Chapter 7 - Part 2

“So,” Monti said, pouring himself a glass of white wine. “You want to know how it went tonight?”

“What do you think?” Lo’Paih responded, her eyebrows raised. The beautiful woman wearing a full suit of armor was the niece of Viceroy Du’Bray, and it was she who had escorted the warforged unit here a week ago.

“I think I have a warforged unit who has had his branded numbers smoothed out and erased. A warforged unit who was made without armor for some reason. A warforged unit with incredible skill and intellect who has been learning what I have been teaching him faster than any other student I have had.” He sipped his wine. “A warforged trained in the monastic arts. A warforged who you claim is six months old, but judging by his paint cannot even be a month old since his forging.”

“You weren’t asked to be clever, Monti,” she said, drawing her sword.

“Oh, put that away,” he snickered. “I’m too valuable to your uncle alive, you can’t threaten me. It’s not that many monks of the Mockery that House Cannith assists in faking his death so as to escape the hangman’s noose. I love the new skin, by the way, looks real.” He drank some more wine. “Oh all right, quit scowling! He beat all six with some serious damage sustained, but that was only because one of the men snuck an acid knife into the training room. I suppose he’ll have to be punished.”

“Not necessary,” she said, sheathing her sword.

He stared at her, taking in her meaning. “Those men aren’t leaving this manor alive, are they?”

“And this bothers you?” she asked, a cold smirk on her face.

“No, I find it delicious!” he said, laughing. “Oh, but your House has become even more murderous than those with the Mark of Shadow!” He finished his wine, and poured himself another glass. “So am I to get any answers about my brilliant student?”

“No,” was his only response.

“Come now, the more I know the better job I can do,” he told the Cannith noblewoman. “The student-teacher bond is a very subtle and complicated thing, I need to know –”

“Stop it,” she told him. “Not only don’t I believe you, but my uncle told me nothing. The warforged is a mystery to me as well as to you.”

“Hm,” he said, while in his mind he thought, when your paranoid uncle trusts you more you will. Drinking more wine. “Well, I’m doing my part, do you have more of the antidote?”

She reached into a traveling pouch and tossed the monk trainer a vial. He caught it and pulled out the stopper, drinking it greedily. Cannith had injected something into him when they had first ‘recruited’ him, and he needed a dose of antidote every day to survive it. The one time he had given his handler an attitude about something the antidote had been delayed for two hours. For the first hour he was merely jittery and twitchy. The second hour was slow agony, a fantastic white heat traveling along his nerve endings.

He had been very, very obedient in the five months since. But he could never resist tweaking this young lady who always came by in her armor. She was too serious for a woman so pretty.