Assassins' Dawn

by Stephen Leigh

  “M’Dame d’Embry.” The Thane nodded. Beyond him, d’Embry could see stone walls and an apprentice Hoorka working on some indiscernible task, hunched over a bench. The complaining whine of a drill rasped the speaker.

  “I’ll be brief, Thane. Quite simply, there have been allegations passing through Sterka—rumors—that concern me. Most of them revolve around you and your organization’s relationships with the, ahh, political aspirants, shall we say, of the Neweden Assembly.”

  As she spoke, she watched the face in the screen. The deep-set eyes narrowed, the lips set themselves in a thin line, a new ridge formed in the forehead as if he were holding back . . . anger? Irritation? Well, he could indulge in temper if he wished. “The Li-Gallant,” she continued, “has asked me to withdraw my consideration of letting your guild operate offworld. He’s also mentioned bringing the Hoorka forward in the Assembly.”

  D’Embry’s hand reached out and found the smooth surface of the ippicator bone, the thin valleys of the carved lines. “Between the two of us, Thane, I don’t think you need to concern yourself greatly with that latter threat. As I understand your people’s odd social structure, he can’t afford to invoke the wrath of Gunnar’s guild in a bloodfeud. He’d lose face—or worse—unless conditions were ripe for such actions. But he is insistent, and he is the head of local government. I have told the Li-Gallant”—with the proper amount of emphasis on the word “told”—“that I will hold a brief, very informal meeting here at the Center in two local days.”

  Through this, the Thane had looked increasingly impatient, though he did not interrupt. He glanced frequently to one side of the screen, as if his interest lay elsewhere. “Is that an invitation for me to attend, m’Dame?”

  For once, d’Embry found a disadvantage in simplicity. There were overtones in his resonant voice that were lost in the reproduction of the viewer, nuances that she wanted to read. Was he simply being offhandedly sarcastic or humorously flippant? No, not the last. The Thane didn’t seem to be a man with humor: a dry, worn-out husk of a man. Had he ever laughed? she wondered.

  “I hope you’ll be there, Thane. The Li-Gallant and Potok will also attend. I frankly consider the entire business a waste of my time and I don’t have a great deal of that commodity to squander, if you’ll pardon my bluntness. But I am the Alliance Regent for Neweden”—she paused—“and the Li-Gallant did insist. I have neither the inclination nor the staff to undertake an investigation of the whole situation, and my people don’t have enough feel for your guild-kinship structure to judge you fairly. Therefore I need the interested parties to outline their stands.”

  “Hoorka has no stance.”

  No, definitely no humor to him at all. He is, instead, quite comically serious.

  “Even neutrality is a stance, Thane. And as I understand the guilds, only lassari can have true neutrality. A person with kin must be loyal to his kin. That is a stance.”

  The shoulders in the viewscreen rose in a minor shrug. “Is that all you wished to say, m’Dame?” In the voice of a hurried man, with the implication of a task waiting.

  “You’ll be here?”

  “I will, if it serves Hoorka.”

  “Then that is all I need to say, Thane. Good day, sirrah.”

  The contact was broken, and before she could gather her thoughts to fit them into her impression of the Thane, the door dilated and Karl brought in a tray.

  “Your tea, m’Dame?”

  Its bittersweet aroma filled the room.

  • • •

  Night.

  Violet scarves of clouds wrapped two spheres, one large and saffron and caught in the dark fingers of trees; the other smaller and cold, becalmed at zenith: Sleipnir and Gulltopp. Double shadows—one purple-tinged—clawed at the earth. It was quiet and watchfully peaceful, the landscape.

  A distraction in the scene: a figure moved. It shushed aside scattered leaves of the nearly-spent autumn. A light-shunter moved patterns of elusive dark across his/her clothing and moonlight stuttered across shapes at its waist as it moved through knee-level grasses toward the house on the knoll. With the laughter of dry leaves, the wind flung clouds to the horizon and freed the moons. In the instant before the light-shunter reacted to the increased light and fuzzed the figure’s outlines again, it could be seen more clearly.

