Shadow's Edge - Brent Weeks [152]
Then… well, the Godking had told him that he had twenty-four hours to do whatever he wanted. “Hu,” the Godking had said, “make me a cataclysm.”
The Godking planned to open up the place afterward and march every noble in the city through it. When the bodies were starting to get ripe, they’d start marching the rest of the city through it. The residents of the Warrens would go last. Then the Godking would have a public ceremony. People selected at random from among the Rabbits, the artisans, and the nobility would be sent into the massacre site. While they were inside, the Godking’s wytches would seal the exits.
Garoth Ursuul expected it would provide a forceful deterrent to future rebellion.
But Hu felt uneasy. He was a professional. He was the best wetboy in the city, the best in the world, the best ever. He treasured that position, and there was only one thing that could threaten it: himself. He’d taken stupid risks at the Gyre estate. Idiotic risks. It had all worked out, but the fact remained that he’d been out of control.
There had just been too much blood. Too much thrill. He’d walked like a god through an orgy of worship that was death. He’d felt invulnerable during the hours he’d butchered the Gyres and their servants. He’d spent time displaying the bodies. He’d hung up several by their feet and cut their throats to bleed them to create that glorious lake of blood in the last hallway.
His job was to kill, and he’d gone dangerously beyond that. Durzo had been a killer. He took lives with the impersonal precision of a tailor. Durzo Blint would never have put himself at risk. It was why some people had considered him Hu’s equal. Hu hated that. He was feared, but Blint was respected. His niggling worry was that the judgment was deserved.
That was why three hundred might be his undoing. The beast within would come out. Three hundred might be too much.
No. He was Hu Gibbet. Nothing was too much for Hu Gibbet. He was the best wetboy in the world. Tactically, this job wouldn’t be nearly the challenge some other jobs had been, but when people whispered his name, this would be what they remembered. This would be his legacy. They would remember this all over the world.
The guild rats were all asleep, huddled together in clumps against the cold. Hu was about to drop through the hole in the roof when he saw something.
At first, he thought he was imagining it. It began as a whisper of wind, a puff of dust scattered in the moonlight. But the dust didn’t settle, and there was no wind tonight. Still, the dust seemed to swirl in one place, gathering in one of the patches of moonlight in the warehouse near the children.
One of the children woke and gave a little cry, and in a second, every child in the guild was awake.
The whirlwind became a tiny tornado. Though there was still no wind, something was taking shape, black specks obscuring and spinning at a dizzying pace to a height of six feet. The tornado glowed an iridescent, scintillating blue. Sparks shot out and danced across the floor and the children cried out.
Taking shape through the tornado was a man, or something like a man. The figure flashed blue, spraying light in every direction, and not even Hu was fast enough to cover his eyes.
When he looked again, a figure unlike any he had ever seen stood before the children who were cowering wide-eyed on the floor. The man appeared to be carved from glossy black marble or shaped from liquid metal. His clothes weren’t so much clothes as skin, though he appeared to wear shoes and was sexless, his whole body was unrelieved black and every contour was crisply defined. He was lean and every muscle was etched, from his shoulders to his V of a chest to his stomach to his legs. There was something funny about his skin, though. At first, the man or demon or statue made of flesh had reflected light