Death Comes To All (Book 1) (10 page)

"Eat
as much as you need," Tara told him. "Tomorrow evening
you'll have plenty of time to gather more food. I'm not sure if there
are oranges there, mind you. I've occasionally used them to flavor
the meat I'm cooking, but I don't really eat them, so I don't really
remember if there are any orange trees there or not. I know for sure,
however, that you'll be able to find something you can eat. There
used to be farms all along here. You'll find that in most of the
places we'll be stopping for camp you can gather some sort of food. I
know where we are stopping tomorrow is right beside a small lake. I
fish there when we are in that area. There are plenty of edible
plants Malik has gathered there while I fished, so I know you'll find
something."

Even
with such assurances, he stopped after only two more oranges, which
was a generous enough meal even for him. He was used to eating more
greens and grains, and the rich citrus fruit was hard on his stomach.
As he lay down to sleep for the night, he heard Trick fly down from
the trees somewhere above them.

Trick
hasn’t come down to join us all day. Surely the animal must be
hungry.

Drom
had seen the animal eat regularly throughout the day when Malik was
still calling himself Garan, yet somehow the creature had gone all
day without eating as far as he had seen.

I
wonder just how intelligent Trick really is. I’ve never heard
of a pet that could follow instructions well enough to ignore its own
needs.

As
Drom fell asleep to the sounds of crickets and the rustling of small
animals in the wilderness around them, he wondered once again why he
trusted his new companions at all. Everything he knew about them
suggested that they were not people he should really associate with,
and yet for some reason he found he trusted them completely. He just
couldn't understand why.

Chapter Five

Drom
woke up to find his companions already awake and ready to leave. He
sighed. He had hoped that somehow this day might start out
differently than every other morning had over the past several weeks.

I
should have known better,
he
thought.

Today,
just like every other day, they would walk until nearly sundown.
Then, before he would be allowed to eat whatever he could scrounge up
for himself for a meal, Malik would instruct him in the use of the
sword.

Most
of that time he spent monotonously hitting small trees with sticks.
Malik insisted that he needed to create muscle memory, so that should
he need to use his weapon in a real confrontation he would do so
naturally. Or so that was the theory at least. Still, Drom was
skeptical. How smacking a tree over and over again was suppose to
make him a good swordsman was beyond him.

Thankfully,
Malik and Tara had not lied about the amount of food they would find
along the path they followed. It seemed that no matter where they
were there was always something to eat. Drom was sure he wouldn’t
have made it if he had to go on sparse rations. He never knew what he
was going to get each night, but there was always something, and it
was always plentiful.

Tara
ate nothing but meat. Her species, it seemed, was entirely
carnivorous. Trick was the same way, eating small scraps of meat that
Malik gave them when they stopped for the night.

Drom
was amazed by the small animal. Even he had trouble going for such
long periods without eating, yet the dragonling stayed away from the
group every day, right up until nightfall.

Perhaps
Trick hunts for himself during the day, eating small rodents and the
like,
he thought.

If
that was the case Drom never saw him doing it.

Malik
would eat nearly anything put before him. It didn't seem to matter in
the slightest if it was cut from an animal or grown in the earth.
Drom couldn't even tell if the human preferred one over the other. He
seemed to enjoy them both equally.

At
least Malik won’t ever go hungry.

Drom
had thought that his father grew nearly every fruit and vegetable
worth eating on his farm, but Malik knew about all sorts of edible
plants he had never even heard of. He had eaten things on this road
that were unlike anything he had ever tried before. Not all of them
were things he wanted to try again, but there were others that were
quite tasty.

With
two carnivores in the group they had to both hunt and fish regularly.
Every time the group caught an animal they had to kill for meat,
Malik made Drom do the killing. The sorvinian man hated every minute
of it, but he understood why Malik made him do it. He wanted Drom to
get used to death. He wanted him to understand the need to take life,
whether to feed his companions or to protect them.

Drom
still wasn't sure if he could take the life of a humanoid, regardless
of which race that victim belonged to, but for the first time in his
life he began to consider it.

Perhaps
in an emergency, if someone I care about was being threatened or my
own life was in danger.

Even
then he wasn't sure he would be able to bring himself to do it. He
just hoped it didn't become necessary, at least not for a long while.
The very thought of it put his nerves on edge.

The
first time the group stopped at a still body of water, Drom stared in
amazement at the stranger staring back at him. His face was bright
red, as was the false hair on his head. He remembered that Malik had
said the skin on his face had been pale white before. Now with the
fur shaved off the sun had burned his skin terribly.

It
just won’t stop itching!

In
time, Malik assured him, that burn would darken into a tan. Until
then he should try not to scratch it, the assassin told him, or the
skin would start peeling before it was ready.

Every
few days Tara shaved his face again. If he wanted to continue to look
human he had no other choice. Once the fur grew back it would be
obvious to anyone who might see him that he wasn't human.
Unfortunately, the constantly regrowing hair irritated his itching
skin all the more.

Within
the first week or two Drom felt certain that Malik knew exactly where
they would be stopping on each leg of the journey. The campsites they
stopped at were never right on the road. Sometimes they were as much
as a half mile into the woods to one side or the other. No matter how
hard Drom looked he could never see any sign that would indicate a
trail, but somehow his companion found these hidden clearings night
after night without fail.

His
training was going remarkably well, if Malik's observations were to
be believed. After the first week Malik started training him in hand
to hand combat as well as his sword training. There was far more to
fighting than Drom could ever have realized.

