Echo in Emerald Read online

  “So you’ll think about the job?”

  I almost laughed. “I don’t want to go to Empara to bring back a boy to come live with you! Who are these men, anyway? What have you done now?”

  “It’s a misunderstanding. It’ll get straightened out. But I need you to make the trip.”

  I just shook my head. “I’m going home now. You can solve this problem without me.”

  He might have replied, but I was walking away, Scar and Red at my heels. Usually when we travel through the city, I let them trail farther behind, so far that it often looks like we aren’t even together, but the little incident under the bridge had spooked me. So I kept them close, though I didn’t have them synchronize their movements with mine. Even at night, even in a largely inebriated part of town, that would have been too noticeable. And so we walked together like a tight band of friends constantly looking out for trouble.

  Pretty soon we were out of the questionable part of town and in the working-class neighborhood where I had my small lodgings. The advantage was that the streets were quieter and safer; the disadvantage was that all the respectable people were already asleep, so there was very little light from doorways and windows to supplement the moon’s ghostly glow. Technically, the neighborhood was a level above my station, since most people who met me would have assigned me to the lowest category of society: the persistent poor. But I was quiet, well groomed, paid my rent on time and never caused trouble, so my landlady was glad enough to keep me as a tenant. I was sure she wondered at the precise relationship between my roommates and me, but she never asked questions and never interfered in my business, and so we got along just fine.

  My apartment was on the second floor of a squat two-level building, and we all climbed the steps as noiselessly as cats. Once we were inside, I made a quick pass through the two rooms to make sure no one was lying in wait. Despite the fact that no one I was acquainted with even knew where I lived, despite that fact that I’d never witnessed any violence in this district, I couldn’t seem to break my habits of caution. Then again, I knew better than most that even home could turn from a haven to a hell in a matter of minutes.

  But for tonight, at any rate, all was well. Nothing disturbed, no one lurking in the shadows. I made sure the curtains were closed, then lit a couple of lamps. Red and Scar were already sprawled on the large, lumpy sofa, one of the six pieces of furniture I owned—the others being two chairs, a table, a bed, and a tall chest of drawers. Anyone who walked in would think the echoes were sleeping, but I knew better. Once we were inside, I had wholly withdrawn my consciousness from them, setting them aside like a pair of shoes I’d kicked off. They wouldn’t move again until I fixed dinner and made sure we all got ready for bed.

  I’d never had a chance to talk to anyone else with echoes, so I didn’t know how it worked for other people. Sure, I’d seen plenty of high nobles riding by in their carriages or strolling through the pricey shopping districts, followed by one or two or three shadow creatures who looked just like them. But from what I’d observed, all of those other echoes absolutely, unswervingly, replicated the actions of their originals. They all dressed alike, they all moved and gestured and smiled in unison—so much so that you wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart if there wasn’t something just slightly different about the echoes themselves. They were all paler than their human counterparts, more diffuse, with eyes that were vacant and voices that never materialized. Reflections, if you will. Nothing more.

  It had been like that at the beginning with my echoes and me, but by the time I was a teenager, I could move between the three bodies as easily as I could turn my head to look over my shoulder. And anytime I was in one body, I could maintain minimal control over the other two, enough to let them walk independently or maneuver around obstacles and other people. I never let them get too far away from me, though; any distance greater than a hundred yards and I started getting nervous.

  I thought this ability to jump between bodies might make me unique among originals with echoes, but I had no way of finding out. Generally speaking, the only people with echoes were high nobles, and maybe the occasional low noble who had married into the uppermost level of society. Not illegitimate street girls like me. Even asking the question—How is it with you and your echoes?—would bring me so much attention that I would rather never know the answer.

  I also went to some trouble to make sure nobody realized what Scar and Red really were. To that end, I took pains to make us look as different as possible. I always dressed Scar in a young man’s clothes, baggy and nondescript. I darkened her auburn hair, kept it cropped short, and usually covered it with a soft-billed cap. I also played up the faint scar that ran across her left eyebrow, using grease paint to redden it every morning. When I was in her body and had to have a conversation, I kept my voice pitched low and my mannerisms brusque. I’d lost track of the people who had later made a point of saying to Chessie, “Your friend Scar isn’t very sociable.”

