Age of Assassins

by Rj Barker

  I realised that the armourer was an oaf. “These ones.” I pointed at the rusted blades.

  “The rusty ones?” He scratched at his stubbly chin.

  “Rust can be removed. With sand and vinegar, I believe you said.” I don’t know if he was more annoyed at having his words thrown back at him or by not understanding why I had chosen a pair of rusty blades. In either case I would not give him the satisfaction of an explanation. “A bow now?”

  “Bows is in the squireyard. Pick one o’ them.” He reached out for the rusty blades and picked up the shorter stabsword, clearly trying to work out what I saw in it. “There’s writing on this,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “there is.” I held out my hand for the blade and he passed it over, grudgingly.

  “These are mine now?”

  “Aye, king’s gift if you’re a squire without.” He stared at me suspiciously. “What’s it say on ’em?” his brows furrowed, and he looked like a dog that could see food through crystal but did not understand why it hurt its nose every time it lunged for it.

  “I cannot make it out,” I said, “for the rust.” This was a lie. It said Conwy, the name of a bladesmith from before the world soured. I doubted the blade was a real Conwy as they are the blades of kings, but even the copies are held to be excellent weapons. “Shield?”

  He shook his head. “In the squireyard.”

  “Thank you. Send the armour to my room when you’ve fixed it, my name is Girton ap Gwynr. I’ll take the swords with me,” I said cheerfully, and left him scratching his head.

  Chapter 4

  Maniyadoc has stood for a thousand years and squats on a hill dominating the land around it. The main keep is a vast square and in front of it is a courtyard and a gatehouse. The towers standing at each corner are covered in the totems of the dead gods, their faces long ago chipped away. Two similarly decorated and defaced towers stand to either side of the gatehouse a hundred or so paces before the keep and are joined to the main building by walls to create a killing zone which turns the whole construction into a rectangle. The keep and its walls rise for six storeys and have enough room within to house an army and all it needs to keep supplied—smiths, bakers, cooks—though no one in the Tired Lands has an army large enough to fill it. Around the keep is the keepyard, which holds the training grounds, and around the keepyard runs the first wall, the keepyard wall, which is twenty paces thick at the bottom, fifteen at the top and as high as ten men. The outer ten paces are solid; the inner part of it is riddled with rooms and stairs, though many have collapsed through lack of use and care.

  Around the keep and its wall is a second and much larger space called the townyard. If you mount the battlements of the gatehouse or the keepyard wall you can look down and see the ghost of the town that once filled it. Brown squares of dead grass trace out buildings of almost unimaginable size. In the first years of the imbalance men had more than they had ever thought possible, but now we know only myths of plenty and live lives full of jealousy for what the long-dead once had.

  Beyond the footprints of the ghost town is the second wall, the townwall, designed in a similar fashion to the keepyard wall but thicker. It once had four gates but three had been blocked long ago to make the wall easier to defend and large parts of the townwall had collapsed through disuse. On one side of the remaining gate are the stables where Xus would be and on the other side stood the kennels, from which the discordant yapping of dogs floated through the air.

  Small towns spring up around many castles but King Doran ap Mennix long ago razed the shanties that had accreted like barnacles against his walls. Mennix has always been a warrior, and those whose commerce he had a use for were moved within the keep; those who he had no use for were thrown out to join the thankful. It is in the dead ground between the townyard wall and the keepyard wall that Festival will come—a slow, many-wheeled and mounted city, its arrival is as inevitable as the changes of season it follows.

  Beyond the wall are many small fortified farms, villages and waycastles. Each is dependent on Maniyadoc for its protection from bandits and outlaws, and in times of need each is as likely to become a predator on their neighbours as the next. The King’s Riders patrol the land constantly in a smaller and more martial version of Festival’s circular route. The superstitious would tell you hedgings watch them pass from their haunts in the fields, woods and pools.

