Night guild 2, p.18
Night Guild 2, page 18
Nothing untoward happened between the wall of the Night Guild and the bridge. It was late, and all was quiet, but as they approached the bridge, they saw what they had feared—a group of armed men, standing around the entrance to the bridge.
There were five of them, and they looked like members of one of the high-end Fighter Guilds. They were well-equipped, well-armed, and stood alert at their posts, scanning the area around them for any movement.
“How are we going to deal with this?” Eric asked. “Time is of the essence.”
“I have an idea,” Diana replied. “I’ll cause a distraction, then you can get across the bridge. I’ll follow.”
She quickly outlined her plan, and the others agreed. “No flashing smoke bombs this time,” Ronan said with a smile, remembering Diana’s escapades that had helped him to enter the Malachite temple unseen.
“Not this time,” she said. “Just a simple appeal to the need of those guards to rescue a damsel in distress.”
Shortly afterward, Eric and Ronan were concealed in the shadows of a building near to the entrance of the bridge. They watched as Diana, her stealth field in place and being powered up by shadows she was drawing from the environment, suddenly rushed out of a lane between two buildings and ran toward the guards. Her stealth field was being used to convince the guards that they were seeing what they expected to see—in this case, a disheveled, frightened, beautiful young woman who they needed to help.
“There’s ten of them!” Diana screamed. “They stole my purse and then tried to pull me down into a building! They got my friend, and took her into the building. I only just managed to get away! You have to help me!”
The men glanced at each other, plainly wondering if this was something worth leaving their post for, when Diana added, “They were a member of Bayron’s Fighting Guild—they had the insignia on their robes!”
This was a clever move, and Ronan grinned when he saw the reaction. Diana had put some effort into studying the Fighting Guilds of the Twelve Isles. These men were from Carral’s Fighting Guild, and it was well known that the men of Bayron’s guild were their sworn enemies. The chance of catching men of their hated rival guild in the act of robbery and possibly worse, perpetrated against two beautiful young women, was too much to resist.
“You stay there,” the captain of the guards ordered one of the men. “Look after her.”
Diana made a show of collapsing into the arms of the man who had been ordered to look after her. A moment later, the other four guards vanished down the lane. Diana lifted her hand to the guard’s shoulder as if to pull herself up, but then her fingers found a spot on the man’s neck, just where his neck met his shoulder.
Her fingers pinched down hard and the man collapsed suddenly into a boneless heap.
“Hey!” the man in the watchtower shouted. He had been watching the whole thing. “Hey! What have you done to him?”
The watchman’s shout would alert the others—the assassins had only a moment to cross the bridge, and they took that opportunity. Eric and Ronan darted out of the shadows and Diana joined them as all three sprinted across the bridge and vanished into the maze of streets beyond.
They took a route through the network of grim alleyways and back streets that honeycombed the spaces between the more respectable buildings of the financial guilds, the tradesmen’s guilds, and the architect guilds that made up the presentable face of Trentum City and Uon Island.
Behind these buildings lay the darker side of the city, the place where people who could not work for one reason or another ended up. Here, there were the guilds of those who were mad, those who were addicted to alcohol or other intoxicants, or those who, through debt, gambling, or other financial impropriety, had ended up unable to continue living in the respectable world of the rest of the city. The houses were made of wood and brick, roofed with whatever material could be scavenged, and starved of sunlight by the high buildings that dominated the skyline on either side.
For the regular citizens of Trentum City, these back streets were a no go area—if the citizens even knew that the backstreets existed. But for the members of the Night Guild, the back lanes represented a refuge, a warren of complex, shadow-filled streets that nobody else knew so well.
It was to this warren that the three friends now turned, knowing that the members of the Fighter Guild would be unable to follow them effectively here. They leaped from roof to roof, and darted through narrow lanes, clambered over walls and tore through the deep shadow that filled the alleyways. They made good time, and after less than half an hour’s running they found themselves on the top of a three-storey residential building next to a fish market, looking down on the fisher docks.
“All seems quiet,” Ronan said. “There’s nobody on the docks that I can see.”
“And there’s the boat,” Eric added, pointing toward a small craft that was berthed in the spot where Janus had said it would be.
“We will need to be wary still,” Diana said, “there may be guards about who we have not seen, but we’ll need to chance it.”
They all agreed to this. Time was pressing, and so they slipped down and made their way toward the boat.
All was quiet as they slipped forward, warily watching on every side for any sign of pursuit. There was none.
Stealthily, they approached the boat. The Blue Sky was a neat little craft with one sail and enough room for the three of them—just. It was not a boat that was really designed to journey as far as Oretum. It was more like a small fishing boat for working the narrow waters around the Twelve Isles. But Eric was a competent sailor, and he was confident that, barring some disaster, he would be able to pilot them the day or so in the coastal waters as far as Port Fero, where they could get a larger boat to take them further north.
One by one, they slipped into the boat. Ronan and Diana grabbed an oar each, and Eric untied the ropes and began to unfold the sail.
Silently, they pulled out of the docks. They had escaped from the Twelve Isles with the dragon eggs in tow, but their real mission was just beginning.
