them.”

-JM