Free Ghost Claws by Jonathan Moeller

Ghost Claws
     
    I have used many names, but you can call me Halfdan, and I have made two decisions that shook the world to its foundations.
    I made the first decision when I was a boy.
    The second decision happened ten years ago along the Bay of Empire’s western shore. I am a circlemaster of the Ghosts, the eyes and ears of the Emperor of Nighmar, and we hunted a gang of Istarish slavers employed by a renegade necromancer named Maglarion. We tracked Maglarion to a ruined villa in the hills, and found that he had killed his slaves and used their blood to fuel his necromantic experiments. 
    All save one.
    When I found Caina Amalas, she was a wisp of a girl, half-starved, half-crazed, and I had no idea what to do with her. I thought to have one of the Ghosts’ friends among the nobles adopt her, or perhaps to give her to the Temple of Minaerys as an initiate. 
    Then I realized that she had gotten out of her cell without any help. 
    A starving girl of eleven, half-mad from grief, and she got out of her cell without any aid. I learned she had a keen eye for detail. She realized things about my companions, about myself, simply by looking at us and making deductions from our appearances. Her mind was keen, and I aimed to make it sharper yet.
    So I did it. Part of my service to the Emperor is to seek out skilled men and women to bring into the service of the Ghosts…and so I deliberately took a girl, still crushed by grief from her father’s murder, and molded her into a weapon. I shaped her into a Ghost nightfighter, one of our Emperor’s elite agents, a woman able to masquerade as a Countess or a commoner,  a woman able to move silent and unseen, a woman capable of killing with knives or daggers or her bare hands. 
    I did this knowing the cost it would inflict upon her, how it would leave her more scarred than she already was.
    But I do not regret it.
    Seven years after I found her, Caina Amalas killed Maglarion…and stopped him from finishing a spell that would have slain everyone in the Imperial capital. 
    A year after that, she defeated a renegade magus that would have burned the city of Rasadda to ashes.
    And a year after that, she kept a greater earth elemental from awakening and drowning the city of Cyrioch.
    Had I not made that decision ten years ago, had I not made her into a Ghost nightfighter, then millions of people would be dead. The Empire would have collapsed into chaos and civil war. 
    I have a chill when I think about how I almost talked her into joining the Temple of Minaerys. 
    How close all those people came to death, because Caina would not have been there to save them.
    While I have made many decisions I regret, this was not of them. 
    And yet…I look at her and see how cold and hard she has grown, and I know that I set her upon that path. She wanted to have a husband and children and shall never have either. Surely she deserves at least some joy in her life. 
    Because of that, I could not make up my mind whether I was going to kill her lover Corvalis Aberon or not.
     
    ###
     
    I woke up, dressed in my merchant’s robe and cap, and left my tent to face the morning.
    We were ten days east of Catekharon, in the midst of the great grasslands of western Anshan. We had stopped the Sages of Catekharon from selling a weapon of sorcery that would have drowned the world in blood. Of course, the Sages themselves would have been destroyed, their souls bound to power the weapon created by their treacherous student.
    The Sages may have been brilliant, but they were not particularly clever.
    Caina and Corvalis sat next to each other by the campfire, eating breakfast. I had disguised myself as Basil Callenius, master merchant of the Imperial collegium of jewelers, which meant Caina disguised herself as Basil’s daughter Anna Callenius. She wore a blue traveling dress, a belt of black leather at her waist holding a sheathed dagger. She never went anywhere without a weapon, and I was sure she had more