Contents
Copyright
Dedication
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CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
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About the Author
Note from the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Sellsword’s Compassion: Book one of the Seven Virtues
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To my mom for teaching me that there are other worlds out there
To my dad for giving me the courage to find them
To my brothers for showing me the way
And to my wife for going there with me
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CHAPTER
ONE
The shack didn’t look like the type of place anyone in their right mind would live. In fact, it looked more like the kind of place a man might go to, say, get tortured and die and, if the screams coming from inside were any indication—screams loud enough to be heard even over the roaring wind and thundering rain—that was exactly what was happening. The house’s walls were rotten and crooked, like an old beggar’s teeth, and the door sat askew in its frame as if the carpenter who had built it had been either drunk or blind. In truth, it seemed more like a thieves’ hideout than a home, and in this way it resembled any other house in the Downs, the largest and poorest district of Avarest.
There was nothing to distinguish the house from the buildings that surrounded it. Nothing, of course, except the two men standing on either side of the rickety door, frowning into the night, their muscled arms folded across thick, barreled chests. And the screams, of course. A man would be hard pressed not to notice those. Not that anyone would be coming to investigate—it was the Downs, after all, and rarely did a night pass without such screams. There were a few guiding principles which the denizens of Avarest’s poorest district lived by: rich men were made for robbing, ale was made for drinking, and, most of all, it was better to be deaf than dead. All rules Aaron made a point of living by himself, or had, at least, until the damned woman had shown up, flashing her gold and her smile.
He sighed heavily and pulled his cloak tight against him in a useless effort to ward off the driving rain. She’d damn sure better be good for it, he thought. She’d promised him triple his usual rate and that was the only reason why he was here. Anything less than that and he would be warming his hands in front of the fire at the Juggling Bear instead of standing in the middle of one of the worst storms Avarest had seen in a year and getting ready to get his fool ass killed.
The man screamed again, this one louder and shriller than those before, and Aaron winced. He was no stranger to death or pain but that kind of screaming wasn’t something a man could get used to. It was the desperate, wailing cry of a man who’d lost any hope of living and only wanted the pain to stop. It was also a sign that the triple he’d been promised was growing less and less likely by the second. Right. No time to scout the area, no time to devise a plan, or take any of the other precautions his father had taught him so long ago. Triple, she’d said, but only if he got the unlucky bastard out alive. Cursing himself for a fool, he checked the cloth bundle strapped across his back to make sure it was secure, pulled the hood of his shabby brown cloak over his head and stepped into the street.
The two men were professionals, good at their work; they spotted him the instant he moved out of the shadows. He stumbled toward them with the meandering, purposeless walk of a drunk, whistling out of tune as he did. Had he appeared armed or at all threatening, the men would have no doubt charged him, cut him down in the street, and worried about why he’d been there later. It was true that corpses didn’t answer a lot of questions, but one thing that his life as a sellsword had taught Aaron was that they didn’t argue much either.
As it was, the Downs was full of drunks and beggars, men who’d given up on life or had life give up on them and had decided the only recourse was to drown their sorrow beneath the bitter taste of ale and wine. The sight was common enough, innocuous enough, that he managed to make it within three strides of the guards before one of them brought his hand to the hilt of his sword challengingly. “Stop there!” Three strides. A reasonable distance, maybe, but if a man was good, if he was quick, it was close enough. He changed his mind about the two soldiers. Maybe they weren’t so good after all.
In one smooth motion, he tore the cloth from the bundle at his back and slung it at the guard who’d spoken. The man grunted in surprise as the coarse wet blanket wrapped around his face. Aaron pulled his sword free of the sheathe at his back and lunged forward, plunging the cold steel throug
h the heart of the other man before he had a chance to draw his own blade.
He kicked the man in the gut and ripped his sword free, spinning to the side and narrowly avoiding a thrust that had been aimed at his back. When he turned to look, he was surprised to find that the guard was still tangled in the horse blanket and had been stabbing blind. Not stopping to question his luck, Aaron stepped forward and shoved his sword into the mass of tangled cloth and flailing arms. The man screamed and a flood of crimson mingled with the rain as Aaron pulled the blade out and rammed it in again. The unfortunate guard stumbled, choked out a rattling wheeze, and crumpled to the rain-soaked cobbles. Aaron shook his head as he stared at the man’s still form, the blanket serving as a burial shroud as blood began to pool beneath it. Iladen really was a fickle god, and there was never any telling how his dice would land.
