Assassin's Quest (UK)

by Robin Hobb

  I put my face close to the panel and tried to study the tiny glyphs there. Did they match the mark­ings on Ver­ity’s map? Were they sym­bols Kettricken would re­cog­nize? I left the tower room and hastened down the stairs, passing through phantoms that seemed to grow stronger and stronger. I heard their words clearly now and caught glimpses of the tapestries that had once graced the walls. There were many dragons de­pic­ted on them. ‘Eld­er­lings?’ I asked of the echo­ing stone walls, and heard my words shiv­er­ing up and down the stairs.

  I sought some­thing to write upon. The tattered tapestries were damp rags that crumbled at a touch. What wood there was was old and rot­ten. I broke down the door to one in­ner cham­ber, hop­ing to find its con­tents well pre­served. In­side, I found the in­terior walls lined with wooden racks of pi­geon­holes, each hold­ing a scroll. They looked sub­stan­tial, as did the writ­ing im­ple­ments on the table in the centre of the room. But my grop­ing fin­gers found little more than the ghosts of pa­per, crisp and fra­gile as ashes. My eyes showed me a stack of fresh vel­lums on a corner shelf. My grop­ing fin­gers pushed away rot­ted debris, fi­nally to find a us­able frag­ment no big­ger than my two hands. It was stiff and yel­lowed, but it might serve. A heavy stoppered glass pot held the dried rem­nants of an ink. The wooden handles of their writ­ing im­ple­ments were gone, but the metal tips had sur­vived and they were long enough for me to grasp firmly. Armed with these sup­plies, I re­turned to the map-room.

  Spittle re­stored the ink to life and I honed the metal nib on the floor un­til it shone clean again. I re­kindled the rem­nants of Ver­ity’s fire, for the af­ter­noon was be­com­ing over­cast and the light through the dusty win­dows was dim­ming. I knelt in front of the panel Ver­ity’s hand had dus­ted and copied as much as I could of the road, moun­tains and other fea­tures onto the scrap of stiffened leather. Painstak­ingly I squin­ted at the tiny glyphs and trans­ferred as many of them as I could to the vel­lum. Per­haps Kettricken could make sense of them. Per­haps when we com­pared this clumsy map of mine to the map she car­ried, some com­mon fea­ture would make sense. It was all I had to go on. The sun was set­ting out­side and my fire no more than em­bers when I fi­nally fin­ished. I looked down on my scratch­ings rue­fully. Neither Ver­ity nor Fed­wren would have been im­pressed with my work. But it would have to do. When I was cer­tain the ink was set and would not smear, I put the vel­lum in­side my shirt to carry it. I would not chance rain or snow on it to blur my mark­ings.

  I left the tower as night was fall­ing. My ghostly com­pan­ions had long since gone home to hearth and sup­per. I walked the streets among scores of folk seek­ing their homes or ven­tur­ing out for an even­ing’s pleas­ure. I passed inns and tav­erns that seemed to blaze with light and heard merry voices from within. It was be­com­ing harder and harder for me to see the truth of the empty streets and aban­doned build­ings. It was a spe­cial misery to walk with my belly growl­ing and my throat dry past inns where phantoms filled them­selves with ghostly cheer and shouted aloud to one an­other in greet­ing.

  My plans were simple. I would go to the river and drink. Then I would do my best to re­turn to the first place I re­membered in the city. I would find some sort of shel­ter in that vi­cin­ity for the night, and by morn­ing light I would head back to­ward the moun­tains. I hoped if I went by the path I had prob­ably used to come here, some­thing would stim­u­late my memory.

  I was kneel­ing by the river’s edge, one palm flat on the pav­ing stone, drink­ing cold wa­ter when the dragon ap­peared. One mo­ment the sky above me was empty. Then there was a great golden light on everything and the noise of great wings beat­ing, like the whirr­ing of a pheas­ant’s wings in flight. About me folk cried out, some in star­tle­ment and some in de­light. The creature dived down on us and circled low. The wake of wind it put out set the ships to rock­ing and the river to rip­pling. Once more it circled and then without warn­ing it plunged com­pletely out of sight in the river. The golden light it had shed was ex­tin­guished and the night seemed all the darker by com­par­ison.

