15

THE ASSASSIN

 

THERE ARE THINGS you never notice until they’re gone, the assassin thought.

Like breath, say. He could breathe, at least. Or the freedom to move your arms and legs, which he couldn’t do.

There wasn’t much else to do except breathe and think, as he crouched motionless in the darkness of the castle garden, waiting for the guards to pass by again.

You can go tendays without even thinking about breathing, but the moment you duck your head under the water in the cut-off barrel you’re bathing in, or take in a lungful of smoke from a campfire, you’re reminded of how much you miss it.

Stretching and moving around were like that, now. He hadn’t thought much about how good it was to be able to move, even a little, since the last time he’d been on an ambush. The body, it seemed, needed to move, and he simply couldn’t, not until he was sure that the guard had passed by.

The baron was not cooperating; he was going to have to do this the hard way.

The cool night was cloudy, only a few stars peeking through breaks in the dark masses, while off in the distance faerie lights quickly pulsed from a bright red to a muted orange and an almost actinic blue, then back again.

He could have done without the faerie lights, but they were far enough off that they couldn’t reveal his position, as long as he didn’t move.

And he didn’t move. He had been crouching long enough that his thigh muscles were complaining and his back muscles were doing worse than that, but he had long since learned to accept — and, if possible, give — far worse pain as simply a fact of life.

It was all just a matter of space and timing, after all. He had memorized the map of the castle grounds and the keep’s floor plan long before, of course, and had, of course, immediately destroyed it as soon as he had. A mercenary soldier in the pay of the Empire would have no reason to have such a thing on his person, and once he had committed it to memory, there was no need for the map.

The gold had been a different matter. He couldn’t leave it in his footlocker, as it was not at all uncommon for a signature knot to be learned by a thieving supposed comrade or a momentarily empty barracks taken advantage of by one less clever who would simply use a knife — what would Dereken, a private soldier, be doing with so much gold?

Some questions were best not asked, and if they were not asked, it would be easy not to have to have an answer. It had been much easier to keep the gold coins on his person until he could arrange a stint in the barracks saddlery, and stitch most of the coins inside his saddle, with a few substituted for the lead weights at the hem of his cloak, just in case he had to abandon the horse and saddle.

If everything went right — and he was determined to make it go right — he would ride away on his pay this night.

He smiled to himself. Yes, of course, only half the money had been paid in advance, but that half would have to do. The merchant who had hired him had sworn that the rest of his payment would be made when Forinel was dead, and he had dutifully agreed on a meeting time and place, several days hence.

He would, of course, be long gone well before that.

A hired killer was a loose end, and whoever it was who wanted the baron dead would have an easy opportunity to tightly tie up said loose end with sharp steel across Dereken’s throat rather than tie it up much more loosely, with gold in Dereken’s pocket.

Leaving him dead might solve the problem more neatly than that — Dereken’s company, after all, was in the pay of Governor Treseen, and his dead body would point toward Treseen.

Which probably meant that Treseen had no involvement.

Who was his real employer?

Lord Miron was the obvious suspect — killing Forinel would as much as give the barony to him — and Miron was said to be spending his time in Baron Tyrnael’s court these days, five or six baronies away, across into Bieme proper.

But who was supplying the gold didn’t matter. What did matter was the gold in his saddle, and the geas that made it literally impossible for him to try to ride away from Keranahan until he knew that Forinel was dead. He had tried, of course, but he had found himself unable to take the eastern road; his fingers and feet wouldn’t give his horse the commands, and he couldn’t even try. He couldn’t even find himself able to believe that he could leave without killing Forinel.

Well, that was part of the bargain, and while he would have broken his side of the bargain without remorse or hesitation, he had been unsurprised when his employer had left the room, and sent in a masked wizard to lay on hands and murmur words that could not be remembered. Actually, he was relieved about the implications of that mask, how it suggested that they wouldn’t kill him when the job was done — it had actually made him consider, just for a moment, risking collecting his pay.

As, no doubt, it had been intended to.

He smiled to himself. You’d think that —

He froze in place, forcing himself not to breathe, not to move, not to look up at the ramparts. He had once avoided a night ambush when a flash of starlight on the eyeball of a hidden killer had alerted him, and he didn’t intend to pass the favor along.

