'Indeed? That is also why I am present in this place, tell me of this individual you seek.' He watched her face carefully, she was hiding something from him.
'Fear not Anacletus, it is not you that I seek to hunt down. Instead I have been charged with finding an Elf of all things.'
He mused over this. 'This is most odd, there are no Elves this far south of the mountains.'
Had Sarvacts really sent this automaton out to capture the Elf that was trailing him? Or was she lying through her teeth and planning on executing him and taking his place?
It didn't make any sense, his pursuers would not follow any further if he simply disappeared or died. Unless the creature's orders were to kill all involved and overpower the Elf.
The assassin smiled, things were beginning to get very interesting.
El-Vador and Eihblin stood, talking in low whispers to the innkeeper.
'Whatever quarrel you have with this man can wait until the morning when you're both outside my premises.' the man said, clearly put out at the thought of trouble.
The Elf drew his sword slightly, the inn was silent but for the blade. The look in his eyes was enough to convince the innkeeper that they were going to have words with the man regardless of what happened here.
'I see you're not the sort that'll take no for an answer then.' he replied nervously, realising after a furtive glance that there was nobody around to help him. 'he's on the third door to the right, here's the key.'
'Return to your business,' the Elf ordered.
The innkeeper shuffled quickly away as El-Vador walked in silence down the corridor, Eihblin slowly following in his wake.
He kept his blade drawn as he stealthily made his way deeper into the inn. Eihblin was surprisingly silent in following him, a good sign for this moment in time but one that he should be mindful of lest she turn on him once the heirloom had been recovered. He counted the doors silently under his breath, the next one should reveal Harlven's assassin. El-Vador only hoped that the man was sound asleep.
The key seemed impossibly loud as he fit it into the lock and turned, waiting for some fiendish trap to spring out and dice him to pieces for having the temerity to enter the assassin's room. When nothing happened he eased his way into the darkened place, his sword at the ready should any trouble present itself.
A darkened shadow hovered over the assassin's bed, arms stretched high and holding exactly what El-Vador suspected.
'Hold,' El-Vador whispered hoarsely to the shape, pointing with his sword.
The figure let out a gasp and turned to face him, clearly it had not been expecting company. 'This doesn't concern you stranger, let me rid this man and be on your way.'
'Oh but it does, we seek an heirloom he carried upon his person.'
He continued to stare into the darkness at the vaguely feminine shape that the voice hinted at.
'His possessions are of no concern to me, you may gather them after I have disposed of him,' she said, then focused her attention on the prone body of Anacletus once more.
'I am called Phaedra,' she said, oddly conversational as she buried the dagger in the man's body, 'would you tell me yours?'
'I am El-Vador and your kill is of no concern to me.'
There was a long pause after this, was the woman thinking of attacking him to prevent further repercussions? 'You are the one I seek, yet you came after Anacletus rather than flee. Why?'
With his attention focused entirely upon this strange woman, El-Vador's vigilance suffered. The seemingly dead body of Anacletus kipped up and threw itself out of the window. How could the man have faked such a mortal wound?
El-Vador pushed past the woman and cursed, if he was quick enough he may yet catch him.
'Stay where you are!'
El-Vador turned and raised his sword at the voice he had momentarily forgotten.
Eihblin stood in the doorway brandishing her own steel, apparently she would not let him pass so easily.
'Anacletus will get away if we dally here!' he said, gesturing frantically at the window.
'That is not my concern,' she replied, advancing upon him fearlessly. 'give the heirloom to me and I may let you live.'
El-Vador eyed Phaedra nervously, she made her way to a small desk and fumbled through the belongings of the departed assassin.
'Enough stalling! Give me the heirloom now!' Eihblin yelled, advancing further into the room.
He watched as Phaedra continued to desperately search through the cloak of the assassin. It would seem that Eihblin was not willing to wait any longer for her property. He brought his blade up to parry as she struck out at him in rage, turning his attention away from Phaedra and trying to shield her from this mad woman's attack.
Eihblin yelled incomprehensibly in frustration as their blades clashed and lunged for El-Vador once again.
He evaded the lunge and sent a swipe out to keep her at a distance, she was practised with the blade and may well best him should this fight last much longer in such close quarters.
She came at him again and he barely deflected the last of her thrusts, this had gone on long enough. He rushed forward as the next lunge sent her off balance, darting under the path of the strike and planting a knee in her sternum. She doubled up on the floor and dropped her blade. It had been a lucky guess on his part, she was well trained in a fair fight but not battle-ready.
'I yield.' she retched, gasping for breath on the floor.
Now that she was disarmed El-Vador once more turned his attention to the other woman in the room.
There was nobody by the robes any more, Phaedra had made her exit into the night, much like Anacletus had before.
'Did she take the heirloom with her?' Eihblin asked from the floor, concern for the possession now causing her previous hostility to vanish.
El-Vador moved to the pile of clothes the assassin had left behind. There was no heirloom to be found. 'Phaedra must have taken it while we were engaged in combat.'
A groan came from the floor, the dawning realisation of Eihblin's own stupidity perhaps.
