He waited until he heard her enter the bedroom above then went to the door. The woman had left it slightly ajar and he could see the man inside. He was seated at a desk, facing a window affording a fine view of the sea, humming to himself as he read a scroll. He was of middling height, portly and balding, more grey in his hair than black. Frentis wondered what his name was as he pulled the dagger from the sheath at the small of his back.
◆ ◆ ◆
“A single thrust,” the woman said as they made their way up the mountain. They had sat in the jungle until morning, watching the house and waiting for the screams. They began to climb accompanied by the grief-filled cries of the magistrate’s wife, moving away from the road and the town where people were like to start asking questions about new arrivals when news of the murder became known. “Neat and quick,” the woman continued, climbing without any obvious strain. “Aren’t you going to thank me for letting you give him an easy death?”
Frentis kept climbing, saying nothing.
They came to the summit as the sun climbed to its apex, the woman turned towards the west, arms wide. “The Twelve Sisters in all their glory.”
They stretched away into the mist-shrouded distance, a line of eleven jungle-clad islands rising from the sea. “For centuries not even the bravest soul would dare to live here,” the woman went on. “It’s said there was a great cataclysm, great enough to shatter the land-bridge joining our continent with what is now the mainland of the Alpiran Empire. What caused it none can say, though legend offers a thousand explanations. The Alpirans say the gods battled the nameless and their wrath was such the earth shook with enough fury to drown the bridge. The tribes to the south have it that a fiery globe fell from the sky bringing destruction in its wake. There’s even an old story in Volarian about a mighty but foolish sorcerer who summoned something he couldn’t control, something that ravaged the land before dragging him screaming back to the void. Whatever it was, when it was done the land-bridge had become what you see now, twelve islands. Wild stories abounded of the great evils and magics still lurking here in the aftermath of the shattering, beasts that could talk like men, men that were more like beasts. It must have been a shock to the first Alpiran explorers who dared to come ashore, finding nothing but stinking jungle.”
She started down the western slope. “No time to enjoy the view, beloved. We’d best be off this rock by nightfall. You can swim, can’t you?”
◆ ◆ ◆
The channel between Ulpenna and its nearest neighbour was at least five miles wide at it narrowest point. The woman had him fashion a small raft for their pack from the light wood that littered the beach, lashed together with vines hacked from the jungle. He pushed it ahead of him with both arms, legs pumping. He had always been a strong swimmer, but that had been in the stretch of the Brinewash curving around the walls of the Order House. This was very different, the ceaseless swell of the sea and the darkness of the water as the sun began to descend conjured fresh images of the great red-striped shark as it devoured the whale.
The woman laughed, turning onto her back, leg kicking lazily in the water, completely at ease. “Don’t worry. We’re far too meagre a meal for a red shark to bother with. He does have smaller cousins though.” She laughed again and swam ahead as his fear lurched to an even higher pitch.
They made it to the far shore without undue incident, though Frentis could swear something rough and scaly had brushed his leg beneath the waves. He gathered driftwood and stacked it in a crude cone. The woman held her hand to it, grunting in pain and delight as the flame lashed out to ignite the timber, a line of blood appearing beneath her nose almost immediately. She wiped it away with a casual flick of her thumb, but he took note of the way she flexed her hand as the flames subsided, and the shudder of suppressed agony in her shoulders. There’s always a price to pay, my love.
They sat by the fire to dry off as the darkness deepened and a half-moon rose high above.
“Can you sing?” the woman asked. “I’ve always had a yen to hear my lover sing to me beneath a moonlit sky.”
For once Frentis was happy to reply without any encouragement. “No.”
She frowned at him. “I can make you, you know that.”
Frentis stared into the fire, saying nothing.
“You’re wondering who he was,” she said. “Why his name was on our list.”