  I jerked back re­flex­ively from the dream wave that leaped against the shore as the river ab­sorbed the dragon’s im­pact. All around me, people were star­ing ex­pect­antly at the wa­ter. I fol­lowed their gazes. At first I saw noth­ing. Then the wa­ter par­ted and a great head emerged from the river. Wa­ter dripped from it and ran gleam­ing down the golden ser­pent­ine neck that next ap­peared. All the tales I had ever been told had al­luded to dragons as worms or liz­ards or snakes. But as this one emerged from the river, hold­ing out its drip­ping wings, I found my­self think­ing of birds. Grace­ful cor­mor­ants rising out of the sea from a dive after fish, or brightly-plumaged pheas­ants came to my mind as the huge creature emerged. It was fully as large as one of the ships and the spread of its wings put the can­vas sails to shame. It paused on the ri­verb­ank and preened the wa­ter from its scaled wings. The word scale does no justice to the or­nate plates that sheathed its wings, yet feather is too airy a word to de­scribe them. Could a feather be made of finely beaten gold, per­haps it might come close to the dragon’s plumage.

  I was trans­fixed with de­light and won­der. The creature ig­nored me, emer­ging from the river so close to me that had it been real, I would have been soaked by the wa­ter that dripped from its out­stretched wings. Every drop that fell back into the river car­ried the un­mis­tak­able shim­mer of raw ma­gic with it. The dragon paused on the ri­verb­ank, its four great clawed feet sink­ing deep in the damp earth as it care­fully fol­ded its wings and then preened its long, forked tail. Golden light bathed me and il­lu­min­ated the gath­er­ing crowd. I turned away from the dragon to re­gard them. Wel­come shone in their faces and great de­fer­ence. The dragon had the bright eyes of a gyr­fal­con and the car­riage of a stal­lion as it strode up to them. The folk par­ted to make way for it, mur­mur­ing re­spect­ful greet­ings.

  ‘Eld­er­ling,’ I said aloud to my­self. I fol­lowed it, my fin­gers trail­ing the build­ing fronts, one with the en­tranced crowd, as it paraded slowly up the street. Folk poured from tav­erns to add their greet­ings and swelled the crowd that fol­lowed it. Ob­vi­ously this was no com­mon event. I do not know what I hoped to dis­cover by fol­low­ing it. I do not think I really thought of any­thing at that time, save to fol­low this im­mense, cha­ris­matic creature. I un­der­stood now the reason why the main streets of this city had been built so wide. It was not to al­low the pas­sage of wag­ons, but so that noth­ing might im­pede one of these great vis­it­ors.

  It paused once be­fore a great stone basin. Folk rushed for­ward to vie for the hon­our of work­ing a wind­lass of sorts. Bucket after bucket rose on a loop of chain, each spill­ing its cargo of li­quid ma­gic into the basin. When the basin brimmed with the shim­mer­ing stuff, the Eld­er­ling grace­fully bowed its neck and drank. Ghost-Skill it might be, but even the sight of it awakened that in­si­di­ous hun­ger in me. Twice more the basin was filled and twice more the Eld­er­ling drank it down be­fore it pro­ceeded on its way. I fol­lowed, mar­vel­ling at what I had seen.

  Ahead of us sud­denly loomed that great gash of de­struc­tion that marred the city’s sym­met­rical form. I fol­lowed the ghostly pro­ces­sion to the lip of it, only to see every­one, man, wo­man and Eld­er­ling, van­ish com­pletely as they strode un­con­cern­edly out into the space. In a short time I stood alone on the edge of that gap­ing cre­vasse, hear­ing only the wind whis­per­ing over the still deep wa­ter. A few patches of stars showed through the over­cast sky and were re­flec­ted in the black wa­ter. Whatever other secrets of the Eld­er­lings I might have learned had been swal­lowed long ago in that great cata­clysm.

  I turned and walked slowly away, won­der­ing where the Eld­er­ling had been bound and for what pur­pose. I shuddered again as I re­called how it had drunk down the sil­ver gleam­ing power.


  It took me some time to re­trace my steps first to the river. Once there, I fo­cused my mind on re­call­ing what I had seen in the map-room earlier that day. My hun­ger was a hol­low thing that rattled against my ribs now, but I res­ol­utely ig­nored it as I threaded my way through the streets. My strength of will car­ried me through a knot of brawl­ing shad­ows but my res­ol­u­tion failed me when the city guard came char­ging down the streets on their massive horses. I leaped to one side to let them pass, and winced as I heard the sounds of their fall­ing truncheons. Un­real as it was, I was glad to leave the noisy dis­cord be­hind me. I made a right turn up a slightly nar­rower street and walked on past three more in­ter­sec­tions.

