A smattering of confused murmurs arose from the group. The chamber's bizarre acoustics bounced them back as a veritable hissing chorus.
“I'm sure, by now,” the Apostle continued, rather than awaiting the obvious question, “that each of you has heard of the dignitary soon to grace our fair city with his presence?”
The room echoed again, not with puzzled whispers but a series of stunned gasps.
“I see that you have.” The Apostle smiled, a gleam of white amidst the unrelenting black. “Let me tell you what I require….”
The door slammed behind her with an awful ring of finality, the snapping trapdoor of a gallows. The private rooms of the Flippant Witch were plain, simple: six chairs and a single table in each, and nothing more. Nonchalant, or at least trying hard to appear that way, Widdershins confronted the trio who'd shepherded her in here. A jaunty smile fixed on her face as though glued to her jaw, she hopped up to sit on the table, her legs crossed demurely and dangling over the edge.
“Brock,” she greeted the hulking boulder of a man.
“I'm so pleased you remember me, Widdershins,” he rumbled, a cruel little grin playing at the corners of his mouth.
“What? No, actually, I didn't. I just have a habit of cursing in High Chicken when I'm startled. Brock!
The grin slid from Brock's face, leaving a faint trail, and his teeth ground against one another. “Oh, you're
“I am? Really? I'm so glad you told me. Based on your expressions, I'd never have guessed that-that-”
Her voice broke into a nervous gulp as the glowering twist to Brock's visage shifted even farther down the spectrum from “unaamused” toward “homicidal.” Widdershins decided that, just maybe, Brock-baiting was not the healthiest pastime to engage in.
With his short-cropped dark hair and rock-solid jawline, Brock might even have been deemed handsome, if someone of a far gentler persuasion had resided behind his face. Though a member in good standing of the Davillon Finders' Guild, Brock wasn't actually a thief. He was, rather, one of the guild's “negotiators”-or, in more mundane terms, a leg-breaker. He was no less a blunt object than the weapon he favored.
He stepped nearer the table, his tread shaking the floorboards into spitting tiny puffs of dust. Widdershins's eyes, of their own accord, flickered to the enormous hammer at his side.
In her agitation, and in spite of her determination not to taunt the man any further, she blurted, “Gee, Brock, I didn't know you were a blacksmith. What-what were you planning to forge with that?” She chuckled nervously, and wished now she hadn't sat atop the table. Her position offered little room to retreat. “You know, when they talk about members of the Finders' Guild ‘forging' things, that's not really what they mean. See, most people in our line of work prefer pen and ink. It's really a lot more-”
“Shut. The hell. Up.”
She did just that, leaning back ever farther as Brock loomed nearer, until it seemed that she might wind up lying flat on her back in order to meet his gaze. He finally stopped, however, no more than a foot away.
“You annoy me,” he told her succinctly. “That's never a wise idea.”
“It's a habit,” she retorted instinctively. “What do you want with me?”
“What do I usually want from people, Widdershins? What they owe the guild. And you, girl, are a little behind.”
His fellow thugs smirked at the entendre.
Widdershins scowled despite herself. Lisette again-it had to be. Nobody else would be riding her yet about a job she'd just completed
He could, she supposed, have been speaking of other, older jobs, but she'd never held back on those. Well, not much;
“I don't know what you're talking about!” she insisted, indignant.
The others chuckled once more, having heard it a thousand times from a thousand mouths. Brock shook his head. “Of course you haven't,” he said snidely. “This is all a big mistake.”
“Well, yes, it is! And besides,” she added quickly as his hand settled on the heavy mallet, “if you kill me, the guild never gets what I
“I'm not supposed to kill you,” Brock told her, his breath a caustic cloud mere inches from her face. “I'm not,” he added, sounding vaguely put out by the whole thing, “even supposed to break any bones. I'm just supposed to make sure that you remember our conversation.” He smiled an uneven, gap-toothed smile as his hammer slid loose with a slimy hiss. “I think you'll remember.”
“Oh, absolutely,” she told him, forcing a laugh through a dry mouth. “Never forget a word of it. You've set me straight, Brock. No sense in wasting any more time on me!”
“This will go easier,” he told her, hefting the mallet, “if you don't fight.”
“Probably,” she agreed, slamming her shins with crushing force up between Brock's legs and into one of his few tender spots. “But ‘easy' is
They needed only seconds to shake off their stupor, to advance on the tiny thief, snarls on their faces and blades in their fists. But in those precious moments of confusion, Widdershins rolled backward, rising to her feet in the center of the table, rapier in hand. The wood creaked beneath her weight, shifted precariously, but held. The blade carved tiny circles in the air as she waited, watching, as the thugs fanned out to flank the table.
Widdershins had time for precisely two thoughts. The first was a brief prayer of thanks for Genevieve's high ceilings; the second a tense whispered instruction to Olgun to “Watch my back!” And then there was no more time for thought at all.
The first enforcer, a scar-faced man with a scraggly blond beard and matching yellow teeth, lunged across the table's edge, attempting to cut Widdershins's ankles out from under her with a wickedly curved dagger. It was, at their respective heights and angles, an impossible parry. The sensible move would have been for Widdershins to step back out of reach.
Which, of course, would have put her squarely in line for a similar attack from the man's companion, a smaller, rat-faced fellow with pockmarked skin. And it would have worked, if Olgun hadn't been bellowing a warning in Widdershins's mind. She indeed stepped backward, but instantly kicked out behind her with her other leg. The thug's vision filled with a blur of soft black leather, and by the time he'd realized that what he saw was the business end of a boot, it had already spread his nose across his left cheek with an unfortunate snap.
The bearded man, having brilliantly reached the conclusion that things weren't going as planned, hurled himself up onto the table, rising in a knife-fighter's crouch. Widdershins, stooping slightly herself, circled warily. She stepped right and he moved to follow, neither looking away, neither daring to blink. Step, follow. Step, follow. Step…Widdershins could barely keep from grinning. Gods, but the man was a nitwit! Follow…The bruiser scowled, uncertain why this impudent bitch was smirking at him. Step, follow.
With a very brief cry and a dull thump, he stepped clean off the table to land, seat first, on the unforgiving floor.
Laughing openly now, Widdershins crossed the wood and delivered a sharp, swift kick to the man's temple. He collapsed next to his bloody-faced companion like a sack of very ugly grain.
“Well,” Widdershins said snidely to the room at large, “I think you boys have accomplished your mission here. I guarantee you, this is an evening I'll remember for a very long eeeep!”
That bit of extemporaneous grammar was the result of Brock surging abruptly to his feet, red faced and roaring like a goosed tiger. His hammer slammed down, a thunderbolt hurled from the heavens, directed not at Widdershins but at the table. Wood splintered, the entire surface tilted sharply, and Widdershins, with a brief squeak, was on her back and sliding.
She found herself fetched up in a twisted heap at Brock's feet, rapier lying uselessly just beyond her grasp. A sick feeling roiling inside her gut, as though she'd swallowed a live and very frisky eel, Widdershins pushed the hair from her face, blinked the dust from her eyes, and peered up with a wan smile.
“Brock? You're a reasonable man, yes? I know that we can come to some sort of understanding if-Brock, your