But there was no hesitation as the even footsteps sounded above; the two guards didn’t even pause in their muttered conversation, and he more felt than saw that their attention was directed outward.

The man who called himself Dereken — shit, that was his name; his name was whatever he called himself at the moment, and never mind what they called him in other places — moved closer to the northern portico.

Peace had made them all lazy. There were square indentations in the ground where the barding would have been installed, turning the opening into a solid oak wall, and making the portico entrance even less accessible than the massive oak door on the front end of the keep. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if there were murder holes in the room above this entrance, as there surely were in the keep’s foyer, giving defenders one last, probably pointless chance to hold off an enemy that had breached the outer walls.

But that wouldn’t give the baron and his wife-to-be — and damn the geas for preventing him from taking the obvious opportunity after he killed the baron; the closest he had ever come to mounting a noblewoman had been that fat town warden’s young wife in Enkiar during the cross-border raid two years ago — the opportunity to walk out of the great hall on a cool evening and smell the roses.

It would have been nice if the baron had done that himself this evening.

One quick looping of that spiked Therranji garrote over the baron’s head, a sharp tug that would have probably broken the baron’s neck and surely would have crushed his windpipe …

… and the man who called himself Dereken could have been on his way up the stairs to the ramparts, and down the outer walls, sliding down the rope much more quickly than he had climbed up.

But, of course, life never was easy, and a mercenary soldier should be used to that.

The keep itself was relatively quiet, but not completely. That was to be expected, even out here in the hinterlands. Dereken had served in Biemestren, and liked the constant noise and bustle of the capital. Standing guard as part of the Keranahan contingent, even at the outer ramparts of the castle, had been less boring than such things usually were, what with servitors from the castle kitchens bringing meals and tea — iced or hot, depending on the season. And some of those servitors had been young and female.

As he made his way into the great hall, the only sounds he could hear came from the kitchens. He kept near the walls — his employer had told him that there were more than a few squeaky floorboards between the old long table and the archway that led to the stairways up into the Residence proper.

He would have said this was too easy, but as a matter of policy and temperament he had never really accepted the notion of something actually being too easy, and this didn’t seem like a time to start.

The Residence had originally been a three-story, fairly slim tower — built during one of the pre-Holtish dynasties; Euar’den, perhaps — but it had been expanded by a series of attached structures that included the great hall and the kitchen on one side and a combination servants’ residence and officers’ barracks on the other, and nowadays it was just a staircase, a widdershins spiral of stone blocks set into the wall of the castle itself, that opened on the second and third floors.

Every ten steps or so, a steel spike had been driven in between the immense blocks that made up the structure, but oil lamps were hanging from only about half of them, and of those, only two were lit, hissing and sputtering as they shed a wan, weak light that Dereken would just as soon have lived without, despite its weakness.

Light was not his friend tonight.

He blew out each of these as he passed. Darkness was his friend and ally, and while it was difficult to admit it to himself, it was good to have a friend and ally, for once.

He passed through the archway and into the hall, keeping close to the edge of the archway more out of superstition than reasoning. After all, if there was anybody awake to see him framed in the doorway, he was a dead man.

But there wasn’t. No guard stood or even slept on watch outside the half-open door at the end of the hall. Dereken stood next to the doorway, and listened, silently, to the quiet sounds inside. It took him a moment to be sure that there were two in there — one barely snoring, the other simply breathing slowly, in sleep — before he walked in.

Under a rumpled pile of light sheets that were more than were needed on such a warm night, two forms lay, intertwined.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried to imagine strangling the baron, then — after gagging her, of course — quickly mounting the woman sleeping with him. It would be a stupid thing to do, but …

But he couldn’t even get excited at the prospect; the geas bound his mind too tightly. He couldn’t even produce a distant relish at the notion of slitting her throat quietly, which is what he would rationally have preferred to do, all things being equal. A quick poke would be available for a few coppers in the nearest town, after all, and if he found that inconvenient, there was always a peasant’s shack.

Unless, of course, it wasn’t Lady Leria.

The thought of that made him smile above and stiffen below. Hmmm … well, of course it wasn’t the Lady Leria; it simply couldn’t be a noble lady. Naturally, unless there had been a marriage, a noble lady would be keeping her noble hymen intact for her wedding, and as long as Dereken could make himself believe that, he could mount her, kill her, and be gone, and no matter that his supposed employer had made it clear that she was not to be touched.

