Nightglass by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781601254405
Publisher: Paizo Publishing, LLC
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Reprisals

The whooping woke him.

It had been the better part of a week since Isiem had talked to Orwyn and the others around the timber wagons. Both he and Oreseis had spent the intervening days asking questions under a succession of guises. Mostly Isiem chose illusionary identities whose mysterious disappearances, like the Pezzacki half-orc’s, could easily be laid at the Hellknights’ door; when such people vanished, it burnished their knights’ reputation for ruthlessness and raised few questions about where they had gone. Sometimes, so that people would not wonder why the Nidalese never showed their faces, he went undisguised.

But whatever face he chose, and whomever he approached, Isiem learned little about the strix. Wild rumors and speculation abounded, but accurate observations seemed scarcer than waterfalls in the desert.

Some said the strix were winged devils in more than name—that the diabolists of House Thrune had deliberately summoned them from Hell and set them loose on the people of western Cheliax so that they could offer protection from the threat they themselves had created. Some said the mine overseers had struck a secret bargain with the strix, allowing them to feast on lazy and unruly workers in exchange for leaving the others unmolested. A few claimed—never when they knew Isiem was listening—that the strix were not living creatures at all, but rather Nidalese thralls who had escaped from the shadowcallers’ control and hid in the deep recesses of Devil’s Perch because no light could reach them there.

The only sure thing anyone knew was that the strix had murdered Chastain, her daughter, and everyone accompanying them—and that the outrage demanded retribution.

That thought leaped to the fore of Isiem’s mind when he heard the whoops that morning. Pushing off his blankets, he went to the window and pulled the curtain to the side.

The street below was crowded with cheering men gathered around four sweat-stained riders on lathered horses. A dark-winged figure staggered on foot between the riders, and two more broken, winged forms dragged in the dust behind them. The ropes that bound the corpses were not tied around their ankles, but threaded through gashes in their calves.

Fastening his shadowcaller’s robe as he went, Isiem hurried down the stairs.

Every citizen in Crackspike seemed to have mobbed the street. He glimpsed the Hellknights pushing forward through the fray, Posie’s girls leaning bare-shouldered on their balcony, and miners and laborers who had come fresh from their work, wearing clothes sweated through and caked with dust so many times that the men seemed made of mud.

The creature who had attracted all their notice seemed oblivious to the crowd. The strix hobbled between the riders with his head lowered between his enormous, bedraggled black wings, unresponsive to the curses hurled his way or the occasional gob spat on him by a spectator. The riders and their horses, spattered with similar missiles, were less restrained; they answered with imprecations fiery enough to burn a Hellknight’s ears, or—if the spitter was foolish enough to be identifiable, and in reach—vicious blows from their quirts.

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