The Copper Assassin

by Madolyn Rogers

  Gorgo paused. “No, not luck. Water is careless when she’s playing against someone she doesn’t respect. She gives away her hands in her expression. Not badly, but enough. I saw her doing it from across the room. When her opponent lost I took his place. After I won she reassessed me and suggested a second game, which I refused. That was when she invited me upstairs.”

  “Why did you refuse the second game?”

  Gorgo shrugged. “She respected my skills by then, and would have been more careful. She would have won.”

  “Continue.”

  “She told me to get the key to the room from Na•ar. It was then that I stumbled into a case of mistaken identity.” He went on to describe the event. Here again he was interrupted by the Warlord.

  “Why did you hide when you saw the Kharvay noble enter?”

  “Six & Seven and I had seen him earlier that evening in the Blue Light District. He’d come into the bar Screaming Midnight and exchanged a few words with the woman at the bar. We thought it looked like the exchange of a password—”

  “We?”

  “Well, I thought it looked like a password.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was too rehearsed.” Gorgo was beginning to suspect she wouldn’t let him gloss over anything. His neck burned with tension, and he forced himself to relax. He had reached the conversation between Na•ar and Radice, and he asked, “Would you like their exact words, as well as I can recall them, or a summary of their conversation?”

  “Oh, as you remember it, certainly.” The Warlord lounged back against the table edge, one foot balancing her against the floor, looking like she had all the time in the world, and nothing to do but hear his story.

  Now why, Gorgo asked himself, did you give her the option? Perhaps merely because he could tell this conversation well, and this one reflected nothing on himself in any case. There was nothing to hide. He had learned from Armida many of her storytelling skills, mimicry and memorization, and he could, when he chose, tell a compelling tale. Now he fell into storytelling almost unconsciously, his voice echoing the tones the two men had used: Na•ar level and soft-spoken, Radice impatient, scornful, or interested by turns, flamboyant with his moods. The Warlord listened with the same expression of interest throughout, never interrupting. Gorgo added the conversation between Na•ar and his man Korl, and went on, “When they both left the room, I came out of hiding and returned to Water. I paid her to place a protection against scrying on me, and left the Tricked Eel. I spent most of the next day at the Library of the Past—”

  “A protection against scrying. Why?”

  “I thought it would not take long before Na•ar realized he’d been spied on. I didn’t think he’d be pleased at it. I didn’t want him to be able to track me down.”

  “Why did you not report word of what you’d heard to the Fence?”

  Gorgo felt the sweat start under his hairline. The Warlord’s voice was mild, but her attention was unwavering. “I wasn’t sure whom I could trust in the Fence. I didn’t know how to get word to you directly. Besides, I didn’t think a mere warning would do much good. They said there was no way to stop the assassin. What was needed was knowledge of her weaknesses.”

  It sounded like a feeble excuse to Gorgo’s ears, but the Warlord merely said, “Continue.” He could read nothing from her manner.

  “I spent most of the next day at the Library of the Past, trying to find any information on the Assassin of the Kahlrites.” Gorgo grinned briefly at the remembered irony. “In fact, I did find something, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was there I came across the Kahlrite chant, ‘Vreel gyzhalla vax gail.’ I had no idea what it meant.”

  “‘We worship the weird of copper.’ It’s their holiest incantation, by which they declare they are Kahlrites. No rival caste would ever say those words.”

  “May I ask, Warlord, how it is you speak the Kahlrite language?” Gorgo could not resist asking. It had bothered him since yesterday.

  She considered him. “How many languages do you speak, Gorgo?”

  “Three. Wyvernyr, Obrail and Rhomish. Well, a little Rhomish.”

  She nodded. “Probably fairly typical. Nearly any educated Oribul will know Obrail, and quite a few learn Rhomish. What you call Wyvernyr, by the way, is no more than the common trade-tongue of the nations, although by now we’ve enlarged it with borrowings from a dozen languages. At any rate, those who join the Catsclaw must learn quite a few more. Five or six is typical. I speak eleven languages, to one degree or another.”

  “But the Kahlrite holy tongue? The religious language of a long-dead cult?”

