Forgotten (23 page)

He shoved the dagger into Gregor’s stomach. The weapon was beautiful. The handle was covered in an intricate design made to look like a ribbon braided around the hilt. The silver so well polished it caught every fragment of light and reflected it back a tenfold. It was nothing Gregor would wear unless it was required.

The blade slid through cloth and flesh like butter. He made sure to angle the blade of the knife upward, in the hope of hitting something vital. Not much chance of that. Kaie knew it would be a slow death. There were other places he could have chosen, ones that would see the soldier’s end much quicker. But this was not like Kissa. This time he wanted it to hurt.
As much, as long as possible.
Blood shot out around his hand with a force he did not expect, coating his hand and covering the front of his shirt.

For a moment, Gregor did nothing but gape at him. Kaie watched as understanding grew in the man’s eyes. The Rit stumbled backwards, knocking over the basin. Water, stained pink with blood, spilled out across the floor. Gregor clung to the table and stared at him, black eyes flashing.

“So now you’re a traitor.” Gregor’s voice was thick.

“That’s funny, coming from you,” Kaie sneered.

“I never killed you.”

“No,” he agreed. “What you did was worse. I want to thank you, actually. I’ve learned so many things in my time with you, but I think the one that means the most is just how easy betrayal is.”

Gregor’s grip on the table slipped and he slid down to the ground. “You did it, didn’t you? It wasn’t Silvertongue who killed her.”

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Kaie said slowly. “I’m not to blame for what happened to her. I didn’t ask her to help, and I won’t feel guilty about running before the Namers could hurt me again. But I’m sorry for what happened to her. And you’re right. I did kill her. If you understood anything about Hollows, you would thank me for it.”

Gregor spat. The dark red spittle never got near him, landing instead at his feet. Kaie chuckled and dropped down closer to the dying man. “Just so we’re clear, I want you to know, I’m not sorry about this. Would’ve preferred not to kill anyone, but we both know that’s not how life works. And let’s be real clear on this count,
Master
. You had it coming.”

He stood up, jerking off the long shirt and using the clean sections to wipe off the blood that soaked through to his skin and clean the blade. Kaie grabbed a fistful of his hair and sawed it off with three quick movements. He tossed it on the bed beside his discarded shirt and grabbed the cloak from the hiding spot, where he left it. Folded inside it was flint and steel. It took some time, but he managed to get the shirt burning. It wouldn’t take long to engulf the bed.

He headed to the door, but the sound of bitter laughter drew his attention.

Blood bubbled and spilled over Gregor’s smiling lips. The light in his eyes was dulling, but there was no mistaking the hatred in them. “You’ll never be free now.”

“Watch me, asshole.”

Kaie wasn’t ever going to remember the details of his flight through the city. It was a blur of tight spaces. The streets were empty and windows were boarded up. Every corner sent his heart soaring up into his ears. The cramped streets made it impossible to tell if the fighting he could hear was waiting for him on the other side, or two blocks away. He would rather not die in the city.

Twice, it seemed certain that’s exactly what he was going to do. The first time was a near-collision with a band of four men with dark cloths wrapped around their faces. Only their eyes were visible as they kicked a bloody and moaning mass on the street. It seemed certain the covered men were going to devote the same attention to him, but they went back to their fun and ignored Kaie.

He didn’t stop to question his luck. He hurried past, taking the same street Maal showed him to get to the manse. Kaie glanced back, and was startled when he recognized the mass as one of Gregor’s captains.

The second time was even more terrifying. Three soldiers, one woman and two men, turned a corner as he was coming from the other direction. Their uniforms were
Urazian,
Kaie realized instantly that these were no friends of his. They didn’t even bother to check his hair color before they were raising their blood-spattered swords.

The woman muttered something but the pounding of his heart was so loud it impossible to hear.
The men with her started laughing.
There was no time to think, no time to plan. The woman locked her vicious dark eyes on him as her lips twisted into a cruel smirk. He could run. He was fast and wasn’t weighed down by any of their thick leather armor. But with three pursuers and more waiting at any turn, Kaie didn’t like his odds. So he did the only thing he could think of: he dove at a pile of garbage at his feet and came up with the first big thing he could wrap his hands around.

It was a thick piece of wood, old and splintered. Its use as a weapon was questionable at best, but it was long. Long enough that he’d gained the advantage of reach. It was one of the luckiest finds of his life.

She hesitated for a second. Her two flunkies were distracted by a little girl who made the same mistake he did, barreling into them from the other direction. Kaie didn’t have the luxury of worrying about someone else. His attention was very firmly fixed on the viper making her way to him.

