The Archon's Assassin

by D. P. Prior

  SHADER

  Book Four

  THE ARCHON’S ASSASSIN

  D.P. PRIOR

  First Edition, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-63452-854-2

  Copyright © 2015 D.P. Prior. All rights reserved.

  The right of D.P. Prior to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Beta readers:

  Ray Nicholson, Valmore Daniels, and Scott Morrison.

  Cover art: Anton Kokarev (kanartist.ru)

  Cover design &manuscript formatting:

  Valmore Daniels (valmoredaniels.com)

  Map of Aethir:

  Jared Blando (theredepic.com)

  Map of The Nousian Theocracy:

  Mike Nash (mikenash.com)

  Photo of the author:

  Theo Prior (dizeazedproductionz.blogspot.com)

  Conversion of italics from Pages to Word:

  Paula Prior (flurriesofwords.blogspot.com)

  NIGHT OF THE GUILDS

  City of New Jerusalem, Aethir

  Year of the Reckoning: 912

  (Four years after the defeat of Sektis Gandaw)

  New Jerusalem was burning.

  At least, the docks were.

  Black smoke mushroomed into the night sky, smothering the stars and choking up the air with acrid fumes. People were screaming in the distance, and someone was shouting out for the militia. Sad bastard. They weren’t coming; not tonight. Not in the middle of a guild war.

  The Senate were the first to admit these things needed to happen from time to time. Best policy was to sit it out and wait for the status quo to resume once the power struggle was over. It would either be the Night Hawks or the Dybbuks, this time round, and it didn’t matter which to them.

  Ilesa Fana breathed in ash carried on the wind, and coughed into her gloved hand. She glanced both ways to make sure she’d not been heard above the clangor of steel on steel, the cries of rage and pain. Then she slipped into the shadows of the buildings lining the water’s edge.

  The other Dybbuks up ahead had found what they were looking for: a two-story warehouse with the kind of doors you normally only saw on senatorial strongholds. They were steel-plated, riveted round the edges. It was something you didn’t get outside Malkuth’s principal city—that kind of workmanship left over by the first settlers from Earth—but Ilesa had seen her fair share these past few years. Enough to know the Dybbuks had lost this last desperate gamble.

  “No way,” she said, abandoning stealth and striding to the doors, where Master Plaguewind and the fat man were engaged in a hushed conversation. “No way we’re getting in there.”

  She wiped her sweaty palms on the seat of her britches, brought one hand to rest on the hilt of the sword at her hip, the other on the pommel of her dagger.

  The men—the ten they’d brought with them—were jittery, and one or two looked ready to run, or maybe make a move of their own. It had been a long time coming, this “Night of the Guilds”, and everything was up for grabs.

  Master Plaguewind turned toward her. He was like a particularly dense shadow in his ankle-length coat. There was fire in the glass eyes of his mask, reflected from the burning buildings on the fringes of the docks. The beak-like nose jutted at her like a dagger. If he had a mouth, it would no doubt be curled in a sneer, but none of his features were visible beneath the molding. There wasn’t even a mouth-slit. It was the tilt of the head to one side that told her what he was thinking before he gave it muffled voice.

  “You think we’d be here if we couldn’t open them?”

  The fat man took a crystal disk from his jacket pocket and inserted it into a slot at the edge of one of the doors. He glanced at Plaguewind, whipped out a handkerchief, and mopped the sweat from his glistening head.

  “That’s it?” Ilesa said. “Now what?”

  “Now we enter,” the fat man said. There was the hint of an accent, but mostly he sounded posh, like a lord or a senator. His clothes were posh, too: a charcoal-gray suit with hairline stripes, shiny black shoes, and a necktie shaped like a butterfly. She hadn’t liked the look of him since he’d set foot in their hideout the day before yesterday, apparently at Master Plaguewind’s invitation.

  A low drone started up, and the doors slowly slid apart. The fat man collected his disk and slipped in first, like he owned the place.

