He saw nothing.
In that respect, at least, the queen’s men had been good. Very, very good.
He was becoming increasingly frustrated, even slightly anxious.
Good, Imp thought.
That’s how I want him.
I need him to be desperate for information, for a solution to his dilemma. So that, when I approach him, he won’t send me packing. Or, worse, kill me.
Yet she was resolved that she would put him out of his misery – she would tell him who had really been involved.
How would he react to that? she wondered: to be told that the queen had perpetrated this attack now being blamed on the assassins?
At last, his lack of progress persuaded him that he had no alternative but to undertake a closer search of the building’s charred ruins. It was a risk; the house might still be under a secretive watch, precisely because it had supposedly been attacked by assassins. It was an attack, too, that had left some of their number dead. There was probably someone, somewhere, who was hoping a lone assassin might show up to find out what had gone wrong…
He entered the ruins carefully, not so much to avoid disturbing delicately balanced timbers, to avoid dropping through floorboards turned to charcoal, but to reassure himself that there was no one watching him. He’d circled the site a number of times, realising that anyone placed on guard here would be capable of detecting and cloaking against an assassin’s use of the Knowing.
He didn’t realise it, of course, but he had no need to worry about the guards: Imp had already taken care of them. They lay in their carefully prepared hiding places. Telling themselves they were still awake, still on watch for any unusual behaviour.
As a further precaution, Imp had also cloaked their minds from further detection by the assassin. She didn’t want to frighten him off, not now she was so close to making contact with the Assembly.
How had she developed all these remarkable skills, capabilities she had read about in the books she’d begged, borrowed, stolen – read, even, in the minds of others – but had believed must ultimately lie beyond her abilities?
There was the surfeit of high quality meat, of course. The candles, lamps. The clothing, of leather and fur. There was also all that reading, the patient, painstaking practise. And, more than all of these, the experience of dealing with and controlling the beasts, moving and manipulating them as if they had become nothing more than puppets in her hands, her mind.
Yet there was something extra. Something inherent, instinctive. A sense that this ability lay within every cell of her being. Some thing lying deep inside her that told her she was capable of all these things, and more.
Call it confidence.
Call it arrogance, if you prefer.
Whatever it was, it was now the impetus that drove her through her life. And the more it drove her, the more confident – but no, never arrogant, as that would ultimately be a weakness – she felt about that ability.
Now she was putting those abilities to their greatest test so far. A test that – if she had become too arrogant – would probably result in her death.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What’re you doing here?’
She had enough sense to make sure she hadn’t suddenly appeared alongside the assassin. She’d let him sense her languid, mournful approach.
She’d let him know who she was too: Imp, the daughter of the butcher and his wife who had lived here. The girl everyone thought was dead.
She wasn’t dead after all.
She caught his unguarded thoughts. He wasn’t expecting her to be able to read them: she was just a butcher’s girl, after all.
It gave him hope, hope that he might be able to work out what had gone on here that night without having to resort to the far more dangerous task of searching out the bodies of those who had made this attack. Those, of course, would be under even closer guard than the house; in fact, as the house didn’t have anyone guarding it, he was thinking, the bodies must be particularly well guarded, for they must hold most of the clues leading to those responsible.
Imp hadn’t made the same basic mistake that he’d made: falsely assuming that the person you’re coming into contact with won’t be using any Knowing abilities. Imp had assumed the complete opposite; that this man’s powers would be extremely well developed and dangerous.
‘And you?’
Even though he thought he Knew what she was doing here, he had to ask it; to appear relaxed, appear normal.
‘I lived here.’
Again, she had to say it, even though he Knew.
Her mind seemed open, innocent to him. He could see her supposed fear that night, when the assassins had come to kill her parents. See the trauma she had suffered.
What she didn’t want him to see – which was most things – was effectively cloaked. But delicately so, fuzzily so, with no sudden, hard divide to draw attention to the veiling.
She let him Know she found him handsome; that would be the natural thing to do.
Flattering for him too. It enhanced his arrogance, his weakness. He believed it gave him a certain level of power over her.
Yet she was pleased to see that he also found her attractive, if not beautiful. He saw her frame as being athletically slim, an attribute a man of action found strangely seductive. Her cropped hair was practical, revealing the sharpness of her chin, the elegance of her neck.
She hadn’t used the ploy of the beggar’s clothes on him: he would see through it. It would alert him to her skills.
She had garnered all of this knowledge of him from his own mind in the last few seconds. She instantly hid that knowledge from him, for, of course, she wasn’t supposed to be aware of any of this.
It was like using your mind the way a card sharp flicks though a pack, bringing the ones you need up to the top, planting the unwanted ones lower down. In the same way, the levels of thought had to be kept absolutely right, endlessly requiring a fresh, swift rearranging. Yet you had to constantly hide the fact that you were swiftly shifting through those thoughts – hiding even the intention to hide, which was the most difficult skill of all to master. Especially when you were taking in new information, new surprises.
