The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “Stay within, lady, unless you wish to see the same visited upon your child.”

  The globe of cold light fell from the Bolg king’s hand and thudded on the ground. Rhapsody froze, drawing the cloak and the baby closer to her chest, as both of the Bolg sank to their knees, struggling to hang on to consciousness.

  “Stop, I beg you,” she whispered in the same tone as the voice had sounded.

  Be silent. The command stabbed her eardrums; Rhapsody gritted her teeth and leaned back against the wall. She watched in horror as both of her friends fell forward, Achmed first, then the giant Bolg Sergeant-Major, their eyes protruding, faces purple in the remains of the cold light.

  She steeled herself against tears, rather feeling hatred running like fire through her veins, as Grunthor’s body finally went limp. Achmed, who had fallen with his face toward her, met her gaze with his own, then tried, and succeeded ever so slightly, in smiling encouragingly at her. Rhapsody thought she saw him wink.

  Then his face went slack as well.

  A shadow approached and fell over the bodies in the blue light. Rhapsody stood as still as she could as a robed hand, long-boned and thin, reached down from the opening and seized Achmed, dragging him to his feet and out of her sight.

  Suddenly the breeze picked up; it had been blowing on her all along, but she saw it riffle through Grunthor’s oily hair and across his cape, making it flutter on his back as he lay prone. After a moment the giant Bolg stirred slightly, then coughed.

  Achmed came around after a moment, his head thudding, to find himself gazing numbly into two pinpricks of light within a dark hood. The figure that held him in its grasp stared at him for a moment longer, then dropped him to the floor and pulled down the hood of his robe.

  In the diffuse light Achmed could make out features he recognized instantly, but in a form he had never seen before. The man who stood before him was thin as a whisper, taller than Achmed, with wide shoulders, sinewy hands, and skin that was scored across every inch with exposed traceries of veins in a great web that gave a dual tone to it. His head was smooth and bald, tapering in width from the crown to the angular jaw, his eyes black as ink without a visible iris, bisected by silver pupils; looking within them was like looking into a mirror in a dark room.

  A Dhracian. Full-blooded.

  But one very different than any he had seen before.

  Get up and step within, the man ordered. This time the command did not cause pain, but rather thudded succinctly against his skin. Achmed obeyed, rising slowly, allowing his body to unfold until he was standing erect. He stumbled past the opening where Grunthor was lying and shook him until the giant shuddered with life, struggling to breathe, then helped him sit up.

  “What the bloody—?”

  “Shhh,” the Bolg king cautioned. Grunthor’s gaze focused on the figure standing before them, then swung in the direction of Rhapsody, who was still leaning against the cavern wall, the baby wrapped within the mist cloak in her arms, panting. “Can you stand?”

  “O’ course Oi can stand,” the Sergeant-Major muttered. “It’s just a matter o’ how long it’ll be before Oi can.”

  “Stand and step deeper within,” the Dhracian said in his audible, fricative voice, the same sandy voice that Achmed spoke with. “Each moment you tarry you risk waking the beast.”

  “Beast?” Rhapsody whispered as the three men came closer to where she stood.

  The thin, bald man picked up the light globe, handed it to her, and gestured impatiently down toward the bottom of the cavern. Achmed nodded; Rhapsody turned and led the way along an angular, descending ledge, at one time one of the feeder channels in the water system, being careful to avoid the nodules of mold and broken bits of hive on the walls down to the enormous cavern’s floor.

  They passed beneath thin long strings of dripping honey, trying to avoid making contact with it; the viscous liquid expanded after each heavy drop fell, then lengthened again, spilling its golden treasure across what had once been a fountainbed. All around them the air swirled with the beating of innumerable wings and the heavy sound of droning that drowned out all other noise.

  They finally came to a large basin for what had once been an immense bath lined with seats of fired tile, through which a trickling stream was slowly running, meandering around obstacles of broken statuary and the wreckage of walls. The robed man stopped beside the stream and pointed to it.

