They slipped onto the empty street. The township was small; he and Grunt stood just outside the light of a streetlamp, their breaths pluming like smoke.
“Helm and Cook are missing,” Grunt said.
“How do you know? Since when?”
“Since yesterday,” the old man replied, his voice rough with disuse. “Since you were at the library.”
“And you’re just now telling me?”
“I wanted to be certain they weren’t holed up in some tavern, drowned in rum.”
Sebastian frowned. “They’re not aboard the Storm?”
“I’ve looked all over. They’re not in their rooms here,” he inclined his head at the inn, “nor aboard. They’re gone.”
“This place is too small for them to disappear to if they’re deserting.”
Grunt nodded. “No ships have left port since we’ve been here. Only arrivals.”
“Stowing away then,” Sebastian said. “Or dead.”
The old man’s face looked a tad pale under his bushy beard and wind burnt skin. “I thought the same,” he said. “Should I put the word out to the whalers to look for stowaways?”
Sebastian wiped his hand over his mouth, thinking. He turned his gaze to the sea. The fires from the tryworks glowed like small islands of flame. “I aim to sail at dawn. That doesn’t—”
The stillness of the night was broken by the scuffling of feet, the creaking of a door, and a muffled scream. Sebastian detected every individual sound— and their direction—like a shark sniffing blood.
“The cask house,” he said. His long black coat whipped behind him as he ran. Grunt followed.
They slipped around the inn, keeping to the shadows until the cask house came into view. It was shrouded in night but for a soft glow of lantern light limning the doorframe. Behind the door, the scuffling continued followed by the distinct sound of a scream barricaded behind a hand. Sebastian made a motion to Grunt to wait, out of sight. The old man nodded and took to hand the club tucked in his belt.
The sounds behind the door demanded urgency but Sebastian moved cautiously. Dagger in hand, he pressed himself flat against the door and pushed it open in time to see a young boy with shocking orange hair gripped from behind by a man with a short black beard. A second man knelt on top of the table where Selena and Niven and ‘Julian Tergus’ had painted their faces just the morning before. The man twisted a knife into the boy’s mouth. Sebastian hesitated, shocked, as blood spurted. The kneeling man dropped the knife and reached his fingers past the boy’s lips, pulled out a hunk of flesh and slapped it onto the table. Sebastian tightened his grip on his dagger and started to push the door open and then his body seized up, every muscle rigid and unbending.
The boy was not a boy but a young woman. Sebastian saw the swell of her breast underneath her man’s shirt before she was pressed, gurgling and spitting blood, onto the table. The man who’d cut her tongue out slipped to the other side and took hold of the girl’s wrists, pulling her tight.
“You might dress like a boy,” said the bearded man behind the girl, tugging at her trousers, “but we don’t mind digging for treasure, do we, Pate?”
The other man, Pate, laughed, and yanked the girl taut across the table as she struggled and tried to scream through a mouth full of blood.
Sebastian’s hands shook and his throat constricted as like to strangle him. When the man had her trousers down revealing a glimpse of the girl’s thighs and naked backside, a red fog of rage descended, releasing him from the paralyzed shock that had gripped his body in a vise.
Mina…
The assassin burst through the door hard enough that it slammed back and busted a hinge. His long coat flapped behind him like black wings as he flew at the man who had the girl bent over.
His instincts screamed through the red haze. Without thinking, he ducked and felt the whoosh of air as a weapon—a plank of wood, maybe—passed overhead from his right. Sebastian’s dagger hand—also his right—shot out, found flesh, and jabbed in. The third man, a bulky figure who’d been hiding on the outskirts of the meager lantern light, made a sucking sound. A club of wood studded with nails dropped from his hands as he clutched the dagger buried in his gut. Sebastian let him keep the blade; his eyes were on the two men at the table.
The first rapist had turned to face the intruder, his face ashen and his mouth hung open in shock. One hand made a feeble try for the pistol on his belt but Sebastian was too fast. The assassin drove his knee into the man’s groin, spun him around, gripped his hair on either side of his head, and yanked left and then right. The snap of bone sounded twice, and the man dropped beside the girl who was cowering under the table. She’d tugged up her pants and sat on the ground staring wide-eyed at Sebastian and then at the corpse that slumped beside her.
Sebastian was on the table before the second man hit the ground. The last man—Pate—stared in dumb shock as the assassin used the table to propel himself over, descending like a bird of prey onto its catch.
Pate stumbled backwards. “Wait! Wait! Wait!”
Sebastian flew onto Pate, knocking him onto his back and slamming his head against the wood floor. The assassin straddled him and slammed his right fist through the man’s mouth. Teeth and blood flew, and a strangled cry tore from Pate’s throat. The left fist followed and Pate’s nose cracked beneath Sebastian’s knuckles and flattened across his grizzled cheek. Sebastian’s right fist came down again, then his left. Blood spurted up at Sebastian but he didn’t see it or the carnage he wrought. He saw the Zak’reth, bent over his sister. The man beneath him could no longer scream but Mina did, and Sebastian drove his fists down again and again until the only sound was his own breath, panting and snorting like a charging boar.
Hands grabbed Sebastian’s shoulders and hauled him off the corpse. He scrambled back on his hands like a crab, bleary and dizzy. Grunt stood over him, held his hand out, like a man warding off a wild animal. He made a slashing gesture with his club. Enough.
Sebastian stared at the old man, at the corpse, back to the old man. The room rematerialized around him, morphing from his sister’s home in the Farendus Isles back to the cask house on Isle Nanokar. His arms and shoulders and knuckles each began to glow with pain, but a woman’s soft whimpering cut through it all.
“Where…?” Sebastian croaked, struggling to his feet.