King of Assassins

by Rj Barker

  “Why did you do that, Girton?” I turned to find my master, small and dark in the bright day.

  “Blue Watta can have him,” I said. “Let his eternity be one of drowning.” She nodded, picked up a stone and threw it into the water close to where the body drifted. It vanished into the river without a splash.

  “A stone to weigh him down,” she added.

  “Rufra wants me to find who did this, and who planned the attack on Voniss.”

  “You cannot be surprised.”

  “No, nor am I unhappy about such a task.”

  “At Ceadoc, Girton, trying to find who wants Rufra dead will be like trying to find a nail in a bucket of nails.” I picked up another stone and threw it at the body, bouncing it off the side of the slowly turning corpse.

  “Then I will examine every nail until I find the one I seek. And if a few are lost or broken in the process I will feel no sadness.”

  “You intend to kill your way to the truth?”

  “If I have to. Powerful and cruel men are like nails, Master. Easily replaced by another just the same.”

  “Murdering your way through Ceadoc will not make Rufra’s task any easier.”

  I stood.

  “I am not doing this for Rufra.”

  She stepped closer, taking my arm.

  “Be careful, Girton. If there is a true assassin working at Ceadoc you may find more there than you bargain for. We both get older.” She glanced down at her useless leg.

  “I am not infirm yet, Master. We should go,” I offered her my arm to lean on, “I will ride with you to Ceadoc. I do not think I will be welcome at the head of the procession with the king.”

  I am not sure when my master stopped riding Xus in favour of me. It had happened around the time I took on the motley of Death’s Jester, soon after the murderer, Neliu, wounded my master’s leg. I had mentioned it once, the day she had bought her mount, Taif, a small white female with four-point antlers. Not a fighting beast—a riding beast of the type popular among blessed ladies, docile and happy to plod along. She had said the change was because I was Heartblade to the king: it was fitting that I rode the best war mount available—and not even Xus’s many children were as fine as him. I accepted it, though we both knew the truth. With her damaged leg she could no longer quite control the mount’s wild spirit, and though I have no doubt he still loved her fiercely, he was an animal given to acts of madness and required a firm hand on his rein.

  I am sure, if asked, my master would use similar words to describe me.

  We rode in comfortable silence for the morning, eating in the saddle from our packs at lunchtime. Rufra wished to make good time for Ceadoc and be there before Festival set up, that way his entrance would not look small compared to the great travelling trade caravan, which was famous for outshining the retinues of kings.

  Smoke was the first sign of Ceadoc. A hint of it on the air teasing my nostrils and worrying the mounts with a suggestion of fire. A little further on I saw the clouds in the sky, brown and unnatural, rising in a pyre above the flat land. Nearer I began to wonder how truly immense Ceadoc Castle was. Maniyadoc was big, but big in a sparse way, its townyard had been cleared by King Doran ap Mennix so empty land surrounded the keep. No such thing had been done with Ceadoc and a city had sprung up around it, bursting through the townwall gates and spreading out so it looked like a four-petalled flower, thick with smoky pollen that hung above it in a haze. At first, there was so much smoke I thought the place surrounded by charcoal burners, but as we rode nearer I began to understand the true size of it. Houses of mud brick, some were two or three storeys tall, teetering over the roads. Where the houses were not mud brick there were canvas tents and, very occasionally, some houses made from discarded wood. As the buildings became clearer so did the stink of humanity, sewage and refuse. The nearer we rode to Ceadoc the harder I found it to understand. So many people crammed into such a place seemed impossible. How did they eat? How did they sleep with all the noise, and breathe with all that smoke and stink?

  I felt the town in a different way, as a bright, throbbing sensation in my gut, as a light in my mind: almost overflowing with life and impossibly fecund, like a huge battery ready to power the magic within me. With the lives of Ceadoc I could remake the entire Tired Lands in whatever image I wanted.

  I bit my lip. Thoughts like that were dangerous and I had not had them for a long time. They were a lie too. The only image I could remake the Tired Lands into was one of death: yellow, blasted and stinking. The magic was always stronger when it had a darkness within me to feed on. I dug my fingernails into my palms, turned my mind from thoughts of magic and back to the city before me, and the castle that rose above it.