  “Drink,” he said to Achmed and Grunthor. “It will restore you.”

  “Oi’ll pass, thank you,” muttered the giant Bolg. “Oi feel just ducky.”

  The Dhracian snorted, and eyed the Bolg king. “And you?”

  Achmed said nothing.

  The Dhracian watched him a moment longer, then crouched down by the spring and cupped a hand into it, then drank from his palm. “As you wish,” he said. He turned away and walked over to a sheltered alcove with blue marble walls that had most likely been a place where bathers had disrobed before taking part in the medicinal baths. The Bolg followed him, but Rhapsody stayed beside the stream, listening to it as it trickled through the cavern floor; it was a musical sound, similar in tone to the song she had heard when they were above. She crouched down, still clutching her mist cloak close to her, and removed her pack, fumbled around in it, and finally brought forth an empty water flask, which she quickly filled one-handed, then capped again and returned to the pack. She joined the men inside the alcove, one of the few places in the entirety of the massive vault that the bees had not chosen to colonize, probably because of the slippery finish of the blue marble walls. Between the shelter of the spot, the breeze whistling through, and the hum of the bees, all noise seemed to be swallowed, occluded, she noticed.

  Achmed turned to the Dhracian. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  The ancient man stared at him without rancor, as if assessing him for market. Finally he spoke, and when he did his voice was toneless in the wind of the cavern.

  “I have a task for you.”

  The Bolg king chuckled wryly. “You have come to assign me a task? Why would you think such a thing possible? And do you really believe that strangling me is the way to assure my cooperation?”

  The dark eyes narrowed.

  “You are of the blood, yet you do not feel the call of the Primal Hunt?”

  Achmed’s eyes narrowed similarly.

  “I feel it,” he said sullenly. “I have answered that call more than once, and have sent more than one putrid F’dor spirit back to the Vault of the Underworld, or into the ether. But I still do not understand why you feel you can attack me and my man-at-arms, nearly choke the life from us, and then expect me to accept a task from you, as if I am your errand boy. I actually have my own thoughts about how I might spend my time, not to mention my own responsibilities—and neither of them involve accepting a task from anyone, let alone you.” His voice rang with rancor, and the last word echoed in the alcove around them.

  The ancient Dhracian said nothing, just stood in silence, watching Achmed carefully. Finally he pointed to the place in the vault where the wall and the hive around it was shattered.

  “Beyond that wall is a Wyrmril, a beast that came here a short time ago seeking healing from a place that was nothing but a memory. She sleeps now—her fire is cooled in a surfeit of honey and sweet water—but any sound, any distraction, could stir her awareness.”

  “Oh, goody,” Grunthor said under his breath. “Anwyn. Oi wondered where that ol’ bitch had fled to.”

  “You may feel competent to take her on—but what of your child, lady? Can he survive a dragon’s breath?” The Dhracian looked up at the expansive hive that had consumed the entire ceiling of the vast place. “That being said, you are in far greater danger from the bees, even though it is their noise that is keeping you alive, the movement of their wings allowing you to hide within the wind from the dragon,” he noted, almost idly. “When Kurimah Milani stood as a haven of healing, the ancestors of those bees were captive, raised by a foll
ower of the man who built this city for their honey, which was used in medicines and soothing emollients. They were the only creatures to survive the destruction of the city.” His reflective gaze returned to the three. “Whatever their harmlessness was then, they could now kill us all with but a thought—and, like our kind, they are of a single mind, able to communicate silently among the entire hive as if it were one entity. Should they swarm and attack, our dead bodies will swell like figs soaked in wine before they burst, and the bees feed upon our carcasses.”

  “Please forbear from further description,” Rhapsody interjected. “I think we understand.”

  The Dhracian smiled coldly, still addressing Achmed.

