Shadowkill

MEMORY:

She turned a corner, found herself in the middle of a kidnapping.

Before she had time to react, one of the men had an arm wrapped around her and a slicer against her temple. “Move and you’re dead,” he whispered. His breath was hot on her ear, she was pressed hard against him; he wasn’t much taller or wider than she was, but she kept thinking of steel traps and sword blades and other hard and lethal things. Lethal, yeh. He wanted to kill her so badly she could smell it like body odor.

Matja Allina exchanged a quick look with Airing Pirs, got to her feet. She signaled the women at her table to follow her, then went sweeping from the room.

Behind the screen Kizra clutched at the arranga and wondered what she should do. Danger was as thick in that huge room as the blood-stink off the body. She wanted out of that place now, no! ten minutes ago.

Fragment by fragment, since the encounter that afternoon with that signifier lizard, she was reassembling her past and with that past regaining an acerbic view of power and the powerful, a view underlined by what had just happened, a lesson of what would happen to her if she followed her natural tendencies in this world.

The door whooshed closed behind him, expanding as it moved to fill the whole space of the opening as if it erased itself to underline the futility of trying to escape the cell. Hands clasped behind her, Shadith scowled at the seamless wall. “Mashak! Dafta!

Your soul smells like dog-shit.” When she was trapped in the diadem she was essentially immortal. She’d abandoned all that when she had Aleytys decant her into this body.

I must have been out of my alleged mind.

That struck her as funny and she giggled, but the spurt of humor was quickly gone. Time meant more now. The idea of wasting her counted hours in a hole like this one with nothing to see, nothing to do, made her wild.

She closed her eyes and reached, searching for other eyes, single or compound, large or small, anything she could look through. Somewhere, somehow, he must have left a crack she could worry at until it was big enough to let her crawl out of this.

A small dark maidservant slipped like a shadowmouse from the curtains behind the screen and touched her on the shoulder. Ghineeli chal. When Kizra started to speak, Ghineeli touched a forefinger to her lips. Then she beckoned urgently, pointed at the curtains.