Rumor had it that before Baron Keranahan’s reappearance, there had been serious talk in Biemestren that she might even marry the Emperor himself. Her bloodline was certainly adequate — she was, by some accounts, rightfully the Euar’den heir to what had centuries before been conquered by the first Prince Holt and renamed Holtun. And the drawing Dereken had seen and the rumors he had heard about her face and form were intriguing enough. It would be interesting to poke a noble lady and see if they actually were any different.

But it wasn’t worth risking even a few gold coins, and it certainly wasn’t worth his life.

A bulbous oil lamp stood on the nightstand on the right side of the bed — the baron slept on the right side, so Dereken had been told — with the wick trimmed to the point where it barely flickered.

One of the forms mumbled something, then shifted on the bed, although the mattress itself didn’t seem to move. You could never quite figure out nobility — if Dereken could have, he would have slept on the softest of soft down mattress that ever there was, but it looked like this idiot had one stuffed with horse hair or something.

Well, while Dereken was, by nature, a curious sort — his long-dead father had often beaten him for asking too many questions, and that, of course, had merely made him ask even more questions — he had learned, painfully, that there was a time and place for everything, including curiosity, and this clearly wasn’t one of those.

He reached behind and loosened his spiked Therranji garrote with one hand, while he unsheathed his dagger with his other hand.

Loop the garrote over the baron’s head, jerk it tight, then slip his hand over the baron’s bedmate’s mouth — surely not the Lady Leria, of course, of course, it simply couldn’t be her, of course, of course — and it would all be over in a matter of the few final heartbeats.

He didn’t waste any time as he stood over the baron’s sleeping form; with one hand he yanked the pillow away, and slipped the garrote over —

It slipped through the baron’s neck, slowed down no more than if it had been sliding through a wisp of smoke, a flame, or a bad dream.

Dereken tried to turn and run — but found that his muscles wouldn’t obey him. The baron wasn’t dead; he had just turned into some sort of intangible phantom, and the geas wouldn’t permit Dereken to flee just because of that.

Light flared from behind him, impossibly bright, unreally silent.

He might not be able to run, but he could defend himself with his knife — and his feet, fists, elbows, and knees, if it came to that.

But as he started to turn, dropping the garrote to reach for the forearm-long dagger strapped to his back, the two bodies in the bed simply disappeared, gone in an eyeblink, like the flame of a candle that has been blown out.

“Stand easy, man, and it’s just possible that you might live out the night,” sounded from behind him.

He finished his turn, his fingers clutching at the dagger’s hilt.

Standing in the doorway were two men. One of them, sixtyish and in gray wizard’s robes, held a short stick — much shorter than the usual wizard’s staff; it was about the length of a typical truncheon — out and to the side, not squinting in the incredibly bright light issuing from its tip, bathing the room in painful brilliance.

The wizard was about Dereken’s height, and his thinning gray hair was bound back, tight to his head. His too-well-trimmed beard seemed awfully short and stylish for a wizard, and his smile revealed overly even, too-white teeth.

“My name is Erenor,” he said. “Some call me Erenor the Great. Then again, others call me Erenor the Barely Adequate, At Best. I’m not offended either way.”

The other one snorted at that. Half a head taller than the wizard, he was simply the ugliest man that Dereken had ever seen. His thick face was heavy-jawed, with sunken, piggish eyes under heavy brows that almost met his hairline. His mouth was too small for him, and his double chins should have belonged to a rich merchant, and not a soldier with the blue and gray piping of Keranahan at the hem and cuffs of his jacket, and a pair of singlesticks clutched firmly and easily in his hands.

A beard would have covered the double chins and the twisted mouth, but there was nothing much that could have been done about the sunken, piggish eyes.

The right thing to do, the only thing to do, would be to run for the window, to get away, and every instinct told Dereken that that was exactly what he should be doing, but …

But there was no baron here. Of course — the baron had been made to vanish, transported elsewhere. And that meant that this Erenor was something rather more than some local hedge-wizard, even more than the masked wizard that this employer had brought in to place the geas on Dereken.

