The Assassin King

10

The wind off the sea was strong in the fading winter’s ebb, growing as the advent of spring approached. The gusts of the prevailing winds were steady enough to carry weather for miles inland, the vapor from the warming ocean blanketing the coastal towns and forests like a dream from which the land struggled to wake, winding its misty way eastward. Rath cursed as yet more icy water whipped around his head, drizzling down his neck. The ability to step between gusts of wind, letting the updrafts carry him great distances and sparing his feet the walking, was a great advantage of his race and profession, but it was not without cost. The arc along which he traveled in this way was an invisible wave of sound, oftentimes inaudible to the human ear, borne on the wind and anchored on each end at two points in the physical world. Rath had been upworld long enough to be able to recognize the beginnings and endings of such waves, and therefore more often than not was able to manipulate the wind to his benefit, as if opening a door at one end of the gust unto the other end, saving time in his travels and passing unnoticed across the wide spaces of the world. Occasionally, however, the wind was temperamental, refusing to be ridden the way a rogue horse or a jackass might. When this occurred, Rath found himself far off his planned course. Sometimes a fair wind turned foul when he was wrapped within its arms, following what had been a clear, strong wave, only to dump him unceremoniously short of the mark in a swamp or midden, or even in the middle of a pond. Whatever weather the wind was carrying was also unpredictable in its path, and as a result he would sometimes find himself bathing in sleet, being pelted on all sides by hail, or drenched in rain even though it had been a fine, dry gust into which he had originally stepped. In short, walking the wind was a necessary evil. But it was the only way one of his race, and his mission, could traverse the world quickly enough to follow the fragment of a fading heartbeat, the whisper of a demonic name. The gust subsided at the end of die wave of sound, and Rath stumbled out of the wind into the solidity of the world again. He pulled his hood farther forward over his face and looked around him. The place he had landed on the rogue gust was vaguely familiar, but Rath could not be certain if that was because he had walked this place before, long ago, or if every small, putrid farming settlement in a backward forested area was indistinguishable from another. Either way, he had appeared in a place that was as sleepy and nondescript as it was possible to be. A dense copse of trees and holly bushes loomed behind him, and Rath quickly stepped within it; he did not see the villagers about, but his sensitive skin registered vibrations that indicated humans were somewhere nearby, oblivious to his presence, most likely, but able to see him should he be out in plain sight. Once safely out of view, he began to cant his litany. Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

He tasted the wind for each name, concentrated until his throat went dry and his skin burned, but there was, as usual, nothing to be found. He listened for the kirais of his fellow hunters, and there too he found only silence or neutral reports; the searching songs of those like him had not discerned any new threads or heartbeats, any new clues to the whereabouts of the F’dor that those hunters pursued. As it had been for most of history. Rath exhaled slowly as the link to the minds of his fellow hunters dissolved. He prepared to move on, but there was a sour sensation in his mouth, a taste of something evil, or perhaps just something wrong, remaining behind where a moment before there had been nothing but the ambient air. Wickedness, evil, hate, they were so palpable that they often left behind traces of acid floating on the wind. Rath’s heart began to beat slightly faster, but his inner senses were not en-named yet; he had experienced this sort of thing many times over the millennia, a misdirection or false lead that would put him off his trail. F’dor, after all, were not the only entities in the world capable of terrible malevolence. Rath had no time for other such entities. His mission, bred in his blood and older than most of the Earth was old, blotted out all else. He inhaled deeply through his nose once more, his sensitive sinuses the last bastion of detection, only to find that whatever had been on the wind had vanished into it, if it had ever really existed in the first place. Rath turned his attention away from the distraction and cleared his mind again. Once more he loosed his kirai, this time calling the name of the living man he sought. Ysk. Once again, the slight tinge echoed back to him, distant, but still clear enough to be discerned. Rath tried to hold on to the vibration, but it, too, eluded him. Then, a moment later, he realized why. It was coming from a different direction than when he had first discerned it. The signal he had picked up when he first landed originated in the southeast. He had been following the prevailing winds in that general direction in the hope that he might catch a stronger vibration. Rath had guessed that the name had been sounded in what other hunters who had trod this continent more recently than he had described as the Bolglands, where Canrif, the royal seat of the Cymrian Empire, had once stood. But now, somewhat clearer and cleaner, it was echoing to the northeast, and not very far away. Rath inhaled deeply, expelling all the wind from his lungs. His target had moved and, moreover, the dead name had been sounded again recently, making a new vibration for him to follow. He closed his eyes and raised his hand to the wind, opening his mouth slightly, fishing about for a new gust of a strong northeasterly breeze to get him closer to his target. A jolt of shock ricocheted through him as he was struck violently from behind, the blow driving the air from his lungs as his chin and teeth smashed into the snowy ground. Caught unaware in the midst of his concentration, Rath gasped, inhaling the blood that had begun to pour from his sensitive sinus cavities. In shock, he dimly heard the sounds of raucous laughter, the grunts and scuffling as he was flipped onto his back in the snow and roughly gone over, his legs and abdomen battered with what felt like heavy sticks. After a few seconds his mind cleared, and he could think again. He sensed that he was in the grip of four brigands or, more likely, drunken ne’er-do-wells by the reek of them. Two of them were slapping wooden tools, rakes or hoes it seemed, against him to keep him supine, while a third searched his robe pockets and the fourth rifled his pack, unimpressed by the sounds of disappointment that he uttered. Rath lay still, feigning stupor and collecting himself, until the one rummaging through his clothes discovered his knife. The man yanked it from the calf sheath and held it high amid the buffoonish laughter of the others. “Well, lookee ’ere, boys!” the bandit crowed. “He’s got a lit’le blade! Right sweet it is, too— can probably terrify an apple with it!”

