The King's assassin

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The ship drew into the estuary of the river Triere. Low-lying glades and salt marsh crept up out of the water on all sides, distant and barely visible. Ahead, the land rose abruptly into a line of cliffs, a solid wall a hundred feet high except for the wide canyon that the Triere had carved between them. Somewhere beyond lay a city, but Berren saw no sign of it at first, the cliffs obscuring everything beyond them; as the ship fought its way up the river through the mouth of the gorge though, the cliffs widened and then one side of the canyon fell away, curving into the shape of a horseshoe as though a giant hand had reached out from the sky and taken a scoop from the land. The ground inside the horseshoe sloped steadily upwards, away from the river to a far ridge that he could barely see. And here, nestled inside this colossal hollow, was the city of Kalda.

Beside the river the ground was flat; as it rose further from the sea, the streets grew steeper until around the edges of the bowl in which the city lay they were almost sheer. Opposite, the river widened into a lake where other ships pitched and rolled slowly back and forth. There were dozens of them, a hundred perhaps, and his own ship drew among them and threw out its anchor. He stared. Kalda. Home, once, to a man called Radek. The man he’d killed on the last terrible day of his old life.

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