Free Ghost Price by Jonathan Moeller Page A

the window and come and go unseen. If she needed to hide, these rented rooms would make a convenient bolt hole. She could stash useful supplies and weapons here, and her cover story as a traveling courier would explain her long absences to Talisla. 
    Talisla gave an indifferent shrug. “Can’t be helped.”
    “But I suppose the dark will help me sleep,” said Caina, “after long weeks on the road. How much for the rooms?”
    They haggled for a while, and at last settled upon a sum. Caina paid Talisla for a year’s rent, which surprised the old woman.
    “Carrying messages must pay well,” said Talisla.
    “It does,” said Caina, though in truth robbing master slavers paid far better. But Talisla didn’t need to know that.
    “Waste of your money,” said Talisla. “I don’t know how long I can keep the house. I should save the coin…but if you pay me, I’ll just spend it all on food.”
    “If you lose the house to the Wazir of the Treasury,” said Caina, “where will you go?” 
    Again Talisla offered that fatalistic shrug. “To the street, I suppose. I have no kin left. I’m too old to whore, so I’ll beg for my bread. Or perhaps an illness will take me, and I’ll die quickly.”
    “I see,” said Caina. Perhaps there was something she could do for Talisla. If need be, Caina had sufficient funds to buy the house outright. But that would create documents, and given that the Teskilati, the Padishah’s secret police, were hunting for Caina, that seemed foolish. Maybe Caina could simply find a way to pay off the debt in secret. That would cost far less than buying the house, and it might turn the old woman into an ally.
    If Caina was to rebuild Istarinmul’s Ghost circle, she needed willing informants. 
    “Men live and men die,” said Talisla, “and our souls return to the Living Flame.” She hefted the pouch holding Caina’s money and grinned. “But not today.”

    ###

    The next day Caina moved some things into the rooms, clothes and blankets and other items of the sort a young mercenary courier would own. She needed to spend at least a few nights there, establishing the identity of Koraz the courier, before she went about her business elsewhere. That gave her the opportunity to pry up a few floorboards and ceiling planks to create hiding places for weapons and bandages and a few other items useful to a Ghost circlemaster.
    It was past dark by the time Caina finished, and she closed out the day by practicing her unarmed combat forms in the bedroom. She moved her arms and legs through the high kick and the low block and the middle strike, into the elbow grapple and the high strike and the side throw. She had practiced them for years, ever since she had joined the Ghosts at the age of eleven, and time and time again the knowledge had saved her life. 
    They also had the benefit of wearing her out and helping her sleep. Caina was only twenty-three years old, but at times she felt as if she had lived five times that, and she had seen some horrible things. Consequently that meant she did not often sleep well. 
    But that sometimes had its advantages. 
    So when she heard the scraping and shuffling noise in the alley below the window, she awoke at once.
    Caina rolled to her feet, moving in silence across the bedroom. It was well past midnight, and the bedroom was utterly dark, save for a few rays of moonlight leaking through the half-closed shutters. She knelt by the window and peered into the alley. A pair of dark shapes stood below, near a ground-floor window. Thieves? Caina felt her right hand curl into a fist. If those thieves sought to rob an old widow, she would teach them the error of their ways.
    Then bright orange-yellow light flared in the darkness. The shutters of the downstairs window had caught fire. 
    The thieves were going to burn down the house. 
    Caina mouthed a silent curse, rolled away from the window, and got to her feet. 
    Fortunately, she had slept in her clothes. She did not