The Lone Warrior (2 page)

Chewing her thumb, she lurked in the shadows, a tall, pale wraith, staring, always staring. More than once, she pushed or kicked a smaller child, so she could watch with greedy eyes when it ran to its mother and was comforted. She had to blink back the tears every time, though she could never work out where they came from or why—or even prevent them in the first place. With a defiant sniff, she’d stamp off to the kitchens and swipe a pastry.

By the time she had breasts and a woman’s hips, Mehcredi was already taller than most men, monosyllabic and sullen. A few years later, when she stood at Cook’s graveside, she was six feet in height, her strange silver eyes shielded by thick, light brown lashes. A tangle of ice-pale hair straggled down her broad back, almost as far as the swell of her buttocks.

Before dawn the following morning, she crept into the baron’s study, levered open the lock on his treasure box and took what she thought she was owed simply for surviving. Without a word, she hauled herself onto one of the castle’s grain wagons, heading for market in Caracole of the Leaves. By first light, she was long gone.

Mehcredi discovered, rather to her surprise, that she liked Caracole, that city of sea-canals and shining white towers and smiling vice, a far cry from the silence and cold unyielding stone of Lonefell Keep. When she sat idle, watching the summer breeze play chase and kiss with the blue wavelets in the canals, strange thoughts drifted into her head, tantalizing fragments of meaning hovering just beyond her grasp, eluding her by the smallest of margins. Skiffs and barges floated by, the people on board talking, laughing, arguing, or sitting in comfortable silence with their arms around each other.

She’d hoped it might be different here, away from the keep, but it wasn’t. She didn’t know how to do any of the things other folk did so naturally. When she tried, they looked at her sidelong—or worse, they laughed outright and turned away.

As if life were a cruel game and they had all the pieces, while she’d been robbed of hers before birth.

After a week of increasing frustration, grief and fury, Mehcredi betook herself and the baron’s gold to the House of the Assassins. The Lonefell soldiers made the sign of the Sibling Moons every time the place was mentioned, half in awed admiration, half in horror. If they were impressed, so was she. She thought no more deeply than that, like a child who only comprehends enough of the world to want what it wants.

Those who had the power of life and death controlled the pieces and the board, and therefore the game itself. Or so she reasoned.

CARACOLE, QUEENDOM OF THE ISLES PALIMPSEST

 

Death padded in pursuit, slipping through the double shadows without a sound. Like the worst nightmare Mehcredi could imagine, except this was all too horribly real. How much longer could she elude him, the man with the hunter’s face? Panting, she glanced over her shoulder at the dark figure pacing behind. As he drifted from one patch of shadow to the next, something pale gleamed where the light of the Sibling Moons tangled in his black hair. Feathers worked into a long braid, and . . . bones?

Were they
finger bones
?

The shock thrilled down her nerves, making her head swim and her vision blur, but her long legs carried her away at a swift, stumbling run, lurching down a narrow alley, deeper into the reeking slum the people of Caracole called the Melting Pot. Turning to fight never entered her head. Gods, she’d barely scraped through the First Circle tests as it was, and her first real commission for the Guild of Assassins had been an unqualified disaster. No, she wouldn’t have a chance.

She couldn’t hear his footfall, couldn’t detect any movement, but his presence behind her was a tangible force. Every cell in her body sensed him with the animal instinct of the hunted—his predatory focus, the grim relish with which he anticipated her death. From her left came the frantic click of claws on the cobbles, a soft whining noise. That damn dog! She might as well wave a flaming torch above her head and be done with it.

“Get lost,” she hissed, glancing around for something to throw. “Scat!” But the little animal only skittered aside, continuing to flank her.

Mehcredi twisted and doubled back. One hand pressed to the stitch in her side, she reeled around a corner and inevitably, there he stood, waiting—pitiless. He wasn’t a great deal taller than she was, but much broader. Lithe and strong and graceful, where she was longboned and clumsy and doomed.

She opened her mouth to shriek, to plead, but long-fingered hands fastened around her throat. As he slowly increased the pressure, digging painfully into the soft flesh under her jaw, the man smiled, lips pulling back from white teeth. The expression gave him an eerie, chilling beauty. He could have been an avenging angel or a handsome demon. Either way, those elegant brutal hands were the sure instruments of her death.

Her fists flailed, punching. When that failed, she raked at his forearms with her nails, but he didn’t even flinch. Mehcredi knew she was strong, stronger than any woman she’d ever met, but it made no difference. Black spots formed in her vision, her lungs labored and cramped.

“No,” she tried to rasp. “No, please.”

From far off, as if down a long tunnel, came the sound of hysterical barking.

The man thrust his face into hers. “
Now you pay,
” he snarled as he sent her down into the dark. “
Assassin
.”

