City of Steel (Chaos Awakens Book 3)

by Heath Pfaff

  He felt the point touch his chest. It was solid, sharp, and cold. He shouldn’t have been able to feel it. It had no way of being real. He took another step forward and felt the tip of the metal weapon pierce his flesh. He recoiled in shock and reached up to his chest. There was blood on his hand. How was that possible?

  Crow laughed. “They’ll get you now, Xandrith.” He vanished, twisting away as though dissipated by the wind. Xan looked down at himself. He was holding one of his knives in one hand, and there was blood on the tip. He looked around in a panic, making sure no one had seen what he’d just done. There were no other trolls immediately around him. He was behind a set of tents, but the damage was done. He was bleeding now, and they’d be able to smell that. He wiped the blade of his knife in the dirt and returned it to his scabbard before examining his cut more closely.

  The wound was two inches long and deep. He hadn’t turned on the cutting edge of the knife, luckily, but it was still as sharp as any weapon he’d ever carried. He needed to stop the bleeding and find something with a strong scent to cover up the blood. He looked around in a panic, searching for anything that might do the trick and save him from discovery by the trolls. The wound was in a place that he couldn’t easily cover it, and it was deep enough that he couldn’t leave it untreated. Blood was soaking into his shirt at an alarming rate.

  The wound should be stitched closed, but he didn’t have the equipment with him to do that, nor did he have a place private enough to perform such a procedure. If the smell of his blood didn’t give him away, the fact that he had a wound that wasn’t sealing shut certainly would. For a human his wound wasn’t grave, but it wasn’t anything to ignore. For a troll it would have been little more than a scratch. Within a minute they would have healed it and gone on about their day unaffected.

  “Magic, Xandrith. Why don’t you use your magic?” The assassin jumped when the voice spoke just inches from his hear. He spun and lashed out with a fist that swiped through the image of the person standing next to him without connecting. It was him. Or rather, it was an illusion of him, but this wasn’t the younger version of himself he’d carried along for so much time. This one was older, bleaker. His eyes were too far sunken into his skull, pits with a glossy black shine in the center, and his cheeks were sunken as though he’d been dead and left in the sun for weeks. His skin was taunt, wrapped over his body like paper over the wooden frame of a hand fan. “Steal some life force from the trolls and patch yourself up.” It said in a dry, cracking voice.

  Xandrith turned his head away from the image. It wasn’t real, and it wouldn’t do any good to listen to it. He needed to get his head clear. He had to solve the problem of his wound, and he had to do it quickly. He needed a source of heat, something to sear the wound shut. It would hurt, and it wouldn’t be pretty, but it would stop the bleeding, and then he could worry about covering up the smell.

  “You can’t though, can you? You burned that right out of you. No magic. No real hope at all. How do you think you can accomplish anything like you are now?” The illusionary thing kept talking. “Leahn would be disappointed in you. She had so much faith in you, even up to the point that you shoved a dagger right into her heart. She never thought you’d really do that, you know. She thought you loved her, and then you killed her. You’re a monster, Xandrith.”

  “Shut up!” Xandrith snapped a wave of anger rolling through him. He snapped his mouth closed, looking over his shoulder to be certain no one had heard him. The closest trolls were still moving about their business, blissfully unaware that he was even there.

  “That’s alright though, Leahn was the lucky one. You only killed her. What about Kassa, Xandrith? Do you know what happens to a person’s spirit when darkness inhabits their body? She probably wishes she would die by now. If you think the Drayid had it bad in their void, Kassa’s punishment is much worse, and her only crime was loving you. She loved you, Xan. Love.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Xandrith whispered under his breath. His hands were shaking and his heart was beating like an anvil in his chest. “I never meant for that to happen to her. I never...”

  “Do you even understand love, Xan?” The shadow version of him spat, anger in his words. “You don’t, do you? If you did Leahn would be alive, and Kassa would be living in a cottage somewhere, raising your brats. All you know is hate and murder, and that is all you’ll ever reap in this world. Everything you try to achieve will end in chaos, and everyone you dare to touch will die horribly. You are a plague.”

  The words hit Xandrith worse than any weapon ever could. He staggered and fell to his knees. “I ... am ... a plague.” The words slipped between his lips. They were true. He’d destroyed so many lives. The only person left was Haley, and he’d left her alone amidst a group of people who might mean her harm.

  “Are you thinking about Haley?” The dark-Xan chuckled. “She’s all that’s left now, but you can’t do anything to save her. You’ve already set her demise in motion, and all she wanted from you was love. What did you give her love in return? Nothing but pain. You rejected her, and that rejection will eat away at her forever. You just couldn’t bring yourself to love the poor little burned girl. Did the thought of kissing her twisted lips bother you that much? You were so sickened by the thought of putting yourself inside her burned up cunt that you wouldn’t dare allow yourself to even pretend to feel for her?”

  “She’s just a little girl.” I whispered the words, shaking my head. “She ...”

  “Quit your excuses, monster. The truth of the matter is that you can’t love anyone. You can’t fight for anything just and right because you are, and always will be, a thing of darkness and evil. Look at me, Xandrith!” The dark thing called, and Xan couldn’t help but look up into its black eyes.

