The Beast broke into the alley and I leapt, my hands grasping a low windowsill. In seconds I was moving upwards, but the Beast did not follow. It had been distracted by the bullies, whom it tore into ribbons of flesh that splashed from the walls. It saved the younger me, still laying on the ground, for last.
I heard my own screams as I shattered a window and crawled inside, finding myself at night, in a building I knew intimately. The long shadows and sharp edges were more horrible than any creature of tooth and claw. I saw myself in bed and I couldn’t breathe.
Those were long nights in an orphanage, under the cruel hands of the masters of that place. We were hired out for jobs to earn our keep, dangerous toil in inhuman conditions. We did it to earn our gruel and place on infested straw mattresses. I remember the punishments of Master Niall, sometimes given in the middle of the night for offenses not remembered. We didn’t understand it for what it was. We just saw it as another kind of beating.
The next year I was one of the boys kicking smaller children. Later that year Niall came for me in the middle of the night. The smell of his breath was like dog shit. I snatched a sharp knife from his bed stand and severed his dangling fruit. His screams echoed off of the walls like a nightmare that propelled me off into the winter cold.
Faced with starvation and frostbite, I killed a sleeping man for his food and his gold. The feeling of power tickled my senses and pushed back the utter impotence that had taken me. By the time I was twelve, I was a petty murderer on the streets of a city, any city, every city, in the Kingdom. I would kill, and steal, until the bounties became too high, and then slip out for another place where I would start all over.
I was fifteen when one of the derelict of the city came to find me and offered me gold in exchange for a life. I did not want to believe him, but a handful of silver convinced me he may have a coin or two of gold to spend. It was not a simple murder, it was not done subtly, but the man died and somehow I escaped. Payment was made, as promised, but it was delivered by a man with the gaunt face of the dead. He moaned that I had been noticed, that I had potential. If I was willing to pay. I looked at the short stack of buttery golden coins in my hand and closed my fist over top of them. I wanted more.
The Beast shattered into the room and reached for me, claws dripping with a hundred vile humors. I gathered the dark curtain into a net and tossed it at the thing, and it became a thick straw mat upon which an older me was fighting.
During this time I drank other’s life like cheap wine, hunting for and against the law to catch lesser criminals to gather the gold for my training. I was soaking up the arts of murder, far to the south.
A fantastically ugly woman, made up of sharp points and cutting edges, looked at me from over a rooftop as my legs cart wheeled into space. Now I remember why I wear my sword on my back. I remember her name is Elidra as she sneers, “The moment you cut a corner, it will leave an edge sharp enough to slit your throat.”
I shuddered. The unfamiliar voice was colder than all the winters throughout time. I absently wandered to a fire in a forest where a man built like a razor blade, spoke intensely, “Not all stealth is quiet. The ears hear danger in the unfamiliar, boy. If an ear is used to a creaking mill, no creaking will disturb the sleeper.”
I turned away and there were dozens of others, each one bore me no love, but taught me in exchange for the gold I earned by murder. a huge weight slammed me and I hit the ground. Suddenly I was laying down and a man was jabbing an inked needle into my back hundreds, thousands of times. He was drawing the lines that bound me into the Ragmen, the symbol of the Great Murderer and Master of Secrets, Isahd.
There were whispers that the tattoo would grow, that it would twist, and that it would burrow into the very soul.
I heard “Are you going to get up, or am I going to kill you here?”
I rolled to my feet but the teacher I expected was not there, instead a great bearish western barbarian-Bjorlov!- was beating me badly with the wooden weapons. He picked me up and shook me like a mastiff with a drunk rat, “’ero’s die boy! You ‘ave to do better!”
He threw me to the mat, but an even older me stood up into my own head. It was not Bjorloff teaching me, it was the Beast coming in full force. But I did not fear. Since the days of my training I have had hundreds of lessons, thousands of victims. The rage inside is my tool, not my master.
