The Assassin King

35

Wars of conquest all have the same father, went the saying among the desert-dwelling tribe known as the Bengard race. He is Hunger. He and his children—Lust, Greed, Rage, Vengeance—are all formed of the same sand.

If anyone knew the lineage of war, it was the Bengard. Tall, oily-skinned, warlike men and women of gargantuan height and mass, whose history of conquest was unparalleled in the Known World, they had a long and deeply held belief that war was not only unavoidable, it was necessary and valuable. There was something almost holy in the constant state of readiness, of willingness to fight for almost any reason, that in the minds of this culture of limited resources and harsh environment was to be cherished and admired above all else. It was not aggression for aggression’s sake, but rather the readiness for a war, whether of invasion or defense, that drove the race into the gladiatorial arena during outbreaks of peace. And the fact that they found mortal combat to be rather fun.

But one thing the Bengard never truly understood was that while the father of war might always be Hunger, occasionally the mother of it was Fear.

More than any fear that clung, when banished by his waking mind, to the depths of his unconscious soul, Beliac feared being eaten alive.

In a different situation, a different man, that fear might be considered more irrational than most. While fear itself was a hobgoblin of the black crevasses of the mind, requiring no basis in the bright sunlight of reality in order to exist, the dread of being consumed while still living was strange even among the more ordinary terrors humans harbored: the fear of darkness or enclosure, of reptiles or arachnids, of heights or being buried alive. If it were anyone other than Beliac, the fear that his flesh might be chewed off of him and swallowed before his eyes would have bordered on insanity.

But Beliac had more reason than most to fear such a possibility. Beliac was the king of Golgarn, the seaside nation to the southeast beyond the Manteids, the mountains known as the Teeth.

And his neighbors, to the north, were the Firbolg.

Beliac had been king of Golgarn for a long time by comparison to the other monarchs on the continent. He had assumed the throne of his peaceful nation more than a quarter century before, and his reign had been a pleasant one, his twenty-fifth jubilee marked by genuine celebration on the part of the populace. The mountains that were the bane of easy trade to the north were also his greatest protection, and given the legends of the population that inhabited the other side of those mountains, he was grateful for the barrier. Nonetheless, in the recesses of his mind were the tales of horror told to him in childhood by his nursemaids and the other children, tales of marauding and murderous monsters who scaled the mountains like goats, their hands and feet equally articulated, searching for prey in the form of human children. As he grew older and studied the history of the continent, he learned the genesis of those fishwives’ tales was real—that in fact the Firbolg truly were a cannibalistic race, hardened by the conquest of every land they had ever inhabited, a conglomeration of bastard strains of every culture they had ever touched. They were demihuman rats, and like rats, they did whatever they had to in order to survive. Including eating their enemies.

It did not matter that Beliac had never seen a Firbolg within five hundred miles of his lands. Nor did it matter that none of his counselors or allies had, either. The Firbolg had taken the mountain city of Canrif in the northern Manteids, mountains they called me Teeth, at the end of the Cymrian War three hundred years before Beliac’s father’s reign, and had lived there ever since, preying on itinerant mountain goats, wayward deer, and each other. No raids had ever been made, no violence ever perpetrated on the citizens of Golgarn. But it didn’t matter. Beliac, like every other young boy in his kingdom, had been told the tales in childhood of the nighttime stealth attacks, where Bolg crept in at children’s windows, stealing babies from their cradles and carrying them off into the night to the sound of crunching jaws and smacking lips. Children were gobbled up a piece at a time, the legends said; it was rumored the Bolg would cover their faces with pillows to ensure quiet while they devoured the Golgarn little ones from the feet up. Beliac, at the age of eight summers, had adopted the customs of his friends and had eschewed sleeping either with pillows or without shoes for that reason.

Upon attaining manhood, he had begun to realize that the tales were lies, legends of the same caliber as the ghost stories and tales of monsters that were imparted between children for the pleasure of frightening each other. Still, there was something planted deep enough in his mind, somewhere between irrationality and reason, down in the deepest spaces where, unlike other children, he was bred with an inborn responsibility to safeguard an entire kingdom, that he could just not shake loose. It was a meaningless terror he had never truly overcome, something he laughed nervously about, all the while attempting to banish it from his conscious mind.

