Night of Knives_ A Novel of the Malazan Empire - By Ian C. Esslemont Page 0,46
then the gag. Kiska blinked, shook her hair from her eyes. She scowled up at a sinewy, broad-shouldered man whose weathered face bore a startling pattern of burn scars from lye or boiling oil.
He stepped back, glanced to a table where the man who’d first grabbed her sat with his feet up on a chair. Kiska recognized him by his leather hauberk with its iron lozenges riveted in rows and his plain blackened iron helmet. A thin moustache hung down past his chin and scar tissue made a knob of his nose. The man shrugged. ‘Nab someone, you said. I had one of them grey-robes but she was too much trouble. Grabbed this one after that. She was eyeing the fight.’
They were at an inn. Kiska recognized it: the Southern Crescent. Men stood about, either watching her indifferently or scanning the street from windows and the door. She counted about forty.
The scarred man turned to her. ‘All right. What’s your story? Who do you work for?’
‘Who do you work for?’
The man slapped her. It felt as if a slab of iron had been smacked across her chin. She blinked back tears, shook her head, stunned more by the casual brutality of the act than the pain.
His eyes remained chillingly flat, merely judging the effectiveness of his blow. Then something caught his attention behind her and he grunted, turning away. A woman walked out from behind Kiska. Short, dark, a thread-fine tattooing of lines and spirals running from her hair line to the tip of her nose, she raised Kiska’s chin in a gesture eerily similar to that of Agayla’s. Kiska had seen the woman around. Carla? Catin?
Studying her, the woman pursed her full lips, nodded as if identifying her in turn. Kiska was shaken to see regret follow the recognition – she wouldn’t live through this; she’d been sentenced the moment the hood left her head.
The woman was turning away when her gaze stopped at Kiska’s chest. She extended a hand and Kiska felt her fingertips tap Agayla’s flattened scrolled letter. Kiska stared into the woman’s eyes, silently pleading. The woman met her stare, sympathetic but pitying too, as if Kiska was already dead. She approached the scarred man at the table.
‘She’s local talent,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Independent. Reports to Pell only’
The man shrugged as if he no longer cared. With one finger he traced a curve on a parchment spread across the table. ‘We’ll just go around. Ignore that crowd.’
‘What if we run into them again?’
The man looked up, stared in his bland manner. ‘Your job is to see that we don’t.’
The bindings cut into Kiska’s wrists. She ached to speak in her defence, to beg, stall . . . anything . . . but the words bunched in her throat, constricted by the intuition that if she spoke they’d just kill her to be done with it. So she remained silent, listening instead. What was this gang of brigands up to? Looting under cover of tonight’s chaos? If so, what did the cultists have to do with it? Had they clashed?
The woman glanced at her again, took a breath, and leaned close to whisper something to the scarred man. He smiled in reply, his lips merely tightening over his teeth, utterly empty of humour. ‘You going soft on us?’ he answered, without looking up.
Adjusting her vest, the woman offered Kiska a slight shrug to convey she’d done all she could. Though it was her life the man had just dispensed with, Kiska forced herself to respond in kind – a small nod. Fear no longer clenched her throat. She wanted to cry. Grotesquely enough, what stopped her was something she’d never have suspected: pride.
The parchment crackled crisply as the man rolled it up. Handing it to one of his followers, he beckoned the others to him. Kiska tensed, her breath shallowing; they were readying to leave and she wouldn’t be going with them.
The scarred man spoke to four of his men, one of whom was the man who’d snatched her. They were all older, more hardened and at more ease than the others. Kiska knew she wasn’t being discussed; her fate had been decided.
A young man at a front window yelped, then jumped away from the wall. ‘A Hood-spawned ghost! A shade! At the door!’
The scarred commander and his squad broke into motion without orders or comment, confirming to Kiska that they were a team of veterans, perhaps part of a unit of Imperial marines.