by Bruce Blake
The others gasped and released their grip on Athryn as they stumbled over each other, rushing for the narrow door. The sword-wielder made it out first; the others pushed and scratched each other in their haste to get away from Khirro’s flames. The latticework bars slammed into place before Khirro got there and the wide, scared eyes of their captors reflected the blaze engulfing his fists as they jammed the logs into place and backed away staring at him.
Khirro reached for the wooden bars—the tinder dry twine lashing them together would burn easily. Before he touched them, the tip of the Mourning Sword came through the widest gap between two of the bars. He grabbed the blade in both hands, stopping it less than an inch from his stomach.
Beneath the flame, the sharp edge of the sword cut deep into his palms, but Khirro held on. The man yanked on the sword, trying to release it from his grasp and Khirro grimaced as steel grated against bone. He held on a second longer before then letting go, sending the man with the sword stumbling into his companions. They gibbered and yelled but didn’t approach the cell door, instead turning to flee, their guttural cries continuing as they slipped away down the tunnel.
Khirro lurched forward, grabbing the wooden bars, but the flames were gone. Instead of fire to burn the wood and twine and set them free, blood smeared across the cell door and dripped to the floor. Elation and despair spun in his head. A manic laugh spilled from his lips, then the world darkened and the wood disappeared from his vision. The last thing he felt before the world went black was his companion’s hands lowering him to the hard stone floor.
Chapter Seventeen
The dreams are getting more frequent, more vivid. This night I dreamed he was three men, not one. All three had their way with me, passed me around like a doll sewn together strictly to give them pleasure, then they beat me and left me for dead. Then I was in a lagoon, bathing with the corpses of all the people he murdered floating around me—hundreds of them. Many of them were women, many more children, and in my dream I hated him more. I wake and wipe cold sweat from my brow, but it isn’t because of the horrible dreams that I’ve woken before morning light.
There’s someone in my room.
I slip my hand to my waist but the smooth-gripped hilt of my dagger is missing. I feel no panic or confusion about this, not now—taking the time for either of these could mean my life. Instead, my muscles coil and I roll to where my sword and scabbard lay beside the straw mattress, but it’s gone. I push myself to a crouching position, ready to spring or defend myself, but there’s little to be seen in the dim room. A shadow flickers to my right and I lunge, but it’s gone before I reach it: a black cloak, almost indistinguishable in the benighted room.
She was here. She took my weapons. Why?
I straighten and turn, put my back to the wall. The room is small with no place to hide, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m not alone. Is it merely the feeling of her left behind? A whisper of bare foot on wood floor outside my door tells me no. I creep to the door and wait.
The latch rattles—someone testing to see if it’s locked. It’s not. A pause no longer than two breaths passes and the latch lifts, the door swings inward slowly on hinges creaking despite the intruder’s care. The sound makes me remember the man and myself as a small child; I suppress a shiver of angry hatred and raise my hands, ready to attack. Scenarios I wouldn’t have imagined in my previous life run through my mind: what to do if it’s a single man with a sword, or an axe, or if my attackers number two or more. Each ends with me killing with my bare hands. I struggle back a grin.
The door swings fully open and a person steps through. A quick glance shows me there’s only one and I pounce, grasping his hands and riding the intruder to the floor. Several observations come at once as I land atop the trespasser: neither hand holds a weapon nor the calluses of hands used to holding weapons; the smell is more perfume than sweat, though there is certainly both; and the grunt of air forced from lungs isn’t the sound made by a man.
The interloper is a woman.
I roll the woman over and look into one of the few faces I know in this Gods-forsaken city. The whore’s expression twists with pain and panic; she struggles to draw breath. She’s not injured, only the air is knocked out of her chest. I made sure not to strike a killing blow because, had it been him, I wouldn’t have wanted him to die without seeing the look on his face as his life fled. It’s what I live for.
“Breathe. You’ll be okay.”
