Age of Assassins

by Rj Barker

  “I didn’t want it. They cut power into me. I didn’t want it.”

  “Who did this?”

  “I won’t give up the other girls. It isn’t their fault.”

  “What you are is no one’s fault, Drusl,” said my master. I watched, rooted to the spot like a tree. “But someone woke your power with pain, Drusl, on purpose? Is that what you mean when you say they cut it into you?”

  She nodded slowly then fell to her knees and stretched out a hand as if to touch Xus before jerking it back in horror at the sight of him. “Xus,” she said, “poor Xus.” She turned from the mount to my master. “They said the symbols would stop me hurting anyone.”

  Gossamer flakes of ash hung in the air around us as I watched, unable to think or move.

  “It was a lie,” said my master. “They sought to control you but have only twisted you; they have taught you no control at all.”

  My words came then—desperate ill-thought-out words planted in the sour ground of desperation, not reality.

  “We can help you escape,” I said.

  “Oh Girton.” Drusl gave me a small, shy, smile. “I knew you’d want to help.” She held out a hand towards me, then looked at the dying Xus and her smile fell away. She turned back to my master, the small hope I had seen in her eyes dying. “But he doesn’t understand, does he? There is no escape from this, is there, wise mother?”

  The old woman stares at his master, and a tear tracks down her face, flowing along the banks of her many wrinkles.

  My master’s face was set like stone and if I could have found my voice I would have begged her not to speak.

  “No, daughter,” she said. “There is no escape.” Drusl bowed her head, and her hands fell to her side. She took a deep shuddering breath and then raised her head.

  “I love you, Girton. What I am doesn’t change that.” She tilted her head to one side. “It’s not all bad. I saved you from the dogs, slowed them for you.”

  “That was you?”

  She nodded.

  “It was worth it for that at least.”

  “Drusl,” I said. My voice died in my throat.

  She watched her left hand as she ran it through Xus’s coat. His fur came away at her touch, falling to the floor to lie against his barely moving side. The mount’s breathing had slowed until it was hardly discernible. “I love Xus too.” A tear ran down her face. “I never meant to hurt him; I never thought I would hurt him.” She stared at the dying mount and then raised her face to me. “You love him.”

  I nodded. “And you.”

  “No one will find out about you, Girton. Don’t worry.”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course.” She looked puzzled and then smiled. “You didn’t? It makes me love you more.” She met my eye, something steely in her gaze. “Remember our happy times together, Girton, and take this gift from me.” She reached into her tunic and drew out a small knife, the type used to pare the hard claws of a mount. “Don’t forget me, Girton,” she said in a whisper. Then, with a final smile, she brought the knife up and it flashed in the torchlight as she opened her neck. A jet of arterial blood sprayed out over the dying Xus. It seemed to slow, to bend and twist, becoming elastic and wrapping itself around the dying animal.

  It feels like a dream.

  I scream, I think.

  The blood, so red, floods my memory. My master holding me tight. I fight her. She stops me running to Drusl. Blood flows, sprays and turns.

  “This is what she wants, Girton. This is what she wants.”

  “No.”

  I struggle. I kick. I cry.

  “This is what is best.”

  “She’s dying.”

  I struggle. I kick. I cry.

  “Nothing can stop that now. Let her blood flow as she wills it.”

  This is not a dream.

  Drusl slumped forward, and I folded into my master’s arms, crying “No” again and again. I felt the movement of life around me. What had been contained and bound by Drusl’s blood was freed and sought its source, binding itself to the great animal lying before me. I felt the walls of his fluttering heart thicken and strengthen. I felt his huge lungs fill with air and begin to work like blacksmith’s bellows. Colour crept across his fur, changing it from grey back to brown and white, and it thickened as though he moulted his summer coat and grew his winter one all in seconds. The muscles of his neck twisted and knitted themselves back to strength, and his heavy head with its huge spread of antlers rose. He struggled, clawed feet slipping on the bloody ground, but only for a moment, and then, with a shrill cry of triumph, he lifted himself and stood over us, huffing and hissing, shivers passing along his flanks.

  And at the same time Xus was standing, breathing, living, my mind was working, seeing pictures. Making sense of what I had seen—what I had missed.

  “Others.” I said the word quietly into my master’s chest. “She said there were others.” I heard a voice I could not quite place. I saw a priest in a place he should not be, heard a woman crying in the distance. I saw groups of letters in the back of the book of names and they burned across my mind with new meaning. I raised my head, looking into my master’s face. “Drusl in the stable,” I whispered it to myself as if to test the truth I found in the words. Columns of letters span in my mind, twisted around themselves. One particular grouping shining especially brightly. “DTS,” I said. “Drusl, the stable.”

  “What?” said my master as I untangled myself from her arms.

  “The priest Neander did this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I stood.

  “She spoke of others. The letters in Neander’s book. They were names and places. DTS, Drusl, the stable.”

  “Girton, you cannot be sure.”

  “But I am.”

  I walked away from her as guards swarmed through the stable doors.

