Assassins' Dawn (9 page)

•   •   •

In her office in the Diplo Center, m’Dame d’Embry watched a holotank set temporarily in the center of her room. There, in miniature, the Assembly Hall teemed with furiously gesticulating figures and a dull, inarticulate roar filled the speakers under the ‘tank. Stretching forth an orange-tinted arm to the controls on her desk, the Alliance Regent turned down the volume with a sharp movement of her wrist. She shook her head, lips pursed, and then turned to her own work.

A procession of the Dead walked outward from the Sterka Gates, into the roadway that hugged the hill ridges of the plain beyond. The fumes of their incense were smeared behind them by the easterly wind and their chanting—a dull and sibilant mantra—lulled the Neweden breeze into submission and put the sunstar to sleep. In darkness, they made their aimless, sorrowful way through the countryside; unseeing, uncaring.

A man in ragged clothing toppled in their midst, falling to the hard-packed surface of the road. The Dead ignored him, though the chant changed subtly into a praise for the presence of Hag Death. The man groaned in pain as he clutched his side. If the Dead that passed saw the blood from a vibro gash that stained his clothing, they took no notice.

What did it matter how Hag Death arranged to take a person? All would go to Her in time.

Chapter 5

I
T WAS ANOTHER LOCAL and petty bloodfeud.

Jast Claswell, a wealthy kin of the Bard’s Guild, wished to dispose of his wife’s lover, a problem compounded by the fact that his wife had had the bad taste to choose a lover outside the guild. The problem was common enough on any world, and common on Neweden. Kinship made for further difficulties. Claswell, a native of the Illian continent, had contacted the Hoorka rather than demanding personal satisfaction. The Hoorka price was normally too high for such domestic vendettas, but Claswell had recently come into possession of a cache of ippicator skeletons and had sold them to an offworld trader without going through the normal Neweden channels, thus avoiding the heavy tax on ippicator relics. It meant that he had monies to use as he wished, and his wish was to kill the man that made him a cuckold.

The apprentices had offered the alternatives to the potential victim, Enus Dausset, but the man couldn’t match the fee and thus negate the contract. Five hours before the Underasgard sunset, Dausset was given the traditional warning, and a dye containing a trace of radioactive material was splashed on his arm; it could not easily be washed off and would remain active for several hours, allowing the apprentices to track the man until the Hoorka assassins arrived. A watch was set around Dausset’s home—it was mid-afternoon on that part of the Illian continent.

All this unfolded while the Thane and Aldhelm slept in Underasgard. For such routines, apprentices were sufficient.

An hour before the sun dropped behind the cliff fronting the main entrance to the Hoorka caverns, word came to Underasgard that Dausset had purchased a hand laser from a weapons store. Body shields were set out and the two Hoorka awakened. Final reports drifted in as they prepared to leave the caverns and fly to Illi. Dausset had secretly paid a last visit to Caswell’s wife (the Thane found himself admiring the man’s courage and/or foolishness in doing that). Dausset had headed south from the city of Irast. Dausset had turned west by south and fled toward the tumbled ridges of the Twisted Hills. After the last report, rope and heavy footgear were added to the assassin’s equipment.

During the flight in the Hoorka-owned hovercraft, Aldhelm and the Thane confined their speech to generalities, and when the craft landed near the edge of the Twisted Hills, they simply unloaded their equipment and watched as the aircraft blinked its landing lights in salute and left them. Around the two, the hills were silvered in the light of Neweden’s double moons, Gulltopp and Sleipnir. The night held the chill of the approaching winter and both the Thane and Aldhelm kept their nightcloaks wrapped tightly about them as some protection against the breeze. A few night-stalkers mewled and shrieked their various hunting cries to the cold air, but otherwise the landscape was a barren panorama of shattered rock and broken ground, the remnants of some ancient cataclysm.

“What did that last report say?” The Thane scanned the empty slopes, seeing nothing but the unmoving, scraggling desert brush that clung precariously to the few pockets of soil. The night, for all its briskness, was arid. The Thane’s throat was dry, as if the air had leached him of inner moisture. He cleared his throat in irritation. After the noise of the flight, the silence was a palpable presence. His voice had sounded dead and weak.

