ARC: Assassin Queen

by Anna Kashina

  It’s all my fault. I’m the one who is putting Mai under an unbearable stress on top of the burden he’s already carrying. Kara knew she would never say this, not now when Mai was already on the brink of losing control. She wanted to step into his arms, to comfort him, but it wasn’t time for that. She forcibly kept her place.

  “I’d like to help,” she said.

  Mai stopped his pacing. “You have already. And, you’re right. I didn’t really want Seldon’s blood on my hands. For a moment there I just felt I had no other choice.”

  She stepped closer. “So, you aren’t mad at me?”

  He looked surprised. “Mad at you?”

  “For being insubordinate.”

  “You’re not formally under my command, are you?”

  She smiled. “I guess there are still some advantages to my position.”

  “Some?”

  “Many. A lot. Just the fact that I’m allowed to kick some sense into you if you behave like a bastard is worth all else.”

  Mai raised his eyebrows. “Did I really behave like a bastard?”

  She laughed. “No. You would have noticed if I felt I had to kick some sense into you, I promise.”

  Mai grinned. “Do you really think you can?”

  “Care to find out, Guildmaster?”

  Mai threw a restrained glance at the tent entrance. “I’d love to. But I don’t think my guards would possibly approve.”

  “Well, then, I’ll settle for the next best thing.” She reached for him, their embrace fierce, near-violent in its passion. It lasted only moments, but when Kara finally found the strength to draw away from him she felt as if she had just stepped into a better world.

  “I must go,” she whispered. “Before we’re brutally interrupted.”

  Mai’s dazed look lingered on her, slowly shifting back to his usual calmness.

  “I’ll deal with Seldon,” he said. “No weapons this time, I promise.”

  “Is he still coming with us to Shayil Yaran court?”

  Mai’s nod looked reluctant. “I have no bloody choice. If I leave him here with Raishan, he will continue poisoning everyone’s minds the entire time. At least by keeping him nearby I can have some control of the situation.”

  She smiled. “Well, if you do behave like a bastard when you talk to Seldon just now, make sure to call me back in afterwards to deal with you.”

  “Promise.”

  She briefly pulled him into another kiss, then turned and walked out of the tent.

  In this campaign, Mai was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. She bitterly wished that he didn’t have to handle everything else on top of that, from Seldon’s pettiness to her own problem, when each step toward their enemies’ secret fortress made her more and more vulnerable to the Kaddim’s magic. Ayalla’s spell was great as a temporary relief, but she knew when they got closer to the enemy stronghold it would stop being effective and all bets would be off.

  Whatever the cost, Kara needed to make the most of the time she had.

  24

  Desert Gear

  Mai had chosen a minimal party to travel to the Olivian capital – five Diamonds, six Jades, and six of his personal Emerald guards in addition to Egey Bashi and Ellah, whose truthsense was essential in the upcoming negotiations. They spent the night at the Gard’hal outpost’s camp with the rest of the Majat, setting out early next morning to continue on to Tahr Abad.

  Kara had just finished packing up her gear when she heard a commotion at the entrance to the camp. She hurried toward the noise.

  A group of men were rushing around a large cart, pulling off packs of what looked like tightly bundled cloth. Further on, two herders were observing the activity, each holding a large metal ring with a dozen leading ropes strung through. Lizardbeasts. Kara looked on, thinking of yesterday’s conversation.

  They didn’t look impressive enough to cost this much gold, even if their sleek, muscular lines told Kara that as far as breeding went these beasts were the best. Despite Seldon’s rebellion, Kara fully approved of Mai’s choice. In the fight they were facing they needed every bit of advantage. They couldn’t possibly risk losing a battle because of inferiority of their mounts. The Majat never operated this way, the fact that made her strongly question Seldon’s judgment in calling Mai on this decision. Or was the older Diamond scrapping for every opportunity to challenge Mai’s authority?

