Assassins' Dawn (25 page)

Silence wrapped the square as the Hoorka switched off their vibros.

Iduna took a spare nightcloak from her pouch, handed one end to d’Mannberg, and together they covered the body. The onlookers slowly began to withdraw, the windows going opaque as they returned to more private diversions. Distantly, they could hear a complaining voice and loud music beginning in mid-bar.

“At least this is over,” d’Mannberg commented. He hefted the body of Gies across his shoulders, grunting with the weight.

He was wrong in that. It was just beginning.

•   •   •

“You’re just reflecting your own doubts, Gyll. The meeting wasn’t run that badly, no matter how you view it. Bachier’s challenge couldn’t have been anticipated. I thought Thane Valdisa handled herself well.”

“To a point, Cranmer. I saw her, I know what I would have done in her place, a few months ago. Bachier wouldn’t have been cut by kin then. Gods, man, I have a good deal of affection for Valdisa, both as a friend and a lover, but I can see that she shouldn’t have been so abrupt with kin. They’re all proud people. Leadership doesn’t have to mean heavy-handedness.”

“And it’s always easier to criticize from the outside. Look, you’re feeling an understandable loss of control since you abdicated in favor of Valdisa. Couple that with the last several contracts you’ve worked and your, ahh, irritation . . .”

“Forget the last contracts. Just—
shh,
be still.”

Ulthane Gyll and Cranmer were in the outer caverns of Underasgard, with the moon Sleipnir throwing cold light past the jagged mouth of the Hoorka-lair. Gyll, sitting slump-shouldered on a boulder, suddenly lurched erect and stared intently at a cave-rodent moving slowly across the broken floor. Cranmer, wrapped in a thick nightcloak, curled his lips, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

The rodent, a stalkpest—a furred body with patches of open sores (it had evidently been in a recent fight), a small head from which the thin whip of its eye-sensor sprouted, a lithe quickness when it moved—stopped, started, and crept forward again, always closer to Gyll. Underneath his nightcloak, Gyll fingered the hilt of his vibro as Cranmer glanced from stalkpest to assassin.

The stalkpest stood on its hind legs, the eye-sensor slashing like the tail of a nervous cat, then inched forward. Gyll lunged, the vibro hissing from its sheath already activated, the arm plunging down. The stalkpest keened in surprise and terror, the body convulsing against the weapon that pinned it to the ground, the claws skittering helplessly. Gyll flicked off his vibro and sheathed it. He prodded the body with a boot tip.

“One less to get into the stores,” he said.

Cranmer, from his boulder seat, shivered. “The damn things give me chills. How can you stand to get near it?”

“A Neweden axiom, scholar—to kill with honor, you must always be near. Our Ulthane taught us that.” The voice came from the darkness of the corridor leading back into the caverns. Gyll and Cranmer both turned to see Aldhelm regarding them. His nightcloak melded with the cavern’s eternal gloom, but Sleipnir’s glow played on his face—light eyes above the furrow of a scarred cheek. “Good evening, Ulthane, Sirrah Cranmer,” Aldhelm said, nodding to each in turn. His gaze went to the bloody stalkpest. “Practicing, Ulthane?” A faint smile seemed to twist the ridge of the scar. “A pity our victims are rarely so easy.”

Gyll felt a rising anger, fueled by the sarcasm he sensed in Aldhelm’s voice. The last three contracts he had worked, the victim had escaped: Cranmer had mentioned it already this evening, and Gyll had been soured by the Hoorka Council earlier. Gyll had heard the whispers of his guild-kin.
Ulthane Gyll doesn’t seem to care for the hunt any more—I was with him, and he didn’t seem concerned, didn’t have the sharpness he once had. He looks like he’s brooding, lost. He’s gotten out of shape—he doesn’t work enough with long-vibro and foil. He thinks about the victims, wonders about their lives. He’s depressed, moody. Ever since he named Valdisa as Thane
 . . . By the code—Gyll’s code—the victim must escape from time to time, but for the Hag to go hungry on three consecutive attempts: it could simply be Dame Fate’s will, but the whispers and the well-meant jests from his kin hurt, made him narrow his eyes in irritation.

“You think I need the practice, Aldhelm? Is that your intimation? Because of the contracts?”

Aldhelm moved in darkness, frowning. Rock scraped rock under his feet. “I didn’t say that, Ulthane.”

“You didn’t have to.” Gyll swept his nightcloak over his shoulder. Moonlight glinted from the vibrohilt at his belt.

“Ulthane,” Cranmer began from his seat, his voice uncertain. The short, thin man cleared his throat. “I think—”

“I was speaking to Aldhelm, scholar.” Gyll did not look at Cranmer, but at the other Hoorka.

