It had taken her a full five minutes to parcel up the disgusting bits of gristle and fat and the same amount of time to scour the stink off her hands with harsh soap. The scraps lasted approximately ten seconds.
“Gods, you’re a scrounger,” she murmured, a smile tugging at her lips. “No manners. Fine food should be savored, you know.”
The tilt of the dog’s head intimated that manners were a luxury he couldn’t afford and was there any more? Strange, she had no difficulty reading his expression, even through the hair.
“No,” she said. “That’s all. And I should go. I have to be up before dawn.”
But when the little animal settled at her feet and laid his head on her ankle, she continued to sit, enjoying the night scents of Walker’s garden. Tilting her head, she stared up at the silver blue serenity of the Sister, the martial red of the Brother in determined persuit. A flitter buzzed past, a mechanical insect silhouetted against the faces of the Sibling Moons. There’d be Technomages on board, bound for the gods knew where. She’d never seen a Technomage.
The sea breeze from the canal danced by, carrying with it a swarm of ripe glowspores. Enchanted, Mehcredi watched them float past, sparkling and winking. The slightest touch and they burst, releasing a cloud of fragrant dust. One of them brushed the dog’s ear. He sneezed, shaking his head, and she laughed, but softly. Why did they do that? How she wished she knew! Somewhere a touchme bush tinkled a cheerful harmony.
“Walker has a gift,” Serafina had told her, her wrinkled face intent. Apparently, even the most unlikely plants grew as if he’d bewitched them, and in his spare time, he designed gardens for aristocratic clients, most of whom wanted him to give up his House of Swords and work for them, but he wouldn’t. “He’s a man of honor,” said Serafina, with a dark look. “Loyal. Did you scrub the second-floor privy?”
Ow! Dislodging the dog, Mehcredi bent to scratch her ankle. When she lifted her hand, blood smeared her fingertip, dark in the moonslight. “You little shit.” She glared at him. “Keep your damn bitemes to yourself.”
Grumbling, she rose. Completely unabashed, the dog accompanied her down the winding path to the kitchen door. She blocked further progress with her leg. “You can’t come in, scrounger,” she said. “Gods, no. Serafina would kill me.” A shiver ran up her spine as if dark eyes tracked her from the shadows. “Not to mention Walker.”
The dog knew. He didn’t whine when she shut the door in his face.
Safely in her room, she stripped naked and checked, but there were no more of the disgusting little bloodsuckers. Meditatively, she sat on the bed and scratched the bite. What must it be like to be infested with the horrible things? Poor dog.
Walker had intended to stop her before she entered the bathhouse, but then he’d had second thoughts. An unwashed assassin was as much a punishment for him and everyone else in the House of Swords as it would be for Mehcredi. He’d always been fastidious, what of it?
“You’re wasting your time,” he murmured to the dog, sitting hopefully at his feet. Swiftly, he bent, grasping the animal’s jaw with strong fingers. “Dig anywhere in my garden, and I’ll bury you in the hole myself.” He pushed the fall of coarse hair out of the animal’s eyes with his other hand. Held the dark-bright stare. “Understand?”
The dog whined.
“Good.” Walker wiped his palms on his trews. Gods, the creature stank. He should have Pounder take it back to the Melting Pot and let it go. Except it would almost certainly come back and Pounder was too soft to kill it. Lightly, he caressed the hilt of the long dagger at his waist.
’Cestors’ bones, the dog was the assassin’s problem. He let his hand drop, lips curving without humor. Let her deal with it—if she had the balls.
She’d been such a long time in the bath, he’d already completed an entire mediation cycle, not that it had been particularly effective. Why he was waiting for her to finish, he didn’t rightly know. Everything about the godsbedamned woman was a problem.
Dai had a young man’s resilience. He was improving daily. Soon, he wouldn’t need a nursemaid. Every other day, Purist Deiter sent a message demanding to see her, by turns wheedling and threatening.
What the fuck was he to do about Mehcredi the assassin?
Cross-legged, Walker settled with his back to the smooth trunk of a purplemist tree.
