I Know Not: The Legacy of Fox Crow

by Ross, James Daniel

  I shook my eyes clear as the familiar sound of a bolt shattering against a wall was punctuated by a meaty thump. Then I slammed my head on the grate. My eyes blurred with pain, but the swirling black feathered bodies resolved for an instant into the corpse of a single crow. I felt at my chest, but as impossible as it seemed, the bolt had passed straight through the thing, knocking the life clean out of it but deflecting the missile just enough to spare me.

  The sight of it lit a fire inside me as I stood and drew forth the Phantom Angel. A strange feeling flooded every particle of my blood, every part of my flesh. I had a purpose.

  Finnegan smiled luridly at the dead raven, his cheeks seeking to smother his eyes as he licked overfilled lips. “And so it has come to this, Simon. Sad. You made me a lot of money.”

  The fourth Ragman of Carolaughan, Brogan Kalinstein, pulled himself into the Cistern from a darkened water-pipe. A long, muscular man, he discarded the spent crossbow without even a second thought. With theatrical flair he removed his heavy grey cloak and cast it to the corner like a broken winged bird.

  Stripped away of all the pretty chains of civilization, he wanted the fortune of jewels on the table, and I stood in his way. He would crush me like a bug and never think of me again. Then he would go kill Aelia and anyone else who got in his way. We may have both been Ragmen, but neither of us had any love nor hate for one another.

  He drew his two long swords as I hefted my Phantom Angel. Brogan, bedecked in coarse, utilitarian clothing, looked more a mercenary than a poisoner, but the gray paste that coated his weapons told another tale. I had to assume that even the slightest knick would be deadly.

  I had one major problem: From the time we join the guild, we buy our lessons from our seniors, we pay them from our contracts to teach us how to kill. Each successive generation of the guild is thus more deadly, filled with techniques from all its members down throughout time. I know fighting styles from all corners of the known world; Places I have never visited myself. Unfortunately, so does Brogan.

  Brogan came in cautiously, but purposefully, edging in for a quick kill.

  “I can make it quick, Simon, for old time’s sake.” He waited a half beat for me to reply- then attacked, swinging his swords in from either side.

  He was hoping to catch me with my mouth open and my weapons silent. Instead my blade met his, the heavier Phantom ringing clear and crisp and pushed his long sword out of the way fast enough to reverse direction and block the second strike.

  The opening he left me was a classical mistake when people fight with two weapons. Never strike with both weapons at once, as the enemy will parry them both, and you will be standing there with your middle hanging open for all the world to see, just like Brogan here. It was a simple mistake, a flaw in training anyone could make.

  Not a Ragman, not Brogan.

  I feinted forward with my foot, making as if to caress his groin with no small force. Immediately his widely spread weapons screamed inwards to draw the edges against my calf and thigh, if my calf and thigh had been there, which they were not. His eyes twitched in irritation as I moved in mercilessly, a wind of storming steel.

  Our strikes began to ring inside the Cistern like a nightmare chorus of bells. Each echo bled into the next peal of laughter from our razor-edged femme-fatales. We were intense upon each other, shutting out the moon, the city, the streets, the pipes, the cistern. All that existed in our duel were two masters of death, waltzing toward oblivion. I pressed ahead again, but found no flaw with his footwork, no lack of timing in his strikes.

  He recovered well, slinging his blades about himself, attacking and defending with each in turn as he rocked on his feet. But this was not a winning fight for me. My arms would soon start to flag as his took turns absorbing my blows and making his own attacks. A single cut from his coated blades meant my agonizing death, a single kiss from any of my weapons may kill, but would more than likely only slow him. I had to change the calculation of my odds. Minutes distended into hours as we fought.

  The next time he made to disengage, I let him and did the same, ensuring distance from him by swinging the bastard sword in a wide arc as I spun away. He did not follow, and it was easy to see why. His lank blonde hair was plastered to his forehead above his empty eyes and his chest was heaving from the exchange. Thankfully he paused for a moment, catching his wind. I wasn’t in any better shape than he. As my arms burned from the exertion, and my head began to swim, I knew I had to do something inspired soon.

