Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,33
their weapons sheathed.
“Follow us,” the woman said. “We'll take you to her. You're going to have to surrender your blade, though.”
“Only if you're prepared to accept it handed over point first and very, very fast,” Shins replied, smiling prettily. “Possibly more than once. Not saying you're clumsy, but it can be a tricky sort of thing to hang onto.”
After which, following a minute's energetic discussion between the two Finders, Shins was ushered back outside and left to wait while the sentinels returned to Lisette for additional instructions. She managed to wait until she'd heard the door latch and the footsteps move away before she cackled aloud.
“I don't think the old snake's going to like having to repeat herself,” she told Olgun.
Indeed, when the door opened once more some minutes later, the woman was holding a hand tight to a bloody nose and lips, while her partner, or brother, or whatever, sported what was already proving to be a dark and nasty black eye.
“I'm not sure your new boss is a very nice person,” Shins observed. The others merely glared and turned their backs, confident that—or else not caring if—Widdershins would follow.
“And you called me cocky!” she quietly crowed—yes, she'd learned how to do that—to her god. “Look at Lisette's arrogance! The only way she even had a chance was if we had to fight our way through the whole hopping Guild to reach her! Now? Ha!”
Indeed, Shins was feeling better than she had at any moment since she discovered her flat had been…profaned. She'd handily beaten Lisette once already, and she and Olgun hadn't worked together as smoothly then as they did now. Even if Lisette had spent every intervening minute practicing, she didn't stand a chance.
Alert for trap or ambush, just in case—though she was fairly sure she'd encounter no such thing—Widdershins followed her guides into the winding tunnels that were the true headquarters of the Finders’ Guild.
And toward one of the few violent clashes, in a lifetime full of them, she was actually looking forward to.
Onward and downward. Through a complex of deliberately twisting passageways, as though someone had dropped a platter of wet noodles; past chambers both open and sealed, of purposes both blatant and hidden. Shins couldn't help but glance sidelong at the darkened chapel, that oddly shaped room with the heavy portals and the fabric-masked idol of the Shrouded God. Glance, and shiver at the memories of the statue's awful curse.
And all of it swimming in a miasma of breath and sweat, wrapped in a chorus of whispers and snickers, beneath the fascinated stares of scores of Finders. Some moved cleanly aside, some bristled and threatened first, but all cleared the path walked by her two guides. Most recognized her, either personally or by description. Many of those offered vicious grins or contemptuous sneers; Shins never had been one of the more popular members of the Guild. Some, however, couldn't quite seem to meet her eyes, or cast their looks with a furtive discomfort.
They're afraid. And not of me.
An ember of doubt tried to ignite in the primal reaches of Widdershins's mind. She swiftly crushed it out.
It's just Lisette.
Still, “You are memorizing the way out of here, yes? This place still confuses me.”
Olgun assured her that he was, which meant the uncertainty she felt in him had to be caused by something else. “What's bothering you?”
But to that, he could offer no clear answer.
The door to which the two thieves finally led her surprised Widdershins not at all. This was the audience chamber of the Shrouded Lord, or at least it had been. Of course the usurper would rule from here.
“I think I can find my own way from here, thanks,” she said to her guides. She was a tad taken aback when they both nodded and stepped aside. Shrugging, she pushed the door ajar and slipped through.
The most notable aspect of the room was that she could see the room. The Shrouded Lord had always kept it full of rolling, incense-perfumed smoke; vapors that blended to near perfection with the tattered storm-cloud fabrics that made up his own uniform, as well as the sheets draped over the desk. The effect had been a ghostly—if also scratchy and irritating—fume wherein the Shrouded Lord was only another partially formed apparition.
Now? It was just a room, an office much like any other in the Finders’ Guild's upper ranks. The walls were a bit soot-stained, perhaps, but the massive hardwood desk was a thing of art, the chairs