The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (32 page)

Uncomfortable sensations aside, we made it the keep safely. I tilted the ladder up, resting it against the balcony, and punched the legs solidly into the snow.

“Don’t worry if you fall,” I said. “You won’t die. Trust me, I know.”

I climbed up first, and the Rots followed one by one. About half of us were on the balcony when the quietest assassin in the world, as I termed him, uncharacteristically stammered.

“What… the piss is that, Shepherd?”

I was looking down the ladder when he said my name, steadying it for Slenna. I glanced up. Then squinted. Then my jaw fall away from my mouth.

As in life, war is full of ebbs and flows. You only stay on top until the wave crests, and it always crests. Although we were winning this battle, I expected something to interrupt our momentum. It’s just that I anticipated it coming from the minds of Amielle and Sybil, and not through the sky behind us.

A molten glow broiled the clouds, transforming the sky into a sullen furnace. If there was an end to the world, where brimstone would sail through the sky like migrating birds and everyone had approximately six seconds to live, this was what it would look like.

At the forefront of the cataclysm were, one could suggest, phoenixes. But these monstrosities were to phoenixes as a sapling is to the tallest pine in a forest. They were massive, hulking distortions of birds whose wings must have spanned a hundred feet. When they flapped, the air hissed away in fear.

Within their talons the size of a small man, they held swollen cocoons encased in flames.

They lumbered along, not at all like the agile phoenixes I’d known. They lethargically aimed their beaks toward the ground. Lower and lower they descended, before suddenly dropping their cocoons.

The sacks of fire splattered on the ground. Hundreds of conjurer soldiers burst out, wielding swords and mauls and maces. Soon there were more — several magnitudes more — and the clumsy transports that delivered them bumbled away, high into the air.

The reinforcements took our new allied northerners by surprise. I couldn’t wait around to see the aftermath, though. I had a job to do.

A rustling drew my attention back to the city of Edenvaile. Two mounted royal guardsmen, clad in plate, stormed toward my Rots on the ground.

“Iggy!” I hollered. “Cut ’em down!”

It was too late. Iggy took a blade edge across the back of his neck.

The quietest assassin in the world, Moor, tried jumping out of the way. But horses are quick, and the swords of royal guardsmen are quicker.

Two of my Rots were down, and four more were being chased. One of the guardsman circled back around and kicked over the ladder, trapping them down there.

Rimeria and a few of the others who were up top with me drew their bows. I lifted a pacifying hand to stop them. “Don’t waste your arrows, you can’t shoot through plate. Come on, we have a job to do.”

I opened my mouth and filled my lungs with the vitriolic air of the North, holding the breath as I walked to the balcony door. Deep breath in, calm breath out. Deep, calm. Easy does it. You learn early on as an assassin that breathing is vital to your career. It steadies your hands, eases the nightmares that wake you, prepares you for another day of killing. Most of the time it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

I wiggled the brass handle of the door. It didn’t budge.

“If I want inside your keep,” I said, licking my lips, drawing back and hauling off with a tremendous kick to the frame, “I’ll get inside your bloody keep.”

Another kick, more ferocious than the first. And another. The sudden jolt of my foot crashing against the wood pulsed up my entire leg, to my hip. Hurt like hell, and I didn’t give a damn. I kicked again and again and again. Finally, the frame splintered, something cracked, and I shoved that fucking door right off its hinges. I punched through the twisted fragments of wood still in my way, withdrew my ebon blade and stepped into the hallway.

Fifteen of my Rots followed. Down six from when we started.

“Only one way to get to the royal quarters,” I said. “Through this hallway, make a few right turns, and the stairs are right there. If we get separated, always stick together, in teams of two. Royal guards are tough bastards with their fancy plate, unless you’re dressed as their commander.”

I continued through the hallway for a few paces, then stopped. “If any of you find Chachant, Sybil, Vileoux or Amielle without me… I want you to kill them slowly. Make them suffer. Make them hurt. Understood?”

No one nodded, but they all understood. We weren’t torturers; we were clean-cut assassins. You go in for the kill and leave just as quickly, no time to stick around and cut out tongues or eyeballs. No reason for it, usually. But when our brethren are cut down… well, we can make time for that sort of thing.

I sifted through the darkness of the hallway, hand along the cold stone wall. It became mustier and danker the deeper I tunneled, and it felt much colder than it had when I walked this hallway during the wedding. Emptier, too, and not so much in the absence of chatty voices and festive wedding colors, but a detached emptiness… something neither here nor there, not quite connected to the fabric of reality.

The hallway stretched on, seemingly forever. Had I missed a turn?

