A Conspiracy of Whispers Page 3

  He could have imagined it, but he thought she actually snorted. At him. Thoroughly unprofessional for an assassin. She exhaled through her mask and raised the rifle again. “I have my contract. Your luck is about to get worse, altus.”

  The weapon came up and Galen tensed, trying to force the fog from his head. He could rush her, maybe make it before she pulled the trigger. He could probably disarm her, or at least take the shot somewhere nonlethal, but that would only leave him in close proximity with an angry assassin and still stuck in the wilds surrounded by possibly traitorous soldiers.

  “So’s yours,” he said and the rifle paused. He held her gaze across the glen. “There’s evidently a spot of mutiny going on in my camp. I’m the commanding officer. I’m guessing your contract didn’t mention that.”

  He held up his cuffs awkwardly. Her eyes widened, flicking momentarily to the pips on his collar, but she said nothing.

  “There’s probably more of them swarming over the area. Maybe you saw them,” Galen continued, keeping his voice calm, coaxing. “And if not, there’s a scouting unit loyal to me on its way. You won’t get five minutes from here without running into them.”

  It was a malleable interpretation of the truth. He had no idea how many of his men Henley had compromised for this little plot, and he was pretty sure Lyre’s scouts were miles to the south by now. But the nose of the rifle lowered a fraction as the woman turned over the information. Galen found himself again fixated on her striking eyes, mostly because they were the only exposed part of her. He wondered what kind of assassin bothered wearing a mask.

  She nodded dismissively to Henley’s corpse. “Stealth hasn’t posed much of a challenge so far.”

  “You’ll have to admit that I was a very helpful distraction,” Galen said dryly. He made an entreating step forward, but his assassin shot up onto a rock like a skittish cat. A skittish, murderous cat. He held up his hands again. “You’ve done me a favor here, whether you intended it or not. I’m a high-ranking officer in the Imperial army. I might be able to see that the Empire offer you a deal if you put down your weapon now.”

  “I know exactly what the doglords would do to me, thanks,” she snapped, confirming Galen’s suspicions that she was, indeed, Syndicate-born. Her gear and casual speak didn’t sound like any Syn military Galen had encountered. A mercenary then? Or a Whisper. She mentioned a contract, which narrowed the options. She considered him. “But perhaps I am interested in a deal.”

  Galen smiled, mind already imagining the look on his sister’s face when he gifted her a Syndicate assassin. He took a step forward, then abruptly halted as he encountered a gun again.

  “Congratulations, doglord. You’ve graduated from dead witness to live hostage.”

  Chapter Three

  This was a bad—no, the worst idea. This was the most horrible of all horrible ideas in all of the Syndicate. Olivia kept her eyes leveled on the altus’s broad shoulders as he stumbled over roots in front of her. He occasionally glanced back at her in that angry and perplexed way he had, liquor-dark eyes crinkling like she was an unruly puzzle piece, but he would only see her cold gaze. He wouldn’t see her worrying her lip raw beneath her mask.

  A hostage. She had an Imperial soldier hostage. An altus Imperial. He was unfairly tall, like most altus men were, but moved less like a lumbering bear and more like an ill-tempered wolf, stalking and growly at the end of his leash. It suited the wolf-head sigil on the shoulder of his military coat. Olivia vaguely remembered stories about the Imperial nobles who raised wolves as companions, just as crude and twice as cruel. Imperial altusii weren’t even civilized, as far as the Syndicate stories went, uncontrolled and running wild with their war games.

  And this altus was strong enough to stay upright when pumped with two hundred dram of suppressant, rather than curled up in a fetal ball like most sane creatures. She was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a strong, angry altus hostage. While she was a caricae-masquerading-as-genta nobody.

  She tamped down on the thrill that hummed up her spine as she thought about the danger. No. Not exciting. A terrible idea.

  But, if he was to be believed—and his dead comrades were quite persuasive—her way back to the border was cut off. She needed leverage out of here. And her hostage was drugged. Suppressed. She could handle this. He’d be sluggish while the drugs were in his system, and most important he couldn’t scent her. Even after the suppressant wore off, as long as she kept him at a distance and didn’t sweat too much—or, gods forbid, bleed—no one would be the wiser. She intended to be far, far away from this whole blighted country by the time those suppressants wore off.