Suddenly, she deliberately reshuffled her thoughts.
‘It was the queen’s men,’ she said bluntly.
‘How do you–’
He gawped in surprise, a brief moment of fear.
She was revealing to him the truth of what had happened that night: the men in assassins’ cloaks, her dead parents, the way she had killed the first man, fought with and unveiled the queen.
She also showed him how she had killed the other men.
Showed him, too, that she had no argument with him; she wasn’t about to attack him.
He was impressed. Not only with the ease of her own assassinations, but also the way she displayed such remarkable skill with the Knowing.
‘Why are you letting me see all this?’ he asked, speaking – although he didn’t realise it – unnecessarily.
She already Knew the question that had been forming. Not that she allowed him to Know that.
‘I need a job,’ she answered.
*
Chapter 15
1000 Years Later
Attending the Academy no longer seemed a chore now that Cranden – for yes, she now saw the beast as being Cranden in some way, his thoughts and emotions being there if not his true physicality – was with her once more.
He could help her train, he had told her. Show her the means of fighting you picked up in battle, not at a glorified school.
Fighting for your life was different to fighting simply to win a dual. You fought dirty: you kicked, you spat, you bit. You clubbed with the pommel of your sword. You used your shield as a weapon, barging into your opponent with enough force to send him spinning away from you.
You took note of the ground you were fighting on, watching out for rocks you can force him back onto, making him unsteady on his feet. You kept an eye out for h
anging branches, once again subtly moving him back amongst them. That way, he suddenly found he couldn’t swing his sword with the ease he had up until now.
Cranden was the perfect training partner. She didn’t have to hold back from putting all the force and aggression she could muster into her attacks and blows, for he could take it all, provided the sword she used was blunted.
He moved surprisingly quickly for his size. His strength, of course, was prodigious: he could alter the levels of defence he was putting up, treating her lightly at first, becoming more brutal as she improved. If she prevailed against him, he informed her, she could hold out against anyone human.
He was more in tune, too, with nature.
He showed her the obvious: how to track other animals, noting the disruption of soil, the broken twigs and leaves. To follow watercourses, to study the portions of prey they had left behind, the clues that could be had from even distasteful waste products like stools.
More unusual, however, was the development of those senses many animals took for granted; the instincts that frequently kept them alive or, conversely, helped them hunt a more careless, unwitting victim.
‘It’s still there, this sense, only hiding deep within us,’ Cranden explained. ‘Or, rather, we’re foolishly hiding it from ourselves.’
The ability itself is patiently waiting to be revived.
Expecting to be revived.
A remnant of this ability still remains easily accessible; that strange, prickling you feel in the back of your neck whenever someone is observing you.
Don’t dismiss this, Cranden warned Desri, as just a foolish notion.
Trust it.
Work on using it more often.
‘And from this, we’ll re-instil in you a gift equal of the Knowing.’
*
Chapter 16
1000 Years Earlier
‘We need a bedroom,’ Haran said to Imp bluntly.
‘I don’t think we’re at that stage yet!’ Imp replied morosely.
It was the reply he was expecting, of course. She couldn’t let him Know that she was already completely aware that he needed the room for the meeting with other Assembly members he’d promised to arrange.
The lone assassin had been suitably impressed by Imp’s earlier demonstration of her skills. But there were some skills, Imp had decided, that she should keep hidden from him.
‘It’s so we can be alone, and the other people in the inn won’t see anything wrong with that,’ Haran said, allowing her a glimpse of his own thoughts, a means – he presumed – of showing her he was telling the truth.
Not, of course, that that meant he really was revealing the truth. It would be incredibly stupid of her not to accept that he might have capabilities she remained unaware of: another level of his thoughts, carefully veiled, might be pondering a totally different reality.
Still, she made her way up to the bedroom with him. It made sense, a meeting taking place away from the curious eyes of those drinking in the bar.
Once again, the assassins had thankfully underestimated her.
Via the roof, they were silently slipping into the bedroom through a deftly opened window. Their cloaks, which everyone assumed were black, only generally appeared this way because an assassin was more usually seen at night, or erupting out of the shadows. Yet they were made of minute, overlapping lizard scales, which reflected the surrounding lights and shapes. Thus to anybody but Imp – who had detected the arrogantly uncloaked minds of men who erroneously thought their Cloud of unKnowing offered protection – they appeared as nothing more than flowing fluctuations of the night, the walls, the window.
She was getting just a little tired of having to act surprised – but it was essential to keep up the subterfuge. So as she and Haran entered the unlit room, she gasped when the three men stepped out of the shadows into the block of dim moonlight coming in through the window.
‘I’ve been told of your abilities,’ one of the men said.