Aldhelm stared back. “When I failed
one
contract—yah, it was the Li-Gallant’s and thus important, but you teach us that each contract is as important as the next—you gave me this.” Aldhelm touched his cheek and the high ridge of the scar. “We all fail contracts, Ulthane. You set us up that way when you created Hoorka. It’s what sets us apart. If your failures bother
you,
well, I think you need to shrive yourself, not be angry with kin.” Aldhelm’s face was set in careful stoicism, neither smile nor frown.

With the words, Gyll felt his anger cool.
Of all Hoorka-kin, he has the most right to taunt you, and he doesn’t. You called him a friend once, after all.
But Aldhelm had opposed Gyll on the two contracts the Hoorka had worked for the Li-Gallant Vingi, both intended to kill the Li-Gallant’s political rival, Gunnar. Aldhelm had twice felt the touch of Gyll’s vibro, and whatever affection they had shared had gone with the blood. Gyll didn’t apologize to Aldhelm, but nodded down at the stalkpest.

“Cranmer and I came out here to see if d’Mannberg and Iduna were back, and I happened to see the ’pest. It’ll feed my bumblewort instead of raiding our grain.” Gyll stopped, noticing the bulging pack under Aldhelm’s nightcloak for the first time. “You’re going out?”

Aldhelm stared at Gyll, defiance ready in his eyes. “Yah.” For a moment, it seemed that he was not going to say more, but then he hefted the pack, adjusting it around his shoulders. “There’s an Irastian smith in Sterka, visiting. He’s reputed to be very good with blades. I’m taking a few things to show him, and I’m also going to see what he might have for sale.” Aldhelm’s affection for edged weapons was well known among Hoorka.

“You’ve gotten Thane Valdisa’s permission?”

“After the uproar during Council last night? We both saw the blood from Bachier’s wound, Ulthane—and I’m not saying it wasn’t what he deserved for arguing with the Thane. But I’m not going to risk my own skin by leaving Underasgard without telling her first.”

“I thought she had sufficient reasons for making the ruling,” Cranmer said. He had wrapped the cloak more tightly around him; the offworld scholar had never gotten used to the cooler Neweden climate. “With the reports of lassari attacks on lone guilded kin, and Eorl being killed in an unprovoked assault, it makes sense to know where all Hoorka are.”

Aldhelm nodded. “I realize that. You don’t have to lecture me, scholar.”

Though the man’s reproof was gentle, Gyll’s irritation rose once more; he was silent a moment, forcing it down with an effort.
So quick to anger of late—calm down, old man.
“Go on, then. But be careful, Aldhelm. The kin can’t afford to lose you.”

“I’m always careful, Ulthane. And I’m also very good with my weapons—I’d worry about the lassari, not me.”

Gyll watched as Aldhelm strode past him to the cavern mouth. Gulltopp had risen—its crescent grinned below that of Sleipnir. Aldhelm was briefly a silhouette against the backdrop of night sky (twinned shadow dark on the jumbled rocks of Underasgard), and then he moved on into the night.

Carefully, Gyll picked up the stalkpest in a fold of his nightcloak. “For the wort,” he told Cranmer.

“Aldhelm seemed angry.” Underneath cloth, Cranmer hugged himself.

“He’s always angry,” Gyll said. He stared past the cavern mouth to the dawnrock standing lonesome in the clearing and the newly clothed fingers of the trees beyond. “It hasn’t killed him yet.”

•   •   •

The grounds outside Gunnar’s window lay hushed in twilight, which was quickly arranging itself in the darker shades of full night. Sleipnir was up, Gulltopp was rising. Gunnar stood before his window for a long minute, staring at the landscape that surrounded his guildhouse, then he touched the contact that opaqued the glass. A wash of purplish black swirled in the panes; then the tendrils met, snaking about each other, swelling until all was black. Gunnar turned back into his room.

He was not feeling well tonight. A vague boiling churned in his gut and a sour taste lurked in the back of his throat—though, he mused, one might expect such reaction after the evening’s dinner. De Vegnes had been the cook for the night; his tastes ran to the unusual, the exotic, the highly spiced. Such fare tended to unsettle the stomachs of guild-kin used to a blander and more provincial menu. But if he wanted Potok to be able to speak before the Assembly next week, he would have to ignore the moaning of his stomach and work. Gunnar shook his head: Potok was an excellent speaker and a charismatic personality, but he needed to be fed the words he regurgitated. He was never able to create them himself.

