Death Sworn (2 page)

If she was still able to.

She pushed that thought away, closed her eyes, and envisioned the words she wanted to say. To her they always appeared in color, glowing slightly from within, looped together in the sinuous musical script in which she had learned them. She retrieved the hair she had plucked from Sorin’s neck and held it with the tips of her fingers.

Stringing the syllables of the spell out between her teeth, she touched the hair quickly to each rock, then stretched it taut between her hands. The words of the spell made no noise, though she spoke them; instead of sound, pure power emerged from her mouth. It shattered the air, and she spat the words out faster and faster to keep them from getting away from her. By the time she reached the climax of the spell, she was shouting, though the room was still silent.

With the last syllable, she let go of the hair. Instead of floating downward, it disappeared, as soundlessly as the rest of the spell.

Ileni lowered her hands, throat raw. A bead of sweat tickled the outside corner of one eye. This was getting harder and harder. That spell, a year ago, would have been a warm-up exercise for her. Back then, she could have done it without the stones. Tellis, thankfully, had refrained from mentioning that when he gave them to her.

She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell on Tellis for days, and the sudden memory hurt like a blow to her stomach. Before she could stop them, the images flooded her mind: Tellis’s lean, rugged face, the blond hair falling over his dark blue eyes. The way those eyes had once made her feel, as if she could barely breathe.

His eyes when she emerged from her second Testing. The expression on his face that told her he already knew what the Elders had said. That he accepted what had to happen now.

That look had driven her to accept the Elders’ mission, to come here to these caves filled with killers, where two of her people had died within the past half year. She had sworn to find out
why
they died, before she met the same fate, but it was an empty promise. What were the chances that she—a seventeen-year-old with rapidly fading powers—could survive whatever had killed two older, seasoned sorcerers?

But she hadn’t cared how dangerous it was, or how lonely. All she had cared about was putting physical distance between herself and all the people who thought she was worthless. No one
here
would look at her with pity.

Ileni’s lips quirked upward—not much, but it was the first time since the meeting with the Elders that she had seen any humor in her situation at all. The people here wouldn’t pity her because they would be too busy trying to kill her. At least it would be different.

Now that she was leagues away from that humiliating parting, she could finally be glad that Tellis hadn’t allowed her to refuse the warding stones, his last gift. If Sorin tried to harm her in any way, he would find her better defended than she appeared.

The stones tumbled against each other as she gathered them into the pack.
One down, several hundred to go.

She pushed the pack under her bed and waited for the assassin to come for her.

Chapter 2

H
igh in a tiny black room carved from stone, the old man watched the slippery rocks outside the Assassins’ Caves, empty now that the sorceress had picked her way across them. A light snow swirled through the cold gray air, already covering the marks of her passage.

It was the first time the Renegai had sent a woman, and it was also the first time they had sent someone so young. The girl was not particularly striking, at least not from this distance: she was thin and short, and her thrown-back hood had revealed matted brown curls. She hadn’t seemed bothered by the snow whispering across her face, and had approached the entrance carefully but without hesitation.

Her predecessor had been visibly shaking as he walked across the rocks. And
his
predecessor, grandiose from the start, had levitated several feet above the rocks and sailed coolly to the entrance.

The door opened behind him. The sound didn’t surprise the old man; he knew exactly how long it would take Sorin to escort the sorceress to her room, and he had been sure the girl would ask for some time alone. The only thing he hadn’t been certain of was whether the boy would change his clothes before coming here. He had mused it over for a minute or two and guessed that he would.

He had guessed wrong—something that rarely happened to him anymore. He could smell the damp sweat clinging to the boy’s tunic as Sorin crossed the small room and bowed low. “Master.”

“Sorin,” the master of the assassins said, and his disciple rose from his bow with sinuous grace.

“The new Renegai tutor is here,” Sorin said. “I was watching the entrance when she arrived, so I escorted her to her room.”

His voice revealed no anger over the fact that he had not been told to expect a sorcerer, which pleased his master. Sorin must realize that this was a test: that he had been assigned to watch the entrance this week, and not told what to expect, on purpose.

“What do you think of her?”

“Nothing,” Sorin said instantly. “I interacted with her for no more than a few minutes. Any thoughts about her now would be premature, and merely prejudice me later.”

“Very good,” the master said. “That is the correct response. Now, tell me what you really think.”

Sorin turned, young dark eyes staring straight into old blue ones. Not many students in the caves could hold their master’s gaze for more than a few seconds. “That is what I really think, Master,” he said.

The master believed him, and that made the second time he had been wrong in the space of an hour. A lesser man might have been irritated, but he was intrigued. There was very little that could still take him by surprise. “You will rise high, Sorin,” he said. “And there will come a day when you will not be able to gather all the information you require, and will have no choice but to guess, based on nothing more substantial than what you saw today.”

