Night guild 2, p.7
Night Guild 2, page 7
“Come here, spirit,” Seth commanded, addressing the ragged figure. As if pulled on a string, the figure moved toward them, but he did not walk. His feet and legs did not move. He floated, like a boat moving across still water in a gentle breeze.
As he approached, he looked only at Seth, ignoring the others completely. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out. Then he looked at the bag of bones on the coffin and raised one hand, pointing at the sack with a look of distress.
“Yes,” Seth said in a soothing tone. “We have something of yours here. You have been very patient, but do not fear. Your patience has been rewarded. Stick by me, and soon you will find a restful place.”
The spirit nodded, one eye still on the sack.
“Come with me,” Seth said. “I have reserved one of our guild buildings for this work.”
They followed the guildsman to a low wooden hut, a ramshackle structure of black wood with a single, unglazed window that yawned like an open mouth. Seth pushed the door open, and Ronan, Diana, and Tarquin followed him inside.
“Lay the coffin on the floor,” Seth instructed them, “and place the bag of bones on this table.”
Except for a trestle table made of rough wood, and a small wooden box in one corner, the space was empty. The table, Ronan thought uncomfortably, looked as if it had been designed to hold a corpse for examination. It was just the right length, and too tall to sit at, even if there had been any chairs.
The room was lit by a single torch which flickered in a sconce by the door. Seth, seeming perfectly comfortable in this eerie chamber, moved to the wooden box. He flipped it open and took out a branch of candles, which he lit from the torch by the door. Placing these on the table, he lifted the sack full of bones and opened it, tipping the contents gently out onto the table.
After shaking the bag and carefully turning it inside out to make sure he hadn’t missed any, he dropped the sack to the floor and looked at Ronan. “Did you get them all?” he asked.
Ronan swallowed. “Yes, I think so. I had a careful look in the earth around the skeleton, so I think I would have noticed if I had missed any.”
“Good enough,” Seth said. “I will attempt the magic.”
The lost spirit had remained by the door, but now it drifted forward and hung by Seth’s side, looking down at the pile of disarticulated bones. Its mouth moved silently.
“Yes,” Seth said, as if replying to words that only he could hear, “these are yours. Do not be afraid. Soon, we will put them back in order for you.”
Ronan looked at the spirit and tried to reconcile the appearance of this poor, confused ghost with the hard eyes and merciless face of the assassin who had killed his father. Perhaps, he thought, if you stripped away all the experience of the man and brought him back just to the essence of himself, perhaps then he would look like that. Perhaps the appearance of the ghost resembles how he saw himself, rather than how he appeared to the rest of the world?
“Your thoughts are not your own here, Ronan,” Seth said quietly. “I can hear you if you are not very careful to shield. You are right, however. This man’s face and body appear as he saw himself, not as others saw him. In death, it’s remarkable how little the things we thought mattered actually do matter, and how much our own honest view of ourselves truly comes to the fore. You must bear this spirit no ill will, Ronan. The spirit is not to blame for the actions of his body in life.”
“I do not blame him,” Ronan said quietly. “I can see now that what you say is true. It’s a valuable lesson for a living man to know.”
“And yet also a dangerous one,” Seth countered, “for it can make a man believe that what he does in life does not matter. They do—the consequences of a person’s actions matter a great deal in the large scheme of things. Death is a release from the consequences and priorities of life, but that does not mean that what you do in your life does not matter. Remember that.”
Ronan nodded.
“But enough talk,” Seth muttered. “I have work to do, both for my friend Tarquin, and for this poor spirit.”
He held out his hands and the sleeves of his robe fell back to show his hands to the others. Ronan heard Diana gasp, and he himself took a step backward. The first impression was that Seth had hands made from metal, but a moment later the light glinted on them, and Ronan realized that the guildsman wore gloves made of a bright metal. They gleamed as bright as silver and looked like the armored gloves that the heavy, steel clad knights and professional soldiers of the north and central Lithian states were said to wear. Nobody went so far in the Twelve Isles, not least because it was too hot to be wearing such gear. Besides, warfare of any serious kind had not been seen in the Twelve Isles or in Oretum for five hundred years. Though there were brawls in the streets, and sometimes conflicts between hired fighter guilds would escalate into larger scale street battles, nobody in Trentum City ever wore any armor more than a leather jerkin and some chainmail.
But Guildsman Seth had articulated steel gauntlets covering his hands and wrists. They were of a beautifully sophisticated design, with lobstered finger plates that gave his hands and fingers complete freedom of movement. They were also light, so that he moved his hands and fingers back and forth across the table with as much ease as if his gloves had been made of leather rather than solid steel.
Seth held his hands out over the pile of bones on the table and began muttering words, too quiet for Ronan to hear properly, but the strange sound of the words gave Ronan a chill that ran up and down his spine like tickling fingers.
A cold and blue, unworldly light flowed from Seth’s hands. Letters shone out on his gloves, done in tiny etchings that were so small and neat that they had not been visible to Ronan until now. He leaned forward, fascinated despite the eeriness of the scene. He glanced up at Diana and Tarquin and saw them both standing perfectly still, their gazes fixed on the table, and their faces strangely illuminated by the eerie, otherworldly blue light.
