For as long as he was moving quickly, Simon stayed orail. After that, he made his the slope, stig to the rgest rocks he could. Despite the fact that they’d fired two volleys, and he’d made a big show of being hit ohey still waited an awful long time before they started to fan out and desd down the slope.

  They definitely know they should be afraid of me, he said, repeating his earlier assertion now that he saw more evidenbsp;

  Ohey were moving, he stopped moving and waited for the man to e toward him. He’d po draw his bdes immediately, but instead, he found himself studying the man’s armor. It was irregur enough to make him a merary, but there were enough pieces of leftover Ionian kit, including a well-bed breastpte, to mark him as a former soldier.

  His features, too, were Ionian rather than Murian, which he’d holy expected. A bunch of army veterans? He woo himself as he waited for the man to pass by his nearly invisible shadowy form. I wonder which general it was I pissed off.

  No sooner did the man move past him than Simon pulled his sword and swung it with both his hands at the back of the man’s neck. He had just enough time to turn at the sound of metal scraping oher but not nearly time to dodge before Simon shattered his cervical vertebrae and dropped him like a sack of potatoes before he could make a sound.

  The group’s line was diffuse and tinued on without him, but for a moment, Simon ighem. Instead, he pulled out his skull-marked dagger and embedded it in the man’s throat, just above his colrbone, seeking to drai few drops of his life. This was going to be ugly, and if there was ever a time when he o feel a little younger and more eic again, it was this.

  Simon held his bde there for the length of tebeats until he felt the flow stop. That was enough for the rush to fill him. Though part of his mind said that he shouldn’t do this with everybody, another part of him hungered for it. Even with the metal as a filter of sorts, drinking in so much pure human life energy was far and away better than bleeding goats htering goat men.

  It leasure he’d denied himself for decades, and now he craved it. In the short term, though, the only way to push that craving away was bloodlust. He approached the sean more cautiously, but now there was a certain looseness in his steps that hadn’t been there in a long time, and Simon was slitting the sean’s throat before he knew he was in trouble.

  As his dagger drank deep a sed time, he regretted not doing this more often. He might have only drained six months of life from the first man and three months from the sed, but at the moment, the iy of it was enough to make him feel like a man of half his age, and with a burst of speed he no lohought himself capable of, he raced toward the arget.

  Simon took out four of them and was almost on the fifth before someone shouted, “It’s not him. Bastard got away!”

  That warning was all it took for the fifth man to see the shadow of death approag for him. He didn’t get to shout in arm before Simon took his head off, but he did get to parry twice. Once high and once low. Each of those bl through the empty night like a bell.

  “He’s out there!” someone shouted. “He took out Leo. God’s Above, Leo and Philip both!”

  They were o now, but Simon didn’t care. He heard a few crossbow bolts ricochet somewhere behind him to both his left and his right. They had no idea where he was. They were just firing blind.

  Even worse for them, he decided, was that he was having a great time. He bolted toward the one, only det to weave to the right enough to kick up a spray of scree before weaving back to the left. The result was that his sixth oppo was fag ehe wrong way when Simon kicked the back of his legs, dropping the merary to his knees long enough for Simon to plunge his sword down through his colrbone and cleave the man’s heart in two.

  This time, he didn’t use his dagger to drink the man’s life force. He was already buzzing with energy. Maybe even with too muergy. He would regret the way he was using his vampiric bde when this was done. He’d promise himself that he’d never use it again, but that wasn’t quite true.

  The truth was that he’d never use it again unless someone deserved it. Murder was wrong. Even murdering bandits and drunks was wrong. Murdering people like the Unspoken might even be wrong in some circumstahey might be awful, but at least they meant well in theory. In their minds, they were trying to save the world.

  As he sidered this, he ran toward the seventh man, even as he was running away from Simon. He wasn’t running away from him specifically, of course. He couldn’t see Simon. He was running to get into formation.

  Assassins armed with poison and a pn that was trying to get him alone so they could take him out without ever having to risk their own necks? Their lives were forfeit. He hadn’t been this angry since he’d nailed Varten’s father to a door with a crossbow of his own.

  Simon hadn’t hurt anyone in years. He hadn’t killed a human sihe bandits had tried to interrupt his time spent teag Bertrand to make art. He was retired now. He taught kids how to read, and someone had hired these pricks to take him out and steal the rest of the time he might have shared with his son?

  “Monstrous,” he spat as he shoved his sword through the man’s back, sending him troubling down the slope.

  There were four left noart of Simon wished he could take prisoners for questioning, but given the power of magic, he khat would be a fatal mistake. A talented warlockcould make his head explode with a word.

  Well, that’s probably a bit extreme, he decided. If they could have dohat, they would have skipped the crossbows.