I stopped and listened intently. No sound of parading boots behind me. No noise at all, in fact, except the disturbing huff of my own breath.

My fingers unconsciously coiled tighter around the hilt of my sword as I shifted slowly around.

A black smog blinded me.

“Kale?” I called out. “Slenna?”

No answer.

“So this is your little trick?” I said aloud. “I can stay here all day, Amielle. All night, Sybil, whichever one of you is behind this. At some point, you’ll tire. Or your keep will be stormed and your throat slashed.”

A peculiar sound droned far away.
Tink-tank. Tink-tank.

There are not a lot of things that tink-tank in this world. Tink? Sure. An arrow will tink off a breastplate. And a drop of water splashing into the bottom of a chalice may tink. But those are singular sounds. This was a melody. A predictable and consistent harmony.

Tink-tank. Tink-tank.
It became louder.

Heavier.

It was crashing now, like cymbals at a climax. There was a theme as it drew closer.
Tink-scrape-tank. Tink-scrape-tank.

I drew my finger across the wall. There was a small space of flat stone, then an indent of mortar. And again, a small space of flat stone, then an indent of mortar.

I pushed the tip of my sword against the wall and traced an identical line.

This was what I heard:
Tink-scrape-tank. Tink-scrape tank.

A
warm glow
chasing away the void is supposed to be comforting, but the flecked orange tails that scoured hungrily down the walls did not comfort me. Maybe it was because of the sound that followed those feathered tails. Or maybe it was because I had the perspicacity to notice it wasn’t so much that the darkness departed as that the light was unsheathed. The blackness, the night, whatever had surrounded me — it gave the impression that it had complete control and it would return whenever it wanted.

As it allowed the room to bask in the burnished embers of a sunset, a shadowy figure sauntered down the hallway, his sword tinking and scraping and tanking along the wall.

His shape reminded me of someone. He was tall and unwieldy, arms flinging uncontrollably as he walked, much like a foal who stumbled and bumbled around with the gracelessness of stilt legs.

“Led me to death,” he said, “but not a grave.”

“Rivon?”

He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile that Rivon Eyrie would flash. It was a cadaverous smile — one unbound by the tightness of flesh and lips. Just a mouthful of teeth and a jaw of pale bone.

“Oh, fuck you,” I spat. “You’re not real.”

He stopped and cocked his head. “Not real? What makes a man real?”

“A beating heart, for starters.”

He put his hand to his chest. Skin unraveled from his fingers, drooping over his knuckles. “There’s something in there.” He pulled his hand away, and the flaps of skin flopped back over his skeletal appendages loosely and crookedly.

“All I wanted,” he said, “was to take good care of my roosters, get good eggs from the hens, enjoy their morning calls. Get far away from the life the Rot gave me. The nightmares followed me, y’know? Never could outrun them. Woke up in a cold sweat every night, swore the eyes of my victims were peering at me through my door… voices were in my hut. I told you the life wasn’t for me. I told you I was done killing. Then you show up and you take me away from the life I loved. You take me on your warpath, and then you don’t even have the decency to let me die in peace.”

He drummed his cadaverous knuckles on the flat side of his sword and approached me.

“That’s not how it was,” I said. “Believe whatever lies you want, Rivon, but you won’t make me believe them. Saving my head in Erior was a choice, one I appreciate. Joining me was a choice, another that I appreciate. But I never made you do either.”

He came to a stop a few feet in front of me. He raised his sword vertically, till it was flush with his fleshless face. “All I want is an eye for an eye. There are no more nightmares to worry about now, because sleep is not something that I know any longer.”

“Ghosts cannot kill me,” I said. In her bid to recreate my friend, Amielle — or Sybil — had stripped all humanity from Rivon. Even his festive style of tripping over his words had been sucked right from his voice.

He laughed sardonically. “A ghost? I wish that’s what I was. No, I’m still chained by the physical realm. I wonder… will you die in peace, or will you suffer my fate?”

He lunged forward, cutting his sword horizontally across the air. I met it halfway, erupting a vicious clang down the inescapable hall. We held position for a moment, until I slipped a free hand away from the hilt and punched Rivon square in his nose.

We both reeled back, him clutching his face, me clutching my knuckles.

“Fuck!” I said.

“Fuck!” he said.

Who knew a dead man could feel pain? At least I had that on my side. I took grip of my sword again and waited for the fallen Rot to lash out. But he didn’t. With the patience of someone who had an entire lifetime to wait, he tiptoed around the hall, sidestepping like a crab to one wall and the other. It was a good plan to keep the blood flowing. Mm. Poor choice of words there, perhaps.

