by E. S. Bell
Her gaze went to it immediately, mesmerized. Blackness. A black crescent moon, stark on her pale skin. Not the black of a tattoo or bruise, the blackness of a shadow, a starless patch of night sky. Blackness that had depth. That breathed.
She stared at it, and her hand rose limply, as if on strings, to trace its crescent shape. The draft over her fingertips was colder now that there was no clothing to muffle it. She felt the smooth ridge where her skin ended and the black nothingness began. Her head cocked to the side. She watched as her fingers touched the edge of the wound and then vanished into the great void where there was no bone or muscle or beating heart to count the passing moments…
I ran inside the house. My father’s travel sack and hat were in the foyer. He’d come home! With my heart pounding with joy in my chest, I clambered up the winding stairs. The big house seemed empty, but I heard something in my parents’ sleeping quarters. As if someone had dropped a sack of flour onto the floor.
I slowed my steps. I could feel a tingle over my skin, like cold breath. I pushed open the door and stepped into a nightmare.
My mind wouldn’t comprehend the whole of what I was seeing. It was too much. My vision shattered into pieces...The knife was silver. The blood was red. The body on the floor wasn’t moving. My mother’s eyes were filled with tears and madness.
“Selena…You’ll be all right,” she told me and then thrust the knife under her own ribs...
Selena jolted, sloshing water over the side. Always the worse memories, she thought, as sobs choked her. And that one, the worst of them all.
She blinked, and shook her head to clear it, confused. Something was wrong. Her arm was held in an awkward position. She looked down. Her entire hand was gone, lost inside the wound.
Selena thrashed and a scream tore from her throat. She ripped her hand from the hole in her chest, out of the endless blackness bored deep inside her where no heat lived. She held up it up before her, staring at it with wide eyes, her breath hitching and her heart pounding in her ears. It was rimed with frost from the tip of the fingers to the wrist, coated with shimmering ice crystals, as if she’d dipped it in diamond dust.
No, not again…
“No, no, no,” she whispered. “How long have I…?” She plunged her hand into the bath water. Muted tingles told her it was no longer scalding hot, but lukewarm.
“No. No more. Please. I can’t take it any longer. Please…No more…”
She scraped the frosty crystals off her skin, rubbing frantically long after they had melted away. She gathered her hair and yanked it down over her left side, and then wrapped her arms around her knees. She sat for long moments, rocking and adding her tears to the quickly cooling water.
And when the water was cold and she began to shiver in earnest, she threw her head back in a silent wail of anguish that no one could hear.
One Last Job
Isle Kabak
The assassin was being followed.
He kept his pace slow, almost strolling, and listened. Two sets of steps dogged his; he could distinguish their quicker pace from those of the thin, desultory crowd that shuffled around him. They stopped when he stopped. They quickened their pace when he did.
Amateurs.
He did not change his course, but he kept to the main street, that looked more like a canal made of dirt than a proper thoroughfare.
When he’d docked the Black Storm at harbor that morning, Darrowden appeared as a giant anthill that rose out of flat sea. A city carved into the natural sandstone mounds of the small island, its hovels and homes all worn down and rounded by centuries of wind, their doors no more than holes cut into the yielding rock.
Like black mouths in chubby, eyeless faces.
The streets were not the open walkways of other, more civilized islands but winding, high-walled paths carved around and through the mounds. The citizens of Darrowden shuffled along these paths, corralled on both sides by yellow stone.
The assassin didn’t know what his pursuers could be after. His boots, maybe, though they were in need of patching. His scimitars were plain, sturdy steel but he guessed they’d fetch a kroon or two apiece at the flea-ridden market at the docks. His flintlock was also simple and in good working order, but it was tucked into his belt at the small of his back, hidden beneath his leather coat. It was likely his long black leather coat they wanted. It was worn at the shoulders from years of salt and spray, but still in good shape. It was damnably hot on this dust-choked isle, but he wore it anyway. He wore it always.
These street rats don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.
