THUNDER CLOUDS HUNG low over the city of Collane, but the threat of rain could not deter the masked revelers who filled the streets. Slaves carried palanquins from one house to another, or marched with painted umbrellas held high. Others carried the trains of the long silk robes worn by their masters, keeping them free of the mud and filth that caked the city’s tight lanes. Rain or not, the first night of Maarthua had come: the festival of the winter solstice, the days of the dead, and the games had begun. From the western quarter of the city came the rising roar of chariot races at the Caeurcae Magnae, where slaves and prisoners raced and died snatching at hopes of freedom. From the north, near the stone harbors that jutted out into the gray sea, the shrill vicious cry of the arena, where the young Lord of Games himself, Prince Dardano, presided over the city’s bloodiest spectacle. In every corner, temples had laid out feasts for the destitute and wretched, and red-robed priests traveled house to house seeking to bless the ill, and sharing around their holy wine from sloshing jugs towed by masked chattelmen.

While the city shook like an inebriate anticipating his poison, a few yet remembered when Marthuua had been a holy night, a night spent in quiet prayer apart from other folk, and all the windows had stood like the dark eyes of the dead, before the rise of the great houses and the new dynasty. Among them, a single, wild-eyed priest in funeral black, who preached to the towering thunder clouds and sang hymns of vengeance over the debauchery. They called him mad and sang along, for the dead were coming to walk the streets, and any song was golden to the lips of the dead.

Dazzled by spectacle, the masses piled into the games and surged to the pageantry put on by the sprawling Collanian royal family. For three days, they would hold the eye and heart of the enraptured public. Each event was a magician’s gesturing hand, the other free to go about its unglimpsed bidding. During Maarthua, the city was of two minds: one celebrating the darkest night of the year; the other scheming, consolidating, advancing claims on half-seen fronts in the shadow war between the city’s true masters.

It was on such grim business that twenty veiled and black-garbed shadows stole through the intestinal warren of the low city. Even the poorest of the Collanians had mostly quit their slums to seek succor in the distractions of the riotous festival. The oldest, and the most diseased part of Collane, no one dwelt in the low city but for those cursed by fortune. It was said that most of the low city’s damned souls had no honest trade, but that was untrue: they were honest about their thieving, whoring, and thugging. Crushed by the cruel palm of fate, even the excitement of Maarthua could not paint a friendly veneer over those scowling, scabbrous alleys, and come the days of the dead, they were, for once, quiet as a boneyard. And for good cause.

The shadows came on in a rush, stealing down one narrow street and then the next. Each man bore a short sword. The skin around their eyes was smeared with ash, and they wore veils that covered mouth and nose. As an outfit, they had no name, for they did not exist. They went by the word of masked masters, but no one in the royal palace had ever met these men. The king himself did not command their bloody swords, yet every man in Collane knew they might one day be visited by the unnamed masks, should they court the wrong man’s fury. The shadows were the unspoken law; the black daggers of Collane. For all their fire and violence, the denizens of the slums that slouched by the harbor had never heard tell of so many shadows dispatched at once. Two, perhaps, to carve a lurid red grin across an upstart’s throat, or leave a coiled cobra in the bed of a merchant whose ambitions outgrew him, or steal a favored son. But twenty?

Such would instantly become a whispered legend, currency enough to keep wine flowing for years afterward.

Quiet as wolves, they encircled one of the slum houses in the heart of the low city. In the summer heat, the upper shutters were thrown open, and light leaked from windows where men sought less festive succor. A few vague shapes in the lightless alleys vanished quick as words when they caught sight of the dark figures. A dog scuttled off with a stifled yelp, tail between its legs. From the upper parts of the house came the long, languorous moan of a woman in the throes of passion, and brash, callous laughter from the ground floor. Two shadows detached themselves, creeping up the wall like scuttling insects, finding purchase in the smallest footholds until their gloved fingers gripped the sills of the windows above. Then, by silent signal, they struck as one.

They burst through the front door and the back. The pleasure house, only moments before filled with soft sounds and cold mirth, erupted in screams of outrage and blackest profanity. Only the man who sat by the door was armed, for that was the rule of the house. He was a fat man with a bald pate and bad eyes, but his mean temper and boundless suspicion had kept him on the job: that, and all the finesse of a headsman with the studded club that rested on his knees. They gutted him first.

Before the fat enforcer hit the ground, the whores were shrieking. Women, breasts bared and festively painted, dressed in little more than sheer silk wraps that flattered hips, fled for the back of the house, knocking over tables and chairs. More of the shadows burst through from the kitchens. Their hopes of escape staunched, the women fell screaming to the floor, prayers for mercy flowing as easily now from their lips as lurid solicitation usually did. They flung up gaudily ringed hands to protect their caked, tear-stained faces, repenting now of every colorful sin.

But the shadows rushed over them like a deadly wind, charging up the stairs. They were silent, for indeed, not a one of them could speak, and women were as ash to them. Raised and trained as voiceless killers, their only dictum was to act when their masked masters spoke. What need had blades of tongues? So quiet were they that those brave enough to trade in such rumor believed they could make no sound at all.

