Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 89: Saana

An hour and a half passed.

They ate from their storage beads in the foliage, each of them in turn, the unwrapping and the chewing done as close to silent as a body could manage when a wrong sound would undo the whole of the waiting. Asp leaned near Tula at one point and spoke to her low, under the threshold the glade would carry — the spirit nagas’ own learning, the things the Black Bowels taught its children about Viletails, how they came and where they struck and what a body did to live a few seconds longer than a body otherwise would. Tula listened. She took it in the way she took in everything, filing it against need, and when Asp finished she said her thanks, and meant them.

The metallic scent of the blood was full in the air now. It had spread from the bodies and saturated the space over the glade, the iron of it thick enough to taste, and beneath the two corpses the Bloodmoss had come up into a carpet — half an inch of it, a soft red growth answering the death above it, fanning outward from the bodies in the slow patient way the moss had of claiming what fed it.

Kei kept watch.

His eyes moved and did not stop moving — the canopy, the foliage, the bodies, the dark between the trunks, and back across the three faces hidden with him, and out again. He had spent two of his Thrill Points in the waiting. One into Perception, one into Muscle, each carried from twenty to twenty-one, the small increments of a man buying insurance rather than power — a fraction more reach in the senses, a fraction more in the body, against a plan he did not trust to go the way plans went. Three thrill points left. He did not spend them. A reserve was a reserve because you did not spend it.

Tula sat silent, as she always sat. Asp had gone restless, the stillness costing her more than it cost the others. Corvyn seemed lost somewhere behind his own face, in thoughts that did not show.

And the feeling came back to Kei.

Not the sharp thing. Not the Yakuza instinct that would have lit the whole of him if a blade were coming — that one stayed quiet, because whatever this was, it was not a blade and not a moment. It was the other thing, the wrongness without an edge, the sense of being looked at by something he could not put at any point on the compass. It had ridden with him since the hideout and it rode with him now, and he could not make it resolve into a direction or a shape.

He thought about putting another point into Perception. A twenty-second mark to grasp the edge of the thing, to drag it up where he could name it.

He did not get the chance.

His Perception fired — the existing thread of it, twenty-one marks of it, catching the thing it had been built to catch. Movement. High, in the canopy, coming over the glade. More than one. He held still and counted as they resolved and made it five.

Viletails.

He moved his hand, the small flat gesture the others had been watching for through the whole of the wait, and the three of them came to alertness without a sound, and the glade held its breath.

---

The Viletails reached the canopy above the glade.

Five of them, coming to rest in the high branches and turning over, hanging by their tails the way the territory’s things hung, their long bodies inverted and their heads down and their senses turned to the ground below. They tasted the air. The blood-smell reached them and their interest sharpened in it — a shifting among them, small sounds passed between one and the next, the sounds of a thing conferring with its own kind.

One detached from the others.

It came down through the branches in a careful descent, not the swift drop the territory’s things were capable of but a slow deliberate lowering, alert at every stage of it, its head sweeping the glade as it came. It reached the forest floor and approached the bodies on a wary line, stopping, tasting, moving again, the whole approach the approach of a creature that had survived long enough to distrust a free meal. It reached the corpses. It put its head to them. And it found them real, and the ground clear, and nothing waiting in the open that should not have been — and it lifted its head to the four above and made a sound.

The four came down.

Swift now, the caution spent, dropping and swinging through the branches and the trunks and reaching the floor in the space of a breath, and the first one had already begun. It had its head into the woman’s body, into the bare unmarked corpse, tearing, and the four arrivals dove in beside it, and the feeding began in earnest — flesh parted from the body in wet handfuls, the wrongness of the unmarked skin opened at last, five predators tearing a woman apart on a carpet of red moss.

Kei watched the woman come apart.

*Hello. Welcome, young master. How may this humble servant be of assistance today?*

Her first words to him. Said in a shop in the Lustrum a life ago, said with the bow and the flutter and the calculation behind the eyes, a salesgirl reading a rich young noble and deciding to have him — and he had let her decide it, because her deciding it was the door he needed. Saana. There had been a female named Saana.

She had wanted to be a mistress of the Rukhs. He remembered that — her saying it, her face distorting with the greed and the want of it, the thing she had confessed without knowing she was confessing it to the man who would use the confession against her. She had wanted to climb out of the life she had been born into on the back of a face and a body she had decided to spend, and her mother had wept at the table watching her decide it, and Saana had not cared, because the climbing was worth more to her than the weeping. freeweɓnovel.cøm

She had thought she was spending herself on him. On Markus of House Tsakani, the rich handsome fool she had roped in, the husband she had won with a token bead she tucked between her breasts and a lie she told herself about her own cleverness. She had been spending herself into a grave in a hearth-lit house at the southeastern corner of Redweed, and she had walked into it of her own feet, lighting the fire he told her to light, going into the room he told her to enter, doing every small obedient thing the plan required of her while she dreamed of dukes.

He had promised to marry her with a lie. He had laid her down with a lie. He had been gentle with her at the end, gentler than the night had any business being, and she had matched him and cried out and fallen asleep in his arms believing the worst of the day was behind her — and he had put a talon through her heart while she smiled with her eyes closed, and she had died believing she had won.

He watched the Viletails eat what was left of her belief.

He felt the old comforting chill he had felt that night — the chill that came to him every time, the body’s quiet approval of a thing done cleanly — and under it, uninvited, something that was not the chill. A thin thread of something that had no use and no name. He did not examine it. Examining it served nothing and the moment did not allow it, and a man who stopped in the middle of a working to feel the dead was a man who joined them. She had been a tool. He had told himself that in the hearth-light, looking at her sleeping face that was not sleeping, and it had been true, and it was still true.

But there had been a girl named Saana. She had laughed and schemed and wanted things, and she had been afraid at the end, in the small moment before the gentleness when she had felt that something was wrong and kept her mouth shut anyway. And now she was a red ruin under five feeding mouths, the face that had bowed to him in the shop gone into the moss, and he watched, and he let the thread pass through him and away, the way he had let everything pass through him and away since the day he learned that the things that stayed were the things that killed you.

Asp watched. Tula watched. Corvyn watched.

The Viletails finished the woman.

What had been Saana was bone and scattered red on the moss, and the five lifted their heads from it and turned, as one, to the other body. The man. They crossed to him over the moss and set on him from the chest, opening the cavity first, working downward into it, the flesh ripping away in strips and the blood running fresh and the wet sound of it joined now by the dry crack of bone giving under jaws built to give it.

And in the foliage, Tula moved.

She left her place among them without a sound — low, flat to the ground, sliding through the undergrowth on the line that took her around behind the feeding pack, behind the five bent heads and the working jaws, into the bushes at their backs. Slow. Patient. Closer than any of them would have gone, close enough that the smell of the opened man was full in her face, and she did not stop until she was where she meant to be.

There, hidden still, she raised her hands.

And from the tips of her fingers, dark against the dark, the Shadow Threads began to come — the House Nightloom craft drawn out thread by thread into the air behind five predators that had not yet learned she was there.