If they had known the assassin they trailed was named Sebastian Vaas, they would have turned tail and run.
The path wound upwards, and grew steeper with every bend. Few people paid him a glance. They kept their heads down, their eyes on the street. There was no chatter, no laughter. No brays of the drunk or angry echoing in the buildings around him. The soft stone path swallowed sound, and the oppressive heat burnt away the will to speak. Small children sat in clusters on doorsteps, playing games of chance with sticks and rocks. They wore sparse clothing and did not laugh. The adults wore plain spun tunics of wool over skirts or breeches, all the same dun color.
The uniform of misery.
Sebastian smelled piss and dust when he wanted to smell the sea. He walked on and his two pursuers followed. Brushing a lock of dark hair from his eyes, he studied the sandstone wall. An easy height to scale. Easy to slip down to the other side, into the warrens of the city. And if I become lost in this gods forsaken shit hole? I have an appointment to keep.
Sebastian’s destination lay ahead—a rundown structure atop a hill, with a path that snaked its way up. The fortress was no grander than any other structure on Isle Kabak, but larger. Adjacent to it, was what appeared to be a prison. To him, it looked like a lump of dough with iron bars set into the windows.
A prison made of sandstone?
Sebastian recalled a half-season spent inside harder walls than sandstone. Half a season locked away from the sea, away from his ship, suffocating on dry air. He brushed the thought away; it irritated him further, as did the men who dogged him now. The world was too full of fools who thought they could take something away from him.
Old Darrowden, the last section of city before he reached the fortress, showed signs of wealth now abandoned and gone to ruin. The homes were of limestone instead of sandstone, weathered and crumbling, fronted by courtyards overrun with weeds and half-dead cacti. They sat high above the rest of the city, and Sebastian could see the Crushing Sea stretch out across the horizon behind them. His ship was at anchor there. Waiting.
One last job. One more. Do this, and then you’ll be free.
A nervous snicker called his attention back to his pursuers. The streets here were empty; the small sound carried loudly in the flat air, and it was obvious they no longer cared for stealth.
Sebastian spat a curse and turned his steps through the rotted iron gate of one manor ringed by hall walls. He pressed himself against the wall to one side. The pursuers were either stupid, desperate, or both as the two men blundered inside after him.
As they passed under the rusted arch, Sebastian knocked the club out of the nearest man’s hands, wrapped his arm around his neck, and laid a dagger to his pulsing jugular. The vagrant was rank with old sweat and piss, and Sebastian grimaced at the grimy hair that brushed his cheek. The second man, young and scrawny like the first, stopped short.
“He dies,” Sebastian said, testing.
The free man, a dented dagger in his own hands, scoffed. “Yer coat’ll fit me better than him.”
The man in Sebastian’s grip was like a rabbit in a snare: tense with fear and too frightened to struggle. The other licked his lips and danced from one foot to the other, brandishing his old dagger in what he thought was a menacing display of skill. Instead, Sebastian saw where his balance could be thrown, how his fingers held the dagger like a dinner fork—easily knocked aside; how
a quick duck and a sweeping kick would be enough to completely baffle the man who thought a blade alone was enough to appear dangerous. Neither stood a chance at besting Sebastian, even on their best day.
Scare them off. No bloodshed.
Sebastian shoved the one man toward the other, and while they fumbled and staggered and tried to regroup, Sebastian’s knife slipped back up his sleeve and he threw the sides of his long coat behind his hips. He unsheathed the two scimitars from their scabbards and brandished them lazily. Or so it appeared. The twin blades caught the sunlight; a nice flourish to his display.
“You want my coat, do you?” Sebastian mused. The two men were frozen. They stared at the assassin with wide eyes, as if even blinking would be a lapse in caution. “Well, you can’t have it. It wouldn’t be much good to you, anyway, seeing as I’ll slice your arms off if you make a try for it.”
