“There are too many Cirisians here,” Mercy shouts over the din of clashing steel. “You should find somewhere safe to go until the fighting’s over. Let me handle Firesse and the others.”
Dayna shakes her head, sucking in deep breaths. “I’m not leaving without you, Bareea. Never again.”
“We swore to fight alongside you,” Matthias says as he moves to Mercy’s side, swiping at the blood pouring from a cut over his eye. “Did you see Firesse?”
She nods, her pulse thrumming in her ears, and pulls them into a nearby alley for a momentary reprieve from the fighting. Mother Illynor is drawing nearer—will soon spot them. She peers out and catches another glimpse of Ketojan’s white hair amidst the chaos. Half of it is plastered to his head, matted with shiny blood. “I’m going to kill her. I need you to get to the warehouse and help Ketojan and Hero protect the people inside. If it becomes too much—if you can’t keep fighting—run. Don’t risk going inside the warehouse—you could get sick.”
“And leave you to kill Firesse on your own?” Matthias hisses. “Are you insane?”
“I’m the only one who has a chance of making it past the Daughters. Besides, Ino and Cassia will be right there beside me, watching my back,” she lies. Out of the way—she needs them out of the clearing, out of the fight, far from the stink of death hanging over the slums. The only way they’ll do that—the only way they’ll let her save their lives—is if they think they’re helping her. “Illynor is Qadari. If you see her coming, you run. Do you understand? You take Hero and Ketojan and you run as fast as you can. Take cover at the tailor’s shop, and we’ll meet you there. Promise me.”
Matthias nods, blinking through the blood dripping down the side of his face. Dayna reaches a trembling hand for Mercy, but she steps out of the alley before her mother can touch her. “We don’t have much time. The End is already lost.”
Before her mother can protest, Mercy draws her daggers and plunges into the clearing. She dodges slashing swords and strikes at any outstretched, plague-infected limbs in her path as she creeps along the houses lining the clearing, keeping well away from Mother Illynor and her deadly blades. She’s not stupid or arrogant enough to engage her in battle. She just sends a prayer up to the Creator that the headmistress stays far away from her family. Halfway to Firesse, one of the Daughters runs past her, her slender rapier flashing, but the woman does not so much as glance at Mercy as she races after a fleeing guard. As she had been for so much of her childhood, Mercy is all but invisible to the Assassin—and, for the first time, she’s grateful for it.
Her pace slows as she makes her way along the edge of the clearing, fatigue settling deep into her bones. She feels like she could curl up and sleep for a month. Beneath her black-and-silver armor—that beautiful, wonderful, perfect gift from Tamriel—her skin is slick with sweat. The wound in her shoulder pulses with heat. She wonders if she has ripped the stitches.
When she spots Firesse’s flame-red hair through a gap between the groups of fighting soldiers, Mercy backs into the shadow between a house and a rundown shop and scans the nearby rooftops for Ino and Cassia. They’re nowhere in sight—still fighting their way along the side streets. Mercy sucks in a deep breath, pushing past the pain and exhaustion in her limbs, and scans the clearing. The few Daughters who had accompanied Illynor and Firesse are scattered about the clearing, slaughtering soldiers and guards left and right. The rest of the Assassins must be fighting their way toward the castle. She prays Tamriel and Ghyslain made it to the carriage in time.
She takes another breath—and bolts.
The second another gap opens between the bodies, Mercy darts through it, her eyes trained on Firesse. The First’s back is turned, her attention on Mother Illynor and the Daughters. Now. Now. Mercy tightens her grip on her double-edged dagger and levels the blade at Firesse’s head, pushing herself faster until her muscles scream and her vision narrows to nothing but the young First. The Assassin within her sings with perverse delight as the distance between them rapidly diminishes. Kill the magic wielder, kill the magic.
By the Creator, she hopes Niamh is right.
When there are no more than a few yards between them, Firesse turns. Her brows flick up in surprise and she jumps out of the whistling arc of Mercy’s blade. “I was wondering when you’d show up,” she croons as Mercy twists, using her momentum to roll and spring to her feet behind the First. Firesse whirls, smirking. She does not pull the sword sheathed at her hip.
