Damian FINUCANE's Arc

Chapter 25 of 57

Damian slid the sealed envelope into his coat. Two bodies lay in the bright shop. Then he heard boots outside. The mastermind's guards had not scattered. They were regrouping on the street, and they meant to close it off before he could slip away. He looked out the wide glass front. Four men spread across the pavement. Two more came from the tower's base, blades drawn. They knew he was inside. They knew he had nowhere left to run but through them. Damian killed the shop light. He crouched behind the counter and thought. A straight fight through six armed men was a coin toss, and he had no coin to spare. He needed a door they were not watching. He crawled to the kitchen. A narrow service passage ran back from the sinks, the same one the mastermind had used to hide. Damian followed it in the dark. It bent once, then opened onto a loading gap behind the tower's glass base. No guards stood there yet. He stepped out into cold air. Above him rose the tower, sheer glass and steel, its lower floors lit blue. He could not linger. Voices carried around the corner. The men had found the shop empty and were fanning out. Damian moved fast and quiet, keeping the tower wall at his back. He reached the end of the loading gap. One guard stood there, facing the wrong way, watching the main street for a runner who would never use it. Damian did not draw the gemmed sword. Steel would flash and bring the others. Instead he closed the distance in three steps and drove his elbow into the base of the man's skull. The guard folded without a sound. He eased the body down and took the man's short cloak. He pulled it over his own shoulders. In the dark, from behind, one guard looked like any other. He walked, not ran, past the mouth of an alley where two more men searched. Neither turned. His raven dropped from a ledge and settled on his shoulder, silent, guiding him with small tilts of its head toward the open street. Damian cleared the last of them and reached a crowded lane. He shed the stolen cloak into a doorway. The guards were behind him now, hunting a shadow in the wrong place. The street was not sealed. He had walked out through the one gap they left. He did not stop until the tower shrank behind rooftops. Only then did he touch the sealed envelope again. He was free of the tower, and its master was dead. But the mark on the envelope belonged to a hand above the mastermind, someone he could not name. His father's killers were dead. The one who paid them all still gave orders. Damian turned east, toward the temple where his master waited, and set out to learn whose name sat above the tower.