I sit on her hips, her wrists pinned to the floor. Inches separate my face from hers as she struggles to fill her lungs. After a moment, I hear the squeak of air squeezing through. I wait until she can fill her chest with breath before bothering to question her.
“Why are you here?” I keep my voice low. If she brought others who haven’t revealed themselves, I want to hear them before they sink their steel into my back.
“I don’t know,” she says, words ragged. “I’ve never met no one like you.”
She wriggles her hips beneath me; the tingling it creates distracts me for half a second.
“Who sent you?”
She shakes her head and her hair brushes against the floor. “No one. I wanted to see you.”
I stare into her eyes, looking for the lie they contain, but all I see is an emotion resembling desire. I don’t know what to think. I’m confused, indecisive, and don’t like the way being so makes me feel. Before I can do anything, she strains her neck, pushes her head up, and her lips brush against mine like a feather caressing them.
Again, the tingle.
I release her hands and sit up looking down at her hair splayed across the floor. Curly and brown, the knots in it the last time I saw her are gone. She washed and groomed herself in anticipation of visiting me.
“I...I came to see you,” she says, hands reaching up to rub my chest.
My leather is thick, but I feel the pressure of her touch on my breasts. Her hips grind against me and my breath shortens. The time with the man in the meadow felt good but a desire to kill him, to protect myself, underlay the physical desire. I feel no need for violence at her touch.
I close my eyes as her hands trail down my torso to my thighs, her touch gentle but firm. She rubs my legs, her fingers reaching higher with each stroke. Behind closed lids I see the face of another woman, a young blond who giggles easily and is eager to learn.
Aryann.
She was my friend, one of the women the man named Khirro murdered. I open my eyes to avoid thinking about him. There are more pleasant things to think about as her fingers no longer rub my legs but somewhere higher, pressing desperately against my breeches. A moan escapes my lips, surprising me, and she smiles. I can’t help myself. I lean forward and press my lips to hers. Her tongue darts out eagerly, searching my lips, finding my tongue. The feel of it takes me to another time when I was a different person, when I wasn’t so unlike this woman. I felt in control of my destiny then, and of the things I did, but ended up dead as surely as this woman will.
My mind wanders through other times while her fingers fumble with the fastenings on my leather. Her breath is loud as our mouths eat hungrily of each other’s passion and I think of those women, and of man after man, but they feel wrong. Physically I was with them, but without emotion—as it must be for this woman as she leans against the rail outside a public house and gets fucked for money. Then I think of him, but it’s not the same as before.
I realize for the first time that I loved the man called Khirro once. And it increases the hate I feel for him.
My leather is on the floor beside us, her hands on my breasts. This time only my thin cotton shirt separates her flesh and mine. Her fingers pinch my nipples and the groan comes again, almost loud enough to disguise the creak of a footstep on a wooden floor. My eyes snap open and, without thought, I roll off her and away, my shoulder thumping painfully on the knotty floorboards. I’m on my feet in an instant facing the two men who crept through the door while I was foolishly engaged in the throes of passion. Bo
th hold bare steel in their hands.
“What do you think you’re doing, whore?” one of the men growls and throws a kick toward the woman. She scrambles away and his boot misses. “How many times do I has to tell you no one rides for free?”
The second man snorts and faces me. His eyes seek my chest first, then move up. When he sees my face, he elbows his friend and gestures at me.
“Hey! Ain’t she the wench what killed Mart last night?”
The first man looks at me, also. A grin spreads across his face.
“Yeah. That’s her all right. Killed more than just Mart, I hear.”
“She don’t look so tough.”
“Mmm. Kinda pretty, really.”
The whore has positioned herself against the wall. She makes a comment I don’t hear, focused as I am on the two men. The first man scowls and spits a curse, then they advance on me. The second man has one hand on his belt, loosening his breeches. Why do men think they have the right to fuck anything they want?
He’ll be disappointed with how this turns out for him.
