A Twist of the Sands
Page 55
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The Gatekeeper sat and closed her eyes; she had dismissed the guild captain with a wave of her hand. The assassin the guild had sent had failed, she had not returned to report, so the assumption was she had failed in her duty. Well she had better be dead, for if she returned the Gatekeeper would certainly make her wish she had died. Make her pay for the inconvenience of having to do the job herself. The herbal brew was starting to have its effect upon her. Already she could not feel the extremities of her body. Her fingers gripped the arms of the chair in which she sat, the muscles were contracting as she expected, a rather unpleasant side effect of the herbal potion, but she would deal with that later. For the time being she had no feeling or sensation of the velvet padding on the arms of her chair, her nervous system was overridden by other, more intense feelings of pain. Her legs were starting to tense, stabs of pain wracked her body as muscle after muscle went into spasm. But again the Gatekeeper cared not, for she would be released from her painful physical form at least temporarily whilst she undertook the task ahead of her. She knew the pain would come later, knew she would pay the price eventually, but for the time being her current task took all her attention.
The minion sat at the Gatekeeper’s feet. He would wait for her return. He knew that although her physical body sat there in the chair, her mind, her intellect was elsewhere, doing only she knew what. So he would wait, for as long as it took, await her return.