THREE HUMANS IN the little cobbled yard around the well: a pair of servants drawing water and a valet relieving himself against the wall. Running and leaping, Jahama passed over the well and between the two servants who dropped without ever seeing the blades that had cut them. A twist in mid-air and he rolled into a lunging double thrust that caught the valet in sternum and throat as he turned. The man fell with his hands still tangled in his breeches and Jahama was away.
Light and noise emanated from the windows of the servants’ hall, and Jahama flicked the stiletto back into his sleeve and grabbed a little wooden stool sitting by a wall. A sweep of a long arm sent it crashing through the shutters and the first of them came milling out of the door a moment later, silhouetted sharp against the firelight. Jahama could have dropped five of them in as many heartbeats with throwing-blades, but he was already bounding up the steps to the walkway that led to the Grail chapel. Its heavy doors stood ajar, throwing out candlelight, and two figures stood outside them, hands on sword-hilts. One grey head, one blond. Harsh human syllables grated on Jahama’s ears.
‘An argument or something. It’s the servants. Shall we finish our prayers, father?’
They peered out, eyes adjusting to the gloom. The old one was no threat, but the young one would be one of the Due’s warriors. There was power in his frame and he held his sword with casual ease.
He ran at them and pirouetted by the young knight to take his father with a low, flat backhanded stroke. The old knight fell to his knees, wheezing in agony and as the son turned to try to swing Jahama made a dainty slash just above his eyes. The cut was shallow but the flow of blood was blinding. The knight staggered, wiping his face with one hand and roaring as Jahama neatly finished his pirouette, leapt straight up and swung onto the chapel roof.
He must have knocked over a lantern in the servants’ quarters; the firelight was much brighter and people were running with shouts and wet sacks. One or two had even come to the door of the main hall where horns and loud singing were still blaring. In front of the chapel, the young knight was screaming. Jahama knew enough Bretonnian to catch ”Father!” and ”Murderer!” before he slipped a noose over a roof-gable and slid down the thin cord to the cobbles on the far side.
A boy was peering out of a high window at the commotion, and Jahama took the opportunity to flick a throwing-needle up and into him. The motion caught the eye of someone at the servants’ hall - the fire was all but out but the crowd was growing - and at the first shout of ”Who goes there?” Jahama was running again, flitting sparrow-quick past the open door to the feasting hall with his blowpipe rising to his lips.
‘Marius?’ from behind him, then, more urgently, ‘Marius? Marius!’ In motions so practised they were unconscious, his left hand stowed his blowpipe back at his thigh and re-drew his cleaving knife. His other sheathed the stiletto and tugged the cord that opened a pack at his hip and sent a dozen small steel caltrops tinkling onto the steps behind him. The man at the hall’s entrance had dragged his crumpled companion away and now more figures were pouring out, from the hall and the tower, and shouts were going around the walls. Jahama grinned, now things would begin in earnest.
FOR THE FIRST time since the skiff had set off from the Ark, Khrait spoke aloud. ‘The assassin was expensive to procure, uncle. And his success-‘ he shot a look over his shoulder, but Miharan had passed out of earshot ‘- his success will bring kudos and rewards to the witch elves at the expense of ourselves. All things considered, uncle, is it really wise to hand Morathi and her followers a gift like this? All that anyone will know when those two return is that House Maledict are so under Miharan’s thumb that we’re freighting a load of slaves back for her for free.’
Khreos turned to look at his nephew as they sauntered down the ramp to the Ark’s lower keep. Scorn, smugness and exasperation fought for position in the curl of his lip and the arch of his eyebrows.
‘Return? Return with us? Don’t be stupid, boy.’
THERE WAS A howl behind him: someone rousted out of bed had been the first to cross the caltrops and hadn’t put on his boots. Jahama laughed loudly for a few moments to give them his location then hurled himself down the cloister alongside the hall and through the first door he found.
