"In the ruined chapel, the dying man's last words came back in a stranger's voice."
Rain fell through the ribcage of a roof that had forgotten how to be a roof. The nave's stones held thin pools where the world turned black and flat and doubled; every drop stitched the reflections back together and unstitched them again.
Aiden knelt beside the courier who had reached this much shelter and no more. The man's coat was soaked and torn, the wound beneath it noisier than the weather. His right hand clutched something like a shard of night, glass‑black, edges too clean, refusing to slip free.
"Take it," the man had said, and now could not repeat. Aiden pried the shard loose, and it came as if choosing him. In his palm it showed the door behind him, the square beyond, the leaning bell frame—everything but his face, which refused to exist on its surface. He tilted, seeking himself, and the shard replaced him with the rain.
"Take it," the chapel breathed back, the wet stones catching the last words and returning them in a voice that was not the courier's. The echo had the shape of Aiden's breath and the distance of a stranger.
He stood because kneeling made prey and prey bled quickly. He slid the shard to his right hand and tested the weight: light, yet present the way a promise is present even before it's kept. He did not want a promise he didn't make. He wanted leaving.
Bootsteps entered the nave with patience that owned the air. Three sets. Crisp, unhurried. Silence gathered around them like a fabric they'd paid for and could shake out anywhere. Ebon Blades. Not friends, not negotiators. People who let quiet sharpen.
The nearest raised two fingers. The chapel's sound thinned. The rain kept falling but now arrived from a distance, as if remembered rather than heard. Aiden's lungs understood they should lower their noise and failed to obey.
He shifted one step along the pew, as if to read a name carved there. "I'm not the kind they want," he breathed, because sometimes the body needs a sentence to stand in.
The chapel returned his line in a hollow tone that fit his mouth and didn't. You are exactly who they want.
Something unknotted under his sternum and then settled there, like a stone placed where stones belonged. Outside, the bell frame leaned; inside, the Blades fanned across the watery floor. Their knives rode low, their eyes measured distances most men discovered by falling.
He had a knife. He didn't draw it. Drawing meant planning to stay.
The left‑aisle Blade slid forward, gaze pinning a place and waiting for Aiden to fill it. Aiden feinted right. The shard painted an afterimage where he had been—solid for a heartbeat, rain skimming its shoulders. His shadow lagged one beat, a tell for anyone watching too closely. Aiden himself moved left, real and breathing.
The knife cut the echo. Water leapt. The ghost broke without bleeding.
Aiden reached the next pew, palm on slick wood, shard cupped in his right hand as if he had always carried it. His heart kicked once—fear measured, not denied. He wasn't brave; he was punctual with fear.
The Blade recovered as if expecting ghosts. No flinch, no anger. A mild recalculation, then the same patient advance. Professionals do not argue with physics; they set fresh terms.
The floor offered him so many Aiden Vales that he could have rented himself rooms. In those sliced mirrors, he looked composed. Lies comfort in glass. He timed his next move against their eyes rather than his own curve in water. If eyes could be nudged a pace wide, he would buy the aisle.
He shifted his weight. Sightlines snagged two paces to his right; focus followed the fake. Aiden passed on the left, his real body running the narrow between breath and knife. Shadow lag: beat late, beat paid.
The tall Blade in the middle held still, a stone that let the river decide how to break around it. Meeting those eyes would feel like offering a wrist to a clasp. Aiden kept his gaze down on the dark sheet of floor where the bell frame floated like a black moon.
He reached the nave's mouth. "Now," he told his legs, and obeyed his own order.
The tall Blade stepped to catch him. The shard agreed to lie for one more breath. An afterimage took the cut, and Aiden took the weather, bursting into rain.
The square outside pooled like a bowl, every cobble slick and bright as a coin. The bell frame loomed—a gallows without a rope, a promise of noise. Noise dulls edges. "If discipline is a blade, noise is a thumb on its edge," he thought, marking the debt he'd soon owe his legs. Cost ledger: breath, spent now; blood, not yet.
He ran for the frame and didn't need to ring it. The bell tolled. Low first, then full—a sound that seemed to travel through his bones to count them. The Blades' breath hitched a fraction. Their timing wobbled, not broke. A falter is a door if your hand is free. He took the door.
Left into a street of tired awnings. Rain whispered as it hit the canvas. Stones underfoot slid where moss owned them. He moved like a man who had mapped bad streets with his ankles.
