Steel's Edge te-4 Page 9

  Voshak drew one last shuddering breath and lay still. The odor of putrescence flooded the clearing. Nausea choked Richard. Voshak’s body began to decompose.

  The dark currents of magic shrunk, once mighty dragons, and now just pet snakes, sliding over the woman’s skin.

  She stepped forward. The chain from the shackle around her ankle pulled at Voshak’s leg. The slaver’s bones fell apart, rotting flesh rolling off them, and suddenly she wasn’t chained to anyone. She walked toward him, picking her way among the bodies, beautiful and terrifying, like an angel of death.

  She reached his cage.

  They looked at each other through the bars.

  Her eyes were just as he remembered: luminescent with power and heartbreakingly beautiful, but this time he saw no concern in their depths. His cage had changed owners. Whether it was for the better remained to be seen.

  Richard weighed his options. One of three things would happen: she could kill him; she could walk away, letting him die slowly; or she could let him out. If he had any hope of getting out of this mess alive, he had to talk her down. He had to survive and finish what he started.

  The dark currents of her magic licked the bars of the cage, sparking with red on the metal. Richard braced himself. He could tell by her eyes that whether he left this cage a free man or died of starvation and thirst inside it depended on what he’d say next.

  * * *

  THEY were dead. All of them. It had felt so unbelievably good to experience their dying. The darkness sang inside her, triumphant, while the rest of her trembled, repulsed and terrified. She was painfully aware of the corpses littering the clearing behind her.

  It had taken all of her will to sit quietly and siphon off their life force, weakening their bodies and building up her own reserves. She’d thought it was the only way to kill them all at once and quickly. Finally, she had infected them and used their own magic to feed the disease within them. They felt nothing until the magically accelerated disease finally bloomed and severed their lives in a few painful instants. They didn’t deserve mercy, but she didn’t want their suffering as much as she wanted their lives. They couldn’t be allowed to continue, and so she ended them fast.

  All except their leader. Something had compelled her to kill him slowly. She’d monitored his body, as it surrendered to the disease, and the feeling of intense satiation that came over her as he lay there dying terrified Charlotte to the very core of her being. She had to cut it short and kill him before she began to revel in his pain.

  The magic pulled on her even now, whispering into her mind, begging her to continue. She locked the magic in the cage of her will, forcing it to subside. She had broken her oath as a healer, but she wasn’t a mindless abomination. Not yet. She could still hold it in check.

  Richard leaned closer to the bars of the cage, his long, dark hair falling over his face. She almost took a step back.

  His color was good, Charlotte noted. Stable vital signs. His body was strong and fit but still, he was recovering with surprising speed. His face was muddy and bruised, and the stench of old urine rose from his clothes. The thugs had tried to batter and debase him, but it made no difference. He refused to notice it, the way most people made a conscious decision to ignore light rain when they were in a hurry. He wasn’t humiliated. He wasn’t cowed or beaten down. A calculating mind looked at her through his eyes. He was like an old wolf on a chain, lethal, cunning, restrained for the time being but biding his time. Danger rolled off him. In her years as a healer, Charlotte had treated many threatening people: soldiers, agents, spies. Her instincts warned her to stay away from him.

  Richard opened his mouth.

  Her pulse spiked in alarm.

  “You’re real,” he said.

  What? “I am.”

  “When I woke up in the cage, I thought I dreamt you.”

  She wasn’t sure what to make of it. “You were delirious when we met.”

  “Did you heal me?”

  She nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  She forced herself to sit down on a pile of bags on the ground. The slaver dog trotted over and lay by her feet between her and the cage. Richard raised his eyebrows.

  “Éléonore is dead,” she said. “They killed her, and they killed a young woman, Daisy. Then they set my house on fire.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  There was an unexpected sincerity in his voice.

  “You brought this nightmare on me,” she said.

  He nodded. “I did. It wasn’t my intention, but the responsibility is mine.”

  “I want to know why. Why did they do this to us?”

