Vayle stared at me like a woman whose vision had retreated away from reality and was stuck in an endless loop inside her mind.
Finally, in a tattered voice, she said, “We should hide here.” She cleared her wet throat and added, “In the roughage. There’s enough to cover us. They won’t look here, I don’t think. Stay for a few hours, yes? Wait until the guards scatter a bit?”
Her breath rasped from her gaped mouth, and she sniffled. Was it something I said? She’d seemed fine moments ago. Hmm. I wondered. Her sudden change in temperament reminded me of a pane of glass I had once touched. It appeared pristine, structurally perfect. But the subtle graze of my finger shattered it into thousands of minuscule fragments. I learned that happens when a tiny, seemingly insignificant crack lurks beneath the surface. It only takes one meager prod to fracture the whole pane.
I’d seen Vayle like this only once before, after she revealed why she joined my side, those fifteen years ago. But I had no time to console her this time. Not now. There were angry men shouting and swords clanking together.
We were being hunted.
Vayle and I shuffled into an empty stall where all the excess roughage was stored. I covered her first and then myself. Her knee trembled against mine. Slowly at first, but as time wore on, it battered against my leg like shutters against a window.
A dank and musty air entrapped us within the roughage. It was wet to breathe in and lay thick in your lungs. Neither of us dared cough — there were too many steel boots stamping across the stables and patrolling the parapet behind us. After a while, the guardsmen complained we were likely out of the kingdom by now, halfway to the Hole.
The cavalcade of soldiers passing through grew more distant and predictable. I felt at ease enough to talk for the first time in several hours.
“Are you awake?” I asked Vayle.
She sniffled. “Of course I am.”
“Not many things worry me on a personal level,” I said. “But seeing my commander lose her composure will do it.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.” She sounded like she was smiling out of embarrassment as she spoke.
“I’ve heard you’re an excellent liar when it benefits your cause.”
“Aren’t all the Rots?”
I grinned. “It’s one of the qualities I look for. But no one lies to me, least of all the greatest friend I have. So tell me what happened. What unhinged you?”
A long stillness was interrupted by a rustling in the roughage next to me. “I don’t like to think,” Vayle said. “My thoughts unravel and lead to places that are not kind. Places that make me feel things I do not want to feel. Fear and loathing. Restlessness. Panic. All of these emotions… I feel them in my chest. I feel them crushing my ribs, squashing my heart into my throat. I can’t escape them — I could never escape them — unless I have a skin of wine in my hand. The sips, they chase away those dreadful monsters. They tidy up my thoughts, make the feelings go away. Far, far away, where they don’t bother me anymore.”
She paused for a while, and then added, “I’m all out of wine.”
“I can find you wine,” I said. “This kingdom overflows with barrels of the stuff. I imagine it’s the only way they can keep their people from fleeing to warmer pastures.”
“The conjurers,” Vayle said, ignoring my offer, “I hate them. My very purpose for not killing myself after escaping slavery and servitude was to dole out justice. I wanted to bring an end to as many of those who deserved it as possible. The conjurers are the epitome of injustice. They come to a land that doesn’t belong to them and attempt to reap its riches while exterminating its people. If they win this war, Astul…”
“They won’t win,” I said. “Now let’s go find some wine and force Dercy Daniser into our debt.”
The law of stealth says that your chance of succeeding is inversely proportional to the number of steps you take and to the number of eyes you must slip past. Only the Black Rot knew of the law’s existence, mostly because I was the one who penned it.
If the law was true, the chances of Vayle and me succeeding in busting Dercy free were approximately — not quite, mind you — somewhere around… zero percent.
First was the not-so-small matter of getting into the keep. Vayle and I had crept out of the roughage at nightfall and discovered Edenvaile had more guardsmen than either of us remembered.
They posted up in pairs along the cobblestone streets of the market square, with no more than twenty feet separating each group. From what we could see of the keep — which was very little — it was much the same. More torches than usual illuminated the walkways, so drifting into the darkness as two shadows wasn’t in the plans.
