Vengeance of the Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

view of the door. He slid into a seat casually enough that it bolstered his tattered pride, and he mustered an air of bland disinterest as his companion joined him. So too was he able to take his first real measure of the man: taller than he indeed, and broader, with a frame as sturdy as an oak tree. The slate-blue korfi scarf that Tantiu men wore, like the veils of their women, hid most of his face. Even with that cloth in the way, Rab noted the wrinkles at the corners of the dark eyes, the hints of iron-gray hair beneath where the scarf wound upward around his head.
    This stranger wasn’t a young man. Nor was he a foolish one. As the proprietor shot him an inquiring look, the Tantiu merely shook his head and waved him away while he claimed the other seat at their table. “Serve the young akreshi whatever he wishes. I’ll pay you when I leave.”
    “You don’t plan on showing me your face, then?” Rab asked, as the proprietor set a steaming mug of coffee on the table. He lifted the mug and sipped from it as nonchalantly as he could. But not until the drink had braced his system and not until they were alone again did he add, “Here I’d thought we were getting on so famously too.”
    “My face will serve you no purpose.”
    “True enough. I don’t care what you look like, what your name is or what gods you serve.”
    The gaze above the korfi didn’t waver. “But you care about the man you’ve called your partner.”
    Julian . A surge of reaction he couldn’t hide flushed Rab’s cheeks, and he fought to keep his hands steady on the mug, his tone indifferent and cool. “You claimed he’d be in danger if the girl you seek isn’t found, which is enough to get my attention. Explain yourself.”
    His companion paused—and despite the man’s hidden features, Rab thought he saw reluctance in his eyes. “Almighty Djashtet blessed Faanshi with great healing power,” he said, more softly now. “So, too, did She bless the akresha Ulima, her kinswoman, with the gift of seeing that which is to come. You’ve heard the news of the death of the duke?”
    “Enough to make my ears bleed. Proceed to the part where I care.”
    “The duke is dead at the akresha Ulima’s hand, and she at his,” said the Tantiu, with a solemn gravity that seized Rab’s interest despite himself. “Before the akresha died, however, she spoke to me of her last vision. She charged me to find the girl. And she warned that the man who’d taken her would himself be at risk of losing his life.”
    Rab snorted. “Every time the Rook shows his face in the streets, he’s at risk of losing his life. Did your akresha get more specific?”
    “No. But I fear that what she foresaw may have already come to pass. The men who returned to Lomhannor Hall with the duke before he died reported that they saw the one you call Rook—and that the Anreulag Herself struck him down.”
    This time Rab couldn’t hold back the reaction, and it took everything he had to keep from hurling the mug of coffee into the nearest wall. A haze of red rolled across his vision; his blood, seemingly urged on by the bracing virtue of the drink, pounded in his ears. “You’re lying,” he growled, abruptly incensed beyond words. Beneath that, he was cold with fear. “The Rook can’t be dead.”
    He can’t be. Not after how I left him. He can’t be .
    “I speak utter truth of what was reported to me.” The Tantiu’s voice flattened. “And the men who served the duke, and who serve the akresha duchess now, aren’t in the habit of lying.”
    “But if the Anreulag found him...” Rab’s hands refused to stop their shaking. To most of the pious, gods-fearing folk in the realm, most of whom never saw Her unless they attended the holiest of services in the capital, the Anreulag was the Voice of the Four Gods, their living avatar. Rab had never been pious. He’d heard all the stories that gods-fearing folk didn’t dare to tell—the ones in which the Anreulag spoke not