The Science-Fantasy Megapack: 25 Classic Tales from Fantasy Adventures

ASSASSIN, by Andrew Darlington

The wall is two thousand kilometres long, one kilometre high, and half a kilometre thick. But walls are no obstacle. He’d known of the walls of Babylon in ziggurat mudbrick tiers, the walls of Tiberian Rome guarded by the geese sacred to Juno, the aluminium walls of Mao-Citadel in Zhongguo fifth millennium. Yet in terms of permanence this wall is impressive, as if grown from the musculature of Earth beneath, an extrusion of basalt stratum, of ruptured millstone. With the flimsy city about its base as ephemeral as skin, to be sloughed off in flakes, its loss neither missed, nor affecting topography to the slightest degree.

Adsiduo Sicarius, the assassin, enters the city as night falls, thick streamers of veined cloud boiling above the abrupt horizon, spliced and subdivided by geometric columns of fading light. His skin, in the visor penumbra of his titanium helmet, is ebon, his jerkin of reflecting vinyl molded into thick ridges mimicking bone structure, a deliberate exoskeleton to exclude all attempted penetration. But despite the psychological armor it is difficult to staunch the tide of foul-smelling memories, cities of the Tigris, of the Ganges, of the Delaware, of the Seine, alike in their squalor. This city — a detritus of triple-layered hovels, lean-to’s and shanties interspersed with the stone-built holds of the merchant trader class — laps at the foot of the wall like the diseased tongue of minions.

The constant murmur of voices hangs in the air, pale-skinned people, vendors disseminating small containers of human flesh grown in vats fed on embryonic fluids, selling sinscmilla marijuana from Ukai on the world’s edge, selling mandalas and hexes from the sunken continent Merique, selling renewable virginities, or opium derivatives for astral projection. Beggars, dwarfs and mutants clawing from cages suspended from pantile roofs, or from grilles set into the runneled paving, grasping at legs or loose drapes of clothing in the names of charity, Zoroaster, Thai, Guatama, the Crize, or the fifteen mercies and 305 sub-mercies of penance. But Sicarius does not pause. He wears anonymity deliberately, like a cloak, an invisibility adopted by subtle nuances of slouch, posture, physical alignment, and fluidity of movement learned by experience.

He halts briefly, at the intersection of a central thruway where a laden chain of ox carts groans by. Have oxen always had six legs, or is this just a locally induced mutation to achieve greater strength? It’s difficult to recall. Heavily armed military escorts pace beside the sweating beasts. The assassin notes the age and range of projectile artillery, selecting potential modes of entering their armor, and the preferred weapons he’d use in case of armed encounter. As he does so, a leprous hand seizes his leg pleadingly. The assassin glances down, and crushes the beggar’s single limb with his heel.

He looks up. Twilight thickening, the shadow of the wall clinging to him like slime, like accusation, like guilt. Congealing into mere loss. Now the ox train has gone. He can see across the cart-tracks, and directly beneath the wall the decaying row of cubist buildings strung together with precisely angled struts disguising the equatorial bulge of settling architecture. His eyes spider first along the elaborate facade, then up one, two, three stories, across the steeply sloping slate roofs, to the now Erebus-black wall itself. A vacuity under the lesser darkness of sky, the first stars, and the pulsing amber beacons of a drifting dirigible.

He crosses the rutted thruway, fireflies forming hieroglyphs across buildings backing directly onto the wall, glow-worm lights twisting and transmuting into trade-names, or proclaiming attractions. ‘THE ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’ flicks at his attention, between a plethora of ragged political posters. He approaches the egress, entering through a low multi-arched corridor. The globular room beyond, divided into stepped levels by thin perspex floors, is awash with repetitive atonal music. Roils of heady smoke are cast clinical blue by light coming tip from the floor. This is the place they’ve agreed. Sicarius needs to eat, to drink, and concentrate his energies, but first there are connections to be made. He paces uneasily round the circumference of the room ignored by its other occupants, some shrouded and masked orientals, others naked, but all earnestly furtive and intense.

