The Assassin King Read online

  Finally, Dyansynos, another of the Daughters and the Guardian of Frothta, the tree of living water, came to her sister’s side, taking in the horrific sight, as if to share the burden of it with Valecynos. Like all dragons, she had no larynx, no voice box to give sound to her words, but her thoughts were audible to those gathered in the greenwood.

  “It is as we feared,” she said, her words soft, as they pained her mind to form them. “Llauron has Ended.”

  As if in agreement, the wind blew through the glade for the first time since sunrise, rattling the branches of the trees, whispering ominously.

  The great wyrms continued to stare at the stone dragon in silence. The profound horror of a wyrm giving up its life in such an absolute way had only been experienced one other time in history, and it was a sacrifice of such magnitude that it was only spoken of in the darkest of times, and then only in whispers. To End was more than to die; it was to disperse all of the elemental lore a dragon carried in its blood back into the universe, to forgo any legacy of blood, where the beast’s decaying body returned to the earth, leaving veins of precious metal or caches of gemstones, which would one day adorn the crowns of powerful men, be valued and hoarded and fought over, as the dragon had done with its treasure in life. These great beasts, who believed that they were without souls, who acknowledged that the Afterlife held no place for them, longed, as each sentient creature longed, for some vestige of immortality.

  To End was to consciously give up any chance of that forever.

  More terribly, it left a hole in the shield of power by which the race of dragons protected the Earth. With the loss of each member of the ancient race came the loss of the control, of the stewardship, by which they kept the forces of chaotic destruction that were imprisoned within the very earth from destroying it.

  Finally the harsh voice of Sinjaf, the vaporous dragon steward of the great poison swamps and everglades of the eastern island chains, crackled through the silent glen. “Llauron was not wyrm, but wyrmkin,” he said curtly, his fear transmitting like a headache to the assemblage. “He was born a man, with dragon’s blood in his veins, true, but not really one of us. His loss, while tragic, hardly affects the shield—”

  “Llauron served to guard the Great White Tree of earth, just as the Daughters guard the three other remaining trees,” interjected Talasynos, a Daughter herself and protector of Eucos, the tree of living air. “From the time he was a child he has tended it, loved it as we Daughters love the World Trees. When my sister Elynsynos gave up her corporeal form to escape her pain, he, as her grandson, took on her stewardship. Had he not, the tree would have been destroyed, as so much of the Wyrmlands were destroyed, in the wars of men. His transformation to dragonkind was complete; he gave up his humanity to join our service. Do not fool yourself, Sinjaf; this loss is as great as it would have been should Elynsynos herself have Ended.”

  The last of her words echoed hollowly through the glen.

  Finally, Mikanic gave voice to what they all were thinking. “Where is Elynsynos?”

  The great wyrms focused their eyes, then their other, deeper senses, on the question, seeking her vibrations in this place over which she had held dominion since birth. They scanned the horizon, sought her within the running sap of the trees, beneath the surface of the ground, tasted the air around her for a trace of her ethereal form, listened for any whisper of her on the wind.

  Not a single echo of her could be felt.

  The horror of the Ending surged within the assemblage into even greater fear.

  “Surely she cannot be dead,” came the insistent voice of Chao, a sparkling creature from the bright lands of the rising sun; frail and nervous, he was the most evanescent of the kin. “We would have felt it as we did the death of Marisynos, who guarded Sagia, when the Island of Serendair was consumed in cataclysm.”

  “Perhaps we did feel it,” said Sidus darkly. “The reverberations from Llauron’s Ending were vast enough to draw all of us here; mayhap Elynsynos’s death was masked within them. Clearly her dominion is broken; these lands of hers are without protection, vulnerable. Can you not feel the loss of her magic?”

  “There are so many holes in the shield already,” murmured Valecynos. “We have lost so many of our kind—look at us. Only a few hundred remain of what was once the greatest of the Firstborn races; how can we guard the Earth with but a few of us? Without a Guardian for the last of the World Trees?”

  “We can but concentrate on what is below,” said Witheragh, “and leave the rest to the races of man.”

  “The races of man are the root of the woe!” exclaimed Dyansynos. “You may coexist happily with the Nain, Witheragh, but most of us live in conflict with the other races, maintain an uneasy truce, or avoid them altogether by keeping to the depths, hiding in the bowels of the Earth. It is their folly that invites the Unspoken in; it is their bodies to which the demons crave to cling, being without form themselves. It is through man that the F’dor propagate, through man they accomplish their destructive will.”

  “Men must fend for themselves now,” said Mikanic. “There is naught we can do for them. While Elynsynos was here, she held these lands completely under her dominion, more so than any of the rest of us has managed since the beginning of the world. Her folly, her association with a man of a Firstborn race, led to the downfall of that, to the war that followed. It is foolhardy for us to try to save any of them now. We must do the best we can in holding a fragile world together, to guard against the evil ones in the Vault of the Underworld, and those that walk the upworld. Whatever befalls the races of man is of no consequence. And to that end, we should bless our brother and be gone from this place, back to our own lands, lest we leave them vulnerable.”

