by Tom Lloyd
‘Are you quite finished?’
Daken cursed and growled with fury, but even as he fought back the pain he knew he could see little beyond the stars bursting darkly before his eyes.
‘I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you,’ the white-eye gasped, reaching blindly for his axe.
‘Like you have your friend?’ the mage said, amused, as a moan of pain came from behind Daken.
‘Yanal?’
‘Ah Gods!’ the man gasped weakly, ‘you …’
Wincing, Daken shook the daze from his head and looked at his companion as best he could. Yanal was sprawled on his side, curled around his chest where Daken had struck him and whimpering. The blow had been a heavy one; even without a sharp peak on the axe-blade he would have snapped a few of the man’s ribs on impact.
‘Your friend will die,’ the mage declared, taking a step closer to Daken, ‘unless you do exactly as I say.’
Dakan finally found his axe and used it to push himself to his feet, but as he wobbled on treacherous legs something struck him on the chest and knocked him back.
‘Are you listening?’ the mage said. He stood over Daken with a strange greenish light playing around his head. When he pushed back the hood of his cloak, Daken blearily made out the thin, imperious face of a middle-aged man staring down at him like he was a beetle flipped on its back.
‘Never liked ’im anyway,’ Daken said drunkenly. ‘Still gonna fuckin’ kill you.’
The mage sighed. Through the haze Daken saw he had strange yellow eyes that made him look something other than human.
‘Very well, if you’re too stupid to play to the niceties, what’s the betting something in the packs on that horse is yours?’
Daken rolled onto his front and managed to manoeuvre himself until he was up on one knee, trying to make sense of what was going on.
‘What’s it to you?’ he said eventually.
The mage crouched down to his eye level, close enough for Daken to reach out and grab his throat, but the sight of yellow lightning crackling over the man’s skin overrode thirst of retribution. ‘Fancy having the hounds of Jaishen catch your scent?’
‘You gonna to set some dogs on me?’
The mage smiled like a snake, his teeth unnaturally neat and white in the last light of evening. ‘Jaishen is the lowest depths of Ghenna. You will need more than a juicy steak to distract them once they have your trail.’
Daken thought about it a moment. He was a savage man, but the look in the mage’s eyes chilled even him. ‘You mentioned niceties?’ he croaked.
‘So I did. I can save your friend’s life and not damn you to an eternity in the Dark Place – so long as you do me a little favour.’
He grunted and heaved himself up. He moved reluctantly, feeling suddenly like an old man with the weight of the Land on his back. ‘Okay, who do you want me to kill?’
‘Quite the opposite,’ the mage said with cold delight, ‘I want you to be a knight in shining armour, to save a lady in distress. Who knows? Perhaps it will suit you better than highway robbery – mark a new chapter in your life.’
‘Oh sure,’ Daken said, ‘White-eye merc turns hero; they sing that one all the time.’
He slung his axe through a loop behind his shoulders and tried to dust himself down, still a little unsteady. With an effort he matched the stranger’s unblinking gaze, noticing only then how the mage was significantly taller than he, a rarity in these parts.
‘So where’s the silly bitch who got herself kidnapped then?’
Daken moved silently through the neat lines of trees, a dagger ready in his hands. At the end of the row he paused and crouched, keeping to the shadows as he surveyed his next move. The estate seemed quiet for the moment, but there was no easy path in as far as he could see. Like most white-eyes Daken wasn’t a man who played well with others, but right now he wanted some backup. His kind could usually count on attracting mercenaries who knew their business, men who could take orders and didn’t panic in a fight. Ex-soldiers tended to know the value of a leader as strong and fast as only white-eyes were, just as they knew what happened when you argued with one.
Fucking damsel in distress eh? he thought, as a sense of unease grew in his belly. Still, everything he told me so far has been true. Let’s hope that continues.
The estate was a remote one, grand but belonging to another age. The perimeter wall surrounding the main grounds was newer than the house within and more appropriate to the border wars of the last few decades, but still it was old with long stretches of brambles growing up it and the nearest part fallen in. They were further north than Canar Thrit and the recent fighting had never reached these parts. No doubt the occupants hadn’t bothered with anything so costly as repairs, knowing it would be over one way or the other before any soldiers reached here.
The orchard ran almost up to the fallen stretch of wall, stopping no more than twenty yards short. It was open ground, but they didn’t seem to have anyone there guarding the way, to Daken’s amazement. It seemed to bear out what the mage had told him; that they were guarding against a magical incursion, but still he was suspicious.
He settled down to watch and listen for patrols, content enough in his sheepskin coat that a half-hour passed easily. Twice he saw faces on the walls, with a main lookout on the topmost part of the house watching the road and open ground to the west. The house itself was split into two parts, a grand three-storey block set imposingly on an outcrop and a smaller L-shaped north wing beyond.
Most of the windows were dark, just a single pair of shutters in the north wing that were edged with light and two more in the main building. Around the wall however were torches set into brackets or driven into the earth itself, burning brightly below painted symbols on the stone. He didn’t recognise the symbols, but guessed they were wards of some sort – how they would stop a mage from walking through Daken didn’t know, but he just had to hope they wouldn’t prove a barrier to him.