They were on their way to their final showdown with the Silent Brotherhood of Ghennet.
Chapter 12
It was deep night when they got out onto the open water. The lights of Trentum city receded fast as Eric got the sail up and caught the swift breeze that was blowing from the west. There was a scattering of stars in the sky, and when Ronan looked up, he could see the long, thin line of faraway stars that represented Rema, the lady of the sky who was said to lean across the night, gazing down on the world below.
There was no moon, but the stars were bright, and they had the advantage of their magically augmented assassin vision, so they had no difficulty seeing their way.
“We will make good time with this breeze behind us,” Eric said. “It feels very good to be on the water again. I used to sail a lot as a child, but I have not had much opportunity to do so at all since coming to the Twelve Isles.”
“I am glad that we have you with us,” Ronan said with a smile. “One thing that I do not have much of is sailing experience. I went out a few times with my father when I was younger, of course, but it was never considered a particularly important skill for me to learn, because as the youngest son, I was unlikely to inherit my father’s business.”
Mention of his father gave Ronan pause, but he shook it off.
“I never sailed at all as a young person,” Diana put in. “The land where I grew up is completely landlocked, and except for a few lakes and rivers, there are a few opportunities for sailing. Horse riding was the thing that I enjoyed most when I was young.”
“That is something that I have never done,” Ronan said. “Horses are scarce in the Twelve Isles, and it’s not considered a noble pursuit the way it is in other Lithian countries.”
“I’ve never ridden a horse either,” Eric added. “There was never much opportunity for the riding of horses in my land. Too much snow and ice.”
“How do the people get about in Norskand?” Ronan asked.
“When we had no option but to travel distances over the snow and ice, we would use a sled pulled by dogs. For shorter journeys, we would use skis and poles. But we did not travel much. The climate was not conducive to it. Anyway, nearly all of the settlements in my home country are on the fjords, the long, deep inlets that turn in from the sea. If a settlement wants to trade with another settlement, they will generally go by boat from fjord to fjord if they can.”
Eric sighed, his nostalgia for his homeland clear in his voice.
The conversation lapsed, and they all thought of the journey that lay ahead of them. They did not know where their path would finally lead, but they all felt that the Silent Brotherhood Temple in the land of Ghennet was almost certainly not going to be the final destination. Images of the snow and ice bound land of Norskand floated through Ronan’s mind.
They took turns at the tiller, Eric showing them the basics of how to operate the small boat, and how to adjust the sail as the wind moved so as to catch the best of the breeze. They talked a little, discussing the road ahead, or examining the map that Tarquin had given them before they left.
The map was good, a detailed representation of the southern coastline from Oretum and the Twelve Isles to Twin Mountain.
“I estimate that it will take around ten days to get from Port Fero to Twin Mountain city,” Eric said, running his finger along the ragged line of the southern Lithian coast. “We will need to brush up on our Ghennetian language before we arrive!”
“Oh,” Diana said, “many of the people of Ghennet speak our tongue, at least well enough to be understood. There should not be much difficulty in that. There are many tradespeople who trained at the Guilds of the Twelve Isles, and the language of the Isles has spread far and wide with them.”
“Still,” Ronan said, thoughtfully, “it would be much better if we could understand what people are saying. I remember quite a lot from our language study in the first year at the guild, but it will be a good use of our time to brush up on our Ghennetian while we are on the boat from Port Fero.”
* * *
They landed at Port Fero as dawn was filling the sky with a spectacular show of oranges, reds, and yellows. Diana and Eric went looking for a likely boat that might take them to Twin Mountain city, while Ronan went up into Viam to buy supplies. They needed to get gear that would work for their mission to get rid of the pirates. They needed to pose as warriors, and for that they would need armor and weapons. Their goal was to motivate the local militias to fight the pirates themselves, but to do that the locals would need to feel that they were being led by people who had combat experience.
It was a new kind of disguise for them. Though all of the assassins in the Twelve Isles were taught the use of swords and shields for face-to-face combat, it was the philosophy of the guild never to enter a fight that they could not win by stealthier means.
This was a different situation.
Ronan bought gear from an armorer in the city, getting padded jerkins and leggings, swords and small shields, light leather helmets, daggers, and a short bow and a quiver of arrows for Eric, who was particularly good with ranged weapons.
He also bought a set of small daggers to replace the ones that had been disappeared by the caryx in their fight on the Kraken’s Revenge. Though they could all use the summoned shadow blades, it would not do to rely on that only. Sometimes, there was no better alternative to cold steel.
Ronan got second-hand gear when he could and made sure it didn’t match. He wanted to give the impression that they were battle-hardened fighters, and so it would not do to show up in brand new matching equipment.
Eventually, he had everything he wanted. He hired a small handcart from the merchant on the promise that he would drop it off at a certain inn on the docks and set off back along the road to Port Fero in the bright morning sun.
When he returned to the port, he found that Diana and Eric had also made good progress. They had found a boat that was leaving for Twin Mountain that very morning, and the captain, upon hearing Diana’s fluent Ghennetian speech, had agreed to give them passage at a very fair price.
