Pathfinder Tales--Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

17

FISHBONE ALLEY

JHERAAL

It took hours for Jheraal to scrub the blood off herself.

Her scales were the problem. Blood caught under their edges and wouldn’t come out. She either had to soak herself in a hot bath or scour herself raw to get clean. Quite often, the Hellknight didn’t bother. She simply waited for those last stubborn traces of blood to dry and flake away.

That wasn’t an option today. The sight of the hellspawn woman’s blood, even reduced to a ghostly, near-invisible pink tinge limning each scale, filled Jheraal with shuddering revulsion.

There were no bath facilities in the Obrigan Gate, only the buckets and rags and cheap, slimy brown soap used to wash the inmates in its cells. Jheraal soaked the rags and squeezed them over her skin to flush as much of the blood out as she could. Then she took a block of pumice stone and scraped it across the residual stains, over and over, until her scales were frayed and flaking, and the rosy taint underneath was not her victim’s blood but her own.

Tears ran down her cheeks as she scrubbed. Jheraal didn’t notice them at first; she had no idea when they had begun. Once she realized she was crying, however, she couldn’t seem to stop it. The tears fell faster and hotter, raining into the bucket of pinkish wash water until it blurred too much for her to see.

She sank to the floor and sat numbly on the cold, water-slicked stone, crying into her bent knees for the cruelty of the world. For eight hellspawn citizens, innocent of any crime, who had tried to make lives for themselves in a city that hated them, and who had suffered and died for other people’s sins. For the little girl with the froglike face who could have been her daughter, had fate taken the smallest of twists.

And for herself, too. For what she’d done, and what she had yet to do. For her shameful weakness in crying, and her inability to stop.

Since becoming a Hellknight, she had never wept. Not once. Hunger, cold, heat, privation—these were the privileges of a Hellknight, a chance to measure themselves against hardship and overcome it by discipline and force of will.

Jheraal could endure pain. She had. She would do so again. It held no fear for her. Pain was nothing but a challenge to be overcome, and she knew her own measure there.

But what she’d done in that cell was different. Nothing in her training had prepared her for that. Nothing could. And it was the unfamiliarity of her own emotions that terrified her, as much as the awfulness of what she had done.

Finally the storm passed, leaving Jheraal feeling scoured as raw inside as she was on the outside. Her tears dried. Her breathing steadied. She put the pumice stone back on its shelf, dumped the dirty water down the drain in the floor’s center, and wrung out the washrags before hanging them on hooks to dry.

The towels were as poor as

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