by Lucas Thorn
Her lips parted, though they were still drawn back into a killer’s grin.
Sucked a breath.
Made to say something, but the air made a sharp snickering sound which sent shivers down the elf’s spine. Instinct drove her to the ground and her head flicked up in time to see three arrows rip Torlik’s life away. He was looking down at the arrows, watching in shock as his blood gushed from the holes in his chest.
Lifted his hand to brush against one shaft, horror dawning.
But then another thunked crisply into his forehead and he dropped, sent to the Shadowed Halls on the wings of Mija’s frantic shrieks.
“Pa! No. Pa! Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead!”
Rockjaw was moving, one heavy arm wrapping tight around Nearne’s waist. He dove sideways, seeking cover. His other arm snatching Mija, cutting her scream as he wrenched her away from the body of her fallen father.
Not moving, Lux cocked his head as an arrow found his chest, left and high. It shot clean through, dangling loose. Loose because it had found no flesh and was instead caught in his cloak and ribs.
He absently reached and plucked it loose, tossing it aside with a contemptuous curl of his papery lips.
The elf froze. Unsure for a moment which way to move. But an arrow stabbed into the ground beside her nose and she bellied along the dusty street, moving swiftly toward where Rockjaw was pressed against the side of a house, out of sight of the archer still sending shafts screaming out of the dark and into the body of the unimpressed deathpriest.
“Shit,” she growled.
Mija, tears streaming, reached a long thin arm. “Pa!”
And the elf’ paused.
She’d felt grief only twice. First, when her mother died. A sudden flash of her mother’s face suddenly flickered across her vision. Pale and sickly as she died a long protracted death.
Poison.
At the time, she’d been told it was sickness. At the time, no one knew what to do.
Later, when she was older, the Jukkala showed her differently. The poison was called gnarlroot. And it killed slowly. Painfully. Often ingested with tea to disguise its slightly acidic taste, it left its victim weak and destroyed their kidneys. There was a cure, of course.
But the man who’d wanted her mother dead hadn’t paid for her to be cured.
The second time she’d felt grief was when she came home to find her husband with a knife in his chest. Dead and cold, he’d died alone.
Alone.
That’s what grief was, she thought, snarling rabidly as realisation burned a hole in her mind. Grief was being left alone. Utterly and with a finality that can’t be reasoned with.
Mija’s tear-soaked gaze swept over her. Met hers. And that was enough. The elf spat hard on the ground in front of her. Then threw herself to her feet, dark shadows in her flesh surging in the echoes of rage which soaked into every fibre of her being.
Rage which demanded blood.
“Nysta!” Rockjaw shouted, but was too busy shielding the two girls to reach for her.
Lux raised a skeletal arm, staff extended. Staggered once as an arrow thrummed into his sternum. “To your left,” he said, voice dry and cruel. “On the roof.”
There was a sound, of course.
A sound which drowned her fear of being shot by arrows.
It vibrated through her body like the wings of rushing bats. It left her senseless with hate.
So, when she spun around the corner of the small house and into the open, she couldn’t hear the archer’s gasped curse. Couldn’t hear Mija’s screams. Couldn’t hear Rockjaw calling her name. Calling her to come back.
Her vision tunnelled, sparking and bright. So bright the moonlight bathed her prey in glittering motes.
She leapt.
Launched herself with everything she had and felt her legs stretch tight as they sent her soaring upward. One arm scrambled for the guttering along the roof, but she still held her enchanted blade so had nothing to grapple with. Her useless hand was good enough only to provide leverage to propel the rest of her body up and over. But, without fingers to snatch at anything, she should have slipped and fallen backward.
She didn’t.
Her hate had brought her this far, and she wasn’t letting him escape.
He kicked back, grey cloak billowing as he sought escape. Stunned by the ferocity in her eyes, hatchet forgotten at his hip, he wheeled and clattered across the uncertain roof. Aiming for the other side.
His mistake wasn’t to run.
Nor was it to forget his hatchet.
His mistake, she thought, was turning his back to her.
