The Assassin King

by Elizabeth Haydon

  It was a perfect fit.

  Thus, trading hosts was almost never necessary anymore.

  But occasionally one came along that proved irresistible.

  The Lord Cymrian had been one such temptation. Portia licked her lips, suddenly dry from the heat of anticipation and the kissing breath of the wind on them. Though she was in female form she had none of the physiological longings of a woman, did not feel the burning desire, the attraction of the flesh the way a human woman did. Rather, her desire was for the connection to power she gained in the fornication of powerful men. Her partners’ surrender in the heat of passion had fed the very essence of her being, their vulnerability and openness to her dominion was an orgiastic feeling. When a man was knobbing her body, his very soul lay open and exposed.

  And not only did she then have access to it, to drink in the essence of it, absorbing whatever primal, elemental power was within him, but she was able to tie that vulnerable soul to a twisting vine of Bloodthorn, the perverted sapling of Ashra, the tree of elemental fire, that grew deep within the Vault.

  As any member of the Older Pantheon of demons could.

  Slowly she ran her hands through her hair, raising her breasts to the wind that caressed her nipples through the thin cloth of her shirt, and sighed happily. She could hear her name on the wind; she knew it was only a matter of time before the Lord Cymrian found her. And now her quarry had arrived; she could feel his presence, even if she did not yet see him.

  The tree of blood had tasted the soul of Gwydion of Manosse once before. Another of her kind, one of the Younger Pantheon, had managed to tear a piece of it free some decades ago, had experimented with it, formed a body of ice and the desecrated blood of children around it, and had used it to procreate without tapping its own soul, something a few other F’dor had tried but had failed to do. Bloodthorn had reveled in the taste of Gwydion’s essence, had almost been able to find and obtain the Sleeping Child with it

  Once she had taken his body as her new host, the Unholy Tree would feed again.

  The wind picked up slightly, tickling the back of her neck and arms, and tousling her long dark locks.

  Portia’s smile grew brighter in the light of the moon. She couldn’t resist a chuckle at her own insatiability, one of the traits that the pathetic Tristan Steward had loved about her. Most F’dor of her power would have considered Gwydion of Manosse to be the ultimate prize, but she wanted more, as she always did.

  She wanted his wife.

  There was something bewitching about the Lady Cymrian that both disturbed and fascinated Portia. She knew immediately what it was—the sublime beauty that the common folk who swore allegiance to Rhapsody were enchanted by was nothing more than an inner core of elemental fire burning within her, something she must have absorbed from a primal source. Unlike the dark fire of the Vault from which the F’dor drew their power, the element within the Lady Cymrian was pure, untouched by the taint of evil.

  And thus, a challenge.

  The flesh between Portia’s legs quivered at the thought. Like the corruption of a child, or the rape of a virgin, certain acts of defilement were profound in their glory, a sensation of destruction of innocence that defied description, surpassing all other acts. The chance to take a source of pure fire and twist it, damage it, pollute it until it, too, served the same mission of Void that all F’dor did was almost too thrilling to contain. She inhaled deeply, trying to do so, and failing utterly.

  I will have you, lady, she thought excitedly. In your very husband’s body, I will have you. I will feed off your passion, your surrender. And when you are open to him, vulnerable in the throes of sickening love, I will take your soul and have your body for my own as well. And right before I do, I will tell you, in his voice, what is happening, so I can pleasure myself with your horror—at least for a moment.

  And as I eat your soul, I will take your fire. But first, I will take your husband.

  Her excitement was reaching a fever pitch. She could leave her next conquest waiting no longer.

  The woman in the dark glen turned slowly around, her eyes glittering in the moonlight

  “I knew you would come after me,” she said softly. “I knew you could not let me go.”

  The breeze picked up around her, caressing her hair. At first there was silence in the glade. Then a voice spoke, not the warm baritone she had come to recognize, but a flat, toneless one that vibrated against her eardrums, inaudible to the wind.

