The Executioner's Blade (The Executioner's Song Book 3)

  The Executioner’s Blade

  The Executioner’s Song Book 3

  D.K. Holmberg

  Copyright © 2021 by D.K. Holmberg

  Cover art by Felix Ortiz.

  Design by Shawn King, STKKreations.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author’s Note

  Series by D.K. Holmberg

  Chapter One

  Finn lingered at the edge of the street that led to Declan Prison, working through the series of questions he’d ask to find the missing girl. The prisoner had posed a unique challenge. The prison towered in front of him, a simple stone building that took up most of one block in this section of Verendal. He stared at it for a moment before moving along the street toward the entrance to the prison. Iron doors blocked access to most, though there usually weren’t many people interested in heading into the prison. Today was different.

  A woman and a small child stood off to one side of the street, watching the foreboding doorway. The woman wore a tattered dress, one that had been patched many times, while the boy had cutoff pants and a scrap of cloth that served as a shirt. Neither wore shoes. Were it late spring or summer, such dress wouldn’t be out of place, but as the weather had started shifting colder and the occasional snowflakes fell some evenings, their threadbare clothing left much to be desired.

  The child struck a chord within him. Finn hated seeing children in the streets like that. Hungry. Poorly dressed. Ignored by the city around him.

  The woman noticed him and they scurried away, disappearing into the shadows of a neighboring alley. Finn still remembered the alleys of the city from his time as a thief, so he knew where those particular alleys would lead. Not anywhere suitable for a child. All he could hope was that they managed to find the warmth of a fire, a compassionate person who might offer them some clothing and food, perhaps even shelter for the night.

  Finn jogged to that side of the street and reached into his pocket for a stack of coins. All he had on him today were silvers, so much more than he once would have carried.

  He looked into the depths of the alley. They were still there. They had to be.

  He stacked the coins on the ground. “For you and the boy,” he said, calling along the alley. There seemed to be a faint shuffling sound. “There’s a place nearby, the Carina Inn, that doesn’t overcharge for meals. They’ve got clean beds. Ask for Berthel.”

  Finn waited. It was more coin than he should leave, but seeing the boy…

  He turned away and headed back across the street and to the prison. Pulling the ring of keys from his pocket, he sorted through them until he came to the key for Declan, stuffed it into the lock and twisted.

  Finn took a deep breath before heading into the prison.

  The air inside had a different feel to it from outside. The prison itself wasn’t heated. That by itself added a torment. A soft stirring of air fluttered past him as he stepped across the threshold and pulled the door closed, locking himself inside once again.

  “You still not used to it?” Gord, one of the iron masters standing near the door, asked Finn. He wore the black leathers of the guards, with a smear of what Finn hoped was dirt on his face.

  Finn grimaced and let go of the breath he’d been holding, inhaling the smell of feces, rot, and hopelessness that permeated every corner of the prison.

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” he said, heading past the guard.

  Getting used to it meant that he would be spending more time there than he wanted. It was bad enough that he had to come for questioning.

  The prison was poorly lit. Mostly, that was by design. The effect was intended to be disorienting to all who came to the prison. An occasional lantern illuminated the hall, giving off a pale light that barely revealed the dark stone. Shadows slithered between the lanterns like something alive. There was a time when that would have disturbed him more than it did now. Truth be told, it still troubled him a bit.

  Finn contemplated heading straight toward the man he had come to question, but decided Meyer would be irritated if he didn’t at least ask a few questions of the warden.

  Stopping at the warden’s office, Finn knocked and waited.

  “Come in,” a gruff voice said from the other side of the door.

  Finn shifted the keys in his pocket. He suspected he had a key that would let him into the warden’s office. That wasn’t something he had ever tested, nor something that he thought he should test unless there was a real need, but it was a strange feeling to know that he could go anywhere within any of the city’s prisons.

  When he entered, he closed the door behind him. “Warden James.”

  The warden looked up from a stack of papers. The topmost page appeared to be from the magister detailing the sentence of one of the prisoners.

  “Finn,” he said, smiling warmly, and setting down his quill. “Don’t tell me Meyer has sent you to question the new prisoner already.”

  “New?”

  There hadn’t been any word of a new prisoner. Typically, Meyer would get an accounting of all the new prisoners. As the lead executioner and inquisitor for the city, he was ultimately responsible for all the prisons within the city.

