The Tattered Banner

by Duncan M. Hamilton

  The Academy and the wealthy area of Highgarden were of particular convenience to one another, either by coincidence or design, and it was not long before the pair reached Ranph’s family’s town house at a brisk pace. On another day, it would easily have been one of the finest houses in Ostenheim. On this day however, smoke billowed from its many windows that almost concealed the flickering orange glow behind.

  Intrigued by the activity of two of the better-known students at the Academy, several others had followed to see what all the fuss was about. As a group, they all stood mouth agape at the magnificent mansion that was not long for the world.

  It occurred to Soren how Ranph would react a moment before it happened. He reached out to put an impeding hand on his shoulder only a fraction of a second too late and it slipped off ineffectively as Ranph rushed forward, through the great doors, and disappeared into the smoke. Soren delayed for a second before cursing and following after him.

  He had not been in the house before so its layout was a mystery to him. To add to the confusion, there was smoke starting to fill the corridor and the sound of flames eating away at whatever they touched. He kicked open each door he passed, peering in without breaking his stride until he came to one that was already open. With his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword, he rushed in.

  Ranph stood statue still staring across the room. Soren moved further into the room, which appeared to be a study and followed Ranph’s stare. There were two men dead on the floor and one collapsed into a leather chair, also dead. The man in the chair was Ranph’s father, Rikard dal Bragadin, Banneret of the Blue and the Grand Cross, Count Elector of Ostenheim, Lord of the County of Bragadin. There was something tragic and heroic about the scene. The two dead men had clearly fallen before him, and he was covered in many wounds, his clothes sodden with his own blood. His sword hung limply in his half open hand and his eyes stared out into oblivion. His mouth was still set with the same determination that Soren had remembered as he had walked past them in to the Cathedral. Ranph stood dumbfounded and the smoke was slowly but visibly beginning to thicken.

  Soren grabbed Ranph by the shoulders and turned him to face him.

  ‘You can mourn him later, we have to go! Now!’ he shouted at Ranph, whose face was frozen with despair. His eyes were glassy, either from grief or from the smoke, Soren could not tell. He didn’t react so Soren grabbed him and shoved him out. As an after thought he ducked back into the office and took the rapier from the former Lord Bragadin’s hand. Ranph should have his father’s sword, Soren thought.

  He rushed back out into the hallway where the smoke made it almost impossible to see, expecting to find Ranph standing there still dumbfounded. Instead he found Ranph sitting on the floor, clutching his stomach with both hands. There were three men lurking in the smoke, the orange glint of flame on steel visible at their hands.

  There was no time to ask questions, or to identify friend from foe. Soren merely reacted. He reacted as he had a thousand times before in training, but this time with the indignant rage of someone who has been wronged. He screamed at them with a fury that visibly shook them and rushed at the men, spinning as he entered their midst. The two swords he held sliced through the smoke, leaving clear little trails in the air behind them. Two of the men began their drop to the floor as he stepped toward the third who had had the presence of mind to step back when he had seen Soren coming at them. As he raised his sword, it appeared to Soren to slow. He could see that it was wet with blood that began to form a drip on the lower edge.

  He drove both lengths of his blades through the man’s chest. He gasped and spluttered and Soren could feel the tug on the swords as the man’s weight began to drop on them. He whipped them out quickly and booted the body out of the way as it fell. He turned to see if there were any other enemies to be dealt with, but there were none. The flames which had been rippling slowly and sensuously through the air resumed their earlier aggressive lapping at the walls. He felt lightheaded and the taste of smoke in his mouth was joined by the bitter tang of bile. He only now noticed the biting sting of the smoke on his eyes, the burning in his throat and lungs and an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion.

  He didn’t have time to inspect Ranph’s wounds, but he was determined that two Bragadins would not die in that house on that day. Taking the swords in one hand, he grabbed Ranph around the waist and hoisted him onto his shoulder, and fled the inferno.

  He had little time to unwind from the attack on Ranph’s house before he had to embark on his own task for the barbarian. He had been utterly exhausted by the experience. He thought hard about how the final assassin’s sword had seemed to slow. It moved faster than the belek had, but more slowly than it should have normally. It seemed as though the Gift had been stronger than normal, but not strong enough to be the Moment. It was all so confusing though, and he could never tell if he was trying to attribute explanations to things that needed none.

  Ranph was safely in the infirmary and there was nothing more that Soren could do for him. He tried to push his concerns for his friend from his head and prepared for his job. He borrowed a sword and dagger from the arms cabinet in the salon where he trained with Bryn. Borrow was perhaps the wrong choice of word, as he had to force the lock, but managed to do so without causing any damage that a little careful bending of metal would not conceal. He would have taken one of the beaters from the rack in River House, but they were as they were named, old, beaten up and not to be relied upon if there was a better option.

  Alessandra had certainly allayed his concerns about his lack of money, but he had made the commitment and did not think Braddock was the type of man who would take to being let down with friendly aplomb. He resolved that the money would go into the poor box at the Cathedral. After that he would be done with it.