  The Warlord chuckled. “In point of fact, I speak Greycowl, not Kahlrite. The Kahlrite tongue is just a bastardized form of the language shared by all the monks, which is still spoken by our Hollow Eye line. M’Chay taught it to me in Ptalmilkour.”

  “I see.” Gorgo went back to his tale, not wanting to try her patience. “I left the Library of the Past the next day, and went to the Sealord’s District. I hoped to learn something from Harpy’s crew, or ideally to discover who had sold the golem. I arrived late, however, and spent the evening checking out the gossip in the bars. And I stumbled onto something.”

  “Oh yes, these little stumblings of yours.” There was no mistaking the Warlord’s amusement.

  Demon hells, this interview was not going at all as he wanted. Gorgo swallowed and continued. He related quickly and matter-of-factly Janna’s expensive drunken spree and how he had trailed her from the bar.

  “Why did you follow her?” the Warlord asked.

  “It was just a hunch. She had too much money, and the gossip said someone was coming for her. I didn’t know for sure she was the person I was looking for. Not until I saw Cockatrice following her.” Gorgo described Janna’s interrogation by Angel Eyes, and Cockatrice’s hasty assassination of the sailor. He left out his own encounter with the smuggler. “The next morning I visited Strace in the Catsclaw District. I hoped for some information from him, but it was soon obvious that there was a Panam Kell in his mind. I was able to use my knowledge of this as a lever to force her to give me the word I wanted, while Water’s protection guarded me against her mental attacks. I didn’t realize she’d placed a spell of forgetting on the word. That afternoon I went to the Cataracts—”

  The Warlord’s laugh came deep and rich, like a river foaming out of the earth. Her shoulders shook with it. “No, that won’t do. It won’t do at all. Let’s try this scene again. I would like to hear this encounter as you remember it, word for word, since you’ve demonstrated that your memory for conversation is excellent.”

  Gorgo resigned himself. He finished off the wine and began. He remembered the meeting clearly and could tell it thoroughly: his passing himself off as Morbid’s man, his insistence that there was an incantation to call off the assassin, the little indications of Wakár’s presence, his lucky guess and her several attacks on his mind. He related how he had pressed her until she had given him the word, including the tale of the brief knife fight that had slashed his arm. In the course of it he mentioned planting the suggestion with her that she might take over Morbid. The Warlord made no comment, but when he had finished he asked, “Is it possible that she did enter Morbid’s mind?”

  “That it was Wakár and not Morbid who braced the Fence? No, it’s not possible. I have known Morbid many years, and it was only herself in her body yesterday. As you saw, it takes some time for a Panam Kell to take over a mind thoroughly enough to be undetectable, particularly if the mind is strong. Either they must suppress the other entirely, letting their own personality show, or the contest between the two will be visible. It is only with time they can wear another’s persona like a cloak, and even then, that personality will be altered in the process. No, wherever Wakár went, it wasn’t to Morbid.”

  So the mind witch had gone to rape some other mind. Cold anger stirred in Gorgo. He wondered at the Warlord’s nonchalance. “It’s not a settling thought,
is it, that shark loose somewhere in the city?”

  The Warlord waved this off. “She is not the only predator roaming in Wyverna. Continue.”

  Gorgo wrenched his thoughts away from Wakár and took up the thread of his story again. “I went to the Cataracts that afternoon. I realized I could only find out what I wanted to know from Morbid herself.”

  “What did you want to know?”

  “When and how she would send the assassin against you.”

  “At which point you would appear and use the word to call her off?”

  Gorgo grimaced. “That was the idea. It didn’t work that way.” He went on to describe Cockatrice collaring him at the door, her questioning of him, and the conversation between Morbid and the golem. “After we left the Cataracts, Cockatrice asked me to name a bar, and I said the Carousel. She—”

  “Why the Carousel?”

  “I figured she couldn’t do too much damage to that one,” Gorgo said dryly. “She asked me to name a person, and then took on the form of the person I named. I think it was something more than illusion, because she was changed to the touch as well as to the eye.”

  “The person was—?”