Aldhelm squinted into darkness and waited a long minute before he answered the Thane. “The apprentices swear he’s hidden himself in the foothills a few kilometers south of here. I have the bearings.” He swung his hand in the indicated direction, his nightcloak rustling. To the Thane, Aldhelm was a deeper darkness against the sky, his flesh shadowed and his mouth concealed in the folds of his cloak. Only his eyes and the crusted wound on his upper cheek were clearly visible. That bothered the Thane—it briefly occurred to him that Aldhelm might be trying to make the wound more conspicuous, knowing it would irritate the Thane—but the Thane was himself bundled in a similar fashion.
Your fears are taking over your logic. Stop trying to rationalize every small detail.

The Thane checked the gear in the pouch of his nightcloak, loosened his vibro in its sheath, and checked the power of his bodyshield.

“Well, kin-brother,” he said, “what do you suggest we do?” The Thane yawned and shivered.

“Go around the man. He expects us from the direction of the port in Irast, in all likelihood. It’ll be simpler if we can come in unseen from the opposite direction. I doubt that he has any idea where our craft left us.”

“Good.” Even as he said it, the Thane knew that his response was wrong. It sounded patronizing and belittling; as the question, in essence, had been. It was a question the least schooled apprentice could have answered, and it spoke well of Aldhelm’s forbearance that he even deigned to speak. And he spoke now with feeling.

“I’m not an apprentice or journeyman, Thane. I haven’t your age or experience, but I’ve been your kin for some time, if you recall.” Aldhelm’s voice was haughty and righteously angry. The words cut into the Thane as if edged.

Aldhelm stared into the shadowed valleys of the hills. He scuffed his feet at the dirt in impatience, not looking at the Thane. “The night isn’t eternal, Thane, and Hag Death waits Her due. Let’s go.”

“Not until we settle this. Speak your mind. We can spare the time, and I think it more important than the contract.”

“This contract is less important than Gunnar’s? What of your—our—code, Thane? Each contract is as important as the next.”

“It was a poor choice of words.” Wearily, but with impatience. “What bothers you, Aldhelm?”

“You don’t know?” His voice sounded genuinely surprised. Aldhelm turned to face the Thane, eyes glinting in the darkness of his face. When he next spoke, his words were harsh and bitter, as if the taste of them burned his tongue. “Why did you pull me from the rotation? Wasn’t it enough that I failed the Gunnar contract, or don’t you think I’m capable of realizing the import of my mistake? Don’t you think I chastised myself far more harshly than you ever could?”

Gulltopp, the smaller of the moons, was setting behind Aldhelm, and its brass-gold light shimmered around him and glazed the hills. “I came close to breaking the damned code, knowing the reactions to Gunnar’s escape. I could have killed Gunnar, just seconds after dawn. But I held back—I have that much respect for what the code has done for my kin; I respect Dame Fate and She of the Five Limbs that much. But I should have followed my instincts. No one would have seen, no one but the Gods would have known. Not even you. If I were able to return to that moment . . .”

He paused, then continued with an agonized hurt in his voice that lashed at the Thane. “Do you have to give me further humiliation by treating me like some rank nouveau?” He uttered a short, caustic expletive as the edge of Gulltopp touched the peaks of the Twisted Hills.

The Thane met Aldhelm’s gaze. Neither flinched or looked away.

“What did you expect?” asked the Thane. “I had to emphasize to all Hoorka-kin the precariousness of our position in this power struggle between the Li-Gallant and Gunnar. The fact that I’d found it necessary to discipline
you,
the most competent Hoorka I have, man or woman, will carry much weight. It’s the most convincing evidence that we’re innocent of conspiring with Gunnar. I don’t want Hoorka involved in a bloodfeud between guilds, and I won’t let us be dragged into the Assembly and outlawed. Anything such as that would jeopardize our chances of growing, of going offworld or escaping Neweden. Gunnar and Vingi will play their power games, and I won’t let Hoorka be a pawn on that board.”
So simplistic,
he thought.
The words don’t even convince me. What can they do for Aldhelm except to convince him that I don’t care for him; as a friend, as kin?

Aldhelm spread his hands wide in the dying light of Gulltopp. “So I’m reduced to being an example in your textbook?” His words quivered with suppressed menace, and for the first time the Thane was aware of the other’s sheer bulk, of his physical conditioning and sharper skills. In the Thane’s younger days, he could have taken Aldhelm, or at least he flattered himself to think so, but now . . . He was no longer sure, and were there a physical confrontation, Aldhelm would most likely best the Thane. The realization did little to comfort the older man.

But Aldhelm suddenly swept his hand through the cold air in aimless, undirected disgust, breaking their locked gazes as he turned to stare moodily at the surrounding hills as if they were mocking strangers tittering at the Hoorka’s overheard conversation.

