Uncommon Assassins

by F. Paul Wilson

  Else join the dead upon the corpse-strewn field

  Eyes raven-pecked, flesh cold, guts spilled

  In fierce battles where men bled and died

  His companions would find Svarti

  Crouched and cowering, dumbstruck

  Unmanned by terror, weeping

  Breeches befouled in hot and stinking shame

  Until he could withstand no more

  Abandoning their war band to slink away

  To sell sword and shield, mount and mail

  To take up trade in the town, and settle there

  Where he prospered, and grew wealthy within its walls

  Now, there dwelled in that city the maiden Alfir

  Of beauty, wit, and wisdom above all women

  Blue-eyed Alfir, daughter of a lord

  Whose father, swayed by gold and greed

  Consented she would become Svarti’s wife

  But war kindled in the land, and fanned its flames

  Until farms and fields smoldered in black ashes

  The folk slain, enslaved, the cattle slaughtered

  The city besieged, bereft of mercy

  Wracked by famines and the pestilence

  Soon Svarti found that all his fortune

  Could not stave off sufferings for long

  Silver useless ’gainst sickness and starvation

  Even emeralds buy no meat or milk

  Nor bread when none is to be bought

  Just when it seemed hope must be lost

  Rescue came, men and horses, over the hills

  A sea of shields, spears like tall grain-stalks

  Sun glinting on helms, an army

  With Guldi’s banner flying at its head

  They broke the siege and sent foes scattering

  For their very lives running in rout and retreat

  Cut down as they fled, heads hewn from bodies

  The city saved from certain fall

  The army welcomed, and Guldi hailed a hero

  In the great glad revelry that followed

  Alfir looked on Guldi, loved and favored him

  Wanting for her husband a brave man, a warrior

  Insisting she would wed no other

  And Guldi did not disagree

  So it was that Svarti, shamed anew

  Vowed oaths of vengeance against Guldi

  Once his friend, close as a brother

  Hated now, his sworn enemy

  Heart poisoned against him

  Then there came to Svarti’s house a traveler

  A stranger, a visitor, wolf-cloaked

  Bright of eye and sly of smile

  Who had heard of Svarti’s troubles

  And come to make offer of counsel

  “For a purse of silver,” the stranger said

  “Men can be bought, hired swords

  Mercenaries loyal-bound to no king

  To beset upon Guldi from ambush

  Cut him down, and end his life”

  But Svarti would not consider this

  Saying, “Guldi is too great a warrior

  Well-armed and well-armored

  Well-accompanied when he rides

  He fights as if born of sword and shield

  “Whole armies could you throw against him

  Like waves against a stone cliff face

  Even should by chance some blow strike

  To die in Odin’s battle glory

  Would be Guldi’s dearest wish”

  “For a purse of gold, then,” the stranger said

  “I will undertake this task myself

  To, by stealth, slay him as he sleeps

  Peaceful, unknowing of his fate

  No weapon within his grasp

  “And so deny him the honorable war death

  That would earn him a seat at Odin’s table

  In high Valhalla, golden-roofed

  The feast hall, the mead hall

  Of its five hundred and forty doors

  “There, men wait, Valkyrie-chosen

  For the sounding of Heimdal’s Gjallarhorn

  To don their war-gear against the giants

  In that final battle, the gods’ twilight

  At the destruction and the drowning of the world”