  “My aunt Armida. Hers was the first name that came to mind.”

  “Why not your gambling companion?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps because I’d been thinking earlier of something my aunt had said.”

  “What was that?”

  Devourer, could she not let the smallest thing go? Gorgo felt the sweat crawling freely down his back and sides. He had been thinking of Armida’s contention that the Fence was far more ruthless than the underworld, more professional and disciplined in their predation. He did not care to repeat that to the Warlord. Honeylegs tapped comfortingly on his shoulder. Gorgo met the Warlord’s eyes squarely. “I’d rather not say.”

  The Warlord studied him for a moment. “I met Armida once. She made an impression on me as well. Continue.”

  Gorgo was torn between relief and fascination. He longed to ask for the story, but he did not dare, not after she had let him skate. He shook off his curiosity and launched into the story of the Carousel: the golem’s casual murder of the underworlder, the appearance of Water—and the two small women, one dark, one fair, who had stared at each other with the eyes of hunting cats until Caarino told them to take it outside. He remembered the cold blue fog of the plaza and the fear in Water’s eyes. He fought away the words and said carefully, flatly, “Cockatrice tried to kill Water, and I interfered long enough for her to escape. The golem decided she couldn’t risk me interfering with her next prey and tried to kill me. That’s when I discovered Wakár had placed a spell of forgetting on the word. I thought Cockatrice might not kill me if she believed me a Kahlrite, so I spoke the chant from the books. And it made me invisible to her.”

  The Warlord shook her head. “Yahsta’s blood, Gorgo, you could make the battle of the Serpent Throne itself sound like a trip to the market.” She sighed. “Your memory for conversation is excellent, but your storytelling skills leave something to be desired. Well, go on.”

  Under other circumstances he might have resented the slur to his storytelling, but this was a tale he had deliberately chosen not to tell well. The fight with the golem had been his experience, in all its fear and strangeness, and he did not choose to share it. And for the first time in this conversation, the Warlord had not insisted he elaborate. Was she growing impatient? She didn’t look it. No, more likely she had merely heard this part of the tale already, from Cockatrice. He must assume the Warlord now knew everything the golem had seen. Gorgo went on to describe his purchase of Honeylegs at Qweekess’ insistence.

  “What did you pay for her?”

  “Two sharks.” Gorgo saw the Warlord’s lips twitch. “It’s not anywhere near her value, I know.”

  “If she was priced at what she’s worth, very few could afford her.”

  “Why did he sell her to me?”

  The Warlord shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him that. Continue.”

  “There’s not much more. I followed Morbid’s instructions to pass through the Fence. By the time I came out, the sun was rising.”

  The Warlord smiled as though he had told a joke. “I have heard Morbid’s instructions. They lacked detail.”

  Gorgo surprised himself by laughing. His stomach was in knots now, but it was a relief to laugh. “Yes, I thought so myself. All right, the Fence passage was beastly. Why do you have such a thing around the district? What’s the point?”

  The Warlord looked at him from unreadable eyes. “The Fence is a test. Surely you know that. Every layer tests something different. It is a trial very few can pass. You are one of perhaps eight people who have crossed the Fence, in the thirteen years it has stood.”

  Gorgo had not really known that. “I thought the purpose was to keep people out.”

  “If that was the purpose, I could find a more effective magical barrier. The Fence is designed to be conquerable, and conquerable without magic. It is merely a side benefit that it keeps almost everyone out.”

  “Why didn’t the golem get through the Fence faster? With her powers, I thought she would have beaten me by hours.”

  The Warlord shook her head. “In fact, Cockatrice spent nearly the whole night trapped in the second layer, the Fence of Darkness.”

  “But why? The golem has no fear.”

  “Exactly. To conquer that layer you must overcome fear. The golem could not feel it. For hours the Fence threw suggestions at her, but nothing triggered fear.”

  Gorgo nearly whistled at the irony. Could the golem have stayed trapped there forever? “How did she finally escape?”

  “Eventually so much time had passed that Cockatrice began to worry her mission would fail. It was not quite fear, but close enough for the Fence. When she steadied her worry, the Fence let her go.”

