Assassin's End

by D. K. Holmberg

  “If the Hjan are after a child…”

  Cael patted my hand. “I know.”

  I turned from the shores, looking up into the city. Forgotten and Hjan and then the issue with the crystal. Adding to that was what Lorst had told me about what he’d been involved with. Maybe he spoke the truth that I knew nothing. I felt as if I knew nothing.

  And how did I get drawn into all of this?

  I had once wanted nothing more than to stay in my place. I had that in Eban, but it had been taken from me when Cael had appeared. It was almost as if the Great Watcher thought to pull me into whatever it was that was happening, but that couldn’t be. I knew that the Great Watcher had abandoned me years ago.

  “What is it that you want now?” Cael asked.

  Figures that she would get right to the heart of what troubled me. What did I want? When I was in Eban, I had wanted to be the most skilled assassin. Not because I necessarily enjoyed my job—in many ways, I didn’t—but because I knew that others would do the same job were I not involved, and they wouldn’t be nearly as selective as me. There were some jobs that needed doing as hired. I didn’t like them, but then, I didn’t always like the people I had been hired to kill. Most were bad individuals, people who had harmed others. But there were other jobs that I saw completed in ways different than I had been hired. I thought of Carth. I’d been hired to capture her, and I had, but not in the way that Orly had wanted.

  When I was in Eban, I had known who I was. Strange that I struggled as I did leaving that city. It was almost as much as when I left Elaeavn the first time.

  Then I had Isander to distract me. Trying not to die would do that for anyone. And now I had Cael.

  With her, it would be a partnership rather than the mentorship I’d entered into with Isander. And I still feared that she resented the fact that by choosing to stay with me, she chose to abandon her family.

  “You keep coming back to that, and I keep telling you that it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I made a choice. After what I discovered, I’m not sure that I could have stayed in the palace. When my father discovered that I’d returned to the city with one of the Forgotten, and that it was you…”

  I considered that. Her father had been afraid of me. And then when I’d come to Asador with Cael, the Forgotten that I found suspected that I had come for them. And the Hjan had come after Rebecca, one of the Forgotten. And now there was a child missing, one that Rebecca apparently searched for as well.

  “Did she have a child?” I asked.

  Cael frowned but didn’t need to ask me for clarification. “There was no child that I knew,” she said.

  “Why was she exiled?”

  “Father never spoke of those things. Once someone was banished, they were indeed forgotten, as if they didn’t exist.”

  Like me. Only, I’d come back. Much like the rest of the Forgotten wanted to return.

  I paced along the street and realized that we had reached the place where Talia’s shop had burned as I tried to piece things together in my mind. I hadn’t intended to come here but had wandered as my mind worked. The walking helped clear my thoughts. Not as well as it would have at night, on the rooftops, but the more that I walked, the easier it became to start to begin to understand. And then Carth. She had been a part of it, I was certain. Maybe still was.

  “I’m still trapped in some sort of game,” I said.

  “What do you mean that you’re still trapped?” she asked.

  I searched the city. With the Hjan here, and the Forgotten, and now with me bringing Cael, I knew that Asador was the place this game would be played, much like Eban had been the place it had been played the last time.

  “She’s alive,” I said, shaking my head. “Damn, but she has to be.”

  “You think your friend Carth lives?”

  Was she my friend? She had been many things, but I don’t know that I would ever have called her a friend.

  What else would she be but a friend? In all our visits since she took Talia from Eban, she had made a point to stop and visit. Always coming late at night, surprising me when she would appear, simply showing up in the city and appearing before me. Few ever managed to surprise me, and certainly never as often as she did, but I don’t know that I ever saw her coming.

  Much like now.

  16

  The rooftops of Asador didn’t allow the same travel as Eban, but they offered a few advantages that I didn’t have in Eban. They were higher, for one, and the city sloped downward and toward the harbor, so that when I made it toward the center of the city and crawled along the rooftops, I could see all around me and all the way to the water.

  Cael wasn’t with me, not on this scouting. She couldn’t be, not if I wanted to move as I needed. Instead, Talia traveled with me, moving with more agility than I remembered her having. She might have lost Carth, and she might have lost control of the Binders here, but she still was a talented spy.

  “Carth is gone, Galen,” Talia said again. She’d told me the same thing each time I brought up what I suspected, and the reason that I’d come out at night. Carth had never come to me in the daylight. There was something about the night with her.

  “I know you think she is,” I said. I crept to the front of an overhang and peered over at the ground. The noise from a nearby tavern drifted up, the bouncing energy of it more lively than any I’d ever encountered in Eban. The musicians were different as well, a strange stringed instrument mixing with an oddly haunting harp played by blowing on it. The stomping of feet drifted up to me and mixed with occasional shouts.

  “Not only me,” she said. “The entire network collapsed. The Binders fell apart. I’ve done what I can to maintain it, but she passed too suddenly.”

  That seemed strange to me. Carth was nothing if not prepared. Wouldn’t she have planned for the possibility that she might not survive? She would have had something in place to protect the Binders.

