City of Steel (Chaos Awakens Book 3) by Heath Pfaff Read Free Book Online

waiting."
    Xandrith took the map and slipped it into a pocket on the sack-pack.  Without another word he oriented himself west and set off from the makeshift camp.  He had a great deal of walking ahead of him, and a hostile town waiting for him at the end of his journey. 
     

Chapter 2
    There and Back Again
    Xandrith made fast time across the uneven terrain of the countryside.  Over the course of his career as an assassin there had been many occasions when he'd been forced to travel roads of his own making, and so he was quite adept at finding the fastest route across even the roughest countryside.  The trip that had taken the caravan men nearly thirteen hours to make only took Xan nine hours.  The day was still bright when he found his way to the walls of Marekston. 
    He snuck in silently, moving cautiously towards the town as he broke free from the surrounding wilderness.  He'd spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the best course of approach, and his natural tendency for stealth had won out over a more direct approach.  If the caravan men had been turned away with only an arrow for warning, then Xan doubted he would be met by a more friendly welcoming crew.  At least the caravan crew were human, and Xan doubted they'd come marching on the small town with anything like hostility.  Xan figured he would look just a tiny bit more suspicious.  No, if Xan was going to get inside Marekston and get supplies, he was going to have to do it using his own methods.  It would be best if they never even knew he'd come and gone. 
    The assassin watched the top of the wall as he slid from tree to tree, bush to bush, inching his way closer to the wall. Annoyingly, his less than solid shadow-companion accompanied him. Young Xan walked out in the open at his side, striding about like there was no chance anyone would see him, which there wasn't. Only Xan could see the other Xan, but that didn't make his brazen attitude any less disturbing to witness in comparison to Xan’s careful stealth.
    "I don't like the looks of this." Young-Xan said as his older, more trollish duplicate was dashing behind a low piece of brush. "Or the sounds of it." He added after a moment. "There are no fires burning in that town, and I can't hear anyone. This isn't a huge town, but even in these troubled times there should be some sign that there are people inside."
    Xan didn't answer himself. He didn't want to risk the noise. His younger self was right enough about the depth of the silence around the town. It was early enough in the day that people should have been going about their tasks. The smith should have been working his anvil. The mills should have been grinding the last of their grain from the silos, getting them ready to welcome a new year of harvest. There was none of that. The town was dead, and it smelled dead too. Yillan Reach had reeked far worse, but the smell wafting from Marekston was no more comforting. 
    "Maybe the trolls have already taken this place?" Shadow Xan spoke the words that old Xan was thinking. "Even they should make more noise than this though, and why didn't they come out and attack the caravan men that'd come calling? Sure a single arrow was fired, but trolls would have done much more."
    Xan nodded his agreement as he slipped forward into another piece of cover just at the base of the town wall.  He had a sinking feel that he wasn't going to like what he was about to discover. 
    "We could just pass the town by and keep heading north. We don't owe anything to that caravan." His younger self spoke the thought that was drifting through his mind in hopeful tones. "In a couple of days they'd assume we were dead, and they wouldn't be any worse off than they were before we came to them." He sounded nearly cheery about the thought.
    Xan glared at himself with hard eyes.  What would Kassa think of him if he did something like that? Xan’s mind jumped from his various conversations with the woman, her darker moments