undying legion 01 - unbound man Read Online Free Page A

smoothing out its creases with slow, practised motions.
    Weeper’s tears.
    Side by side, there could be no mistaking it. Despite the differences in language and letterforms, the penmanship was the same: precise shapes, unusually heavy downstrokes, graceful loops. The thickness of the pen, the colour of the ink; even the finely-textured, uncommonly light-toned paper was the same.
    He sucked in a lungful of air, the breath shuddering in his chest. They told me you were dead. Found floating in the river with your throat slit. His hand trembled on the desk, brushing the old ransom note askew, defying his efforts to still it.
    He turned the letter over, but the seal showed no crest or identifying mark, just an abstract, maze-like pattern. Still no name. Inside would be different, though. The letter itself would surely be signed. All he had to do was open it, and —
    “Arandras? Did I happen to — oh, thank the gods, there they are.” Grae crossed the floor to Arandras’s desk, gazing at Yevin’s letters with the rapture of a man who had just found his coinpurse. Instinctively, Arandras shifted his hand to conceal the unfolded note. “Thank the gods,” Grae repeated as he gathered up the bundle. His gaze fell on the sealed letter before Arandras, and he reached out an expectant hand.
    Slowly, feeling as though he were watching from over his own shoulder, Arandras held the letter out. “I thought I recognised the seal on this one,” he said. “Can you tell me who sent it?”
    Grae took it and glanced it over. “No, sorry. Could have been someone in Anstice, but I can’t be sure. Most of these are from Anstice.” The letter disappeared into his bag. “These are all for Yevin. Yevin Bauk, one of the scribes up at the Arcade? You could ask him.”
    “Perhaps I will,” Arandras said. Alive and in Anstice, but still no name. Never a name.
    The courier nodded and left, but Arandras sat there a long while, staring at the old note and the space on his desk where the letter had been. The note was short, its brief message burned into his memory. Even now, five years on, it haunted his dreams; and when he encountered it there, the final line was always enough to tear him awake.
    Speak of this to nobody, or your wife will be dead by morning.
    And every time he woke, Tereisa was still dead, and he was alone.
    •
    Murder always left Eilwen Nasareen feeling ill.
    She shifted in the saddle of her Guild-owned horse, rubbing ineffectually at the ache in her bad leg. Today was her fourth day on the road after a successful trade visit to Spyridon, and the third since the kill. Her victim’s face had been bandaged. She’d never seen his eyes. Yet her stomach had been churning ever since, and even now, as she approached the end of her journey, her gorge rose at the memory of what she had done.
    And of the four of them, she had killed only one.
    Grimacing, Eilwen urged her horse on, her eyes narrowed to a squint against the bright sun. Fields of beans and barley crowded the road, the golden stalks of the latter waving gently in the faint breeze and filling the air with their grassy scent. Behind them stretched pastures dotted with recently sheared sheep, some grazing in small groups, others standing apart as though ashamed to be seen without their fleeces. Despite the day’s warmth, a sympathetic chill stole into Eilwen and she hunched lower in the saddle.
    Ahead lay Anstice, almost close enough to smell; its rooftops, spires, chimneys and redoubts all reaching skyward like trees competing for sunlight. The great forest of masonry sprawled across the landscape, spilling past the outer wall and into the surrounding farmland. She’d often felt when returning from a journey that the city had spread a little more in her absence, like a single living entity growing ever more corpulent.
    One day it will grow so fat that the earth will collapse beneath it, leaving nothing but a vast chasm, she thought, and shivered at the imagined