Assassin's Shadow (Veiled Dagger Book 2) (12 page)

Rothar felt as though he were struggling to wake from a deep sleep, consciousness coming and going in turns. The things he saw in front of his eyes did not make sense and the words in his head were jumbled and nonsensical, though he understood the language. Then a rush of cold took his breath away and snapped his eyes open.

He stood, dripping wet, before three men, one holding a water bucket. Rothar’s arms were tied behind his back tightly and his ankles were lashed to the chair on which he sat. Looking around, he saw that he was in a large room made of earth and wood. Somewhere behind him a fire was burning brightly. He could feel it’s warmth dancing on the back of his neck. The three men in front of him scowled darkly, all of them possessed the same black hair and piercing dark eyes as Mortez.

Rothar struggled to regain his wits. He could tell that the knots that bound him had been expertly tied. He would not be able to free himself before these men could do what they wanted with him.

“I suggest you untie me, and save yourself feeling the wrath of the King of the northern kingdom,” he tried.

The dark men snickered. “We pay no allegiance to your King,” said the one in the middle. “And who are you? Why are you prowling about our gate?” The man’s voice was sharp with hatred.

“I am merely a messenger,” said Rothar.

“Yes? And what is the message?”

“Stop sending your poison into the Kingdom of Heldar, or every last one of you shall die,” Rothar said, giving up on diplomacy. He determined that his only timely option was to force his captors to make a mistake, and anything short of killing an adversary like Rothar was a mistake.

The three men looked at one another and laughed aloud.

“Poison, you say?” asked the leader. “If it is poison we peddle, then how come your people want it so badly? Can you not see that we are helping them? We help them deal with their pain, their sadness.”

“You destroy lives,” Rothar spat back.

The leader mocked offense. “Have you even tried it? I think it might do a man like yourself a world of good.”

The men laughed again as Rothar made no reply. One of the men began pulling the shutters over the windows in the room and the other walked to the fireplace behind Rothar. He heard him shut the flue.

“Have a wonderful journey,” one of them said, and then Rothar heard a door shut.

The room was silent save for the crackling of the fire, which had increased since the men had left. The space began to fill with an acrid smoke, the scent of which Rothar recognized immediately. He had no way of knowing how much of the Obscura the men had thrown onto the flames before sealing him in there, but he was certain it was no small amount.

Rothar tried to hold his breath as he focused on loosening the knots that held his wrists. He knew there was no hope in struggle or panic, so he sat very still and concentrated strictly on wriggling his wrists and controlling his breathing. Shallow breaths, only shallow breaths and only when absolutely necessary. If he held his breath outright he would end up taking in huge gulps of air once his lungs gave out. The knots gave way just a small amount and allowed him to press his fingers together, giving him more leverage against the twisted ropes.

Rothar took another tiny sip of air and closed his eyes. Lights danced in front of his vision. He shook his head to clear the illusion but the lights only splashed against the edges of his consciousness and flowed back to the middle of his line of sight, dashing together in spectacular waves. He opened his eyes to escape the brilliance.

On the floor in front of him lay a coiled snake of gold. Rothar felt no reason to be afraid of the snake, and the snake seemed to feel no fear of Rothar. The animal simply slithered up his leg and onto his lap, where it immediately began to lay ruby red eggs that glimmered and sparkled in the light of the fire.

Rothar realized that he was no longer fighting the ropes and he shook his head hard to try to regain focus. The snake disappeared and the room went back to it’s smoke filled dreariness. Rothar worked hard against the knots and was finally able to get one hand free. With his free hand he reached down and began working to untie the knot at one of his ankles. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something polished in the smokey chamber. It was his dagger.

With small hops, he skidded the chair over to the table where the dagger lay. Reaching it, he immediately severed the ropes that held his ankles. When he turned to cut the rope that bound his other wrist, he saw that his arm was tied not to a chair, but to the neck of a hulking black bull.

The bull stared at Rothar with beady black eyes, filled with hatred. Rothar stood frozen, evaluating how quickly he could slit the beast’s throat and cut the rope. The bull snorted and stomped at the wooden floor, shaking the boards beneath Rothar’s feet. In one motion, Rothar lashed out to cut the rope and kill the beast. His dagger struck only wood, clattering against the rungs of the wooden chair that was still tied to his left wrist.

