Sputtering, screaming, clutching at the four-pointed agony behind his knee, he dragged himself onto the bank and scrambled after his comrade.
She laughed again, a bitter and challenging sound that rattled in her throat, and she glanced around in time to spy the street urchins who had gathered at the far end of the span to watch. They melted away like shadows in the sun. On the
Downwind side, too, figures faded into alleys and doorways, unwilling witnesses.
Chenaya bent and wiped her blade on a dead man’s garments, retrieved the first star, and cleaned it, too.
She had no doubt that Zip would hear of this. She wanted him to hear. It was why she had come to this stink-hole side of town. Sheathing her sword, she walked on, giving no further thought to the bodies in her wake.
Come to me, Zip, she willed, come to me.
There were taverns in Downwind, or places that professed to be taverns. Only
Mama Becho’s, though, could legitimately claim to be such. Even so, there were lifelong drunks in Sanctuary who wouldn’t deign to spit on its threshold, let alone consume its questionable product.
Chenaya stepped through the low, doorless entrance, her vision swiftly adjusting to the dim light. A dozen pairs of eyes turned to examine her. Quite a different crowd from the one that frequented the Unicorn. There the faces were full of menace or scheming or general disinterest. The eyes at Mama Becho’s reflected only desperation and despair.
It was like no place she had ever seen before, and she thought of the men who had met her at the bridge, men like these, men with the same desperate eyes.