until clarity returned to his gaze. “You have taken poison,” he said in realisation.
The response emerged in a hissing echo of a laugh. “Of course I have. Took it before I sliced that old fool Kohn’s throat. Timed the dosage just right, brother. But I’ve had plenty of practice in such things . . .”
His eyes dimmed again, face going slack in Vaelin’s grip. Vaelin shook him again, leaning close to shout his demand. “Where do I find her? Where is Sherin?”
“Gone to minister . . .” the Messenger murmured back, his voice barely a whisper, “. . . to the Jade Princess . . .” He spasmed, the movement violent enough to shake him loose from Vaelin’s grasp. For a brief second life returned to his features and he looked up at Vaelin with open, fear-filled eyes, tears streaming down his bleached skin. “Don’t worry,” he rasped, shuddering with the effort of talking, Vaelin watching a matrix of swelling veins spread across his eyes as his skin grew ever whiter. “There will be no more shells for me . . . This time, it will finally rip the remnants of my soul to nothing. Think . . . better of me, brother . . . if you can . . .”
He closed his eyes and his head slumped forward, the chains clinking a final time as his limbs slackened. Vaelin stood in silent regard of the corpse as a cavalcade of memories played through his mind. All the horrors crafted by this creature, all the torments he had suffered at its hands. The moment should have conveyed a sense of finality, he knew, an epilogue to the epic of malice. But instead he knew it to be a beginning, for the memory that came most to mind was not of murder or cruelty, but the face of a woman he had last seen over ten years ago. Her features had been slack in the sleep of the drugged as he placed her in the stonemason’s arms, her skin warm as he smoothed the hair back from her forehead. Despite the eventful years since, the memory of her face hadn’t dimmed at all, nor had the guilt . . . Betrayal is always the worst sin.
Does she hate me? he wondered, a question that had bedevilled him ever since he watched the ship take her away. What would he see in her eyes when she beheld him once more? Scorn? Despair? Somehow, he doubted it would be joy, and yet, she always possessed the most compassion of any soul he had met. Perhaps forgiveness?
He straightened as the decision took hold, moving to the door and knocking for the guard to open it. “Burn that,” Vaelin told him, jerking his head at the Messenger’s corpse. “No rites are needed.”
Vaelin strode away along the passage and ascended the stairs to the courtyard, deaf to the questions Ellese shouted in his wake. Whatever Sherin chose to show him when he looked upon her once more, he would accept it as his due. He would sail for the Far West, find her and see her safe, regardless of any risk or cost, for that was the least of the debt he owed her.
CHAPTER SIX
Like North Tower, Nehrin’s Point had grown since the war. What had once been a small cluster of somewhat dilapidated houses fringing a shallow bay was now fast becoming a substantial settlement. Unlike North Tower, however, the inhabitants felt obliged to construct and maintain a sturdy defensive wall.
“This is a garrison town?” Alum enquired as they crested a low rise a half mile short of the main gate.
“No,” Vaelin said. “Merely home to people with a well-justified sense of caution.” He paused, unsure of how to explain the peculiarity of this place. “My people have a phrase,” he went on after some brief consideration. “‘The Dark.’ You know of this?”
Alum’s scarred brows bunched in bafflement and he shook his head.
“Your cousin’s . . . ability,” Vaelin went on. “In the Unified Realm it would be called a manifestation, or an affliction, born of the Dark. In recent years, however, the term ‘Gifted’ is preferred, and enforced under the Queen’s Word.”
“In the wider empire they call it ‘the Shadowed Path,’” Alum said, understanding dawning on his features. “Amongst the Moreska we do not name it. Those born with it are watched closely, for we know it does not hail from the Protectors, and who can say how such power will twist the