“Ya know what they say about men wi’ lit’le blades, Abner—”

“Yeah, poor fellow, got no shoes neither, damn him. He’s a baldy, too, no hair. A right sorry sort.” The laughter grew more uproarious. “Good job, Percy—ya picked someone ta rob who got less’n we got! What’s the odds of that?” One of the brigands tossed his hoe on the ground and snatched the knife angrily. “He’ll have even less in a minute,” he said tersely. He shoved the first man out of the way and grabbed for Rath’s robe below the waist. With a speed born of the wind Rath seized the robber’s wrist and clenched it in the viselike grip of his race. With grim satisfaction he ground the bones against each other, feeling them pop from the joints. The man gasped raggedly, then began to wail in pain, a hideous noise that scratched against Rath’s skin. He tilted the man’s arm at an impossible angle and with the man’s own hand dragged the small knife across his throat, slashing through the veins and cartilage to the bone. The three other brigands froze, even as the pulsing blood from the neck of their comrade showered them in gore. Rath rose from the ground, kicked aside the body sprawled in the pink snow, snatched up his pack, and quickly searched the wind for a favorable updraft. He opened his mouth and let loose a strange hum, the call that summoned any wayward breeze that might be gusting through. In answer, a southeasterly breeze filled his ears, drowning out the animal-like sounds of terror from the remaining robbers. Rath pulled up his hood, preparing to depart, and lowered his gaze to take in the sight. He cursed inwardly, annoyed with himself for having been caught unaware by such pathetic specimens of humankind. One of the men’s faces melted from the rictus of horror before his eyes into a mien of black fury. He scrambled to his knees and lunged wildly at Rath, encouraged after a few seconds by his bewailing fellows. “Get ’im, Abner! Get the bloody bast—”

Rath’s eyes narrowed in his angular face. He changed the character of the vibration he had used to call the wind into a discordant drone, intensifying the modulation and increasing the frequency, punctuating it with harsh clicks from his epiglottis. The two men who remained crouched on the ground shrieked in pain and grabbed their heads as their temples throbbed, the veins threatening to burst. Rath reached down and seized the man who had charged him by the back of the neck in his iron grip, then stepped into the open door of the wind. The updraft was a strong one, its trajectory high. Rath allowed it to carry him and his struggling passenger aloft till it was at its apex twenty feet from the ground, then released his grip, dropping Abner headfirst onto his fellows with a thud that resounded like the crashing of a melon. The pink snow beneath them splashed red. Not at all an unattractive picture when viewed from above, thought Rath as he traveled down the long wave of the gust, moving quickly across the ground where the air temperature was colder. He closed his eyes and allowed the wind to carry him northward, toward the east, where upon landing he would once again seek the man with the dead name. Ysk. His closest prey.