The Muse of Speech was resting this evening. Even Gunnar, usually quick and facile, couldn’t find the words he needed—every phrase that appeared in the terminal of his desk seemed clumsy, falling over itself with pretentiousness. Gunnar clutched his complaining stomach, grimacing. He finally sighed in resignation and reached for the wooden box that sat on one corner of the desk. He opened the malawood lid, taking out the black silk that held his Tarot. He toyed with the cards, turning them in his thin hands and leaning back in his floater. He riffled the deck, though his mind was still entangled in the forest of Potok’s speech. He thought—as he did every time he handled the cards—that he would have to have them reproduced soon. They were simply too old and fragile for his constant handling. The trader from whom he’d purchased the cards claimed that they came from Terra herself. Extravagant tales of their lineage aside, the cards were ancient in appearance if not in fact: they were printed on cardboard, the image inked on the surface, two-dimensional. The corners were soft, bent, dog-eared with use, and one of the cards—the knight of swords—had once been folded in half.

Abandoning all hope of finding an opening for Potok’s speech, Gunnar spread the cards face down on his desk and plucked a card from the array.

The Tower: an edifice crumbled to dust in the midst of a storm, while figures plunged to their deaths from the ramparts. An eye veiled in clouds watched impassively from above. Gunnar shook his head once more, his narrow face pinched in irritation. The card was ill-omened, not that Gunnar professed a belief in the card’s ability to predict events. His attitude was more that of an interested skeptic, though he did feel that a person of some power had once possessed the cards, and that this imagined person had been able to use them to peer murkily into the many possible branches of the future. For his own part, he doubted that Dame Fate would be willing to reveal Her whims so easily. There were times: more than once he had thought he could discern a pattern to the cards that had fallen into a reading, some cohesiveness that suggested a single course of events.

The Tower, then: danger, destruction of plans, ruin. Gunnar tossed aside the card and pulled another from the pile without looking at its face. He held the card in his hand for a long moment, his eyebrows lowered in concentration, studying the intricate scrollwork on the back. The Sun, he guessed.

The Devil. Fate, blind impulse, a secret plan about to be executed: from the card’s face, a horned goat stared at him balefully, a scepter before it, and figures below the animal joined in mystic symbols.

“Well, then I’m to be damned and double-damned,” he muttered. He threw the card down.

“Light,” he said, and the room brightened in response to his command, the hoverlamps in each corner irising open. “Enough.” Gunnar leaned forward, gently moved the cards to one side, and touched the metal circle of a contact on the desk’s surface.

He leaned back once more, hands behind his head, eyes closed.

“Some notes for you, Potok. Though I think I might end this by telling you not to listen—I think de Vegnes’s supper has ruined my sense of composition.

“Point One: that Oldin woman insists that our guild will figure prominently in her plans, though she’s yet to give me any indication of what that might mean. She smiles when she says it, and she has a predatory smile. And she’s also as closemouthed about her ‘plans’ as a puffindle. I think we might do well to find out more about her and the Families—she’s only been here a few months, but there’s been more disruption around Sterka in those months than in the last five standards. There might be a file on the Family Oldin in the Alliance Center. An offworlder isn’t going to react as will those of us born to Neweden, and we can’t expect her to have our best interests in mind. We need to know which way she’ll jump if we push. By all means, bear in mind that you can’t trust her—she’s an avaricious bitch and she’ll go whichever way promises her the most, and I know she’s had meetings with the Li-Gallant as well. We have to be in a good position to promise her more, or she may start dealing with the other side. Butter up that tongue of yours, kin-brother. I expect miracles of it.”

(His eyes shut, his back to the window, Gunnar did not see the darkness swirl or the stars become visible through the now clear pane. Nor did he see the apparition that appeared there: the head and shoulders of a person wearing a light-shunter. His/her features were torn and scrambled, waves of pulsing shadow moving erratically. Dark against blackness, the head turned and fixed upon Gunnar.)

“I’m going to work on your speech tomorrow.” Gunnar stretched his legs out beneath his desk—a joint cracked loudly. “We have to stress the fact that our guild has gained in strength in the last several months. I actually think that I have the Hoorka to thank for that, having failed to kill me twice. It certainly put us in a good light with the other guilds. We’ll cite all the economic woes that Vingi’s rule-guild is causing. And I’ll hit hard on the ippicator smuggling and the lassari troubles—that’s Neweden’s lifeblood. I expect you to have them shouting by the finish, so we can call for a vote of confidence in the Assembly. We’ll lose, but it’ll give an indication of the rate of erosion in support for the Li-Gallant, and it might just throw a scare into Vingi. If we can force him into an open election . . .” Gunnar’s voice trailed off. His eyes opened, questioningly. He sensed something
wrong
with his room, though he could see nothing out of place. He started to turn in his floater, to rise.