by Ben Galley
Nobody else had taken any prisoners.
Enderl licked his dry lips and edged closer, but there was nothing more to be done. The massacre had been as quick as it was brutal. The mud was churned with blood. A dozen knights lay dead, armpits and groins and faces savaged by sword thrusts. The last man fell, his scream cut short, and then the Wolves raised their blades into the sky and let out a satisfied howl.
Enderl grinned. His first fight. He’d survived. He was blooded! He raised his sword, but was too late - the moment had passed. Some of the Wolves moved into the tower, while the others began walking back to the siege camp to have their wounds tended to. Squires and servants rushed forward to pick over the bodies.
Ser Berchold grinned at him as he walked by, his teeth covered in a film of blood. His armor was dented by furious blows, and his blade dripped gore. “You should spend more time fighting and less time praying, your lordship.”
Enderl pointed his blade at where his captive stood. “I took one prisoner.”
Ser Berchold stopped. He was a massive man, and his thick plate only made him more imposing. Enderl watched him intently. Was he impressed? No. Berchold spat blood. “Why’d you do that? You need money?”
“Why?” Enderl didn’t know what to say. “What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“Couldn’t cut him down, could you? Well, whatever you think is best, little lord.” Berchold gave him a salute and moved away.
Enderl raised his blade. It gleamed softly in the gray light, as if underwater. Its perfectly clean length mocked him. Where was the comradeship, forged in the heat of battle? Why did he feel even more lost than he had before?
“Come on,” he said to his prisoner as he strode past him. “Follow me.”
The large man did so, head hanging low, seeming to stare into a different world. Enderl walked the length of the muddied field and back to their distant camp. A score of black tents were pitched behind the low ridge. Men were calling out to each other in jest; laughter and groans in equal measure rose from the wounded, and already the smith was working on abused armor. Servants rushed by, and the scent of burning pork filled Enderl’s mouth with spit.
He reached his tent. It was the largest, set in the center of the camp, and he hated it for how it set him apart. His father’s tent. He’d no right to it. He ducked inside.
Magister Plune set aside his book and rose to his feet. “My lord. How did you fare?”
“Fare?” Enderl set to pulling his gauntlets off. “As well as any fool.”
“And who is this?” Plune looked at the strange knight. “You took a prisoner?”
“I did.” Enderl threw the gauntlet to the ground.
“Well done, my lord. A noble accomplishment! Who are you, ser knight?”
The man didn’t answer. He stared hollowly at the ground.
“He seems to have taken a blow to the head,” said Plune, moving closer. “We’ll have to keep him awake for a few hours to make sure he doesn’t die in his sleep.”
“He might as well!” Enderl hurled his other gauntlet at the tent wall, which billowed out under the blow.
“My lord!”
Laughter from outside. Were they laughing at him? “When I knelt to pray, they mocked me, Plune! They threw mud at me!”
“Nobody would ever accuse the Wolves of being pious men, my lord.” Plune folded his arms. “But that does not absolve you of your obligations.”
“Obligations.” He began to pace. The hallowed nights filled with trembling, passionate prayers seemed ridiculous to him now. “You’ve filled my head with nonsense. I should never have gone to Nous. I should have studied here, on the battlefield. Learned from men like Berchold and Haug.”
“Not so, my lord. They are knights. You are the future Lord Kyferin. It is your duty to be an example to these men. To show them what it means to be an Ennoian knight. The sword of the empire, the servant of the Ascendant.”
Enderl stopped. “What do you know about being a knight, Plune? Other than what you’ve read in your books? You ever killed a man?”
“I beg your pardon? Of course -”
“How am I to lead the Black Wolves if they laugh and throw mud at me?” Enderl ran his hands through his hair.
“Enderl,” said Plune, his voice shaking. “Yours is a sacred responsibility. Your father -”
“My father founded the Black Wolves. They respect him. They obey him without question.” Enderl began to pace anew. “Does he pray before battle?”
“Well, no -”
“Does he take prisoners?”
“He has on occasion, I’m sure -”
Enderl felt as if he stood atop a perilously high column, buffeted by fierce winds that could at any moment send him screaming into the depths. The tent was too close; he could only take three steps before being forced to turn around. Strange. His cell back in Nous had been a fifth as large, yet had never seemed so small.
“Enderl, please. You are still young. It is natural that the Wolves will treat you like a child. You need a few years yet to -”
“Silence.” Enderl stopped. His whole being quaked. He thought of the Virtues. The greatest warriors in the empire. The pinnacle of martial accomplishment, the paragons of imperial virtue.
“Those are the Black Wolves out there,” he said at last.
“They are,” said Plune.
“I am to lead them.”
“One day, assuredly, though your father is yet in good health.”
“You know nothing, Plune. I lead them today or not at all. You. Follow me.”
He ducked back outside, his prisoner in tow. Nobody looked at him. He walked woodenly toward the open space before the forge. His prisoner stumbled to a stop behind him.
Enderl studied the man. The bovine vacuity of his expression infuriated him. The world pressed down upon him, his breath locked in his chest. The man was his prisoner. Ennoian chivalry stated that his safety was Enderl’s sacred charge.
