The Book of Taltos (35 page)

The next night I moved into town once more, this time to sneak into the Palace so I could get the layout of the place. I sent Loiosh to look around the building once, just in case there was something interesting that he could hear or see. He returned and reported no open windows with rope ladders descending, no large doors with signs saying, “Assassins enter here,” and no guards. He took his place on my shoulder and I stepped up to the door. I’m used to casting a small and easy spell at such times, to see if there is any protection on the door, but Verra had said it wouldn’t work, and for all I knew it might even alert someone.

This was the first time I’d ever gone into someone’s house in order to kill him. In the Organization you don’t do that. But this guy wasn’t in the Organization. Come to think of it, this was also the first time I’d shined someone who wasn’t one of us. It felt, all in all, distinctly odd. I gently pulled on the doors. They weren’t locked. They groaned quietly, but didn’t squeak. It was completely dark inside, too. I risked half a step forward, didn’t stumble across anything, and carefully shut the door behind me. It felt like a large room, though by what sense I knew that I couldn’t say.

“Loiosh, this whole job stinks.”

“Right, boss.”

“Is there anyone in the room?”

“No.”

“I’m going to risk some light.”

“Good.”

I took a six-inch length of lightrope from my cloak and set it twirling slowly. Even that dim light was painful for a moment, as it lit up about a seven-foot area. I set it going a little faster and saw that the room wasn’t as big as I’d thought at first. It looked more like the entry room of a well-to-do merchant than a royal household. There were hooks on the wall for hanging coats, and even a place by the door with a couple of pairs of boots, for the love of demons. I kept looking, and saw a single exit, straight ahead of me. I slowed the lightrope and went through the doorway.

I had the feeling that, in normal daylight, this place wouldn’t have been at all frightening, but it wasn’t daylight, and I wasn’t familiar with it, and half-forgotten fragments of the Paths of the Dead came back to haunt me as I gradually increased the speed of the lightrope.

“Can this place really be as undefended as it seems, boss?”

“Maybe.”
But I wondered, if these people were so unwarlike, why their King had to die. None of my business. I moved slowly and kept the light as dim as possible. Loiosh strained to catch the psychic trace of anyone who might be awake as we explored room after room. There was one room that seemed quite large, and in the Empire would have been a sitting room of some sort, but there was a large carved orca on one of the walls, with a motto in a language I couldn’t read, and in front of the carving, which seemed to be of gold and coral, was a chair that was maybe a little more plush than the rest. The ceiling was about fifteen feet over my head. Assuming the other two stories to be slightly smaller, that agreed with my estimate of the total height of the building. There was some sort of thin paneling against the stone, and parts of it had been painted on, mostly in blues, with thin strokes. I couldn’t make out the designs, but they seemed to be more patterns and shapes than pictures. Possibly they were magical patterns of some sort, though I didn’t feel anything in them.

I made more light and studied the room fairly carefully, noting the line from that chair to the doorway, the single large window with carvings in the frame that I couldn’t make out, the position of the three service trays, which appeared to be of gold. There was a vase on a stand in a corner, and flowers in it that seemed to be red and yellow, but I couldn’t be certain. And so on. I passed on to the next room, still being totally silent. I can do that, you know.

The kitchen was large but undistinguished. Plenty of work space, a little low on storage space. I would have enjoyed cooking there, I think. The knives had been well cared for and most of them seemed to be of good workmanship. The cooking pots were either very large or very small, and there was plenty of wood next to the stove. The chimney ran from it out of the wall behind it to the outside. The opposite wall held a sink with a hand pump that gleamed in the dim light I was making. Whose job was it to polish it?

And so on. I went through every room, convinced myself there wasn’t a basement, and decided against trying the upstairs. Then I went back out into a chilly breeze full of the salt water and dead fish, and circled the place again, this time without a light. I didn’t learn much except that it is difficult to remain silent while stumbling over garden tools. By the time I returned to my hiding place, dawn was only an hour or so away. There was now enough light in the east so that I could almost see, so Loiosh and I used the time to look for a place near the Palace where we could hide. To turn an hour-long search into a sentence, we didn’t find one. We left the town and walked off the main roads until we were well into a thicket that seemed safe enough. It was still chilly, but would warm up soon. I pulled my cloak tightly around me and eventually drifted off into something that passed for sleep.

I awoke late in the afternoon.

“We going to do it today, boss?”

“No. But if all goes well today, we’ll do it tomorrow.”

“We’re almost out of salted kethna.”

“Good. I’m beginning to think I’d rather starve.”

Loiosh was right, however. I ate some of what was left and sneaked up to the edge of town. Yes, the Palace did seem to be completely unprotected. I could probably have gone in right then and done it if I’d known for certain where the King was. I crept a little closer, staying hidden behind a rotting, collapsed fruit stall that had been tossed aside some years before.

The sky had just begun to darken, and I decided this would be about the right time of day to do it; when there was enough light so I could still see, but when the approaching night would shield my escape. I consulted the notes I’d made about entry points and the layout of the Palace, and figured that today I’d make a test run: doing everything I could to try things out.

