‘Itirel was right about one thing…’ he groaned, dropping onto the edge of the bed. The Helven let out a soft grunt beneath him.
Every question she posed… every smile she flashed… Each was rife with warning.
If his rebellion was discovered, all the might of his True Blood brethren could not protect him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Alright, time to get off this shithole,” Hazamareth informed, pushing open the door to the ship’s sleeping quarters. She frowned in concern, watching Tsuki dry heave into a barrel beside one of the wooden posts. “Gods, Tsuki. We’re docked now,” she gibed.
“Well then, tell the damn ship to stop rocking,” Tsuki groaned, blearily gripping his wide hand around a pillar for support.
Hazamareth walked forward, stopped beside her comrade, and surveyed him. His sun-tanned skin was pale and clammy. His usually straight and strong frame was hunched over with an arm tucked into his gut.
He was not an attractive sight.
“Alright, let’s get you up,” she grunted. She lowered her body to put an arm under Tsuki’s. “Come on. Up. We’ll put some solid ground beneath those weak legs of yours.”
Tsuki leaned against her in silence. Damn, he really was ill to not even offer a half-formed retort—granted, that was usually all he managed even on a good day. She grunted as he sank against her. And by Malranus was he heavy!
“The last time I had to haul your ass like this, you were sprawled out in that tavern… The Cuddly Sprite, was it?” Hazamareth groaned, wishing she had a bit of Tsuki’s usual strength. “No more of that disgusting vandrant fat you call meat.”
Tsuki grunted, staggering forward. “The Ugly Knight. Gods, five centuries and you still can’t read.” He stumbled and clutched at her narrow shoulders. “Don’t strain yourself. You haven’t eaten much since we set sail. You must be weak, yourself.” He rubbed his neck subconsciously.
Hazamareth felt her mouth salivate, but she forced her eyes away from the wound at the base of her companion’s collar. “It’s you who needs to rest. I am fine.”
And that was partially true… just light sensitivity and the rapid heartbeats of the ship’s crew thundering about in her head.
Tsuki shot her a due reproach and they continued their slow ascent to the ship’s deck. When they broke out into the glaring evening sun, Hazamareth found she hardly had the courage to raise her eyes and scan the bustling deck.
Maybe they were both a little pathetic after the voyage…
“Fair ye well, lads,” the captain hollered from the bow as he gathered his belongings lowered from the foretop. “Always welcome aboard The Wench—if you can stomach it!”
There was a chorus of laughter and Hazamareth heard Tsuki let out a low, guttural growl. She pinched her comrade’s ribs. “Hush,” she rebuked. “Let’s try to rise above the scum today, shall we?”
“Lucky I’m still feeling ill or they’d—” Tsuki began.
“Tsuki, hush.” ‘The temper on him…’ Though she had to admit, it was pleasant to see a flame after the simpering of the last few days—but they had already pushed the crew far past their welcome. ‘We just need to get out of this rat nest.’ She struggled toward the disembarking plank, moving as briskly as Tsuki would allow.
They had wobbled no more than a few yards before she heard several pairs of boots rushing toward them from the starboard. She shifted her hazel eyes to the side. Three familiar faces were hastening to intercept them. ‘Ah, of course.’
“Sorry,” Gavin began as Hazamareth made to step around the human. He planted his burly body between the two mercenaries and the shore as Kellam and Aldridge fanned out to block their path. Hazamareth could hear their riled blood even before she looked up to see the stupid sneers plastered across their sun-burnt, peeling faces.
“Don’t you think you’ve given him enough trouble?” Hazamareth began calmly as the ship shuddered in the waves.
Tsuki closed his eyes and began his nervous drumming against her arm.
She shifted her weight, regarding the three of them stoically. It was the elven side of her that now took charge: the side that determined her lack of reaction was more infuriating than the best laid insults. “So he doesn’t have sea legs—we have all heard the jab by now. Might you have thought of something new?”
Kellam flicked a boney hand, retaining equal calm. “Naw. Poor pup. We just thought we’d see him off, seein’ as how it’s his last day with us an’ all.” He scratched the flaking skin beside one of his dirty ear cuffs and leered.