It was also a personal flaw that he had made the mistake, years before, of mentioning in the course of a supper well lubricated with the fine spirits of Argaut, to a friend of his. A merchant named Talquist.

The Raven’s Guild of Yarim had always had a guildmistress.

No one knew exactly why that was; most guilds in the underworld system of organized thieves and assassins were led by a guildmaster, a man whose reputation for strength and ruthlessness had been tested over and over again until he could reign undisputed, aided by a cohort of similarly strong henchmen and lackeys. It was the same politics that played out in palaces, barracks, and mercantiles the world over, but often with less backstabbing. Thieves and assassins, unlike kings, soldiers, and merchants, knew when to leave well enough alone where power was concerned.

But the Raven’s Guild of Yarim was different. Unlike its brother guilds across the Known World, it had been led and held in the steely grasp of a series of women from its inception. As a result, it not only was the best organized of any known guild, holding all of the power of the province’s capital city, Yarim Paar, in its tight control, but it was the most merciless and vengeful.

The mothers of the guild had established from the very beginning the need to own or have a major interest in all the industry of the city—in Yarim Paar’s case, a massive tile foundry—so that the more nefarious aspects of the guild’s business were only sidelines and methods of maintaining supremacy, rather than the main enterprise. The guild operated openly, and even the duke of the province knew better than to attempt to restrict their activities; one of his ancestors had been foolish enough to attempt it, and the dynastic line had almost not survived because of it. The members of the Raven’s Guild, therefore, had an almost religious devotion to their guildmistresses. The most recent of these women, Esten, was revered as a goddess, from the moment that Dranth, the guild scion, had spotted her eviscerating a soldier in a back alley at the age of eight summers. She had grown quickly to womanhood and dominance, holding the guild, the city, and much of the province of Yarim in her merciless grasp for her entire adult life, propagating the Raven’s Guild’s undisputed reign in black market trafficking, murder, thievery, assassination, and a host of even more brutal crimes, raising their skulduggery to the level of pure artistry.

Until her recent unfortunate, and wholly unexpected, death at the hands of the Bolg king’s general.

The guild was still in shock from the delivery of her head, ripped from her shoulders and stuffed into a leather crate wrapped perfunctorily in parchment. The blood oath that the entire membership had taken against the man who was her enemy, Achmed the Snake, king of Ylorc, and his military commander who had been her assassin was the darkest and most eternal of any promise of revenge ever sworn. If the guild had been aware that even as they met in secret discussion and nefarious planning, that king, his Sergeant, and the Lady Cymrian were silently making their way across the red clay-sand of the province’s open desert, the guildhall would have emptied like a bursting heart, and blood would have flowed into that sand until it ran black.

But the guild was unaware of the passage of the Three across their region. And the leaders of that guild were not in Yarim. They were in Golgarn, a nation to which neither of them had ever traveled, in search of their brother guild within the port city’s darker streets.

Dranth, the Raven’s Guild’s scion, paused in disgust outside a filthy tavern in a back alley of the sailors’ district, and turned to Yabrith, one of his lead guildmen, a petty thief, assassin, and general thug, the expression of annoyance making his already hollow features even more frightening.

“What sort of operation is this Spider’s Clutch?” he asked disdainfully. “This is the third location, each one abandoned. Proletarians! This guild doesn’t even have a permanent hall. I cannot believe Esten even entertained commerce with them. They’re nothing more than street rats, scurrying from rathole to rathole each time they are flushed out. It embarrasses me to think that even distantly we are of the same profession.”

Yabrith glanced about the alley nervously. “Never can be sure, sir. P’haps we best just check the last of the places we’ve been given, eh?”

“We have little enough choice,” Dranth agreed. He pulled the hood of his cloak closer about his head and made his way back up the alley to the wharf, looking for signs of a smithy with a red-banded barrel out front.

The wind off the sea was fresh and salty, so unlike the hot breezes heavy with sand and the smoke of the tile foundry fires from whence they had come. The two men braced against it as they came around the street corner; the smell of the wind there changed to one of putrid barrels and fish, rotting wood and pitch.