  The yearsage sunlight barely warmed my skin as I walked through the keepyard, but it was welcome nonetheless. Outside the townwall the fruit trees, which grew thick around the castle in ordered rows, would be ripening and the brewers would be getting ready for harvest and to produce the sweet alcohol Maniyadoc was famous for.

  “Girton ap Gwynr?” The voice coming from behind me had the growl and tempering of old age and it took a moment before I realised it addressed me—I was still new to the skin of Girton ap Gwynr. I turned to find an old man dressed in full armour, his shoulder guards stained and scratched in memories of bright green. Once he must have been a Landsman, hunting down the sorcerers who’d sucked away the life of the land and created the sourlands. The Landsmen were cruel, but it was a necessary cruelty as the destruction wrought on our lands by sorcerers was far worse than the pain any man could bring. People feared the Landsmen appearing in their villages, but not as much as they feared a new sorcerer rising and destroying what little fertility was left in the land.

  The old man held a flared helmet in one gloved hand, both helmet and gloves in the same scratched green as his armour. His white hair and beard had been shaved close to his skin.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am Girton ap Gwynr.”

  Behind him I saw that a number of corpses in various states of decay and clothed in the uniform of Maniyadoc’s guards hung by their necks from the battlements. Placards reading TEMPTED BY DARK UNGAR had been tied to each one. From its size I was sure one of the corpses was the man Joam, who I had fought at the entrance to the nightsoil drain. The old man turned when he saw me staring.

  “Traitors,” he said.

  “I thought criminals were sent to join the desolate, to bleed into the land?”

  “The priests say the land will reject the blood of a traitor, so we hang them or set them on a fool’s throne to burn. It is a waste really.”

  “They burn them?”

  He shrugged.

  “Aye, some of them, but a first meeting should not be clouded by sad tidings.” He moved nearer so his body blocked my view of the corpses. “I was sent to guide you to the squireyard, Girton ap Gwynr. I am Heamus. I use no family name.”

  “I can find my own way,” I said. I was holding my rusty swords awkwardly and one slid out of my hands and on to the ground with a clang.

  “Well, maybe I can carry your swords then?” He smiled. He had watery blue eyes that flashed merrily as he bent and picked up the longsword I had dropped. As he straightened up he sniffed the air. A look of confusion passed over his face and then he stared at me strangely. It was as if he no longer saw me and his gaze was transported to some faraway place. He smiled again, shook his head and put out a hand for the stabsword. “Good choice you made in these,” he said, letting light dance down the steel between the stipplings of rust on the blade.

  “The armourer did not think so,” I said, wondering why he had sniffed the air and if I needed to bathe again.

  “The armourer is a fool.” He shook his head and sighed. “There are plenty of fools in this castle, sometimes I wonder if I am among them.” He grunted a little and placed the hand holding the stabsword on the small of his back, leaning into it to stretch his muscles. “I hope you will not add to our fools, Girton ap Gwynr.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “Good. Then follow me, boy. You will not need your blades today.”

  He led me across the parched ground of the keepyard and around behind the castle where a wall, head high to me, separated off an area. The old Rider unlocked a door and then turned, holding up the key.

  �
�For you. Lose it, and the king will have the cost of replacing it taken out of your hide.”

  “Yes, Heamus.”

  He pushed open the door. “After you, squire,” he said. As I passed him he grabbed my arm. “When you introduce yourself, Girton, use your first name only. All the squires who attend training at the keep are of rich or powerful families. We do not use surnames or titles. In memory of the Queen of Balance all are to be treated equally.”

  “So there is no favouritism?”

  “Well—” he smirked “—that is the idea, and you should at least pretend it is the case.”

  “Yes, Blessed,” I said. Something crossed his face then, something between regret and amusement.

  “I am no blessed, Girton. Call me Heamus only, that will do.” He opened the door. “And, boy, do not be too disheartened by your first day of training. It can be hard.” He ushered me through into the training ground, where the squires waited.

