where I’d find you, and I’d pay her for nothing; but I’d take a lie out other
hide if six of my friends had to hold down her blacksmith buddy. She, she
described where I’d meet you. I recognized it, I’d taken the Lady Samlane-‘
‘Here?’ Samlor’s voice and his knife both trembled. Death slid closer to the
room than it had been since the first slash and scramble of the fight.
‘Lord, lord,’ the captive pleaded. ‘Only this far. I swear by my mother’s
bones!’
‘Go on, then.’ The knife did not move.
The other man swallowed. ‘That’s all. I waited here – I didn’t tell anybody.
Lord Regli put a thousand royals on your head… and… and the S’danzo said I’d
live through the meeting. Oh gods, the slut, the slut…’
Samlor smiled. ‘She hasn’t lied to you yet,’ he said. The smile was gone,
replaced with a bleakness as cruel as the face of a glacier. ‘Listen,’ he went
on, rising to one knee and pinning his prisoner by psychological dominance in
the stead of his body weight. ‘My sister asked me for a knife. I told her I’d
leave her one if she gave me a reason to.’
A spasm wracked the Cirdonian’s face. His prisoner winced at the trembling of
the dagger point. ‘She said the child wasn’t Regli’s,’ Samlor went on. ‘Well,
who ever thought it would be, the way she sniffed around? But she said a demon
had got it on her … and that bothered even her at the last. Being used, she
said. Being used. She’d tried to have it aborted after she thought about things
for a while, but a priest of Heqt was waiting with Regli in the shop where she’d