  True to their name, the beasts indeed resembled large lizards, four legged and flat footed, with long tails sweeping the ground behind them and chair-like saddles strapped at the bases of their long necks. Their yellow eyes surveyed the activity calmly, scaly skins glistening in the sunlight. Their sheen, ranging from green and purple to charcoal-gray, did look somewhat silky, but not, Kara supposed, to someone who had issues with the whole idea of a lizard-like mount.

  Most of the departing party gathered nearby, but there was one person Kara prominently did not see.

  “Where’s Ellah?” she asked a Jade passing nearby.

  The man hesitated. “I think I saw her at the back of the camp a short time ago. Not sure why. She should be getting ready to leave, shouldn’t she?”

  Kara nodded. “I’ll see to it.” She turned around and strode to the back of the tent rows.

  Ellah was sitting by the wall, staring into the distance. She looked pale, her arms clasped tightly across her stomach as if the girl was fighting a serious bout of nausea.

  “Are you all right?” Kara asked.

  Ellah raised her face, her lips twitching as if she was having trouble controlling them.

  “I’m fine,” she said after a pause.

  “I don’t think so. Care to tell me what’s the matter?”

  Ellah turned away abruptly. After a long pause, Kara sighed and lowered down to the ground next to her.

  The silence seemed to stretch forever, but Kara knew better than to start the conversation. From her experience with trainees at the Guild, as well as her long-term familiarity with Ellah, she knew that whatever troubled the girl could not possibly be dragged out by force. Ellah had to venture the information forth on her own, however long it took.

  “I can’t do it,” Ellah said eventually.

  “Can’t do what?”

  Ellah’s lips curved down with disgust. “I… I hate lizardbeasts. To think of touching one, let alone riding them…” Her voice trailed into silence.

  “Why?”

  “They… They have scales all over. Like snakes!”

  “They’re nothing like snakes, actually. Their scales are smooth, silky.”

  “Silky.” Ellah spat out the word, as if it had a bad taste.

  Kara let out a sigh. “You know that in this kingdom you can’t travel anywhere by horse.”

  “I don’t have to travel, actually.” Ellah swallowed. “You’d do just fine without me. I can stay here. Or, go back to the Forestlands. Grandma always told me I would come to trouble if I ever allow anyone to talk me into traveling too far away from my village.”

  “You know we need you, right? Without your truthsense…”

  Ellah pursed her lips. “You’ll do fine without me. They’ll listen to you at the Queen’s court. You look like you were born here, don’t you see it?”

  Kara held a pause. She did look Olivian, but if anything, it made her mission as a negotiator at the Queen’s court harder, not easier. With her looks, everyone would assume she was closely familiar with every local custom. If she messed up the talking, it would seem much worse to the locals than if she was an obvious foreigner. Without the feedback Ellah’s gift of truthsense could provide, she would feel like a fish out of the water.

  “Does preventing the end of the world as we know it mean less to you than a trivial thing like riding a lizardbeast for a while?” she asked.

  Ellah shook her head. “It’s easy for you to say. You were probably never afraid of anything in your entire life.”

  Kara smiled. “Do you really think so?”

  Ell
ah lifted her chin, a challenge in her gaze. “What were you ever afraid of, then?”

  “Men.”

  “What?” Ellah’s eyes widened.

  “Look,” Kara said hurriedly. “It’s not really important. The point is, all of us have some fears. All of us have to make sacrifices to overcome them and go on with our lives.”

  “Men?”

  Kara glanced away. She supposed now that she started this conversation there was no way back. Yet, even after all this time, she found the subject too difficult to talk about. She paused, trying to find the right words.

  “When we train, the Majat Guild encourages us to take lovers, so that we could explore our bodies in every way we can. To most, especially the male trainees, it comes easily. By their ranking age, in early twenties, they explore all they want and get over it.” She paused. “They learn to channel it all into fighting. We all do.”

