Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Thirteen: Blood Money

"Here they are."

Arlen glanced up from sharpening his blade and let his boot fall from the table. He leaned over to Usk. "Don't see the boy with them."

"Cuz he isn't." Usk scratched under his chin and repositioned with a short groan, watching three men limp across the room towards the table at the far end.

Arlen looked them up and down, noting the raw red marks on their wrists and tensing.

"They got nicked," he muttered, "Better not have squealed."

"Wouldn't dare come back here if they had." Usk took a long draught of ale and threw his tankard into the basin behind them. "Brave enough coming back without the boy."

Arlen sneered. "If they want money, they're stupid, not brave."

He slid his sharpened dagger into the sheath at his hip and flicked hair from his eye. The three mercenaries had come to a stop in front of a high-backed chair which currently stood empty, and Usk was grinning in anticipation when Arlen glanced back at him. His teeth glinted in the candlelight, wickedly sharp and dotted with silver and gold. All Varthians kept their teeth sharp, but Usk took special care over his. Legend had it that he had once bitten a man's hand clean off in a sparring ring, so efficiently that the man had taken a full minute to start screaming.

Arlen thought the full minute an exaggeration, but was fully prepared to believe that it had happened. He had witnessed Usk neatly remove an ear with them, and it was only a short jump to chewing through a wrist.

The room they sat in was an abandoned beer hall in the dead quarter, long and broad with the original furniture long since looted. The chairs and tables they lounged on were their employer's own, brought from his personal estate. It wasn't just anyone he allowed into their meeting hall, and the three men seemed to know it. They huddled together in the light from the row of candelabras on stands in the centre of the room and kept their eyes ahead of them.

In the darkness at the borders of the beer hall, Nictaven's most prolific criminals watched them and leered.

Arlen curled his lip and held out his tankard. A girl darted from the shadows and refilled it before disappearing again, the whisper of her bare feet the only evidence she had been there. He took a long draught and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"He's making them wait," he muttered.

"No way he needs them to tell 'im they fucked up," Usk said with a chuckle. "Probably found out hours ago."

"Aye." Arlen cocked his head to fix them with his good eye from behind. "And what a fuck-up. Should've sent me."

"Already tried that," Usk mumbled, "'member? The witch man scared you off."

Arlen's dagger split the wood between Usk's index and middle fingers and stood there, quivering.

"Yddris doesn't scare me," he growled, without looking round. "He just knows how to make a scene. Didn't want to make it public."

"Uh huh." Usk picked the knife out of the table and idly spun it in one hand before offering it to Arlen hilt-first. "Well, the witch men scare me. Should scare you too. Bet it was Yddris had 'em limping out like that."

"Don't tar me with your superstitions, Usk. They're just men. They bleed too."

"They also read minds and shit fire," Usk said reasonably, "And we can't do that. Can be righteously cautious, that considered."

"They don't read minds," Arlen said. "That's a myth."

"Shitting fire is still cause for concern."