by CS Sealey
“Get out!”
Zoran made to push the shaman once more but Emil’s hands clamped onto Zoran’s arms with such force that the assassin thought he meant to break his bones. Their eyes locked. The assassin struggled but found the shaman’s grip too strong. Angered, he called upon the powers he had left dormant for decades, the art he had nurtured in his youth, the gift that had distanced him from his own kind. His black eyes flared a cold blue-gray and he felt the hairs on his arms prickle and stand up as his magic flowed through his skin. Then, with a deft twist of both arms, Zoran broke free of the shaman’s hold and released his own ancient power.
It was as though he had never neglected it. The feel of the wind flowing through the particles of his body was no more alien to him than breathing. He saw Emil look around in pure astonishment as Zoran lifted into the air, nothing more than a drifting spiral of something that resembled sand. The elf laughed and his voice emerged from the forefront of the coil, the voice of the wind.
“Sable!” Hjorta shouted. “Sable, this is not necessary!”
But he could not stop laughing. The pure rapture of surrendering to his powers after so long engulfed him. He was free and invincible and in complete control! And, yet, even as he swirled around his visitors, his laughter faded. Hjorta, Feilon and Messnin were looking just as horrified and shocked as the Ronnesians. His friends had not seen him in this form before and, despite their knowledge of his abilities, they were afraid.
Calming, he returned to his physical body, eyes flaring amid the coil of dust before his form materialized once more. The queen was clutching her breast in silent fear, the shaman was looking at him with a mixture of astonishment and anger, but Challan was simply petrified.
“I have never seen anything like that in all my life…” the queen whispered. “It is…impossible.”
“It is old elven magic, quite forgotten among my kind.”
“I daresay Varren wouldn’t know what to do with you,” Emil muttered.
“Please,” the queen said earnestly. “Rid us of his evil. You have no idea how much good you could do us.”
“Indeed?”
“When was the last time you had the opportunity to save lives instead of taking them?” she asked.
He glanced at Hjorta, who was standing only a few paces away, staring at him with wide eyes and mouth slightly open. They appreciated him for his work but Zoran knew they could never truly understand what it meant to be a creature of power, especially the ancient ways of the elven people. He was neither proud nor ashamed of what he was or of the life he had left behind, but he had felt like an outcast for so long. He had never been able to speak of his gift, to utilize it as his instincts urged him to for fear of being seen. Yet here was the opportunity at last – a shaman and the possibility of more mages who could share their knowledge with him. How could he refuse?
But he did not wish to go. He ached to stay in Caervyn with Hjorta, his only true friend. He had promised Hjorta that nothing would draw him away from the city, least of all war. But how long could he continue to neglect his gift? He had been exiled from Gorran for two hundred and forty-two years – almost two and a half centuries since he had been in the presence of other magical beings. He suddenly realized how empty he had felt all that time without learning anything new, without being able to practice his skills. Magic was a part of him and he had suppressed it for so long, denying himself the rapturous feeling of being surrounded by his gift and the following coldness in its wake.
And yet, if General Varren was as powerful as they claimed, would he ever return from Te’Roek? Would this be his last contract? Would it be worth the risk? Then again, if he refused the contract now, would the chance ever arise again to enrich his knowledge? He could not go back to Gorran. If the Ronnesian Empire was, indeed, on the verge of collapsing, perhaps the mages would go the same way too, as many had in history before them.
He sighed.
“I am sorry, Hjorta,” he said, turning to his friend. “Again, I will leave you, but you have my word, I will return.”
“You’d better, Sable,” Hjorta said, the traces of amazement still in his voice. “You’d bloody well better! I have some questions for you!”
Zoran chuckled, straightened up and patted down his dark-coloured robes. He turned, fixing his now black eyes on the queen.
“You have me. When do we leave?”