The only refuge from the armored presence was where Vayle and I were currently trapped: the stables. It made sense. The only way out of the stables was toward the gate or the market square, both heavily guarded and patrolled.
“This is problematic,” I said.
Vayle’s teeth chattered in sync with her shivering hands. Withdrawal was taking its toll.
“We need a distraction,” she said.
“Shall I strip and streak through the market square while singing love poems? That would serve well as a distraction.”
Vayle sported a grin that quickly disappeared. “Fire would be a more promising one.” She licked her lips: a tic of hers when she was deep in thought. She shuffled through the snow, toward a horse. “Help me untie them.”
I lifted my chin slowly as her plan became clear. Smart woman, that one.
I slid into a tie stall, where the horse who sniffed my arse was stationed. After undoing a rope with three knots in it that secured him to the feeder, I patted his long face. “No hard feelings on the mix-up earlier, yeah? You know how it is.”
The steed blinked.
Vayle and I worked with haste to free the remaining horses from their rope. Thankfully, all of them remained in the stalls, none the wiser. One even lay down.
I met Vayle in an empty square stall piled high with excess roughage. She was kneeling, two daggers in hand. Affixed to the foundation of their leather grips was a charcoal-gray distention. This distention was present on the daggers of every Black Rot. It was a tool of survival: flint.
She held one dagger firmly on the roughage and struck the flint with the other. Flecked sparks licked the air and fizzled out. She struck the flint again and again, faster and faster. Sparks spat from the blade and settled onto the roughage, smothered into nothingness by the cold and snow. But it only takes that one special spark to conflagrate that one special piece of tinder, and then… well, you’ve got yourself a pretty little campfire.
With a few more strikes of the flint, a long stem of roughage sizzled and smoked. Vayle carefully cleared away the damp coating of snow that lay near it and protected it with her hands as the insignificant flame burbled in the wind. It slowly engorged the entire stem and began trailing along the top layer of the roughage.
Vayle backed away and proudly watched her creation grow into a hot fire that sent white smoke billowing into the black sky.
One of the horses picked her head up. Her ears were high and forward, but all the weight was on her back legs. She snorted a deep vibrating pitch and waddled backward unevenly, her haunches crashing against the stall. She pinned her ears back now. She snorted again and spun around, knocking against the stall. And then she galloped away furiously, tail tucked behind her butt.
The other horses took note of this and the growing fire and thought they too would bail out while they had the chance. There were suddenly fifteen horses galloping freely and wildly inside the Edenvaile walls. There would have been more — potentially a good hundred more, on account of the wedding visitors — but they were likely stowed away in the stables of nearby villages. Can’t have the kingdom smelling like horseshit on the cusp of a wedding.
A guardsman hollered from across the market square. “What in the bloody hell are these horses doing?”
“There’s another
!”
“Three more,” a third guardsman put in.
“I’m gonna slice the fuckin’ skin off that stable boy’s ass. Get these damn beasts wrangled up.”
“Sir, there’s smoke! By the stables.”
“Fuck’s sake.”
Vayle and I slipped into a narrow alleyway that cut between a curtain of small stone buildings, the front of which faced the market square. It smelled like rotten fruit had been shat upon by bats with rotting guts. I gagged a few times before pulling my undershirt up above my nose and breathing in the sweet smell of sweat. You have to take what you can get in these situations.
There was a heavy clank of steel near the stables.
“Fuck me,” the guardsman muttered. Or perhaps he was a captain. Seemed like it, with the way he issued commands.
“I need buckets!” he yelled. “Whole damn thing is going up in flames. Haul your asses!”
The hooves of a frightened horse pounded through the market square.
“Look out!” a guardsman said.
“I think he was aiming for me,” another suggested.
They hurried past the alleyway.
We moved deeper into the alley and emerged into the market square. Merchant carts had been turned over, some of them splintered and beyond repair. A tavern door had been caved in and the wooden sign mangled. Probably from the resulting riot of frightened peasants, although the horses madly galloping around likely didn’t help matters.
