The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1)

by Justin DePaoli

  Sybil and I walked abreast toward the stables. The stable boy shoveled roughage from a wheelbarrow into each stall.

  “Chachant is still deeply troubled by his father’s… disappearance,” Sybil said, keeping her voice hushed and her lips close to my ear. “As am I. Have you discovered anything more about the conjurers?”

  Yes, disappearance was a good word. Because the bastard certainly wasn’t dead. “Forget about the conjurers for a moment,” I said. “How’d you convince him to stay his assault on Braddock’s walls?”

  “I didn’t… not entirely.”

  My brows raised involuntarily. “You just said…”

  “I know.” She subtly scanned her surroundings. “There are lots of people here. I didn’t want to alert anyone. He’s still convinced Braddock is behind the assassination.”

  “He’s managed to make a damned fool of himself over all of this,” I said. “What of the mustachioed king of the sea, Dercy Daniser? Did your lover at least have the presence of mind not to beg him for his bannermen in a bid against Braddock?”

  Sybil’s lips tightened. “He’s not marching to war, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You met with him?”

  “Of course,” Sybil said. “I told you I would.”

  We strode past the stables and into the outer ward, where the curtain of stone walls besieged us. “You must have had one hell of a wind at your back to make the ride from the slavers’ camp to Dercy’s kingdom and then all the way back here in time to plan a wedding.”

  I watched Sybil’s temple pulse as she subtly shifted her jaw. I was walking a very fine line. I needed her trust so that I could stay for the wedding, but I didn’t want her to feel too cozy and comfy in my shadow. She needed to feel on edge. She needed to feel the terror that possibly someone knew her secrets — a possibility she couldn’t confirm. That’s where the terror breeds, in the uncertainty that the deep, dark secrets you’ve kept hidden for so long have escaped their prison and are out there for prying eyes to see.

  “The weather was friendly,” Sybil said, “and the steed the Rots kindly provided was strong and tireless. Tell me about the conjurers. Have you learned any more?”

  “I learned about them up close and personal,” I told her, watching her face vigilantly for the subtlest reaction to what I was about to reveal. “Birds bathed in flames soared high above Vereumene.”

  Sybil stopped in front of a large forge. Her nostrils flared. “That sounds…”

  “Similar to the description of the thing you saw flying high over Edenvaile the night Vileoux died? They’re called phoenixes. Fierce as hell.” I patted the scabbard at my side, smiled smugly and added, “As it turns out, however, they don’t fare well against ebon and barbed arrows. I’ve yet to find anything living that does.”

  Sybil’s face was unreadable. She’d perfected the art of masking her emotions. “You fought them off?”

  “Killed them,” I corrected her. Lying was so much more fun than telling the truth, particularly when the truth sees me in a bad light, or absolutely no light at all and locked in a rank dungeon with iron clasps binding me to a pillar. There is, I theorize, an indirect correlation between the number of times an assassin finds himself locked in a dungeon and his credibility.

  Sybil sidled up to the forge and took a pair of iron forceps. She closed and opened them mindlessly before hanging them back on a rack. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given what the Black Rot showed me they’re capable of.” She turned. Sincerity tightened her face. “I never had the opportunity to thank you — the Black Rot, that is — for freeing me from that awful camp.”

  “Consider your debt paid so long as you keep your boy king in check.”

  “He wants to know who killed his father, but I’ll do my best to blunt his raging emotions. I’m more concerned about the conjurers. Do you think they’ll attack?”

  One more lie. One more tale to spin, and it would be the grandest of them all.

  “No,” I said. “I think we scared the balls off their men and the tits off their women and the courage from both of their hearts. The phoenixes were a test. One they were not prepared for us to pass.”

  Sybil’s shoulders fell and she sighed. “I hope you’re right.”

  And I hope you believe me, I thought. When your enemy believes you’re not prepared, they underestimate you. And belittlement is a tool that has delivered so many victories for those who should have never had a chance.