He’d had the sense to cloak the part of his mind revealing his real identity. Of course, as he wasn’t even attempting to pretend he wasn’t hiding anything, it was a solid, abrupt veiling of the vast majority of his mind. The other two men with him had taken a similar precaution.
‘You say these men were the queen’s men?’ one of the other three men asked.
‘It has been known,’ the third said, as if he didn’t require Imp’s answer.
‘If you wish to join us, we have a task you might relish.’ It was the first man who spoke again.
‘So soon?’ Haran said doubtfully. ‘I have seen in her mind what she can do, but a degree of training–’
‘Of course!’ The third man interrupted him. ‘
‘Who is it?’ Imp asked curiously.
She felt both irritated and yet strangely relieved that she couldn’t directly see whom they had in mind as a target.
‘Lord Krag,’ the first man replied.
‘Lord Krag!’ Haran didn’t hide his surprise. His horror. It would probably have been useless to do so. ‘We’ve already lost–’
He was stilled in his protests by a raised hand from the first man.
‘It’s gratifying to see that you care for the wellbeing of our latest recruit, Haran,’ he breathed caustically. ‘We mention this only to show her that there can be benefits in making a commitment to our cause.’
‘Lord Krag.’ Imp nodded her head in satisfaction. She had never forgotten that Lord Krag had been responsible for Hoak’s death. ‘I don’t care what protection he has; I accept this mission.’
The other two men chuckled at her impetuousness.
‘First,’ the second man said, ‘there’s the requirement of a payment for your training.’
‘Payment?’ Imp hadn’t expected this.
She could hear the smile in the third man’s voice.
‘We’d like to utilise your talents as a butcher.’
*
Chapter 16
1000 Years Later
The Academy’s training, as Cranden had warned her, seemed rather basic in comparison to the multitude of skills she was gradually honing under his tutelage. Even so it was, of course, highly impressive in its own way.
She was taught how to ride, how to continue spurring your horse on to what could be a gruesome death for both of you. That, of course, was a skill Cranden had mastered in.
In particular, she was shown how to command men, how to make decisions in the heat of the moment when everyone else was panicking, overwhelmed by a run of apparently hopeless misfortunes. Taught, especially, that she should be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. An officer incapable of taking this on board was not an officer at all, but simply another man.
You could not, therefore, you could never, regard those under your command as ‘friends’. This was not the way to ensure they would always obey you, not when you were issuing orders that could result in them being maimed or killed. They had to trust you because they realised you had a wider perspective of the battle than they could ever hope to master.
Friendlessness was something Desri could effortlessly identify with. There were no other girls in the Academy. No one, even, from her own low level of life.
Every boy there was the son of someone holding a high position in the ruling class. Their natural inclination was to look down on her, to view her as an unwanted intruder into what they believed was their own rightful level of life.
Added to this was their other natural inclination to follow the crowd, a crowd led by Barane’s ideas of what was right and what was wrong. No one questioned these ideals and attitudes that everyone had subserviently and willingly accepted, for fear of being made an outcast, the butt of the anger and vengeance of those very ideals.
Desri noticed that the boy who had made an effort to defend her that night in the alley obviously made some attempt at rebelling against these self-imposed rules of the crowd. As she had presumed that night, he also seemed attracted
to her. He not only made no effort to fully disclose this attraction, however, but also failed to use it as a spur to stand up for her, despite the way she was either ostracised or humiliated at every opportunity. She was jostled in the corridors, such that she dropped her books. She had odious tricks played on her, including the time a venomous spider was left in the leggings of her armour. The deliberate weakening of her shield lead to its unexpected collapsing in a dual, resulting in a badly injured arm.
Of course, Desri had no firm proof that the boy, Neilif, found her attractive. Yet she couldn’t fail to be aware that her beauty seemed to be increasing with the passing of each month, the physical training she was being put though by both the Academy and Cranden giving her both a leanness and a confident baring that enhanced her already natural elegance and gracefulness.
Moreover, she often caught Neilif intently watching her, and not just when she also happened to glance his way either: she sensed his interest whenever he was close, feeling his longing intent even when he was seated behind her in class. For, just as Cranden had instructed her to do, she had gradually developed that natural, instinctive sensation of the prickling neck, experienced whenever someone was intensely staring at her.
She no longer needed to whirl her head around, in the hope of catching the culprit before they had chance to look away. Instead, under Cranden’s directions, she absorbed that focused intent, making herself fully aware of it, like you attune your ears to picking up malicious whisperings about you.
Letting that intenseness of the observer soak into her, she dissected it, examined it, felt the intent of the person. She felt the person himself, utilising his own longing as a connection between them: secretly rushing back on the waves of energy sent out by him, dipping into the pool of his being, swimming around in there for a while to see what she could learn about him.
The classes on Knowing taught that the eyes were more than a window to the soul: they were a door to a person’s mind, their identity, their very being.
Carefully, subtly (an unhurried subtleness is essential throughout) catch someone’s eye.