A stifling kitchen, cooks banking the coals in the roasting-pits now that the feast was finally done. Good. Jahama’s arm described a curt quarter-circle and two fell back with slivers of steel in their necks, then he vaulted a chopping-block, plucked the cleaver from it and drove it into a serving-man’s shoulder. Almost without thought his fingers picked a loose-weave sachet of Tuern’s Curse - one of the few poisons he had bothered to bring - and tossed it into the stewpot as a surprise for them later, then he turned as the knights poured in behind him.
All were unarmoured, but all were armed: a dozen drawn swords and perhaps half that many axes and maces. All weapons needing a wind-up and space to swing. If he could get in among them, getting back out to the courtyard would be an easier matter.
They were rushing at him, the young one he’d cut in front of the chapel in the lead wearing a mask of blood and tears. Jahama took a moment to wonder how he looked to them - a head taller than they but slender even with his cloak and cowl about him, narrow-faced and steel-eyed even by Naggarothi standards. The dying fires seemed to give everything a lushness, a depth, and turned his assassin’s cloak into a pit that drank the light. Then Jahama stopped thinking, gave a nonchalant flick of his arm that threw a line over a roofbeam, and swung neatly up over their heads.
They were quicker than he expected and a sword-point caught the hem of his cloak, but it was too light a touch to slow him and he somersaulted in the air to land lightly behind the men who had run at him. Someone cannoned into him and for a moment he almost lost his balance, but it was no real difficulty to turn and trap the man’s leg just so. The knight’s knee snapped as he fell forward into the others. Jahama whipped the edge of his hand expertly into the next man’s jaw, sending him choking as another bared his teeth and swung a mace. In the second it took the assassin to shift his balance inside the swing the haft had caught him above the ear and with a snarl to match his attacker’s Jahama arced his knife up and lunged. His reflex was to take out the man’s throat before he could balance for another swing until he remembered what he was here for, just in time to reverse the stroke and smash the weighted pommel into the man’s temple. He would live.
Jahama placed his hands on the staggering knight’s shoulders as though he were about to deliver a double-cheek Bretonnian kiss of comradeship, then he spun the man about, pushed off and drove both his feet into the face of the first of the squires to come running through the far door. The boy went down unconscious or dead and Jahama turned the movement into a backward roll, swiped a knife through the hamstrings of the second squire and ran through into the great hall.
Almost empty, now, a handful of cowering servants the only ones left. A great bestigor head leered from the wall and captured banners hung from the ceiling. Jahama thought of looking for any he recognised but there was no time. Horns were blowing outside, and the counterpoint of booted feet was everywhere. The knights were on his heels again, far too many to fight now - Jahama was starting to think he had done his work a little too well.
‘DO YOU THINK she knows we’ve sent her star pupil on a suicide mission, uncle?’
‘Knows? I don’t see how she can. She’s too sure of the massacre her pet is preparing to deal out, for all the taunting I gave her.’ Forgetting his dignity, Khreos spat on the deck. ‘Oh, he’ll do his share of damage, I don’t doubt. That’s why I sent him on ahead to begin with. We’ll march into the Due’s lands in a few hours and find the castle boiling like ants’ nest that someone has kicked. But you’ve read the reports of the Due and his men. One elf destroy them single-handedly? Even one elf whose smug little mistress loves to spin such stories about him? Hellebron’s challenge, indeed! Have you ever heard of that Hakoer fellow? Of course not!
‘My sp
eech about Jahama emptying out the castle was for Miharan’s benefit, Khrait. If you believe it you’re as gullible as she - Jahama will never leave that castle alive. Shadowblade himself would be lucky to silence the Due’s entire household. Think about it, Khrait. If one assassin were able to achieve that, or even a dozen, why are there any knights left in Bretonnia at all? He’ll never kill them all, certainly not the Due himself. From what I know of our human friend I think he’ll swat Jahama like a gnat when they face off. Face off they will, of course, since that’s what I had Miharan tell him to do. But Jahama will kill enough of them for the Due to be preoccupied with lamenting his comrades, not watching for more attackers. We arranged for our spies to be captured to teach the Due that dark elves only ever sneak into his lands alone. Just as he’s writing off this as another solitary intruder, albeit a more vicious one - there we shall be!’