  “How did they collapse?” I asked. “I saw what they had set up in Eban. There’s no way that they would have simply fallen apart.”

  “The Binders had changed in the time that you knew of them. There are things that you could not know, as you were not one of them.”

  “Not as much as you think,” I said. “You haven’t been in Eban for a long time,” I said to her. “The hospital remains. The Binders remain. What Carth built remains. When she visited, she made a point of showing me exactly how she sustained it.”

  Talia fidgeted with a long knife, turning it over in her hands for a moment. She spun it a few times before slipping it up an arm sheath, where it disappeared with a sharp snap. “She should not have shown you all that she did,” she said.

  “You were with me when I first met Carth. Why does this bother you?”

  “If she still lives, I would be disappointed that she did not trust me enough to share.”

  “Would she have shared if it meant another plan failed?” I asked.

  Talia stared out into the night, saying nothing. Standing this close to her, I felt the warmth I remembered, mixed with a familiar scent clinging to her. Cael feared those emotions, I suspected, worried that my past connection to Talia would place ours in danger. But Talia and I had never really shared anything other than potential.

  “How were the Binders organized?” I asked.

  “You saw how they were organized,” Talia told me with a laugh. “You more than any man—well, other than Orly—can make the claim that you know how the Binders are organized.”

  I almost smiled. It was as if she wanted to remember the past we had shared but didn’t dare let herself. Then again, neither did I.

  Talia would have understood the life I led, and she certainly understood what I experienced as an assassin, and had never judged. She had been more than understanding, and almost willing to share in that with me.

  Now that I was with Cael, I wasn’t that person anymore. I probably hadn’t been that same person for a while, though it was hard for me to admit, especially to
myself. I viewed myself as an assassin, and with that taken away from me—however voluntarily—I didn’t know what I was meant to be. Perhaps that was why Cael had suggested I come here tonight with Talia.

  “In Eban,” I said. “I know how the Binders were organized within the city, but what about outside Eban? How were they organized there?”

  Talia unsheathed the knife again and spun it in her fingers before slipping it back up her sheath. “Loosely. Each city has a collective much like the Binders. In Eban… you saw how we were organized. Other cities had a different structure.”

  “Not inns and prostitutes?” I asked.

  Talia shrugged. “Most of them are, but not all. Some cities won’t allow women to own property, and others won’t let women run inns. It makes it harder to have a unified approach when there is less coordination.”

  “You came here and started your seamstress shop.”

  “It was not the same, and I knew it. There is less information that flows through there. Gossip, to be sure, but not the same as in the tavern. Men say things when they’re full of ale and when they’re trying to impress a woman.”

  I’d seen that firsthand often enough to know that it was true. That was the simple beauty of the Binders.

  “Why do it?” I asked.

  “Because she asked me. And then when she was gone, the network collapsed,” Talia said. “It should not have, not with Carth and her planning. You’re right about that. But she must have been betrayed; otherwise, it would not have collapsed in the way that it did. You knew Carth. Would she have allowed her people to have come to harm?”

  She wouldn’t. And neither would Talia. “That’s why you remained.”

  “I remained because I could go nowhere else.”

  She looked down, ignoring me, and I realized that I had touched a nerve I hadn’t intended to. Worse, I realized that I hadn’t asked what had happened to her over the last few years. She must have experienced something fairly horrible for her to have taken the edge that she did. She had been willing to sacrifice me—though she claimed that she had not, and that she knew that I would find a way to escape. As much as she looked it, this wasn’t the same Talia that I had known, just as I wasn’t the Galen that she had known. Both of us were different people.

  “Why did you want me to come up here?” she asked.

  “I told you the reason.”

  “You told me that you suspected Carth still lived. You didn’t need me on a rooftop to discover whether that was true.”

  I sighed. “No. I haven’t had the chance to talk to you since…”

  She glanced down at her hands, her breathing steady. “I’m sorry for that,” she said.

  “I would have done the same. If that’s what it took to keep you and your people safe, I would have done the same, and we both know it.”

  “Not about that.” She took a step back from the edge of the roof and carefully settled herself. The tiles here were slick, nothing like the textured slate of Eban. This would be too smooth to run across without falling, negating its advantage. “I… I’m sorry about the way that I left.”

  “You had to go,” I said softly.

  “I could have chosen—”

  “Could you? Would you really have chosen something other than serving the Binders?” I took a seat next to her and held onto her hand. She let out a sigh, one that told me that she started to relax her guard. It was difficult for her, I knew. Difficult for both of us, really. “There is purpose in what you do.”

  “Did,” she said.

  “Because she’s gone doesn’t mean it’s over.”

  “It does,” Talia said. “The Binders—what I could hold onto—began to fail a few months ago. I didn’t know why, not until I began to hear about these men and women from Elaeavn.”

  “They wouldn’t have caused the Binders to fail.”