  “I should go back to my quarters,” she said, pulling the wools tightly around her as the wind picked up. “My… er… workers are probably getting nervous about the time. I need to bathe, dress up, and practice for the wedding.”

  “Just call them servants,” I said. “We both know what they are. You’re a queen now, or you will be very soon. You’ll be sipping wine from golden chalices and flinging your hand at the nearest slave — sorry, servant — to fetch you some berries.”

  She let out a strained laugh. “That’s not who I am.”

  “No? Then who are you?”

  She shrugged. “I’m Sybil Tath. Luckiest woman in Mizridahl.”

  With a smirk, she ambled away, around the forge and back toward the keep.

  “Pardon me,” said a man with a thick drawl. He ducked inside the forge.

  “Is this yours?” I said.

  He rummaged through his tools that clattered together. “Ah, I wish. Property of Lord Chachant. But I run the thing. King requested a new helmet, fit with a black diamond in the center.”

  “Vanity shit,” I said. “It’s not good for a damn thing.”

  “King has to look good,” the blacksmith said, placing his tools of choice on a table. He tied an apron around himself.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Borgart,” he said. “Master blacksmith, been shoving steel in fire and whackin’ it with hammers for near thirty years now.”

  Borgart? Now that’s a name I hadn’t heard in a while, but one I was familiar with. I withdrew my sword from its hilt. “Does this look familiar?”

  Borgart dusted the soot from his hands with his apron and laid the flat underside of the glistening black blade on his outstretched palms.

  “An ebon blade,” he enthused. He traced the mystical blue swirls down the fuller. The design naturally occurred when the ebon cooled. His thumb came to the crossguard, where a letter resembled an abstract B, its curves jagged, symbolizing the Black Rot.

  His eyes flashed with excitement as he looked up at me. “Astul,” he said confidently. “Yeah?”

  “You got me,” I said. “How’d you know?”

  “The experience of making an ebon blade does not leave you,” he said, paying it affectionate attention with his fingers. “I crafted these when I was the blacksmith for a little village.”

  “You had a reputation,” I told him, “as one of the only blacksmiths who could reliably craft an ebon blade. I see your reputation has served you well.”

  Borgart handed me back my sword with great reluctance. “One of Lord Vileoux’s commanders saw my work. He told the king, and here I am.”

  “How quickly can you forge an ebon blade?”

  He snapped his fingers. “About that fast. Ebon is a straightforward process, unlike iron. There’s no making steel out of it. No folding it. No hammering the damn thing for three weeks. You melt the ebon, you mold it, craft your edge, and you got yourself the best sword this world will ever see. See, problem is, it’s extremely soft fresh out of the forge. Whack the thing a smidgen harder than you intended and it’s ruined. Once it cools, it can never be reheated. It’ll shatter. Not many blacksmiths have the subtle touch for it.”

  An erratic crow darted through the forge, cawed at Borgart and shot through to the other side.

  “Damn birds,” he said, waving it at five seconds too late.

  “Can you make a few hundred — or more — in, let’s say, fifteen days? You probably have more time than that, but let’s play it safe.”

  Bo
rgart crossed his fibrous arms over his stomach. “Oh, sure. Soon as you let me in on this little secret of yours.”

  “I am a man of secrets,” I said. “Which one would you like to know?”

  “The one where you’re gettin’ these bucketfuls of ebon from. I’ve made about ninety of the immaculate things in my entire life, and most of ’em were for your mercenaries.”

  “Assassins,” I corrected him.

  “Yes, well, point still stands. Where are you gettin’ the ebon from?”

  I’d figured that question would arise. Some historians claim ebon existed as plentiful as the trees when this world was first created, or mistakenly born, whichever the case. The evidence, they claim, is the unusual hollowed gaps in the nooks and crannies of mountains and the emptiness of old mines. They believe our ancestors took it from the earth to make their armor and weapons for war. Ancient poems refer to a blade that could sing sharper than a morning bird with an edge so black it could blot out the sun.

