Kariana stood over her, the hate so intense in her breast that she felt she would burst into flames. “Bitch! Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?”
Marissa stared up at her, tears streaming down her face, breathing in short gasps. “I’m sorry, Kariana! I had to! They made me!”
“Made you?” Kariana felt a wicked smile creep across her face as she giggled like a girl. “What would they have done to you if you refused, I wonder, that made this the better choice?” She flicked the blade with her fingertips, sending droplets of blood flying. Marissa winced as they fell on her face like rain, mixing with the tears welling in her eyes.
“I wanted to be special,” she sobbed. “Like you! Beautiful! Important!”
There were no words to communicate Kariana’s wrath, yet she could not contain it. It burst from her throat, a roar of bestial madness as she fell upon the frightened girl.
Marissa raised her arms and grappled with Kariana, struggling to defend herself. She was considerably bulkier, but Kariana’s rage made her a tigress. They rolled across the floor, screaming, Marissa in terror, Kariana in unbridled fury, knocking over Kariana’s vanity. Perfume bottles rained down, exploding as they impacted the marble floor.
“Bitch!” Kariana shrieked. “You fat fucking cow!” She slashed at Marissa with mad abandon, at her face, her breasts, any exposed flesh.
Marissa wailed in agony as the blade bit into her flesh, leaving deep gashes. She rose to her knees, desperate to escape, but Kariana kicked her flat on her back, mounted her like a horse, and bludgeoned her head repeatedly with the pommel of her blade.
Marissa could no longer defend herself. Her head cracked against the floor with each blow. She mumbled through shattered lips, “Stop. Please.”
Kariana, exhausted, paused her attack. She sat astride Marissa’s unresisting bulk, panting and gasping from her exertion. Marissa lay still, covered in blood, eyes closed. She might have been dead save for the occasional twitch or moan.
“I thought you were my friend,” Kariana whispered, her vision clouding with tears.
Marissa looked up at her with dazed, unfocused eyes. “I am, Kariana. But I had to be loyal to my family.”
“You were like a sister to me. You were my family.”
“I’m sorry. We can fix it, can’t we? Now that you know? They were just guards. You said you didn’t care about them lots of times.”
Kariana felt a cold hand squeeze her heart. She wanted so desperately not to be alone that she had almost been fooled again. Marissa was still trying to cover up her part in the attack on Lara.
Kariana looked down at Marissa. There was so much she wanted to say, so many words, all meaningless, all just more opportunities for a snake to slip inside her mind once again. “I never cared about the guards.” Marissa’s face lit with hope for a brief moment, then fell as she looked into Kariana’s eyes. “Aiul tried to kill me because of your stunt with his wife. And now I have to kill him.”
“No! It wasn’t—!”
Kariana plunged her dagger into Marissa’s throat. Blood fountained over her hand in warm jets. Marissa’s eyes grew wide, and she clutched at her throat as her life poured out of her, turning her head back and forth in denial.
“Goodbye, sister.”
Marissa’s face softened from fear to sadness as she accepted the inevitable. She reached for Kariana’s hand and squeezed. Kariana snatched her hand away and spit in Marissa’s face. “You ruined my life. You go to Elgar alone, bitch.”
Kariana rolled off her victim and lay on the bloody floor. She breathed in the bizarre mix of scents: pungent sweat, acrid blood, cloyingly sweet perfume. Exhaustion bore down on her as the adrenaline slowly ebbed away, the pounding in her temples and roaring in her ears giving way to blissful silence. Sleep is like dying.
She woke to shouts and the clang of armored boots on stone. Caelwen was staring down at her, patting her face with a mailed palm. For a brief moment, she thought he was here to arrest her.
“Two assassins in one night,” he noted. “I’m impressed you survived even one. You’re quite the mess, Empress.”
“You missed the first one,” she said in a husky, sleep-dulled voice. She shrugged aside his attempt to help her to her feet. Any assistance from him was an admission of weakness. She raised herself on her arms and stood, her muscles still aching. “It was quite a show. I guess you had better things to do.” She glared at him, a silent accusation.