  That thought put prisoners ba the table, but he still decided that it was best not to risk it. Truthfully, he didn’t know if that was because he just wao kill them or not. He supposed it didn’t really matter, not after one of them cast a fire spell, sending a gout of fme arg out into the darkness.

  The four of them stood in a cirow, shoulder to shoulder, practically daring him to try all four of them at o was a bad bet. Even as energized as he was at the moment, he knew he had trouble taking on three men on a good day as he was these days.

  “Tell me who put you up to this!” he yelled out as he ducked behind a boulder, in case a bolt of force shed out at where his voice had been.

  “He’s here!” the you of the four called. “Ennis will—”

  “Show some spihe older man growled, sileng the junior soldier before shouting. “Nothing personal. We were hired for a job, and clearly, we bit off a bit more than we could chew.”

  Simohe silence reign for a moment, trying to decide which spell he should kill them with and if he should do it o a time or separately when the man that seemed to be the leader spoke again. “I’ve got some information, and I’d happily trade it for our lives.”

  There were some tense whispers theween the leader and the mage. At least Simon retty sure it was between those two. It was too far away for him to say for sure.

  “I ’t say I trust those that use magic so fgrantly,” Simon called back, moving slightly after speaking again.

  “You know, I ’t say I bme you,” the man he’d been talking to said right before he drew his sword and put it through the neck of the mage, leaving him to fall to his knees and choke on his own blood. His hands were now free, and he held them up in a gesture of surrender. With a word, his two remaining men did likewise. “What say we talk like men, then, and I tell you exactly what happens—”

  He never fialking. The mage had been silenced and killed, but death did not e soon enough, or perhaps it did, and what happened was triggered by his death. Simon couldn’t say. Either way, the ground around the three remaining meed in a vicious firestorm, and when it was done, everyone was dead.

  “And that is why you don’t try to take prisoners,” Simon told himself.

  After that, he didn’t even really want to approach the bodies. He just sat there for a long time, running the se over and ain in his head. Eventually, his spells wore off, and sometime after that, when his stolen energy started to fade, he went to retrieve his sword.

  He tried to think of a way that he should have hahis differently or better, but really, he couldn’t. He decided to wait for dawn to iigate the corpse of the mage and instead busied himself with the corpses he’d killed earlier that night.

  He found gold in every man’s pouch, which was unusual. However, the fact that it was her Ionian, Brinish, nor any other kingdom he reized almost certainly meant that it was Murani, which told him any number of things at that moment, and all of them were terrible.

  Although he searched the st bodies ohe sun , he found no smoking guns. In fact, he became more certain thahat the magic that had tied up loose ends so ly was triggered by the mage’s death precisely because of how little evidence was left behind. He eventually found the mage’s amulet, but the forces it had eled were a charred ruin, and it offered no clues about how it worked.

  Simon walked back to Ionar that m, a day earlier than pnned. Even though he found no trouble at any of the little vilges he went back through on his way to the pace, he stayed ever vigint, going so far as to buy a Shepherd’s colorful wool poncho to look less like himself.

  Just because he’d survive one assassination attempt didn’t mean he’d survive ahe whole way back, he worried about who else might have been killed, and he feared for the lives of both Seyom ahena. Ultimately, though, those fears were unfounded, and he found the pace little ged from how he’d left it.

  Seyom ughed at Simon’s ridiculous outfit, but when he saw the storm clouds in his expression, he quickly stopped ughing. Simon didn’t tell him anything, of course. Only that “my outing was a bit more exhausting than I was expeg, that’s all.”

  Once he was shooed from the room, he id out to the Queen what had happeo him. He told her a bit of a toned-down version, of course, because she would have to tell it to other people who didn’t know what he was capable of. Still, her hrew with every word, especially after he told her of the mage that had self-destructed and showed her the s his thugs had been paid in.

  “This will be war!” she swore.

  Simon sighed at that. He o y down. Now that the emergency was over, he could feel the cravings for more life force crawling under his skin like ants. He needed a week to himself just to zen this shit out of his system. He wasn’t going to get it, though, not with everything that was happening.

  On the plus side, now, I’m definitely a year or two youhan I was before all this bullshit, he thought, trying to find some way to tamp down all the emotions that were threatening to boil over inside of him.

  “It probably already is war, truthfully,” he replied, “Even though I wish it wasn’t. If I had died, they would certainly have used my ck of cil to vince you to join the winning side, but if that is impossible, then a surprise attaewhere on the northern border is probably only a matter of time.”

  “Why would the Murani want to fight us anyway,” she answered with a shake of her head. “We’ve dohing to them.”

  “Ionar is just territory to be quered,” Simon expined, “And in this case, the territory is particurly valuable because it allows them to outfnk their oppo via a dozen different passes. Brin holds the line because it is so narrow, but if they had to defend everywhere at ohey would surely fall.”