A Flaw in the Glass found meat. Found bone. Found lung. And tore down, shearing through his body as she ripped him open.
His scream was loud.
So loud it echoed through the streets. So loud the yellow fog curling against the shores, momentarily crawled back into the town.
But she couldn’t hear him.
Couldn’t hear his sobbing cries as she jerked the blade free only to bring it plunging in again.
Didn’t hear his bone splinter and break.
Didn’t hear his heart spit its last few drops of blood.
Didn’t hear his lung gasp its final breath.
Heard only the sound which had been tearing through her harder than the arrows he’d shot into Torlik. A man she didn’t know. A man she hadn’t even liked.
But a man the girl called Mija now grieved for.
With a grief the elf felt compelled to recognise in echoes of her own.
And, as her throat was made raw by the wordless roar, the sound began to fade. Hoarse and seething, she plunged the knife one more time into unfeeling flesh.
“Fuck you,” she said through mouth wet with spit. “Fuck you. Fuck you all, you fucking grey bastards. Fuck you.”
Wet with blood, A Flaw in the Glass let out a metallic hum as she wrenched it free.
Slumping, the elf looked down on the ruin of the young man and found an emptiness filling her insides like tar. It oozed, turning muscle to sludge.
She threw her face to the sky, seeing a glitter of stars through random wisps of cloud and her own burning eyes.
Lifted the glowing green blade, its edges still zinging with blood, and pointed its curved tip into the belly of the black. A ritual so primal it felt natural as she summoned the face of her dead husband into her mind and imagined him looking down at her from his place in the Shadowed Halls.
“I miss you,” she breathed, voice ragged.
Was he watching?
Did he smile?
“Now, that,” said a voice she recognised. A mocking voice. “Was quite a fucking performance.”
With a hiss, she turned. Found herself staring at three more archers and a flood of Nath’s raiders. Lux was on his knees, staff laid in front of him. Rockjaw was on his face, blood streaming from where they’d hit him in the head. Hard.
Mija was clinging to one of her father’s arms, eyes wide and confused. Two raiders stood beside her. One grinned widely. Too wide for his face.
Nearne stood beside a woman with dark hair and curving cheeks. The elf allowed she was a woman who could turn a man’s head and hurt his neck in the process. But it hadn’t been a man’s head she’d turned because she could be no one else but the girl’s mother, Dalle.
Head hanging low, Nearne stood like a thief condemned and the elf understood their betrayal of Rockjaw in the space of a heartbeat. A betrayal made more obvious by the similar grey dresses they wore. A betrayal just dawning on Mija.
Whose face twisted into an ugly mask of hate as she aimed a stream of spit at the girl she’d worked so hard to keep safe from both Nath’s raiders and the draug who’d been crawling through the town in an orgy of violence and death.
“You fucking bitch! How could you-?”
The grinning man struck her hard across the back of her neck with the butt of his axe to drop her to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Nearne sucked a breath, but
refused to look.
Kept her face staring straight down at her shoes.
And the elf’s own gaze moved smoothly onward toward the speaker. The one-eyed raider stood with his heavily-wrapped leg up, boot on Lux’s shoulder. Axe pressed hard against the deathpriest’s cheek.
“You’ve got nowhere to go now, Nysta,” Maks said. “I knew you wouldn’t die out there. Knew you’d get inside. Just a matter of finding you. And that was easy. Follow the bodies, I told them. Follow the dead. You were bound to leave a trail.”
“Maybe I’ll leave a bigger one right to the gates of the Shadowed Halls.”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ve got you covered on all sides.” He absently brushed a hand against his wounded leg. “You know, for a while, I thought you were someone else. I know now that you ain’t him. You just got on the wrong ship. Bad for you, maybe. Seems to have worked out alright for me, though. I’ve been asked to bring you in alive. Seems the Lord of Light’s got a price on your head. Means you’ll live long enough to be dragged on your knees in front of Him. But where there’s life, there’s hope, right? So, come on down off that roof and maybe you’ll survive. And know that if you so much as breathe funny on your way down, we’ll kill you. How’s that sound?”
