He drew back his arms and threw as he rose from cover, both knives arcing towards the targets with a precision he had thought lost to his youth. The left-hand throw was marginally the less accurate of the two, the steel dart striking at the join of the Tuhla’s neck and shoulder, but still managing to find a vein of sufficient import to send the warrior to the ground with blood gurgling from his mouth in a dark torrent. By contrast, the archer somehow remained standing despite taking the bone-handle knife full in the throat. He even tried to draw his bow as Vaelin made an unhurried approach, though the Tuhla’s spasming limbs soon shook the weapon from his grasp. Vaelin stooped to retrieve the bow before pulling the knife free and relieving the Tuhla of his quiver when he finally collapsed and choked out his last strangled breath.
Vaelin put an arrow to the string as he moved on, the black-song growing into an ugly murmur. It was coloured by a sensation he hadn’t felt for many years, the hum of recognition that meant only one thing: Another Gifted is near. A fresh upsurge of laughter led him to the rest of the Tuhla, a dozen standing in a loose circle around a small group of kneeling men. The kneelers were all bare chested, but a pile of discarded armoured jerkins nearby marked them as captured soldiers of the Merchant King. Also, Vaelin saw as he crept closer, men he knew.
Cho-ka knelt at the forefront of the group, flanked on either side by the prone corpses of two fellow members of the Green Vipers. His sweat-beaded features bunched in mingled hatred and frustration as he stared up with admirable defiance at the portly man standing over him.
“Where is he?” the portly man asked in Chu-Shin. Unlike the Tuhla, he was unarmoured and carried no weapons, and was garbed in clothing typical of the borderlands. As the man angled his head and leaned closer to Cho-ka, Vaelin felt a blossoming of power along with a rush of recognition. The Darkblade’s tent, he remembered. The day he killed the Jade Princess. It had been this one who had frozen Vaelin in place when he tried to avenge her murder.
“Tell me,” the portly man went on, playing a hand over Cho-ka’s furious visage. “We know you helped him escape the city. So why isn’t he with you now? Did you kill him? Steal from him?”
Cho-ka gave no answer beyond a sneering curl of his lips, which provoked a soft, regretful sigh from the portly man. “You have already witnessed the price paid by those who shun the Darkblade’s love,” he said, gesturing to the bodies on either side of the kneeling smuggler. Vaelin was unable to see the nature of their injuries but the ground beneath them was dark with blood and the stench was familiar to anyone who had witnessed a disembowelment. “Why suffer such a fate for a foreigner?” the portly man enquired. “A vile and treacherous foreigner at that.” He leaned closer, voice softening into an insistent plea. “Spare yourself and these others. Redeem yourself in the eyes of the only true living god. Tell me, where is the Thief of Names?”
Cho-ka’s sneer turned into a snarl, although his teeth remained clenched and his body rigid. Vaelin saw that his arms were unbound but remained tight against his flanks. “Such a closed soul,” the portly man said, shaking his head in meagre despair. “I think you should set it free from your cage of flesh.” He shifted his gaze slightly, focusing on Cho-ka’s bare torso. Vaelin felt another swelling of power and the smuggler shuddered, his arms coming up in a spasmodic jerk, hands forming into trembling claws. “Although,” the portly man added, “the soul of one such as you will be hard to find. Dig deep.”
Cho-ka’s hands slapped against the flat muscles of his belly, his entire body shuddering in fruitless resistance as the fingers began to gouge at his skin. The black-song started to shriek again when Vaelin saw the first trickle of blood on the smuggler’s skin, the music full of an all-encompassing rage. There are too many, a small, still-rational part of his mind protested as he raised the bow, the string scraping over his cheek as he drew it to the full. The song’s only answer was a small, vicious trill of amusement before his fingers loosed the arrow.
Vaelin saw the shaft skewer the portly man through the chest and felt his gift dwindle and die. Before the red-grey mist descended once again to obscure the world, he was aware of casting the bow aside and drawing his sword, charging forward and throwing the bone-handle knife so that it sank into the ground near Cho-ka. Everything went away when the first Tuhla raised a sabre to parry his thrust, the last clear image Vaelin caught being the man’s bisected features as the star-silver blade cleaved him from forehead to chin.
“Shouldn’t we stop him? They won’t get any more dead.”
“Feel at liberty to try.”
The voices were little more than dimly heard murmurs beyond the red mist, but held sufficient meaning to snare the vestige of reason not drowned by the black-song’s clamour. Vaelin felt a rush of sensation as the song subsided into the headache he was beginning to understand as its resting state. His body shuddered with recent exertion, muscles throbbing and chest heaving as sweat coursed down his back. Even so, he felt no sense of exhaustion, although his sword arm ached as he lowered it, squinting at the blood covering the blade from tip to hilt. A man lay at his feet, or rather what was left of him. His jaw had been hacked away along with a good portion of his upper lip, teeth gleaming white amongst the red mess. Shifting his gaze, Vaelin saw another body lying facedown a few feet away, the leather armour on his back rent and cut away along with the flesh beneath, all the way down to his spine.
“Lord?”
Vaelin jerked towards the voice, sword rising in instinctive reflex. Cho-ka stepped back from him, lowering the scimitar he held, his free hand open in placation. “We need to be gone from here,” the smuggler said.
“We?” another voice asked. It belonged to a stocky man Vaelin remembered from the ranks of the Skulls. He had been a good soldier, resolute in the face of the Darkblade’s repeated onslaughts. Now, however, he eyed his former commander with a mixture of suspicion and deep trepidation. Another surviving Viper stood at his back, his face displaying much the same sentiment.
“Shut your yap, Kiyen!” Cho-ka snapped. “An unsettled debt is a curse. Or don’t you value your hide?” The words had a sense of authority to them, as if the smuggler were reciting a solemn rule not to be broken.
The stocky man’s face hardened at the rebuke as he flicked a hand at their surroundings. “You really want him travelling with us?” he asked.
Looking around, Vaelin counted six more bodies, most in a similar state of mutilation to the one at his feet. “Did I . . . ?” he began, trailing off as the pain in his head made him wince.
“We did for two ourselves,” Cho-ka told him, patting the bone-handle knife tucked into his belt. “A bunch ran off after they saw . . .” He inclined his head at the bodies with a grimace. “This. Can’t say I blame them.”
“They’ll be back with more,” Vaelin said, shaking his head to clear the last traces of red mist from his vision. “If the Darkblade doesn’t execute them for cowardice.”
“Lucky they left us these, then.” Cho-ka started towards a rope line where a number of horses were tethered. “Any preference, lord?”
A stamp of hooves drew Vaelin’s gaze to the sight of Derka emerging from the trees nearby. “That won’t be necessary.”