She snuggled closer, sighing in contentment . . . and the itch burned like fire.
◆ ◆ ◆
They killed twice more in the Twelve Sisters. A merchant’s clerk on Alpenna, throttled by the woman in an alley as he searched for a place to piss away the night’s wine. Next was a tavern girl in Astenna, lured to Frentis’s room by the silver he spun before her eyes, making it dance along his knuckles. She giggled as she followed him up the stairs, giggled as he stood aside with a bow at the door, giggled in the room as he lit a lamp and closed his arms around her. Once again the woman let him make it quick.
They found a ship before the sun was up and sailed away with the morning tide. The ship docked at Dinellis four days later, a huge bustling port even larger than Mirtesk. The guise of lady and bodyguard had been abandoned by now, replaced by husband and wife, though this time she played the role of cowed mouse and had him act the domineering braggart, spoiled son of a Meldenean merchant come to oversee his father’s trade. Dinellis yielded another victim from her list, a rotund innkeeper persuaded to join them for a cup of wine on their veranda by a boisterous Frentis. They left him there, staring sightlessly at the harbour, his empty wine cup still resting on his extensive belly.
The days took on a nightmarish monotony as they journeyed north, finding listed names along the way. There was no pattern to this list, at least none he could decipher. A village washerwoman ten miles north of Dinellis, a strapping farmhand two days later, a half-blind and deaf old man the day after that. If not for the fact he had seen the man with the too-familiar voice hand her the list, he might have thought it just a delusion of her fractured mind, an illusion giving her permission to kill at random. But there was a control to her killing now that told him this mission was not recreational, the savagery that had so disgusted him when she killed the old man in Hervellis replaced by a terrible efficiency. Whether she did the killing or forced him to it, little was left to chance. Their victims were observed and killed when opportunity arose, quickly if not cleanly, and they were gone well before any alarm could be raised.
A carpenter in Varesh. Another magistrate in Raval. A bandit leader in the hills to the west.
“Well, he was a tough one.” The woman angled her head at the body of the bandit, shaking blood from her short sword.
Frentis dodged a spear thrust from the last of the bandit’s men, the five others all lay about their camp, bloodied and lifeless. The camp had been hard to find, taking several days tracking through rocky hills. When they finally came upon it the woman eschewed waiting for darkness in favour of walking in and killing them all. “We’ve scant time for artistry, my love.”
The bandit leader had fought hard, if briefly. His men hadn’t run when he fell, bespeaking a genuine friendship and respect amongst these rogues.
The final bandit wore his hair in long, tightly bound braids, an intricate array of decorative scars etched around his eyes and mouth. He cursed Frentis in an unfathomable torrent of Alpiran and redoubled his efforts, fury putting too much strength into his final spear slash, the barbed blade arcing wide, leaving him exposed. Frentis’s boot took him square on the jaw, felling him unconscious to the dusty rock.
“He’s seen us,” the woman said, the binding forcing Frentis to bring his sword to bear on the fallen bandit’s neck . . .
. . . the itch burned, bright and fierce, so bright he wondered it didn’t burn through his shirt and blind her . . .
. . . the blade stabbed down, severing the spine. The bandit spasmed once and died.
They took the bandits’ horses, squat, wide-legged animals little bigger than ponies, and rode hard towards the north. The horses withered as night drew on but the woman wouldn’t stop and they rode them to death before the next morning. Two days’ walk brought them in sight of Alpira, the empire’s capital.
“Magnificent isn’t it?” the woman said. “They can’t build a road worth a turd but they can build a city.”
Alpira was a vast square grid of countless houses and towers, bordered all around by huge sloping walls fifty feet thick. Frentis would have been awe-struck by the sight of it but for the images of murder that now crowded his head. The farmhand had approached them with a wide smile, stepping away from his plough with raised arms, thinking them travellers in search of direction. Frentis’s dagger had opened his neck with a single slash and they watched him thrash on the ground until he bled his life away.
“See?” the woman was saying, finger pointing. “The dome of the Emperor’s Palace.” The dome seemed to shimmer with a white fire as it reflected the afternoon sun. “Clad in silver, every inch of it. I wonder what it’ll look like when it burns.”
