Tig wiped his hands clean after tossing the host inside a room and shutting the door. “Let’s slice and dice a fookin’ lord, whadd’ya say?”
Elaya set her sights on the door at the far end of the room that supposedly led to a hallway which would bring them to the Diamond Room. She tried the handle, but it didn’t budge.
“Locked,” she said.
“Our friend prolly has the key,” Adom suggested.
“Just kick it in.”
Tig stepped forward. “My pleasure. Use’ta do this on the regular, you know.”
“Who boots doors in on the regular?” Kaun said.
“Yeah,” put in Adom, “what kind of job is that?”
Kaun elbowed Adom playfully and said, “Maybe one fit for an ogre.”
Tig glared at them both.
“Boys,” Elaya said, an undercurrent of impatience in her voice, “we have limited time. So, please, shut your mouths and execute the plan.”
With a thundering kick into the bottom corner of the door, Tig managed to snap a hinge. Another kick fissured the door frame, and soon after they were in.
The ceiling above croaked.
Elaya hurried down the carpeted hallway that smelled of fresh wood. She wondered if this section of the brothel had been recently added on; everything from the red trim of the carpet to the shiny silver sconces looked fresh and new.
A bare pine stairway at the end of the hall spiraled up. Holes for banisters had been drilled into the floor but remained empty, confirming Elaya’s suspicion. She crept up the stairs, grateful that the risers and stringers weren’t yet worn and busted. Lord Gruppus’s guards would have little warning that four mercenaries were coming for them.
In hindsight, Elaya should have known that breaking down a door causes quite the commotion. She reached the last step at precisely the same time a sword jabbed in from around the corner wall.
The tip of the blade slid along her belly, shaving away cotton shirt threads and leather crumbs from her hauberk.
She flung herself backward and into the open arms of Tig, who leaned a knee into a stair to brace himself.
“Look out!” Adom cried. He leaped forward. A downward swing of his sword followed, clashing against the lunging blade of a Jackal and driving it into the stairs.
Steel screeched. Elaya’s body clenched.
“Go!” Adom barked, teeth bared. Veins in his forearms bulged as he fought to still the Jackal’s sword, keep him trapped and susceptible.
Free of Tig’s embrace, Elaya steadied herself. She had every intention of fitting the summit of her sword snug inside the eyeholes of the Jackal’s helmet, but Jackal Number Two came thundering down with crashing strides.
Had he a sword, she would’ve matched him swing for swing. He did not have a sword. He had a flail. And he was swinging it like a lasso readying to reel in a wayward calf.
Oh, shit, Elaya thought. A pivot later and she was facing Kaun behind her. Both of them hurried down the steps, Adom and Tig in their wake.
They made it safely to the bottom, heaving and swearing. The Jackals smartly kept their position, having the high ground.
“Who sent you?” asked a Jackal.
“Death,” Elaya said.
“He’ll be taking you back, wench.”
She had an idea and whispered as much to Tig. He offered her an affirming clench of his jaw. While Phase Three of Sack the Gravendeer Vault had called for outnumbering and efficiently eliminating Lord Gruppus’s guards, the circumstances dictated a different approach.
“Pity,” Elaya whispered to Tig. He gave her a wink.
Elaya told Kaun and Adom to hold their positions; the staircase wasn’t wide enough for all four mercenaries to stand abreast. She and Tig, with as much space between them as possible, advanced up.
One step at a time, she told herself. That was the best way to take stairs, after all, especially when you’ve got a flail-wielding soldier wanting to knock your head right off your shoulders.
The plan she’d concocted wasn’t a safe one. One couldn’t call it smart, either. But she had the courage to try it and the finesse to pull it off.
Hopefully.
Elaya paused three steps short of the Jackals. Flail Man readied his weapon, swinging the chain and hammer above his head. Elaya kept one eye on his feet and the other on his hand. Those two extremities tell you everything you need to know in combat. If his weight would drift forward, or his arm would swing slightly wide, that was her tell to roll or dive or otherwise dodge certain death.
“Does Lord Gruppus pay you well?” Elaya asked, blade held outward despite it having no chance of deflecting the flail.
