CHAPTER 2
I choked on muddy water. Before my brain could process the situation, my body took over. I flipped onto my stomach and retched.
I was still alive and drowning again.
How was I alive?
Every spasm hurt like hell. I felt the pain all the way in my toes.
The last of the water spilled out of me. I coughed, my throat raw, and opened my eyes, half expecting to be back in the same ditch somehow.
No, not a ditch. Above me, high up, was some sort of dark roof or ceiling. I was on my hands and knees in about six inches of water. My left hand was squishing slimy mud. My right was still clutching the money bag, its cord wrapped in a tangle around my wrist.
How . . . ?
I untied the cord and pulled the bag open with shaking fingers. Coins. Handfuls of them.
I hugged the bag to my naked chest and sobbed. For a few moments nothing existed except the bag and overwhelming relief.
Gradually it dawned on me that I was naked again and that what I could see of myself looked unwounded.
Lecke had stabbed me. I was sure of it. I closed my eyes, and my memory served up the knife slicing into me in a flash of pain.
Yes, he’d definitely stabbed me. And then cut my throat.
I checked my neck. No blood. No wound. No scar that I could feel. Nothing on my stomach either.
Even if he hadn’t stabbed me, the river should’ve killed me. I should’ve drowned.
Where the hell was I?
I looked around. The rain still sifted from the sky, but it was no longer a drenching shower.
I had attacked Lecke about thirty minutes after four pm.
Now dusk was creeping in. Dark water stretched in front of me and to the sides, flowing around a narrow strip of muddy ground choked with weeds and low bushes wrapped in a thorny vine.
A stone column rose behind me, supporting the roof above my head.
Far in the distance, the top of the Mage Tower fluoresced weakly against the encroaching darkness.
When I’d waited by the bridge, it had jutted almost directly across from me, and now it was much farther away, which meant the river had carried me downstream.
I had washed up on Ogden Island, a small, marshy chunk of solid ground at the junction of the Koreg and another small river.
Ogden was the only island downstream of the Estret Bridge that would still let me view almost all of the Mage Tower.
I knew this because one of the characters chose this spot for an ambush and had a whole page of inner monologue about the beauty of the Mage Tower and how this was the only island where so much of it could be seen.
On other islands the trees or buildings blocked the view.
I was sitting under Ogden Bridge right by a busy neighborhood. I needed to get the hell out of here before someone noticed me or Lecke came looking for his blood money.
Getting up proved to be a heroic challenge.
My stomach didn’t have a gash, but my whole body hurt as if someone had pummeled me with a baseball bat.
After three tries, I stood and leaned against the column, which was likely a bridge pier, took a short breather, and stumbled forward, keeping my left hand on the stones and my right cradling the money.
Every step hurt, but I was losing light and fast.
I rounded the pier and squinted at the narrow stretch of shrub-covered ground. Something rested on the muddy shore, halfway in the water. The air reeked of an unmistakable, slightly sweet stench.
A dead body. I waded through the ankle-deep water toward it.
It was blue-black and bloated. I couldn’t even tell if it was a woman or a man. It looked like it would fall apart at any moment.
I retched, but there was nothing in my stomach, so I just dry heaved until I peed myself. I would’ve cried, but I didn’t have the energy for it.
The body wore a cloak and some sort of tunic and pants, ripped and stained.
A rope with torn ends wrapped around the corpse’s waist. There must’ve been a weight attached to it.
This was a planned drowning, never meant to be discovered.
The floodwaters had dislodged the corpse from the riverbed and carried it to the island.
I waited until my eyes stopped watering from the stink, walked over to the body, crouched, and unhooked its cloak. Getting it off the corpse proved a lot easier than expected. I pulled, and it came free.
I had to wash it. The river was cold, muddy, and dark. I gritted my teeth, dragged the cloak into the water, and sloshed it around.
A small shape slunk out of the twilight to the right of me. I turned my head.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The little stelka hugged the ground and showed me her teeth.
My voice came out ragged, like a growl. “I will end you. I mean it.”
The stelka hesitated, unsure.
If I ever went back to my world, I would burn every copy of The Thieves of the North I could find. I would build a Viking funeral pyre out of them on a raft, push it into Lake Travis, and howl like a wolf while flames consumed it.
