by Sam Sea
OF ASSASSINS, ORCS AND GODS
By
Sam Sea
Copyright © 2016 by Sam Sea
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Table of Content
Prologue
Chapter 1 – The Learning Lessons
Chapter 2 - The Duke of Northern Sirnia
Chapter 3 - The Hunt
Chapter 4 - The Beer ’n Bear Tavern
Chapter 5 - The Gathering
Chapter 6 - The Northern Road
Chapter 7 - The Champion
Chapter 8 – The Sick Boy
Chapter 9 - Silent
Chapter 10 - The Monastery
Chapter 11 – The Grand Master
Chapter 12 - The Quest
Chapter 13 – Little Prince’s Big Problem
Chapter 14 – Wildmen
Chapter 15 – The Witch
Chapter 16 – The House of Black Claws
Chapter 17 – Master Urko
Chapter 18 – Silence in Charge
Chapter 19 – The Road to Three Rivers
Chapter 20 – Reunions
Chapter 21 – The Rotten Apple
Chapter 22 – The Dagger in the Back
Chapter 23 – The Battle of the Stone Bridge
Chapter 24 – Farewell
About the Author
P
rologue
My mind is a meadow….
A meadow… green and lush, soft with morning’s dew, basking so freely under the merciful sun, where nothing but joy and playfulness can exist. I go there now… I run there now, run there to be free, to tease the tall, swaying grasses of my thoughts, to dance with the butterflies of my senses, to soak up the sunlight of hope, for the hope that I will ever be free again is the reason I will take my next breath...
My mind is a calm sea, water that is welcoming, soothing, that mellows pains of my broken bones, lashed skin and ripped flash. I feel no pain in that water… I feel nothing but its soft caresses.
They can do whatever they want with me, pluck my nails like goose’s feathers, brand me with a hot iron as if I was a wild horse. But my mind cannot be cleaved. My mind is mine. I will never give it to them. It is mine! It is all I’ve got. And with my mind I can do anything, and go anywhere…. Oh, dear lord, please help me, please… ease my pain, show me the way to my meadow…
My mind - my meadow, tall, green grasses where I go to play… where I feel the warmth of the sun, where no pain lingers…
“You think he is still alive?”
“Haven’t see him twitch for a while now… I think he is as dead on that chain as a smoked ham.”
Two guards, completely covered in a dark brown, leathery armor, leaned lazily against the rounded wooden beam and watched a half-naked man in front of them. Or whatever was left of him. The metal had cut deeply into the flash of his hands by which he was hanged. Blood that ran down his arms had dried itself dark.
His chin was pressed against his chest, eyes bashed and closed, but still… A few drops of blood were still dripping down his back, down his legs and toes into a small pond few inches below his bared feet, the result of his last whipping. The sound drops made interrupted otherwise eerie silence of the old dungeon.
That much could be seen with only but few rays of daylight coming from the small, iron-barred, ceiling window. On the opposite side of hanging man, barred cells occupied dark corners. Their rusted metal doors were all open wide revealing scattered hay reeking of human waste and decay. They were all empty.
What couldn’t be seen were splattered traces of all the blood covering dark places, remains and reminders of the grotesque tortures and butcheries of those unfortunate ones to have been brought there.
“You can go and check out if you want,” the stubby, short guard interrupted the silence. “You can go and feel his heart, to see if it’s still ticking…” He let go a short, mocking laugh as if such possibility was ridiculous. “But you better watch out. This one is one mean son-of-a-whore. The last guard, poor old John, who got too close to him had lost his ear. They just carried him out, minutes before you came.”
The other guard, a head taller, with a fancy archer’s hat covering half of his face, seemed unimpressed.
“He launched at him with his mouth, bid on his face, holding him with his teeth while he kicked him, cracking a few of his ribs with his booths! We heard it all!”
“Nothing like the sound of a broken bone to get your attention, huh?”
“That’s right!” The fat, short guard was finally happy that the new arrival was responding. “It took three of us to separate them. I could have not done it myself, to tell you the truth…no matter how much I beat him. Poor John, he lost his whole ear. We could only found half. I guess he must have swallowed the other…” the man let go of another croaking laugh.
“Maybe he has a taste for a human flash?”
“Would not surprise me… Would not surprise me at all if he was like them wildmen…”
“That’s why you tore his boots off?”
“Yes, I sure did!” the man said with pride. “And cranked few of those toes too. Let him try to kick us again now. So, if you want to go and see if his heart is still ticking, just go ahead. Be my guest. But I would recommend that you wait until other guards come back from caring earless John to nursery. Poor John. I wonder what his whore would say now…”
“Yeah, maybe you are right. Maybe we just let him hang there.” But regardless of what the man said, he didn’t settle down, nervously stretching his back, padding the dangling sword on his left hip. “But the duke said to keep him alive, and if he is dead, what then? What will happen to us? Maybe then we will lose more than our ears, don’t you think?”