His chest warmed. He hadn't pocketed the shard; the shard had pocketed him. It sat beneath his sternum like a held coin, cool at the edges, warmer at the thought of being used. His shadow lagged another beat, then remembered its dignity and caught up.
He pressed two fingers to the warmth and felt only bone and skin and a presence that didn't belong to organs. Gifts, he reminded himself, are just debts with better table manners. One debt at a time—the kind paid in breath, not with someone else's.
A figure blocked the alley mouth ahead: hooded, slight, still. The stance promised speed. The rain cast beaded lines off the hood's edge, a steady curtain between them. A glove showed—index finger nicked white at the knuckle, an old cut that remembered.
"Aiden," the figure said, the vowels belonging to the part of the city where roofs were patched from inside and tools were borrowed without names for them. The old nickname followed and fit too well.
He didn't look at the face. Looking gives blades angles. He kept his eyes on the left wall where rain made a poor mirror of plaster. His reflection moved one fraction late—his chosen tell. If the hooded figure saw the delay, they didn't show it.
Behind him, the bell counted again, higher than the bodies he had seen. Bells count bodies, he'd always believed. The count climbed anyway, like a debt arguing with arithmetic.
"Been a long time," the figure said.
He said nothing. Silence is the cheapest armor; it dents easily but doesn't slow your feet.
They stepped once. "You took it."
He kept his gaze on the running sheet. "I took a problem."
"They'll make you into something."
"They always do." A drip steadied; his afterimage steadied a beat late.
"Choose it first," the voice said.
"I'm choosing not to die in this alley." Footfalls feathered behind him—closer now, too light to be carts, too measured to be drunks.
"You don't have to be afraid," the figure said. The gloved hand remained open; the hidden hand stayed hidden.
"I am," he said. Fear admitted has fewer hands to grab with.
"You always were slippery," they added, and the word didn't sound like an insult.
"Slippery keeps breathing." The shard cooled by a shade, as if approving the economy of that truth.
He angled half a step. The hood's attention clung to the false body in the wall‑water. Aiden took the living path past the real body. He smelled leather and something beneath it that belonged to a house he'd once lived in and wouldn't name. He did not give the shard a new lie. He gave it a decision with no air between.
He cleared the figure and the corner in one breath and entered a smaller square strung with laundry. Shirts leaked their own rain. He ducked under a sagging line; cloth clung to his shoulder and then peeled away as if the shirt wanted a memory and took none.
A cart edged into a rut; a woman strained the handle. Aiden lifted the front end as he moved, set it beyond the hole, and kept going. Help, then go—the sequence that kept him human.
He passed a shuttered gambling hall and a banner whose letters had dissolved into snakes. The street smelled of boiled leather, old broth, iron. He followed the parts of the smell‑map that would send ears elsewhere.
He reached the drain that cut beneath the market like a shallow canal. The water there was matte, soot‑thick. No reflections lived on it. He stood above the run and listened. Hawker's song two streets over. A hinge that had forgotten oil. A dog explaining weather to emptiness.
Footsteps behind. Measured now. He shouldn't have slowed. Options: a three‑stone bridge, a narrow duct, the water. He took the stones and the lie that they were wider than they were.
On the second stone a clipped call from the right—his name shaped like an instruction. He obeyed the instruction by ducking. A bolt hissed past his ear and bit a post, then went quiet, as if designed to be embarrassed when it missed.
He crossed, found the bend, and bent with it. A shadow cut the far mouth of the turn that didn't belong to a cloud.
"Prophet," said a voice too soft for the distance and too certain for any man to have earned it.
He stopped because some words are nets thrown across alleys. He hadn't chosen a name. Someone had chosen for him.
"Not me," he said, denying the net a knot.
The bell—farther now, yet near wherever the count lived—finished a number the street hadn't earned. Bells count bodies, he had thought all his life. The shard warmed once and disagreed. It gave him a word with no breath behind it. Debts.
From the corner he hadn't turned yet, and from the ruined chapel behind his thoughts, and from a mouth that had learned him long before today, a voice he knew too well whispered his true childhood name.
He didn't look to see which mouth owned it. He chose the next step, made it, and let the rain press every sound into the stones as if sealing a letter to be delivered later to whoever survived to read. Shadow lagged—beat late, beat paid—and the city kept counting what he owed.