The Jackals refused to dignify that with an answer.
“You could have joined me, you know,” she said. She shrugged and added with emphasis, “Pity.”
With the cue word uttered, Elaya and Tig charged the Jackals. Tig’s cyclopean strides jarred his opponent back as the two met with clanging blades.
Elaya hoped he had the Jackal’s sword tied up well enough, because soon she’d be as defenseless as a newborn coming out of the womb.
Soon she’d be vulnerable.
Soon she’d be—there, Elaya thought as the flail-wielding Jackal brought his arm up and out. She waited a split second longer so the motion and trajectory of the flail had already been set, then she dipped her head and lunged to the right.
She somersaulted in front of Tig just as a steel flail head struck and obliterated part of the staircase she was on.
A voice, behind her. Footsteps, behind her.
“No,” she barked. “Stay—dammit!”
Panic smothered the morbid excitement of battle. Kaun and Adom were racing up the stairs. She’d explicitly told them to stay behind. She’d ordered them to stay behind.
She couldn’t worry about that now. She had a plan to execute.
A Jackal to execute.
Iron screeched, as it’s wont to do when sharpened edges grind and grate and slide against one another. Tig locked his wrist, maintaining the forward impetus of his blade. If the Jackal had disengaged, the momentum would have likely tripped him up; such is the disadvantage of sword fighting on stairs.
Another disadvantage, albeit wholly unlikely and completely unforeseeable, met him in the form of a screaming woman who had somersaulted across the stair beneath him. She jumped to her feet and essentially speared him.
The Jackal flailed his arms, attempting to keep his balance. With a well-placed blow, Tig struck the guard’s sword from his grasp. It clattered somewhere behind him.
Elaya drove her shoulder into the Jackal’s breastplate, flooring him. She’d planned to rip off his helmet, strip away his defenses that way. But his head rolled back and revealed the flesh of his neck.
Tsk, tsk, she thought. Ought to have worn a gorget.
She thrust her sword in there and eventually out of there—well, out the other side, anyhow.
The Jackal gurgled then. Convulsed, too. Blood fountained from his throat in a pulsing manner that intensified with each glug he made.
From the corner of Elaya’s eye flashed gold. She turned, watched as Jackal Number Two flew forward with the stiffness of a corpse. Adom had wrapped his hand around the chain of the flail and yanked it. She doubted he figured the Jackal would come with it.
“A twofer!” Adom hollered, celebrating his achievement by stomping the Jackal’s head till he stopped squirming. Then he bent down, flipped him over, and slit his throat.
With her nails digging into Adom’s shoulder, Elaya forcibly wheeled him around. “I told you to stay down there.”
“It wasn’t my idea. Kaun came charging up.”
Elaya’s glare shifted over to Kaun.
“Are you fucking me?” he said. “I just saved your life.”
“I had a plan. The plan did not include you two.”
“I saved your life.” His voice strained.
“No. You disobeyed a direct order. That’s what you did.”
> Kaun coughed up a disbelieving laugh. “I’m sorry, Lady Elaya. Shall I bow down and put my lips to your boots?”
With her chin low and her eyes cast down, she said, “You could have gotten yourselves killed.”
“But we didn’t.”
Elaya turned away in disgust. She wasn’t a queen. She wasn’t a demanding, punishing taskmaster, but she commanded the Eyes, dammit. She led them. Obviously Kaun didn’t respect that.
She’d deal with him later. Right now, a nasty, devious lord needed gutting.
The Diamond Room of Lord Kuss’s brothel disappointed. Elaya had expected literal diamonds to sparkle and glitter. Where they’d sparkle and glitter from, she didn’t know—maybe the bedposts—but there’d be glittering and sparkling, she was sure of it.
Instead, she found herself in an expansive yet mostly empty room with one large bed curtained off by thin white drapes. Sitting in a sea of pillows and bunched-up sheets were three naked women and one disgustingly naked man, his mouth gagged.
“Well,” Elaya said, “this should be easy. Scatter, ladies. Please.”