She doesn’t need to.
She murmurs a single guttural word in ancient Cirisian, and Mercy’s blood boils.
A scream of pain wrenches free from her throat as flames dance under her skin, ragged and raw from breathing so much smoke and blood and ash. Her armor merely traps in the heat; her flesh is being cooked from the inside out, her blood boiling and hissing, her eyes burning every time she blinks. Her heart stutters, on the verge of failing completely.
Then Firesse repeats the incantation, and the flames disappear.
The sudden relief sends Mercy to her knees. She sucks in air as she fights to see past the black spots clouding her vision. Firesse kneels beside her. “The tough Assassin can’t handle a little fever?”
Mercy growls and pushes to her feet, her hands shaking as she lifts the dagger. Firesse rises, too. “It was a valiant effort,” she says as she draws her sword and easily knocks Mercy’s swing aside. It glances off the First’s armor, barely leaving a mark in the leather. “Giving yourself up to kill me, I mean. A valiant effort, but a foolish one.”
A tremor shudders through Mercy—but not from an incantation. No, her body is betraying her. Her arms shake as she slashes again at Firesse—and again, fails to draw a single drop of blood.
“You can feel the corruption, can’t you?” Firesse asks. She doesn’t bother to go on the offensive. She’s letting Mercy tire herself out. “You can feel the plague killing you.”
“I’m immune,” she snarls through gritted teeth, but her mind betrays her, calling back the memory of the sick elf’s foul blood pouring over her hands in the house on the opposite end of the clearing, the brush of his blister-covered palm against her cheek, the hammering of her heart against her ribcage as she had felt—felt—the plague seep into her. She’d cut off his head not five seconds later, but that brief contact had been enough. She is not immune. She is going to die like that guard they’d encountered on the way here. The plague had ravaged that woman’s body in fifteen minutes. How much longer does Mercy have? Five minutes—ten?
“For a while, you were, but I made the disease more potent to weaken your prince’s people and ensure a victory for my own. We aren’t soldiers, after all. We need every advantage we could find.”
When Firesse knocks aside yet another clumsy attack, Mercy leaps back and scans the rooftops again for Ino and Cassia. Her sister is nowhere to be seen, but just as she turns her head, she spots Ino scrambling across a nearby rooftop with a Cirisian shortbow in hand. Firesse follows her gaze as Ino nocks an arrow. “An ally?” the First asks. “He doesn’t know you’re infected, does he? That you offered to come kill me because you knew you were going to die anyway?”
As Firesse turns, an arrow punches through the armor covering her left arm, leather splitting from the force of the shot. Firesse grimaces, and Mercy watches through the spots clouding her vision as the First snaps the shaft of the arrow in two and rips it out of her arm. Not a single drop of blood falls.
“How is that possible?” Mercy breathes. She falls back a step, and the movement sends another tremor through her body, a jolt of pain through her brain. The plague—this is what Alyss had endured for days, how Pilar had suffered until she had finally succumbed. Her knees tremble, and it’s all she can do to keep standing.
“Anything is possible with the powers of an Old God,” Firesse responds, dropping the pieces of the arrow onto the blood-slick road. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have an appointment with the king. I’ll send him your regards.”
&n
bsp; The strength finally leaves Mercy’s body. Her dagger slips out of her grasp as she slumps to the ground, her face pressed into the dirty, grimy, bloody cobblestones. Distantly, she can hear Ino’s cry of alarm as Firesse picks up Mercy’s double-edged dagger and steps over her body. Her breaths come out as dry, ragged gasps. They slow, and slow, and slow . . . until a thick, heavy blackness comes and sweeps her away.
43
Tamriel
The throne room is the site of a massacre.
