Stasia blasted the door open with her shoulder, and Cyrus followed in her frenzied wake. Four men sat at a round table, scattered dice between them. Stasia went left, and so Cyrus went right, the unspoken plan between them made in an instant. The men scrambled to their feet, reaching for weapons and shouting curses, but it was over before it even began. He slashed open the nearest man’s throat, a much cleaner cut than what Lioness had torn. Then he buried his off-hand blade into the next man’s belly, pinning him to his chair. He hollered, blood seeping across his waist as he tried to pull it free. A thrust with Cyrus’s other blade, right to the heart, put an end to that.

The other two, arguably, fared worse. Stasia buried an ax into the first man’s shoulder, sinking it all the way down to crack ribs and have his arm dangle at a stomach-churning angle. While he collapsed and bled out, she faced off the lone weapon managed to be drawn, a slender dagger that couldn’t hope to compete against her axes. As if insulted, she pounded him to the bloody floor, hacking open his stomach with chop after chop until he stopped squirming.

“Where are the prisoners?” Cyrus asked. A fog settled over his mind. The blood and innards, while stark and horrifying to his eyes, weren’t real to him. He couldn’t dwell on those details, not if he wished to keep going. Had to push it deep down and far away. Had to be like the Ax of Lahareed and the Lioness.

“I’m guessing in there,” Stasia said, gesturing to the lone door leading farther into the small, squat building. After a quick check of her two kills, she rounded the table and kicked the pinned guard off his chair. The body landed with a splatter of blood. She quickly patted him down, then stood, a twinkle in her eye. No doubt she grinned behind her mask as she dangled a pair of dark iron keys.

“Hurry it up,” she said, tossing Cyrus the keys. “Get them marked first, then open the cell. I’ll wait for you outside.”

No amount of reasoning could completely quell his distaste for the deception. There were four of them in Thorda’s band of elites, but it was always the Vagrant who received credit for the work.

“Wouldn’t it inspire the people better if they knew there was a group of us working together?” he had asked Thorda after their first few missions. “Maybe even convince them we are the start of an army?”

“I don’t want them to trust groups and armies,” his master had explained. “I want them to see what one lone man can do, and then imagine what an army with you at the helm might accomplish.”