Read Balanced on the Blades Edge #2 Deathmaker for Free Online Page A

better... goo?”
    Her tone was full of wariness. She knew his name, the rumors surrounding him. She had to be uneasy down here with him, understandably so. He wasn’t sure how to settle that unease. He also hadn’t figured out how he was going to get her to his ship, short of overpowering her and knocking her out. As long as they were close, and she didn’t have the range to throw something sharp at him, he figured he could overpower her, but that seemed a poor reward for the help she had provided so far. If she hadn’t been there when that guard had rounded the corner, he would have aimed at Tolemek instead of her. Waiting for his goo to work at the end of the hall, he had been too far away to do a thing about it. But simply letting her escape into the jungle? He didn’t know if he could do that either.
    “I prefer science to magic when it comes to my goos,” he said. “Not that I know enough about magic to know if it has any useful applications, regardless, but this—what I seek here—is to help another, not myself.”
    “Some lover or relative sick?”
    “What?” he blurted, almost tripping into one of the pockmarks in the floor.
    In the darkness, he couldn’t see the shrug, but he heard it in her voice. “They say some of those old sorcerers were healers.”
    Tolemek’s first reaction was to stop talking or to brush her off. Her guess had been a little too close—not even the captain knew what exactly he was searching for and why. But maybe he could lessen her wariness by talking about his family, making her believe that no matter what she had heard, he was simply a person.
    A person who wanted to entrap her for his own gains. He grimaced at himself. Why was he even worrying about her when he had reached the room he had been scheming and planning to reach for the last three months?
    “Not a lover,” he said by way of completing the conversation. “My little sister.”
    “Oh.”
    Tolemek fished out a match from his pouch and found a wall to scrape it on. The flame flared to life, revealing walls full of stone bookcases, empty stone bookcases. A few old tables had been pushed to the sides of the big room, and an expanse of mostly bare floor lay before him. The mold wasn’t growing on it, but piles of fine gray dust undulated across it. Rat and snake tracks disturbed it in places, but there was so much that it hadn’t been scattered completely by time or visitors.
    Frowning, he crept forward and crouched, touching his finger to one of the piles. His match burned down, searing his flesh and going out, at the same time as he realized what he was looking at. Not dust. Ashes.
    He snarled and slammed his hand into the hard floor. He couldn’t see them now in the darkness, but he felt the ashes stirring and rising into the air, tickling his nostrils with the scent of ancient books and scrolls long destroyed. Oh, he didn’t know how long it had truly been, but it didn’t matter if it had been a year or hundreds of years. He was too late.
    * * *
    Cas waited in the darkness beside the doorway. She wanted to get going—this far under the main fortress, she couldn’t heard the alarm anymore, but she wagered it was still going on, and it wouldn’t take long for guards to find that huge hole in the wall. Still, she suspected Tolemek would want to search further, if he had made the journey here specifically for this. Whatever this was. That room hadn’t looked promising from what she had seen in the handful of seconds the match had been lit, but maybe there was more to it.
    “We can go,” he said scarce seconds later. He hadn’t even bothered to light another match.
    Cas thought about telling him she was sorry he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but she wasn’t sure she believed his story about wanting to help his sister. For all she knew, he was looking for something to turn into a weapon. “I’m ready.”
    He took the lead again, and she followed him through the dark passages, using a hand on