  “This is the only place in all the world that bees of this species live; they were brought from the old world, a place that no longer exists, and have grown and changed over the centuries to be unlike any other. If someone were to come into this vault, with flame perhaps, he could eradicate all of the bees of this type from the face of the earth.” His voice grew even more toneless and soft. “It is just so with another Vault.”

  “You are talking in riddles,” Achmed said darkly. “I probably neglected to mention how much I hate riddles. What is it you want?”

  The Dhracian met his gaze with a piercing one in return. “I have come to bring you into the Hunt, as you should have been all along. You are needed, Ysk. Time is growing short.”

  A sarcastic smile crawled over the Bolg king’s face. “And here again you address me by the name that was bestowed on me in spittle, as reviled and disgusting a title as has ever been conferred. Why should I help you? I have my own responsibilities, my own burdens to bear. A kingdom that requires my attention.”

  “Yes,” said the angular man, “the Assassin King; so I have heard. I called you by the only name I had for you, though you had cast it off long ago, because the one you were given after that, the Brother, made you all but impossible to find on the wind.”

  “That was the point.”

  “I have been looking for you all your life,” said the Dhracian. “I knew of you before you were born; so it is with all the Brethren.” His voice grew less harsh, as if the wind was softening the effects of the sand in it. “The Zherenditck, those who have joined the Hunt and walk the upworld in search of the F’dor, share a link, a communication, that transcends time and space; they are of one mind, and so what happens to each of them is known to all. But you are not Zherenditck, you are Dhisrik, one of the Uncounted, a Dhracian of the blood who is not tied to a Colony, and therefore outside the common mind. You do not understand the bond between us; ironic, for someone who was renamed to be Brother to all, but akin to none. You have kin, Ysk—or whatever you choose to be called now—kin that have been combing the wind for you since your birth. Your mother was one of us, one of the Gaol. We witnessed your conception, experienced it, suffered through it as she did, though not as much as she did.

  “We searched in vain, across the years, across the wide world. You were not to be found. Then, when one of the other Dhisrik, Halphasion, sent us word that you had been taken in and renamed, trained, made aware of your Dhracian heritage and the blood pact that it commands, we waited for you to come to us, to join in the Primal Hunt. But you have not been compelled by the deepest calling in your blood, though you may have heard it, may have used its power to make a name for yourself. Instead you have listened to a lighter voice, an upworld call, that has wheedled you to the concerns of earthly men—power, comfort, friendship, security—who knows what pleasure, what commitment, could have swayed you from that which is primordial in you, allowing you to deny the undeniable? It nauseates me to know that such a thing is even possible in one of our order. I took the air from you to see if the ultimate obscenity were possible—that one of the Brethren had become the host of a F’dor. I am glad to see it was not so, that a tainted spirit feeding off of you did not beg or wheedle, or try to run to another host as your body was dying. But I confess that had it happened, it would not have surprised me, given how you have been able to deny the undeniable, to undo the inevitable, and ignore what runs in your own veins. Perhaps you were aptly named by the Firbolg. There is something inherently odious about one of the Brethren who feels the needles in his veins, knows the burning of the skin, the blood rage that is our shared burden, but does not join in the Hunt.

  “So I have come to discover this, Assassin King—are you more king? Or more assassin?”

  Achmed’s face was a mask of stoicism, but his mismatched eyes gleamed with an intensity that frightened Rhapsody.

  His answer was drowned in a sudden squeal from within the mist cloak in her arms. The sound pierced the noise of the hive, drowned out the tricking of the brook, and resounded through the ruins of the bath.

  All three men started. Rhapsody’s eyes widened in panic; she jostled the bundle, reaching within to try and soothe the child, but the squeal only intensified into high-pitched shrieking, louder than she had ever heard before.

  “Meridion, Meridion, shhhhhh, no, no,” she whispered, futilely trying to put the baby to the breast. “Gods, please, you’ll wake the dragon.” But the child continued to wail, his plaintive cries echoing off the cavernous chamber and shattering the low hum.