The first man doesn’t have such designs. He swings his sword halfheartedly at me, to scare me and keep me in my place, but I have other plans. As the blade sweeps past, I dart in and spin him around, changing the path of his sword. The steel slashes his friend’s arm and he’s suddenly not so concerned with getting his cock free of his pants. I push the man into his companion. They both yell—one in pain, one in anger—but recover quickly and face me across the room again.
“Whore,” says the second man, the one with the fresh cut on his arm.
“Not anymore,” I growl back. The only whore in the room is behind me; I remain aware of that, but I don’t think I need be concerned about her. Not yet.
The two men rush me, but they’re disorganized and untrained. I dive between them, snagging the dagger from the first man’s belt. Before he can turn, it’s buried in his left side. He gurgles, falls to his knees, then tumbles face first on the floor at the whore’s feet.
The second man comes at me more slowly, the look of rage on his face tempered with fear as blood drips from the fingertips of his left hand. He prods the sword tip at me and I jump back a step. The door is close beside me. He swings his sword and I open the rickety wooden door; the blade crashes into it instead of my side. While he’s off balance, my boot finds his ball sack. The sword hits the floor and my fingers wrap around his windpipe. He thrashes, but I’m behind him, listening to his last breaths rasp down his throat. I dig my nails into his flesh, feel the blood begin to flow, then I tear his esophagus out. He slumps to the floor, blood pooling beneath him.
The whore sits hard against the far wall, knees drawn up to her chest. In this position, I can see up her skirt and feel the tingle again, like an itch that can’t be scratched, but push it aside. As I approach, she tries to make herself smaller. I crouch before her.
“He sent you, didn’t he?”
She steals a look over my shoulder at the men dead behind me, shakes her head hard.
“Not them,” I say doing my best to smile comfortingly. “Him. Khirro.”
“I don’t know no Khirro. I told you that.”
“Of course.” Still smiling, I stroke her cheek with my fingers. She flinches. Her skin is soft. “Is he in the city?”
“I don’t know no one like that.”
My smile disappears. “Is he close?”
This time she shakes her head. I won’t get anything from her. This Khirro’s connections and influence run deep. He must be a very dangerous man for her to be more afraid of him than me. Good.
Could I really have loved such a man?
I touch her cheek again, run my fingers through her hair. She doesn’t flinch this time. It seems to calm her, instead, as is my intent.
“It’s all right,” I tell her, forcing the smile back to my lips. She relaxes a little more. “I’ll find him myself. Now, where were we?”
I slide my other hand beneath her skirt and stroke the soft flesh between her legs. A shiver runs through her; I lean in and put my lips on hers. My tongue goes into her mouth, but I feel no excitement like before, no tingle. Instead I notice the gap in her teeth. I suck her breath into my lungs and she stiffens. I move my hand from her crotch to her chest, my palm flat against her breast. It’s large and soft, and it makes me think of another woman, not the young blond but an older woman, a woman who I once thought of like a mother. I don’t let the thought stop me as I push my palm firmly into her chest. Her ribs let go and her life ends.
I stand and survey the night’s work, looking upon the blood and the bodies. My hands are tacky with drying blood, a feeling to which I’m becoming accustomed. Three dead, only one by weapon. My skill is greater than I knew. But am I ready for the man named Khirro?
As I regard the dead, I realize two things. First, I’m going to have to find somewhere else to stay while I await my prey. The second thing I come to understand is I can trust no one. Anyone can be in league with my enemy.
Perhaps everyone.
Chapter Eighteen
Khirro’s head hurt almost as much as his hands.
He blinked his eyes hard to refocus, but the pain distracted him and the dimness of the cell conspired against his vision. Through the haze and feeble light, he discerned a shape huddled against the wall across from him.
Athryn.
“How long?” Khirro’s words grated out of his dry throat. They’d been given no water since they came underground, and bursting into flames did nothing to help his thirst.
Athryn crossed to his companion. “A couple of hours. How do you feel?”
