The Tattered Banner (Society of the Sword Volume 1) (32 page)

Alessandra had certainly allayed his concerns about his lack of money, but he had made the commitment and did not think Braddock was the type of man who would take to being let down with friendly aplomb. He resolved that the money would go into the poor box at the Cathedral. After that he would be done with it.

The smuggler was waiting for him as planned. Soren felt slightly ridiculous discretely passing over the chit Braggock had given him to confirm their identities, and this sense of the ridiculous was added to by the smuggler’s garb that could not be more clichéd if it had been intended. A long dark cloak covered him completely, with its hood casting a shadow over his face. The only colour he bore was the brace of fat leather satchels, a faded brown, which were slung over his shoulder. If Soren were to draw a picture of a smuggler, this man would have been it. He constantly had to remind himself that this was not a game that he was playing.

He made to introduce himself to the smuggler who gruffly told him to be quiet. In silence, they made their way out of Oldtown and down the street into the city proper. The smuggler insisted on taking back streets and tight alleys through Docks, clearly concerned that they would be approached by the City Watch and arrested if they were out in the open. It felt to Soren as though they were inviting as much trouble as they were avoiding, and this suspicion was confirmed when two figures loomed out of the darkness in the lane ahead of them.

‘Get rid of them,’ said the smuggler, before they had even moved.

They approached and the first of them, a scrawny looking wretch in garish clothes, the type often favoured by thugs to suggest wealth or reputation, drew a knife and spoke.

‘Hand over the package and we’ll let you live,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Soren. He pushed back his cloak to reveal the hilt of his sword.

The thug smiled. ‘Anyone can strap a sword to his waist and act tough! Just hand over the package and save us all a lot of unpleasantness.’ He became more menacing and the second thug, taller and more heavily built than his colleague, revealed the club that he was carrying. The scrawny thug watched Soren, his eyes bright, revealing a cunning that would not otherwise have been attributed to him. His lips curved slightly in a smile as he nodded to his colleague who approached. ‘Fine then, we’ll do it the hard way,’ he said, a smile still on his face.

The mage lamp on the street at the end of the alley flickered gently. Soren waited until the second man was close; the fool was taking his time with what he clearly thought was an easy kill. The smuggler had not budged from where he stood behind Soren, his faith blindly placed in an unknown swordsman’s skills.

Soren reckoned that a non-fatal splash of blood would be enough to scare the thugs off. In one movement he drew his sword and flicked the tip across the large thug’s chest. His eyes widened in surprise. Blood bubbled from the corners of his mouth as he dropped to the ground.

The depth of the wound was as much of a surprise to Soren as it was to the others. He had only intended to draw blood, but had cut all the way through muscle and bone and into the thug’s lungs. His control should be better than that. It was only as he berated himself for the sloppiness of his stroke that he realised things seemed slower than they should. The speed was similar to that he had experienced at Ranph’s house. Slower than normal, but not as slow as time had seemed when he killed the belek.

The scrawny thug in the false finery roared in anger, but his voice was dull and the roar was long and drawn out. He came at Soren with his dagger. There was no mistaking his intention; he meant to kill. Without thinking, Soren lashed out with his rapier, slashing its tip through the thug’s throat, tearing it open.

He gasped and tried to speak, but his destroyed throat allowed no more than a rasping whisper. He dropped his dagger and pressed his hands to the wound, as though trying to put everything back in place and hold it all together. ‘Don’t you know who I…’ Then his face relaxed and his eyes lost their focus. His last exhale spluttered from his throat rather than his mouth.

Soren had killed the scrawny thug in less time than it had taken for him to even think of doing it. It was as though his body had identified a threat and destroyed it without him ever needing to consciously make a decision. He had not intended to kill the larger of the two at all and yet that was what he had done. The whole episode had been done with in only a few seconds and it was taking his brain longer than that to make sense of it all. Still somewhat bemused, he turned back to the smuggler, his bloodied sword still in his hand.

‘Are you ready to continue?’ he asked.

‘Gods alive, I’ve never seen anything happen so fast,’ the smuggler said, his mouth agape.

C h a p t e r   3 2

CHOOSE YOUR FRIENDS WISELY, BUT YOUR ENEMIES?

F
orty crowns was a huge sum of money to Soren. The street child inside of him grew giddy at the thought of so much, but there was just something about the way that he had earned it that tainted it. The fact that they were violent criminals made him feel a little less sullied by the experience. That he had not intended to kill them at all did worry him though. His physical action had gone beyond what he had intended to do, almost as though he could not control his own body. He did not think he had been in the Moment, the experience had not felt nearly so extreme as that in Ruripathia. It was however, as with the time when Ranph’s father had been killed, noticeably different to the way he normally felt.

