I closed my eyes and took slow, deep breaths to clear my head of thought. That was one of the techniques Blackstone had taught me. He said it allowed you to transcend the limitations of your physical body and exist solely as a spirit in your mind.
I thought that was a crock of bullshit. But it did help me ease my nerves when I was stressed.
I opened my eyes. I noticed the light from outsider getting dimmer. I glanced over my shoulder, and saw the red sun dipping below the horizon. It was nearing dusk.
I turned back to the knives. Suddenly, a new feature of the chest caught my eye.
The lid was thrown back, and with the light shining in the room a particular way, I saw for the first time that the inside of the lid was padded.
I stood up and reached for it. My fingers traced the edges. I brought my free hand to the other side, and I felt that the lid was slightly thicker than it should be.
Aroused by curiosity, I pulled the chest toward me, disturbing the neat row of knives in front of it. I brought my ear to the inside of the lid and knocked.
It sounded hollow.
Excitement burst to life within me. I had discovered a hidden compartment!
I felt a flash of guilt at the same time. What if Blackstone didn’t want me to know about it? But then, I figured if he trusted me enough to leave, he shouldn’t get too angry if I found something I was not supposed to.
I flipped the chest over, so the lid was on the table, and started to search for my way in.
There was no button to push or lever to depress. All in all, the chest had the appearance of being solidly built.
But I knew that appearances were meant to deceive.
After searching every square inch of the surface for half an hour, I decided that the only way in would be to crack the inner lining.
Again, that tendril of guilt surfaced within me. Blackstone would be furious when he came back and found his chest ruined. I had no doubt of that.
He might even throw me out.
But, I was gripped by the curiosity that only a nine-year-old can feel. I thought that I had unearthed a great treasure. My mind buzzed with what I might find inside.
Most of all, it was fascination with the unknown that made me pick up the dark, thick knife, jam it into the side of the chest, and pull with all my might.
The chest cracked. I grinned and pulled harder. I hung my entire weight on the hilt and jerked it down.
I heard a splinter, followed by a loud crack. The blade torqued in my hand. I fell to the floor.
Quickly, I scrambled up, seized by the promise of seeing my discovery. When I laid my eyes on the inside of the chest, a murmur escaped my lips.
“Whoa.”
Embedded within the surface I had broken were six knives of a kind I’d never seen before. Their blades were white like snow. Their hilts were yellow gold. Each had a slight curve along the neck of the blade.
My fingers shook as I reached out to pick one up. There was no doubt in my mind: Blackstone did not mean for me to find these knives. They were forbidden.
That made them so alluring.
I brushed the hilt with my fingers and sucked in a reverent breath. The metal was smooth and cold to the touch. I knew, just by looking at them, that these were no ordinary knives.
My fingers reached the blade. As soon as I touched it, a sharp, jolting pain exploded above my shoulder, right beneath the old scar on my collarbone.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that at that precise moment in time, I did not know that my mother had been the one to give me that scar. I did not know that she had once tried to kill me. I did not know that I actually had seen a knife of this type before, when I was one.
I only learned those things years later, when I returned home and spoke to my mother minutes before her death.
Would she have died if I did not come and see her? No. But that is a story for another time.
Back in Blackstone’s home, I cried out and jerked my hand away. Heat started to form around the scar. I felt it swarming down the length of my arm like an army of fireants, leaving a trail of menacing intensity.
I stumbled back. My foot caught the leg of the chair, and I fell. The heat was seeping into the very marrow of my bone. The pain was excruciating. I gritted my teeth and clutched my shoulder, hoping desperately that it would pass, and doing my best not to make a sound. I was terrified of how Blackstone would react if he saw me like this.
I rolled to all fours and tried to push myself up. But as soon as I put the smallest amount of weight on that arm, the pain magnified ten-fold. It felt as if an inferno had opened and swallowed my shoulder whole. I opened my mouth to scream, but by then the pain was too much, and my body was too far gone.
I passed out from shock.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I came to, shivering from the cold, even though I was under a pile of blankets. A wet rag lay on my forehead.
I was drenched in sweat. I lifted my head to look around, and that slight movement sent a piercing pain through my head.
I saw movement flicker in the corner of my vision. I turned my eyes that way and found Blackstone.
He looked exhausted. His irises floated in a sea of red. His eyes were rimmed by dark circles. His hair was unkempt, his usually tidy beard disheveled. His shirt was creased in many places, as if he’d been sleeping in it for days.
“Here,” he said, giving me a full cup. “Drink.” His voice was hoarse and heavy.
I took the wooden cup from him and winced as I sat up. Motion of any kind disturbed the uneasy equilibrium my body had adopted.
I drank the liquid—not water—under Blackstone’s watchful eye. It burned my throat. It tasted of pinesap and alcohol. When I was done, I tried to give the cup back to Blackstone. He grunted and ignored my outstretched arm.
Suddenly, I remembered the chest. If I was in bed, and Blackstone with me, he must have seen what I’d done!