“Suppose you’re real,” I said, matching his dancing feet. “Who brought you back from the dead?”

His tongue orbited the empty space where his lips should have been. “Who raises a carrot from a seedling to a fully grown vegetable?”

“Probably a farmer.”

“Think the carrot knows that?”

He faux-charged me, grinned and then dashed with purpose. I side-stepped his blow, and we traded sides.

“Rivon Eyrie, ever the philosophical man,” I mocked. “Come to the tavern at night to hear his deep thoughts, which include ‘If a rooster can see you, can it look into your soul?’ and the timeless comparison between growing food and rising from the dead.”

“Whoever brought me back,” Rivon said, “it’s greater than anything either of us can comprehend.”

I wagged my finger disapprovingly. “I don’t think so, old pal. Amielle is the one who did this, and I still don’t believe you’re real. She has a knack for creating nightmares that trap you. You’re just a vestage of my past. Good as dead in the real world.”

The balls of his shoulders rolled back, and he sprinted forward again, this time carving a wicked pattern through the air. He brought his blade up, down, across, diagonally, jabbed it, faked it, swung it quick and swung it hard. I parried each blow and kicked him the gut, driving him back again.

“Funny thing is,” I said, breathing laboriously now, “she recreated you damn near perfectly. The same flaws you had as a Rot have become even more obvious in your tenure as Braddock’s rooster bitch. You telegraph every move a half second too early, and your feet couldn’t outdance a clubfooted drunk. Tried teaching your old ass, but you never could learn.”

Holding my blade at guard, I took a step, and then another, moving fluidly across the floor. Rivon backed away, his boot scraping and dragging. All you heard from mine was the gentle tap of the toe kissing the wooden planks, effortlessly carrying me across the way much like foam hitches a ride across a river.

“I’ve taken down giants,” I said. “Cut off arms that were bigger than both of mine. Lopped off heads that weighed as much as a ripe pumpkin. Doesn’t matter your strength or your speed or your shit-eating grin. Technique and fluidity, Rivon — that’s all you need. And you’ve got neither. You were a good man. Funny, kept the Hole in order. We would’ve snipped you loose a long time ago if you weren’t.”

“I assassinated my fair share,” he asserted.

“You botched your fair share too. Anytime you took a job on your own, you returned with excuses as to why the job didn’t get done. Today, your excuses run out.”

With the panache of a haughty sword master and the grace of a limber dancer, I sprung across the room. With spry steps and quick flicks of my wrist, my black blade sung a series of sharp notes as it eviscerated the air with its steely blue swirls. He parried one, two, three and a fourth and a fifth, but as I changed direction without warning, twisting around his shoulder, his ankles tangoed with one another.

He stumbled. He straightened his arm, a desperate attempt to brace himself against the wall as he was falling.

He never got the opportunity. A murderous cry, and then a black edge ripped apart the flesh of his chest and violently slammed him into the floor. He lay there, impaled on my sword, his bony face shivering.

“Don’t worry, Rivon,” I whispered, yanking my blade out, “I know you weren’t truly alive. I refuse to believe.”

A rotten crimson jelly mottled with streaks of jet black, like coagulated blood, painted the edge of my sword. It was as thick as honey, but smelled like meat that a bucketful of maggots had gotten to weeks ago.

I tried shaking it off, but it was inspissated across the ebon edge. Expecting — or perhaps, hoping — it would vanish with this abyss Amielle or Sybil had trapped me in, I tucked my sword back inside its sheath and continued walking.

The darkness pursued me, from either side. But just before it blotted out the last remnants of light Rivon brought in his wake, the illusion that entrapped me shattered.

Or more accurately, it tucked its tail between its legs and scurried off. There was no great explosion, no twisting and collapsing ether that made the air vibrate and the walls shift. Just a whimper.

Black carpet, trimmed with gold, lay beneath my feet. And an overpowering scent of pine that one only finds deep in the forest or within the keep of Edenvaile wafted through the air. It was a much more pleasant smell than the acrid jelly-blood-infested repulsiveness that fouled my blade. Speaking of which, I wondered if it had disappeared, or…

I’d have to check on that later, thanks to a little thumping that sounded quite similar to panicked feet hurrying down steps.

More noises: some voices echoing off the walls, shouting naughty words, and the clangor of angry steel.

“Fuck off!”

Something crashed above me, shaking the ceiling.

“He said fuck off!”

My Rots. I looked up and followed the muddled sounds of their racing footsteps with my eyes. They trailed off, toward a staircase that wound around and emptied out into the hallway I stood in. It was on those stairs where the urgent pattering of feet from moments ago had now blossomed into a slim figure who turned the corner and ran.

