Assassin's End

by D. K. Holmberg

  Carth flashed me a predatory smile. “First the crystal. That must be safe. Then we will focus on the next step in this game.”

  “This is a game?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it always, Galen of Elaeavn?”

  “What kind of game?”

  “The kind where the remaining moves have become limited. The kind where we must move quickly, and decisively. The kind where we must position pieces of strength in such a way that the Hjan and Venass have only one choice to make.”

  “What choice is that?” I asked, worried what she would tell me.

  “The choice to attack.”

  “She intends to use Elaeavn in whatever she plans,” Cael said.

  “We don’t know that she does,” I said.

  Cael closed her eyes. “If only I could Read her, I would be able to answer that with confidence and certainty. What is it that protects her?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know with Carth. She’s always been more skilled than me. From the moment I met her when Orly hired me to capture her,” I said, laughing at the idea. Now it seemed funny to think of actually managing to capture Carth. As skilled as I might be, and I would never underestimate the fact that I had skills that many did not, she had never really been threatened by me.

  “She doesn’t have abilities of the Great Watcher,” Carth said.

  “Neither do the Hjan, from what I’ve seen, and they’re still pretty powerful. I don’t know anything about her, other than the fact that she has always been dangerously competent and that I have always been a step or more behind whatever she planned.”

  “And her desire to bring down the Hjan?”

  I let out a breath. “Cael, I don’t know anything about the Hjan. I faced them once before, and that was with Carth helping.” I didn’t tell her that I’d faced them to save Talia. I didn’t need to. “They can Slide, but they can do more than that. They seem like they have abilities of the Great Watcher, but I don’t think they’re from Elaeavn.” Not when some of them had dark eyes, though some had green, though green that was washed out, making it unlikely that they were strongly gifted. “All I know is that there are other powers in the world beyond what we’ve been given. And Carth possesses a different ability, one that makes her dangerous to us.”

  “Not to us.”

  “No. Not to us. To others, though. The Hjan and perhaps others like them.”

  “Which is why I fear that she intends to use Elaeavn. There was an attack once already. From what I can tell, they barely managed to hold it off. My Father didn’t speak of it, mostly because I think it scared him, but if they were able to destroy part of the city with a minor attack, what happens if they bring others? What if all of Hjan attacks?”

  I shared the same concern. If she brought the Hjan to Elaeavn again, then what would be there to stop them? I’d seen Lorst fight and thought that he might be able to counter some of what the Hjan could do, but there was only one of him. I might be able to keep myself safe, but I had barely survived when facing one of the Hjan individually. If I happened to face them again, and this time with more force…

  “That’s why we need to find the crystal,” I said. “Carth claims it’s here, and that the exiles have it.”

  “Even she didn’t know where to find it.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Then how will we?” Cael asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m an assassin.”

  “Were.”

  I smiled. “I was an assassin. I know how to move in the night and how to be silent. I think it’s time to go looking for answers. Besides, now I have a special weapon I’ve never had before.” The same weapon I suspected Carth wanted to use.

  Cael frowned, and I detected her Reading me. I was more and more aware of it these days, as if I was becoming attuned to it. It was the same way that my hearing seemed slightly sharper. There was a part of me that wondered if it was tied to being around the crystal, but then, I had never held the crystal, not the way that Cael had or the way that Lorst described it.

  “Are you going to tell me?” she asked.

  “Do I need to?”

  She nodded. “This time you do.”

  I touched her hand and smiled. “You.”

  27

  The rooftops of Asador weren’t all that close together, forcing me to jump greater distances than I would normally be comfortable doing. Cael managed to jump along with me, not bothered by either the height or the distance, not as I would have expected for someone unfamiliar with them.

  The city itself carried with it different sounds as well. The birds sounded different, less of a chirping and more of an occasional cawing of the gulls. There was a murmuring sort of din, one that came from the people in the city, the voices that layered atop each other, one over another, mixing with music from the taverns and the occasional shouts, all of it creating the particular feeling of Asador. Eban was much the same, only the feeling of the city was different. Other cities I’d been to had a different vibrancy to them as well, each unique in that way.

  “Where are we starting?” Cael asked.

  “We listen,” I said.

  “This is what you did?”

  I shrugged. “You can learn a lot simply standing above the city and listening to the sounds of it. You get a sense where the happier sounds are, and where there’s more violence. After a while, you come to know where to focus your attention, or you have informants who give you the information you need.”

  “Like Orly?”

  “Orly gave assignments. Sometimes they came with information, but not always. Most of the time, I didn’t trust what he told me anyway. I needed to confirm the reason for my targets.”

  “You’ve never been a conventional assassin, have you?”

  “That’s why he hired me.”

  “I thought he hired you because you were good.”

  “I was good, but not everyone deserves to die,” I said. “Not all the assignments are for the right reason. I was willing to listen, to learn which I should take and which I should ignore. And then there were the others, those I had to help.”

  “How can I help?”

  “You can listen.”

  “Listen. That’s it?”