He reached for the door and caught himself. Two men on the outside. That left two, maybe three on the inside. Two, maybe three men who’d made a career out of killing and even over the claps of thunder and the beating rain, they had to have heard the screams. Unless they were a band of deaf hitmen, and somehow he doubted that even Iladen’s favor—if he’d had it—would make him that lucky. Going in the front entrance, the only entrance, was an errand he’d have been happy to avoid. A fool’s errand.
He hesitated, staring at the door, his sword held at his side, the wind pushing at his back as if urging him forward. A man would have to hate himself an awful lot, he thought as he studied the light spilling beneath the door. I could leave, he thought, his hand hovering above the door handle, I could just leave. After all, it didn’t matter how much money the woman paid him if he wasn’t alive to spend it. If he turned around now, he could get away clean, without any worries about the men in the house being able to track him down. He knew that, but he also knew that he wouldn’t. He knew he was going in, had known it since before he’d stepped into the street. The screams had made sure of that.
Shaking his head at his own foolishness, he sheathed his sword and drew two shorter blades from where they hung at his hips. Each blade was about a foot long and despite the nicks of hard use on their surface, each bore an edge sharp enough to shave with. They were short, brutal weapons made for close, brutal combat. He’d always preferred the sword, but he preferred breathing more, and it would be too easy for a longer blade to get caught on something once he was inside. A small, tight space, meant close in work, and the shorter blades would be better for that. If, like their comrades, the men inside carried only swords, it would give him an edge. He’d have preferred an army, but he’d take what he could get.
Before he could question the foolishness of his decision, he backed up, took two running steps, and slammed his shoulder into the door. The rotten wood burst apart in a shower of damp splinters, and he hit the ground in a roll. He came to his feet in an instant and swept his eyes around the inside of the shack. A bare-chested man hung loosely from where he’d been tied to a wooden support in the center of the room. Blonde hair, lank with sweat, hung in the stranger’s drooping, haggard face but did little to cover the bloody ruin where one of his eyes had been. The prisoner’s chest and arms were covered in jagged, dripping cuts, and a short, stocky, bearded man stood beside him, a bloody knife in his hand.
Movement flashed in the corner of his vision, and Aaron barely managed to duck a sword that would have taken his fool head off his fool shoulders. Growling, he whipped around, drove both blades into his attacker’s gut, and barreled forward, slamming him into the wall. The swordsman’s screams turned into shrieks of agony as Aaron jerked the blades upward, and the man’s sword clattered to the ground.
Footsteps behind him, and he tore one of the blades free before turning and throwing it at the approaching man. The blade sank into his chest, arresting his charge, and he crumpled to the ground with a groan. Aaron started forward, managing only a step before arms wrapped around his chest from behind like bands of iron. Bastard’s quiet, he had time to think before his head was rammed into the wall.
His vision erupted in a burst of white light at the impact, and he growled in pain and anger as he struggled vainly against the man’s grip. The soldier pulled him back by his hair and started toward the wall again, but Aaron managed to get his legs up in front of him. His feet struck the wall, and he pushed off with all the force he could, grunting with the effort, and he and the man holding him tumbled backward.
They landed hard, and the man’s grip loosened. Aaron spat out a mouthful of coppery-tasting blood and was crawling to his feet when a booted foot struck him in the side and knocked him onto his back. He groaned, and blinked, trying to clear the fog from his eyes. His vision was just coming back when thick, hairy fingers wrapped themselves around his throat. He grasped the man’s wrists and snarled as he struggled to keep from being throttled.
The soldier was surprisingly strong and, despite Aaron’s desperate efforts, he was able to do little more than keep enough pressure off to draw a few choking breaths.
“No … you don’t … bastard,” he said. He let go of one of the man’s wrists, pawing drunkenly at his boot, his vision fading to a thin tunnel of light as the man applied more pressure. He felt a surge of relief as his fingers touched the handle of the blade secreted in his boot, followed directly by a moment of panic as the knife caught on the leather. He grunted, his struggles weakening, and suddenly the blade came free, and he shoved it into his attacker’s side.
