Of Kings and Killers (Elder Empire Sea #3) - WIll Wight Page 0,88
unknown time.
Foster shuddered awake when a boot nudged him in the shoulder.
His cheek was pressed against the floor, his reading glasses cracked. Every joint and muscle in his body ached, and none of it meant anything against the remaining echo of his massive headache.
His situation was a blur in his mind, so he followed the boots up to a pair of filthy pants that had probably once been a color other than brown. A similarly disgusting shirt and coat covered a short, round man in a bowler hat. He looked like he had once worked in a bank, but his eyes were streaked with the blue veins of an Anthem addict.
Harriford Wells, leader of the brigand gang that had taken over Foster’s town after the Emperor’s death.
No one from the Capital had ever come to defend them or check on them.
The whole town was alone.
“This it?” Wells asked, jerking his chin at the workbench. He was chewing on something, but Foster couldn’t tell what.
Through sheer effort of will, Foster climbed to his knees, steadying himself on the side of the bench. “Read it yourself,” he choked out.
He wasn’t sure if he was correct or not. Had he finished the gun?
A surge of nausea kept him from straightening up. If he hadn’t finished, then he would die here. His family would be lined up and shot next to him.
He hoped.
The worst case would be if they weren’t shot, if Wells made him try again, if he forced Dalton Foster to continue making custom guns while still carving off a tiny piece of his family every day…
Wells ran his thumb along the tips of his fingers, blue-veined eyes narrow. A moment later, he called out the door, and a woman hurried in.
She looked like the child stories of a swamp-witch, her skin artfully streaked with mud, tiny animal bones woven into her hair, strange symbols tattooed onto her eyelids so that they flashed whenever she blinked. She had a staff with a skull that she claimed was that of an Elderspawn, but which Foster recognized as coming from an ordinary bat.
“Check it,” Wells ordered, pointing to the workbench.
Wells was supposedly an accomplished Reader…or at least, his men thought he was. Maybe he was only fooling them, or maybe his paranoia made him more careful than Foster would have expected.
There were indeed some traps that you could set for a Reader that carelessly checked an object. The simplest and most well-known of them being the unexpected inclusion of Elderspawn Intent, which Foster had indeed included.
Reading the Great Elders directly was a one-way ticket to an asylum, and Reading any Elders was tricky business, but most Elderspawn were weak enough that Reading them was only disorienting and disturbing.
But those effects could be enhanced. Foster had heard of Readers tricked into getting lost in Elder objects, caught in a trance from which they never escaped.
The witch-woman, whose name Foster had never learned, sucked in a deep breath. Wells glanced over to Foster, flipping out a switchblade.
The same switchblade that had taken off the fingertips of Foster’s children.
“It’s…amazing,” the woman said. “A work of art. A true weapon.” She had far less of an accent than Foster had initially expected, when he’d heard her speak for the first time. The swamp-witch getup was most likely a costume she’d adopted to impress customers who were superstitious about Reading.
Wells’ eyes lit up with greed, and he pushed her aside, snatching up the pistol.
For the first time, Foster saw the weapon he’d made with his own eyes.
It was a dark green, like the hide of an alligator, but it glistened in the light of the white quicklamps that illuminated Foster’s workshop. The leathery hide covered the back of the barrel and down the grip as though it had grown there, armoring the metal, and wherever the iron did show, it was a deep black that looked like it had been painted.
The weapon had a lean, aggressive, hungry look to it, and as Foster watched, he could see lengths of bone on either side of the barrel that resembled fangs.
The bandit leader held the gun from every angle, twisting it this way and that, examining his new treasure like a child with a present. His knife rested on the bench nearby.
“I knew you could do it, Foster,” he whispered. “I believed in you.”
It took everything left in Dalton Foster not to grab the knife and lunge at the man right then. He held himself back.