The Copper Assassin

by Madolyn Rogers

  With an effort, he brought his mind back to the present. He had wasted enough time. Cockatrice had gone to the Fence to kill the Warlord. There was nothing now standing in her way, no defense between the Warlord and death. Gorgo gritted his teeth. From Morbid’s instructions, he knew where the golem would enter the Fence. He’d have to hurry to catch up to her. It seemed the Kahlrite holy words had made him invisible to her, and soundless and scentless as well, but he did not know how long this would last, nor if he was invisible to everyone else as well.

  He glanced around. He stood among the first stalls of the Hunger Market. Sometime in that last frantic dive away from Cockatrice, he had crossed its border. The seller still lounged in his chair, half-dozing, as though he had not noticed the fight in front of him. Was the man in the grip of some drug: dreamweed, perhaps?

  The man glanced up, and his heavy eyes focused on Gorgo. “Good evening. I am Qweekess. Would you care to buy one of my wares, young sir? It’s rude to enter and not buy.” His voice was a slow drawl, as sleepy as the rest of him.

  Gossip said the Hunger Market was dangerous, and one should not insult the sellers. The rumors said they might curse you if you scorned them. That was why no one came here. Caution touched Gorgo; he could not afford another enemy. “I have no need of anything, and I’m called away on urgent business. My apologies.”

  “You’ve lost your knife. It’s not good to be abroad at this hour with no protection but a broken knife.”

  Gorgo looked around at the collection of odd curios scattered across the stalls. He saw nothing that even resembled a weapon. He did not want to offend Qweekess, but neither did he want to barter with the man all night. “What would you suggest?”

  The older man pointed languidly at an object lying on a nearby stall. “How about old Honeylegs over there?”

  The man names his wares? The goods must be like old friends. How often did he make a sale, anyway? Gorgo grabbed the object—some kind of furry fruit, it seemed—and flipped two coins at the seller. “Two sharks, take it or leave it.” Sharks were pocket change, but it was all he had left.

  “Enjoy her,” the seller said, gathering up the coins one by one.

  Probably the man’s first sale of the year. And Gorgo had wasted enough time here. He loped from the plaza after Cockatrice.

  Qweekess watched him go, thoughtfulness in his sleepy eyes as he rolled a toothpick between his teeth.

  8: Madness in the City of Dragons

  The buildings were of stone, at least, even if their forms were all wrong. Bakoshkry—she still thought of herself in the Holy Language, although she knew in the language of this place she was called Cockatrice—paused between two of the buildings to listen to faint sounds, which she identified a moment later as rats. That, too, was the same and yet not the same. Madness had crawled with rats, but they had been sandy-furred desert rats, not black rats as here. Everything was twisted here, as though an image in a mirror. A city of stone buildings, with mountains behind them—it should have been familiar, but instead it was oddly distorted. The peaks were too near and too steep, looming over the city like the stylized mountains drawn on maps. The buildings were a mad jumble of contorted shapes—domes and columns, balconies and porches, carven figures jutting from ledges. Nowhere could she find the clean lines and harmonious rectangles of the priests’ architecture.

  She drifted through another alley, examining her surroundings minutely as she went, filing away every detail as she always did. Even the air was different here, moist, salty, full of the smells of breeding and decay. Sometimes she caught a whiff of alcohol, perfume, incense, or a drug she could not identify. If she stretched out her senses, she could detect the reptilian odor of the dragons—wyverns, the people here called them—roosting in the mountains above. The dry desert air of Madness had been simple, with few scents to catalog. The air here was packed with information, straining her ability to make sense of it.

  Sounds were easier, and not quite as strange. Voices, laughter, footsteps, they had not changed much, though the language was new to her. But the music was odd, swirling and chaotic, the thump of wild rhythms, the wails of horns and pipes, the liquid ripples of strings. The priests’ music had been monotonous, a steady stream of chants and chimes. Sometimes here she made out screams, sobs, moans—sounds she had not heard in Madness until the very end. Sometimes she heard the clash of steel, the hiss of a spell.