  All of your kind should know the same, Hrarfa. So it has been since the beginning of history, and so it shall remain until each of you is extinguished and buried in ash, like candle-flame.

  Deep within her, Portia felt the words echo.

  Terror, old and consuming, rose up inside her and spread through her like fire on pine. She turned to run, or tried to, but ahead of her, almost as close as her own shadow, the darkness of the glade moved.

  A figure in shadow held up his hand, palm forward.

  Zhvet, it said. Halt.

  All around Portia the wind died suddenly. All sound, all air, seemed to vanish from the glen, leaving her breathless and gasping. Panic swelled and overran her defenses; each of her kind knew this moment, feared it almost from the beginning of Time. She, like many of the escapees of the Vault, had come to disbelieve the possibility of it, especially after the racial pogroms and campaigns against the Dhracians that all but extinguished the hunters from the face of the Earth.

  Yet the time had come, and she was trapped by one that had her name.

  Rath inhaled again, allowing his skin-web to relax, and gave a tug on the first net of wind he had woven from the invisible silk of his kirai. The demon’s body flinched, then shuddered to a frozen stance, he noted with satisfaction.

  Slowly he spread his fingers and began to chant.

  Bien, he canted in the inaudible buzzing voice of his first throat. It was the name of the north wind, the strongest of the four and the most easily found. The wind responded immediately, as it always did for him, wrapping itself snugly around his index finger, anchored in the first chamber of his heart.

  “No,” the woman whispered, rigid in place. Rath could see her eyes darting wildly even from where he stood. “No.”

  He hadn’t expected a F’dor of the Older Pantheon to beg. In his experience, the older, more powerful demons were stoic, furious, but generally silent or threatening rather than supplicant when facing destruction. He remembered her penchant for deception and cleared his mind, returning to his state of inner calm.

  Jahne, he whispered over the aperture of his second throat. This was a call to the south wind, the most constant and enduring of the winds. Rath felt the answer in both his finger and his chest, where the wind had knotted in the second chamber of his heart.

  The woman screamed, not the harsh, atonal scratching of an angry F’dor, but a heartrending wail of human despair that had no impact on Rath whatsoever.

  “Please,” she begged, her eyes growing wide from fear and the pressure that was building up in her skull. “Have—have mercy. I know much that would be—valuable—”

  Rath did not even hear her words. His focus was his entire existence now, and all sound, all fury, faded into the shadowy twilight at the edge of his consciousness, leaving nothing but the pure, ringing tones of the winds responding to his call. Satisfied with the clarity of the first two, he summoned the third wind, the wind of justice, that blew from the west.

  Leuk.

  “I—I know where—others are,” the woman whispered now, the effort of forming words causing the veins in her neck to distend grotesquely. “I—will—tell—you—”

  In the darkness of his ritual, Rath called for the last, the east wind, and waited patiently for the tentative breeze to appear in the glen, hesitantly wrapping itself around his fourth finger, entwining itself in the last chamber of his heart that was now beating erratically with the changeable breezes.

  Thas. The wind of morning, the wind of death.

  Like
strands of spider-silk, the currents of air hung on his fingertips, waiting, tethered through the valves of his heart. Once he cast the second net and began the ending of the Ritual, he would be vulnerable; he could not stop until the body of the host and spirit of the F’dor were dead, even if he desired to, lest his own heart be sundered in his chest.

  Rath opened his eyes and met the terrified gaze of the beast. The woman who had been Hrarfa’s last host had been beautiful in life, with large, dark eyes that gleamed in reflected light. Those eyes brimmed with tears that he almost could believe were tied to actual emotion.

  Almost.

  Rath closed his hand into a fist.

  The woman twitched again, still frozen in place.

  With a fluid motion, he cast the net of tangled winds around the demon, anchored in his palm, cemented in his heart, and pulled with all his might.

