“It’s been a while.” A sad smile flickered across Aldhelm’s scarred face—the track of Gyll’s vibro. “I remember it very well, though.”
His words brought back the memories, and they held all the rancor that existed between them.
Valdisa, of all the kin, why did you choose Aldhelm? He’d be the least willing to understand my feelings.
Gyll was suddenly tired, very tired, as if the contract were already over, a long run finished.
Aldhelm moved into the light, checking the Khaelian dagger scabbarded to his belt and letting the nightcloak fall around his tall, muscular figure. “You needn’t worry, Ulthane Gyll. I’ve no intention of letting us fail this contract.” A pause. “And we’ll do it by the code.”
Gyll couldn’t read his face, couldn’t dredge deeper meanings from the blandly spoken words—it was the problem he always had with Aldhelm: he couldn’t pierce the man’s emotional armor. Aldhelm turned away, moving with a determined stride to the cavern mouth and beckoning McWilms ahead of him. Gulltopp, the larger of Neweden’s two moons, was now rising beyond the trees, silvering the higher branches and silhouetting Aldhelm as he moved into the night, out from the domain of stone.
Gyll, staring, waved the apprentices back to their work and nodded a brief farewell to d’Mannberg and the other Hoorka. He hurried after Aldhelm and McWilms, the well-wishes of his kin following.
Aldhelm had gone to the dawnrock and stopped, McWilms moving on to the flitter that waited near the clearing’s edge. The slender tapering pillar of the dawnrock scratched at the sky, the glass receptor at its summit catching the light of Gulltopp. Aldhelm, seeing Gyll approach, touched the dawnrock with his right hand, stroking where the rock was worn to a glossy sheen from the touch of a thousand Hoorka hands: the last ritual upon leaving Underasgard.
Gyll, with a gesture that seemed almost angry, touched the dawnrock in turn—he could feel the warm smoothness of the stone underneath his fingers. The whine of the flitter’s engines moved from purr to roar, rebounding from the cliff-face in which the mouth of Underasgard loomed black and empty.
“What did you mean back there, Aldhelm?” Gyll’s voice was a harsh whisper, as if the dawnrock were listening.
Aldhelm shrugged. His nightcloak, dark against darkness, swirled about him. “I know what you’re feeling, Gyll, whether you want to believe that or not. I know you’ve grown tired of killing, whatever your reasons, in the past several months. I’ve watched you, and you wonder too much about the victims. You always did that to an extent, but the tendency is more pronounced now. You think of them far too much for your own good as Hoorka-kin.”
Gyll felt the sting of wounded pride: it flared his anger, and he felt the blood rush to his face, felt his nails dig into his palms. “I
made
Hoorka, kin-brother. And I’ve killed more than you. Over the standards—”
“Over the standards you’ve done less and less of it. You want to see their faces, you ponder their lives. You empathize. Do they haunt your sleep, too? All those ghosts you’ve sent to the Hag . . .”
“Damn
you, man. Hoorka is
my
creation, all the kin follow
my
code, and the code tells us how to feel. You act as if you understand how I feel better than I do.”
“I’ve always understood you, Ulthane. Ever since you wounded me in the last contract for Gunnar—and I hope the Hag’s minions gnaw at Gunnar’s soul for eternity. He cost me too much, and I wasn’t at all unhappy to see him die. I understood your feelings back then. I understood, and I wasn’t angry with you. Did I ever say or do anything to make you think that?”
“It doesn’t matter. My feelings aren’t within the realm of your concern, Aldhelm.” The man’s patient calm fueled Gyll’s anger. He could feel control slipping, knew he had to break off the conversation or risk saying too much. He fiddled with the shoulders of his nightcloak, tightened the strap of the bodyshield with too much concentration.
“I was merely giving you my observations, Gyll.” Aldhelm’s face was still a careful mask.
“Then observe tonight.” Gyll’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowed. “Watch me, Aldhelm.” Filled with a fury he longed to vent, Gyll stalked away, slapping the dawnrock once more in passing. His booted feet crackled through dead leaves underfoot with a sound like dry fire. He did not look back to see if Aldhelm followed.
• • •
Bondhe Amari, kin of the Guild of Petroleum Refiners, was a man whose mouth was too often ahead of his brain. He was also a poor conspirator.