  She was a tall, almost emaciated woman. Her startled eyes looked upward at the sky’s betrayal.

  Near the interface of meadow grass and stately lawn, she paused. She looked up toward the house and the trees gathered at the crest of the hill, all dark against the moonlit sky. There were no signs of life or vigilance.

  Good. This might be easier, then.

  The windows of the house were polarized black, or the rooms beyond them were dark: she could not tell which. Either way, no one could easily see her. She went to her knees in the tall grass, checking the equipment hung on her belt. No signs of life, but already a detector was flashing its awareness of a warning field just ahead. She fumbled at a loop and unhooked a cylinder of black metal rimmed with switches. She flipped one, then another, watching a red light on the detector with intense eyes. It pulsed red, then an amber that burned and slowly died. She smiled into darkness, patted the cylinder, and replaced it at her side. She rose again to her feet.

  The transition to lawn was more heard than seen—the light-shunter fogged her perception of the scene—as the tidal soughing of weeds gave way to the soft padding of low grass. She could feel her pants, wet from mid-thigh to ankle, clinging to her legs with cold dampness. But treated fabrics that resisted moisture also tended to be noisier when moving. A small thing, but it would be small things that kept her alive tonight.

  She began to curve diagonally up the hill toward the side of the house, remembering the whispered advice given to her the night before in a Port bar near the Center. Her contact had taken her over toward the bio-pilot’s alcove, away from the general commotion of the place. He had detailed the grounds and obstacles she might expect to meet; the entrances to the home and how they might be guarded. The information, if correct, was invaluable. If wrong . . . it meant little. She hated Gunnar, who had once refused her membership in his guild. She hated all he stood for, and if her contact knew of someone that would pay her to do this, all the better. The payment had been generous, at least the half she’d managed to get in advance. Last night had been more than pleasant. The euphoria still clung to her, diaphanous.

  They’d gone together to his rooms, and she’d slept for a while. Yes, and she’d woken with a fierce passion against Gunnar. It remained, a backdrop, to the more gentle passions she felt that night.

  She was aware of trouble before she could physically sense it. A momentary prickling shivered along her back. She crouched, rolled, and sought cover without thinking . . . but there was no cover on that hillside.

  She heard, suddenly, the electric crackling of a sting, and her right side tingled with the near-miss—she’d been seen. She felt the beginning of panic. A scream rose in her throat, and she forced it down.

  Her contact had told her—in his harsh, sibilant whisper—that Gunnar’s house was not well-guarded, that she would have no trouble once past the shield. She’d been skeptical, even then, but the money he had shown her and the things the money had bought . . .

  She rolled again, the opposite way, as she freed a hand laser from its holster and fired toward the house. She knew she had next to no chance of hitting someone, but hoped it would confuse the person with the sting long enough for her to run to the meadow grass and the small protection it would bring. Gunnar. She hated him and his guild all the more, and she felt keen frustration at being thwarted. The wash of emotion blunted the first onrushing of panic. She began to think again. She raked laser fire across the darkened front of the house, smelling the acrid fumes of burning paint.

  There had been, first, the Stretcher: an innocuous-looking pill that had elongated her time sense. It had taken a week to yawn, a hour to raise glass to lips . . .
>
  The sting barked again, and again it struck very near her. She abandoned stealth and ran.

  . . . and the girl who’d been so co-operative once her palm had been crossed with silver. Her hands had been slick and smooth like malleable porcelain, her breasts small and girlish . . .

  She switched direction at random, with little hope. The moons were bright, the light-shunter was poor camouflage, there was no place to hide and Dame Fate and Hag Death pursued her, their twin breaths hot on her neck.

  . . . offworld foods she’d always wanted to taste simply because their names had been so exotic: cockatrice, day-diggers. And because she was lassari, there had been no money for such luxuries. . . .

  The next shot found her. The grass was surprisingly soft as she fell. It caressed her. The shunter, broken, bathed her with bands of sparkling brilliance.

  . . . and . . . and . . .