Rothar was confounded, and he felt his will slipping away from him. He had to fight the effects of the…
ladder.
A ladder had appeared in the center of the room. The ladder itself seemed to be made out of light and reached so high that it disappeared into the night sky. Rothar asked himself why he could see the night sky when he was inside a small room, but he quickly forgot the question as the daunting ladder leaned hard in one direction and became a staircase with gleaming handrails reaching into eternity.

Curious, Rothar took a couple of steps towards the spectral stairway. As soon as his foot touched the bottom step, however, the entire thing inverted and crashed into the ground with a thunderous roar. The earth itself opened up to accommodate the staircase and Rothar smelled sulfur and fire from deep in the bottomless passage. Moaning and screaming reached his ears, and Rothar tried to will the staircase to reach heavenward again. The moaning and screaming grew louder until Rothar realized the loudest voice was his own, bellowing over the tortured sounds of those below.

When Rothar screamed, the ground closed up in front of him and the stairway disappeared. The screaming and moaning ceased, and all was silent again. Not only was everything silent, but everything was pitch black.

The room around him was gone. He could see neither ceiling nor floor. He was suspended in such darkness that he could not tell what was up and what was gone, the sensation had a dizzying effect. Slowly, he began to feel as though he was being pulled in two directions, like a man being drawn and quartered. The feeling was slight at first, a gentle tug one way and the other, but it grew steadily until he felt that his shoulders were about to be pulled out of joint and his legs may be simply torn from his body. The pain was excruciating, and then it was gone.

Rothar tumbled to the ground, his head striking rough stone. He scrambled to his feet and found that there was light again, and he was standing atop an impossibly high stone wall. Something bumped at his side and he spun defensively, only to find that what had nudged him was only the chair that was still tied to his arm.

He looked about, and saw he was on top of the wall that ringed the red city. On one side, he could see the vast darkness of the clay desert, endless and unforgiving. He vaguely realized that his companions were somewhere on the other side of that darkness, and he wondered if they were waiting, if they were sleeping, or if they had been found.

Turning around, Rothar looked down into the center of the city. Fires burned everywhere and the horse carts he had seen before were moving about like ants. In the center of the fortified city was what appeared to be a massive garden. Low, shrubby plants of the same variety grew in close rows. Men and women in black dress were moving about the plants, inspecting and picking certain leaves and putting them into round baskets.

Suddenly, a horn sounded and the harvesters hurried out of the garden. On the far side Rothar could see a group of men fighting to secure a live horse to a set of stout ropes that were strung up above the garden in taut lines. Once the horse was secured, the men slashed the animal with long swords and pushed the poor beast out to be suspended above the plants, it’s blood pouring down on the soil.

Rothar could scarcely believe what he was seeing and tried to convince himself that it was all just an effect of the drug.

Once the horse bled out and died, it was retrieved, and an even more horrific scene began to take shape. In the place where the horse had been prepared, Rothar saw the executioners tying a man to the apparatus. The man was barely conscious and his head kept falling down upon his chest. Once he was tied in, he too was slashed deeply with the razor sharp swords and pushed out to dangle above the plants.

The man twisted and flopped loosely on the ropes, turning onto his back and staring up blankly at the moonless sky. Even at such a distance, Rothar recognized Canus, son of Briar.

Rothar turned away and sank down on the stones, trying to get a grasp of reality. When he turned he found that he was not alone on the wall. The leader of the men who had captured him was standing there, only a few feet away, watching Rothar take in all of this horror and brutality.

Now the man stood smiling down upon Rothar, a horrid glint in his dark eyes.

“So, you have seen our irrigation system,” he said, and Rothar was certain that he saw a forked tongue flick out of the man’s mouth as his eyes turned yellow and glowing. “It is unpleasant, I admit, but it is also entirely necessary. You see, the plants will not have any potency if they do not grow in blood. Do not ask me why, it is just the way things are.”

Rothar tried to rise but found he was too weak to move.

“No no, do not get up,” the man said. “You have no need to fight me anymore, I am not going to kill you.”

Rothar must have looked surprised, because the man gave a cruel little laugh and reached out to take him by the arm. Once Rothar was on his feet, another man came up from behind and slipped a rope around his waist.

“You have tasted it now, so you understand,” the man hissed in Rothar’s face. “You, the champion, can go back to your people and show them that you are as in love with the ladder as they are, that is, if you can make it back across the mountains.”

With that, the man took Rothar by the shoulders and shoved him over the outside edge of the wall. Rothar fell freely for a second before someone above took up the slack in the rope and he jerked to an agonizing stop. From there, he was lowered slowly down the towering wall, only to be dropped the last ten feet.

