Sin Eater Read online

  “I’m sorry!” whimpered the boy, eyes red with tears, the crooked teeth in his mouth chattering as though it was midwinter rather than the height of summer. “It was supposed t’be a warnin’ shot! Durgo told me to send it near past his head! I’m sorry, sir!”

  Kennah looped the makeshift noose around the boy’s scrawny neck, tightening it slightly, then letting it rest on his shoulders. “I’m gonna hang you now, boy,” he answered, matter-of-fact, smoothing out his bushy beard with a big hand. “I’m gonna throw this rope over the fat limb of that tree Agnes just cut with your friend Durgo’s rubbish sword, and I’m gonna yank you up with it and choke the life from you.”

  “Don’t kill me, sir!” the youth begged as Kennah took hold of the dappled horse’s reins and led her over toward Agnes’s oak, ideal for his purpose.

  Agnes knelt beside Ruben’s body and grabbed hold of the killing arrow, steadying herself on his shoulder with her other hand. She grunted as she pulled the missile free. Gore clung to its steel head. She patted Ruben’s shoulder, then stood, breaking the arrow over her thigh as she did so. She flung the two halves at the boy, striking him in the chest. The boy recoiled as the pieces fell to the ground. His tattered, filthy shirt now bore a new stain left by Ruben’s lifeblood.

  “The penalty for banditry is hanging, lad,” growled Agnes. “No exceptions. You ambushed us, two grown men and a woman, each of us armed, armored, and mounted. If you’d stuck to easy pickings, fat merchants too cheap to hire an escort, maybe you wouldn’t be where you are now. There’s a price to be paid for murder, but there’s a steeper one for stupidity.”

  “Do you know where the man you killed has been?” barked Kennah as he heaved the other end of the rope over the tree limb and caught it coming back down on the other side. “He’s crawled in Busker tombs in Bannerbraeke and the Karnes, fought snarling wights and hollow men. He cut down a gods-cursed demon that prowled the halls of an old sea-cave temple in Warwede. It was eight feet tall and had the head of a crocodile, claws like a tiger! And why is this brave, good man dead now? He’s dead, boy, because you have shit aim.”

  The boy’s lips quivered, and tears coursed down his soiled face. His eyes pleaded with Agnes, begged her. Kennah pulled a dagger from his belt with sudden violence. Agnes grabbed him by his armored leather sleeve. “Hanging, brother,” she said firmly. “The penalty is hanging.”

  Kennah scowled at Agnes, his face boiling with righteous fury. “I’m not gonna gut him, Agnes! I’m gonna cut his bonds. That way, it’ll take him longer to strangle. I wanna watch him dance and claw with that rope round his neck! I want to watch him shit himself while his lips turn blue!”

  “This is by law, Kennah,” Agnes answered, looking her Syraeic brother in the eye, “not vengeance.” Kennah jerked his arm away from Agnes’ touch and sawed at the rope binding the whimpering lad’s hands with the knife.

  “There’s nothing in the law that says it needs to be quick or that his hands have t’be tied. By Marcator’s oath, he’s not gonna die quick!”

  The second the boy’s bonds parted, Kennah—a big man who outweighed the lad by more than a hundred pounds—seized the rope with both hands, lurched back, and pulled. The boy shot out of the horse’s saddle so quickly that his cry of “No!” was choked off before it was out of his mouth. His legs kicked, his fingers plucked with fruitless urgency at the noose. The crackling sound of the rope tightening about his neck mixed with the boy’s frantic, terminal struggles. Kennah put his full weight into it, grimacing with the effort, a hateful glower on his quaking lips. The boy’s face was soon red like a beet, his eyes bulging from their sockets, the wild and desperate gyrations of his body clearly taxing Kennah’s muscles.