With a cry, Enderl punched the man in the face, and then again. The knight grunted, raised his arms, but Enderl punched him once more and he fell.
Conversation stilled. Enderl paced around the fallen knight, looking for his opening, and then kicked the man in the face when he found it. Something crunched.
“It is folly to strive,” said Enderl loudly, continuing the Ascendant’s prayer. “To seek dominion over ourselves and the world.” He kicked the knight again, breaking fingers. “Yet life compels us to do so even as it mocks our efforts.”
Black Wolves were rising from their campfires, drifting closer to watch in silence.
“It is madness to expect justice in a world this cruel.” Enderl stomped his boot as hard as he could on the knight’s helm. “Yet always we seek balance.” He stomped again, and when the knight rolled away Enderl drew his knife. “At best, we may hope for love.”
“Enderl!” Plune’s voice broke the silence.
Enderl didn’t look his way.
The knight was fighting to rise, climbing up to all fours like a whore on a bed of mud. Enderl was breathing in sharp, sudden gasps.
“Yet, too often we pass love by, distracted as we are by the vagaries of life,” whispered Enderl, and then he stepped forward and slid his blade through the knight’s gorget and into his throat.
The man gasped and reared up onto his knees. Enderl planted his boot square in the man’s chest and kicked him back to the mud. The knight squirmed as if with pleasure, bucking his hips and clutching at his neck. Blood poured through his chainmail.
Enderl stared, entranced. His first kill. Not with his sword, but with a dagger. The only sound in the camp was that of the dying man. He seemed to struggle for hours, but it must have been mere moments. Finally, he lay still.
Enderl threw his dagger aside and moved to the closest campfire. The Black Wolves parted for him. He sat on th
e log and stared into the ashen coals. The flames that danced there were nearly invisible. But for the heat, Enderl might have thought there was no fire at all.
A knight sat beside him. Ser Haug. He pushed a bowl of something hot into Enderl’s hands.
Enderl ate. He was a stranger to himself. He felt nothing. A great, frozen expanse filled his soul like the darkness between the stars. A convulsive desire to vomit swept through him and then was gone.
The sounds of camp returned. No laughter this time. Other knights sat about the fire, bowls of food in hand.
“You learn that prayer in Nous, my lord?”
“I did,” said Enderl. He dragged his gaze up from the coals. “It’s a long one. Speaks to our need to strive even in the face of certain failure. Would you hear it?”
“Aye,” said Ser Haug, and the other men nodded.
Enderl recited it, softly at first, but with ever growing confidence. He recalled how he’d cried once in a chapel in Nous, hearing it sung by the choir, the call of each verse answered by the magister’s response: Yet we Ascend. He thought of the cold cell in which he’d slept, the resolve he’d felt to bring that purity of mind to the field of battle. Thought of the Virtues. Of the nobility of battle.
The Black Wolves nodded to each other when he finished.
“That’s a good one,” said Ser Berchold from where he stood. “Speaks true to life. All we can do is serve the Ascendant. Kill those that need killing. Accept our death when it comes. We serve the Ascendant with our blades. Nothing ambiguous about a sword.”
“Yes,” said Enderl, and it was as if another spoke. “We kill those that need killing.”
“Luckily for us, there’s plenty of those,” said Haug. “Lots of impious bastards out there needing to be taught a lesson.” He raised his mug. “To the Black Wolves!”
Someone shoved a cup into Enderl’s hand. He raised it with the others. “To the Black Wolves,” he said. He felt his heart throb, felt a pang of pain spear clean through it, and tears sprang to his eyes.
Enderl smiled, and drank deep of the fiery liquor.
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10
A Simple Thing
Bryce O’Connor
Entry I: 42nd of Autun, 658e.b.
Killing a man is a simple thing.
The act of murder requires little effort, after all. In truth you need no more than a good blade and the resolve to finish what is started. A stomach for blood helps, as does a clever mind if you’re looking to get away with it, but in general… killing a man is a simple thing.
Especially for someone as well versed in the act as I.
But everything has a beginning. Every person has a start to their story. For now I remember mine as vividly as a parent might recall the birth of their first child, though it might be more accurate to make a comparison to some poor virgin’s maidenhood. It could be argued that both affairs result in one form of a bloody mess or another, but I loathe clichés as much as I loathe this illness of the mind that has driven me to record my recollections on a more permanent medium than memory.
Glad to see my thoughts wander even on paper…
Returning to the point. Regardless of the metaphor, I recall my first contract vividly. It’s believed I had fourteen summers at the time, perhaps less, and followed my second year of apprenticeship under Kingport’s most demanded killer. My master—whose face I still know, but whose name I have long since lost to this cruel affliction—was not a fatherly man, but he was good to me. The contract was a gift, a commendation of survival. I wasn’t the first of my master’s protégés. I wasn’t even the first to make it two years. But the fact remained that I had made it and this, I was told, put me in the minority and was well worthy of praise.
In short, I was deserving of the opportunity.
