by Ian Whates
Really? Tom would never have guessed.
The rider was hunched over his mount's neck, face partially obscured, yet there seemed something familiar about him. Then he sat straight and proceeded to rein the horse in. With a start, Tom recognised him: Seth Bryant!
Then he noticed the differences. Demeanour, expression, the whole set of body and face were at odds with the jovial landlord he remembered from the Four Spoke Inn. It was as if somebody else were wearing Seth's body. And when he spoke even the voice had changed, the words emerging with a clipped, nasal quality which reminded Tom a little of Dewar.
"Hello again, King Slayer." Seth looked directly at their leader. "I couldn't possibly let you leave without saying goodbye properly."
"So, you are one of the Twelve," Dewar said, as if this confirmed a suspicion.
"That I am, or rather was. Can't tell you what a pleasure it is to finally meet the man who betrayed us and destroyed my life."
"I didn't. It wasn't like that. The assassination was sanctioned."
"Do you honestly expect me to believe that?"
"No, not really," Dewar replied wearily, "but it doesn't alter the fact."
Seth nodded. "Agreed. And the fact is that you're about to die!"
At the final shouted word, the mounted man threw his right arm out in an arc. Tom instinctively jumped back, though the half dozen glistening slivers flew towards Dewar, not him. The assassin was already moving, leaping aside to land with rounded shoulder which enabled him to roll and spring to his feet immediately. Six needle-pointed darts thudded into the ground, none of them finding their mark. Seth urged his horse forward, driving it straight towards Dewar, who had managed to keep hold of his kairuken and was attempting to bring the weapon to bear. The assassin fired but the shot was a snatched one, the disc missing its intended target and slicing into the horse's neck in passing. The wound clearly startled the horse, which shied and turned its head sharply away from Dewar, almost unseating its rider in the process.
The large man who'd arrived with Seth started forward, making a beeline for Tom, who raised his sword and adjusted his feet as Dewar had taught him. Nervous he might be, but his determination to defend Mildra steadied his hand and he drew strength from the recent lessons, casting doubts aside.
As on the night they were attacked in the clearing, Kohn stepped in, swinging a massive fist at the attacker. Tom watched the giant's blow connect, smashing into the man's head. A surge of relief coursed through him, only to turn to dismay an instant later as he saw how little effect Kohn's strike had. Tom had seen those hands pick up a small tree trunk and wield it as readily as a bat in some ball game, yet when struck in anger by such a fist the attacker barely flinched. His response, on the other hand, was far more decisive. Somehow, Tom had come to think of Kohn as invincible, an illusion that was shattered as he watched the Kayjele crumple beneath a dismissive swipe from the advancing figure.
Suddenly, Tom's own doubts came flooding back. If this unnerving figure was powerful enough to floor Kohn so easily, what chance did he stand? No point in using his ability to hide, the attacker knew exactly where he was. He glanced quickly around, hoping for salvation from somewhere, but Dewar was fully occupied with Seth, who continued to throw taunts at the assassin, though Tom couldn't spare the attention to catch exactly what was said.
The sinister attacker loomed large, almost upon him. Tom took a deep breath, prepared to make a thrust with his sword, and silently prayed for a miracle. It arrived in the form of Kohn. Somehow the Kayjele regained his feet and threw himself at the advancing figure. The giant's body slammed into the far smaller man, his muscular arms engulfing him. The attacker staggered under the impact but, against all reason, still didn't go down. The Kayjele grimaced and growled, his arms bulging with the effort to crush his opponent. Not a sound came from the man held in that bear-like clinch, whose features remained unmoving while his eyes stared relentlessly at Tom, sending a chill coursing down the boy's spine. What was this thing?
As Tom watched, the giant's hold was broken, his arm's forced apart by this stone-faced enemy. Finally the thing's gaze deserted Tom to focus on Kohn, and its whole body started to glow.
A golden radiance shone forth from the slighter figure, slowly spreading along Kohn's arms from where the thing gripped him until it enveloped the struggling Kayjele. Tom could no longer look at the attacker, the light was too bright, but by squinting he could still make out the form of Kohn, his face contorted in agony. Then that form seemed to distort, stretching and bending as no living thing should.
At which point it silently disintegrated.
"No!" Tom realised he'd screamed the denial, as he watched his friend die.
"Dear goddess," Mildra murmured from behind him. "A Rust Warrior."
Had Tom not been terrified already, that would have done it. The Rust Warriors were as feared and loathed as the Blade. They were also supposed to have been wiped out long ago. Yet here one was, standing before him as big and bold as life itself.
Yes, Tom was afraid, but fear was just one of the emotions stirring within him. Anger and grief were there as well. The glow around where Kohn had stood dissipated. All that remained of the gentle giant was a flurry of rustbrown flakes settling slowly to the ground like leaves stirred by an autumn breeze. As he watched this, Tom's fear was supplanted, withering away before the onslaught of those other feelings. The glow around the Rust Warrior also faded and his form became clear again. Tom heard Mildra gasp, realising at the same instant that the monster's face had changed. As if to mock them, the Rust Warrior had adopted the appearance of its latest victim. It looked like Kohn.