The port of Golgarn was impressive in its size for a small nation, with seven hundred quays and slips in full operation at all times of the year. Golgarn’s navy had its own outer harbor through which merchant ships and military vessels of other nations had to pass, protecting the docks from becoming a haven of illegal commerce, for the most part. Shipping was the nation’s main industry, due to its sheltered nature as one of the easternmost ports of the Known World, and its location far enough away from the Skeleton Coast of Sorbold to prevent competition. The secondmost industry was hospitality in support of that shipping trade; inns, hostels, and taverns of every stripe lined the streets leading away from the waterfront, catering to whatever proclivities their seafaring clientele might have. The easternmost side of the city, known as the Jeweled Streets, was the most elegant, with beautiful inns, expensive eateries, and well-stocked shops that dealt in wares from all around the Known World, as well as the work of Golgarn’s renowned weavers and jewelers, artisans who made exceptional use of the soft wools of the native stock of mountain sheep and the sapphires, rubies, and tourmalines mined from the face of her mountains. The farther one went away from the Jeweled Streets the plainer and more homespun the offerings became. The central district, built around an immense dormitory known as the Sailors’ Arms, was a clean, serviceable area with plentiful food and goods available to the working men and women of the town, and those who plied the seas for a living, seeking a peaceful night’s rest before shipping out again.

The shops and alehouses became poorer farther west, near the less-traveled piers and the fishing villages, where Golgarn’s poorer sons dragged their living out of the waters that had been the livelihood of their families for time uncounted. The trade in those parts was rougher, the constabulary less in evidence, but still the presence of the maritime soldiers and armed Coast Watch troops was never too far out of sight. Shipping trade invited unsavory sorts, and so Golgarn had one of the best equipped naval forces in the Known World, not to wage war upon the sea, or form armadas to threaten other ports, but to fend off the pirates and other scum of the ocean that preyed upon coastal nations.

As Dranth and Yabrith traveled the wharf in the fading afternoon light, they looked to the skies for a clue to help them find the smithy. Within a short while it became clear that the air about the smokehouses where fish were being cured was different in color from the fumes above businesses dealing in more durable goods, so they moved away from the streets closest to the harbor and deeper in the western district where blackened stone buildings stood with only narrow alleyways between, their shutters and stairways largely broken or rotting from the salt air.

In front of one such building, its storefront open like a yawning maw, was a red banded barrel. Acrid black smoke poured from the wide chimney and out the front of the small building, causing the opening to look even more like a demonic mouth. A harsh, deep clanging issued forth from inside the shop. “This is the last ’un,” Yabrith whispered. Dranth strode to the doorway, waving aside the smoke, and looked inside. A heavyset man with muscular arms and a bulging belly was hammering with an enormous sledge against an anvil, banging a red-hot iron brace into shape. His almost hairless head was crowned with a snowy fringe, the only part of him that appeared the least bit white, so covered was he in soot. His face was red in the heat of the smelting fire, and he grunted with each blow of the sledge. Three scrawny boys were taking turns working an old, shoddy bellows.

Dranth choked back his displeasure and stepped through the smoke. “John Burgett?”

The man at the anvil looked up; he took two more short whacks at the brace, then put down the sledge beside the anvil. “Who’s askin’?”

“I bring you greetings on behalf of my cousin in the hills,” replied Dranth. It was a countersign used only by those familiar with the darkest of guild workings. The heavyset man inhaled deeply, then damped the fire. He turned and yelled over his shoulder.

“Taffy! Get out here an’ tend the anvil! You ’prentices, keep pumpin’ them bellows.”

A thick, black-haired man with a weasel-like countenance appeared from the back. The heavyset man took off his leather apron and tossed it to him, then wiped his hands on his trousers and came over to where Dranth and Yabrith were standing. “Does this cousin of yours have a name?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Dranth. “Her name is Esten.”

“Hmmm,” said the man. “Then I suppose I’m John Burgett. What do you gents want?”

“I have a business proposition for you,” Dranth said. The man smiled broadly. “Your horse throw a shoe?”

“Yes,” said Dranth acidly. “That’s it.”

The broad man chuckled, nodded to Taffy, then gestured for the two men to follow him. He led them out of the smoke-filled smithy and along the narrow alleyways back toward the wharf without speaking; Dranth and Yabrith were accustomed to such silence. They followed him past ramshackle houses and bait shops, taverns and pubs, until they finally came to the waterfront. The man who had called himself John Burgett whistled merrily as they approached the wharf, heading straight for a long dock at the western end of town, deep within the fishing village.