Getting inside was easy, since the kitchen staff didn’t lock the service door,
and there was no one in the kitchen after the evening meal. I listened for a long time before proceeding down the hall and into the narrow aperture below the stairs. It was nerve-racking waiting there, hearing footsteps and bits of the servants’ conversation.

After half an hour I found the right time: when the king left his dining hall to go upstairs. I saw him walk by: a slinky-looking fellow, moderately old, with plastered-down hair and bright green eyes. He was dressed fairly simply, in red and yellow robes, and bore no marks of office except a heavy chain around his neck engraved with one of the symbols I’d seen in his throne room, or audience chamber, or whatever it was. He was walking with a young fellow who carried a short spear over his shoulder. I could have taken them both, but one reason I’m still alive is that I’m always very careful when my own life is on the line.

They walked by, as I said, right in front of me, not able to see me in the dark stairwell. As they were walking up the stairs over my head, I tested my escape route back through the kitchen and out, around the Palace, and back to my hiding place.

“Well, how does it look, boss?”

“Everything seems fine, Loiosh. Tomorrow we do it.”

I spent the rest of the night memorizing landmarks in the dark so I could get as far away as possible, and, as the sky was just beginning to get light, I pulled my cloak around me and slept.

O
NCE UPON A
D
RAGAEREN
time, they say, there was a Serioli smith who, at the request of the gods, built a chain of diamonds that was so long it went up past the top of the sky, and so strong the gods used it to hold the sky up when they got tired of the job. One day one of the gods took a diamond as the wedding price for a mortal she had a hankering for, and all the other diamonds went flying about the heavens, and the gods have been holding the sky up ever since. They couldn’t punish the goddess who did the deed, because if they did, the sky would fall, so instead they took it out on the smith, turning him into a chreotha to walk the woods and, well, you get the idea.

I mention this because it came to mind as I sat in the woods, trying to stay alert for anyone coming near me and considering that the only reason I
was on that island was that my personal goddess had sent me there. It also occurred to me again that this would be the first time I’d ever killed someone outside the Organization. Coming as it did just while I was going through the sort of moral crisis an assassin has no business having, I didn’t like it much. It began to start bothering me that I was taking life for money. Why, I’m not sure.

Or maybe I am, now that I think about it, from the perspective of the other side of the ocean (metaphorically). I think everyone knows someone whose opinions especially matter to him. That is, there’s this person whose image lives in the back of your head, and you sometimes find yourself saying, “Would he approve of this?” And if the answer is no, you get a kind of queasy feeling when you do it. In my case, it wasn’t my wife, actually, although it hurt badly when she, in the course of two years, went from a skilled assassin to a politico with a save-the-downtrodden complex as big as my ego. No, it was my paternal grandfather. I’d suspected for a long time that he didn’t approve of assassination, but in a moment of weakness I’d made the mistake of asking him directly, and he’d told me, just as all the rest of this nonsense was going on, and all of a sudden I was unsure about things that had been basic up until then.

Where did this leave me? Hiding in a thicket on a strange island and figuring how to take the life of someone I didn’t know, someone who wasn’t in the Organization and subject to its laws, all because my goddess told me to. We humans believe that what a god tells you to do is, by definition, the right thing. Dragaerans have no such ideas. I was a human who’d been brought up in Dragaeran society, and it made for much discomfort.

I pulled a blade of grass and chewed it. The trees in front of me bent uniformly to the right, as if from years of wind. Their bark was smooth, an unusual effect, and there were no branches on the lower fifteen or twenty feet, after which they erupted like mushrooms, full of thick green leaves that whispered as the wind stirred them. Behind me were typical cloin-burrs, about my height, bunched up like they were having a conversation, their reedy bodies standing on those silly exposed roots as if they were about to turn and walk away. Cawti had a gown made of cloin-burr thread. She’d pulled the thread herself, finding a whole grove in late summer, just when they were turning from pale green to crimson, so the gown, a sweeping,
flowing thing, with white lace about the shoulder, starts as a mild green at the bottom and burns like fire where it meets at her throat. The first time I took her to Valabar’s, she wore that gown with a white gem as the clasp.

I spat out the blade of grass and found another as I waited for sunset, when I could walk down the streets unnoticed. When that time came, I still hesitated, undecided, until Loiosh, my companion and familiar, spoke into my mind from his perch on my right shoulder.

“Look, boss, are you really going to explain to Verra that you had a sudden attack of conscience, so she’s going to have to find someone else to shine the bum?”

I started a small fire with the bark of the trees, which turned out to burn very well, and in it I destroyed the notes I’d made. I put the fire out and scattered the ashes, then I removed a dagger from under my left arm, tested the point and edge, and made my way into town.

T
HERE WAS THE BLOOD
of a king on the back of my right hand as I stepped out of the Palace and ducked around behind it. The few moments after the assassination are the most dangerous time, and this whole job was flaky enough already that I very badly didn’t want to make any mistakes. It was early evening and would be full dark in less than an hour. Even as it was, I didn’t think I’d stand out very much. I ducked behind a large wooden frame that I’d picked out earlier, and I still didn’t allow myself to break into a run. I walked steadily toward the edge of town. I wrapped the knife, red with the King’s blood, in a piece of cloth and stuck it in my cloak.