Tom felt horrified, appalled. His stomach heaved and he had to fight back the urge to heave up his last meal. But beyond the revulsion, as he looked upon this abomination now wearing the face of their murdered friend, he felt outraged.
Something within him snapped.
When Tom had felt his mind invaded by one of the Dog Master's creatures during his trek across the underCity he'd fought back, drawing on abilities he never knew were there. When one of the hybrid creatures had latched onto Kat, preparing to invade her mind and warp her will, he'd used those same abilities to lash out and destroy a whole swarm of them, and, later, with support from the prime master and Jeradine crystal technology, he had cleansed the entire under-City of those scuttling mechanisms and their parasitic charges. On each occasions he'd paid with crippling headaches and exhaustion, but this time he actively sought that coil of brooding power within him, and there was no reluctance or internal conflict as he reached deep inside to draw it forth and hurl it at the Rust Warrior with all his passion and will.
The result was spectacular.
This walking malevolent effigy of their murdered friend stopped in its tracks and began to tremble violently. Eyes bulged in the closest thing to an expression Tom had yet seen on whatever face the thing wore. The trembling ended as abruptly as it had begun, and then, without further warning, the Rust Warrior exploded.
Tom felt a great blast of heat and light wash over him. He was dazzled by the brightness and found himself blown backwards by the force, knocking into Mildra. They both went down.
As he sat up, desperately blinking stars from his eyes in an effort to see what had happened, he was amazed to discover no real injuries. He'd seen a boiler explode once and so knew about shrapnel, and had himself been hit by a shard when the sun globe came down, but there didn't seem to have been any this time; nor any real flames for that matter, despite the heat.
Tom climbed shakily to his feet, pausing to help Mildra up once he'd done so. From across the road Dewar stared back at him with obvious dismay. "I don't know what the breck you hit that Rust Warrior with, kid, nor where you've been hiding it, but good job – very good job. Don't suppose you got Bryant at the same time, did you?"
There was no sign of Seth or his horse. Tom shook his head. "No."
Dewar grunted. "Thought that would be too much to hope for; which means
he'll be back, I suppose."
Tom didn't comment. He was staring at where the Rust Warrior had stood scant seconds before. A small black smear on the ground was all that marked the monster's passing. His second thought was no headache! He felt slightly disorientated, a little light-headed, but that was all.
Mildra also seemed to be examining the ground. She stooped and picked something up. Tom recognised it immediately as the dull orange-red gemstone Kohn had worn around his neck, the one the giant had shown him on the barge – their first step towards friendship. The strip of leather that supported it was gone, but the stone seemed undamaged.
"Kohn's heart stone," Mildra murmured. "Somehow it's survived whatever the Rust Warrior did to him."
"Heart stone?"
"Yes," she said, her gaze still fastened to the pendant. "Every Kayjele is given one at birth. They believe the stone forms a home for their essence, their spirit, everything that makes them who they are."
Tom found himself staring at the stone as intently as the Thaistess. It was now all they had to remember the gentle giant by. "What will you do with it?" Images of Kohn striding beside him on the road or sitting with him during their days on the barge chased each other through his mind.
"I'm not sure." She frowned thoughtfully. "I suppose I should try to get it back to his family, if I can. That's what he would have wanted." There was a quiver in her voice as she said this last, and Tom realised the Thaistess was close to tears.
"I… I wish I'd done something sooner," he said.
She put her arm around his shoulders. "Don't blame yourself, Tom!" This was spoken urgently, insistently. "You acted as soon as you could, and you saved us all from that awful thing."
All except for Kohn, he thought but didn't say. His gaze returned to Dewar, and he remembered then that Seth Bryant had seemed to recognise him. What was the name the former innkeeper called out? "King Slayer", that was it. What did that mean? What had Dewar done to earn such a name and the hatred which Seth so clearly displayed?
Ever the pragmatist, Dewar would miss Kohn principally for the Kayjele's strength and willingness to carry things. Their horse, which Mildra had named Beauty, must have bolted during the encounter, taking most of their provisions with her. Fortunately, Kohn had still been carrying some and the giant had possessed enough good sense to put his bundle down before attacking the Rust Warrior, which meant they each still had a change of clothes at least. The assassin always kept coins and any valuables about his person, a habit he had been grateful of more than once in his life.
While his two surviving companions seemed incapacitated by grief over their fallen comrade, he set about dividing their remaining possessions into three bundles. Might be an idea to trust the two of them with a little money as well, he decided, just in case they became separated at some point.
Despite his outward calm, Dewar was more shaken by this latest incident than he cared to admit. In many ways Indryl, fabled capital of the Misted Isles, seemed a lifetime ago, yet some details remained as fresh in his mind as if they were but recent yesterdays. He'd always known the surviving member of the Twelve were out there somewhere, keeping their heads down while building new lives for themselves under assumed identities, and he'd always known they would never forget.