  By contrast, Red was all woman. I’d let her hair grow out almost to her waist and deepened the auburn color with a rinse that I faithfully reapplied every week. Even on outings like the one we’d been on tonight, I made sure she was dressed in more feminine attire, with low-cut shirts that hugged her bosom and skirts or trousers that emphasized her backside. She got made up every morning, too, but the scar that we all shared was powdered over on her face. Instead, I emphasized her eyes and painted her cheeks and lips in rosy shades. When I was in Red’s body, I was always smiling. Sometimes I thought she might be the only one of my incarnations that remembered how to do that.

  Chessie’s look fell somewhere between the two. I made no effort to hide her shape, so everyone could tell Chessie was female, but her clothes were almost as nondescript as Scar’s and her face nearly as plain. Her hair was longer than Scar’s, shorter than Red’s, and left to be its natural color. All three of us had brown eyes, and there wasn’t much I could do about that. Fortunately, brown eyes were common and no one seemed to notice that ours were all shaped exactly the same.

  While I could spend hours in any one of the three forms and not think twice about it, Chessie’s was the body that I thought of as being me. If I didn’t have a reason to act as Red or Scar, I tended to return to Chessie. As I had tonight.

  I rummaged through the small eating area to put together a late meal, then I roused the echoes so we could all eat. These were the times—at the end of a long day, when I was almost too tired to think—that I was most likely to put the echoes completely under my control. It was just simpler and less wearisome to follow one set of commands—lift fork, open mouth, chew food—than it was to try to orchestrate actions for three different bodies.

  Similarly, once we’d eaten, I got us all ready for bed with one coordinated effort, and we climbed under the covers at the same time. Sleeping was the easiest thing the echoes and I did together; we all dropped off at the same time, turned restlessly with the exact same movements, and woke up at the same instant.

  I did wonder, sometimes, if we all had the same dreams. We had to, didn’t we? Even though Scar and Red moved independently from Chessie, they moved at Chessie’s direction. I never surprised unfamiliar thoughts in their brains when I flung my consciousness from one body to the next. Sometimes I looked—sometimes I thought wistfully how much I would like the echoes to be friends, or sisters, whole and separate creatures with whom I could share my hopes and secrets. But I never found anyone except myself inside their heads.

  So I had to believe that their dreams were my dreams—though tonight, at least, it didn’t matter. I didn’t dream at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the morning I took on Red’s body and dressed with special care, adding a braid to the luxuriant hair and wearing my most flattering black blouse. I worked several days a month at a tavern called Packrat that was located in a neighborhood only slightly less disreputable than the one I’d been in last night. I liked having the steady income to supplement the money I bro
ught in from my more lucrative but less reliable pursuits. And I liked the bits of knowledge I often picked up from the less discreet customers who tended to patronize this establishment.

  It was noon when I arrived for my shift. As usual, I left Scar and Chessie across the street in a scrubby patch of greenery that passed for a city park. In reality, it was a place where a whole range of people loitered looking to make connections for generally illegal transactions. Few people lingered long enough to realize that Scar and Chessie were there all day. Whenever I got the sense that their presence had drawn attention, I called them into the tavern, sat them at one of my tables, and served them a meal. They could sit there a couple of hours pretending to talk and play cards. The bartender and the regular patrons knew them as friends of mine. No one paid them much attention. Or at least, no one asked questions.

  But then, Packrat wasn’t a place people tended to ask—or answer—too many questions.

  Today the weather was chilly but sunny, so I figured the echoes would be fine outdoors at least until nightfall. I settled them on the broken remains of a park bench and stepped through the front door into the tavern. I was instantly enveloped by the friendly smells of beer, bread, onions, and smoke. There were probably a dozen people already there, scattered among the twenty tables. Five or six greeted me by name and a few others nodded in my direction. One of the other servers, Dallie, greeted me in relief as she passed by with a loaded platter. “I could kiss you,” she said.