The itch flared anew, almost burning now. He fought down the impulse to wince and kept his hands resting on his knees. If she knew of his discomfort, the woman gave no sign, tossing dry twigs into the fire as she spoke on, “I’m sorry to tell you he wasn’t a bad man, quite the opposite from what I could gather. A fair and learned judge, immune to influence or bribery. The kind of man who is trusted by all, rich and poor. The kind of man people look to in a crisis.” She tossed a final twig into the fire, offering Frentis a sad smile. “That’s why he was on the list. His worthiness killed him, not you. You are merely the instrument of a long-planned enterprise.”
She rose, moving to sit at his side, wrapping her hands around his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He knew they must have made a pretty picture, young lovers huddled together on a moonlit beach, but her voice held no vestige of prettiness when she began to speak again. It was a harsh, sibilant whisper, barely controlled, the voice of a madwoman.
“I know this pains you,” she said. “I remember that pain, my love. Though it was many lifetimes ago. You think me cruel, but what do you know of true cruelty? Is the tiger cruel when it takes the antelope? Or the red shark when it claims the whale? Was your mad king cruel when he sent you off to fight your hopeless war? You mistake purpose for cruelty, and I have always had a purpose. I am not mindless. When we are done with this list I promise you we’ll write one of our own, and then there will be no pain when you strike off a name, only joy.”
She snuggled closer, sighing in contentment . . . and the itch burned like fire.
◆ ◆ ◆
They killed twice more in the Twelve Sisters. A merchant’s clerk on Alpenna, throttled by the woman in an alley as he searched for a place to piss away the night’s wine. Next was a tavern girl in Astenna, lured to Frentis’s room by the silver he spun before her eyes, making it dance along his knuckles. She giggled as she followed him up the stairs, giggled as he stood aside with a bow at the door, giggled in the room as he lit a lamp and closed his arms around her. Once again the woman let him make it quick.
They found a ship before the sun was up and sailed away with the morning tide. The ship docked at Dinellis four days later, a huge bustling port even larger than Mirtesk. The guise of lady and bodyguard had been abandoned by now, replaced by husband and wife, though this time she played the role of cowed mouse and had him act the domineering braggart, spoiled son of a Meldenean merchant come to oversee his father’s trade. Dinellis yielded another victim from her list, a rotund innkeeper persuaded to join them for a cup of wine on their veranda by a boisterous Frentis. They left him there, staring sightlessly at the harbour, his empty wine cup still resting on his extensive belly.
The days took on a nightmarish monotony as they journeyed north, finding listed names along the way. There was no pattern to this list, at least none he could decipher. A village washerwoman ten miles north of Dinellis, a strapping farmhand two days later, a half-blind and deaf old man the day after that. If not for the fact he had seen the man with the too-familiar voice hand her the list, he might have thought it just a delusion of her fractured mind, an illusion giving her permission to kill at random. But there was a control to her killing now that told him this mission was not recreational, the savagery that had so disgusted him when she killed the old man in Hervellis replaced by a terrible efficiency. Whether she did the killing or forced him to it, little was left to chance. Their victims were observed and killed when opportunity arose, quickly if not cleanly, and they were gone well before any alarm could be raised.
A carpenter in Varesh. Another magistrate in Raval. A bandit leader in the hills to the west.
“Well, he was a tough one.” The woman angled her head at the body of the bandit, shaking blood from her short sword.
Frentis dodged a spear thrust from the last of the bandit’s men, the five others all lay about their camp, bloodied and lifeless. The camp had been hard to find, taking several days tracking through rocky hills. When they finally came upon it the woman eschewed waiting for darkness in favour of walking in and killing them all. “We’ve scant time for artistry, my love.”
The bandit leader had fought hard, if briefly. His men hadn’t run when he fell, bespeaking a genuine friendship and respect amongst these rogues.
The final bandit wore his hair in long, tightly bound braids, an intricate array of decorative scars etched around his eyes and mouth. He cursed Frentis in an unfathomable torrent of Alpiran and redoubled his efforts, fury putting too much strength into his final spear slash, the barbed blade arcing wide, leaving him exposed. Frentis’s boot took him square on the jaw, felling him unconscious to the dusty rock.