“Of course,” Sorin said. “But I have no reason to believe that this is that day.”

The master smiled, pleased and amused. “Well, gather information as swiftly as you can. I am making her your responsibility.”

“Yes, Master.”

The old man regarded him, wondering how much the boy suspected. He still remembered the day Sorin had been brought into these caves, half-crazed and all-wild, willing to die for the sake of nothing but his fury. Now that anger had been channeled and focused, making Sorin an exemplary assassin—one of the best, but still a tool, even if a finely honed one. Sharp, deadly, but very straightforward.

So his master thought, most of the time. But then there were those moments when his guesses turned out wrong.

He still hadn’t figured out why, so he kept throwing tests Sorin’s way. If nothing else, this assignment should provide him with new and interesting information about the boy. Even if Sorin died, that information would be useful.

Information always was.

“Go, then,” he said. “Make sure you take her to the training area while the advanced students are practicing, so she can see what we are capable of.” He chuckled, more to himself than to the boy. “Or rather, some of what we are capable of. The rest can wait a few days.”

“Yes, Master.”

Sensing a note of doubt in Sorin’s voice, the old man stopped smiling and met his eyes. Sorin jerked, then bowed his head as if under a sudden weight.

“Go,” the master said coldly. “She is your charge. Take this assignment very seriously. I don’t want what happened to the others to happen to her.”

What did one say when strolling through an underground corridor with a trained killer? As she followed Sorin through a passageway lit by glowstones, Ileni came up with and discarded several possible openings, ranging from
The weather down here is surprisingly pleasant
to
So, how many people have you killed?
Sorin, striding grimly a step ahead of her, showed no inclination to start a conversation on his own.

The corridor sloped downward in a steady curve, which made Ileni feel vaguely nauseated. By the time they encountered an actual staircase, they had walked in what she was sure was a complete circle, which meant they were a full level below her room. And now they were going even lower. The stone walls closed in on her. Her vision blurred, and she couldn’t breathe.

Stop it
. She would be underground for the rest of her life. She had better get used to it.

The staircase was a steep spiral of rough white rock, so narrow that at times Ileni had to slow down to squeeze herself through. At irregular intervals, the stairs were interrupted by equally narrow passageways, each with several sharp turns. The way was well lit by the glowing stones set in the walls, but the effect was still macabre. Every time Ileni turned, she had to keep herself from cringing, her body expecting someone—or something—to be waiting for her.

The stairs were also, she noted, defensible. In case of attack, the interior of the caves could be defended by a few men against an army. The famed impregnability of these caves was no myth.

At the bottom of the third staircase, they stepped into a large cavern. This one had three passages branching off from it, and only the middle was lit.

“The left-hand passage leads to the main training area,” Sorin said.

Ileni squinted. She didn’t see any stones set in the walls. “It’s dark.”

“So it is.”

She was not going to give him an excuse to be amused at her expense. “You first, then.”

Sorin held up one palm, which began to glow with a yellow light. He walked into the passageway, holding his hand out to light the way.

Ileni followed cautiously. The passageway grew narrower as they walked, until there wasn’t enough room for two people to walk side by side. “A regular magelight would be a lot simpler.”

“Sometimes, I’m not simple.”

She blinked. He glanced swiftly over his shoulder at her, not a hint of levity in his expression, then looked straight ahead.

Ileni watched his back, since that was all she had to look at. His gray tunic pulled tightly against his shoulders as he moved, and one unruly tuft of golden hair stuck out near the top of his head. “Which of my predecessors taught you that trick?”

“Absalm,” Sorin said. “Cadrel was not here long enough to teach me anything.”

Absalm had been the assassins’ tutor for ten years before his death, so no one had been suspicious when he died earlier that year and the summons came for his replacement. The Elders had sent Cadrel, a mid-level sorcerer with a friendly smile and a talent for cooking. That had been soon after the Elders decided that Ileni’s fading powers should be put to another Test, so she hadn’t been paying much attention.

By the time a messenger came two months later to report that Cadrel, too, was dead, the Test had confirmed her worst fears. Even the rumors about how Cadrel had died hadn’t pierced her fog. Not until the Elders summoned her had she started to take some interest. By then, of course, it was too late.

But she wouldn’t have avoided the summons, even if she could have. Ever since the Elders had told her that her entry into the sorcerers’ compound was a mistake, that her powers were going to fade away just as they did for the hordes of Renegai commonfolk, she had survived by focusing only on whatever step was immediately in front of her. The Elders had helped by giving her a new and almost impossible task: find out what had happened to the two tutors who had come to these caves before her.