  “Overworked already?” I asked as I headed toward the kitchen to get an apron.

  She jerked her head to a table of four shoved into the darkest corner of the room. “Jackal’s been here for an hour already. He keeps asking when you’re going to show up.”

  “I’ll have to see what I can do to keep him happy.”

  She snorted and kept moving. I went to the back, said hello to the cook, put on my apron, and picked up a tray of food to carry out to Jackal and his friends.

  The four people sitting at the table all greeted me in their own ways. One of the men and the lone woman said, “Hey, Red,” as I set down the tray. Jackal patted my wrist. The fourth one, the only stranger, slapped me on the buttocks. I nodded at the first three and coolly unloaded all my plates before I spun around and tucked a short blade right under the stranger’s chin, digging it in just enough to let him feel the edge. He goggled up at me, paralyzed with surprise.

  “Don’t touch my ass,” I said in a pleasant voice, “or I’ll cut your hand off.”

  Jackal and the other two laughed uproariously. “She’ll do it, too,” Bertie said gleefully, as if watching a dismemberment was his favorite pastime.

  “Oughta cut his balls off,” Pippa said.

  “I would, but it’s easier to reach his hand,” I said, still pleasantly, still staring calmly down at the stranger. He was thin and a little weaselly, but wiry and probably stronger than he looked. He wouldn’t be easy to overcome if he really went after me, but I’d learned that a show of force early on usually discouraged bullies from making additional attempts.

  “Don’t scare the piss out of him, Reddy-girl,” Jackal said, touching my arm again. “I might need him.”

  I slipped my knife back in its sheath on my forearm and turned to give Jackal the attention he deserved. He was a bit of a rake, a bit of a ruffian, with curly dark blond hair, a ruddy complexion, and a permanently inquisitive expression. Built like a brawler, with big hands and strong arms and a swaggering stance that suggested he thought a fight was the best way to settle a disagreement. He was only ten or twelve years older than I was, but a sharp brain and an utter lack of fear had turned him into one of the savviest players in the criminal network of Camarria. Everyone knew Jackal. If there was a job you needed done, but you weren’t sure who could do it, Jackal could make the introductions. If something had happened but you didn’t know the details, Jackal could fill you in. He generally didn’t bother taking direct action, but he knew how all the game pieces were deployed in the less legitimate enterprises of the city.

  He was my friend, my mentor, and my sometime lover, but he didn’t know I had two echoes. I always assumed he had secrets equally as big. I always assumed everybody had secrets.

  I shook Jackal’s hand off, to show that nobody could paw me without my permission, but then I leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the mouth. Because he was dangerous as hell, but still one of my favorite people. “I’ll be good if he will,” I said.

  Jackal nodded at one of the empty tables nearby. “Grab a chair and sit with us for a while.”

  “Can’t. I just got here. I have to work.”

  “Well, we’ll be here for a few hours,” he said. “Whenever you want to take a break, come over and join us.”

  “All right.” I looked around at the others. Bertie and Pippa were already tearing into their sandwiches, but the stranger was just poking at his, still sulking at my treatment. “Anyone need anything else?”

  “Good for right now,” Pippa said. “Check back later.”

  I nodded to them, then headed to the kitchen. Looked like it was going to be an interesting day.

  And it was, in fact, an interesting day, though long and tiring. The sunshine lured people out of their homes and away from their shops, so we were kept busy serving beer and food. A tableful of drunk young men got a little rowdy and had to be ousted by the bartender and the cook, with Dallie following behind armed with a poker to enforce order if necessary. A young couple who were fondling each other in a booth were interrupted by a furious woman who came charging into the tavern, screaming about cheaters and whores. She picked up a mug of beer from someone else’s table and dashed it into the other girl’s face, so then there was more screaming and some broken glassware. One of the inquisitor’s men dropped by and took a stool at the bar, nursing a drink for an hour as he attempted to overhear what the patrons might be saying about any nefarious plans they were cooking up. Of course, everyone recognized him as one of the inquisitor’s spies, so no one discussed anything more exciting than horse racing while he was on the premises.