That much the Hoorka gleaned from their conversation with Sirrah Dramian, kin-lord of Amari’s guild and the signer of the contract for the man. Dramian, his white hair a proud sign of a long and successful life, had no sympathy for Amari. “Kill him,” he’d said to Valdisa upon signature. “I’ve no cause to begrudge a man scheming to make his way in the guild—the gods know I’ve done it myself. But this fool is clumsy. The rumors are just too loud for me to ignore. He offends my honor, and I’m too old to challenge him myself. I can afford your damned high price. Kill him.” He’d coughed, twisted one of the rings about his finger, gathered his expensive robes about him, and left the caverns, trailing a spoor of perfume.
McWilms brought the flitter down near Undercity. Here, in the oldest sector of Sterka, the buildings massed above on metal stalks that held them above the floods and the mud of the early rains. The air was filled with the foul odor of rotting vegetation. The flitter squelched to a landing in the mud, settling uneasily in the ooze. Gyll and Aldhelm peered out to the clustering of lights reflecting dully from the wetness below.
“Undercity.” Gyll exhaled nasal disgust. “It’ll take hours to clean the mud from our boots.”
Aldhelm was silent.
McWilms shifted in his seat, glancing over his shoulder to the Hoorka. “Sirrahs, it’s not quite that bad, if Amari hasn’t shifted positions. Ferdin said to go up the lift there”—he pointed to a diagonal of hoverlamps moving from the river muck to the buildings—“and into Oversector. He’s holed up in an abandoned house there. Save your pity for Ferdin. She had to chase Amari through that gunk for a good hour.” McWilms grinned at the assassins.
Neither returned his amusement.
The Hoorka flitter had been observed in its landing. Eyes watched from the porches of Oversector as Gyll and Aldhelm stepped out, the mud sucking greedily at their soles. A small crowd had gathered at the terminus to the lift (the mud smeared everywhere, dried into confused footprints). For the most part, they were lassari, though a few wore the insignia of the less-profitable guilds. The spectators eased back from the lift’s exit as the grim-faced Hoorka walked out, kicking the clinging filth from their boots. Oddly silent, yet somehow expectant, they backed into shadow, staring.
Gyll leaned toward Aldhelm to whisper as the hungry eyes plucked at them. “This happens more and more. They watch, as if the Hoorka were some damned street entertainers.” Aldhelm nodded—sour agreement.
Gyll flicked the cowl of his nightcloak up, shrouding himself. The assassins moved in a pathway ringed with shadows and wraiths. The watchers moved with them, gelid, as the Hoorka moved into the streets of Oversector. Oversector was perhaps the poorest area of Sterka—squalid, far too crowded, and filled with the stench of the river beneath and the poverty above, a subjective fog that was tangible enough to cause Gyll to draw his lips back from his teeth in a snarl of disgust. A woman near him, seeing the rictus, drew quickly back in a rustling of cloth.
“To the right, Aldhelm—that’s where Ferdin’s to be waiting.” Gyll swept cold eyes about him. “Carrion birds,” he muttered.
The way was ill-lit, for most of the hoverlamps that had been placed here were missing, shattered, or simply not functioning. Gulltopp had not yet risen high enough to light the area. Night was triumphant. A hoverlamp thirty meters away showed the open maw of a cross street and a nightcloaked figure waiting there. The figure held up a hand, the fingers moving in the identification code. Ferdin.
The apprentice was slight, boyish. She shivered as if cold as the two approached. “Sirrahs,” she said, bowing. “I see you’ve brought an audience with you.” She scowled at the watchers. “They make you almost afraid to speak. I could always feel them staring, as soon as we moved into Oversector.”
“Where’s Amari?” Aldhelm’s voice brooked no sympathy—a chill reproof, it caused Ferdin to draw herself erect, to stare at the man with eyes gone flat and emotionless. “In a house two doors down on your right, sirrah. I sealed and placed alarms on the other entrances and windows—he has to come out there.” A thin index finger impaled darkness, indicating an archway where a hoverlamp bobbed in a portable holding field. It threw knife – edged light at the door. “I set the lamp.”
“Did he give you a long chase?” Gyll could see the mud of Undercity caking Ferdin from feet to mid-thigh. The apprentice caught Gyll’s glance and smiled tentatively.
“I’m going to spend the rest of the night cleaning myself, as you can see, Ulthane. But no, he hasn’t moved in two hours. He has a sting, but other than that he should be easy. McWilms and I could have taken him a hundred times over. If it weren’t for the damned watchers . . .”
“Go on then. McWilms is waiting for you in the flitter.”
Ferdin nodded her thanks. She let her nightcloak—with the red slash of the apprentice—fall about her and moved into the night.