Lord Gruppus’s fat rolls jiggled—all of them, and there were many—as he murmured and muttered and stammered, a black ball between his lips muddying his words. He attempted to sit up, but the rope that bound his hands behind his back made that difficult.
The brothel ladies parted for Elaya and the Eyes, hugging themselves in terror as they pranced to the edge of the room.
Elaya loathingly pulled at the sheets near Lord Gruppus’s crotch, covering him up. “We won’t kill you,” she said, resting a hand on the headboard, “if you cooperate. Okay?”
Lord Gruppus’s caterpillar brows twitched. He grunted something.
“Where is the key to the vault? I know you have it on you.” Another grunt. Elaya pulled the gag out of his mouth and waited for an answer.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
She let the ball snap back into place. “I’ll give you three chances to cooperate. You just blew number one. Where is the key?” She removed the gag again.
“My purse, my purse! It’s in my pants. Gods, who are—”
The black ball snapped into his mouth again, slinging spit into his eye.
Adom rummaged through the clothes on the floor. He eventually produced a leather pouch, flicked it open and showed Elaya.
A thick wrought-iron key with a wolf’s head perched upon the top stared at her. She returned to Lord Gruppus, frowning. “I’m sorry, but I lied. Witnesses are a detriment.”
She couldn’t believe the way she sounded. So callous, undeniably cruel. But that mindset let her do the things she wasn’t proud to do. Things that she needed to do.
Using the same knife she’d threatened the brothel host with, she bled Lord Gruppus, cut both veins in his throat. Then she left, having gotten what she needed.
The final phase of Sack the Gravendeer Vault had arrived. And, with any luck, Jocklun and the rest of the Eyes had fulfilled their duties.
The vault, Jocklun had told her, lay nestled in a fold of slate and limestone on the first wrung of the spire. She thought this odd, given the keep stood on the topmost rung, which was, presumably, the most heavily guarded. But the vault’s placement comes down to history, not logic.
When the builder Oppalus had constructed the city of Haeglin, he had done so not with a magnificent kingdom in mind, but a small, artful composition of striking architecture and compelling views, all of which could be achieved by keeping to the first rung.
The vault from Oppalus’s day was small and meager, but future rulers had expanded it rather than relocated it, and now it stretched a quarter mile into the hillside, rendering relocation impossible.
Elaya and her mercenaries kept mostly to alleys and the shadows, far from lit footpaths. Night patrols weren’t heavy, especially on the second and first rungs, but Jocklun had given her specific directions that would bring her to the vault. And, unlike Kaun, she followed directions.
“When you pass the fishmonger hut,” Jocklun had said, “look for a wall.”
Elaya had thought identifying a single hut in an entire kingdom—or part of a kingdom, since she was now on the first rung—would be difficult. But the fishmonger hut was quite unmistakable, what with its many distinctive odors.
The wall Jocklun had spoken of loomed in the distance. On both sides and in symmetrical fashion, it hemmed in a descending path that led to the vault. From atop, Elaya saw a silhouette of gatherers far below. She could only hope—and pray, if the gods were real and hadn’t abandoned her—that those figures were her Eyes.
Moments later—many, many moments later, for the way down was long, not to speak of its lonesomeness and darkness—her hope was rewarded with a familiar, annoying voice.
“Purrrrfect timing,” Jocklun proclaimed, hand pointed at two Jackals whose blood still poured from open holes in their faces and neck. He and six Eyes stood before an enormous reinforced steel door. “We’d just gotten here ourselves. Was a wee little bit of a, er, holdup.”
“What kind of holdup?” Elaya asked.
“A march in support of Queen Olyssi Gravendeer. I can tell by the look on your face you’re as gobsmacked as I am, but let’s put this key into the lock and then we can talk about the good days Raegon had reigned over. Good days because, uh, let’s face it—the days will be a helluva lot worse with Olyssi on the throne. For these people, anyhow. Not for me! No, no, no. I’ll be sitting seaside, munching on, er… whatever it is seasiders munch on, and I’ll be drinking cupfuls of rum till I die.”
