Blade Archer ~ Forty

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‘A guard?’

Banok shrugged open-handedly. ‘It’s as good as she’ll give you,’ he admitted. ‘More than most. She likes me.’

‘One guard,’ Kael repeated, then waved his arm in the general direction of the barracks. ‘They’ll kill him, too, then.’ He swore between his teeth.

‘Enough of that,’ Banok growled, but he sighed and rested back against his desk. ‘As she sees it, you’re still a southerner with his fingers in the wrong holes, and it’s not her fault that the ground snakes have come biting.’

Kael stared at him in open-mouthed indignation. ‘I been trying to keep me fingers to meself this whole time! It’s only when ye told me to take it to the Talons that any ground snakes came out!’

Banok held his hands out to stave off Kael’s arguments. ‘I know, that’s what I told her, that she should be rewarding people for coming forward about criminal activities. That’s when she offered you the guard.’

Kael shook his head. He didn’t want any of this. ‘I wanted to leave all this behind,’ he muttered. ‘I am trying, really, really hard, and it just keeps following me my whole life.’

The weapons master sighed and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. ‘I’ve got a spare room or two at my place, but it couldn’t be for long. I’ve got three kids.’

He dropped his eyes, not quite sure how to respond to the generosity. ‘Nah. They’ll just come after ye then. And yer kids. Don’t get involved any more’n ye already has. Forget the guard, too. Same reasons.’

Banok’s heavy hand rested on his shoulder and gave him a few pats. ‘Sorry, kiddo. I promised I’d protect you, and I will. Just keep yourself safe for tomorrow, right? I’ll have something by then.’

Kael shrugged his hand away with a snort. ‘Figured I’d be on me own, anyway.’ He stood wearily and made for the door. ‘If I miss training tomorrow, ye knows why.’

It was with great effort that Kael avoided the quickest route home. He went past as many pubs and other meeting places as he could, wherever there was light and people congregating, and he took small comfort in the uniformed Talons that patrolled the streets in his district. When he had neither, he scrambled up to the rooftops and looked for the closest glowing firelight of another pub.

He considered briefly going to his mother’s old house, to put him back in familiar territory and with all the people he knew, but immediately he dismissed the idea. Street kids were no match for these people.

He dropped down from the roof when he caught sight of the beacon that signalled home, the lights of the pub two houses down from him, but even so close he didn’t let his guard drop.

There, down the gap between two houses, so narrow it could hardly even be called an alley, a shadow moved more smoothly than any lost drunkard should. Kael pulled his dagger smoothly from its sheath and kept walking.

Where there should have only been one set of whispering footsteps behind him, there were at least two. Ahead, halfway between him and the pub, two more figures walked side by side. They might have been friends walking home from the tavern, except that Kael couldn’t hear their voices in the otherwise silent street. Then, he saw, they were wearing hoods.

For an instant, his throat gagged with dread and his fingers tingled numbly where he gripped his hilt. Then he bolted. He shoved his dagger back home and threw himself at the closest wall to scramble up onto the roof. As he gripped the edge of the hard-packed mud brick, a hand snatched at his ankle. The shadow from the house-gap had been moving more quickly than he had anticipated.

He yelped his fear and clawed desperately at the roof, kicking out with his free leg, but a second hand joined the first with a far stronger grip than his own. He pulled away a clump of the roof as they yanked him down. He threw it in a desperate attempt to blind his attacker, but that shadow, too, wore a hood. A second grabbed at his wrists before he could reach for his dagger.

‘Help!’ he screamed, even as he knew the futility of his cry. ‘Help, please!’ Nobody would come. Even if they did, they would be able to do nothing.

A dark, musty hood was shoved over his head, while the hands that pulled it there gripped around his throat. Kael gasped in panic as the fingers pressed under his jaw. He had only a moment for one last coherent thought before unconsciousness claimed him.

I’m going to die.



Kael regained consciousness slowly. Even as awareness blossomed, he remained dizzy and lightheaded. He was upside-down, he realised, or halfway-so. His stomach ached where he had been slung over something solid and jostling. It smelt like camel, he decided. He was tied up over a camel’s back.

Memory came next, just soon enough for him to suppress a groan as the blood rush to his head intensified. His brain had been starved of it before and now it had too much.

