First Kill (3 page)

The sheer curtains prevented Kiam from seeing who the visitor was, but Grem’s obvious anger intrigued him.
Who could possibly impose on this powerful man so late at night, cause him so much anger and not be executed for his temerity
?

“What do you want?” Grem demanded of his visitor.

Clinging to the shadows, Kiam moved a little closer to hear the visitor’s response.

“Your answer, my lord,” the unseen man responded in a heavily accented voice. The man sounded like a Karien.

“What you ask of me is … impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible for those who believe in the One True God.”

“I cannot do what you ask…” There was an edge of desperation in Grem’s voice, something Kiam had never heard before. Grem Kannangara was a big, powerful man with a booming voice and a personality to match. This man verged on the edge of a quivering wreck.

“Do you need more proof of Xaphista’s power? Is not the fact that your only child currently dishonours your House with every breath she takes sufficient punishment for your reluctance to embrace the one true religion?”

“What you ask of me is too much. People will die.”

“Then I can only assume you enjoy the reports you receive daily, about your daughter’s stellar career as a whore.”

Grem’s expression was tortured. “What if I announce I now worship the One God … surely that will be enough?”

“The One God demands you deliver the Trinity Isles to him,” the Karien priest said—Kiam reasoned the visitor could be nothing else. “You must drive out every worshipper of the false gods. Only then will your daughter be released from her life of sin. I trust you will make the right decision, my lord, before pestilence or some drunken sailor your daughter is servicing for a pittance solves your dilemma for you.”

The priest left without waiting for Grem’s permission to depart. As the door closed, the big man collapsed to his knees and put his head in his hands, weeping silently.

Kiam was at a loss. He had never seen such a broken man.

But the reason he had been contracted to kill Sofya was beginning to make sense.

The One God was making a move on the Trinity Isles. If the Symposiarch closed the temples, killed or drove out all the nonbelievers and declared the worship of Xaphista the only true religion, the other islands of the Trinity Isles would follow. Grem had obviously refused and they were using Sofya to force his hand.

And that was why he had commissioned the Guild to kill her.

If Sofya was dead, the Karien priests could no longer use his daughter against him.

Does the Guild know about this?
he wondered as he faded back from the Symposiarch’s sleeping chamber. He would learn nothing more there tonight. He was much more interested in following the priest, because once Kiam realized there was a Karien priest of Xaphista the One God involved, he also knew the reason Sofya didn’t recognize him.

*   *   *

Teriahna was waiting for Kiam in his room at the inn.

“Did you follow me here?” he asked, wondering if she was here to kill him for his failure or give him a chance to explain himself.

“When you arrived yesterday. You made no attempt to hide from me.”

“Would there have been a point?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps not. Where have you been?”

“Doing my job.”

“Then Sofya the Siren is dead?”

“You know she isn’t.”

“Interesting definition you have, then, of
doing your job
.”

“That girl in the tavern isn’t Sofya.”

“Assuming I entertain your absurd notion, who is she, then?”

“It’s Sofya’s body,” he said, “but I don’t know who’s inside it. I do know
why
she’s plying her trade at the Bull’s Balls, though.”

“Is this going to make any difference to how you kill her?”

“Absolutely.”

Teriahna rolled her eyes. “Oh, this had better be good, little man, because right now, I’m mentally composing my letter to the Raven about his son’s unfortunate demise brought about by his spectacular level of incompetence.”

He treated her to a winning smile. “So, you’re
not
here to kill me?”

“We’ll see. What’s this plan you have?”

“We’ll get to that. First, I have to know if you’ll help me.”

“Of course I won’t help you! It’s your test to pass, not mine.”

“But isn’t part of the test demonstrating my ability to use whatever I have on hand to get the job done?”

Teriahna scowled at him. “Not by getting me to do the job for you.”

“I don’t need you to do the job, Teriahna. I need you to be there to save Sofya when I succeed.”