  The tip of the Phantom Angel went into a gap in the grate and I kneeled behind it. Brogan’s eyes widened, then narrowed as he took in my new stance, then decided attacking was better than waiting for whatever I had in store for him. It was too late, the hidden knife was already in my hand. He grit his teeth and took a single step when I flicked my wrist and send the little sliver of steel tumbling like a deadly acrobat into Brogan’s chest.

  It hit him in the gut, he staggered for a moment, and I heard the knife clink harmlessly against the grate before disappearing into the water below. I snatched another knife from my boot, then one from my belt, then a spike from up my sword arm. Each one flew true, and each struck arm, thigh, and chest. Finnegan chuckled from behind his big, full desk, as Brogan smiled and lowered the swords and startled hands, revealing glints of metal beneath his clothes.

  Whisper mail is expensive, and therefore rare. It is made by taking a sparsely linked mail shirt and threading the spaces between the rings with black leather cords. It does not jingle, it barely shines, and it is usually worn without padding so it fits beneath generously cut clothing. It’s good to turn against a dagger, or even to stop a cut from a lighter sword, and while it won’t do much against a hammer or the Angel, it is perfect to stop light throwing blades.

  Then Brogan came at me again, and I quickly ran out of options. He stopped being conservative with his strikes and came at me as fast as he could. There was no way I could block them all with the heavier Phantom, so I began a prancing dance of retreat and dodge, further sapping my reserves as my muscles begged for rest and my breath became ragged and uneven.

  I leapt away from a vicious lunge and slammed my hip into the large desk in front of the master of assassins.

  “I was feeling sad to have lost you.” Finnegan slurped at a mug of beer, all worries forgotten with the death of the raven, “It turns out you aren’t much of a Ragman after all, Simon.”

  The thought flitted through my head to hold the fat man hostage, but all I’d be doing is threatening to promote Brogan. My opposite struck mercilessly, dispassionately. He may have been a murderer, but it was just a job for him. He was just looking to get paid.

  Paid in a small pile of jewels laying fast at hand.

  I parried a strike with a large fraction of my fading strength. Then, with a free hand, I swept up the piles of gems and flung them at Brogan, turning them into a glittering wave of stars for a brief instant.

  Brogan screamed incoherently as my body finally gave in to exhaustion. The Ragman dropped his swords as he clutched at the few baubles that landed on the folds of his clothes even as he watched the rest drop through the bronze grate into the water flow. There they tumbled like faeries in a glass of white wine before being swept downstream toward the city.

  He watched them go like an abandoned child, his entire world collapsing under the weight of lost wealth. In fact this would be the time to decapitate him, or run him through, or even try to give him a really vicious head rubbing with my knuckles. Any one of those would be perfect, if I were not collapsed in a heap in front of Finnegan’s desk.

  Just as you could only whip a horse to run so long, you can force a body to swing four waterweights of steel for so long. For those precious seconds while he screamed, I lay as defenseless a few paces away. My eyes never left Brogan has he mourned his loss. The burn in my muscles started to fade, the chill of the icy night began to penetrate again. I went to flip my hair from my face, and discovered only a forest of bristle inhabite
d by sweat. I slung the hand dry and gathered up the Phantom from the grate, but then Brogan was there.

  He slammed into me like a rampaging bear, and I barely engaged one blade and forced it into the other out of the way as he shouldered me back across Finnegan’s feast. Swords, axes, spears, all of them require some distance to use efficiently. Face to face, punching and kicking while rolling on the ground, a sword is worse than useless. So it becomes a necessity to watch how close you let your opponent get, because if he has a sword and dagger, and you have two swords, he will gut you. Sadly my dagger was in my boot, my blades lay in the water beneath the grate, and anger was lending him strength as mine faded. Now that we were nearly face to face, even his swords were hard to wield, and the Phantom near impossible.