  “This is you. This is the real us. When we come in the night with our blade drawn and death clinging to our hands, this is what our victims see before we snap the light from their eyes forever.” The dark Xandrith straightened up, pushing back his shoulders, and he seemed to double in size, radiating shadows that spun and clung to him to him like living things. “We are death! We are hate! We are chaos! We are the sum of all the darkness that our childhood breathed into us, all the loneliness and the sorrow we swallowed just to wake and open our eyes every morning. We are the wretched thing that crawled over the dead and feasted on their spoiling and rot in order to grow up and become more powerful. That, my friend, is what we are! And you thought we could become something good?! We have nothing left in us that is good.” His laughter boomed, then his face sobered, and his voice was quiet. “We have nothing left in us.” The dark Xan faded with these last words, turning more and more transparent until he was simply gone, faded back into the unreality from which he’d come. The only thing that remained of him was the weight of his words on Xandrith’s shoulders.

  Xan knelt upon the ground, his hands balled in the dirt and his forehead pressed against the earth as tears burned his eyes. He felt broken. His will to go on was staggered, his indomitable spirit shattered into a million pieces. He looked towards where he knew the troll camp would be more populated, out from behind his partial shelter in the shadows. Xan blinked away the tears that filled his eyes and tried to gather his wits. Was there any point in going on? He’d already failed everyone at every turn, what was the point of going any further?

  Perhaps the best thing he could do for the world at this point was to cast off his troll disguise, walk back into the midst of the trolls, and just kill as many of them as he could before they destroyed him. Murder was all he was good for anyway. Death was all he was equipped to give out. He forced himself up from the ground and reached for the clasp on his cloak. His fingers were still trembling as he worked it open and dropped the leather to the ground. Death was all that was left for him.

  Xandrith turned and looked at the trolls. He took a step in their direction, and then another. The next one was even easier. Then he stopped. He took a massive breath and let it out in a stutte
ring sigh. What was he doing? Haley was still alive, and she was waiting for him back at the Unth wall. What the fuck was he doing? He walked back to his cloak and fastened it in place around his neck again.

  “I can’t quit. I have to see this through as far as my body will take me. This isn’t for me, this is for Haley, for all my friends who I’ve failed getting here. I can’t quit.” He said the words aloud, biting back the bitterness he felt about his own shortcomings. Xandrith Dalt had one job left to do. He had one more life to take, and he was a professional. Assassins did their damn job or died trying, they didn’t just quit in the middle.

  Chapter 9

  That Was Heavy

  Xandrith’s wound was closed and the hole in his shirt roughly patched with string taken from the fabric of his pants. It had taken him an hour of skirting the very edges of the troll camps to find a source of fire to close his wound. He’d eventually managed to steal a firebrand and sear the wound closed. Apparently the smell produced no longer raised suspicious, it just made the trolls hungry. More than once after the searing he’d heard a troll comment on the delicious smell of roasting meat. Well, he’d rather smell like he got too close to a piece of roasting flesh than like he was a piece of meat waiting to be cooked.

  He’d come a long way since then. The horde seemed to go on forever, but he’d kept his direction of travel the same. Now, as he looked out over the heads of the troll mass, he could see a set of black tents that rose higher than all those around them. This was what Xandrith had come for. These were the tents of the human knights that the trolls had been talking about. It had taken the better part of the day to find them, but finally he was within sight of, if not his final objective, then the place where he would find the way to his final objective. He approached cautiously, circling the area.

  The trolls had set guards around this section of the camp. Beyond the line of impressive looking troll security, there was a quiet, open space. Xandrith could see people, human people, walking between the tents. Each of them bore a bonesteel weapon of some variety. The assassin had never seen so many wielders in one place. They would all have a unique set of skills and abilities that made them highly dangerous.

  If he was going to find out anything more he needed to get closer. He’d need to find his way through the line of guards, and he’d have to remain unseen. The same disguise that had worked so well to get him through the horde would be a hindrance amidst the black tents. He couldn’t exactly wash off the red dye on his skin and walk in there like one of the knights. Xan was only guessing, but they probably would know him by his face, even if it had changed some recently.

  No, disguise and fitting in one was out of the question. That only left him with stealth, and for stealth to be effective he needed to create a distraction to loosen up the wall of guards he planned on slipping by. The problem was that trolls weren’t particularly easy to distract. Normally Xandrith would just kill someone and lay their body out somewhere near the security guards. A body would normally bring authority figures from all over, but the trolls probably wouldn’t even care that another one of them was dead. They were possibly killing and maiming more of each other every day than the Unth were. It was shocking they’d even made it so far with any army left. It must have been true that they were prolific breeders, though that came as little surprise with what Xandrith had seen of them so far. It was almost impossible to remember that they’d once been human.

  Xandrith was going to have to get creative if he wanted to ignite a big enough scene to distract the guards. He walked the circumference of the line, looking for something that would give him the opportunity he needed. As he passed a low burning fire with a group of trolls sleeping nearby an idea occurred to him. He reached behind his back and unlashed one of his Unth blades from his belt. He gave the weapon a forlorn look. He’d only gotten to use it once, but now it would need to serve a better purpose. Xandrith snuck between the sleeping trolls, his footsteps so light they made not a sound as he wove between the snoring forms.