CHAPTER 65
Zoran Sable had felt many sensations in his life that he considered unpleasant but being magically transported from the Weary Walker to the roof of a disused tavern in the lower city of Te’Roek was the worst, without a doubt. He did not feel fear but a sense of dread as the air compressed around him and the shaman’s grip on his shoulder tightened. He was blind and cold, battered by a powerful wind that threatened to dislodge his cowl. It lasted only a few seconds, but as he examined every new sensation, it stretched into what felt like an eternity.
Moments later, Zoran felt a hard stone floor materialize underneath his leather soles and he staggered away from the shaman, blinking ferociously in an attempt to clear his sight.
“Steady,” he heard Emil say. “There are stairs to your left.”
Zoran stopped and rubbed his eyes, then waited. Slowly, the shape of a crumbling stone wall appeared in front of him, followed by a short flight of stairs that led down to a lower level of the roof. It had been raining in Te’Roek and it was some time before Zoran realized that the lingering whiteness in his vision was natural mist.
“You’re faring well,” Emil noted with interest. “Most vomit the first time.”
“Where are the others?”
“They have gone back to Milena,” Emil replied.
“I would have thought you’d want Kayte here with you,” Zoran said, folding his arms. “Just in case we run into Varren.”
Before leaving Caervyn, Emil had escorted Zoran, Queen Sorcha and Challan back to the inn in which they had booked two rooms. There, Zoran had been hastily introduced to the sorceress, Kayte. The queen had given Emil a long list of orders, after which she had promptly bid Kayte to take her and Challan back to see some prince. The sorceress had whisked them away, leaving Zoran slightly perturbed.
“Kayte will return later,” Emil explained, heading down the stairs to an old door. “Now we must be quiet and discreet. Ayon guards patrol the streets and sometimes the buildings too. Any sign of a disturbance and they will swarm like a pack of wolves.”
“Where are we going?”
“The resistance headquarters,” Emil said. “You will probably find it a little…unusual.”
The shaman wrenched the door open. It was dark in the corridor beyond but Zoran’s eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom. Doors lined both walls of the passage and he deduced that they were inside an inn of some sort, one that did not appear to have much business, for it was deathly quiet.
“Where is everybody?” he asked when they descended the stairs to another, identical, floor.
“This building is deserted. The Ayons have turned everybody out, accusing them of conspiracy against the new consul. The lucky ones managed to get away, but some were caught and put on trial. The judges are too willing to pronounce them guilty.”
They continued on in silence. Emil emerged from the stairwell into the tavern, which was littered with broken pewter tankards, overturned chairs and tables, crossed the room to the front door and cautiously left the inn. They stepped into an adjoining alley, where it appeared that the waste of the entire city had been dumped: broken pieces of furniture, crates, boxes, old clothes, cracked plates and pieces of scrap wood, not to mention human waste. Zoran wrinkled his nose beneath his mask. Even the cloth could not veil the stench; it made him feel sick. Te’Roek was the largest and most populated city he had ever visited and he quickly understood why Hjorta had once told him that, despite their reputation for beauty and culture, the larger cities were cesspools of filth and injustice, crime and hunger.
“Caervyn is the only city where even
the poorest of the poor can find something to eat,” Hjorta had once told him. “That’s why we do well here. In return for tellams or pfenns, the poor help us find information or create distractions that enable us to perform our work. They loot the bodies and the houses of the men we leave behind. It’s a cycle that keeps the lower orders bonded together like brothers.”
“They are your eyes and ears?” a much younger Zoran had asked.
“And shadows,” Hjorta had replied. “You will see.”
“Where is this place exactly?” Zoran asked the shaman after they had turned off into yet another alley. “Couldn’t you have transported us closer? I’m not wholly enjoying this tour of yours.”
“The Ayons patrol every street, alley and passageway in the city. I couldn’t risk it. By transporting us to a place they were bound to never look, I was assuring our secrecy.”
“Then why not go straight into the headquarters itself?”
