Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Our eyes lock, and my lungs jerk an inhale as those oblong pupils suck me in. The moment of the balas’s death imprints on my mind—
Not how it dies. Not with me and the broadsword.
As the vision overtakes me, the weapon slips free of its catch on the tunnel floor and clatters off to the side. The balas has an expert predator’s sense of space and timing, and comes right at my head—but as I’ve been pulling back on the weapon, when it goes out, so do I, my momentum to the rear carrying me off my feet.
Those jaws snap closed on thin air—
My hard landing stuns me and my vision dims. When it returns, Merc’s somehow back in the fight. He’s got hands under the balas’s lower jaw, his arms vibrating as he holds off all those teeth again while trying to get the beast away from me—
My little knife finds my hand, and I jump to my feet, the vision I just witnessed laying clear my strategy: Two running leaps. Then like a varthig, I am airborne and full of vengeance. Now I know exactly what I’m doing.
The little blade knows, too.
The moat’s beast and I are suddenly face-to-face, and just as my premonition showed me, the tip of my knife pierces the balas’s left eye. My trajectory along with my propulsion does most of the work to drive the blade deep into the socket, but somehow, I manage to flip my body around and straddle its nape. Pulling back with both hands, the hilt of the knife becomes the pommel on a saddle as the balas lets out a roar of pain and rears up. Ducking, so I’m not knocked out by the ceiling, I ride the monster’s knobby body, while beneath us, Merc’s arm stretches out.
The broadsword finds home in his palm as if called.
With what must be the last of his strength, he hefts the impossible weight, and his expression is one of pure vengeance as he stabs the balas through the throat.
Instinctively, I release my hands and leap free. I don’t know if the broadsword can come out the back of the skull, but I don’t want to find out—
Crack!
The sound is as loud as an axe splitting dried hardwood, and for a heartbeat, I have no idea what could have made such a noise.
Then the pain in my head registers and all I can do is lie where I land in a heap, an odd numbness replacing the feeling in my limbs, my stomach flip-flopping, my eyes shifting over to the balas while they struggle to focus.
Merc is still under the gruesome blanket of the beast, and he turns his head slowly to me. His black hair is a tangled halo around his face, which is flushed from effort and stained with green and red blood, what is leaking out of the balas mixing with what’s in his own veins.
As I barely remember to avoid his eyes in time, I have a thought that I’ll recall this scene always. Assuming we get out of here alive—
It dawns on me that his lips are moving like he’s speaking to me, and I try to respond. I don’t have any idea what’s coming out of my mouth. Then my lids grow too heavy to hold up, and everything starts to dim, what I see, how I breathe, what pain I feel, as if the numbness is an infection taking over my flesh.
The last thing that registers as I lose consciousness is the two blades: my smaller one in the beast’s eye, the tip of Merc’s far larger weapon extending out the back of the head.
It’s exactly what I saw as I stared into those oblong pupils for that moment, and I know that Merc would have died without my effort.
It’s satisfying to think even a mercenary could be helped by someone as insignificant as myself.
We’re a good team, all things considered.
Seventeen
A Shared Meal.
The smell of cooking meat is so strong, my hunger is like a sword in my gut.
I’m at the Gauntlet, and for reasons that I cannot explain, I’m relieved that everything is as it has always been: the familiar customers at the tables, Sallae Mae and the working girls, the tender of the bar who hates his job … Mr. Lewis who dislikes me. The voices are loud, and the air thick with the sweet smell of ale and the sour stink of bodies that are washed but once weekly.
It is precisely how I have spent every evening of my life. Yet something is … off.
All of the things I don’t like about the place are soothing to me, as if I miss them, and this makes no sense.
Also, there’s a fire pit in the center of the pub.
Why has Mr. Lewis allowed a ring of stones to be set right in the middle of the floor and filled with flames—