But spells took preparation, and Dereken knew enough about wizardry to know that they could keep only a small number of spells coiled in their minds at one time, ready to be shot forth like the quarrel of a crossbow. Surely this wizard would have some spell ready to protect himself … but perhaps if Dereken threw something at him — his knife would do — to distract both him and the ugly man for just a moment, and then leaped through the open window and hoped that he didn’t shatter his ankles on the stones below …

It was a slim chance, but his only one.

Until Baron Keranahan stepped into the room, a pistol in his hand, as well.

Dereken might be able to distract one long enough to flee, but the window was easily five, six steps away, and the other would surely cut him down before he made it halfway.

And Baron Keranahan? As a boy, he had fled his title to make his name adventuring in the Katharhd, and had returned just before the Emperor and Parliament were to award it to his half-brother.

Dereken could not leave him alive.

Forinel, Baron Keranahan was taller than either of the others, with the broad jaw and sharp cheekbones of the Keranahan dynasty, leavened perhaps by the dark eyes topped by almost feminine eyelashes that he must have inherited from his mother. He held a pistol leveled at Dereken, as well, but he held it awkwardly, unlike the short sword that he held in his right hand.

“I’m known as Forinel, Baron Keranahan,” he said. “You have my word that if you’ll tell me who sent you, you’ll depart a free man. An outlaw, mind, guaranteed death if you don’t flee the Empire. But a free man.”

The wizard smiled at that, his eyes twinkling in the light from his faerie torch. “But there’s plenty of world beyond the Empire, and some of us, at least, have been known to flee a town from time to time.”

“Shut up,” the ugly one said. His voice was higher-pitched than Dereken would have guessed it would be, but there was no anger or heat in his voice.

“But, I —”

“Shut your hole, Erenor.”

Dereken was stunned at the wizard’s reaction: he just bowed, albeit sarcastically, in feigned apology, although his eyes never left Dereken’s face as he spoke.

“Yes, Pirojil, of course. I live but to obey.”

Fleeing wasn’t possible, and Dereken had no illusions that his geas would permit him to tell what little he knew. There was only one solution.

With no hesitation, no windup, he flipped his knife at the baron, hoping that it would land point-first.

But, just as the garrote had, it passed through the baron’s neck, and clattered against the wall beyond.

And then the ugly one was upon him, the sticks swinging swiftly.

Dereken ducked under the first blow and launched himself at Pirojil, the ugly man, lashing out with fists and elbows and knees and head. He simply couldn’t be taken — they would have him tortured to extract what little he knew, and since he would be unable to talk, all he had to look forward to was an eternity of pain.

But the sticks moved more quickly and deftly than they should have in the hands of such a clumsy-looking man. One battered his hands away to his sides, while a poke from the other caught him in the middle of the gut, sending him, retching, to his knees.

Distantly, he felt his hands taken behind him and bound, and he was dragged upright to his knees. The smiling wizard took hold of his shoulders — his grip was far stronger than Dereken would have guessed — while the other one lifted him by his hair, the length of one of his sticks resting against Dereken’s throat.

“He’s been made safe, Forinel,” Pirojil said.

Again, the baron walked out from behind the door, holstering the pistol behind his back.

His face was emotionless, in a way far more frightening than anger would have been. He unsheathed a knife from his belt and took a step forward.

“No,” Pirojil said. “You gave your word.”

“Well, actually, no,” Erenor said, “he didn’t.”

He held tightly to Dereken’s right ear with one hand while the other lightly fluttered up and down Dereken’s tunic, removing his purse and his spare knife, but missing the hidden garrote and small, scabbarded knife that Dereken had tied to his upper thigh. “It was my seeming, after all, and not really the baron.”

“He would have killed her, too, Pirojil,” the baron said. “He would have slit her throat in the bed, while she slept next to me, Pirojil.”

Why the baron was pleading with an ordinary soldier was something that Dereken didn’t understand. Enough to understand that, appearances to the contrary, this Pirojil was in charge here, and if Dereken was to bargain for his life, it would be with him, and not with the baron.

Erenor shook his head. “He’s just a tool, no more than a knife. You don’t blame the tool — blame the man who uses it. If you need to destroy a tool, go out into the hall and break his knife, and let’s see if we can get some answers out of the man. At least he can talk.”

