‘Sin?’ Kre wondered what Cooter meant by that. Maybe it did have something to do with gambling after all, since greed was one of those exceptionally deadly sins that was mentioned in sermons every now and again at the local chapel.
“Don’t worry Mr. Cootsman,” Kre whispered, “I’ll get you out of here.”
The younger man grabbed the older man’s arm and tried to throw it over his shoulder in an attempt to help him up and ideally out the window to safety. As Kre gripped Cooter’s wrist, he almost recoiled from the feeling of wrongness. Cooter’s arm felt like a string on a lute that had been wound too tightly. The worst of it were the constant yet invisible muscle spasms that were cascading up and down Cooter’s body. When he felt those, Kre left out a soft gasp and immediately released his grip, afraid that he would overwhelm that tension and snap Cooter’s arm like a twig.
Steeling up his nerve, Kre told himself that he was being ridiculous and he needed to get Mr. Cootsman to safety as fast as possible. He reached back out to grab at Cooter’s other arm, the one with which he was holding the small hand crossbow. For a brief moment, Kre wondered why the muscle spasms hadn’t caused Cooter to fire the weapon. As he examined it a little closer, he noticed Cooter’s trigger finger was laid alongside the foregrip of the crossbow and had not been resting on the trigger like most amateur shooters might do.
“It’d be like carrying a twenty stone sack of flour you know. Dead weight. He can’t move a muscle.” Kre froze as the sound of the raspy voice behind him. He hadn’t even heard a footstep or the creak of the floorboards to warn him that the intruder had managed to sneak up behind him.
A rough gloved hand reached around from behind Kre and grabbed him by the front of his neck. Another hand shoved Kre forward until he was stooped over Cooter’s body, their eyes no more than a few finger’s breadths away from each other.
At the same moment, from the corner of Kre’s vision, he could see a dull gray piece of metal flash in the dimness of the room. “Maybe now, Ser Sandiscoot, you will tell me where the roster is, or I torture the kid,” the intruder advised as the edge of a knife blade pressed into his cheek, just under his right eye.
The sad look in Cooter’s eyes returned, staring up at Kre as if in apology. “Ser Sandiscoot?” Kre asked, clearly puzzled by the idea that Terry Cootsman had a different name, a name with a knight’s title at that.
His assailant laughed once, sharply, and slid the knife a fraction of a finger, opening up a long shallow cut on Kre’s face. “The other side of this blade is the poisoned side Terync. Tell me where the roster is and he goes free with just this small scratch that could have been from shaving before he had any hairs to cut.” The hand gripping Kre around the neck tightened and Kre started to feel dizzy from the choke hold.
Cooter’s eyes changed rapidly from sad to insanely angry. Still holding the old man’s wrist, he felt the arm rise slightly. The look on Cooter’s face, or rather on Ser Terync Sandiscoot’s face, was one of pure hatred and complete concentration. Kre felt moved by the effort and used his own strength to bring Terync’s arm up.
It was an act that was utterly inconceivable in the mind of the assailant. Neither the old man nor the boy should have been able to move Terync’s body with the amount of paralyzing toxin flowing in his veins. Given that, the assailant had no idea that the hand crossbow was now tucked under Kre’s armpit. Still, despite Cooter’s best efforts in getting his arm to move, he was unable to do the same with his trigger finger, which was still plastered against the side of the crossbow.
Kre felt the knife slide away from his face, and he thought that it meant a reprieve of some kind, but it was not to be so. The blade returned to rest just a bit higher than before. This time, he felt a slimy coolness along with the metal of the knife.
“Ten seconds Terync,” the assailant warned. “A boy of his size might just completely choke on his own spit with the smallest dose of this stuff.”
A wave of fear and terror erupted across Kre’s mind. He now realized how close he was to being killed, or worst yet, tortured and then killed. The immediately of that death caused a lifetime of mental images to flash in his imagination. The last one was, of course, of this situation now. “Oh… assassin, not sin!” was the only thing that came out verbally from that barrage of mental flashes.