The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  In short, walking the wind was a necessary evil. But it was the only way one of his race, and his mission, could traverse the world quickly enough to follow the fragment of a fading heartbeat, the whisper of a demonic name.

  The gust subsided at the end of the wave of sound, and Rath stumbled out of the wind into the solidity of the world again.

  He pulled his hood farther forward over his face and looked around him.

  The place he had landed on the rogue gust was vaguely familiar, but Rath could not be certain if that was because he had walked this place before, long ago, or if every small, putrid farming settlement in a backward forested area was indistinguishable from another. Either way, he had appeared in a place that was as sleepy and nondescript as it was possible to be.

  A dense copse of trees and holly bushes loomed behind him, and Rath quickly stepped within it; he did not see the villagers about, but his sensitive skin registered vibrations that indicated humans were somewhere nearby, oblivious to his presence, most likely, but able to see him should he be out in plain sight.

  Once safely out of view, he began to cant his litany.

  Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

  He tasted the wind for each name, concentrated until his throat went dry and his skin burned, but there was, as usual, nothing to be found. He listened for the kirais of his fellow hunters, and there too he found only silence or neutral reports; the searching songs of those like him had not discerned any new threads or heartbeats, any new clues to the whereabouts of the F’dor that those hunters pursued.

  As it had been for most of history.

  Rath exhaled slowly as the link to the minds of his fellow hunters dissolved. He prepared to move on, but there was a sour sensation in his mouth, a taste of something evil, or perhaps just something wrong, remaining behind where a moment before there had been nothing but the ambient air. Wickedness, evil, hate, they were so palpable that they often left behind traces of acid floating on the wind. Rath’s heart began to beat slightly faster, but his inner senses were not enflamed yet; he had experienced this sort of thing many times over the millennia, a misdirection or false lead that would put him off his trail.

  F’dor, after all, were not the only entities in the world capable of terrible malevolence.

  Rath had no time for other such entities. His mission, bred in his blood and older than most of the Earth was old, blotted out all else.

  He inhaled deeply through his nose once more, his sensitive sinuses the last bastion of detection, only to find that whatever had been on the wind had vanished into it, if it had ever really existed in the first place.

  Rath turned his attention away from the distraction and cleared his mind again. Once more he loosed his kirai, this time calling the name of the living man he sought

  Ysk.

  Once again, the slight tinge echoed back to him, distant, but still clear enough to be discerned. Rath tried to hold on to the vibration, but it, too, eluded him.

  Then, a moment later, he realized why.

  It was coming from a different direction than when he had first discerned it.

  The signal he had picked up when he first landed originated in the southeast. He had been following the prevailing winds in that general direction in the hope that he might catch a stronger vibration. Rath had guessed that the name had been sounded in what other hunters who had trod this continent more recently than he had described as the Bolglands, where Canrif, the royal seat of the Cymrian Empire, had once stood. But now, somewhat clearer and cleaner, it was echoing to the northeast, and not very far away.

  Rath inhaled deeply, expelling all the wind from his lungs. His target had moved and, moreover, the dead name had been sounded again recently, making a new vibration for him to follow.

  He closed his eyes and raised his hand to the wind, opening his mouth slightly, fishing about for a new gust of a strong northeasterly breeze to get him closer to his target.

  A jolt of shock ricocheted through him as he was struck violently from behind, the blow driving the air from his lungs as his chin and teeth smashed into the snowy ground.

  Caught unaware in the midst of his concentration, Rath gasped, inhaling the blood that had begun to pour from his sensitive sinus cavities. In shock, he dimly heard the sounds of raucous laughter, the grunts and scuffling as he was flipped onto his back in the snow and roughly gone over, his legs and abdomen battered with what felt like heavy sticks.