  “And the other layers?”

  “Those were easy for her.”

  “They weren’t for me,” Gorgo muttered. He paused, remembering. “At the end of the Fence of Mirrors, did it matter if I jumped right or left?”

  “No, it did not matter which way you went. It only mattered that you made a decision quickly. Those hallways would have vanished in another second.”

  “And the fourth layer. That was a real place. Where was I?”

  “The Fence of the Deeps? About half a mile down, in caverns beneath Yahsta’s Claws. How many squid did you fight?”

  “Twelve.”

  “The magic of the Fence baits that hollow in the ceiling, to attract the squid and keep them there. They climb up from the chasm below when they smell the bait, but they are very slow to gather, each one arriving over months. So there is no set number; it depends on how recently someone has bested the Fence and cleaned them out. Twelve is… a great many.”

  Gorgo grimaced. He wondered for a moment why the golem had not killed them off, then realized Cockatrice would have had no need. The cave squid must have slid off her armor, unable to touch her. “I wished for my knife. But Honeylegs took out half of them.”

  “Half?” The Warlord arched a brow.

  “Well, two.” The Warlord did not comment on his math. “Could I have died in that cavern?”

  “It is possible, though not as easy as you might think. More likely you would have found yourself back in Ilkour, badly wounded.”

  “What of the last layer?”

  “That is the Fence of Finality. It taunts a person with failure, though the form it takes varies depending on what is in your mind. But the end is always the same, an assassin who stabs you through the heart.”

  “What does that Fence test?”

  The Warlord regarded him from dark enigmatic eyes. “Willpower.”

  She seemed perfectly willing to let him ask the questions. Was it only that she learned as much from his questions as his answers? Gorgo shut up. An instant later he regretted it.

  “Why did you try the Fence passage at all? Why didn’t you come to a gat
e?”

  Gorgo stared. “I had no Fence stamp.”

  “So? You could have gone to a gate and told the Margays on guard that you had word of an assassination attempt against me. They would have given you a stamp and brought you to me. It would have been faster.”

  Well at least, Gorgo reflected, if his goal in this interview had been to appear stupid, he was accomplishing that. “I didn’t think they would,” he muttered. Could it really have been so easy? He’d had it so firmly in his mind that he had to stay away from all contact with the government. And here he found himself being grilled by the Warlord.

  “Continue with your story.”

  “There’s not much left. I thought I could get into Mort Glave more easily if I wore a uniform, so I had Honeylegs knock out a lone tail. Anyway, it worked—until Cadi drew a knife on me. You know the rest.”

  “And you insulted the Hands as an aid in getting to see me faster, no doubt.”

  The Warlord’s scrutiny never wavered. Gorgo longed to be done with this. “It seemed like the right move at the time.” He hesitated, then asked, “Is the Hands still angry about it?”

  “Angry? I doubt he was ever angry. You wouldn’t like to see him angry.” The Warlord laughed. “I’d say he was intrigued. You surprised him. The Hands enjoys surprises. They keep him young. Much though he may grumble about them.” She paused, observing him. “When did you acquire that large quantity of bruises? So far there’s been nothing in your story to account for them.”

  “Yahsta, I don’t even know.” Gorgo rubbed his forehead. “Probably most of them came when Cockatrice threw me against the wall of the Carousel.” The Warlord’s arched eyebrows begged the question. Strange that so small a movement could be so compelling. Gorgo was tired. The strain of talking to her had intensified his headache, and his wounds clamored at him. Her silent pressure could not be ignored. He had to admire her technique. “You’ve a hand with interrogation, Warlord,” he said, almost without realizing he’d said it aloud.

  She smiled toothily. “Oh no. It’s the ambassadors who are wicked interrogators. This is mere conversation. You do seem reluctant to converse, however. Well,” she stirred from her seat on the table, stood and strolled to the wine decanter to pour herself a glass, “I’ve enjoyed your tale. Now I want you to put in all the parts you’ve left out, including your meeting with Shaoti in Stone Hearth, what part your cousin Six & Seven played in all this, and anything else that may have slipped your mind.”