Читать «Rising Tide (зксм-1)» онлайн - страница 75

The women rushed into an alley to the left.

Laaqueel caught the corner of the building with her free hand and whipped her body around. The alley surprisingly turned sharply, almost switching back on itself to the right.

The woman who'd seen through Iakhovas's illusion reached for a perilously stacked pile of refuse at the side of a fishmonger's shop. Standing taller than a man, packed with fish tripe and bones from a few days' business as well as rotting vegetables and other garbage, the pile came down in a wet rush.

Battered by the garbage coming down on top of her and swarming underfoot, Laaqueel nearly fell. She caught herself on one hand and kept going forward. Huge rats came down in the refuse as well. One of them whipped through her hair in its fright, and two others clung to her body. She swept the one from her hair, then hurled herself up against the side of the building to knock the ones off her back.

The women continued to scream fearfully.

Hoarse voices shouted overhead, and a few lights came on. No one came to investigate and no one peered too closely from the windows above ground level.

The malenti caught up with the second woman first. She swung her sword, bringing the flat of the blade down hard. The woman stopped running at once, dropping to the ground and laying stunned.

Still in full stride, Laaqueel grabbed the other woman by her hair and yanked her from her feet. The woman came down hard on the muddy cobblestones. The breath left her lungs in a rush.

Breathing hard, her gills not quite able to meet the demands being made on them, the malenti held her sword under the woman's throat. She looked into the surface dweller's eyes, seeing the fear there and relishing it. Fear meant power.

Tell me-" Laaqueel gasped,"-tell me-what you saw!"

The young woman cried, tears flowing freely from her eyes as she shook her head and panted, "I can't."

Knowing the wererats were going to be on them within minutes, Laaqueel yanked the woman up and dragged her back to where she'd left the first woman. The malenti laid her sword on the ground and held the woman with one hand. She laid her other hand on the unconscious woman's face. She prayed in her tongue, the sahuagin clicks echoing in the alley even over the continued shouts by the people inside the houses.

In answer to her prayers to Sekolah and to the power she wielded in the Great Shark's name, the unconscious woman's face writhed with sudden infection-filled weals. As she finished the prayer, the weals erupted in bloody pus. The woman moaned with the pain even though she was unconscious, barely clinging to her life.

Laaqueel fixed her hot gaze on the woman and shook her. "Tell me!" she roared. "Tell me what you saw or she'll die in agony!"

It took two attempts for the woman to get any words out. "I can't!" she cried finally. "Tymora help me, what I'm telling you is the truth. I was doing a true seeing, looking at an object brought to us by a sailor who wanted to know if it had any magic about it. When we heard the screams coming from the harbor, I went outside. I didn't mean to see you."