Of course, he had no means of knowing how one of them came to be running the Four Spoke Inn in Crosston, but given their shared former profession, he could make a shrewd guess.
Assassination had been an accepted mechanism of government in the Misted Isles for centuries – part of the political order. Killings were carried out by the Twelve and overseen by the First. It had been an elegant, effective system, with each assassin working independently, rarely if ever meeting or even knowing who his fellows might be. They weren't public faces, weren't known to anyone apart from the First. The Twelve were self-policing, and would hunt down relentlessly any outsider who committed a murder and tried to pass it off as their work, or, indeed, one of their own who made a hit that had not been officially sanctioned. The system worked well, until Dewar was assigned the unthinkable. He had been tasked with killing the king.
In all his years of service he had never hesitated, never questioned a sanction no matter how prominent the target might have been nor, conversely, how apparently insignificant. But he paused to query this one. Regicide seemed a little extreme, even for the Twelve. However, the sanction was immediately confirmed, which meant that saying no and staying alive became mutually exclusive options.
They called him King Slayer; the irony obvious and fully intended. Because, for the first time in an otherwise exemplary career, he failed. It could have happened at any time: blind luck turning against him. The king leant forward at the wrong moment; the poisoned dart that would have killed him in seconds missing by a fraction and sailing past to bring an abrupt end to the life of a royal aide. There was no opportunity for a second attempt. Bodyguards surrounded his highness in an instant and Dewar made good his escape, avoiding capture by the skin of his teeth.
It took him years to make sense of what came after. The First disowned him, acknowledging that the attempt had been made by one of the Twelve but denying that the hit was officially sanctioned. In a fit of rage, the King declared all the Twelve outlaw, to be hunted down and tried for treason. Only the First was exempt. The rest of the order were forced to flee for their lives, and it was common knowledge that not all made it. Two were captured and very publicly hung, drawn and quartered, while at least three more were said to have been killed while trying to escape.
A political mechanism which had been in place for centuries was torn apart at a stroke, and he had been the unwitting instrument of its destruction. Had that been the plan all along? Was this a deliberate move to strengthen the royal hand by removing the Twelve, long seen as a counterbalance to imperial autocracy? But that made no sense. He'd come within a hairsbreadth of actually killing the king. No, this smacked more of desperation, of pragmatism by the First, who sacrificed the Twelve to save his own skin, and of opportunism by the king, who seized upon the incident as an ideal excuse to destroy the Twelve's power base once and for all.
Dewar didn't doubt that he'd been the pawn in some dark political machinations, but felt increasingly certain that unfolding events had skewed the outcome into a completely new form. The king and the First had become allies by circumstance, not by design, and Dewar drew some small satisfaction from knowing how uneasy an alliance that must be. Did either of them sleep well at night?
None of which altered the fact that he was the scapegoat, a figure of hate and the prime target for both a powerful national state and its agents, and also the surviving members of an exiled assassin caste. King Slayer they dubbed him; partly in cruel jest and partly because making the attempt made him just as guilty as succeeding would have done.
The only place he could ever imagine being safe again was within the walls of Thaiburley; the towering, dense hub of the human world.
Dewar was neither proud nor ashamed of his past. Regrets were pointless, nostalgia a luxury he'd never allowed himself. His past was simply there, a tapestry of events forever unfurling behind him as he progressed through life. People might occasionally see a part of that constantly evolving picture but the whole was his and his alone. Everybody had one, even someone as young as Tom or as sheltered as a Thaistess, but their histories were of no more interest to him than his was any business of theirs. So he said nothing to expand on comments already overheard and made no effort to satisfy the curiosity evident in the glances coming his way, particularly from Tom. Let them wonder. His past was his own.
THIRTEEN
The prime master's sense of foreboding grew more pronounced with each passing day – an irritation that wouldn't be soothed, an itch that refused to go away.
The incidents of bone flu had grown more frequent until it had become impossible to keep a lid on the situation. There were new cases reported among the arkademics each day, outbreaks occurring in rapid succession, and
he had felt compelled to share what little he knew about the disease with the other members of the council. The prime master was impressed and more than a little proud of how calmly his colleagues took the news. These really were a fine lot of people, and their most extreme reaction was to censure him for not having shared the burden earlier. In truth, it made him a little ashamed at ever having doubted their character.
While he was now completely open with his fellows on the Council of Masters, he chose to be a little less candid when it came to the assembly, whom he had addressed on the subject of bone flu that very morning. There were considerably more in Thaiburley's second tier of government than the mere dozen of the Council, and while the prime master knew for a fact that the assembly boasted many dedicated and highly competent men and women, inevitably in such a comparatively large set of people characteristics such as integrity and courage varied. A vessel was only ever as strong as its weakest point, and he couldn't risk word of the darker implications of bone flu leaking out and causing panic across the city.
So he stood in front of the assembled members and smiled, projecting confidence and implying a far greater level of control over the situation than actually existed.