  At this, Svarti let himself be coaxed

  Giving the stranger half a purse of gold

  For which he would that very night

  Go to Guldi, and do mischief upon him

  Dooming him forever to Niflheim, Hel’s realm

  The stranger, whose name was Mord-Vargr

  The killer wolf, the murderer

  Went forth in darkness from Svarti’s house

  Stoat-silent and cat-quick

  Upon death’s errand like a shadow

  He donned again his cloak, two-sided

  White-furred and black, a gift to him

  From the insulter of the Aesir

  Mother of Sleipnir, Fenrir’s father

  The wily one, bringer of Baldr’s bane

  He went unseen to the place where Guldi slept

  Dropping into the hearth embers a sprig of herbs

  Troll wife stuff, marsh witchery

  Its smoke to lull and cast a pall

  Drawing dreamers deeper into dreams

  Guldi had by his bedside a broad-bladed axe

  On the bedpost his sword belt hung, within reach

  A stabbing blade he kept beneath his headrest

  A short knife secured to his wrist

  All of these, Mord-Vargr slipped from him and took away

  The warlord, unarmed and unaware

  Defenseless, Guldi slumbered on

  He felt nothing as the knotted twine

  Looped loosely ’round his neck

  Twisting tight and ever tighter

  First flush then pallor flooded Guldi’s face

  Mouth gaping and with lips blue-tinged

  He twitched, and gave a thin last gasp

  Then strong limbs slackened; he lay dead

  Strangled like a stillborn babe upon its own birth cord

  Swift and stealthy as he’d come, he left

  The wolf-cloaked killer, Mord-Vargr

  Returning to the house where Svarti sat waiting

  Gut-sick with reproach at his abasement

  Even as his heart leaped in wicked joy

  “The deed is done,” the murderer said; “Guldi lives no more

  No seat awaits him among the einherjar, Odin’s own

  No mead horn and feast of boiled meat

  Cut each night from the flesh of Saehrimnir

  The immortal boar renewed again each dawn”

  Svarti paid what was owed, that terrible perversity of wergild

  Yet took but bleak and shallow satisfaction from it

  For a coward lives like one half-dead already

  And he knew the freezing fogs of Niflheim

  Would one day await him as well

  But Freya’s tears of gold had purchased Alfir’s tears of silver

  The maiden weeping, grieving for the hero slain

  Mourning him, she scorned anew what Svarti offered

  So despite his wealth, a dragon’s hoard

  He grew old and wretched, and died alone

  A hush spread as Thyf spoke, and for a span of time it lingered when he finished.

  He’d watched the jarl’s men grin at the words of war glory and battle carnage, and seen them sneer their disdain for Svarti’s cowardice.

  And he’d observed how unease seeped into each of them, like groundwater, as Guldi’s dishonorable death unfolded. He saw them shiver, and faces go ashen beneath their beards.

  Every warrior’s innermost creeping fear, dark, gnawing and insidious, was to be denied a glorious death in combat, and be deemed unworthy of Valhalla. To become aged and infirm, crippled, weak, a feeble burden, a frail and useless creature ... or to die of illness, accident ... or worst of all, a low and slinking murder, life not lost but stolen ...

  They had asked him
for a grim tale, had they not?

  Now, gathering themselves, the men uttered bluff and hearty laughter to prove it had not affected them unduly.

  “Grim, indeed,” Hodvard said to Thyf, “but, well told, well told.” And he gave Thyf a brooch of hammered bronze.

  The fires had burned low by then, the mead bowls drained, and Hodvard’s folk readied themselves for the night.

  Some of the men made a joke show of checking that their weapons rested near at hand by their sleeping places. Others peered into the hearths, poking the ash-covered embers as if searching for suspicious sprig bundles, to the amusement of all.

  There were none, of course, and the smoke no different than ever.

  Neither was it the mead that had been laced with potent herbs.

  Soon enough the night noises of the hall became slumbering sounds, rustles and murmurs, snores and slow breaths.

  Beyond log walls and thatch roof, wind whistled and snow blew.

  Then Thyf, who had lain awake all the while, arose from his furs and blankets.

  None stirred at his movement.

  He went to Hodvard’s great chair. Behind it hung a partition of hides, draping off a smaller chamber where the jarl and his young wife Esja shared a bed.

  The dull red glow from the low-burned fires let him make his way unhindered to Hodvard’s side. He saw that the old warrior slept with a hand-axe, its iron head leather-sheathed, curled to his chest the way a child might cradle a twig doll.