“You need to talk with the apprentices, Ulthane. They shouldn’t be so easily spooked.” Aldhelm watched Ferdin’s retreating back, glanced with irritation at the watchers along the street.
“You were never bothered?”
“You have to ignore the lassari fools, neh? I concentrate on my task—that’s what you taught me as an apprentice, Gyll. I simply follow your teachings.” He stared at Gyll.
And I should follow them myself: is that what you tell me, Aldhelm? Once I did, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. I wish it were that easy now.
“Then let’s see if I taught you well,” he said.
• • •
The doorway to the building was grimed in an irregular semicircle about the handle, the legacy of many unwashed hands. Gyll unsheathed his Khaelian dagger, grimacing at the weight (he preferred his vibro, but the Khaelian weapon had other advantages), and prodded at the entrance plate. The door slid into its niche with a rumble. The Hoorka flattened themselves to either side of the archway.
Aldhelm’s fingers moved in the hand code:
I’ll go first.
A quick downward flick of the wrist:
No. Wait.
The interior darkness remained silent, quiescent. Several curious lassari moved nearer, staring at the Hoorka and peering into the open doorway. Aldhelm feinted toward them with the dagger and they fled.
Now.
First Aldhelm then Gyll moved into the room, Aldhelm rolling a flare ahead of them. Night fled to the far corners of the space, startled. Shadows reared and died as the ovoid flare wobbled, bounced from one wall, and came to a shuddering halt.
“Amari?” Gyll called. There was no answer.
The light stabilized. The Hoorka stood in a shabby reception hall that had once been grand. Three archways led out—one directly ahead, one to either side. Two floaters lay keeled over in their holder units, their fabric coverings torn and shredded. A broken holotank sat in a small mound of glassine shards. The floor gritted underfoot. From one corner, a stalkpest went about its foraging, unconcerned.
“Aldhelm, do you see the formal warning? Amari’s supposed to have a sting, so there should be—”
“Gyll!”
Gyll turned at Aldhelm’s shout, the dagger up and ready. He had only a moment’s glimpse of a gaunt apparition in the far archway (frightened dark eyes under a shock of brown hair; a , defiant stance) and a fleeting impression of the sting the man held.
The blast struck them.
Gyll’s ears ached with the roar, there was a sudden constriction about his body, and he could not move. A dark hail swept around him, and the world slammed him from his feet. His body toppled, stiff.
When the bodyshield released him from its iron grip a second later, the figure was gone. Aldhelm was picking himself up beside him. Slugs from the sting clunked dully to the floor from their nightcloaks; the wall behind them was pitted and torn.
“That cowardly, filthy lassari-sucker,” Aldhelm muttered, softly and without inflection. “Without so much as a word to us, without a warning or a thought to his honor and kinship. . . . I can understand the contract for this piece of dung. If it weren’t for the shields . . .”
“The bastard,” Gyll agreed. He was filled with a sudden rage. All hint of his listlessness was gone, kindled to ash by the rush of adrenaline in the attack’s aftermath. He brushed unnecessarily at his nightcloak. He felt as he once had felt—a cool, methodical killer in the service of Dame Fate, a hunter seeking death for the Hag.
“Stay here, Aldhelm—Amari can’t escape the house if one of us guards the door. I’ll go find him or flush him toward you.” Gyll’s voice was clipped, high.
“All things considered, Ulthane . . .”
“Neh!” Gyll spat out the word. “His life suddenly offends me, Aldhelm. He’s mine. Stay here and be ready.”
“He may attempt another lassari stunt, and if we’re together . . .”
“We can’t talk Amari to the Hag, man.” Gyll hefted the dagger in his hand, tapping the floor with an impatient foot. “I insist on this, Aldhelm.”
Something in Gyll’s demeanor took the fire from Aldhelm’s protest. He began to speak but stopped, staring at the older man. He shrugged and moved to the left archway. “I’ll wait here for your call, then. If you find him, if you need help . . .”
Gyll shushed Aldhelm with a raised finger. They listened. From the floor above, they heard the sound of furtive movement, a scraping of wood, then silence.
“I won’t need your help.” Gyll—a dark-clothed wraith—moved into the corridor.
Amari’s path was easy to follow: he left behind the detritus of fear and panic. The sting, empty, lay abandoned against the wall a few paces down the corridor, and the dust of the hall was visibly disturbed by his flight. From the end of the corridor, a lift-shaft beckoned. Gyll did not waste time with stealth; he moved quickly to the shaft and peered up.