The Beast lunged, hateful, hurtful, and hungry. I simply moved to the side, lashing out with a whip made of black steel and drawing a bloody line down its flanks. The wall at then of his whole body thrust shattered into dust, but as I turned the Animal was exploding out of the cloud of chalky dust. I went low, flinging the blade overhead as the storm of teeth and claws blew past. His roar changed to a scream as he fell and destroyed another wall within myself.
There are some men who see a rock and know there is a sculpture inside. There are those that see a blank page and can feel the soft curves of the story and wishes to bed down upon it. There are those that listen to the wind and the rain and can capture the notes in fleeting puffs of air. The Dark Thing is like that. I am like that. Assassins are like that. Our medium is death.
The Beast blew by one final time and I cut it three times, spilling blood, bile, and viscera across the entire road.
Road? It was not the Beast. I was carrying a crossbow. I had shot a Knight- No! An Inquisitor, like the knight of Amsar on the road. I had pierced this holy judge’s foot to the ground, then calmly reloaded as he sought to free himself. I laughed as he tore himself free, mangling his foot.
He drew his Angel-hilted sword and struggled toward me as I punctured his lung, crushing his chest-plate in. I had taken his bright sword from his numb fingers and hacked his head from his body with the impossibly sharp edge. It flashed and crackled, hot lightning clinging like fire as the blade blackened as my victim’s head tumbled down the hill and splashed into a pond surrounded by fir trees. I looked at its darkened surface and raised my prize into the sky, cackling with triumph. I brought the blade to my eye as the interior shadows deepened.
My hair was shorn short, my eyes red and sunken from weeks on short rations while on the hunt…
I blinked as a trail of blood seeped from my scalp. I wiped it away and looked back into my reflection. As the smell of dried bones slammed back into me, the candle danced in a wind that was not there. The shorn haired crazy man was staring at me from the safety of the mirrored candle stand. His head was cut and blood was flowing into his face. I glanced at my feet and saw long, fashionable tresses spread across the floor. The Phantom Angel was in my hand. Hairs were stuck to the bloody edge of the supernaturally sharp blade.
I looked back into the mirror, knowing that I was the man that had chased me after all. The swordsman on the roof was Kenneth, the axe-faced woman was Claire, the Knife of Bannon. I knew them, of course. They were Assassins, Ragmen of the Guild. The marks on their backs said as much. Marks like mine. I turned and angled my head and shoulders so I could clearly see the mass of sharp metal and soft tentacles tattooed into my back between my shoulder blades. In the center of the mass was the all seeing eye, symbol of Isahd, patron devil of murder.
I had always known it was there.
But as I looked away from it The Lidless Eye blinked, and unknowable agony shot through me like a boulder dropped from a mountaintop. It went on and on, and I could feel the unbending rage throw hooks of hate into my skin and pull like a leash to remind me of my place.
I heard wings, and then I blacked out. The candle said I awoke an hour later, but it felt like centuries. Having a naked chest flush against the carved rock of the tombs left me with a bone deep chill, but still the cold trickle of water across my back was a soul cleansing relief. I heard a rag being rung out and spread across the obscene tattoo, immediately quenching the fire and barbed claws.
The memory of the bounty doubtless on my head flooded me with wordless panic. I tried to jerk around to challenge whoever was with me, but I only managed to thrash
sluggishly. Gentle hands pressed me back down, and Gelia whispered, “Crow, you can’t get up yet. Crow. Crow!”
Then all fight went out of me. The pain, the hurt, the sheer volume of all my memories crashed into me like every waterweight of stone between me and the sun. It shifted and churned like the sea underneath a winter windstorm, building currents that poured into my head and exploded out of me as pure misery. I fought for control, but sobs slipped through my fingers and shattered against the walls. Gelia moved my head to her lap and stroked what bristle was left of my hair.
She tried levity, “I told you, every time I leave you, you start bleeding.”
And I felt the weakness coming, and I hated myself for it. I cried against her, and I don’t know for how long, pressing into her kind warmth as if I could not believe that such a thing ever existed. Inside my head the Fog continued to retreat, fingerlength by fingerlength. It had only just begun, but I had a feeling I knew where it would end.