  Agnes looked from the strangling boy to her Syraeic companion, that soft part of her welling up with pity for the lad and horror at Kennah’s enthusiasm for the task. In her mind’s eye she saw herself draw her sword from its scabbard and sever the taut rope, the kicking lad plummeting to the ground. Somehow, she would convince Kennah to let the boy go and the little fool would run off into the woods with the burn of the noose on his flesh as a lifelong reminder. But the hard part of her—the part that had trained with men like poor, dead Ruben, whom she had counted on to have her back—that part said, Watch Kennah throttle the life from the stupid bastard. And that part of her won out.

  When at last the youth was dead, tongue protruding from his mouth obscenely, eyes bloodshot and flesh like the skin of an eggplant, Kennah marched the rope around the trunk of the tree and tied it off. He got a bit of charcoal and a sheet of parchment from his saddlebag and scrawled a word on the page. He reached up and shoved a wadded corner of the paper into the dead boy’s gaping mouth, deep enough for the parchment to stay there and for the world to read what he had written. Anyone who passed by as the dangling body rotted over the coming weeks and months would read: HIGHWAYMAN.

  “Hanging by law,” he said, spitting at the base of the tree.

  They rode the rest of the day in silence, in part because Ruben had been the instigator of most of their conversation since leaving Boudun. But there was also a lingering tension, Agnes thought. Kennah read censure in her earlier call for restraint. The big bearded man, short black hair cut by what must have been a drunken barber, rode with Ruben’s body secured behind him across his mount’s rump. Agnes held back her own horse’s penchant for speedier travel to accommodate the other horse’s double burden. It was while they set up camp for the night hours later that Kennah finally spoke, gruff and irritable.

  “Thought I’d stick a bound man with my knife? What do you take me for? Some thug in an alley?” It seemed he had been stewing on the matter the whole day.

  “I apologize, brother. I misread your movements in the heat of the moment.”

  “I’ve known Ruben since we were eleven,” he continued while hobbling his mount, doing his best to hide the tears welling in his eyes. “He saved my life at least four times over the years.”

  “It was idiot chance,” Agnes offered. “It’s part of what makes it so terrible. Some half-wit peasant boy, half-starved and frightened…” She wasn’t sure how to finish her thought.

  “That demon, with the crocodile head? We were in one of those sea-cave temples, near the edge of the Urwyd Swamp—constant sound of surf boomin’ through the rock ‘til you’re ready t’ bust your head against a wall. The thing, the demon, it had bulging, blood-red eyes, saliva dripping from teeth this long.” He held out a hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Ruben drove his sword right into the thing’s mouth, elbow deep in the beast’s jaws! Gave the blade a nasty twist. It gurgled and screamed and dropped t’ the ground like a sack of stones. The thing had taken a chunk out of a merc we hired before Ruben dropped it. We didn’t have a priest with us on that run and the hireling’s wound festered. The woman was dead before we were halfway back to Mache. Probably some sort of venom in the beast’s saliva. Ruben was elbow deep in its mouth. If just one o’ those fangs had grazed his skin, he’d’ve been a goner.” Kennah untied his sleep roll and threw it on the ground. He let out a long sigh, covering his face with both hands. Agnes could barely make out the words he spoke into his palms: “Fucking warning shot.”

  Agnes fought an impulse to put a hand on the man’s shoulder. He didn’t seem the type to welcome comfort from another, especially someone he’d met only a few days before. She may have chanced it several months back, when she was still enamored with her newfound notoriety. Truth be told, she had let it go to her head for a bit. Though she was younger than both Kennah and Ruben, having just turned twenty-two, Agnes had some fame in the Syraeic League for the role she played in combating the devilish plague that had so devastated the Citadel a year ago. Of course, her father and his cohorts were the most celebrated heroes, having brought an end to the pestilence by slaying its author, a so-called god who lurked deep in the bowels of the Barrowlands.

  Her father. To
retrieve him now was the purpose of their present mission.

