4 City of Strife Read Free Page B

ability to quickly sum up a stranger stared at him with calculating glances. He let them look, knowing that all they would see was a successful mercenary, one who had maybe been a knight once before he fell out with the wrong people. It was what most people took him to be.
    He strode up to the bar. A beautiful, blonde woman looked at him as if she could not decide whether to smile or throw the tankard she was holding at him. Kormak could not blame her. He had been forced to leave the house at speed the last time he was here.
    Eventually she strode over to him and said, “You’ve got a nerve, I’ll say that for you.”
    “Lovely as ever, Lila,” he said, looking her up and down. Her face flushed slightly and it was not from the heat of the fire. She stared at him. “We’ve a lot to talk about and this is not the place to do it.”

    Afterward, as they lay on the bed, Lila looked along the length of his naked body and said, “You’ve got more scars.”
    He stroked her hair and said, “You don’t.”
    She shook her head. “It’s not that bloody easy, Kormak. Where have you been?”
    “I told you I might have to leave the town quickly,” he said. “I wasn’t lying.”
    “Yes, but five years, five bloody years and you just come strolling back in the door as if not a minute had passed, looking the same as you always did, except for the bloody scars. How the hell did you get them anyway?”
    “I’m a soldier, Lila.”
    “So was my first husband. I’ve seen a few sword wounds in my time, a few arrow wounds too. Those cuts were never made by blade or point. Those are claw marks and I have no idea what the hell might make them. Too big for any hunting cat I have ever heard of. ”
    He shrugged. She leaned forward and touched the tattoo over his heart. It showed a red winged dragon. She looked at it for a long time thoughtfully then got up and poured herself another goblet of wine. “Do you remember when we first met?” she said.
    “It was downstairs, two days after the feast of Saint Verma; you asked me what I wanted.”
    “And you said you were trying to avoid being drawn into sin.” She smiled. “I was good-looking in those days.”
    “You are very beautiful,” he said.
    “By your voice I thought maybe you were a churchman,” she said. “One of those visiting scholars who are always coming to the Prelate’s court. I thought maybe you were one of the ones who liked to break their vows of chastity.”
    “So the idea of sinning with a priest excited you . . .”
    “You know it did . . . but that was just the first look I took at you. A second told me you were no priest. Too dark, too fierce, too dangerous.”
    “There’s plenty of priests who fight, Lila. Your own Prelate for one. In his youth he put both his neighbouring barons to the sword and took their lands for the Holy Sun’s church.”
    She got up and moved away from the bed, stood studying him in the mirror, as she adjusted her hair. She looked over at his gear, the saddle-bags, the sword. She looked at the amulets hanging over the bedposts.
    “You know the last time, after you left, they found a dead body up in the Cathedral.” She spoke a little too casually and Kormak was immediately on his guard. He kept his face bland. “Really.”
    “They found several actually. A prominent churchman. The architect of the Cathedral. Two well known local merchants.”
    “All dead?”
    She looked at him cold-faced, tilted her head to one side as she judged him. “They were all beheaded. As neat as if the Council’s executioner had done it. As if they had been found guilty of some crime. Whoever killed them did everything but stick their heads on a spike over the gates for the peasants to gawp at.”
    He would have done that too if he’d had the time. He kept his face bland. She paused for a second, took another drink. “Another merchant vanished, was never found. He left town in hurry, apparently very scared. The same night you left,