“Just do it,” said Slate. “My friend’s sick.”
“Drunk, more like…” muttered the driver, but he snapped the reins and called “Heeee-yup!” to the horses. They plodded off. The wheels creaked.
“I’m sorry,” said Caliban again, resting his hands on his thighs. “You must be regretting your choice.”
She smiled briefly and patted his knee. “No. This’ll pass in a day or two, and you’ll be fine. Or at least no worse off than the rest of us. Or you’ll kill us all. Either way, really.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. Her face, when there was nothing passing across it, looked tired.
And that was another odd thing. She touched him without fear, but he hadn’t seen any interest in her eyes. Caliban wasn’t used to that. Women usually noticed him. Some men, too. He was the god’s own champion, a great demonslayer, and by all accounts a very handsome man.
Is she a woman for other women, then?He hadn’t gotten that impression.
There was a strange scar on the ring finger of her right hand. It looked like a wedding ring in reverse, two ridges of blotchy scar tissue around a smooth band of unmarred flesh.
Caliban looked down at his own hands, at the dirty fingernails and grime between them, and almost snorted at his own arrogance.
You haven’t bathed or shaved in a season. A woman hardly has to prefer her own sex not to find you attractive. You’re not exactly the elite Knight-Champion of the Dreaming God any more, if you haven’t noticed.
Perhaps she’s simply not attracted to mass murderers.
The carriage rumbled to a halt. “Just a little farther,” said Slate apologetically.
The last leg of the journey passed without notice. There was an inn, a blur of empty tables, a flight of blessedly enclosed stairs. Slate opened the door to a suite, and ushered him inside.
“He’s aknight?”
The man who spoke was a wiry, compact fellow with heavy eyebrows and shoulder-length hair. He had been slouching with his booted feet over the arm of a chair.
He had not actually been flipping a knife, because hardly anyone really did that, but he looked like the knife-flipping type. A pile of cigarette ends in the ashtray showed what he’d been doing instead.
When Slate informed him of their new acquaintance’s identity, he sat bolt upright. “Have you lost your mind? The pick of the Dowager’s prisons—the finest cutthroats and criminals in the kingdom—and you bring us aknight?”
“They’re not the finest,” she said, “or they wouldn’t have gotten caught. Yes, I picked him. His name is Sir Caliban. Caliban, this is Brenner. He’s an assassin.”
He could be at that,Caliban decided, looking Brenner over. The man moved with more strength than grace, and yet, despite pacing wildly back and forth across the room (as he leapt up and began to do) his feet made no sound. He wore dusty black clothing, and his boots were very fine.
It was funny in a way, that a man who could forget how huge the world was could still recognize good boots.
The inn was not so good as the boots, but it could still have been a lot worse—a suite of rooms, one narrow window, chairs and a fireplace in the sitting room. Someone was paying rather a lot of money for it.
The fireplace had a smoldering fire in it. Caliban stumbled to it, feeling the warmth on the backs of his legs. He had not warmed himself at a fire in a long time.
“Good god, a knight? Why not bring some watchmen along too?”
“They had some,” said Slate. “I didn’t much care for their looks.”
“Yes, but—gods! I thought you were going to get us a half-dozen thugs, some muscle for the trip, not aknight.” Brenner stopped in front of Caliban, raking his eyes up and down. His eyebrows moved like angry caterpillars.
A season or a lifetime ago, Caliban would have drawn his sword and shown the man muscle. He might be an assassin, but few assassins were terribly good at a straight assault. The way this one moved said that he was probably a more-than-competent knife fighter—he had that unconscious tendency to present only a profile to the enemy—but a sword gave you a good bit of advantage in reach, although not as much as one might think.
A straightforward attack, then, right down the middle, butchery rather than swordplay. It would have the advantage of surprise. If the man got a knife out, he could adjust tactics accordingly.
Caliban did none of these things. He had not held a sword for months. He could not even think of a response to the man’s words, and his wits were generally the last thing to desert him. Possibly they’d fallen into the sky.
Ngha, ngha, hggahnmama halikalikali…muttered the demon.
His hands were shaking. Caliban put them behind him. He looked up and met Brenner’s eyes, which were blue, with pale rings around the pupil, and knew the man had seen him trembling.
Of course. Assassins were an observant lot, or they didn’t last very long. Little things like trip wires and the changing of the guard could really put a damper on one’s career.
