Pathfinder Tales - Shy Knives

by Sam Sykes

  I breathed. Feeling came back to my body, blood crept back into my limbs. I could feel the wood of the chair beneath me. I could feel the bite of rope binding my wrists together behind me.

  I breathed. I heard no sounds of the night or of the wind. I heard no whisper of people or shuffle of feet. I wasn’t in Alarin’s manor anymore, then, but I was still somewhere close, somewhere confined.

  I breathed. I felt a cold breeze, followed by a cold word, followed by a cold blade—

  Ah, hell.

  “Are we awake, Miss Ratani?” A voice, harsh and sharp as a spade that digs a grave. “Have we slept well?”

  The tip of a blade prodded beneath my chin, tilted my head up. Through a clenched jaw, I replied.

  “We have not,” I said. “We would suggest that proper rest is rather impractical when one has one’s head smashed from behind.” I sniffed. “But then, we also assume the question was rhetorical.”

  “Still so smug.” The voice became a hiss. The blade traced its way down to the hollow of my throat. “Even now, tied up and with a blade at your throat, you can’t help but mouth off, can you, Shaia?”

  “It’s not you, darling,” I replied with far more confidence than a woman in my position should. “I hate to give you the wrong impression of me, but this isn’t even the first time this week I’ve been tied up and had a blade at my throat. The novelty’s a touch diminished.”

  “Are those really the last words you want to leave before I send you to Hell, Shaia?” The knife prodded a little deeper. I felt a drop of blood blossom on my neck.

  “No,” I gasped. “But you’re not going to kill me.”

  “Oh?” The voice took on a softness as the blade trailed across my throat. “And why is that?”

  “Because there’s only one person who calls me Shaia.”

  The blade came to a halt right at the base of my throat. I swallowed a cold, hard lump and felt the point brush against my neck. I whispered and felt every word reverberate in its steel.

  “And she once told me that she’d never hurt me.”

  Do it long enough, lies start coming easy. You slip on names, histories, emotions as easily as you put on a cloak. It stops being a sin and starts being just one more part of a job.

  It’s honesty that gets hard. Every truth you speak tastes bitter in your mouth. And speaking plainly is so hard it makes having your throat cut open seem not so bad in comparison.

  Or maybe that’s just me.

  Because those were words I had hoped I’d never say again.

  Words died. Breath went still. Everything fell so silent I could hear the knife have a conversation with my throat. The beating of my heart, the blood rushing into my jugular made a plaintive plea. I heard the knife mull it over as its edge slowly slid along my neck, steel lips dancing across my skin in coy kisses. And all throughout the silence, that cold-knife fear in my belly wrenched itself a little deeper.

  A snort of contempt. A muttered curse. The knife left my throat with a whisper. I took a moment to let out a breath as that fear slid itself out of my guts.

  A breath, it turned out, was all I had. For an instant later, the sack was torn from my head and my eyes were sent fluttering against the sudden light that assaulted me.

  Not that it took long for them to adjust. What little light there was was dim and flickering, cast by a few old candles set in rusted wall sconces in a tiny, drab room. And yet, for as little light as there was, it was still enough to afford me a good view of my captor as I looked up into two cold, pupil-less eyes.

  And that cold-knife fear jammed itself right back into me and gave itself a good, hard twist.

  I took her in. That bone white hair, cut so severely around her long, pointed ears. That slim, athletic build wrapped so tightly in black assassin’s leathers. Those eyes—that cold blue stare that had seen a thousand men beg for mercy and hadn’t so much as blinked when they watched her cut their throats.

  And I smiled sweetly. And I said …

  “Hey, Char-Char.”

  Let it never be said Chariel Longstride, assassin of the Brotherhood of Silence, suffered an abundant sense of humor.

  Also, let it never be said she didn’t have a mean backhand. Because I barely had time to register the sneer across her face before her left hand shot out and slapped me square across the face.

  “Son of a bitch,” I snarled. “Slapped twice in one night? Do I have a sign on my back or something?”