The lord’s steward was standing nearby with a golden tray. They watched carefully as the aged elf had a mouthful of wine from each goblet before they picked them up.
‘What will Miharan do when she realises?’
‘Oh, I hope she tries to avenge him, Khrait.’ Khreos chuckled as he swaggered away. ‘Oh, I hope she does.’
Khrait took a last swallow of wine as he watched his uncle go. But even as he was dismissing his uncle’s vainglory and walking away to prepare for the march, his thoughts turned back to his last sight of Jahama’s cloak parting as the assassin had bent to step out of the coach, and the gleam he had seen at the assassin’s neck: a collar of dull silver plates with a single deep red jewel.
‘ASSASSIN!’ THE VOICE filled the room and seemed to thrum in the stones.
Standing on one of the long trestle tables, Jahama turned and stared. In the doorway, almost filling it, his knights assembled behind him, the man he had been sent here for. The Due, his iron-grey hair flowed to his shoulders and his greatsword looked like a rapier in his hands. His scarlet and white tunic caught the torchlight.
‘Only vermin stab and flee in the night. Can you not fight a knight of the Lady, you that hide in the shadows and murder children and old men? Let me look you in the eye. Do yourself one service in your degenerate life: die a proper death.’
The man had taken a step into the room and the knights were spreading out around him, watchful but not attacking. Jahama realised they were waiting for the duel between their lord and their invader.
The Due had taken up a fighting stance. His bare arms were heavy with muscle: to an eye used to slender elf limbs he seemed to vibrate with power. Jahama’s knives felt like sticks in his hands, felt like nothing. He took a deep breath.
Voices in his memory. The Lord: you are to be the knife we draw tonight, the core and pivot of my stratagem. Lady Miharan: Remember only what it is you have to achieve. He took a deep breath.
Then he swept his arm in a single, careful throw that drove his last throwing-blade through the heart of one of the damsels huddling by the fire, gave the Due his most winning smile and polite bow, and was gone into the courtyard.
TWO MEN-AT-ARMS RAN to block him. Jahama flew by them without seeming to slow or even to strike until one after another they dropped to the cobbles. Everywhere he looked in the courtyard there were soldiers closing about him, he fixed his eyes on the gate and opened his stride to the longest. For one agonising moment he thought he would have to climb back to the parapet and back down the line he had cast to scale the walls, but then he saw the little gatehouse door. Instinct made him swerve and jag as he ran at it, and the archers on the walls sent their arrows down to crack against the cobbles. Then the bar to the little inset gate clattered to the ground behind him - one last move to make. He worked it loose from his belt and dropped it just where they would run in pursuit of him. Then he ran, swerved, and made a long dive that carried him almost to the far edge of the moat. A single stroke and he was surging up the far bank, a shadow among shadows even as the first rumours of dawn began to touch the eastern sky.
I have put my neck down across the block and lifted it away clean, he thought. The wind now gone, he heard voices behind him from the gate and allowed himself a single backward look. He could just make out one man peering after him and another standing hunched over, staring at something on the ground. The little waterproof pouch with the parchment map inside. Jahama laughed then, almost doubling over before he heard the horns behind him and sped up again. He thought they would have better things to do than hunt him now.
IT WOULD BE dawn very soon. Khreos did not like to admit it, but he was finding these lands less detestable than he used to. The sunlight that had scorched his white skin intolerably when he was younger now brought a not unpleasant glow to old bones that felt older in the Naggaroth winter. He put the thought from his mind and hefted his lance - he hated the way he never seemed to be able to concentrate when they were due for battle.
He turned in the saddle, settling into the swaying gait of his cold one, and looked around him; there behind the ranks of his personal guard, Khrait was riding with his own little retinue. To either side, blocks of warriors quick-stepped to keep pace with the cavalry, crossbows slung on shoulders. The sea dragon scales on the corsairs’ cloaks and banner caught the pale pre-dawn light.
A noise nagged at the edge of his hearing and he turned his head this way and that, trying to place it. Cries? No. Birdsong? Too harsh. The only thing it sounded like, it couldn’t be. Miharan’s assassin had seen to it. He craned around again trying to see the little witch elf, but her palanquin had fallen further behind as they rode out from the Ark. As far as he could tell she was still back in the forest that the road had just emerged from.