'You were too eager to retrieve it,' El-Vador chided her. 'had you not been so unreasonable with your demands we would have both Anacletus' head and the talisman. Now we will have to keep hunting after both.'
'We shall speak of it later.' she replied, picking herself up and sheathing her sword. With that she left, not giving El-Vador any chance to voice an objection. Apparently she was going to use his help regardless of whether he was willing to agree.
He shrugged, two sets of eyes were still better than one. So long as they didn't come after you with a sword again, he would be wary of that next time. Should Eihblin betray him again he would make it her last act.
XVII
It was the rarest of things in those turbulent days, for me to place trust in one who had already raised a blade in defiance of me. Yet in her I saw parts of myself, she claimed to seek an heirloom but I knew that in her heart it was truly vengeance to be claimed.
The dagger came out with a hiss after some degree of tugging, he shuddered as the black smoke left his body and the wound began to heal. He had not stopped lurching away from the village until he was entirely certain that all immediate pursuit had ceased. Ultimately he knew that what he was running toward was far worse than anything he could have been running from. His head hurt at the implications, an automaton of Sarvacts' own design had taken the heirloom from his possession and driven a dagger into him. Why then had the stab not been fatal? Had the creature aimed for his heart then its orders would have been carried out, instead it had buried the blade in his side. To an ordinary man that may still have been a killing blow but to Anacletus, the master of the shadows, it was but a setback.
Surely if Sarvacts had planned to do away with his assassin he would have given specific instructions to aim for the heart when the exhumation took place. Either Sarvacts wanted to punish him but leave him alive, or the automaton had no knowledge of his physiology and was acting independently of its ma
ster.
This thought caused much confusion within Anacletus, who assumed that Sarvacts' control over his own forces was absolute. He had certainly been given no reason to doubt that before, had something changed that he was unaware of?
The Elf was of greater concern to him, let Sarvacts do what he would with his automatons, Anacletus was still determined to deliver the pointed creature to his employer's lap. A kicked hound may yet still be obedient for a time, he wasn't going to completely abandon the coin Sarvacts provided based on one poor judgement. It would be hard to find work that would match his fee, most of his richer clientèle had been warned off him already.
Either the Elf and Eihblin had the heirloom or the creature had taken it and somehow escaped their grasp. His first task was to determine whose possession this trifling bauble was in the hands of, no easy feat given the wary nature of those involved.
He had soon acquired some clothing off freshly made corpses he had garotted, the meagre coin they had also provided gave him another blade and enough food to survive on.
There was of course the possibility that the Elf had taken it and refused to return it to Eihblin, perhaps thinking that it would produce a pretty penny on the market. That produced an entirely different set of problems. Anacletus could only hope that his task continued to follow him out of some sense of vengeance rather than the noble deed of retrieving an heirloom.
If the creature was still under the dominion of Sarvacts and possessed the trinket then it would lurch its way out to the fortress, he could lay in wait and reacquire it from her, leaving enough evidence for the Elf to carry on following him.
If it were not in the thrall of Sarvacts there was no determining where it was going or what it was doing, though there would also be little sense in it acquiring the heirloom in the first place.
He would have to hunt down this automaton and put an end to it, whether it had the heirloom or not. Then he would take up the search for El-Vador once more, a long night of tracking awaited him.
As the false dawn neared, Anacletus finally discovered his quarry trudging along the trail directly toward him. It had been a long and punishing night, stretching his senses forth in an attempt to find the permeation that the automaton would cause in the natural ebb and flow of the world, yet he had located it eventually.
He lay in wait now, undetectable to all but those with the sharpest of sight. His prey seemed weary and ponderous in motion, though that could just be the natural gait for the creature. Anacletus didn't plan on spending enough time around such things to make that sort of determination.
He readied his blade and lowered his haunches into a crouch, soon he would spring forth and drive the simple knife deep into the necrotic flesh. Then the heirloom would be his once more and the pay he earned for his duties would also come, regardless of whether this minion belonged to Sarvacts or not.
As the beast passed the boulder that served as his concealment, Anacletus leaped out at the thing and thrust his knife expertly under its ribs. It threw up one hand to protect itself, but the gesture was utterly futile against a practised assassin. He had been witness to such shocked reactions a thousand times and his path need not deviate any. The blade plunged home and stuck there, she toppled to the roadside and he smiled in triumph
Anacletus bent over her prone form and retrieved the pouch containing the heirloom. Luck was on his side this day, it would appear that he had picked the right target. He aimed a kick at the corpse that turned her face-down into the road, the knife sinking deeper into her beyond the hope of retrieval. No matter, he could easily procure another with what little coin he had left.
For a time he thought of dismembering the corpse, then decided better of it. Should this one really serve Sarvacts he could choose to reanimate it himself. Anacletus had no desire to make his Orcish employer's life any harder. He had what he came for and in these inhospitable parts it would be unlikely that another would chance upon her corpse before Eihblin and El-Vador, assuming that they still worked together.
He turned and left the body for the crows, his chuckling slowly receding as he made his way down the path.
