The Assassin King

44

By the time Rath reached the glen the back of his throat was burning with the caustic taste of acidic blood. Cautiously he slipped through the shadows, following the buzzing in his throat and sinuses, the sensation of needles running through his veins. Rath fought down the racial hatred that was causing his teeth to clench and his heart to pound furiously, concentrating instead on the demonic whisper of the name, hovering on the wind just beyond his sight. Each step, measured against ten of his heartbeats, brought him closer. Rath focused on being quiet. After such a long journey, so many centuries of pursuit, it would be cataclysmic to lose the beast at this moment, when it was almost within his grasp.

His night-sensitive eyes could see something now, at the outskirts of his vision, something tethered to the end of the gossamer thread of sound that glittered evilly in the moon- light, hanging amid the branches like a strand of spider silk, evanescent and deadly. Even the threat of what it led to could not prevent Rath from hesitating for a moment, enraptured by the beguiling beauty of it, the visualization of kirai, this fiber of undying connection between the wind of his heritage and the black fire of the F’dor.

A few more steps, he thought. Slowly.

A millennium of experience had trained him to never anticipate the host of the demon he was seeking. He had found F’dor clinging to any number of different types of men, women, and children. Rath had no fear of whatever form the monster took; he had watched dispassionately as the heads of toddlers in which the beasts had hidden exploded at the end of the Thrall ritual, because Rath understood the consequences of being swayed. Still, his curiosity got the better of him. He closed his eyes and tasted the wind on his tongue. Hrarfa.

The name resounded in his sinuses, clear as a bell. His heart, and that of the demon’s host, beat in perfect syn-chronicity. Assured again that he had found his quarry, Rath opened his eyes and moved silently closer to the glen. In the moonlight a woman was standing, her back to him, her long hair glistening in rivers of dark silver. She was stretching lazily in the moonglow, her hands running over her shoulders and through her hair in a slow, sensual dance, as if to gather the power of the heavenly light into herself. Rath inhaled; in what few tales were known about the hosts this demon had chosen, Hrarfa had rarely allowed herself to be seen in female form, the one closest to her formless spirit’s own. He took it as a fortuitous sign that she was about to die appropriately.

Portia smiled. She had heard nothing, seen nothing, in the pale light of the waxing moon. Nothing but shadows moved in the dark glade, but still she sensed a presence. The wind was high, and it caressed her human form like a lover, whispering over her skin with evanescent kisses, then moved on to tousle her hair.

The nascent fire in her poisonous spirit crackled with delight, both in the erotic sensation of wind on her skin and in the knowledge that her trap had been successfully sprung. Unlike her kin, many of whom saw the human form as a distasteful necessity for survival in the upworld, she had found the carnal delights of being encased in flesh to be a wonder that she both enjoyed and craved. There was a joy in the domination of a host, the pursuit and eventual capture of a new body, a pleasure in the eviction of its original owner through an exquisite painful devouring that left her aroused, alive in a way like no other. And there was solidity, a comforting sense of being still and real, so unlike the natural insecurity of being that was each F’dor’s bane. She had always been a bit of a risk taker, more daring than her fellow escapees of the Vault. Many of the Unspoken, as the dragons had called her kind, had discovered patience, a trait not naturally occurring in the children of dark fire, when they made their way upworld and away from their eternal prison. They had been able to build up empires slowly over the ages, trading hosts as cautiously as humans traded pieces in chess, biding their time, growing stronger in the material world, in the hope that the power they were gaining would enable them to at last find the rib of an Earthchild or some other way to free their fellows.

But she was different. She had found an intoxicating excitement in the lure, the switch, the deception of drawing unsuspecting humans to her, studying their ways, their traits, the very patterns in which they drew breath, then catching them unawares and ravaging their souls, taking their bodies for her own.

She had taken the form of a young Liringlas Skysinger once, several millennia ago and half a world away, and had learned some of the science of names, had made good use of what she had gleaned from him before she discarded his useless corpse in favor of one more interesting. She knew, as a result, how to bend her vibrations, alter the signature that her human form conveyed, until it could be almost anything that she wanted it to be. She also learned the intricacies of male lust, something she had used to her advantage on both sides of the bed. Eventually that led to her conquest of a First Generation Cymrian girl in Manosse, whose body was not subject to the ravages of time or age-related illness, seemingly immortal like the rest of the refugees from the Island of Serendair. She had liked the girl’s name—Portia—because it was very close in sound to her own, and the additional power the young woman’s lithe form and beauty gave her in enchanting foolish men through wanton sexuality. Finally, there was. an irony in subsuming a Cymrian—like the F’dor, they were a race of exiles with endless time to brood about being driven from their homeland. It was a perfect fit. Thus, trading hosts was almost never necessary anymore. But occasionally one came along that proved irresistible.

