The Assassin's Tale (Isle of Dreams) (75 page)

‘As your
Training Captain I take responsibility for the actions of my Lieutenants. 
They have been dismissed from the Ri for their failure to carry out my
orders.  The loss of an apprentice is regrettable and whilst warriors must
accept that death is a part of their life it must be noted that –’ 

Leo paused and
glanced fleetingly at the Divinus who gave the faintest of nods.

‘– against all
odds you excelled in your Qualification hunt.  Well done.’  Leo
finished stiffly and sat down quickly.

‘That must’ve
hurt!’  Xerxes muttered under his breath, causing several stifled laughs
fortunately drowned out by the sound of the Magnate rising to their feet and
applauding.

‘You are all
dismissed!’  Leo called in a return to his usual abrupt manner and strode
over to the doors.  Flinging them open he stepped back to allow the newly
Qualified warriors to stream past him. 

A buzz of
conversation broke out the moment they left the Main Hall.  Laughter and
crude speculation about Golden and Columbine’s futures, disbelief at Leo’s
obviously forced praise and sheer delight at having finally Qualified.

‘What did you
see?’  Phantom hissed, wide-eyed with excitement when they poured out into
the corridor to be swept along by the others towards the Entrance Hall.

‘Guilt and
remorse,’ said Mistral with a smile of satisfaction, earning murmurs of
righteous agreement from the twins.  ‘And a lot of ambition,’ she added in
a more unhappy voice.

Phantasm
shrugged lightly, ‘Only to be expected.  My brother and I are
exceptionally gifted after all, and so are you,’ he added, slipping his arm
around her shoulders in a rare display of affection.

‘I think I’m
going to frame mine,’ Phantom sighed, gazing reverently at his application
form.

‘Hmm,’ agreed
Phantasm, studying the signatures on the back page.  ‘Do you think you
could replicate these?’ he asked looking at his brother with a raised
eyebrow.  ‘It might prove handy for our future careers.’

‘Piece of
cake!’  said Phantom, peering closely at the various signatures of the
Magnate.

Mistral stared
uncaringly down at the parchment in her hand.  For the twins it was a
ticket to a career in the Council that circumstances had cruelly denied them. 
For her, it felt like she was holding a prison sentence.  With a burst of
bitterness she crumpled the parchment into a ball and shoved it angrily into
her pocket.  Her fingers brushed against something cold and metallic; the
key to her home with Fabian. 

Smiling
broadly, she linked arms with the twins to walk down the path towards The Cloak
and Dagger where her dark-haired destiny would be waiting patiently for her.
 

It was a cold
Friday morning, Mistral and the twins were having breakfast in the Refectory
listening to the first years talking excitedly about the knucker hunt they were
being sent out on for the day.  Phantasm smiled as he glanced out the
window at the snow falling thickly.  The sky outside was so heavy and grey
it barely looked like daylight.

‘Bless
them!  Am I glad not to be a first year anymore,’ he sighed happily.

‘Can you
actually imagine getting excited about hunting a knucker?’  Mistral asked
with an incredulous shake of her head.

‘There was a
time when you would get excited about hunting for a lost sock,’ Phantasm
reproved her with a frown.

‘You’re
right,’ Mistral admitted and laughed ruefully.  ‘I was all about the
hunting-and-eating-it part!  Still am, come to think of it,’ she added
thoughtfully.

‘Well I wish
you had hunted my breakfast!  Where on earth does Bernadette get her ideas
of what constitutes an appropriate breakfast from?’  Phantom muttered as
he pushed his half-eaten bowl of fish stew away with a shudder.  He looked
around with a bored expression on his face.  ‘What’s on the agenda for
today brother?’  he demanded, drumming his fingers moodily on the
table-top.

‘Master Nox,’
replied Phantasm, pushing his own empty bowl away with a satisfied sigh. 
‘You know, that’s beginning to grow on me.’

Phantom
suddenly perked up, ‘Master Nox?  I wonder what he’ll be teaching us,’ he
leaned his elbows onto the table and clasped his hands together
thoughtfully.  ‘Poisons, obviously, but what else?’

‘What else
does he specialise in?’  Mistral asked, taking a sip of water from her
cup.  She hadn’t even bothered to fill a bowl from the large iron tureen
on the counter; Bernadette’s breakfasts were notoriously inedible. 

‘Master Nox?
 I’m not sure,’ said Phantasm narrowing his eyes broodingly. 

Mistral raised
her eyebrows in surprise.  It wasn’t like the twins not to know every
detail of one of the Magnate, down to their inside leg measurement.

‘There are no
records of his achievements in the Ri’s library, only the standard entries of
the dates of his apprenticeship and the date he completed working back his debt
to the Ri … then there’s a huge gap until he became a member of the Magnate.’

‘Fabian says
he was an excellent assassin in his day,’ Mistral said distractedly, her
attention drawn to one of the first years enthusiastically demonstrating the
best method of restraining a knucker.  She watched him for a moment then
turned her attention back to see two sets of bright green eyes staring
impatiently at her.