  After a few seconds his mind cleared, and he could think again. He sensed that he was in the grip of four brigands or, more likely, drunken ne’er-do-wells by the reek of them. Two of them were slapping wooden tools, rakes or hoes it seemed, against him to keep him supine, while a third searched his robe pockets and the fourth rifled his pack, unimpressed by the sounds of disappointment that he uttered. Rath lay still, feigning stupor and collecting himself, until the one rummaging through his clothes discovered his knife. The man yanked it from the calf sheath and held it high amid the buffoonish laughter of the others.

  “Well, lookee ’ere, boys!” the bandit crowed. “He’s got a lit’le blade! Right sweet it is, too—can probably terrify an apple with it!”

  “Ya know what they say about men wi’ lit’le blades, Abner—”

  “Yeah, poor fellow, got no shoes neither, damn him. He’s a baldy, too, no hair. A right sorry sort.”

  The laughter grew more uproarious. “Good job, Percy—ya picked someone ta rob who got less’n we got! What’s the odds of that?”

  One of the brigands tossed his hoe on the ground and snatched the knife angrily.

  “He’ll have even less in a minute,” he said tersely. He shoved the first man out of the way and grabbed for Rath’s robe below the waist.

  With a speed born of the wind Rath seized the robber’s wrist and clenched it in the viselike grip of his race. With grim satisfaction he ground the bones against each other, feeling them pop from the joints. The man gasped raggedly, then began to wail in pain, a hideous noise that scratched against Rath’s skin.

  He tilted the man’s arm at an impossible angle and with the man’s own hand dragged the small knife across his throat, slashing through the veins and cartilage to the bone.

  The three other brigands froze, even as the pulsing blood from the neck of their comrade showered them in gore.

  Rath rose from the ground, kicked aside the body sprawled in the pink snow, snatched up his pack, and quickly searched the wind for a favorable updraft. He opened his mouth and let loose a strange hum, the call that summoned any wayward breeze that might be gusting through.

  In answer, a southeasterly breeze filled his ears, drowning out the animal-like sounds of terror from the remaining robbers. Rath pulled up his hood, preparing to depart, and lowered his gaze to take in the sight. He cursed inwardly, annoyed with himself for having been caught unaware by such pathetic specimens of humankind.

  One of the men’s faces melted from the rictus of horror before his eyes into a mien of black fury. He scrambled to his knees and lunged wildly at Rath, encouraged after a few seconds by his bewailing fellows.

  “Get ’im, Abner! Get the bloody bast—”

  Rath’s eyes narrowed in his angular face. He changed the character of the vibration he had used to call the wind into a discordant drone, intensifying the modulation and increasing the frequency, punctuating it with harsh clicks from his epiglottis.

  The two men who remained crouched on the ground shrieked in pain and grabbed their heads as their temples throbbed, the veins threatening to burst. Rath reached down and seized the man who had charged him by the back of the neck in his iron grip, then stepped into the open door of the wind.

  The updraft was a strong one, its trajectory high. Rath allowed it to carry him and his struggling passenger aloft till it was at its apex twenty feet from the ground, then released his grip, dropping Abner headfirst onto his fellows with a thud that resounded like the crushing of a melon. The pink snow beneath them splashed red.

 
Not at all an unattractive picture when viewed from above, thought Rath as he traveled down the long wave of the gust, moving quickly across the ground where the air temperature was colder. He closed his eyes and allowed the wind to carry him northward, toward the east, where upon landing he would once again seek the man with the dead name.

  Ysk.

  His closest prey.

  11

  Haguefort, Navarne

  As soon as the council dispersed, both the lord and lady went to the chamberlain of Haguefort.

  Gerald Owen was an older Cymrian, and had been in the service of the family Navarne for several generations. He set a great store by efficiency and proper etiquette, and took great pride in the meticulous running of his staff. He was in the process of getting the Lady Navarne ready for bed when the lord and lady appeared in the hallway.

  “Owen?” Ashe called as the two of them approached.

  Gerald Owen turned in surprise. “Yes, m’lord?”