  Richard shifted in the cage. His hands were tied behind his back. It must hurt, Charlotte realized.

  “These men are slavers. They raid the isolated settlements in the Weird and the Edge and sometimes even in the Broken. They kidnap men and women, and deliver them to the coast to the secret meeting points, where ships pick them up. From there, the captives are taken to the Market, a hidden auction house where they are sold off to the highest bidder. Slavery has been outlawed for three hundred years, but they prosper.”

  “How? If slavery is illegal . . .”

  “The border barons always need fodder for construction and armies. Mine owners use slave labor. The magic users who tangle with outlawed applications of magic theory buy subjects for their experiments. And others, well, when you see a rich man with a young, beautiful woman on his arm, would it occur to you to ask if she was free?”

  “That’s barbaric.”

  Richard’s eyes turned hard. “You would be surprised how many ‘servants’ come from the Market.”

  He was right. It would never have occurred to her to ask anyone if their attendants were slaves. She simply assumed they weren’t.

  “The slavers feed their own legends,” he said. “They dress in black, they arm themselves with wolfripper dogs, they ride dark horses. They appear from nowhere in the middle of the night, reap their human harvest, burn the settlements to the ground, and vanish like ghosts.”

  “Like a night terror,” she said. Bastards.

  Richard nodded. “They want to be the stuff of nightmares because fighting one’s fear is always harder than fighting another man. They see themselves as outside the law, as wolves who prey on sheep. Most of them didn’t amount to much, and they cling to their illusions of grandeur both because they have nothing else and because they find cruelty empowering. So if you wish an honest answer, here it is. They killed Éléonore and Daisy, and burned your house because that’s what they do. It wasn’t personal or planned. They didn’t give it a second thought. They simply did it because that’s the way they do business. Other people’s lives matter to them not at all. They’re slavers.”

  His words only fueled her rage. “And you?”

  “I hunt the slavers. I’ve killed dozens over the past months. They think themselves wolves, so they call me Hunter. They’re not fond of me.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I made a mistake, and they finally caught me. They were taking me to the Market for a public execution.”

  That explained things. The slavers had beaten him not to hurt him—he was unconscious—but to make him less frightening. They were terrified of him. If they were the night terrors, he was their legendary killer, and when you kill a legend, you must make it as public as possible, or it might not take.

  “Are there more of them?” she asked.

  “Many more.” Richard grimaced. “No matter how many I kill, there are always more.”

  Many more. That meant many more dead Daisies and Éléonores, many more Tulips, weeping over bodies. Many people like her, left with a gaping hole ripped in their lives, not sure how to pick up the pieces and move on. Her magic seethed within her. Her body was nearing exhaustion, but she wanted to scream in outrage. Why did this go on? Who allowed this to keep happening? Did they think nobody could stop them? Because she could, and she had, and she would do it agai
n. It wasn’t finished. She wasn’t finished.

  “Tell me more,” Charlotte said.

  He shook his head. “Not through the bars of the cage.”

  She leaned back. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to let you out. I don’t know what you might do.”

  His eyes met hers. “My lady, I assure you, I’m not a danger to you.”

  “Says the Hunter of wolves.”

  “You view me as dangerous, but you allow a slaver dog with bloody teeth to lay by your feet.”

  “I’ve known the dog longer than you.”

  He grinned at her. “‘Can two people ever truly know each other through the bars of the human cage?’”

  Charlotte blinked. He’d quoted the Prisoner’s Ballad, a work that was considered to be one of the pinnacles of Adrianglian literature. She was sitting on some dirty bags in the middle of a clearing filled with corpses, and a man who, by his own admission, was a serial killer just quoted a philosophical masterpiece to her. This had to be some sort of surreal absurd dream.

  “I can simply walk away and leave you in the cage,” she said.

  “I don’t think you will,” Richard said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “You healed me,” he said. “I remember your eyes. You wouldn’t sentence a man to slow death.”

  He’d called her bluff. Leaving him to starve to death was beyond her now, no matter how dangerous he was. “If I open this cage, you’ll answer my questions.”