  There are rules to soldiery and squiredom in the Tired Lands. Any man or woman, as long as they are not of the thankful, may take up arms and pledge to spill their enemies,’ and often their own, blood upon the ground for their blessed. However, if you wish to have the great honour of dying on the back of a warmount then you must be a man and you must be blessed. My master says it was not always so and in some places women still wear armour and still fight on mountback, but it is rare now. One of the King’s Riders, looming over me from his mount, once told me it is because women lack the strength to control a mount, but my master rides Xus, who is always wilful, and she has no trouble handling him at all.

  I’d expected there to be more boys waiting, and it was a slight disappointment to see only two small groups gathered. A castle as big as Maniyadoc should have more squires than the twenty or so before me; maybe the others were out with their blessed.

  As Heamus had intimated, the idea that keeping our surnames from one another would ensure equality was a fanciful one. Looking at the armour of the sullen boys waiting for me gave me a quick idea of the hierarchy. At the top, and surrounded by a bunch of boys who seemed upset by my appearance, was Aydor, the heir. He was dressed in armour thick with ornate gilding and bright enamelling, making it pointlessly heavy. I reassessed my opinion of Aydor a little. He may have looked overweight but he carried his armour carelessly which spoke of enormous strength in his thick body. An elaborately cast twisting snake crowned his flared helmet.

  The squiremaster stepped forward as I stared. He was another stumpy man who looked to be a bastard offshoot of the Mennix bloodline.

  “Girton?” he said. He made a face like he had stood in manure.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Squiremaster!” he barked back at me.

  “Yes, Squiremaster,” I replied obediently, head bowed.

  “Look at me, boy! You are a warrior, not a mouse.” I raised my head to meet his eye. He had the look of a carnivorous flying lizard and I recognised a killer. He was not a man I would ever want to face in serious combat, and if I had been tasked to finish him it would have been done with poison or a blade in his back. “Better,” he said with a nod. “I am Nywulf but you will call me squiremaster. What skills do you possess, Girton?” He turned my name into a sneer, the standard approach of squiremasters the Tired Lands over.

  “I can ride a mount and shoot a bow, Squiremaster,” I said.

  “Swordplay?”

  “A little, Squiremaster.” It would be easier to feign a lack of skill than pretend some moderate skill where a slip-up was far more likely. The squiremaster felt the muscles of my arms and legs, running his hands along me the way one would when buying a mount. His hands were like spades and he made sure to hurt me with his examination.

  “Scrawny,” he said. I heard laughter from the other boys. The squiremaster silenced them with a glance but I could feel the eyes of the other squires on me. It was a peculiar pressure, like an acid heat on the back of my neck that melted away my confidence, slowly stripping back Girton the assassin and leaving behind something lesser: Girton ap Gwynr, a scared and lonely boy. “You’ll need more brawn on you than you have to swing a longsword, boy.” He was right. That was why I preferred knives. “And you’ll need some weight on you if you want to put a spear through an armoured man from the back of a mount.” I would give him that too. He turned from me to Heamus, who had been waiting in the doorway to the training yard, watching. “Heamus, you can leave us now. Take his blades back to his room.”

  The old man nodded and I thought how odd that was. Here was a man who had once been a Landsmen, one of the greatest powers in the Tired Lands, being treated like a member of the thankful classes by a lowly squiremaster.

  “Thank you for bringing the boy,” said the squiremaster, making it an obvious dismissal. Heamus nodded again, retreating back through the gate in the wall. “Right, boy,” said the squiremaster. “Run for me.”

  “What?”

  He cuffed me with a rough hand and I heard Aydor laugh. “Don’t ask questions, boy. Do as you’re told. Run for me. Around the wall. Keep going until you can’t.”

  I wondered if he had chosen this exercise because of my club foot. Girton the assassin’s apprentice could have hobbled around all day, but Girton the country boy would not have my stamina. As I started my uncomfortable-looking rolling jog it was the oppressive stares of the gathered squires that became the real drain on my energy. The squiremaster set them to practise swordplay, but they took every opportunity to throw suspicious, unfriendly glances in my direction.

