The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (56 page)

On all sides the traffic stopped. Some people stared, others darted
into the guild halls (what would they say, she wondered, if
her
guild
had asked to open a hall here?). Two teenage boys edged forward,
their eyes partially on each other as if each hoped the other would
stop first. Crossing her arms Cori looked them up and down, and the
two ran back to the line of adults pressed against the buildings.

Somewhere in the crowd a child said, “Momma, why is everybody
looking? I want to see.” The mother slapped a hand on the child’s
mouth, then nearly smothered it when it started to cry. Cori could see
the woman staring at an alley leading away from the square.

“Oh, let her alone,” Cori called. “I’m not going to swallow her.”

With a sob the woman grabbed up the yowling child and ran for
the alleyway.

A man shouted, “Go back where you belong.” Cori shrugged.
Where the blood would that be?

She looked around the square. On one side the setting sun lit the
gold plates of the different guilds. Everything else lay in shadows.
Near her stood the tables and chairs of an outdoor café. Usually, she
knew, people crowded it after the market closed, laughing, drinking,
the merchants bragging of their sales, the artists drawing the statues
or the crowd, the pickpockets with one eye on their “customers”
and the other on the waiters who doubled as market police. Now
the chairs stood empty, the tables bare except for a few abandoned
drinks. Cori walked over and sat down.

She raised an eyebrow at the burly waiters lined up by the doorway
of the café. “You’ve got a customer,” she told them. “Why don’t you
see what she wants?”

“We don’t serve murderers,” one of them said.

Cori smiled at him. “You served me with enough eagerness last
winter, when I came in different clothes. If I remember—yes, weren’t
you the one who suggested
I
could serve
you
below the Sea Wall?”
A few people laughed; a few more joined in when the waiter blurted
out, “That’s a lie. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

An older waiter slapped him on the back. “Forget it, Jom,” he
said. “You’ve tried with so many, you might as well count an Assassin
in with the rest of them.” He stepped up to Cori. “What can I bring
you?” he asked.

“Ale. A double tankard. And free drinks for anyone who wishes
to join me.” A safe offer; no one sat down. Cori sipped her drink as
the crowd began to calm itself. She watched them slide away and she
thought how it never changed. In the larger towns the people might
show a little more sophistication, but behind each pair of casual eyes
lay the same thought displayed so openly on all these frightened faces;
she’s come for
me,
someone’s hired her to kill
me
.

They were mostly gone when a boy threw a rock at her. Cori
caught it with one hand, slapping down the ale with the other. She’d
half risen and had her arm cocked when the anger exploded out of
her. She sat down heavily.
Idiot,
she scolded herself,
you’ve come for a
dragon, you’ll spill the hunger on some brat?
Shaking slightly she threw
some money down and left the square.

Though Cori wasn’t due to see Morin Jay until the following
morning, she didn’t much feel like imposing herself on some trembling
tavern owner. She headed for the Sea Wall, still upset by the fury
that had swept her. Anger—the worst thing that could happen to an
Assassin. It threatened all the years she’d spent training, practicing,
learning to control the hunger and not release it until she’d found the
right target. If she let it burst out of her at the slightest insult then she
deserved everything those pompous fools thought about her.

Maybe I deserve it anyway,
she thought.
Maybe we all do.

“Choose a proper target.” What gave her the right? She sighed.
Necessity. And wasn’t a dragon a better choice than a boy?

She climbed the stone stairs of the Wall, stopping for a moment to
look through the bars of a cell. The Wall, which ran for several hundred
miles along the coast, protecting the various towns and provinces from
storms and pirates, contained catacombs of cells. In the small room the
single prisoner looked up curiously at the face peering in at her. Either
she couldn’t tell what Cori was, or she didn’t care, for a moment later
she sank back on her cot, her elbows on her knees.

At the top of the stairs Cori stepped onto the wide grassy surface.
To the right a solitary guard post shined its yellow wizardlight on the
sea. Cori walked some few hundred feet to the left and sat down.

The sea leapt nervously at the sloping wall. Like someone trying
to break in, she thought. In minutes the cold spray had coated her,
soaking right through her clothes. She didn’t mind; through narrow
eyes she watched the waves, her hands around her knees as she
remembered the time she’d swum a mile underwater to rip open the
bottom of a ghost ship. What a beautiful kill that was. The hunger
had exploded out of her with enough force to boil away the chunks
of ice banging into her. She remembered how she’d half swum, half
floated back to shore. So empty. So light. And she remembered the
cheers of the villagers who’d lifted her from the water and wrapped
her in fur blankets.

What a difference from Sorai. Or was it? She’d done a job for
them. How would they greet her now if she ever came back for a visit?

She thought about Laani, speaking to Cori that first night in the
Guild Hall. She’d just arrived, filthy and hysterical, screaming any
time someone approached her. Only much later did she find out
how much her anger and fear had threatened everyone sitting there.
Then, all she knew was that she wanted her mother. Laani, not much
older than Cori herself, had managed to grab the flailing arms and pin
the kicking legs with her knees. “Forget your parents,” she’d told Cori
over and over. “We’re your family now. No one else but us. No one.”