  It was the broth that had been drugged, the broth of boiled beef with leeks and garlic, strong flavored so that the bitterness was masked.

  Thyf, with gentle care and caution, lifted the axe to remove it from Hodvard’s arms. He put it aside on the floor, where it might easily enough have fallen in the course of normal sleep.

  He slid his fingers through thick gray hair, raised up Hodvard’s head, and turned it to the side. There was the neck, the nape exposed.

  Not the strangling twine this time.

  She wanted it done without sign or trace, an undetectable murder.

  At the base of the skull where the spine joined with it was a hollow, an indentation of the flesh.

  “I bore him six sons,” Olrunn had said. “Six strong sons, fine boys.”

  Thyf withdrew from one of his woolen leg wraps a folded piece of linen, and from it a long sliver of ivory. Its narrow end came to a point, sharp as any needle, while its wider end was blunted. Its edges were honed like those of the thinnest sword blade.

  Olrunn, the jarl’s first wife, was divorced of him and gone away, back to her father’s hall. Hodvard’s friends and kinsmen said he was well rid of her, for she had been both shrewish, and over coddling of their children.

  “He led them all to war, though I begged him not to,” she’d said, “and let them all be killed in battle. When I raged at him, furious, he scoffed and said that when he met them again in Odin’s feast hall, they would thank him.”

  He placed the point against the hollow at the base of Hodvard’s skull, gripping the blunted end between two knuckles and bracing it with his thumb. In a short, fast jab, he pierced the skin, punching the ivory needle up and deep and at an angle.

  “If I must lose my six dear sons, never to see them again in this world or the next, then I would have the same for Hodvard! He will not, must not be reunited with them!” And, so saying, Olrunn had paid Thyf his purse of gold, sending him to do this.

  Hodvard grunted, a wet spit bubble escaping his lips.

  The slightest sideways gesture sliced the sharp edges in an arc, shearing through the tough and gristly brain-stem, severing it.

  The jarl’s chest sank, subsiding, on a slow exhalation. A looseness overtook his body and settled him heavy upon the bed.

  Thyf pressed the sliver deeper until it had gone fully embedded. Of blood, there was barely a drop. The blunt ivory end, flush against Hodvard’s skull, would not be noticed even by the women who would wash and bathe and comb and dress him to be readied for his funeral pyre.

  Then he silently returned to lie down again and shut his eyes, and await what despairing outcry the morning’s grim discovery would bring.

  MISCONCEPTIONS

  BY MATT HILTON

  I sat in the room, doing the old Sam Spade bit waiting for the femme fatale to knock, and thinking to myself, There has to be a better way than this. I couldn’t think of anything. A man past forty, whose waist size exceeds his age, needs something kind of sedate to get by on.

  The room wasn’t a PI’s office. In fact it wasn’t even much of a room. It was a box at the end of a damp corridor above a pole-dancing club with rusty poles. It was more like a storage closet, plasterboard tacked onto a wooden frame, no paper, no photos or diplomas in frames, just boxes of stacked junk lining the walls and an old Formica-topped table and two plastic chairs. I’d sat in chairs just like them at school back in the ’80s. They were uncomfortable then; now that my ass had grown much bigger, they were torture. I was itching like crazy and all I wanted to do was get up and pull the material of my shorts out of my butt-crack. But I held the nonchalant pose of a noir antihero; people kind of expected it when they arrived.

  The femme fatale arrived. She didn’t knock because there was no door. She just leaned in and scowled at me like I was something filthy. She wasn’t far wrong, I suppose. I looked back, and maybe the sour expression on my face told her everything. Femme fatale she wasn’t; she’d a face like a hog and the body to match. She was dressed in a floral dress a family could set up camp beneath, a brown overcoat, and dingy training shoes. Bare legs, patchy with dermatitis. Her hair was greasy, tight curls going gray where the black dye had faded. I could see where she’d shaved hair from her chin, the blunt razor leaving a barely healed scar.