“So now you know.” She did not ask. Of course she had seen the tattoo weeks ago while tending me, and had known what I was, even though I did not.
“My name is Simon.” I said. It was still foreign in my mouth and my head was full of dung-stained cotton. Gelia reached over me and pulled off the cloth from my back. The stinging needles began again, only to be quenched by another application of whatever tincture she had placed in the water. “Gelia, will the hurting ever really go away?”
Her face, so often pointed at me as a mask of barely bridled angst and loathing was set like a mother with a sick child. “I do not know, Crowe. I think there is something inside of you screaming to get out. That mark on your back is a baleful thing. Something powerful is trying to reclaim you, but you will not let it.”
I had known all the poisons by sight and smell, known the weapons and methods of an assassin, if I had been less busy trying to stay alive I could have seen it a long time ago. I rose from her lap, and the cloth slid to the side, exposing me again to a hail of burning wasps as I threw acidic words in a torrent, “I won’t let them? Who are you trying to fool? I’ve been stuck without me for so long I don’t even know who I am!”
My fury would have had as much effect on a mountain. “Maybe that is what the Gods intended all along.”
The pain was like being staked out under a stampede. I had to choke the words out, “I am not who you think I am!”
Again, she was placid, “I know. You never have been, and that’s what gives me hope.”
With those cryptic words she gathered me to her aged breasts like a child and rocked me back and forth. A seed within struggled and twisted, tearing at the cascading fabric of nothing within me.
“Fight for it Crow.” She whispered, giving the seed teeth and claws, a wolverine fetus that was swimming in the sea of my own apathy.
“My name is Simon.” My own voice was distant, detached. It was as colorless as all my memories from the age of thirteen, and before a few scant weeks ago.
“You are Crow. You have always been Crow. You always will be Crow.” The Seed roared like a dragon, shaking the pillars of my mind and cracking the dam I had erected against insanity. “When I called to the Goddess in fear, she spoke to her Father and he sent us you as a deliverance.”
Waves of emotion built and began to swirl, taking the last vestiges of the Fog from me and beginning to arc along my spine. The pressure in my head was amazing, cracking the mask of quiet I wore against the world. “I am a killer Gelia.”
“You are a hero, Crow,” She began to stroke my hair as if I were a long lost child. “and you always will be.”
Again the rag quenched the blinding pain like a storm obscures the stars. And even at that instant all other things were becoming clear. I was not a good man. I was not a hero. I was not a protector of old women and boys. I was a murderer.
Five hundred gold had almost bought the life of Sir Walden, Marshal of the Sorrow Wood. Had the barbarians not attacked while I was of convincing Walden I was a third son of a noble turned mercenary for hire, he would be dead all the same. I would have killed him. Had I been paid a few coins more, I would have killed his daughter and wife as well. Even his infant son could have been purchased as easily. Ten coins more, after all, what’s one more?
I was trying to fight my way out of the castle, not defend it. I am not a good man. I am an assassin, and if everything weren’t dead inside me, I supposed I would be sad. I shifted and the rag fell away, exposing the tattoo and starting another whipping. But even as Gelia soaked the rag and replaced it the hurt felt half hearted, as if the lesson had been learned and now there was only the inertia of ire causing it to burn.
“What medicine is that?” I wheezed, frightened by the weakness in my own voice.
“It is only water.” She replied.
“Just water?”
“Well, it was the blessed water from my silver flask. It was all I had at hand.”
I sat in mute shock as she adjusted the rag again.
Head bent, I felt the stirrings of bone deep shame bubble through my flesh. Twin drops slapped silently into the stone. I touched the corpses of my tears gingerly as the final dregs of pain drained from my back. I saw the salty water, certain they were not borne from any wound. These were tears of loss, and knew they meant something profound, if only I could decrypt it.
Then the final wisps of Fog cleared, revealing the dark and dangerous cloaked stranger. It was me, had always been me, the cold Murderer inside of my mind that held the wild Beast in check. It calculated everything, it felt nothing. It was as much protection from the world as the thickest castle walls. It spread its arms showing me its hollow core and it did not embrace me so much as lunge.
