Read Petrodor: A Trial of Blood and Steel, Book 2 for Free Online Page B

courtyards. For people who knew Petrodor's alleys, and had the vision to move through them at night, the city lay exposed.
    The alley turned uphill again; a steep, ragged stairway between walls so close Sasha had to keep her arms tight to her sides. A cat sprinted before them in panic, and leapt a wall. Rhillian jogged easily, leaving the steps where they curled around a large tree growing from the rock, finding foot holds on its big, exposed roots. Then she paused, and pointed at the step ahead with her blade, for Sasha's benefit. When she hurdled the step in question, Sasha vaguely saw a trip-string in the gloom, doubtless rigged through a gap in the neighbouring wall, where it would ring a bell and warn of wraiths passing in the night. Petrodor's alleys were full of such devices, more use against night-blind humans than serrin. Sasha pointed to the step for Errollyn, hurdled it and jogged onward up the steep, winding stairs.
    They crossed several narrow roads that wove their way across the slope, past brick and stone buildings with shutters tightly closed. The din of voices and music seemed to grow louder as they climbed. Further along one road, Sasha saw a great mass of people gathered outside a bar, with fires, music and dancing. At another crossroad, a stray dog barked madly and charged them, but Aisha hit it with a stone from her pocket and it sprinted yelping in the other direction. Its companion, however, chased them up the alley, growling and barking, and another of Aisha's well-thrown stones only seemed to infuriate it.
    Aisha prepared her blade, but Errollyn pushed back past her, fake-stepped left, then hook-kicked with his right, crunching the dog so hard to the head it fairly spun about and rebounded off the wall. It lay still, then tried to rise, then fell again.
    “Errollyn!” Aisha said with annoyance, moving back to kneel by the scraggly, bony animal. She felt its neck, then made a face, drew her blade and cut its throat. “Why not just use your sword? It's kinder.”
    “My tel'shan'til needs practice,” Errollyn explained easily. It was a form of unarmed combat, mastered in Saalshen, like the svaalverd. Aisha wiped her blade on the dog's mangy coat and waved them onward, irritated. The path was briefly wide enough for two and Sasha fell back to Errollyn's side.
    “And here I thought you loved animals,” she remarked. She had no great love of the stray mutts of Petrodor, but Errollyn's methods seemed needlessly callous. Sometimes, he just seemed…unpredictable. Dangerous, even.
    His green eyes flashed in the dark as he looked at her. He was not a small man, nor a weak one, yet his presence seemed to fill more of her awareness than mere size could explain. “The strays around here are diseased,” he said. “The aggressive ones are either so hungry they're insensible, or possibly rabid. In the wild, nature culls the weak and sick. Here, they are kept alive.”
    “You could have used your sword,” Sasha echoed Aisha's scolding.
    “When a mouse attacks a bear in the woods,” Errollyn continued, “and the bear swallows the mouse whole, do you feel sorry for the mouse?”
    “If one happens to have a soft spot for suicidal mice, I suppose one might.”
    “There's a great difference,” Errollyn replied with a smile, “between those who say they merely love nature, and those who proclaim to learn from it.” Sasha gave him a long, wary look…but then the path was narrowing again and she had to move ahead to keep in single file.
    Finally, as the noise ahead seemed at its peak, Rhillian paused beside a wall where the growing trunk of a tree had cracked the bricks outward. Rhillian climbed with ease while Sasha sheathed her sword and clambered over branches in Rhillian's wake, then along the wall to a flat rooftop. Along the hard tiles of the rooftop, then a stiff-fingered climb up a short length of vertical, stone wall, and pulled herself over the top.
    Here was a wide, flat roof of paved tiles,