“Nice one, Sarge!” I yelled. “But leave some damn souls for me, huh?”
Sarge shrugged his skeletal shoulders and then charged off to continue fighting. I spun around to pick another target but saw the girl in black smashing a trooper with muscles like a bull’s on the head with her flail.
“Damn it,” I muttered. “There aren’t gonna be any left for me!”
Some distance away, I saw Fang biting the head off a huge one, and behind me, Elyse was throttling the life out of another, her rope of golden light wrapped tight around the grubby fool’s throat. I threw my hands up in the air; these people didn’t even need me here. Feeling dejected about the fact that I’d barely managed to capture any souls, I trudged over to the short guy—who was writhing in agony on the ground, his entire head and neck a uniform dark gray—and stuck Grave Oath listlessly into his heart. Watching his body convulse and then shrivel like a prune barely even put a smile on my face. The skirmish was over, and I’d only gotten two souls out of it.
I walked over to Fang, who was munching contentedly on a soldier’s leg like a happy mutt with a bone, and scratched him behind his ear hole. His eyes glowed a little brighter in response, but he kept chewing.
“You did well, buddy,” I said. “You’re quite something on the battlefield, I gotta say that. Try to leave a few more for me next time, though, huh?”
He vibrated with a deep, weird rumble that could have meant “all right then,” and carried on eating the dead guy’s leg.
Elyse was busy dusting her robe off, and my skeletons were all standing around idly. The woman in black walked up to me, her dark eyes in her full-face mask bright with energy and vigor and something else. Was she checking me out? I flashed her a charming smile and twirled Grave Oath with a flamboyant flourish.
“Thank you for coming to my aid,” she said in her deceptively soft voice.
“To be fair,” I said, “you might have done all right without us. But, you’re welcome. May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”
“You may call me Rami,” she answered.
“I’m Vance, Lord of Brakith, at your service. And now, Rami,” I said in as suave a voice as I could manage, “could I have the pleasure of looking on your face?”
Something like delight and mischief, colored with a flicker of danger, flashed across her eyes.
“Usually, if someone who has seen me in my ai’tendar then sees my face, I have to kill them,” she said. “But for you, Soultaker, I’ll make an exception.”
“Ai’tendar?”
“The garb in which I am currently attired. The sacred fighting outfit of the enjarta.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding knowingly. I’d heard of the enjarta of Yeng; they were an elite, highly secretive sect of warriors and assassins dedicated to the arts of stealth and espionage. They were also highly regarded in terms of fighting prowess, especially with unconventional weaponry and unarmored hand-to-hand combat. I never imagined I’d actually meet one, though. She remained quite silent, though she kept looking at me with those piercing eyes. I guessed I was probably intuitively leaving her space to ask for my name, but of course, she had already shown she knew who I was.
“How do you know me?” I asked her, staring at her with sudden suspicion.
“By reputation, of course. Word of your skill as an assassin has traveled far; yes, even across the Sea of Storms. I was not aware, though, that you were a necromancer as well as an assassin.” She stared fascinatedly at Fang and my gang of skeletons. “You’re quite an enigma, to be sure.”
Rami immediately noticed the breadth of the proud grin spreading across my face.
“But you, Soultaker, have nothing to do with my reason for being here,” she added hastily. “I have come to Erst to find Bishop Nabu.”
Interesting. What did this tight-bodied, beautifully deadly young woman want with a scumbag like Nabu? I decided to hold back, for the moment, from revealing what our intentions with the bishop were.
“You’ve almost found him, it would seem,” I commented casually. “So, what’s next? What is it about Bishop Nabu that has made you brave the Sea of Storms and travel all this way?”
“He has something I want. Something of great value. Something he stole and that a foul man like him has no right to own. Something that the head of our sect sent me to take from him by whatever means necessary.”
I nodded, my smile broadening; Rami was on our side.
“You might be interested to know,” I said, “that my companions and I are also looking for Nabu. It seems that he has a bad habit of taking things that don’t belong to him. We’re here to take back something that was rightfully my friend’s. And me, personally, I’m looking to take Nabu’s most precious possession from him.”
“And what might that be?”
“His soul,” I answered, tracing my fingertip along Grave Oath’s edge and staring at the effigy of Isu on the hilt. “Anyway, before we get into that, you did tell me you were going to make an exception to your deadly habit and show me your face.”
She laughed, a sound that made me instantly weak in the knees; it was a ridiculously sexy laugh, and this only made me more eager to see the face of the kind of woman who could make such a sound.
“All right,” she said, and I figured she was smiling beneath her headgear. “But don’t you dare tell the leader of my sect about this if you ever meet him”
“See these lips? They’re sealed like a demon’s tomb.”
Rami let out another of her beguiling laughs, and I grinned; making this enjarta let out that enticing sound was a pretty addictive activity.
She pulled the mask off her