“That is, of course,” Pirojil said, “if you agree to that, Baron Keranahan. It’s your choice, of course. It’s your word.”

“If he’s not just another of your seemings, wizard,” Dereken said. “I’d not take the word of an illusion.”

This Erenor didn’t look like a wizard — from his manner and the cut of his clothes Dereken would have guessed him to be a guard officer, possibly, or more likely a minor noble.

But …

“Oh, this one’s no seeming,” Erenor said. “Your little toys — and such nasty little toys they are, aren’t they? — went right through my seemings. They’re just illusions, after all. But the baron is solid enough, and that’s easy enough to prove. You want to persuade him of that, Baron?”

Keranahan’s brow furrowed.

“Please. I think he’s still skeptical.” Erenor jerked his chin at Dereken. “Touch him.”

A vague smile crossed the baron’s lips. He took a step forward and backhanded Dereken across the mouth so hard that lights danced in Dereken’s eyes. His hand seemed harder than any noble’s hand had a right to.

Dereken’s own blood tasted salty in his mouth, but somehow the feeling was reassuring rather than frightening. It wasn’t the first time he had tasted his own blood, after all.

“If you tell us everything you know, you’ll live. Just as the seeming said.” The baron’s lips tightened. “Unless you ever, ever take a step in her direction. Just once, take just one step toward her, no matter how far away you are, and if you have time to look around you’ll find me behind you.”

Pirojil’s face was impassive, but Erenor rolled his eyes.

“Always the hero, our … baron is,” Erenor said. “Still, don’t think he doesn’t mean it — although how you’re expected to know where she is all the time escapes me, as does how, if you’re off in, say, Pandathaway, you’re supposed to know which steps might lead you ever-so-slightly closer to her. But you get the idea.”

“Do you swear it?” Dereken asked. “Will your wizard here put you under a geas?”

Erenor chuckled. “A geas? That’s not my specialty. They’re far too real and substantial for an illusionist like myself. And, other than that, if the truth be known — and it is, from time to time, if not often — when it comes to anything other than illusions, I’m not very much of a wizard at all.”

Keranahan eyed him levelly. “I don’t need spells to bind me to my word, and you do have my word.”

“Take it or leave it,” Pirojil said.

“Please leave it.” Erenor chuckled. He was enjoying himself by all appearances, although Dereken didn’t trust the appearances much. “I want to see how he does this.” His eyes hardened. “And, truth be told, and even a liar tells the truth now and then, I’m ordinately fond of the lady myself, and don’t much take to somebody who would have slain her in her betrothed’s bed.” He patted Dereken on the cheek, and the gentleness of that was more frightening than the baron’s meaty slap. “You’re quite lucky that she’s not even in Keranahan at the moment, or the baron wouldn’t be so generous.”

Dereken would have shrugged, but Pirojil probably would have taken that as some sort of attempt to escape and beaten him senseless, so he didn’t.

So be it.

I am under a geas.

He could say that, and they would understand why he couldn’t say any more. He wouldn’t have to say any more — they’d find some wizard to break it, like a locksmith opening another’s lock. It would take time, and perhaps a trip to Biemestren — the Emperor’s wizard was, understandably, the best in the Empire — and perhaps during that time there would be a chance to escape.

He would certainly try.

“I am under a —”

***

There are things that you don’t miss until they are gone, the assassin thought, as his heart stopped.

He would have sworn that he had had rarely either heard or felt the gentle thud-thud-thud as it beat within his chest, but it had always been there, and now it was gone.

He’d always thought that when your heart stopped you were dead, immediately, right then and there.

Oh, he had heard stories about soldiers continuing the fight with an arrow or a spear or a bullet through their heart, and he had certainly learned early that a man didn’t die right away simply because you’d run him through.

But it wasn’t so.

He couldn’t breathe, and if Pirojil and Erenor hadn’t been hold ing him upright, he surely would have fallen, but he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t gone. He was still there. He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t speak; his heart couldn’t beat, and he missed breath and speech and heartbeating, but he was still there.

And then, slowly, the blackness swept up and over him until it became a light as white as that of Erenor’s faerie flare, and his last thought was not to wonder if he was the only person ever to notice that a man didn’t die instantly when his heart stopped, but rather to wonder how many before had learned this just before it all went —