  He reached his target quickly, the smallest of the group with blue tinged skin. From his own experience Xandrith was aware that the trolls were not exactly fond of their smaller brethren. The bigger the troll, the more respect he was given. Xandrith’s next moves were made with practiced caution. The troll was dressed in a cloak similar to the one that Xan wore. He pulled one side of the cloak open and then carefully tied his second knife to the troll’s belt. The troll momentarily swatted at him, his sharp claws swinging within inches of Xan’s arms as he tied the final knot to secure the Unth weapon.

  With the weapon secured he drew the cloak back down in place so it was covering most of the weapon and then made a hasty escape, being certain that no one saw him about his business. Once he was clear of the little camp, he made a straight line for the line of guards around the tents. He caught the attention of one and dashed quickly towards him, waving urgently.

  “A spy!” Xandrith growled as he drew close. “I’ve found a spy.”

  The guard snorted and spat. “What?”

  “In my camp, just there.” Xandrith pointed. “He has crystal weapons, like the men behind the wall. I think he’s an informant. He has it hidden under his cloak.”

  The guard looked dubious.

  “Where do I get the reward for finding him?” Xandrith pressed, seeing he needed to sweeten things a little. He was sure to speak loudly enough so the guards to either side of the first could hear as well.

  “Reward?” The guard’s attention was peeked. “I will investigate this. Where was this spy?” He boomed, now eagerly looking in the direction Xan had pointed.

  Xan pointed again. “The one on the north side. He’s sleeping, but you can see the weapon on his belt. He tried to hide it, but I found him. I want the reward!”

  “Wait here.” The troll said, and started off towards the camp, the other two guards at his side looked at each other, and then followed after. They weren’t letting their friend get the reward without them. Xandrith smiled and waited until they had walked away before he turned and slid in amidst the black tents.

  Xandrith exercised every bit of stealth he’d ever put into practice. A mistake now could cost him everything, and when he was so close to his final goal the thought was terrifying. For a time he sat and watched the coming and going of the knights. He needed to know where they were gathering, and where he could pick up the most useful information. After a while he began to spot a pattern in their movement.

  There were six tents in this part of the camp. Five of them formed a circle around a center tent that seemed to be a meeting area. The other five tents, from what Xandrith could tell, were shared by four or five of the bonesteel wielders each. That meant there were at least twenty of them, and that was a frightening number considering how much power each one had at their disposal.

  The assassin crept along the edges of the outer tents until he found a clear line to get to the center pavilion. There was no guard detail within the ring of trolls that circled the tents, but anymore security would have been unnecessary. The Templar were incredibly dangerous. This meant that Xandrith only had less eyes to avoid on his final run to the meeting tent, but that didn’t make him any less cautious. As he approached he could already hear voices spilling out through the fabric of the tent walls. Hearing normal human voices again was a bit of relief, though the content of their talk had the opposite effect.

  “...siege will be done by dawn tomorrow.” A female voice said. “I, for one, will be happy to be done with this mess. These trolls reek, and the damn leash has been too tight recently for my liking.”

  “Power always has a cost, and the cost of our servitude has been slight for the power it’s granted us.” A male voice responded.

  Xandrith placed a few fingers below the edge of the tent and gave it a slight lift to see how securely the walls were down. They didn’t lift far, but laying down gave him a view inside the tent. The room inside was dark, lit by a handful of candles. He counted fifteen
individuals sitting around a table in the center of the room.

  “Your cause is nearly at its end, Templar.” Another female voice spoke and Xandrith’s heart jumped in his chest. He recognized the voice. He carefully adjusted his position to get a better view of who was talking. He had to be certain. “Once we have captured the Wellspring your service will be done and you may disperse as you see fit.”

  He saw her then, standing at one end of the table, her palms flat on the surface as she leaned over and spoke to the knights. She looked different, but Xandrith would have known Kassa’s face anywhere. Her cheeks were gaunt, her eyes like black coals set into sockets darkened by what looked like exhaustion. Her skin was as pale as death, and the expression on her face was hollow and emotionless. It sent both a thrill and a horrible pain through him to see her again. Even with all the changes for the worse, she still looked like something of the woman he’d loved. It was as though she were sick, for all that he could see the changes he still had trouble accepting she was beyond him.

  “Do you even need us to capture the spring?” Another one of them asked. “The troll shamans are bringing down the wall, and after that it’s just a matter of marching into the city and taking what is yours.”

  Kassa shifted her stance and Xandrith caught sight of a peculiar white dagger at her hip. She was wearing the bone knife that Xandrith had gotten from the other god-thing. A realization struck Xan then. It had been Kassa who’d infiltrated the Forge. She’d been the one to break Captain Fortsmith’s mind. He’d been chasing Kassa this entire time, and now he’d found her, but she wasn’t his Kassa anymore. The knights talked to her like she was their leader, like she was the god-thing he’d come to kill. It was using her body as a puppet to directly influence the world.