There was no satisfaction that he had done something worthwhile, as there had been when he killed Chancellor Marin. It felt as though he was squandering the opportunities that he had been given. He could not shake the feeling off and resolved that any work he took from then on would have to have a higher, more honourable purpose. Killing for coin was a last resort, for when a swordsman had no other alternatives. Soren was a long way from that situation.

He had arranged to meet Braggock at another tavern, no longer wishing to risk being seen with him by Alessandra, and it was here that he sat, waiting for the barbarian.

‘You bloody fool,’ a voice rasped out of the darkness. ‘I’ve just heard what you did. You can forget about getting the rest of your money.’ Braggock slipped out of the shadows into the booth beside Soren. ‘If you’ve any sense you’ll get out of the city fast, although if I had any sense I’d kill you myself and hope that it would make amends.’

Soren raised his eyebrows to indicate the foolishness of such a course of action, but nonetheless he felt a sinking feeling in his gut.

‘Why? What went wrong? The courier arrived safely as agreed,’ said Soren. Of its own accord he found his hand tightening around the hilt of the dagger he wore at his waist.

‘You killed Don Abelard’s nephew, his sister’s boy,’ said Braggock.

Soren recognised that the strained quality to his voice was from fear and tension rather than anger. He also recognised the name.

‘My associate’s already dead. I’m leaving town now. I’d already be gone if I’d heard what happened any sooner but I only just found out myself. All you had to do was scare them off, you fucking idiot!’

Everyone in Ostenheim knew who Don Abelard was. He controlled almost all of the illegal activity in the city and its surrounds, or received a tributary cut from that which he was not directly involved in. In truth, Soren had assumed that indirectly it would have been him that he was working for. It appeared however that Braggock had created this little venture on the side and had attempted to get it through without paying a percentage. As though this were not bad enough, one of Abelard’s many relatives was now rotting on the cobbles of a back alley. He wondered briefly which of the two men he had killed that it had been, but it was clearly the scrawny one in the gold embroidered doublet.

‘The best thing you could do now is disappear!’ said Braggock, and with that the barbarian stood and took his own advice.

He collapsed onto the cot in his room, the soft mattress momentarily easing the tension in his body. He jumped up with a start at a knock on the door and opened it cautiously, dagger in hand. It was an Under Cadet.

‘Master Dornish wishes to see you immediately,’ he said.

Soren felt every part the naughty schoolboy as he knocked on the door to Master Dornish’s office. It was imposing and decorated with ancient looking wood panelling. The somewhat ornate decorations on the wood betrayed its original function as the door to the study of the head of the city’s Library of Mages.

‘Soren,’ Dornish said, his face grim.

Soren didn’t reply. He was still uncertain as to why he had been summoned, and how much the Master knew, if anything at all. It was however becoming clear from his demeanour that the summons and Soren’s concerns were directly related.

‘A broken lock on an arms cabinet in the salon where you train. A sword and dagger missing. Two corpses in a backstreet killed with surgical precision, and finally, every thug on the streets of Ostenheim looking for a student of the Academy who is believed to have killed, I won’t say murdered although that is what is being said, a nephew of the largest figure in the city’s underworld. I hear the reward is two hundred crowns. A hefty price indeed. Regretfully, all of these little clues lead inexorably to you,’ said Dornish.

Lying flashed through Soren’s mind, but it was not in his nature and it would have been pointless anyway.

‘Yes, I did it,’ said Soren.

‘I won’t ask why, it isn’t really important. What is important is that you have made every student in this Academy a target for any thug that fancies his chances of making some easy money and that is something I will have a very hard time forgiving,’ said Dornish. He paused, resting his chin on his hand. His brow furrowed, then relaxed. ‘Nonetheless, you are still a student here and your safety is also my responsibility.’

There was a cursory knock on the door and Amero swept into the room, his cloak billowing behind him. He removed his gloves and sat down without a word, before looking up at Soren, his face breaking into a half smile.

‘Got yourself into a spot of bother I hear!’ he said. ‘I rather expected you’d knocked up some tavern wench whose father was banging on the Academy doors, but word of this is spreading like wildfire! This is a proper spot you’ve got yourself in!’

It relieved Soren that Amero did not seem to be angry, but the fact that he was there at all brought home how serious a situation he was in.

‘That Soren needs to disappear is a given,’ Dornish said. ‘How we go about that is another matter.’ Dornish paused again for a moment in silent contemplation before continuing. ‘It will mean missing the Competition. A shame, but unavoidable.’