“I had to attend a wake. Several, actually. I filed the appropriate paperwork. Perhaps you missed it in the excitement of preparing your orgy?”
Kariana considered saying something more vulgar, but she was seized by a mad impulse to laugh. The blood, the shattered glass, Marissa lying dead on the floor, it all struck her as a great, black joke. She threw back her head and cackled like a witch.
Caelwen eyed her warily. To her surprise and pleasure, he looked a bit unsettled, frightened even.
Good, she thought. If I cannot be loved, then fear will do.
Soon, Tasinalta would teach all Nihlos the true meaning of fear.
Chapter 8
Escape
Brutus wasted no time escaping the prison. He crouched in the shadows outside the entrance, waiting for the show to start, the bizarre, orange clouds of the night sky hovering overhead like an impending rain of fire. If Sandi and the others did their part, the escapees would provide plenty of cover for exfiltration.
He pulled the cloak tighter against the cold, cursing under his breath. Of all the battlefield conditions he had ever endured, cold was the one he hated most. The flimsy wrap, designed to keep rain off, offered precious little in the way of actual insulation. It’s better than nothing.
Before long, the prisoners came running, for the most part, loud and disorganized, many shouting threats to the skies, though the odd few had sense enough to slink away without ceremony. Brutus shook his head quietly, knowing many of them would be dead before morning. If they die, at least they will die free.
Imprisoning men was yet another barbaric practice the Nihlosians favored that made absolutely no sense to Brutus. For the life of him, he could think of nothing that would warrant caging a man that wouldn’t also warrant putting him to the sword. If a man couldn’t be trusted to roam free, who would leave him alive to threaten others if he were to escape? And why waste resources feeding and guarding such a man? Cruel, stupid, and wasteful, just like everything else with these pale dogs.
Even their criminals seemed fools. Why not simply flee? Instead, half of them sprung immediately to mayhem, setting fires and breaking windows. Brutus understood, though. They were angry, after being kept in that evil place. The fires and chaos would bring the guards running, the very men responsible for much of their misery in the prison. Sometimes the need to kill a man overrode reason. Vengeance was a strong motivator.
At any rate, their foolishness was to his benefit. Soon enough, knots of guardsmen came straggling in to quell the fires, only to be surrounded and savaged by the prisoners.
Time to go.
The escapees took no notice of him as he slipped into a dark alley, moving with purpose but resisting the urge to run. Running men draw attention.
It quickly became apparent that there was a flaw with his escape plan: the prisoners provided cover, but they also drew more guards. Worse, the undercity population was a rebellious lot at the best of times. Many, seeing the initial chaos, saw opportunities to indulge grudges or loot. It spread like flame through kindling, slowly at first, but steadily increasing in speed until the entire undercity was blazing with chaos, and Brutus was hardly immune.
They fell in behind him, four hooligans in all, dirty and thin, their intentions as clear as the clubs they smacked against their palms. These were no pampered lordlings. They were hard men, hungry men who had done this before. So have I, dogs.
Brutus shrugged out of his cloak and drew his blade. The attackers paused briefly, sizing up this new wrinkle as Brutus brought his shield
to bear, then charged forward as a group.
Brutus stepped to the side, raising his shield to block the closest thug’s swing with a dull clang, and slashed at his throat. The would-be mugger staggered back, clutching at his neck and gurgling blood.
Brutus wasted no time with taunts. As the remaining three circled him, trying to surround him, he lunged forward and stabbed the tallest in his gut. The man dropped immediately to his knees, screeching in agony, as Brutus faced the others and waited for an opening.
The remaining two, wide-eyed, calculated their own odds and seemed to find the numbers bleak. One, an ugly fellow with a nasty scar across the bridge of his nose, cursed, then turned and fled immediately, but his skinny, rat-faced partner scuttled to the side first and scooped up the rain cloak Brutus had dropped, as if he simply could not leave the area without some prize to claim for his efforts.