It
was not just throwing a punch or a kick like he would have thought.
Each movement, even a small change in the position of his feet, would
make a huge difference in how an attack presented itself.

Where
he hit was just as important as how he moved, he learned. Malik
taught him each point of weakness, which bones could be broken, the
position of organs and how to strike them, and every conceivable way
to inflict the greatest amount of damage possible.

His
own techniques were not the only aspect of combat he was taught.
Malik also taught him how to predict his opponent’s movements
based on how they positioned themselves. Malik informed him that,
once he was better at it, he would know what his enemy would do three
steps or more before they did it.

For
the most part Malik barely said anything at all outside of his
instructions, choosing instead to simply watch as Drom practiced each
movement over and over again. Drom wouldn't have believed that his
training was really going well at all, however Malik rarely corrected
his stances or movements any longer, so he must not have been doing
too badly.

The
main changes that Malik would make was in his footwork. He would
often step just a little bit out of place when he moved forward or
back. It didn't seem to make much of a difference in his attack
techniques, but Malik insisted on correcting it each time.

Drom
decided on a new name for himself during the first week of the
journey. He called himself Roland, after a fictional hero in one of
the stories his mother told him as a child. Unlike her histories,
which she insisted were true tales from ancient days, the tales of
Roland had no basis in truth. They were tales that were once used to
teach morals to children, which is the reason his mother had told
them to him.

Roland
had not been like most heroes, not any Drom had heard of anyway. He
was not good looking or overly skilled. Instead he was just a normal,
average man, who found himself in a difficult situation, overcoming
it through shear force of will and more than his fair share of luck.
Drom hoped that, should he find himself in a similar situation, he
would fare as well.

As
expected, his companions had no difficulty with the new name. For
people who shed their names as quickly as snakes would shed their
skin it would be quite easy for them to deal with his name change.

The
background he chose for his new persona was not that different from
his own, as Malik had suggested. Since he now appeared human he fed
into that, claiming to have come from a family of human farmers in
the north. That way, should he for some reason be questioned, his
story was more likely to be believed. After all, he really had grown
up on a farm, and knew plenty about that lifestyle.

"We
should reach the city in about three more days," Malik announced
after days of saying nearly nothing at all. "We'll need to leave
the road about a mile up ahead to gather herbs that grow in the woods
there. Not many people know about them and they're difficult to get
to, so I'm almost certain they'll still be there. We can sell them to
merchants in the marketplace once we are in the city."

"I
thought you were meeting your contact in the city?" Drom, now
Roland, questioned. "Why do you want to gather herbs to sell?"

"It's
part of our cover Roland," Malik explained. "If we try to
go in without anything to sell it might look suspicious. When you
create a cover it has to be believable enough that anyone who looks
won't find anything that could give you away. I'm posing as a
merchant who sells black market gems. The herbs are what he sells
openly to avoid suspicion."

"So,
what you're telling me is that your cover story needs supplies for
his cover story?" Drom, now Roland, asked. "That sounds
incredibly confusing. How do you keep all of your stories straight?"

Malik
grinned. "You don't get confused when thinking about people
you've known for a while, right? It doesn't matter how detailed their
life might be, you still know their story and can remember it fairly
well. Knowing your persona isn't much different. I'm not telling a
lie so much as creating an entire fictional person. Details I keep
vague, so that way no one can see through the person I am at that
time.

"In
this case though, you're basically right. This persona, Malik, does
need supplies for the lie he creates to hide who he is. The real me,
the assassin that exists behind all those covers, stays hidden under
so many layers that anyone looking into him won't look far enough to
ever learn the real truth. If someone looks into Malik, they might
see through the man who sells herbs, but underneath they'll find
someone who sells gems illegally. They would never have a need to
look further, so they’ll never find what lies under all of
those layers. Understand?"

"I
get it. Instead of just hiding behind one person, you hide who you
really are behind several. Even below the assassin that Tara and I
have come to know, I'm willing to bet that there are even more
layers. You won't ever let anyone know the real you, will you?"

Malik
laughed heartily. "Of course not. It would defeat the entire
purpose of hiding my identity if I did. Tara has come closer than
anyone to understanding who I really am. Now you know almost as much
as she does, though she knows more of my aliases than you do. Of
course she's been with me longer, so that's to be expected. The only
other people who know anything at all about me I haven’t seen
in years, and most of them are dead. Who they were isn’t really
important."

"I
take it that it's safe to assume that you have the gems to sell as
well?" Roland asked, almost more of a statement than a question.
Malik didn't bother replying. The answer was obvious.

Of
course he does.

The
group continued down the broken road, until by some unseen sign Malik
turned them into the woods to their right. With Malik leading the
way, they pushed their way through the thick brush. Roland kept his
eyes open, watching the ground and trees to either side of him.

He
had heard tales of huge serpents that lived in some of the swamps and
woods in the areas. From what he had been told about such animals
they were supposed to live further south, in and around the deep
swamps, but he had no intention of taking any chances. Certainly
there were rattlesnakes and moccasins to be found nearby, and they
were dangerous enough to warrant caution.

Malik
threaded his way through the thick scrub for nearly an hour, down a
path only he could see.

He
certainly wasn't lying about this place being difficult to reach,
Roland thought sourly, as the bottom of his tunic caught on the low
hanging branch of a tree and held. The fabric tore before he could
stop himself from going any further forward. With a disgusted snort
he glared down at the rend.

I’ll
need to repair it when we stop for the night,
he thought, hoping
he would remember to do so. He was certain that
Malik
wouldn’t be very happy if the uniform he lent him was destroyed
while they stomped through the woods.