The Silver Tongued Devil Chapter 9: Chapter 9 - Honor-Bound

Read chapter 9 of The Silver Tongued Devil by The Vilkas on NovelPedia.

The second morning came in layers of noise and bone. First came the coughs. Dry hacking from the far end of the barracks, answered by a wetter one two bunks over. Then the shuffle of wool and leather, the scrape of calloused feet on stone. Someone cursed softly when they swung into the draft from the slit window. The air had that same thin, mineral edge as yesterday, cutting through sleep like a saw through rotten plywood. Every bruise I had pulsed and moaned as I rolled in my one-man cot. My wrist hummed, ribs ached, and my ankle felt like it had been used as a hinge in the wrong direction. Under all of that, the Level 4 leftover sat like someone had scooped out a handful of whatever counted as structural filling and not quite put it back right. The rumble from the deep stone was gone. Or hiding. Hard to say which was worse. Merrik's shadow fell across my bunk. "Up," he said. Spear in one hand, the other palm thumping my shoulder. "Slope won't check itself." "I vote we let it," I muttered, but I swung my legs over the side anyway—the cold floor bit through the thin layer of whatever passed for socks here. My head did that slow tilt thing when I stood up—less roller coaster than yesterday, more like a ladder with one loose rung. The mailbox icon pulsed top-right. Quiet. Watching. No new text. So. Still provisional. Still tracked. Still here. Serh stood by the door again, leaned into the stone like she was bracing the whole mountain out of habit. Bow on her back. Quiver at her hip. Eyes doing that slow, methodical sweep of the room that made you feel like a line item in a ledger. She jerked her chin toward the gear racks. "With me," she said. No one needed to ask who she meant. ~ The armory nook felt even smaller with three bodies in it. Spears and short bows lined the wall in crooked rows, each one showing scars—nicks in steel, grips darkened by years of sweat and oil. A couple of short-hafted axes hung near the door, their heads stained with old rust and newer things. My peg still sat on the far end, empty. The borrowed spear from yesterday leaned against it, haft smudged with dried wolf blood and my own fingerprints. Serh looked from the spear to me, then to Merrik. "You saw his throw on the retreat," she said. Merrik's mouth twitched. "Ugly," he said. "But it landed." That was one way to describe braining a wolf with a rock on the way back. The memory of the impact lived in my shoulder still—a jolt that had bypassed words and gone straight to the part of me that knew good from bad sound on a job. "Stone killed it from a bad angle," Serh said, as if ticking off a column. "Not nothing." She turned to the racks, sliding a few pegs aside. Metal clicked. "Spear is fine on clean ground. Our slopes are not clean." She pulled something down and tossed it, hilt-first. I caught it out of reflex. Short sword, not some fantasy greatsword. Blade maybe two feet long, single-edge, with a hint of curve. The grip was wrapped in dark leather that had seen enough hands to remember them. Weight settled into my palm. Different from a hammer, but not alien. I rolled my wrist carefully. The balance point sat a hair closer to the hilt than I expected. "Closer work suits you," Serh said. "Walls, doors. Wolves on your chest." "Besides," Merrik added, "less chance you pitch yourself off a ledge trying to play at spearman." He ducked his head slightly, like he was expecting a boot to find his shin for that. It didn't. Not yet. I turned the blade a little more, feeling the way it wanted to move. "Lighter than my roofing hatchet," I said, "but not some paperweight." That got me the barest ghost of a smile from Merrik. From Serh, nothing. Yet. She crouched by a lower shelf and pulled out a narrow leather strip with loops stitched along it. Two short knives sat in the loops, blades slim and thick-spined, edges clean. Not kitchen knives. Purpose-built. The kind you didn't leave stuck in meat if you meant to get them back. "These," she said, holding the bel