Night guild 3, p.8
Night Guild 3, page 8
“Well,” Ronan said. “I’m glad we arrived when we did. We’ll leave now and let you get on with dealing with the death of this so-called High Priest.”
The king regarded them for a long moment. In their black clothes, with their faces covered, Ronan knew that they could not be recognizable afterward, but the keen gaze of the old man still made him feel exposed. There was something about this king that Ronan could not pin down. Something that reminded him of the Night Guild, in fact, and even of Tarquin.
“I will tell no one that you were here,” the king said. “A contract with the guild is sacred. Go well, assassins. May the light of Mala shine on your road.”
Ronan remembered the red light of Mala as it had been turned on them during their fights with the Silent Brotherhood in the temple and with their rogue assassins back on the ship in the city of Port Fero. He hoped that the light of Mala was something he would not see again on his travels.
The god Mala had come to the aid of their enemies, and it was only by the intervention of the Night God that Mala had not been able to completely derail Ronan’s plans. How could this be if the brotherhood was, in fact, an evil influence on the kingdom of Ghennet?
There is something more here, Diana’s voice said, transferring her thoughts to his mind. The relationship between the brotherhood and Mala is not what it seems. I see it, too, but we cannot question the king further without revealing too much of our purposes. Come on, thank him, and let’s get out of here.
Ronan did so, and a moment later, they found themselves back outside the castle, hanging from the wall just below the window. Ronan had relocked the catch and slipped the roundel of glass back into place so that the cut could barely be seen.
The whole episode had taken hardly any time, and the night was not much more advanced than it had been when they had first embarked on their mission.
In silence, marveling at the strangeness of it all, they climbed down the wall and stealthily made their way back to Deshyor’s yard.
* * *
They spent one more morning in Saon City, stocking up on supplies for their journey north. They would travel by the main road, dressed in nondescript robes that would not make them stand out from the common travelers. They bought furs and snow boots here, too, and everything else they thought they might need for a journey in the frozen north. Though it was a long way to the snow line, and they had no desire to burden themselves with unnecessary weight, there was no guarantee that they would be able to buy what they needed once they got further north. Saon City was an important trade hub, and it was better to buy here, when they could, rather than wait and rely on luck to give them a better place to buy later on.
The main item was food supplies, and Eric and Tanya saw to this with the help of Jallor the next day. All seemed quiet in the streets, and there was no sign of any trouble caused by the death of Kaishog — not yet anyway. Ronan guessed that the episode would be kept as quiet as possible, and only a distorted rumor would ever reach the streets.
By mid-morning, they were well supplied with food for the road, as well as new boots and waterskins, light cloaks, and the green robes of humble Saon traders. They retrieved their bags containing the dragon eggs, strapped on their weapons, and prepared to leave.
“Better you take the back way out of the city,” Master Deshyor said. He had come to see them off. He had not asked about their mission, but from the twinkle in his eye, Ronan guessed that he had his own sources of information. Deshyor was well enough informed to know that they had succeeded in taking Kaishog – and with him the last influence of the Silent Brotherhood — out of the picture.
“There is a secret way out of town?” Ronan asked.
“That’s right,” Deshyor said. “The guards — as you now know from experience — are a bit too enthusiastic about seeking bribes from travelers on the outskirts. I guess you’re not keen to fight another bout in the arena if you can help it, so I’m prepared to show you my own personal back door out of the city. Come on, Jallor will show you the way.”
They bid farewell to Deshyor and his men, and Jallor took them to a nondescript-looking door of brown wood that stood at one corner of the yard. It looked like a closet, and no one would have paid it any attention.
Jallor took a key and unlocked the heavy bolt, then threw the door open. Behind it, there was a steep flight of steps running downward.
“Follow the stairs,” Jallor said. “When you get to the corridor at ground level, just keep walking until you see daylight. The exit is a good three miles from the city, so it’s a long walk in the dark, but it will save you trouble of another kind when you get out.”
The tunnel was indeed long and dark, and in addition, it was damp and cold and narrow. The four friends trudged along in silence and in single file for what seemed like an age until they finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
When they finally emerged, Diana and Tanya both stretched and turned their faces toward the sun with closed eyes. Ronan also stretched and looked around. He breathed deeply and felt for the first time that there might be a chill in the air.
“I smell winter,” Eric said quietly, “and we’re not even that far north yet. The change of seasons is coming. It’s a long time since I caught the scent of the coming winter off the mountains. It reminds me of home.”
“We’re a long way from Norskand,” Ronan said, “and I guess the farther north we go, the more we’ll find winter coming to meet us.”
Eric nodded thoughtfully, looking north toward the mountains.
“We’ve a long step before that happens, hopefully,” Tanya said. She was a southerner born and raised, and she did not share Eric’s nostalgia for the depths of winter. “On the road, hopefully we’ll have a chance to discuss one or two things. We’ve not had the chance yet, but I still want to hear more about your little trick in the arena, Diana. That was quite something when you took on the shape of one of the guards!”