  Plaguewind’s head tilt this time reeked of smugness. He leaned on his staff and waved Ilesa in next.

  She paused in the doorway, looked up into Plaguewind’s glassy eyes while angling a glance at the fat man’s back. “You trust him?”

  “Much as I trust anyone.”

  “He’s a shogging defector.”

  Plaguewind threw his arm about her shoulder, and nodded for the men to go in.

  “We’re all defectors, Ilesa. One way or another.”

  That cut her to the bone. She knew what he was referring to, and it was a cheap move. She never should have told him about Portis, about what had happened, about how she’d abandoned her brother, Davy.

  In an instant, she relived the wolf-man’s slavering jaws gnashing at them, felt the change come over her. She could still taste the blood as she ripped out its throat; still smell its musty hide. She’d protected Davy that time, but those weren’t the only wolves. Second time round, she was too late. Sure, she’d made their bastard father pay for what he’d done to Davy, but the boy was ruined, and Ilesa couldn’t handle that. Still couldn’t, truth be told. That’s why she’d left him there alone.

  “You think you know me,” she said with venom. “But you don’t.”

  “What?” Plaguewind said. “What do you… Oh, Ilesa, it isn’t always about you. I meant in general, for the kind of work we do, the things we have to do to survive: jumping from ship to ship; going where the strength is.”

  “You even know who he is?” It was an effort to stay on track, because she was still seething. Trouble was, once the Davy button was pressed, it didn’t matter if she’d misread what Plaguewind was saying; it would take an age for the fire in her veins to burn off.

  Plaguewind seemed to understand that. In the time they’d known each other, he’d become a master of deflection.

  “Remember how Shadrak the Unseen took out the Pinchers?”

  Ilesa snapped her head back toward the open doorway. She could just about make out the fat man’s bald head amid the men going in.

  “No! That’s him? Albert the poisoner?”

  “Best there is,” Plaguewind said. “And now he’s working for us.”

  “You sure about that? I mean, why—?”

  Plaguewind stopped her by raising his hand. She’d grown so accustomed to taking his orders these past few years, she bit her tongue without even thinking about it.

  “Ilesa, you are my second, and I trust you.”

  That was unexpected. Praise from the master. Suddenly, Plaguewind went down a notch in her estimation. Didn’t help her confidence in the faith he placed in Albert. All it told her was he was a poor judge of character. Trust you! For shog’s sake, she was hard-pressed to trust herself.

  “Not absolutely, mind,” Plaguewind said.

  Least he wasn’t a total shogwit
, then.

  “So, I’m your second, but you don’t trust me enough to explain why our arch-rival’s top man is probably right now leading us down the garden path. Is that it?”

  “I do have secrets, Ilesa,” Plaguewind said. “Even from you.”

  He wasn’t kidding. After all the hours he’d spent training her to hone her… ability, all the jobs they’d done together, all the times he’d watched her back and she’d saved his skin, she still didn’t know the first thing about him. Save for his body-language. There was no one better at reading each subtle inclination of his head, each minute hand signal, each shrug of his shoulders. But that was the extent of her knowledge. She still had no idea who or what he was beneath that mask. Some said he was horribly disfigured after a spell had misfired. Others that he was marred by the Demiurgos in return for the gift of magic. She’d even once heard he was a stygian from the nightmare realm of Qlippoth, somehow crossed over the Farfalls undetected by the Maresmen patrolling the border.

  “Trust me,” Plaguewind said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He turned to enter the building, when an ear-shattering boom rolled across the water. Hot air blasted Ilesa against the warehouse wall, and her knees buckled. She felt Plaguewind’s hand on her arm, keeping her up.

  “Inside,” he said. His voice was mushy in her ears. She could barely hear him, yet he looked to be shouting. “They’re rallying!”

  Ilesa blinked her eyes into focus on the river. A barge was on fire, and there was fierce fighting on the far bank. Dozens of men were in the water, wading across, flaming torches held high, daggers glinting between their teeth.