  “Bring him back to us, Agnes dear,” aged Lictor Rae had told her from her sick bed. “Things are happening of which he must be apprised.” The old woman’s face had grown sallower; she seemed dreadfully frail. Despite the lictor’s great age, Agnes had never before thought of her as infirm. But the past year had seen a decline, one that even the healing priests of Belu couldn’t halt. She would be dead before the year was out, Agnes was certain. Pallas Rae had pushed herself tirelessly to facilitate the League’s recovery from the great losses suffered during the plague, recalling many from the field to train a crop of aggressively recruited novices to replace the scores of agents whom the insidious contagion had sent to the grave.

  “Can you fetch us some wood, Peregrine?” Kennah asked as he gathered stones at the perimeter of the clearing to encircle a campfire. The use of her Syraeic nickname signaled that the gruff man had forgiven her. She was christened with that name as a novice, her first week at the Citadel: her prominent nose reminded her cheeky fellow initiates of a falcon’s beak. It bothered her at first, but now she knew it was used with affection. She had taken her lumps like the rest and earned the respect of her peers and preceptors in short order, a scrappy, serious girl of sixteen when she entered training. Her father was a Syraeic agent of reputation. That had given her a leg-up on many of the others, who had entered training without knowing what lay ahead. Agnes had a far better understanding of the League’s unusual curriculum and what trials to expect. It was her father who had given her both her nose and the stories of adventure that led her to the Citadel, much to her poor mother’s chagrin.

  Agnes gathered kindling, sticks, and a few larger scraps of wood from nearby and began her meticulous construction as Kennah placed the last stone in the circle. For Agnes, assembling a campfire was an art: dry leaves and other bits that would catch easily gathered at the base, thin sticks carefully propped above the tinder so that they held one another up at the center, followed by larger sticks, and more sizable pieces of wood forming a pyramid above the rest, plenty of gaps for the air to steal through. She had a proper blaze going to cook their meal mere minutes after she set it alight with her tinderbox.

  Kennah had downed a plump hare with his bow only half an hour before they stopped for the night. It would have been Ruben’s turn to prepare the meal. Agnes took that duty as well rather than discuss it with Kennah, still sullen despite his forgiving address. She skinned the hare with an expert hand and cleaned it, stuffing the cavity she had made with wild mushrooms and herbs growing near the base of an old sycamore opposite their horses and Ruben’s body. She propped the skewered hare over the fire and sat back.

  Agnes decided she was tired of the quiet. “Mushrooms and herbs,” she said, staring into the fire. “My godmother Lenda taught me that. It’ll take the gamey edge off the meat and you’ll think we were in Boudun, feasting at the Rose and Green.”

  “So, tell me about your famous old man,” asked Kennah, sitting on a log across from her. The big man employed his dagger in an absent fashion, sending shavings from a hunk of wood into the fire. “I’ve heard tales.”

  Kennah makes conversation, thought Agnes. She assumed she’d be chattering on for a while before he finally spoke. He must be feeling some guilt about snapping at her, or more likely the way he had made the boy suffer. She decided to let him dangle a bit.

  “He’s a swordsman, retired a few years back.”

  “Yes, yes,” Kennah responded, frowning sourly and tugging at his beard. “I know that much. Everybody knows that much.” He adjusted the hare over the flames and a few mushrooms fell into the fire. Agnes resisted the impulse to scold him.

  “What do you want to know? He was a swordsman. He spent his early career in the eastern empire, in Busker ruins mostly, some in the Sea Lord caves in Warwede. Then he graduated to the Barrowlands.”

  “You still haven’t told me anything I don’t already know,” said Kennah, adjusting the hare again at the cost of another mushroom. “What’s the man like?”

  “Leave our dinner be, for Belu’s sake!” she shouted, a bit too shrill. Strange how quickly talk of her father still riled her, even though they had reconciled last year. After her brother’s death, her father tried talking her out of the League. Her novitiate at the Citadel began only a few months before Tomas’s death, crushed by a great stone in some Busker king’s crypt. She had refused her father’s entreaties, of course, her dream of being a Syraeic agent every bit as powerful as it had been for her brother. Agnes knew her mother had blamed her father for Tomas’s death, railed at him for the stories of adventure with which he had filled their heads as children. Mother and father both retreated into their grief, and a month later her mother hanged herself in the fruit cellar of their cottage on the outskirts of Boudun. Mother had endured her father’s frequent absences by dedicating herself to her children, but the League had taken her son from her, just as it had claimed the devotion of her husband, and eventually her daughter.

