Death Comes To All (Book 1) (5 page)

Several
seconds had gone by before he was willing to open them again. The
first thing he saw was Garan standing over him, his blade inches from
Drom's throat. Raine was chuckling under her breath.

"First
rule of combat, whether you're an assassin, a soldier, or a guard. No
matter what happens, you never show fear to an opponent. I could have
killed you right then without you even making an attempt to defend
yourself. If you're going to die, and that's always a possibility, at
least have the decency to die with a little dignity. Look your enemy
straight in the eyes, and do whatever you can to stay alive. Never
forget that."

The
fierce look in Garan's eyes frightened Drom so much that he, for
several seconds, didn't realize that Garan had just given him his
first lesson in combat. It wasn't until Garan pulled back and
sheathed his sword that what had just happened hit him. Garan took
several steps back and waited for Drom to speak.

"I
didn't even have a weapon!" Drom said at last. "Even if I
had already been trained in combat, how could I possibly have
defended myself against you?"

"You
didn’t see me use a weapon when I fought in the bar, did you?"
Garan reminded him. "Here." He pulled his sword back out of
its sheath and held it out, pommel first, to Drom. "Let's try
things the other way. Go ahead and attack me. Show me what you can
do."

Drom
had seen Garan in the bar fight back in the Staghorn, and didn't fear
that he might harm the wiry assassin. Still, he felt a certain
hesitation in attacking an unarmed man. The assassin saw that
momentary pause and moved in at once, almost disappearing from Drom's
sight, reappearing behind him with a single finger placed lightly on
Drom's neck.

"Never
attack a man without the intent to kill," Garan informed him
sagely. "And if you intend to kill someone, never hesitate. A
moment of hesitation will kill you." He stepped back to where he
had been standing before. "Try again."

Drom
took the assassin's advice and charged quickly, putting all of his
weight behind his attack. As he expected, the striking sword fell on
nothing. As before, the assassin had disappeared from his sight.

But
Drom knew that Garan was going to be able to dodge the strike.
Without hesitating he immediately spun and stuck again behind him,
thinking that Garan might attack from there as he had seen him do
before. The swing struck nothing but air. Garan wasn't there. Drom
heard Raine chuckle again.

"Who
were you swinging at?" Garan asked from his left, a few feet
away. The man had moved so quickly that Drom didn't even know where
he was until he spoke. "There wasn't anyone behind you when you
swung the sword."

"You
move too fast for me to see," Drom admitted hopelessly. "I've
seen you attack someone from behind like that twice though, so I
thought maybe you might come at me from that direction. I guess I
just don't have any talent for this."

"You're
not as worthless as you might think," Garan said thoughtfully.
"Granted, your attacks were slow and clumsy. You haven't even
learned how to track an enemy yet, and your eyes lost sight of me.
However, even though you couldn't see me, you paid attention to my
attacks and attempted to form a strategy around what you've seen. You
can already think ahead. I've seen quite a few guards and soldiers,
all of them better swordsmen than you are now, that still haven't
learned the basic concept of strategy. It's something to start with
anyway."

Garan
took back his sword and sheathed his weapon. "Alright, so you
don't have any training in weapons. That's not necessarily a bad
thing. At least you haven't learned any bad habits. I don't have to
deal with poor training. You're a blank slate, so as long as you're
learning properly you can be taught swordsmanship that much easier.
Now let's test your strength. I've heard that sorvinians are
exceptionally strong. Some say they might very well be the strongest
of all the races when it comes to raw power. Prove it to me."

This
was certainly something that Drom could do. He might not be as strong
as his father, or most of the other sorvinians for that matter, but
he knew he was much stronger than any of the human workers he had met
on the farm.

He
stepped over to the log the two of them had been sitting on, and with
a heave and a grunt lifted one end. Sliding sideways to get along
side of it, he carefully pulled until both sides were in the air. It
was all he could do to keep the load balanced, but he was able to do
it.

"Good,"
Garan said, smiling. "I would guess the weight of that log to be
about five hundred pounds, give or take. The strength of most races
are fairly comparable to humans, but I can see that the tales of
sorvinian strength has not been exaggerated. You can put down the log
now."

"Actually,
most sorvinians are much stronger than I am," Drom admitted,
replacing the log back in the same place where it had been before.
"My human blood makes me weaker than I would be if I was a
pure-blooded sorvinian. That log was about as much as I could lift,
and it was all I could do to lift it. My father could have picked it
up without any problem at all."

"The
trog I killed would have had trouble moving that log. He certainly
wouldn't have been able to lift it like you did, and they are
considered a powerful race," Garan pointed out. "Power can
be useful, however you shouldn't rely on it. The trog lost because he
was slow and stupid. I goaded him into attacking without thinking. He
expected his power to overwhelm me, but as you saw that didn't work.

"Which
brings me to my next point. You are probably thinking that I only won
because I was faster than my opponent, but that's not quite true
either. What defeated that trog was something you didn't see. Let me
ask you something, do you think that I really needed to fight that
trog in order to kill him last night?"

Drom
shrugged. "I don't know. You could have killed him some other
way I suppose. You could have used a crossbow or a throwing dagger.
Why didn't you?"

"I
fought that trog because I like to try to challenge myself, although
he was a bit of a disappointment in the end," Garan replied
wiping some of the dirt off of the freshly turned log before sitting
down again. "I've been doing this a long time, and if I don't
test myself from time to time my skills could suffer because of it.
Should I have to fight someone closer to my equal in speed and skill
a failure to test myself regularly could be what kills me. So I
sometimes make things harder on myself purposefully. That's what you
saw in the bar last night. However, I was never really in any serious
danger."

"That
trog certainly seemed dangerous to me," Drom said skeptically.
"How did you know he would be so easy to defeat?"