  The thick gray paste coated the edges a fingerlength from my face, and Brogan growled as he slid his blades against mine, trying to find an angle where he could get steel into me. But there were weapons of a sort within reach, and Brogan had pushed me next to them twice. Again, I flung my hand back to Finnegan’s table, knocking into the iron bound book, snatching up a two pronged fork. I slid the small, iron implement along the greasy gray goo on Brogan’s blade, then plunged it into the back of his hand.

  Brogan screamed and backed off, allowing me precious seconds and space to regain my footing. I need not have bothered, for he was already sweating and his skin was turning gray. I backed off as the sword in his right hand tumbled noisily to the bronze floor.

  Brogan had forgotten the foremost fact about poisons: Like fire, they call no man master and spare no man their deadly embrace. I watched him tumble to the floor next to his weapons, his legs giving out even as he tried to wheeze past fluid filling his lungs. He did not weep, did not beg, he did vomit messily into the water flow. The practical part of me made a mental note not to drink the fountain water in Carolaughan for a while.

  Then he died. Inside of me, for the first time since I was a boy, I felt something stir. He had tried to kill me, had killed countless others, but I had still killed him. It felt like it deserved some kind of ceremony, some closure. What I got was Finnegan clapping his overfull hands together behind me.

  The other thing that spoiled the moment was that, for once, I had managed to live up to my reputation and exit a face to face battle without being stabbed, shot, crushed, or cut. Unfortunately there was no one around to see it. No one who was going to live through this, anyway.

  “Simon you have done the impossible.” He proclaimed, waving the servants off down one dark corridor, “You have eliminated a generation of assassins in Carolaughan. You will have the pick of whatever contractions you desire. You will earn a tithe training every junior Ragman and hopeful Whisperer looking to come up the ranks. You will be wealthy beyond measure, powerful and feared. And one day, one day, you will take over this seat and rule as the master yourself.”

  My stomach turned as he took another bite of pudding. As he talked about continuing it all, of returning to his fold as if I had done all this just to consolidate power. I was angry at him for giving me an out, for tempting me with things that whispered out of the back of my head.

  I bent down and picked up the deadly eating tine. I had little time left. The familiar dangerous tingle was starting up now that my shirt was drying, “No, Finnegan, I’m here to cancel the contract on Aelia Conaill.”

  I set the fork on his desk, pointed at his heart, but his face was twisted into a hungry grimace I was having a hard time believing was fear. “Hmmm…It is too bad, Simon. I made a lot of money from you.” The last of the Whisperers shuffled in a panic out of the cistern, as I lifted the Phantom Angel, “But, I suppose all good things have to end,-Schlimonnnn.”

  Paralysis washed over me as Finnegan’s voice, normally distorted, became nearly unrecognizable. His smile spread, wider and wider, nearly touching his jaw line as two slimy pink growths launched forth to frame his teeth. He stood, his mammoth proportions more evident than ever as he stretched, sending shards of velveteen and silk flying in all directions. His jowls were gone, replaced by a skeletal head with a mouth sprouting a halo of tentacles tipped with blinking eyeballs. Six more flailing, boneless tentacles unfolded from around his chest, arms, and legs, robbing them of his mountainous girth. His chest was barely big enough to contain his spine and ribs, warped by the presence of these extensions of his assassin’s tattoo.

  Where his body was inhuman, he was covered in dense clusters of huge pustules, and the tips of the tentacles were bulbous and discolored. These disgusting limbs pawed at the floor, bearing his starved body aloft. He loomed above me, his own flabby feet and pudgy hands hovering above the ground as he was borne aloft by his nightmare parts. These extremities parted down horizontal lines and the sheath of flesh pulled back to expose massive eyeballs.

  “Why would you abandon us, Simon?” He said. Just then the eyes began crying, raining black ichor into Carolaughan’s water. Huge suckers lining each tentacle sprouted a wickedly curved tooth, and every cluster of boils on the opposite side opened into an army of eyes that stripped me down and lay me bare. The thick balls on the end of the tentacles opened into eyes with sharp teeth as lashes. Each iris was a hollow, endless pit that wanted to swallow every hidden part of me. “Why would you choose doom?”

