I Know Not (The Story of Fox Crow) (29 page)

     
A Phantom Angel holds out to me Thomorgon and Isahd, the poor raven and the all seeing eye. A horde of nightmare creations smashed the walls to the cistern with terrifying ease. The stars behind them were not far off at all, and when they blinked they did so with bloody lids.

      A boy cries in the night for a hero that never comes.

      The sword in my hand sputters and flares as it is corrupted in its purpose by my blackened soul.

      A scream, crystal pure and resonant, shatters the half–remembered indifference to the plight of my fellow men.

      The hidden crow cawed again, and while Finnegan jumped, he still said, “Isahd will kill you, Simon. All for some noble trollop.”

      My hands found their treasure: a small silver flask. Left wrenched free the stopper and Right dumped the contents over my back. The liquid purged the army of insects feasting on my flesh, quenching the fire and resolving the world into focus. I slammed Gelia’s empty bottle of blessed water onto the table, shaking with the sudden release from misery.

      “Her name is Aelia. She is an Grand Noble to the Kingdom.” I said, my voice sounding stronger, purer, than it had any right to.

      The crow cackled, and Finnegan jumped, his eyes chasing every shadow, “So you know of her? Who spoke of this? Perhaps we can find out the spy that-”

      “I am your spy.” I know what I have been, what I am. I am no Hero, but I am no longer an Assassin, either. Something inside me awoke, neither Simon or Beast, and began to paw the floor of my soul. I opened my eyes, and quite suddenly I was no longer a fragmented man, but whole. “I am your spy, I am your difficulty, and I don’t work for you any longer.”

      I would like to tell you he folded like a shoddily made privy, but it would be a lie. His face, troubled by the threat of ravens, resolved into a dark glower. He pursed his huge, bloated lips for a moment and nodded sagely, “I thought as much.”

      I half heard the taut line snapping, and I knew I was a dead man. The world was caught in amber, creeping along even as I threw myself to the side. Lazy tendrils of incense simply halted and spun about me like ghosts waiting to collect my soon wayward spirit. A slave was turning her dead eyes to me. A gobbet of grease was edging off a hunk of pork into the brazier. I watched the bolt, fired from a dark passage, rush to me like a longing lover seeking my heart.

      The bolt was expertly fired, and carefully aimed. My reaction was secondary and off balance, a wild gambit to prolong my life a few short breaths. Heedless of my effort, disdainful of the thin cloth covering my heart, the bolt was about to core me like a soft fruit.

      I shook my eyes clear as the familiar sound of a bolt shattering against a wall was punctuated by a meaty thump. Then I slammed my head on the grate. My eyes blurred with pain, but the swirling black feathered bodies resolved for an instant into the corpse of a single crow. I felt at my chest, but as impossible as it seemed, the bolt had passed straight through the thing, knocking the life clean out of it but deflecting the missile just enough to spare me.

      The sight of it lit a fire inside me as I stood and drew forth the Phantom Angel. A strange feeling flooded every particle of my blood, every part of my flesh. I had a purpose.

      Finnegan smiled luridly at the dead raven, his cheeks seeking to smother his eyes as he licked overfilled lips. “And so it has come to this, Simon. Sad. You made me a lot of money.”

      The fourth ragman of Carolaughan, Brogan Kalinstein, pulled himself into the Cistern from a darkened water–pipe. A long, muscular man, he discarded the spent crossbow without even a second thought. With theatrical flair he removed his heavy grey cloak and cast it to the corner like a broken winged bird.

      Stripped away of all the pretty chains of civilization, he wanted the fortune of jewels on the table, and I stood in his way. He would crush me like a bug and never think of me again. Then he would go kill Aelia and anyone else who got in his way. We may have both been Ragmen, but neither of us had any love nor hate for one another.

      He drew his two long–swords as I hefted my Phantom Angel. Brogan, bedecked in coarse, utilitarian clothing, looked more a mercenary than a poisoner, but the gray paste that coated his weapons told another tale. I had to assume that even the slightest knick would be deadly.

      I had one major problem: from the time we join the guild, we buy our lessons from our seniors, we pay them from our contracts to teach us how to kill. Each successive generation of the guild is thus more deadly, filled with techniques from all its members down throughout time. I know fighting styles from all corners of the known world; places I have never visited myself. Unfortunately, so does Brogan.

      Brogan came in cautiously, but purposefully, edging in for a quick kill.

      “I can make it quick, Simon, for old time’s sake.” He waited a half beat for me to reply– then attacked, swinging his swords in from either side.

      He was hoping to catch me with my mouth open and my weapons silent. Instead my blade met his, the heavier Phantom ringing clear and crisp and pushed his long–sword out of the way fast enough to reverse direction and block the second strike.

      The opening he left me was a classical mistake when people fight with two weapons. Never strike with both weapons at once, as the enemy will parry them both, and you will be standing there with your middle hanging open for all the world to see, just like Brogan here. It was a simple mistake, a flaw in training anyone could make.

      Not a Ragman, not Brogan.

      I feinted forward with my foot, making as if to caress his groin with no small force. Immediately his widely spread weapons screamed inwards to draw the edges against my calf and thigh, if my calf and thigh had been there, which they were not. His eyes twitched in irritation as I moved in mercilessly, a wind of storming steel.