The bearded man’s eyes bulged, and he grunted in surprise as the blade slid home. His grip weakened, but only for a moment. Then he growled, a sound more like that of an animal than a man, and began to shake Aaron by the throat, slamming his head against the floor. Fighting against the darkness overcoming his vision, Aaron pushed the blade in a second time, then a third, until he could feel the man’s hot, sticky blood coating his hand and arm. When he was sure that he couldn’t take anymore, that his head would burst from the pressure, the man’s grip suddenly slackened. The bearded soldier wavered for a second, then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed on top of Aaron, dead.
Aaron lay there for several moments gasping and hacking through a throat that felt as if it was on fire, oblivious of the dead man lying on top of him or the warm blood covering his shirt. Then, when he felt that he could get some air—though each breath made his throat feel like it was laced in razor wire—Aaron heaved the corpse off of him and struggled to his feet. He shuffled to where his knives lay, wiped them on the tunic of one of the corpses, and slid them back in the sheathes at his waist with shaky hands. He took a moment to fight off a fresh wave of dizziness, then stumbled toward the figure tied to the pole. “Don’t you be dead, you bastard,” he said, rubbing at his throat, “don’t you dare be dead.”
“Not … yet.” Came the stranger’s reply, so quiet that Aaron almost didn’t hear him. The man raised his head groggily, and Aaron winced in sympathy. He had high cheekbones, and—apart from the marks of his recent torture—a smooth, unblemished face. Once, his would have been a face women would have giggled and whispered about but those days were behind him now. As it was, the ragged, puckered hole where his eye had been and the blood that matted his face and hair made him look more like a corpse than any of the dead men littering the room.
“Good,” Aaron said, struggling to keep back his rising gorge as he forced himself to look the man in his remaining eye, “that’s good.”
One side of the stranger’s mouth turned up in a grizzly smile, and Aaron wondered how the man could talk let alone smile considering the wreck the men had made of his body. Aside from the damage to his face, the skin of his chest and back had been flayed off in places, and he bled freely from several deep puncture wounds. “T-twenty years,” the man whispered, his head lolling, “twenty years of war and blood and fighting and more coming.” He coughed and a fresh wave of crimson wound its way from his mouth. “I-I just wanted it to end. I just wanted to protect them—to stop it.”
The man didn’t look a
ny older than Aaron’s own twenty seven years, and somehow the sellsword seriously doubted he was involved in war at the age of seven, but considering the state he was in, it was no surprise he wasn’t making sense. Still, the man’s words awakened an old anger in him, and Aaron grunted and spat, “There isn’t any stopping it. The strong take what they want and the weak suffer. It’s the way it has always been—the way it always will be.”
The man wheezed a breathy laugh, “My brother … would agree with you.” He raised his head shakily with what looked to Aaron to be a monumental effort and met his gaze with a piercing, blue eye. “You’re angry.”
Aaron frowned. The man’s words sounded almost conversational, “I’m angry because I don’t like fools, now come on. We gotta get you down from there. I know some people that can--”
The man shook his head slowly, “It’s too late. I’m dying. Even she can’t stop it—not this time. It seems that … Belgarin … has finally gotten his wish.” He smiled a sad smile and the hole in his face puckered in a way that made the sellsword’s stomach clench, “I’d thought he’d changed. When he asked to see me, to discuss an end to the war, I’d thought perhaps,” He burst into a fit of hacking, wrenching coughs that made his entire body shake. “I thought t-that he’d become a good man.”
Against his will, Aaron thought of his father, a general in Prince Eladen’s army who’d only ever wanted to end the war, to make a better life for his family and his city. He thought too, of the way he’d found him and his mother, their throats slit, lying in a pool of their own blood. “There’s no such thing as a good man,” he said, “not anymore and people don’t change.”
The man’s face twisted in the same ghastly smile, “Y-you’d be surprised,” he whispered, then his head fell forward, and he let out a single rattling breath and was still.
A Sellsword's Compassion_Book One of the Seven Virtues Page 1
