Jim Butcher - Captain's Fury

He was tense. Afraid.

"You're a middleman, Ibrus," Ehren replied. "Everyone wants to see you in the middle of the night-or in the middle of a bonfire. There's not much in between."

"Someday your mouth is going to get you into trouble, Appius," Ibrus said darkly.

Ehren lifted a purse and jingled it. "I'd better move it to where it won't disturb you, then. 1 need horses."

Ibrus scowled, then rolled his eyes. "Siggy."

The big man held out his hand, and Ehren tossed him the purse. Siggy dumped the coins out in his palm, looked at them, and then dumped them back into the purse, which he handed to Ibrus with a nod.

"There's not going to be much to choose from," Ibrus warned him. "The Free Alerans were grabbing anything they could get their hands on."

"What have you got?" Ehren asked. The two men got down to haggling over horses.

As they did, Isana became increasingly aware of the discrepancy between Ibrus's manner and his actual state of mind. That was nothing unusual, really. Most people could dissemble reasonably well, in that sense. After all, it was part of being polite and showing common courtesy to others. But ever since her venture into the leviathan-haunted sea, her watercrafting senses had become increasingly fine, able to distinguish details and nuance with greater and greater clarity. Ibrus's emotions were not simply a repressed reaction he preferred not to display. He was actively worried, impatient, and increasingly frightened.

"You're expecting someone," Isana said sharply.

The conversation stopped, and every pair of eyes in the room turned to her.

She hadn't meant to say it aloud, but the die was cast. She stepped forward, locking her gaze to Ibrus's and spoke clearly. "Who are you expecting, Ibrus? Why does a simple horse trade frighten you so?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Ibrus replied.

Tavi's eyes narrowed. He traded a quick glance with Isana, and said, "You're sweating, Ibrus. Even though it's a lovely, cool evening."

Araris, who had become motionless once Isana began speaking, abruptly moved. His sword cleared its sheath as he spun, and the blade struck through what looked like empty air.

A spray of blue sparks and a ribbon of blood spilled forth from nowhere, splattering the floor and Ibrus's fancy robes. There was a cry of pain and a man appeared, tall, slender, dressed in mail, and bearing a sword. Araris's blade had sheared through his armor like a knife through cheese, and a long, gaping wound in the metal links was matched by the far more gruesome wound in the flesh beneath. The man went down, screaming, dropping his sword to clutch at the innards spilling from his belly.

Isana recognized the man. He had been one of Senator Arnos's singidares .

Which meant…

There was an enormous roar of shattering stone, and the wall nearest the party suddenly fell inward, toward them, shattering along the way. Isana saw Araris leap back-directly into Tavi, pushing him away from the falling stone. Araris went down underneath the fall of white marble and screamed.

Isana found herself falling backward, and realized that Kitai had seized her by the back of her dress and hauled her away from the deadly rain of marble. Ehren flung himself into a neat forward roll, toward Ibrus, and when he came to his feet again, the young Cursor sank one of his knives to the hilt in Ibrus's throat.

Siggy whirled toward him and leapt on Ehren, flattening the smaller man to the floor. He seized Ehren's throat between two huge hands, and Isana saw the young man's face turn purple.

She rolled and came to her knees, then gestured at the fountain of stagnant water and called to Rill.

A jet of water leapt from the pool and flashed across the room. It slammed into Siggy's maimed face and simply clung to his head, filling his, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The big man released Ehren's throat in a panic, reaching up to claw uselessly at the water covering his face.

Ehren arched his body and threw Siggy off him. Before the big man could fully settle to the floor, Ehren had produced another knife and flicked its razor-sharp blade across Siggy's throat.

The man's terror flooded over Isana, layer after layer of it, like a landslide of some kind of hideous, stinking mud. It weighed her down relentlessly, magnified by her contact with the dying man, but she kept the tendril of water on his face until his movements went frantic, then suddenly slackened, his fear abruptly vanishing.

Isana released the crafting with a sob and began to struggle to her feet, calling for Tavi. Just as she did, someone smashed the furylamp, which rose up into a brief column of fire and vanished, leaving the ruined house in utter darkness.

Sparks leapt up across the room for a moment as blade met blade, showing Isana a flash image-Araris, his lower legs pinned beneath the rubble of the fallen wall, and another large, muscular man, also one of the Senator's bodyguards, standing over him with a great war hammer raised over his head.

Isana cried out. In the renewed darkness, she could not see her target, so she did the only thing she could think of. With Rill's help, she seized the entire contents of the stagnant pool and flung them in a single, coherent mass toward the man about to kill Araris.

There was an enormous slap-splashing sound and a cry of surprise. Another flash of sparks showed her the man lying dazed on the ground several feet away, and a drenched Araris choking and coughing.

Then someone with an iron grip seized her by the hair. They jerked back on her head, snapping it back to a painful angle, and then a line of fine, deadly cold settled across her throat. Isana froze in place.

Her captor and she sat motionless in the dark for a time, until finally a cold, female voice said, "Get the light back on and report."

Someone produced a pair of small furylamps and set them on the floor nearby, and Isana could see what was left.

Araris lay on the floor, still trapped from the knees down. His hands were empty and spread, and a man stood over him with the tip of a long blade resting in the hollow of Araris's throat.

The man with the huge hammer looked up from lighting the furylamps. "Aresius is dead," he said, his tone neutral. "So are both locals. We've taken two prisoners."

The woman holding Isana said, "Scipio? The Cane?"

The man with the war hammer swallowed. "Gone."

Her captor suddenly pulled hard on Isana's hair, flinging her onto her back on the ground. The tip of a sword came to rest upon her cheekbone, and Isana found herself facing Phrygiar Navaris.

Navaris looked the worse for wear. The skin of her face was peeling, badly, and looked as if it had been blistered. Her short hair was burned to a lighter color, similarly, and her hands and arms told the same tale of too much sun and the exquisitely painful consequences.

"Steadholder," Navaris murmured. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill both of you. Right here. Right now."

Tavi had been unable to sense anything of Ibrus's emotions as the man spoke with Ehren. That was hardly unusual. His own watercrafting senses were still somewhat clumsy, certainly in comparison to those of a real watercrafter, like his mother. But all the same, something about their situation had made him uneasy, and when his mother had confronted Ibrus, he was more than willing to back her.

Then Araris had moved, his sword screaming from its sheath and drawing blood from a man who had kept a windcrafted veil wrapped around himself even as he slipped up closer to their group-specifically, toward Tavi.

Tavi drew his sword, but even as he did, he felt a surge of power shiver through the ground beneath him, and then the head of an all-metal war maul smashed through the nearest wall as if it had been made of beeswax. The whole wall came down, all at once under a wave of earthcrafted power, spreading out from the opening created by the blow of the hammer.