by P. J. Fox
THE ASSASSIN
P. J.
FOX
This story is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living, dead, or undead, or to places or events existing within the world as we know it is purely coincidental.
THE ASSASSIN
Copyright © 2015 by Evil Toad Press
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Evil Toad Press
Cover design by Evil Toad Press
Published by Evil Toad Press
ISBN: 978-1-942365-30-3
FIRST EDITION: January 2015
BY P.J. FOX
THE BLACK PRINCE TRILOGY
Book One: The Demon of Darkling Reach
Book Two: The White Queen
THE PRINCE’S SLAVE
Part One: Captive in His Castle
Part Two: Bound in His Bed
Part Three: Collared in His Care
THE HOUSE OF LIGHT AND SHADOW
Book One: The Price of Desire
Book Two: A Dictionary of Fools
The Prisoner
The Assassin
COLLECTIONS
I, Demon
NONFICTION
I Look Like This Because I’m A Writer: How To Overcome Sloth, Self-Doubt, and Poor Hygiene to Realize the Writing Career of Your Dreams
Self Publishing Is For Losers: The Evil Toad Press Guide To Self Publishing
For Jim
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
About the Author
Chapte One
He watched the dog stumble toward him, down the dusty street.
If street could be applied as a term, that was. There was no pavement to speak of; he doubted there ever had been. Mud and raw sewage had been churned together into a black paste that stank to high heaven. Piles of garbage were everywhere, most currently being investigated by slat-ribbed animals of various descriptions and equally slat-ribbed children.
High walls rose on either side, tipping precariously inward to block out most of the sun. It was a small mercy; even in the close, humid shade, the smell was bad enough. What looked, at first, to be buildings, great monolithic structures like prison walls, was in fact a conglomeration of abandoned cargo containers, sheets of corrugated aluminum and even, he saw, cardboard boxes. It was the work of decades, each new generation building on the last one’s effort.
The slow accretion reminded him of nothing so much as a packrat nest. The odd little animals, social and boisterous when not chewing electrical cables, gathered all sorts of seemingly random materials—everything from leaves and twigs to bottle caps—and used them to build sprawling, fantastically complicated warrens. The mortar they used in cementing their prizes together was cheap, natural, and easily available: urine. Sugar and other substances contained in the liquid crystallized as it dried, forming a surprisingly strong bond.
To one side of the street, looming up out of the mud like a great leviathan, was the top half of a six foot wide pipe. Two such pipes supplied water to a slum of almost one million people.
You couldn’t drink it, either. And even if you carried mineral water, which he, of course, did, you couldn’t drink that, either—not unless you wanted to whip your cock out and expose it to the elements, possibly to some exotic and as-yet undiagnosed disease. In Dharavi, the capital of Charon II, there was one toilet for every two thousand residents. Not a sufficient ratio, he’d concluded, for foreigners with scruples. Or for anyone at all, really.
No one paid attention to the dog, not even the other dogs. They dug into the trash, tails wagging, apparently not a care in the world.
And that was the craziest thing: everyone here, even the dogs, was happy. People sat behind lean-to stalls, selling soap rinds and the occasional wizened lemon, laughing and chatting with one other. Clothing—he couldn’t tell whether it was laundry, was for sale, or was serving as some sort of structural element—hung in great, long lines from concealed ropes. Children played in the shade underneath, half naked and hitting each other with sticks.
As streets went, this one was virtually uninhabited. Only one girl, a little thing of about ten, was capering along the top of the pipe. Everyone else seemed to be at work, in one fashion or another.
The dog staggered to a halt, sniffed the air, and waited. Its thin sides heaved with exertion and dehydration. It was a pitiable sight, even to him. He’d often found that he felt more kinship to animals than people. Animals acted on instinct; their decisions made sense.
The people here seemed utterly unconcerned. He wondered if it was a lack of self-preservation brought on by the hopelessness of abject poverty, or if they’d all just grown stupid from drinking water laced with lead. Either way, it didn’t matter. They didn’t care about him, either, which was good. He didn’t want to be cared about; he didn’t want to be seen.
The dog was just an annoyance. It had been following him, now, for some time.
He waited.
The dog’s fur was matted down, and its eyes were glittering slits.
Rabies was a form of viral encephalitis that occurred in warm-blooded animals. It was zoonotic, meaning it could be transmitted from one species to another—such as from dogs to human beings, if it bit him or any of the other worthless creatures on this street. After entering the blood, usually through infected saliva, the virus traveled to the brain by following the peripheral nerves. Although the incubation period was usually no more than a few months—less, in smaller animals—it varied depending on the distance it had to travel.
If post-exposure prophylaxis wasn’t administered before the virus reached the central nervous system, it was too late; full-blown, symptomatic rabies was fatal within days.
He’d seen a man with rabies, once.
First, the man had complained of fever and flu-like symptoms. Even in their supposedly glorious modern age, viruses still dominated—and slums like this still existed.
