“Are you sure?” I said, letting my uncertain pout slip into my voice. “I—I’m very late, but I don’t want to disappoint him. He wanted me here tonight.”
The guards exchanged another glance—
And then blood painted the space between us.
24
Atrius and I moved the moment the guards’ eyes left us. He took the one on the left, stabbing him through with his sword and snapping his body aside with a flick of his blood magic. I took the one on the right, driving my dagger through his throat. We tossed the bodies to either side of the doors like sacks of flour.
Within the chambers, commotion stirred immediately. The threads trembled, like the reverberations after a sudden discordant strum of an instrument, as those inside responded.
We didn’t give them time to prepare.
We burst through the doors. Tarkan’s wing was large, much more an apartment than a bedchamber. He kept his most trusted warriors close, even in the dead of night, though apparently still did not respect them enough to give them beds to sleep on—most of the men who jerked awake from their drug-laden sleep now had been sprawled out on sofas and armchairs, and a few even on the fur rug. I wondered if Tarkan had increased the number of people within his chambers in light of Atrius’s movements across Glaea.
Several of the guards inside had been awake, stationed to watch for an attack. They were ready.
But so were we.
We dismantled them. Then continued to carve our way through the men who threw themselves at us. We naturally fell into position, back-to-back, covering the areas that the other couldn’t reach. I stretched threads between our opponents and slipped between them, disappearing and reappearing at their throats before they had time to register the movement.
So quickly—so disconcertingly easily—Atrius and I fell into a rhythm. Smoother, even, than what we had done in Alka. I struck, stunned, crippled. He finished.
Through the carnage, as we cut through the first wave, Atrius rasped at me, “Where?”
Where is Tarkan?
That was the only thought in my mind, too. I could feel him there, like a splinter wedged into my fingertip.
I pointed my blade to the bedchamber. “There.”
There were other guards there, too—just a few. I sensed them rushing into Tarkan’s bedchamber from the opposite wing of the apartment. Arming him, perhaps, or maybe attempting to help him escape.
They wouldn’t get the chance for that.
The two of us stepped over the freshest bodies toward the bedchamber door.
But Tarkan wasn’t Aaves. He wouldn’t meet his death cowering at the foot of his bed. Tarkan had gotten where he was today because he was a warrior.
The door swung open.
After so many years without eyesight, one starts to forget what it feels like to see something in that form. Yet there were some images that remained seared into my mind as I had once seen them—some that I didn’t want to remember, and some that I wished I could remember more. I was not supposed to hold any of those memories, whether in love or hatred. I was supposed to wipe them all away like the Arachessen taught me.
But the memory of Tarkan’s face remained with me, another mark that still stubbornly remained on my slate.
I experienced him differently now, of course. But the image of him as I’d seen him nearly twenty years ago still struck me when he opened that door. He was a tall man, hair neat and slicked back—even in sleep, apparently—and beard well-groomed. I could sense the age in him now, the way it hollowed his cheeks and weighed down the fragile skin around his dark eyes. And yet, so much was the same. The hard angles to his appearance, brutal and selfish. The way he looked at the world like it belonged to him.
Strange, how the past didn’t feel so strong until all at once it surrounded you again, like the tides swallowing the tunnels of Alka.
Tarkan didn’t say a word to us. He just nodded, and the two guards with him lunged at us.
Atrius disposed of the first one easily. The second came at me. He was wielding an axe—the brutal tool of someone trained by a warlord, but a fine one, perhaps given to him by Tarkan himself. He was a decent fighter, but nothing special. The frenetic choppiness to his movements, too-quick and too-abrupt, hinted that he was under the influence of Pythoraseed—good quality stuff, if it helped him move faster rather than slowing him down.
Maybe that was why I didn’t recognize him at first.
Not until I blocked one of his strikes, and the proximity of him sparked something in the back of my mind, something I just couldn’t place— I hesitated too long. He swung.