The Lord Cymrian had been one such temptation. Portia licked her lips, suddenly dry from the heat of anticipation and the kissing breath of the wind on them. Though she was in female form she had none of the physiological longings of a woman, did not feel the burning desire, the attraction of the flesh the way a human woman did. Rather, her desire was for the connection to power she gained in the fornication of powerful men. Her partners’ surrender in the heat of passion had fed the very essence of her being, their vulnerability and openness to her dominion was an orgiastic feeling. When a man was knobbing her body, his very soul lay open and exposed.

And not only did she then have access to it, to drink in the essence of it, absorbing whatever primal, elemental power was within him, but she was able to tie that vulnerable soul to a twisting vine of Bloodthorn, the perverted sapling of Ashra, the tree of elemental fire, that grew deep within the Vault.

As any member of the Older Pantheon of demons could.

Slowly she ran her hands through her hair, raising her breasts to the wind that caressed her nipples through the thin cloth of her shirt, and sighed happily. She could hear her name on the wind; she knew it was only a matter of time before the Lord Cymrian found her. And now her quarry had arrived; she could feel his presence, even if she did not yet see him. The tree of blood had tasted the soul of Gwydion of Manosse once before. Another of her kind, one of the Younger Pantheon, had managed to tear a piece of it free some decades ago, had experimented with it, formed a body of ice and the desecrated blood of children around it, and had used it to procreate without tapping its own soul, something a few other F’dor had tried but had failed to do. Bloodthorn had reveled in the taste of Gwydion’s essence, had almost been able to find and obtain the Sleeping Child with it. Once she had taken his body as her new host, the Unholy Tree would feed again. The wind picked up slightly, tickling the back of her neck and arms, and tousling her long dark locks. Portia’s smile grew brighter in the light of the moon. She couldn’t resist a chuckle at her own insatiability, one of the traits that the pathetic Tristan Steward had loved about her. Most F’dor of her power would have considered Gwydion of Manosse to be the ultimate prize, but she wanted more, as she always did. She wanted his wife. There was something bewitching about the Lady Cymrian that both disturbed and fascinated Portia. She knew immediately what it was—the sublime beauty that the-common folk who swore allegiance to Rhapsody were enchanted by was nothing more than an inner core of elemental fire burning within her, something she must have absorbed from a primal source. Unlike the dark fire of the Vault from which the F’dor drew their power, the element within the Lady Cymrian was pure, untouched by the taint of evil.

And thus, a challenge. The flesh between Portia’s legs quivered at the thought. Like the corruption of a child, or the rape of a virgin, certain acts of defilement were profound in their glory, a sensation of destruction of innocence that defied description, surpassing all other acts. The chance to take a source of pure fire and twist it, damage it, pollute it until it, too, served the same mission of Void that all F’dor did was almost too thrilling to contain. She inhaled deeply, trying to do so, and failing utterly.

I will have you, lady, she thought excitedly. In your very husband’s body, I will have you. I will feed off your passion, your surrender. And when you are open to him, vulnerable in the throes of sickening love, I will take your soul and have your body for my own as well. And right before I do, I will tell you, in his voice, what is happening, so I can pleasure myself with your horror—at least for a moment.

And as I eat your soul, I will take your fire. But first, I will take your husband. Her excitement was reaching a fever pitch. She could leave her next conquest waiting no longer. The woman in the dark glen turned slowly around, her eyes glittering in the moonlight.

“I knew you would come after me,” she said softly. “I knew you could not let me go.” The breeze picked up around her, caressing her hair. At first there was silence in the glade. Then a voice spoke, not the warm baritone she had come to recognize, but a fiat, toneless one that vibrated against her eardrums, inaudible to the wind. All of your kind should know the same, Hrarfa. So it has been since the beginning of history, and so it shall remain until each of you is extinguished and buried in ash, like candle-flame. Deep within her, Portia felt the words echo.

Terror, old and consuming, rose up inside her and spread through her like fire on pine. She turned to ran, or tried to, but ahead of her, almost as close as her own shadow, the darkness of the glade moved. A figure in shadow held up his hand, palm forward. Zhvet, it said. Halt. All around Portia the wind died suddenly. All sound, all air, seemed to vanish from the glen, leaving her breathless and gasping. Panic swelled and overran her defenses; each of her kind knew this moment, feared it almost from the beginning of Time. She, like many of the escapees of the Vault, had come to disbelieve the possibility of it, especially after the racial pogroms and campaigns against the Dhracians that all but extinguished the hunters from the face of the Earth.

