Obsidian Ridge - Jess Lebow [61]
The blades slipped away from his neck, and he could feel her step away. She didn't make any noise as she moved.
"Turn around," she said, "and keep your back to the wall."
Doing as he was told, the Claw turned around and finally got a look at the woman who had held him at knifepoint. She was tall, almost as tall as him, with ragged blonde hair. Her slim half-elf build was accentuated by a suit of black leather armor, fitted tight against her frame by a series of straps and buckles. Her outfit would have been quite impressive, had it not been worn thin at the knees, elbows, and neck, and its snapped buckles retied with bits of leather. Tattered sleeves and torn seams on a woman this capable could mean only one thing: she'd been down here for quite some time.
The half-elf stood in front of the destroyed spiders, one dagger pointed at him, the other poised above her shoulder, ready to throw. She looked him over, sizing him up, but every few moments she would look behind her, scanning the room, like a burglar watching for guards.
"Well now," said the Claw, "it's not every day you see something like that." He indicated the intricate strap and buckle system on her suit of armor. "Now do you?"
She looked down at herself and chuckled. "No," she said. "I suppose you don't."
"Must be kind of rough," he said, breaking a smile. "You know, taking it off and whatnot."
"Don't flatter yourself," she said, an evil smile on her face. "Just because you're the first man I've laid eyes on in half a year doesn't mean I'm going to rush into your arms as soon as you look at me all sideways."
The Claw blushed under his mask. He hadn't meant that the way it sounded.
"What's your name?" he asked, trying to change the subject.
"Evelyne," she said. She looked him over once again. "And what do they call you?" "They call me the Claw."
"The Claw? Well, that's catchy. So listen, Claw, now that we're all friendly, why don't you go ahead and take off that mask of yours, so I can see your face?"
"Why would you want me to do that? You don't know me."
Evelyne smiled. "But of course I do. You're the Claw. King Korox's personal assassin."
"Well, you have me at a disadvantage then. Since all I know about you is your name."
"Oh, you're at an even bigger disadvantage than that. If you haven't noticed, I've got you at knife point. And even better, I know my way around, and I'll bet both my blades that you don't have a single solitary notion about where you are right now."
He nodded. "You got me there," he said. "So now what?"
"Now you take off your mask, so I can see your face. Or we go back to where we were, and I kill you." She cocked her arm even farther, getting ready to throw her blade.
"Wait. Wait." The Claw dropped into a crouch, ready to defend himself. "I've caused you no harm. You don't want to kill me."
She took a step closer. "A girl can tell a lot about a man by looking at his face. So I want to see it now, if I'm going to parley with you. If not, you can die."
"You're making a mistake-"
His words were cut short by a tremendous hiss. Then the room erupted in sound as a pair of nearby pillars were torn from the floor and ceiling and hurled across the chamber. Three greenish tentacles appeared from behind the pile of spider muck. Each was capped with the head of a serpent or drake-long slithery tongues and mouths full of teeth. They sniffed at the air, focusing in on Evelyne with their white eyes.
Beside the heads, three more tentacles appeared. Thick and round, they had the suction cups of an octopus on one side, and the scales of a snake on the other. They tapered to a point, and one of them held in its grasp a shattered piece of stone, wielding it like