  • • •

  The body of a woman was found the next morning by a caravan of spice traders moving autowains toward Sterka and the Port. The night animals had gotten to the carcass—a not particularly pleasant sight—but the traders, a stoic guild, threw the body across the back of a wain. After all, if she were of kin, her guild would wish to give final rites, and might pay for the body. The cinnamon odor of the spice cloaked the smell of blood.

  They found that the woman was well-known to denizens of the Port, and that she was lassari—a minor criminal record had made her face (what remained of it) familiar to the constabulary. They shrugged their collective shoulders, complimenting the traders on their generosity in bringing the body back and shaking their heads sorrowfully at the wasted effort.

  Irritated that they had spent their time on a lassari, they left the body with the policing guild, who had the hospital nearby remove any useful parts and then dispose of what remained.

  No one particularly mourned her death—and since murder is not always a crime in Neweden, no one bothered to look any further into the matter.

  Hag Death was mollified.

  • • •

  The Thane lay on his bed. He pillowed his head with his hands, lying on his back, and stared at the reflections of a dim hoverlamp skittering across the bare rock of the ceiling. The top of his uniform lay discarded on the floor; glancing down, he could see the torso of a man still in fair shape, but the edges of the once sharply-defined musculature were being slowly eroded. A general blurring of tone, an indefinable sag—he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t more emotional than physical. The Thane would find himself, now and then, staring into a mirror at the reflection of his profile, seeking assurance that the stomach was still relatively flat and the posture erect, trying to find in that shadow Thane the echo of his younger reality, that earlier Thane. Where was age, how did one see it? Was it a function of the hands, the face, the mind? Could it be captured and removed, could he rekindle the intensity?

  It was distressing to him that only he of all Hoorka-kin could remember his father—his biological father—telling him tales of the long fall of Huard and how his father had been trained to kill Huard, part of a group of revolutionaries. Huard’s suicide had destroyed that group’s meaning and drive; his father’s among them. He had wandered through the wreckage of a reeling empire, finally ending on Neweden to find himself a pariah, a social outcast without kin—and, as suddenly, as trade between worlds ended, with no way of leaving. The Thane could remember his father, who had been old when he was born, but it was a wavery face dimmed and filtered by distance. He had a holocube of the man somewhere, but it had been years since he’d looked at it, and kin do not honor their biological parents.

  The chime of the doorward interrupted his thoughts. He considered rising to dress, then shrugged mentally, not caring to move.

  “Come,” he said. He sat up on an elbow and watched the doorshield waver and dilate. Valdisa stepped through, her eyes wide as she tried to adjust to the dimness. The Thane could see her clearly against the corridor lamps. Hers was a full, almost stocky figure that—while feminine and graceful—still carried a raw power. Auburn hair was glossed by the backlighting, a frothy, soft nimbus. Her legs were trim and muscular, her hands at her side. The stubby fingers opened and closed. She moved into the room hesitantly, glancing at the hoverlamp on the ceiling, and then to the bed. She stepped fully into the room and the doorshield irised shut behind her.

  “Damned dark in here. You think this is a cave?”

  “Cute.”

  “An old joke, neh?” Valdisa smiled.

  “Yah. I can see you, anyway.”

  “So? What color are my palms? I’ll bet you can’t see that well.” She held them out toward him. He saw a pair of dark islands, each with five peninsulas.

  “Blue,” he said. It seemed likely.

  “Flesh. I washed the tint from them this evening—and the dye was orange, in any event. Have you ceased to notice my appearance at dinner, or are your eyes failing you? Either way, I’m not flattered.”

  The Thane hmmed a reply deep in his throat. He glanced down the length of his body and saw the roll of flesh at his waist. He stretched himself and finally lay back down so that the stomach was again smooth. His own vanity amused him, but he made no move to ignore it. “Did you come in here simply to be flattered?”

  “I need reasons to see you?” she asked, lightly.

  “I suppose not.”

  With that, the talk faltered. There was a moment of mutual embarrassment as Valdisa glanced nervously from the Thane to the hoverlamp. Then, hesitantly: “You haven’t been much in evidence the last few days. Problems?” She waited, a beat. “As a friend, Thane.” Her eyes pleaded with his.

