At the sound of his voice, a strong current of distaste makes her wonder why she tolerates him at all. She returns her attention to the mirage. “I have work to do.”
River collapses back onto the pallet and sighs. “You’re always tinkering with that stupid thing these days.”
“If by ‘stupid thing’ you mean one of the most valuable repositories of arcane knowledge in existence, and if by ‘tinkering’ you mean inching closer toward breaking the powerful charms protecting it, then yes, I’m tinkering with the stupid thing.”
Anyone else, and she would have had to kill him after divulging such information, but the man across the room, mystic though he may be, is an idiot. He wouldn’t know true magic if it exploded in his face.
“That’s a flashy new spell,” he says dreamily. “I didn’t know you could work illusions too.”
“I can’t.”
“No? Then what am I looking at?”
“Something you wouldn’t understand if I explained it to you a thousand times.”
River snorts with low-pitched laughter. “You’re probably right.”
The Maidservant isn’t looking his way, but she can picture him relaxing on his back with his head resting on interlaced hands, staring up at the rafters with a crooked grin while his chest heaves with laughter. A tingle of arousal and something else stirs inside her at the image, but she kills it quickly with a well-aimed spike of hatred. “You should get rid of the body.”
“What body?” River asks from the pallet.
“The old man you killed last night. I believe this was his hut. The stench of him offends me.”
“I killed him? Huh. That’s not how I remember it. Then again, we did have a bit of a wild night, didn’t we?”
You will lose yourself to it.
The smugness in River’s voice irritates the Maidservant, and she grits her teeth. “Get rid of him.”
“Why bother? It’s not like we’ll be coming back here again.”
“Just do it, River.”
The man emits a loud groan before fumbling around the pallet for his kikoi. “As you wish, my little fly.” She hears him get up, wrap the kikoi around his waist, and pad toward the old man’s body.
He must study it because he’s quiet for a while. “Why’d we kill him again?”
“Why d’you think?”
“Can’t remember. I’m guessing we had to torture him for information on our free agent. But are you sure it’s me who killed him, because . . . you know what? Never mind. Doesn’t matter anyway.”
While she continues deciphering the mind stone’s protections, River hauls the body out of the hut and returns minutes later with the whiff of smoke and burnt flesh hanging about his person.
He’s a man of simple dress for a warlord’s disciple. Nothing ever covers his heavily tattooed torso save for a cascading necklace of beads and bones, and he’s always in a red-and-black kikoi.
He’s a broad-shouldered silhouette when he stands by the door, blocking the light from the rising suns. “Speaking of our free agent, I say we pay him a visit soon. The big man hasn’t summoned us in more than a month, and I have a feeling he’ll do it today. I don’t want this assignment delaying us.”
The Maidservant tenses up in her seat. River might not know why, but he has a knack for knowing when the “big man” is about to summon them. Sure enough, he has no sooner finished speaking than a tremor of power ripples across the ground beneath their feet.
No one but a mystic with the Umadi ancestral talent in their blood would sense this tremor—though it isn’t quite a tremor, more like a shadow blanketing the earth as a storm cloud floats by. Either way, it’s a clear message from the man who rules the land from which she and River and many other disciples draw their strength, and it says: Come.
A command the Maidservant could never defy even if she wanted to.
River gives her a self-congratulatory grin, teeth showing through a thick beard. “See? What did I tell you?”
Uttering a curse, she waves a glowing arm over the table, banishing both talisman and mind stone back into her Voidspace. “I’m so close,” she mutters. “Closer than I’ve ever been. I can feel the walls cracking and giving way. I just need more time.”
River frowns at her in concentration. He scratches his beard, seeming to weigh the words in his mouth before he speaks them. “You know, little fly, I have no idea what you’re up to, and I really don’t care that you haven’t told me, but . . . you know I’m with you to the end of the world, right?”
The Maidservant blinks at him, this stupid walking conundrum of a man. She has seen firsthand how ruthless and cruel he can be, how callously he can kill, how black his heart is. She has seen him slaughter countless innocent souls. And yet he can stand there and feel genuine concern for her?
How is he not a howling, hateful void? How is it that he expects her to feel something as he does? How dare he expect this from her. Who does he think he is?
She gives him an icy smile. “You’re not going soft on me, are you, River?”
He lifts his open palms in a gesture of appeasement. “Point taken.” And without another word he moves into the hut to collect his spear of tronic bone where he left it balanced against the wall. “We should get going.”
For some reason the Maidservant is annoyed that he doesn’t say more or try harder; she cleanses herself of that useless sentiment by focusing on the lingering pain of her tattoos, inviting a purifying torrent of hatred to wash over her. Instantly sobering.
A minute later she whisks them both into the Void, and they sweep toward the village in the valley in a cloud of swiftly moving flies, leaving the hut forever.
The secluded village is a group of thatched mud huts surrounding a central compound. The Maidservant and River materialize from the Void in a recently cultivated field just south of the village and watch for a time as it slowly wakes up to the morning.
A woman with a baby swaddled on her back is bent over as she sweeps the dry earth around her hut with a brush of twigs, stirring up clouds of dust. Not far from her, two young boys in brightly colored kikois enter a pen and start herding a group of bleating goats out of it. A trio of teenage girls moving in procession walks up a well-beaten path from the river, balancing earthen jars on their veiled heads. Distastefully quaint, how these people seem to take their peace for granted.
“I like this part,” River says, idly twisting his metalloid spear.
The Maidservant studies him and notes the predatory glint in his deep-set eyes. This is the River she understands, the bloodthirsty brute. “What part?” she says.
His teeth show as he practically salivates at the village. “Watching while they’re still going about their lives. They have no idea what’s about to happen to them.”
The Maidservant looks back at the village. Some part of her prods itself to see what she feels about what she must do here; as usual, it comes up empty. “Then let’s change that.”
Stretching his neck muscles and grinning a feral grin, River ignites his three-ringed shards with the moon’s power. And then they attack.
River is a Fire mystic, and though his sorcery might not be particularly skillful or powerful, his deadliest spell can enshroud an unwarded victim in devouring moonfire.