  “Get out of my way,” I said and drew my blades. They lowered their pikes, but I would not be stopped.

  I could not be stopped.

  The world changed.

  I fell into a new existence. My vision became a series of glowing lines drawn on black. The stable, the guards, their weapons, all became unreal—simplified. Only I was real, only I existed. Beyond the paper-thin veneer of reality I could sense a roiling, a black fire fuelled by life. All I had to do was reach through and the fire below would be mine. I could cast away the guards, the stable block, the rotten castle that housed it and every blessed who used others like tools. I could do it all with a thought and a flick of my mind.

  It would be a pleasure.

  “I am sorry, Girton. But I cannot let you do this now.”

  A whisper from another world.

  A cool hand against my neck.

  A darkness all-enveloping.

  Interruption

  This is

  a dream?

  He swims.

  Swims after her

  Swims through a sea above the land. Through water blue as flame, red as hot liquid, green as life. Pellucid water clear as duty and as thick and murky as choices. Animals swim around him. Shoals of mounts dart through the water between waving fronds of seaweed that reach up into the black sky to become the pillars supporting it. Herds of fish run across the land and far away the sourings sing sewage and the throne of the hedgelord, Blue Watta, rises.

  He swims after her.

  The water passing through his lungs is as sweet as sorrow: it tastes of fear and spite. It is the warmth of a hand offered in unexpected friendship. It is the drowning steel of a knife blade through the gullet. Currents pull him through the doors and windows of a ruined castle and the decayed faces of people he-may-but-may-not-know scream a welcome at him. The dizzying spin of a whirlpool drags him through a hedging’s door, shrieking and joyful into the depths.

  He swims after her.

  Beneath him his mount supports him, and it is a marvellous creation of mechanical scales, as intricate and perfect as a water clock. It writhes and twists thr
ough the water with all the striking grace of death. Its antlers are gilded for war. Its saddle is as supple as love. Its eyes are scars that can see through time. In the distance is death and in the foreground is death and in the mid ground is death and in the roof of the stars is death and in the floor of the ocean is death. Xus the unseen laughs at him from where he hides between the shining cracks of his mind.

  He swims after her.

  Beneath him are the dead gods with their throats slit, imposing bodies piled carelessly upon one another, flesh of alabaster, ebony, azure, ruby and sand. Skin as soft as refracted light within a diamond, faces as achingly beautiful as they are terrifying. A pair of eyes, heavily browed and puzzled, stare out of an ugly face. “Why?” He does not know why or what or who. He feels judged and judgemental. He feels guilty and proud. The bodies of dead gods writhe together in a fertile frenzy, slit throats moan in ecstasy, bodies grow scars. Their forgotten children, the hedgings, shout for attention from below a wall of transubstantial flesh.

  He swims after her: ghosts in the water

  She is a reminder.

  He is a creature of the land. He should walk on two legs. His mounts are furred and his fish swim. This is not real and the water he breathes is as lethal as any ligature. His memory is a memory of life that dooms him to a watery death as surely as it steals away the magnificence of the seascape around him.

  He chokes.

  She goes where he cannot follow.

  A noose constricts around his neck.

  The pain is a knife in his eye. It is his heart being cut out. The strange world fades. Little by little it becomes more mundane until it is gone and he stands alone in an amphitheatre. Below there is a play on. Merela Karn fights off a thousand little men armed with tiny daggers, and when she is finally overwhelmed blades rise and fall like bloody metronomes.

  a dream

  Is this?

  Chapter 24

  I lost three days to grief and shock.

  The first day I cannot remember at all.

  The second was a haze. A mist of sweat, pain, twisted blankets and mental recriminations. Should have saved her. Could have saved her. I should have saved her.

  How? How could you have saved her.

  Merela Karn should have saved her. Cleverest person I’ve ever met. Best fighter, greatest assassin. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t she? She could have done it, should have done it. She could have disguised her, hidden Heamus’s body away …

  How? The guards were on us almost immediately.

  Somehow! She should have done it somehow. Instead she practically talked Drusl into suicide.

  Drusl. Oh Drusl. The pain is sharp like Conwy steel cutting into my breast. My master, how could she? How could she do that? Let Drusl die. She just let her die. Let her die. How could she let her die. Kill her.

  My master killed her. Talked her into death.

  What else could she do?

  Something!

  She could have done something. She should have done something. Instead she talked the woman I loved into death.

  Did she?

  Yes!

  “Thank you for your kindness, daughter.”

  Drusl said there was no way out. She knew there was no way out.

  She was right.

  No.

  She was right.

  No, she wasn’t!

  Should have saved her. Could have saved her. I should have saved her.

  How?

  And round and round and round it went in a circle of tears and anger.

  On the third day I faced the truth, met my master and woke to a new world.

  It was not the world I had walked through before. It was a world dulled. My colours were the washed-out colours of a land beneath sky the grey of threatening storms. I heard sound as though I stood in a landscape covered in deadening snow, the highs and lows absorbed by ice. Somewhere, far away, a piper played but I could no longer hear the melody, only noise. When I ate the food which had been left out for me it was even more tasteless than usual.

