The Beginnings Omnibus: Beginnings 1, 2, 3 & Legend of Ashenclaw novella (Realm of Ashenclaw Beginnings Saga) (74 page)

Lady Saphirra looked to the still-seated assassin and smirked.

 “It is up to Helgoth. I do not pretend to know how he plans on completing his task,” she said with finality, folding her arms over her chest. A lengthy silence ensued.

“I will do my best to bring her to you alive,” Helgoth eventually said, sounding very cold and distant, his voice continuing to haunt the guards in the room. “But I cannot guarantee that she will provide me the opportunity. Some circumstances are unavoidable and they dictate what must be done.”

“I understand,” Ganthorpe said, nodding appreciatively to the assassin who finally stood from his chair. He was dressed very similarly to Saphirra, his entire ensemble dark and foreboding, void of all color except for those cold, violet eyes. And yet, the details of his garb were seemingly shifting. Ganthorpe could not focus on anything, his entire raiment seeming to shift and swirl within the gloom.

“Do your best,” Ganthorpe managed with a nod as the assassin’s violet eyes found his own again. They conveyed a dangerous look as they narrowed ever so slightly.

“I always do,” the assassin retorted in response to Ganthorpe’s innocuous comment.  Without warning, the man disappeared within the shadows and reappeared behind Ganthorpe, knife held to his neck in such a way as he could silence the Master Thief with but a flick of the wrist if he so desired.

Ganthorpe, the man who prepared for everything and anything, was flabbergasted and truly helpless. His saliva disappeared completely as he waited for the game to play out, his guards frozen in place, awaiting instruction from their leader.

Helgoth quickly released the pressure on Ganthorpe’s neck as he disappeared once again. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, along with all of his guards, his chair uprooted as well, and he was staring up at his ceiling. The assassin had taken them all down with a leg-sweep.

It had all happened within a heartbeat.

“I
always
do my best,” he repeated with emphasis as he stood over the prone bodies.

Ganthorpe merely nodded as he stood and dusted his clothing off, feeling irritated by that demonstration. He looked back at his guards who were also regaining their footing and shook his head disappointedly at them, and then looked at the tight space in which the assassin had just executed that maneuver, as he reset his chair in place.

“Very…impressive,” Ganthorpe finally managed, suppressing his anger.

Saphirra still stood near the door to his chambers, arms folded over her chest, and smiling widely.

The door abruptly opened, revealing both Zeke and Aidan. The two of them sensed the profound uneasiness within the room and saw that the assassin stood near to Ganthorpe. They looked at their leader and began to move their hands to their hilts, ready to protect him. Ganthorpe shook his head slightly while shooting them a hard look, dissuading them to react.

“Pay her,” he finally said to Zeke, who handed the large coin purse to Saphirra and adjusted his floppy hat atop his head. Helgoth Argentus stood beside Saphirra, and had somehow maneuvered the space so quickly that it defied logic, Ganthorpe admitted, thinking magic to be involved. He was both impressed and frightened by this man and was glad he was on the proper business side of their contract. He silently hoped that he would never end up on the opposite side.

Zeke and Aidan stepped aside as the guards outside the room nodded to Ganthorpe and led the two assassins to the exit of his underground structure within the underbelly of Oakhaven’s Warehousing District.

Ganthorpe stared after them as they left and thought Rose overmatched by this man, if indeed he even was a man.

No one knew for sure.

At least, no
living
witness came forth who could put an end to that mystery.

Rose winked at the elf on top of the caravan and then walked into the deep shadow it offered on the valley floor. She then reappeared several hundred feet away and above the caravan on the ridge where the archers were stationed. When she arrived, she surveyed the surroundings and saw that one of the three remaining archers was dead, an arrow through his chest.

Well-placed
, she thought as she silently praised the elven archer.

“Hello, boys,” Rose boldly said as she moved directly to the rear flank of one of the human males, covered in brigandine armor, which she knew as having a leather chest piece adorned with sporadically placed metal plates. Unfortunately, for this man, his armor also offered many flaws.