  Amid silent assent, the dragons turned once more toward the stone corpse of one of their own kind.

  “What was he doing, when he Ended?” Chao asked nervously. “Why is he crouched, yet his head is erect, his eyes open?”

  The dark evergreens rustled loudly as the wind blew through the greenwood again.

  “He must have been sheltering something,” said Talasynos. “Whatever it was, he must have considered it worth the loss of not only his life, but his legacy, and all of his lore.”

  “We can return at least some of that to him in blessing,” said Valecynos. She closed her incandescent eyes and began to chant without sound, without words, joined a moment later by the others.

  Llauron’s stone shell was suddenly engulfed in flames, clear, pure elemental fire with no trace of ash or cinder, the kind that burned brightly deep within the heart of the Earth. The streaks of ash that had once marred him now purged by the flames, the chant changed, summoning cold rain from the clear morning sky. Once the body was cleansed, the wyrms altered their chant again, summoning the wind, which dried the droplets of rain as a mother dries the tears of a child. Finally, when the body had been blessed by those three elements, the very earth below it opened gently to receive Llauron, forming a grave deep within the forest he had loved in life.

  When all the elements of the natural world had anointed the place where he had Ended, the dragons fell silent. They remained in the greenwood, standing vigil, until the night came, and ether, in the form of starlight, came to rest on the grave. The oldest of the five elements, ether was considered the magic that tied their race to the rest of the universe.

  “May it bring you peace, and whatever immortality you can attain, Llauron,” intoned Valecynos. And may whatever you sacrificed yourself for have been worth the price you paid, she thought

  As the wind picked up again, the immense serpentine bodies loosed their ties to the corporeal flesh of earth. Translucent, gleaming ethereally, they caught the wind as gossamer does, or burrowed back within the ground and returned to their lands.

  Trembling with fear.

  3

  Deep within the Hintervold

  At least one of the race of dragons did not attend the blessing of Llauron’s body. Her absence did not mean th
at she had not witnessed the results of the Ending, however.

  She had been the cause of it.

  That Llauron had been her son was only a fragmented awareness for her; she had lain in a grave of coal ash and soot for almost three years, blasted from the skies with ethereal fire, and as a result, her memory was not what it used to be. In fact, she had only a few lingering recollections, and none of her children inhabited any of them. She had long forgotten the primal rule of wyrmdom, that no dragon would ever consider killing another dragon, since the loss of even one made for a terrible hole in the shield of protection they maintained in the world.

  If she had known, she would not have cared.

  She knew little more than that she had recently awakened in the earth, in pain and confusion, and that giving vent to her pain through destructive wrath eased her agony a little.

  She also knew, as she lay in her empty palace of ice and frozen stone, that she was dying.

  The dragon Anwyn had only been in wyrm form for a relatively minuscule period of time, a few years out of the millennium and a half that she had lived. She had only assumed the form a few times over her life, always as a means to achieve an evil end, and had been caught unawares by the blast of starfire that had crippled her wing and consigned her to a deathlike state in her black coal grave. She had no idea what had caused her to awaken. She only could recall pieces of memories, images that she often did not understand, and how satisfying hatred felt when it was translated into destruction.

  And one clear memory: the lingering hate for a woman with golden hair, the woman who had put her into the prison of her grave.

  All of that had receded into the recesses of her mind now as she struggled for breath on the stone floor of her keep in the frozen mountains. Within her chest cavity a piece of metal was embedded, jagged of edge, round, thin, and razor-sharp. It had been cold-fired in its manufacture and made from a type of metal that expanded greatly when it came in contact with heat, but of course she did not know that, either. She only knew that until she had made her way back here, to this place of endless winter, it was tearing at the muscle of her chest, growing bigger as the heat of her body made it expand, slicing nearer and nearer to her three-chambered heart.

  Now she was lying as still as she could, trying to keep her mind clear and herself from panicking, struggling through the ruins of her fragmented brain, searching for a memory that could help her.

  Healing, she thought desperately, breathing as shallowly as she could, watching her spittle pool on the floor, tainted pink with blood. I must find healing.

  But in her life, Anwyn had cared little for the healing arts, and so had little idea of where to find them.

  Near a window that looked out into the mountains she could hear a humming sound louder than the ever-present north wind howling outside her palace; a moment later she realized that she heard it not in her ears, but in her blood. Slowly she turned her head, wincing in agony, and attempted to focus her gaze on whatever was calling to her.

  Atop an altar of heavily carved wood lay a tarnished spyglass.

  Like a strike of lightning, realization came to her.

  The spyglass had been the tool of her trade for most of her life, an instrumentality that had once belonged to her sailor father, but rather than looking at objects far away at sea, Anwyn had employed it in her capacity as the Seer of the Past. She did not remember any of that, but had a sense that if she could reach the spyglass, it might be able to show her what to do to save herself. So, as she had struggled to bring herself to this place, she now put the last of her energy into dragging her body, enormous of heft and grievously injured, to the altar.