  “What you’ve got, Shaia, is a scent.” The knife came back under my chin, tilted my face up to look at her. “And it’s of a rat.”

  “I resent that,” I replied, eyes pointedly on the knife. “A rat is someone who turns over her companions to the authorities. I never uttered a word to a guard that wasn’t more spit than language.”

  “Hardly seems the time to be pedantic, doesn’t it?” Chariel asked.

  “If I’m going to die here, I want the record set straight. I never ratted you out, Char.”

  “No.” Her hand shot down, seized me by the hair. My cry was drowned out by her growl as she wrenched my head back and loomed over me, blue eyes bearing down upon me like two blocks of ice. “You just left.”

  I opened my mouth to say the first thing that came to mind. After thinking better of it, I closed my eyes.

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Yeah. I bet you did.”

  She released my hair. My head slumped forward as she stalked away from me. The candles flickered as she walked by, as though they wished they could just snuff themselves out at her passing. And in their quivering light, I could get a better look at my surroundings.

  The paint on the walls was peeling. The carpets were torn and ragged. Portraits of people I didn’t recognize bearing names I didn’t know hung crooked on the wall. Everywhere, furniture covered in white sheets loomed like a child’s idea of specters. The room and everything in it did not so much have a layer of dust as it had a suit of armor made entirely of grime.

  Still, it was big. Big enough to house a lot of furniture and a couple of boarded-up windows. I wagered we were in one of the abandoned manors at the edges of Yanmass, from back before the city got big and being any kind of wealthy short of “insanely” became unacceptable.

  That made sense. I knew the Brotherhood liked to keep property in every city in Taldor. Just a couple of nice, out-of-the-way spots that would be ideal for, say, killing, dismembering, and then disposing of someone who had once stolen a large amount of money from them.

  Just as an example.

  “See, here’s what really irritates me…”

  I glanced over to Chariel. By the light of a nearby candle, she inspected her blade, studied the tiny drop of my blood adorning its tip.

  “I like to think I’m merciful,” she said. “There are quite a few things I can forgive. Betrayal, murder, theft … I don’t always hold a grudge against these.”

  I would imagine she didn’t. Some of our best friends were ardent practitioners of those arts.

  “But when someone wrongs me…” She turned her scowl on me. “When someone wrongs the Brotherhood … and they simply saunter under my nose like I won’t find them? That insults me. That irritates me.”

  “I went into hiding for months,” I protested. “Whatever anyone says about your nose, Char, it’s not nearly so big that it could cover the whole city. Frankly, I’m not even sure how you got into the city, let alone how you found me.”

  “Yanmass is built and governed by paranoid nobles who see doom at every corner.” She smirked at me. “Are you that surprised to learn there are more than a few secret ways in and out of the city? As for how we found you…”

  I didn’t have to ask. An instant later, the answer came stalking in from the shadows.

  “We covered our tracks,” a man said. “No one will be following us.”

  “One guard got nosy,” a woman added. “Nothing a few gold and a few words didn’t fix.”

  Ah, hell.

  I should have r
ealized it. I should have recognized them. My eye picked them out of the crowd for a reason.

  Sem would have told me to trust my instincts.

  The man and woman spared a haughty smirk for me as they entered the glow of the candlelight. Their hair was as dark as I remembered from the party, but they had changed their servants’ uniforms for black garb. Hell, now that I saw them in more appropriate clothing, I could almost recognize these two. I thought we might have shared whiskey together, once.

  Idiot, Shy. Of course the Brotherhood had agents in Yanmass’s manors. Why the hell wouldn’t they? How the hell could you have been so stupid as to think they wouldn’t recognize you?

  “So, what are we thinking?” the woman asked. “A quick chop job? Ship her carcass out piecemeal for the boys back in Oppara to see?”

  “Too messy,” the man said. “You’d want to keep her whole, right? So the bosses know we really got her? We could ship her out in a barrel of wine.” He looked to Chariel. “What do you think, Longstride? Just tell us what you want us to—”

  “Leave.”