  These thoughts depressed her. To shake them, Agnes searched her memory for a tale from her father’s storied career and settled on one that Kennah would appreciate. It was one she herself appreciated more now as a Syraeic in ways that the little girl who first heard it couldn’t. “Have you ever heard of Myrgan the Crescendo Prince?” she asked Kennah, knowing full well he had.

  “Of course!” the man barked with furrowed brow. He smoothed and tugged at his black beard, a gesture both impatient and self-conscious. “King of East Marcien just after the War of Seven Songs, yes. Everyone knows about Busker Myrgan.”

  “My father was expeditionary lead when his tomb was located, in the hills northeast of Hulwick.”

  “Ah!” Kennah’s eyes widened and he propped his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. It was the posture of a little boy sitting at the end of his grandmother’s bed for a story. Agnes couldn’t help but find it endearing. “My guess is that was a real gauntlet, yes?” he prompted. “I’ve heard the haul was enormous.”

  “You’d think so, it being a gauntlet,” she teased, “but it was a holiday stroll until just before they reached his sepulcher. A few cleverly hidden doors and a climb up a sheer wall, but until they came upon the hall approaching the actual tomb, they hadn’t faced a single serious threat.”

  Agnes paused, adjusting the hare over the fire. Kennah tugged at his beard and shifted on his log but said nothing. Perhaps he realized she was having some fun with him. She dropped her little game and launched into the telling.

  “After surmounting the wall, they found themselves in a wide hall, lined with limestone statues of brutish humanoids with…ah! Here’s a coincidence! The heads of crocodiles, just like your Sea Lord demon. Each wielded a pair of stone swords, crossed over the breast. They examined one thoroughly, but found nothing of interest, so they proceeded down the hall. But just as they passed the last one, that final statue stepped down from its pedestal and slammed the weapons it wielded against the wall. Both shed thin layers of stone, exposing two keen blades of wickedly sharp iron.”

  “A golem,” said Kennah. “Of stone?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Fucking Buskers! I’ve seen golems made of flesh, clay, plant matter, never stone. How could the thing even move?”

  “Father said it moved as though the stone was as pliant as flesh, but still hard as a mountainside,” she answered, feeling her excitement grow at the telling along with that of her bearded companion. “And there was the dilemma. My father and his closest Syraeic sister, my godmother Lenda, faced off against the thing, both wielding swords. But their swords were as effective against the golem as they might have been against the Ironspur Mountains.”

  “A war hammer,” Kennah suggested, rubbing his hands together, relishing the tale. “They needed something like a war hammer. Or a whole phalanx of them.”

  “Perhaps, but there were none handy. T
hey could do nothing but parry, ward off the golem’s blows, one after another, backing away as it advanced on them. One of the blades grazed my godmother’s cheek, and the sight of blood seemed to excite the thing; it redoubled its attacks. My father tried to knock it off balance by slamming against it, but he said it was as though he had thrown himself against a wall of the Citadel—a broken nose and his vision swimming with stars were his reward.”

  “What was the rest of the team doing?”

  “Brenten Rensmith was their alchemist. While they battled the golem, he concocted a solvent that would eat away limestone, but the acid was apparently just as effective eating human flesh. He realized he couldn’t get a clear shot: the splash would be sure to hit my father and Lenda. Brenten called out what he had for the purpose, but Father and Lenda couldn’t escape the golem’s aggression—it was relentless. All they could do was ward off attacks.”

  “So they fled.” It was half a statement, half a question.

  “Stand their ground or flee, those were the obvious choices,” Agnes answered. “But when my father threw himself against the golem, trying to topple it and earning that broken nose, my godmother was left to answer the brute’s assaults on her own. One slipped through, and the blade caught her between neck and shoulder, bit into the meat there.”