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looking at us that way?”
    “It’s this—” I waved an arm to take in the whole neighborhood. “There’s no one around, which means we can’t pull a decent fadeout. Not on the streets anyway.”
    “What would you do if you didn’t have me to carry?” demanded Stel.
    I couldn’t tell her I’d vanish into shadow, not without admitting what I was, so I offered my second choice. “I’d head up onto the chimney road.” I pointed toward the rooftops. “There’s never much of a crowd up there to begin with, and we pretty much all agree not to see each other when we do meet. But there’s no way you’re going to make it up there, so we need to think of something—”
    A sudden brief blast of light and sound cut me off. What the…
    “Stel, you idiot!” It was Vala, who was glaring up toward the nearest low rooftop—a tannery. “That hurts,
and
you could have killed yourself, us…” She trailed off into a string of obscenity as she started up the wall after her pairmate.
    It was only then that I realized what Stel must have done. She’d aimed the battle wand at the ground, triggered it, and ridden the resulting shockwave up onto the rooftops. I was just about to follow the Dyad roofward when I heard a shout from somewhere behind me.
    “Look there’s one of them now, by the tannery! Get him!”

3

    L ater , if we lived through the next couple of hours, I was going to strangle Triss for getting us involved in this.
    “Go,” I called up to the Dyad. “Head north until you run up against a big street with square stone cobbles and actual lights. Then find someplace to hole up for a bit. I’ll draw them off and catch up to you there.”
    That was when the first crossbow quarrel stuck itself in the wall a few feet from my head. There was a slender gap between the tannery and its nearest neighbor, providing a narrow breezeway. I ducked into it and started to feel my way into the pitch-black depths.
    Another quarrel followed me in, but the angle was too steep and it didn’t come anywhere close to me by the sound of it. The lack of any hostile magic thrown after it suggested that I was going to be spared further Elite attention at least for a little while. That greatly increased my chances of pulling pursuit away from the others without getting myself killed in the process.
    Every cautious step I took involved the sorts of crunching and squishing sounds that make you happy you can’t seewhat you’re stepping on and depressed that you can smell it. Mostly rotten food and dead rats, if I had to guess. I’d gone less than ten feet when I felt the familiar sensation of Triss wrapping me in a skin of shadow, like that moment of welcome transition when you step from the hot street into a cool tavern on a sunny summer day.
    “Shroud up?” he asked.
    “Not yet, we have to give the guard something to follow. I will need your eyes, though.”
    “Done.”
    With that Triss put himself into the dreamlike state that allowed me to use his senses as my own, expanding my “view” of the immediate surroundings to a full 360 degrees of Shade-style unvision.
    That let me pick up the pace to a fast jog and reach the alley at the end of the breezeway just as the pursuing guards got the necessary angle to send more quarrels my way. They were still effectively shooting blind, and the majority of the quarrels stuck in the walls somewhere behind me, but even a blind shot can kill you if your opponent gets lucky. There was more light in the alley proper, so I had to close my eyes as I approached it. The overlay of the two different ways of seeing becomes especially confusing in situations where my own vision moves back and forth from useless to barely helpful.
    I turned right as I moved out into the alley, away from the original direction of pursuit and started really laying down boot leather. The guards weren’t stupid, so I had no doubt they would already have sent runners to try to close off both ends of the little alley.