The rapist threw back his arm and hacked downward with his sword, attempting to drive the point through the chest of his weeping victim. Pulo closed the distance between them in the blink of an eye, and steel clanged against steel. Jonn and Roddalin weren’t far behind. Her guards’ foes may have been ungainly brutes, but they handled their weapons with skill. Parry after parry, thrust after thrust, they held off her escorts’ attacks. The alley was filled with grunts, yelps, and the clanking of steel on steel. Yet for all their skill, the two could only defend. The moment they tried to attack, they found themselves overwhelmed by a coordinated offensive. Bren suffered a gash on his upper arm, his partner a slash on his thigh, and yet Pulo, Jonn, and Roddalin had not even suffered a scratch, and the thin chainmail over their chests and the silver vambraces on their forearms were as shiny as they’d been earlier in the morning. Even so, it was a chaotic ballet, one that allowed the naked, violated girl to crawl across the dirty ground and into Soleh’s waiting arms.
When the girl was safe, Roddalin ended the fight, drawing his dagger from his belt. Sliding sideways past a thrust, he dropped to one knee, and his dagger swept through the heel of Bren’s ally, severing the crucial tendon there. The man collapsed screaming, clutching at his leg. Jonn silenced him by hacking through his neck, spilling blood over his tunic and his purple sash. The man was dead an instant later.
Bren wasn’t so lucky. Pulo struck the man in the forehead with his pommel, and then looped his cutlass around like an oarsman, burying the blade in the man’s crotch. He yanked it free with a revolting plop, and the rapist backed into the wall, his cries shrill. He grabbed at his severed nether parts, blood spurting between his fingers and darkening his breeches. Soleh watched him suffer, the rage in her breast slowly abating. When she gave a nod, Jonn took off the man’s head with a single swipe of his sword.
Holding the shaking girl in her arms, a half-disgusted, half-satisfied grin crossed Soleh’s lips. Adeline would have been proud.
They waited as more members of the City Watch arrived, summoned by the commotion. They were members of the old guard this time, men she recognized. They whisked the raped girl to safety, hunted down the three remaining men, and cleaned the bodies out of the alley. Soleh made sure to confiscate the coin purses of the criminals, the living and dead alike. She emptied their contents on the blood-splattered ground of the alleyway. Silvers and coppers bounced and spun on the cobbles. She stared at the contents of each in turn, particularly the crest adorning each coin, and then up at Pulo.
“This is Connington swag,” she said. Pulo nodded back at her, his expression dire. She shook her head. It had been the Conningtons who had accused another of hiring a rapist to strike against their family. Now they were lending coin to the kingdom to lure those same types of men into the Watch. She wondered who had suggested these bastards-the brothers, or the king.
When the mess in the alley had been cleared, Soleh handed four of the five sacks of gold to the victim, who thanked her mightily before Roddalin took her away to be treated for her wounds. Soleh then hurried to the castle. The streets were more crowded with curious onlookers now, but all it took was one glance at Soleh’s hard expression for them to clear a path. She stormed through the portcullis and into Tower Justice, telling Captain Gregorian she was canceling the day’s docket. The poor, overworked man looked less than happy about it, but he bowed and acquiesced, barking orders at the rest of the Palace Guard to stow the prisoners away once more.
Soleh felt for him, but she had more pressing matters to address.
She crossed the courtyard and burst into Tower Honor, still dragging Pulo, Jonn, and Roddalin along with her. She stormed into the King’s Court, but the room was empty. Karl Dogon, King Vaelor’s personal shield, informed them that the king was ill and would be receiving no visitors. No matter how much Soleh demanded, the man would not cave. “Sickness is sickness,” he said with a dismissive wave. Furious, she scoured the rest of the tower, seeking out Cleo or Romeo Connington, or both. One of them was always lingering about the castle somewhere, sidling up to the king or the royal Council, trying-often successfully-to curry favor for his mining and weapons trades or toss more unfounded accusations on Matthew Brennan.
Much to her chagrin, however, neither Connington was to be found. Tower Honor was a ghost town, with only cooks, servants, and whores lingering about. Not even Clovis, who never missed an opportunity to let everyone know how important he was, had shown up yet.
If the esteemed Highest Crestwell wasn’t in the palace, there was only one other place he could be.
Soleh left the castle and commandeered a horse and carriage from a jeweler who had been selling his wares in the courtyard. As payment, she tossed him what remained of Connington coins that she’d taken from the purses of the five criminals. Pulo slid in beside her in the front of the carriage; Jonn and Roddalin took the rear; and they set off without delay.
Pulo guided the cart without care for those before them, the horses’ hooves pounding away. The wagon bounded along the streets of Veldaren, heading west toward Karak’s Temple. She didn’t need to look at her escorts to know they were worried, much more worried than they’d been when confronting the gang. Their tension hung in the air like a poisonous mist.
The streets emptied out the farther west they traveled, the buildings and homesteads giving way to wide expanses of dirt where only a few abandoned tents and lean-tos stood. Vulfram had insisted that in time the whole city would become a sprawling paradise of brick and stone, but that had not yet come to fruition. The sight of the bare earth, where all the trees had been felled and grass refused to grow, was actually more depressing than the gray gloominess of the finished sections of the city.
Soleh had embarked on this trek at least a couple times a week since Karak had returned to her, constantly needing to be in his presence. The deity preferred to greet his subjects in the home he had built for himself, located in the far west of the city. The structure slowly appeared before her, rising above the brown ruinous soil like a shimmering diamond in a sea of coal.
It was an overwhelmingly simple construction, square at its base and tall, the thick stones of its walls stained black. The onyx lions guarding the entrance were mirrors of those outside the Castle of the Lion; in fact, they were exact copies carved by Ibis. The entrance to the temple was a huge door marked with three stars set in a triangular pattern-a symbol representing the cooperation between the three gods of the realm.
There was a white mare tied to a post in front of the temple. Soleh recognized it instantly, and her heart started racing. She had Pulo bring the carriage to a stop beside it.
“Stay here,” she told her entourage, knowing they wouldn’t mind remaining outside. Karak was beloved throughout the realm, but his forty-year disappearance had made him a mysterious figure for most of the populace. A small dose of fear to keep the people in line, Lanike Crestwell had told her, and Soleh readily agreed. It was too bad those words hadn’t proved true. Perhaps if Karak had made himself more available, the city would not have plummeted into this violence; perhaps it might in fact have retained the short-lived peace and harmony that had emerged just after his reappearance.…
She ran her hand along the smooth hairs covering Highest Crestwell’s horse on her way by. The mare whinnied and kicked its hind legs slightly. Soleh ignored the irritable beast, so much like its master, and climbed the steps, pulling open the tall temple door.
The inside of the temple was lush, filled with fineries donated from every corner of Neldar and beyond. In the antechamber alone there were stuffed carcasses of pelicans, cranes, and brightly colored kingfishers, pottery from the ruins of Kal’droth, potted plants as tall as grown men, and weapons that predated man by a thousand years, which had been given as gifts by the Quellan elves. The items had built up over Karak’s absence, as visiting the temple had become a pilgrimage for many of the deity’s children. It struck her as ironic that now that the god had returned, the temple saw far less traffic.