Golin Mafusin

Smith's open hand smashed across his countenance and sent him plunging into the embankment. His countenance brushed against rock and he dismounted heavily.

When he whirled over, Smith was strutting over him.

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you," Smith mumbled.

Toy girl. She wasn't just the reply to Smith's query, she was Flynn's shortcoming. She was where Rat would smash. A ripple of squeamishness swept over Flynn.

First Nathan and now Toy girl.

"You should," Flynn confessed.

Smith lifted an eyebrow again.

"You're the best Rudeboy in the city, but you're not the only one. And if you won't apprentice me and you don't kill me, I'll convoy under Hu Gibbet or Scarred Wrable. I'll spend my life practising simply for the period I have my opportunity at you. I'll wait until you feel I've bypassed today. I'll wait until you feel it was only a silly guild rat's peril. After I'm a master, you'll leap at shadows to an extent. But after you leap a dozen times and I'm not there, you won't leap just once, and that's when I'll be there. I don't care if you slay me at the same time. I'll swap my life for yours."

Ryan's sights hardly had to drift to go from dangerously fascinated to simply dangerous. But Flynn didn't even see them through the tears brimming in his sights. He just saw the vacant look that had to appear in Nathan's eyes and visualized discerning it in Toy girl's.

He visualized her yells if Rat attained and seized her every night. She'd wail wordlessly for the first few weeks, perhaps fight—bite and scrape for a while—and then she wouldn't yell anymore, wouldn't combat at all. There would only be wailing and the sounds of flesh and Rat's pleasure. Just like Nathan.

"Is your life so bare, boy?"

It will be if you assert no.

"I wish to be like you."

"No one wishes to be like me." Smith pulled an enormous ebony blade and stroked the rim to Flynn's throat.

At that juncture, Flynn didn't care if the blade gulped his life's blood. Death would be more considerate than gawking Toy girl vanishes before his eyes.

"You like hurting people?".

"No, sir."

"Ever killed anyone?"

"No."

"Then why are you wasting my time?"

What was wrong with him? Did he mean that? He couldn't.

"I learned you don't like it. That you don't have to like it to be nice," Flynn mumbled.

" Who told you that?"

" Momma J. She asserted that's the disparity between you and some of the others."

Smith scowled. He yanked a clove of garlic from a satchel and socked it into his maw. He wrapped his blade, chewing.

" All right, kid. You want to get rich?" Flynn shook.

"You're quick.

But can you explain what your marks are speculating and recall fifty stuff at once? Do you possess good hands?"

Nod. Nod. Nod.

"Be a gambler." Ryan chuckled.

Flynn didn't. He peeked at his feet. "I don't wish to be scared anymore."

"Marlian whacks you?"

"Marlian's nothing."

"Then who is?" Smith inquired.

" Our Fist. Rat." Why was it so difficult to say his name?

"He strikes you?"

"Unless you'll . . . unless you'll perform things with him." It whistled wettable, and Smith didn't mumble anything, so Flynn let out.

"I won't allow anyone to hit me again. Not ever."

Smith kept staring past Flynn, bestowing him time to blink away his tears. The full moon saturated the city in a golden glow.

"The aged whore can be glamorous," he mumbled.

" Despite everything."

Flynn followed Smith's gaze, but there was no one else in the scenery. Silver fog rose from the warm manure of the cattle terraces and curled about ancient shattered canals. In the darkness, Flynn couldn't behold the Bleeding Man freshly doodled over his own guild's Black Dungeon, but he understood it was there. His guild had been relinquishing territory steadily since Marlian got unhealthy.

"Sir? " Flynn called out.

"This town's acquired no culture but alley culture. The edifices are brick on one street, daub and wattle on the next, and bamboo one over. Titles Alitaeran, equips Callaean, music all Bandaras harps and Lodric arilyres—the damn rice paddies themselves stolen from Brok.

