I Know Not (The Story of Fox Crow) (30 page)

      Brogan had forgotten the foremost fact about poisons: Like fire, they call no man master and spare no man their deadly embrace. I watched him tumble to the floor next to his weapons, his legs giving out even as he tried to wheeze past fluid filling his lungs. He did not weep, did not beg, he did vomit messily into the water flow. The practical part of me made a mental note not to drink the fountain water in Carolaughan for a while.

      Then he died. Inside of me, for the first time since I was a boy, I felt something stir. He had tried to kill me, had killed countless others, but I had still killed him. It felt like it deserved some kind of ceremony, some closure. What I got was Finnegan clapping his overfull hands together behind me.

      The other thing that spoiled the moment was that, for once, I had managed to live up to my reputation and exit a face to face battle without being stabbed, shot, crushed, or cut. Unfortunately there was no one around to see it. No one who was going to live through this, anyway.

      “Simon you have done the impossible.” He proclaimed, waving the servants off down one dark corridor, “You have eliminated a generation of Assassins in Carolaughan. You will have the pick of whatever contractions you desire. You will earn a tithe training every junior ragman and hopeful whisperer looking to come up the ranks. You will be wealthy beyond measure, powerful and feared. And one day, one day, you will take over this seat and rule as the master yourself.”

      My stomach turned as he took another bite of pudding. As he talked about continuing it all, of returning to his fold as if I had done all this just to consolidate power. I was angry at him for giving me an out, for tempting me with things that whispered out of the back of my head.

      I bent down and picked up the deadly eating tine. I had little time left. The familiar dangerous tingle was starting up now that my shirt was drying, “No, Finnegan, I’m here to cancel the contract on Aelia Conaill.”

      I set the fork on his desk, pointed at his heart, but his face was twisted into a hungry grimace I was having a hard time believing was fear. “Hmmm…It is too bad, Simon. I made a lot of money from you.” The last of the whisperers shuffled in a panic out of the cistern, as I lifted the Phantom Angel, “But, I suppose all good things have to end, –Schlimonnnn.”

      Paralysis washed over me as Finnegan’s voice, normally distorted, became nearly unrecognizable. His smile spread, wider and wider, nearly touching his jaw line as two slimy pink growths launched forth to frame his teeth. He stood, his mammoth proportions more evident than ever as he stretched, sending shards of velveteen and silk flying in all directions. His jowls were gone, replaced by a skeletal head with a mouth sprouting a halo of tentacles tipped with blinking eyeballs. Six more flailing, boneless tentacles unfolded from around his chest, arms, and legs, robbing them of his mountainous girth. His chest was barely big enough to contain his spine and ribs, warped by the presence of these extensions of his assassin’s tattoo.

      Where his body was inhuman, he was covered in dense clusters of huge pustules, and the tips of the tentacles were bulbous and discolored. These disgusting limbs pawed at the floor, bearing his starved body aloft. He loomed above me, his own flabby feet and pudgy hands hovering above the ground as he was borne aloft by his nightmare parts. These extremities parted down horizontal lines and the sheath of flesh pulled back to expose massive eyeballs.

      “Why would you abandon us, Simon?” He said. Just then the eyes began crying, raining black ichor into Carolaughan’s water. Huge suckers lining each tentacle sprouted a wickedly curved tooth, and every cluster of boils on the opposite side opened into armies of eyes that stripped me down and lay me bare. The thick balls on the end of the tentacles opened into eyes with sharp teeth as lashes. Each iris was a hollow, endless pits that wanted to swallow every hidden part of me. “Why would you choose doom?”

      And my total and utter destruction it was. Icy hands grasped at my innards, twisting my intestines with hands made of broken glass. My heart refused to beat in the presence of the demonic thing bearing down on me. His voice sounded like rough stones being ground in the stomach of a giant as he laughed. I ducked one tentacle even as another lashed out and tossed me into a wall where nymphs were carved cavorting. The Phantom Angel went spinning away into the darkness as I landed. The world rocked and spun as my much–abused skull began to seep a trail of crimson into my collar. Like a tortured animal, I scrabbled to my feet on base instinct alone, slinging my dagger from its sheath to defend myself from The Master of Assassins.

      “Could you ever conceive of me, Simon?” I hurled my body to the side, sprawling away from the creature as it tried to hammer me with one massive mouth/eye. I plunged the dagger into it, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. Another tentacle descended from above and I rolled clear as it shattered the bronze grillwork. Shrapnel kissed my face like stinging wasps. I regained my feet only to face him again, his tentacles sliding him from place to place with the speed of a galloping horse.

      “Did you ever think your pact with Isahd for body and soul would be so literal, so powerful, so permanent?” I barely managed to bat away one of the ichor dripping eyes from my face before it struck, sending shock–waves through my left arm and into my shoulder. I lunged forward in a desperate attack at his torso, but the endless supply of barbed talons and suckers were held too far in front of his body for me to reach.

      “But I have to ask WHY?” he continued. Another damn tentacle swatted the dagger from my hand while another gripped my middle and began to squeeze.

      “All the others had doubts. For two decades I have been the master and I knew every one of their petty, weak doubts running like stray dogs between their ears. But not you.” I felt the world spiraling in upon my, the Fog coming to claim me whole this time, spirit me off to the land of Death, where Isahd doubtlessly waited to claim me as his prize. Talons pierced me as he slammed me into his eating desk, sending food scattering in all directions. I began to hear the buffeting of thousands of wings…ravens wings…the souls I had sent to death before their time. “You were always the perfect little killer.”