  “As honestly as is in my power.”

  “Before I let you out, typhus, malaria, red death, Ebola, tuberculosis . . . Do you have any preference? I have others, as well.”

  “Where?” Richard asked.

  “I carry dormant samples of them within my body. To cure a disease, you must first understand it, and sometimes a deliberate infection is necessary for vaccination. If you attempt to attack me, I will end you, Richard. Look around you if you have any doubts.”

  “I’ll strive to keep it from slipping my mind.”

  Charlotte rose. The white-haired slaver was the leader. He would likely have the key. She crouched by his body—it smelled awful—and searched his clothes, briskly turning out his pockets. Money, bullets . . . “No key.”

  “Thank you, but we don’t have to have one,” Richard said. “I only need a knife and free hands.”

  She pulled a blade from the sheath on the slaver’s waist, reached between the bars, and sawed through the tough cord binding his wrists. The rope snapped. He rolled his shoulders and held out his hand.

  She might regret this, but she couldn’t just leave him in the cage. Charlotte put the blade into his hand. Richard flipped it. She felt magic flow toward the blade. It drained from his body onto the metal, stretching in a thin glowing line of pale white along the edge.

  Richard sliced at the chain wrapped around his feet.

  The metal fell apart.

  She’d seen concentrated flash sever a body before but never metal. Not like this.

  He struck at the chain securing the cage’s door, and it crashed to the ground. Richard pushed the door open, slid out, and swayed, catching himself on the wagon. She hadn’t realized how tall he was, almost six inches taller than she. Charlotte waited for him to sit down, but he remained standing. It was an obvious strain.

  Then the light dawned on her. She sat back on the bags, and Richard sank to the ground as well, leaning against the wagon wheel. Ridiculous. Richard might not have been a blueblood, but he behaved like one, and the ingrained manners of the Weird wouldn’t permit him to take a seat if she was standing.

  “You had questions?” he asked.

  “Tell me about your involvement with the slavers,” she said.

  “Are you familiar with the Marshall of the Southern provinces?” Richard asked.

  “Earl Declan Camarine? Rose’s husband,” Charlotte said. “Éléonore spoke of him quite often. I never met him in person, but I do know of the family.”

  “The Office of the Marshall of the Southern Provinces has fought slavery for years,” Richard said. “Unsuccessfully. The slavers have an elaborate organization, and the slaver crews like this one are just the lowest rung of it. The slavers employ shippers, accountants, brokers, and guards. The list goes on. In the last decade, the Marshall of the Southern Provinces has led several operations against the slavers and failed. Somehow, they knew exactly when and where he would strike.”

  “Someone is protecting them,” Charlotte guessed.

  “Someone highly placed and well connected, with access to the inner workings of the Ministry of State. A little over a year ago, Declan invited me in for a conversation. Declan needed someone on the outside, a man who could act without the constraints of his office. He asked me if I would be that man, and I agreed.”

  “Why?”

  Richard paused. His eyes grew darker. “My family is from the Edge. I have my own motivations to want the slavers dead. Suffice it to say that my reasons are highly compelling.”

  There was trauma there, she could sense it. Some great injustice had been done to Richard. She wanted to know what drove him, but his eyes told her that was the one question he wouldn’t answer. And Sophie, whoever she was, had to be a part of it.

  “I spent eight months collecting information and gathering people I could trust and another four pursuing the slavers. I studied them, then I killed them. I slaughtered them in the open against overwhelming odds. I killed them in their sleep. I destroyed their camps. Four slaver captains are dead by my hand. It made no difference. They simply recruit more thugs. I knew I had to climb up their food chain and sever the head of the organization. And for that, I needed to find their Market, where the kidnapped are sold. During my latest raid, I obtained a map. It’s the record of where the slaver ships are landing, but the map is in code, and I couldn’t break the cipher. I needed the key.”

  “Is that how you ended up in the cage?”

