Chunk 1
Like I did last year, I'm posting each day's whatever. The breaks will be wherever I was at midnight and probably won't coincide with any actual scene or chapter breaks, so keep that in mind while you read.

I spent most of today banging out notes and not much time actually writing. I'm actually at a little under a thousand words right now; I'd have quite a bit more if we were allowed to count said notes, alas. :) After last year, though, I'm less uptight about daily wordcounts. I feel good about this one and I think I have more of a handle on where I'm going and how I'm going to get there than I did at this time last year.

This one's a fantasy, although there won't be all that much magic in it. It'll be smutty eventually but probably not for a while. I know, so what else is new? ;)

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Swords and Shadows

Chapter One

Luka Tevarion peered down the street into the lengthening twilight and debated one more time going out to look for Tochi. There was no one visible directly outside the walls of his school but he could hear angry shouts and pained screams and the wordless roar of riot drifting by on the evening breeze off Lake Smedevo on the other side of the city.

Tochi was one of his best students, at twenty-six nearly ready for the black and red badge of a swordsmaster; he was spinning death with the two swords and was better than Luka himself with a pair of longknives. Luka had sent him with Luka's sister Lena and their mother to hide in the ossuary vaults, where the bones of the dead rested. He'd heard others talking of sending their women and children there, a few days ago when the last of the granaries in the southern district of the city -- the one only five streets from the school -- had been stormed by starving rioters.

It had sounded like a good notion at the time. There was nothing down there to attract anyone, neither to eat nor to loot, and the vaults were built deep into the bedrock beneath Parakovac Ruvor. The city rose high above the lake on solid cliffs, elevated above its surrounding rough hills and defended by both the landscape and its heavy fortifications. Its place on the shores of the Smedevo and at the juncture of two heavily trafficked rivers put it at the crossroads of the east and foreign armies without number had marched through their lands and even attacked their walls. The city had never fallen, though.

Never before.

And Luka was sure it wouldn't now, not even with the might of the Molani Empire arrayed below its walls and the blue and gold striped sails of their ships blockading it from the water. The Molani had formed, by both wealth and conquest, the greatest empire known since the Age of Heroes, but armies were expensive to maintain, especially in the barren land around a city built on trade, and navies likewise, and Luka was sure the Molani would withdraw their seige before the city fell. He couldn't imagine otherwise.

Neither could he imagine that Tochi had run into trouble on the way to the ossuary vaults, when he had the women with him. The delay had to have been on his way back; anything else was unthinkable.

Up the street echoed the heavy impact of running feet -- too many feet to be Tochi, unless he were being chased, which was all too possible. Luka stepped over the threshold and murmured to the students behind him to close the gate, and bar it if he shouted. If it were Tochi, he wanted to be able to help, but if it were a mob he wanted the courtyard secure.

The glow of torches appeared around the corner, lighting a crush of moving bodies. Out in front, away from the light, a single figure ran, although not fast enough for someone being chased. A few moments later, Tochi trotted up and saluted with a fist to his shoulder.

"They caught some poor bugger!" he called, his voice a mixture of revulsion and excitement. "No one knows him so they've decided he's a spy."

"That's ridiculous," Luka retorted. "The city's packed with stranded travellers and refugees from the villages. There must be ten thousand people no one would know."

Tochi shrugged. "That's too much sense for a mob."

Luka nodded. People were hungry and frightened and angry and any excuse to focus it all on something concrete, someone mortal, would be seized.

It looked like there were about a dozen people in the approaching group. Not quite a mob, then, although more than enough to overwhelm one man, especially if it were some poor farmer or herdsman with no fighting skill beyond a sling or bow. He stepped up onto the narrow curb just outside the school gate and gestured Tochi to stand next to him. Something compelled him to watch the flickering cluster of light and dark and bodies as it approached him.

When they came within a few paces, he was able to recognize a handful of the men. One of the ones with a fierce grip on the supposed spy in their midst was Halvic, a silversmith whose shop was in the next street. A burly carpenter's apprentice had a hold of the prisoner's ragged jerkin from behind, and carrying one of the torches was a brewer whose inn had had neither food nor beer to sell for the past two weeks.

The man they were hauling along was of average height, sturdy and strong looking, with no extra fat on him. That was common enough; in a city under seige, only the very rich who'd started out grossly fat had any extra by the fourth month. The man's clothes were plain and sturdy although well worn. The jerkin might have belonged to a poor craftsman, the shirt to a farmer, the breeches to a soldier. It was impossible to judge his place by the look of him, and that alone would likely have been enough to raise suspicions, with nerves stretched as taut as they were.

He might well be a spy, Luka thought with a mental smirk. He could just as easily be any poor man whose clothes came from a second-hand shop or from a charity bin.