The Thane placed a hand on Aldhelm’s shoulder and forced the Hoorka to look at him. “Aldhelm, I’ve considered you to be my most likely successor, and I’ve considered you to be more than a simple kin-brother. You’re the best of the kin, more accomplished than I ever was. But I’d throw you to Vingi’s guards tied hand and foot if I thought it would save Hoorka. My life is Hoorka’s. As is yours. I won’t have us destroyed, no matter what sacrifice is demanded. Do you understand?” There was no sympathy there, no hint of the doubts he felt inside. The Thane spoke with an iron voice tempered and made steel, the voice he’d used in the past when he’d taken a ragged band of lassari and by force of personality and fighting prowess had turned them into the Hoorka—a voice he hadn’t used in standards. The words echoed faintly among the stones of the hills.

Aldhelm glanced at the Thane’s hand and brushed it away ungently. “I understand better than you may think,” he said.

Aldhelm turned and began moving into the tortured land of the hills, the sparse night dew from the brush beading on the hem of his nightcloak as Gulltopp sank fully below the horizon. The light in the hills changed suddenly, becoming more bluish and cold, as only Sleipnir was left to wander among the stars. Aldhelm, one foot on a fallen boulder, suddenly thrust himself up and pivoted, facing the Thane again. “I understand your reasoning and your motives. As to your claim of friendship, I don’t believe you capable of it. Nor would Valdisa, I think. You’re too reserved a man for that, my kin-brother, too much in love with your creation. No, your love is reserved for a thing, not for people. You care for the words that bind Hoorka, not for the kin that form our guild, and your affection is cold and dry.” He walked a few steps away from the Thane. “And I hope that disturbs you,” he said to the rocky landscape before them.

The Thane, his thoughts a maelstrom both contradictory and painful, watched Aldhelm move away into the Hills, finally disappearing from sight around a cliff that held back the heights from the broken ground below. He listened to the quiet around him. Finally, with a violent start, he followed the path Aldhelm had taken.

•   •   •

Fulfillment of the contract was simple, routine.

The Thane wondered if he should not have left the task to the apprentices to hone their skills. They found Dausset sitting on a rock below a ledge not far into the hills, looking toward the glow on the horizon that bespoke the presence of Irast. The man’s head moved slowly from side to side as he swept the plains for signs of movement, but he never looked to the slope behind him nor saw the two Hoorka suddenly appear against the sky and stare down at him from the heights. The barrel of his weapon glistened harshly in Sleipnir’s light. Dausset coughed once, a sound startlingly loud in the night. The Thane and Aldhelm studied the man, and their sensors picked up the mark of the apprentices’ dye on him. The Thane nodded to Aldhelm.

The younger Hoorka kicked a pebble downslope and, as Dausset turned toward the noise, threw his dagger with seeming nonchalance. It sped true. Dausset grunted in surprise, then crumpled without further outcry, the hand laser unused. Blood stained the rocks beneath him. Quite quickly, quite simply, it was over. The assassins made their way to where the body lay.

“Good work, Aldhelm.”

Aldhelm disdained to reply.

The Thane shrugged. “Turn him over. I want to look at him.”

“Doesn’t the fourth code-line state that the Hoorka must show no concern for the victim, must consider him to be wed to Hag Death once the warning is given so we feel no pity?”

There was mockery in Aldhelm’s voice. The Thane ignored it. “A minor quirk, that’s all. I like to see their faces, to know how the souls I send to the gods appeared in this life.”
No, that’s not the truth. This sudden concern with appearances started only recently, when the faceless dead began crowding your dreams. Are you . . .
The Thane cut off the inner contention with a physical wrench. “Turn him over,” he repeated, with self-irritation evident in his voice. He doubted that Aldhelm would notice the inward direction of his contempt.

Aldhelm shrugged and turned the body with his foot. Moonlight washed the contorted features of the man’s face and outlined the edges of the death-rictus. A thick rivulet of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and across his right cheek. Thin and unmuscular hands clasped his useless weapon. Dausset’s was a common face, a crowd face: thin but not exceedingly so, eyes set a shade too close to a bony and inelegant nose. The Thane wondered what the woman had seen in him to violate her contract with a wealthy man. He reached down and turned off Aldhelm’s vibro before pulling it from the wound. It came forth easily, with more blood following; bright, arterial blood. The Thane handed the blade to the Hoorka. Aldhelm plunged it once into the earth to cleanse it—feeding She of the Five Limbs—and placed it back in his sheath.