The Assassin King

  She tried to lift the doubletree off him, but it was too heavy. He was gray in the face, sweat pouring from him, but he did manage to meet her eyes.

  “Fly, m’lady,” he said. Then he shuddered and fell unconscious.

  Practicality descended. Melisande contemplated taking the mountain horse but discarded the thought, realizing she had no knowledge of the animal and that it was ill-suited to taking on forest paths. When she believed the soldiers were too engaged to see her, she hurried to the roans, and with small nimble fingers and speed born of much practice, she unbuckled the one standing and mounted it, pulling herself up easily. It was a horse she knew well; it recognized her and did not bolt.

  She kicked the horse and leaned forward over its neck as it started, then broke into a fast trot, a faster canter, and finally a smooth gallop down the forest road.

  She kept up the gallop for the better part of half a league, then slowed to a trot again. The forest road was dwindling to little more than a footpath, and the night sky was giving way to the gray of predawn. By the time the clouds grew rosy she had left the road altogether, traveling north, as best as she could figure, spurred on by panic and an inner call to flight born of the horror she had witnessed.

  When the sun finally crested the horizon, filling the frosty woods with diffuse light, making the trees shine silver and white in its radiance, Melisande finally came to a halt. She listened, but heard nothing behind her except the sounds of the forest, of ice creaking on the boughs of trees, the rustle of the pine needles in the morning wind, and the calls of winterbirds that were just beginning to wake.

  She had absolutely no idea where she was, except utterly lost.

  Finally able to breathe, she dismounted and looked around, then the sensations that had shut down in her fight for survival came roaring back. Even through her boots and heavy woolen stockings her feet were chilled; she was shivering with cold and trembling with fear, and hungry, but without any supplies or provisions except the waterskin at her side and the knife in her boot.

  She looked around at the endless greenwood, realizing she was not even sure where the path was now. The Circle should be north of here, she reasoned, or perhaps west. Her chin quivered, but she willed it to stop. Then she straightened her back, took hold of the horse’s bridle, and started off toward the north.

  She had gone a thousand paces when grief overwhelmed her. Melisande sat down on the rough ground beneath a towering shag bark hickory tree and began to sob as if her heart would break.

  After a few moments, calm restored, she stood up, got back on the horse, and started off into the forest in search of the Circle and Gavin.

  16

  At the edge of the Krevensfield Plain

  While those who dwelt in the upworld would not consider the sort of sleep that Dhracians experienced real slumber, it was for their race the closest equivalent, a time of cessation of thought and activity, a drowsiness that allowed their bodies to rest and recharge, as every other living thing did, a panacea of revitalization required of all creatures with a beating heart. Even the near immortality bequeathed to them being sons of the wind, born at the beginning of history, did not spare them the need for rest.

  Rath closed his eyes as he contemplated this, lulled by the thundering of the wind around him as he took shelter in the lee of a grassy hillock. While the primal elemental power of their race and those like it, known as the Firstborn in the nomenclature of the human world, exempted them from many of the limitations that those races that came later were hobbled by, there was something inescapable in the need for rest, even as they traveled the upworld in endless pursuit of their prey. He wondered sometimes idly if death or damnation would be preferable to the endless vigilance required of him and his fellows, the obsessive, interminable need that drowned out all other reason for life, the bloodlust for the destruction of the demons of fire known as the F’dor.

  Certainly it would be easier.

  But preferable or not, easier or not, it didn’t matter.

  It was inescapable.

  As he drifted off into the state of relaxation, Rath was haunted by what passed for dreams, the same sorts of images and memories that filled his mind each night when the last of his kirai had been expended, when he no longer tasted the wind actively for traces of the F’dor stench, when his duty was delayed for a few brief hours while the rest of the world slept. Like those others of his race, he had trod one time or another each of the seven continents, crossed each of the seven seas, had traveled almost every footpath, every byway, had wandered through parts of the world seen only by the birds and inhabited only by mountain goats, all in the endless search for what had escaped, and still eluded them. It was an unforgiving hunt, an endless quest, and all the centuries that had passed had served to leave little memory of anything good.

  Rath rolled to one side in his slumber. In spite of all the visions his eyes had beheld of the world, there was still within his memory a clear recollection of another place that he had not seen in thousands of years. As his breathing deepened and slowed, he visited that place yet again as he had each night since leaving it.

  From the recesses of his mind came forth thoughts of a time in the world long before humans had spawned and propagated the planet, when but five races held sway, his own being one of them.

  His mother race, what men called the Kith, believed the stories of the creation of the world told to them by one of the only other races that had preceded them on it, the Seren. The Seren Singers told of the birth of the Earth as a piece of the star that broke off from its mother and sailed across the universe, coming to rest in orbit around that blazing entity that had given it life. The rock had continued to burn, the Seren said, with flames of worldly fire, the first element unique to the Earth. Finally, when it seemed that the flames would consume the new planet, they receded and sank into the core of the new world, where they continued to burn, hot and pure. The new planet was said then to be covered with the element of water, and the living sea spread to all corners of the globe, teeming with the beginnings of life.

