Path of Revenge Read Online Free PDF

example to all who dared criticise Bhrudwan policy. Later she had rallied and spent an hour trying to convince herself that they would be commended fortheir son’s brave words, and he would be appointed as the Hegeoman’s adviser. Both scenarios were nonsense, Noetos thought, but he was not prepared to admit how closely some of her thoughts mirrored his own.
    The fisherman took a settling breath and pulled open the door just as the cloaked and cowled figure made to rap on it again. The figure jerked back, then rushed past in a rustle of cloth. Before Noetos knew it he found himself seated on his couch beside his wife and son, with the Recruiter standing before him, sword out, tip resting on the tiles.
    Only one? Where were the others? Could they fight this one off if he went to strike at them? Why had he not thought to fetch his sword down from its place in the roof?
    The figure standing there was not a Recruiter. It was the female servant. Her wide-hipped, full-breasted shape had been obscured by her grey robe.
    ‘What do you want with us?’ Noetos asked, struggling to keep the fear out of his voice. ‘What have we done to offend your masters?’
    Still the figure said nothing. Then, in a smooth gesture that Noetos jerked away from, she let the sword fall to the floor and swept her cowl back, revealing a swollen face, deep, ravaged eyes and a shockingly bald head. Opuntia gave a cry of fright, then held her tongue.
    ‘I repeat: what do you want with us?’ the fisherman asked again. Something was not right here, his soldier’s sense told him, and an air of deadly danger settled on the room.
    The servant opened her mouth and made a sound like a baby crying. Some sort of foreign language? No, not a language. The woman made the noise again, waving her arms in what was undoubtedly frustration, tears leaking out of her eyes. What was going on here?
    ‘Ahhh…waay! Ahh…WAAAY!’ said the woman, then opened her mouth and pointed to it.
    ‘She has no tongue,’ said Anomer, horrified. ‘She can’t talk.’
    ‘What are you trying to say to us?’ Noetos stood, as though there was something he could do to help her. The woman shook with something like rage, waved her arms again and pointed to them, then to herself.
    ‘I don’t know what she’s saying,’ the fisherman said, pity in his voice. ‘Perhaps we should go and get the Recruiters.’
    ‘Nnnn! Nnnnnn!’ the servant cried, shaking her head vigorously. She swept a desperate glance around the room, then cried in triumph and strode over to the plinth holding the bust of Arathé. Before any of them could stop her she took the plinth in one hand, held it up, pointed to herself and then to the carving.
    ‘Ahhway!’ she said.
    Opuntia jerked to her feet, screamed as though taken by a sword, then fell to the floor.
    The truth eluded Noetos a moment longer. He turned from his unconscious wife to look again at…at…
    His daughter.
    No, no, not his daughter, not his sweet Arathé. Not her, please Alkuon, not her. But he looked at the bust on the plinth and looked again at the raddled servant of the Recruiters, and the dreadful truth hooked him.
    Oh, no. God of the sea, please, no.
    Everything blurred. His feet didn’t seem to move, but somehow he found himself holding his daughter, crying into her robe, then pulling his weeping wife to her feet, and none of it was true, but here stood his daughter, sobbing, face buried in his shoulder, Anomer still as death on the couch… Oh, Arathé, what have they done to you?
    Gradually things began to come back into focus, but his eyes beheld a different world. A world in which someone could do dreadful things to his daughter without his knowledge, a world in which he was powerless to undo the damage that had been done. Her tongue! She had been such an eloquent, passionate speaker, shaming him again and again with her zeal and her forthright views, and it had been this passion two years ago that attracted the notice of the