Shadow's Edge - Brent Weeks [162]
The creature shrieked again and thrashed backward. An enormous splash sounded, and then all was quiet.
“Logan,” Kylar said, his voice shaking with the aftereffects of adrenalin, “was that… was that Khali?”
“No. Khali’s… different. Worse.” Logan laughed uncertainly. “That was just a dragon.” He laughed again like a man set free from his senses.
Then all light faded.
When he woke, the three of them had been fitted with harnesses, and Kylar was hoisting them all by a rope that must have been attached to a pulley high above. They were ascending the central shaft of the Stacks. It was a huge metal tube, thirty paces across, and all of the enormous fans had been stopped. How did Kylar manage that?
The trip took several more minutes, and the whole time, Logan was aware of his arm burning and tingling where the creature’s eye blood had spilled on him. He didn’t have the courage to look at it.
“We have a man inside who helped me,” Kylar said. “The Sa’kagé is now one of your most important allies, my king. Maybe your only ally.”
A few minutes later, they reached a section where the pipes turned horizontal. With great care, Kylar untied Logan and then Gnasher. He cut the ropes and let them fall into the abyss. The pulley followed. He led them down the narrowing horizontal section until they reached a door. Kylar tapped on it three times.
The door opened and Logan found himself face to face with Gorkhy.
“Logan, meet our inside guy,” Kylar said. “Gorkhy, your money is—”
“You!” Gorkhy said. His face showed the same disgust Logan felt.
“Kill him,” Logan croaked.
Gorkhy’s eyes bulged. He grabbed at the guard’s whistle he carried on a lanyard around his neck. Before it reached his lips, though, his head spun free of his body. The corpse dropped without a sound.
It was that fast, that easy. Kylar dragged the body down the tunnel to drop it into the shaft and returned a minute later. Logan had just ordered his first kill.
Kylar didn’t ask for an explanation. It was an eerie, awesome, awful thing. It was power, and it felt disconcertingly… wonderful.
“Your Majesty?” Kylar said, opening the door out of the shaft, out of the nightmare. “Your kingdom awaits.”
54
When Kaldrosa Wyn and ten of the other girls from the Craven Dragon emerged from Momma K’s safe house, the Warrens were changed. There was a nervous excitement in the air. The Nocta Hemata had been a triumph, but repercussions were coming. Everyone knew it. Momma K had told the girls they needed to leave her subterranean safe house because the secret of its existence had leaked. Somehow, the Night Angel had saved them all from being slaughtered by Hu Gibbet.
Kaldrosa had heard rumors of the Night Angel before, right after the invasion, but she hadn’t believed them. Now they all knew he was real. They’d seen Hu Gibbet’s body.
Momma K had told them she would smuggle them out as quickly as possible, but moving three hundred women out of the city was going to take time. They had ways to get around or under the Godking’s new walls, but it wasn’t easy. Kaldrosa Wyn’s group was supposed to go tonight. Momma K had told them that if they wanted to stay in the city, if they had husbands or boyfriends or family to go back to, all they had to do was not show up at the rendezvous tonight.
The Warrens were quiet, expectant, as the women made their way to the safe house. They were conspicuous, of course, all of them still dressed in their rich whoring clothes. Master Piccun’s designs seemed obscene in the broad daylight, in the context of open streets. Worse, some of the girls’ costumes were stained with brown-black smears of dried blood.
But the women passed no guards, and it was soon clear that the Khalidorans didn’t go into the Warrens now. The residents who saw them looked at them strangely. One