Shortly after Calum and the Daughters had unleashed themselves upon Tamriel, Ghyslain, and the guards, a loud banging had echoed through the room, followed by the groaning and splintering of the doors leading to the great hall. The remaining Cirisians had burst through using a heavy marble pedestal as a battering ram. Watching them pour through the broken doors, blades and bows drawn, Tamriel’s heart had leapt into his throat. It had nearly stopped entirely when the sick elves they’d seen outside the castle gates had come tumbling into the room, including the undead corpses of the guards who had been manning the gate. The Cirisians must have let them in before running to the Daughters’ aid.
Calum—Drake—had come for him first, a dark, savage hunger glittering in his eyes. It was still hard to reconcile the fact that the man standing before him, trying to kill him, was not his cousin—that Firesse had somehow given Drake his son’s skin to wear as an actor dons a costume in a play. Drake had come charging at him, his sword held aloft, with that snarling Assassin—Faye, he’d called her—at his side. With Nynev and Niamh’s help, they had been able to avoid those slashing blades long enough to get in a few strikes of their own, but nowhere near a killing blow.
Now, Master Adan lets out a cry as he leaps in front of Ghyslain, lifting his sword to meet a Daughter’s blade as it arcs toward the king. The Daughter immediately drops low and pulls a knife from her boot. She sticks it into Adan’s thigh as she scrambles up and gracefully jumps to her feet. Adan shouts something he cannot hear over the sounds of fighting to the king, and Ghyslain nods.
“Tam!” Nynev yells. He whirls around and lifts his sword in time to see an arrow pierce the neck of a sick elf not three feet from him. The man claws at his throat as he falls, a bright trail of blood spilling over his lower lip.
“Thanks!” Tamriel whirls around and parries a blow from a snarling Cirisian, the impact of their clashing swords reverberating up his entire arm.
“How about you watch your own ass so I don’t have to be the one to tell Mercy how you got yourself skewered?” she tosses back. The huntress lunges forward, her hunting knives whistling as they arc through the air and nick Drake’s armor. “Something funny, demon?”
He points at something behind them. Niamh turns and sucks in a breath. “Firesse.”
The First is striding through the broken doors of the throne room, Mother Illynor and the remainder of the Daughters trailing behind them. Every one of them is soaked in blood, and their boots leave wet, dark footprints on the gray stone floor. Firesse pauses and surveys the chaos. When she meets Tamriel’s gaze, a triumphant grin spreads across her lips. Everything in the room fades away at the knowing expression on her face, the slight arch of one brow, and Tamriel’s grip on his sword slackens with shock.
The double-edged dagger in her hand can mean only one thing:
Mercy is dead.
For a moment, the world stops spinning.
An inhuman roar fills the throne room, echoing off the stone walls, drowning out the sounds of swords clashing and people dying, and it’s not until the tip of an elf’s blade flies out and nearly hits him that Tamriel realizes he had begun moving. He charges at her. His blood is pounding so loudly in his ears that he almost doesn’t hear when the Cirisian sisters shout his name and scramble to keep up through the throngs of soldiers, sick elves, and undead creatures.
Someone snags his arm and yanks him back. Tamriel’s feet slip on the blood-soaked floor and he jerks to a stop, instinctively lifting his sword to break free of whomever had taken hold of him. When he looks up, however, it’s into Master Adan’s grim face. “Get ahold of yourself, boy,” he snarls. “Do you not see you’re running to your death?”
“She— She killed—” He chokes on the words.
“I know,” Adan murmurs, his voice soft and placating. “I can’t let her get you, too.” He nods to the king, who is locked in combat with a Daughter and a sick elf, Niamh beside him. Niamh takes the brunt of the Daughter’s lightning-quick attacks, grimacing with pain when the woman’s blade nicks her skin. No blood falls from her wounds, but Tamriel can tell by the gashes in her clothes that she’s been struck several times—and that she can feel the sting of every single one. A few yards away, Nynev has gone on the offense with Drake, slashing out with her blades so quickly Drake is forced to yield step after step away from Tamriel and the king. His hate-filled eyes keep flicking to Tamriel, and his distraction earns him a deep gash in the cheek from one of Nynev’s knives. “Through the doors off the dais,” Adan says so only Tamriel can hear. “Stick to the smaller halls and get downstairs. Try to get out through the servants’ entrance and make a break for the gates. If you find yourself trapped, barricade yourself in your mother’s tomb until my men or I come find you.”