  I hal­ted. Here. This was the plaza where I had been kneel­ing in the snow the night be­fore. There, that pil­lar stand­ing at its centre, I re­called some sort of monu­ment or sculp­ture loom­ing over me. I walked to­ward it. It was made of the same ubi­quit­ous black stone veined with gleam­ing crys­tal. To my weary eyes it seemed to gleam brighter with the same mys­ter­i­ous un­light the other struc­tures gave off. The faint shin­ing out­lined on its side glyphs cut deep into its sur­face. I walked slowly around it. Some, I was sure, were fa­mil­iar and per­haps twin to those I had copied earlier in the day. Was this then some sort of guide­post, la­belled with des­tin­a­tions ac­cord­ing to com­pass head­ings? I reached out a hand to trace one of the fa­mil­iar glyphs.

  The night bent around me. A wave of ver­tigo swept over me. I clutched at the column for sup­port, but some­how missed it and went stum­bling for­ward. My out­stretched hands found noth­ing and I fell face for­ward into crus­ted snow and ice. For a time I just lay there, my cheek against the icy road, blink­ing my use­less eyes at the black­ness of the night. Then a warm, solid weight hit me. My brother! Nighteyes greeted me joy­ously. He thrust his cold nose into my face and pawed at my head to rouse me. I knew you would come back. I knew it!

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Co­terie

  Part of the great mys­tery that sur­rounds the Eld­er­lings is that the few im­ages we have of them bear small re­semb­lance to each other. This is true not only of tapestries and scrolls that are cop­ies of older works and hence might con­tain er­rors, but also of the few im­ages of Eld­er­lings that have sur­vived from King Wis­dom’s time. Some of the im­ages bear su­per­fi­cial re­semb­lances to the le­gends of dragons, fea­tur­ing wings, claws, scaly skin and great size. But oth­ers do not. In at least one tapestry, the Eld­er­ling is de­pic­ted as sim­ilar to a hu­man, but gold of skin and great of size. The im­ages do not even agree in the num­ber of limbs that be­ne­vol­ent race pos­sessed. They may have as many as four legs and two wings also, or have no wings at all and walk upon two legs as a man.

  It has been the­or­ized that so little was writ­ten about them be­cause know­ledge of the Eld­er­lings at that time was re­garded as com­mon know­ledge. Just as no one sees fit to cre­ate a scroll that deals with the most ba­sic at­trib­utes of what a horse is, for it would serve no use­ful pur­pose, so no one thought that one day Eld­er­lings would be the stuff of le­gends. To a cer­tain de­gree, this makes sense. But one has only to look about at all the scrolls and tapestries in which horses are fea­tured as the stuff of com­mon life to find a flaw. Were Eld­er­lings so ac­cep­ted a part of life, surely they would have been more of­ten de­pic­ted.

  After a very con­fus­ing hour or two, I found my­self back in the yurt with the oth­ers. The night seemed all the colder for hav­ing spent an al­most warm day in the city. We huddled in the tent in our blankets. They had told me I had van­ished from the lip of the cliff only the night be­fore; I had told them of all I had en­countered in the city. There had been a cer­tain amount of dis­be­lief on every­one’s part. I had felt both moved and guilty to see how much an­guish my dis­ap­pear­ance had caused them. Starling had ob­vi­ously been weep­ing, while both Kettle and Kettricken had the owly look of folks who had not slept. The Fool had been the worst, pale and si­lent with a slight trem­bling to his hands. It had taken a bit of time for all of us to re­cover. Kettle had cooked a meal twice the size of what we usu­ally had and all save the Fool had eaten heart­ily. He had not seemed to have the en­ergy. While the oth­ers sat in a circle around the bra­zier listen­ing to my tale, he was already curled in his blankets, the wolf snug be­side him. He seemed com­pletely ex­hausted.

  After I had been over the events of my ad­ven­ture for the third time, Kettle com­men­ted cryptic­ally, ‘Well, thank Eda you were dosed with elf­bark be­fore you were taken; oth­er­wise you would never have kept your wits at all.’

  ‘You say “taken”?’ I pressed im­me­di­ately.

  She scowled at me. ‘You know what I mean.’ She looked about at all of us star­ing at her. ‘Through the guide­post or whatever it is. They must have some­thing to do with it.’ A si­lence met her words. ‘It seems ob­vi­ous to me, that’s all. He left us at one, and ar­rived there at one. And re­turned to us the same way.’

  ‘But why didn’t they take any­one else?’ I pro­tested.

  ‘Be­cause you are the only Skill-sens­it­ive one among us,’ she poin­ted out.

  ‘Are they Skill-wrought as well?’ I asked her bluntly.

