It was a simple thing. One cut across the throat and it was done: brutal, but simple. As Kaden stood in the darkness, however, parsing the guard’s breaths, trying to measure the empty space between knife and neck, the most basic elements of the action suddenly seemed implausible, impossible. How would he cross the corridor? How would he pivot to bring that knife to bear? Should he move slowly, to avoid suspicion, or lash out all at once, murdering the man in one quick slice?

No, he reminded himself. Not murdering. “Murder” was a sloppy term, imprecise, laden with judgment and emotion. Killing. Killing described the action, nothing more. I’ve killed goats, Kaden reminded himself. I thought I’d killed that leach back at the saddle. Still, it was one thing to discharge a flatbow at Balendin from the still depths of the vaniate: a twitch of the finger, the reverberation of the spent bow, the brief whistle of the bolt in the air, and the man was gone, vanished off the side of the cliff. It hadn’t felt like killing. It hadn’t felt like anything. Cutting the guard’s throat would be harder, messier.

He considered the exposed flesh below the jaw. Here is the knife. Here is the neck.

In the end, it was a simple matter of three steps followed by an extension of the arm. The blade bit immediately, snagged for a moment on the tough cartilage of the trachea, then pulled through, slick and hot and wet. The guard managed to half turn, reaching a hand toward Kaden’s shoulder as if in friendship. Then the life fled his limbs and his head caved forward into the wreckage of his neck. Blood drenched Kaden’s face and chest, slicking the hand that held the knife, pumping in stubborn dark sheets down the front of the dead man’s sealskin cloak to puddle in the pits of the floor. The body slumped forward, then fell.

For a moment, Kaden didn’t move. He stood, gory knife at his side, blood soaking his fetid clothes. Some feeling, delicate-pawed and silent as a mouse, prowled the edges of his brain, slipping away each time he tried to look at it directly. Guilt? Kaden glanced at the slumped form, the mound of bone and flesh that had, until moments before, been a man, then closed his eyes, trying to corner the elusive sensation. Regret? Doubt? It glared at him a moment, tiny, feral, then darted farther into darkness.

He’d lost track of his pulse in the attack, but it didn’t matter now. Kiel’s route out didn’t involve the corridors above. The schedule of the Ishien no longer mattered.