Night guild 3, p.1
Night Guild 3, page 1
Night Guild 3
DB King
Copyright © 2023 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Series by DB King
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
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Support DB King on Patreon!
Free progression Fantasy Novel!
Series by DB King
Apocalypse Knights
Crafter’s Fate
Dragon Magus
Dungeon of Evolution
Elemental Mastery
Fatehaven Farm
Kensei
Mage’s Path
Night Guild
Ranger’s Magic
Shinobi Rising
Spellweaver Codex: Elder Mage Chronicles
Summoner’s Shadow
The Last Magus
War Wizard
World End
Chapter 1
Night lay thick over Saon, capital city of the Kingdom of Ghennet. Here, the land rose in a long, sweeping slope over several miles, and at the top of the slope, the tall, dark stone buildings and packed, narrow streets of Saon clustered like strange growths on the crown of the hill.
Ghennet was a flat land, enclosed on all sides by mountain ranges and crisscrossed by a thousand rivers. The land flooded regularly, and over the generations, the folk had learned to use the yearly flood season to grow their crops and fertilize their fields with the rich silt the flooding brought. But the floods did not allow for large-scale, permanent buildings in stone.
Only here, on the Hill of Helder, did the people of Ghennet build in stone.
Saon City was a warren, a crazy, winding labyrinth of streets, lanes, bridges, underpasses, and tall blocks of houses with thousands of tiny windows glowing out into the night. In the old days, when war was more common, there had been a high wall around the city, but over the years, the wall had fallen into disrepair, the stones had been harvested for use in new buildings, and now the city spilled down the hill toward the flat lands.
On the outskirts of the city, the assassins of the Night Guild walked.
Ronan Renzo and his companions had traveled several days through Ghennet to get here. On their backs, secreted in packs of soft black leather, they carried precious cargo — the unhatched eggs of dragons. One egg was black and silver, one green and blue, and one red and gold.
A fourth egg, yellow and blue, had already hatched, and the dragon of sacred fire who had taken the name Fury now soared and fed and slept above the northern mountains.
But Ronan and his friends had their mission. They were going to hatch all three of the remaining eggs, and that was no easy task. The eggs must be bathed in the affinity element of the dragon that would hatch. They must be soaked in the blood of folk killed in battle, and they must be inhabited with the willing ghost of a human.
Ronan and his companions had taken on this mission at the behest of their patron, the Night God.
Ronan, Eric, and Diana were assassins, trained in the Night Guild of the Twelve Isles. Tanya, who walked with them, was a highly-trained alumnus of Daeron’s Guild, one of the best fighter guilds in the Twelve Isles. Between them, they made a powerful team.
Their mission was no ordinary one. Usually, a team of Night Guild assassins would be working out of the Night Guild, back in Trentum City. But fate had a different plan for these three. They had traveled north with the dragon eggs under the orders of the Night God himself, that mysterious deity who was the powerful divine patron of the guilds of darkness.
Diana, her brown hair tied back tightly from her pleasant, alert face, looked around at the quiet streets. “I’ve not been in Saon City for a long time,” she said. “When I was a girl growing up on my father’s estate in the riverlands of Ghennet, I used to travel here with him sometimes. Back then, the city was nowhere near as extensive as it is now.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to get the supplies we need for our journey north without too much difficulty?” Eric asked. He was a big northerner, his blue eyes and ice-blond hair standing out in marked contrast to Diana’s mellower Ghennetian coloring, and even more so to Ronan’s black hair and sun-browned skin.
“We should be able to,” Diana answered. “Saon City sees enough trade that we should not stand out too much.”
“It’s money that I’m worried about,” Ronan said. “We left Trentum with little enough, and we’ve not gained much more on our way.”
Tanya chuckled. “You did insist on giving away your bounty for assassinating the pirate captain back in the Scattered Isles.”
Ronan smiled at her. “The islanders needed it more. Perhaps we will be able to find some work in Saon City?”
“Or we could steal supplies,” Eric suggested. “We’re all more than capable of doing so.”
“Let’s wait and see,” Ronan said. “We have enough money to get an inn for the rest of the night if we want to, and then we can see what the situation is. I don’t want to cause too much of a stir if I can help it, and a spate of thefts is likely to draw attention.”
As they ascended the hill, the streets became busier despite the lateness of the hour. They passed the old wall and came into the oldest part of the city. Here, a single main road ran like a great river with many small tributaries snaking off from it. The road led straight up the spine of the hill, and at the top, lit by many torches, the friends could see the outline of the king’s castle.