They made camp atop a nearby hill, watching the city as night fell, a spectacle of lights appearing as the shadows grew long, the city resembling an unnaturally well-ordered spider’s web.
The woman took a piece of waxed parchment from the pack, unfolding it to briefly scan the names it held, then tossed it onto the fire where it blackened and curled in the flames. “You still haven’t reckoned it out, have you?” she asked. “What this has all been for?”
Frentis watched the last fragments of parchment burn and said nothing.
“Do you know what scrying is?” she persisted.
He wanted to ignore her, but found he needed to know why she had made him spill so much blood. If he could make some kind of sense of it, then perhaps the images wouldn’t plague him with such ferocity.
“I heard one of my brothers talk of it once,” he said. “Brother Caenis, he knew many things.”
“I see. And what did knowledgeable Brother Caenis have to say about scrying?”
“It’s a thing of the Dark. A way of seeing the future.”
“Quite so. But it’s a far-from-exact art, and a rare gift. The Council have been scouring the empire and beyond for centuries to find those with this gift, all with but one object, to divine what will happen when we finally come to take this land. Decades of scrying, most of it under torture, produced our list. Each name recurring again and again in the visions forced from the seers. The magistrate on Ulpenna would have rallied a fleet of armed merchant ships to harry our supply lines. The clerk was destined to be a master strategist in naval warfare, architect of a great victory. The whore in the tavern would discover a talent for archery, becoming a legend when she killed our admiral on the deck of his flagship. I assume you can guess the rest. Our list was a list of heroes, my love. By removing them we ensure success and eternal glory for the Volarian Empire.”
The sound that rose from his chest was so unfamiliar it hurt his throat. A laugh, in truth more a grating mirthful cough, making the woman narrow her eyes. “Do I amuse you, my love?”
Her anger just made him laugh harder, choking off as she flared the binding, leaning forward, hands flexing. “I will not be mocked. You saw me drink the blood of the last man who mocked me. Do not forget what I can do.”
He was surprised to find she had left him freedom to speak. “You won’t,” he rasped. “Mad bitch that you are, you’re actually in love with me.”
She became very still, fists clenched now, face twitching. “It seems you know more about cruelty than I gave you credit for.” She reclined slowly and unclenched her fists. “I asked what amused you.”
This time the binding left no room for silence. “There are millions of people in this empire,” he said. “Not slaves, free people, more than can be counted. Janus sent the largest and finest army ever mustered by the Realm and we couldn’t hold three cities for more than a few months. You think because we killed the people on your list this empire is ripe for the taking? You think amongst all the millions there won’t be any to take their place? I hope your vile race does try to take it, and I hope I live long enough to see their ruin.”
She gave a laugh of her own, short, almost wistful. “Oh my love, if only you knew how childish you are, how small your mind is. You talk of taking an empire, and in truth those idiots on the Council dream of little else, selling themselves like the cheapest whores to the Ally. They can have this empire. I want more, and I’ll have it, with you at my side.”
The itch, dormant for much of the day, began again. Not so painful now, but an insistent throbbing ache.
“But first,” the woman said, getting to her feet and brushing dust from her clothes, “we have the last name on our list to strike through. And this time, since you find me so amusing, I think I’d like you to play with them a while first. It’s a child you see, and children do so love to play.”
◆ ◆ ◆
The villa stood on a plateau to the west of the city. It was a large horseshoe-shaped structure, two storeys tall, comprising a stable and workshop as well as a lavishly decorated main house, all set within well-ordered groves of acacia and olive trees. White-cloaked guards patrolled the grounds in pairs. From the number visible, Frentis guessed there was at least a company garrisoned here.
They had approached via a narrow fissure in the southern slope of the plateau. It would have been a perilous climb in daylight but at night their success in scaling it seemed miraculous. He knew he had the woman to thank for the smooth precision with which he had made his way up the rock, hands and feet finding purchase with faultless accuracy. Somehow the binding enabled her to convey her skills to him, along with her bile. The itch hadn’t stopped and he worried continually it would prove such a distraction he would slip, but the binding and the woman’s Dark skill left no room for error and they reached the plateau’s edge without incident.