At length the assassin crosses to an alcove formed by the protuberance of grotesquely erotic sculptures, and sits down across from three figures. After a pause of some seconds, the music, emanating sourcelessly from the empty core of the gallery, completes its complex phase and begins to destucture in preparation for its next cycle, and as though this is a signal, the man in the center slides his hand beneath the elaborate folds of his dark synthsilk robe. The assassin focuses on him, tracing the physiognomy, ghosted as it is by blue shadow. The forehead is unnaturally high, domed by fringed black hair elegantly beaded. The nose almost non-existent, yet double-helixed with small jewels drawing attention from the surrounding features which are smoothly planed — artificially so, eyes paling almost to white, inset correction lenses giving them a glazed glaucomatous appearance.

He produces a small holographic icon and nudges it across the table.

“You know this man?”

Sicarius recognises the idealized image moving within. “It is Vhed Varah. I know his face from the posters.” A diminutive man — one third of the city’s ruling Presidium. This is to be his target.

“The image in this holo is deliberately slanted, as though viewed from beneath, as if he is seen through the eye of an insect, don’t you think? The artist has done that to flatter Varah’s vanity, to compensate for his lack of stature,” he continues conversationally. “The artist was one of many commissioned. He was subsequently honored, and the icon widely distributed. The unsuccessful candidates were ruthlessly abacinated as a matter of course.”

The assassin absorbs detail which is already becoming blurred, merging with the thousand shifting faces of other victims — dictators, tyrants, libertarian benefactors, slaves, lovers and deposed pleading gods incarnate.

“My name’s Erason,” says the man tonelessly. “And Vhed Varah is an encumbrance. Our trade suffers.”

The assassin strains to recall the wedge-shaped cuneiform script on the posters. “I thought he claimed a policy of neutrality, non-alignment with either of the warring protagonists. Trade with both sides?”

“Is it important you should know our motivation?” A voice — female, but distorted by the white porcelain mask she wears, the atmosphere filters visible beneath its lower lip, and the vocal synthesizer set into her throat. An off-worlder? He’d heard stories of dimensional portals. But there are always stories. And then again, the human form is infinitely pliable, particularly in this wretched age. Sicarius himself — he smiles wryly — is more than proof of that.

“No, it’s not important. I merely ask.”

“Curiosity is less than a requirement. Indeed, it is a trait to be discouraged,” Erason snaps, impatient to bring the subject to an end.

“It matters not. But if you care to know, Varah’s policy is an entrenched, ruthlessly defended anti-interventionism, his ambitions as diminutive as his stature,” the words spat. “Freed from such dilettante posturing we would be able manipulate the war, engineer victory for whoever we choose to support. Free of Varah’s timidity we can assume real power.”

Sicarius conjures an image of the lumbering tripedal war machines involved in the continent-wide War of Holy Liberation five thousand K’s away. “You need offer no justification. My contracts are not dependent on moral considerations.”

Sicarius disconnects attention from the argument, their words igniting unbidden memories that are irritatingly incomplete. The wall is old. But there had been a time before it had been constructed when the plain from which it grows had been crossed only by the drifting dirigibles of mercantile trade en route for the New Soviets of the West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.

West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.

“Vhed Varah shelters behind the wall?” he says suddenly.

“No. Inside the wall. Never emerges. He’s impossible to reach.”

“I can reach him.” The assassin signifies the end of the transaction by standing and approaching an induction register. Once a room has been reserved for him he finalizes price and ‘identification procedures’ with his new employers, and retreats to the upper floors of the Cathouse. The establishment’s androgynous whores are individually structured through genetic implantation to suit diverse tastes.

As she services him he considers symmetries. Whore and assassin. The impulse to life and the impulse to destroy life. The passage of millennia changes little, the two professions inextricably linked.

The room is small. A gable window opens out onto the lichen-pitted roofscape. As the whore sleeps, he dresses, then prizes open the window and climbs easily onto the precarious slates.