  Ashe pulled the elderly chamberlain aside. “Pack Melisande’s belongings, and enough of your own for a brief journey.” He looked over to the young Lady Navarne, whose face was growing pale at his words. Rhapsody put her arm around the little girl’s shoulder. “You will take her to the Circle at Gwynwood, where you are to entrust her to Gavin, the Invoker of the Filids. Then return to Haguefort and gather the staff; direct them to begin packing in a written missive before you leave. They will be relocating to the stronghold at High-meadow when you return.”

  “Yes, m’lord,” said the elderly chamberlain smoothly, but his hands were shaking. “When do you wish the Lady Navarne to leave?”

  Ashe glanced at Rhapsody. “Before dawn,” he said, then turned and left the room. Gerald Owen bowed quickly to Rhapsody and followed him.

  “You’re—you’re sending me away to Gwynwood—alone?” Melisande stammered.

  Rhapsody knelt down and turned the trembling little girl to face her.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Yes. Don’t be frightened. I have a mission for you.”

  Melisande’s black eyes, glazed an instant before in building terror, blinked, and in the next second were sparkling with interest

  “A mission? A real mission?”

  “Yes,” said Rhapsody seriously. “Wait a moment, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  She closed her eyes and reached out both hands to Melisande, who took them excitedly. Then she began to chant softly, words in an ancient language taught to her more than a thousand years before by her mentor in the art of Singing, a science known to her mother’s people, the Liringlas, called Skysingers in the common language.

  The air in the room was suddenly drier as the water within it was stripped, and a thin circle of mist formed around the two of them, glittering like sunlight on morning dew. A moment later the words Rhapsody was speaking began to echo outside of the mist in staggered intervals, building one upon the other until the room beyond was filled with a quiet cacophony. Melisande had witnessed this phenomenon before; Rhapsody often called such a circle of masking noise into being whenever the two of them were whispering, giggling, and sharing secret thoughts to protect their words from imaginary eavesdroppers. In the back of her mind, she knew innately that those days were about to come to an end.

  When she was satisfied that their words had been sufficiently occluded, Rhapsody opened her eyes and looked down at the Lady Navarne.

  “I need you to do something for me that I can entrust to no one in this world other than you, Melly,” she said, her voice soft but solemn.

  The words rang with a clarity that Melisande recognized as the Naming ability of True-Speaking; she straightened her shoulders to be ready for the gravity of what was to come.

  “This night I will send a messenger bird to Gavin asking him do as you direct him when you arrive. I can only entrust this request to you in spoken word, because if something should happen to the message, it would be disastrous.” Melisande, orphaned by such disasters, nodded soberly, understanding the full implication of the Lady Cymrian’s words.

  “Once you arrive at the Circle, ask Gavin to take you, along with a full contingent of his top foresters and his most accomplished healer, to the greenwood north-northeast of the Tar’afel River, where the holly grows thickest. These are sacred lands, and I can give you no map, for fear of what might become of it. Gavin will know where this is. Tell him to have his foresters fan out at that point, keeping to a distance of half a league each, and form a barrier that extends northwest all the way to the sea, setting whatever snares and traps they need to protect that barrier. They are to remain there, allowing no living soul to enter. They should comb the woods for a lost Firbolg midwife named Krinsel, and should they come upon her, they are to accord her both respect and safe passage back to the guarded caravan, which will accompany her to Ylorc. Are you keeping up with this so far?”

  “Yes,” said Melisande. She repeated the directions perfectly, and the Lady Cymrian’s emerald eyes sparkled with approval.

  “Gavin himself is to take you from this point onward. A sweet-water creek flows south into the Tar’afel; follow it northward until you come to Mirror Lake—you will know this body of water because its name describes it perfectly. At the lake you are to leave Gavin and travel on alone. He is to wait for you there for no more than three days. If you have not returned by then, direct him to return to the Circle.” She paused, and Melisande repeated the directions again flawlessly, her face calm and expressionless. “Walk around the lake to the far side. There you will see a small hillside, and in it, hidden from all other vantage points, is a cave. Its entrance is approximately twenty feet high, and on the cave wall outside the opening is an inscription—Cyme we inne frid, fram the grip of deap to lif inne is smylte land.”