The job was to be a simple one. In-and-out, no strings attached. No need to get rid of the body. No need to avoid a scene. Our employer, for reasons unknown—and equally unimportant—to myself or my master, wanted only that a particular man be doing much less living in the not-too distant future. I merely had to locate my walker—my target, my “dead man walking”—and end his life in any way I saw fit.
Simple. Easy. Quick.
I should have known I was fucked from the start.
Now, it needs be said that this would not be my first killing. Hell, this wouldn’t even be my first murder. But it would be my first in cold blood, the first death by my hands dispensed without thought or feeling, without emotion or judgment. I knew my master had doubts as to whether I could go through with it, just as he knew I kept the same worries.
Thing is, if I failed… well… It was best not to think about it. My master had had other protégés, other apprentices, as I’ve said.
What I failed to mention is that more than one happened to be dead by his hand…
Again, best not to think about it, and I had plenty on my mind to be getting on with. “Our hardest work comes not in the blow, but in the whetting of the blade,” another of my mentors, an old man we called simply the Fool, used to say. “Prepare. Plan. Plot. In doing these you will find the hallmarks of the assassin, the things that draw the final line between a true killer and the common butcher. Anyone can wield a sword, can hack at a shield until it splinters and breaks. It is only the assassin, however, who can slip a blade up the shield-bearer’s ass and convince him he swallowed it.”
In retrospect, this last bit of advice may have been given to me at a later time, under the influence of more wine than I care to admit to.
Still… it makes its point.
So prepare I did, and first came the obvious: I had to track down my walker.
Wex Arrun—the irony of recalling this man’s name amongst all those I’ve forgotten is not lost on me, I assure you—was a dockworker in the port district of Eastborough. Finding him wasn’t a hard job, in the end. Bald, burly, and bitter, with a cruel face and still crueler temperament, Arrun seemed to have a nasty reputation along the wharf, especially among the beggarfolk. This was most unfortunate for him, because the beggarfolk—with their eyes and ears in every shadowed alley and damp nook in the city—are the ones you want to treat best in a place like Kingport. They knew what I was, recognizing me from other jobs I’d followed my master on to watch and learn. Yet still they would have given me what I wanted on my walker for free, offering it up merely for the vengeance of old abuses.
I wasn’t fool enough, even then, not to learn from the failure of others. I paid every tramp a copper, and two if they could offer me something new. Within a week I knew Wex Arrun so well all I would have had to do to take his place was grow six inches and shave my head. By the end of two, I might have gotten away without even that.
Too bad dock work never really caught my interest.
Once I had his habits down, I started planning, making a list of opportunities. He kept a shared room in one of the shabbier inns overlooking the port, the Three Old Sails. Striking while the walker sleeps would generally be ideal, but luck does not favor the wicked. I spent a rainy night hunkered down on the steep slate roof across from the room’s single small window, watching men come and go at all hours, working odd shifts or frequenting the dockside taverns later than might be advisable. There was no pattern, nothing predictable. My master could have pulled it off somehow, I was sure, but there was little chance I myself would be able to slip in and out without getting caught.
While I wasn’t worried about making a scene, I had no intention of being trapped in a cramped room with a half-dozen angry dockworkers, each half again my size.
And so the inn was the first option to be scrapped.
Next came the thought of catching Wex on the job, but it wasn’t long before that idea went out the window, too. While it seemed almost a flawless opportunity—what with the bustling port and crowded fish markets I could try
to lose myself in—something else the Fool had taught me kept tripping up my plans.
“A crowd is only good to you while you don’t stand out.”
The city’s central bazaar was one thing. Thousand on thousands of commonfolk, aristocrats, and nobles pouring in daily from every corner of Kingport and its closest territories. Never the same face. Never the same crowd. One could melt into the throngs as easily as a shadow swallowed by the night, vanishing without a trace.
Such was not the case along the harbor.
Eastborough was home to thousands, true enough, but fishermen knew fishermen like dockworkers knew other dockworkers. If anything went awry, if anyone had the opportunity to point me out, I would shine bright as a torch in the dark, alone in a crowd likely all too happy to see me caught.
Needless to say, the docks wouldn’t do. I had to find something else, something better.
His lovers’ apartments?
No good. There were three of them that I knew of, all with their own risks and challenges, and he never visited any particular woman on a predictable enough schedule to be of any value to me.
On his way to and from work, then?
Again, no. The Three Old Sails was barely a five-minute walk from his assigned jetty, following the busy harbor. It offered me neither the time nor the options I needed to risk an attempt.
Where he ate his meals? Where he collected his pay? Where he drank and gambled with the other workers?
No, no, and no. He ate at the inn, collected his wages at work, and didn’t seem to have any friends to speak of. The port was no good. I had to find something else.
Then when did he leave? When did he travel out of Eastborough?
Almost never, he only went into the city to… to…
Oh.
Twice weekly, like clockwork, Wex Arrun trekked his way west into the hub of the city, following the same path every time. It took me an attempt or two to figure where he was going, slipping in and out of the crowds a few paces behind him as he twisted and turned along Kingport’s maze of thoroughfares, side-roads, and alleyways. More than once I was tempted to cut him off at a corner and end it then and there, slipping my dagger into his belly and disappearing before anyone could register what had happened.