*   *   *

The training to become an assassin took almost a decade and was only partly about the physical skills required to take a human life in as many different ways as one could imagine. The majority of Kiam’s training had been about mental discipline. It had been about learning to resist the probing of a Harshini with the power to take secrets from an assassin’s mind, even though nobody had seen a real Harshini for more than a century. It was studying human nature. It was about comparative theology. And it involved wading through a mountain of historical literature that rivalled what they had stored in the Sorcerers’ Collective Library in Greenharbour.

During his studies, Kiam had been particularly fascinated by the notion of miracles. Not because he wanted to work them, particularly, just that they existed at all. So, he’d read more than he needed to, about the various ways the gods had interfered with humanity over the centuries by working miracles, including accounts of soul transference between bodies, a trick favoured, apparently, by Xaphista. There were few recorded cases, and even those accounts seemed doubtful, but the possibility had intrigued him.

When he suggested that was what was happening there, Teriahna had laughed in his face.

But she had agreed to aid him, mostly, Kiam suspected, because she expected him to fail. When he did, she would be there to clean up his mess, first by killing Sofya herself and then coming after Kiam.

It was a risk he was willing to take, and not just because he really didn’t want to kill the first girl he’d ever seriously kissed. If the Karien priest succeeded in his plan to control the Trinity Isles by forcing Grem Kannangara to destroy the other gods’ temples—and their followers—the whole of Hythria was threatened too. He owed it to his stepbrother—Hythria’s future High Prince—to prevent that from happening if he could.

He sent Teriahna back to the Bull’s Balls to watch over Sofya. His instructions to her had been simply
Watch her. You’ll know when I’ve succeeded.

Teriahna had shaken her head at his folly but left without a word.

Kiam headed back to the palace. What he was looking for should be there. Sofya was a princess and would have been guarded like the precious jewel she was. There was no chance Grem would have let her out on the streets of Calavandra where she might be corrupted before he could arrange a suitable marriage for her, so however the Kariens had gotten to her, they had likely done it in the palace itself,. That meant what he was looking for was probably still there.

Kiam roamed the palace roof for most of the night before he found it.

It was the Karien priest carrying a tray with a bowl of broth from the kitchen, across a courtyard to a locked basement door that alerted him. Arrogant to a fault, no priest carried his own food or waited on anyone else. The only reason a man like him would be taking a tray to someone late at night was because he didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

The priest seemed oblivious to the fact he was being followed. Kiam wasn’t sure if that was a testament to his assassin skills or the priest’s preoccupation with his own problems. He picked the lock silently and followed the man through the door, down a narrow dark staircase and into a dimly lit basement where an acolyte sat by a narrow stretcher, beside the desiccated body of an unconscious old woman.

“How is she?” the priest asked.

“Still alive. But barely.”

“She is dehydrating,” the priest said. “You need to keep her fluids up.”

“It wasn’t supposed to take this long.”

“The Symposiarch is a tougher nut to crack than we thought.” The priest put the tray on the stool beside the acolyte and began to roll up his sleeves. “I’ll see if I can get something into her. Take a break while you can.”

The acolyte rose to his feet and stretched for a moment, leaving Kiam with a dreadful dilemma. The acolyte had to pass Kiam to get out of the cellar, but he had been commissioned to kill only Sofya. He was hidden by the shadows now. As soon as the acolyte passed him, he would be discovered.

We don’t kill innocent bystanders.

It was one of the basic tenets of the Assassins’ Guild.

Well, that’s easy,
Kiam decided, as he slid a long narrow blade from the side of his boot.
Neither of these men is innocent.

He took the unsuspecting acolyte down silently as the young man headed for the stairs. The man didn’t know what had happened to him or make a sound as Kiam lowered him to the floor in the shadows, his throat slit from ear to ear. The priest remained oblivious to the danger. He was busy tending to the old woman, trying to spoon some of the broth into her slack mouth. This, he guessed, was the woman in control of Sofya’s body.

Hopefully, once she was dead, Sofya would not longer be possessed.