“Oh, that,” Diana said dismissively.
“Yes, that!” Tanya said. “You didn’t want to talk about it, but I think we need to know.”
“Later, though,” Ronan said. “For now, let’s concentrate on putting some miles between us and the city.”
Tanya gave Ronan a look and grinned. “Very well,” she said. “But I want to hear about this new magic! You’re right, though. We ought to step on it. Come on, then, let’s make some headway.”
They turned and looked back for a last time, seeing the Hill of Helder topped with the great bulk of Saon City, the dark castle up on top of the shaded mass like a great monster crouching above the hill, gazing out over the land below. The tunnel had taken them about four miles away, and they could see the road a little distance off. They had emerged from what looked like an abandoned well-house, a little stone construction in the side of a hill, almost entirely hidden by brambles and thick ivy.
They took their bearings from the sun and headed north on the road, walking toward the mountains. The land was flat, the road wide and well-made, and they made good progress, walking at a steady pace and politely greeting the few travelers that they saw. No one showed much interest in them — they were just four travelers on the move, and that was no rare sight in this part of the world.
That night, they slept in a little area of woodland by the roadside. In the morning, they woke early, ate, and drank, then spent the day walking again. It had taken Eric several months to make his way south from Norskand to the Twelve Isles when he had initially left. Ronan hoped it would not take quite so long to get back there, but the distances were huge, and they were on foot.
He frowned, wondering about how long it might take them. He had not given this much thought yet, but by the next morning, the others were all thinking about it, too.
Eric looked troubled. “I don’t know about this,” he said at last as they got ready to head out on their third day out from the city. “I think we need to find a quicker way of traveling.”
“There’s only one way I can think of,” Ronan said, “and that’s on the back of Fury the dragon.”
“You think he would come to meet us?”
Ronan looked to the sky. He had told his friends about the power of farseeing, of course, but he had not used it again since that night in the inn when he’d spoken with Tarquin. Now, he wondered if he might be able to make it work to get in touch with Fury. The dragon had claimed he needed to go off on his own for a while. Well, he’d had a while, and he owed them a favor. Ronan resolved to try it.
He looked around, considering the country they were walking through. So far, the road had been well-made, straight and clear, with little villages and farming homesteads dotted at regular intervals along the way. Now, however, the road was becoming less well traveled. The stones at the edges of the road were dark with moss, and the woodlands and open spaces by the road were less well-tamed. The companions had passed a very small village shortly after setting off that morning, but the land had appeared steadily less populated since then, and they had not met another traveler on the road since yesterday.
“Diana,” Ronan said, “you know this land. You grew up here. It seems to me that we’ve moved out of the heavily populated areas. Do you think we’re likely to encounter any more villages within the next day or so?”
Diana shook her head and gestured at the wild grasses that stood tall in the fields on either side of them, interspersed with self-seeded young trees, their leaves golden in the morning sun. On the horizon, the mountains loomed, majestic as the sunlight gleamed on their lofty heights.
“We’re coming into the wild parts of the Ghennetian northlands,” she said. “People do not farm here. There are some nomadic herders out here, but they will have traveled south by now, I guess. Most of the mining traffic takes the new road over to the east of here, to reach Saon more quickly, and the mountain mass we’re heading for is little used at this time of year. No, I’ll be surprised if we pass any more villages or meet any travelers on the road out here.”
She looked keenly at Ronan. “You’re thinking that it would be better to meet Fury in a less well-populated part of the land, am I right?”
Ronan nodded. “We’ll walk for another day,” he said. “By that point, we’ll be a good bit farther from that last village we passed, and we might be able to get Fury to land without attracting too much attention. If he’s willing, we could certainly get a ride across the mountains on his back. Perhaps even farther.”
It made sense to avoid attracting undue attention by hitching a ride on the back of a dragon, and the others all agreed to Ronan’s plan. The weather was good, the country around them wild and beautiful, and despite the deteriorating quality of the road, walking was pleasant. The prospect of getting a ride on Fury’s back to cut their journey short cheered them, and they made good progress, striding through the wild countryside on the old road, and chatting together as they went on.
“So,” Tanya said after they’d been walking for a while, “I wonder when I’ll manifest my special ability?”
“Beg pardon?” Ronan asked. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Tanya replied with a grin, “you three have all developed a new power — apparently, a high-level Night Guild ability. You have your power of farseeing, Ronan, and Eric has his healing power. Diana seems to be able to behave as a full-on shapeshifter, though she doesn’t want to talk about it. I wonder if anything like that will happen for me?”
The three Night Guild assassins looked at each other. She was right, of course. They had all manifested new and impressive powers in the last few weeks, seemingly unprompted. Eric’s healing ability had been gifted to him by the Night God, as had Ronan’s ability for farseeing.