One man looked ready to cry. Sebastian Vaas of five years ago would have laughed and cut them to ribbons for their audacity. Sebastian Vaas of seven years ago would have kept one alive to watch the other lose body parts one by one. And the one left alive to watch—pissing himself with terror—would have realized he was in the presence of Bloody Bastian, or Bastian the Bastard, or the Black Star of Eastern Edge as the assassin was variously known, and that he was going to die as Bloody Bastian never left witnesses. Never.
The two men were young and underfed and the Sebastian Vaas of this day was merely disgusted.
“Go,” he told them. “Before I spill your guts over your own feet.”
The men dashed out of the courtyard before his last word was uttered; he could hear one curse the other for selling him out as they ran.
Sebastian sheathed his blades and lit a cigarillo. He could hear his own smoky exhale. A ficus tree clung to life in the shade of the decrepit house. Dappled sunlight danced under its browning leaves. He imagined what it would be like to have a home like this, except not on a shit-stinking island like Kabak. But a bungalow, perhaps, on that atoll he’d found four years ago.
The atoll.
It invaded his thoughts more and more as of late. He wondered if that little beach was still pristine and untouched; if the foliage in its interior was still impossibly green; if the water that kissed its shores was as blue and clear as the sky on a summer day. Probably not. Probably some rowdy bunch of sea dogs found it, stripped it of its fruit, pissed on its sand, and then left their campfires to burn it up. He looked again at the blue expanse of sea and sighed.
Cigarillo finished, he ground it under his boot, careful to make sure it was out and wouldn’t blow away to blaze up all the dried leaves. Or that one struggling tree.
Not that it matters. It’ll be dead before the summer’s out.
Sebastian left the courtyard and resumed his march up to the old fortress.
The passage slithered up the hill, buffered on either side by high stone walls. Soon, the path turned a sharp left, widened a bit, and the old fortress was obscured from sight.
His instincts hummed.
Before he consciously decided to do it, his body danced to the left and he brought his right arm up to shield his head. A boulder the size of a cannon ball exploded on the ground where he’d stood a second before. It had scratched his arm as it came down but his leather coat protected him. He wasn’t even going to bleed.
But these bloody damn fools, they will bleed. They leave me no choice.
He shaded his eyes from the sun with his upraised arm and saw the heads of his two pursuers in silhouette on the wall. There were other stones piled up beside them.
A set up, Sebastian thought with a snarl. They knew I would come this way, toward the fortress. The assassin felt a shiver of cold slide up his spine. Zolin, you old bastard…
Sebastian scaled the smooth sandstone wall like a lizard, and swung himself up among the stones. The second rock his attackers dislodged landed in an empty corridor. The two men scrambled away, and dropped down onto the path on the other side. One fell badly. The snap of his leg and his agonized scream echoed through the quiet passages. The other man ran for his life that he had no hope of keeping.
Sebastian jumped down from the wall and landed on the fallen man’s back. The man’s screams were loud but Sebastian ignored him. He withdrew his pistol from his belt and took aim at the other attacker who fled in clumsy, flapping strides. Flintlocks were scarcely reliable at ten paces let alone fifty. Sebastian took his time. The passage ran straight for fifty spans and then turned. The other man almost made it to the turn when Sebastian’s bullet found the small of his back. The vagrant dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He landed with a whoof and a cloud of dust.
The man pinned beneath Sebastian screamed again, this time in fear as well as pain. He writhed helplessly. Sebastian set the flintlock down and released the dagger held in the catch up his sleeve. He gripped a fistful of that grimy hair and yanked up. With a smooth stroke, he drew the knife across the man’s throat.
The screaming stopped.
Down the way, the man Sebastian had shot did not scream but whimpered. He clawed the dusty sand, dragging dead legs behind him. In the next moment, Sebastian was straddling him and cursing through clenched teeth that his bullet hadn’t ended the man clean. He gripped his bloody dagger and shoved it through the base of the man’s skull, pressing down with both hands until he felt it scrape stone on the other side.
When the body ceased to twitch, Sebastian sat back, breathing hard. “Gods damn you,” he told the dead man, and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Gods damn you to the Deeps.”