The skinny thief cackled, his laughter echoing off the alley walls, as he fled with Brutus’s only means of hiding his face. Brutus watched them go in shock, slowly realizing what had happened. He could have defended the cloak, he felt certain, if it had ever occurred to him to do so. Now, for no sensible reason, he had lost the one thing he most needed, a thing that offered little or no value at all to the men who had taken it. I would almost prefer they had taken my damned sword!
Pursuing them would simply make matters worse. Exfiltration had suddenly and pointlessly become ten times harder, but there was nothing for it.
He would kill whom he had to, if it came to that.
Carefully, Brutus began making his way toward the east gate of Nihlos, the only one he had actually seen. He knew the way well enough from his earlier scouting runs. The trouble was that, with the growing unrest, he had no idea which areas were now high traffic, and which would be quiet. He tried keeping to the shadows, which worked fairly well. Once, as Brutus passed what appeared to be a brewery of some sort, a single guard approached, but the man was obviously distracted and in a hurry, burdened with his own problems. Brutus turned toward the wall and began urinating, hoping that the shadows would keep his gear from standing out too much, and the guard passed him by without a word.
It took nearly an hour of skulking on a necessarily circuitous route to arrive at the gate. Brutus’s heart sank to see it was heavily guarded, with at least twenty defenders surrounded by agitated commoners and weathering a barrage of thrown rocks, vegetables, and crockery. A nearby tavern had just begun to burn, filling the whole area with thick black smoke.
Brutus could think of no curse strong or vile enough to mutter, and punching the walls would simply give him away. He waited in the shadows, seething, desperately trying to formulate a plan that would get him out of this accursed city full of madmen and back to his ship.
Idiots! Why attack the gate? But even as his rational mind asked the question, his gut answered: Because that’s where the guards are. Mobs were more like beasts than men. They lashed out without much reason beyond proximity and vague anger. One fool with a belly full of drink sees an opportunity, and the others follow.
It was a good place for even an excellent soldier to get killed on his own. To be a good soldier, one needed discipline and teamwork to control not just his own weapon but the enemy as well, even the environment to a degree. Tonight, though, Brutus was merely a lone warrior, and warriors had to rely too much on fortune for his taste. Still, it was what he had to work with so it would have to do.
He turned back toward the heart of the city, trying to remember details from the reports the other scouts had filed with him. As he recalled, there were four primary entrances to the city, on at each compass point, along with a number of smaller portals that were locked at night but left unguarded. It was tempting to try the lesser access ways, but in truth, guarded or not, they were out of the question. He wasn’t strong enough to bend the bars on the gates, and he wasn’t going over the wall without climbing gear. He could always try liberating some rope and a grappling hook if he ran across a store that stocked them, but it seemed far easier to mug someone for their cloak and take his chances at one of the primary exits. Assuming they’re not all like the one I just left.
As he cast about looking for a likely victim, he heard shouts nearby, cries of rage, and what sounded for all the world like his own men in the thick of battle, crying out: “Hold the line!”
Against his better judgment, Brutus moved toward the battle and peered around a corner. Before him, was one of the rare few public access-ways from the undercity to the city above, where a pack of rioters had surrounded a group of five beleaguered guardsmen. The defenders stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the entrance to a great switchback staircase, shields up and hard pressed against the nearly twenty men trying to push past. Several guards lay in pools of blood on the platform below, dead or dying, as the commoners pushed against the shield wall, tracking bloody footprints up the stairs.
Brutus ground his teeth, knowing what he intended was madness, but for the moment, he simply could not see walking past. Ilaweh is great, I have lived this. I have been that man holding the line.
He charged up the stairs and slammed his shield into the back rank of the mob, bowling three men over. He planted a boot to the face of one, a sword in the chest of another, and slammed the edge of his shield down across the third man’s mouth.
It took a moment for the rioters to realize they were under attack from the rear. Brutus slashed two more across their backs, sending them down screaming.