Night was falling, and no one paid any attention to them; scores of fishermen were heading in, unloading their second catches of the day, emptying the spoils of their clam traps and lobster pots into wagons and horse-drawn carts poised along the docks, then dousing the shellfish with seawater, paying little mind to anything else taking place around them. The flurry of evening activity was electric and covered their passage perfectly. Dranth and Yabrith exchanged a glance as the blacksmith stepped out onto the long pier and began heading for the end of it. Neither man had ever been on the water before; neither had even seen the sea, but Dranth had ice in his veins and Yabrith was afraid enough of Dranth not to be able to refuse him anything, so after a second’s hesitation they both stepped gingerly onto the shaky pier and followed the heavyset man to the end. As they were walking, they watched in alarm as he turned and stepped off into the water, or so it appeared. When they reached the end of the dock they saw he was standing in a small dinghy, tossing a coil of rope out of the way of the rough boards that served as seats. The man looked up at them and grinned.

“Come aboard, gents,” he said, then went back to his work.

“Where are we going?” Dranth demanded, his dark eyes nervously scanning the pier and the water.

The blacksmith shrugged. “I thought you wanted to meet John Burgett,” he said cheerily. “My mistake—never mind. Good day to you both.”

Dranth exhaled sharply and looked farther offshore. In the distance he could make out a cluster of medium-sized boats, moored many yards out but still within the inner harbor. He silently acknowledged that such a place would be a formidable haven for an enterprise such as the Spider’s Clutch, a movable hideout surrounded on all sides by water, where the chance of being overheard was minuscule.

The two desert dwellers steeled their nerves and stepped down into the rowboat; Yabrith stumbled and fell to his knees as the dinghy rocked beneath him, to the great amusement of the blacksmith. He offered Dranth his hand, but the guild scion shook his head and stepped down carefully, only eliciting minor rocking. He took a seat on a slimy board, choking back his disgust and trying not to be overwhelmed by the smell.

The blacksmith sat down heavily in the other end of the small boat, fitted the oars into the oarlocks, and began rowing for the cluster of boats.

All during the passage Dranth and Yabrith struggled to hold on to the contents of their stomachs. Water was a precious and rare commodity in Yarim, so the sight of the endless sea and its accompanying odor and motion was overwhelming. By the time the little dinghy reached the encampment of boats, both men were green, to the obvious amusement of the blacksmith. The man merely continued to row in silence until they reached the outer edge of the cluster, where cabin boats and barnacle-encrusted fishing trawlers bounced gracefully on the waves.

As they grew closer, the blacksmith began to whistle, a cheerful melody that cut through the sound of the splashing waves slapping against the hulls of the boats as the sun began to sink below the rim of the world, splashing the sea with red light that resembled a rippling pool of blood. After a moment, a small round man with a dark blue cap and jacket appeared on the closest boat’s deck and stood, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the dinghy as it approached.

When the rowboat was finally alongside the outer cluster, the blacksmith secured the oars and stood up. He grabbed hold of the rope mooring and tossed it to the round man, who caught it with a movement so quick that Dranth didn’t even see him take his hands from his pockets. The two men of Gol-garn tied the dingy to the mooring irons of the boat, then the blacksmith stepped easily out of it and onto the deck. He turned and beckoned to Dranth and Yabrith to follow.

The two Yarimese assassins looked at each other.

“Ya coming?” the blacksmith asked patiently.

Dranth stood up slowly and stepped carefully over the gunwales, trying not to look down at the green sea looming between the boats. He stepped onto the deck and slid on the salt spray, but managed to right himself before falling. He turned quickly and pulled Yabrith over, then gestured impatiently at the blacksmith, who chuckled and disappeared around the bow of the boat.

The two men of Yarim followed him quickly, only to discover when they rounded the bow themselves that they were staring at a corridor of boat bows, all aligned nose to nose with one another, bobbing gently in the tide. While a few of the boats were open skiffs, most of them were trawlers and houseboats, with dark cabins in which flickering lights beckoned ominously.

The blacksmith reappeared, six boats away.

“You gents coming in?” he asked solicitously. “Or are ya planning to swim back?” He laughed aloud, then vanished into the black hold of the houseboat. Dranth and Yabrith inhaled collectively, then slowly began to pick their way between the moorings, balancing carefully, as the red light on the sea faded to gray with the coming of night.