by Will Wight
With one hand, she broke the seal on her pack of paralysis needles. She pulled out a pair, shifting one to her left hand.
A double dose of this poison would likely be lethal, even for a man of Urzaia’s size. He would lose muscle control, and then even his heart and lungs would seize up. Most people would die in seconds.
But Champions were given resistance to poison as one of their many gifts. If he was indeed a member of that Guild, she couldn’t afford to take any chances.
Before he’d turned all the way around, she embedded a poisoned needle in both sides of his neck.
He staggered, and Shera wrapped her whole body around him, clapping a hand over his mouth. The gladiator struggled weakly, fumbling at his belt for his hatchets, but she pinned his arm in place with an elbow.
As his weight settled down onto her, she noticed the flaw in her plan. Light and life, the man was heavy. It was all she could do to use her entire body to lower the man to the deck rather than dropping him.
His hatchets fell out as he hit the wooden planks, but she couldn’t spare any attention for that. She did freeze for a few seconds, both to catch her breath and to see if anyone came in response to the sound.
No one did.
She plucked the needles from his neck and tossed them into the ocean—the ship had an alchemist onboard, and there was no need to leave any more clues than necessary.
Once again, she swept a hand over her equipment, taking stock of her remaining needles, making sure everything was still in place, loosening her shear in its sheath.
The major threat had been culled, and now all that remained was the target.
She felt her hopes swelling—she was inches from not only keeping the Heart of Nakothi buried, where it belonged, but also setting Lucan free.
When she noticed her own thoughts, she crushed the feeling with resolute force, letting the ice spread in her heart once again.
She couldn’t think about anything needless until the mission was over. Hope had killed as many assassins as fear. Only cold, careful thought could keep her alive and successful now.
When her mind was cool and calm once more, she slipped up to the cabin door. She slid the latch open slowly with the tip of her knife, pulling at the door with her gloved hand. She took almost a full minute to open the door a crack, at which point she slipped through.
For a moment, she was surprised to see two people in the same bed. Did Naberius sleep with his Silent One? She’d heard the Guild discouraged relationships between Witnesses, which was one reason why they preferred sibling pairs, but Witnesses had to travel all over the world. There was little the Guild could do to stop Chroniclers and Silent Ones from doing whatever they pleased.
More importantly, the file on Naberius hadn’t indicated any romantic connection between him and his partner, Tristania, but that could just mean they were discreet.
She padded closer, filling her left hand with a needle and her right hand with her shear. Since they were in the same bed, she would have to kill Tristania first; as a Soulbound, she was the bigger threat. So Shera would paralyze the Chronicler, then slit the Silent One’s throat.
As she moved closer, she saw Tristania’s black hair spilling over the pillow. The file had noted that Tristania preferred to cover her body in bandages at all times, presumably to hide some disfiguring injury, but it seemed she took them off to sleep.
Shera leaned over the bed, raising her needle and her blade...
Then she stopped as a shaft of moonlight fell through the porthole and landed on the man’s head.
He had red hair. Naberius was supposed to have long, dark curls—the file mentioned them specifically, as well as the salons where he preferred to have his hair styled.
Calder Marten, she realized. The captain of the ship had stayed in his cabin after all. Which made the woman next to him his wife, not Tristania.
She cursed her own inattention, but it couldn’t be helped. The file’s description of Jyrine Tessella Marten was cursory and brief. She had never been a subject of interest for the Consultants, so the Guild knew very little about her. There wasn’t even a physical description, and Tristania always covered her face, so there was no way she could have told them apart.
Shera leaned back, stepping away as quietly as possible. If she acted quickly, she could still salvage this. She just had to find where Naberius was sleeping.
At that instant, as if to curse all her meticulous preparations, the wood creaked under her.
And Jyrine Tessella Marten sat straight up in bed.
Shera whipped her left hand forward instantly, hurling the needle. Throwing a needle was an art, but mastery was almost impossible: unlike throwing knives, which could be weighted and launched predictably, needles tended to drift through the air. Getting the point in the target was as much luck as skill.
But this time, neither luck nor skill came into play.
An earring in Jyrine’s left ear flashed green, and the needle burst into green flame in midair. It was made of metal, and should have at least melted, but not even ash drifted away.
Soulbound, Shera thought.
Of Jyrine, the file had only said, “No combat training. No special powers.”
When the woman summoned a ball of acid-green flame into her palm, Shera began to suspect the file might be wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Thirteen years ago
Of the two thousand Consultants living on the Gray Island, five hundred and twelve were students.
The Masons hosted the most, with two hundred and thirty-seven children of varying ages learning two hundred and thirty-seven different professions. They would be trained as librarians, alchemists, shipwrights, Witnesses, guardsmen, merchants, landowners, Kameira hunters, scholars, and even actual Masons. All so that when the Consultants needed an insider to deliver information, they would have already have an expert trained and perfectly positioned.
