Night of Knives

meant to send the man to their master, just as they’d tried with her. Yet they appeared to be waiting for someone or something… some sign. She damned her luck. Here she was in sight of her quarry, yet he remained as unreachable as if she’d never found him. Damn Fate and the feckless Twins — they played havoc tonight!

The bodyguard with the long tribesman’s moustache and fur cap approached her man, gestured to the north — Mock’s Hold? He nodded, stood, brushed at his loose pants. He pulled his cloak tightly about himself. The guards fell in about him.

Some of the cultists stirred, closing on the outcrop. Kiska counted fifteen. She wanted to hail a warning, but surely the man must know. Then she glanced back over the encirclement and froze. Three extraordinarily tall and thin cultists in ash-pale robes now stood to one side. Where in the Queen’s Mysteries had they come from? It was as if they’d stepped out of the night.

One raised a gloved hand in a negligent gesture and the cultists charged in.

Kiska dashed to new cover to keep her quarry in sight. He and his guards maintained a steady and tight retreat. Cultists darted in, knives flashed, robes twisted and flew, and the man and his companions kept backing off, leaving dead behind. The three commanders, or priests, followed at a distance, observing. Kiska moved parallel to the fight, catching glimpses through the trees: the guards duelling, disengaging, ever edging backwards around her target. Their skill amazed her.

A larger knot of cultists coordinated an attack from all sides. Each guard was engaged by more than one man and Kiska’s heart went to her throat. This was the man Agayla had sent her to find! This was the man Oleg said must act tonight! Here he was, about to be butchered by these assassins and there was nothing she could do about it. She was too late! Kiska fairly screamed her frustration.

While she watched, two of the guards fell and the cultists streamed in on her man. He snapped a hand- gesture and a brilliant flash blinded Kiska. Thunder rolled over her as she blinked and rubbed her eyes. She glanced back. Where a struggling knot of some ten figures had writhed and fought, now only three stood: the man and his two remaining bodyguards. He now faced the three tall cultists. They halted.

The one at the centre raised a hand like a man parting cobwebs blocking his path.

The lesser cultists waited, weapons bared.

Though not a talent, Kiska knew herself to have a feel for such things, and though she stood some hundred yards off, she could feel the forces gathering between the two men. It was like being deep within a ship’s hull, knowing that dark incomprehensible forces churned scarce inches from you, forces that could smash you into non-existence in an instant. She held her breath, waiting for the slightest motion to release the power building between them.

Then a hand in a rough leather gauntlet clamped itself over her mouth, and an arm wrapped around her waist and lifted her away from the stones.

Kiska dropped the crossbow, flailed and kicked her legs. All the while she slowly drew her slimmest knife with her right hand. As the dagger cleared its sheath her head was given a savage wrench. Sparks burst upon her vision and searing currents lanced down her spine.

‘Drop it, lass,’ a low voice growled, ‘or I’ll snap your neck like a twig.’

Numb, Kiska let the dagger drop to the ground.

The man slung her over his shoulder, limp, her heart fluttering, hiked back down between the parallel ridges, past the dead cultist that Kiska concluded he must have killed. She damned herself for not suspecting the murderer might still be hanging about. And now she was being carried farther and farther from the ruins. She strained to listen for sounds of battle but heard nothing. Once her captor entered thicker woods, two other men rose and joined him. They were either soldiers or plain ruffians. It was hard to tell, though they did carry themselves with the discipline of veterans. One faced her, pulled a black cloth from his belt, while the one holding her removed his hand from her mouth.

‘Quiet,’ he warned.

A gag was snapped over her mouth before she could recover and the cloth, a bag, was tossed over her head. She did try to yell then, stupidly late, and fought while they tied her wrists in front, followed by her ankles.

She was again hefted over a shoulder and hauled like a sack while the man jogged through the woods. She stopped struggling then and burned instead at the indignity of it.

She’d been wrong about one thing. Someone else was stupid enough to be out this night. And she’d become so engrossed in watching the battle she’d completely dropped her guard.

Disgusted, she decided she deserved whatever was to come.

After a fair march she was carried into a room and dumped into a chair, which left her hip smarting. People — men — moved about, muttering. Hands patted her down, found her throwing spikes and daggers. But the search was rushed, missing one throwing knife secreted in a flap of her cloak’s collar. Impatient hands prodded up her sleeves, turned her arms this way then that, pulled open her jerkin, her padded vest, and tore the string ties at the neck of her linen undershirt. Had she not been gagged, Kiska would’ve laughed as she knew exactly what they searched for: tattoos — the real article or fake — of either the severed bird’s foot or a claw.

Finding neither, the hands pushed her clothing closed again. She heard a male voice, close: ‘Damned fools.’ The hood was yanked off, then the gag. Kiska blinked, shook her hair from her eyes. She scowled up at a sinewy, broad-shouldered man whose weathered face bore a startling pattern of burn scars from lye or boiling oil.

He stepped back, glanced to a table where the man who’d first grabbed her sat with his feet up on a chair. Kiska recognized him by his leather hauberk with its iron lozenges riveted in rows and his plain blackened iron helmet. A thin moustache hung down past his chin and scar tissue made a knob of his nose. The man shrugged. ‘Nab someone, you said. I had one of them grey-robes but she was too much trouble. Grabbed this one after that. She was eyeing the fight.’

They were at an inn. Kiska recognized it: the Southern Crescent. Men stood about, either watching her indifferently or scanning the street from windows and the door. She counted about forty.

The scarred man turned to her. ‘All right. What’s your story? Who do you work for?’

‘Who do you work for?’

The man slapped her. It felt as if a slab of iron had been smacked across her chin. She blinked back tears, shook her head, stunned more by the casual brutality of the act than the pain.

His eyes remained chillingly flat, merely judging the effectiveness of his blow. Then something caught his attention behind her and he grunted, turning away. A woman walked out from behind Kiska. Short, dark, a thread- fine tattooing of lines and spirals running from her hair line to the tip of her nose, she raised Kiska’s chin in a gesture eerily similar to that of Agayla’s. Kiska had seen the woman around. Carla? Catin?

Studying her, the woman pursed her full lips, nodded as if identifying her in turn. Kiska was shaken to see regret follow the recognition — she wouldn’t live through this; she’d been sentenced the moment the hood left her head.

The woman was turning away when her gaze stopped at Kiska’s chest. She extended a hand and Kiska felt her fingertips tap Agayla’s flattened scrolled letter. Kiska stared into the woman’s eyes, silently pleading. The woman met her stare, sympathetic but pitying too, as if Kiska was already dead. She approached the scarred man at the table.

‘She’s local talent,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Independent. Reports to Pell only’

The man shrugged as if he no longer cared. With one finger he traced a curve on a parchment spread across the table. ‘We’ll just go around. Ignore that crowd.’

‘What if we run into them again?’

The man looked up, stared in his bland manner. ‘Your job is to see that we don’t.’

The bindings cut into Kiska’s wrists. She ached to speak in her defence, to beg, stall… anything… but the words bunched in her throat, constricted by the intuition that if she spoke they’d just kill her to be done with it. So she remained silent, listening instead. What was this gang of brigands up to? Looting under cover of tonight’s chaos? If so, what did the cultists have to do with it? Had they clashed?

The woman glanced at her again, took a breath, and leaned close to whisper something to the scarred man. He smiled in reply, his lips merely tightening over his teeth, utterly empty of humour. ‘You going soft on us?’ he answered, without looking up.

Adjusting her vest, the woman offered Kiska a slight shrug to convey she’d done all she could. Though it was her life the man had just dispensed with, Kiska forced herself to respond in kind — a small nod. Fear no longer