That was wrong. From the second floor, two men shrieked as if their very skin had been flayed from them.

The shadows’ footsteps were heavy in the choked corridor of the pleasure house’s second floor. A few greasy candles danced in rust-flecked sconces on the wall, casting long shadows and pale fingers of light on the water-stained ceiling. They shed scarcely enough light to see by, and did naught to scour away the stink of cheap love, stale ale, and unwashed bodies. The veiled men piled up outside the room from whence the screaming came. Eager for blood, they kicked in the door.

The first man through caught a sword to the chest, hurled from across the room. He let out a surprised whuff and staggered back into his comrades, briefly blocking the way. He mewled as they shoved him aside with a serpent’s hiss.

Standing in the center of the room, as stark naked as the day he was born, was a giant of a man. It was for this grim figure they had been dispatched: Ulrem the Slayer. His thick black hair was wild about his head like a lion’s mane, and wildfire fury burned in his granite eyes. Every inch of him was bound in thickly corded muscle: cabled strength born of years hard at fighting and adventuring in the worst pits of the world. Upon his left hand was a golden ring that flashed in the low light with molten fury, as if it had a life of its own. They had surprised him en flagrante with a woman who was now pressed up against the headboard of a huge, ornately carved bed, yelling her tousled head off. Her legs were curled up under her, the sweaty sheet they’d shared but moments ago her only shield from the storm of violence around her.

The giant had already killed one of those shadows who had come through the window, his skull stove in by the bloody candlestick that lay at the giant’s feet. With his other hand, the savage held the second attacker aloft by the neck, crushing the man’s throat in his massive paw. That one would never make a sound again.

“Which coward sent you?” Ulrem raved, rattling the shadow back and forth. “I will have his name, damn you!”

He had acted on raw instinct when they kicked the door in, the kind of near-prescient predatory reflex that made the great cats so deadly. They staggered under the weight of the man he had skewered with the thrown sword, but he did not stop moving. A moment later, he hurled the dead man he had been shaking, too. He bounded over to fetch up a huge sword from where it stood glowering in the corner. His ploy was only partly successful, for he had counted on the attackers to fight as a unit, seeking to preserve one another. He was wrong. They leaped over their slain brothers and leaped slashing at him.

He caught the next two by their arms, wrenching them aside, crushing their bones and tearing screams from them, even as he felt the cold kiss of blades across arm and back. One he flung at the wall with such force that the whole house rocked. He tore a sword from the other, splintering fingers cruelly, and silenced the howling with a single, brutal chop that sent a veiled head rolling, splashing arcs of bright blood like the garish paint that would soon be thrown across doors in celebration in the high city that very night.

“How many of you curs will I drag to hell tonight?” he roared at them. Lesser men might have fled from that fearsome visage. Men with something to lose might have felt the ice of mortal fear coiling up their spines. Here was a beast of a man, who walked with death as an equal; a barbarian from beyond the horizon, his killing instinct honed to near perfection. But the shadows that swarmed into the whorehouse had nothing, were nothing. They threw themselves at him, even as he smote left and right with the stolen blade, striking down one after another.

Thick as his arms and legs were, powerful as his roar, Ulrem was still but a man. The shadows piled onto him, and though he shook them like a typhoon storm, raging curses, still they clung to him. Despite the weight of a dozen men bearing down on him, the giant managed to wade halfway across the room.

“Help me, woman!” he cried as they dragged him to the floorboards.

It was only when he was down on the ground, his legs and arms chained with harsh iron, that she found the courage to peer over the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry, love,” she said. She smiled like a cat, the corners of her mouth pulling up with sharp satisfaction as she stared down at him. If she expected anger, or a show of snarling fury, she got neither. Rather, he watched her with grim resolve in those gray eyes, and she felt, for the briefest moment, as if she had been the one bought and sold, not this brute. Her heart fluttered in her breast. He was a handsome savage, for all his web of scars, and his cold stare stung like a bully’s slap. A look of resignation passed across her face. “They didn’t give me much of a choice, now did they?”

“Did they pay you better than I did, you trollop?”

Her hurt turned to sudden, indignant anger. They had spent many nights together, and though he seldom spoke, he had given her not a passing harsh word. Now, hearing such recrimination, seeing the steel restraint of his rage, she felt like a fool. How dare he speak to her so, she thought. Should he not beg? Plea? She glanced up at the veiled shadows, who were collecting their dead. They, too, would vanish before long. As a creature of the night, she knew the value of talk. And she knew when she had been shortchanged.

They hauled the big man to his feet and shoved him towards the door.

The whore opened her mouth to sling a final curse at him for making her feel like a rotten child, but whatever venom she might have spit at him was cut short. One of the shadows flicked out with his blade as he passed, opening her throat in a single, almost thoughtless slash. Blood ran down her slim throat and onto the stained mattress, and dribbled from the corners of her surprised little mouth.

The city, enraptured in the bloodsport and spectacle, roared outside, cheers bringing life to a night filled with death.

She died where she had been born.