Sebastian sheathed his blades and lit a cigarillo. He could hear his own smoky exhale. A ficus tree clung to life in the shade of the decrepit house. Dappled sunlight danced under its browning leaves. He imagined what it would be like to have a home like this, except not on a shit-stinking island like Kabak. But a bungalow, perhaps, on that atoll he’d found four years ago.
The atoll.
It invaded his thoughts more and more as of late. He wondered if that little beach was still pristine and untouched; if the foliage in its interior was still impossibly green; if the water that kissed its shores was as blue and clear as the sky on a summer day. Probably not. Probably some rowdy bunch of sea dogs found it, stripped it of its fruit, pissed on its sand, and then left their campfires to burn it up. He looked again at the blue expanse of sea and sighed.
Cigarillo finished, he ground it under his boot, careful to make sure it was out and wouldn’t blow away to blaze up all the dried leaves. Or that one struggling tree.
Not that it matters. It’ll be dead before the summer’s out.
Sebastian left the courtyard and resumed his march up to the old fortress.
The passage slithered up the hill, buffered on either side by high stone walls. Soon, the path turned a sharp left, widened a bit, and the old fortress was obscured from sight.
His instincts hummed.
Before he consciously decided to do it, his body danced to the left and he brought his right arm up to shield his head. A boulder the size of a cannon ball exploded on the ground where he’d stood a second before. It had scratched his arm as it came down but his leather coat protected him. He wasn’t even going to bleed.
But these bloody damn fools, they will bleed. They leave me no choice.
He shaded his eyes from the sun with his upraised arm and saw the heads of his two pursuers in silhouette on the wall. There were other stones piled up beside them.
A set up, Sebastian thought with a snarl. They knew I would come this way, toward the fortress. The assassin felt a shiver of cold slide up his spine. Zolin, you old bastard…
Sebastian scaled the smooth sandstone wall like a lizard, and swung himself up among the stones. The second rock his attackers dislodged landed in an empty corridor. The two men scrambled away, and dropped down onto the path on the other side. One fell badly. The snap of his leg and his agonized scream echoed through the quiet passages. The other man ran for his life that he had no hope of keeping.
Sebastian jumped down from the wall and landed on the fallen man’s back. The man’s screams were loud but Sebastian ignored him. He withdrew his pistol from his belt and took aim at the other attacker who fled in clumsy, flapping strides. Flintlocks were scarcely reliable at ten paces let alone fifty. Sebastian took his time. The passage ran straight for fifty spans and then turned. The other man almost made it to the turn when Sebastian’s bullet found the small of his back. The vagrant dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He landed with a whoof and a cloud of dust.
The man pinned beneath Sebastian screamed again, this time in fear as well as pain. He writhed helplessly. Sebastian set the flintlock down and released the dagger held in the catch up his sleeve. He gripped a fistful of that grimy hair and yanked up. With a smooth stroke, he drew the knife across the man’s throat.
The screaming stopped.
Down the way, the man Sebastian had shot did not scream but whimpered. He clawed the dusty sand, dragging dead legs behind him. In the next moment, Sebastian was straddling him and cursing through clenched teeth that his bullet hadn’t ended the man clean. He gripped his bloody dagger and shoved it through the base of the man’s skull, pressing down with both hands until he felt it scrape stone on the other side.
When the body ceased to twitch, Sebastian sat back, breathing hard. “Gods damn you,” he told the dead man, and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Gods damn you to the Deeps.”
He tore his dagger free and stood up. Sebastian had no doubts that the manors were homes to vagrants like the two he’d just killed but if anyone had heard the struggle or the gunshot, they kept themselves hidden. He examined the black places for movement. When he saw none, he wiped his bloody blade on the dead man’s shirt and then took up his flintlock. More powder went into the pan and another ball into the chamber. He tucked the pistol into his belt and headed back. The other corpse lay face down in a pool of its own blood that was maroon against the yellowed stone. One leg was bent out at an obscene angle. Sebastian stepped over it and scaled the wall.
His gray-green eyes scouted the territory as he resumed his trek up the hill. He neither heard nor saw any other life until he arrived at the fortress. The assassin guessed that anyone else watching had learned what those two fools did not.
Or the old bastard hired just two, he thought. He must have hired them. As a test, perhaps.
Sebastian looked up at his appointed meeting place.
The fortress was old and perched atop the hill, and more exposed to the elements. If most of Darrowden resembled an ant mound, then the fortress was as several ant mounds of various sizes stacked upon one another and then melted under the meridian sun. The path Sebastian walked opened up into an outer bailey studded with pale green cacti and strewn with boulders. A gibbet stood off to the left, empty. Its rusted chains creaked when the stingy breeze decided to blow. On the right, there was an animal pen that now corralled a small pile of dead men. The corpses were bloated, blistered, their skin black and peeling in the inexorable sun. The stench suggested they were no more than a half-week old. Flies buzzed.
The old man and his minions were victorious in their conquest of this illustrious fortress, Sebastian mused.
Two men emerged from the dimness of the fortress gatehouse. They wore red and black robes cinched at the waist and cut at the sides to allow for movement. Unlike Sebastian’s own scuffed pair, their tall black boots were polished to a high sheen, as were the wicked blades in their hands. Sebastian heard a sound like a whisper and two more Bazira shadow adherents stepped seemingly out of nowhere from behind him. Two more stood atop the one remaining battlement, high above. The sun was too bright to see for certain but Sebastian could feel the arrows trained on him.
Or maybe poison-tipped crossbow bolts. I’ve heard the Bazira are fond of poison.
The shadow adherent was huge and in his hand he carried a mace with head as large as an anvil. He emerged from the gatehouse and stepped from between his brethren. “Julian Tergus?”
For now, Sebastian thought. Aloud he said, “Aye.”
The immense shadow adherent, who seemed built more for armor rather than the cloth, held up one meaty hand. “Weapons.”
Sebastian hesitated, but before he could either protest or acquiesce, he was surrounded and stripped of his scimitars, his flintlock, and the dagger he kept in his boot. He kept his face neutral and pretended cooperation, lifting his arms here and there to help the men divest him of his weapons. With misdirection, he insured they missed the dagger on his wrist that had last been buried under a man’s skull.