Soren put himself between them and the oncoming revenants, pulling his pistol free. He aimed and fired, and unlike the dead man’s bullets, Soren’s put the revenants down. The dead fell to the ground, bodies twitching as the poison coating the bullets interfered with the spores.
He unsheathed his short sword and pressed a button beneath the cross guard with his thumb. Poison trickled out of the hilt and down the blade, just enough to ensure the revenants couldn’t rise again after he cut off their heads.
Soren had separated the head from the second revenant on the ground when the shouting around him changed pitch. A blur of movement out of the corner of his eyes had Soren twisting around and bringing up his short sword.
The revenant ran itself through on the blade, fingers scraping down his leather vest as it lurched closer. It twisted its head, sinking its teeth into the meat of his upper right arm through his shirt, biting deep with inhuman strength in its jaws. The pain was excruciating, burning like acid, but nothing he hadn’t felt before.
Soren put the barrel of his pistol beneath the revenant’s jaw and blew its skull apart. He wrenched his arm away, needing to use the butt of his pistol to knock the damned thing’s teeth out of his skin. Blood slid down his arm from the bite wound, staining his shirt, but he couldn’t worry about cleaning it just then.
He ripped his poison sword free of the revenant, kicking the body aside. Twisting around, Soren raised his pistol despite the pain in his arm to fire it at the revenant that had got one of the debt slaves in his hands and was steadily pulling out the woman’s intestines. The debt slaves on either side of the dying woman had nowhere to run, not with the chain connecting them.
Soren put two bullets in the revenant before striding over and cutting off its head. It shuddered, slumping over the bleeding-out woman with its hands still sunk deep in her abdomen.
She blinked up at Soren, blood trickling from her mouth and down her throat, sliding over the newly inked bank numbers that hadn’t even lost their scabs. There was no saving her, and all Soren could do was line his pistol up with her heart and pull the trigger, granting her a mercy she would never find in this place.
It was a better death than the one she would’ve had if the spores got in her flesh.
“Where the hell didyoucome from?” someone barked behind him in Solarian.
Soren looked over his shoulder at two Solarians who stood with rifles in their hands, the barrels pointed directly at him. Soren’s eyes flicked from the rifles to the men holding them, to the still-frantic scurrying of warehouse workers behind them. The thunderous sound of a Zip gun going off somewhere inside a warehouse echoed through the air, causing one of the men to glance over his shoulder.
“I go where the poison and dead take me,” Soren said in the same language.
“Put your weapons on the ground.”
Soren stared at him. “I’m a warden. The Poison Accords grant me passage anywhere.”
The man barked out a laugh. “Not here they don’t. Weapons on the ground. Now.”
Soren calculated the odds of getting a shot off before the others could pull the trigger and decided against trying. Moving slow, he placed his pistol on the ground before driving the blade of his poison sword into the dirt as far as it would go. Soren reached for the second pistol holstered on his other hip and laid that down as well.
The man raised an eyebrow when Soren started to straighten up. “All of it.”
He blinked slowly before deigning to remove his heavy belt with the extra ammunition, poison bombs, tiny vials of antidotes, and spyglass. He removed his goggles and the poison-tipped throwing knives attached to the strap that secured his leather pauldron and sword sheath in place. He removed his obvious dagger but left the stiletto one in his boot since the sheath was sewn in to not show the outline.
Soren stood with his hands above his head. The bite wound in his upper arm pulled with the motion, blood soaking his shirtsleeve. He really needed to tend to it.
The taller man jerked his head to the side a little. “Step back.”
Soren did as ordered, hating leaving his weapons where they lay. The younger Solarian stepped forward and knelt in front of everything Soren had divested himself of.
“I wouldn’t touch any of that,” Soren warned, watching the man freeze in place with his hand outstretched. “You’re not immune to poison, and you’re definitely not immune to revenant gore. It’s as bad as a bite to someone who was never a tithe.”
The man scowled before standing with an irritated huff, the trade tongue stilted on his lips. “And you think you’re immune?”
Soren wriggled his fingers. “Warden.”
“Yes, so it seems,” a clear, female voice called out in the same language.
Soren looked past the men at the woman in a pair of coveralls who stalked their way. His gaze lingered on the mechanical prosthetic made of metal, clockwork gears, and chips of clarion crystal. His skin prickled at the presence of magic engraved in every line of her inorganic forearm and hand.
The woman was clearly Daijalan and the person in charge, judging by how the two Solarians deferred to her presence. She was older than Soren, pale in the way of someone who didn’t get outside much, and the clinical way she stared at him made his skin crawl.
She stopped near the men, coming no closer to Soren, which was a pity. He’d have taken her hostage if she had, and she must have known that.
“You aren’t the first warden to come crawling around where you shouldn’t.” Her gaze flicked from him to the downed revenants around them. “You proved more useful in a pinch than the last one, at least. That’s not enough to spare your life.”
Soren tensed at her words. “You’ve killed wardens?”