Kaie backed up to the wall. It meant his movement was going to be restricted, and that was a big risk. But he couldn’t take the risk that another enemy would sneak up behind him. Freedom and revenge were so close he could taste the tang of them on his tongue. Dying here in an alley, after everything he’d done and endured, was simply unacceptable. Not even the gods could be that cruel.

Then she was on him.

She was not from the Twelfth. He realized that even before he caught a glimpse of the gold star on her shoulder. This woman was too arrogant, and too accustomed to carving into people who didn’t offer much resistance. She made no attempts to protect herself, relying on her armor to do that work while she attacked. Gregor would never allow that behavior. In a fair match, it would make her easy to Kaie to dispatch. But this was definitely not one of those. Not so long as she had that sword of hers.

She darted in at him, trying to get inside his reach. She was fast. He was faster. He managed to fend her off, but it
won
him a deep cut on his right arm. The blood flowed down his arm. It was only by luck that it didn’t coat his hand and compromise his grip on the board. He needed to neutralize her blade before she scored a hit that caused him real problems. It wouldn’t take much. All she really needed was for him to loose enough blood to slow down. Defending himself wasn’t going to win him anything here. He needed to attack.

Making that decision was a lot easier than implementing it. She was cocky, but not a fool. She watched his movements closely. He could probably manage to take the sword from her, but the price would too high. It would almost certainly cost him his life, even if he managed to win the battle. He wasn’t getting out of this alley with her so focused.

As if his thoughts summoned it, a loud explosion shook the buildings around them, turning her attention away for just an instant. Kaie took the opportunity to bring down the hunk of wood across her hands with all the strength in his body.

The board shattered, leaving nothing more than a jagged hunk of wood
no
bigger than the size of his hand. She screeched in pain and dropped her blade. He shifted his feet, preparing to launch himself and his shattered weapon at her, almost seeing the wood tare through her throat. She spun. In an instant, she was running, the two men close at her heels. He stared, trying to figure out what just happened. Then he turned to help the girl.

The whole fight hadn’t taken more than a minute or two. But that was plenty of time for the brutes to do sufficient damage. They didn’t even bother with their swords. Their booted feet were more than enough to leave her nothing more than a mass of meat. There was nothing he could do for her.

The rest of his trip
proceeded
much like the beginning. He encountered no more trouble. The sounds of fighting
faded,
the deeper into the city he went. If he could just manage to keep moving long enough to get where he was going, he could worry about the whys later. But the blood loss was taking its toll. By the time he reached the water, Kaie was lurching along at a pace that made his anxiety almost unbearable. Each step seemed to drag on for hours.

Kaie saw no signs or markers separating the merchant district from any other part of Hudukul. He wandered around, nearly aimless, looking for a house that clearly belonged to Losen. But all the buildings looked the same.
Until they didn’t.

Only the wealthiest people would live in the plaza he stumbled into. That meant the merchants. They might not be the highest caste, but they were certainly the ones with the money. The fountain was big enough for a family to go swimming in. Each house was a different color, all as garish as the shirt Losen was wearing the last time Kaie saw him.

There was no need to wonder which one was the politician’s. It was a light purple, the door bright orange, and each of the windows was surrounded by a ring of dark red. There was also the flag of the empire fluttering over the door arch. He recognized the diving sparrow anywhere. It was stamped into every set of armor he came across for the last two years.

Of course, it was also the only place on fire. There were a few flickering tendrils eating away at the wood covering one of the windows, and a thick stream of smoke climbing up into the evening sky.

His energy lasted just long enough to get him through the charred doorway. Then he collapsed in an uncomfortable heap. He laid there, discomfort be damned, waiting for some small amount of strength to return to his limbs. He would’ve stayed sprawled there for an eternity, enjoying the relative peace and safety the house offered. But then he noticed the body.

The body was in the precise center of the entry hall. The clothes were mostly intact. He recognized them as the attire given to slaves in Lindel. Every inch of skin that wasn’t covered was a mass of huge red welts, like engorged insect bites or blisters. It almost looked like the person boiled from the inside. The body’s head was hidden between its arms, but he could see a tuft of brown hair sticking out from between what used to be fingers.

The sight of the disfigured corpse made his stomach tighten in a primal disgust. Swallowing hard against the instinct to vomit, Kaie rolled onto his stomach and stumbled to his feet. He knew it was pointless, knew there was no way something that twisted could still be a living thing, but he reached out to check for a pulse. His finger brushed against one of the welts, and it exploded.

