Read Online The Sword by Jean Johnson - Free Book Online

this time starting in the master chamber above the hall,” he informed them bluntly. “Gods know if they’re anywhere else, too. We’ll have to do a full sweep.”

FOUR
    S ome of the others swore, or started to swear. A couple of them eyed the woman in their midst and elbowed their fellow siblings to shut them up. No two looked exactly alike, although according to Saber, they were supposed to all be pairs of twins. A bit of squinting in the fading light allowed Kelly to pick out the shapes of noses and brows and chins. She discovered they all had a very similar cast in their facial features, though hair and eye colors varied from twin to twin.
    Well, at least they’re trying to be gentlemanly and polite in their language around me, Kelly thought, wondering at the same time what a mekha-whatchamacallit infestation was and how bad it could possibly be. Just my luck to uncover the nest personally.
    â€œMorg, do you have a piece of chalk?” Saber asked one of his brothers.
    â€œAlways,” the one she recognized admitted, though his long, light brown hair was now down out of its knot, and the headband was gone. He dug a small white rock from one of the pouches hanging on his belt and tossed it at his brother. Saber squatted and sketched out a near-perfect circle on the surface of the largest uncracked flagstone around them, marking almost to the edge of the weeds bordering the stone. Straightening, he picked Kelly up by the ribs and set her in the middle of the smallish circle before she realized his intent.
    â€œYou will stay right here and not move until I give you leave to. Su-bah makadi deh, ” he added as he pulled his hands away. He lifted a chalk-smeared finger and pointed at her. “Do not move.”
    â€œWhat did you do?” Kelly asked warily, glad it was a warm evening. She tugged her pajama top down a little more, then folded her arms across her breasts to hide them further. Most of the other seared spots were mid-thigh or lower, and there was that rip he’d made earlier under her armpit, but that one over her ribs was embarrassingly close to revealing something she didn’t want revealed. She might be borderline starvation-thin, but her endowments weren’t all that starved-looking.
    â€œYou are in a repellent shield. So long as you stay within the circle, you will be perfectly safe.”
    â€œWhat’s a mekha…mekhuda—?”
    â€œA mekhadadak is a carrion-eater, and more,” one of the other brothers informed her, the most blond-haired of the eight men. “Nasty things, too.”
    â€œThey were designed over a thousand years ago to eat the bodies of the fallen in a massive war—ecologically sound cleanup,” the one clad in lightweight, dark-dyed velvet added wryly.
    â€œBut some twisted bast—uh, impolite person of a mage,” a slender third corrected, as a fourth elbowed him sharply in the ribs, the largest one of the eight with a massive, muscled figure, “—remade some of them to seek out the living, not just the dead, and eat them. They are very efficient eaters.”
    â€œWe have enemies who would see us dead, and not just exiled,” Saber added grimly. “Though thankfully few of them. One of those enemies must have conjured a nest of them into the castle…but since we don’t go into every one of the hundreds of rooms here, they apparently haven’t been drawn out by our movements until now.”
    Kelly thought about being attacked while she had been using the facilities and blanched a little. “Ah.”
    â€œIf she faints, I’m not catching her,” one of the brothers muttered, about as surly sounding as Saber had already proven he could get. This one had midnight black hair and a somewhat leaner figure. He didn’t even deign to look her way, this darkest-haired brother.
    â€œI’m not going to faint!” Kelly snapped, shoving her hair back from her