“I’m sorry,” I began, “I didn’t—”
“Drop it.” Blackstone’s command left no room for argument. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry unless you mean it. I know you don’t. Because you don’t even know what you should be apologizing for.”
“Your chest,” I said. “I broke it open.”
He barked a hard laugh. “You think I’m worried about some piece of wood? No.” He glowered down at me. “I should have expected you to be curious enough to investigate what’s hidden inside. That, I do not fault you for.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Do you remember what happened to you after you broke into the chest, Dagan?”
I thought back. “I… I touched the hilt of one of those white knives. And then, when my fingers brushed the blade…”
“You awoke the power latent in it,” he finished for me.
I stared at him. “What?”
“Look at your left shoulder.”
I turned my head away from him and looked. My eyes widened when I saw the scar on my collarbone. It pulsed a vile red, almost like a living thing. The skin around it was marred black with corruption.
“That is your body trying to fight.” Blackstone picked up a wrapped package off the floor. He set it down on the bed and carefully unrolled the cloth.
A single ivory knife lay inside.
I sucked in a breath that shot another jolt of pain through my head. The blade was glowing. A red aura surrounded it like a small, foggy haze.
“This is the knife you touched, Dagan,” Blackstone said. “Your body activated it, and you bound yourself to it the moment the connection was made.”
He put his hands beneath the cloth and offered the knife to me. “Take it. It is yours.”
I looked at him warily without moving. The last time I touched the knife, pain exploded at my shoulder and I passed out. Why would things be different now?
Blackstone saw my hesitation. “It won’t hurt you this time,” he said. He motioned to a small table beside the bed.
I turned
my attention to it. There was a white, porcelain plate in the middle. It had a single sliver of white ivory on it, coated in blood.
I saw the operating tools beside it. An iron needle. A spool of thread. Tweezers.
I looked back at my shoulder, and saw the tiny stitches marching over my scar.
“I pulled that out of you,” Blackstone said, nodding to the bloody plate. “It’s a fragment of a knife like this one.”
I didn’t know why I had a fragment of a knife inside me. And I had no idea why Blackstone had to take it out. “What are they?” I asked.
“The white knives are blades inlaid with old magic. Once, they were aplenty in the world. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands. They were prized because they were light as a feather. They did not dull.
“In the dark years after Rel'ghar fell, knives like these became feared. All relics of magic were feared. They were gathered and destroyed. Kings paid ransoms for them quadruple their weight in gold. The goal was to restore mankind to normalcy by eliminating all traces of magic from the world.
“But some who owned the knives hoarded them. The unlucky ones were found and killed. Their families were burned at the stake for permitting evil to linger.
“Eventually, only twenty such knives remained. Two were given to each of the ten noble families for protection. The families vowed to keep them safe.”
“But you have six,” I marveled. “How?”
“I told you the Black Brotherhood is mostly a band of thieves,” Blackstone said. “They possess more magical remnants than any other group in the world. They are the only ones who practice magic openly, although they cannot do very much. I got the six from them.”
“You stole them,” I said.
“I did not steal them.” Blackstone looked down at me. “I retrieved them. Once they were in my possession, I had no need of the Black Brotherhood anymore.”
***
Blackstone explained to me that the moment I touched the ivory knife in his chest, the power in it clashed with the sliver that was in my shoulder. Each knife had a certain blend of magic. My body was rejecting the bit of it inside. That was why I passed out.
I found out I’d been asleep for seven days. Blackstone was not a healer. He hired an old woman to look after me until my fever broke. She left the day that happened. I awoke forty-eight hours later.
I wondered if she might have been Magda. I remembered the thing she told me when I first awoke in her hut: that she knew people who could teach me.
Was it just coincidence that I came under Blackstone’s protection? Or did she arrange it? Was that the reason she was gone when I tried to find her a year ago? To give me a clean break from her, so I could fully commit to training with Blackstone?
I did not know for sure. But I suspected the truth lay somewhere along those lines.
Blackstone resumed my training as soon as I could stand. After the accident, he expected twice as much from me to make up for the time I’d missed.
I am proud to say that I delivered.
The ivory knife never left my side. As soon as I gripped it on that bed, I felt a new power seep into me. It gave me strength. Blackstone said that was the bond forming between me and the weapon.
Apparently my body, through no effort of my own, was highly attuned to magic. So much so that even the remnants of the spell left on the knife energized me.
That was my great gift. That was what my mother feared, and that was the reason she tried to kill me. That is why I could see the Black Brotherhood assassins when nobody else could.
Blackstone was not as gifted as I was. But he was trained by them. He knew Helosis’s power and teachings. That is how he fought invisible foes.
My ability did not seem like such an amazing thing to me at the time. With most of the world’s magic sealed away, there was little I could do with it.
The glow around the blade lessened each day. It disappeared entirely after a month. So did the energy I felt when I held it.
Blackstone told me I’d developed a kind of tolerance. The power the knife contained was still there. It simply affected me less.