But as long as you don't touch her or glance too close, periodically she's beautiful."

Flynn thought he believed. You had to be cautious about what you touched and where you strolled in the Lowdys. Puddles of vomit and other bodily fluids were spattered in the alleys, and the faeces-fueled blazes and greasy steam from the continual boiling tallow vats coated everything with a greasy, sooty sheen. But he had no retort. He wasn't even sure Smith was speaking to him.

"You're close, boy. But I never receive apprentices, and I won't receive you." Smith hesitated and idly spun the shiv from finger to finger.

"Not unless you accomplish something you can't."

Hope ruptured into life in Flynn's breast for the first time in months.

"I'll accomplish anything," he asserted.

"You'd have to perform it independently. No one else could realize. You'd have to extrapolate how, when, and where. All by yourself."

" What do I have to do?" Flynn interrogated.

He could feel the Night Angels twirling their fingers around his stomach. How did he realize what Smith was getting on to mumble next?

Smith picked up the deceased rat and flung it to Flynn.

"Just this. Slaughter your Rat and get me the evidence. You've got a week."

Golin Mafusin guided the nag up Sidlin Way between the gaudy, close-packed manses of the outstanding families of Aquilia.

Many of the buildings were less than a decade old. Others were ancient but had been lately renovated. The edifices along this one alley were qualitatively unique from all the rest of Aquilian architecture.

These had been carved by those wishing their money could purchase culture. All were garish, striving to contest their acquaintances by their exotic layout, whether in builders' illusions of Ladeshian spires or Friaki pleasure domes or in more accurately expressed Alitaeran mansions or perfect scale replicas of outstanding Brokian summer castles.

There was even what he felt he comprehended from a portrait as a bulbous Ymmuri temple, complete with prayer pennants. Slave money, he reckoned.

It wasn't slavery that appalled him. On his isle, slavery was ordinary. But not like it had been here. These manses had been formulated on pit combatants and infant plantations. It had been out of his path, but he'd wandered through the Lowdys to glimpse what the quiet half of his modern home city was like.

The squalor there rendered the fortune here obscene.

He was exhausted. Though not tall, he was thick. Thick through the abdomen and, mercifully, still thicker through the chest and shoulders. The virago was a nice horse, but she was no warhorse, and he had to stroll her as frequent as he rode.

The big residences hovered forth, distinguished from the others not so vastly by the magnitude of the edifices as by the proportion of land within the embankments. Where the manses were loaded side by side, the residences sloped.

Wardens presided over gates of ironwood preferably than sophisticated grillwork—gates erected long ago for protection, not embellishment.

The gate of the initial estate bore the Jadwin trout inlaid with a gold layer. Across the sally haven, he saw a luxurious terrace filled with monuments, some marble, some coated with beaten gold. No wonder they amass a dozen sentries.

All the sentries were experienced and a few furlongs short of handsome, which bestowed credence to the buzzes about the duchess, and he was more than glad to pass the Priya estate. He was a gorgeous man with olive membrane, ebony eyes, and fur still black as dusk unscathed by the grey shadows of dawn.

Sharing a cottage with an insatiable duchess whose husband evacuated on regular and prolonged rationale was turmoil he didn't desire.

Not that I'll discover minor where I'm getting on.

Zenji, my friend, I hope this was intellectual. He didn't wish to consider the other likelihood.

"I am Golin Mafusin. I'm here to see Lord Bond," Golin mumbled as he attained in the guise of the Bond residence's gate.

"The duke?" the sentry inquired. He shoved his helm back and scuffed a hand across his forehead.

The man's a dummy. "Yes, Duke Bond." He enunciated gradually and with additional vigour than was essential, but he was exhausted.

"That's a weeping disgrace," the sentry let out.

Golin waited, but the man didn't elaborate. Not a dummy, an ass.

"Is Lord Bond gone?"

" Nawp."

So that's what this is about. The red fur should have tilted me off.