El-Vador spotted it far quicker than his reluctant companion. Some poor soul had been the victim of either the cold or bandits, he suspected the body had been stripped clean of any useful possessions and judging from the circling birds it would be stripped clean of flesh long before it froze.
As he drew closer he noticed something decidedly odd about the positioning of the corpse face down on the side of the road. Here was a kill that had been made some time ago yet still it twitched as if freshly disposed of.
Touching the cold shoulder of the robed figure he turned it over and heard Eihblin gasp in recognition at the face. It was Phaedra, the very woman they had been chasing. He quickly palmed through her robes but there was no sign of the heirloom, the bandits must have made off with it.
That was when the woman began to shake, at first it was the faintest of tremors as he searched her body, these broke out into outright shakes and he took a quick step back as her arm rose and pointed at the ugly wound the buried knife had inflicted.
Without thinking of the consequences, El-Vador reached forward and yanked the weapon from the woman's sternum. She took a gasp of air that made both Eihblin and El-Vador cry in disbelief, somehow this woman wasn't dead after all.
She picked herself up off the frozen ground slowly, eyeing the drawn weapons that faced her.
'What manner of creature are you? Explain yourself now.' the Elf demanded.
Phaedra looked up at him. 'You are the one I seek,' she stated quietly, not answering his question. 'I stole your trinket in order to get your attention. You would not have heard me out otherwise.'
El-Vador frowned, he considered himself fairly reasonable even in the face of such sorcery. 'Why do you think I would not have heard you out?'
'You are in grave peril, the forces that seek you demand vengeance most foul in order to sate their lust for power. Would you not have considered me a mad woman had I told you that?'
'Does she have the heirloom?' Eihblin asked, a frantic tone in her voice that concerned El-Vador.
'I do not have that which you seek,' she replied, causing the other woman to deflate. 'Anacletus followed me and took it, undoubtedly he continues toward my former master's lair.'
El-Vador threw a hand up in frustration, though he kept his sword arm extended outward at what he assumed was a woman, but wasn't entirely certain. Eihblin was after an heirloom that belonged to Anacletus who presumably was trying to kill him, yet continued to evade his pursuit. Now this Phaedra had taken the heirloom only to be ambushed by Anacletus who she somehow knew already while searching for him. While it was all too interwoven to be coincidental, he couldn't figure out the link.
'He will return the heirloom to Sarvacts in an attempt to lure you to his power.' she said.
El-Vador blinked. 'What did you just call him?'
She seemed hesitant given the Elf's recognition of the name. 'Sarvacts, he is the dark power that dwells in the fortress south of here. You know of him?'
El-Vador said nothing for a time, staring south as if in shock, his hand gripping his sword so tightly that it shook. 'you said that this Sarvacts was your master?'
She told him everything she knew, of the captivity and the reanimation and the snatches of conversation she had been privy to between the Orc and Anacletus.
'Now you want me to deliver myself into his hands in the hopes that I can kill him and restore you to that which you once were.' he said. 'I came here to avenge a friend, not my entire people. It seems that I will have to do both.'
'You can save what is left of your people, there are bound to be some of us that you once knew from the occupation of the north. You are Elven as I once was, you cannot have been unaffected by such a thing.'
He sighed. 'We were the first village that he torched to the ground. I was the one that destroyed both him and his forces.'
'You did this
alone?' Eihblin asked, disbelief clear in her voice.
'I did this alone,' El-Vador said.
'Then how did this Sarvacts survive if you destroyed him as you claim?'
He thought about that for a moment. In truth he could not know how such a phantom could rise from the grave to haunt him once more. It had been bad enough that his dreams had been plagued by the sounds of burning and the massive Orc's grin, to know that he was somehow still living was an affront to everything he had fought for.
He felt the noose of fate closing in on him once more, there was no choice here. He was compelled by his sworn oath to destroy all the Orcs, he must venture to this fortress and do away with Sarvacts, even if in coming there he was playing directly into his hands.
'Well?' Eihblin demanded.
'I do not know.' he said, trying to keep his cool and not swing his blade at this persistent woman. 'Perhaps it was much in the same way as Phaedra survived Anacletus' lethal thrust. Sarvacts may not be Orcish at all any more.'
'The heirloom and Anacletus both lead to the fortress of an enemy of yours.' Eihblin said. 'I think we know where we must go to with all haste.'
El-Vador stared at Phaedra now. Yes, they had to depart quickly if they were to catch Anacletus, but what of this reanimated creature before them?
XVIII
I have long espoused that in order to kill an enemy you must gain an understanding of their offence. Be wary when making your observations, as often to use the tool of your foe is to become akin to him in ways you cannot revoke.
Anacletus was slumped by the side of the road, gripping his head in frustration, how he hated these communications with his employer. He was no minion to be ordered about as bidden, Sarvacts would do well to remember that. No creature was master of Anacletus, he would bow to a person's will in exchange for coin and no other reason. At least now perhaps he may discover whether the automaton that had assaulted him had been in the service of his employer or not. He hoped that the lack of swiftness in his return would not be chastised, he loathed senseless conflict with those who held the purse strings.
El-Vador's Travels Page 15