Time to move.
He crept forward to the very edge of the orchard’s cover. The greater moon, Alterr, wasn’t particularly bright tonight, but he didn’t want to linger in the open in case the guards were a decent shot. He took a deep breath and ran for the broken line of wall between the two furthest-apart torches. No warning voices cried out and soon he was at the foot of a pile of rubble that someone had clearly made a half-arsed attempt at piling back up again.
Clearly it would fall with a gentle push, but Daken didn’t want to risk the noise. He found a stable part to hold onto and vaulted the pile, trotting forward until he was again in shadow – this time in the lee of a rose bush that hadn’t been pruned for a few seasons. Before he could move again he heard the creak of a door open on his right. He turned to see a man in a studded jerkin at the open doorway of a stone outbuilding set against the inside of the wall. Not waiting to be discovered, Daken charged.
He covered the ground in a few swift steps, lunging forward with his dagger before the guard had properly seen the danger. It pierced the man’s jerkin with barely a scrape of metal, the force of the blow enough to throw him back through the open doorway.
‘What—?’
From nowhere a second face appeared on his left, a soldier reaching for his sword even as he stared down at his fallen comrade. In one movement Daken slammed an elbow into the man’s arm to stop him drawing and grabbed him by the neck. He jerked the man forward and smashed his forehead into his nose, feeling the bone crunch under the impact. The blow drove the man backwards, sword forgotten and lungs still filling to cry out as Daken stabbed him in the armpit. A second blow finished him off but then the first guard began to huff and wheeze in panic. Dakan stamped behind him and felt his boot come down on the man’s chest – not enough to kill him but it winded him and bought the white-eye enough time to open his throat.
He stopped, forcing himself to be still as he listened over the hammer of his heart for sounds of alarm. There was nothing, no shouts or clatter of feet.
‘Good
start,’ he muttered, dragging the first man’s legs inside the doorway and closing it a moment while he thought. Both were a lot smaller than he and dark-haired – there was no point in attempting subterfuge when he was a broad, shaven-headed white-eye.
‘How about a bit of distraction instead?’
He looked around the outbuilding. It was pretty much empty, just a table and chairs with the light of a small fire to illuminate it – clearly they were using it as a guardroom, which meant more would likely be here soon. With his dagger he levered a log from the fire and rolled it out of the grate. He looked around and spotted some sacks in the corner so he kicked it over to them and, once they were alight, took one and hung it over a rafter for good measure. The thatch would catch happily enough, even on a cold night, and in a few minutes he’d have enough of a distraction to follow the mage’s instructions.
Daken reached for the door latch and stopped, suddenly noticing something odd about the two dead soldiers in the burgeoning light. Each one had strange flowing tattoos on his face, running from his cheeks and down his neck to disappear underneath his jerkin. The lines didn’t seem to be writing of any kind, nor any sort of God’s device. When he went to the other body he saw they weren’t an exact match but the style was the same for certain.
‘Good,’ he muttered with a wolfish grin, ‘I was getting suspicious that fucking mage had told me everything. Whatever this is least I know what I’m lookin’ out for. Better than findin’ out what he didn’t tell me as it kills me.’ He looked up at the burning roof. ‘Time to move.’
Peering out of the doorway he saw the grounds were still deserted. What in Ghenna’s name was going on here he couldn’t tell, but the mage had said his damsel in distress would be occupying most of their attention. What that meant the mage hadn’t said, but it had been clear most of them would be inside, with her. Daken had guessed they were up to some sort of ritual using her as a sacrifice and hadn’t been corrected, so most likely he was running out of time.
‘Right, find the house shrine,’ he muttered, remembering what details the mage had given him.
When he’d scouted all round the house he’d noticed a pair of thin, double-height windows flanking the house’s main entrance. While they weren’t the only grand windows in the building to contain glass, they were dramatic and west-facing. The first light of dawn would stream through them and most likely reach the length of the imposing hallway. It would be an arresting sight for any pious fools droning through the morning devotionals, most likely they would be there.
He skirted the back of the main building, keeping to the shadows. The Hunter’s Moon, Kasi, was behind the building, sinking fast to the horizon but Daken guessed he still had a while before midnight. If there was a ritual to be done in darkness, most likely they’d do it as Kasi went down and the darker half of the night began. There were several doors in view, but he didn’t bother trying any of them. Instead he went to the corner where the two distinct buildings were joined and assessed the stonework there.
There was a lead-lined gully where the roof of the lower building met the side of the larger, a pipe leading down from that to a water butt. Using the gully as a low point to aim for, the pipe and stonework around one of the windows proved enough to allow him to scale the side. Before long he was crouched in the gully, working the numbness from his complaining fingers as he gauged the next stretch.
Above was a protruding balcony built into the stone, too far away to reach from where he was, but the roof of the lower building sloped sharply up to his left. He gingerly walked up the tiled roof, wincing as two cracked under his weight, until he was level with the balcony’s wrought-iron rail. Freeing his axe, he reached as far forward as he could with it, assessing the distance he had to jump. The axe was well short of the balcony, another four feet he guessed. Considering how much run-up he’d have, Daken wasn’t confident of making the jump.