He shouted out and scuttled backward as a stream of shadowy black specks spewed out of the body. They hung in the air for a second, and Kaie got the strong sense that they were aware of him. Then they shot upward and vanished into the ceiling.

He took in the state of the house for the first time. Everywhere he looked there were signs of destruction. A table was toppled, surrounded by bits of colorful glass that probably used to be something expensive. A tapestry on the wall opposite the front door was ripped nearly in half. Near the window, there was another body. It was burnt into little more than charcoal, surrounded by charred floor and flickering flames crawling up the walls. For no reason he could put into words, Kaie got the sense the person lit themselves. There was a third corpse that he almost missed, curled up on the other side of the downed table, tucked into a ball small enough to be completely hidden.

Three bodies in the front room.
Two more in the next one.
All covered in the same welts. Kaie didn’t waste time searching the rest of the bottom floor. He walked past two doorways, not even glancing inside. He didn’t want to count the dead. Instead, he headed straight down the hall to the circular staircase. He saw more corpses.
Six?
Seven?
He tried not to count.

Upstairs was better. He was able to walk down to the last door without adding any to the count he was trying so hard not to keep. Once he crossed the threshold of the last room, though, he almost missed the lower level.

There were other things in this room. At first, Kaie thought it was a thick fog lurking in the corner of the small room. Then he realized the buzzing wasn’t coming from his head and that the fog was moving in a way that could only come from living things. It was the strange black flecks that burst out of the first corpse, multiplied a hundred-fold.
Bees?
They couldn’t be bees.

Blood, tiny dots of it, covered the room so uniformly he could almost convince himself it was paint. Thick red goo fell onto the back of his hand.
Someone’s insides.
It was all over the walls, the ceiling.

There was no stopping the vomit this time. Not even his empty stomach slowed it down. Before he could make any attempt at fighting it, Kaie was retching all over the floor, splattering bile across the floor and on his boots.

Between gasps, Kaie noticed the whimpering. He worked to calm his breathing, half convinced it was just his imagination. When he was sure there was nothing more coming up, he carefully made his way around his mess and headed as close to the swarm as he dared.

There was a pile of gore-splattered blankets tucked away from the window. At first he hadn’t noticed it. The horror of the room was distracting, and that was part of it. But there was more than that. The pile was arranged to make the eyes slide right past it. The darker blankets lined up almost perfectly with the shadows, the lighter ones with what was left of the fading sunlight from the window. It was masterful.
Almost art.

He tore it down in an instant. It felt good, taking apart something so carefully put together. He found what he’d come for crouched behind the pile.
The source of the whimpering.
Vaughan.

The swarm moved in closer, the buzzing growing louder. Kaie couldn’t shake the sense that they were angry at him. He wanted to run, but forced his feet to stay rooted in place. He wasn’t going to leave Vaughan.

Kaie called for him, but the boy did not look up. He clung to his knees, staring off into some unknowable spot in space. The only reaction his presence was a long string of mutterings replacing the whimpers. Leaning close enough to feel Vaughan’s breath on his ear, Kaie could just make out the words.

“Sorry.
Didn’t mean to.”

Over and over, Vaughan murmured the words.
A litany.
Kaie’s eyes widened as realization rocked through him. Vaughan was responsible for this.
For the impossible bees.
For the guts painting the room.
At least twelve dead.
More, his instincts screamed.
Many more.
His mind could not catch hold of the reality before him, could not reconcile the meek, broken Vaughan with a monster of this caliber.

He shook his head, clearing it of the fog. There were too many things to do. Climbing back to his feet, he wiped his hands on the legs of his pants without looking at them. Innards or vomit, nothing good could come of knowing what he’d been sitting in now. That taken care of, he went to work getting Vaughan’s attention.

Shouting and shaking him did
nothing,
Kaie wasn’t particularly enchanted with the idea of hurting the boy. Evidence of what happened when Vaughan was distressed was everywhere,
But
he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Gritting his teeth, Kaie slapped Vaughan across the face. The blonde’s head snapped to the side. An angry red patch began forming almost instantly. He hadn’t meant to hit him hard. He cringed, fully expecting the swarm to descend upon him.

Vaughan blinked twice.
“Kaie?”

The bees evaporated like mist.

“Glad to see you’re done freaking out. Can we get out of here before the whole damn place falls on our heads?”

His eyes darted around, not landing anywhere for more than a second, and the rest of his face colored to match the mark Kaie left on his right cheek. “I didn’t mean to… You said to be here. You told me to be here, and he was going to take me away. He was going to make me leave, and crawl into my head and make me empty. I couldn’t let him. I couldn’t. You said to be here.”