The elf eyed the raiders standing behind him. A quick count gave fifteen. A few more ducking around the edges of the surrounding buildings. She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth.
Briefly thought about trying to take them.
Die in battle.
But she wasn’t a hero from a tavern tale. And she’d used her hand to pull herself onto the roof, causing it to throb with heat. Her fingers, now swollen, wouldn’t be holding a knife or punching a face for a while. Even if her life depended on it.
Sweat slithered down her back, dragging exhaustion on its cold tongue. She slid the enchanted blade into its sheath and stood slowly. Painfully.
Kept her hands at her sides and tried to keep hopelessness from her voice. “You and I, feller, we lived through a storm of draug. Got wrecked on a beach. You had your leg chewed on by the same bastards who ate your crew. And me? I got by with just a few scratches. Feels like we’ve both had more than our fair share of good fortune lately. And I don’t reckon either of us deserved it. Sooner or later, one of us had to take the bad to balance the good, right?” She wiped sweat from her face. “But that ain’t what you want to hear. Not what you wanted to know. You wanted to know how good your offer sounds, feller? Well, I reckon it ain’t exactly music to my ears, but I ain’t got a choice for now. So, I’ll take your direction at this stage, in a broad way of speaking.”
“Don’t be like that, Nysta,” he called with a sneer. Looked more confident with every word she spoke. “Nath’s looking forward to meeting you. He’s got some questions he wants to ask. I promised him you’d be singing.”
A few chuckles rewarded him and he looked to Nearne, who gave a short smile in return. But the elf also noticed a tightening of her eyes. Or maybe she was imagining things, because the girl’s cheeks flushed red when Maks grinned at her in response.
The raider standing above Mija’s unconscious form let out a high-pitched giggle.
He had a face which had seen a few battles. A deep red scar down the side of his throat reminded her of Neckless. A name which sent a sliver of anger ribboning through her chest.
She’d remember this man’s face, she thought. Remember it well. She promised herself she’d kill him.
“Only song Tainted are good at singing, Maks, is one with a lot of screaming,” he said loudly.
“You got that right, Jaimes,” Maks returned, gifting the elf a name for her hate. Then motioned for her to come down. “Slowly. If I even think for a second you’re gonna try something…”
“No sweat,” the elf said. “Reckon we can agree this is your play, so I ain’t about to bring the house down.”
She had to move around the corpse and her boot slipped in a smear blood. Skidding briefly, arms cartwheeling for balance, she earned the startled creak of several bowstrings as nervous archers took no chances.
Maks leaned forward, glaring up at her. “I’m telling you, Nysta, don’t you fuckin-”
“And I told you no sweat, feller,” she snapped back, arms wide. Bared her gleaming teeth at Dalle, who stood almost triumphant beside Rockjaw’s splayed body. “It’s just much ado about nothing, not fiddler on the roof.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The elf dropped to the street with a light crash, damaged hand providing no hope of balance. Sucked air through her teeth as legs crumpled beneath her. “Shit.”
And was hit from three sides as Nath’s raiders drove her onto her back and stripped her of her knives. Each blade lost was like a string plucked from her soul and she had to bite hard to not fight back. Because Maks was right.
While she had breath in her body, there was hope she could kill her way out of this.
Her violet eyes, thinned to slits to hide her rage, skated toward where the blind deathpriest knelt as though unaware of the danger surrounding him. His head was cocked slightly and he seemed to be listening to something beyond even her own hearing.
Rockjaw moaned, slowly drifting up from the depths of his unconsciousness as Maks pointed at her. “Make sure you get them all,” he told his men. “She’s sneaky. She’ll have a few in her boots. More than one in her shirt, too. Search everywhere.”
They took her jacket. Took her boots.
Someone cut open her shirt, searching for weapons more than skin.
They rolled her onto her stomach and even ran calloused fingers through her hair. Which surprised her as they took Last Chance Hotel, a small needle-thin blade threaded through her knotted locks. Whoever took the dagger, gave a grunt of satisfaction when he found it and slapped the back of her skull with a contemptuous paw.