His cold one raised its head and grunted at the air, and he turned to grab the goad from its saddle-clip. Only then did he see what his soldiers were staring at, and understand the noise he had heard.
The war-horns on the hilltop ahead of them gave another blast, and the glittering ranks of armoured knights sent up a shout as the scarlet and silver Grail banner of the Due unfurled over their heads. Khreos, gaping, could only clutch at his lance as a babble of orders rose behind him, cries as his corsairs milled about into fighting ranks, as the crossbow regiments scrabbled for bolts, as his champions tried to awaken the Blood Banner to bring their cold ones to full frenzy.
And then hissing clouds of arrows flew high into the air, line after line of yeomen and Squires rounded the base of the hill and the Bretonnians were thundering down the road toward them like a floodtide.
KHREOS MALEDICT, LORD of Karond Kar, Master of the Black Ark Exultation of Blighted Hope, was dying. He could still feel dim fire in his crumpled leg where his cold one had fallen on it, but he had to lie on that leg because lying on his side was the only way he could drag himself along after a Bretonnian mace had crushed his other shoulder even through his armour and sea dragon cloak. His lungs felt full of splinters and when he coughed he coated the ground in front of him in a fine red spray.
He had to find Khrait. He couldn’t see his nephew’s black-and-cobalt surcoat anywhere in the drifts of dead dark elves that choked the road. He was sure that Khrait would never have fled like the last remnants of his army had, the triumphant Bretonnians scattering them into the forest and riding them down. He had to find Khrait, or someone that could get him to hiding and then to the Ark, get him somewhere he could heal before the last of his energy ran out or the Bretonnians came back to make sure the battlefield had no survivors.
His vision greyed out and he lay there for a time until another coughing fit ripped unconsciousness away from him. He still lay alone in the road; he was still surrounded by his dead. He was clear of the dead cold ones now: the big beasts has still been blinking stupidly as the lance-points drove at them, their nostrils only just twitching with the Blood Banner’s scent. Their corpses were jammed and piled together like sacks, the bright blood of their riders mixing with the dark reptile ichor. Khreos was under no illusions that any of his guard might still be alive. For a moment he thought he saw one
of the cold one carcasses breathing, but it was just the shimmer in his vision as another wave of grey broke over him.
Reach, drag. Reach, drag. The gravel of the road was washed red under his fingers, and the dust by the roadside was a bloody slurry.
He was in among the infantry now, piled high atop one another after the knights-errant had crushed the formations as they had tried to plant their spears ready for the charge. Beyond the heaped corpses lay the second, more scattered lines of bodies where his crossbow ranks had died under Bretonnian arrows, scrambling to get their own weapons strung and loaded. The bodies thinned out towards the treeline - those were the ones who had tried to run as they realised what was happening and had been chased down. There were none of the stirrings and cries that he was used to after battles - Bretonnian fury had made the killing far too efficient for that.
Reach, drag. Reach, drag - his world had shrunk to the pain of his broken body and the sun beating on his armoured back.
He lay in between a dead corsair whose name he couldn’t remember and a warrior he didn’t recognise. He tried to see which regiment’s badge the warrior wore, before he realised through the fog of pain that the elf wore no armour at all. The body was not lying in a death-sprawl but reclining lazily on the grass at the roadside twisting a flower-stem in his fingers. Finally he was able to focus his eyes on the red gem in its silver collar about the other elf’s neck.
‘I’m sorry, lord, was this not what you had planned?’
Khreos managed a single dry croak that would not become words. He could think of nothing to say.
‘I would give you your map back, my lord, except that, oh, I seem to have misplaced it. Perhaps that was careless of me, but then who would have expected that a clumsy brute such as the Due - with his castle full of sleeping babes that a single assassin could kill - would be able to read a map that showed the road by which you would be marching to his castle? Perhaps I should have memorised the land and the rendezvous position, rather than carry a map that showed me how to find my way-right… to… you.’
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