5
As always, the ch���qui of the planet flowed deep and true, a balm to Walker’s soul. Keeping a wary eye on the bathhouse door, he dropped quickly into a state of relaxed readiness, opening himself to the springing, green essence of his world, letting it soothe all the empty places inside that ached still and would forever ache.
Because he would always be the last of the Shar. No one left to sing the Songs so integral to the spiritual life of his people, not a single voice to chant his own Song of Birth and Life, to weave the strands of his soul with those of the Ancestors, a never-ending tapestry of intertwined lives that reached back to the dawn of time. His desert tribe was gone, every man, woman and child wiped from the face of the earth, of no more consequence than a nest of bitemes. All due to the greed and overweening ambition of Pasha Ghuis Gremani Giral of the Trinitarian Republic, and his fucking diablomen.
No one to speak his language, to say his name out loud. Only the vengeance that was all he had to give to the Shar’d’iloned’t’Hywil, to those he’d loved and lost. His offering and his atonement.
The night he’d opened the first of the Trinitarian diablomen from neck to groin, he finally slept deep, almost to dawn, without the dreams of spraying blood and shattered bone, the guttural chants of the dark wizards calling their demons. Worse though, much worse, were the creatures’ eldritch howls, the green acrid fog that alternately cloaked and revealed their hideous forms. Pincers and mandibles, skinny shanks and horned toes, segmented limbs and spittle-slick tusks. Even now, the memory of the fundamental wrongness of them made his guts lurch.
When it came to the second kill, he allowed the diabloman to see him, to know and fear his fate. The man had stared at the finger bones threaded into Walker’s long braids. “Barbarian,” he sneered. “Move aside or—”
The last words he spoke.
Now, fifteen years later, Pasha Giral, architect of the entire atrocity, was dead, murdered by his pet assassin, if rumor was true. Walker ground his teeth, realized he was doing it and stopped. Nearly over. With Giral’s escape, only one of the bastards remained, the fifteenth diabloman, Nerajyb Nyzarl, a great greasy bull of a man, too indolent to stray from the fleshpots—and the safety—of the High Palace of the Grand Pasha.
He’d worked his way through the demon masters, stalking them one by one, planning with meticulous care—it was no easy thing to destroy a man bound body and soul to a devil—even less so if you wanted to draw out the agony, gaze into their eyes while they pissed themselves with terror.
And if the executioner’s ice had entered his heart and frozen it from the inside out, who was there left to know or care? There were times he wondered if there was anything left of his soul at all, every last particle consumed by the Shar’s vengeance, and he himself was nothing but an empty husk that walked and talked and went through the motions.
It wouldn’t be easy to reach Nyzarl, but he’d find a way. Soon, soon, once Mehcredi had completed her penance. Walker had to lean hard on his discipline to prevent himself from shifting with annoyance. A complication he didn’t need. He maintained his straight-backed posture, but the hand that had rested open on his thigh curled slowly into a fist.
The door of the bathhouse clicked open. The dog catapulted off the bench where he’d been lying and trotted over to frolic around the assassin’s legs. “. . . filthy little beast,” he heard her say, her voice somehow different in the dark, warm as Trinitarian brandy, its huskiness just as potent.
Walker came to his feet, every sense alert. You could learn a great deal about an adversary from their first, unguarded reaction. But once again, she failed to even glance in
his direction, though he was standing in plain sight and the Sibling Moons were high.
Conscious of the oddest thread of disappointment, he studied her, taking his time. She looked different, posed in a bright fall of moonslight, her pale skin glowing like a temple statue come to life. All she wore was a loose shift that left her arms and legs bare and skimmed over the shape beneath, her silver blond hair twisted up into a careless knot on the top of her head. Wisps of it escaped to brush her cheeks and caress the column of her throat. It exposed the elegant severity of her jawline and the tender nape of her neck, giving what he knew to be an erroneous impression of vulnerability. Walker’s lip curled. Under the puppy fat, Mehcredi the assassin was what Rose would call handsome rather than merely pretty. As the owner of The Garden of Nocturnal Delights, the best courtesan house in Caracole, her judgment in such matters could not be faulted. Godsdammit, he didn’t doubt any normal, red-blooded man would deem Mehcredi eminently fuckable, if a little strange. Plenty to hold on to, he thought sourly, suppressing a snarl. The dog glanced up from devouring a noisome little pile of scraps, but the assassin continued to gaze up at the moons, oblivious.
