“All right, Gnash, you’re strong. Are you strong enough to climb out of here?”
Gnasher nodded and flexed. He liked being called strong.
“Then let’s get out of this hell,” Logan said, but even as he grabbed the rope, he felt a slackness in it. A moment later, the entire length of the sinew rope fell around them. There would be no climbing out. There would be no using the precious key. There would be no escape. The Holers had dropped the rope.
“Where the hell are they?” Tenser Ursuul demanded. The Holers barely recognized him in his fine tunic with his face shaved and his hair washed.
“Where do you think they are? They escaped,” Lilly said.
“They escaped? Impossible!”
“No shit,” Lilly said.
Tenser flushed, embarrassed in front of Neph Dada and the guards accompanying him.
A magical light bloomed in the Hole, illuminating everyone. It even dipped to the cutout where Logan had so frequently hidden. There was no one there.
“Logan, Fin, and Gnasher,” Tenser said, naming those missing. “Logan and Fin hated each other. What happened?”
“King wanted—” Lilly started to say, but something cracked across her face and sent her sprawling.
“Shut up, bitch,” Tenser said. “I don’t trust you. You, Tatts, what happened?”
“Logan wanted to build another pyramid. He wanted to attract Gorkhy and see if we could grab his legs and get the key off of him. Fin wouldn’t go for it. They fought. Fin threw Logan in the Hole, but then Gnasher attacked him and all of them fell in.”
Tenser cursed. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“And fall in myself?” Tatts said. “Anyone who’s tangled with Fin or Logan or Gnash gets killed, buddy—Your Highness. You were down here long enough to know that.”
“Could they have survived the fall?” Neph Dada asked in his icy voice.
One of the newer inmates yelped and everyone looked at him. “No,” he shouted. “Please!” A bright ball of magical light stuck to his chest and another to his back and lifted him over the Hole. Then he fell.
Everyone crowded around the hole, watching the light disappear into the darkness.
“Five …six …seven,” Neph said. The light winked out right before eight. He looked at Tenser. “No, then. Well, I can’t say your father will be pleased.”
Tenser cursed. “Take them, Neph. Kill them. Do whatever you do, but make it painful.”
51
Hu Gibbet crouched on the roof of a warehouse deep in the Warrens. In a more prosperous time, it had been used to store textiles. Later, smugglers had used it. Now, it was a crumbling ruin that housed guild rats of the Burning Man guild.
None of that mattered to Hu, except for the inconvenience of having to kill the ten-year-old boy who was standing guard. Or maybe it had been a girl. Hard to tell. The only thing that mattered to Hu was a slab of stone on the floor by one crumbled wall. It looked like it weighed a thousand pounds and it was as weathered as all the other stones, but it opened on hinges that not even the guild rats knew about. It was the second exit for one of the largest safe houses in the city.
Right now, if Hu’s source was correct, the safe house held approximately three hundred whores, enough food and water to keep them for a month, and the real prizes: Momma K and her lieutenant, Agon Brant. Hu didn’t expect those two to be here, not really. But he could always hope.
He always had trouble with the big jobs. A big job required such balance. The pleasure in so much blood threatened his professionalism. It was so easy to get caught up in the sheer joy of it—watching blood spill or dribble or spurt, blood in all its glorious hues, the red red blood fresh from the lungs, the black blood from the liver, and every shade in between. He wanted to bleed every body dry to please Nysos, but on the big jobs he couldn’t usually take the time. It made him feel like he was doing things halfway.
Plus it always left him depressed. After he’d killed and bled thirty or thirty-two at the Gyre estate, he hadn’t been the same for weeks. Even all the killing during the coup couldn’t satisfy him. It was all a letdown. The Gyre estate had been the best. He’d still been in the estate when the duke got home. He’d watched Regnus Gyre run from room to room, mad with grief, slipping in the Nysos-pools Hu had left in every hall. He’d been so excited by watching that he couldn’t even kill the duke, though he knew the Godking wished it.
He’d finished that job the next night, of course, but that had been nothing. Not even close.
This job wouldn’t be too hard. There would be some tight moments early on. First, he had to get in. He’d kill the children if he had to, but guild rats were slippery. They knew every hole in the Warrens the size a walnut and could fit into it with room to spare. It would be better not to give them the chance to warn anyone.
After he got in, there would be a guard or two on the back exit. It was an exit that had never been used, and there was only so long a man could stare at a wall before he got bored and tired, so the guards there might well be asleep.
Then Hu would need to kill the guards at the front exit without raising an alarm. Then he’d have to block or destroy the front exit. After that point, it wouldn’t matter if the whores found out he was there or not. He could handle whores.
Then …well, the Godking had told him that he had twenty-four hours to do whatever he wanted. “Hu,” the Godking had said, “make me a cataclysm.”
The Godking planned to open up the place afterward and march every noble in the city through it. When the bodies were starting to get ripe, they’d start marching the rest of the city through it. The residents of the Warrens would go last. Then the Godking would have a public ceremony. People selected at random from among the Rabbits, the artisans, and the nobility would be sent into the massacre site. While they were inside, the Godking’s wytches would seal the exits.
Garoth Ursuul expected it would provide a forceful deterrent to future rebellion.
But Hu felt uneasy. He was a professional. He was the best wetboy in the city, the best in the world, the best ever. He treasured that position, and there was only one thing that could threaten it: himself. He’d taken stupid risks at the Gyre estate. Idiotic risks. It had all worked out, but the fact remained that he’d been out of control.
There had just been too much blood. Too much thrill. He’d walked like a god through an orgy of worship that was death. He’d felt invulnerable during the hours he’d butchered the Gyres and their servants. He’d spent time displaying the bodies. He’d hung up several by their feet and cut their throats to bleed them to create that glorious lake of blood in the last hallway.
His job was to kill, and he’d gone dangerously beyond that. Durzo had been a killer. He took lives with the impersonal precision of a tailor. Durzo Blint would never have put himself at risk. It was why some people had considered him Hu’s equal. Hu hated that. He was feared, but Blint was respected. His niggling worry was that the judgment was deserved.
That was why three hundred might be his undoing. The beast within would come out. Three hundred might be too much.
No. He was Hu Gibbet. Nothing was too much for Hu Gibbet. He was the best wetboy in the world. Tactically, this job wouldn’t be nearly the challenge some other jobs had been, but when people whispered his name, this would be what they remembered. This would be his legacy. They would remember this all over the world.