      As the blackness tried to fall forever Right hand - always the over achiever, flailed through the seas of overturned food, knocking Finnegan’s thick book of contracts and names onto the floor, and found a little friend I had put there earlier. Right closed over it, and then jabbed the poison covered eating tine into the tentacle.

      Finnegan roared, and flung me to the side, but as I clawed the wall to get my feet, he had not died. The tentacle had slowed, but as the poison diluted in its black blood, it was quickly regaining use.

      “Clever.” He said in a voice devoid of humor or admiration. “But you made a bargain Simon! You took the mark. You made the pact.”

      I don’t know where the hit came from, but I sailed through the air and crashed against the wall, crumpling in a heap at the bottom. My joints and back felt as if I had been run over by horses and it was all I could do to paw at the grate beneath me as my blood mingled with the water, drop by drop. My life was seeping from me in a half a dozen places. The Fog rushed in again, and I pushed it back, but not so far. It haunted me, waiting to finally take me whole.

      “For a man who’s soul is already sold, I would think you would want to live a little longer in this world.” The Animal roared within me, urging me up and moving my body against its desire to lay back and die. I wrenched knifes from their hiding places, hurling them with the Animal’s pure abandon. They sunk into the massive, rubbery flesh of the tentacles. Eyes burst, suckers bled, flesh oozed, but it mattered not even a bit to him.

      The cold, demonic man that resided within me for so many years read off my odds of survival as just short of pure suicide. He smiled within me as my legs buckled, knowing he had been the only rational part of me all along. He was the part that sold men’s lives, judged their worth, and clinically absorbed their last breaths. He was preparing to do the same to me.

      “You are an assassin, Simon.” Finnegan hissed. His black–eyed gaze leveled on me again, his ravaged face leering from around the hungry tentacles that had begun to seep drool.

      “And you belong to both of us!” He began to rush for me, a demon on slithering, snakelike legs.

      “You belong to me!” My hand closed on the Phantom Angel’s hilt. It had been thrown here when I was first struck, and now it was in my hands again. A few weeks ago, I died with this blade in my hand, I suppose it was only fitting I do so again, this time for good. I managed to struggle to my feet…

      …and I felt the Seed inside me begin to sing.

      “You belong to Isahd!” He was rushing in at full speed, his extremities arcing back to strike.

      I lifted my eyes to his monstrous visage. My hand tightened upon my sword, then loosened as I took a deep breath.

      I dove to the side, trailing the sword behind me to cover my flank like a shield. I felt one of his boneless limbs impact the blade and heard a scream that brought dust from between the rocks of the walls. It hit me like a physical force and sent me sprawling. I slapped the ground with my free hand, absorbing some of the shock of the fall, and rolled into a crouch.

      Finnegan screamed with pain as one severed tentacle flopped about like a landed fish. The blade of the Phantom Angel wept blue flame, the fire dancing about the steel, burning the dark corrosion from it in long streams. It burned like fire, but flowed like water off the blade, extinguishing as it fell to the grate below. The room was bathed in its blue glow as Finnegan shook the whole cistern again with an outraged roar.

     
Witch–fire, the inquisitor had called the sword Witch–fire.

      His many limbs shot at me, one pinning me to the wall as I tried to escape. The Angel lashed out, and though it severed it like a torch parting fog, its mate found my thigh. It was one of the mouthed eyes and I felt the teeth bite deep even as the bone snapped. I screamed, but somehow swatted at another weaponed limb as Finnegan yanked me from the wall and sent me through three of the braziers.

      The intense pain, the horrible sound of sizzling fat, or the smell of burning flesh woke me, and after I was awake it didn’t matter which had done the job.

      “Drop it!” He shrieked, picking me up and slamming me back first into the pile of coals, “Drop it!”

      One tentacle pressed down into the center of my chest, pushing me back into the irregular pile of coals. I glanced to my right, and saw I did, indeed still have the Angel in my fist. As the fire seared the nerves in my back to death, I found the strength to use it.

      Finnegan screamed again, spurting black blood across my chest as he recoiled with a truncated stump. It burned like acid and hissed on the coals with the sound of screaming children. I struggled to my feet as numbing waves flooded into my shoulder and sent the world into an unfocused blur. He picked me up by one ankle and drew a line of barbed tentacle teeth across my fist, finally separating me from my weapon.

      He slammed me into the center of the room, across the body of Brogan, and a lifetime away from where the Phantom Angel fell. Finnegan leaned in close to my twitching form, opening his mouth and spreading the halo of small eyed tentacles wide to crush my head. “It is a shame you have become so corrupted from your true path, Simon.”

      As he came close to me I pondered the dead raven on the grate near my face. Whatever reason Finnegan had feared it, as a sign, portent, enemy, or avatar, it was dead now. As he pulled himself completely upright and spread himself to blot out everything else, I came to a moment of absolute peace. Maybe that was the answer, the reason I had been spared so many ignoble deaths so that I might die here instead. This one bird had died and so spared my life and turned the tide for a moment. Perhaps history, perhaps Aelia, needed just one moment more.

      I let the whole world go and lived from heartbeat to heartbeat, as serene and deadly as I had ever been in my life. I managed to say, “My name is Crow.”

      Somewhere inside the Seed caught fire, burning into my soul past the pain and blood and tears. My eyes snapped open and burrowed into his twin dark pits as he made his fatal lunge for my face.

      Left hand closed over the hilt of one of Brogan’s poisoned swords, waiting for me all this time at his dead feet. The blade came up, the point aimed unerringly at Finnegan’s heart. Finnegan, for all his power had forgotten he may have had numerous tentacles, he had only one body, only one heart, and his size meant he had weight. He simply could not, veer, could not stop.