She laughed suddenly for no reason, a deep, joyous gurgle, unexpectedly sensuous in the soft night air, and the faintest ripple of response traveled over the sensitive skin of his scrotum, like the slow, gelid swirl of water trapped under ice. Walker blinked, genuinely astonished.
Still human after all. Father’s balls, who’d have thought it? He hadn’t been with a woman in . . . How long? He frowned, trying to recall. More than a year.
That part of him, the sexual part, the lonely youth who craved warmth and connection, had closed down, slowly but inexorably, over the years of his vengeance. He gave a wry smile in the dark. Too fastidious for his own good, because quick fumbles in the dark left him cold. On the other hand, lengthy entanglements were something he couldn’t afford.
It was easier—cleaner—to remain his own contained, enigmatic self. If it got too bad, he had his own hand.
Another few moments of communing with nature and the assassin rose with a sigh, closing the door in the dog’s hopeful face.
Walker stretched, feeling joints pop and muscles sing. Thanks be to the Ancestors for the discipline of the nea-kata that kept him supple and balanced, mentally and physically. Every morning at dawn, he practiced, flowing from one movement to the next, making each element as close to perfect as possible for a mere mortal, his homage to the Ancestors.
Stripped to a loin pouch, he’d offer all that he was, the morning breeze off the water caressing his sweaty skin, the lush, short grass cool under his bare soles, the only spectators the small hopping birds. These last few days, of course, he could add the assassin to his audience, peering from behind the kitchen door, where she thought he couldn’t see her.
Idly, he wondered what she made of it and whether she’d be there again on the morrow. She hadn’t missed a day in a week so far. Then he decided he didn’t care and went in to bed.
Though her bones ached with tiredness, Mehcredi slept badly, so anxious she’d miss him it seemed she woke every hour. It was still dark when she dragged herself down to the kitchen, but that didn’t matter, she’d come to know the place like the back of her hand. Deftly, she raked over the coals in the big wood-fired stove that was Serafina’s pride and joy, and put on a kettle for a tisane.
Walker arrived early. How she knew he was there, she wasn’t sure, only that a ghostly sensation prickled over her skin and gave her goose bumps. Her grip tightened on the stoneware cup, warm and rough against her palms. Creeping to the door, she eased it open a crack.
Bathed in the cool gray light of dawn, the swordmaster had his back to her, removing his shirt. Soundlessly, Mehcredi let out a long breath. Light and shadow flirted with the hollows and planes of his body, pooling in the smooth indents that paralleled the groove of his spine, gleaming across the strong horizontal bone structure that gave his shoulders their width. The male body wasn’t new to her—the baron’s men had no use for modesty. When they bathed, which wasn’t an especially frequent occurrence, they did so in the deep tarn above the keep. There they splashed and wrestled in the freezing water like frisky warhounds, obscenities echoing back and forth in the chill mountain air.
She’d seen plenty of male flesh, but by the Sister, she’d never seen skin like Walker’s, bronze satin sliding sweetly over long strong bones and shapely swells of muscle. The keep guards were hairy, some of them as thickly rugged on the back as the front. But though she stared at the swordmaster until her eyes ached, all she could see was a mouthwatering expanse of smooth skin, his only blemishes four wicked scars—she’d counted. For some insane reason, they made her want to weep. The worst of them was a set of five parallel gouges curving over his left hip, disappearing under the waistband of his trews. They looked like claw marks.
Mehcredi’s fingers tightened on the cup. What had hurt him so badly? A direwolf? A tygre? Had he cried out in rage and pain? Had he killed it? She snorted quietly. Of course he had.
The first time she’d seen him perform this strange ritual, he’d worn nothing more than a leather pouch that cradled his genitals, leaving his taut buttocks bare, so that her wide-eyed gaze swept unimpeded—except for the thin leather strip at his waist—all the way up the hard luxurious glory of him, from strong bare feet to long thighs and high muscular buttocks, a trim waist and broad shoulders.