  They’d been lucky so far, only facing hours of thick forest, trudging through the mist in mutually agreed upon silence. Olivia kept a wary eye, on alert for any sense of oppressive influence. Altusii, like caricaes, carried strong pheromones in their skin. But where caricaes could only draw in, pull, an altusii, with practice, could use his pheromones to push. An oppressive, influencing effect that had a persuasive effect on an unaware mind. It wasn’t mind control, precisely, but being too close to a pushing altus was an uncomfortable, anxious feeling. Uncomfortable for gentas, worse for caricaes. It was taboo to do in polite company, considered a form of assault in the Syndicate. But she’d had enough surly altusii approach her in bars, all swagger and push, to know what to look for. Staying alert required an exhausting amount of attention.

  Ahead, her hostage scaled the side of a gully, long legs bounding up the rocks easily, despite suppressants and cuffed hands. Olivia clicked her tongue and ensured the Imperial stopped in her line of vision, then used her free hand to haul her not-quite-as-long legs up over the rocks.

  He made a reaching motion as she approached the top, and it took a split second for Olivia to realize he was offering her a hand up rather than grabbing for her. She glared a line from his hands to his face until he twitched back.

  He frowned at his hands as she finished climbing. “We could move faster if you uncuffed me.”

  Before they left the clearing, Olivia had taken a fingerprint to verify the contract and then patted down the dead altus until she’d found the keychip. It was now stored somewhere on her person that the Imperial captain definitely was not getting his hands on anytime soon.

  Olivia kept on walking. “We could move faster if I shot you and left you in a ditch.”

  “And why haven’t you done that?” He tilted his chin at her. They were both keeping their voices low, which meant a whisper for Olivia, but the captain had this strange, soothing way of rumbling his words that made her stomach flip every time he spoke.

  “Leverage.” Doubt ate uneasily at her so she picked up her pace. “If we run across these rebels that dislike you so much, I’ll give you over wrapped up in a bow and go on my merry way. And if we meet your scout friends, I’ll trade your safety for the right to pass.”

  “And if we miraculously encounter neither?”

  “Then our business is concluded when I reach my destination and we part ways,” she lied.

  It was a solid plan. She would have felt better if she’d thought of it prior to sparing him. There’d been a moment, just there in that clearing, when she’d made the decision to pull the trigger. The Whisper order stipulated no witnesses. The captain had lined up so easily in her rifle sight, early light filtering through the raw twists of hair that escaped his ridiculous military man-bun. But her finger had tightened on the trigger and a wrenching feeling, an innate wrongness hit her in the chest. It was like she’d tried to punch her own stomach. Her hands had locked up around the gun.

  She’d had an altus lined up in her sights and she couldn’t pull the trigger. It terrified her. Whether it was nerves, pity, or some sympathetic baser instinct, it was the last thing she needed right now. Her fingers itched to dig into her pack and find her pillbox, swallow down the panic with a swig of water.

  The cap
tain huffed, snapping her out of it. “You Syns think everything is a neat and bloodless business transaction, don’t you?”

  The judgment in his tone was obvious, and Olivia bit on her cheek to smother the instinctual urge to defend herself, to win approval. Fuck approval.

  “I think I’ve already proved that I can handle a little blood,” she said. “I have no intention of vacationing in your backward country for longer than I need to.”

  “Backward? That’s clever coming from a country that corrals its citizens like so much cattle.” His lip curled as he looked at her. “Tell me, did your government discover you had a special psychopathy for murder as a child, or was it vocational training?”

  “I don’t know, did yours teach you to be an arrogant asshole?”

  “Me? I’m not the one who just murdered a good young man in cold blood.”

  “The good young man who drugged you? Or the one who was going to shoot you?”

  “You’re the only killer present I can see.” He looked at her, and Olivia knew that look, the look of wealth, assessing the value of the trash stuck to the bottom of their shoe. “You might not understand the value of a life, but any Imperial soldier deserved better.”