The street was flanked on either side by tall stone buildings. Ronan looked up in amazement — he had never seen buildings so tall before. They seemed to teeter impossibly high on either side. Windows peeped out from all parts of the walls, most dark, but some glowing with warm light.
On the lower floors of the buildings, there were shop fronts, inns, and taverns. Most of these were shuttered up for the night, but several of the inns had lamps hanging outside the doors to show that travelers might still find a welcome despite the lateness of the hour.
“This looks like a decent prospect,” Ronan said, looking up at one of the inns. The clean frontage, bright-painted sign, and polished glass of the window all attracted him. “A place that keeps their outside so well-kept should also keep their beds in good condition.”
The others laughed and agreed. Inside, they were welcomed without too much interest by a heavy-set, disinterested-looking man, who showed them to a set of two rooms. In Ghennet, men and women who were not married were not permitted to sleep in the same room, so Eric and Ronan got one room and Tanya and Diana took the other.
“That innkeeper didn’t seem to want to look too closely at us,” Eric said, “even with our strange clothes.”
Ronan nodded. “I noticed that. It’s a good thing. Hopefully, all the citizens of Saon will be equally disinterested.”
It was their first night in a real bed in a long time. Assassins of the Night Guild did not sleep in the same way as other people; they drifted into a state of deep awareness, resting their minds while remaining alert to their surroundings. In this state, an assassin could even travel, sending his awareness out from his body into the world around him. Ronan did not choose to do this tonight, however. He was tired, and he allowed his consciousness to drift where it wished as he sank into the clean, comfortable bed.
Morning came, bright and cold, the sun blazing in through the windows of the little room. At breakfast, the four travelers sat together at a round table in the inn’s common room, eating a good breakfast and drinking the strange-tasting tea that was the ubiquitous drink for the people of Ghennet.
Diana, who had been born and raised in Ghennet, drank the tea with great relish. Ronan found the taste a little bitter for his liking, but it had a pleasantly stimulating effect on his mind, making him feel excited about the day ahead.
The people around them spoke Ghennetian. Ronan and Eric had worked hard in recent weeks to gain a rudimentary knowledge of the langu age, and they were pleased to find that they understood enough to know what was being spoken about. As a native of the land, Diana spoke the language fluently, and even Tanya, having grown up not far from the border, had a good understanding of the local tongue.
How much the Ghennetians could understand of the Twelve Isles language was another question. Ronan and his friends did not think much was understood of that language here, but they kept their voices low all the same.
The talk was all of the events of recent days. The Silent Brotherhood Temple had exploded, it was said, and many of the brothers had died in the explosion. Kaishog, a senior member of the brotherhood, had escaped the disaster and come to the city to see the king only two days earlier. The Ghennetians were all firm devotees of the god Mala and revered the brotherhood, and they were deeply disturbed by the events.
It wouldn't have been a good thing for Ronan and his friends if the locals had gotten wind of the true nature of the events. It was no explosion, but rather the actions of the four companions that had brought about the destruction of the temple.
Their coming had freed an ancient dragon from under the temple, and it was the dragon rising that had destroyed the place. It was their presence, and their pursuit of the secrets of their enemies, that had brought about the destruction.
Thankfully, there seemed little chance of the travelers being blamed. The inn had several travelers patronizing its clean beds and hearty breakfasts that day, and Ronan’s group did not stand out, even with their night-black clothes and heavy packs. The world was large and full of strange peoples, and the Ghennetians seemed content to let those who passed through do so without challenge.
So, the three companions listened quietly to the talk of the people around them. As they heard talk of Kaishog, the senior member of the Silent Brotherhood who was said to have arrived in the city and gone straight to the king, they all looked at one another. In the Silent Brotherhood temple, they had met Kaishog for themselves.
He was a terrifying figure. A man whose face was no longer the face of a human. Instead of features of flesh, the man had a skull of gold, bare and exposed to the air.
Two crazed eyes stared out, lidless, from the skull’s eye sockets, but that was the only human feature remaining. From within the skull’s malevolently grinning mouth, a horrible, shrill voice came, but there was no sign of a tongue.
“So,” Ronan said to his companions, “the gold skull survived and has come here.”
He spoke low and in the Twelve Isles language, thinking it to be the best chance that the locals would not understand. They were well out of earshot at their small table, and no one was paying them any particular notice, but still, the habit of discretion ran deep. “The fact that Kaishog has gone straight to the king does not bode well for Ghennet,” Diana said. “The brotherhood must have engrained themselves deeply into the fabric of power here if the king’s court is Kaishog’s preferred refuge.”