Elaya hated his voice. She hated his face. She hated every morsel that made up Jocklun, yet still that hatred came nowhere close to the contempt she had for Olyssi Gravendeer. Olyssi didn’t have the charm and wit and tact to rule. Though she did possess the tyrannical cruelty needed to torture, maim, imprison and otherwise cause mass suffering.
How could this happen? Elaya thought. She shouldn’t have cared. It wouldn’t affect her. But the poor people of Haeglin… oh, they would endure grief like they’d never known. And for that, she felt sad. She’d lived in a world where suffering was celebrated by those in power, and she couldn’t bear the thought of a child growing up like she had.
“Right-o,” Jocklun said, swiping the key from Elaya. “In the slot like this it goes. Oooh, fits so nicely. A twist.” He cleared his throat. “I said, a twist. There we are. And… open!”
Moonlight bled into the now-open vault, its milky fingers probing the carved-out hill. Elaya wasn’t sure what the inside would look like. She recalled a drawing she’d seen once that showed a vault stuffed with loose gold coins piled from floor to ceiling, and lots of gold chalices and rings and necklaces, too.
The Gravendeer vault did not resemble this, at least not from the little she could see. The belly of the hill devoured all remnants of light beyond that which the moon provided, but those thin pale slivers revealed order and structure. There must have been sixty lidless chests organized in tight, compact rows.
Elaya lowered her hand into one and felt the coolness of coins. Another one held gems, unset rings, and empty lockets.
“The bags,” Jocklun said, dumping out the several pouches from the cloth satchel he’d used to deliver the Eyes their weapons. “Take what you want and scoot, that’s what I’d do. That’s what I will be doing. Don’t want to be waitin’ around for some poor chap to walk into the brothel and see blood staining the floors. That’ll alert the wrong kind of people, and before you know it, a bunch o’ Jackals’ll be thumping their chests and looking for us. Anyhow, have a lovely life, Elaya. It’s been fun.”
Elaya massaged the knife hanging from her belt. She approached Jocklun, stomach churning. Things you need to do and things you want to do, she told herself.
A flick of her finger, along the knife handle.
She touched Jocklun’s shoulder, prompting him to jitter. “Huh, huh?”
“What are your intentions after you leave here?”
Jocklun scrat
ched his jaw with a yellow fingernail. “Er, my intentions? I intend to get the, uh, fook out of here, as your big burly bastard over there would say.
“I see myself on a beach,” he continued, waving a hand in the air as if bringing his imagination to life. “The sand’s white, soft, and—and—it’s so lovingly hot. It kinda burns! There are gulls above, and sometimes I feed them crabbies that the tide washed up. Sometimes I yell at them while I’m drunk, tell them I ain’t their slave. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m going to be free. Free! No worries, no stresses.” He leaned in, gave her a wink and added, “Oh, it’s going to be just perfect. Just perfect.”
Elaya sensed the Eyes were standing around, taking in the conversation. She sensed this because she heard no jangling of coins and necklaces and rings.
“Pack it up,” she said. “I don’t want so much as a squirt of piss worth of space in those purses.” She faced Jocklun. “Sounds enticing. If you make it all the way, of course.”
“Er, why wouldn’t I?”
“Well,” she mused, tapping her foot, “the shore’s a long ways away. Nearest one is the Blue Coast. Take you three weeks if you cross the Crags. Add another couple if you take the Baren Stretch. Crags are brutal and you’ve no supplies.”
Jocklun bent down and scooped up a handful of gold from a chest. “But I’ve money.”
“It buys everything, no?”
“Right-o. Everything, even love. Well, maybe not love, but lust! And, hey, you know what? Those two are practically the same. If some big-breasted girl wants to give me lust instead of love, who am I to say no?”
Elaya’s stomach seized. Everything tightened. Jocklun had redeemed himself, although it was mostly out of selfishness. She could let him go frolic about on his beach till the day he croaked. The Eyes wouldn’t have protested, she didn’t think. Gold begets forgiveness, after all.
But the thing is, she’d let people trample on her before. And each time it becomes easier to permit, till one day you look at yourself and you’ve got boot marks stretching from your face to your shins.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 28
