A long, white hand curled in the mud on Pritkin’s chest, I assumed grabbing onto his tunic or shirt, although it was impossible to tell. Gray gunk squeezed up through the king’s long, white fingers, like writhing worms. It dripped down his hand, and splattered the stones at his feet, but he didn’t seem to notice. His smile turned feral.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” he told the vamp. “It took twelve of your kind to find him in the hells and bring him out to me, for which they charged me a fortune—only for him to escape that very night. It’s taken me months to track him down, and in the process, he has killed dozens of my people. But I have him now—”

“You have nothing!” the vamp spat. “He is Rosier’s heir! If you think that slimy bastard won’t tear this world apart to find him—”

“Tear away,” Aeslinn said, glancing about contemptuously. “Who would notice? But I will have him, nonetheless. There aren’t many strong ones left—”

“Then you’ll have to take the weak,” the vamp said, and knocked his hand away.

“Have a care, demon,” Aeslinn hissed, his good humor suddenly gone.

“I am, and it seems that I’m the only one who is. This one goes missing, and you’ll give the whole game away. We’ve worked too hard to risk it all now—”

“We!” Aeslinn roared, the formerly porcelain face suddenly flushed and furious. “I do the work; I take the risks; I suffer the losses! What have you ever done—”

“Keep the demon council off your back? Else you would have been shut down, long ago. And likely skinned and eaten as well, but not like the gods do, elfling, so clean and pure. But raw and red and while you’re still thrashing—”

I never found out what Aeslinn’s reply would have been to that, because he didn’t get a chance to make one. Unless you count the grunt he let out before going to one knee. It took me a second to realize what had happened, to see the blood bloom on the light gray of his tunic, bright and red and surprising, to see his hand go down to the knife that Pritkin had just shoved into his belly.

It looked like the king had some kind of armor on underneath that tunic, which the knife had hit and then slid off. But Pritkin had gotten the weapon below it now, and was trying to slice upward, toward the heart, while the king struggled to hold him off until his dull-witted guards caught on. They did so a second later, belatedly realizing that the stinking mage had somehow grown an extra arm, which he was using to kill their king.

Everything abruptly stopped, as frozen as before. And I turned on the telepath, my heart in my throat. “What happened? Why did you stop it?”