  Talia sighed again. “She would be so disappointed in me. I think that’s the hardest part of all. And now that she’s gone, I’ve been left with nothing but my own thoughts and memories. Alone. I started to wonder what it would have been like had I stayed in Eban. Always my thoughts went back to you.”

  She looked up at me, and I could see the glimmer of hope hanging in her eyes.

  The last time she’d left, she had been the one to hurt me. I hadn’t even known the depths of my affection for her then, and it had taken nearly losing her to really appreciate it, but this time, I would be the one to hurt her.

  The Great Watcher had set us on a cruel path. Why should one of us always have to hurt the other?

  “A few years ago,” I started, and she raised a finger to my lips.

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  She pulled her finger away, and a part of me wished I could walk back in time, perhaps Slide there as Lorst so easily Slid, so that I could have the time that we missed. Would it even have worked out between the two of us? We were so different and yet, we had shared so much.

  Watching Talia, and knowing the kind of woman she was, I knew that we would have worked. And in many ways, it was a more sensible pairing than with Cael. Cael represented all the things that I wanted to forget: the city, the people, and even myself. Talia represented everything that I was: assassin, protector, and oftentimes criminal.

  Yet… when I was with Cael, it was the man I had been that came forward as if the Great Watcher had decided that enough was enough and I needed to return even if I had been comfortable with my role. Now that I was with Cael, I knew that I hadn’t been.

  “I wish things could be different for us, Talia,” I said. “I was a stupid man then. Had I only…” I shook my head. “I wish that I would have understood my feelings for you sooner, so that we could have had the opportunity to see if there would have been more.”

  “You’re still a stupid man, Galen.” She leaned into me and kissed me gently on the lips.

  It was not a passionate kiss, not like what Cael and I shared where I lost myself with her. This was sweet, and tender, and filled me with memories rather than lust.

  “You’re still a good man, though.”

  “I’ve never been a good man,” I told her.

  “Do you think Carth would have spent as much time with you were you not a good man? You have always undervalued yourself. Even Orly knew it, which I suspect was why he kept you around. He feared the moment you would begin to understand your true worth.”

  I laughed. “Maybe that’s why he placed the price on me that he did.”

  Talia laughed with me, and it felt nice, almost as if we were back in the Brite Pot, sitting in a booth, sharing a secret.

  Then she patted me on the hand and stood. “Carth is gone, Galen. I know you wish it could be otherwise. The stars know I wish it could be otherwise. But she’s gone. And now I have to figure out how to get along without her.”

  Talia walked to the edge of the roof and jumped, disappearing into the night and leaving me with only the lingering memory of her lips, and the warmth of her body, and the soft floral scent she wore.

  17

  When I went back into the city looking for Rebecca, I had Cael with me.

  She was quiet, and I suspected that she knew what had transpired between Talia and I, though she didn’t say anything about it. For that, I appreciated her even more. She could have easily gotten angry at the fact that I had spent the time I had with Talia, even though nothing had happened between us, but she had not. Yet, there was a hesitance to her as we searched through the city.

  Maybe the hesitance had nothing to do with Talia. Cael focused as we walked, using her ability to Read to try to find where Rebecca might have gone. Cael claimed she should be able to find her more easily now that she knew what she sounded like, though that made no real sense to me.

  We stopped at a small park. It was nothing more than a plaza, really, with a small square of grass, a few elevated beams that children climbed over, and a small circle with a fire burning in the night. The crackling of flames gave the plaza a certain warmth, as di
d the murmuring of voices.

  My eyes tried sorting through the darkness. With my Sight, I could see clearly through the shadows even with the fire blazing, and saw a few children. As soon as they saw me, they scampered away, disappearing over a low wall.

  “How are we supposed to find a child in Asador?” I asked. “The damned city is overrun with orphans.”

  “Are you sure they’re orphans?”

  I remembered the look on the faces of some of the children that we’d passed. They’d had the wide eyes and sly confidence of an orphan. It was a look I knew well.

  “I’m sure most of them are,” I said, thinking of the boy who’d tried to pickpocket me. I imagined he got away with it most of the time, but then, I had training of my own. I don’t know if Cael even noticed when we were down by the shores.

  “I noticed. I didn’t think they were all orphans.”

  Ever since we first appeared in Asador, there had been lots of children running through the streets. Not all would be orphans, but enough of them would be. After a while, they barely caught my attention.

  I smiled. “That would be clever, wouldn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Cael asked.

  I shook my head. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m getting played again, moved about a board that I can’t see, but one where I know I’m playing. It’s just the kind of thing Carth would do.”

  Between the Elvraeth in Elaeavn, the Forgotten, and the Hjan, this was a game with greater stakes. It was the kind of game that Carth would have played, and one that she would have enjoyed.

  “These children would make a network almost as effective as the Binders. They slip around, unnoticed. Think of where they could go. Were they caught, no one would say anything.”

  “The children would,” Cael said. “No child is hard enough for what you suggest.”

  I considered what I knew of children like I’d seen around Asador. I couldn’t help but think that some children were that hard. I knew that I had been, at least until Della had taken me in.