Bugger, what else is there? He looked at the axe in his hand, then up at the iron rail around the balcony. If he could maybe hook it on one of the iron bars, he’d be able to pull himself up. It wouldn’t be easy, but white-eyes were unnaturally strong and he knew he had it in him, no matter how heavy he was. Daken picked his way halfway down again and looked up at his proposed route.
If I fall, that’s going to make enough noise to get them all out here, he realised as he set himself.
As quietly as he could he ran five feet down the roof to get up some speed, then launched himself forward at the wall ahead and kicked up off it. Reaching as high as he could, Daken slid the axe head through the bars and twisted as soon as it was through.
Gravity dragged him down hard, even with both hands tight around the axe handle it was almost wrenched from his grip. A sharp pain briefly flared in the wrist that took the brunt of his weight, but he refused to release his grip and a moment later he was just dangling above the rain-gully, legs swinging freely. With a grunt he raised himself to shift one hand above the next, then hauled as hard as he could to pull himself close enough to the balcony to grab its edge.
He hung another moment until the swing of his body under him slowed again, then shifted one bar closer to the wall to set his boot against the stone to use it for support. Within a minute he was crouched on the balcony and unhooking his axe from the bars of the rail, ready to enter the house itself. He tried the door that led off the balcony and was unsurprised to find it bolted, but nearby was a shuttered window with a simple latch that his knife could work open without difficulty.
This high off the ground, the window was big enough for even Daken to crawl though. He checked he couldn’t hear anyone coming to investigate then eased himself through and shut the window behind. In the darkness of an empty room Daken grinned. The hardest part was over; now he was inside their defences and undetected. The main part of the manor house was oblong and Daken stood at one end of that. If the hallway was as grand as he suspected it would also contain the main staircase, but in a house this large there would be servant stairs too.
He went to the door ahead of him and tried to see through the keyhole. The corridor beyond it was dark enough that he couldn’t make anything out. When he inspected the other door he saw it didn’t have a lock, just a simple latch. Clearly this was a disused suite of rooms, all connected to each other. He stowed his axe and drew his dagger again, easing the door open with the weapon ready. There was no one in the other room but it did have a few pieces of furniture, a large bed and looming wardrobe, all draped in dust-sheets. The next room was similar to the first except it didn’t have an exit onto the corridor, just a musty garde-robe in the back corner, so Daken returned to the second and waited at the door, listening for a long while before he opened it.
He found himself on a bare stone corridor that led off to the left and met another from which a faint light shone, while on the right it turned a tight corner a few yards away. He followed it that way and was rewarded with a narrow doorway covered by a long drape that led to a cramped servants’ stair. He walked slowly up to the third floor, his only illumination the moonlight that crept through a slit window halfway up.
There he found a similar corridor and stalked along it until it met the central landing. Somewhere down that he could hear the tap of footsteps walking slowly towards him. A single pair; walking with the measured pace of a guard doing a circuit inside their perimeter.
He transferred his knife to his left hand, pressing his back against the wall that hid him. His practised ear told him when the footsteps were just at the corner, two steps beyond the point where the anxiety of adrenalin screamed for him to strike. He was reaching just as the figure came within one pace – dragging himself around the corner as he brought the knife up. The guard flinched at Daken’s sudden appearance, but had no time for anything else before the knife-blade was at his throat, its edge pressed hard enough to break the skin.
‘Move or cry out and you’re dead,’ Daken whispered, his other hand around the guard’s which in turn clasped his sword hil
t.
The guard was an average-looking man who could have been anything to Daken’s eyes. He was middle-aged and clean-shaven; not as battered or unkempt as most mercenaries but clearly no raw recruit either. After an initial moment of panic in the man’s eyes he grasped the situation with the clarity of someone who’d felt Death’s hand on his shoulder and recognised Daken wasn’t exaggerating.
He didn’t nod of course, standing perfectly still without replying but Daken could see he understood easily enough. Keeping the knife at the man’s throat he turned around him and put a hand to his back, pushing him towards one of the doorways off the corridor. The man realised what he was being asked to do and walked without complaint into the room.
‘Do what I say and there’s no need to kill you. Now, lose the sword belt.’
The man perceptibly sagged with relief that he wasn’t going to have his throat cut in the next few moments and fumbled to obey – taking care not to drop his sword and make any undue noise or do anything else that might annoy the white-eye with a knife at his throat. Daken took hold of the back of the belt and pulled it away from the guard’s unresisting grip.
‘Good. Now I’ll be tying you up soon enough, but first tell me where she is.’
The guard made a puzzled sound. ‘Her?’ A moment later Daken heard him gasp. ‘The mirror? You’ve come to free her?’
The white-eye sensed the change in his prisoner immediately; body tense, lungs filling. Without thinking he wrenched back with his dagger, cutting deep into the guard’s throat as he moved back. The man turned half around, hands rising as though to reach for Daken, but the movement was never completed as a spray of blood followed the knife and he crumpled to his knees. Daken took another step back and caught the dead man by the arm, easing him down while trying to avoid the worst of the blood flowing out over the wooden floorboards.