  “What about you?” Ellah asked slowly.

  Kara took a deep breath, unwelcome memories flowing over her.

  “I was showing so much promise that the possibility of my Gem ranking was brought up earlier than it normally is. I was fifteen when my trainers first started asking me to explore my sexual side. Sixteen, when they started really pushing me into it…” Her voice trailed away.

  Ellah watched her wide-eyed. “I admit, this seems a bit young. But… you knew you were going to do it eventually, anyway. Why did it frighten you so much?”

  Kara looked away. “I was one of the few women on the training grounds. Probably the only one most men found attractive. I could see them all looking at me this way since I was twelve. Worse, those not bound by the code of our Guild pretty much assumed I would jump at the possibility. Let’s just say, something like this tends to leave a mark.”

  “But… you did do it in the end, right?”

  “Yes. When I was nearly eighteen. By that time, my trainers were about to give up. In fact, they’d come very close to reaching a decision not to train me for a Gem rank at all.”

  “Just because of this?”

  Kara shrugged. She might never know for sure how close it came for her. It felt so good, in retrospect, to put it all behind her.

  “It takes a lot of resources from the Guild to train a Gem,” she said. “Especially in the last years of training. They didn’t want to invest into anyone with problems, no matter how much promise I showed.”

  Ellah’s eyes hovered over her thoughtfully. “I heard they now consider you one of their best warriors ever.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, how did you do it?” Ellah asked after a pause.

  Kara leaned back, forcing her mind back into calmness. “Simple, actually. One day, I just asked myself: does my fear of men mean so much to me that I am willing to renounce my lifetime dream because of it?”

  “And?”

  “Once I realized this was my only choice, my fear of men seemed meaningless in comparison to everything else at stake. Putting it behind me took no effort at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Ellah watched her a moment longer with a mesmerized expression. Then she rose and made her way to the front of the camp.

  When Kara followed her, the sight that opened in front of her made her mouth fall open. The merchants had unraveled their bundles of cloth, laying out sets of clothing.

  “What’s this?” she demanded.

  “Desert gear.” Lance stepped up to her, holding out a headdress fashioned somewhat similarly to the ones the merchants wore. It looked a bit like a helmet made of cloth, with long flaps of fabric extending over the shoulders and back and another one hanging at the side of the face to fit over as a mask, if needed.

  “Are we all going to wear them?” The thought trailed off as she realized that the man standing near the lizardbeasts was not a herder as she originally believed.

  “Mai?”

  He grinned and held his arms out to his sides, giving her a full view.

  She had never seen him in anything else but his elegant Majat blacks – except, of course, for the times when he wore nothing at all. And now, her mind simply refused to accept the way he looked in the new clothes, no less stunning than he always did, but completely unrecognizable. The yellow-white fabric, draping around loosely to soften the lines of his muscular body, brought out color in his pale skin, making him look darker than he did when accented with the black – and far less threatening, even if every bit as handsome. His eyes shone like pale blue jewels in his laughing face. Seeing him this way made her gape, the blend of the familiar and the foreign in a way that made her see him in a completely new light.

  Of course, Mai was always known for his ability to blend in into any surrounding. She had just never seen such a radical change occur so effortlessly before.

  “You and Ellah can change in that tent over there,” Mai said. “Hurry up.”

  25

  The Power of Life

  “You’ve been doing well,” Ayalla said.

  Kyth raised his head, surprised at the relief he felt at this brief praise. He was exhausted, hauling rocks all day, learning to dissipate them with and without touching them first, and to put them together at Ayalla’s command. Unlike her rocks, he was never able to recreate the original shape exactly, but on the grand scale of things it didn’t seem to matter. If she was happy with his progress, he was going to take it, no questions asked.

  “And now,” Ayalla went on, “I will tell you why we have been spending so much time on rocks. You wanted to know this, didn’t you?”

