He paused before entering the place and glanced over his shoulder. There was no sign of it, but he could have sworn someone had followed him into the alley. No visible sign, however-only a feeling.
Thieves learned to trust their feelings.
Kalen pulled aside a loose shutter, pushed into the abandoned building, and immediately crouched low and to the side, his daggers drawn.
Drawing pursuit had been part of the plan all along-light some fires, attract attention-but he hadn’t expected it quite so soon. After all, he’d only lit up one tavern and beat up a few bruisers. Chief Duulgrin was no doubt sore about it, but the Dustclaws weren’t known for their street smarts. Perhaps someone had been watching him from the moment he’d entered the city. But who would have known he’d be coming?
That, then, was his best lead: whoever had anticipated his arrival and was having him shadowed might well be the same gang that had Myrin.
He crouched, warmed by the anger that flowed inside him. He wanted someone to come through that window-wanted to plunge his blades into a foe’s flesh. He waited.
And waited.
Eventually, after half an hour had passed, Kalen gave in to weariness and niggling pain from his wounds. Slowly, he put the daggers away and set up his snare: another of the clay flasks of alchemist fire, balanced to fall out into the alley when disturbed. The liquid inside would burn on contact with the air, not needing a spark. Anyone who followed Kalen was in for a screaming surprise. It might not kill, but it would rouse him from slumber so he could prepare.
Stalking room-to-room inside, one dagger drawn, Kalen found them mostly empty. One upstairs held a withered, sweat-stained bedroll and a pair of surprisingly intact boots. Someone must have lived here once, but no one had been here in a tenday at least.
He was about to sheathe his blade when a scrabbling sound came from inside the closet at the end of the chamber. Kalen raised his dagger, which caught the murky rays of sunlight through the boarded-up window. He moved slowly to the door. Closing his fingers carefully around the latch, Kalen breathed in and pulled.
A skeleton lunged out of the closet, its bony fingers scrabbling for his eyes.
Kalen drew aside quickly and the inanimate skeleton tumbled to the floor, its bones flying in every direction. The skeleton’s jawbone bounced and rolled along the creaking floorboards, finally coming to a rest on the abandoned bedroll.
“Skeletons in Luskan’s closets,” Kalen murmured.
He peered down at the source of the scratching: a bulbous rat, newly freed, looked up at him with wide, red eyes. Greenish froth trickled from its mouth. Having grown up in this city-and learning from an early age to tell which animals carried afflictions-Kalen knew the rat to be both diseased and malnourished, and he didn’t like the way it looked at him.
Kalen nodded to the skeleton. “You didn’t eat all of that poor blaggard, did you?”
The rat cheeped, as though considering the question, took two weak steps forward, flopped on its back, and died. Freedom, it seemed, was a mighty curse.
Kalen inspected the bones, which were bleached as though the skeleton had been there for decades. Probably a slaying spell of one sort or another. He found a few other rat bodies in the closet as well. Perhaps they had picked the body clean, though Kalen had never seen vermin that could do that so completely that they left the body in a standing posture. And how had they come to be sealed in the closet?
A feeling of unease crept over him, as though what he’d thought was a good place to rest had turned suddenly very dangerous.
Ultimately, however, he simply didn’t have the strength to move to a new hideaway. He needed to rest and he wasn’t likely to find a more defensible spot soon. He almost wished he had Vindicator’s familiar if uncomfortable grip in his hand.
Almost.
He resolved that, if more rats came to attack him in the night, his blades and four remaining vials of alchemist fire would just have to do.
He picked up the jawbone and set it back by the skull. “You don’t mind, friend,” he said, “if I share your tomb with you.”
Though it had its jaw back, the skeleton chose silence as a reply.
Kalen kneeled and unbuckled his leather hauberk. Scars and stitched rents crisscrossed the armor, the legacy of thousands of fights Kalen barely even remembered. He’d earned at least one new cut-from Galandel’s sword-that would need to be patched when possible. Before he attended to that, however, he pulled off his leggings and sat bared to his smallclothes in the grimy room. A cough bubbled up in his chest and he covered it with his hand. No blood on his fingers-good.
He drew his pack over and took out a silvered mirror. With it, he inspected himself: hands, arms, legs, back-all those stretches of flesh he could not easily see. He found mostly bruises and small scrapes, but blood trickled from a long and vicious cut on his right shoulder. He remembered the blow that had dealt it-one of the Dustclaws in the alley beside the tavern. Shame, he thought he’d dodged that one. Fifteen years ago, he’d have taken bitter revenge.
He had to do this inspection every day. He usually couldn’t feel his injuries when he received them, let alone afterward. If left untreated, even the smallest of wounds could fester and kill him. He couldn’t die now-he had too much to do.
“I will make of myself a darkness,” he said. “A darkness where there is only me.”
The mantra calmed him, steadying his hands. There was no fear and no pain in the stillness, and he set about to binding his wounds.
The process would have been easy for a true paladin, who could heal at a touch. But Kalen hadn’t felt like a paladin for months-not since Vaelis. And now that he had abandoned Vindicator, the skin-shedding felt complete. He’d honestly been surprised he could heal Ebbius in the alley. Even that touch of grace had grown numb, like his body.
With the efficient confidence of having done it many times before, Kalen cleaned his wounds with liquor from a flask, which stung only dully. His spellscar could be useful at times. Each time he cleaned a wound, he stitched or bandaged it as needed, and then bound it with linen. When he was done, he sat limply against the wall, listening to his breath.
After a moment, with a slightly shivering hand, he drew from among his discarded leathers a folded scrap of paper yellowed with age. Even faded and smudged with tears, the feminine script stood out legibly-Myrin’s last words to him, from a year before.
In the note, she told him she was leaving, that he was looking for something and it wasn’t her. She said she had taken some of his sickness from him-given him some of her life, in exchange for saving her from those who meant her harm.
Myrin asked him not to follow her. She claimed he didn’t owe her anything.
He’d respected her wishes, but he’d kept the note.
He’d read it over and over for a year, usually when crusading in Downshadow turned particularly painful and he considered giving up. The Guard had chased him underground but his quest hadn’t ended. Holed up in one subterranean chamber or another, lit by the last stub of a candle or a burning taper, Kalen had read Myrin’s words when existence had grown most bleak. He’d read them during the undead plague that last winter and when the gangs of Downshadow united to attack Waterdeep above. He’d read them after Vaelis. Somehow, every time, they gave him the strength to go on. No matter how many mistakes he’d made-even mistakes with Myrin-at least he had done something right for her.
But then he’d lost the letter a tenday past. At first, he’d thought it simple forgetfulness, and he’d cursed himself. But ultimately it had been returned to him, four days past, with one significant addition. Another hand had added a single word in blood red letters.