  The demon screamed again, this time in a primal voice that scratched Rath’s inner ears like nails on flesh. The lovely face began to contort into something dark and hideous, with black eyes flashing hatred that was palpable. Smoke rose around her as the winds encircled her in an unbreakable cage and began to close in, pressing against her with the force of a cyclone.

  Rath inhaled deeply. The Thrall ritual had reached its climax.

  It was time to cut the net.

  He opened his mouth slightly wider, inhaling the air over all four of his throat openings, each holding a single, unwavering note. With a skill born of uncounted hunts, Rath clicked the glottis in the back of his throat.

  A harsh fifth note sliced through the monotone of the other four.

  The winds screamed discordantly with the beast, tearing through the glade and causing the trees to shiver violently.

  Rath felt the threads of wind attached to his fingers go slack. Quickly he clicked his tongue, tying off the ends of the wind-cage and allowing his first net to dissipate. Then he clenched his thumb to snap the wind-thread taut against the flailing spirit.

  His heart thudded against his chest. Now that the beast was stationary, unable to escape, he began the final chant, the note that would build to a crescendo of such intense sound, aligned with the vibrations of their interlocked heartbeats, that the host body’s blood would reverse in its path and flood the brain until it exploded.

  All the air in the glen was sucked into the vortex of knotted wind swirling around the ancient monster.

  The rictus of fury twisted the woman’s face into a mask of even more hate. She grimaced in agony and tried to scream curses back, but her pupils were beginning to expand almost to the size of her irises, her forehead scored in deep furrows of pain.

  Rath matched the intensity of her gaze. He could hear in the rising sound of imminent death the age-old calls of his Brethren, living and dead, joining him, unlimited by time and space, adding their voices to the chant. For all that the climax of the Thrall ritual left the hunter vulnerable, his heart in synchronicity with the essence of pure evil, there was a comfort in the solidarity of the cause that his race had sworn fealty to thousands of years ago.

  He was too in thrall himself to hear the cracking of the branches under the feet of someone entering the glade.

  45

  The moon gleamed silver on the open fields, lighting a path.

  “Are you all right, Owen?” Ashe called to the elderly chamberlain as they left the horses at the roadway and made their way through the grass at the glade’s edge.

  “Yes, m’lord,” Gerald Owen replied between grunts. “I—still say that the wench is—probably hiding out in the—garrison, servicing the—”

  “Desist.” The Lord Cymrian stopped long enough to examine a beech tree that had sustained a snapped branch, the sap still running fresh from the break. “She did nothing, Owen, nothing save remind me of things beyond my grasp. It was wrong to send her away in such a state; there will be blood enough on my hands in due course. I don’t wish to inaugurate this war with that of an innocent servant.”

  “Her blood’s—on Tristan Steward’s—hands,” replied Owen, struggling to keep up. “He should have taken her—back when we moved to—Highmeadow. She wasn’t—needed—”

  “With any luck, her blood will remain in her veins, if we can find her soon enough,” Ashe said. “Hurry, Owen—I have to return forthwith.”

  “I know, m’lord, I know.” Owen doubled his pace and kept sight of the Lord Cymrian as he traveled through the glen by the metallic gleam of his hair, silvery red in the light of the bloody moon.

  Ashe stopped in his tracks, the dragon in his blood enflamed.

  In the near distance they could hear the sounds of strife, a hissing whine that thudded and scratched against the eardrums like nails. Each man put a hand to his temple as the pressure inside his head began to rise, throbbing in a sudden sharp headache. A vortex of power, ancient and deadly, was sucking all the energy, all the lore, from the air in the vicinity.

  The Lord Cymrian drew his sword, flooding the woods with pulsing blue light, and ran for the glen.

  Rath did not see the shadow that loomed behind him until it had already blotted out the light of the moon pooling in the glen at his feet.