  Thanks to our gluttonous ancestors, the mineral exists in tiny and increasingly rare quantities today. Funny thing, though. When I was young and angry, still running from the murder of my father and battling a demented mind that begged me to end it all, I came upon a square, stout hill that rose high above the ground below. And as proof that nature dabbles in art from time to time, the only way up was a flawlessly sculpted path that wound tightly around the hill. It had the sort of steepness and perilously sheer edges that goats enjoy bouncing around.

  When I made it to the top, I decided that was where I would make my home. Soon, I decided to shovel out a trench so I could sleep in something resembling a bed, rather than on a flat chunk of land. As I pierced the dirt with the rusted shovel, something chimed, like a note struck from a finely crafted instrument. It gleamed a menacing black under the assault of a noonday sun. With a procuring of a pickax, I tunneled down a foot or so, scooping up all of the ebon that I could.

  Vayle joined my side soon after. Fifteen years later, the Black Rot was a hundred men and women strong, and our little shit village was known as the Hole. The wooden boards that make our walls in that deep tunnel conceal a secret few will ever know. Thanks to my happenchance discovery and the fortune of very wealthy merchants whose eyes bulged upon seeing the black gold, the Rots became richer than most kingdoms and better outfitted than every army in existence.

  “Go south into Nane,” I told Borgart. “Do you know where the Voll Inn is?” The infamous Voll Inn was where the son of Enton Daniser was poisoned seventy years ago.

  “Roundabouts,” he said.

  “Continue due south from there, you’ll come to a hill that looks like a demon had punched up from beneath the earth. It’s in the middle of flat land, you can’t mistake it. At the top, there is a hole. Go inside. If you value your life, you’ll slide along the right wall. There are traps that have a tendency to puncture your lungs with darts if you straddle the middle or enjoy a nice walk on the left. Inside the last room at the end of the tunnel, there is enough ebon to make a blacksmith like you cry like a boy upon seeing his father return from the war. There is also plenty of food to be had.”

  Borgart was listening earnestly, his long fingers entangled in his muddy beard. “What kind of magic have you got yourself into, Astul?”

  “No magic,” I said. “There is a forge above ground. A few amateur blacksmiths in our ranks tell me it’s quite nice.”

  He stuck a thumb between his eyes and shook his head in disappointment. “I can’t just abandon my duties here, Astul. I live nicely here. I eat what I want, drink what I want, my wife isn’t bound to servitude like so many wives.”

  I wanted to tell him none of that would matter when the conjurers soon swept across his comfy little world. But he would never believe that, so I had to borrow a remedy old as time itself.

  “There is a vault in my hole,” I told him. “In the room before the ebon. A key sits under a helmet in that room. Take what you feel is necessary, but do not rob me. I am not a man you want to steal from.”

  In truth, I had two vaults. The one with so much glittering gold you could submerge a catapult in it was tucked away safely in a corridor on the left side of the Hole. The one on the right held payments for various… debts.

  Borgart stuffed his hands in his pockets and slowly turned, inspecting the forge wistfully. Indecision marked his face.

  The air suddenly ruptured into a short but intense gust of bitterly cold wind. I hid my face in my shoulder of soft wool as a foot-high snowdrift fusilladed across Edenvaile. It stopped as abruptly as it began.

  “You love your wife, no?” I asked him when the storm abated.

  “Married twenty-five years now. She’s my…” He searched for the words.

  “Everything,” I said helpfully. “Any children?”

  “Two boys and a girl. My daughter beats the snot out of her brothers when it comes to blacksmithing. She’s got the magical touch of her father.”

  I sidestepped onto the raised steel platform on which the forge sat and put myself as close to Borgart as possible. Personal space did not exist at this moment. He needed to feel nervous. Uncomfortable. Unhinged.

  “If you truly love your children and your wife, you’ll take them all to Nane. You’ll make my ebon blades. You’ll take your gold and you’ll get the fuck out of here. There’s a cloud approaching this world, Borgart. And it’s going to pause right over this kingdom. You don’t want to be here for it. Trust me.”