“I agree,” Eric said. “They must have powerful influence at the king’s court.”
“Magic can do strange things to people,” Tanya said. “It can cause a lust for further power that is no good for anyone, and that draws in anyone who is near the orbit of that power.”
Tanya had some magic herself. She had been trained at a Twelve Isles fighter guild, and so her power was to boost the strength and speed of melee fighters. During their travels, the powers of the Night Guild assassins and Tanya’s powers had merged. Now Tanya had some of the abilities of a trained Night Guild fighter, while Ronan and his friends could boost their melee ability. This was useful for everyone as the Night Guild were not trained in face-to-face combat, and the fighter guild acolytes were not trained in stealth.
In addition to the presence of the Night God, Ronan and his friends found the god of the fighter guild, Valandrus, as a presence in their minds as well. This was an unprecedented situation as everyone in the Twelve Isles guilds was usually limited to the patronage of only one god, but Ronan and his friends were not complaining; they would need all the power they could get.
They looked over their supplies and their gold.
“It’s not enough to get us to Norskand,” Eric said. “No way. And when we get toward the northlands, we’ll need new clothes. Our Night Guild robes may keep us warm here in the temperate lands, but winter is on its way, and by the time we get to Norskand, we’ll need furs and heavy boots if we want to survive.”
“We’ll need to find some way of getting coin,” Ronan said. “I think the best way would be to present ourselves as travelers in need of work and see where that takes us. There may be opportunities to earn enough coin for supplies and find out more about what is going on in the city while we’re at it. I’m keen to head north and hatch our second dragon, but I don’t like the idea of leaving Kaishog here unchallenged behind us.”
It was agreed that they would put feelers out and see where fate led them in this strange city. When they were done eating, Ronan stood and went to speak to the landlord.
“Well, young man,” the landlord said, speaking Ghennetian slowly and carefully for Ronan’s benefit. “I hope all was to your liking?”
“It was, thank you,” Ronan replied carefully in the same tongue. The landlord smiled at his effort. “But I was wondering,” Ronan continued, “if there is any opportunity for work that you might have heard of recently? My friends and I have just arrived in the city, and we were hoping to make ourselves useful if you understand me.”
The landlord looked him up and down with a very knowing look. His previously unobservant attitude was replaced by a very keen glance. “I do understand you,” he said. “Or at least I think I do. You and your friends look like a very capable lot. I think you’ll find… opportunities aplenty if you look in the right places.”
Something about the way the man said the words made Ronan wonder what he meant. It felt to him that the landlord might have gotten the wrong idea, but before Ronan could correct him, the man leaned in close, gesturing for Ronan to come closer.
“Listen, young man, you need to keep an eye out for yourself and your friends. Have a care. There’s trouble about — as you may have heard. There are not many in town who would begrudge a young man like yourself the chance for some honest work… or some not-so-honest work, even. But just at present, there are too many things going on for my liking, and it’s hard for me to recommend you to anyone without warning you upfront about the risk. You may find more trouble here than you’ve bargained for if you go about things the wrong way.”
Ronan nodded sagely. “I know how to be discreet, and so do my friends.”
Clearly, the trouble the landlord referred to was the destruction of the Silent Brotherhood Temple, but what kind of work this man had access to was not yet clear. Ronan wondered if this fellow really did have work for him until the man leaned back and looked him in the face, smiling.
“Hmmm. Good,” the innkeeper said. “You’ll find the one place to look for the kind of work you’re after is up at the castle itself. The king’s guard are always looking for capable people to carry out missions for them, and if you do well, you might even find yourself in the favor of the court. Maybe this is the start of a glorious career for you and your friends, eh?”
He looked at Ronan hard for a moment. Ronan raised one eyebrow and said nothing.
The landlord’s smile broadened. “Good man,” he said. “I see you’re looking for something a bit more… low profile. Well, you can always go down to the market stalls by the wall and ask for Harran. He knows plenty of people in the city and can always find work for willing hands.”
Ronan remained silent, feeling that the landlord had something else up his sleeve that he had not yet revealed. The man’s grin grew even wider. “No? Well, if it’s something really special you want, well, perhaps you should come back here tonight, around midnight, and settle yourself in the bar. Alone. Then maybe I’ll have something for you myself.”
Ronan matched the man’s smile. “Thank you,” he said. “For my part, I’m looking to keep my profile low and earn as much coin as possible, as quickly as I can. I think I prefer the last option. That seems to have the most promise.”