Wind howls around him, a subliminal susurration constant since the eruption of the wall, a monument to protect what lies beneath its vast foundations. The city is silent. He slithers down to the roof lip, bare metres from the obsidian blackness of the wall, its surface melted into a smooth glaze sucking all into it and giving back nothing. It had been fused by the intense heat of the holocaust wars which, two thousand years before, had left the plain a wasteland, and had simultaneously uncovered the secret the wall had been constructed to keep, leading to the first discovery of the substance named for Pluto sunk deep into the substratum of the Earth. It was then that the prospectors had clustered like ants, their footprints widening into broad highways of creaking laden wagons feeding new military technologies five thousand K’s away. Creating this city of hideous genetic mutations.

But the wall is not solid. Washed by the incandescent heat of nuclear suns its skin had rippled, boiling like liquid, developing capillaries and smooth interconnecting bubble chambers that solidified gradually into an igneous network covering large areas of the monolithic barrier. A maze mapped and colonized as the most impregnable of fortresses, access points concealed and jealously guarded. The assassin allows himself a week to prepare his assault, piecing together and comparing fragments of information, checking over the equipment of his ancient trade, exercising physically and spiritually for die oncoming ordeal.

About a fifth of the way from the base of the wall to its crest is a small aperture, a chimney of rock set into featureless glaze. As the sun sets Adsiduo Sicarius begins to scale the wall, sheltered by the shrouding darkness of the Cathouse. From beyond the plain, from a technology over two thousand years dead, he’d brought a small laser transducer with which he laboriously cuts a series of small ascending recesses. Once the epidermis glaze is thus penetrated it is possible to sink stressed steel pegs into the less dense material beneath, connecting the pitons with thick hawsers, then retrieving both pegs and rope as he climbs.

The method is slow and backbreaking but Sicarius moves methodically through the long night, with exactly spaced rest periods during which he secures himself firmly to the face, and self-induces a hypnotically relaxing trance. By sunrise he’s reached a sufficiently lofty elevation that his presence passes unnoticed in the bustling city below him. Then, with the last of the fading light, it is possible to obtain a visual fix on the aperture, and work more swiftly towards his objective, shrugging off the deliberately low-key dogmatism he’d assumed to make the climb tolerable, to dampen fear, assuage die pain and vertigo.

Then he was reeling in the hawser for the last time, reaching the lip of the chimney, and hauling himself into its waiting darkness. The capillary slants steeply upwards, but is narrow enough for the assassin to brace himself across its restriction and gradually work upwards. There is artificial light beyond, and he slows, crawling forward as die chimney narrows. A grille separates him from an elaborately decorated corridor, the tunnel obviously serving as a ventilation duct or sluice for the disposal of waste materials.

The grille could be wired. Nothing visible. But he coats it with a blast blister, neutralizing any potential active fields within. Then, using the laser, Sicarius severs his way through the grille, angling his cuts in such a manner that he’s able to lift the center section, hang for a moment, then swing precisely up, dropping gently to the fused-ceramic tiles inside. He crouches, watching, breathing, listening, sensing. Cameras, tripping-traps, sneak-beams, bug-rays? No. A gallery. Long and shadowy. He turns to replace the grille, leaving little detectable trace of interference.

Further. Little more than several paces and he’s brought up sharp. Something indefinable. A sensor-grid. Little more than a haze of particles. A faint ionization of the air, invisible to most. But he detects it. He traces its limits. They’ve been lax There’s at least a metre of clear space between its highest point and the upper arch of the ceiling. More than enough. He retrieves the pitons and hawser from the ventilation duct. For a moment, once on the far side of the grid, he relaxes his tensed muscles, allowing the seep of feelings to scream back beneath his self-discipline, allowing random sensations to flood him, the staleness of richly perfumed air, the dazzling color of wall frescoes covered with opulent tapestries to disguise their ‘volcanic’ origins, the nauseous backwash of vertigo. Such direct tactile impressions can be useful if correctly utilized and logically filtered.

