There had been four Landsmen to guard the five desolate. Now the guards are blurry smears of torn, angular metal, red flesh and sharp white bone.
Darik rubbed his eyes and forced himself up, staggering like a man waking from too long a sleep. A movement in the corner of his eye pulled at his attention. One of the Landsmen was still alive, on his back and trying to scuttle away on his elbows as Darik approached. The smith knelt by the Landsman and placed his big hands on either side of his head. It would be easy to finish him, just a single twist of his big arms and the Landsman’s neck would snap like a charcoaled stick. He willed his arms to move but instead found himself staring at the Landsman. Not much older than he was and scared, so scared. The Landsman’s lips were moving and at first the only sound is the high whine of the world, then the words come like the approaching thunder of a mount’s feet as it gallops towards him.
“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry …”
“It’s wrong,” Darik said, “this is all wrong,” but the Landsman’s eyes were far away, lost in fear and past understanding. His mouth moving.
“… I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry …”
Darik stared a little longer, the killing muscles in his arms tensing. Now his vision had cleared he saw beyond the broken bodies of the other Landsmen to the shattered corpses of those who had died beside him. They had been picked up and tossed away on the winds of his fury.
Darik leaned in close to the Landsman.
“This has to stop,” he said, and let go of the man’s head. The words kept coming.
“… I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”
He could see Kina’s corpse, dead at the hand of the knights then shredded into a red mess by his magic.
“I forgive you,” said Darik through tears. The Landsman slumped to the floor, eyes wide in shock as the smith walked away.
Inside the thick muscles of Darik’s arms black veins are screaming.
Chapter 1
We were attempting to enter Castle Maniyadoc through the night soil gate and my master was in the sort of foul mood only an assassin forced to wade through a week’s worth of shit can be. I was far more sanguine about our situation. As an assassin’s apprentice you become inured to foulness. It is your lot.
“Girton,” said Merela Karn. That is my master’s true name, though if I were to refer to her as anything other than “Master” I would be swiftly and painfully reprimanded. “Girton,” she said, “if one more king, queen or any other member of the blessed classes thinks a night soil gate is the best way to make an unseen entrance to their castle, you are to run them through.”
“Really, Master?”
“No, not really,” she whispered into the night, her breath a cloud in the cold air. “Of course not really. You are to politely suggest that walking in the main gate dressed as masked priests of the dead gods is less conspicuous. Show me a blessed who doesn’t know that the night soil gate is an easy way in for an enemy and I will show you a corpse.”
“You have shown me many corpses, Master.”
“Be quiet, Girton.”
My master is not a lover of humour. Not many assassins are; it is a profession that attracts the miserable and the melancholic. I would never put myself into either of those categories, but I was bought into the profession and did not join by choice.
“Dead gods in their watery graves!” hissed my master into the night. “They have not even opened the grate for us.” She swung herself aside whispering, “Move, Girton!” I slipped and slid crabwise on the filthy grass of the slope running from the river below us up to the base of the towering castle walls. Foulness farted out of the grating to join the oozing stream that ran down the motte and joined the river.
A silvery smudge marred the riverbank in the distance; it looked like a giant paint-covered thumb had been placed over it. In the moonlight it was quite beautiful, but we had passed near as we sneaked in, and I knew it was the same livid yellow as the other sourings which scarred the Tired Lands. There was no telling how old this souring was, and I wondered how big it had been originally and how much blood had been spilled to shrink it to its present size. I glanced up at the keep. This side had few windows and I thought the small souring could be new, but that was a silly, childish thought. The blades of the Landsmen kept us safe from sorcerers and the magic which sucked the life from the land. There had been no significant magic used in the Tired Lands since the Black Sorcerer had risen, and he had died before I had been born. No, what I saw was simply one of many sores on the land—a place as dead as the ancient sorcerer who made it. I turned from the souring and did my best to imagine it wasn’t there, though I was sure I could smell it, even over the high stink of the night soil drain.
“Someone will pay for arranging this, Girton, I swear,” said my master. Her head vanished into the darkness as she bobbed down to examine the grate once more. “This is sealed with a simple five-lever lock.” She did not even breathe heavily despite holding her entire weight on one arm and one leg jammed into stonework the black of old wounds. “You can open this, Girton. You need as much practice with locks as you can get.”
“Thank you, Master,” I said. I did not mean it. It was cold, and a lock is far harder to manipulate when it is cold.
And when it is covered in shit.
Unlike my master, I am no great acrobat. I am hampered by a clubbed foot, so I used my weight to hold me tight against the grating even though it meant getting covered in filth. On the stone columns either side of the grate the forlorn remains of minor gods had been almost chipped away. On my right only a pair of intricately carved antlers remained, and on my left a pair of horns and one solemn eye stared out at me. I turned from the eye and brought out my picks, sliding them into the lock with shaking fingers and feeling within using the slim metal rods.
“What if there are dogs, Master?”
“We kill them, Girton.”
There is something rewarding in picking a lock. Something very satisfying about the click of the barrels and the pressure vanishing as the lock gives way to skill. It is not quite as rewarding done while a castle’s toilets empty themselves over your body, but a happy life is one where you take your pleasures where you can.
“It is open, Master.”
“Good. You took too long.”
“Thank you, Master.” It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but I was sure she smiled before she nodded me forward. I hesitated at the edge of the pitch-dark drain.
“It looks like the sort of place you’d find Dark Ungar, Master.”