  With her sixth sense she smelled magic. It lay thick here, wafting off the city in waves. People carried it at their waist or on their fingers, wore it on their backs—swords, rings, cloaks, and a hundred other objects vibrated with it. Magic smoked from the glowglobes and the blue lights, oozed from certain houses, flashed out in spells like bright explosions to her senses. Some people pulsed with magic, shimmering in their breasts like an inner light. The priests’ magic had been slight, a flicker in their chests, a whiff in the air. This city stank of it.

  It was a new challenge for her, for she was not the only one who could smell it. Many of the sorcerers extended their senses about them in fine nets, sweeping for spells as Bakoshkry did. In other places spells stood active, humming through the air. Bakoshkry saw these nets, of senses and spellcraft, as though they were cobwebs twining through the city. She trod carefully, not to wake the spiders.

  Only the sky was the same. It was not as cloudless as the sky of Madness, but the stars were familiar, the constellations almost unchanged. The moon had not risen yet, but she had seen last night that it too was the same, green as rusted copper in the black veil of night. Yet the stars lied. They told her the world had not changed, when in fact she walked in a foreign land, one where all the rules were broken.

  Bakoshkry paused in the shadow of a windowless wall to let a small party pass by, memorizing each face and each scent reflexively. She turned over memories of her 48 previous life cycles. Each of her past lives bore a name, the name of the one she must kill—or sometimes, several names. The name of her target shaped each life, defined its purpose and its end, for every life cycle ended with the death of the target, and was followed by formless nonexistence. She saw her past like sunlight falling through window slats, bright wakefulness divided by dark bars of oblivion.

  She knew each life cycle was separated in time. Usually she could estimate how much time: by the stars, by the weather, by the faces of the Senders. These all marked time at different rates. But not until recently had a life cycle been separated in place. Always she had awakened in Madness, before one or another of the Holy Followers of Kahlros. How much time, then, had passed before this life cycle? The question had little function. This city of the dragons was not Madness, nor had anything to do with her previous lives. Nonetheless she asked herself the question. Bakoshkry did not believe in information without function.

  She thought of her last lives in Madness. For months before, skirmishes had reigned in the streets: figures darting out of sight in the shadows, the ringing of knives, death screams cut off. Two life cycles before the end, the streets had roared with open battle, and Heretics and Holy Followers had traveled in armed phalanxes. Flames boomed and licked from the buildings, vast kilns fed by nests of fire asps. But when she woke for her last life in the city, life cycle 45, she saw the place had changed. That had been the life cycle of the Heretic Djean, the leader of a heretic order who worshipped the weird of iron. He was strong in his powers, able to hide from her senses. It had taken her three days to track him through the city. The place was silent now. The great fires were burning out, and the asps would soon die in the cold. Soot and char lay everywhere; each breeze lifted a black grit of death. Bodies heaped high in the streets. The few skulking figures she saw ran from her. In her three days of hunting Djean, only five Heretics attempted to assassinate her.

  She found Djean at last locked high in a tower with his lieutenants around him. He was waiting for her. His lieutenants cast spells, which fractured like glass against her copper carapace. They sprang at her with knives, gleaming dimly w
ith magic, which shattered against her. But Djean wielded a lance of iron that blazed with sorcery to her eyes. That could harm her. She was obliged to fight him two-handed, her axe and sword whirling together to turn aside his lance, wrest it from his grasp, keep it from ever touching her. When his lieutenants got in the way, she turned them to stone with her glance. It was a power she used rarely, and never on her target, for it did not truly kill. At last nothing moved in the room but Djean, disarmed, snarling, hurling himself at her with useless punches and kicks, spitting spells that fizzled against her. The axe Oxfeen had tasted his blood, and silence had reigned.

  When the mission was complete she had returned to the Sender. The last of the Holy Followers had hidden themselves in a burned-out cellar. She found the secret doors jammed open and the smell of death heavy inside. Bodies of Heretics and Holies lay mingled, contorted as they had fallen. One pair twined together, their jagged knives buried in each other, their faces twisted. The Sender was dead. No Holy Follower of Kahlros came forth to command her. Bakoshkry descended into the deepest part of the cellar, where the Holies had made their sanctuary. Her mission complete, she ended the life cycle. It was her last memory of Madness.