Summoning all of his energy, Rothar rose to his feet and whistled for Stormbringer. The horse arrived in moments and sank to the ground so that Rothar could collapse across his back.

“To Peregrin,” Rothar whispered, and Stormbringer slowly trotted back out into the red desert, careful not to let his beloved master slip off of his back.

A bleak and evil dawn was breaking over the red desert. Peregrin had roused the men over an hour ago, and the party was tensely awaiting Rothar’s return.

“He should have been back by now,” Peregrin muttered to Stone. “He would not want to be out in the open when the sun began to rise. He never exposes himself like that.”

Stone was chewing a piece of dry bread and scanning the crimson horizon, silent and stoic. Even at such an early hour, waves of heat were beginning to bend the distant terrain. The contrast between the frigid mountain above them and the scorching wasteland before them was striking. They stood at the spot where fire met ice and awaited the return of their dark companion.

A whistle came from above, where Gamble crouched on a rocky outcropping. The marksman pointed out into the desert. The men below traced his gesture to a spot on the wavering horizon. A tiny, dark figure materialized out of the mirage, growing slowly as it moved carefully towards them.

“It is Stormbringer!” called down Gamble.

Peregrin leapt onto his horse and spurred him hard. Racing out over the red clay, Peregrin strained his eyes to see if Rothar was aboard Stormbringer. No hooded head stood above the horse’s ears, and the animal’s saddle bags seemed swollen and cumbersome. Stormbringer loped along with his head low, exhausted from the night’s ride.

As he rode closer, Peregrin could see that it was not saddlebags that were flopping at the stallion’s sides, but it was the body of a man - the limp and wasted body of Rothar.

Peregrin reached the horse and rider and circled tight before pulling up alongside. He was relieved to see that Rothar appeared to be breathing, and there were no visible wounds on his body besides a nasty little cut on his head and abrasions on his hands and knees. It almost looked as though Rothar had crawled halfway across the desert, except that his hands and knees were a chalky white, showing no trace of the red clay on which they now rode.

“Rothar! Rothar wake up!” Peregrin reached over and shook his friend. “Can you hear me?”

Rothar mumbled incoherently but did not move. Peregrin took up Stormbringer’s reins and trotted the horse back to where the huntsmen waited. When he arrived, Dewitt and Trevitt helped him take Rothar down off of Stormbringer and lay him down on a bedroll. Stone wet a cloth and pressed it to Rothar’s face and forehead.

“What is wrong with him?” asked Dewitt. “His body seems whole and unbroken, yet he is so depleted.”

It was true. No one had ever seen the mighty Rothar in such a state. He was sweating and shaking, mumbling and twitching.

“One thing is for certain,” said Peregrin. “He found something. Come, help me get him back onto his horse, we are not safe here. We must head back.”

“But, what of the mission?” protested Stone. “What of the others?”

“We cannot go on with Rothar in this state,” countered Peregrin. “Besides, he surely holds information that we need before venturing into the desert. We have to know what he knows. Come now.”

Reluctantly, the men obliged. Rothar was carefully placed on Stormbringer’s back and wrapped in woolen blankets before the group set out to again cross the frigid mountains.

***

The solemn huntsmen pushed onward through the blistering cold winds and blinding snows, but Rothar felt no cold. In his mind, all was aflame. He was trapped in a feverish dream and the horrors that his mind produced were as wicked as hell itself.

He was running in loose red sand, his feet kicked and skidded, but he made no progress. Above him, an obsidian sky was alive with gore and sacrifice. Flying horses split the air, raining blood down upon the desert. Other bodies tumbled through the air as well, human bodies, screaming in agony and scattering entrails. The whole scene was ringed in fire.

Rothar scrambled about the gruesome terrain, feeling exposed and haunted and repulsed, looking for a way out. Every time he came near the ring of fire, however, he would be shouted back in by contorted faces and voices filled with rage.

He recognized the faces, every last one of them. They were the visages of men he had killed. As they crowded around, separated from him only by the flickering flames, they screamed vile things to him; enraged threats and promises of things that would be inflicted upon him in the afterlife.

Somewhere deep inside, Rothar felt that he was in a dream, but when he tried to will himself back to consciousness, he only sunk deeper into the sand. The shouting grew louder and melded with the moans and neighs from the sky to form a horrid cacophony. One voice screamed louder than all of the rest, rising in a tortured crescendo that was lost to a godless sky. Rothar was startled to realize the voice was his own.