  Dead gods, every time I saw it I realised I had failed to understand the size of the place.

  The road that led towards Ceadoc looked like it was lined with figures, but as we approached I realised the scale of them was wrong. They were far too big to be people; they were statues of the dead gods. Each one towered over us. The first pair were nearly three times the size of a man and I guessed them to be Adallada and Dallad, but it was a guess. All the statues had been disfigured, arms and heads broken off and little of what paint they had once had remained. I had heard people speak with awe of the enormous statues of Adallada and Dallad within the sepulchre, but never of this street of statues. Maybe because they were so damaged.

  The statues that came after were smaller, only twice the height of a man. As we rode we were at the height where their heads should have been, all the many gods of the Tired Lands, paired male and female. I wondered, as we rode down the aisle of forlorn statues, if this damage had been done recently, in anger at the forgetting plague. But when I looked closer I could see the damage was ancient, the stone worn where it had been chipped away at neck and elbow.

  Only one set of statues remained intact—the last ones—and these were not larger than life. These were the same size as a man, and still painted, black cloak and hood hiding the figures’ features. If I had looked I knew I would have found them unprepossessing. Also, unlike the other gods, this one had only itself for a counterpart, twin statues standing at the end of the aisle: a symbol of the eventual destination of all that lived. Here waited Xus the unseen, god of death.

  When we speak of our dead gods, we speak of their beauty and their poise, but Xus has none of that as when death comes it comes in quietly and unnoticed. So Xus is just a man, or a woman—simply another traveller who is there to take your hand and lead you along the road to his dark palace. My mount, as if recognising his namesake, shook all over and let out a growl, I had to pull on the rein to stop him rearing. Only when I had him under control did I notice that the statues of Xus had also been defaced, but this was far more recent. Across the plinths someone had painted, “Darsese lives!”

  “Dark Ungar, he better not,” said Aydor from beside me. “If I’ve blistered my backside riding all this way only to be greeted by High King Darsese saying it was all a terrible mistake I won’t be happy.”

  If the town around the castle was big, but it was at least so on an understandable scale, Ceadoc Castle itself? It looked as if it had been constructed by giants. It was at once brutal and beautiful, high walls topped with half-hexagon crenellations. I saw a guard walk in the gap between them and realised each one was as tall as a man. Flags flew, bearing the gold of the high king and the green and white tree of the Landsmen. Towers rose, some spindly, some thick and squat. Roofs of many types: slate, shingle, thatch and canvas, decoration everywhere, huge motifs of the queen of the dead gods, Adallada, and her consort, Dallad, many times as big as a man. The castle resembled steps. Nearest was the largest, grandest part of the castle and behind and spreading out like wings from the main facade it descended. Each new attempt at building on it had clearly been done with less material and less know-how. The slenderest and most impressive towers of its architecture were the oldest and so Ceadoc was breathtaking to look at, but at the furthest end of the
castle it was little more than a ruin: though the walls there may be thousands of years younger than the main keep they had not stood the test of time and were little more than crumbling reminders of what had been.

  From ahead I heard cymbals crashing and drummers frantically beating out a tattoo, guards shouting as they cleared a way for Rufra to enter Ceadoc town.

  There was a little cheering for us, but not much. As my master and I rode in behind the parade, most of the faces turned toward our column were suspicious or disinterested, as if they had been forced to attend. Lines of Landsmen kept the people back from us, but it was strange, for a town so big there did not appear to be enough people. Maybe the forgetting plague had hit Ceadoc even harder than other places. The town had the air of a home after a bereavement, sad and empty.

  Though the townspeople were sparse, the opposite was true of the Landsmen. I was used to seeing Landsmen in groups of ten or less, and once a phalanx of over a hundred had camped with Rufra and maybe double that number had opposed him at Goldenson Copse. But there must be far more in Ceadoc. At least a hundred were here to control the crowd and I could see flashes of green on the castle battlements. I bit down on my discomfort. I had known they would be here, but it was disconcerting to see so many of the high king’s sorcerer hunters. Behind the unsmiling Landsmen the gathered people were filthy. None of the usual bright rags here: most wore brown or grey, worn and sad-looking. The crowd had little energy though at one point a fight broke out between the black-clad Children of Arnst and a group of townspeople led by a priest. I heard a shout of “Darsese lives!” and then fists were flying and Landsmen were wading into the crowd. Apart from that small altercation there was little excitement, and trotting down a path through this silent and scant crowd was dispiriting in a way few other things in my life had been. I told myself it could not get worse.

