No Quarter Read Online Free PDF Page A

babies were born. The rest, condemned out of their own mouths, stood bound on the beach before the council.
    Most of them looked numb, a few cursed softly, a couple wept. They all wore the marks of rotten eggs and fruit. The crowd had stopped throwing things only after the council had threatened to move to the privacy of the council chamber.
    From her central seat in the semicircle of driftwood chairs, it was clear that Ilka's position as eldest not only allowed her to run the council but also everyone on it. "You're lucky we're not on the mainland," she declared, looking as though she considered them lucky indeed. "On the mainland you'd have to go through all this again before the king at a Death Judgment. Fortunately for us, our distance from His Majesty ensures a certain autonomy in dealing with the sort of people who have, over a period of some years, slaughtered, individually and collectively, upward of two hundred men, women, and children. In short, in dealing with scum like you." She stood, accepted a staff carved with an entwined pattern of kelp and crowned with a leaping dolphin, and slammed its metal-bound butt three times into the smooth stones of the beach, "By the power invested in this council by Theron, King of Shkoder, High Captain of the Broken Islands, lord of a whole bunch of places that don't mean fish shit out here, I pronounce sentence—hang them."
    The crowd released a collective, satisfied sigh and Vree thought she saw Tomas wince as he said, "Witnessed."

    "Of course she's dangerous. She just put an end to the most vicious crew of mass murderers we've had in these waters since my grandfather's time." Ilka nodded in satisfaction as the seventh pirate was hoisted kicking and writhing into the air at the other end of the beach, then turned her attention again to the pair of Imperial merchants. "Tell me something I don't know."
    "Honored Councilor, you don't understand." Although he spoke Shkoden fluently, the merchant's accent put strange inflections on the words. "Assassins are trained only to kill or be killed, for them there is no middle ground and they are never away from the army. For this one to be as she is, deciding to kill as she has, is wrong."
    "Very wrong," affirmed his companion. "It is as though a sword moved through the world, striking and killing with no hand wielding it."
    The elderly councillor studied them, weighing their fear. "How do you know there's no hand wielding her?" she asked at last. "Perhaps she's been sent to kill someone in Shkoder, no one saw fit to tell the two of you, and you've just blown her cover to the other side. That's treason, isn't it?"
    The young man paled. Frowning, the woman shook her head. "Assassins travel only as part of an army. They are targeted and released by the army. The Empire is not at war with Shkoder, nor do we wish them to be. War is very bad for trade."
    "It is that." Hand disappearing into her robe, Ilka scratched at the white line of an old scar, received the day Pitesti fell. "So what do you want me to do about this wild sword of yours? If she's too dangerous for Shkoder, she's an unenclosed sight too dangerous to hold here. Even if we had a reason to hold her. Which we don't.
    And besides, she spent the morning with the bard and if she was any kind of a threat, he'd have told me."
    "We know nothing of bards, Honored Councilor, we merely thought that someone should be told what we know of assassins."
    "Well, someone's been told. In fact…" The sudden shrieking of a pirate brought face-to-face with his own imminent death cut her off. She waited until the noise stopped before continuing. "In fact, from the whispering I've been hearing, hasn't just about everyone been told? Didn't it occur to you that she could get annoyed about that and, if she's as dangerous as you say, maybe you'd be better off not attracting her attention? You think on that, and I'll think on what you've told me.
    Ass-kissing bottom feeders," she added after the two