Next were the Shepherds, with their one hundred and twenty-three trainees. These young men and women learned skills of infiltration and observation, from memory training to scaling walls. For a young Consultant to be called a Shepherd, she needed to be able to swim from a river into a sewer grate, climb the walls of a clock-tower, then observe a target through a telescope for eight hours before returning and reciting all of the target’s actions without error. This was how the Consultants built their legendary fortune of accurate information.
The Architects ruled the island, their students kept separate from the other orders. One hundred and seven children studied to lead their Guild, learning Reading and alchemy, history and strategy, linguistics and the secret machinations of the other nine Guilds. Where Masons and Shepherds would be sent out in the world to harvest knowledge for the Am’haranai, Architects knew that the Gray Island would forever be their home.
The Miners, a small and oft-forgotten order, housed only forty-two students. These were the archivists, those who kept and sorted the true wealth of the Consultants: their records. Not a single habit of a single Izyrian milkmaid was ever lost or misplaced; if the Consultants knew it once, they would know it forever. And the Miners trained to keep it so.
Miners, even more tightly than most Consultants, were sworn to secrecy. Because they also kept the personnel records for the Gray Island, and they knew that among the four orders of the Am’haranai, only five hundred and nine students were accounted for.
Three had gone missing.
Had this knowledge leaked to the wrong ears, it would lend credence to a nasty rumor, one that all Consultants publicly denied.
As everyone outside the Island had been told again and again: Gardeners did not exist.
All this Shera learned, as she and her two fellow students were taught how to kill people.
~~~
Nothing grew in the Garden.
The home of the Gardeners was a vast underground chamber that Kerian said had existed since the dawn of the Empire. Over the years, all that empty space—enough to swallow the Capital
district where Shera had been born—had been filled with houses. Every conceivable type of shelter, from a simple lean-to to a sprawling Summerland estate, was represented here, recreated with impossible detail.
It was important that every inch of the dwellings was represented accurately, because you never knew where the assignment might take you. Targets could lurk in the back of a townhouse, or hide in the belly of a Navigator’s cargo ship. No matter where they hid, a Gardener had to know a way in and a way out.
In her two years with the Consultants, Shera had learned more about architecture than knife-work. She still wondered who cleaned the hundreds of homes modeled here, or if they were somehow invested or alchemically treated to maintain themselves. The oldest houses in the back, made of fluted columns and towering arches of stone, seemed remarkably well preserved. Though they had to be at least eight hundred years old, they looked as if they’d been torn out of the streets yesterday.
Meia, the oldest of the three Gardeners-in-training, hissed and snapped her fingers to get Shera’s attention. Shera jerked awake—she’d dozed off while thinking about the Garden.
“It’s my turn,” Meia declared, stepping up to the foot of a dusty stone tower. “Please pay attention.”
Shera rolled out of the hammock she’d strung up between an eighth-century monolith and a Luminian chapter house. She sat on the edge of the hammock, adopting a look of intense concentration. “Your audience has arrived.”
Meia tied her blond hair up and kicked some gravel in Shera’s direction. For some reason Shera didn’t understand, the entirety of the Garden floor was covered in fine gravel, as though it had been built to make stealth as difficult as possible.
“You should take this seriously,” Meia said. “If you watch me, you’ll have an easier time. You might not get punished today.”
“Good point,” Shera said.
She fully intended to be asleep before Meia made it down from the tower.
A whistle pierced the silence. Somewhere in the Garden, their mentor waited with a whistle, signaling the start and end of the training assignment. She would be observing everything they did.
And, as Shera had discovered, their mentor could be hiding anywhere. Sometimes she would be waiting in a far-off clock-tower watching through an invested spyglass, and other times she would have burrowed deep into the gravel beneath their feet. You never knew where she’d come from until she hit you with a blow dart or seized your ankle.
At the first sound of the whistle, Meia shot up the side of the tower.
For this assignment, the parameters were simple: scale the five-story stone tower, kill the straw dummy posing as the target, and return without being spotted. It was simple enough, and there was even a built-in time limit; Meia had applied tacky alchemical glue to her gloves and the toes of her shoes. It allowed her to climb up the stone walls as easily as a lizard, but it only lasted about five minutes before it dissolved. If it ran out while she was still in the room at the top of the tower, she would have to take the five-story trip down the hard way.
So she had to climb the wall, kill a straw man, and return within five minutes. Shera could do it in her sleep. She had proved that, once, when she had fallen asleep in the Garden and woken up at the top of a sixth-century bell tower. Sleepwalking was a terrible curse.
Meia would have no trouble with it either. Indeed, she was halfway up the tower before the echo of the starting whistle had faded. She scuttled up the stone like a black spider, reaching the shuttered window of the top room inside ten seconds.
It was an impressive feat of strength and agility, but Ayana—their mentor in the Gardeners—was not known to make tests easy.
Meia slid a thick knife from the sheath at her ankle, silently sliding the window latch up. She chewed on a loose blond hair as she worked, frowning in intense concentration.
She always took everything too seriously, in Shera’s opinion.
The window slid open soundlessly, and Meia slipped inside.
Closing her eyes, Shera leaned back in the hammock. It was never this simple, with a test Ayana had set up. She didn’t want to test their athletic ability, but their judgment. Which meant guards.
