The Warlord's Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the heavens.
    Glass lanterns on posts burned away the darkness, accompanied by stone-ringed bonfires the Cephirans had constructed in the midst of major intersections to illuminate the night more brightly still. Nobody was going to be sneaking around, not on
their
watch.
    Nobody lacking a stolen uniform, anyway.
    His back quivered with the strain of maintaining a steady walk when every instinct lashed him with whips of adrenaline, demanding he break into a desperate sprint. Every few steps he rubbed the sweat from his palms on his pant legs, and his eyes darted this way and that with such spastic frequency that he was sure he would soon learn what theinside of his skull looked like. Cerris wasn’t one to succumb to fear, and frankly being found out and executed as a spy would be a far more pleasant death than many he’d courted, but something about the need to remain so godsdamn
casual
got his dander up.
    ‘
Or maybe,
’ he swore he heard that demonic voice whispering, ‘
it’s that you still believe, deep down, that they should be afraid of you.
’ A moment of blessed silence, then, before ‘
Even if you and I both know that there was never any good reason to be. Not without me doing all the heavy lifting. You never were much more than a porter, when you get down to it, were you
?’
    Finally, after a few more minutes during which Cerris was certain he’d exuded enough sweat to float a longboat, he neared his destination. The streets grew smoother still; some avenues even had mortar filling in the gaps between the larger cobblestones, to prevent carriages from rattling. The houses here were of a larger breed and stood aloof from one another, boasting sweeping expanses of lawn behind wrought-iron fences or stone walls. Here, in the city’s richest quarter, most traces of invasion vanished—except for the guards who stood at the entrance to each gated estate. These were clad in the ubiquitous crimson and boasted the night-hued gryphon, rather than the various colors and ensigns of the noble houses.
    Just another example of Cephira’s commitment to “civilized warfare”—a concept that, where Cerris was concerned, had about the same legitimacy as “playful torture” or “adorable pustule.” The commoners might be pressed into service, but the nobility? Their soldiers and much of their staff were stripped from them, and they were confined to house arrest, but otherwise they remained unharmed and largely unmolested. There they would linger, until either their families offered sufficient ransom to buy their release, or until someone in the Cephiran military command decided that they posed a threat or possessed knowledge the invaders needed.
    At which point, all bets were off. Civility only goes so far in war, after all.
    “Colonel Ilrik requires information from the baroness,” Cerris announced as he advanced up the walk toward one particular estate,dredging from memory a name overheard during the past weeks. “I’m to question her at once.”
    “What questions?” asked the first guard, a young man whose sparse beard did little to hide either his rotted teeth or his smattering of pock-marks. “What could Colonel Ilrik need with …?”
    Cerris halted and slowly, deliberately, turned the full weight of his contempt upon the soldier. Eyes that had seen horrors few could imagine bored into the guard’s soul, and the younger man visibly cringed within his armor.
    Expression unchanging, Cerris looked the soldier up and down as though examining a rotting, maggot-ridden haunch of beef. “My apologies, Baroness,” he said, his tone frosty as a winter morning. “I didn’t recognize you in that outfit.”
    “I … Sir, I just thought …” The guard glanced helplessly at his companion for support, but the other soldier had the good sense to keep his mouth firmly shut.
    “You’re still talking,” Cerris informed him. “You really ought to have a physician look into that before it affects your