  “Problems,” he conceded.

  “The fight with Aldhelm?”

  “Partially.” He knew the curt replies were hurting her, but somehow couldn’t bring himself to elaborate. He watched her standing in the center of the room, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and he knew he could end her discomfiture with a word. He couldn’t say it.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked finally.

  “No.”

  “Talk sometimes helps.”

  “You really think it necessary? Talking won’t make anything clearer, won’t change situations.”

  “Maybe not, but it won’t cloud things, either.”

  “Then talk.” The Thane waved a hand and closed his eyes. Through the self-imposed darkness, he could hear her soft breathing, the rustling of cloth as she moved.

  “You’re letting everything that happens become some”—Valdisa hesitated, searching for words—“some magical symbol of vague doom. I don’t even know what’s most disturbing, your twisting of small events into auguries of great import, or the events themselves. The Hoorka are facing a real crisis. We need a real solution. And you seem content to let Dame Fate twist the threads into whatever pattern She desires.”

  “As She always will do. Hoorka has faced crises before, and come through them.” He spoke with his eyes clamped shut. He didn’t want to see the concern in her face.

  “And it has always been your guidance that led us.”

  Valdisa came over to the bed and sat beside him. He felt the supporting field bounce slightly as it compensated for the increased weight. She touched his hand tentatively; then, when he didn’t pull away, she let her hand rest there, covering his. All of the Thane’s consciousness seemed concentrated there—he could feel the satiny texture of her palm and the roughness of the calluses gathered at the tip of each finger. Her hand was warm, with a trace of sweat, and his own hand seemed chill against hers: autumn and high summer. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to look at her, though his eyes opened. He stared at the nether regions beyond the hoverlamp.

  “Why these sudden hesitations?” she asked. “You can see what it’s doing to the others.” Her voice was gritty sand and fluffed cotton. “You made the fight with Aldhelm take on an importance beyond its true proportions. No Hoorka would expect you to defeat him in a fight at any other time—h
e’s simply bigger, stronger, and more agile than you, and if that pricks your damned pride, I’m sorry. You insisted on turning it into a power play. If it was a symbol, you made it that way.”

  “It seemed necessary.”

  The Thane’s voice rasped through his throat, rough and husky. But his eyes, finding her face, discovered it to be vulnerable and open with genuine empathy. His hand moved, a spasm, beneath hers.

  “A reprimand . . .”

  “Wouldn’t have been enough,” he finished for her. Then: “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.” Irritated, he moved his hand from under hers and gesticulated violently. The hoverlamp bobbed with the moving air as Valdisa moved back in surprise.

  “I don’t know any more,” he shouted. “I find myself wondering about the morality of what I’ve built here, wondering whether I care to have my name forever linked with that of Hoorka . . . Valdisa, I’m tired. I find myself caring more about myself than for my kin.”

  “You’ve always masked yourself. I don’t even know your family name.”

  “Does it matter on Neweden?” His eyes were pained. “They were lassari.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Hermond. Gyll Hermond.” His voice dared her to comment.

  Valdisa shrugged. “It’s a name. What does it matter that Hermond isn’t among the lists of the guilded?”

  “It mattered. You’ve never been lassari—your family had kin. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Perhaps not, but I can still feel your pain, kin-brother.”

  The Thane shook his head. “I sit here and make excuses for all my problems. I’m getting very tired—and I’m not senile, not in my dotage, not even particularly old. I don’t think I’ve lost any mental agility I once had. And making you feel guilty about my background is just another ploy on my part. I surround myself with sophistry and easy motivations.” A pause. He ran his hand through graying hair. “I’m sorry, Valdisa. I truly am.”

  The Thane sat back against the rough stones of the wall, staring at the hoverlamp in the center of the room. Valdisa reached out to stroke his cheek with her hand. The undepilated stubble dragged at her skin, and she let the hand wander from cheek to shoulder. She moved close to him, the bed jiggling as it took her full weight. Shadows merged on rock. She forced him to look at her, her hands moving in mute comfort.