Something must have given him away. The camel slowed its pace. A hand patted him on the back of his head, then curled around with a second hand to grip again at his neck. Panic seized him as the blood was once more cut off to his head. His legs tried to kick out but were firmly tied to the camel, and when he tried to scream he felt the gag in his mouth. He only managed a gurgle before he slipped once again from his body.

He was in the same position when he awakened the second time. This time, he gained awareness quickly enough to assess his situation a little more closely. They hadn’t killed him, and they weren’t allowing him to see either their faces or where they were taking him. This could only mean they intended on keeping him alive, but he hadn’t the time to ponder why as the hands gripped again around his throat and panic stole his mind.

The third time, he figured he should be keeping track of how many times they knocked him out. There must be some standard, he figured, for these people to know when to strangle him each time. How long did a person stay unconscious after they had been strangled? Would it be longer each time? Every time the irrational fear took him. He knew they were going to do it, knew they wouldn’t kill him yet, but his body always reacted the same way to the firm fingers around his throat.

Four times. He tried to take note of anything he could pick up of his surroundings, but the camel smell was too strong to smell anything else, and the bag over his head blocked his vision even as it rustled against his ears and hid all other sounds.

Again his mind and body jarred in panic as the hands closed over his throat. Six times, he thought as his dazed mind drew itself back. Or was it five? He was losing count. The first time he had just been struggling to hold onto consciousness; the second he realised he wasn’t dead; the third he had started keeping track; the fourth had smelled like camel. Had there been a fifth in there that he had missed? How could he be certain it was the third time when he had started keeping track?

He decided when he awoke the next that this was the seventh, or possibly the eighth. He felt sick, and the gag in his mouth only tempted what must be the inevitable. He swallowed, trying to keep the thought of throwing up in his hood away from his mind. It would only sicken him further.

His head swam. He took as deep a breath as he could gather, trying to drive the sickness from his belly and the disorientation from his mind. He took another breath, taking in the smell of the burlap sack and—no camel, he realised, just the faintest hint of its smell left on the bag. He wasn’t on the camel anymore, and he had been allowed to think for longer this time, too. He took another deep breath, feeling his chest expand as it wouldn’t have been allowed to slung over the back of the camel. Was he upright? He could feel the pressure on his left arm and leg that told him he lay on his side, but the world still spun even though he couldn’t see it.

He was sideways, then, and still tied with rope around ankles, knees and wrists. With awkward effort, he elbowed his way into what he estimated to be a sitting position. Yes, he decided, this was up. His head cleared enough to thank him for it and he sat, panting through the coarse hood until his mind and body were his again.

He was unhurt, he realised, except for the bruises on his stomach from the camel, and his neck was tender. He coughed hoarsely, and the sound of it echoed as if he were in a large, empty room like the army barracks. He felt a light breeze against his ankles and his arms, and there was hard-packed earth beneath him. The wall he leaned against felt like solid stone, not mud brick.

He calmed his breathing once more, listening past it for anything else that might give away his position. He could hear a stiff breeze whistling through cracks in the building, then a creak of timber. The docks. Only a tied-up boat would make a sustained creak like that. He listened, and heard it again, followed by the wet clunk of wood on wood. He was in a stone warehouse right on the waterfront.

But did that help, he wondered. Aen had said he had never been to the same place twice, and Kael hadn’t heard him mention a warehouse by the docks before. Could this just be a meeting place they had randomly selected, one that happened to be empty enough tonight for whatever they had planned?

He shivered and took another deep breath. There was something else in the sack he hadn’t noticed before, a musty, almost warm and exotic smell that made his nose tingle. Spices, maybe? He had been past the pungent spice stalls once before in the markets, almost choking on their overpowering fragrances. He breathed again. Yes. The smell took him back to those stalls, and the pasty-skinned Kazinians shouting their wares.

‘You’re in warehouse fifteen.’ The sudden voice made Kael jump and cringe with a tiny whimper. It was a woman’s voice, dry and husky, almost bored and very, very close by. She had been watching him for some time, then.

‘In the Thirty-Second District,’ she went on. ‘Two streets along from the Cat and Coconut.’ Her clothes rustled like the expensive fabric Kael had bought for his proposal to Ronanen, and she moved even closer. Kael could smell her perfume through the sack, a twin to his fiancée’s. ‘But none of that matters, of course, because you won’t be here tomorrow.’