  “Deserved?”

  It wasn’t until the captain’s back hit the tree and his dark eyes startled wide that Olivia realized her hand was fisted in his jacket. Her pistol pressed under his chin. His cuffed hand snapped around her wrist, tense, then light and cautious. Olivia released his jacket with a snarl and shoved, but this time it was like punching a wall. She wouldn’t catch him off guard again.

  Olivia took a tempering breath through her mask. She nudged his chin up with the gun. “I will shoot you if you don’t let go now.”

  “Hard to shoot with a broken hand.” He readjusted his grip. She could put a hole through his jaw but likely not before he crushed her wrist. Suppressed strength or not, he had the advantage up close.

  At least he did until a spark snapped the air, and he jolted hard enough to smack his head against the tree. He hissed, releasing her wrist to hold his side. A finger picked at the new burn mark in his shirt. Olivia stepped back and held up her free hand with a smile. The prongs of her stunbug poked above the edge of her sleeve, little blue lights arcing between them. “I did warn you.” It was worth burning through her single stun cartridge for the glare he gave her.

  “That’s a coward’s trick.” He grimaced and recovered from the shock too fast for Olivia’s liking.

  “Let’s just get one thing clear, doglord.” She took another step back for good measure. “I don’t want to know you, and you definitely don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “I suppose not.” A perplexed frown worked between his brows as he considered her. Cuffed hands twitched. “You could start with a name, you know. Mine is not doglord. It’s Galen.”

  He was trying to humanize himself. It was almost quaint that he thought that would work. Still. “Just Galen?” Olivia was not above finding out the value of her hostage. If he was of some notable noble house perhaps she wouldn’t shoot him at the border, after all. The Whispers might pay extra for a worthwhile ransom.

  He studied her before they started hiking again. “Galen de Corvus. And don’t think I didn’t notice you’ve not answered in kind.”

  Olivia ignored that. She didn’t recognize the house name, but the de confirmed her suspicion that he was an Imperial noble of some kind. A minor house, perhaps. “So a doglord, after all. Where’s your faithful hound?”

  The Imperial—Galen, Olivia tried hard not to give him a name but now it was difficult—had carried anger like armor since they met. But it shifted then, and just for a moment worry twisted his lips. His answer was soft. “I don’t know.” His eyes searched the forest around them. “I sent her out to range at sunrise, before seeing to Henley—your dead target.”

  “Her? Your hound is a she?”

  The corner of his lips softened and Galen narrowed his eyes in a way that seemed surprisingly fond. “The she-wolves are the strongest, where I come from. Zahira is the fastest hunter at...” But then, just as quickly, his face fell. “She should have found me by now.”

  “Perhaps his allies caught her.” The words came out harsher than Olivia intended them. She gritted her teeth behind her mask. There was no point in sympathy for a likely dead beast.

  But it appeared to only echo what Galen had considered. His eyes clouded. “Perhaps.”

  The lengthening shadows made an excellent excuse to fall silent and they both retreated into their thoughts, though Olivia’s worries now included straining her ears for rustling leaves that signaled an angry wolf coming to rescue her master. Rebels and scouts and altusii and wolves. This was supposed to be such a simple Whisper job.

  The sun was nearly lost beneath the treetops when Olivia heard it. She froze, and Galen’s footsteps fell quiet a second later. “Do you hear that?”

  That was faint, at first, a twinkle beneath the thrum of the forest at twilight. Olivia switched to her rifle as silently as possible and nodded Galen ahead. As they cleared the rise, it gradually resolved into a pale tinkle, delicate and glaringly artificial.

  Olivia’s feet turned to lead. When she finally found her voice it was a hoarse whisper. “Blue hell.”

  The rise revealed a narrow deer path that, Olivia had intended, would lead them down to the main road. Metal stakes dotted the path, the quick-deploy kind that Imperial military used for temporary fencing. Each reached about seven feet in height. But instead of steel mesh, the stakes braced broken corpses. Half a dozen in all. Their faces were turned toward the sky. No rope, no chain held them in place. It took Olivia’s mind a moment to realize they’d been impaled on the stakes. The smell of pierced bowels made the extent clear. Their limbs hung at odd angles and moved liquidly in the breeze. As if their dark green military fatigues were all that held the dead men together. In a detached moment she identified the source of the tinkling: the sound of brass military buttons colliding in the breeze.