Without thinking, Cori began to breathe along with the waves,
following the Moon rhythm that lay underneath the wind-driven
frenzy. Her body swayed as she closed her eyes and breathed in the
dark water, breathed out all her memories, the kills, the loneliness. In
and out, rising and falling. She could let herself open like the paper
flowers in the Crystal City, let the sea enter her and carry her away
until nothing was left but the waves, rising and dying forever.

With a sharp cry Cori shook herself loose. She stood up and
rubbed her arms. What was happening to her? First she almost spills
herself on some nameless brat, now she comes close to emptying the
hunger into the sea. Was she scared? Of the dragon? Maybe she was
just tired. Sick of it all.

She began to walk along the muddy road that formed the top of
the Wall. What would have happened if she’d let herself drift off like
that? With the hunger so high. Burn the whole town probably.
What
they deserve,
she thought sourly.

Memory again. Huddling in the corner of her parents’ stone floor
kitchen—her dress torn, blood spattered—her ears battered by her
mother’s gulping sobs, her father’s groans and whimpers, the shouts
from Rann’s father and brothers, and from the mob throwing rocks
at the walls and the closed wooden shutters. And then the stillness.
It started outside the house and spread inside, even silencing her
mother, as
they
appeared in the doorway, three of them, neither men
nor women it seemed, despite their close-fitting tunics. Weaponless,
silent, they walked her through the enraged crowd, and even Rann’s
father didn’t dare throw the stone he held so tightly in his hand.
“We’re your family now. No one but us.”

“Rann,” Cori said softly and squinted at the wet night as if the sea
would fling his burned body at her. She started walking again, then
stopped when she saw another guard outpost. Don’t want to give the
poor boy a shock, she thought. She lay down on the road, so soaked
it didn’t make a difference.
Mother Earth,
she thought,
when are you
going to let go of me?

2

Morin Jay lived in a turreted house with too many rooms. A servant
met her at the door. Despite his blousy shirt and balloon trousers,
the costume of a middle-rank Hrelltan, the man’s accent betrayed
his local origins. He led her through a long hallway to a large room
overlooking the sea. Cori glanced at the paintings in their gold-edged
frames (expensive but she would never have hung them), the long
desk covered with symbols of the Yellow God, the graceful gold and
red rug before the desk, and she thought how the god had favored
Morin Jay more than he cared to admit.

The merchant stood up, his hands politely extended, then dropped
them as Cori stood motionless. He offered her a room in his house;
she said she preferred to camp on the grounds. He vaguely suggested
lunch; she suggested they go look at the ruins. Obviously relieved he
wouldn’t have to entertain her, Morin dismissed his servant (even
more relieved) and led her from the house.

The dragon’s former town (or castle, or spell-casting ground)
covered the flat top of a hill somewhat higher than that of Morin’s
house. Though the winding road upward appeared gentle, Cori soon
found herself struggling, almost as out of breath as Morin Jay, who
gulped air at every step. Entry barrier, she thought, probably very
strong at one time. But when she tried to reach past it to ground
her nerve ends in the Earth she discovered a very different barrier.
For the first time in years she couldn’t sink her mind through the
pathways in the rock to that endless source of power. She could sense
a kind of fever, a sickness in the Earth itself.

“What’s wrong?” Morin whispered. “Should we turn back?”

“Shut up.” Panic shook her like an infant who can’t find her mother.
Panic, and a wild urge to smash her elbow into Morin Jay’s face, to
cut his belly with her sharp, hardened fingernails. Calm, she ordered
herself. The memory of what the Guild had done to Jabob, the “client
killer,” helped her to throw off the tension from her eyes and mouth,
then move the calm down her body to the toes and fingers. “Come
on,” she said, and strode up the hill. Morin puffed behind her.

Cori had never seen ruins like these. The building or buildings
must have been built of some artificial rock, if such a thing could
exist, for she knew of no way to carve stone in such graceful spirals, or
in such fine and regular points. Nor could anyone dye stone in such
vivid delicate colors. There was rubble everywhere, from pebbles
and formless chunks of jagged “rock,” some as big and lumpy as a
sleeping horse. Cori picked up some small pieces, found them cold,
more smooth than the grainy look suggested, and amazingly heavy.
She stared at a flattish piece smaller than the palm of her hand—and
found herself thinking how she could crack Morin Jay’s skull with it.
Shaking, she threw it behind her.

Though no complete buildings remained, several half structures
rose from the ground like plants. One, a kind of vertical maze, began
as a narrow tower, then impossibly curled around and back on itself,
until Cori grew dizzy trying to follow all the twists of “stone.” In the
center of the ruins Cori found some sort of well, a tube of glistening
dark blue stone about four feet in diameter and broken off a short
distance above Cori’s head. She found a smooth edge and hoisted
herself up to look inside. Dizziness seized her; she got a glimpse of a
deep tunnel, murky dark with a pinpoint of light far below the hill.
Her fingers came loose and she fell heavily to the pebbly dirt. Morin
hovered over her. “What was it? Did you see something?”