  She awoke into her next life cycle on the desert in the thick of night, commanded by the Sender Wakár. Madness was visible as only a ridged bump on the horizon, and there was no way to tell how much time had printed itself on the world since she had last seen it. The Sender Wakár gave her eleven names; four of them bore the title Panam Kell. They were the companions and servants of the Sender, and suspected no danger. The targets were sleeping together around a bedded fire, its coals still glowing. The deaths were all to look like accidents, the targets smothered to death but otherwise unmarked, buried in the sand as though caught by a sudden sandstorm. The Sender Wakár gave Bakoshkry explicit directions, efficient and clear.

  Bakoshkry had brought forth Cold Snakes from her flesh, and sent them to nest on the targets’ breasts, breathing their icy mist into the sleeping faces, plunging them into deep hibernation. The humans died peacefully then one by one, smothering beneath her hands without ever waking. Except for the last, the Panam Kell Liost. He had woken, somehow, from the depths of cold sleep. He had fought her with his mind. Bakoshkry had never experienced such a thing. His thoughts were like saws in her head, ripping through her concentration, tearing at her resolve, whispering heresies. Black sparkles danced before her eyes. Her sense of smell flickered in and out, as though the world were opening and closing to her. Reality wavered as if turned to fragile paper. But Bakoshkry knew her duty and her purpose, and she need know nothing more. She did not need to see or smell the world. She needed only to contract her hands about Liost’s throat. She kept choking Liost until at last he was dead, and the buzzsaws left her mind. Then the Sender Wakár had no more need of her.

  She had woken in a small stone room, commanded by the Sender Na•ar to kill an unarmed woman who stood before her, whom he named the Slave Uta. One stroke of her axe had done it. The only witness was the woman Janna, seated nearby, who then began to squabble with the Sender over the exchange of monies. They spoke a language Bakoshkry had never heard before. They were still fighting when Bakoshkry ended the life cycle, dwindling back into darkness.

  Life cycle 48 blossomed from the dark in the chambers of the Sender Morbid. Morbid had asked many questions about Na•ar and her last life cycle before giving Bakoshkry the name of her target, Janna. The Sender Morbid spoke the same strange language as Na•ar. Bakoshkry set forth to find Janna, and it was then she discovered that she walked in an alien city. She knew nothing of its streets, its people, its ways. She listened to every conversation, collected every clue she could. The hunt dragged across hours, though Janna was a weak prey. Bakoshkry realized she had a seventh sense, one she had never appreciated, and that was knowledge. Without it she hunted lost.

  Her current life came fast on the tail of life cycle 48, with no darkness in between. The Sender Morbid merely spoke the holy words again, without properly closing the life cycle or giving Bakoshkry time to end it. The Holy Followers of Kahlros would never have permitted such an irregularity. The Sender Morbid had named Angel Eyes and his three followers as Bakoshkry’s targets. But the Sender did not want Bakoshkry to have knowledge, would not give it to her. She had sent her out without it to hunt clueless and slow through the puzzling city.

  And now the Sender Morbid had given Bakoshkry the most troublesome problem of all her many life cycles. Bakoshkry shuffled equations in her mind once again, seeking how best to reconcile her conflicting duties. As she saw it there was only one way. She must kill Angel-Eyes-in-his-form-as-the-Warlord, and she must do it tonight, by the Sender’s order. But this in no way canceled out her obligation to kill the Angel Eyes she had met before, and when the Warlord was dead that one would still be very much alive. The only answer was that she must kill them both before this life cycle would be over. The Holy Followers of Kahlros had never given her such a conundrum.

  She was close to the Fence now. She sensed sorcerers nearby, and raised the Five Circles of Invisibility. The first three circles made her undetectable by sight, by hearing, and by smell. The Fourth Circle allowed her to leave no trace upon the world, no footprint in the dust, no smudge on a whitewashed wall. The Fifth Circle made her invisible to the eyes of magic, with no smell nor thought nor glimmer that sorcery could see. She would not keep up the circles long, not unless it was essential, for they drained her energy.