  “You can’t be Ward?” she said by way of introduction.

  Well I sure as hell wasn’t Sam Spade, but I didn’t get what she was meaning.

  “Why not?”

  She came into the room uninvited and sat on the other chair across the table from me. It squealed in protest, and little wonder. She pressed her hands into the thick rolls of flesh on her upper thighs, giving me a head-to-heels inspection. By the look of things she wasn’t impressed. The feeling was mutual.

  “I heard you were meant to be something,” she said.

  I looked down at my gut hanging over my belt. I was more of a man than I used to be, that was for certain. But meant to be something? Fair enough, I was no oil painting, but who was she to complain?

  “Depends what you want,” I said and she snorted.

  “Well it’s a good job I ain’t looking for a wild time.”

  That pissed me off, but I didn’t say. She wasn’t exactly my type either, but she was carrying the money I wanted, and like I already said, I was there to make an easy living. Every job has pros and cons. Seeing as I could think of nothing that suited me better, I just took the day-to-day bullshit as a necessary evil.

  “When we spoke on the phone, you said that you’d do whatever I asked.” She was obviously happy now that I was what she’d expected. She wasn’t the least nervous. Maybe it was my lack of response to her sarcasm that reassured her: An undercover cop would have argued his case more, to get her to incriminate herself before pulling out his cuffs.

  “Only one thing I don’t touch,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, you said. You never touch kids.”

  I nodded. “Kids.”

  “So you do have some standards.” She was eyeing my rumpled suit, her mouth twisted into a sneer, and I guessed she wasn’t confusing standards with morals. That was okay. A body like mine didn’t carry a nice suit well, so I just made do with an old one. I didn’t dress nice, and I didn’t kill children—some legend I’m graced with.

  Not that I was squeamish about doing a child, but they carried too much fuss with them. You could kill a man, a woman, and it barely hit the papers these days. But do a kid and there was a national outrage. Doesn’t do much for your career chances if the en
tire country is looking for you, and I had a living to make.

  “I don’t want you to harm a kid. Not unless you have a limit on mental age?”

  I held up the flat of my hand, surprising even myself. “I don’t do handicapped people either.” I pinched my lips around the politically incorrect term, but I wasn’t sure what the acceptable moniker for someone soft in the head was these days. Should have said I’d never killed anyone with mental health issues before, not any in the clinical sense. Plenty of whack jobs and nut cases, mind you, but that’s not the same.

  The femme grunted and it suited her.

  “I was making a joke. My husband still thinks he’s a teenager the way he’s running around.”

  I got her this time, but didn’t say. So she’d cottoned on that her husband was having a good time, looking elsewhere? Can’t say as I blamed him too much. Still, she was the cash cow so I tried to look sympathetic without putting the emphasis on “cow.”

  “You still sure you want me to kill him?”

  “That’s what I’m paying you for. I don’t want a frigging half-baked job. When you do him, put an extra bullet in his brains to make sure.”

  “I was just checking. See, maybe after you think about it, you’ll have a change of mind.”

  She shook her head and I caught a whiff of cheap fragrance and sweat. “That bastard is screwing everything in a skirt that he can find. And I’ve got the proof. The scumbag gave me a sexually transmitted disease and then tried to say he caught it off me!”

  I could understand her outrage, I mean, what were the chances of that?

  She gave me the beady eye, still didn’t care for what she found. “When you’ve done it, how’d I know you can keep your mouth shut afterwards?”

  “I was just going to ask the same thing.” We stared at each other, my hard eyes on her limpid ones. When she didn’t offer anything, I said, “I’m not in the habit of confessing my sins. I’m taking it that once he’s out of the way you want to start a new life. You aren’t gonna speak if it means your new life is in a cell not much bigger than this shit-hole.”