At last he re-applies mental control, and lopes soundlessly towards the interior, attempting to superimpose the remembered map-fragments onto what he sees around him. At seemingly irregular points the ducts converge into spacious galleries, smooth, featureless chambers and long white ceramic galleries that lie at the center of new radiations of corridors. Whispers of sound come closer. Whispers magnified by tricks of acoustics. He hears a disembodied wash of voices, and stiffens, but the voices fade, and he resumes. Then he waits, pressing himself into the wall ornamentation as two women pass along the concourse.

They are deep in intimate conversation, talking animatedly in some gutturally obscure Asiatic dialect. Yet he recognizes their language. They are discussing a missing child, and they continue to do so until they are out of his hearing. Security is almost boringly lax. It will be concentrated lower, at the more obvious ground level access points. Or in the upper levels, in case of aerial assault. But here, deep within the wall, they are complacent in their supposed invulnerability.

Soon it becomes apparent that despite their seeming randomness the corridors are regular, geometrically structured, and he’s able to slot their apparent vagaries into an understandable system, working his way towards the hub of the network.

Eventually Sicarius finds himself confronting the great double doors heading to the inner labyrinth of Vhed Varah, admission barred by a single guard, armored in the fashion he’d witnessed in the city. Military discipline has lapsed, no attack expected in this most impregnable of fortresses.

The assassin draws a long slender needle from his belt, approaches the lounging soldier from the rear, and with ice-cold accuracy inserts the point between overlapping plates of steel at the man’s neck. He jerks the needle with practiced ease upwards at a calculated angle, taking it into the underlayers of the brain, killing the man instantly.

Leaving the corpse, Sicarius slides through the doors. Warmly peach-tinted light spills from the vestibule beyond. The newly glimpsed grotto is partitioned off into many separate sumptuous apartments decked out with the decadent luxury of conspicuous wealth. There are sleeping figures, male, female, and hermaphrodite, who ignore him as he purposefully makes his way towards his quarry.

Vhed Varah, a squat but ridiculously corpulent man, wakes and starts up from his coverlets as the assassin enters the small enclosure. He can sense the intruder’s mission — almost expecting it.

“You’ve come to…?” he squeals in terror, but his expression of horror freezes, the scream of panic dying in his throat as the laser punctures a neat hole through the center of his forehead, its heat cauterizing the wound even as it is made. The whites of his eyes flutter momentarily like moths trapped in their sockets. Then nothing.

Sicarius lowers the weapon. The heady scented air now ionized and vibrantly charged by the needle-beams of energy, redolent of the imagined smell of adrenaline, and fear. There is no pleasure in death, just acceptance. For all men must die, even as they must breathe. He smiles at the thought.

Sicarius waits for long moments, preparing himself psychologically for what is to come. For what has happened times without number. Vhed Varah lies half-naked across plush eiderdowns, the pale light catching and silvering the glisten of sweat along rolls of fat and near-black body hair. There is no blood. The murdered politician’s eyes are lifelessly fixed on the partitioning tapestries of heavy weave.

An ugly and disgusting death. A contract fulfilled. The impulse to life. The impulse to destroy life.

Now there is sound beyond the small enclosure of artificial intimacy, the raster of fear punctuated by raised strident voices, the thump of heels. And the assassin’s patience is eventually rewarded as the drapes are wrenched brutally aside and three masked soldiers break in. He spins to face them. They wear easily penetrable armor, his eyes professionally noting points of vulnerability. The first of the guards carries a trident. Calmly, the assassin thumbs the laser grid to minimum, raises the weapon to waist level and depresses the stud, hitting the forearm through its defensive plating, scorching the flesh. The soldier yells and lunges forward, a purely instinctive reaction. The center prong lodges in the assassin’s eye cavity, its tip on its way to the brain.

Suddenly, the soldier is bracing the haft of the trident, aware of the solidity of impact on the interior of the other man’s splintering skull, the murdering intruder coiling down to sprawl at his feet, the closely scrutinized vinyl jerkin now unmoving. Only gradually does he become painfully conscious of the laser burn on his forearm where the muted beam has melded his armor, blistering skin. He can feel the curdling sickness at the base of his stomach. He lurches, the second soldier moving forward to support him, speaking reassuringly.