“But Firesse—”
“We’ll do everything we can to stop her. The most important element is getting you and your father to safety so my men can stop worrying about you and start focusing completely on the battle. Got it?”
Tamriel nods numbly. Adan releases his arm and roughly shoves him forward—through the slender gap Nynev and Niamh created. He runs for the dais, dodging swords and spraying blood, and his father trails after him a moment later. They scramble up the steps of the dais and bolt for the unaccented door set into the wall, almost out of sight. He rips it open—then slams it shut.
“What—” his father begins, breathing hard.
“Assassins.” They’d been halfway down the hall, running toward them with predatory grins. Firesse has set guards on every exit. They’re trapped—utterly, completely trapped.
Across the room, Firesse has begun stalking toward the throne, wading through the sea of bodies and blood as if she were ambling through a meadow. She is holding Mercy’s precious double-edged dagger in one hand, but she does not bother to use it; Mother Illynor and her Assassins do all the fighting for her. They’re spread out around her, cutting their way through the guards and soldiers. When she passes under the light of a chandelier, Tamriel notices that her sun-tanned skin has grown sallow, that inky shadows hang under her eyes, that what little he can see of her hair through the blood lacks its usual luster, and a tiny bud of hope blooms in his chest. She’s weakening. Expending so much magic is costing her. She may not be able to hold up for much longer.
“We need to go after Firesse,” he hisses to his father. “We need—”
“Trying to flee, Your Highness? How very cowardly of you.” Tamriel shoves his father behind him when Drake bursts through the sea of soldiers and leaps up the steps of the dais, his sword dripping blood. His eyes flick to Ghyslain. “Well, you are your father’s son, after all.” His arrogant expression does not waver when he launches himself at Tamriel, his blade ringing when Tamriel’s knocks it aside.
Drake attacks him again and again, the strikes coming so fast Tamriel barely has time to lift his blade to block before Drake swings the other dagger toward his face, his stomach, his neck. Tamriel’s arms begin to shake with the effort of matching the strength and speed of his cousin’s blows. They’d trained together all their lives, but Calum had always had a natural talent for swordplay. Every time they’d dueled, he’d been two steps ahead.
The door behind him swings open, and his concentration break when he hears his father’s sword meet the Assassins’ blades. Drake feints right, lunges left, and swings his sword straight at Tamriel’s head. The flat of the blade connects with his skull hard enough to make Tamriel’s ears ring. He staggers back, blinking hard against the spots blooming
and bursting in his vision. The move should have killed him. Had Drake turned his blade just a fraction, his head would have been cut clean off. Drake is toying with him; it would have been too clean, too quick a death for what he has planned.
Tamriel presses his free hand to the side of his head, and his fingers come away slick with blood. “If only you could hear your cousin right now,” that monster wearing Calum’s skin purrs, lowering his weapons. He grins as Tamriel takes a step forward, lifting his sword, and the room sways. “If only you could hear his screams, the way he pleads for me to spare you.”
Behind him, Ghyslain lets out a grunt of pain. Where the hell are Niamh and Nynev?
Just then, an arrow flies through the air inches from Drake’s nose and shatters one of the glass panes behind the throne. A heartbeat later, two more thud into flesh, and Tamriel whirls around—causing spots of blackness to appear in his vision—to see the Daughters his father had been fighting slump to the ground.
“Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you?” Tamriel says with a shaky laugh as Nynev and her sister hurtle toward the dais. Faye follows close on their heels, bleeding from her nose and a long gash in the leather armor on her arm.
“I prefer to think of it as a dramatic entrance,” the huntress quips as she steps between him and Drake. She throws her bow and empty quiver aside and unsheathes her hunting knives. Before the steps, Niamh turns on Faye, keeping her busy and away from him and his father.
Born Assassin Saga Box Set Page 110