That was the entire extent of the benefit of magic.
Nonetheless, I treasured that blade. It was light and could cut through anything. It never dulled and required no sharpening. It could not be broken.
Or so I was told. My mother’s experience proved different.
Blackstone taught me how to use it as a weapon. He taught me the seven points of the human body that are most vulnerable. He taught me how to move with the blade as one.
Soon, holding it felt as natural as having fingers. It became an extension of my arm.
Blackstone also gave me smaller throwing knives. He taught me how to conceal them so they did not stand out in regular clothes, but, at the same time, were always accessible. He taught me the importance of balance and speed.
Don’t get me wrong. Training was not a walk in the park. I had more cuts on my hands from handling the blades after a week than all the gnashes I’d received over my lifetime combined. After a day of throwing, both shoulders throbbed. The scar that Blackstone opened never fully healed. It affected my left arm. I had to learn to counteract the difference to perfect my aim.
Blackstone seemed pleased with my progress. Two months after we started again, he sat me down and told me how well my skill was developing. He said that, if I continued at my pace, in half a year he would send me out into the outside world.
The idea thrilled me. I did not know what he expected, but I was ready to show him anything he wanted to see.
One day at supper, he asked me a question I was not ready for.
“Dagan,” he said, “do you know how I can afford you?”
I took a bite of the chicken thigh I was holding. “I thought you were rich.”
He blinked, then laughed. “No. But I know of ways to make myself rich—at least, temporarily.”
“How?”
“There are things I learned in the Black Brotherhood.”
“You mean, stealing?” I took another bite.
He nodded. “Aye, stealing. Stealing and thievery and all those elaborate schemes of improving one’s position in life. My last heist came two weeks before I met you. We’ve been living off that since, but the well’s starting to run dry. You aren’t cheap to clothe or feed. You have the appetite of three grown men.”
I took that as a sort of veiled compliment and allowed myself a smug smile.
“I don’t steal from just anybody, Dagan,” he said. “Never from the poor. Rarely from the rich. My thefts are from the corrupt. I take back the things that were never rightfully theirs.”
“Do you return those things to the people they took it from?” I asked.
He laughed. “No. I’m not a bloody priest.”
“Oh.”
“I’m telling you this because I want to know if you have any problems with it. I know some grow up believing stealing is wrong.”
I shook my head. “No problem,” I said. Thievery was the one thing I was good at before I met Blackstone.
“Good,” he said. “I have another heist planned. Tomorrow, we begin training for it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Blackstone woke me earlier than usual the next day. He threw a ragged collection of clothes on my bed. “Put those on.”
I held them out. There was a pair of brown, patchy pants and a soiled, scratchy, wool shirt. They were worse than the clothes I’d worn when I lived on the street.
I knew better than to ask irrelevant questions, so I changed into them without a word.
Blackstone was dressed completely the opposite of me. His rich, green jacket had embroidery all over the front. The sleeves ended in bits of lace. He had a crisp, white shirt underneath and pressed pants.
He’d also trimmed his beard so that it was no more than a dark shadow.
“Today, you observe,” he told me. “You do not speak to anyone. Only watch.”
I nodded in agreement.
“You’ll trail after me on the rooftops,” Blackstone said. “I remember you had some capacity for that before, no?”
“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t scampered up walls and on tops of buildings since Blackstone took me in, but I doubted my skills could have eroded. If anything, I was quicker and more agile now. I was better suited for following him unseen.
He clapped his hands together and told me to get up. I did.
Blackstone left the house first. He told me to count to sixty before following.
I got impatient and ran out at forty-one.
The street, as expected, was mostly empty this early. I looked at the outer facades for a way to the roofs. I found my path in a low window.
I caught my foot on the windowsill and pushed up. My hands wrapped around a rain pipe for support. One strong lunge had me gripping the edge of the roof. I pulled myself up.
Standing straight, I looked around for Blackstone. I spotted a man in a green jacket hurrying away from the house. I ran after him.
I did not know where he was leading me, but I ran along the rooftop like a shadow. My steps were light and made little noise. I stayed close enough to never lose sight of him, but far enough to remain unseen.
All in all, I thought I was doing quite well.
Until I felt an ice cold blade slip in front of my throat.
“One move and I gut you,” a voice rasped in my ear.
All the training I had learned rushed to mind. Like Blackstone taught, I tucked my chin, trapping the blade. My arm shot out to dislodge the assailant’s grip. I felt the blow connect, and was just about to duck and roll, carrying the blade with me, when a hand tangled in my hair and stopped me.
“Nice try,” the voice hissed. “But you’re too slow. Whoever taught you should be ashamed.”
Panic exploded in my chest. It lasted only the length of time it took for me to hear the laughter at my ear.
The knife fell away. I sputtered when I turned and saw Blackstone.
He was wearing the same rags as I was.
A Thirst for Vengeance (The Ashes Saga, Volume 1) Page 12