  He was barely aware of the sound of the chanting now. From all corners of the Earth, the voices of the Gaol were whispering in primal melodies, the fricative buzz of the common mind, adding their power to the ancient ritual. The world stopped spinning for a moment, it seemed to him, as it always did when one of the denizens of the Vault was about to be extinguished, leaving behind nothing to taint the earth.

  The beast before him was in its death throes; he could see the devouring darkness of its spirit locked in the struggle to escape the woman’s body it had been inhabiting for years before that body died. Even as it grappled with its looming demise, its hatred was as caustic as acid, hissing and gurgling in fury as it writhed on the ground, blood pouring from eyes locked on him in malicious fury.

  Smoke, acrid and sulfurous as the stench of the Vault, began to issue forth from the demon’s chest. Her eyes bulged as the blood swelled in her brain, her back arched rigidly as the pathways to it burst.

  The air went suddenly dry on the verge of cracking, rent with the heat of evil being violently torn from its earthly connection. The smoke that had emerged from Portia’s sundered chest swirled angrily, then dissipated, as the beast was returned to its vulnerable noncorporeal form, choking and shuddering in the grip of the Dhracian’s net of wind.

  The body fell to the ground, limp and without life.

  Rath felt the woman fall, felt the strangling and twitching in his hand and heart as the invisible threads that bound its heart to his tugged, growing weaker with each breath, like a fish fighting on a line. The beast would continue to struggle for a few moments longer, he knew; being from the Older Pantheon, Hrarfa had a good deal more strength than the demons he had most recently destroyed.

  Each twist, each attempt to sustain itself, caused Rath’s heart to cramp. The unbreakable bonds of wind that tied them together were threaded through his arteries; every tug was like a knife in the chest. But Rath had sustained worse, and oddly, the pain cheered him, did his heart good. Each contraction was weaker than the one before, a sure sign that the spirit would shortly follow the body in death and into oblivion.

  And so he was far too submerged in the thrall of the moment, in the import of the event, in the revel of a thousand years of searching finally coming to fruition to be aware that the glen had been entered.

  Until the blow that caught him in the back with the force of a lance at full charge, snapping half of his ribs, flinging him across the glen and headfirst into a beech tree.

  The shock kept him conscious, at least at first.

  Faron stood still for a moment, watching the man in the robe he had just slapped away crumple to the ground like a pile of cloth.

  There was a smell in this place that had brought him to it, a dry burning of the air that reminded him on an innate level of the father he had lost in the sea. He had
followed that odor to the glen and had come up on a sight he didn’t understand, except that whatever was being wrought was bringing back that loss in his mind.

  A loss he had not been able to fathom, let alone accept.

  The heft of the man was nothing; he had been flung with little more than a glancing blow. Faron looked around the glen, but saw nothing.

  Aid me! Please.

  The voice scratched against his ears; the stone titan slowly shook his head from side to side, recognizing the tenor of it. It was the same desperate wheedle that sometimes could be felt, if not heard, in the air around the Baron of Argaut, the man the world had once known as Michael, the Wind of Death.

  Except that it was decidedly feminine.

  Faron’s mind was too primitive, too malformed by birth, rebirth, and circumstance, to grasp what was happening. Something primal in him warned him to run, some long-ago sense of self-preservation and horror bequeathed to him by his long-dead mother, yet at the same time there was also something familiar, something entrancing about the voice that also rang in the core of his being.

  Please—shelter me. I am dying.

  Faron turned to leave the glen.

  Please. The voice was fading, though its tone was more desperate. We are kin, you and I—there is dark fire in you. You and I are kin. I will nurture you, teach you. Don’t let me die—please. Shelter me; take me on.

  Faron stopped. For all that the words were frantic, there was a truth in them that could not be denied. The concept of kin was one he had long since abandoned, but now, the possibility of belonging, of being related, connected, of not being alone in the world, made him hesitate, like a child longing to touch the fire that he knew could burn him.