“He’s seen us,” the woman said, the binding forcing Frentis to bring his sword to bear on the fallen bandit’s neck . . .
. . . the itch burned, bright and fierce, so bright he wondered it didn’t burn through his shirt and blind her . . .
. . . the blade stabbed down, severing the spine. The bandit spasmed once and died.
They took the bandits’ horses, squat, wide-legged animals little bigger than ponies, and rode hard towards the north. The horses withered as night drew on but the woman wouldn’t stop and they rode them to death before the next morning. Two days’ walk brought them in sight of Alpira, the empire’s capital.
“Magnificent isn’t it?” the woman said. “They can’t build a road worth a turd but they can build a city.”
Alpira was a vast square grid of countless houses and towers, bordered all around by huge sloping walls fifty feet thick. Frentis would have been awe-struck by the sight of it but for the images of murder that now crowded his head. The farmhand had approached them with a wide smile, stepping away from his plough with raised arms, thinking them travellers in search of direction. Frentis’s dagger had opened his neck with a single slash and they watched him thrash on the ground until he bled his life away.
“See?” the woman was saying, finger pointing. “The dome of the Emperor’s Palace.” The dome seemed to shimmer with a white fire as it reflected the afternoon sun. “Clad in silver, every inch of it. I wonder what it’ll look like when it burns.”
They made camp atop a nearby hill, watching the city as night fell, a spectacle of lights appearing as the shadows grew long, the city resembling an unnaturally well-ordered spider’s web.
The woman took a piece of waxed parchment from the pack, unfolding it to briefly scan the names it held, then tossed it onto the fire where it blackened and curled in the flames. “You still haven’t reckoned it out, have you?” she asked. “What this has all been for?”
Frentis watched the last fragments of parchment burn and said nothing.
“Do you know what scrying is?” she persisted.
He wanted to ignore her, but found he needed to know why she had made him spill so much blood. If he could make some kind of sense of it, then perhaps the images wouldn’t plague him with such ferocity.
“I heard one of my brothers talk of it once,” he said. “Brother Caenis, he knew many things.”
“I see. And what did knowledgeable Brother Caenis have to say about scrying?”
“It’s a thing of the Dark. A way of seeing the future.”
“Quite so. But it’s a far-from-exact art, and a rare gift. The Council have been scouring the empire and beyond for centuries to find those with this gift, all with but one object, to divine what will happen when we finally come to take this land. Decades of scrying, most of it under torture, produced our list. Each name recurring again and again in the visions forced from the seers. The magistrate on Ulpenna would have rallied a fleet of armed merchant ships to harry our supply lines. The clerk was destined to be a master strategist in naval warfare, architect of a great victory. The whore in the tavern would discover a talent for archery, becoming a legend when she killed our admiral on the deck of his flagship. I assume you can guess the rest. Our list was a list of heroes, my love. By removing them we ensure success and eternal glory for the Volarian Empire.”
The sound that rose from his chest was so unfamiliar it hurt his throat. A laugh, in truth more a grating mirthful cough, making the woman narrow her eyes. “Do I amuse you, my love?”
Her anger just made him laugh harder, choking off as she flared the binding, leaning forward, hands flexing. “I will not be mocked. You saw me drink the blood of the last man who mocked me. Do not forget what I can do.”
He was surprised to find she had left him freedom to speak. “You won’t,” he rasped. “Mad bitch that you are, you’re actually in love with me.”
She became very still, fists clenched now, face twitching. “It seems you know more about cruelty than I gave you credit for.” She reclined slowly and unclenched her fists. “I asked what amused you.”
This time the binding left no room for silence. “There are millions of people in this empire,” he said. “Not slaves, free people, more than can be counted. Janus sent the largest and finest army ever mustered by the Realm and we couldn’t hold three cities for more than a few months. You think because we killed the people on your list this empire is ripe for the taking? You think amongst all the millions there won’t be any to take their place? I hope your vile race does try to take it, and I hope I live long enough to see their ruin.”