  It was then that the awareness of his race began. The legend said that the wind rose from the stirrings of the sea, blowing back the waves to reveal finally the land, the last of the elemental lores. From this wind came the beings known as the Kith; Rath remembered clearly the tales told him in darkness of what the world had been like at that time, when the sons of the wind were free to walk the world unfettered, unencumbered by any duties, sworn or unsworn. They were a harsh race, uninterested in alliance or commonality with the beings that emerged from each of those other elements—the tall, thin golden creatures that were said to have been born of the element of starlight, ether, known as the Seren; the elusive, membranous beings know as the Mythlin whose skin was porous, their flesh almost gelatinous, as they spread across the seas from which they had sprung; the Wyrmril, or dragons in the tongue of man, serpentine beasts that chose a form other than the model that had been provided by the Creator, who jealously guarded the Earth from which they had been formed, nascent with the traces of each of the other elements that had touched it. The Kith, more than any of the other races, were loners, happiest when free to roam about the wide world in the arms of the wind

  But that had been before Rath’s time.

  Long before he had been born, there had been an intense battle in which four of the primordial races had become uneasy allies, banding together for the purpose of sparing the world from the destruction of the first of the worldly elements to be born, the destructive and all-consuming element of fire. For while fire had had a natural beginning, some forms of it had become tainted and perverted very early in the life of the world, serving not the power of Creation, but rather that of destruction, of Void, the antithesis of life. The beings that had sprung from fire, and had twisted its purposes to destruction, were the ephemeral spirits known as the F’dor, the race he and his brother hunters now sought.

  As always, Rath’s breathing became labored as the cycl
e of his memory recounted the image of the Vault in which the F’dor had been sealed away within the depths of the earth by the four races of the Alliance. It had been outside of that very vault where he had been born and come to awareness, the child of two Dhracian parents, the tribe of Kith that pledge to serve as the jailers of the F’dor, standing endless vigil at the doors of the Vault of the Underworld. Rath and those of his tribe were even more harsh, more emotionless than the rest of his kin, largely owing to the bleakness of the earth and passageways in the darkness in which they dwelt. To be Dhracian was to be born into a form of endless agony, a perversion of nature, a child of the wind locked away from all vestiges of air or freedom, instead doomed by the promise of generations before to stand guard in endless darkness trapped in the earth for all eternity.

  Or at least it would have been that way, had it not been for the intervention of the Sleeping Child.

  Rath’s heartbeat began to race, as it did each time he slept, each time he dreamt of the day in his memory when the falling star crashed to earth, exploding the dome of the Vault. It was a cataclysm that defied words, a shattering of the tunnels and hallway in and around the prison of Living Stone that contained the most destructive force the universe had ever given birth to, in screams of agony from the jailers and ecstasy from the captives as they roared forth, into the world, dispersing like milkweed down on the wind. Rath had been young then, but he still remembered the taste of salt water in his mouth, the burning in his nose as the sea roared in, the terror of his fellow Dhracians as they drowned within it, not at the imminence of their own deaths, but in the knowledge that the world they had served to guard was no longer safe.

  His mother had been one such to die.

  He was still haunted by the sound of the laughter, thundering in his ears, burning his eardrums, and, even worse, the diminution of it as the voices drifted away, falling silent as the demons dissipated into the world.

  As one of the surviving jailers, he had partaken with grim glee in battling the remaining demons back into the Vault, had helped in the rush to seal that Vault again, containing them within the earth once more. It gave him some satisfaction to remember the howls of fury, the harsh voices disappearing into their tomb of Living Stone, but he had had enough of a glimpse of the inside to know that it was only a temporary containment. Those that had escaped had a single purpose outside of the destruction of all that lived.

  To free those that had not been lucky enough to make it out the first time.

  The sleeping Dhracian twitched, remembering in his dreams the glimpse he had of Bloodthorn, a tree not unlike the ones that grew in each of the places where Time began, but brutal and twisted, a perverse abomination, not plant as much as living entity, with branches and limbs of writhing thorns lashing out like the tentacles of the sea creature seeking prey. It had impaled and swallowed a number of his surviving kin before the Vault was resealed; Rath’s soul still pounded in pain recalling the sounds of their screams.

  His father had been one of them.

  He woke with a start, as he often did, bathed in sweat that quickly dried in the cool breath of the wind. The dream was gone, as was his repose, but it served to remind him of why the Hunt was necessary, of why the needles that ran in his veins were an essential measure to safeguard the world from that which would see it in flames again, as it had once been at the beginning of creation. It was a grim reminder, but an indispensable one, and it gave him the ability to go on living one more day, to continue in his pursuit of that which hid from the wind itself, formless and ephemeral, and purely destructive.

  And any living being that would aid those evil entities, knowingly or unknowingly.

  Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

  As usual, his kirai yielded nothing.

  Rath tried again.

  Ysk.

  The salty taste returned to his mouth, an echo of common blood.

  Rath rose, shook the dust of the road from his garments, and followed the sound once again.