  The smuggler was waiting for him as planned. Soren felt slightly ridiculous discretely passing over the chit Braggock had given him to confirm their identities, and this sense of the ridiculous was added to by the smuggler’s garb that could not be more clichéd if it had been intended. A long dark cloak covered him completely, with its hood casting a shadow over his face. The only colour he bore was the brace of fat leather satchels, a faded brown, which were slung over his shoulder. If Soren were to draw a picture of a smuggler, this man would have been it. He constantly had to remind himself that this was not a game that he was playing.

  He made to introduce himself to the smuggler who gruffly told him to be quiet. In silence, they made their way out of Oldtown and down the street into the city proper. The smuggler insisted on taking back streets and tight alleys through Docks, clearly concerned that they would be approached by the City Watch and arrested if they were out in the open. It felt to Soren as though they were inviting as much trouble as they were avoiding, and this suspicion was confirmed when two figures loomed out of the darkness in the lane ahead of them.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ said the smuggler, before they had even moved.

  They approached and the first of them, a scrawny looking wretch in garish clothes, the type often favoured by thugs to suggest wealth or reputation, drew a knife and spoke.

  ‘Hand over the package and we’ll let you live,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Soren. He pushed back his cloak to reveal the hilt of his sword.

  The thug smiled. ‘Anyone can strap a sword to his waist and act tough! Just hand over the package and save us all a lot of unpleasantness.’ He became more menacing and the second thug, taller and more heavily built than his colleague, revealed the club that he was carrying. The scrawny thug watched Soren, his eyes bright, revealing a cunning that would not otherwise have been attributed to him. His lips curved slightly in a smile as he nodded to his colleague who approached. ‘Fine then, we’ll do it the hard way,’ he said, a smile still on his face.

  The mage lamp on the street at the end of the alley flickered gently. Soren waited until the second man was close; the fool was taking his time with what he clearly t
hought was an easy kill. The smuggler had not budged from where he stood behind Soren, his faith blindly placed in an unknown swordsman’s skills.

  Soren reckoned that a non-fatal splash of blood would be enough to scare the thugs off. In one movement he drew his sword and flicked the tip across the large thug’s chest. His eyes widened in surprise. Blood bubbled from the corners of his mouth as he dropped to the ground.

  The depth of the wound was as much of a surprise to Soren as it was to the others. He had only intended to draw blood, but had cut all the way through muscle and bone and into the thug’s lungs. His control should be better than that. It was only as he berated himself for the sloppiness of his stroke that he realised things seemed slower than they should. The speed was similar to that he had experienced at Ranph’s house. Slower than normal, but not as slow as time had seemed when he killed the belek.

  The scrawny thug in the false finery roared in anger, but his voice was dull and the roar was long and drawn out. He came at Soren with his dagger. There was no mistaking his intention; he meant to kill. Without thinking, Soren lashed out with his rapier, slashing its tip through the thug’s throat, tearing it open.

  He gasped and tried to speak, but his destroyed throat allowed no more than a rasping whisper. He dropped his dagger and pressed his hands to the wound, as though trying to put everything back in place and hold it all together. ‘Don’t you know who I…’ Then his face relaxed and his eyes lost their focus. His last exhale spluttered from his throat rather than his mouth.

  Soren had killed the scrawny thug in less time than it had taken for him to even think of doing it. It was as though his body had identified a threat and destroyed it without him ever needing to consciously make a decision. He had not intended to kill the larger of the two at all and yet that was what he had done. The whole episode had been done with in only a few seconds and it was taking his brain longer than that to make sense of it all. Still somewhat bemused, he turned back to the smuggler, his bloodied sword still in his hand.

  ‘Are you ready to continue?’ he asked.

  ‘Gods alive, I’ve never seen anything happen so fast,’ the smuggler said, his mouth agape.

  C h a p t e r 3 2

  CHOOSE YOUR FRIENDS WISELY, BUT YOUR ENEMIES?

  Forty crowns was a huge sum of money to Soren. The street child inside of him grew giddy at the thought of so much, but there was just something about the way that he had earned it that tainted it. The fact that they were violent criminals made him feel a little less sullied by the experience. That he had not intended to kill them at all did worry him though. His physical action had gone beyond what he had intended to do, almost as though he could not control his own body. He did not think he had been in the Moment, the experience had not felt nearly so extreme as that in Ruripathia. It was however, as with the time when Ranph’s father had been killed, noticeably different to the way he normally felt.

  There was no satisfaction that he had done something worthwhile, as there had been when he killed Chancellor Marin. It felt as though he was squandering the opportunities that he had been given. He could not shake the feeling off and resolved that any work he took from then on would have to have a higher, more honourable purpose. Killing for coin was a last resort, for when a swordsman had no other alternatives. Soren was a long way from that situation.

  He had arranged to meet Braggock at another tavern, no longer wishing to risk being seen with him by Alessandra, and it was here that he sat, waiting for the barbarian.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ a voice rasped out of the darkness. ‘I’ve just heard what you did. You can forget about getting the rest of your money.’ Braggock slipped out of the shadows into the booth beside Soren. ‘If you’ve any sense you’ll get out of the city fast, although if I had any sense I’d kill you myself and hope that it would make amends.’