  The woman’s face screwed up in ire. “We just got here.”

  “She’s dangerous, Chariel,” the man added. “All the bosses said so. We’re supposed to keep eyes on her.”

  “And considering your past with her,” the woman muttered, “maybe we should…”

  She never finished that sentence.

  Chariel didn’t threaten her. Didn’t throw knives, didn’t cut throats, didn’t spill blood. That would have been tactless, coarse. You didn’t get to be as respected as Chariel by being coarse. No, you got to be where she is, at the very top of a long, black list held by the Brotherhood’s highest heads, by being good.

  Good enough to send a man and woman cold and breathless with just a look.

  Kind of like the look she shot them.

  “Yeah, all right,” the man said, turning to leave. “Call us if you need help, Chariel.”

  “Better give us credit for the kill,” the woman muttered as she followed, earning a jab in the ribs from her companion.

  The two of them stalked off, disappearing into the shadows as Chariel watched them go. When she was certain she was alone, she turned back to me, strode over to the chair I was bound to. Slowly, she looked me over, her gaze cold and sharp as any knife, so that I didn’t dare move.

  I merely stared back, silent, following her gaze as she looked down at my wine-stained dress. She reached down, idly played with one of its billowing straps across my shoulder.

  “Mauve?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  Slowly, she stalked around behind me, her hand sliding away from the strap and onto my shoulder. I felt her fingers squeeze gently as she leaned down behind me and drew her knife back. There was a quick, sudden jerk.

  “You look better in black,” she said as the ropes fell from my wrists.

  “Wasn’t my idea.” I rose up, knuckled out a kink in my back as I turned to face her. “It was the only dress available for the disguise.”

  She looked at me. The smile that crept across her face was small, so small you could barely even call it a ghost of a grin. But it was gentle, it was warm, and I had spent more than one night thinking of it.

  “Always up to dirty business, Shaia? Even when you got out?”

  “Do you remember what I told you back when we first met?” I asked. “You can take me out of Katapesh…”

  “But I can’t take Katapesh out of you. I remember.”

  I grinned. “I missed you, Char-Char.”

  And she stopped smiling.

  Anyone who plays this game—from the rat kid who lies to guards to the shadow lord who shakes hands with the men he intends to kill—has more than one face. Chariel was no different, even if she didn’t have as many as I did.

  Most people—the men whose throats she cut in the night and the men who paid her to do it—never saw more than the one face: the cold mask she wore, dark as deep winter and unflinching even when blood was spattered against it. A lucky few had seen her smiles, those small little curls of lip that danced across her face and were gone in a flash, like pixies.

  But there was a face she saved just for me. A mask of black silk, soft and sad, when her eyes became melting snowflakes and a frown deeper than night painted her face.

  A face she had shown me only three times.

  Once, when she woke up beside me.

  Again, when she knew I was leaving.

  And now.

  I wished I could tell you it didn’t tear me up worse each time to look at it.

  “I told you I hate that name,” she said, turning away from me.

  “That’s never stopped me from calling you it before.” I shot her a grin in the hope she might shoot me one back.

  But the gods didn’t love me quite that much.

  “Things were different before,” she said. “Before, we were on the same side.” She gave me a look, cold and deep. “Before, I didn’t have an order and a fat sack of gold telling me to kill you.”

  I held her gaze, unsmiling, unblinking. I cleared my throat and glanced away. “Yeah, well … you haven’t killed me yet.”

  “I should have,” Chariel said. “Calistria knows I should have. It’d make things a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Char, we’ve been in this work too long to believe that killing makes things easier.”

  “Well, things sure as shit aren’t easier with you still alive.” She whirled on me with a snarl. Her eyes hardened to shards of ice, pinned me against the wall as she stalked toward me. “You betrayed us, Shaia. You betrayed the Brotherhood, you betrayed the job, you betrayed me. And I could have lived with that if you had done the smart thing and fled Taldor and gone where we couldn’t find you, but you stayed here.”

