We Ride the Storm by Devin Madson

Author:Devin Madson [Madson, Devin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Devin Madson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

The gates closed behind me with the speed and finality with which doors often close behind a whore. I did not look back and yet they loomed over me, tall and foreboding, the same glare of the matron through whose legs I had just escaped. Almost I expected an arrow and the sudden blinding pain of life oozing out through the back of my head, but it never came. Just the sound of my footsteps upon the road and the stretching golden fingers of light from the gatehouse, fading to darkness.

She said nothing. She hadn’t spoken on the way out of the castle, nor as the guards led us through the city, and now we had been spewed free onto the road she maintained her silence. Silence I had often begged for and now I did not want.

“Well,” I said, keeping my voice low as my boots scuffed the road with each step toward the night. “The road to Mei’lian will be very long without a horse, so we had better go pick up that one Empress—”

We are not going to Mei’lian.

“—Hana said would be waiting in—”

We are not going to Mei’lian.

I did not stop walking, but I stopped talking. Her voice had an edge it had lacked before. No pleading, no complaining, no whining just hard, sharp commands. It wasn’t an improvement.

I can hear your thoughts, you know, She said. We are taking the head to the Chiltaens and getting our audience with the Witchdoctor. If you want to go and kill an emperor when you’re free of me then that is your choice.

“I made a deal and I intend to honour it,” I said, the weight of the head dragging upon my arm. “We are going to Mei’lian.”

I kept walking. No clouds crowded the night sky, but the half moon gifted little light. A lantern would have been helpful, but with the Chiltaens so close it would only have drawn unwanted attention. As would leaving the city on horseback. On foot I was no one.

The empress had said that and a lot more, had given me instructions on getting into the palace in Mei’lian, had spoken of contacts and allies and described ways it would be beneficial to have the emperor found, but I had heard barely a word in every five. Whole again I might have been, but never more broken. And from out in the city the dead had called to me once more.

The last of the reaching torchlight lost its hold on us as Koi shrunk to nothing at our back. Ahead the road continued in darkness.

If we go to Mei’lian and kill the emperor before taking the head back it will be unrecognisable, She said as I walked on, determined to make it to the small village the empress had mentioned and the horse she had promised. We have to take it back now.

“I took a job for an empress,” I hissed to the night as fireflies darted out of my way. “How many

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