And then the bones began to move.
They heard a hideous scraping sound as the skull was dragged, as if by an invisible hand, across the wooden surface and up to the head of the table. Next, vertebrae and shoulder blades dragged themselves upward, followed by the many parts of the rib cage forming up around the vertebra. Long arm bones slipped into place, and then the hips and legs formed at the same time as the twenty-seven bones of the hand slipped into place on the left hand and then on the right.
In less than a minute after Seth had begun speaking his magical commands, a fully articulated skeleton had formed from the disordered pile of bones that had been tipped out from the bag onto the table in front of them.
The ragged ghost was the only one present who seemed unaffected by the light. He seemed to be lit by his own personal illumination; a cold, white light shone on every part of him equally, regardless of what went on in his environment. The spirit stared at the skeleton, his mouth moving slowly, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides.
When the skeleton was complete, Seth raised his shadowed face and—though his face still remained concealed in the shade of his hood—seemed to fix Tarquin with his gaze. “You would have me interrogate this spirit still?” he asked in his strange, metallic, and distant voice.
“I would,” Tarquin replied quietly.
“And what would you know?”
“Who killed his body. Who gave the order to kill Serverus Renzo, Ronan’s father.”
Seth shook his hooded head. “I cannot promise you will get answers to your questions,” he said. “This man has been dead for more than two years?”
“We believe so—probably close to three, in fact.”
“As you know, a spirit may remember how his body died, but the circumstances and details fade quickly. But you have asked, so I will try.”
He leaned over the skeleton and placed one glowing, steel-gloved hand in the skeleton’s grinning mouth. There was a bright flash, and everyone blinked.
When Seth stepped back, he turned to the spirit. The ghost had undergone a change. His mouth no longer moved silently, and his face was no longer lit by the eerie, otherworldly light that coated the rest of his body. Instead, he was illuminated by the same light as the others—flickering candlelight from the branch on the table, and torchlight from the sconce by the door.
“Who were you working for when you killed Serverus Renzo?” Tarquin asked.
The ghost looked at him. “Working… for…” he said in a voice that creaked like a rusty hinge. “I cannot quite remember….”
Tarquin frowned. He was disappointed, but he did not seem surprised. “Who were you with before you died?” he asked, trying a different angle.
“With…the Silent Brotherhood assassins. I did my work for them, against the Red Dawn. Yes, the Red Dawn! That was it! That was who I was working for! They were my people, but I betrayed them…I fooled them…they did not know I turned on them.” He laughed, a horrible, bubbling sound. “I found out the Red Dawn’s plan. I knew what they wanted to do!”
“What did they want to do?” Tarquin asked eagerly.
“To birth dragons,” the ghost croaked. “The Red Dawn wanted to bring dragons into the world, because they wanted the dragons’ power. They wanted what the dragons could do…”
“What power did the dragons have that the Red Dawn wanted to use?” Tarquin asked.
“I do not know,” the ghost replied sadly. “I have no memory of that.”
“Why did you kill Serverus Renzo? Why did you kill the man with the paper packet?” Tarquin tried again, but the ghost just shook his head.
“Those were my orders. That was my mission,” the ghost replied.
“Describe your mission,” Tarquin said.
The ghost shook his head and shrugged. “Take the papers, kill the man. I don’t know why.”
“Did the Red Dawn give the order to kill the man?”
“No, no,” the ghost said. “The man I killed worked for the Red Dawn.”
Ronan felt a wave of dizziness hit him hard and fast, and he swayed on his feet, but Tarquin steadied him with a hand.
“I killed him…yes!” the spirit continued, oblivious to his plight. “I remember now! I killed him so that he would not be able to tell the Red Dawn I’d betrayed them.”
Something foul and acidic bubbled at the back of Ronan’s throat, and he swallowed against the urge to vomit.
“The Brotherhood gave the order, yes, yes! Take the papers, kill the man to cover my tracks, deliver the papers to the Brotherhood. The Red Dawn had to be stopped.”
No way, Ronan thought, and from the way everyone looked at him, he knew all of the people present heard him.
Still, the spirit went on, “They had to be stopped from hatching the dragons. I would have been well rewarded, but then I was killed.”
Tarquin sighed. He looked at the ghost. “Who killed you?”
The ghost looked straight at Ronan and nodded affably in his direction. “He did,” he said. “A knife to my wrist, and to my back. It was the one to the back that did it. Became infected. It took three days to die. Not pleasant.”
Ronan couldn’t find it in himself to feel regret for having killed the man—not because he hated the spirit, but because of the truth that the spirit spoke.
The Red Dawn, he thought, it can’t be!
“Master Tarquin,” Seth broke in, “the magic will not last much longer. Do you have any more questions to ask?”
“Just one,” Tarquin said. “Spirit, what was your name?”
The spirit looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Tarquin sighed and nodded once to Seth.
Ronan’s mouth opened, but no words spilled out and his mind went blank. He had no idea how to process the news—no amount of assassin training could have prepared him for such a devastating blow.