Yet the time had come, and she was trapped by one that had her name. Rath inhaled again, allowing his skin-web to relax, and gave a tug on the first net of wind he had woven from the invisible silk of his kirai. The demon’s body flinched, then shuddered to a frozen stance, he noted with satisfaction.

Slowly he spread his fingers and began to chant.

Bien, he canted in the inaudible buzzing voice of his first throat. It was the name of the north wind, the strongest of the four and the most easily found. The wind responded immediately, as it always did for him, wrapping itself snugly around his index finger, anchored in the first chamber of his heart.

“No,” the woman whispered, rigid in place. Rath could see her eyes darting wildly even from where he stood. “No.”

He hadn’t expected a F’dor of the Older Pantheon to beg. In his experience, the older, more powerful demons were stoic, furious, but generally silent or threatening rather than supplicant when facing destruction. He remembered her penchant for deception and cleared his mind, returning to his state of inner calm.

Jahne, he whispered over the aperture of his second throat. This was a call to the south wind, the most constant and enduring of the winds. Rath felt the answer in both his finger and his chest, where the wind had knotted in the second chamber of his heart. The woman screamed, not the harsh, atonal scratching of an angry F’dor, but a heartrending wail of human despair that had no impact on Rath whatsoever.

“Please,” she begged, her eyes growing wide from fear and the pressure that was building up in her skull. “Have—have mercy. I know much that would be—valuable—” Rath did not even hear her words. His focus was his entire existence now, and all sound, all fury, faded into the shadowy twilight at the edge of his consciousness, leaving nothing but the pure, ringing tones of the winds responding to his call. Satisfied with the clarity of the first two, he summoned the third wind, the wind of justice, that blew from the west. Leuk. “I—I know where—others are,” the woman whispered now, the effort of forming words causing the veins in her neck to distend grotesquely. “I—will—tell—you—”

In the darkness of his ritual, Rath called for the last, the east wind, and waited patiently for the tentative breeze to appear in the glen, hesitantly wrapping itself around his fourth finger, entwining itself in the last chamber of his heart that was now beating erratically with the changeable breezes. Thas. The wind of morning, the wind of death. Like strands of spider-silk, the currents of air hung on his fingertips, waiting, tethered through the valves of his heart. Once he cast the second net and began the ending of the Ritual, he would be vulnerable; he could not stop until the body of the host and spirit of the F’dor were dead, even if he desired to, lest his own heart be sundered in his chest. Rath opened his eyes and met the terrified gaze of the beast. The woman who had been Hrarfa’s last host had been beautiful in life, with large, dark eyes that gleamed in reflected light. Those eyes brimmed with tears that he almost could believe were tied to actual emotion. Almost. Rath closed his hand into a fist. The woman twitched again, still frozen in place. With a fluid motion, he cast the net of tangled winds around the demon, anchored in his palm, cemented in his heart, and pulled with all his might.

The demon screamed again, this time in a primal voice that scratched Rath’s inner ears like nails on flesh. The lovely face began to contort into something dark and hideous, with black eyes flashing hatred that was palpable. Smoke rose around her as the winds encircled her in an unbreakable cage and began to close in, pressing against her with the force of a cyclone. Rath inhaled deeply. The Thrall ritual had reached its climax. It was time to cut the net. He opened his mouth slightly wider, inhaling the air over all four of his throat openings, each holding a single, unwavering note. With a skill born of uncounted hunts, Rath clicked the glottis in the back of his throat.

A harsh fifth note sliced through the monotone of the other four. The winds screamed discordantly with the beast, tearing through the glade and causing the trees to shiver violently. Rath felt the threads of wind attached to his fingers go slack. Quickly he clicked his tongue, tying off the ends of the wind-cage and allowing his first net to dissipate. Then he clenched his thumb to snap the wind-thread taut against the flailing spirit. His heart thudded against his chest. Now that the beast was stationary, unable to escape, he began the final chant, the note that would build to a crescendo of such intense sound, aligned with the vibrations of their interlocked heartbeats, that die host body’s blood would reverse in its path and flood the brain until it exploded. All the air in the glen was sucked into the vortex of knotted wind swirling around the ancient monster. The rictus of fury twisted the woman’s face into a mask of even more hate. She grimaced in agony and tried to scream curses back, but her pupils were beginning to expand almost to the size of her irises, her forehead scored in deep furrows of pain.

Rath matched the intensity of her gaze. He could hear in the rising sound of imminent death the age-old calls of his Brethren, living and dead, joining him, unlimited by time and space, adding their voices to the chant. For all that the climax of the Thrall ritual left the hunter vulnerable, his heart in syn-chronicity with the essence of pure evil, there was a comfort in the solidarity of the cause that his race had sworn fealty to thousands of years ago. He was too in thrall himself to hear the cracking of the branches under the feet of someone entering the glade.