A guardswoman turned the corner near the fountain, where the square intersected with paths that led to the stables on one side and the barracks on the other. A grating voice stopped her.
“What’s going on here?” That voice… straight from the mouth of the commander of the city guard, Wilhelm Arch. He probably wasn’t a very happy man.
“Sir, the stables are on fire and the horses are running freely. Captain Quill has requested buckets.”
“Get out of my way,” he snarled.
The commander stormed past his soldier. Vayle and I crouched behind a broken merchant cart, although his tired eyes probably wouldn’t have seen so much as a tail of our shadows.
“Quill,” Wilhelm barked. “Get your men to the keep.”
“This thing will burn to the ground!”
“Then let it burn. Get your men to the keep now and form ranks. Let the servants put the fire out. The Shepherd is still here.”
Wilhelm marched back across the front of the square. He stopped a guardsman who bounded through with a bucket in hand. He snatched the bucket from the guard’s grasp and sat it on the frozen fountain. “Go find some servants and tell them to put this fire out.”
“Which servants, sir?”
“All of them! I don’t give a damn if they’re sleeping, washing, cooking or serving the fucking king. Get them down here now.”
“Yes, sir, of course.” The guard obediently loped up the steps toward the keep.
Wilhelm moved swiftly past the fountain. “Gods help you, Shepherd,” he muttered lowly, “I will hunt you down.”
“You know,” I whispered to Vayle, “I much prefer when people hide from us. It’s not as much fun the other way around.”
“Damn,” Vayle said, her face scrunched up in frustration. “Guess my plan didn’t work.”
Like ants coming to the aid of their queen, the city guard of Edenvaile formed ranks along the front of the keep and then around it.
“It got us out of the stables,” I said, “and into the square. Which is where my plan now comes into effect.”
“You have a plan?”
I smiled. “I do now.”
I crept deeper into the square, treading carefully along the outcrop of shadows dangling outward from the buildings. Most of the city guard had positioned themselves by the keep, but there were still guardsmen and guardswomen who maintained their roving posts atop the parapet, and an eye in the sky is the most difficult of all to avoid.
Vayle and I made it to the outer ward, not far from the gate. From there we followed the snow-dusted cobblestones toward the forge and onward to the barracks that stood near the northeast part of the kingdom. Someone had apparently woken the stable boy, because he had one horse wrangled and tied to a post by the forge. He was in hot pursuit of the other, which made my foray into the barracks clean and quick.
I might have told Vayle I had a plan, but that wasn’t entirely true. I had the fragments of a plan, the bits and pieces that make up the foundation of a plan. I just hadn’t quite filled in the details yet. Which was a problem, because as we stepped inside the barracks, the conclusion to my plan was rapidly drawing near.
The building was made mostly of ancient timber dull as dirt, patched up over the years with fresher pine that looked out of place. Several rooms split off from the main hallway, most of which, from a cursory glance, stored armor, cloth, weapons and stale wheat rations.
The floor of wooden planks and the braced walls twisted and turned beneath ceiling joists appearing in dire need of repair. Eventually, the hallway spat us out into an enormous square room where the luminous glow of torches reflected off a marble floor. The walls were covered in stone, and on the back wall hung a large banner with two swords crossing a shield: the coat of arms of the Edenvaile city guard.
A man stood with his back to us, behind a desk littered with papers, candles and an inkwell. He was admiring a knight’s helmet hanging upon the wall. It looked like it had come hot off the polishing stone, never having seen battle a day in its life.
“Nice helmet,” I said.
He sucked in a silent breath, noticeable only because his shoulders damn near rose up over his ears for a moment. He turned slowly, a solid steel breastplate fastened to his chest. Plate bracers covered his wrists and matching gloves protected his hands. Half of him shined with the luster of gems, the other half dull with the muddiness of leather and old mail.
“Did I catch you while you were changing?” I asked.