  Her target Angel Eyes also walked within the Fifth Circle of Invisibility. Her sixth sense was blind to him. Once gone from the limited range of her other senses, he had vanished. She could not perceive his presence anywhere in the city, could not track him down by the distant pulse of his life as she could her other prey. It posed a thorny problem. She was obliged to chase him using her seventh sense, knowledge.

  Bakoshkry had sought the last witness to Janna’s killing, the one the Sender Morbid did not know about, as a possible link to Angel Eyes. The man who had called himself first Rashin and later Gorgo Pton also moved within the void of the Fifth Circle, which she had thought a promising sign of his connection to Angel Eyes, though it stymied her efforts to find him. How fortunate that he had come to her instead, strolling up the stairs just as she went to report to the Sender. Though it turned out he knew nothing of Angel Eyes, he was a resource who could empower her seventh sense, and she took him as her guide.

  He had served her well tonight. He had put her close on the trail of Angel Eyes. She had wondered if he aided her on purpose or by accident, and she knew now it had been by accident, since he had interfered with her at last. His purposes were obscure; his actions seemed irrational. Everything in this city was without meaning or clear direction. Bakoshkry knew it was because she understood nothing of the underlying structure here. The Holy Followers of Kahlros had been simple: they wanted to kill all heretics. In this city of dragons nothing was simple. Tapestries of conflicting purposes emerged as she sought to map out the threads of this place. She had no means to anticipate possible resistance to her mission; she had no way to plan the best course of action. It seemed the Sender Morbid wished it so, did not wish her to think or plan. But Bakoshkry could never stop thinking, and now she was without a guide to question, nor was there time to find another. There were too many unknowns here. She needed the guide.

  It disturbed her that he had vanished.

  She had thought it was a power only the Holy Followers had. It had always been a Holy Follower before. It was unlike the action of any of the Circles of Invisibility. When the Holy Followers vanished this way, they seemed to melt from her mind, as though they had slipped through cracks in the world. Somehow she was sure it was not real. She was sure that if she released the white snake Seeker, it would find them at once. But she would never be able to prove it; as the Holy Follower disappeared, so too his image evaporated from her mind, so that she could no longer recall quite what he looked like or how he sounded. She had no picture b
y which to direct the Seeker. It had not mattered much, then, except as a curiosity. She had never been sent against a Holy Follower. She did not need to find them.

  Never before tonight had it been her prey who had faded away. If it was only her mind that was affected, had the axe Oxfeen truly struck him down? How could she know? Oxfeen hardly slowed its swing when it cleaved a fragile human. There was no telling by that. She had seen no blood on Oxfeen’s blade, smelled none on her gauntlets, but was it only that she could not sense it?

  It was something she did not understand, could not respond to. It was forever outside her control. It troubled her in its unpredictability. If it was not only the Holy Followers who could do this, what was to prevent a named target from vanishing before she could kill him? If the Warlord were to vanish as she struck, how could she complete her mission?

  Those improbably tall and spiky mountains loomed close upon her now. Between the two buildings before her lay the way she must take into this “Fence” the Sender had described. Her senses told her no one was near. Bakoshkry dropped her Circles and paused to rejuvenate. She wrapped one hand around the hilt of her sword Basilisk, drawing strength from the copper within. She had used tremendous energy tonight, most of it to change her form into that human woman the guide had specified. Such magic was taxing, such alterations of body and mass—the most powerful spell she could perform. It would take hours of feeding from copper to fully recharge. She did not have hours, but no matter. It took little energy to kill. She killed with Oxfeen by preference, or by the poison in Basilisk if need be, and either was easy. Oxfeen, the Unbreaking, could shear through stone or iron without dulling. Nor did it take much power to produce snakes from her flesh, and they too were a mighty resource: fire asps, Cold Snakes, the seven-headed Hydroxy, the amphisbaena, the white snake Seeker.