As the mass of rioters turned, confused, slowly toward him, the guardsmen, seeing their chance, went on the offensive. From there, it was a simple task to split the mass and slaughter the individual knots of rioters.
When it was done, Brutus simply stood, catching his breath as the guards, faces masked behind visors, stared down at him.
One finally jerked off his helmet and called out, “Elgar take me, blackie, I figured you for dead!” He was an older, grizzled looking fellow with close-cropped, gray hair, a scar on one cheek and a couple of teeth missing from his grin.
Brutus was surprised to realize he recognized the man. “I know you.”
One of the other men also removed his helmet and barked at the elder Nihlosian, “Lorinal! You’re wanted for murder!” He pointed his blade at Lorinal. “There’s a warrant for your arrest!”
Lorinal sneered at the younger man. “Me and this ’un just saved your lives, boy, and this is how you pay us back?”
The other guards were more interested in Brutus, keeping their blades pointed at him, but making no move to attack. Brutus returned the favor, but he smiled back at them, too. He was pleased to let them interpret that smile as they would.
Lorinal pushed past the younger guard’s weapon and slapped him hard enough to leave a red palm print on the man’s face. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Tyreth, sir. Tyreth Noril.”
“A goddamn noble, and I just walked past your sword and slapped the shit out of you. Are you a fucking idiot? What moron trained you?”
Tyreth’s face grew an even brighter shade of red as he stammered, “Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. And, uh, you trained me, sir.”
“Mei’s hairy ass, did you just call me a moron, boy?”
“No, sir!”
“Sir? Are you saying I don’t know both my parents, now?”
“No, s—sergeant!”
“Do you want to die tonight, Tyreth?”
“No, sergeant!”
Then maybe you ought to call your men off that black skinned devil there before he opens your guts to the elements, you think?”
Tyreth followed Lorinal’s gaze and started as if he had just noticed Brutus for the first time. “Mei!” He quickly waved at the other guards to stand down. “What in Mei’s name is going on tonight?”
The guards lowered their weapons. Brutus lowered his own blade and said to Lorinal, “You were at the cave.”
Lorinal nodded. “Aye, I was. I tried to kill you, too, but I wasn’t fast enough. Nothing personal,
just business.”
Brutus grinned at him. “I heard you were already dead.”
Lorinal scoffed. “From Prosin trash? I smelled those fuckers from way off and put paid to them. Now they want me for murderin’ nobles, like they didn’t come to murder me to start with.”
Brutus had no idea what a Prosin was, but the rest made sense. Lorinal had used his blade to avoid the grisly fate his companions had met. “And now you’re a fugitive like me.”
“Aye. You’re looking for a way out of the city, I reckon. Me too. I just couldn’t let these poor bastards get slaughtered.”
Brutus grunted. “Same. Seems we’re more alike than we might guess. Do you have a plan?”
Lorinal nodded toward the guards. “None I want to talk about in front of them.”
Tyreth, nodding, put his helmet back on, and pointed to his men, then back at himself. “We never got a good look at the people who helped us, right?”
The other guards nodded, and one reached a mailed hand toward Brutus. “Good luck, friend.”
Brutus grasped the man’s forearm. “You, too.”
“Let’s move,” Tyreth called, pointing up the stairway. “We’ll have reinforcements up top. We won’t be so lucky with passing strangers next time.”
Lorinal shook his head. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll break the whole damned thing loose at the top. They can fix it once this shit settles.”
Brutus waited for the guards to head up the stairs before speaking. “So how do we get out of this?”
“Is it ‘we,’ now? No grudges?”
Brutus laughed. “Like you said, it was business. Nothing personal.”
Lorinal stared at Brutus as if taking his measure, then gave a quick nod. “Good.”
“Do you have a plan? I tried the east gate. We’re not getting through there. It’s a warzone.”
“Not to mention that you stand out like a turd in the snow. Me, at least I can keep my helmet on.”
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