  I was wrong, of course.

  As we passed into Ceadoc town I felt nauseous, and it wasn’t the usual claustrophobic feeling of panic brought on by the stink and noise of a town. This was something deeper, something within me. A disturbance in that dark place that felt all life as wonder and light. It was as though the ground was crumbling beneath me, life vanishing. I closed my eyes and let my senses reach out a little. I was wary of using the magic in me with so many green-clad sorcerer hunters around, but what had fallen upon me seemed so impossible, here of all places, that I had to make sure.

  Inside me a fire burned, at once golden and black, twisting and writhing in response to every breath, footstep and action of the people around me. If I concentrated hard enough I could feel not only them but everything, the mounts we rode, the pigs, the sheep, the goats in the city and the tiny parasites sucking at their lifegiving blood. I knew to anyone watching I must appear as though drunk, wavering in the saddle as my mind slipped and slid, falling and twisting along shining lines. I concentrated so hard I could feel the creatures that lived on the parasites on the animals, specks so small they could not be seen but the magic within me knew them and hungered for them as fuel.

  But I would not feed that hunger.

  The magic fed not only on life but also on desperation and misery, using it like a pry bar into my mind in its blind attempts to escape, but it would not. I let it seep out of me, imagining it as an imperceptible mist, a tendril of smoke that touched upon everything around me without disturbing any of it. I rarely let my senses reach out too far, it felt too much like temptation and took too much concentration, but this time I reached out further than I had ever done before. I had become adept at this on a small scale, sounding out the world around me from the shadows of the life within it. To use it on a larger scale was almost a relief, like cool water over my face: the slow metronome of a guard’s patrol on top of the wall marked the highest points of Ceadoc Castle. The walls were a nothing—neither there nor here, like air—but they were covered in moss, in clinging plants, in tiny lizards that nested, lived and died within the stone without ever seeing the sky. Shadows within shadows. Past the walls and into the courtyards, around the castle. Life everywhere: usable, twistable, changeable and wonderful.

  And then Ceadoc’s keep. There, surrounding the centre, the oldest, most magnificent and massive part of the castle, was a dead spot. Not dead like the wall, not a neutral and empty place. A truly dead place, a place where the life had been sucked from the castle and nothing would grow or live. People were within it—moving round, talking, eating, living—but I could not feel them because of what the castle was placed upon.

  A souring.

  Ceadoc Castle was centred on a place soured by magic.

  “Master …” I began.

  “I feel it too, Girton.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “But think on what it means.”

  “It means there was once—”

  “Once?” Surrounded by Landsmen she could not use any of our assassin tricks, no Whisper-that-Flies-to-the-Ear here, and I leant in close to her to whisper back.

  “What do you mean by ‘once,’ Master?”

  “Think, Girton, what is under a castle keep?”

  “Dungeons.”

  “And what happens in dungeons?”

  “Torture, death …” I felt my face pale, felt my heart still. “Blood is spilled. Regularly.”

  “Aye, blood gives life to soured land, and there’ll be more blood spilled than in most at Ceadoc’s dungeons, Girton.”

  I leaned even closer.

  “That souring should not be there: that is what you mean by ‘once’?” She nodded, and I spoke more to myself than anyone else. “Ceadoc Castle must have a sorcerer working within.”

  “Aye,” she said, “and by the feel of that souring, Girton, a powerful one.”

