Usurient felt a faint shudder slide through him. “You don’t mean to take Bael Etris, do you? I can’t allow that.”
Mallich rose, stretched, and looked down at him. “If you want this done, you do what I tell you to get it done. Meet me at midday at the prisons. If you’re not there, we forget the whole thing. If you choose to object to the decisions I make, we forget the whole thing.” He leaned down. “I know how to use men, too, Dallen.”
Then he turned away and was gone out the tavern door.
FIFTEEN
MIDDAY OF THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS CLOUDY, GRAY, AND opressive, and it mirrored Dallen Usurient’s mood as he waited for Mallich just inside the entrance to the prisons at Sterne. The building was a two-story stone-block monolith with barred windows and watchtowers, and it looked just exactly like what it was intended to be. The guards were members of the City Watch, men and women trained for and assigned to this particular duty, and they all wore matching blue uniforms with prison insignia. Guards staffed all entrances and passageways and the watchtowers at the corners of the building. The smells that permeated and the gloom that shrouded every part of the building reflected the grim and hopeless nature of the prisoners lodged within.
Usurient was engaged in reviewing his decision to send Mallich in search of Arcannen, wondering anew if he had made a mistake. He had not counted on the other man turning to prisoners to accompany him on his hunt, believing he would settle for his animals and one or two men from the old days. One or two men not locked away. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made that the other would come here. Mallich did not intend to risk losing anyone else he cared about to this endeavor—not after what had happened to Mauerlin. Instead, he would take men who had no future and about whom he cared absolutely nothing. Their loss would not impact him, and it might even be that he expected to lose them and they were meant to serve as little more than a distraction for his quarry.
But Bael Etris? Usurient shivered just at the mention of the man.
He leaned back against the wall, forcing his nerves to steady. Etris had once been a member of Mallich’s cadre of hunters, a proficient tracker and a ruthless killer, useful in certain situations, but sometimes unmanageable and always unpredictable. He overreached himself when, two years back, while serving Mallich—but under Red Slash auspices nevertheless—he killed an entire family of Southlanders who were rumored to be magic users. It wasn’t so much that he killed them as that he did so without making sure he had the right family—which he didn’t. And it wasn’t even so much that as what he did to them. When he was finished, there was barely enough left to identify them as human and nothing to say which parts belonged to which person. What was clear from the carnage was that the man had enjoyed his work to a degree that verged on madness.
It was brutal and unnecessary, and the Federation High Command had tried Etris for murder and mayhem and sentenced him to life in the prisons. There the man had found a new calling, a fresh challenge to his twisted worldview. Within the first three months, he had killed three other prisoners. Within the first six, he had killed four guards, as well. After that, he was confined to solitary indefinitely and not allowed out save for one hour a day so that he could exercise by walking around the perimeter of a twelve-by-twelve-foot open pen. Even then he was kept under heavy guard.
Etris had been left to rot, and there wasn’t anyone Usurient knew who thought this wasn’t as it should be. Men like Bael Etris did not belong in the larger world. They barely belonged in cells where they could be caged like the animals they were.
And now Mallich wanted to let this creature out.
Usurient had racked his brain all night trying to find an excuse for not doing so, a reason that the other man would accept, any alternative that would appeal. But Mallich was not the sort to adjust his thinking without good reason, and in this case he had made up his mind when he had accepted the job of tracking down Arcannen that he would take Etris with him.
Who else did he intend to take?
“You don’t seem happy, Dallen.”
Mallich was standing right in front of him. He had been so absorbed in thinking about Etris that he hadn’t heard the other come up. He straightened, making an effort to appear casual. “I was just wondering how you plan to keep yourself alive if you have Bael Etris sleeping next to you.”
Mallich gave him a crooked grin. “You needn’t worry. I can manage him. It’s you who should worry if I fail to come back from this. He genuinely hates you.”
This was true. Usurient had instigated the court action that had resulted in Etris’s imprisonment. For all intents and purposes, he was responsible for what had been done to the man. Not that he regretted it. But he would have preferred that Etris remain where he was rather than be set loose again.
“He might kill you just to get to me,” he pointed out.
Mallich shook his head. “I will treat him like one of my oketar, only with less patience and a very short leash. He won’t be able to get near me. Now, are we through discussing this? Because it really isn’t your concern, is it? So can we go to his cell and speak with him?”
Usurient nodded reluctantly. “Wouldn’t it be better if you went alone?”
“Why? Don’t you want to come with me? Does he frighten you so?”
Angered by the other’s impudence and recognizing a challenge when he saw one, Usurient stalked over to the guard station where visitors were required to sign in. From there, they went through a steel door, down a hallway, up a set of stairs, down another hallway, and finally through another steel door into a short corridor that was so quiet, it seemed to Usurient you could hear the walls breathing.
At the far end, the guard released a lock on a floor-to-ceiling sliding steel panel and then rolled the barrier back to reveal a set of bars separating them from Bael Etris.
The prisoner sat on a hinged bed frame staring at them. He was unusually small, barely more than five feet, his prison clothes hanging on his slender frame as they might on a scarecrow. His limbs and body, however, were ridged with muscle and ritual scars, and you could feel the power radiating off him. His face was oddly beatific—smooth, calm, devoid of expression—almost child-like until you looked into the strange green eyes and saw the madness reflected there.
“Usssurrrient,” he whispered in what came out as a slow, drawn-out hiss. “Have you come to beg my forgiveness?”
He rose and came to stand a few feet away as he looked up at them, his gaze shifting from one face to the other. Then he spit on Usurient through the bars.
The Commander of the Red Slash flinched in spite of himself. But Mallich stepped forward to block an effort at retaliation. “Your fate rests with me, Bael. So perhaps you ought to stop acting like a child and listen to what I have to say before you do something you’ll regret.”
The other cocked his head. “I never do anything I regret. Only what I fail to do in a timely manner.”
“Are you finished pissing around?”
“Oh, I’ve no quarrel with you, Mallich. None at all. I’ve never had one with you. You weren’t the one who had me locked away. You weren’t the one who betrayed me. I have no wish to anger you. Say what you came to say. I will pay close attention.”
His voice was soft and appealing, a clever and practiced tone. Usurient wiped the spit off his face and clothes, thinking of ways he could make the man’s life so unbearable he would beg to be killed. But that wasn’t an option. Not yet, at least.
“I am going to track a man into the far eastern shores of the Tiderace. I require someone with your skills to join me in my hunt. If you agree to come, you will earn your freedom by doing so. Are you interested?”