  She met my glance. ‘I looked at the guide­post by day­light. It is hewn of black stone with wide threads of shin­ing crys­tal in it. Like the walls of the city you de­scribe. Did you touch both posts?’

  I was si­lent a mo­ment, think­ing. ‘I be­lieve so.’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, there you are. A Skill-im­bued ob­ject can re­tain the in­tent of its maker. Those posts were erec­ted to make travel easier for those who could mas­ter them.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of such things. How do you know them?’

  ‘I am only spec­u­lat­ing on what seems ob­vi­ous to me,’ she told me stub­bornly. ‘And that is all I am go­ing to say. I’m go­ing to sleep. I’m ex­hausted. We all spent the en­tire night and most of the day look­ing for you and wor­ry­ing about you. What hours we could rest, that wolf never stopped howl­ing.’

  Howl­ing?

  I called you. You did not an­swer.

  I did not hear you, or I would have tried.

  I be­gin to fear, Little Brother. Forces pull at you, tak­ing you to places I can­not fol­low, clos­ing your mind to mine. This, right now, is as close as I have ever come to be­ing ac­cep­ted into a pack. But if I lost you, even it would be lost to me.

  You will not lose me, I prom­ised him, but I wondered if it was a prom­ise I could keep.

  ‘Fitz?’ Kettricken asked in a nudging voice.

  ‘I am here,’ I as­sured her.

  ‘Let us look at the map you copied.’

  I took it out and she drew out her own map. We com­pared the two. It was hard to find any sim­il­ar­it­ies, but the scales of the maps were dif­fer­ent. At last we de­cided that the piece I had copied down in the city bore a su­per­fi­cial re­semb­lance to the por­tion of trail that was drawn on Kettricken’s map. ‘This place,’ I ges­tured to one des­tin­a­tion marked on her map, ‘would seem to be the city. If that is so, then this cor­res­ponds to this, and this to this.’

  The map Ver­ity had set out with had been a copy of this older, faded map. On that one the trail I now thought of as the Skill road had been marked, but oddly, as a path that began sud­denly in the Moun­tains and ended ab­ruptly at three sep­ar­ate des­tin­a­tions. The sig­ni­fic­ance of those en­d­points had once been marked on the map, but those mark­ings had faded into inky smears. Now we had the map I had copied in the city, with those three en­d­points on it also. One had been the city it­self. The other two were now our con­cern.

  Kettricken stud­ied the glyphs I had copied from the city’s map. ‘I’ve seen such mark­ings, from time to time,’ she ad­mit­ted un­eas­ily. ‘No one truly reads them any­more. A hand­ful of them are still known. One en­co
un­ters them mostly in odd places. In a few places in the Moun­tains, there are raised stones that have such marks. There are some at the west end of the Great Chasm Bridge. No one knows when they were carved, or why. Some are thought to mark graves, but oth­ers say they marked land bound­ar­ies.’

  ‘Can you read any of them?’ I asked her.

  ‘A few. They are used in a chal­lenge game. Some are stronger than oth­ers …’ her voice trailed off as she stud­ied my scratch­ings. ‘None match ex­actly the ones I know,’ she said at last, dis­ap­point­ment heavy in her voice. ‘This one is al­most like the one for “stone”. But the oth­ers I have never seen at all.’

  ‘Well, it’s one of the ones that was marked here.’ I tried to make my voice cheery. ‘Stone’ con­veyed noth­ing at all to me. ‘It seems closest to where we are. Shall we go there next?’

  ‘I would have liked to see the city,’ the Fool said softly. ‘I should have liked to see the dragon, too.’

  I nod­ded slowly. ‘It is a place and a thing worth see­ing. Much know­ledge is there, if only we had the time to fer­ret it out. Did not I have Ver­ity al­ways in my head with his “come to me, come to me” I think I would have been more curi­ous to ex­plore.’ I had said noth­ing to them of my dreams of Molly and Chade. Those were private things, as was my ache to be home with her again.

  ‘Doubt­less you would have,’ Kettle agreed. ‘And doubt­less got your­self into more trouble that way. I won­der, did he so bind you to keep you on the road and pro­tect you from dis­trac­tions?’

  I would have chal­lenged her again on her know­ledge, had not the Fool re­peated softly, ‘I would have liked to see the city.’

  ‘We should all sleep now. We are up at first light, to travel hard to­mor­row. It heartens me to think that Ver­ity had been there be­fore FitzChiv­alry, even as it fills me with fore­bod­ing. We must get to him quickly. I can no longer stand won­der­ing each night why he never re­turned.’