  Soren raised his eyebrows to indicate the foolishness of such a course of action, but nonetheless he felt a sinking feeling in his gut.

  ‘Why? What went wrong? The courier arrived safely as agreed,’ said Soren. Of its own accord he found his hand tightening around the hilt of the dagger he wore at his waist.

  ‘You killed Don Abelard’s nephew, his sister’s boy,’ said Braggock.

  Soren recognised that the strained quality to his voice was from fear and tension rather than anger. He also recognised the name.

  ‘My associate’s already dead. I’m leaving town now. I’d already be gone if I’d heard what happened any sooner but I only just found out myself. All you had to do was scare them off, you fucking idiot!’

  Everyone in Ostenheim knew who Don Abelard was. He controlled almost all of the illegal activity in the city and its surrounds, or received a tributary cut from that which he was not directly involved in. In truth, Soren had assumed that indirectly it would have been him that he was working for. It appeared however that Braggock had created this little venture on the side and had attempted to get it through without paying a percentage. As though this were not bad enough, one of Abelard’s many relatives was now rotting on the cobbles of a back alley. He wondered briefly which of the two men he had killed that it had been, but it was clearly the scrawny one in the gold embroidered doublet.

  ‘The best thing you could do now is disappear!’ said Braggock, and with that the barbarian stood and took his own advice.

  He collapsed onto the cot in his room, the soft mattress momentarily easing the tension in his body. He jumped up with a start at a knock on the door and opened it cautiously, dagger in hand. It was an Under Cadet.

  ‘Master Dornish wishes to see you immediately,’ he said.

  Soren felt every part the naughty schoolboy as he knocked on the door to Master Dornish’s office. It was imposing and decorated with ancient looking wood panelling. The somewhat ornate decorations on the wood betrayed its original function as the door to the study of the head of the city’s Library of Mages.

  ‘Soren,’ Dornish said, his face grim.

  Soren didn’t reply. He was still uncertain as to why he had been summoned, and how much the Master knew, if anything at all. It was however becoming clear from his demeanour that the summons and Soren’s concerns were directly related.

  ‘A broken lock on an arms cabinet in the salon where you train. A sword and dagger missing. Two corpses in a backstreet killed with surgical precision, and finally, every thug on the streets of Ostenheim looking for a student of the Academy who is believed to have killed, I won’t say murdered although that is what is being said, a nephew of the largest figure in the city’s underworld. I hear the reward is two hundred crowns. A hefty price indeed. Regretfully, all of these little clues lead inexorably to you,’ said Dornish.

  Lying flashed through Soren’s mind, but it was not in his nature and it would have been pointless anyway.

  ‘Yes, I did it,’ said Soren.

  ‘I won’t ask why, it isn’t really important. What is important is that you have made every student in this Academy a target for any thug that fancies his chances of making some easy money and that is something I will have a very hard time forgiving,’ said Dornish. He paused, resting his chin on his hand. His brow furrowed, then relaxed. ‘Nonetheless, you are still a student here and your safety is also my responsibility.’

  There was a cursory knock on the door and Amero swept into the room, his cloak billowing behind him. He removed his gloves and sat down without a word, before looking up at Soren, his face breaking into a half smile.

  ‘Got yourself into a spot of bother I hear!’ he said. ‘I rather expected you’d knocked up some tavern wench whose father was banging on the Academy doors, but word of this is spreading like wildfire! This is a proper spot you’ve got yourself in!’

  It relieved Soren that Amero did not seem to be angry, but the fact that he was there at all brought home how serious a situation he was in.

  ‘That Soren needs to disappear is a given,’ Dornish said. ‘How we go about that is another matter.’ Dornish paused again for
a moment in silent contemplation before continuing. ‘It will mean missing the Competition. A shame, but unavoidable.’

  Soren had not even thought of the Competition. A ticket to a future of fame and fortune and he had thrown it away for forty crowns, only twenty of which he had actually got.

  ‘I would suggest the east,’ said Dornish abruptly. ‘A garrison commander on the frontier is a former apprentice of mine. We shall send you to him. It will be worthwhile experience anyway. Return to your rooms and pack what you will need. I will prepare the necessary letters of introduction and we will have you on your way before nightfall.’

  ‘Does it mean that I have to drop out of the Academy?’ Soren asked, a hint of fear entering his voice for the first time.

  Dornish scratched his chin thoughtfully for a moment before speaking. ‘No. You’ve easily surpassed the standard required to graduate. I shall pass you so you will be eligible to return to the Collegium next year. By then this matter will have hopefully blown over. Criminals are killed with such frequency in this city that I expect other matters will be occupying their attention by then. Now go.’

  Both Soren and Amero left Dornish’s office and were walking across the courtyard when a thought jumped into Soren’s mind.

  ‘There’s a favour I need,’ he said.

  ‘Name it!’ Amero replied.