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that.”
    “Well, yes, but—”
    “But nothing. You told me that was the path you wanted to walk going forward,
and
that I should help you stay on it. Consider this helping.”
    Somehow I was losing an argument with my own shadow. Again. “Later, you and I are going to have a long talk about exactly what helping me means.”
    “But there is no time now,” said Triss, and rather smugly in my opinion.
    “No there isn’t, so if you’ll just …” But I could already feel him flowing up my legs to encase me in a second skin of cool shadow.
    A moment later, he released his will to me. Using the part of myself that was temporarily Triss, I touched the lock on the door and extended a tendril of shadow-stuff into the keyhole. From the outside the lock looked simple enough, the sort of crude iron mechanism you might expect to find in the stable of a run-down inn, but it was more than it seemed. Much more.
    The inner workings were of Durkoth make, though not their best, nor even the best they sold to humans. I couldn’t begin to afford the finest the Other smiths had to offer. What I could and had done was add spells devised by the priests of Namara to reinforce and enhance the Durkoth workings. It would have been far easier for an intruder to break down the thick oak door than to pick the lock.
    Shaping and hardening the shadow-stuff into a key—the original, I had long since destroyed—I sent a pulse of magic through the lock and twisted. The door opened inward. The room beyond hardly seemed worth the effort, tiny and tucked into the wedge where the roof met the wall of the stable. It barely had space enough for the pallet and low table that were my only real furniture—a small trunk provided a rough bench as well as storage for my more precious possessions.
    I closed and latched the door behind me before I reached for the shaded magelight fixed to its lintel. Closing up wasted time, but not much, and it was hard to push aside the cautious habits of a lifetime. With a touch I moved aside the shade, filling the room with an intense and expensive white light. A mosaic of threadbare rugs would prevent it shining through to the stable below and I’d chinked all the cracks in the walls long ago.
    I released Triss then and he dropped to the floor, briefly providing me with a normal sort of shadow before shifting to dragon form and extending himself across the room. While I applied the tip of a knife to the socket holding the magelight, Triss cracked the spelled lock on my trunk and popped the lid. I was going to miss the trunk, but it was too bulky to move quickly.
    I tipped the trunk up on end, dumping its contents across the rug, then grabbed my sword rig off the top of the resulting pile. The arrangement of leather straps and steel rings held two short straight swords in a matched set of hip-draw back-sheaths as well as several smaller sheaths for knives and other tools of the Blade’s trade.
    Fixing a heavyweight canvas pack to several of the rings was the work of a few moments, as was filling it. I tossed in the best of my clothing, a few durable items of food, a tucker bottle of Aveni whiskey—Kyle’s fifteen—and finally the magelight, plunging the room into darkness once more. Put that on my back, add my much worn trick bag, and the pouch that held what little money I currently possessed and I was ready to go. Figure five minutes total, and back out to the ladder.
    I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me. It wouldn’t have slowed down the sort of searchers I expected to come once some witness connected me with the Dyad. There was also the slim possibility that if no one had to deal with the lock, no one would look at it closely enough to see that it was more than it ought to be. There were clues there as to what I was for those with magesight and the training to see them, so that would be for the best.
    I was almost disappointed to find the Dyad waiting for me in the courtyard. Since they didn’t look very