As the last of her hidden arsenal was taken, the elf felt her heart begin to beat with a rhythm she hadn’t felt in a long time.
The rhythm of defencelessness. Rhythm of the urchin who’d haunted the darkest shadows of alleys seldom trod in an effort to remain hidden. Because hidden was safe.
She was bare now. Exposed and vulnerable to their threats. Their taunts.
As close to naked as she could feel, she wondered how much of the killer in her was made powerful by her knives. If opportunity arose, could she fight with just one hand?
Doubt crippled her more than the wounds and disarmed her more than the loss of her weapons.
Dragging her to her feet, two heavy men held her arms while another pressed a spear to her back. Three archers remained at angles behind her so she couldn’t pinpoint their position, arrows drawn. Nervousness skipped across Jaimes’ face. He glanced at Maks. Then the nervousness seemed to fly like an invisible bat, wheeling across all their faces one by one while the elf felt a clean ribbon of sweat trickle down the back of her neck as something horrifying occurred to her.
They’d searched everywhere. Even her hair.
They knew.
Knew what she was. What she could do.
At the same time, a new feeling crawled into her heart and curled up beside the embers of her hate. Its eyes glared out from the darkness and a dark chuckle made her veins tremble as she realised their knowing had made them afraid. Afraid of what she was.
And that gave her an edge. An edge she could use, if she timed it right.
With this knowledge clutched tight, she stood straighter and allowed her mouth to curl into a crooked grin which twisted the ugly scar on her cheek. Defiance lifted her jaw and stared Maks right in the eye. Said; “Now what, fuckhead?”
Not quite the reaction he’d been hoping for, the big raider scowled back and couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at the glittering pile of knives. Drew a small amount of comfort from the fact she was held far enough from her weapons. “He said you had a mouth on you.”
“Who?”
“Guess it don’t matter if you know,” he said. “But we were told to expect a long-ear. An
Accepted who ain’t yet made the sacrifice. We’d know ‘em by the scarred face. That’s all we knew. Figured it was you for a long while. It’s why I talked the Captain into taking you on board. Nemo didn’t want you. I was wrong, though, wasn’t I?”
“Willem,” she muttered darkly. And when Maks blinked in surprise; “We’ve met. Made him a promise I was gonna open him up from his dick to his throat. Spit in his guts and piss on his heart. Aim to keep that promise.”
The two men holding her tensed, fingers tightening around her arms.
Which only made her grin wider, showing the glint of her teeth as even Maks took a half-step back. The one-eyed raider shook his head. “Shit,” he said. “He was right about you, wasn’t he? You’re the real fucking thing. Jukkala.”
“Give me a knife,” she said, deliberately looking bored. “Just one. And I’ll show you.”
“Bullshit,” Jaimes said, spitting at her feet. “Look at her. She’s only got one fucking hand.”
The elf’s gaze moved lazily toward his. “One hand’s all I’ll need for you.”
Jaimes made to step forward, but Maks was faster. His experience showed as he slapped a hand onto the young man’s shoulder and jerked him away fast. “Don’t be stupid,” he growled. “Before you start waving your dick in the wind, take a look up there at what she did to Pope. And down here. Look around. That’s all her work. You heard what they said about the Jukkala. Right now the only thing we’ve got to our advantage is numbers. You jump at her now, and you’re giving her the advantage. It’s what she wants.”
“Stories,” he persisted, but there was something there. A catch in his voice as he had to work to keep his anxiety at bay.
“All stories have truth. And even if you only want to believe a tenth of them, that’s still some scary shit.” He looked around. “Learn something, all of you. Respect what your enemy can do. Sure, you mock them. You shout at them. Say whatever you like before a fight. But if you’re keeping them alive, like we are now, you just think about what you’d do in their place. In her place. You’d kill to get free. And make no mistake, she’ll kill you. First chance she gets. So don’t give her that chance. Don’t let her talk you into anything. Because she ain’t unarmed until we’ve cut them both from her shoulders. Even then, she’ll probably bite your fucking throat out. That about right?”