  The nearer we got to Ceadoc Castle the stranger it seemed. Ceadoc was not only the seat of the high king, it also housed the Sepulchre of the Gods, the most sacred place of the dead gods, sacrosanct to both the priesthood and the Landsmen. That a sorcerer should work among them was unthinkable. As we crossed the drawbridge I felt a sudden vertigo, as if I were about to tumble from Xus’s saddle and into the stinking, half-full moat far below. Was this another way for the Landsmen to check for magic users? I had travelled through sourings many times. I was used to the terrible hollowness within. I knew what was coming when I entered the castle proper. But to some village wise woman who had spent her life eking out magic, taking and giving to the land to heal the small hurts and diseases of her people? To suddenly be cut off would be a form of torture, an added layer of loneliness and fear, and her sudden discomfort would be an obvious visual signal for the men who hunted such people.

  I had hated the Landsmen for as long as I could remember. Seeing their home and its hypocrisy only made me hate them more.

  As I crossed the bridge, the sounds of the town began to spin around me, became a tube constricting my vision. Then, with an echo like a hard ball thrown down a tunnel, my sense of the world around me vanished and I passed into a world, pillow-soft and silent. Even the chatter of those around me was numbed. The scars on my body, so long dormant, began to ache, twisting and shifting, and I wanted nothing more than to run, to turn Xus and send him galloping away.

  But I thought of Feorwic lying under her cairn and tightened my hands around Xus’s rein. He let out a low growl and snapped at one of the nearby Landsmen guarding the way, breaking my reverie and bringing a smile to my face.

  Everywhere I went I brought death. Ceodoc would be no different and, for once, I was not sorry about it.

  Chapter 7

  At every turn Ceadoc continued to shock me with its enormity. Maniyadoc was a shepherd’s hovel compared to Ceadoc but, unlike Maniyadoc, Ceadoc was—and this is strange—unimpressive in its enormity. There was a coldness to Ceadoc that its cavernous spaces only served to accentuate.

  The main hall rose so far above me I could not see the roof, only fluted and carved stone ribs that curved up and up before vanishing into the confined
smoke. Huge fires threw orange light across our party and made their faces unfamiliar, alien, as if the personalities below the skin were changing. For a moment I thought myself surrounded by the shiftlings, the creatures of Fitchgrass of the Fields that spirited away children. A shudder ran through me. Despite the fires and the heat of yearslife, in Ceadoc’s great hall the air was chill.

  I stood to Rufra’s left and on his right stood Dinay. I still remembered her as the young girl who had ridden from Gwyre to bring Rufra galloping down on the Nonmen in our most desperate moment. Now she headed his cavalry. Behind us walked Aydor and Boros, between them Celot. Behind them came a phalanx of Rufra’s personal guard, in black and red emblazoned with his flying lizard, and before us Gusteffa the jester capered, cartwheeling and spinning. The huge hall echoed with slow cymbal crashes and the low moansong of priests. We walked a path between men. First Landsmen, green armour shining and the flames of the fires burnishing them in flickering bronze. Then the Landsmen gave way to the high king’s guard, fierce-looking men and women in armour of pure silver. I knew little about them except they were believed to be the most fearsome of all the Tired Land’s warriors, and their severe faces stared forward as if we were not even there. At a shouted command of “Hut!” swords came out. My fingers twitched with the desire to go for my blade. Then with a shout of “Ayt!” the swords were raised so we walked down a tunnel of razored steel. At my side I heard Rufra give a small grunt. He walked unaided despite that it caused him terrible pain.

  At the end of the corridor of swords a group of men waited for us. They were flanked by standard bearers who held long sticks with large canvasses, each one showing what I presumed to be High King Darsese in the position of repose, legs together, arms crossed over his chest. The figures were simplistic and so stylised they could have been anyone but for the long red hair which Darsese and the family of the high king had been famous for. My stomach cramped and blood hissed as I picked out Neander, high priest of the Tired Lands, in the group waiting for us. He wore a coat of multicoloured rags to signal he stood for no god and all of them: the only colour missing was the black of Xus the unseen, as that god still lived. His craggy face stared at me like a hunting lizard sizing up prey. He had made his peace with Rufra and I knew that Rufra needed him, but the last time we had spoken I had dreamed of putting a knife at the priest’s throat and letting his blood spill upon the ground. My feelings had not changed. And here, if I were to see him every day? Could I keep my promise not to act on this hatred? Even after so many years had passed since he caused the death of my first love, Drusl?