  “You can Read if that helps, but I’m focusing now on the sounds of the city, and then we’ll start looking elsewhere. If we can find enough that sounds off, I can follow that lead, and that will take me to another, and from there another.”

  “It will take a long time.”

  “This is never quick work. It’s the kind where you have to be patient and know that you’ll eventually find the answers if you can be patient long enough.”

  We fell silent, and I listened to the sounds of the city. There was a cacophony of noise, but within it, there were features that I could pick out, things that were clear to me and patterns that I recognized. Some of the taverns I’d visited throughout the years had a specific energy to them, and I knew that with those places, even more information would be learned, especially with Cael along with me.

  I motioned to her, and we jumped down from the roofs and started through the street holding hands. With my free hand, I worked on readying darts. Since finding Carth again, I had a renewed supply, and the city had plenty of herbalists able to supply me with coxberry.

  “Where are you leading us?” she asked.

  “There’s a place up here,” I said, pointing to a tavern where I’d heard the most likely connection. I wasn’t entirely certain how I knew that was the place to go, other than the fact that the rhythm I detected from above seemed a little less focused here.

  When we reached the door, and I pulled it open, I knew this was the right kind of place.

  Cael frowned at me. “How did you know?”

  “A feeling.”

  “Was it something you saw?”

  I shook my head. Sight had nothing to do with this. Training with Isander had taught me to be attuned to this sort of thing, so when I heard the way the tavern sounded, and
the way the city felt around it, I knew I was in the right place.

  “Interesting skill you have.”

  I shrugged. “It’s something all assassins can learn.”

  She smiled. “Not all, I don’t think.”

  We entered the tavern and found a table near the wall. Cael knew how I preferred having my back covered and a place where I could watch everything around me and had chosen a spot that met everything I preferred.

  We took a seat, and I looked around, studying it for the first time. The tavern was busy, tables bunched together, with men and women crammed into chairs, and some even standing. Servers made their way through the tavern, none with the painted faces I had grown so accustomed to seeing while in Eban. Thankfully, no prostitutes here. Bawdy music played from the back, though I couldn’t hear the singer over the sound of the crowd. The dirt floor turned to mud in places where drinks were spilled.

  Those within the tavern had a particular appearance to them as well. Some had the look of fishermen, with the thick arms and the suntanned faces. I didn’t need to smell them to know that they likely had come in off some ship. Others shared the same deep coloring, but they were thinner. Merchants, I supposed. Most of the merchants I knew were one of two types: either thin and weak or fat and slow. There were others, but they were rare.

  The food in the tavern had a decent aroma, carrying the savory scents of pork or roasted vegetables or fish. Even the bread smelled well baked.

  In spite of appearances, this was a nice tavern, the kind of place I would frequent if I weren’t searching for business—or information.

  “Can you Read anything?” I asked when Cael got situated and looked around.

  “I’m not sure what you’d have me do. I don’t think I can Read everyone in here. That’s too much even for me.”

  I didn’t really know the limitations to her abilities. From what I’d seen, there really weren’t any.

  I searched the tavern as well using my Sight. With it, I could make out subtle changes in expressions and noted the eye color of everyone here. Most were blue or brown, but there was some gray, and one older man with a hint of…

  “Him,” I said, nodding toward the man. He sat across from a younger woman, though she had bright blue eyes and wore a high-necked dress, one that would have been out of place in Eban. Hell, it was out of place in Asador. Something like that was more suited to Elaeavn.

  I thought of what I’d seen from others with great power, men like Brusus who turned out to be more than I had realized. His weak ability was merely a show, nothing real about it. Could this man and his faint green eyes be the same?

  “Be careful,” I cautioned.

  She smiled. “I think I know how to use my abilities.”

  Cael watched me, but I could tell her focus was elsewhere. She turned it toward the man, and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She blinked, and I knew that whatever she had done had finished.

  “He is of Elaeavn.”

  “Not Elvraeth?”

  She shook her head. “I would have recognized him were that the case.”

  “What was his crime?” I asked. He was either exiled like me, or he had left by choice. With eyes as pale as he possessed, it was unlikely that he would have left by choice. He wouldn’t have any advantage outside the city like that.

  “Galen—”

  “What did he do?” I asked again.

  She shook her head. “A minor offense, I think. Something when he was younger. Without digging deeper into his mind, I can’t tell.”

  Minor. The minor offenses were supposed to be sentences to the mines, the place where I had gone when they claimed they were offering me a gentler sentence, keeping from sentencing me to death. Ilphaesn was bad enough, but to most within Elaeavn, it was a better fate than exile. At least with serving in the mines, there was hope for return to the city. With exile, there was no return.

  Cael waved to the server. When the woman came over, Cael flashed a warm smile, and I could feel that she did something, though I didn’t know exactly what it was that she did. “Do you think we could talk to Dolan?” she asked.

  The woman glanced at the man sitting near our table. Discovering names like that was one advantage of Cael’s ability, though in reality she had many advantages.

  “Dolan don’t speak to many people,” the serving girl said.

  “Ah, well, I suspect he’d speak to us.”