  Kyth merely nodded. He had felt curious about it at some point. But now, after days and days of this endless practice, he felt so tired it didn’t matter anymore. He had accepted the fact that he was here to do Ayalla’s bidding for as long as she deemed necessary – and not just him. Every night after she returned him back to their camp, she left again with Alder, who kept her company at night and returned in the morning looking no less exhausted than Kyth, even if much happier. The Forest Woman seemed to have infinite energy and no need to sleep at all, which made Kyth feel even more surreal about the fact that she was apparently still intending to train him to use a power similar to her own. He hoped she didn’t expect him to develop the same kind of stamina – not in this short time at least.

  “Now, listen closely,” Ayalla said. “Inside the Kaddim’s fortress there is a special chamber, the one that feeds their Reincarnate’s power. Many who speak about it believe it leads directly to the underworld. But very few of those know that it’s not the chamber but a stone inside it that links the Reincarnate to the Cursed Destroyer. It looks like a platform, an elevated rectangular slab in the middle of the room.”

  Kyth froze. He knew about the chamber. Once, after Kara’s escape and re-capture, he’d overheard her talking about her vision of the stone slab. His skin prickled at Ayalla’s words, the realization of what he was learning cutting through the haze in his tired mind, snapping him back to attention.

  “This stone,” Ayalla went on, “is infused with the Destroyer’s magic. So much so, in fact, that very few realize a very simple fact. No matter how much magic it holds, it’s still a stone, made of the element earth. As such, it is held together by similar types of bonds that hold together the rocks you have been practicing on. And now, with your training, you have the ability to turn it into dust once you get close enough to have it in your direct view. If you do, it will sever the Reincarnate’s link to his source of power. It will make him vulnerable.”

  Kyth gaped, absorbing her every word. Everything she taught him up to now suddenly made sense. He shivered at this realization, for the first time filled with hope that this plan of training him in the use of his magic could actually work.

  “Is this the way to defeat him?” he asked.

  “It’s the first step, yes.”

  “The first step?” Kyth’s heart sank again, tiredness settling in anew. What she said just now seemed hard enough to accomplish. The chamber she spoke
about had to be at the very heart of the fortress, in the place protected by the entire Kaddim’s defense force. Worse, by the time Kyth and the Majat arrived there, the Kaddim would likely be aware of the menace. Was destroying the stone not enough...?

  Ayalla laughed. “Don’t look so forlorn. You didn’t think it was going to be this easy, did you?”

  “Actually I did, for a moment.”

  “There is a bright side,” Ayalla said. “Through the stone, the Reincarnate’s power will be feeding all his warriors, especially the Kaddim leaders who call themselves Brothers. After you dissolve it, their link with each other will weaken. They will no longer be able to feed off him at all. This will make them all the more vulnerable, giving your Majat friends more of a chance. It will also give you your opportunity to end it all.”

  Kyth pulled himself upright. In all his prior Majat training he had learned too well that he couldn’t allow himself to feel exhausted or to assume he could relax before time. Mai and his trainers had beaten this attitude out of him once and for all, often in quite the literal sense. Ayalla was no different. Of course here, in her realm, he didn’t need to be afraid of bruises and scratches earned in weapon practice, but these bouts of tiredness he felt after each training session seemed bad enough, even if they always passed after a good night’s sleep.

  “My power is not normally meant to kill,” Ayalla said. “But since it feeds off the elements, it could be used this way. The human body is made of elements too, just like everything else around us.”

  Kyth’s eyes widened. “You want me to dissipate his body, as if it was a rock?”

  Her lips twitched. “Close, but not exactly. To kill a living being, you need to call upon another element – fire. The bonds that hold a human body are made of water. Fire can aid you in dissipating them.”

  “Fire?”

  “Yes. The process is much the same, actually. You must see the watery bonds holding his body together. Then you must call upon the fire to dissipate them, make them boil. It should be easy in the middle of a desert filled with fire and wind.”