She’d come down early that particular morning, because Serafina had charged her with starting the porridge and she’d wanted to take her time, get something right for once. Catching sight of him through the small window, the jug she held had slipped from her lax fingers. Fortunately, she caught it, ignoring the milk that splashed and dripped over her legs and feet.
You’d think he was dancing—until you saw the swords. Entranced, she leaned against the wall and watched him flow through a series of intricate, fluid movements. Bronze-clad muscles expanded and contracted, the swords flashed and arced, and the end result was a poem of such grace, power and control that it made her yearn for something beyond her grasp.
His features were more relaxed than she’d ever seen them, tranquil, with a purity she hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps this too was a part of his shaman’s Magick. The Mark over her heart surged with heat and she trembled all over.
She’d spent the week struggling through the unfamiliar feelings, thinking about him, about that strong, perfect body. Watching now, mourning the appearance of the trews, her lips curved in a wry smile. This had to be sexual attraction. Desire. She wasn’t prepared to call it lust, didn’t want to associate this lovely warm tingle with the rutting that was all she’d known of relations between men and women.
The swordmaster was . . . clean, as beautiful as one of his blades. Wistfully, she watched him spin and bend, the long black tail of hair whipping about as he turned, his strong bare feet landing with precision on the short turf. The wicked razor-sharp edges whirled hungrily all around his body. Godsdammit, how was it he still had all his limbs?
Here it came, the slow, graceful pattern that meant he was about to finish. Mehcredi set the cup down on the floor, her brow furrowed with concentration as she copied his movements. Right arm over the head, sweep down in a balletic arc to the left hip, rock back on the left heel, raise the right foot—Oh, shit. She wobbled and the posture collapsed.
Hell, she couldn’t get anything right. Might as well be back at Lonefell. Half-wit slut, sneered Taso, swaggering out of memory like a bad dream, eyes bright with cruel hunger. Lucky ye don’ keep yer brains in yer cunt.
She shuddered. Walker wasn’t anything like Taso.
“It’s called the nea-kata.”
Mehcredi’s eyes flashed open and she jerked, one foot kicking the cup. It rolled into the wall with an audible clink.
Slowly, she raised her eyes to meet the swordmaster’s long-lidded gaze as he stood in the doorway. “Sorry,” she meant to say, but what came out of her mouth was, “Teach me. P
lease.”
“No.” Walker didn’t even blink. Stepping aside, he picked up his shirt.
Mehcredi’s chest went tight. “I can watch though?”
He shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”
Facts snapped together in Mehcredi’s head. The man was a hunter, the most skilled she’d ever met. His senses were far keener than hers.
“That’s not right,” she said triumphantly. “You knew I was here, right from that very first day. And it does make a difference, because now you’re wearing trews.” She waved a hand in the general direction of his groin. “Instead of that little pouch thing.”
Walker froze. His lips went thin and sooty lashes swept down, concealing his eyes. The hint of a flush bloomed on his high cheekbones.
A reaction! Mehcredi caught the chuckle before it could bubble out of her throat. She might not be very bright, but she had a feeling laughing at the swordmaster’s expense was an exceptionally bad idea.
“The porridge is burning,” he said.
By the time she rushed to the stove, he’d disappeared in the direction of the bathhouse.
Mehcredi suspected she’d ruined everything with Dai. Each day, she stood outside his door, breathing hard, her belly aching, trying to force herself over the threshold. There were times she could swear there was an invisible barrier, as thick as glue. If it hadn’t been for the swordmaster and his godsbedamned Mark . . . Every time the swordsman fought to swallow, her own throat closed and she couldn’t breathe or think.
Reminding herself she’d survived worse—a little voice in her head sneered, Really? And what might that be?—she knocked, shouldered the door open and maneuvered herself and the lunch tray inside. To her surprise, Dai wasn’t alone. A skinny boy sat cross-legged on a chair opposite the swordsman, frowning down at the small table drawn up between them.
The Lone Warrior Page 6
