King of Assassins: The Elven Ways: Book Three (32 page)

“I don’t want to look at him.”

“Try it anyway. You are Vaelinar, yes, but you have a Kerith River Goddess bound into your very being and . . . something else. You should be able to see what I can only sense, and most others are blind to. Study him, Rivergrace.” His words were low, pitched for her ears alone, but there was steel tempered in them, steel that made her flinch as he uttered them.

“Anything you can see in him, any weakness, may be our key to surviving his intentions.”

“Escaping is our survival.”

“Not all things are escapable.” His embrace left her ribs as he lifted his hand to under her chin, forcing her to focus on Quendius. “
Look
.”

She swallowed tightly. Viewed mostly from the rear, a little to the side, Quendius sat tall in his saddle, broad-shouldered, silver-gray bared arms freed by the sleeveless vest he wore. Those same arms were corded with muscle, strength learned from decades of working at the forge and in the field with the weapons he tempered. The legs were equally as strong, no weakness in the calves as the leather pants curved tightly to them. Grace closed her eyes a moment, and then reopened them. She was not at all sure what Narskap asked of her. Healers could look at a person and sometimes pick out the thread that did not belong in their complex weaving, that thread being the illness or injury that plagued them. But she wasn’t a healer in Vaelinar terms. She could heal and did, by virtue of touch, absorbing that into herself that she found wrong when she touched someone. It was not a skill she practiced often, and her vision had little to do with it. Narskap removed his hand from her throat and chin, sun moving to dapple her chilled skin where he had touched her. Quendius had none of the lines of refined strength that attracted her in Sevryn. Instead, his was a crude and demanding strength, one that she found intimidating to look at. And, yet, it seemed that portrait was one that Quendius fought to project: hardened strength, not one of refinement or power coiled in waiting. Head on, strong-as-a-bull qualities.

“Lily was a weaver. Tell me how that man is woven.”

“I can’t do that!”

“I think you can. Try for me.”

Rivergrace made a small sound of exasperation before narrowing her eyes at Quendius. He wasn’t a man she wished to be on the same continent with, let alone within riding distance. If he were a weaving on Lily’s loom, he’d be threads of arrogance, crossed by others of violence, the warp and weft of his existence. There would be other threads to fill in the pattern: anger, hate, a sly intelligence, a joy at the pain of others, all these things she knew about him. There was much she didn’t know about him and never would want to: those areas were huge, gaping holes in the weave. But as she worked in her mind and then looked at him, she saw.

Saw the bared threads of the man’s existence. She sucked in a long, slow breath, her hands dropping to her father’s arm and gripping tightly to steady herself.

“What is it?”

“I can’t describe it.” She took a breath that quavered as it filled her lungs. “He’s coated with this oily darkness. It slithers around him as though it were alive. There are huge gaps in his weave, and among all the darkness, all the wrong and knotted patterns, there are silver-and-gold threads that don’t seem to belong. I can’t . . . I can’t see anything else.” Nor could she bear to, she thought, no matter what her father asked of her. The sight of Quendius stuck in her throat with a sick, stinking coating that threatened to suffocate her as if merely by looking she drank it in. She shuddered.

Narskap put one scarred hand over her eyes. “Do not follow his web.”

She closed her eyes behind the coolness of his palm. “The silver threads are Vaelinar. I’ve seen them before.”

“His heritage. But why gold? There is nothing of light about the man at all.”

“I don’t know.” She put her hands up to bring his down.

“You didn’t see the magic in him? His Talent?”

“No.”

“He has the eyes! He has to have a Talent in his blood.”

“Sevryn doesn’t have the eyes, yet he does have the magic. It could be the reverse with Quendius.”

“No. I smell it on him from time to time. Magic has a stink to it.”

She took his hand from her eyes to look at the man riding several horse lengths ahead of them. “If he does, then it comes from the abyss.” Her head throbbed, but she picked at the essence of magics about them, and when she touched again upon the oily, dark strings emanating from Quendius, her heart took a leap that felt as though it landed at the back of her throat. She examined the web carefully, even as doing so repulsed her.

Then she spoke ever so softly. “Narskap. He sees, but he does not see as we do, and he hasn’t discovered it yet. We see the threads of life that weave our world about us. He sees only the thread of death. If he learns to tug on those threads, to weave them as he wills or to snap them entirely, he will learn to destroy at will. Can’t you see it on him?”

Narskap didn’t answer for a very long time, until he had breathed again, and his breaths were so far apart she could barely discern them, and would not if she hadn’t been leaning against him. The Undead breathe, but very rarely. “Are you certain?”

“Yes, as you should be. I have died once, and you stand on the threshold between. If anyone can be certain, it should be us.”

“He’s had centuries to learn himself and although he creates tools of destruction, he’s never shown an inkling that he needs no tools. He seeks chaos and thrives in it.”

“He may be blind to his abilities, but he won’t always be. He has been content to use you, but what happens when that no longer satisfies him? We need to leave him dead behind us.” She said it barely audibly, the words disgusting her as she uttered them, but she knew they were true.

“Not yet. I don’t know what we might unleash if we do. I’m not saying that you’re not right. I’m saying only that the universes have their laws and I don’t know yet what kind of backlash we invite when we deal with Quendius.”

“Backlash?”

