Read Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel for Free Online

be sure Semner wasn’t coming back, didn’t I?”
    “Ah. Smart thinking.”
    “And don’t forget it.”
    Kallist couldn’t help but smile. He stepped beside the woman he loved—even if he’d also felt, over the past evening, that he could learn to hate her—and reached out to embrace her. His heart fell to his toes when she retreated before him, until he remembered the state of his clothes.
    “New pants, I think,” he suggested with a rueful grin.
    “I’d surely appreciate it.”
    Kallist moved to the bed, stopping long enough to stick a hand through the shutters, collecting a handful of rainwater with which he removed the worst of the blood from his face. “Are you all right?” he asked as he knelt, wincing, to dig through the lower half of the wardrobe. “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
    “Only what you saw, Kallist.”
    “I’m glad.” He staggered and hopped his way around the room, trying to yank a clean pair of trousers over his legs even as he went about collecting certain vital items. “Who do you think hired Semner? Boricov? The Consortium itself? Or maybe that Kamigawa shaman’s also a walker …”
    “Does it matter?” Liliana bent down, wrapping the few remaining strands of solid rope around the splayed limbs of the unconscious thug. “If we sat here listing everyone who might want Jace dead, he’d die of old age before we finished, and save them the trouble.”
    “It matters,” Kallist said, teetering into the center of the room with an armload of traveling supplies, hisscabbarded broadsword protruding from the heap. “It’s going to impact how we run.”
    “Run?”
    “If it’s just the ratfolk looking for a bit of payback, there’s no reason to think you and I are in any further danger. But if the Infinite Consortium’s hunting us again, we’ve got to put at least a few hundred leagues between us and our next home. One of the larger districts, do you think? Glahia, maybe? Not Favarial, for obvious reasons. Or maybe we could—”
    “Kallist,” Liliana said softly, laying a gentle hand across his arm, though he had no memory of her crossing the room, “hush.”
    He hushed.
    “We can’t run,” she told him seriously.
    “I’ve got a pack of supplies and two fairly sturdy feet that say we can, actually. Why—”
    “We have to warn Jace.”
    Kallist’s armload fell to the floor, the hilt of the sword landing hard enough on his foot that, had he not already put his boots back on, he might well have broken something.
    “Semner must have hit me harder than I thought,” he told her.
    “Oh?”
    “I’m hallucinating. I actually imagined I heard you say we should go warn Jace.”
    “Well, that’s a mighty convenient hallucination, then, since I
did
say we should go warn Jace. But at least I won’t have to repeat myself.”
    “You’re insane. There’s no way—”
    “Someone’s got to, Kallist.”
    “Liliana, Jace doesn’t want to see us.”
    “And we don’t want to see him,” she agreed.
    “Precisely. Why ruin such a mutually satisfying arrangement?”
    “Kallist …”
    “He’s never forgiven you, Liliana. And he’s
certainly
never going to forgive
me.”
    “And that, of course, is as good a reason as any to sentence the man to death.”
    “He ruined my life!”
    “Because he was trying to save it.”
    A long pause, as Kallist glared at her—and then his shoulders drooped, the breath hissing through his teeth as it escaped. “Damn it.”
    “Yeah.”
    Kallist slid down the wall to sit, arms on knees, beside the window. Liliana crouched next to him, two fingers running idly through his hair.
    “When did we start worrying about the ‘right thing?’” he asked hopelessly.
    “I think about the time it started to involve someone who saved your life half a dozen times.”
    A final deep sigh deflated Kallist from the waist on up, but finally he nodded. “All right,” he said. And again, “All right. Semner’s got over an hour’s head start.