The short, fat guard was not laughing any more with a nervous tick attacking his left eye. He moved his barrel-type body off the wooden bean and started to hop from one leg to another. His mouth opened, but no words came out of it, his fat head unable to produce any meaningful answer.
“He does not look so dangerous. Are you sure he is one of them Black Claws?”
“Yes! He has one of them crazy tattoo on his back. You don’t believe me? You can go and see. We whipped his back really good, but you can still make it out.”
“Anybody can get a tattoo…”
“No… He is a real assassin, I’m telling you… He may not look dangerous to you right now, but he is a deadly snake all right… They found all the killing tools of his trade on him, claws, hooks, flying stars, daggers, everything… some stuff I never even knew existed, don’t even have words for them…”
“Yeah, where are they? I don’t see anything around here?”
“The duke took them all with him. But I saw it, I swear. And… and, when General Wath smacked his mouth really hard, half of his teeth came out, and you know, one of them… was poison inside of it… That’s right. The old priest who came afterwards clearly said so. I was there.”
“A poison capsule inside a tooth, huh?”
“That’s right. He could bite that capsule and spit out the poison right into your face… I bet he could kill both of us with it! Good that the general smacked him the way he did right away… Imagine, being poisoned by him… Probably worse than a bite of wartan. Imagine that.”
“Don’t be stupid!” The tall guard leashed out in anger “The capsule was there for him, stupid! To commit suicide if he was ever
captured. That’s why when… they go on missions, they hardly let themselves fall sleep… too afraid they may bite their teeth too hard and let the poison in… never to wake up again…” The man’s voice trailed off quietly.
“You know a lot about those things…”
“I’ve been around.”
“But you do see it now, you believe me now, right? He is dangerous. We both better be careful.”
“I think he is dead.”
“Well, go and check. Be my guest.” The short guard dared him.
But the other guard did not rise to the bait. “Who do you think his target was? Did he say anything, like who was supposed to die by his hands?”
“No… I have not heard him say anything. But then I was not here all the time.”
“After all the whip you put on him?
“No. He is tough, I’m telling you-”
”I really wonder who he was sent to kill…”
“Well, on the account that Gathering of Twenty is tomorrow, could be anybody…even our duke… Maybe even the king himself, who knows?”
“But he didn’t say anything about it while you were here, huh?”
“No… tough as an old goat he is… They say they breath them like that, that they take a slave wildwoman and have a bear rape her, and then if the boy is born, well, they raise him to become an assassin…”
“Is that what they say?” the tall guard didn’t hide his disgust.
“One of the stories also say that-”
“I know…” the archer interrupted him, not ready to listen to those stories. “But then I doubt he came here to kill anybody at the summit…”
“Why do you say that?”
“Hasn’t he been captured like a month ago. What assassin would go to a place one month before he was to commit a murder?”
“Well, that makes sense…”
“And in a whole month, he said nothing, huh?”
“No…We had him locked inside one of them cells, and when he was caught trying to escape, the duke said to hang him by chains, get answers by the morning.”
“Make sense… get answers before the guests start arriving. Who wants to hear screams in the middle of the night or while they are all sitting around having dinner with the king?” The man said nothing for a while, but then started to shake his head. “Black Claws…? I don’t believe it. I thought they were just a myth, bed-time stories to scare little children…”
“Well, so did I, so did I… But those were the first words out of duke’s mouth as soon as he saw that damn tattoo.” The fat guard started to shake his head, continuously staring at the hanging prisoner. “Say, what do you think the duke will do to us if he is dead?” The assassin was still not moving.
“I don’t think he will be pleased at all. The way he told me to come down and keep an eye on him… Who knows, we may be the ones dangling on the chain next. That is if he bothers to spare our lives. I mean, what is the worst he ever punished one of us?”
“He had old Siler whipped for falling asleep on the guard duty just the other day!” The man remembered as a big dumpling of fear went hard down his through. “Fifty lashes! He received right there in front of everyone! All two hundred of us had to watch. You’re lucky you just came here yesterday. “
“Did it kill him?”
“No… and that is not to say that would have not been the best thing to have happened. Old Siler is in the infirmary still. Doubt he will ever get well. It would have been more merciful to chop off his head, just like the duke used to do before...” The words suddenly could not leave man’s mouth anymore, his bottom jaw twitching uncontrollably. He stepped closer to the prisoner, not sure anymore what to do, his eyes trying to detect any sign of life in the dying man. But he could see none, fighting for words and thoughts, with saliva drooling from the corners of his wide-opened mouth.
But no words would ever come out of his mouth again. As he made another step forward, the tip of a dagger suddenly appeared to come out where his tong was. For a moment, it stood there with the man’s eyes popping out in an outmost disbelief, blood overcoming saliva. Then, the archer jerked out the dagger from the back of the guard’s head, and let his lifeless body fold to the cold stones below.
Without bothering to wipe blood and brain off the blade, he moved toward the prisoner.
“Les, Leeeesss… do you hear me?” He called out in a subdued tone. “Les??”
Les’s head lifted just a bit up off his chest.