He gave a disgusted snort.
So much for progress.
Headaches, high fever, and something the man described, rather unhelpfully, as a general feeling of malaise developed into acute, shooting pains. It was like break-bone fever but much, much worse. He’d been on an assignment at the time, having infiltrated a rebel cell. He’d insisted they take the man to the hospital, not because he cared if the man lived or died—he didn’t—but because it was something the man he was pretending to be would do.
The man had died, screaming and strapped to a bed, the skin under his restraints rubbed raw, foaming at the mouth after having bitten off his own tongue.
He removed his sidearm from its holster, checked the cartridge, and brought it to bear on the dog. He always aimed carefully, taking his time, even if that time turned out to be no more than a split second. Pulling the trigger, he controlled the recoil carefully as the dog dropped.
No one looked up; no one cared.
Holstering the weapon, he turned and continued up the street.
This was a terrible place, and he wanted to leave it. But he had a job to do, and he couldn’t leave until he did.
If things went according to plan, however—and he had no reason to suspect they wouldn’t—he’d be out of here and on a transport tonight.
He didn’t consider luck; Ceres Mara Sant didn’t believe in luck.
He’d decided that, of all the things he missed, he
missed women the most. Real women. If, he corrected himself with a faint smile, sometimes surgically enhanced. That he had no problem with. Anything that made a woman more pleasant to look at was fine with him. It was their job, after all, to be pleasant to look at and, if he so desired, to be pleasant to touch as well. What did not make a woman pleasant to look at was the fact of living here.
He looked up. Above him loomed the bombed-out, abandoned husk of a factory he’d spotted the other day. After several different reconnaissance missions, both at night and during the day, he’d decided that this was the place. It gave him a clear field of fire and, more importantly, was on a route he knew his target would have to walk, eventually. His target, he’d observed, had developed something of a drinking problem. For the first week he’d been in Dharavi, he’d been careful. Frequenting a different bar every night, and sometimes not at all.
But, when no one appeared to be coming for him, he’d relaxed his vigilance.
Proof, if Ceres had needed any, that his target had gone off the reservation.
Perfectly calmly, head held high, he walked over to the side of the building. The simple fact was, people heard what they wanted to hear and saw what they wanted to see. He’d have drawn much more attention to himself by acting as though he had something to hide, as that would have aroused curiosity. Everyone loved a scandal, especially the kind of bored, hopeless individuals currently peering out at him from under their cardboard awnings.
Colorful piles of trash lay against the buildings, here, like snowdrifts.
Without fanfare he splayed his long, patrician fingers, hooked them into a fissure in the crumbling concrete, and began to climb. He was a good climber, and moved very quickly. The sun beat down on his back, superheating the skin under his medium-weight jacket. He cursed the thing but, of course, he couldn’t take it off. Not yet. He continued to climb, hand over hand, feeling his muscles bunch and extend as he pulled himself up the sheer face.
No one called out. No one asked questions. Somewhere, a different dog barked and a train horn blew. There were no cars in this part of the capital; the roads were too narrow and, besides, who would own one?
He slipped through a formed concrete rectangle that had once been a window and disappeared into the darkness.
He had to be careful, here; the subfloors were all rotted, only the structural beams supporting any weight—and even those, not always. Slowly, deliberately, he crossed the room on the balls of his feet. He moved gracefully, easily. An inch on either side of his foot was a hundred foot drop, rusted fence posts and other debris waiting to impale him at the bottom. But he wasn’t fazed. Heights had never bothered him and more importantly he had confidence in both his body and in his judgments about what it could do.
In another life, he might have been a dancer.
He moved soundlessly; it was a matter of distributing one’s weight right. Most people walked heel to toe. An assassin walked toe to heel. It felt unnatural at first but this was, in fact, how most toddlers walked before being trained out of it by well-meaning but ultimately inept parents.
He put his foot down and pivoted, bringing himself against the crumbling frame of another window. He peered out, careful not to cast a shadow. He wanted to see, not be seen.
The toe to heel stride allowed for maximum shock absorption and, thus, minimum noise. It also promoted posture and core strength, elongating the muscles of the legs over time.
He knelt down, sinking gracefully to the narrow beam that still supported him, and took off his jacket. He laid it down carefully behind him, careful, as always, of his possessions.
Strapped against his back was a gun, a different kind of gun from the sidearm he always wore. This gun was a long-range sniper rifle, the barrel narrow and trim. Taking it out of its holster, he laid it out carefully and took it apart, checking that each separate component was spotlessly clean and in perfect working order. The job of a sniper, any sniper, was not one for the hot-headed; but an assassin had to be especially cold, calm, and calculating.