  In the fields of Canderre

  Achmed dragged his mount to a stop, twisting his face away from the back and shoulders of the woman who rode on the horse before him, swathed in a cloak of mist from which a foul stench was emanating.

  “Hrekin,” he said sourly. “Rhapsody, for the sake of everything that is holy, or unholy even, what is that repulsive smell?”

  “Oi think ya got it right the first time, sir,” said Grunthor, merrily. “Children is one of them things what tastes better than it smells.”

  Rhapsody chuckled. “If you even lick your lips within an arm’s length of him, I’ll cauterize your intestines with Daystar Clarion—don’t think I won’t, you child-eating lout,” she replied.

  Achmed exhaled loudly in annoyance. “When I offered to let you ride with me, it was because your husband was concerned you would fall off on your own in your weakened state,” he said, turning to keep his nose from the area of stench. “You did not warn me that your child would make a fine catapult shell—better than rotting garbage or dead fish.”

  “Do you want to stop so that I can change him?” Rhapsody asked, opening the folds of her cloak, sending Achmed writhing away again, covering his sensitive sinuses. The tiny child was sleeping deeply, his black lashes a fringe on the rosy face barely visible in the light of the moon. “I know he smells bad, but it might be best if we just let sleeping children lie.”

  The Three fell silent and exchanged a glance. Rhapsody’s comment had inadvertently served to remind them of the direness of their situation.

  Long ago a poem had proclaimed a prophecy of three sleeping children, each one known indiscriminately as the Sleeping Child.

  The Sleeping Child, the youngest born,

  Lives on in dreams, though Death has come

  To write her name within his tome

  And no one yet has thought to mourn.

  The middle child, who sleeping lies,

  ’Twixt watersky and shifting sands,

  Sits silent, holding patient hands

  Until the day she can arise.

  The eldest child rests deep within

  The ever-silent vault of earth,

  Unborn as yet, but with its birth

  The end of Time Itself begins.

  The first child in the prophecy was sheltered within Achmed’s kingdom in the mountains, an Earthchild, a being made of Living Stone, left over from when the world was born. For all he knew she might even be the last of this race, which the dragons fashioned out of elemental earth, considering them their progeny. The ribs of her body were made of the same Living Stone that comprised the Vault of the Underworld, the prison that held the demons in check, and would thereby act as a key to it were she to fall into the hands of the F’dor.

  And they knew she was there.

  The second child mentioned in the prophecy was the star that fell into the sea on the other side of the world, the same star that shattered the Vault. That burning star, which slept beneath the ocean waves for thousands of years, rose and consumed the Island of Serendair in fiery cataclysm fourteen centuries before.

  And for all the destruction that ensued, for all the lives that were taken, the middle child brought about far less damage than the other two could.

  The third Sleeping Child of the poem, the eldest born, they had seen with their own eyes in their journey along the Axis Mundi, the root of the World Trees that tied them together along the center line of the Earth. It was a wyrm of immense proportion, comprising nearly one-sixth of the world’s mass, sleeping in the cold dark wastes below the Earth’s mantle.

  Waiting for the day the F’dor would call it by name and awaken it.

  Whereupon it would consume the earth.

  “You have to change him now,” Achmed said as the horses danced in place. “The odor is burning the skin off the inside of my eyelids.”

  In the distance a flicker of movement caught his eye. Had he not twisted to get away from the stench of the child, he never would have seen it,
but there it was again, the subtle indication that they were being followed on horseback.

  Grunthor had seen it, too. He clicked to the other horses that he was leading, the two light riding serving as pack horses, and began to trot away again toward the east.

  With a speed born of years of experience, Achmed silently vaulted off his horse’s back, surprising Rhapsody and causing her to sway in the saddle.

  “Keep going,” he said softly to Grunthor. “I’ll take care of these.” He waited until the horses had gotten a slight head start, then found a low clump of leafless ramble off to the side a way where he took cover.

  After a few moments he could feel the sound and vibration of approaching hooves in the ground. A moment beyond that, the handful of soldiers in Ashe’s regalia appeared behind them, traveling quickly and quietly, following closely but making no effort to catch up.

  There was something about the way they sat in the saddle that caught Achmed’s notice. He had seen Anborn training the retinue of the Lord and Lady Cymrian, and knew that his trainees were prone to sit forward and up, the position that would best prevent them from getting quickly off, and most protect their viscera. But those coming down the road were sitting high in the saddle, in total contradiction to what he knew the Alliance soldiers’ training to be.

  And they were riding the gray mountain horses of Sorbold.

  The Bolg king crouched down and swore silently. There was a time when he would have felt them coming from a quarter mile away, and felt their very heartbeats in his skin, and could return fire accurately at that distance as well. But his blood gift, the ability granted him early in life as the first of his race born on the Island of Serendair, the first of Time’s birthplaces, had deserted him when he left the Island, disappearing through the root of Sagia, the tree of elemental starlight. When he arrived in this place, fourteen centuries later, his ability to unerringly follow the heartbeats of every living creature on the Island had vanished, leaving him, somewhat ironically, only able to do so still with those who themselves had come from there.