The cloak stank, but not as bad as I expected, so I put it on and staggered around the shore of the small island. The fabric was wool but soaking wet and cold. I could really use some shoes . . . No. Stuffing my feet into boots filled with human sludge was beyond me. Barefoot it was.
The stelka watched me, wary.
The assassin who hid on this island, waiting for his victim to cross the bridge, mentioned that one of the piers had metal handholds for maintenance.
I scanned the three piers. The middle pier offered a row of rusty metal brackets.
My way out. I tied the bag of money around my neck and took one last look around.
Something was wrong with the river’s current ahead. Something odd . . .
There it was, about fifty yards away, a section of the river that seemed unnaturally free of ripples. It was the same color as the rest of the water, a muddy brown, but it was moving at a different speed, slower, as if it were fighting the rushing current.
I had no idea what the hell it was. It wasn’t in the books. I was absolutely sure it wasn’t. I would’ve remembered that. Every instinct in me screamed that it was bad and I had to avoid it at all costs.
The translucent mass cut across the current to the left, heading straight for the island.
Fear shot through me like an electric shock. I spun around and sprinted to the pier with the handholds, stumbling over fallen branches and weeds. The shrubs caught my cloak. I ripped it free and kept going, jerking my feet out of the mud.
Behind me something let out a desperate shriek. I looked over my shoulder. The little stelka was flailing in a clump of thorny shrubs, stuck up to her chest in mud.
The dark thing sped toward us. An eerie feeling squirmed along my back, like a clammy, wet hand brushing my skin. The stelka screamed, a pitiful frantic cry.
Damn it.
I reversed, tore back through the shrubs, yanked the little beast free, and heaved her onto my shoulder. She sank her claws into the cloak and my skin, clinging to me for dear life.
I crashed through the bushes, heading for the pier. Mud squelched under my feet. I slid on the sludge, caught myself, slid again, and skidded into stone. My fingers caught the first metal handhold, and I scrambled up. Three breaths, and I had climbed onto the bridge and whipped around.
Below me, a translucent body slid out of the river. It was formless and stretchy, like a ten-foot-wide amoeba swirling with terrifying darkness. It licked the shore of the tiny island, slid over the corpse, and slipped back into the water.
The corpse was gone as if it had never been there.
What the actual fuck . . .
The terrible creature lingered by the edge of the island, waiting, its surface rippling like some horrible oil slick. It couldn’t climb up the pier, could it? Surely it couldn’t.
I held my breath. On my shoulder the stelka froze, completely still.
The monstrous thing sank below the surface.
A moment . . .
Another . . .
The dark thing floated back up, pushed away from the shore, and the river took it, pulling it under the bridge.
I exhaled.
And realized I had a wild animal clawing into my shoulder. At that exact moment, the stelka realized she was clinging to a weird human. I jerked, she squeaked, I stumbled back, and she leaped off my shoulder and raced off into the night, vanishing between the houses at the other end of the bridge.
Okay then. So that happened.
I slumped against the bridge’s rail. The dark water rushed below me.
I was definitely in Kair Toren. The Mage Tower was where it was supposed to be, the Bluestone Square was as described, Ogden Island, the bridge I was on, Lecke walking across Estret right on schedule—all of that matched.
But there was also the body on the shore and then there was that thing, whatever the hell it was.
That thing shouldn’t have been here. It shouldn’t have even existed. It wasn’t in the books.
Maybe this wasn’t just a book.
I should’ve realized this sooner, but I had been too caught up in trying to survive. Dying must’ve given me some clarity. Wherever I had ended up, this world wasn’t limited by the pages of the books I knew. This place was something else, something much bigger. Something alive and very dangerous.
I swallowed, hid my money under the cloak, pulled the hood over my head, and forced myself to turn away from the river toward the city.
The rain had eased but the streets were still deserted.
Night had pounced, drowning Kair Toren, the outlines of tall buildings charcoal sketches against a deeper gloom.
Darkness pooled in the mouths of alleys and stretched onto the roads.
Here and there a few windows were lit from within, taunting me with warmth.
I had to get off the streets.