Whether his action would save Sofya or end her life, too, Kiam couldn’t say.

The blood from the acolyte’s severed jugular reached the priest a moment before Kiam did. The man glanced down at the floor, puzzled by the dark liquid pooling at his feet. Then he looked up.

Kiam drove the knife through his right eye and straight into his brain before he could react. The priest dropped as silently and as dead as his acolyte.

The woman on the bed had not moved.

Kiam looked down at her, wondering who she was. She must have known what they were planning. Perhaps she was a true believer. More likely she was an old whore who’d jumped at the chance to be young and beautiful again for a time.

Surely, she had known that even if they had succeeded, the Karien priests would never have let her leave this cellar alive.

Kiam felt a twinge of pity. He squashed it ruthlessly as he plunged his knife into the old woman’s heart, hoping it was enough to release Sofya from the spell that possessed her.

And hoping Teriahna would see the change come over Sofya at the Bull’s Balls and not decide the young woman still needed to die.

He felt the old woman’s heart stop beating against the blade and withdrew it. Then he squatted down, dipped his silver raven ring into the blood pooling around his feet and, one by one, marked the foreheads of the priests and the old woman so whoever found them would know this was the work of the Assassins’ Guild.

Once that was done, Kiam stepped back out of the blood, took off his boots and his blood-soaked shirt, rolled them into a ball and carefully made his way out of the cellar, leaving no betraying footprints behind.

*   *   *

It was dawn by the time Kiam got back to his room. There was no sign of Teriahna. Kiam wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

He desperately wanted to head for the Bull’s Balls to discover how Sofya had fared, but knew it was both a stupid and dangerous idea. His mission—theoretically—was done. He had killed the hag possessing Sofya, which meant Sofya the Siren was dead. He wasn’t sure if his father would see it quite the same way. Much of that, he supposed, depended on Teriahna’s report, and Kiam had no idea what she would say to his father about how he’d performed.

Assuming, of course, he had even passed the test and managed to get out of Calavandra alive.

That was his next priority. Kiam gathered up his few belongings and, after paying the innkeeper to swear he hadn’t seen the occupant of Room 7 for days, headed for the wharf. He’d checked the tides before he left Greenharbour and knew that if he got there quick enough, he could catch a “trader of opportunity” and be free of the city before the sun was all the way up.

He made it almost all the way to the docks before he was set upon by a couple of street roughs who threw a bag over his head and dragged him kicking and screaming into a dim warehouse where Teriahna was waiting for him.

*   *   *

The men pulled off the hood and Kiam looked around. Teriahna stood in front of him, dressed in the dark wool and leathers of an assassin rather than the
court’esa
’s outfit she’d worn up until now.

She seemed a lot more dangerous now.

“You know, I was almost prepared to let you live,” she said as he wiped away the gritty taste of the dirty hessian sack they’d thrown over his head. “And then you let a couple of street thugs overpower you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to get mugged on the way out of town.”

“You see, I struggle with that,” she said, frowning. “You’re supposed to be an Assassin. You’re meant to expect everything.”

“So, I failed, then?”

“You tell me,” Teriahna said. “You were sent here to kill Sofya the Siren. Instead, you kill a couple of Karien priests and an old whore, far as I can tell. Sofya is back in the palace, the Assassins’ Guild is being blamed for the death of two priests and you managed to get yourself mugged by a couple of amateurs. What would you call it?”

Kiam knew what he’d call it. It was enough to make him wonder if he could get out of the warehouse before Teriahna got to him.

How will she do it? A knife? Poison?

“Lucky for you, however, that you did mark those priests.”

Still mentally preparing to meet his doom, Kiam stared at her in surprise. “
Lucky
?”

“Apparently, Grem Kannangara knew the Kariens had possessed his daughter. You killing the men responsible for that and returning his no-longer-possessed only child to him has somewhat endeared the Guild to him.”

“Sofya is all right, then?”

“She will be,” Teriahna said. “Eventually. How did you know?”

“That she was possessed? She didn’t remember me.”