Warbreaker

Chapter 53

Vivenna waited up for Vasher. He did not return.

She paced in the small, one-room hideout—the sixth in a series. They never spent more than a few days in each location. Unadorned, it held only their bedrolls, Vasher’s pack, and a single flickering candle.

Vasher would have chastised her for wasting the candle. For a man who held a king’s fortune in Breaths, he was surprisingly frugal.

She continued pacing. She knew that she should probably just go to sleep. Vasher could take care of himself. It seemed that the only one in the city who couldn’t do that was Vivenna.

And yet he’d told her he was only going on a quick scouting mission. Though he was a solitary person himself, he apparently understood her desire to be a part of things, so he usually let her know where he was going and when to expect him back.

She’d never waited up for Denth to come back from a night mission, and she’d been working with Vasher for a fraction of the time she’d spent with the mercenaries. Why did she worry so much now?

Though she had felt like she was Denth’s friend, she hadn’t really cared about him. He’d been amusing and charming, but distant. Vasher was . . . well, who he was. There was no guile in him. He wore no false mask. She’d only met one other person like that: her sister, the one who would bear the God King’s child.

Lord of Colors! Vivenna thought, still pacing. How did things turn into such a mess?

Siri awoke with a start. There was shouting coming from outside her room. She roused herself quickly, moving over to the door and putting her ear to it. She could hear fighting. If she were going to run, perhaps now would be the time. She rattled the door, hoping for some reason that it was unlocked. It wasn’t.

She cursed. She’d heard fighting earlier—screaming, and men dying. And now again. Someone trying to rescue me, perhaps? she thought hopefully. But who?

The door shook suddenly, and she jumped back as it opened. Treledees, high priest of the God King, stood in the doorway. “Quickly, child,” he said, waving to her. “You must come with me.”

Siri looked desperately for a way to run. She backed away from the priest, and he cursed quietly, waving for a couple of soldiers in city guard uniforms to rush in and grab her. She screamed for help.

“Quiet, you fool!” Treledees said. “We’re trying to help you.”

His lies rang hollow in her ears, and she struggled as the soldiers pulled her from the room. Outside, bodies were lying on the ground, some in guard uniforms, others in nondescript armor, still others with grey skin.

She heard fighting down the hallway, and she screamed toward it as the soldiers roughly pulled her away.

Old Chapps, they called him. Those who called him anything, that is.

He sat in his little boat, moving slowly across the dark water of the bay. Night fishing. During the day, one had to pay a fee to fish in T’Telir waters. Well, technically, during the night you were supposed to pay too.

But the thing about night was, nobody could see you. Old Chapps chuckled to himself, lowering his net over the side of the boat. The waters made their characteristic lap, lap, lap against the side of the boat. Dark. He liked it dark. Lap, lap, lap.

Occasionally, he was given better work. Taking bodies from one of the city’s slumlords, weighting them down with rocks tied in a sack to the foot, then tossing them into the bay. There were probably hundreds of them down there, floating in the current with their feet weighed to the floor. A party of skeletons, having a dance. Dance, dance, dance.