"I
thought that would be obvious by now," Garan laughed. "I've
spent the past two weeks studying everything I could learn about him.
I knew everything I needed to know about him long before I took him
out. He was strong, even for a trog, but for all his strength he was
one of the slowest men I've ever had to fight. He favored his right,
almost exclusively in fact, since he almost never needed to hit
someone a second time. All trogs have a soft spot on the back of
their heads, right above where the base of the skull meets the neck,
so I already knew exactly where to hit him. Every race has their
strengths and weaknesses. Knowing those will often be the difference
between victory and defeat."

"These
are things we will teach you, or at least some of it, depending on
how long you travel with us," Raine told him, speaking up.
"However, you can't learn everything today. For now we should
all get a little rest. We should be leaving here by midday. It will
take the city guards most of the day today to pick up our trail, but
eventually they will. Garan knows how to hide his tracks, and I can
walk without making any if I put a little effort into it, but they
can still follow yours. They will also likely have horses, which we
don't. We need at least a days head start if we want to avoid them."

As
much as Drom wanted to know more, to learn as much as he could, he
had to agree with her. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt
so completely exhausted. He lay down on the ground with the log at
his back, pulled his hard pack up under his head as an uncomfortable,
makeshift pillow, and closed his eyes.

Chapter Three

Drom
awoke to the feeling of someone none to gently kicking his lower legs
to wake him up. Opening his eyes painfully in the bright midday sun,
he looked down to find Raine standing over him. She stopped kicking
him once she could see he was finally awake.

"Time
to get up," she informed him. "It'll be easier traveling
during the day, so we're going to be moving faster than we have been
until nightfall. If you want to travel with us, you're going to have
to keep up. We're leaving now."

Drom
barely had time to get to his feet and rub the sleep out of his eyes
before the group of them set off. Raine hadn't been lying about the
speed they would be traveling at. Garan, who took the lead, walked
about fifteen yards ahead of Raine and Drom, setting such a brutal
pace Drom was hard pressed to keep up. Garan stayed ahead of the
group for nearly three hours, leading them down a trail only he
seemed to be able to see. By the confident way that Garan walked,
Drom was certain that the man knew exactly where he was going. Trick,
Garan's dragonling companion, was nowhere to be seen.

It
seemed to Drom that they were going in the wrong direction. Garan had
said they would be going south, but Drom was fairly certain that he
was leading them more westward than south, deeper inland, away from
the ocean. Drom wasn't quite certain where the trade city of Lando
was located; he had never seen any real maps, but he had thought that
Lando was almost directly south of Port Dayton.

Drom
was still exhausted from the day before. He wasn’t certain how
long he had slept for, but it was far from enough. He barely looked
around him as he walked, keeping his eyes cast down toward his feet,
only glancing up from time to time to make sure that he was still
following Garan along the unseen path. After perhaps an hour of this,
that seemed like an eternity to Drom, Garan paused ahead of them,
waiting for them to catch up. Drom didn’t even notice, and
nearly ran into the assassin where he waited.

They
had come out of the wild brush onto a wide, open stretch of land
running straight east to west, as if some giant scythe had swept
across the land, clearing the trees in its path as it would thin
stalks of wheat. Drom could see patches of dark grey along the ground
that looked somewhat like rock, but different somehow, poking up
along the stretch. It was obvious even to his untrained eye that
there was something unnatural about this land.

"What
is this?" Drom asked no one in particular.

"This
was once a road, back in the Age of Technology," Garan answered
him. "The ancients had some way of creating liquid rock, that
they poured along the ground. Little more than grass grows on this
path, but the ground is broken and uneven. A lot of the shadier
traders and merchants still use it, along with anyone else that
doesn't want to be seen on the guarded roads. We should stay together
on this road. If I scout ahead like I have been doing it may be
noticed, and the people who take this trail would turn us in for a
couple of silvers if they knew the guard was looking for us, or some
of them would anyway. The guards will have trouble getting their
horses down that deer trail we used to get here, but if they have
followed us this far they can make good time from here. We don't want
to stand out to anyone who might see us."

Drom
realized that Garan was only talking to him, teaching him. Raine
would already know all of this, as would nearly anyone who had reason
to avoid the city guard.

"Are
we likely to run into any legitimate traders on the road? I would
think that they would be more likely to turn us in if the guards
questioned them, wouldn't they?"

"You
would guess wrong actually," Garan replied. "Most
merchants, both honest and dishonest ones, want to avoid the guard
altogether. They don't want trouble with any armed men, and since
quite a few of them cook the books to avoid taxes, they wouldn't want
the guards to take too close a look. Besides, whatever technology the
ancients used to make this road has long since been forgotten, so the
road's not in very good shape. In some places it's almost completely
fallen apart, and no one knows how to fix it, even if someone would
have wanted to put the time and money into doing it. Traders who are
obeying the laws and are willing to pay the heavy levies the mages
place on everything will be using wagons; I'm sure you've seen them
before at the farm where you said you grew up. They wouldn't want to
take a wagon down a road in this state of disrepair if they can avoid
it. We shouldn't see anyone, but if we do, watch yourself. It's
thieves and cutthroats that take this road. Just like us."

"So
we're to follow the road then?" Drom asked. "I thought you
said we were heading to Lando, and you said that the trade city was
due south, but we've been traveling further and further westward all
day. Now you are taking us due west."

"You're
right," Garan said, cutting in quickly. "I was not planning
on going to Lando before we left with you. We were going out of our
way to take you there. Now it seems you're thinking about coming with
us. So we're heading to my original destination instead. I've done
the job, now I get paid. In a way it has worked out. If we had gone
on our original path we wouldn't reach this road for another two or
three days."