Slate nodded. “I’ll add it to the cost of the room. Our expense account is positively decadent.”
Caliban nodded. That explained the clothes, then, although the cut was rather alarming. Not because they didn’t fit, but because they fitexactly, practically as if tailored. Even the boots were an excellent fit. That the assassin had looked at him so briefly and judged his size so exactly was a trifle alarming.
If he can judge a cut of clothes this fine, I wonder how he can judge a cut of the knife?
It was almost worth it, however, to see the look on Mistress Slate’s face when he entered the room. She’d been draped over the chair—apparently both criminals shared a criminal disregard for furniture—looking half asleep, until she’d seen him.
Definitely not a woman only for other women, I think. At least I clean up well.
Gha gha, ngh’aa, ha…
He grimaced as the demon voice slithered up from someplace between the back of his mind and the pit of his stomach.Stupid.Stupid to be thinking about women at all.
He did not think he was still dangerous. The demon was dead, even if its corpse was rotting in his brain. He’d realized long ago that the muttering voice was notalive, that it was more like a peculiar spiritual stench of decay.
But that didn’t matter. The dead novices at his feet had been too large, too irrevocable a thing. He had not been the architect of their deaths, but he had been the instrument, and he could not quite pretend that it had happened to another person, that someone else’s muscles had moved and lifted the sword and swung and lifted the sword again—
The shudder worked its way up the back of his spine and he turned his head a little as it struck.
Still. Women should not look at me with anything but revulsion. It is an old habit of thought to think otherwise.
I must forget old habits.
“There’s bread and cheese on the table,” said Slate, who was looking back at the fire again. What she might have read in his face was anyone’s guess. Caliban could barely read his own thoughts. “Someone ought to be up with stew in an hour or so.”
“Thank you.”
He turned to the table, took a step, and froze.
A naked sword lay across the table, gleaming in the pool of light cast by the oil lamp beside it.
It was a large blade, meant to be used one- or two-handed. Light did not so much gleam on the steel as caress it intimately.
Damn that assassin. His eye had beenperfect.
Is this a cruelty? Did he know how deeply holding such a sword would cut me?
Was he trying to be friendly?
The last time he’d held such a sword, blood had dulled the edge—blood and bits of other things. His keepers certainly would not have trusted him with a sword again, whether the demon was gone or not. His blood roared in his ears.
If I pick the sword up, and the demon isn’t gone—if all that ritual, if the pain and the chanting and the water and the blood wasn’t enough—
—so much water—
“Brenner got you a sword,” said Slate behind him.
He looked over his shoulder. She’d flopped sideways in the chair, peering at him with her head tilted upside-down over the arm. The long column of her throat could not have been more exposed if she’d been on a chopping block.
If there was still a demon in him, it would take him three strides to cross the room, swinging the blade over his head—the ceilings were high enough that he need turn only a little sideways, rather than straight up—and then down. Necks were harder to cut through than people thought, but with his weight and the weight of the sword, he could hardly fail to cleave through, straight into the overstuffed arm of the chair. The wood and the cloth would probably bind worse than flesh and bone would.
“Is it the right kind? Brenner said it’s what the temple knights used…” She yawned, stifled it. “Sorry.”
And we’ll all go to hell in good company…
Caliban reached out and closed his fingers around the hilt.
Nothing happened.