  “Ah. Not him.” Was that relief that swept across James’s face? Finn watched him for a moment, trying to gauge just what emotion James might be hiding from him. Perhaps none. He and James had become friendly over the years, even sharing a pint of ale on occasion. There weren’t too many people who wanted to spend time with an executioner’s apprentice, so finding those who did, and who were the kind of company that he wanted to be around, was rare. “You’re here for Holden again.”

  Finn drew a heavy chair away from the wall and perched uncomfortably, his feet tucked behind one of the many sculptures of the gods that littered James’s office. The office was not large. There was space for the desk cluttered with papers James had stacked on the surface, the only free area around the lantern that gave light to the room. A chair situated on the other side looked to be too big—and ornate—for the room, as if it were crafted by a master carpenter for someone in one of the nice sections of the city and confiscated to be brought here. A bookshelf next to the desk looked to be crammed in and almost unnecessary, considering that James didn’t have any books on it. What he did have were what looked to be small
sculptures. Finn had asked him about it once and learned they were items made by the prisoners that he’d pilfered from them over the years. Most of the small sculptures were carved from the stone of the prison itself, somehow pried free by the prisoners to work on during their confinement. In that way, James figured he had a right to those items. All of them were markers of power, and of the power James had over the prisoners he kept there.

  “Have your men been questioning him?”

  “You know that we wouldn’t do anything to disrupt an ongoing investigation.”

  Finn smiled at him. “I know you wouldn’t. Come on, James. I’m not Meyer. You can tell me what you’ve uncovered.”

  James watched him a moment. “You’re not Meyer, but you’re starting to act like him these days. Damn, Finn. When you first started coming around, you still looked like you’d rather be out in the streets. Now…”

  “Now what?” Finn asked carefully.

  “Now… now you belong. The Hunter.” He chuckled softly as he said it.

  It was a nickname he’d heard about in whispers. The iron masters didn’t talk too openly about it, but they did talk.

  It was a nickname that stemmed from the first case Meyer had assigned to him. It had been Finn’s opportunity to prove himself. He’d tried to take everything that he’d learned from Meyer in the time that he’d been working with him and use it to understand the reasons behind the crime. Understanding was key to ensuring the proper punishment was carried out.

  “Hunter is better than what I used to be called.”

  “What was that?”

  “Shuffles.”

  James tilted his head off to the side, grinning. “Shuffles? Why is that?”

  Finn held his gaze, saying nothing.

  “Come on. You can’t share a detail like that and not tell me why. There’s got to be a story behind it.”

  “Not so much of one that it matters. When I was working in the streets”—Finn didn’t bother to keep that a secret, since most knew of his time in the prison anyway—“there was a man I worked with who thought I made too much noise when I walked. Complained that I shuffled. Nothing more than that.”

  “Gods. That’s a terrible nickname. If it were me, I’d have wanted something more intimidating.”

  “That’s the thing about names in the street. You don’t get to choose them.” Not that Finn hadn’t tried to turn things so that he could be called something else. He didn’t want to be Shuffles any more than he wanted this new nickname. He wanted something that conjured an image that others might respect or even fear. At the time, that had been something like the Hand. Wolf. The King. All of them had names.

  “Well, now you’re the Hunter. Guess it could be worse.”

  “I could be called the Lion.”

  James sniffed. “That poor bastard,” he said, shaking his head. James shuffled a few pages and pulled another one to the top of the stack. “I know you probably don’t want to hear it, but you and he would have gotten along. The man could be a real bastard like you say, but he got answers.”

  “Meyer never cared for him.”

  “Meyer never had an apprentice until he got you. Had the Lion for a while, but that wasn’t a real apprentice. He was a journeyman before he ever came to the city.”

  Finn only nodded. There wasn’t any point in rehashing all that. The Lion was gone, killed because of the information that someone thought that he’d acquired, and left to rot in the river.

  “Your men haven’t gotten anything from Holden?”

  “Not much,” James admitted. “We’ve tried. Knowing the time is short, we’ve been pushing him, but he’s not the kind to break. As you’ve seen.”

  Finn sighed. “Then it’s back to work for me.” He got to his feet, and started for the door. “Who’s the new prisoner?”

  “Nothing all that interesting, I’m afraid. Archers brought him in earlier today, which was why I would have been surprised that you had heard something about him already. We’ve still been trying to process him before sending word to the magister.”

