The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) by Glenda Larke Read Free Book Online Page A

drunken sailors walked by. When we surfaced for air some time later, he said, ‘Lord, Blaze, you’re almost enough to make a man think of settling down—’
    ‘Almost,’ I repeated dryly, and he had the grace to laugh.
    ‘Be careful, firebrand,’ he said. ‘I’d hate something to happen to you, I would.’ He smiled a farewell and disappeared into the darkness.
    The rest of that night I spent in a succession of bars and shabby holes where the swillie was barely drinkable, the company barely tolerable, and the information non-existent. No one knew where I could buy a Cirkasian slave. The slavers themselves, usually so very eager to make a sale, simply shrugged and said they had no such merchandise. When I tracked down a few more of the seamen from the slaver ship that had come in from Cirkase the day before, hoping they would open up now that they were away from the ship’s officers, not one of them admitted to having had a Cirkasian female on board, alive or otherwise. I tried bribery, I tried making them drunk, I tried tricking them into saying what they didn’t want to say—and got nowhere. Maybe they were too scared to talk. Maybe they’d had a dunmagic seal on the subject placed on their lips. Probably the latter; around every single one of them I caught the sickening whiff of the red magic…
    I set off for The Drunken Plaice before dawn, and almost didn’t get there at all. Of course, having made it quite clear that I had enough money to pay for a prime quality slave (a lie), I suppose I must have looked like a plump sea-trout for the gutting. Few men expected a woman to be able to fight, and fewer still expected anyone at all to be able to stave off six armed thugs.
    However, I didn’t carry a sword for nothing. I was well-trained, and nothing if not experienced, in the art of street skirmishing, and I had the advantage of carrying a Calmenter blade.
    A Calmenter sword is at least a hand-span longer than an ordinary sword and you have to be tall to be able I wear it, let alone fight with it. Even someone as tall as I was had to wear it in a harness on the back and reach for it across the shoulder. If it had been forged from ordinary steel, it would have been too heavy to wield properly, but Calmenter steel was actually a secret alloy as light and as sharp as the double-edged shaft of a horned-marlin, and even more deadly. I could make it sing when I put my mind to it.
    And being attacked by six men on a darkened street put my mind to it.
    They came at me out of a side alley with their swords already drawn, all six of them together, which was their first mistake. I could see from the clumsy way they crowded themselves that they lacked training. I half turned as if to run, which enticed the nearest of them into a lunging attack. Then, instead of fleeing as he expected, I side-stepped his thrusting blade and brought the heel of my left hand up into his nose—hard. Before the others had time to react, I had my sword in my right hand and was driving it past the body of this first assailant and into the chest of the second. With his view blocked by his friend, the second man never saw it coming and died on the spot. I hadn’t really expected to kill him, as the thrust had been more or less blind, but he was undoubtedly dead.
    I stepped back, and so did the others. The first man was clutching at his face, his eyes blurred with tears, blood pouring out from beneath his fingers. He reeled, half stunned, and was out of the fight. The other four hesitated, more cautious now. I demoralised them still further with a showy display of swordplay, weaving the blade back and forth through the air, smiling ferociously as I did so. It was all playacting, but in the dim light I hoped it looked formidable; if the sword had been made of Souther steel, I would hardly have been able to lift it in one hand, let alone make it dance. At the same time, I manoeuvred myself so that I had the wall of the building at my back and they