Don Bassingthwaite - The Killing Song

Two bright spots of color leaped into Mithas’s face, and his smile faltered. “I’m the night commander!”

Singe let out a short, barking laugh. “That’s not a posting-that’s punishment! What did you do this time to …” He cut himself off with a shake of his head. “No, I don’t care what you did. I don’t know what you think is in that message, but give it to me or I will go to your commander and let him know that you’ve been interfering with private messages. And I’ll guess that you paid someone to tell me to come back at night if I showed up during the day shift, so that’s bribery.” He held out his hand again. “Message. Now.”

The man on the other side of the counter looked as if he was working hard to maintain even a semblance of friendship. Singe heard the young thugs behind him muttering and glanced over his shoulder to see them watching the brewing confrontation. Ashi was beyond them, half of her attention on the Sentinel Marshal display, the other on the thugs and on Singe. He turned back to Mithas.

Just in time to catch him glancing toward the door behind the counter-the door through which the duty officer had disappeared. The skin on the back of Singe’s neck prickled. He hadn’t made it through the war without developing a good sense of when someone was up to something. Mithas looked back to him, meeting his eyes, and the smile vacated his face. Reflexively, he lifted the message higher. Singe kept his eyes on the other man’s face.

“What’s going on, Mithas?” he asked softly, dangerously. “Waiting for your friend?”

“Just making sure he doesn’t come back too soon,” Mithas said. “He doesn’t need to see money changing hands.” He twitched the paper. “You’ve got to be good for … what? A hundred?”

His voice was light. Deceptively light. He was stalling. “You’re going too far,” Singe growled at him. “Give me that message before you get yourself into trouble.”

For a moment, fear flickered across Mithas’s face, but then his expression hardened. “You want to be careful about starting trouble, Singe. You’re already in enough of it.” The cold smile came back to his face. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re doing in Sharn when you were last seen running from a burning village in the Eldeen Reaches?”

The prickling on Singe’s neck turned into a painful burn. Caught up in his anger, Mithas twisted the knife of his words a little more. “Word filtered back to the House a few weeks ago. The survivors of some kind of raid on a little backwoods settlement were full of praise for the heroic death of Toller d’Deneith, but it seemed no one knew what happened to his lieutenant. I think the lords of Deneith would like to have a talk with you, Singe. And I’m going to be the one to give them that chance, thanks to this.” He snapped the gray paper of the message between his fingers. “I know opportunity when it spreads itself out in front of-”

At the other end of the hall, Ashi let out a startled exclamation, and there was a sudden, sharp sound like tearing paper. Mithas glanced past Singe, and a look of surprise and anger flared in his eyes.

Singe didn’t let the moment of distraction go to waste. He leaped up and forward, thrusting himself across the smooth wood of the counter. Mithas tried to twist away with the message, but the message wasn’t Singe’s target. He kicked out with one swinging leg and clipped Mithas’s shoulder, spinning him into the wall. Before the other man had even managed to turn himself around again, Singe was on him. He punched Mithas hard across the jaw, then pinned him against the wall long enough to hammer a second blow into his belly. As Mithas doubled over, Singe plucked the message from his fingers.

“You never know when to shut up,” he told the choking man. “That’s why you always lose at cards too.”

He stuffed the message inside his vest and vaulted back over the counter. Ashi was halfway along the hall, her eyes wide with surprise, her sword half-drawn, and a piece of paper clenched in her fist. The young thugs were standing back out of the way-one of them had a knife out but didn’t look like he sure whether he should use it or not. Singe ignored them and intercepted Ashi.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“Nothing to worry about right now,” he said, turning her around. “We’re leaving.”

“Singe, look at this.” Ashi tried to put her scrap of paper into his hands. He pushed it back at her.

“Later!”

There was a groan and a whistling intake of breath behind them. Singe’s belly tightened and he whirled. Mithas was up again and leaning heavily against the counter. His eyes flashed malevolently. He flung out a hand, and words of magic rippled from his tongue, raw and half-formed to Singe’s ears, the intuitive magic of a sorcerer rather than the practiced spell of a wizard, but just as dangerous. Singe darted his fingers toward Mithas and tried to call out a spell of his own, something to break the other man’s casting, but Mithas was just a heartbeat faster. Before he could even gather his will to resist it, a kind of peaceful calm rolled over him. The fiery syllables of his spell froze, then faded, on his tongue. Ashi grabbed him and shook him, but it seemed as if all he could do was focus on his old friend Mithas.

The sorcerer pushed himself off from the bar. “Why don’t you just come back here, and we’ll keep talking, Etan?” he said through teeth clenched tight with pain. “You’re not in a hurry to leave, are you?”

Something at the back of Singe’s mind screamed that yes, he was, but the words that came out of his mouth had no urgency at all. “No, I’m not in a hurry. What did you want to talk about?” He shrugged off Ashi’s hands and started to amble back toward Mithas, but the hunter seized him and swung him around again.

“Rond betch!” she spat. Singe watched her eyes narrow in concentration, felt a sudden heat in her grip-and the eerie calm that had gripped him shattered like glass as the power of Ashi’s Siberys mark brushed aside Mithas’s magic. Singe stumbled, anger washing over him once more, then spun back to Mithas. The sorcerer’s eyes were bulging in confused amazement at the sudden, effortless breaking of his spell.

“You dabbling bastard!” Singe hissed at him.

Mithas just choked, “How-?”

And that was when the thug with the knife managed to find the nerve to attack. Whooping like a halfling raider, he threw himself at Ashi, his blade raised high. It was a ridiculous, clumsy attack, and Ashi didn’t even bother to draw her sword, but just reached up, grabbed the wrist of the young man’s knife hand, and wrenched it. Her assailant’s knife flew in one direction while he flipped in the other, arms and legs flailing.

His waving hand caught her scarf and ripped it free. He hit the floor hard, and the fabric slithered down on top of him, covering his face-but leaving Ashi’s bare, the vivid patterns of her dragonmark exposed.

Singe saw the shock that passed across Ashi’s face, but the damage had been done. Still leaning against the counter, Mithas’s eyes bulged even further as he stared at the complex lines of color that rose along Ashi’s neck, swirled across her cheeks, and vanished beneath her thick, golden hair. His mouth worked in astonishment. “Sib … Sib … Siberys!” he croaked.

Outrage and alarm churned inside Singe. He grabbed Ashi and dragged her to the door, snatching up the scarf in passing.

The outer door of the hall opened, and the guard who had stood outside came charging through the foyer, maybe alerted by the sound of the thug’s attack and defeat. His gaze darted from Singe and Ashi, running toward him, to the fallen thug, groaning on the ground, and his hand went to his sword with the precise discipline of Blademarks training.