Through a yawn, Shera started counting. “Three...two...one.”
As she finished counting, a door crashed open. Yellow light flooded the room at the top of the tower, and Shera could make out Meia’s silhouette and the sounds of combat.
She let her eyes slip shut and drifted back into a state of relaxation. Maxwell had taught them to rest when they could, so that they would always be ready, and it was a lesson Shera had taken firmly to heart.
The whistle sounded again, and there came a ‘crunch’ as Meia landed back down on the gravel. Limping footsteps moved closer to Shera’s hammock, and a panting voice said, “You should...have been...watching.”
“I got the general idea,” Shera said, without opening her eyes.
Metal scraped on metal, like a knife being sharpened an inch from her ear.
“Did you, now?” Ayana asked. Her voice drifted like a ghost’s, but Shera snapped awake, rolling out of her hammock and onto her feet. Lazy she may have been, but Shera always responded to danger.
Ayana, the mentor assigned to train the three future Gardeners, looked like a phantom out of a play. Her hair was pale blond, her eyes light pink, and her skin looked as though she had never seen the sun. Worst were her fingernails, which grew six inches out from her fingertips and were made of solid black iron. They were sharp as knives, and she had the habit of scraping them together as she spoke.
One night, in a fit of courage, Shera had asked where the nails came from. To her surprise, Ayana had answered. Her parents were two members of the Imperial Guard, who integrated parts from Kameira into their bodies. Such people were usually infertile, but when they did conceive, their offspring often had...problems.
Ayana’s father had dropped her off at the Gray Island when she was three days old.
“Meia was killed,” Ayana said. “Why?”
“She tried to stay and fight,” Shera said. It was a guess, but a good one. Meia didn’t like retreating.
Ayana flexed her iron-tipped fingers, but gave no indication whether Shera had guessed correctly. “How many guards were there?”
“Two,” Shera stated. As Zhen had once taught her, it was best to sound most confident when you had no idea what you were talking about.
The Consultant flicked one fingertip, drawing a red line on the back of Shera’s hand. The pain made her close a fist, and a single drip of red crawled down the skin, but she was careful not to react any more than that. Excessive complaining indicated weakness, for which Ayana would punish her more.
“Shera,” Ayana said, drawing out the word until it sounded like a specter’s lament. “It’s your turn. Try to stay awake.”
Shera stepped up to the base of the tower, pulling on her gloves and wincing as the cloth slid over her fresh cut. For the first time, she looked straight up the tower’s side. It seemed so much taller from this angle, stretching up like a highway into the sky. The stone bricks were cut rough and set wide, so they would provide handholds, but it wouldn’t be as comfortable as she had imagined.
She should have borrowed some of that alchemical glue from Meia. Or better yet, thought to bring some herself.
When Ayana’s whistle echoed through the Garden, Shera hesitated. It seemed like so much work, climbing this tower with nothing more than physical effort. Maybe she could fail intentionally, and share Meia’s punishment.
But as always, she saw Maxwell holding a smoking gun over Mari’s corpse. Finish your work and rest, he’d say. Fail your work, and rest forever.
Cold focus washed over Shera like an icy bath. Once again, the world was simple. The faster she finished her assignment, the sooner she could relax.
She hauled herself up hand-over-hand, reaching the top window in only ten more seconds than it had taken Meia.
The Masons posing as guards had clos
ed and re-locked the window, so Shera had to slide the lock up again, slipping through the shutters.
This was where Meia had failed.
Shadows concealed most of the room, but there wasn’t much to it. One large bed, with a straw man stuffed into the sheets. A bedside table holding a shuttered alchemical lantern and a single book. Against the opposite wall, a wardrobe.
Now, what would Meia have done?
Shera could see her now: creeping in the window, drawing a knife, and plunging it into the target’s chest. Meia was skilled—having been born and raised among Consultants, she could do without thinking what took Shera two hours of planning—but she tended to think in straight lines. Shera had to do better.
Turning around, she closed the window and locked it.
Then she crept to the center of the room, taking a moment to think. The space under the bed was small and easy to check, and the wardrobe probably didn’t have many clothes in it. This was a model, not a real home. More importantly, the Mason guards would almost certainly have instructions to check the obvious hiding places.
Shera took a second look at the wardrobe. Someone had carved it to satisfy a frail ego: it was built on a ridiculous scale, almost big enough to count as a closet.
And the top was spacious, wide, and shrouded in shadow.
Without any more hesitation, Shera slipped up the side of the wardrobe and curled into a ball on top. Her black hair should act as a hood, hiding her skin, and the rest of her outfit would blend perfectly into the shadows.
Now she only had to wait.
The two Masons may have been hired to act as guards, but they were still professionals. When they finally entered the room, they didn’t fiddle with the doorknob to give her any warning. They pushed the door open soundlessly, leveling fake pistols.
When they didn’t see anyone, they wasted no time. One of them ducked to check under the bed—leading with his pistol—and the other poked around inside the wardrobe. With one last glance up at the ceiling, in case Shera had suspended herself there with alchemist’s glue, they left.
