A Thirst for Vengeance (The Ashes Saga, Volume 1) by Edward M. Knight

Author:Edward M. Knight [Knight, Edward M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Edwards Publishing
Published: 2014-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

I spent the rest of the day watching the man get more and more drunk.

In truth, his casual nonchalance made me uneasy. I saw what he could do: throw a knife. But, he’d done that when he was still sober. He said the Black Brotherhood was coming for him, but it was obvious that he did not see them as much of a threat.

It was either that, or he was insanely brave. Or stupid.

The thought seemed ironic. Those were the two qualities he’d identified in me earlier.

An hour after midnight, things became interesting.

I had been watching the tavern fill up with patrons as the evening progressed. The rundown bar was apparently a favorite spot of both nobility and peasants. You could distinguish each from the cut of his cloth. I had never seen the two types of people mingling together as freely as they did here.

The first customers who entered the bar after dinner eyed me curiously. I was an oddity. My presence didn’t fit. But, the man I was with was still lucid enough to look intimidating, so I wasn’t troubled.

However, I was worried that as he drank himself deeper into oblivion, somebody would take issue with my presence at Lamore’s.

Instead, I found the opposite. As more people filled the space, I was given less and less attention.

A blue hen stands out in a flock of fifteen, but is lost in a crowd of one thousand.

Still, I jerked my head up every time I heard the front door open. I did not know how the Black Brotherhood would make their entrance, so every loud noise had the tendency to spook me.

A girl about my size, though probably at least ten years older, stood up on a table in the middle of the room with a harp. She strummed the strings and began to sing. The crowd joined her with the words of a song I did not know. It seemed to be a jolly melody.

The sound of the song made the man I was with perk up. He joined in. He sang with his full voice, slurring the words. When the song ended, he roared to his feet and cheered the loudest.

That was when I noticed two small men in brown, indistinctive cloaks walking toward us.

My eyes swept over them at first. They were so ordinary that nothing about them attracted attention. You could walk down the street and not notice their kind until you were a heartbeat away from a collision.

But, just as I was going to turn my attention back to the performance, the glint of a metallic edge in one man’s hand caught my eye.

Everything seemed to happen at once.

The girl started to sing. Her song began with a chorus that everybody knew. A hundred voices burst to life around me.

At the same time, the men quickened their steps. Their faces showed absolutely no emotion, but their fingers danced. I saw blades twirling in their hands.

I screamed to alert the man. My voice was lost in the uproar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.