Night guild 3, p.22
Night Guild 3, page 22
“Let us wait here,” Janus said quietly. “From here, we can see everything that goes on down on the docks. There are enough fighters down there that effort probably won’t be needed, but we can intervene if it becomes necessary.”
At the entrance to the prison building, there was a flurry of activity. The double gates opened, and a small knot of figures was led out. Even at this distance, Ronan could recognize his old friend Redwin, and Tella, his wife. Ronan clenched his teeth in anger. There was a large purple bruise over Redwin’s left eye, and Tella hung her head, looking frightened. Several other prisoners were being hustled along behind them, all under the watchful eye of a team of tough, experienced-looking parthayeen.
The prisoners were led out onto the dock. Their guards cleared a way roughly through the press of onlookers. All the regular traffic on the Outlander Dock had ceased, and the locals stood back, watching the scene with barely concealed resentment.
To Ronan’s eye, it was clear that the populous of the Twelve Isles was in no way supportive of the new arrangement of power in the city.
The prisoners were headed for a ship that was berthed at a nearby point, bobbing gently in the water. Guards waited on the deck of a ship and also on the dock around the gangway that would take the prisoners on board.
“It seems a very tightly controlled operation,” Ronan whispered to Janus at his side.
“The guards are taking no chances,” Janus agreed. “I hope we have enough fighters to make the difference.”
At that moment, the trap was sprung.
There was a sudden surge of movement from the crowd around the guarded prisoners. The prisoners were now at the middle point between the exit from the prison and the entrance to the ship.
This was the most vulnerable point, and the rebels were about to take full advantage of it.
As the rebel fighters pushed through the watching crowd, the common folk on the dock parted to let them pass, seeing what was happening, and fully supporting it.
The rebels moved swiftly toward the guards in five columns — two coming from either side and one from behind. As they closed on the prisoners, the two parthayeen at the front of the column suddenly turned and plunged the spearpoints of their polearms into the armored chests of the guards behind them.
Blood spilled in the street, and someone screamed.
The two parthayeen who had attacked their fellows pulled off the helmets to reveal the dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin of Twelve Isles natives. Somehow, Twelve Isles rebel fighters had managed to infiltrate the parthayeen guards, taking advantage of their over-decorated helmets, which completely covered the faces of the guards, making it impossible to discover the replacement.
“That’s clever,” Ronan said. “Now the other guards are not sure who to trust.”
It was true.
The other guards in the column were now looking at one another suspiciously. They were trying to close ranks, when another of their number suddenly lashed out with his sword, taking out the man beside him and then turning his attention on the next closest parthayeen soldier.
At that moment, the columns of advancing rebels crashed into the sides and back of the little party. The parthayeen guards from the ship advanced, pushing their way through the crowd, but they found that the citizens of Trentum were in the way.
The spectators on the dock were not actively fighting the guards, but they were getting in the way. The guards from the ship roared in anger, and one of them lashed out with his spear.
A townsman who stood nearby screamed in pain and shock, his blood fountaining out into the clear morning air.
There was a muffled gasp of shock from the crowd around them, then deadly silence. Ronan guessed this was the first time that the parthayeen had gone so far as to kill a citizen of Trentum in the street.
Then a yell from a parthayeen officer broke the silence. “The prisoners! The prisoners are getting away! Form up, move out, and kill anyone who gets in your way!”
His voice was shrill with panic and anger. At his words, the murmur of the crowd suddenly rose loud, and the onlookers all surged forward at once, shouting in outrage. The parthayeen were suddenly faced with not only a well-armed and well-drilled band of rebel fighter guild members but also a whole pack of angry guildsfolk.
Ronan saw the parthayeen officer glancing around in rising panic as the crowd pushed him and his men toward the docks and the ship that had been supposed to hold the prisoners.
Ronan thought that the ship might end up being a useful safe haven for the parthayeen guards. In the press of people and the sudden chaos that had erupted, the prisoners had been spirited out of the press.