  Plaguewind dragged her inside the warehouse, left her reeling on her feet. Her ears were ringing, and her nose and throat were thick with sulfur.

  “Shogging black powder!” Plaguewind said, singling out Albert. “You forgot to mention that, fat-boy.”

  “Black…?” Albert said, fanning himself with his handkerchief. “I had no idea. Honestly.”

  Plaguewind’s chin dropped to his chest. He was pissed off, but giving Albert the benefit of the doubt.

  “Seal the door.”

  “Good idea,” Albert said, fishing out his disk and scuttling over.

  “I know,” Plaguewind said. There was ice in his tone.

  “They’ll smoke us out,” Ilesa said. “Burn this place.”

  “No,” Plaguewind said, strolling to one of the crates stacked in rows all across the floor. “They won’t.”

  He slid the lid off and beckoned for Ilesa to look. It was crammed full with dried black and brown leaves, and gave off a pungent aroma, tinged with sweetness.

  “Somnificus?” she said. “In all of them?” There must have been more than a hundred crates. If they all contained somnificus, why, that would mean—

  “Millions of denarii,” Albert said, ambling back from the door. “If you know how to eke out sales and control the flow.”

  Plaguewind nodded, his beak-nose slicing the air, making him look like a demented bird. “He who controls the somnificus…”

  “Controls the guilds,” Ilesa finished for him. It was a cliché often spoken of, but no one really believed there was a stash like this. She looked from Plaguewind to Albert. “How…?”

  “The Night Hawks have been shipping it in from Portis for donkey’s years,” Albert said. “My job was overseeing the overseers, make sure none went missing. Shadrak’s idea. He’s what you might call a control freak.”

  Portis. Ilesa couldn’t think of it as home anymore. Too many bad memories. Too much left behind. Let those old wounds open up, and she’d likely bleed to death.

  “But he’d know,” Ilesa said to Plaguewind. “Shadrak. If fat boy’s got access to this warehouse, and now he’s gone over to the other side, then…”

  She trailed off when she recognized Plaguewind’s nodding for a conceited, “all part of the plan.”

  Albert was grinning like the cat that got the proverbial. “He’s no fool. They’ve been following me for days, waiting to see what I do.”

  “So it’s a trap,” Ilesa said, her sword already halfway from its scabbard.

  Plaguewind stopped her with a sharp look. “For Shadrak, not for us.”

  The rumble of voices came from outside, muffled by the steel door Albert had closed just in time.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Albert said. “No one sets foot in here save Shadrak and my successor.”

  “Who is?” Ilesa said.

  Albert sniggered and looked to Plaguewind, but the master had stiffened. Had he sensed something? Or was it just the thrill of being so close to what he had planned?

  “Buck Fargin, I imagine,” Albert said. “A nauseating little toe-rag who’s destined to one day lord it over the unified guilds of New Jerusalem.”

  “Was,” Plaguewind said, almost absently. “Was destined.”

  “Naturally,” Albert said. “Until your own stupendous ascension. My point is, there’s no way that flaccid little prick is going to risk his scrawny neck coming here in the middle of a guild war. So—”

  “Shadrak will come,” Ilesa said. Her breathing quickened, and she licked her lips. Was this the moment she finally got to see Shadrak the Unseen? His name was whispered everywhere. It was common knowledge he had the run of the Night Hawks and had moved in on all the other major guilds, save for the Dybbuks and Koort Morrow’s outfit. Master Plaguewind still had a tight grip, largely on account of the fear his sorcery engendered. They might be a bunch of thieving, backstabbing cutthroats, but the Dybbuks were far from ripe for the taking.

  Albert was nodding enthusiastically, but Plaguewind was all business. He had gathered the men together and spoke quietly with each in turn. They all produced glass bottles and started to uncork them.

  “Why doesn’t he wait?” Ilesa thought aloud. “Why not starve us out?”