Someone chased her. No, someone followed her.

Faces flashed in my mind. There was my brother’s face, flat and empty as I rent his throat with a rusted dagger. There was my father’s face, mouth agape, eyes shinier than marbles as I cried and cried and stabbed and stabbed, sucking the blood from his rotten heart. There were the faces of my Rots, pale and still as the stench of death emanated from their spoiled organs.

A profound anger pulsed inside me. The tingles and shivers climbed across my shoulders and down my spine. My arms were pimpled and my teeth were clenched. I didn’t go through all of the shit in my life to sit here and play the role of a dazzled spectator.

My predatory instincts — the kind of savageness that idealists and do-gooders like to think men have cast aside for intelligence and morality — propelled me forward. I was a wolf, and these gals were my prey.

Ebon blade in hand, I hunted them down, eyes fixed on the dragging hems of their white cloaks like a jackal pursuing the swaying tail of a fleeing fox through the dark of night.

Sybil Tath’s mess of black hair flung to one side of her shoulder as her head swiveled around. The fear… oh, it percolated in her eyes like beads of sweat through pores. I was faster, stronger, hungrier. And she knew it. Magic wouldn’t save her now.

She turned back around, shoulders bobbing, arms flinging.

I readied my blade, lowering it to my side.

The royal Verdan carpet beneath my feet became a blur. The torches affixed to the walls coalesced into a canvas of bleary sunsets. I wasn’t running, I was soaring. Felt like I wasn’t even touching the ground.

With another stride, I drew back my sword.

A second stride, and I held my breath.

With a third, I swung.

With a fourth, there was a yelp, and my arm shuddered. Serrated ebon sunk its teeth into the soft tissue of Sybil’s calf. I leaned away and dragged the blade across the muscles and tendons, careful to avoid bone. I wanted her in disrepair, not to bleed out. Not yet.

Her ankle twisted, and her knee bent in disturbing fashion. She crumbled to the ground and rolled onto her back, clutching her leg, beating the air into submission with her squeals.

I went on, not missing a stride. Had to keep running, keep hunting, because the true prey was still trying to get away.

Amielle curled her fingers around the edge of a wall, and then she disappeared, down another flight of stairs.

Sybil’s howling faded behind me as I turned the corner. I bounded down the steps, skipping every other three.

Amielle’s auburn curls bounced springily on her shoulders as she raced away from a wicked grin. She was being chased by a cold-blooded killer, she thought, one who wouldn’t hesitate to chop those pretty little lips right off her face. Let her think what she wanted. Better for fear to push her on.

She jumped from the fifth step and landed stiffly on the floor below. She said something, and then darted to the left. Had she made it all the way down that narrow hallway, she could have pushed open the doors and been greeted by the frosty air of the rear courtyard. Maybe she could have hidden, signaled a stray guard, something to bide her time while she searched for a pair of wings in the sky to pervert into a submissive beast of flame.

Could have
— those are the two great words of finality.

I leaned my shoulder down and brutally drove Amielle into the wall, shielding her head so body parts of lesser importance would take the brunt of the force. The wall met us with the same kindness of a fifty-foot wave. We fell backward and rolled in each other’s arms, till the thick carpet beneath slowed us.

My arm had caught a few rugged ridges of rock along the wall, splitting the skin. And my shoulder… boy, felt like a party of gremlins inside there, taking turns at gnawing on my tendons.

But no amount of pain could stop me now.

I fisted Amielle’s hair and yanked the bitch to her feet. Her once-baleful eyes that had looked as frightening as the center of a maelstrom were now dull and marred with the fogginess of defeat. She shied away from me, until I pinched her thin chin and wrenched her sandy face toward mine.

“You know, I’ve never been big on words when someone’s going to die. But you and I,” I said, tapping the center of her head with my finger, “we need to talk.”

“Shepherd,” Kale called out from down the hallway. “Got her.” He heaved a wounded Sybil Tath onto his shoulder.

“And him,” said Slenna, who appeared from the stairs holding a dagger to the throat of one Chachant Verdan.

“This one too,” said Ervin, pushing Vileoux Verdan along. He slapped the old man’s face and said, “Come on now, look alive.”

“Can I cut the tongue out of this one?” another Rot asked, tracing the tip of his dagger along the gaunt mouth of Edmund Tath. “He fuckin’ spit on me.”

A few more Rots followed down the stairs, dragging conjurers who appeared a few hours away from death, and some northern lords who apparently weren’t eager to take to the battlefield.

“I told you to kill them,” I said.

Kale shrugged. “Once you up and vanished, Slenna said you were talkin’ out your ass, passion and all that.”