Simon opened… I opened my eyes, devoid of the taint of Crow. The rag fell away and my back tingled with the cold, and nothing more.
Gelia still stared at me, pale blue eyes pitifully beseeching me for some hint of hope. She was a hollow bag of blood and bone, little more. She leaned forward, waiting for me to say something, anything, to give her mind rest. My eyes flicked to a dozen deadly and innocuous items strewn about the tomb chamber. Each was more tempting than the last, but she was much more of an opportunity than a threat. I would need her to move forward.
The changing room of my mind blurred behind my eyes and I reached in and effortlessly plucked the right personality from the speeding throng. It easily slipped on over my emaciated sense of self. I smiled, carefully portraying quiet embarrassment and a certain amount of frayed nerves, “I will try to be that man, Gelia. I will try.”
And the breath she hadn’t known she was holding whooshed out of her, signaling her boundless relief. I forced my posture to relax a little and a self deprecating smile to flirt with my face. She smiled back and hugged me tightly as I wondered if anyone had heard me screaming. It was a thought that brought me back to the desperation of my situation, because I could not hide in the tomb forever. I shrugged, “So how high is the bounty on my head?”
Gelia blinked twice before giggling like a young girl, erasing decades from her face, “Crow I was there. I saw the Lieutenant attack you. I may just be a sagging old woman to some people, but I am a Priestess and my word carries a lot of weight. I testified before the Grand Duke.” Then her tone slipped into being more than slightly reproachful, “You were a free man before you beat up Roehm and escaped to here.”
Inside of me there was a slight bounce of joy at a deception well executed, and more for my status as a free man, but it definitely had a iron chain clamped around its ankle. I shook my head as if in disbelief, but I was trying to get rid of some nagging feelings that hovered like smoke behind my eyes. “And Aelia?”
Her countenance soured, “Furious, as you might expect, but at more people than just you, which you might not.”
I looked back and forth, forlornly, desperately trying to project half-hidden consternation at the news. Truthfully I was wondering, “Gelia, how did you find me down here?”
She was worried again, rea
ching out a wrinkled hand to cup my face, “You’ve been screaming for hours like the living dead. In fact they believed the dead down here had woken.“
“And yet you came down.”
She gave me a knowing look, “I have heard you scream like that before.”
That brought a hot flow of something foreign and frightening oozing into my chest. I clutched my heart and shook my head violently.
“Does it hurt?”
I nodded, lying easily as I pushed her away. “It will pass.”
She looked from one disturbed corpse to another and laughed dryly as she gathered up her bundle of herbs, balms, needle, thread, and cloths, “When I first saw you here, I had feared for a moment that your victims had come back to life to take their revenge upon you.”
I picked up the Phantom Angel from the floor, marveling at the brightness of the silver robe and golden wings next to the blackened blade. Now that I knew what to look for I could see the trails in the surface, marking the bloody death of a holy man. My voice echoed off of the walls, “Who says they didn’t try?”
Anger welled up inside me as I could not deny the hint of loss, of weakness disrobing in the echoes. I remembered being that little boy beaten in the streets by bigger boys, being hungry enough to eat garbage in the winter snow, of watching half dead men being eaten by redcaps under a harvest moon. I remember holding onto the bones of parents long cold and dead.
I won’t go back to that.
So when Gelia touched my arm tenderly, I let her embrace me even though the closeness made my skin crawl. I hugged her back, calculating the pressure of the contact to maximize how desperate, how pitiful I meant to feel to her.
At the same time I stomped on something warm and humble inside my chest, I resisted the very real urge to drive a dagger into her heart. She pulled away and primly began to gather her supplies. It was best she did not see as my hands shook violently as my insides churned like the boiling sea. I caught the reflection of my tattoo in a candle mirror and I swear the inked eye turned to glare at me.
I Know Not: The Legacy of Fox Crow Page 22
