“Mikowacz, bring me that woman in the green skirt. I’ll start with her. By morning I want you to have found the youngest and prettiest among them. We have three days until we reach the mines.”
He cast a glance back at Evrit, whose face was white as the crescent moon that hung over the Sorbold desert.
“When I’m finished with the leader’s wife, you may allow her to sit beside her husband in the wagon until we reach the salt mines.”
He climbed into his carriage, leaving the door open.
6
Yabrith, petty thief, assassin, and thug that he was, had a gift for knowing when a man was about to crack. He had used this talent many times over the course of his criminal career, amassing an impressive reputation for prying information and secrets from the most unwilling of victims.
His sensitivity to situational precariousness was in a heightened state of alarm now, deep within the dark confines and crumbling walls of the Raven’s Guild hall in the Inner Market of Yarim Paar. The air was thick with the static of danger, of black rage only slightly held in check.
Yabrith had no desire to be the weight that tipped the scales. He set the heavy crystal glass down in front of the guild scion and stepped quickly to the side of the table, trying not to draw the man’s notice while hoping silently that the spirits he was providing would quell the nervousness that had taken hold of the scion, and all his fellows in the Guild over the last few weeks.
Dranth, the guild scion, extended a hand that shook only slightly and seized the glass, downing the amber liquid in one bolt. He clenched his teeth and inhaled over the burn, drawing the vapors into his sinuses, hoping they would soothe his mind, and realizing dully that they could never be strong enough.
For a full cycle of the moon he had been plagued, for the first time since childhood, with nightmares from which he woke drenched in sweat and the sour smell of fear. Dranth had taken to pacing the floor after these dreams, hoping to drive the images from his mind, but he could only succeed in making the pictures fade into the dark recesses for a short while, lingering in the shadows until sleep took him.
Whereupon they would emerge to clutch at him again.
He dropped the glass onto the thick board of the new table, wincing as it thudded. It was a sound similar to the one that haunted him, the dull thump of a box that had been placed on this table’s predecessor two fortnights before.
Dranth had opened the small, leather-bound crate, sealed and wrapped in parchment paper carefully, believing it to be yet another package sent home by the guildmistress, who was working surreptitiously in the mountains of Ylorc, deep within the Bolg king’s lair. Upon removing the internal wrapping, however, he had discovered instead the guildmistress’s own head, her eyes open and festering with maggots that crawled through the sockets, her mouth frozen open in an expression of surprise.
He had lurched back and vomited all over the floor of the guildhall.
It was not horror at the ghastly fate that had befallen the guild’s erstwhile leader which caused Dranth’s stomach to rush into his mouth. Nor was it any loss he might have felt for the woman herself. In the twenty years he had known Esten, there was no one to whom he had been more devoted, more enslaved, more loyal, but now, beholding her disembodied head rotting before him on the table, it was not grief or revulsion that racked Dranth.
It was abject fear.
Because, until he beheld the evidence of it himself, he would never have believed it possible that anyone could visit death of any kind, let alone such a gruesome and violent one, upon the guildmistress.
From the moment he had first seen her in a dark alleyway, ripping her blade mercilessly into the belly of a startled soldier at the tender age of eight summers, eviscerating the man as coolly as she might play jackstraws, Dranth had been painfully aware of Esten’s extraordinary powers of murder and self-preservation, as well as her utter lack of a soul. She had held the guild, the city, and much of the province of Yarim in her merciless grasp for her entire adult life, propagating the Raven’s Guild’s undisputed reign in black-market trafficking, murder, thievery, assassination, and a host of even more brutal crimes, raising their skullduggery to the level of pure artistry.
Dranth, the man who loved and respected her more than anyone in the world, believed her to be Evil Incarnate, and more—he believed she was invulnerable.
Yet someone had managed to kill her, to rip her head from her shoulders, beheading her while alive.
And whoever it was had caught her completely by surprise, something else Dranth had believed impossible.
So if invulnerable Evil could be so stripped of life, so torn, snuffed without so much as a skirmish, it was clear to Dranth that he had lived his entire life underestimating just how powerful his enemies, and those of the guild, could be.
He was still shaking now, a month later. He had slipped into the desert when the moon was new, and in the devouring darkness of the wilderness buried Esten’s remains beneath the sandy red clay, blinded by the blackness of the night and his tears. Dranth did not wish to remember where her grave had been, because there were so many who would seek to steal its contents, to mock her in death as they never had dreamed of doing in life, putting her skull on display in some ignominious place like a tavern, a brothel, or a privy.
As she herself had done to innumerable opponents.
He had burned the leather crate, the table, and everything it had touched.
Dranth glanced up from staring at the new table board. In the dim light of the guildhall three score or more of thieves stood, clinging to the shadows, waiting for instructions.
When his voice was able to be forced into his mouth, it was soft, harsh, deadly.
“It was to the court of the Bolg king that the guildmistress went, seeking revenge for an old wrong,” he said, his eyes glinting black in the fireshadows that roared on the hearth behind him. “It was from the court of the Bolg king that the package containing—that the package was delivered.
“Esten built this guild with the labor of her hands, with her very blood. Any that would dare to spill that blood must answer to the guild.”
A quiet chorus of voices rose, murmuring assent, then fell into silence once more.
“The Bolg king has earned our undying enmity, and he shall have it visited upon him. But anyone with the strength to fell Esten will not be vulnerable to traditional attack, not even the kind of murder we practice in the shadows.” He lapsed into silence as well.
“What, then, Dranth?” one of the journeymen asked.
Dranth stared into the fire. He watched the flames flicker against the soot that stained the bricks of the back of the hearth, letting his mind wander with them. Finally he turned back to the guild.
“We will stand ready to aid his enemies,” he said simply. “Before her death, the guildmistress sent back meticulous plans, maps of his inner realm, details of his stockpiles, armaments, treasury, manpower. This information will be invaluable to anyone who seeks to bring him down, and has the army to do it.”
He tossed the crystal glass into the fireplace.
“There are any number of such men out there,” the guild scion said. “But I think I will make inquiries first in Sorbold. It lies on his southwestern border, and has a new regent. I hear he was once a guild hierarch himself.” Dranth’s eyes glittered. “And as the mistress always said, a guildsman knows the value of the goods; it is merely a matter of making him feel an overwhelming need to have them, whether he needs them or not.
“So we will make them available at a price he cannot resist.”
The gargantuan doors of the ice castle were frozen over almost beyond recognition.
The dragon stared at the entranceway, her body beginning to slow from the loss of heat. Snow now caked her mammoth claws, packed between the phalanges of what had once been her fingers, hardening with each painful step. Her eyelids stung from the crust that had formed on them, her skin peeling under the weight of the ice on her scales.