  As I jogged I watched their swordplay. They were all bigger than me and a talented enough bunch, but I saw something that made me realise how wary I would need to be among them. As two squires fenced, a huge, broad-boned boy and a smaller boy in ill-fitting armour, their fight took them near another pair, one with a damaged face and the other with a blind eye. I saw what was about to happen to the smaller boy before it took place. A look passed between his opponent and the pair of boys behind. A second later one of the pair, the one with the blind eye, disengaged and turned to deliver a vicious swipe with his wooden sword to the smaller boy’s arm. There was no way he could have blocked it, he was completely blindsided. When he turned to find out who had hit him his opponent stepped in with his wooden blade, cracking him so hard on the helmet it drove him to his knees. It was a well rehearsed bit of bullying, and from the grins on the faces of the three boys involved it was something they enjoyed doing.

  I gave it six rounds of the walls before I started to flag. The fencing practice stopped and the weight of the boy’s eyes on me grew. I caught glimpses of their faces: some sneering, some smiling, some laughing quietly and a few simply avoiding looking at me as if I carried some curse. At eight laps I started to stumble, and on my tenth lap, despite being screamed at by the squiremaster, I slowed to a walk. Eventually, the man called me back to him.

  “Pathetic,” he said, and a ripple of laughter echoed around the walls. “Stand there.” He pointed at a spot before him on the scrubby ground. I found myself staring at, not only the squiremaster, but at a wall of hostile boys lounging lazily behind him amid the training equipment. I stood, panting harder than I needed to, and casually studying the squires. They existed in two separate groups and everything about their body language told me they loathed one another. Aydor ap Mennix led the larger group, twelve in all including the three bullies and their victim. The heir’s group wore armour of bright colours and differing degrees of elaborateness. Only the tallest of them was dressed differently: he wore plain armour and stared out into the world as if barely seeing it. He also wore real blades and I presumed he must be Celot, the Heartblade tasked to protect Aydor.

  The second group consisted of eight squires, all wearing armour that was dented, its enamelling scratched and dull. This was a division of attitude not riches as for all its dings and welts it was still expensive armour. This group laughed and joked with one another, they seemed to possess an easy camaraderie and I wondered what it would be like to s
hare such a bond.

  Whatever the differences between the two groups, neither of them looked particularly kindly on me, and I continued to feel a strange withering within. I had tried a few tentative smiles as I had run around the squireyard but had only been met with stony glares or averted eyes. The boy who had been bullied, he seemed as uncomfortable in his skin as he was in his poorly fitted armour, had given me a crooked smile, and I could not decide if he was mocking me or not. Now, while I stood panting, sweating and pretending to favour my bad leg, they fixed me with dead eyes, and I knew any ideas I had of sliding easily into their ranks to uncover plots of murder were the fantasies of a child. I felt very lonely and small. Digging my fingers into the palms of my hands I started to whisper to myself, “I am not Girton ap Gwynr.”

  “Right, boys,” said the squiremaster, “while young Girton gets his breath back you can introduce yourselves.”

  They started to rattle off their names in a way that made it difficult for me to hear. Some mumbled and some said their names so quickly I could not catch them.

  “I am Tomas.” I caught this one’s name, and he meant me to. He was one of the boys in the beaten armour and looked older than the others—eighteen, nineteen maybe. Old for a squire. Beneath a mop of black hair his face was heavily bruised, though this didn’t seem to dent his confidence any. Rather than letting the squires closest to him speak, he introduced them to me. “This is Boros—” he pointed at another tall boy, who wore his blond hair long, as if he had made a vow “—and this is Barin.” His angular face and long blond hair were a mirror of Boros’—twins. From the way Tomas acted as spokesman, and the way Aydor sneered at him as he spoke—the heir clearly detested him—I guessed he was the leader of this group.

  Aydor stepped forward.