“How kind of you.” Hazamareth narrowed her dark eyes in gentle warning. “And here I thought you were still sore about losing all that coin. How shameful of me. Gentlemen such as yourselves would hardly start a brawl over such trifles.”
The humans exchanged stupidity, uncertain if sarcasm laced her tone.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take my friend to—”
Aldridge flapped his arms with a heady laugh from his barreled gut. “Hold your tongue, lady—no need to speak another word. Please, take your man before he stains your pretty leather boots.”
Tsuki swallowed back a heave.
Kellam swept aside, allowing a very narrow path between him and the edge of the plank. Even his puny ass would have struggled to squeeze by.
‘Well, this isn’t going to end well,’ Hazamareth resigned. She adjusted Tsuki’s balance and prepared for the inevitable. The notion that they had cheated in the recent acquisition of their wealth was…
Frankly true and entirely deserved.
She gave the sailor a falsely amiable nod and began her slow march forward. Beside her, Tsuki was fixated on the bustling dockyard ahead, but Hazamareth suspected he was readying himself for a fight.
As they came to pass between the men, she saw the muscles along Gavin’s flaking shoulders tense—and then the brawny arms flew out to shove them into the frigid sea below.
How disappointingly unoriginal. Hazamareth had seen it so plainly written in the man’s body language it was almost a shame to have to respond.
Tsuki sprang into action, ripping from her grasp to catch Gavin’s right arm. Hazamareth pivoted, snatching her comrade’s left bicep. At that, Tsuki flung himself toward the center of the plank, whipping the stunned human clear off his feet. With calculated efficiency, Tsuki used the momentum of the man’s body to swing himself around behind the smuggler.
In a swift kick, Tsuki sent Gavin clear off the plank.
There was the immediate response of feet behind them accompanied by a storm of angry shouts. Hazamareth could expect no less—while wit and talent were certainly lacking, comradery was not.
Tsuki, however, had not broken his movement. Even as Gavin made a resounding splash below, Tsuki carried his energy into a fist square into the nose of Kellam. The wiry lout was sent tumbling into the water on the opposite side of the plank.
Hazamareth looked over her shoulder in time to catch view of the half-dozen approaching bastards before Aldridge seized her wrists and yanked them behind her back. Even worse than her incapacitation was her renewed proximity to his stench of cod liver oil and sea salt.
“We should have dumped you in the waters first,” she jabbed before she was forced to stifle a gag.
Aldridge merely gave her a good shake as his comrades crowded before her. “Haven’t you two bastards caused enough problems?” one of his shipmates growled.
Two others had managed to wrestle Tsuki’s wild swings into submission. He could do no more than watch as one of the smuggling bastards laid Hazamareth squarely in the jaw.
Her head snapped to the side.
“You attack one of us and you attack the lot of us,” another smuggler gnarled, drawing a small knife from his dirty linen shirt. “Which one of you wants t’ wear a souvenir?”
His shipmates drew their shoddy steel blades to join in the fun, but a stern roar of command bellowed suddenly from the dockyard below. “That’s enough!”
The hu
mans’ childish jeering ceased as they cast their eyes to the cobbled square. Hazamareth craned her neck to spot two of the city’s guard standing at the foot of the plank, eyeing them harshly.
The hands about her loosened. “Just havin’ a bit of fun,” Aldridge called. “No harm intended.”
“Then release them and disperse,” the guard barked back. “Or I will have the lot of you taken in for disrupting the peace.”
“MEN,” hollered a voice behind them. “You heard the gentleman! Back to work!”
“Back to work,” Aldridge repeated with a furious huff, shoving Hazamareth down the plank. “God-damn lucky—that’s what the two of you are.”
Tsuki was quickly at her side, steadying her as hastily as he balanced himself.
The fight dispersed, the city guard spun away and marched down the snow-spattered docks.
“Well, that could have turned ugly,” Tsuki muttered, dropping his weight shamelessly against her side. “Hate to be a wanted man here as well.” His fingers tapped rapidly against her arm.
