hair, a thin red robe tossed carelessly over his smooth torso. Leather britches riding dangerously low. Barefoot.
A girl stood before him, legs slightly parted, bending backward like a sapling in a storm. Small sighs of pleasure slipped over her lips, her kohled lashes fluttering. She was dressed in a black Hand’s robe, open at the front, plastered to her skin with her own blood. The ruby red spilled from a dark slice between her bare breasts, flowing down her naked belly and then lower still. She held a bloodstained knife in one hand. Her other was wrapped in his hair.
Speaker Adonai was knelt in front of her, hands clutching her buttocks, his face pressed between her thighs. Groans of bliss rose right up from the core of him as he lapped and sucked and licked. His clever tongue flickered, his smooth chest heaved, his lithe body shook. Eyes rolling back so only the pink-not-white showed. His throat moved with every deep swallow, every shivering, red mouthful. Mercurio had seen starving wolves tear apart a lamb when he was a boy. The sounds they made as they killed and the sounds coming from the speaker as he drank were much alike.
Weaver Marielle sat in the corner of the room, watching her brother feed. Dark robes draped over her hunched frame, hood pulled low over her hideous features. Wisps of bone-blond hair spilled from the shadows of her cowl, along with a thin ribbon of drool from her misshapen lips. One twisted hand was pressed to her throat. The other between her legs.
Adonai dragged his mouth away from the girl’s blood-slick petals, gasping like a man near drowned. His face and teeth were smeared with crimson, red rivulets running down his throat. The girl shivered, bloody fingertips caressing Adonai’s face with all the reverence of a priestess before her god. Asking no forgiveness for her sins. Preferring punishment instead.
“More,” she moaned, pulling him back in.
“Am I interrupting?” Mercurio asked.
Adonai’s eyes found a muzzy sort of focus, and he let out a gasping chuckle. Still shaking, swaying as if drunk, he swiveled his head like a blindworm toward the light. Finding Mercurio in the doorway, the smile fell away from his bloody lips. His gaze became a glower, a long spool of ruby spit swinging from his chin.
“Yes,” he and Marielle said.
“Shouldn’t have left the fucking door open, then, I s’pose,” the old man replied.
He hobbled into the room, walking stick beating crisp on the moist black stone. It was uncomfortably warm down here in the sorcerii’s part of the Mountain, and he knew climbing back up those stairs on his shitty knees was going to be agony. He was sweating like an inkfiend with a needle three turns dry. His legs ached like a pair of bastards. His left arm ached even worse.
“Away with you, lass,” he told the bleeding, breathless girl.
Dragging her sodden robe partway closed, the Hand managed to glare at Mercurio despite looking ready to pass out from the blood loss.
“Go on,” he said, waving his cane at the door. “Off with the fuck. There’s at least three more of your fellows skulking on my heels. Maybe one of them has a suggestion about how better to spend your time than in the company of these fucking perverts.”
The girl glanced at Adonai, and the speaker gave a small nod.
“Here, child,” Marielle whispered, beckoning with twisted fingers.
The girl walked toward the weaver, a little unsteady on her feet. As she drew close, Marielle raised one misshapen hand, swayed it in the air before the girl’s bleeding chest. The girl shivered. Sighed. And as she turned, Mercurio saw the bone-deep knife wound had closed as if it’d never been.
He sucked his lip, forced to admire the woman’s handiwork. Despite being unable to manipulate her own hideous flesh, Marielle could mold others’ like a potter with clay. There wasn’t a mark on the Hand’s body.
The weaver knows her work.
“Regain thy strength, sweet child,” Marielle lisped through split and bleeding lips. “Then visit us anon.”
With one last poison glare for the bishop of Godsgrave, the lass pulled her soaking robe closed and made her way from the room. Adonai reached out to her as she walked by, too blood-drunk to say his farewells.
Mercurio looked down the hallway she left by, saw two of the Hands that Drusilla had trailing him lurking in the gloom. Close enough to let him know they were watching. That the Lady of Blades was watching. But not quite