Falcon of the Night
Page 3
who he pretended to be, and that tempted me more than anything else to tell him what I’d heard. I wanted him to react so that I could, which would begin the game of shadows. I missed the life of deception, and though I resisted it then, I knew I had to get back into it.
I sold the barge and everything else, taking my fortune to the eastern wildernesses of Walthorn and purchasing land and a cabin away from watchful eyes. There, I devoted myself to mastering falconry, something that I had been dabbling in ever since I began on the river.
Once I was well established, I started to build the life I was really interested in. With all the money and time in the world, there was no need for meaningless pilfering. I wanted to sneak my way into the political vein of the Northern Kingdom, to learn more of its secrets and observe and manipulate its destiny from the darkness.
There was, however, one thing I could not do anymore, be a chameleon and change names. I had to have aliases, of course, but I wanted there to be something real behind them. Not my name, which I left in the plains, but one to claim as my own. I settled on Karsa, my father’s name.
The Final Brick
A man once told me that a life of dishonesty is one spent building a prison a single brick at a time. Only when we complete the structure do we realize that we are stuck on the inside. I now see that in the fading night of my existence.
I did get the opportunity to witness the fate of the kingdom, or rather see what its destiny is likely to be, but I will ultimately play no role in any of it. It is great men who shape the world. I should have remained content with something simpler.
To be brief, my years as Karsa have been spent restlessly performing the dirty work of the dukes, both directly and through their agents, but I was only a pawn in a game that has been going on since well before I was born, one whose conclusion seems to be nearing on the horizon.
That is not to say that I have lived a miserable, unrewarding life. It is only here at the end that I see the bleakness for what it is. My years as a spy were everything I wanted them to be, and there was much to take joy in, particularly from my falcons. I, too, found a kinship with them, something that brought me closer to the memory of my father. One in particular, Elsu, quickly became my favorite. He was quite young when I found him, lost in the wilderness, abandoned and orphaned. My best years have been spent with him by my side.
Unfortunately, each step I have taken in his training has pushed me further down an inescapable path, one that has reached its final bend. It seems that when you’ve been around as long as I have, you find that some people want you dead if only because you are a weapon that could someday be used against them, even if they are at the same time using you to accomplish their purposes.
I should have seen this treachery coming, that the very people who sent me to this wilderness lake town would be sending me to my death, but it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters now that I can see the end is that I am about to be free. It is not the kind of freedom I ever planned on, but perhaps with all that I have done, it is right that this is how I make the final journey home.
Faint traces of light begin to paint the sky in oranges and reds as I finish reading, my mind troubled instead of relieved. We were stripped of all our belongings when we were captured, meaning the journal had to have been written completely in advance. Karsa knew that we would be captured and yet left me completely in the dark all the way up to his death.
Still, I refuse to believe that he would leave me for dead like this. There has to be something more behind everything, and the journal must be the key. I reopen it, flipping through its pages again and again and reviewing its format. After a moment, I have it figured out. The introduction is not just a message for me. It is a cipher.
This is the first one Karsa ever taught me, very simple and quite easy to overlook. There are four sentences in the introduction, and the journal itself is divided into four sections. The number of letters in each sentence denotes that order of word in the corresponding section. The resulting message should therefore be four words.
The first sentence has eighty-seven letters, so the first word is the eighty-seventh word in section one: falcon. The second sentence is sixty-one letters: of. Fifty-nine for section three: the. Forty-six for the fourth section: night. Falcon of the night. That is the message, but how is it supposed to help me?
Perhaps I made a mistake. I go back over the text and try to see if I can decipher something clearer by using the words surrounding the code words. A course be night. A course the fading. Falcon is one fading. To course one night. To course one fading. They’re all gibberish.
From the types of codes we’ve used in the past, falcon of the night is the only one that sounds right to me. It has to be the message Karsa intended. That is unless there is no message and I’m reading into something that has no underlying meaning. That no hope remains.
“It’s time,” a familiar voice calls out to me from the hall.
The door unlocks and swings open as I turn around. I brace myself thinking to fight back, but two guards quickly seize me by the arms and hold me firmly while a third one, the one from last night, places a dark bag over my head and binds my wrists behind me.
At this point, I reconsider my impulse to resist. There is nothing to say and little I can do. Fighting will only delay the inevitable. I have failed to grasp whatever Karsa needed me to understand to get through this alive.
My escorts lead me down stairs and through hallways at a deliberate, casual pace, and my mind wanders back to the journal. There was so much there I wish I could think on, even for such a brief sketch of Karsa’s life. A lot about how he was makes sense with what I read. But as I think about it, there are also things that make no sense at all.
Elsu, for instance, was not found in the wild like he wrote, which tells me that Elsu wasn’t who he was writing about at the end of his journal. It was me. I was the wanderer, an orphan in the forest scrounging for food after my father was killed when our village was raided.
“What was that?” one of the guards holding me says, bringing our movement to a stop.
I hear the hiss of an arrow flying through the air, and the guard to my right falls down, groaning in pain. Heavy footsteps then rush in our direction, followed by the clashing of swords. I carefully step away from the noise of fighting until my back bumps up against a stone wall.
As the swordfight continues, I crouch down and try to free my hands from behind my back, but before I can make any progress, the conflict in front of me resolves itself, ending with the unpleasant sound of metal slowly penetrating armor and flesh. I am then grabbed and pressed up against the rough surface behind me.
“For you to be true, you must answer me this,” a deep-voiced man says. “If you were a bird of prey hunting fowl without light—”
“Then I would be a falcon of the night,” I finish, immediately grasping the import of the phrase.
“It is you then,” he says, ripping the bag off of my head. “And what of your master?”
The look I give him is one of sorrow as I put things together in my mind. Karsa knew what we were getting into and planned an exit for me. Why wouldn’t he also provide a means for his own escape?
“I see,” he says, discerning the answer from my eyes.
I am about to ask a question when the echo of distant footsteps interrupts us.
“This way,” he instructs firmly, cutting my bonds and then pulling me out of the long hallway we are in and down a dark set of stairs.
We make our way swiftly through a number of unlit tunnels and corridors. Light peeks in where it can between cracks in the walls and ceiling, providing a faint outline of my rescuer. He is tall and built heavy, but there is something to his frame that makes him seem youthful, perhaps the agility and energy with which he moves.
There is also something about him that makes me a little wary of just who he might be. I didn’t recognize him when I first saw him, which didn’t initially trouble me, but now that I think about it, I don
’t know if I should be willing to trust him once we get beyond the city walls.
After a few more bends and turns, we reach a collapsed section of flooring exposing an underground waterway beneath it. The man prompts me to jump right in.
“Swim to the end of the tunnel. There is a doorway right before the water pours off into a canal that runs through the city. I’ll be right behind you.”
The water feels like ice as I plummet into it and then resurface, but it doesn’t bother me. I’ve always found it refreshing for some reason, that sensation of cold numbness. I like to imagine that this is how birds feel when they fly among the clouds in a wintry night sky.
“Now what?” I ask once I reach the door.
“We walk through there, and we’re home free,” he answers, pulling himself up on the ledge of the waterway.
His comment makes me anxious, so I wait for him to be the first to exit the room. Everything about this has been almost too easy.
“After you,” he says slyly.
I study him for a moment before doing as he requests, the light from the rising sun adding detail to his face as it pours in through the grate where the water is flowing.
“I just saved your life,” he reassures with a soft, empathetic voice. “You can trust me.”
A part of me wants to, but my intuitions are screaming at me that I shouldn’t. Even if Karsa did