This all should have been quite grim, as Karigan knew how brutal Weapon justice could be, but she detected a frisson of excitement just below his calm exterior. He halted abruptly and turned toward her. Then, before she knew what he was about, he wrapped an arm around her, drew her into him, and kissed her soundly. When he let go, she staggered backward into Raven, who snorted in surprise. She had to throw her arm around the stallion’s neck to remain upright.
“What—what was that for?” Not that she had minded.
Cade gingerly touched his swollen lip. “That hurt.” He grinned, then winced at the pain that caused.
“Well?” Karigan demanded.
“If not for you,” he replied in all seriousness, “I would not have met these other Weapons and had my calling answered. They validated the worth of what I am doing and the tradition behind it, all that I’ve given up to pursue this course. I mean, I know its worth, but now I know it truly. You led me to it.”
“Not on purpose,” she pointed out. “You followed me.”
“You led me in other ways, as well. You have awakened me to the fact there are other possibilities in this world than having to live with oppression. Without you, I would not have realized it, nor would I have come to the tombs and truly become a Black Shield. Thank you.” He gave her a courtly bow.
She wished people would stop bowing to her. “I think I preferred the kiss,” she murmured.
He smiled enigmatically, then turned back to their path, searching through the woods with his light. They soon came upon Widow Hettle’s mule, and Karigan held the light while Cade unbuckled hobbles and tightened the girth. From there they kept walking until the woods fell away and they reached the road. Cade extinguished the lantern.
“We will have to be very careful as we near the city,” he said. “It is after curfew. Well after, if I’m any judge.”
Karigan pulled her cap out of her jacket pocket and placed it on her head, tucking her braid back under. They waited for a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the dark, then mounted up and rode back in the direction of Mill City.
They rode in companionable silence in the misty dark, Raven prancing in a decorous pirouette now and again to remind her of his stallion-ness. Soon the billowing glow of Dr. Silk’s excavation came into view atop the summit of the Old City, his slaves still hard at work in the deep of night. All too soon they came across signs of habitation, and not long after, the lights of Mill City wavered in the mist before them.
“Be watchful,” Cade said in a low voice.
He didn’t need to tell her.
They entered the poor neighborhood on the east side of the canal bridge. Few streetlamps worked well here, and Cade stayed away from those that did. There were few signs of life at this hour—a stray dog dug through rubbish alongside a ruined building, bats swirled around a sputtering streetlamp. The hooves of horse and mule clattered all too loudly on the street. The neighborhood reminded her of the empty ruins that surrounded Castle Argenthyne, the buildings but corpses of a long ago civilization. But this, this was not a long ago civilization—people lived in these buildings in the here and now.
All remained quiet until the bridge over the canal came into sight. The lamps at both ends of the bridge illuminated a pair of Inspectors chatting in the middle of the span, two Enforcers with them. Cade touched her sleeve and urgently gestured they should head down a side street. It was narrower, darker.
“We’ll not be able to cross till dawn,” he explained in a low voice.
“What about another bridge?” Karigan asked.
“Too risky to travel that far, and they may be keeping watch on all the bridges. They do that sometimes.”
“Well, you have all your weapons, and I bet I could take out both of those Inspectors myself.”
“And harming an Inspector or Enforcer would bring the city’s entire complement swarming into this section of the city and leave no one alive. Now, let us go and go carefully.”
He took her down a series of derelict streets. Twice they spotted Inspectors on patrol with their Enforcers trundling alongside them.
“The Enforcers don’t see as well at night,” Cade told her, “or at least as far as we can tell.”
Who was “we?” she wondered. She assumed Cade and the professor, but perhaps he meant the opposition as a whole.
When they heard a shout and running feet, they slipped behind the ruins of a tenement and into overgrowth. A young man pelted past their hiding place, breathing hard. An Enforcer shot after him stretching its long, spindly legs, moving more swiftly than Karigan could have believed of the mechanicals, the tips of its legs hammering the street cobbles in a menacing rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat.
Just as quickly, it skittered to a halt beneath a sputtering street lamp. A hatch on its central orb popped open and disgorged a long metallic tentacle, which lashed out and wound around the man’s torso. The Enforcer tugged, and the man fell. It then reeled him in.
Karigan started in her saddle—it had happened so quickly. Cade grabbed her wrist.
“We should—” she began in a whisper.
Cade’s grip on her wrist tightened. “Too risky.”
She was about to protest when an Inspector jogged up the street huffing and puffing and stopped when he reached the mechanical.
“Got the thief, have we?” he demanded.
“I’m no thief,” the man said, struggling in the coils of the tentacle.
“That so.”