“Like a horse galloped across my forehead.”
“Not a horse. Magic. You found the fire, Khirro.”
He held up his hands wrapped in pieces of cloth torn from Athryn’s shirt.
“Did the fire do this?”
“No. You grabbed the blade of the Mourning Sword. You are lucky you did not lose your fingers.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
“But how did you bring the flame to be? Do you remember?”
Khirro’s brow wrinkled as he thought back, struggling for recollection. He remembered the men coming to take Athryn and wanting to stop them, jumping to Athryn’s aid before the fire came without warning or provocation from him. The same feeling of elation and despair he felt when it happened rose in him again—he’d brought the flame forth but had no idea how.
“I don’t know. It was just there.”
“Well, thank the Gods it was. You saved me from that horrible fate.”
The magician pointed at the corpse in the middle of the cell and Callan sprawled out beside it. Khirro had forgotten about Callan.
“Has he woken at all?”
Athryn shook his head.
Khirro pushed himself up to his feet, wincing at the pain in his palms as he did, and went to where Callan lay. A few more of the glowing worms wriggled about near the corpse of the unknown man while others lay still, their light dimming or gone.
“Be careful around those grubs.” Athryn came to his side. “The wounds in your hands will make easy access for them. That is how they got them inside our friends here.”
Khirro stomped harder than necessary on the worms, grinding them into the stone floor with the sole of his boot, lips pulled back in disgust.
Athryn went and kneeled beside Callan and Khirro watched as he pulled the bottom of the man’s shirt open. In the lack of light, Khirro had to move closer to see the small incision on the man’s lower abdomen; the skin around it looked red and irritated. Tiny ripples rolled across his belly like it was a pond into which someone had tossed a pebble, disturbing the surface.
“He doesn’t have much longer, does he?”
“It would seem not.”
Khirro stared at the minute movements, imaging the grubs beneath the skin, crawling over each other in a frenzy to feed on Callan’s insides.
What a horrible way to die.
“Is there anything we
can do for him?”
A pause. “Kill him.”
Khirro’s heart jumped at his companion’s words, though he knew they were the truth. They’d seen what happened to the other man—it was too terrible a death for anyone. They remained crouched at Callan's side for a minute, neither speaking. Khirro contemplated Athryn’s words.
We have no option. I’m sorry, Callan.
The sound of a footstep in the tunnel yanked their attention from Callan and the things writhing inside him. They both looked up toward the wooden bars.
“They are coming back,” Athryn whispered. Khirro began to unwind the bandages from his hands, hoping to find a way to reignite the fire, but Athryn stopped him. “No, Khirro. Wait by Callan’s side. When I signal, you must take his life.”
Khirro swallowed hard and nodded.
Killing him isn’t just about saving him from agony, it’s about saving ourselves.
He knew Athryn felt badly for his inability to help when the giant attacked at the shore, leaving the boat in ruins and nearly killing them both, and now Khirro had found his magic and saved Athryn. Here was the magician’s opportunity to redeem himself.
But I don’t want to kill him. Khirro watched Athryn glide across the cell and crouch beside the door. He bit his teeth together hard. It must be done. Athryn must find his magic.
The light of one of the underground-dwellers’ torches bounced into view. Khirro knelt beside Callan, looked up and down the man’s body, deciding how to kill someone who wasn’t threatening him. He could choke him, squeezing the life from him, but that might take too long for Athryn’s purposes and would expose Khirro’s wounds to the glowing worms. And there would be no blood.
Does there need to be blood?
He looked across the cell at Athryn standing beside the door, out of sight from the approaching men; too far away for Khirro to ask for his input without alerting their enemies.
But he didn’t have a knife nor a sword; no weapon of any kind to open one of Callan's veins. How then?
Khirro looked down at the smear of worms on the floor between the two men, crushed by his boot, and the solution came to him. It brought with it a shudder of revulsion, but he could think of no other way.