“What if meeting death is all it takes for him to learn what he is capable of? We could unleash the very Talents we fear. You’ve reminded me that I ought to be able to see more than you of his potentials. I’ve been studying him from the living side. Now, I need to walk among the ashes.” Narskap raised his hand again, to place his cool palm on her forehead. “Now rest a bit.”

His touch felt oddly soothing as she closed her eyes and relaxed in her father’s hold. She remembered days from so long ago she barely knew how to walk, exploring the vast underground river in the mining cavern where they lived, the three of them, her mother and father like silver flames in the semidarkness. Her singing. His strong arms rocking her to sleep. Protecting her. His strong voice talking with her mother, planning on how to free them. The horse moving in a swaying walk that lulled her back to sleep, despite her worry.

“Mik is nearly dead.”

Rivergrace stirred at the gravelly voice. Narskap put a heel to his mount’s flank, swinging him about to watch.

The raider speaking reined his horse up and lifted his short sword, prepared to hasten the event, knowing his commander would demand the man abandoned immediately.

Quendius put his hand up. “Leave him. I have a need for him yet.”

The blade halted in midair, a silvery splinter that caught the sun and looked as if it could part the sky itself. Quendius smiled at it as if in memory of his forges and his men, and of their workings in fine weapons. He wheeled his horse around to block the horse next to him, threading his way through the pack to clasp his hand upon Narskap’s bony shoulder. “It is your turn.” He ignored Rivergrace as though she did not, for the moment, exist. He had been ignoring her for days.

Her Undead father moved his head about slowly, bones creaking under paper-thin skin. “For what?” A peculiar tension brought his shoulders back.

“Initiate him.” He tightened his hand on Narskap’s shoulder. “It’s time for you to teach me, and show me how to make Mik into what you’ve become.”

They all of them smelled of campfire smoke and sweat and horse lather, odors that overwhelmed Grace, all except for Narskap who smelled of horse, a little, and . . . what? A dried herb and perhaps a faint, musty smell, like something which had been put in a trunk long ago and just brought back to light. He no longer smelled of the living. Grace felt him shift behind her. “And you believe this is something I know how to do.”

“I have the proof before me.”

“You assume it was voluntary. And, even if it were something I knew how to do, why would I wish to curse another being with
this?
”

“Your wishes hardly matter to me as long as Rivergrace’s welfare concerns you. I thought we had an agreement, you and I.” Quendius tilted his head as if listening to the lifeblood rattling in the throat of the dying man. “We have little time. This isn’t a choice you get to make, I’ve made it for you.”

Narskap’s attention went to Mik and flicked back to Quendius. “If you would be a God, be a compassionate one and let him go. If not, do it yourself.” He raked a hand over his face, welts tore through his cheek and then sealed, all without pain or blood. Quendius watched the gesture hungrily. “I would wish this on no man.”

“And I,” Quendius said, leaning out of his saddle and into Narskap’s face, “would do it to any. Give me an army, Narskap, an army that does not feel pain or stop fighting to bleed. If you don’t, your precious daughter and her family will suffer as long as they have a thumbnail’s worth of skin upon their bodies and a drop of blood to lose. I will enjoy finding ways to keep them alive while I invent their torture.” Then and only then did he drop his hot gaze on Rivergrace, and she found her heart quaking as he did. She thought of the short sword sheathed on her father’s hip and the palm of her hand itched.

She could feel him straighten and raise his chin. “You don’t want to threaten me.”

“Oh, but I do, dear hound. I have spent many a decade threatening you, and it simply binds you closer to my heels and my wishes. Now do this for me, or Mik will spend the last candlemark of his life in more agony than a dying man deserves to be, followed shortly by your girl.”

Narskap shifted away from him, from his hold on his shoulder and putting his sword out of Rivergrace’s reach as though he had read her desperate thought to take it from his hand and drive it home, and swung down from his mount. The horse dropped his head to the ground and began to lip dispiritedly at bruised grass sprouts. They traded a long look. She shook her head ever so faintly. Narskap’s only response was to lift a bony shoulder and drop it, nearly imperceptibly, as if to negate her concern. He looked to Quendius. “As you wish.”

Quendius smiled thinly in triumph.

The raider chief and another of his men cut the lashes that had bound the mortally wounded brigand to his saddle and lifted Mik to the ground. Narskap’s shadow fell over him, a casting hardly more substantial than he was, thin and wavering. Mik’s eyelids batted wildly as he groaned and then subsided into the choking rattling noise he had been making. Rivergrace saw Narskap’s eyes widen and a glint lit them, a gleam from deep within him that shut her, and all else around him, out. She put her hand over her mouth as she realized how lost he was. The metallic smell of fresh blood flooded her senses and she realized it would drive away the other’s control. She dug her hands into the saddle to steady herself as she watched his face and lost all that she knew of the man who had been her father and the being who had been her nemesis as he became something
else
altogether.

Narskap went to one knee beside the injured man’s sodden flank. He forgot Quendius. He forgot Rivergrace. All he could remember was fresh blood.

The taste of it lay on his tongue though he never brought his fingers to his mouth as he touched the man, the warmth of it warmed him like a banked fire, and the sticky, silken sensation of it washed over him as though he’d bathed himself in the man’s essence. He could feel a life stirring in him that he had not felt in weeks, not since he had died, or nearly died, on the fields of Ashenbrook. It awakened and stretched rasping claws through him from the inside out and he knew that this thing, this obscenity that kept him pretending to live was hungry. It had him and it hungered for more.