“Was it the same for you, Diana, in the arena? I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Ronan said.
“Yes,” she replied reluctantly. “It was a very strange feeling. One moment we were working on keeping our stealth fields up, then suddenly, I heard the Night God’s voice in my ear. It was as if the power of shapeshifting was growing in me at a rapid pace. You say you’d never seen anything like that before, well, I’d never felt anything like it before. Such a rapid transfer of power.
“Of course, we’ve known the power of faces from our work in the guild, but to completely transform one’s appearance…. It’s like a combination of the power of faces with the power of the stealth field. I made myself appear as I chose, rather than as people expected to see me. It didn’t just happen, though. The Night God gave me the power, but I had to accept it. That took an act of faith at that moment, but I kept my faith in the god and in the guild and went with it.”
“And the same feeling went for me,” Eric added, “both at the inn, where I first manifested my healing power, and at the arena, where I felt prompted by the Night God to go ahead and use the power on the wounded guards. I don’t know why it happened — I know it put us at risk at the time — but I just felt certain it was the right thing to do.”
“It almost feels like our faith in the Night God is being tested by these events,” Ronan mused.
“How do you mean?” Eric asked.
“Well, we’re on this path, hatching the dragons, and yet the most important thing, on the surface, would be freeing Tarquin from jail back in the Twelve Isles. We have no idea what is at the end of this path laid out before us, and yet we must go ahead and do it because the deity has told us that’s our path. As we go forward, we’re being offered opportunities to do things that we didn’t expect, gaining new powers that we didn’t even know existed before, but to do so we have to do things that don’t necessarily feel like they make sense in the moment.”
“Particularly when we might have the instinct to do something else — such as go back and free Tarquin,” Eric said quietly.
“Exactly,” Ronan agreed. “That’s the nature of trust.”
* * *
They traveled all the rest of that day mostly in thoughtful silence, only conversing to deal with the necessary elements of the journey: choosing a campsite, cooking together, and at one point deciding on which road to take at a junction. They took the less-used one — it had trampled grass growing uniformly across its width, and enthusiastic ferns were encroaching on the edges despite the oncoming winter.
It was cold now; Ronan could see his breath faintly as the sun sank toward the mountains. That night, he would try to reach the dragon.
He had no luck in the end. Though the power of farseeing came to him easily, he found that he could not locate Fury. He flew over the mountains in his spirit form, seeing the long mountain pass road winding its way up through a high, bare rocky valley, deserted in the moonlight.
He moved over the mountains, traveling at incredible speed, glorying in the exploration of this new ability. Ghostlike, he felt no sensations. No wind in his hair, no chill of cold on his skin, and no vertigo as he looked down on his bird’s eye view. Over the mountains and beyond, there opened out a wide, hilly landscape that stretched away north toward Norskand.
He flew farther north, but a feeling of unease troubled him. This was not like the first time, back at the inn. Then, he had almost willed himself to the Twelve Isles, and a part of him, his astral body, had stayed near to his physical body, floating above the inn. Now, he had moved his astral body away, far from his sleeping physical body, and the familiar tugging sensation made itself known in the center of his chest.
So, the ability allowed his astral body to travel much farther than it had previously, but it was not limitless. He had come to the end of his ability to travel freely away from his body.
He hung there, looking out over the darkened world, then turned and flew back toward his body. Once he was closer, he would try to speak to Tarquin again.
When the little area of woodland they had camped in was in view below him — along with the unusual and slightly unsettling vision of himself, lying with closed eyes and still face looking toward the sky — he centered himself and conjured the part of the spell that allowed him to travel instantaneously to Trentum. Again, he left his astral body behind, floating in the psychic plain above his physical body. His awareness split, and a new part of himself that had no body at all — neither physical nor astral — was floating above the darkened roofs of the Twelve Isles metropolis.
“You’ve returned,” Tarquin said, becoming immediately aware of him.
“I wanted to talk to you. How are you?”
“No change with me, I’m afraid. And you? You are making progress?”
“I’m trying to travel north with the dragon eggs, but it’s a very long way. We’re on foot, and the journey may take months. In the lands farther north from here, there may be horses we could use for a time, even boats that could take us swiftly to the north upriver, but here in Ghennet, no one seems to use horses. The most they have is a donkey or two for laboring work. I guess they don’t travel much.”
“Horses never really caught on in the southlands,” Tarquin said thoughtfully. “I wonder why that was?”
There was a moment of silence.
“I discovered something, Guildmaster,” Ronan said, then explained to Tarquin what the King of Ghennet had said about sending a message to the Night Guild, asking for help in assassinating Kaishog and destroying the Silent Brotherhood.
“He sent the message some time ago — months, I think — but it never reached us,” Ronan said.
Tarquin immediately saw the significance of this. “If the message never reached us, that means someone intercepted it. Perhaps the brotherhood themselves? But they would have no way of knowing.”