From the vantage point of the roof, Ronan saw Redwin and his wife, along with the other prisoners, casting dark hoods over their faces and hurrying away in the company of a group of rebels who included, he now saw, Tanya and a tall, red-haired man who he recognized as Daeron, the leader of the fighter guild where Tanya had trained.
The parthayeen were reforming, and they had now been reinforced by men from the ship. They formed a line fifteen strong, their pikes pointed outward at the angry crowd. Their captain, the officer who had screamed out the order to kill anybody who got in the way, was standing at the left-hand end of the line, glaring out through the slit in his helmet at the crowd of civilians.
“That man is going to do something drastic,” Ronan said with certainty to Janus. “We need to take action otherwise he’s going to kill more civilians.”
“I need to concentrate on my mission,” Janus said doubtfully. “I can’t be drawn from that; my men need my leadership when they get the prisoners back to the safe house.”
“Leave it to us,” Ronan said grimly. “Eric, Emelia, Diana — with me.”
He slipped over the edge of the roof and, followed by his friends, clambered down and slipped into the crowd.
It was an unnerving sensation, moving through the crowd without the benefit of his stealth field. The people in the crowd around him very much saw him and his friends, but they let him pass without incident. A few of them recognized his clothing as the uniform of the Night Guild.
“The Night Guild,” the murmur ran through the crowd. “The Night Guild have come at last.”
Ronan was glad to hear people saying this.
To him, this meant that the folk in the crowd did not know that the betrayal had actually started at the Night Guild. They had no idea that the Night God had vanished, which was why the Night Guild had been silent all these recent weeks.
Though secret, the existence of the Night Guild was really rather well known within the community in the city. People did not know where the guild was based, but they knew that it existed, they knew what the uniform looked like, and above all, they were deeply proud of the efficiency of this part of Trentum’s guild culture.
The crowd let Ronan and his friends slip through toward the guards, just in time.
Ronan reached the far end of the parthayeen line just as the furious and frightened officer raised his pike and drew breath to give the order to charge. The man’s face was a twisted, cruel mix of fear and anger, and his shrill voice was about to ring out, ordering the soldiers around him to kill the innocent guildsfolk of the city.
Ronan stepped silently from the crowd. The man’s attention was focused forward, and he did not see the assassin who stepped quickly up, keeping in his blind spot. Ronan’s knife flashed in the sun, and the blade dipped into the man’s jugular vein, blood blasting steaming out into the air as his order died in his throat. The man staggered forward, and as he did so, the other three assassins attacked from the opposite side of the line.
Five parthayeen guards fell before the others could form up. The crowd roared and surged forward, pressing the remainder back toward the gangway up to the ship. Two guards tried to push forward and attack the nearest townsfolk. They died with the assassins’ weapons in their chests before they could strike.
That was enough for the remainder of the parthayeen. They ran up into the ship, and a group of unarmored men onboard made quick work of drawing the gangway up. The crowd rushed up to the ship, shouting angrily, and Ronan and his friends drew together.
“Let’s slip away,” Diana suggested. “This crowd is ready to tear these parthayeen apart, but the parthayeen don’t seem likely to hang about to be attacked.”
“You’re right,” Ronan agreed. “We’ll get back to the safe house and…”
But his words were cut off by a sudden change in the tone of the crowd. The confident anger was suddenly replaced by a gasp of amazement and fear, and the people around Ronan pulled back from the edge of the dock.
Ronan looked up to see what was happening, and then it was his turn to stare in amazement out at the water.
There was a dragon in the bay.
It was enormous, as big as a whale, and it was cutting along just below the surface of the green water that surrounded the Twelve Isles. Green and blue flashed along the skin of the beast, and the huge, sinuous, snakelike form of the dragon lengthened under the water, stretching out behind the enormous head in a long and terrifyingly large unfurling.
The monster’s head broke the surface.
