Chapter List

enesh swallowed, desperately trying to keep his teeth from chattering. He watched her breath freeze and float to the ground. The cloth of her cowl resembled a rotted burial shroud: dusty and threadbare. A shadow obscured all but her chin.

“I was inventing poisons four hundred years before your grandfather learned to walk.” Reina spoke as if impatiently lecturing a lesser being. Kenesh didn’t notice the shadowy tendrils seeping into the dock around her feet. The wood planks first lost their color, and then rotted to a scorched, mangled ash.

The Vicereine turned her back on the assassin and dropped the useless pieces of his knife. “Do you know what it feels like to have a part of your body die while still attached to living flesh?” By now Reina was standing in a huge expanding slough of foulness.

Several of the tendrils rose from the swirling edges of the pestilence surrounding Reina’s feet and coiled back, growing eyes and fangs. Kenesh noticed and desperately tried to push his way up the wall with his hands. One by one the viper’s heads struck his left foot. The very real sharpness of otherworldly fangs pierced his boots, skin and leg.

Kenesh felt as if every nerve in his body was being drained through the sole of his left boot. A cold, burrowing agony invaded the entire left side of his body. Pain exploded from every joint as his collapsing weight forced his frozen bones to bend at unnatural angles.

He slammed against the blackened wood of the dock and made an inhuman sound that nearly burst the inside of his throat. Rivulets of icy sweat scraped his face, chest and arms. He banged the back of his head against the corner of the warehose as his body convulsed, leaving the wood smashed and frozen blood caked across the back of his head. Within moments, all that was left of his left foot was a putrified weight attached to a limb so infected that the very thought of moving it made his nerves boil over with pain.

“Now you know.”

Kenesh panted as he failed to regain his balance. He rolled against the door, the cruel cold sweat tormenting his parched tongue with a salty tang.

“Who sent you?” Reina asked. Kenesh did not answer. He could scarcely breathe.

“Answer me, or I will infect every limb of your being with dessication that will see two harvests before death releases you from it.” The Vicereine stood resolute, her staff looming over the platform. No light remained. Kenesh drew a choked breath that covered his teeth with rime.

Reina reached down and picked up a small medallion from the dock.

“The Escator Merchants Guild?” Reina said. Her glowing red eyes narrowed as she examined it. “What plan did you hatch with those overfed hyenas? Did you expect to waylay me with your robber’s club like some sweeper of porches?” Reina turned the medallion over. “Pity. I was in a fine mood before all this, too. I had a nice meal this evening. They served me cornbread.”

She glanced back to Kenesh. “I like cornbread, don’t you?”

Kenesh sputtered and inhaled reflexively.

“Do you wish to be free of this curse?”

Kenesh attempted to nod his head, but instead his shoulders convulsed. His face was frostbitten almost to the point of paralysis.

“You will return to whichever of those fattened vermin drank enough courage to hire you and inform them the Vicereine sends her regards.” Reina turned the medallion over in her hand as she lowered her voice to a menacing tone. “You will also inform them the blood of the next assassin sent after me will be used to boil their skulls.”

Reina turned towards the end of the dock.

“You have one hour.”

Kenesh’s next cough rattled alarmingly and with immense trembling effort he rasped a response.

“But it is two days ride.”

Slithering fingers of black vapor climbed the back of Reina’s robes, crossing over each other and thickening as they crawled upwards. They gathered at her shoulder and formed the shape of a perched black bird. The mangy fowl solidified just before the Vicereine offered a piece of dried plum, which it devoured hungrily before shivering its feathers.

Reina dropped the medallion on the dock.

“You have one hour.”

Continue to Chapter Eleven