  Because, unlike his mother, he knew the beast was already awake.

  33

  The dragon had been coming to consciousness for some time before she actually heard the name.

  In the lightness of her slumber the dreams she had been luxuriating in had grown less comforting; for all that there had been moments of celebration and acclaim in her long life, they had actually been few and far between when compared with the centuries of distrust and deception, rejection, plotting, war, murder, defilement, leading ultimately to even more centuries of banishment, exile, and solitude. Eventually the happy memories were used up, repeated too often to be of comfort.

  She twitched in her sleep, fighting to keep the unpleasant thoughts at bay, but they were beginning to mass outside the gates of her mind, like rebel hordes eager for conquest.

  The honey and wax she had devoured, believing it to be healing sunshine, was cloying in her maw, coating her throat and making her gag. The bees that had attacked her had done little to damage her hide; she felt no pain from that, but the stings that landed in her eyes had left them swollen and sore, irritating her back into low-burning anger again.

  So when the name was spoken, even though it had been a great distance away in a different chamber of the bath, it went right to her ear and clanged like a cymbal against her brain.

  Rhapsody, step forward and aside, out of the sluice.

  The beast’s sore eyes opened wide in the darkness of the broken bath, casting an eerie blue light around the gloom.

  Rhapsody.

  At first it was a struggle to waken; her mind, buzzing with the sound of the hated woman’s name, caught fire and began to hum with eager energy, but the body that had been torn and rent from the inside by the shards that still remained within her was slow to react, in need of more rest and healing. The wyrm steeled her will and began to assert dominion over her limbs; one by one she stretched her legs and forearms, extended her claws until her muscles tensed in the sweet pain of controlled movement.

  She stretched slowly, not the languid extension of muscle and bone that had felt so sinuous and delightful in torpor, but the careful, calculating reinvigoration of a dormant body into motion again. At the same time she listened carefully, hoping to catch the name again, or some sign of where the woman was. This place of ancient magic, with its low abiding song of healing and the hellacious buzzing from the hive, left her senses jumbled and unclear; there was no way to allow her inner sight to scan the ruins.

  She would have to do it with her own eyes.

  When finally she adjudged her body to be working as well as it could, she slithered back into the streambed and made her way to the hole she had caused in the vault, her forked tongue tasting the air, seeking to banish the last vestiges of s
weet honey and replace them with an altogether more enticing sartorial experience.

  Blood and bone, flavored with hate.

  The three men froze only for the briefest of instants.

  A second later they were in motion. The Dhracian, seemingly familiar with the ruins, ran at the lead, making his way over the broken vases and urns that had once held medicinal water and soothing oils, clearing a path as much as he could. Achmed snatched the light globe from Rhapsody’s hands and followed him, illuminating the path as Grunthor grabbed her and the baby up and carried them, knowing his stride was more than twice hers.

  They crossed the floor of the ancient bath with alacrity, leaping and ducking to avoid the scattered ruins of the public bath, past enormous statues of smiling robed women with hands outstretched in blessing, around the pieces of what had once been beds for basking beneath a sheltering desert sky, all the way to the channel down which they had come, and began climbing back up to the sluice.

  Just as they had reached the midpoint of the channel, the beast burst forth into the chamber through the hole in the shattered vault, bellowing forth a roar so filled with caustic hatred that could have melted glass.

  The firmament of the vault rumbled in response, loosing a hail of sand and grit, followed by pieces of the hive that had been adhered to the ceiling.

  Rhapsody ducked her head against Grunthor’s chest and pulled Meridion as much under her chin as she could, hoping to spare his head from the falling debris. The thudding of the giant’s massive heart as he charged up the channel was like thunder, she closed her eyes, struggling to keep the infant sheltered with her own body.

  At that moment the hive shattered, sending a black storm of bees, thick as the dust wall of a sandstorm, cascading out and swirling angrily in every direction. The low drone became a ferocious scream, rising in volume, pitch, and fury.