  The girl shook her head, and I could tell that whatever Cael attempted to do to her, the way that she intended to convince her to help, wasn’t working quite as well as Cael had expected. I didn’t know if that meant the woman was somehow immune to it, or whether it was that Cael didn’t use the full force of her ability.

  “You see, Dolan pays for a certain level of privacy,” the girl said.

  “He’s sitting right there,” I said. “I think he’d see me.”

  I figured I could add to whatever Cael was doing, though didn’t know if that was true. Without having some sort of two-way communication with Cael, I wouldn’t be able to really understand.

  “And just who do you think you are?”

  “Galen of Eban,” I said.

  The girl blinked and glanced from me to Cael. She crossed her arms over her chest and shrugged. “I can see what he says. The rest is up to you.”

  When she left us, I frowned at Cael. “That seems like an awful lot of protection for a man who had only suffered a minor offense to the Elvraeth.”

  Cael watched as the serving girl leaned close to Dolan. The man flicked his gaze toward me, and there was an intensity to it that I’d seen before, but rarely from men of Elaeavn. It was the deadly confident sort of gaze that I suspected I possessed as well.

  Dolan stood, and two others stood with him. One was a wide man, but not very tall. He had a rough face and appeared to have had his nose broken several times, and had multiple scars on his cheeks and forehead. Nothing like I’d seen on the Hjan. These were more like the kind of scars a man who had seen fighting before carried. They were the kind of scars I suspected I would have acquired had I remained an assassin much longer.

  The other was a gray-eyed woman with short, spiked black hair. She was small, and in some ways reminded me of Carth, especially with the way she walked. It was a gait that oozed confidence, a sort of swagger to it, but one that told me she feared nothing. A curved sword hung from her waist.

  “Watch the woman,” Cael warned.

  I smiled. “Are you actually asking me to keep an eye on another woman?”

  “She’s dangerous, Galen,” Cael said in a whisper. “I don’t know why, but I can sense that she is.”

  I stood and slipped a handful of darts as I did. “I don’t need to sense that to know she’s dangerous. I’ve seen her type before.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Sword masters.”

  She didn’t have the appearance of someone from Neeland, but she carried herself in much the same way as the Neelish sellswords. It was so much like Carth that I had to think they had trained in the same place.

  “You must be Galen of Eban,” Dolan said as he approached our table. He glanced at Cael and seemed to dismiss her.

  Good. In some ways, with her ability to Compel, she was the more dangerous of the two of us.

  “It seems to me you would be more like Galen of Elaeavn,” Dolan said.

  It was so much like what Carth said that it couldn’t be coincidence.

  “I haven’t been of Elaeavn for many years,” I said.

  “Rumor says you’re not of Eban any longer, either.”

  I tipped my head. “Is that right? Has rumor spread of me already?”

  Dolan smiled. To some, it would likely be taken as a disarming smile. One that was intended to be reassuring. I’d seen men like him far too often to be reassured by it.

  “You know how rumors can spread,” Dolan said. He leaned toward me, and the woman stayed close to him. He smelled of sweat and dirt, but I noted a sweeter aroma from h
er that mixed with something almost like fire and heat. It was a strange combination that also reminded me of Carth. If I had any doubts that they somehow knew each other, that answered it. “Why have you called me over here, Galen? If you’ve left Eban as rumors claim, you’ve done so for a reason.”

  His gaze settled on Cael and I squeezed the darts a little tighter in my fist. I didn’t want to kill him—or even be forced to fight him if I could avoid it—but I would do whatever it took to protect Cael.

  “I left for my reasons,” I said.

  “Do you intend to establish yourself in Asador? You might find a different level of competition for your services here.”

  “I’ll do whatever I need,” I said to Dolan, but I looked at the woman. She wore a hint of a smile. “But that’s not why I asked to speak to you. There was a woman in the city I think you might have a connection to.” He arched his brow. “A woman by the name of Rebecca. Elvraeth born,” I added, watching his response. Which side had he been on?

  With my Sight, I could make out even the subtlest hint of a response. I expected to note the corners of his eyes twitching, or maybe the pulse in his neck pounding a little harder and faster, or even a hint of sweat beading along his temple. I’d seen those before when trying to draw out information. Dolan was either more skilled at concealing his reaction—which I suspected was possible, given the company he kept—or he didn’t know her.

  “Why would I know her?” Dolan asked.

  I shrugged. “Because you share something in common.”

  “What is that?”

  “You’re both Forgotten.”

  He reacted to this more than he reacted to word of Rebecca. His brow furrowed, but only slightly. His pulse quickened, enough that I could see it pounding in his neck.

  The woman next to him tensed, though she stayed still. I prepared for the possibility of attack.

  “I don’t think you should be the one talking about those who are Forgotten,” Dolan said.

  I resisted the urge to glance over at Cael. Doing so might look to him like a sign of weakness, and I’d learned that you couldn’t display weakness around men like him. “I don’t have any trouble admitting that I’m Forgotten, though it seems there is a little more organization to the Forgotten then I’d ever known.” I watched him, then shifted my attention to the woman. “You know something about that, don’t you, Dolan?”