“Very well,” Seth said. He held up one blue-gleaming steel-gauntleted fist and spoke a word in a strange tongue. Blue light ran across the skeleton and shimmered up the body of the assassin’s ghost.
A look of complete peace came over the face of the spirit, and he sighed. There was a rustle like fabric being pulled aside, and then both spirit and skeleton vanished into the gloom. For a moment, a cloud of gray dust drifted where the spirit had been, then it disappeared.
The spirit of the man who had killed Ronan’s father was now gone from the world.
Chapter 5
They had less to discover with the mysterious coffin. Guildsman Seth took a look at it, at Tarquin’s request, but he saw nothing.
“I cannot tell what this is,” he said, touching some of the foul-smelling thick, clear liquid that still coated the base of the coffin.
Ronan tried hard to focus on what Seth was saying, though he was still rattled by the revelation.
“But I can tell that there is some foul magic at work,” Seth began. “I will not ask where this coffin comes from, nor what other parts there may be to this story, for that is not my business. All that I can tell you is that there has been some kind of necromancy employed here. Oh, you may think that I have no place calling anybody else a necromancer, after what you have seen here tonight. But the work of the Guild of the Dead is necessary work, done in the interests of the many spirits of humanity. And if we sometimes employ our magic in ways that are not strictly necessary, as I have done tonight, you will see that we do it only to help out our friends. My suggestion to you, friends of the Night Guild, is to burn this foul relic, now, tonight, before the break of dawn. That is all I will say.”
“We thank you for your counsel, Guildsman Seth,” Tarquin said, inclining his head gravely toward the tall, eerie figure. The others all bowed low to him, and to their surprise he then bowed to them as well.
“May the Night God smile upon you, and make your deaths easy when they come,” he intoned gravely. It sounded like a traditional farewell from members of the Guild of the Dead. Before the Night Guild assassins could say anything in reply, Guildsman Seth had turned and, head bowed, strode swiftly away into the shadows.
“He has given us great help,” Tarquin said. “Now, at least, we have an answer to the riddle of who the man was who killed your father, Ronan, and why.”
“It’s hard for me to believe that my father was working for the Red Dawn,” Ronan said. His stomach still churned, though he tried to pull himself back together.
“Many people can be caused to work for an organization without being fully aware of exactly for whom they're working. Look at the fisherman, Ruben, or the other mirrors who were used to pass the dragon eggs from hand to hand. Do you think any of them knew that they were working for the Silent Brotherhood? I doubt it very much. Though it is always possible that your father was, indeed, a full-fledged Red Dawn agent, I think it far more likely that he did not know and chose not to ask exactly who it was who had given him the papers.”
“But Guildmaster,” Diana said, “that does not make sense. The ghost of the man who stole the packet made out that he had to kill Serverus, Ronan’s father, so that Serverus would not be able to identify him. That means Serverus must have known his assassin, at least his face, and have known enough about what was going on to compromise the agent to his superiors.”
“What you say is very true, Diana,” the guildmaster mused. “We must look into this further. I believe I will put a guild member of my choosing onto this aspect of the mystery and continue looking into the events surrounding Ronan’s family here in Trentum myself. For now, however, you three should proceed with your plan as intended. We will burn this coffin tonight, and tomorrow you must travel to Oretum by the first boat you can find.”
The assassins all agreed to this. Guildmaster Tarquin led them to an open courtyard behind the great bulk of the Night God temple, where they had room to work but were shielded from view from both the Night Guild and the Guild of the Dead. Here, he brought out a little vial of white powder from a fold in his robe and mixed it with the contents of a vial of thick, viscous black oil.
“This,” he said, “is a useful formulation that it might be good for you three to know how to make.”
As the powder mixed with the oil, a strong, tarry scent floated through the air. The vial of oil foamed over suddenly, and Tarquin tossed it into the middle of the coffin. It smashed, and a thick froth of oily foam quickly multiplied and spread out until it coated the whole surface of the wood.
Tarquin stepped forward and took a flint and steel from his belt, then he knelt and struck a spark into the foam. Immediately, bright yellow flames leapt up from the thick foam and the three assassins stepped back from the sudden whoosh and the lapping of the powerful heat against their faces.
They watched in silence as the bright fire swiftly consumed the half-rotten wood of the coffin. Ronan did his best to sort out his feelings as he watched the dancing flames, but it was no easy task.
As the last of the flames died away, Tarquin smiled at them, though he looked slightly sad and troubled. “Visit me tomorrow in my office before you leave,” he told them. “There will not be time to teach you the trick of making the fire starter potion, but I can at least give you each several doses of it for yourselves. Make sure you stock up on everything you need. High tide tomorrow is around noon. There will be ships sailing to Oretum, and you will be on one of them.”
* * *
The next day was bright and windy, and the rising winds were the only sign of the changing of the seasons. Here in the Twelve Isles, the days were sunny most of the time and almost unbearably hot sometimes in the summer months. But, as the summer bled away toward the fall, the wind took on an unfamiliar crisp edge. The seabirds changed, too, as some of the smaller species of avians began to move south toward the warmer climates of the continent of Afrik to the south, and others arrived from central and northern Lithia to spend the winter in the relatively warmer climate of the Twelve Isles.