Perhaps their deaths were accidents
, the Elders had said, but without sounding like they believed it in the slightest. Truly, Ileni didn’t want their deaths to have been accidents. All that would mean was that she had no purpose at all, that she had been sent here to bide her time until her own death. That she was truly disposable. Untangling an assassin plot seemed highly preferable.

If she could do it.

She might as well get started. “Cadrel lived here for nearly two months, didn’t he? Surely that was sufficient time to teach you
something
.”

“Not much,” Sorin said. “I was on a mission for most of the time he was here.”

On a mission.
She knew what that meant. “Do you know how he died?”

Sorin stopped walking and turned to face her. The yellow glow illuminating his face . . . or maybe the knowledge that he had murdered someone a few weeks ago . . . made him look hard and dangerous. “He fell down the last of those staircases and hit his head. These caverns can be dangerous to those who aren’t used to them.”

“I’ll be careful, then,” Ileni said. She flicked her wrist, and all at once the passageway was filled with a bright white light emanating from nowhere in particular. It wasn’t much harder than calling up a magelight, but she felt her power flutter weakly, deep in her stomach. “That should make it easier to see my footing.”

The yellow glow around Sorin’s hand was nearly invisible in the sudden brightness. “I’m sure Cadrel made it just as light.”

“He wasn’t as powerful as I am,” Ileni said flatly. It was true, in a way. “I’ve heard that Absalm was more so. Did
he
die in a fall?”

“No.” Sorin closed his hand, and the yellow light vanished. “Absalm drowned.”

Ileni glanced around at the dark walls of dry rock surrounding them. “Drowned where?”

“We don’t know where he died. We only know where we found his corpse.”

Before she could ask the next obvious question, he turned his back on her and continued walking.

Ileni resisted the urge to look back toward the stairwell. Even if Sorin was telling the truth about where Cadrel had died—and it seemed like a silly thing to lie about—he had to be lying about
how
. Cadrel would have been very careful, a mere two months after arriving at the caves.

They emerged at the top of another staircase descending into a large cavern, this one brightly lit by hundreds of glowing stones set into the walls. Ileni had never seen so many glowstones in one place before. She let the white light go, and forced herself not to sigh with relief as the effort of holding it eased and the passageway went black behind them.

The walls of the vast cavern were raw and jagged, and the high ceiling dripped with stalactites. The glowstones illuminated dozens of young men, stripped to the waist and gleaming with sweat, attacking each other with swift, deadly movements. No one ever made contact, so despite the jabs and kicks clearly meant to cause harm, the bouts resembled dances more than fights. It was terrible, graceful, and oddly beautiful.

It also, Ileni discovered when she got close enough, stank.

The assassins ranged in age from as young as ten to as old as . . . not very old; none of them was even close to thirty years of age, as far as she could tell. The rank smell of sweat was almost enough to take Ileni’s mind off the weapons they were training with. Not one of them held a sword or dagger. Instead they danced at each other with circles of metal, pieces of rock, wooden staffs, whirling strips of rope—the variety was as mind-numbing as it was frightening. Another myth confirmed: assassins could kill with anything.

Some of them were practicing with no weapons at all.

The Elders had told her that she would be safe, that the assassins’ discipline and obedience were strong enough to protect even a lone girl trapped in their caves. And of course, they all thought she was powerful enough to defend herself with a word. That should help. Even so, she found herself walking as close to the wall as she could.

Sorin moved the way they fought, with graceful purpose, every part of his body taut and controlled even though he was merely walking. He lifted an eyebrow at her, and Ileni attempted—too late—to look unperturbed. He led her around the edge of the cavern, far too close for comfort to several of the duelers—none of whom glanced in their direction, even though they must never have seen a girl here before.

On the other side of the cavern, several narrow archways had been cut into the wall. Sorin led her through one of them into a smaller cavern, as craggy as the one they had passed through, but completely empty.

“This is where you’ll be giving lessons.” Sorin turned in a tight circle, his eyes darting swiftly across every surface in the room, as if searching for danger. “Absalm would only train one pupil at a time here, to avoid injuries. Though you can do what you like.”

Absalm had, no doubt, made up that rule to slow down his pupils’ advance. At home they had all trained together, in a large stadium surrounded by majestic trees. The memory cut through Ileni’s defenses, quick and sneaky, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.

Sorin looked at her sideways, and she said swiftly, “I won’t be teaching spells that can cause injuries.”

The side of his mouth lifted slightly. “I’m told that’s what Absalm thought, too, when he first came here. It didn’t take him long to learn that to an assassin, anything can be a weapon. It might take you a little longer.”

Ileni turned and scowled at him, feeling dangerous. “I would advise against comparing me to your previous tutors. You might be in for some unpleasant surprises.”

He just looked at her. The expression on his face was intolerable. It said,
You’re not dangerous at all. I see right through you.