Satisfied, he reassembled his rifle and eased himself into position. Over the past few days, once he’d selected the optimal location, he’d spent time carefully analyzing the angle of the sun as it rose and set. The smooth, straight lines of a rifle were ones that did not occur in nature. Even an inch or two of protruding barrel, casting its shadow against the pitted concrete, would be enough to give him away. And he knew his target would be watching.
Because, even in the extremis of his foolishness, he was still one of them.
Ceres waited, cloaked in shadow. The target would come along soon, perhaps in an hour or so. He’d come this way three times in a row, now. It was the most direct route from the shanty where he’d been staying to the shanty where he’d been buying his warm, unfiltered beer.
He’d met a woman, Ceres had divined that much. How serious it was, he couldn’t tell and didn’t care. It was convenient, that was all. Indeed, it would be best if it were serious; one backup plan he’d considered was kidnapping the woman and torturing her, to lure the target in.
They’d been friends, once. Before.
His rifle was a work of art. It had been fine-tuned by the most famous gunsmith on Brontes and it was accurate to more than a mile, although this would be close work. It had a free-floating barrel, like all the best rifles, ensuring that it and the actual weapon came into contact as little as possible. This reduced vibration from recoil, which mattered. The fewer the variables he had to account for, the more reliable the shot.
He breathed in, and out, sighting through the crosshairs as he waited. He’d wait, too, still and silent, for as long as it took.
He was calm.
It was unusual, working without a spotter, but sometimes the occasion called for it and this was one such occasion. Tracking one of their own was always a challenge; however far gone the man was, he still knew all the tricks. The more men there were pursuing him, the likelier they were to be spotted. As it was, Ceres was one of the most skilled assassins in the guild and he’d been tracking this man for weeks. He’d proven to be unusually elusive.
Motivated, was the term, he thought. Dharun Ravi was motivated to live.
Even from up here, the smell was nauseating: raw sewage, baking in the summer sun, rotting corpses and—something else. It took him a moment to place it: candy. The air carried the distinct, tooth-achingly sweet odor of spun sugar. Where was it coming from?
He breathed in, and out.
Dharun appeared, glancing around him without really appearing to do so.
Ceres focused. Even the minutest rise and fall of his chest could overbalance the rifle and ruin the shot, which was why a trained shooter always pulled the trigger on the exhale.
He prepared himself.
An agonizing pain shot through his calf.
He whirled, drawing his sidearm.
A sour-faced urchin glared back at him, all dirt and rags.
He? She? It seemed unimpressed by his gun, looking down at the barrel and up into his cold, flat eyes.
And then it spoke. He realized it was a she when he heard her high, clear voice. A child’s voice, he thought.
“You’re going to Hell,” she told him.
Fuck. This is what happens when there’s no spotter.
It was the spotter’s job to protect the sniper. He couldn’t both focus on the shot and watch for a rear attack. Which was exactly what had happened here. He examined his calf, and looked up. The little urchin was clutching a fork in her fist, its tines covered in blood. His blood.
He’d need to disinfect the wound, or risk losing his leg. God only knew what was on that thing.
“I’m not going to Hell,” he said patiently. “There is no Hell.”
Ceres was an atheist and always had been, although the idea had solidified in his mind after his parents died.
She tilted her chin up. Offended or hurt, he couldn’t tell, but her gaze remained firm.
“Take not life,” she quoted effort
lessly, “which God hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law: thus does He command you, that you may learn wisdom.”
“I’ve read the scriptures, too,” he told her. In truth, he’d memorized them. It had been part of his training.
“Then you know that this is neither justice, nor law.”
“Actually,” he said, “it’s both.” Why was he bothering to explain himself to this street person?
He stood up. “You have to come with me.”
Her eyes widened. In terror, he saw with satisfaction.
“It’s one of my personal rules, not to kill children,” he told her calmly—although, in truth, he still wasn’t sure how old she was. Appearances aside, she had some strange aura about her.
“You have rules?” She sounded disbelieving.
That wasn’t a child’s cynicism—although, he corrected himself, here, it might be. He’d lost his innocence young.
“Everyone has rules,” he explained patiently as he holstered his rifle. “You just might not understand them.”
She made no move to stand.
He shrugged his jacket back on, adjusting the collar.
He couldn’t leave her behind, that much was obvious. But he couldn’t kill her, at least not yet. If nothing else, he had to find out why she was protecting this man whom, he knew, she barely knew. In all the time he’d been tracking Dharun, he’d never seen her or anyone who remotely looked like her. And yet…here she was, attacking an armed man with a fork.
“This can be as pleasant or as unpleasant as you want,” he told her, absorbing the dread in her eyes. She had, perhaps, realized now that she’d made a mistake. He licked his lips slightly, just the barest movement, but she caught it. She understood, paling even further.
Her dawning realization of her predicament was like an aphrodisiac, making him want to hurt her. The erotic thrill of power, absolute power, was almost overwhelming. He restrained himself with effort. She’d been so brave, so ferocious, and now she was so…vulnerable.
