Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Fifty Two: A Favour

"Varthi's saggy tits, watch it!" Arlen roared. Usk darted back to avoid taking a boot to the face, then returned to bandaging Arlen's wounded leg.

"You watch it," he said mildly, with an undercurrent of a threat. "The goddess's tits are not saggy. Don't blaspheme, or I'll cut it off."

"You don't even worship anymore," Arlen growled back, spitting onto the floor and pushing sweaty hair out of his eyes. "What do you care?"

"I care." Usk tied off the bandage. "And you are at my mercy. So shut up."

Arlen knew he had pushed Usk to the limit since returning from the temple job, but he couldn't find it in him to care. The bolt wound wasn't healing clean; it was looking increasingly like he would have to lose the leg. Several members of the Devils had metal limbs – it was an occupational hazard to lose body parts every now and again – but no one relied on them the way Arlen did. How was he meant to travel over rooftops with any speed lugging several pounds of metal? Not to mention the pain; Devils had to rely on gutter doctors and quacks for their medicine. Any respectable physician would never open the door to them.

If he had to lose the leg, it might not even come to figuring out how to travel. Shock was as big a killer as rot.

He scowled at the offending limb. Blackweed kept the edge off, and alcohol helped a little, too, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept well. It woke him in the night, sweating and weak and having to suffer the indignity of asking Usk to move him back into the front room so that he could dose up again. He hadn't been sober for more than an hour or two in days, but it wasn't worth the agony.

He could already feel blood seeping into the dressings. He wasn't sure if it was the leg that smelled like a sewage pit or if it was all of him.

"Has the brat been back today?" he asked. Silas hadn't spoken more than two words to him since the job. He'd barely been in the building at all, and while at first Arlen had been grateful for it, his continued absence was getting suspicious.

"Not that I know of." Usk sat at the table opposite, the argument already forgotten, and poured himself two fingers of whisky from the bottle at Arlen's elbow. "Akiva said he's been lurking around the beer hall, not talking to anyone."

"He's a strange little fuck," Arlen muttered. "Can never work out what exactly he wants."

"I'm sure he'd take your undying love," Usk said. Arlen glowered.

"Don't make it weird."

"I didn't make it weird, he did. I bet he'd let you bend..." the brute ducked the now-drained whisky bottle as it flew at his head. It smashed on the wall behind him and Usk resurfaced, rocked with deep belly laughs. "That hit a nerve, did it?"

"Now it's your turn to shut up. We're even."

Usk held his hands up in a placating motion. "Shutting up."

The silence, though, was always worse. Silence left him with only the pain for company, and a deep fear that he might never walk again. Keeping the leg could have a higher cost still; the bolt had gone deep. Arlen had never been afraid of death, because any assassin had to be prepared for the job that got them killed. Almost no one in his line of work died a natural death at a venerable age, and he'd come to terms with that a long time ago; but with it, he had relied on the belief that he'd die on his feet, dignified in action. Not forced into permanent immobility or pinched out of existence by wound-rot and pain.

He groaned, shifting in his seat, but nothing provided any relief. He needed to make provisions, he knew that, in the event of the worst case scenario, but he couldn't bring himself to broach it with Usk. Arlen didn't have friends, but he and Usk had a partnership that went deeper than Guild ties, and there was no more humiliating thought than having a man who had seen him at his strongest make arrangements for the possibility of his death.