Tide, the sea dragon, had grown more than Ronan would have thought possible in the short space of time they had been apart. The seawater ran off his huge head like waterfalls as he shook himself, his great mane of green and blue spikes ruffling up around his neck.
He was still very much a sea serpent, not a dragon in any traditional sense. For some reason, all the dragons of the ancient legends were winged creatures of the air, but this one was a creature of the water, his gills pulsing even as he drew in a huge breath of air from above the water. Clearly, here was a creature who could breathe both on land and under the water. But there were no wings, and the beast did not seem to have grown feet in the time he’d been away either. He was a sea creature, through and through, with the nose at the front of his head being the only nod toward his airborne cousins.
It made Ronan wonder how many other kinds of dragons there might be out there, and for a moment, his mind went back to the map of the world, with all its hundreds of little colored dots spread out all over the known world. There could be all different kinds of dragons out there… perhaps more than anyone could imagine.
“Ronan!” Tide boomed in a voice like rolling breakers. “Ronan, I have come back to you as I promised! Come to me now!”
The crowd fell back in rising fear and panic. To them, this creature seemed merely a huge sea-serpent of the kind that terrorized merchant ships in the southern seas on the journey round the coast of Afrik to the spice isles of the east.
But this was no mere sea serpent, and the sight of the dragon’s head, plus the fact that it spoke an intelligible Lithian dialect, made the people even more afraid than they would have been if it was just a common sea serpent.
Ronan heard many voices muttering prayers to the gods of whatever guilds the people were affiliated with. Little flashes of bright light, many different colors, lit up around the hands of many who prayed. The gods of most of the guilds were fairly tame creatures, not immensely powerful or particularly willful. The great gods, such as the Night God, were a different kind of being, but the common gods of the guildsfolk were still able to intervene and provide some protection against certain threats to life.
Ronan, to his surprise and pleasure, realized that he was suddenly aware of the presence of all the many small gods who had just been invoked. This was a new sensation; since the Night God’s disappearance, all awareness of magic of this kind had vanished. The feeling of the whispering of many gods against his senses was a welcome change.
“Tide!” Ronan cried in as loud a voice as he could muster. “I am here. Friends, let me pass. I must speak with this noble creature.”
The crowd gave way in silent awe as Ronan, flanked by Eric, Diana, and Emelia, walked boldly forward to the edge of the dock to speak to the enormous blue and green shimmering sea dragon.
A glance to the right showed Ronan that the parthayeen ship that had been meant to take the prisoners away had shut up its gangway but had not cast off. The parthayeen onboard, and the crew, had all moved to the rail of the ship to look in amazement at the dragon.
“Are you content that you’ve learned the ways of the sea, as you intended?” Ronan asked Tide.
“I am,” the dragon replied, his mouth moving into a surprisingly human-like smile. “I have seen much of the deeps and have traveled fast and far to come round the Lithian coast and find you here. And I have learned more. I have learned to communicate with the other dragons. And I have learned how to travel to the realm of the gods, through the portals deep in the waters.”
“There are portals through to the realm of the gods under the sea?”
“Deep in the sea, and high in the air, yes, that is where the entrances lie. But there is no time for this talk. You must come with me. I must take you to the portal under the ocean. Fury has sent me his message — you must come to him, for he cannot come to you. I must take you there, right now, and transport you through into the realm of the gods.”
Ronan was keenly aware of the crowd at his back. It felt like half the population of the Twelve Isles was on the dock, watching and listening to this conversation. Not the most discreet way to conduct business, and for a trained assassin like Ronan, it was a highly unusual feeling.
Ronan looked at his friends, then back at Fury. “How deep is this portal?” he asked. “How long will it take to get there?”
“Oh, very deep,” the dragon replied cheerfully. “I’m don’t know how to measure in your human time, but it is quite a long way.”
Clearly, the dragon was not seeing the problem that was obvious to Ronan and his companions.