A month later, Erason slouches across the low couch in his private room to the rear of the ‘ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’. He rubs his slightly lacquered hand down the side of his face, feeling the perfect smoothness of his depilated skin. Smiling falsely at the soldier, he sucks in a breath and lets it out raggedly. “You have business with me?”

“The encumbrance has been removed,” says the man, palming his perspex mask clear, the upward movement revealing a plassealed forearn. “Trade need no longer suffer.”

Erason stands slowly. “I don’t quite understand fully.”

“Understanding was never part of the agreement. Vhed Varah is dead. I’ve satisfied the accepted identification procedures, and now request only that your commitment for payment be fulfilled.”

Erason can feel his neck muscles tightening involuntarily as he looks at the stranger. “Yes. You’re right. Of course you are. I was merely curious. The trade of assassin is one carrying a certain ancient mystique. The reek of lost sciences, perhaps even shape-shifting? Presumably you got out of the fortress due to your…ability?”

The other man relaxes visibly, and nods.

“And you intend leaving the city? It would be unhealthy, from my point of view, for you to remain.”

Again the soldier nods, glancing about the room with no particular focus of interest. Intent only on escape.

“Then I’ll detain you no further.” Erason reaches down to hoist twin panniers onto the couch that stands between them. “Reward for your services, as we agreed.” He loosens the clamp on the brocade leatherwork of the uppermost pouch.

“Here, for your inspection.” He inserts his hand beneath the flap, and withdraws it clamped around a projectile pistol.

The man’s eyes fix on the weapon even as the trigger goes in, the dart catching him soundlessly in the throat.

“I’m sorry,” begins Erason. “Truly I am sorry, but it would be unsafe.…” His eyes widen, almost white, the correction lenses clouding them into colorlessness. Then he screams, drops the pistol, his hands clawing upwards at his hairless temples, long nails drawing blood. The room seems to fragment, small, juxtaposed sounds vorticing in from the void beyond. An aimless jumble of perceptions, slowly and painfully reorienting. Understanding comes at him tangentially as he watches the soldier/assassin die, and feels the correspondingly vampiric growth in his own head. A slithering insinuating evil, a blood-red darkness as old as time, undying, eternal, gradually possessing him. Drowning him, as he sinks relentlessly beneath tides of alienness.

The scream ceases. He listens to it dissolve in the low currents of air. There is no more pain. Erason is gone. Sicarius rubs his hands together self-consciously, then passes the palm of his right hand experimentally over his unnaturally high forehead, brushing the fringe of black beaded hair. He bends down to retrieve the projectile pistol, replacing it precisely in the uppermost pouch of the panniers. Then he moves towards the door, carrying the bags, raising the hem of his dark synthsilk robe to step over the soldier’s corpse. The body that, briefly, he had occupied.

Erason/Sicarius closes the door behind him, the noise of the Cathouse shifting, the globular room with its atonal music to his left. But instead he paces evenly down the low arched corridor and out into the blinding daylight of the thruway.

A carriage waits. Erason is important. He doesn’t walk the city street. As he climbs into the carriage, its upholstery settling, he chances a covetous glance at the kilometre-high wall rising monolithically above the sloping roofs of the squat cubist buildings. An instinctive reaction, a gut-wrenching vertigo, makes him clench his fists, the lacquered nails impaling the soft skin of his palms, drawing small half-moons of blood as he recalls every centimetre of the nightmare climb up the wall’s relentlessly vertical face.

Then the eternal assassin relaxes.

The treachery had been unexpected. He’d been taken unawares. But luckily the projectile pistol used against him caused a lingering death. Time enough for an induced transmigration of souls, the assassin’s ultimate, and most perfectly crafted weapon. Sicarius smiles. He’ll enjoy being Erason.

At least for a while.