Free Sword Empire by Robert Leader Page B

it.
    â€œHide yourself,” he commanded Sylve. “The Sword Lord Karn is a sick man and he will not detain Raven for long. He could return at any moment.”
    Sylve scowled. She did not like taking orders and this was her plan, but Tighe was a trained assassin and Doran had placed him in charge. She drew the long knife from her hip and then moved to conceal herself behind the tall curtains. It gave her a certain pleasure to hide there, standing over the fallen body of the hated brown bitch. If Tighe did his job properly, she would not be needed, and then she would be perfectly situated to slice the brown bitch’s throat before they left.
    Â 
    Maryam’s senses swam back slowly. The side of her face hurt and her head ached and she lay still to avoid aggravating the pain. She felt the wetness of blood trickling down her cheek and remembered what had happened to her. She felt her anger rising, but instinct warned her to remain silent and still.
    When her head stopped swimming, she carefully opened her eyes, just enough to give her narrowed slit vision. She saw the bare floorboards, a glimpse of the bottom edge of the tall curtains, and a black leather boot. She could hear nothing. She lay as if frozen and then risked opening her eyes fully. Her head hurt a little more, but nothing else happened. She could see no more than she had seen through her slitted eyelids, just a few more square inches of knotted floorboard and a little higher up the curtain.
    Very slowly, she turned her head a little toward the black boot. The black leather rose to a blue-skinned knee, and then there was bare blue thigh flesh, disappearing under a short leather skirt. She realized that Sylve was standing over her, and a glint of steel almost out of range of her vision told her that Sylve was holding a drawn knife.
    Sylve was silent and waiting, hardly breathing, and she had not been alone. Maryam guessed that the man who had accompanied Sylve was also silent and waiting, Out of sight from the main door in either the food room or the bedroom. They were waiting for Raven to return.
    Maryam steeled herself, and she too waited.
    It seemed an eternity before she finally heard movement at the outer door. Raven’s key clicked in the lock and she heard the door creak as he pushed it back without any need for silence or stealth. Above her, she saw and felt Sylve go tense.
    â€œRaven, beware!”
    With both palms flat on the floorboards, Maryam pushed herself upwards. The back of her neck slammed Sylve in the crotch and her shoulders butted hard at the taut buttocks. Turning her head in the same moment that she shrieked her warning, Maryam sank her teeth into the soft flesh of Sylve’s inner thigh and bit down with all the strength of her jaws. Sylve was knocked forward, out of the window alcove and dragging the curtains down with her.
    Raven froze in the outer doorway. He saw Sylve tumbling forward, and then Maryam rearing up behind her. Sylve still hung on to her long knife, and now Maryam was drawing a similar weapon from her own hip. In the split second that it took Raven to register the scene, he also recognized that the fighting women were not his immediate problem. Assassins rarely worked alone, and it was almost certain that Sylve had a partner.
    Raven stepped back a pace, and then leaped forward into the room with a complete head over heels somersault. He landed upright, and instantly leapt backward on his heels. He came to rest in the window alcove, facing into the room in a fighting crouch, his sword already flashing out from its scabbard.
    Tighe had charged out from the bedroom, sword drawn and lunging. He slashed only empty air where Raven had already passed, and then spun on his heel with the shock of impending death already in his eyes. Raven’s blade whirled, disarming the would-be-assassin and flinging the other’s sword from his grasp.
    Tighe snatched for a dagger at his hip and Raven calmly ran him