      Our strikes began to ring inside the Cistern like a nightmare chorus of bells. Each echo bled into the next peal of laughter from our razor–edged femme–fatales. We were intense upon each other, shutting out the moon, the city, the streets, the pipes, the cistern. All that existed in our duel were two masters of death, waltzing toward oblivion. I pressed ahead again, but found no flaw with his footwork, no lack of timing in his strikes.

      He recovered well, slinging his blades about himself, attacking and defending with each in turn as he rocked on his feet. But this was not a winning fight for me. My arms would soon start to flag as his took turns absorbing my blows and making his own attacks. A single cut from his coated blades meant my agonized death, a single kiss from any of my weapons may kill, but would more than likely only slow him. I had to change the calculation of my odds. Minutes distended into hours as we fought.

      The next time he made to disengage, I let him and did the same, ensuring distance from him by swinging the bastard sword in a wide arc as I spun away. He did not follow, and it was easy to see why. His lank blonde hair was plastered to his forehead above his empty eyes and his chest was heaving from the exchange. Thankfully he paused for a moment, catching his wind. I wasn’t in any better shape than he. As my arms burned from the exertion, and my head began to swim, I knew I had to do something inspired soon.

      The tip of the Phantom Angel went into a gap in the grate and I kneeled behind it. Brogan’s eyes widened, the narrowed as he took in my new stance, then decided attacking was better than waiting for whatever I had in store for him. It was too late, the hidden knife was already in my hand. He grit his teeth and took a single step when I flicked my wrist and send the little sliver of steel tumbling like a deadly acrobat into Brogan’s chest.

      It hit him in the gut, he staggered for a moment, and I heard the knife clink harmlessly against the grate before disappearing into the water below. I snatched another knife from my boot, then one from my belt, then a spike from up my sword arm. Each one flew true, and each struck arm, thigh, and chest. Finnegan chuckled from behind his big, full desk, as Brogan smiled and lowered the swords and startled hands, revealing glints of metal beneath his clothes.

      Whisper mail is expensive, and therefore rare. It is made by taking a sparsely linked mail shirt and threading the spaces between the rings with black leather cords. It does not jingle, it barely shines, and it is usually worn without padding so it fits beneath generously cut clothing. It’s good to turn against a dagger, or even to stop a cut from a lighter sword, and while it won’t do much against a hammer or the Angel, it is perfect to stop light throwing blades.

      Then Brogan came at me again, and I quickly ran out of options. He stopped being conservative with his strikes and came at me as fast as he could. There was no way I could block them all with the heavier Phantom, so I began a prancing dance of retreat and dodge, further sapping my reserves as my muscles begged for rest and my breath became ragged and uneven.

      I leapt away from a vicious lunge and slammed my hip into the large desk in front of the master of assassins.

      “I was feeling sad to have lost you.” Finnegan slurped at a mug of beer, all worries forgotten with the death of the raven, “It turns out you aren’t much of a ragman after all, Simon.”

      The thought flitted through my head to hold the fat man hostage, but all I’d be doing is threatening to promote Brogan. My opposite struck mercilessly, dispassionately. He may have been a murderer, but it was just a job for him. He was just looking to get paid.

      Paid in a small pile of jewels laying fast at hand.

      I parried a strike with a large fraction of my fading strength. Then, with a free hand, I swept up the piles of gems and flung them at Brogan, turning them into a glittering wave of stars for a brief instant.

      Brogan screamed incoherently as my body finally gave in to exhaustion. The ragman dropped his swords as he clutched at the few baubles that landed on the folds of his clothes even as he watched the rest drop through the bronze grate into the water flow. There they tumbled like faeries in a glass of white wine before being swept downstream toward the city.

      He watched them go like an abandoned child, his entire world collapsing under the weight of lost wealth. In fact this would be the time to decapitate him, or run him through, or even try to give him a really vicious head rubbing with my knuckles. Any one of those would be perfect, if I were not collapsed in a heap in front of Finnegan’s desk.

      Just as you could only whip a horse to run so long, you can force a body to swing four waterweights of steel for so long. For those precious seconds while he screamed, I lay as defenseless a few paces away. My eyes never left Brogan has he mourned his loss. The burn in my muscles started to fade, the chill of the icy night began to penetrate again. I went to flip my hair from my face, and discovered only a forest of bristle inhabited by sweat. I slung the hand dry and gathered up the Phantom from the grate, but then Brogan was there.

      He slammed into me like a rampaging bear, and I barely engaged one blade and forced it into the other out of the way as he shouldered me back across Finnegan’s feast. Swords, axes, spears, all of them require some distance to use efficiently. Face to face, punching and kicking while rolling on the ground, a sword is worse than useless. So it becomes a necessity to watch how close you let your opponent get, because if he has a sword and dagger, and you have two swords, he will gut you. Sadly my dagger was in my boot, my blades lay in the water beneath the grate, and anger was lending him strength as mine faded. Now that we were nearly face to face, even his swords were hard to wield, and the Phantom near impossible.

      The thick gray paste coated the edges a fingerlength from my face, and Brogan growled as he slid his blades against mine, trying to find an angle where he could get steel into me. But there were weapons of a sort within reach, and Brogan had pushed me next to them twice. Again, I flung my hand back to Finnegan’s table, knocking into the iron bound book, snatching up a two pronged fork. I slid the small, iron implement along the greasy gray goo on Brogan’s blade, then plunged it into the back of his hand.

      Brogan screamed and backed off, allowing me precious seconds and space to regain my footing. I need not have bothered, for he was already sweating and his skin was turning gray. I backed off as the sword in his right hand tumbled noisily to the bronze floor.