How the Axe Falls

Chapter 7

Talon couldn't move. 

Well... he could wiggle fingers and toes and shift about but lengths of rope had him pinned to the wall.

Thin lines of amber peered through the cracks of floorboards above, wavering over an empty table with empty chairs, a couple lying on their backs.

Indistinct shapes, barrels he presumed, lined the hold. Spices and herbs, some familiar to Talon wafted under his nose, making him sneeze. A dry, salty smell punctuated what came from the barrels – meat, it must have been, swinging lazily from the ceiling.

The moan of wood struggling against the sea brought along the eventual realisation: he was still on the ship.

Talon struggled against his bonds to no avail, earning rope burn and a burning sensation in his side for his trouble.

He thought of the man-servant who had stabbed him and the green-eyed girl spinning out of the shadows like a spider from a web. The girl who had saved Talon, only to choke him near to death on her ship.

Had she followed him inside the Viscount's Tower without him being aware? No, surely, she must have come from inside the tower. But given how easily she adopted the pale shade of the Tower's nooks, Talon did not doubt she would have found it child's play to hide amongst the villagers of Edge Cliff.

Yet, he would have bet all the gold in the world she had been in the tower all along. Oh, those green eyes could get her anywhere. Talon reckoned she could have swooned Buck Owens into giving up his prize flock of sheep and fooled the oaf into thinking he'd been done a favour. Those eyes could get her anywhere... Perhaps at the arm of a Viscount? A now very dead Viscount, rotting in his stone grave far sooner than he'd imagined. The thought brought some comfort but did little to sate the bloodlust, curdling as it rose from the depths of his stomach. Talon knew a feeling such as this would not be easily dismissed.

A sharp slapping noise, which sounded like the skimming of book pages, cut through the dark.

Someone, no several people, sat at the table in the middle of the hold. Though, Talon could not recall seeing nor hearing anyone enter, let alone the vagrants that now occupied the once empty chairs.

'Vangrantsssss?'

Talon stiffened. Had his thoughts been read?

The voice had an unnatural hiss to it that made Talon's skin crawl. It couldn't have possibly belonged to anything human.

'Is that what the boy thinks of us?' another snorted. His voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, filling the room like smoke.

'Now, now, gents–' a more cheerful sounding voice began.

'–and ladies,' a woman added, her words carried much weight that her voice seemed almost lazy.

'–and ladies, but of course, of course,' the cheerful voice added hurriedly.

'Devil's blood... what a pushover,' another voice, so deeply disgruntled Talon almost mistook it for another of the men, intervened. 'Wanna lick her boot heels while you're at it, Angus?'

The lazily voiced woman made a soft tsk. 'Better mine than yours, Cilia,' she said.

The light trickling down from the floorboards illuminated a patch of the table. A pair of gloved hands shuffled a deck of cards once more before spreading out the contents in a neat arc across the table. Like crabs emerging from fissures, more pairs of gloved hands reached into the light, dragging their hand of cards back into the shadows.

A shape which Talon initially thought to be one of the barrels, upended by the ship's lurching, rolled towards him. The closer the noise came the more he realised it couldn't have been one of the ship's cargo. The barrel didn't sound as if it were made of wood but rather a coil of ropes dragging itself across the floor, gently scratching against the wood.