Authors: Usman Ijaz
"Then you know of the Source also?"
Leah looked at him, perplexed. "The Source?
What do you mean?"
Connor looked away from her gaze, wishing that
Alexis would hurry back. "Nothing."
The finality in his voice ceased all other talk
between them, though Leah still looked as though she wanted to question him.
Connor stood up and walked out into the wide street, as much to escape her
questions as the mood that hung in the air. The city was well awake, despite it
being early in the morning. With a backward glance at the inn and up the street
to see if Alexis was heading back, he dared to stroll a little way down and
explore this new city.
He stared into the shops he passed and gazed at
the goods displayed on carts along the street. He was careful to note the
suspicious glares that most of the venders gave him, as though he might steal
something at any moment. All around him was the garble of a city coming awake.
He should have been used to the sounds having lived in Port Hope all his life,
but here they sounded strange and new.
Connor came into a large square and turned to
look up the street. The inn was still in sight, and all he would have to do to
reach it was retrace his steps. The square lay at the center of four
intersecting streets. In the center of the square was a large limestone statue
of a man standing with one hand outstretched to the sky, as though reaching for
the clouds. At the base of the immense statue, several children sat playing at
marbles. Connor headed towards them and stood by one side as he watched them
play. It wasn’t long before he was invited to join in the game.
The game came fairly quickly to him, though it
was different than how he and Adrian had played back home. The children played
for the joy of it, with nothing riding on the wins and losses. Looking at them,
Connor doubted many of them had anything to bet. Many of them were dressed in
dirty garb, but then his own was hardly new. The minutes seemed to flow by
without notice. As the game wore on, some of the children left, disinterested. Soon,
Connor saw that there were only three of them remaining. The boy who owned the
marbles looked large for his age, and his eyes twinkled with joy as he flicked
the marbles. Connor supposed the boy would go on playing by himself when he and
the other girl left. Connor noticed her, and his gaze kept returning to her.
Dark shoulder-length hair fell around her face, hiding the pure joy in her
tilted green eyes as she played. She wasn’t very good, but then she played as
though she had hardly done so before.
She suddenly looked up and met his gaze. "I
hit it! I hit the little bastard!" She had a flat accent that Connor
couldn’t place at all.
Connor grinned. "You don’t play often, do
you?"
She shook her head. "I do not have very
much time for games of this sort."
"If you want, I could show you," he
offered.
"Really? Oh, that would be wonderful!"
"My name is Connor," he said.
She looked at him for a moment and then nodded.
"I am Iris."
Connor showed her how to hold the marble in the
crook of her thumb and forefinger, and how to shoot. She imitated him as best
she could, but didn’t always get it quite right. They laughed at each failed
attempt. Her laughter was soft and full of joy. Some part of Connor felt as
though he could lose himself forever in such sweet laughter.
Then a shadow fell over them and Connor looked
up to find a tall man standing before them, blocking out the sun. The man’s
harsh face stared at them with a stern and judgmental gaze.
"What are you doing?" he demanded Iris
in a rasp.
Connor thought he must be her father, but the
manner in which she answered the man made him wonder if the man wasn’t her
older brother.
"Oh, Amon, I was simply enjoying a short
game."
The tall man's callous gaze shifted to Connor,
and Connor felt like cowering before that stare. Those eyes seemed colder than
ice, filled with a bitter madness that made it plain to Connor the man could
kill him without so much as a second thought. Distantly he wondered what Iris
was doing with a man like him. The man muttered something under his breath, and
then said aloud, "Get up. We are leaving. There is no sign of them
here."
"Must we really, Amon?" Iris begged.
"I wish to play a little longer."
"You do not have time to play," the
man told her. Connor suspected there was always an edge to his voice, even when
he wasn’t angry. "Now get up, or I will leave you here to rot."
Iris sighed as she stood up. "Goodbye,
Connor," she said, giving him one last smile, and then turned and followed
the man away.
For a moment Connor simply sat there, watching
them walk off and then turn a corner and disappear from his view. A part of him
regretted Iris’s departure, but another part was just as glad to be away from
the tall man. He shook his head and stood up, handing back the marbles to the
other boy, who had gone on playing throughout the entire incident. He had spent
enough time here, he decided. He turned and headed back the way he had come.
Halfway to the inn he ran into Leah.
"Where did you go to?"
" I was playing marbles."
"Well, we must hurry back. Alexis returned
with the horses and we are ready to depart."
Connor followed her back to the inn. He looked
back once, thinking to perhaps see Iris somewhere down there, but he didn’t see
her. At the inn, the horses stood saddled and waiting.
They put Lacon to their backs that morning and headed
north-east once more.
1
Amon kept his quiet as he trudged up the narrow
stairs, the girl following him with her head down. He kept his quiet as they
entered their room, and then as he closed the door. The girl stood before him,
knowing full well she was about to be rebuked. She stared at the floor with her
hands clasped behind her back. Amon studied her: a girl nearing fourteen, her
true beauty well in the stages of blossoming, her assassin’s skills not
apparent outwardly but rather a child’s wistful longing.
Did I raise her
wrong by keeping her from indulging in her childish whims?
he wondered.
Will
she forever now possess the heart of a child, yearning for what she was denied?