  “I bargained with a man and fell into a trap,” Richard said. “It was a miscalculation, and I won’t repeat it. They chased me, and I ran. I knew the Edge was my best chance. Unfortunately, I was too delirious to know where I was going or to deliver a warning when I got there.”

  He leaned forward and bowed his head. It was a bow that would’ve been a credit to any blueblood lord. “I’m sorry I brought this on you. I will make them pay. It’s all I can offer you.”

  He was about to end this conversation and leave, taking her chance to matter with him. No. No, she wouldn’t stand for it. The wounds inside her were too raw, the memory of the fire too fresh. “Not all,” Charlotte said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “It’s out of the question,” he said.

  She gathered herself and looked down on him with all of the haughtiness her upbringing could provide. “You mistake me, my lord. I’m not asking.”

  “My apologies. In that case, I should advise you that I don’t respond favorably to threats.”

  The dog raised his head and bared his teeth.

  “You’re not my enemy,” Charlotte said. “I don’t want to kill you, Richard. I want to end this.” She pointed to the cage behind him.

  He sighed, and for the first time, she saw the signs of weariness in his face.

  “Perhaps, I should explain further. I mentioned that I needed a cipher key.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jackal Tuline, one of the slaver undercaptains, had a sister. A month ago, she was serving drinks at a tavern. Voshak bashed her over the head with a bottle and forced himself on her in full view of a dozen witnesses. He flattened her nose and dislocated her jaw. I’ve seen her personally, and the woman is almost unrecognizable. The experience left her deeply damaged, and her face is the least of her injuries.”

  Charlotte glanced at the decomposing corpse. He wouldn’t force himself on anyone again. That knowledge filled her with a frightening, savage joy.

  “The word on the street said Tuline wanted revenge but was too afraid to take Voshak on directly. I a
pproached him and offered him a chance to get even. We bargained.”

  His voice dripped with derision, as if he were describing swimming through sewage.

  “We came to an agreement. He would sell me the cipher, and I would see to Voshak’s death. When I met Tuline in the woods to deliver the payment, six of his men ambushed me.” Richard smiled. It was a hard, humorless grin. “Tuline took a few moments to astonish me with his cleverness. He had deliberately engineered the rape of his own sister.” Richard paused. “He thought this plan up, talked it over with Voshak, then he did it. All to draw me out. The level of depravity is mind-boggling.”

  It made her want to retch. “What happened?”

  “I left him in two pieces.” Richard leaned forward. “When Declan came to me with this proposal, he told me that this mission would consume me—and it has. He chose me for many reasons, in large part because I have nothing to lose. My family doesn’t need me now. My wife left me. I’m childless.”

  An old pain stirred in her. She was childless, too. “I’m sorry.”

  He paused, momentarily off-balance. “Thank you.”

  An awkward silence stretched between them.

  Richard cleared his throat. “I chose this road deliberately, and when I started, I thought I was worldly. I wasn’t. I’ve seen atrocities along the way that would horrify most people, and I committed some because I had to be as ruthless as my enemy. There is no room for mercy or compassion in this quest, and there is no turning back. It changes you, and should I survive, I’m not certain that I’ll be capable of normal life. Make no mistake, my lady. I’m a monster. Don’t follow me. It’s a one-way trip. Sane, kind people aren’t meant to take it.”

  “How about mass murderers?” she asked. “What’s the policy for us?”

  Richard shook his head. “Go home, my lady.”

  “My home is burned to the ground.”

  “These people are ruthless, cruel thugs. Think of what you must become to hunt them.”

  He didn’t understand. “Look around you,” she said softly. “I came to the Edge to hide from my magic. I ran because I have an obligation as a healer to contain it and prevent it from hurting anyone. I needed to be someplace where my power was weakened and nobody knew me. Someone had injured me, and I wasn’t sure I could hold my emotions in check and not seek revenge. I came to the Edge alone, and I had nearly starved to death when Éléonore found me. She saved me, Richard. I rebuilt my life. I was content and this”—she indicated the corpses with the sweep of her hand—“had fallen dormant. And then they killed her, and they killed Daisy.”