  “Because of the other secret I haven’t shared with you,” Plaguewind said, coming back over. “One of several, actually.”

  Albert’s grin was starting to get up Ilesa’s nose. She’d half a mind to punch him. “But fat boy knows, clearly.”

  “We planned it together,” Plaguewind said. “No one knows Shadrak like Albert. No one knows his operations better, either. This… battle over the docks is nothing but a ruse. Oh, they’ve pushed us back, and we’ve lost a lot of men, but it’ll be worth it.”

  “It’s a diversion?” Ilesa said. “You always were a devious bastard.” He’d beaten her at chess more times than she’d care to remember; even cheated on occasion, she was sure of it.

  “Albert’s given us the locations of every Night Hawk stronghouse in the city. You wondered why I hadn’t been around much these past few days. Well, it’s because we’ve been to meeting after meeting, shoring up a last-ditch alliance to stop Shadrak from taking absolute control. While our forces have been clashing in the docks, and we made our way here, hundreds of assassins have been moving in on Night Hawk positions. But that’s not all. Albert knows Shadrak. Knows what he looks like, where he stays. Chances are, we won’t have to use those potions the men have, but it’s always good to have insurance.”

  “You mean, he could already be dead?”

  Albert nodded like a mad man, but Plaguewind lifted his glassy eyes and looked slowly around the shadows collecting in the corners of the warehouse.

  “What’s in those bottles, anyway?” Ilesa said. “What potions?”

  Plaguewind’s head snapped round. “Albert is friends with—”

  “Associate,” Albert said. “An associate of.”

  “Magwitch the Meddler,” Plaguewind said.

  “The mad mage?” Magwitch was the crazy the Senate used for all their security. His talents were legendary, but hardly anyone could afford his services. Many a guild master had tried coercion, but the magical backlash was enough to persuade them never to try again.

  The men were taking up positions all around the warehouse, each with nothing but a bottle in hand. Ilesa strode over to o
ne, snatched the bottle from him and read the label.

  “Global Tech? Isn’t that Sektis Gandaw’s old company?”

  Histories were already being written, since the Technocrat had been brought down, and his plot to unweave all of creation had been thwarted. Quintus Quincy’s was the only one she’d heard, badly declaimed at the Dog’s Head, but there’d been just enough Earth history in among the bad poetry to keep it interesting.

  “Magwitch has a stock of them. Says they used them to win wars on Earth. One swig of that stuff and a man will grow twice as strong, twice as fast, and twice as aggressive,” Albert said. “Well, I may be selling it a bit short. Ten times would be more accurate.”

  “Gandaw used magic? But I thought—”

  “Science,” Albert said. “And quite the science at that. I’ve had a good look at them, being something of a chemist myself, and I have to say—”

  A shadow descended behind Plaguewind. Ilesa opened her mouth to warn him, but thunder cracked, and she averted her eyes from a blinding flash.

  Silvery motes lit up around Plaguewind in a sphere—his magical ward.

  The shadow landed lightly on the floor of the warehouse. Not a shadow, a cloak, fanned out like the wings of a bat. The hood fell back to reveal a face as white as bone. Pink eyes took in everything in the warehouse in a single sweep. In the same instant, Ilesa registered every detail, like it was burned forever into her mind: Small. Barely the height of a child. Shaven head, the stubble white; box beard, pallid hands, each of them gripping… a wand? One was smoking, the other coming to bear on Plaguewind’s sparking shield. It boomed, and the shield flashed argent and fizzled out.

  “My eyes!” Plaguewind cried, hands flying to his mask. “My eyes!”

  The other weapon bucked and roared, and this time Plaguewind screamed as he pitched to the floor, clutching his thigh.

  “Now you see me,” the assassin said, as he leveled both weapons at Plaguewind’s head. “Now you—”

  “Potions!” Plaguewind cried. He groped at the air, blinking frantically, and clearly seeing nothing. “Now!”

  The men knocked back the contents of their bottles without hesitating.