Jim Butcher - Academ's Fury

Kalare grunted. "Why is she hooded?"

"She put up a fight before we got her bound. She bit Cardis's nose off."

" Off ?" asked Kalare.

"Yes, my lord."

Kalare chuckled. "Amusing. The spirited ones always are."

"Rook said to ask you what you wanted done with them, my lord. Shall I detach them?"

"Turk," Kalare said, his tone pleased. "You've employed a euphemism. Next thing you know, you'll be showing signs of sagacity."

Turk was silent for a blank second, then said, "Thank you?"

Kalare sighed. "Do nothing yet," he said. "Live bait will do us more good than a corpse."

"And the barbarian?"

"Her too. There's a chance she's the result of some kind of fosterage agreement between the barbarians and Count Calderon, and until there is leisure to extract the information from them, there's little point in making myself a blood enemy of the Marat. Not until it will profit me."

Suddenly fingers tangled in Tavi's hair, painfully strong, and jerked his face up. Tavi managed to keep himself totally limp.

"This little beast," Kalare said. "If the woman wasn't a greater threat, I think I would enjoy seeing him flayed and thrown into a pit of slives. That such a waste of a life could have dared to lay a finger on my heir." His voice shook with anger and disdain, and he released Tavi's hair with a flick of his wrist that made the muscles in Tavi's neck scream.

"Shall I arrange for his transport, my lord?"

Kalare exhaled. "No," he decided. "No. There's no point in giving him a chance to survive, given what I have planned for his family. Even something like this could grow into a threat, given time. We'll throw them all into the same hole."

His boots thudded on the floor as he walked back to the door. Turk's heavier, clumsier steps followed, and the door opened and closed again, the bolt fastening.

Tavi checked to make sure that they were alone, then said, to Kitai, "You bit off his nose ?"

Her voice was muffled by the satchel as she replied. "I couldn't reach his eyes."

"Thank you for the warning."

"No," she said. "I said someone was coming. I didn't mean through the door."

"What?"

"The floor," she said. "I felt a vibration. There, again," she murmured.

Tavi could hardly feel his feet, but he heard a faint, scraping noise from somewhere behind him. He twisted his head enough to see a floorboard a few feet away quiver and then suddenly bow upward, as if made from supple, living willow rather than dried oak. He saw someone beneath the floor work the floorboard free and draw it down out of sight. Two more floorboards followed it, and then a head covered with a shock of tousled and dusty hair emerged from the hole in the floorboards and blinked owlishly around.

"Ehren," Tavi said, and he had to labor to control his excitement and keep his voice down. "What are you doing?"

"I think I'm rescuing you," Ehren replied.

"There are guards here," Tavi told his friend. "They'll sense what you've done to get in here."

"I don't think so," Ehren said. He gave Tavi a shaky smile. "For once it's a good thing my furies are so weak, huh? They don't make much noise." He winced and began to wriggle up through the hole in the floor.

"How did you find us?" Tavi asked.

Ehren looked wounded. "Tavi. I've been training to be a Cursor as long as you have, after all."

Tavi flashed him a fierce grin, which Ehren struggled to return as he gave up on crawling up through the hole, and lowered himself to start passing a hand steadily over another of the boards, which quivered and slowly began to bend. "I was out asking questions, and I noticed that a man was following me. It stood to reason that whoever took your aunt might have an interest in following me around. So I went back up to the Citadel, turned around once I was out of his sight-"

"And tailed him back here," Tavi said.

Ehren coaxed the board into bending still more. "I swam out under the pier and listened to a couple of men talking about the prisoners. I thought maybe it could have been your aunt, so I decided to take a look."

"Well done, Ehren," Tavi said.

Ehren smiled. "Well. It was sort of a happy accident, wasn't it. Here, almost got it."

The board creaked and began to move, when Kitai hissed, "The door."

The bolt on the warehouse door rattled, and the door opened.

Ehren hissed and dropped down into the hole and out of sight, except for the white-knuckled fingers of one hand, holding the warped board flat against the floor with his weight.

Tavi licked his lips, thinking furiously. If he remained inert, the guards would have nothing better to do than notice the missing boards.

He lifted his head to face Turk. The broad-chested man wore a curved Kalaran gutting knife on his belt, and his eyes were stormy. Behind him walked a lean, skinny man in the same river sailor's clothing, and another curved knife rode on his belt. He was bald and looked as though he had been made from lengths of knotted rawhide-and his nose was missing. Watercrafting had left what remained a shade of fresh pink, but it gave him a skeletal look, his naval cavities reduced to a pair of oblong slits in his face. Cardis, then.

"Well," Turk said. "Look at that. Kid's awake."

"So what," Cardis snarled, stalking over to the bound and hooded Kitai. He tore off the leather hood, took a fistful of the girl's hair, and savagely tore it out of her scalp. "I don't give a bloody crow about the boy."

Kitai's eyes blazed with emerald fire, something wild and furious rising up behind them. Her face bore bruises on one cheek, and dried blood clung in brown-black clots to the lower half of her face.

"Don't touch her!" Tavi snarled.

Cardis almost idly dealt Tavi's face a sharp, stinging blow with his open hand, then turned back to Kitai.

The Marat girl stared at Cardis without flinching or making a sound, then deliberately slipped her tongue between her lips and licked at the blood on her upper lip, a slow and defiant smile crossing her face.

Cardis's eyes went flat and dangerous.

"Cardis," Turk snapped. "We're not to harm either of them."

The other man stared down at Kitai and tore out another heavy lock of hair. "So we don't mark them up. Who's to know?"

Turk growled, "My orders are from the old crow himself. If I let you cross him, he'll kill you. And then he'll kill me for not stopping you."

Cardis's voice rose to a furious scream as he gestured at his face. "Do you see what that little bitch did to me? Do you expect me to just stand here and take that?"

"I expect you to follow orders," Turk spat.

"Or what?"

"You know what."

Cardis bared his teeth and drew his knife. "I've had about as much of this dung as I'm going to take for one day."

Turk drew his knife as well, eyes narrowed. He flicked a glance aside at Tavi, then his eyes paused on the floor behind them. "Bloody crows," he muttered. "Look at this." He took a couple of steps to stand over the hole in the floor.

"What?" Cardis asked, though his voice was less angry.

"Looks like someone is trying to-"

Ehren's head and shoulders popped up out of the hole, and the little scribe drove his knife straight down through Turk's heavy leather boot and the foot inside it to bury its tip in the floor. Turk let out a startled cry and tried to dodge, but his pinned foot could not move with him, and he fell to the ground.

Kitai let out a sudden and bloodcurdling howl of primal wrath. Her body jerked once, twice, and the chair she was tied to shattered into pieces still attached to her limbs. She swung one arm in a broad arc, and smashed the heavy wooden arm of the chair still tied to her wrist into Cardis's knife arm. The knife tumbled free and rang as it hit the floor.