“Did you talk? Did you reveal the secret?” The man was less than an arms-length away from him. “Did you?” he whispered.
An eye lid opened up less than an inch revealing a blood shot eye which tried to focus on the guard’s murderer.
“Did you talk? Is the secret safe?” Now the man was only a breath away from him.
But Les was silent, not even a mutter of a sound, not even as the assassin dropped a bit of water on his lips. He just let his good eye surrender and it closed again with his head falling back to his chest.
This is not a rescue mission. Tirniran has never been tasked no rescue missions… This is a cleanup. It has to be… He would have already looked around for a way to let me loose. Would come here maybe even during the night… Tirniran will put that dagger inside my head as soon as he gets his answers, just like those guards were planning to end me tonight.
“I need to know… Did you break the code? Did you tell them the secret?” the man insisted, placing a free hand on his waste, stopping Les’s body from swinging.
If I say ‘yes’, how many more will die? I will be the first one for sure. Les finally uttered few sounds, but if they formed words, they certainly could not have been understood. Tirniran dropped few more drops of water on blood-dried lips, and put his ear closer to them.
“The boss needs to know… I need to know before I set you free. I need to know in case you die. We need to know, so tell me-” His whispers covered up the swooshing sound of an arrow splitting the air.
It made a popping sound as it pierced his armor and went all the way through his chest, pointing out at the place where his heart should have been. Just like the man he killed only seconds ago, it was turn for his eyes to bulge out while he stared in the shock at his chest, dropping the dagger from his hand, going for the arrow’s tip sticking out. But before he could do anything about it, his knees gave in and met the floor, and then his body collapsed forward with his head knocking Les’s feet into a swing and then slapped dead over the hard stone, but a steps away from the man he killed seconds before.
Les, steadying his feet on the fallen body of the assassin, jerked his head up and dared to look up. The shadow moved toward him, coming down the last few stairs, a small crossbow already swung over its back. Soundlessly it flew over the floor, and within seconds brought its hand to the chain above Les’s head.
“Who are you?” he muttered through his broken teeth toward the shadow, his eye unable to see beyond its black cloak.
“Who sent you? What do you want?”
“Shhhhhh…“ The shadow put a finger to his mouth, ever so gently.
“Are you the devil, ready to take me away?”
“Be quiet…” The whisper barely reached him, the soft sound of a child, an angel, or the voice of a ghost, or of one of his past victims, coming back from the other side, finally reaching for him to settled the score, reaching… he could see it… reaching with one hand to its back and pulling out a thin, long sword, a kind of which he never saw before.
The lighting of a blade flashed in the corner of his eyes, and the chain above his head shattered like a broken glass window. If the shadow didn’t hold the chain with one hand, he would have dropped to the floor. But instead, he was ever so softly laid down.
To save me… the devil would not have bother… an angel even less…
Then the sword flashed again, the metal shattered as if made of clay, and the shanks on his ankles clunked off.
Am I free now, free at last? Is this my mind danci
ng with me, playing its ultimate tricks? Are you real? Why are you doing this? Can I die now? His thoughts must have muttered through his mouth out loud, as the shadow pressed its gloved hand over his mouth again. Les fought for air and jerked himself to reality.
“I will not tell you the secret?! I’ll tell you nothing…” his denial came hissing through shadow’s fingers.
“Never!” With the last of his breath, his voice carried further through the basement chamber, echoing off empty space. “Take my body, my soul, but my mind is-”
“Keep quiet!” The voice was not silky anymore, the touch on his lips not soft at all. “Don’t care about your stupid secrets.” The words filled with anger and impatience shut him up only for a second.
“I will tell you nothing-”
“Good! Do that! Keep your mouth shut. And if you keep quiet, who knows, maybe you will live…” The whisper sounded strange, twisted, spoken in a strange way he should not have been able to understand. Yet he understood it all, perfectly.
Les could not make sense of it, and his hand tried to feel the dead body of an assassin next to him, looking for anything he could use, reaching out. “Be still, or I’ll put that iron on you again.” The shadow threatened while its hands worked around something it took out of its cloak.
Suddenly, everything changed in his mind. What if he dies, and the secret dies with him. How many would then die. “You, you have to listen, whoever you are…My life doesn’t matter. But you have to let someone know… The priests of Ra, they would know what to do… You have to let them know, the whole world is to end…” His voice was giving up on him, his thoughts were slipping away, and he was not so sure if he even spoke any of them out-loud at all. He was not sure of anything anymore.
The shadow was pouring some milky liquid over his hands, his feet, his whole body. The jolting pain as the liquid reached parts of raw flash gathered the last lights in his head. “You have to believe me, all life will be lost. Millions will perish… You have to-” He uttered in a single breath, pulling himself up on his elbow,
“You can’t even take care of yourself, yet you worry about million others?” The shadow was mocking him. “Listen… Don’t waste your breath. I don’t care about your secret and I do not care about millions. That is not why I am here. For all I care this whole place can go to hell. What I care about is you keeping quiet and stop flopping around like a dying fish.”