“Too crowded – I may fatally injure someone transporting myself inside. With the resistance so fragile, we cannot afford to lose a single life or the support of the rest. Besides, if Varren was anywhere nearby, he would be able to sense my magic and eventually pinpoint the location of the headquarters.”
Zoran grumbled to himself and battled the urge to continue finding fault with their mission. It was not that he disliked the shaman, it was the fact that he was in Te’Roek at all. He had told Hjorta that he would not leave Caervyn to fight in the war and, yet, here he was, being led to the headquarters of the Ronnesian resistance. What was wrong with him? Was he growing soft in his old age? What was the company of mages to the company of friends?
“Perhaps you are learning to feel compassion,” the shaman said.
Zoran clenched his fists and closed his eyes momentarily. “Or perhaps the promise of so much gold was more than I could refuse,” he said bitterly. “Do you make a habit of mind reading?”
“It’s not a practice I enjoy but one I consider necessary in order to ensure the safety of my mistress. You sometimes never truly know of a traitor until it’s too late. I don’t know enough about you to trust the words you speak, so I must do what I can to discover your true meaning. You can’t hide what you think from me; only the most powerful mages can mask their thoughts.”
“Like the man you expect me to kill?”
“Varren, yes.”
“How do you suppose I’ll get near enough if he is as powerful as you say? Won’t he sense me coming? He could read my mind and know which move I mean to make.”
“You will not be the only tool we use to do the deed, merely an unexpected addition to our group, which will catch him off his guard. He can’t look in two directions at once, or three.”
“Then lead me to him and we’ll do this right now!”
“No, not yet. The time isn’t right. Without Varren, the Ayons will falter but they will not crumble. They have seasoned commanders who could readily take his place. We need men ready and willing to fight the Ayons, drive them out of the city completely and then back across the Divide.”
“I said I’d help you rid the city of this usurper, nothing more. I’m not going to train recruits or wander round the slums trying to find homeless men who can – ”
“We don’t expect that of you at all. Ah, we’re here.”
Zoran had not been paying attention to his surroundings. So concentrated was he on the back of Emil’s braided head that he had not realized they had entered a much cleaner and wider alley. Here, the ground had been roughly paved and most of the buildings were plastered on the outside. Though the plaster was cracking and showing its age, it was a welcome improvement from the mud-brick dwellings they had left behind them.
Emil knocked four times upon a dull wooden door, paused, knocked once, paused and then four more times. Zoran tapped his fingers against the side of his leg impatiently and looked down the alleyway in both directions. It did not appear to be a well-used passageway. After a moment, he looked up and saw that clouds were moving in from the west.
His hand went automatically to the hilt of one of his concealed knives when he heard the sound of a bolt being drawn across. His keen eyes scrutinized the figure that appeared in the doorway.
“And about time too,” the woman croaked. Zoran released his grip on his knife. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”
“Just being extra cautious, Lila,” Emil said, stepping over the threshold when the woman moved aside.
“Who’s this?” the woman asked, staring at Zoran as he entered the building. “Haven’t seen him before.”
“He’s all right,” Emil said, gesturing for Zoran to follow. “He’s with me.”
“Another recruit?”
“Hired help,” Zoran said shortly.
“Any more of them coming?”
“Just the one,” Emil said over his shoulder.
“You went abroad for a single man?” Lila asked incredulously. “What can one man possibly do?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, old woman,” Zoran muttered.
“Sable, follow me.”
Zoran glanced at Lila as he followed Emil up the stairs and noted that, though she leaned heavily on a cane, she appeared to be ready to use it as a weapon. Her graying hair was arranged in a strange and intricate style and her make-up was slightly overdone. In fact, her whole appearance was odd, even the clothes she was wearing. It appeared that she was trying to accentuate beauty that had long gone.