  And by processing, that meant James and his iron masters were trying to question the new prisoner. There were times when that helped and Finn could overlook it, such as when they were dealing with someone like Holden, who supposedly had captured a woman and had her hidden somewhere, but there were other times when James and the iron masters went beyond what they needed to do.

  “What’s he accused of doing?”

  “Cutpurse. Caught on the road outside of Verendal.”

  Finn paused and turned back to James. That was a strange crime for someone to come to Declan Prison for, which suggested there was more to it. “What else?”

  “There were bodies, Finn.”

  “Bodies?”

  James nodded, glancing to the page in front of him. “Three. A family. All left somehow dried out. They’d been dead for a while, from what the Archers said. This man carried them with him. Kept them in a cart.”

  Finn inhaled deeply and wished that he wouldn’t have. The smell within the prison got to him again. “I can question him when I’m done with Holden.”

  “You don’t have to do that yet. Like I said, we’ve still got to get him processed. I’ll send word like I always do when he’s ready.”

  Finn considered pushing but decided against it. Doing that would not only disrupt his friendship with James but it would put him in a strange situation of having to override the warden. As he remained only an apprentice and not the lead executioner, his responsibility was to report to Meyer and let him handle anything more that would need to be done.

  “That sounds fine.”

  “Do you want me to walk you down to Holden?”

  Finn chuckled. “I think I know the way.”

  He stepped out of the warden’s office, closing the door behind him. When he was out, he looked along the hall before heading toward the stairs at the end of the hall. From there, he went down into the depths of the prison.

  He stopped at one of the landings where Mather, a lanky iron master, stood guard. “Bring Holden to the chapel,” he said.

  The iron master nodded and hurried off.

  Finn turned and made his way toward the chapel. The room was a strange construct in the prison. The curved ceiling had been long before painted and worked with art of the gods. A small window high overhead let some light in, though this was filtered by the filth covering the window. A pair of small lanterns rested on a table at the far side, where the tools of his trade rested, the metal gleaming from the reflected lantern light.

  He’d spent quite a bit of time in this room over the years. Time had made this room familiar to him, but Finn had never gotten over what had once been done to him there and that he had to do something similar to those who were brought here.

  At least the chapel didn’t smell quite as bad as so many of the other places in the prison. There was only a hint of sweat mixed with what Finn had come to think of as fear. Mostly, that was tied to the men—and it was only men in Declan—who were brought into this room for their questioning. Almost all were afraid. How could they not be? Even the strongest eventually cracked there.

  The door opened, and Mather and another iron master guided Holden inside.

  He was a thin man with hollowed, almost haunted eyes. His pale brown hair hung limp in front of his face. The iron masters had to drag him into the room, though Finn wondered how much of that was because of what Finn had done the day before and how much of it was because of what the guards themselves had done during their questioning. He hoped they hadn’t been too aggressive. There was an art to interrogating men like Holden, and he didn’t want the iron masters to have interrupted that art.

  The guards settled him into the chair in the center of the room and strapped his arms and legs into it. Meyer rarely needed men to be strapped in, but Finn still preferred the comfort of having them confined like that. It made him feel more in control of the situation.

  “Thank you,” Finn said to
the iron masters.

  They stepped out of the room, closing the door behind them.

  When he was alone with Holden, Finn stopped in front of him and crouched down to look directly into his eyes. His shoulder twinged a bit with the movement, the result of the door-hanging exercises he’d been doing the evening before.

  “How are you doing today, Holden?”

  It wasn’t how he wanted to start the questioning. He needed answers—and quickly. A woman’s life depended upon it, but Holden needed the right approach. The problem Finn had was that he wasn’t sure he knew the right approach.

  Holden looked up and glared at him, though he didn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to need you to talk to me. If you want to get this over with, you’re going to need to answer questions.”

  “You don’t care what I have to tell you.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  Holden lowered his head again.

  Finn got to his feet and headed to the far side of the room, suppressing the frustration within him. “When you were here yesterday, we used the boots. I’d rather not have to do that again. To be honest, I’d rather not have to do any of this, but you haven't given me much of a choice.”

  He made a point of moving several of the implements around the table. It was a rare thing these days for him to need to use any of them. For the most part, he could start with the less-aggressive approaches and talk his way through what he might do so that they wouldn’t need him to step up to the next technique.

  Holden had proven difficult.