  The wind beyond the ice-slicked panes of glass screamed in triumph as the dragon’s image, mirrored in the window, came nearer. She could feel her damaged heart beating wildly as she made her way across the floor, leaving a trail of dark blood behind her. With great care she reached a taloned claw up over the wood and felt carefully around where she had sensed the vibration; when she could feel the cool metal beneath her claw she fought against grasping it too eagerly.

  With the last of her energy, she slid to the ice-covered windows overlooking the vast chasm below her, lifted the glass to her enormous serpentine eye, and peered through as best she could.

  She had forgotten that the spyglass could only show her things from the Past, but that didn’t matter. The image that formed as she peered through the lens rang a clear chime in her memory. It was the picture of a place of historic and mysterious healing properties, a desert citadel where hot springs flowed, healing gardens bloomed with herbs to soothe the mind, body, and spirit, where the warmth of the sun coupled with the medicinal attributes of the claylike sand could draw even the deepest infection from the body, or the most damaging memory from the soul, leaving nothing but sweet clarity and peace. That this haven for the suffering had slipped into the sands of the desert before her father had even set foot on this continent fifteen hundred years before, and that she had never even seen the place, let alone experienced its healing power, was also something she did not understand. She only knew that she could see, in the tiny lens of the spyglass, exactly what she was looking for.

  The lost city of Kurimah Milani.

  Gasping for breath, the dragon began to laugh raggedly.

  4

  Haguefort, Navarne

  By inexplicable happenchance, at the moment Rath came ashore, the man who had once carried the reviled name that the hunter was seeking was within a few score miles. That man was staring in silent contempt at the rosy brown stone edifice of a small keep known as Haguefort, observing a reunion that made him unconsciously desire to expectorate in the same disgust as was conveyed by what used to be his name.

  Ysk.

  Since the time when that name had been contemptuously conferred upon him, the man had borne several other titles as well. In long-ago days he had been cleansed of Ysk by a wise and highly skilled Namer, a man trained in the science of vibration and its manipulation. The Namer had called him simply the Brother, for Ysk was, he said, brother to all, but akin to none. It was a name that gave him power by which he could have come to be a great healer, but instead he chose the opposite side of the coin, passing his time in the trade of a solitary assassin.

  A less-skilled practitioner of that same science had renamed him decades later, and now that he ruled over a mountainous kingdom of Firbolg, the same race of monstrous beings that had long ago given him the title Ysk, he was known by many dreaded and silly appellations: The Glowering Eye, The Earth Swallower, The Merciless, The Night Man. He had narrowly escaped becoming the owner of the most respected traditional title given to chieftains and warlords among the Bolg tribes, which translated roughly as The Supremely Flatulent, by virtue of the fact that he could not be described as such, or by any other title tied to the senses. In the dark caverns and tunnels of Ylorc, he was never seen or heard, and certainly never smelt, unless he wished to be.

  Now, at this point in his history, he was known as Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg.

  The name given to him at birth had vanished from history, and from all but the deepest vaults of his memory. He had only given voice to it once in almost two thousand years, and had spoken it softly, in the depths of the Earth, to the Namer who had given him his current appellation.

  He watched that woman now being led up the steps of the rosy brown keep, shaky from recent childbirth and the sting of the late-winter wind, and exhaled deeply. He turned to his Sergeant-Major, an enormous half-breed who had been his constant companion for most of his life.

  “No one is watching. If we leave now, they won’t know we’re missing until we’re already home.”

  The Sergeant-Major shook his head, hiding a smile.

  “Nope, sir, ‘twouldn’t be right,” he said, trying to sound serious. “Ol’ Ashe asked us to wait ’ere so we could brief ’im on what happened in the forest. We ain’t supposed ta talk about it ‘til we meet in council to keep the mem’
ries fresh.” He pointed in the direction of two young people, the Duke and Duchess of Navarne, who were holding a squalling bundle. “But if we’re talkin’ fresh, Oi say we ’ave a bite ta eat while we’re waitin’. Sound good ta you?”

  Achmed smiled slightly. “You’re suggesting we eat Rhapsody’s baby?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  The Firbolg king’s smile faded as the guards from the keep arrived to take him to his solitary chamber.

  “Because there’s not enough to share,” he said within plain earshot of the soldiers.

  “You’re right, as always, sir,” Grunthor called out amiably as Achmed was led away. “’Ow about you just let me bite off the ’ead, an’ you can ’ave the rest?”

  The Firbolg king shook his head. “No,” he said without turning around. “It’s related to Ashe, so it probably tastes like mutton. You know how much I hate mutton.”

  The chambermaid who had taken the baby from the children let out a little gasp of horror and scurried away from the two monstrous men. The young duke, his nine-year-old sister, and the keep’s guards, long accustomed to the two of them, however, didn’t raise an eyebrow.

  When the Lord Cymrian had first commanded that all present be ushered to separate rooms and kept in silence until their meeting, most of the others had scowled. Each of the people who would be summoned in what Lord Gwydion had promised would be a short time hence had urgent business to discuss, terrible findings to report, and all were frustrated at the delay.