“You did,” he said, taking a meaningful step toward the table. “I was preparing for a hunt.” His lips glowered from behind the denseness of his beard. He reached down and took a long, heavy-looking great sword from the table.
“Seems a weapon you’d want if you were hunting pigs.”
He heaved the greatsword into his clutches, holding tight to the cracked leather hilt with both hands. “It is a weapon intended to be used while mounted. A weapon you need swing only once.” He dropped it onto the table, where it crashed with a deafening thud. “I suppose it’s not needed anymore. My prey has come to me.”
He sounded mad. Looked mad, too. Had that empty, voided look about him that a person gets when their mind has fled, leaving behind a cold, dark husk.
“Listen to me, Wilhelm,” I said, hoping that my plea with insanity would for once work. “What you heard on that balcony… none of it was true. Why would the Black Rot ally with the Danisers? Since when have you known us to be players in the game? We’re hired swords, that’s all.”
“You’ve played me for the third time now,” Wilhelm said. He took a pair of plate greaves from the table and fastened them around his legs.
“Vileoux is dead, Wilhelm. For all intents, he’s dead. His mind is being controlled by the conjurers. He’s a puppet. It’s all a show. It’s a front.”
Wilhelm secured pauldrons around his shoulders. “Conjurers? That’s your best lie?”
“Think about it,” I said. “Truly think about what Sybil accused me and Dercy of. Forget for a moment the passion in your heart, the perceived deception you accuse me of, and instead question the logic of your queen’s accusations.”
Wilhelm turned and removed the knight’s helmet pinned to the wall. “Vileoux will have me put to death for this. I failed him. Twice. My only hope for survival is delivering your head to his bedchambers.”
“How long have we known each other?” I asked. “A good thirteen, fourteen years? Almost as long as the Rots have been around.”
He put the helmet on. It fit loosely arou
nd his thin neck. When he spoke, his words reverberated off the brushed steel. “Fourteen long years of deceit.”
Vayle stepped forward. “Commander Wilhelm, I know of a young man who had been part of your city guard many years ago, a young man whose name you will undoubtedly recall better than I. A night in a tavern that had run too long and seen far too much ale drain from the kegs ended with this soldier bedding a barmaid. His wife caught wind, and left for deeper into the North with their two children, back to her family. It drove the man mad, and in this madness, with passion disfiguring his thoughts, he murdered fifteen people and then himself.”
“Eulys Torr was a coward,” Wilhelm said.
“Only after passion had made him one,” Vayle said. “Don’t let the madness of passion turn you into something you may greatly regret, Commander. Something you may not return from. Astul tells the truth. The conjurers are coming, and they have Sybil Tath orchestrating their arrival.”
“I saw the end of the conjurers,” Wilhelm said, taking a large triangular shield made of hardened iron and covered with embossed designs. He produced a sharp short sword, marred with scratches and dents. “They don’t exist anymore.”
He moved slowly around the table. “This ends now, Shepherd.”
Damn. This wasn’t how my plan was supposed to conclude, with the death of a, for the most part, good man who I’d known for many years. I was supposed to convince him, to lure him in with the power of persuasion. People think an assassin’s greatest strength is his blade, but it’s not. Sharpened steel — or ebon — is only fitting for the throat you intend to slice. Often, lots of good men, proud women and innocent children stand between you and that throat. You can’t just go along and kill everything in your way. You’ll soon find yourself dangling from a rope, and if you evade capture long enough, all the death, the murder, the blood… it’ll mess with you. It’ll change you.
There was another reason I didn’t want to duel Wilhelm. Iron clanking against plate is loud enough, but ebon smacking against the heavy shit sounds like the god of thunder erupting in orgasmic glory. It’s a great way to give everyone in a half-mile radius the precise point of your location, which I suppose is wonderful if you’re a merchant looking to hawk your wares or a whore eager to make your day’s fill. It’s less enticing for an assassin attempting to sneak into a heavily guarded keep.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 23