The building’s interior was quite dark, as though there were no windows, or all the shutters were all firmly closed. He understood that the house was a sanctuary but, from experience, it looked more suspicious from the outside if all the shutters were closed in the middle of the day. Did they have no sense at all? And there was an odd smell lingering in the air, of incense or old perfume. Then it hit him and he paused on the stairs.
“This is a whorehouse!”
“Kindly call it a den of pleasure, young man!” Lila said.
“It was, yes,” Emil said, turning, “but when the Ayons moved in, the girls moved out.”
“First few days were hell,” Lila said, coming up uncomfortably close behind him. “Once the bastards knocked down the door and set about my girls, there was nothing I could do to stop them doing what they pleased. I told my girls to go, and most did.”
“Most?” Zoran asked.
“This place is as much a sanctuary for my girls as it is for the resistance now,” Lila explained.
On the floor above, they were met by a young man who introduced himself as Rasmus Auran. He extended his hand immediately to Zoran in a sign of friendship, which Zoran was hesitant to return.
“I heard Emil was bringing reinforcements,” Rasmus said. “I guess you’re something special if they went all the way to the elven lands to find you.”
“Caervyn is no longer elven,” Zoran corrected him, “and I’m merely here to help you kill your unwanted consul.”
“As are we all,” another man muttered, emerging from a large room off the landing. “Tiderius Auran. We’ve been expecting you.”
The lighter-haired and shorter Auran also extended his hand and Zoran clasped it briefly.
“So, by the attire, I suppose you’re a…” Tiderius began but the appearance of a young woman descending the stairs from the floor above caught his attention.
All the women Zoran had seen in the southern countries were tall and curvaceous, lightly tanned by the sun, with hair ranging from blond to dark brown, and eyes of brown, green or blue, but this woman was pale, slight of stature, with the darkest eyes he had ever seen and a curtain of straight, almost black hair that hung freely down her back.
“Ah, Angora,” Rasmus said, moving forward, “this is Zoran Sable.”
Angora looked him up and down and the slightest of smiles flickered at the corner of her mouth. “Come to kill Varren?”
Zoran heard the undisguised note of cynicism in her voice. “I’ll do my best to ensure my journey here wasn’t wast
ed,” he offered, folding his arms. “But I know little about my target as yet.”
“Then allow us to enlighten you,” Emil said, gesturing to the room from which Tiderius had emerged. “Will you have a drink?”
“Whatever is on offer,” Zoran said.
As Angora followed them, the assassin noted that she seemed to be making every one of her steps deliberately and carefully, as though she feared falling. A brief glance down to her middle revealed the reason for her caution: she had rested one hand upon her rounded stomach as pregnant women often did.
Zoran moved into the mess hall, welcomingly brighter than the landing. Two windows stood open, letting in dull light and a cold breeze that carried the scent of fresh rain and damp stone.
“Unfortunately, since the Ayons arrived, we’ve had to make do with water most of the time,” Rasmus was saying, propping up the lid of a barrel in the corner of the room and dipping two mugs in at a time, “so the best we’ve got is a tankard of the earth’s best.”
Zoran grunted in appreciation as he was handed his mug and sat himself down at one of the many tables. Tiderius kept throwing him furtive glances, obviously uncomfortable with his manner of dress. Zoran sighed. As he understood it, he would stay in the sanctuary for a number of weeks, perhaps even months. That was an uncomfortably long time to continue to hide his face from the men and women of the resistance who were expected to trust him.
“Are all in this house bound to silence and secrecy?” he asked Emil.
“Absolutely,” the shaman replied. “If it was known where the resistance was hiding and who were members, all involved would be put to death.”
Then what the hell, Zoran thought bitterly. If the shaman knows, the others will know soon enough.
Reluctantly, he threw back his hood and pulled down his mask, knowing the reaction would be immediate. And, indeed, all eyes fell on the tips of the long, sharp ears beneath his mass of dark hair and his scarred, yet ageless, features. He chose to ignore their stunned expressions and swallowed his first mouthful of water. It tasted different to the water he was used to down south.