Before he could react or even lower his crossbow, he felt the sting of her twin daggers scoring two and then a third deep wound through the back. He fell to the floor clutching at his wounds futilely as blood puddled on the ground beneath him.

“Vile witch!” called the remaining archer who held his arrow poised at the woman’s chest. “Do not so much as flinch or you will find this bolt’s tip through your black heart!” He began to retreat and make his way along the ridge’s path, trying to get behind her.

“Of course,” she answered him, daggers held in a reverse-grip. Rose extended her arms skyward in a demonstration of surrender and she held her ground, not moving one way or the other. “Let’s not get carried away.”

She waited patiently for the archer to near the rear edge of the pathway where the shadows were in abundance and the mist was not. She peeked to her right and saw that she stood directly in the shadow of the cliff’s overhang and fell into it.

She ran quickly through the shadow realm, the distorted vision of the central plane of Krotto still within her sights, though visibly gloomy. She saw that the man fired the bolt, but she was long gone before it arrived.

She never ceased to be amazed by her abilities, which allowed her to travel through the shadow realm while time crawled in comparison on her native plane, allowing her to step out and resume her actions while less than a blink of an eye had been achieved in real time.

She emerged from the shadows directly behind the archer, who still did not quite know what had happened. He was directing his gaze back and forth, eyes darting up and down.

“Looking for me?” asked Rose as she grabbed at the man’s quiver strapped tightly to his back. She yanked him back, kicked the back of his right leg, which straightened it out and knocked him further off balance, leaving him hanging precariously off the side of the ridge.

“You will indulge me?” she asked the man as she continued to maintain her advantage, balancing him so as not to drop him to the ground far below.

“Aye,” answered the archer in a fearful tone, fighting to maintain his balance on the dew-moistened grass.

“Does your group work alone or is there another group that watches from nearby?”

“We are alone,” the archer answered without hesitation.

Rose let him slip a bit more as she knelt, her right arm still maintaining a firm grip on the man’s quiver, bending him backward, and lower still. The strain must have been great on his left leg for after she lowered her center of gravity he had to follow suit. His face was a grimace.

“Are you certain?” Rose asked him once more, pulling him back and forth slightly to remind him of her superior position.

“I am!” he yelled. “We work alone, I swear!” Beads of sweat were forming on his brow and face beneath his dark head of hair.

“Liar,” she said as she stood and spun away from the cliff in one motion, pulling him toward her instead of off the edge of the cliff. In that motion, his back found the waiting tip of
Zaedra
, one of her twin, magical daggers. The blade was so long that she drove the thing completely and easily through flesh and armor alike, the force of her thrust in conjunction with the man’s momentum causing it to burst forth from his belly.

“I dislike liars most of all,” she said as she brought a knee up and used it to shove the stunned and dying archer off the cliff. She watched him disappear into the brush, trees and mist below and then ran off back toward the road below, where Elec had stopped to treat a fallen man.

She hoped she could locate him quickly, for she would certainly lose him soon in the thickening fog.

Garius retrieved a satchel from amongst his personal belongings and headed back into the cave entrance, away from prying eyes. He immediately went to work methodically, retrieving items from the satchel, one by one. He laid out several candles and trinkets, icons and symbolic talismans of the gods in a very specific order around the area he had marked for the ritual and then lit the candles. The candles, which were different colors, mixed with the phosphorescent moss on the wall, combined to cast a rainbow of colors along the cave walls.

The blonde-haired young priest watched all of this anxiously as he awaited the ritual’s commencement.

The Inquisitor bade Thaurion to sit before him, surrounded by some of the trinkets and candles, and he did so, steeling his gaze and banishing the fear within him. He knew he had to do this if there was any hope of finding the cursed phylactery of Sadreth. Garius sat and spread his arms wide.

“What can you show me Shimmering One? Watcher?” Garius began as he fell into a meditative chant, his eyes closing slowly. “What have your creatures seen, Mistress of The Hunt?” As he spoke these words, the various symbols and runes etched into his pauldrons glowed brightly, albeit briefly, as if in response to his pleas.