  Jackal stayed at the same table all day long, though the roster of people who sat with him changed every couple of hours. He was doing deals, no doubt, collecting and sharing information. He even went over and exchanged a few words with the inquisitor’s man, who seemed to know him. Everyone else smirked into their beer as they watched that conversation.

  I took my second break of the evening a few minutes later. It was an hour or two before midnight and I was tired, but still game for the rest of my shift. Scar and Chessie had come in from the night chill and taken a small table near the back. I’d given them each a beer and let them be.

  Now I dropped down next to Jackal, took a sip from his glass, and nodded at Bertie and Pippa, who had returned about an hour earlier. For the moment, there was no one else at their table.

  “Look at you,” said Bertie. “Still look fresh and pretty as a flower.”

  “I don’t feel fresh and pretty.”

  “You don’t need to be pretty,” Pippa said in her usual bored drawl. “You just need to be good at what you do.”

  Jackal reached over and rubbed the back of my neck, putting some force into it to knead away the tension. “How was your day?” he asked.

  “Long,” I answered. “But entertaining.”

  “That woman,” Bertie said, delighted as always at drama. “Screaming her head off. Do you think that was her husband? She’s got to shorten his leash.”

  Pippa made a sound of disgust. “Man like that, she’d be better off just to let him go.”

  I ignored them. “Best part was watching you make nice with an inquisitor,” I said to Jackal. “You about to turn us all in to Malachi?”

  Jackal grinned. “Now that would be an interesting day,” he said. “I bet he pays better for information than all the rest of these lowlifes.”

  Malachi—the king’s head inquisitor—did pay well and everybody knew it. Stories were legion of would-b
e conspirators betraying their fellows for the reward money Malachi handed out so liberally. You couldn’t trust your brother, your lover, your best friend not to supply information to the inquisitor if the price was good enough.

  It was one of the reasons Jackal was so popular, and so successful. He would never sell anyone out—at least, not to Malachi. His hatred for Malachi was a pure and beautiful thing, completely free of the possibility of corruption. His brother had died at the inquisitor’s hands; Jackal had witnessed the execution, and there was nothing in the world that he wanted more than to see Malachi suffer. He didn’t have the means to hurt Malachi in any significant way, but he took any chance he could find to throw an obstacle in the inquisitor’s path. He would hustle informants out of the city, feed false information to Malachi’s spies, erase evidence that some careless criminal might have left behind. It was the thing I loved about him most, since I was probably the one person in Camarria who hated Malachi even more than Jackal.

  Though Jackal didn’t know that about me, either.

  Didn’t know that Malachi was my father. Didn’t know that I’d spent the first eleven years of my life hearing stories of his faithlessness and cruelty. Didn’t know that I sidled around the streets of Camarria, always on the lookout for the inquisitor, always afraid of encountering him unexpectedly around some busy corner. Didn’t know that I wondered, almost every day, Would Malachi know me if he saw me? Would he remember my face?

  I didn’t imagine I’d ever have a reason to tell Jackal all that.

  “So what did he want here? The inquisitor’s man?” I asked.

  “He didn’t specify.” Jackal took his glass back from my hand and took a slow sip. “But I’m thinking it had to do with the assassination attempt. Malachi’s been investigating that for close to eight weeks now. Must bother him that he hasn’t found anything out.”

  Now we all nodded. Two months ago, someone had tried to kill Prince Cormac, who was next in line to lead the Kingdom of the Seven Jewels. The prince had been unharmed, but the incident had shaken everyone in the city—because just a couple of weeks before that, Cormac’s illegitimate brother Jamison really had been killed. A young noblewoman and her echoes had been publicly executed for Jamison’s murder, but this second attempt had gotten everyone talking. Was someone intent on slaying each of the king’s three sons? Was Prince Jordan also in danger? What about the young princess?