  These were Imperial soldiers.

  A cracked sound came from her right. Galen’s face was jagged and stiff, horror locked harshly away. His eyes flicked back and forth between the stakes before he suddenly darted forward. He began to run down the corpse-studded path.

  “Hey! Stop!” Olivia swung her rifle up automatically, even if her mind hadn’t quite caught up. “Capt—Galen!”

  Using his name brought him up short. He froze, and Olivia could see his broad shoulders trembling from the effort. He barely turned his chin toward her, voice a half growl. “There’s a survivor.”

  Olivia’s eyes followed where he pointed and her stomach lurched. On one stake, a body twitched just slightly out of movement with the breeze, head twisted.

  Blue hell. She was reduced to a strangled whisper, half inaudible beneath her mask. “Go.”

  Galen must have heard her, because he nodded once and darted to the soldier. By the time Olivia reached him, he had the soldier’s head in his hands. This stake was slightly lower than the others, perhaps one of the last erected in a hurry, but Galen’s enormous height allowed him to barely reach. Galen was murmuring low, soothing words to her in a language Olivia didn’t understand.

  Olivia came up short a couple yards away. She took in the stake slicked with black blood and shattered lay of the soldier’s legs. Visible skin was speckled with the telltale red blossoms of internal hemorrhaging. She’d invited enough death to be familiar with its knock. There would be no survivors here.

  The soldier was half-conscious at best. Her head lolled and twisted between Galen’s hands and she kept hoarsely repeating a foreign phrase over and over again. Shi vas tyu. Shi vas tyu, regni. Imperiatsu, regni. Imperiatsu shi vas. Galen’s jaw worked and he swallowed thickly. His hands fell away from the soldier’s face.

  Olivia cleared her throat but didn’t approach. “What’s she s
aying?”

  “She’s asking to be allowed to die.” Galen didn’t look at her. She could hear bones creak as he clenched his fists viciously onto his thighs.

  “Allowed?”

  “Permission and...” Galen hissed an injured sound. “Assistance.”

  Olivia couldn’t speak around the ball of horror in her throat. Galen twisted toward her and Olivia nearly took a step back. Whatever had shuttered his dark gaze before was gone and what was left was sharp, raw, and cutting. His eyes howled rage and pain enough to make Olivia’s heart stutter. He swallowed again before he spoke. “I was her commander. It’s my responsibility.”

  Galen silently held out his cuffed wrists. Right, he would need both hands to...help the soldier. Olivia wanted to refuse, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even hesitate, not with the dead crowding around them. She fished out the keychip and gripped it tight until she could guarantee she could undo the cuffs without shaking. They came off with a click. Galen didn’t thank her but turned his back on her again, rumbling soft, reassuring words to his soldier. Olivia clenched her teeth and closed her eyes to what would follow.

  It wasn’t enough. She’d weathered the corpses. She’d managed to keep her head bobbing above the horror and the stench. It was the sound that did it. The muted, crisp knock of bone and twisted flesh that was the staccato end to a life.

  Acid lanced up her throat and suddenly her mask was too hot, smothering on her face. She clawed it off. In a half turn, half stumble, Olivia reached a tree and lost her stomach in the undergrowth.

  She took a moment to steady herself. She was still crouched by the tree, wiping the taste from her mouth when she heard Galen’s low, tired grumble. “An assassin with no stomach for killing.”

  Irritation helped her bite back the relief that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to approach her. “This isn’t any kind of killing I deal in. This is torture.”

  His expression was stiff, locked down again, but eyes lighted on her naked face. She remembered her mask a moment too late. The light in his eyes did a slow reeling in, from haughty anger to something more complex. His face took on the look you’d get biting into a new food and encountering an unexpected spice. He studied her face intently, as if memorizing her. It felt intimate, grotesque in the shadow of corpses.