Diana had given the captain their agreed cover story; that they were three cousins who had been training at one of the merchant guilds in the Twelve Isles and were going to visit family in Ghennet. The captain accepted this without question and gave them a small cabin for the three of them to share.
Ronan dropped off the cart as agreed and packed his newly purchased gear into a heavy sack, which he flung over his shoulder. After a hurried breakfast in one of the few inns that was open at this early hour, they made their way aboard the ship.
It was a generously sized vessel, and they found that there was no problem with moving around comfortably on board. Their cabin, though simple, was perfectly comfortable and met all of their needs. They ate in the mess with the other passengers—mostly merchants and traders from Viam headed for Twin Mountain—and slept in their cabin. During the days, they rested and practiced their Ghennetian with Diana, and spent time in prayer to the Night God in the morning and the evening.
They prayed so regularly that the other passengers began to joke and call them ‘the pious cousins,’ and comment on the powerful faith of those from the Twelve Isles. By the end of the journey, the other passengers had been inspired by the assassins’ practice. Rather to the discomfiture of the assassins, several of the other passengers began joining them for prayer, kneeling silently and giving thanks to whatever God was their chosen favorite.
Thus, it happened that Ronan and his friends found themselves praying to the Night God in company with an old merchant giving prayers to Mala, a young woman praying to Anaxis, and a strange priest who called his deity ‘the nameless one’ and muttered under his breath as he knelt with them at the back of the ship in the salt spray.
Really, the hardest part of the whole job was maintaining their incognito for the duration of the trip. A ship is not a large space to share with other passengers, and there is not very much to do except talk to each other. The three assassins could not completely avoid talking to the other passengers, and they ended up having to improvise an extensive backstory for their fictional Ghennetian family and their training in the Twelve Isles. They stuck together at all times, listening to each other’s embellishments on the story, and eventually they agreed that the improvisation and memorization of each other’s additions to the tale had been a valuable exercise.
“After all,” Ronan said, “an assassin should be able to lie, and lie well, whenever needed. It’s good practice.”
They could not help worrying about their friends back at the Night Guild. Tarquin would no doubt get in trouble from the High Guild Council of the Twelve Isles, as well as from the Night Guild Council, once it had been discovered the dragon eggs were gone. He might be removed from his office as guildmaster for letting them go with the dragon eggs, or even worse, he might be punished for disobeying the council. But he had been willing to risk that. The three friends were in no doubt that Tarquin fully understood all the risks—probably better than they did themselves. They would fulfil their mission. That would be the best way they could honor him for the risk he’d taken in the name of this mission.
Their mission. Ronan spent a lot of time on the voyage thinking about their mission. They were aiming to reactivate three dragon eggs, with the goal of hatching them and bringing dragons back into the world. Ronan did not know what consequences this action would bring. Dragons; he knew nearly nothing about them. The legend was that long years ago, dragons were common in the world, and they had a large part to play in the day-to-day life of humanity.
Dragons required management. They were huge beasts, with equally huge appetites, and they were intelligent, as intelligent as humans, if not more so. They did not take kindly to having rules forced upon them by others, and a human town that had a locally resident dragon would do well to prepare a regular tribute of cattle or sheep for the great lizard.
But there was more to the dragons than just being large carnivores with large appetites. The legends said that the dragons had strange powers, not limited to the classic story that they could create clouds of elements from their breath. Ice dragons could summon up a storm of snow and ice particles. Fire dragons could create an inferno with single breath. The dragons who had an affinity with rocks and metal could create terrifying blasts of stone or whirling clouds of sharp metal shards.
But it was said that they had other, stranger and more mysterious powers even than this, but of those powers, no clue remained in legend.
Because of their impressive powers, it grew to be the case in the old world that dragons were coveted allies. Kings and other rulers of Lithian principalities sought out the dragons and tried to make alliance with them. Having a dragon on one side could make the difference between defeat and victory. Many were the old stories in which the changing alliances of dragons made or broke the fates of kingdoms, or even of mighty empires.
When he thought on this, Ronan had his moments of doubt. Could it be that the Silent Brotherhood were right in their desire to keep dragons as a myth and not a reality? But then he thought of Guildmaster Tarquin and his Book of the Fates, the upright moral code of the Night Guild, and the terrible magic that the Silent Brotherhood were engaged in. No, he thought, we are doing the right thing. We are right to oppose the Silent Brotherhood, and their desire to keep dragons from the world is a good enough reason alone to bring the dragons back.
The weather was kind to them as they traveled north and then west along the coast of Lithia. The seas were busy, and many small fishing vessels plied the coastal waters, accompanied by larger ships that moved goods north and south through the sheltered coastal waters of the Middle Sea.
After ten days of uneventful journeying, they got their first sight of Twin Mountain. They went to the ship’s rail with the other passengers, looking out at the two tall mountains that gave the city its name. The mountains rose abruptly out of a flat, green country, so tall that they still had the remains of snow on the top, and so similar in shape and size that they looked like mirror images of each other. At the mountains’ feet lay the city that was their destination.