She gave a laugh of her own, short, almost wistful. “Oh my love, if only you knew how childish you are, how small your mind is. You talk of taking an empire, and in truth those idiots on the Council dream of little else, selling themselves like the cheapest whores to the Ally. They can have this empire. I want more, and I’ll have it, with you at my side.”
The itch, dormant for much of the day, began again. Not so painful now, but an insistent throbbing ache.
“But first,” the woman said, getting to her feet and brushing dust from her clothes, “we have the last name on our list to strike through. And this time, since you find me so amusing, I think I’d like you to play with them a while first. It’s a child you see, and children do so love to play.”
◆ ◆ ◆
The villa stood on a plateau to the west of the city. It was a large horseshoe-shaped structure, two storeys tall, comprising a stable and workshop as well as a lavishly decorated main house, all set within well-ordered groves of acacia and olive trees. White-cloaked guards patrolled the grounds in pairs. From the number visible, Frentis guessed there was at least a company garrisoned here.
They had approached via a narrow fissure in the southern slope of the plateau. It would have been a perilous climb in daylight but at night their success in scaling it seemed miraculous. He knew he had the woman to thank for the smooth precision with which he had made his way up the rock, hands and feet finding purchase with faultless accuracy. Somehow the binding enabled her to convey her skills to him, along with her bile. The itch hadn’t stopped and he worried continually it would prove such a distraction he would slip, but the binding and the woman’s Dark skill left no room for error and they reached the plateau’s edge without incident.
He hung at her side as two guards passed by above, fingers clamped to the ledge, sweat bathing him as the strain told. But his hold never wavered and he suspected, if she so wished, she could have him hang there until he starved. She waited until the voices of the guards had faded then hauled herself up, sprinting into the gardens, Frentis trailing ten feet behind. They moved fast but with barely any sound, halting in tree-cast shadows to allow patrols to pass. They were both dressed head to foot in black c
otton, the metal hilts of their swords and daggers blackened with ash to conceal any telltale gleams. The guards were a vigilant lot, speaking to each other in infrequent murmurs, their eyes constantly scanning for intruders. Whoever lived here was clearly worthy of the best protection the Emperor could offer.
It took over an hour before they made it to the rear of the main house. The windows on the ground floor were all securely shuttered and this side of the building was bare of any decorative fixtures that would have afforded useful handholds. The woman took something from the silk sheath on the underside of her wrist, a small garrotte he had seen her use on the merchant’s clerk in the Twelve Sisters, ten inches of shining steel wire stretched between two wooden grips. She moved to one of the windows, briefly inspected the iron padlock on the shutters, then looped the garrotte wire around the U-shaped piece of iron to which it was secured. Her hands moved in a blur, the scrape of the wire on the metal seemed like a scream after so much time spent in silence. Frentis kept watch as the woman worked. In the distance he could see two white-cloaks moving through the gardens, left to right, then right to left, following a pattern that took them ever closer to the house. He and the woman were concealed in the shadow cast by the stables but that would offer scant protection when the white-cloaks came within thirty paces or so.
There was a ping then a clatter as the lock came free of the shutter, the woman catching it before it could hit the ground. She pulled the shutters apart and climbed through, Frentis following, closing the shutters behind them. They were in a kitchen, the cook fire still glowed from the day’s work and rows of hanging copper pots gleamed in the half-light. The woman drew her sword and moved to the door.
Most of the servants would be abed in one of the side buildings at this hour, but there were still a few tending to nightly chores in the main house. They found an old man lighting lamps in the hallway, the woman’s sword piercing his neck from behind before he even sensed their presence. A pretty young maid swept a broom over the marble steps ascending from the main lobby, she had time to gape at them before Frentis’s thrown dagger took her square in the chest. He pulled it free as they climbed the stairs. By now the itch had grown to a tiny pinprick of purest agony in his side, the kind of agony that would have sent him screaming to his knees but for the binding.