  Melisande’s small face lit with excitement.

  “Elynsynos! You are sending me to Elynsynos?!”

  “Shhhh,” cautioned Rhapsody, though she couldn’t suppress a smile at the reaction. “Yes.”

  “I remember those words from my history lessons,” Melisande said. “‘Cyme we inne fri, fram the grip of deap to lif inne is smylte land—Come we in peace to life in this fair land.’ That’s the inscription Merithyn the Explorer carved on her cave, the birthplace of the Cymrian people—and how we came to be called by that name.”

  “You must walk respectfully as you approach her lair,” Rhapsody said, import in her words. “Tread softly, walk slowly, and pause every few steps to listen. If you feel warm air flowing from the cave, or hear the leaves of the trees begin to rustle noticeably, stop and ask permission to enter.”

  “I will,” Melisande promised, her face shining.

  Rhapsody crouched down and ran her hands up the young girl’s arms.

  “As much as I pray that this will come to pass, I regret to tell you that I think that you may hear nothing,” she said, the pale golden skin of her fair face growing rosy. “It is my fear, Melisande, that you will find her dead, or injured, or not there at all. If you find her dead, return to Gavin and report what you have found. If she is injured, but can still speak, ask her what she wants you to do. If she cannot, again, go to Gavin, but return with the healer to the cave, and stay with her while they attend to her wounds.

  “But if she is missing, when you report to Gavin, tell him to seal the cave. There is great treasure there, much of it not readily recognizable. If that lair is plundered, it would mean even greater woe to the continent than it will have already experienced with her loss. And take nothing, Melisande—not even a pebble. To do so would be a desecration.”

  “I understand.”

  Rhapsody stood straight again, her hand still on the young girl’s cheek. “I know you do,” she said, pride shining in her eyes. “Understand this as well—if through your efforts Elynsynos is found and restored to health, you will be doing this continent one of the greatest services that has ever been done it. And even if it is too late—” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Even if it is, you will be safeguarding
more than I can possibly explain.”

  “I’m ready,” said Melisande.

  Rhapsody smiled, and bent and kissed her adopted granddaughter.

  “We wouldn’t be sending you if we didn’t believe it,” she said. She waved her hand dismissively in the direction of the circle of mist, and the babbling voices ceased; the glittering circle broke and shattered, its water droplets descending slowly to the floor like falling sparks from a campfire.

  “When my mission is done, where will I go then?” the Lady Navarne asked anxiously as Gerald Owen reappeared in the room, hovering politely in the doorway.

  Rhapsody considered, then put her arm around the girl and walked with her to the door.

  “I suspect Ashe will want you at Highmeadow,” she said as they went to meet the chamberlain. “In the four years it has taken to build, it has the strongest defenses, and the most intelligent construction, of anything I’ve seen on the continent, even exceeding those of Tyrian, which are brilliant. There is nowhere on the continent where you will be safer.”

  Melisande kissed her grandmother on the cheek as they parted ways in the hall.

  “It sounds to me like that is not saying much.”

  The Lady Cymrian sighed.

  “Alas, sworn as I am to the truth, I cannot disagree. I love you, Melisande. Travel well.”

  The chamberlain and the young girl watched her walk away in a rustle of brocade. Her golden hair caught the lanternlight as she passed the sconces in the hall, seeming to capture it and take it with her, leaving the corridor dimmer when she was gone.

  12

  Gwydion Navarne and Anborn were deep in the process of mapping out the garrison of the Alliance army in relation to their proximity to known Sorbold outposts before the roaring fire when a knock came at the door of the study. Without awaiting a response it opened and Rhapsody came into the room, her face set in a calm mien but her skin wan and bloodless, either from weakness or from worry.