  Her lips pursed. She narrowed her eyes.

  “And we found you.”

  I swallowed something cold and hard. It settled in my belly like a lead weight.

  “And?” I asked. “What happens now?”

  “You insulted me once, Shaia. Don’t insult me again by acting like you don’t know.”

  Yeah, I did know.

  From the minute I decided to leave Oppara to the minute I showed up on Herevard Helsen’s doorstep with a big, fat letter of blackmail, I knew what was going to happen to me, eventually.

  Same thing that happens to everyone who burns the Brotherhood of Silence.

  Except for me, it’d be worse.

  See, the Brotherhood doesn’t do small-time. They’ve got dreams. Big, bloody, dirty dreams. And I was at the centerpiece of one of them when they brought me onto the streets of Oppara and shoved me in front of the carriage of one Senator Ignatio Calavus.

  Taldor had been dying for centuries. Everyone knew it. And no one knew it better than the bickering men and women in Oppara’s senate. Most of them could be trusted to do the smart thing: play nice with the Brotherhood, kick them a few favors and get out with as much gold as they can carry when the hammer falls. But men like Ignatio come from old blood with old visions of when Taldor was great, and believe in things like honor and virtue and romance.

  Honor that compelled him to step out of his carriage and see this poor, down-on-her-luck Katapeshi girl that had stumbled in his way. Virtue that compelled him to take her in, this wretched soul without anyone to care for her. Romance that compelled him to fall in love with her, never suspecting she was there to put a knife in his back so someone more amenable could step up and take his place.

  A normal assassination would bring up concerns of political motives. But if we could make him seem a faithless lover and me a vengeful woman spurned, the whole thing would be written off as a big tragedy. I’d be smuggled out before I could go to trial and his successor would play the way the Brotherhood wanted.

  It wasn’t a bad idea, really. Chariel’s idea. We put a lot of work into it, her and me and about a dozen other Brotherhood higher-ups.

  Not really sure why I chose to run away before we
could do it, if I’m honest.

  Maybe I didn’t feel like sharing the gold we would get from it and decided to leave when I could get a bigger payday from looting Ignatio’s vaults. Or maybe I knew that those privy to the Brotherhood’s bigger assassination schemes were usually the next to get their throats cut.

  Or maybe, when Ignatio looked me in the eyes and told me he loved me, I believed that he did.

  I’ve made a thousand mistakes in my life, starting with my birth. Leaving the Brotherhood was just one of my latest. But when I fled for Yanmass, hoping to stay low until I could get to Galt, I never thought it’d end like this.

  With Chariel’s knife drawn on me even as she looked like she was about to cry.

  “Char-Char,” I said, breathing hard as she edged closer, “put the knife down.”

  “Don’t call me that, Shaia. Don’t say a damn thing.”

  “Chariel, listen to me—”

  “It’s kinder this way, you know.” Her voice was a soft whisper. “I send you back to Oppara, they torture you, cut your eyes out and feed them to you. With me, it’s just one stroke, in and out. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I lied, poorly.

  “They saw you, Shaia. Two of the Brotherhood saw you. And they saw you with me last. They’ll know. They’ll think I betrayed them, like you betrayed them.”

  She swept forward suddenly. Her arm was over my throat. Her knife was pointed against my neck. Her jaw was clenched and she drew in sharp, ragged breaths in a desperate bid to chase away the tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

  “Like you betrayed us.”

  “They wanted me to kill him, Chariel,” I said, gasping as I struggled to pull her arm away. “They wanted me to marry him and then kill him. I had to leave. What else could I have done?”

  “You could have told me.”

  “What could you have done.”

  “I would have come with you.”

  Both of us went wide-eyed, silent and breathless at that. She hadn’t expected to say it. I hadn’t expected to hear it. And I sure as hell hadn’t expected to feel so damned guilty for not even having considered it.

  You know you’ve made some bad decisions in life when you feel morally inferior to an assassin.