He tore his dagger free and stood up. Sebastian had no doubts that the manors were homes to vagrants like the two he’d just killed but if anyone had heard the struggle or the gunshot, they kept themselves hidden. He examined the black places for movement. When he saw none, he wiped his bloody blade on the dead man’s shirt and then took up his flintlock. More powder went into the pan and another ball into the chamber. He tucked the pistol into his belt and headed back. The other corpse lay face down in a pool of its own blood that was maroon against the yellowed stone. One leg was bent out at an obscene angle. Sebastian stepped over it and scaled the wall.
His gray-green eyes scouted the territory as he resumed his trek up the hill. He neither heard nor saw any other life until he arrived at the fortress. The assassin guessed that anyone else watching had learned what those two fools did not.
Or the old bastard hired just two, he thought. He must have hired them. As a test, perhaps.
Sebastian looked up at his appointed meeting place.
The fortress was old and perched atop the hill, and more exposed to the elements. If most of Darrowden resembled an ant mound, then the fortress was as several ant mounds of various sizes stacked upon one another and then melted under the meridian sun. The path Sebastian walked opened up into an outer bailey studded with pale green cacti and strewn with boulders. A gibbet stood off to the left, empty. Its rusted chains creaked when the stingy breeze decided to blow. On the right, there was an animal pen that now corralled a small pile of dead men. The corpses were bloated, blistered, their skin black and peeling in the inexorable sun. The stench suggested they were no more than a half-week old. Flies buzzed.
The old man and his minions were victorious in their conquest of this illustrious fortress, Sebastian mused.
Two men emerged from the dimness of the fortress gatehouse. They wore red and black robes cinched at the waist and cut at the sides to allow for movement. Unlike Sebastian’s own scuffed pair, their tall black boots were polished to a high sheen, as were the wicked blades in their hands. Sebastian heard a sound like a whisper and two more Bazira shadow adherents stepped seemingly out of nowhere from behind him. Two more stood atop the one remaining battlement, high above. The sun was too bright to see for certain but Sebastian could feel the arrows trained on him.
Or maybe poison-tipped crossbow bolts. I’ve heard the Bazira are fond of poison.
The shadow adh
erent was huge and in his hand he carried a mace with head as large as an anvil. He emerged from the gatehouse and stepped from between his brethren. “Julian Tergus?”
For now, Sebastian thought. Aloud he said, “Aye.”
The immense shadow adherent, who seemed built more for armor rather than the cloth, held up one meaty hand. “Weapons.”
Sebastian hesitated, but before he could either protest or acquiesce, he was surrounded and stripped of his scimitars, his flintlock, and the dagger he kept in his boot. He kept his face neutral and pretended cooperation, lifting his arms here and there to help the men divest him of his weapons. With misdirection, he insured they missed the dagger on his wrist that had last been buried under a man’s skull.
“I’ll be wanting those back.” Sebastian nodded at his weapons.
The big man tossed the blades and pistol into the dust. “They’ll be waiting here for you when you’re done.”
Other Bazira snickered and then Sebastian was led inside the fortress.
It was small, enclosed, airless. Three guards flanked him while the big shadow adherent tromped behind. They led him past a rounded entry hall and down a side stairway. Beneath the dust, the assassin could detect the scents of the piss and offal of the vagrants who had lived here and were now piled up and rotting outside.
The narrow pathway canted down and became narrower, and still the Bazira did not stop. Sebastian was beginning to wonder if they were walking circles, the journey was taking so long. His steps slowed, and when the doors on either side of the stony hall began bearing bars, he stopped.
“If you think to imprison me, you’re bloody well mistaken.”
The Bazira only chuckled, but Sebastian sensed the man tense, ready for conflict.
Sebastian studied the four shadow adherents in the narrow hallway, measured the space, their size, his speed. Lightning fast, his dagger was in his hand so when the huge shadow adherent clapped a hand around the back of Sebastian’s neck, the assassin was ready.