She reminded him too much of the whore who had
given birth to her. Looking at her, Amon reflected on the strange twist of fate
that had brought the girl and him together. After years of traveling and
growing his skills as an assassin, he had returned to the slum where he had
grown up and learned all of life’s harsh truths. In his first night back in
Mahdenpoor he had gone to a brothel, hoping to find the whore who had once
loved him out of pity. That it had been out of pity, he was certain, for he had
had no coin then to pay her with. But she had been the only one who had not
regarded him as though he were a vile snake. She gave some sense of love to him
freely, where once he’d had to force it upon some unfortunate soul. But it had
been as far as their relationship went. Even then he had been incapable of
truly loving anyone. She satisfied his basic urges, and that had been all that
he needed.
She still lived and worked at the brothel, he
found. She had been surprised to see him, but not as much as he was at the sight
of the little girl that clung to her leg. The girl that she claimed was his
daughter. He left the whore then, telling her if she so much as mentioned it to
him again, he would kill both her and the child. He never went back to her.
He found the girl in the cold two months past,
shivering in the torn rags she wore. Amon stood and watched as her frightened
gaze shifted from face to face, her wide-eyed innocence begging for help.
No
help for you,
he thought.
Not in this world.
He judged the girl to
be of five years of age. He admitted that the lines of her face were similar to
his. Nonetheless, he had been ready to turn his back on her - after all, what
was she but a bastard spawned by a bastard - until he saw the ridicule she
suffered from children who were clearly her betters. No street urchins were
they, but the sons and daughters of nobles, wrapped in furs and silk. He
watched as they threw pieces of bread at her, always out of her reach, and
laughed as she darted from one to another. For a long time he stood and watched
her be the butt of their japes. Perhaps it reminded him too much of his own
time spent on the streets, or perhaps it was the look on her face, as though
wondering if this misery was all the world was composed of, but his feet were
carrying him across the street before he’d made up his mind. The other children
had left, and the girl sat alone as Amon approached her. Her wide, haunted eyes
looked up at him, as though wondering what new misery was about to befall her.
There was no recognition in those eyes. She had forgotten him if she’d ever
marked him in the first place. Amon hunched down before her and met her gaze
levelly.
“I can teach you so that you never have to fear
any other, but have them fear your shadow.”
For a long time she had simply stared into him.
Then she stood up, wiping mucus from her nose, and took hold of his hand.
Eventually he learned that her mother had died of sickness and the owner of the
brothel had turned her out.
Amon stared at the girl as she stood before him
now, and wondered how odd it was that at times she could be as cold as him, and
at other times walk about open to the world. She was nearly a woman now, far
from the child he had found and raised. He wondered why she hadn’t inherited
his indifferent cruelty as well as his physical attributes.
“Did you enjoy your game?” he asked her coldly.
“Amon, I--”
“Would you have noticed them if they had walked
right past you while you were playing your idiotic game?”
A fierce light came in her eyes then. “We do not
even know what they look like, Amon. This whole mission seems a waste.”
The statement startled him for a moment. His
hand flicked out and caught her hard on her left cheek. The sound seemed loud
in the small room. The back-handed blow sent her back a step. She met his gaze
with one that was full of hurt and surprise. He had struck her plenty of times
before this, often for a smaller offense, so he didn’t know why she should look
surprised.
“The damn mission does not matter,” Amon told
her. “What matters is that we uphold our reputation. Now be quick and pack your
belongings. I want to be out of this god forgotten place within the hour.” The
girl obeyed him silently. He hoped she harbored some resentment towards him, a
loathing that he could turn against others in time.
Within half an hour, with the sun still short of
its midday perch, the two priests were on the road. Amon looked back towards
Lacon once, then settled in his saddle and stared ahead. Soon they were riding
at a canter, leaving dust in their wake, black robes flying in the wind like
banners. He knew their prey was close, he could almost feel it, and this
strange and powerful certainty had him looking all around them, expecting to
see the Legionnaire and the boy. He had hoped to find them in Lacon, judging it
to be a likely spot if they were traveling north from Mareth. The Legionnaire
and the Ascillian could have taken ship, he knew, but he didn’t think they
would have snared themselves like that. A ship offered little chance of escape.
It would have been easy for them to escape Sune by ship and perhaps make berth
somewhere along the coast of Kumai, or perhaps into the outskirts of the Ruins,
which would take them closer to Teihr, but Amon didn’t think they would have
risked it. The people in Arcadia might dismiss the rumors from the south as
fabrications, but he knew that many were the truth. For a time the boy and the
Legionnaire had been held in the town of Sune. Not once though had he
considered changing their path toward the south and trying to intercept their
prey; he knew full well where they were heading.
He glanced towards the girl, wondering if the
intent focus in her eyes would hold when the time came.
It had better, or
else her future will be filled with one beating after another.
2
Even as he lay in the comfort of his wife’s
arms, Aeiron couldn’t take his mind off what might be happening so far out of
his reach. His wife slept next to him, her breathing a steady rhythm against
his chest, yet his thoughts were a thousand miles distant. Shadows covered
their spacious sleeping chamber, giving every table and chair an air of
mystery. Outside the tall glass doors that gave way to a white balcony the wind
howled, heralding the storm that was to come. Aeiron watched the shadows as
equally dark questions plagued his mind. At last he gently removed Jayne’s arm
from his chest and crawled out of bed. Wrapping a thick robe about himself he
headed to the glass doors to stare out into the night. There were no stars out,
he saw; the skies were a thick mass of murky darkness. The chill that crept in
from the cracks of the door made the hair on his body try to rise. Nonetheless,
he slid open one of the doors and quietly exited onto the balcony.