  There had been no escape for Drusl. Three times she’d killed when threatened and each time she had used more power. It had never been under her control. If it had been under her control she would never have harmed Xus. Never.

  And I’d touched the magic in a way I never had before.

  At the thought of magic my mind started to slide away on a sheen of silver, sword-blade bright. I pulled it back.

  I’d felt the magic in the stable that day in a different way. I had felt its power, its terrifying power, and I knew the truth of it was just as my master had said. It wanted to be used. It desired to be used, and its voice was a slick, an oily membrane that spread across the mind it touched. It promised so much: pleasure, power, safety.

  Revenge.

  Whatever you wanted was within it. “I can give you that,” it said, though it had no voice. It was more subtle than that. It was as if the magic were a dark bird that settled on your desires and its weight pushed them to the forefront of your mind.

  “I can give you that.”

  I felt the pull again but it was dulled, like everything else. The only thing that was sharp and focused was the pain in my chest.

  “Drusl.”

  “I’m sorry, Girton.” My master’s first words as she entered the room that evening. She had shed her Death’s Jester make-up and motley. Instead she wore a plain leather jerkin and skirts as she strode across our room and opened the box at the end of the bed to remove our packs and drop them on the floor. She sat on the bed. I moved my legs so I was not touching her and she looked like I had driven a blade into her side, but I could not take the action back. “I am sorry,” she said. “I had no other option. We had no option. And …” Her voice tailed away.

  “I understand,” I said quietly. Her hand inched across the sweaty blanket towards my own, as if she unconsciously desired my touch. I moved my hand away. “Understanding is not forgiveness, Master.” I looked away from her with tears in my eyes. I could feel what I was doing, feel how I was thrusting my own pain into my master’s heart. It showed as new grey in her hair and new lines etched onto her face—silvered lines in her eyes.

  “I understand too,” she said.

  “We are leaving?” I nodded at our bags.

  “Yes. You do not have to stay with me, but …”

  “But?”

  “What you were about to do in the stable …”

  “You mean destroy the castle?” I said dully. “Bring it all down around their blessed ears?”

  “The power within you,” she said, “it was like nothing I have felt before.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “But you would have, Girton. You would have hurt everyone.” Her voice dropped so low I could barely hear her. “And that is not who you are, so I have cut you,” she said, staring at the floor.

  “Cut me?”

  She nodded, and without looking at me her hand came up, moving aside my jerkin so I could see a shape incised into the flesh above my heart, a knotted tangle of lines and whorls that would not stay still in my mind. As soon as I knew it was there it started to hurt as if it was eating into my flesh.

  “It is like the symbols I found in Heamus’s rooms.”

  “I am sorry. It was the only way to hold the power at bay.”

  I think she expected me to explode with anger. Instead I pulled my shirt across to hide the cuts. “Good,” I said.

  She smiled sadly, shaking her head.

  “It won’t last, Girton. The magic wants to be used.”

  “I know.”

  “It will find a way around.”

  “I know,” I said. My voice sounded as dead as Drusl. “That’s what she meant when she said there was no escape, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. But it is different for you, Girton. You have learned control, and together we can make sure that you don’t …” Her voice faded again.

  “Destroy the land?”

  She wouldn’t look at me.


  “You would never—”

  “I nearly did,” I snapped. “It wants to be used, that’s what you just said. You should kill me. If you don’t then I will. You’ve seen the sourlands, the people starving. We cannot afford another sorcerer. I cannot bear to be responsible for more—”

  “No!” She grabbed my shoulders, shaking me. “Never say that! Never think it!”

  “I see no other way, Master!” It seemed such an obvious way out. A way to safeguard the land and to end the terrible pain within me. She stared at me and her mouth moved, but no words came out. She bit on her lip as she held my gaze.

  “You were right about Neander,” dry words. “He escaped the castle along with a number of young girls, the ‘others’ Drusl spoke of. In his quarters was found a letter from Rufra requesting the death of Aydor.”

  Suddenly I felt something apart from my own pain.

  “That cannot be,” I said.

  “It was.”

  “But Rufra would not—”

  “It seems he did, and tomorrow they will burn him alive as a traitor. But I must leave, and you intend to die so …” She shrugged and stood.

  “Rufra is a good man, far better than any blessed or king we have come across.”

  “Good men do not become kings.”

  “Then what does become of them?”

  “They die, Girton.” She would not meet my eye. “They die, and usually they die so that bad men may remain kings.”

  “Rufra should not die just because …” There were no words. I closed my eyes to try and banish the room and the castle and my master but only succeeded in conjuring up images of Rufra on the pyre—my friend screaming in agony on a fool’s throne, the wood seasoned and dried so it burned cleanly and the smoke did not suffocate him, his clothes daubed with oil so they caught the flame. He would die hard, and I could feel the currents of magic roiling and turning far below me, distant but full of possibility. I felt like a thirsty man on a mountain, reaching for the line of the sea on the horizon in an effort to wet his hand.

  A letter.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Master, did you see the letter?”