‘Honestly
Mistral, you could share these things!  And what else did Mage De Winter
say?’  Phantom demanded in a heated whisper.

Mistral
shrugged, ‘He said Malachi was an expert at non-contact assassinations, you
know, using poisons.  Fabian met him a few times when Malachi was working
for the Council as a special foreign envoy, or some other fancy title. 
Basically the Council would send him off abroad to tidy up when sorcerers had got
carried away and exposed their true identities.’

Phantasm
frowned, ‘How exactly did he do that?’

‘Assassinated
them and anyone who knew the truth,’ she replied evenly.

Phantasm and
Phantom shared a bleak look.

‘Sounds like
yet another delightful person we have the pleasure of getting to know,’ sighed
Phantom darkly.

‘I suggest
that we don’t keep him waiting then,’ said Phantasm briskly and made to rise to
his feet.

‘I agree, or
we might not make it to lunchtime … which, I might add, is another high-point
in my day,’ grumbled Phantom.

 ‘Another
fun day,’ Mistral muttered dispiritedly and reluctantly followed the twins
across the Refectory.  ‘You know, I almost envy them,’ she said, casting a
wistful glance at the first years pulling on heavy cloaks ready for the day’s
hunt in the snow.

She trailed
after the twins while they chatted away, climbing up the stairs to the second
floor.  Her second year’s apprenticeship was proving to be a lot less
exacting than her first.  To add to her flat mood Fabian being her Training
Lieutenant had so far not turned out to be quite as pleasurable as she had
imagined it would be.  For starters, her training schedule for the year
involved much less physical work and was more orientated around mastering her
gift, requiring her to spend lots of time with Serenity Lightwater and
occasionally the Divinus, and less in the Training Arena where Fabian was every
day.  True, she did get to see him most lunchtimes and every night … and
morning, but she had envisaged spending her whole days with him too and felt
cheated.  She was also finding mastering the illusive power of Sight more
difficult than she had imagined. 

Despite all of
the work she was putting in, Mistral had still not been able to develop her
ability beyond being able to read auras.  By contrast the twins were
progressing rapidly with their Gemini gift and had already been offered a
classified Council Contract, which they had returned from with unbearably
superior attitudes until Mistral had pasted them in a sword training session
and brought them down to size again. 

Mistral had
been offered suspiciously few Contracts so far and was swiftly coming to the
conclusion that there was some kind of “keep Mistral safe until she masters
Sight” campaign going on behind the scenes.  She was willing to bet that
it had been agreed between Fabian and Leo but also suspected that the twins had
been coerced into preventing her from doing anything vaguely interesting. 
They always seemed to be conveniently busy whenever she asked them to go out
hunting with her, forcing her instead to accompany them on long, pointless
sessions with Mycroft Casterton.  Mistral had fallen asleep during the
last one and had not been invited back again, for which she was grateful. 
Mycroft Casterton’s knowledge on Council politics and history was both vast and
vastly dull.  The combination of his fondness for the sound of his own
voice and his sumptuous, overheated tower room made Mistral feel sleepy just by
thinking about it. 

Lost in
brooding thoughts on how boring the second year was turning out to be, Mistral
didn’t realise that they had reached the door to Malachi Nox’s tower room until
she walked into the back of Phantasm.

‘It’s polite
to knock before opening the door.’  Phantasm chided when she bounced off
him with a surprised look on her face.

‘Sorry,’ she
sighed.  ‘Just eager to get in there and learn, learn, learn.’

‘Of course you
are,’ he murmured and rapped smartly on the black wooden door. 

With a sinking
feeling of impending boredom, Mistral followed the twins through the door when
it was opened by an unsmiling Malachi Nox.

‘Enter and be
seated,’ he said crisply, waving a thin hand towards a long workbench and a
number of tall stools.

Mistral stole
a glance around the room as she walked over to sit on a stool.  She had
been inside all of the Magnate’s tower rooms now and had quickly realised that
their living quarters provided useful insights to their personalities. 
Mycroft’s was furnished with plush velvet armchairs, all arranged around a fire
that blazed winter and summer.  He rarely moved from his armchair kingdom
unless it was to refill the dish of sweetmeats set by his side.  By contrast,
the Divinus’ tower room was utterly devoid of any furnishings other than a
stark throne-like wooden chair.  Leo Sphinx’s room was scattered with
weapons and bits of armour in need of repair.  It also held possibly the
largest four poster bed that Mistral had ever seen.  She grimaced whenever
she thought of it, knowing that Golden had been in it for most of the previous
year.  Serenity Lightwater, the only female member of the Magnate, did not
use her tower room but had a small bedroom adjoining the Infirmary where she
worked.  In effect, the Infirmary was her tower room and reflected her
ordered and annoyingly caring personality.

Malachi Nox’s
tower room was crammed full of books, tainting the air with their peppery,
musty smell.  Shelves covered the stone walls from the floor right up to
the high vaulted ceiling; all packed with leatherbound volumes.  The
overall effect was slightly claustrophobic but not chaotic.  Mistral could
see the books were all neatly ordered with a framed reference to the contents
hanging at the end of every row. 