  “War?” he asked. “I haven’t heard of a war.”

  “Do you have ears that hear whispers from the coast of Erior to the coast of Eaglesclaw? I don’t request a few hundred ebon blades because I want to parade them around the kingdoms of this world. There is a war coming, Borgart. Your boys will be made to wield a sword and shuffle around with leather scraps dangling off of them for armor. And your girl and wife… well, who knows.”

  He lowered his head and pushed past me. “I’ll leave as soon as I gather them. Where will I deliver the weapons?”

  “Stow them away in the Hole. Then find yourself a little village far away from Vereumene, far away from Watchmen’s Bay. Don’t even think of coming North again. If we lose this war, little villages will be the last place they come.”

  He stopped. “Who?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I would.”

  “Conjurers,” I said.

  I could tell he was riffling through his mind, trying to reconcile the near-extinction of conjurers in Mizridahl with this new uprising.

  Surprisingly, he asked nothing more. He simply nodded and ambled along, toward the gate. He must have lived in one of the villages on the outskirts of the walls.

  I grabbed a straight-peen hammer lying on his workbench, looked it over and then slammed the heavy bastard as hard I could into the side of the forge. The resulting clink deafened my ears. My wrist recoiled behind my head, drawing the hammer inches past my temple.

  All I could hear was a loud uninterrupted ringing. I dropped the hammer and threw my elbows on the tool table, burying my face in my nearly numb hands. Ever since I’d met Tylik and witnessed the atrocities done to that man, and the injustice… I… it changed me. I didn’t like it. Didn’t like feeling. I never used to feel. Just did what I had to do. And now, I displaced a man and his family so I could get a few hundred fancy swords to help for a war, and I felt like I’d committed an atrocity.

  I needed to blunt my emotions. But how? How do you undo the changes that have altered your shape, that have reached in and obliterated the soul that made you who you were and molded it anew, for better or for worse? How do you return to the person that the world remembers you as and not the caricature you’ve become?

  I had to remember who Astul was. He was a thief, a liar and a grand manipulator. He was an assassin, a man of gluttony and purveyor of sin. He was indifferent to injustice, inhospitable to the needy and insincere to every lover he’d ever fucked.

  I consider
ed this for some time, and then it dawned on me. A man like that wasn’t the type of person to help save the world. Of course, I wasn’t trying to save the world. I was simply trying to save myself and my Rots. That’s what I told myself, anyhow. I had to retain some pride.

  Time to fetch Vayle and prepare for the grand wedding. We had a conjurer to outsmart.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Vayle was still sitting on the frozen fountain, but only after close inspection could I tell. The snowdrift that blew through had dumped a heaping of snow over her, and she didn’t so much as shake one flake of the white stuff off. Hopefully the cold hadn’t frozen the blood in her veins.

  “Is my commander dead?” I asked.

  A skin of wine rose from beneath the outcropping of snow like a paw of an animal trapped under an avalanche. That was a good sign.

  “I will be soon,” she said, “if we stay in this kingdom much longer. It’s cold. Very cold. One of the many reasons I do not miss the North.”

  I clapped my hands and rubbed them together diabolically. “I’ve got some news that’ll be sure to warm your bones. We get to hunt for an assassin.”

  Vayle looked at me, and the snow perched upon her shoulder collapsed, cascading onto her thigh.

  “You look ridiculous,” I told her. “You do realize that moving softens the cold, yes?”

  “A paradox,” she remarked. “The cold makes it so that moving is a painful thought, but moving is the only way to stay warm.”

  I blinked. “Right. About the hunt for the assassin…”

  “Let’s get on with it,” she said, rising from her crudely made snow shelter.

  “We’re assuming Mydia and possibly Chachant are going to keel over during or after the ceremony. Death requires an assassin. Unless he’s arriving on the wings of a phoenix, he’s already here. I say we start our hunt for him in the kitchen.”