  And my total and utter destruction it was. Icy hands grasped at my innards, twisting my intestines with hands made of broken glass. My heart refused to beat in the presence of the demonic thing bearing down on me. His voice sounded like rough stones being ground in the stomach of a giant as he laughed. I ducked one tentacle even as another lashed out and tossed me into a wall where nymphs were carved cavorting. The Phantom Angel went spinning away into the darkness as I landed. The world rocked and spun as my much-abused skull began to seep a trail of crimson into my collar. Like a tortured animal, I scrabbled to my feet on base instinct alone, slinging my dagger from its sheath to defend myself from The Master of Assassins.

  “Could you ever conceive of me, Simon?” I hurled my body to the side, sprawling away from the creature as it tried to hammer me with one massive mouth/eye. I plunged the dagger into it, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. Another tentacle descended from above and I rolled clear as it shattered the bronze grillwork. Shrapnel kissed my face like stinging wasps. I regained my feet only to face him again, his tentacles sliding him from place to place with the speed of a galloping horse.

  “Did you ever think your pact with Isahd for body and soul would be so literal, so powerful, so permanent?” I barely managed to bat away one of the ichor dripping eyes from my face before it struck, sending shock-waves through my left arm and into my shoulder. I lunged forward in a desperate attack at his torso, but the endless supply of barbed talons and suckers were held too far in front of his body for me to reach.

  “But I have to ask WHY?” he continued. Another damn tentacle swatted the dagger from my hand while another gripped my middle and began to squeeze.

  “All the others had doubts. For two decades I have been the master and I knew every one of their petty, weak doubts running like stray dogs between their ears. But not you.” I felt the world spiraling in upon my, the Fog coming to claim me whole this time, spirit me off to the land of Death, where Isahd doubtlessly waited to claim me as his prize. Talons pierced me as he slammed me into his eating desk, sending food scattering in all directions. I began to hear the buffeting of thousands of wings…ravens wings…the souls I had sent to death before their time. “You were always the perfect little killer.”

  As the blackness tried to fall forever, Right hand -always the over achiever- flailed through the seas of overturned food, knocking Finnegan’s thick book of contracts and names onto the floor, and found a little friend I had put there earlier. Right closed over it, and then jabbed the poison covered eating tine into the tentacle.

  Finnegan roared, and flung me to the side, but as I clawed the wall to get my feet, he had not died. The tentacle had slowed, but as the poison diluted in its black blood, it
was quickly regaining use.

  “Clever.” He said in a voice devoid of humor or admiration. “But you made a bargain Simon! You took the mark. You made the pact.”

  I don’t know where the hit came from, but I sailed through the air and crashed against the wall, crumpling in a heap at the bottom. My joints and back felt as if I had been run over by horses and it was all I could do to paw at the grate beneath me as my blood mingled with the water, drop by drop. My life was seeping from me in a half a dozen places. The Fog rushed in again, and I pushed it back, but not so far. It haunted me, waiting to finally take me whole.

  “For a man who’s soul is already sold, I would think you would want to live a little longer in this world.” The Animal roared within me, urging me up and moving my body against its desire to lay back and die. I wrenched knifes from their hiding places, hurling them with the Animal’s pure abandon. They sunk into the massive, rubbery flesh of the tentacles. Eyes burst, suckers bled, flesh oozed, but it mattered not even a bit to him.

  The cold, demonic man that resided within me for so many years read off my odds of survival as just short of pure suicide. He smiled within me as my legs buckled, knowing he had been the only rational part of me all along. He was the part that sold men’s lives, judged their worth, and clinically absorbed their last breaths. He was preparing to do the same to me.

  “You are an assassin, Simon.” Finnegan hissed. His black-eyed gaze leveled on me again, his ravaged face leering from around the hungry tentacles that had begun to seep drool.

  “And you belong to both of us!” He began to rush for me, a demon on slithering, snakelike legs.

  “You belong to me!” My hand closed on the Phantom Angel’s hilt. It had been thrown here when I was first struck, and now it was in my hands again. A few weeks ago, I died with this blade in my hand, I suppose it was only fitting I do so again, this time for good. I managed to struggle to my feet…