Malachi had a
narrow single bed pushed up beneath the room’s only window which looked as
though it had been cut out of the bookshelf surrounding it.  There was no
fire in the room to protect the books and as a result it was icily cold. 
The only source of light apart from the boxed-in window came from a huge iron candelabra
hanging down from the centre of the vaulted ceiling.  

Mistral slid
onto a stool next to Phantasm and switched her gaze to the workbench in front
of her.  Rows of glass bottles of all sizes were stacked three-deep along
the length of the wooden surface.  Each bottle was made of a different
coloured glass and sealed with a distinctive bright green wax stopper.

The twins were
sat as though carved from stone but Mistral wasn’t fooled; she knew their green
eyes would have taken in every detail of the room.  She hid a smile,
knowing they would spend their evening talking about what they had deduced from
their observations.

‘I will begin
by attempting to introduce you to the subtle art of poisons,’ Malachi Nox’s
clipped tones broke into her musings and drew her attention to the dark-robed
figure stood before them.  He was tall and angular with unnaturally pale
features accentuated by closely cropped black hair that grew into a widow’s
peak at the front. 

‘However, I do
not expect you to excel at, or even appreciate the art; few do.’

Mistral kept
her face expressionless while she wondered privately how hard it could be to
brew up poison.  Cain was a dab hand already with no real instruction and
Fabian concocted his own blend that was particularly potent.

‘Try to
comprehend that poison is not just limited to its ability to kill quickly and
silently,’ Malachi continued in a curt tone.  ‘There are poisons that will
induce a coma so deep that it is virtually indistinguishable from death, others
that force the taker to reveal the innermost secrets of their soul and some
that are capable of causing indescribable agony to the victim yet leave them
resiliently healthy in every other aspect.’

As he spoke
Malachi reached out to caress a bright red bottle with one long finger. 
Mistral suppressed a shudder of repulsion.  She was willing to bet that
bottle contained the agony-inducing potion he was describing. 

The morning
dragged by slowly with them reading through and making notes on basic recipes
for different types of poisons.  The lack of natural light in the room
gave it a strangely timeless feel and it was only when Mistral’s stomach
rumbled hungrily that she realised it must be midday.

‘I will see
you back here in one hour,’ Malachi dismissed them shortly, holding the heavy
door open for them.  They filed past him silently and ran lightly down the
stairs from his room.

‘Well, that
was fun,’ said Mistral heavily.  ‘Let’s go to The Cloak.  I can’t
stand the thought of eating another of Bernadette’s vile concoctions.’

‘Why don’t you
say what you really mean?’  Phantom huffed.  ‘You want to have lunch
with your Mage, not us!’

‘Please
forgive me for trying to have some enjoyment in my sorry excuse for a
life!’  Mistral snapped and abruptly stalked off ahead of them.

‘That was
rather tactless brother,’ murmured Phantasm, watching Mistral vanish down the
second flight of stairs to the ground floor.  ‘You know how hard she’s
finding the idea of a second year.’

Phantom
sighed, ‘But she used to be such fun and now she’s either brooding over her
Mage or drooling over him and I don’t know which is worse.’

‘The
brooding,’ said Phantasm firmly.

By the time
the twins had walked through the heavy snow down to The Cloak and Dagger
Mistral was already talking to Fabian at the bar, gazing deeply into his eyes
with an expression of such utter happiness on her face that even Phantom began
to feel guilty for his harsh words.

They wandered
over and greeted Fabian before ordering drinks and meals from the red-cheeked
bartender.

‘How was your
morning?’  Fabian enquired, passing Mistral a tankard of ale.

‘Duller than
dull.’  Mistral replied, taking a long drink from her tankard before
setting down it on the bar again.  ‘How was yours?’

Fabian
shrugged lightly and smiled, ‘Quite entertaining.  I oversaw the first
years out on their first knucker hunt.  Considering that they are all
tribe born they have rather lamentable hunting skills.’

‘Where are
they now?’  Mistral asked, gazing around at the empty bar.

‘Two are in
the Infirmary with concussions from falling off their horses and the rest are
still hunting.’

Mistral
laughed, ‘Let’s hope none of them die, I don’t think it would look too good on
your record as a Training Lieutenant.’

‘Ours didn’t
do too well last year did they?’  Phantom interjected with a wry
grin.  ‘Two died and you practically lived in the Infirmary.’

‘Good times,’
Mistral sighed and took another long drink from her tankard.  ‘At least I
was doing something to get injured.’

‘You will if
you keep drinking at that rate – don’t forget we’re going to be handling
dangerous substances this afternoon,’ said Phantasm, looking pointedly at her
nearly empty tankard.

Mistral fixed
Fabian with a pleading look, ‘Please let me skive off with you this
afternoon.  I will honestly die of boredom if I have to spend the
afternoon with Malachi Nox.’