“But my friend,” Ronan said gently to the dragon, “we are humans. We will drown in deep water. You may take us to the portal, but we would not survive the journey.”
The dragon looked distressed as he understood what Ronan meant. “Of course,” he said. “I did not think. I have so little experience with humans.” He glanced around, clearly unhappy and unsure what to do. “I suppose,” he began, “I could try to find one closer to the surface… but it’s very urgent, and the ocean is so big. I do not want to delay.”
Ronan glanced at Eric, who shrugged ruefully. “I can’t think of any way we can manage it,” he said, shaking his head. Emelia, who stood near Eric, looked scared.
But Diana looked excited. She was hunting through her belt much for something, and a moment later she gave a little cry of satisfaction as she pulled something from the depths of her belt pouch.
“Diana, what’s that you have?” Ronan asked.
“Sea breath,” she announced, holding up three little green pellets of compressed leaves. “A potion that I was working on before we left. I didn’t think we would have use for it, and I’d almost forgotten about it, but it seems they will come in handy after all.”
“I thought sea breath was a lost potion recipe that no one knew how to make anymore!” Ronan said. The sea breath pellet was legendary. It was a very specific blend of herbs, treated with a tincture of magical potion, that would allow an assassin the ability to breathe underwater for a limited amount of time.
Diana grinned. “I guess all that time in the library during my early days at the guild paid off,” she said. Then she glanced at Emelia and Eric. “But I only have three doses of sea breath potion. We won’t all be able to go.”
“That’s an easy choice to make,” Emelia said firmly. “I will not go to the realm of the gods. I am no dragon rider. I’ve played my part so far, but I fear too much what I might find if I tried to go through to the other realm. You must go, I will not.”
“Very well,” Ronan said. “Find Janus and the others. You will have your part to play in the rebellion.”
Taking a sudden decision, Ronan whirled round to face the crowd. He straightened his shoulders and cried out in a booming voice that carried across the heads of the gathered islanders, “The time for rebellion had come! The citizens of the Twelve Isles must rise up to restore order to the city. The High Guild Council has been corrupted by outside influences, and the head of the Night Guild has been imprisoned. You must join with the rebels, now. Janus, the rebel leader, and Daeron, the leader of the fighter guilds, are the people you must follow. Find them! Spread the word! Take back the Twelve Isles in the name of the people who live here!”
The citizens all cheered, and Ronan saw a few older, more experienced guildsfolk taking charge, calling out orders to the people around them and rallying them to pull together.
Ronan saw a few other people too, faces he recognized from earlier on, moving through the crowd. Some of the rebel band that had led the escape earlier were now returning to the crowd, giving instructions and handing out weapons.
“Hurry, humans,” Tide said in his booming, watery voice. “We must go. Fury said it was most urgent.”
“Time for us to go,” Ronan said.
Ronan, Eric, and Diana took one of the little herbal pellets each and bit down on them. A bitter, salty taste flooded Ronan’s mouth as the potion was released and ran out onto his tongue.
“Good luck,” Emelia said with feeling, then slipped into the crowd.
Tide came crashing toward them, pushing through the crowded boats in the harbor and shouldering them aside like an impatient man in a crowd. He managed to move remarkably gently, however, and though the boats were moved out of the way, they were not destroyed.
All, that is, except the parthayeen prison transport.
When Tide reached the edge of the wharf, he raised his head up and loomed over the parthayeen boat. He glared at it and then opened his mouth.
His eye flicked toward Ronan as if asking for confirmation. Ronan raised an eyebrow, then nodded his head once.
The dragon blasted a gout of seawater from his jaws. The water blasted out with extreme force, under such pressure that it formed a high-powered jet, almost as devastating as Fury’s sacred fire.
The water smashed into the center of the boat with all the force of a rock falling from the heavens. Timber flew into the air, masts shattered, and water surged and foamed around the ship. In an instant, the parthayeen boat was swamped.
