Lords of Rainbow Read Free

the carriage.
    Part of her wanted to laugh, while on another level another part of her became very cold and separate. It, that part, was moving high above the trees on soft cobweb wings . . . while she struck and parried and then thrust with her blade, feeling the resistance of flesh, feeling steel tear through muscle and grate against ribs.
    And then the pale-cloaked man noticed her, paused, and it nearly cost him his life.
    Or maybe it hadn’t. She merely saw his stilled face. And in those instants of rich detail, she observed the shape of gloved hands, dying half-light reflecting off jewels clustered on fingers.
    “ To your right!” she cried, and he turned to avert and parry a Bilhaar sword. Then, like a methodical butcher, he slashed in turn, and the black man fell.
    A nobleman. Bejeweled fingers. A self-confident fool. Where in hell are your bodyguards? thought Ranhé while she cut the throat of the black assassin before her.
    No. . . . Do not think of it, of what you are doing.
    The gray man dispatched the last one of the pairs. The fifth had disappeared into the forest, she knew. His task as the last living of his set would be to report back, and to take the honorable Guild punishment—or so rumor had it.
    Silence, and the world came back into focus. The clearing was littered with anonymous black bodies. Ranhé became aware that she breathed again.
    Death  . . .
    Breathing harder than she, the gray stranger moved to dismount. He crouched, saying nothing, and wiped his fine blade on a Bilhaar’s dark garments, then walked quickly to calm the two horses of the carriage. His own trained mount followed like a familiar.
    Stench inside me, so familiar, death .
    Ranhé also dismounted, and bent to clean her own blade against a dead man’s black cloth. Because of the gray stranger’s turned back, his lack of acknowledgment, she wasn’t sure how to proceed.
    Temples pounding.
    Slowing down.
    She sheathed her blade, then remounted and slowly rode up to the carriage, her horse fastidiously stepping over the bodies and sniffing nervously.
    “ May I be of any more help, sir? Are you hurt?”
    Her voice had an uncanny quality. So steady, so matter-of-fact after what had just occurred. She heard its falsity as she was floating one moment outside her body, and the next, inhabiting it. Her tone was polite and cloaked, the kind she used with prospective customers.
    The gray one had dark long hair. It spilled like a bit of the road darkness past the folds of his hood. And as he turned to regard her, there was at last a face, one of aristocratic refinement.
    “ Thank you for the help already given, freeman,” came a voice devoid of emotion. “And no, I am unhurt.”
    The keenness, the elegance of his features, as if wrought of candle wax. Impossibly distant. It reminded her of temple statues with their beautiful chilling asexual faces. She tensed with the effort of remembering what bloodline might have produced this likeness. For, this man’s Family was surely one of the Noble Ten. His eyes were absolutely opaque in expression.
    He is taking my assistance for granted. And he doesn’t yet know I am a woman. Not that it really matters.
    The closed curtains in the carriage window moved, and a veiled matron looked out.
    “ Is it over?” sounded a shaking old female voice. “Elas?”
    “ I am unhurt, aunt, everything is fine. They are gone.” He spoke to reassure, this man called Elas. How differently he addressed the old woman.
    “ Ah—all Tilirr be praised!” the dame exclaimed, breathing with difficulty and holding a kerchief to her veiled face, as though she could shield herself from it all.
    Stench is rising . . . .
    “ You’re both very shaken, aunt,” he said immediately. “And Lixa? They didn’t touch—”
    “ No, of course not! No one got through.” The old woman sputtered with indignation at the very possibility. And then she noticed Ranhé.
    “ Good evening, madam,” said Ranhéas Ylir.