By the bones of Those Before, she was a strange one, this Mehcredi. Walker had never seen a woman like her. Certainly, never one so pale, nor so big. He stared down at her unconscious form, stretched full length in the bottom of the skiff he was poling under the Bridge of Empty Pockets. He flexed his shoulders, still a little surprised by her bulk. But he’d managed well enough in the end, heaving her over his shoulder in the alley and manhandling her into the skiff without tipping it over. Drowning the assassin wasn’t part of his plan. Every time she looked like regaining consciousness, he shoved hard fingers into the nerve cluster behind her ear and she slipped away again.

Arriving at his House of Swords, he moored the skiff, hauled her out and dumped her at the foot of the stairs. Then he woke Pounder, whose room was on the ground floor. It took the combined heft of two fit, powerful men to haul her long limp body up the steep flights to the top floor. Once they had her laid out in the narrow bed, Walker unfastened her cloak, discovering it was thickly padded. So was her jerkin and vest. An interesting disguise, part of an assassin’s stock in trade. No wonder she’d looked so bulky.

He had the woman down to shirt and trews before heavy breath on the back of his neck recalled him to the presence of his companion.

“Brother’s balls,” rumbled Pounder, chewing his moustache, battered brows arched in surprise. “She’s not bad. Don’t look like a murderin’ bitch, not really. Who’d a thought it?”

Who indeed?

The woman moaned and rolled her head on the pillow. Her lashes fluttered, revealing a glimpse of strange silver irises. Unnerved, Pounder fell back with a curse, making the sign of the Sibling Moons.

Her white blond hair whispering across his knuckles, Walker used the nerve-pinch to send her under again. The agitation smoothed away, leaving her face unlined and innocent as a sleeping child’s, marred only by the ugly necklace of bruises around her white throat. Her body was . . . well,
lush
was the word that came to mind, broad-shouldered and deep-bosomed. Long, strong bones. No wonder they’d found her dead weight so awkward to maneuver.

A murderer for hire.

Walker sent Pounder away before he unlaced her shirt and folded it back to expose one magnificent breast. The left. He had to be able to access her heart.

His fingers itched to slap her awake, to take his blade and carve Dai’s full name into the soft swell of flesh. The Ancestors had blessed him; he was light handed, deft. He could make the agony last for hours.

He closed his eyes, seeing Dai convulsing on the tavern floor until his spine cracked, the hideous clotted sounds he’d made as the prettydeath clawed his gullet to ribbons. Gods, poor Dai—merry and wicked, gifted with the charm of a junior angel and the morals of an alley cat. Yet the man was never casual about his blade work. He could have been a swordmaster in his own right, with his own establishment, but he’d chosen to stay at Walker’s House of Swords, the gods knew why.

He owed Dai for his loyalty. The assassin owed the man for his pain.

Walker prayed to Those Before for the discipline not to kill her. Then he reached out and spread the fingers of his left hand over Mehcredi’s breast and cleavage. He touched only what he needed to touch, even when her nipple stiffened, ruching into a velvety pout as tender and pink as a new rose.

Kneeling by the bed, he concentrated so hard everything faded away save the beating heart beneath his palm and the Magick he drew from deep in the loamy earth, welling up from the
ch’qui
of the planet. One tendril at a time, he willed green spectral shoots out of the rich moist soil and wound them gently around her heart, a cage of Magick to keep her with him, interwoven with guards to prevent her doing further harm to Dai. What he crafted was beautiful, because to do less with what the Ancestors had given him would have been blasphemy. In the end, he let instinct guide him and when he opened his eyes, the thing was done, the delicate fronds of the pattern as pleasing to his aesthetic sense as the graceful, unbreakable strength of the Magick.

Walker laced up her shirt, his fingers a little unsteady. Something deep in his guts ached. He hadn’t done a Magick as powerful as that for a long time. Why bother? The Shar were gone, his people no more than ash blown by the hot desert winds. Alone, always and ever.

The dreams were terrible. Or was this death? A succession of horrors to be endured over and over, endlessly?

A cloak of formless evil gathered in the night sky and swooped—smothering her mouth and eyes and nostrils in a blanket of filth, plucking at her nerves with strong, cruel fingers. Mehcredi tried to scream her agony, but no sound emerged. Instead, the Necromancer’s thin, sexless voice echoed in her skull.
You failed me, assassin,
it said.
Failure is not acceptable in my service
.

Her soul shrank with horror. Gods, not again, she’d rather die. Every dream visit from the Necromancer had been a leisurely violation, undertaken with casual, lip-smacking glee.

The hunter appeared suddenly, all of a piece, as dream figures do. Immediately, the Necromancer’s hideous form shrank, coalescing until it was no more than a greasy spot that oozed away, trickling down a gutter. Mehcredi turned to her nemesis with something very like a sigh of relief, her throat bared and vulnerable. Merciless he might be, but his presence was clean, sharp as a blade, with none of the taint of evil about it. There was the strangest comfort in that. Strong fingers squeezed, choking, hurting.