“Give us another century or two—we’ll manage it,” Hazamareth replied as she swung a hand up to signal the ship’s captain a final finger salute. Then she patted her comrade’s restless fingers still.
A crowd had crammed together near the ship: a mix of burly sailors and wide-eyed townspeople hoping for the fight to rekindle. It was as though nothing in their dry, simple days could be more interesting. She would have given them no regard except that she swore a familiar face had peered out at them from the crowd…
Tsuki groaned, lurching forward unexpectedly. “Damn. Let’s get on some solid ground already!” he choked.
Hazamareth corrected his unbalanced gait. “We are on solid ground.” She loosened her grip. “Any better?” A bead of sweat rolled down his temple. “You do not look any better…”
“I’m not,” Tsuki grunted in response.
Hazamareth glanced back up toward the dispersing crowd, but there remained no one she recognized. She brushed it aside. There were more important matters at hand—like the beast. What sort of sailors let a nearly horse-sized creature vanish onto a vessel? And for that matter, what idiotic humans had let it pass? “I will get us a room at an inn and leave you to rest and clean up. I shall ask around about the beast. The ship that ferried it was supposed to stop by this city. If so, I have no doubt that a murder or two will get us back on its trail.”
Tsuki nodded. “Damn world will not stop rocking. To Ramul with ships. Next time our job jumps continents, we let it,” he balked, even as the port bustled with the stifling mass of the civilization he so loved.
Hazamareth ignored the meaningless gripe.
They made their way through the crowd, under the long archway beneath the buildings, and into the market square. Here, the populace only intensified. “Keep your eye on your pockets,” Hazamareth warned as she inspected a dirty child tossing a storm-orb between his hands. The boy paused to watch them from beneath a low-hanging canopy, his crafty face flickering in the orb’s light. “Thieves around… Should be an inn nearby, though.” She turned expectantly into a side street. “And as I suspected,” she said as she gestured triumphantly to a creaking wooden sign of a fat bird at rest. “The Pigeon’s Coop. Always the cleverest of names.”
“The Crow’s Nest,” Tsuki sighed.
Hazamareth swung the door open with her foot and stepped into the tumult of noise. The air was thick with lantern, torch, and candle smoke while the floor maintained a tidy affair of pools of spilt ale. Her brow furrowed. Not clean enough for her taste, but then, she had learned to put up with the shady places Tsuki preferred to bed in. That was, after all, the human way.
She moved to the counter, extending a hand. “A room,” she requested. The rotund bartender scrutinized the two of them for a moment, milky eyes trailing their weaponized garb. ‘Yes. We’re not sailors,’ she thought impatiently. ‘Just give me the damn key.’
The man finally swung to the back wall. “Two silver. Only have rooms with one bed left. ’Ll get you two.”
Hazamareth dropped the coins and slid them through a puddle of grime toward the innkeeper. “One is fine.”
The man lumbered to the counter, an eye squinted in thought as he dropped the key from the fat rolls of his palm. Whatever thoughts swam about beneath the ample blubber he kept to himself. “Upstairs on your left.”
“My thanks.” And she helped Tsuki up the stairs. She drew to a stop beside the door. “Stay out of trouble for a few minutes.”
Returning downstairs, Hazamareth took a seat on a stool by the counter, leaning one elbow forward in the single dry spot she could find. Bartenders always seemed to know the most about a city; they were the best single, collective source of information in the land.
The man breathed into a mug before he wiped it slowly with a dirty rag. “What d’ya want?”
Hazamareth grimaced at the imagined taste of the bitter liquor. “Anything,” she replied to be polite, setting down an extra coin with her payment. “I just arrived in this city. Perhaps you could inform me of something in particular. Any… exceptionally brutal murders as of late? Anything that stands out?” There was no use in preliminary banter.