“What of you, Harvester?” Garius continued. “Show me what the forests and the very things of nature can divulge.”

Thaurion was astonished by the scene. The smell of the incense along with the symbols and lighting began having a hypnotic effect on him. He fell deeper and deeper into his subconscious and suddenly was unaware of anything at all as the chanting and words of the Inquisitor faded into nothingness.

Elec bent low to inspect the prone human male, closely examining the wound from the pair of bolts that protruded from his arm and back. It appeared to him that as the man presumably fell off the roof of the caravan, the bolt in his arm had been pushed mostly through. He was bleeding profusely from his back, which was the most dangerous of the wounds. The man was barely breathing and Elec withdrew several elixirs from his bandolier and from his pack too, opening a rather wide and deep jar filled with a white substance.

Elec brushed the hair from his eyes and snapped the bolt in two, pulling the shaft out of the man’s back and immediately covering the injured area with a cloth. He was worried about permanent damage to the man’s back and spine, but had no choice if the man was to survive at all. He poured some alcohol onto the wound and then spread the thick, white substance from that jar over the man’s torn flesh, causing it to cover and harden over the gash as it mixed with the blood. It had been in use for centuries and Elec had become a master at mixing and using this particular life-saving balm.

He uncorked a liquid in one of his flasks, sat the man upright to guide the liquid down into his belly and poured it down his throat. He then snapped the second bolt in two, pulling the remnants out of his arm carefully, and lathered that same healing balm overtop both the entry and exit wounds. The thick white ointment intermixed with the crimson to form a pinkish seal over the injured areas very quickly, just as it had done on the chest wound. He lay the man down and immediately washed himself and the wounds on the man using a combination of both water and alcohol. He was confident that the mixture of topical and ingested treatments would work in saving the man’s life, as it had done so for him on occasion.

It was then that he felt something out of place, a tingling in his subconscious, a sense that perhaps he was being watched. He peered around and looked more closely toward the base of the hill to his left. In the swirling mist, he glimpsed a pair of amber eyes penetrating the haze. He focused through it and caught sight of an orc observing him curiously. No, not an orc, he corrected, but
half
-orc—he was sure to see the signs of human heritage within his features. The half-orc was a gray-skinned sort, strong of build, though his orcish features were somewhat muted. He brandished a shield as well as a strange, ebon-headed axe.

“Come meet your maker then, elf,” teased the half-orc as he turned and disappeared back into the brush along the hill. Elec uncorked a flask, downed its contents and repeated this action twice more before withdrawing his weapons.

The half-orc stopped a few steps into the brush and stared hard at the elf, then ran further into the undergrowth, disappearing into the thickets and the mist. Elec ran after him, very quickly at that, as a certain potion began to take effect. He made a mental note to refill his bandolier soon and continued after the half-orc.

After briefly following the half-orc’s trail, Elec came to a four-way intersection in the path. There was a huge rock, completely smooth and void of any texture, immediately to his left. Before he moved further though, he bent low, catching sight of a well-hidden tripwire. Elec crouched to his knees in an attempt to examine or disable it, but his hands shook unsteadily. He calmed himself and breathed slowly and in measured gasps, attempting to steady them with sheer concentration and force of will. His heart raced as did the blood within his veins and he felt uneasy, powerless to steady his hands.

What is happening?!

He was so intent on first the tripwire and then the physical reaction to his elixirs that he did not even notice the approach of the half-orc from behind.

“Find something of interest?” Elec heard as the half-orc moved closer. Assuming that he was attempting to attack his exposed back, Elec recklessly dove over the tripwire, fearing that the orc would take a swipe at him, and rolled forward into a thorn bush. Diving out of the thorns, he saw that the half-orc remained, unmoving and uninterested in taking advantage of Elec’s misfortune, which now consisted of several thons protruding from his skin and leathers, too.

“Come on, elf,” the half-orc stated and gestured for Elec to attack him. Elec was more than a bit curious at that as he picked a few more thorns from his leather sleeve.