The man slid the coins into his free hand as he handed Hazamareth a mug. He began with a strong lilt, leaving off the beginnings and ends of what seemed like a random slew of his words while he hardly dared to put more than half a dozen together. It grated on Hazamareth, and she had to remind herself to not scowl in derision. Despite hundreds of years surrounded by humans, her elven ass still retained some remnants of a stick. “Mercenary type, eh? Aye. There’s been a brutal strin’ o’ murders as o’ late. Hardly a person tha’ll leave their home without ensurin’ there’s at least a dozen other people ’round. Not that it’d help much. House ’r streets. Don’t matter nothin’ to it. ’Nd we know what it is too. Seen it by just a week ’r so back. Terrifyin’, huge creature with horns ’nd wings ’nd yellow eyes. Killed some city guard ’fore takin’ off out o’ the city. Comes back ev’ry night… if it ain’t a new person dead, it’s a new person missin’. The body’ll show up later. There’s a slew o’ guards stationed ’round the city. Don’t do anyone no good. Somehow it gets in ’nd out. Has to hole up under bridge. Best that can be reckoned is the Yislaval. Yislaval Mountains, that is. They’re the mountains just north o’ here. Only one way in ’nd out on foot, but if it can fly, then you best be talkin’ to Lady Luck, ’cause you won’ never find it in that death trap. Filled with yislaval.”
Yislaval… those damned winged vermin—elvish in appearance but as feral as any wild beast. She had not dealt with their kind in a very long time. And yet, she could not help but smile as she stepped lightly off the stool, her mug untouched. Well, her work for information had hardly ever been easier. “Thank you. You told me exactly what I needed to know.” She paused. “If I may ask, is there a reward around here for the beast?”
“Mighty large one,” the innkeeper replied with a sharp nod of his head. “From the governor.”
Hazamareth tapped her head and gestured her thanks, stepping lightly up the stairs. There was nothing like a day when she did not have to drag herself across a filthy city looking for information. This beast was fortunately as consistent and indiscreet as ever.
She reached the top of the stairs and pushed their door open. “Just me,” she called in warning.
Inside, Tsuki was seated cross-legged against the headboard, a loaded crossbow in his lap. He settled it onto the nightstand as Hazamareth closed the door behind her. A roaring fire had already significantly warmed the room, and Tsuki’s bare chest was glistening slightly in the heat.
Hazamareth surveyed the clutter already expanding across the small chamber. “I thought we discussed keeping things a little tidier? We would not have lost the Amulet of Rohar if you had just put it away.”
“Me? What I remember is that you wore it last.”
Hazamareth ignored him—mostly because he was likely right.
“The beast is here,” she began, plucking up his strewn stockings and boots as she went. “Apparently arrived a week ago and has been killing every night. The general assumption is that he has taken refuge in the mountains. There are plenty of guards around town, but no one has laid a hand on him.” She dropped her boots aside and unlaced her shirt. “The humans know only one way in and out of the mountains by foot. Judging by the way the beast has travelled thus far, those wings are likely as useless to him as a woman to a eunuch.” She rubbed her lips, her mouth suddenly aching. She could hear Tsuki’s heart thudding steadily in his warm chest, pumping blood through his powerful body. “Damn it,” she muttered below her breath.
“Hungry, Haz?” Tsuki asked with a smirk and slightly raised chin. “Probably should have stopped to eat. Has to be something you like around here. You know. Something else.”
Hazamareth leaned down and snatched up her boots. “Yes, I will go get something to eat.”
And before the words had fully left her lips, the atmosphere around them changed; with great force, the door to their room flew back against its hinges, crashing into the wall with an echo that resounded high above the tavern’s din.
Tsuki and Hazamareth moved as one for the crossbow, but were forced to recoil as a silver dagger shot across the short expanse.
The blade lodged into the bed with a soft thud. “Well, well. If it isn’t Hazamareth and Tsuki,” the Sel’ven male at the door commented, leaning against the frame with an ostentatious sniff. “Gods, who figured you two would show yourselves here? Causing a scene at the docks is how you two avoid attention, is it? Kisix certainly has delivered revenge to my blade.” A slow sneer crept across his chapped lips. “Last time I saw you was… let me see… when you tried to turn me in to the city guard for murder. Some comrades you amounted to. I had heard that the two of you were unscrupulous, but I never imagined you so far as backstabbers. Relstavum? Yes. But not you.”
Heroes or Thieves (Steps of Power 2) Page 34
