The Assassin's Destiny (Isle of Dreams)

K
L Jones

Copyright
©2013 K L Jones

All
Rights Reserved

Cover
design by Rob Francis of ink-corporated.co.uk

Other
titles in this series:

The Assassin’s Tale

The Seer

It was a cold Friday morning, Mistral
and the twins were having breakfast in the Refectory listening to the first
years talking excitedly about the knucker hunt they were being sent out on for
the day.  Phantasm smiled as he glanced out the window at the snow falling
thickly.  The sky outside was so heavy and grey it barely looked like
daylight.

‘Bless them!  Am I glad not
to be a first year anymore,’ he sighed happily.

‘Can you actually imagine getting
excited about hunting a knucker?’  Mistral asked with an incredulous shake
of her head.

‘There was a time when you would
get excited about hunting for a lost sock,’ Phantasm reproved her with a frown.

‘You’re right,’ Mistral admitted
and laughed ruefully.  ‘I was all about the hunting and eating it
part!  Still am, come to think of it,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘Well I wish you had hunted my
breakfast!  Where on earth does Bernadette get her ideas of what
constitutes an appropriate breakfast from?’  Phantom muttered as he pushed
his half-eaten bowl of fish stew away with a shudder.  He looked around
with a bored expression on his face.  ‘What’s on the agenda for today
brother?’  he demanded, drumming his fingers moodily on the table-top.

‘Master Nox,’ replied Phantasm,
pushing his own empty bowl away with a satisfied sigh.  ‘You know, that’s
beginning to grow on me.’

Phantom suddenly perked up,
‘Master Nox?  I wonder what he’ll be teaching us,’ he leaned his elbows
onto the table and clasped his hands together thoughtfully.  ‘Poisons,
obviously, but what else?’

‘What else does he specialise in?’ 
Mistral asked, taking a sip of water from her cup.  She hadn’t even
bothered to fill a bowl from the large iron tureen on the counter; Bernadette’s
breakfasts were notoriously inedible. 

‘Master Nox?  I’m not sure,’
said Phantasm narrowing his eyes broodingly. 

Mistral raised her eyebrows in
surprise.  It wasn’t like the twins not to know every detail of one of the
Magnate, down to their inside leg measurement.

‘There are no records of his
achievements in the Ri’s library, only the standard entries of the dates of his
apprenticeship and the date he completed working back his debt to the Ri … then
there’s a huge gap until he became a member of the Magnate.’

‘Fabian says he was an excellent
assassin in his day,’ Mistral said distractedly, her attention drawn to one of
the first years enthusiastically demonstrating the best method of restraining a
knucker.  She watched him for a moment then turned her attention back to
see two sets of bright green eyes staring impatiently at her.

‘Honestly Mistral, you could
share these things!  And what else did Mage De Winter say?’  Phantom
demanded in a heated whisper.

Mistral shrugged, ‘He said
Malachi was an expert at non-contact assassinations, you know, using
poisons.  Fabian met him a few times when Malachi was working for the
Council as a special foreign envoy, or some other fancy title.  Basically
the Council would send him off abroad to tidy up when sorcerers had got carried
away and exposed their true identities.’

Phantasm frowned, ‘How exactly
did he do that?’

‘Assassinated them and anyone who
knew the truth,’ she replied evenly.

Phantasm and Phantom shared a
bleak look.

‘Sounds like yet another
delightful person we have the pleasure of getting to know,’ sighed Phantom
darkly.

‘I suggest that we don’t keep him
waiting then,’ said Phantasm briskly and made to rise to his feet.

‘I agree, or we might not make it
to lunchtime … which, I might add, is another high-point in my day,’ grumbled
Phantom.

 ‘Another fun day,’ Mistral
muttered dispiritedly and reluctantly followed the twins across the Refectory.
 ‘You know, I almost envy them,’ she said, casting a wistful glance at the
first years pulling on heavy cloaks ready for the day’s hunt in the snow.

She trailed after the twins while
they chatted away, climbing up the stairs to the second floor.  Her second
year’s apprenticeship was proving to be a lot less exacting than her
first.  To add to her flat mood Fabian being her Training Lieutenant had
so far not turned out to be quite as pleasurable as she had imagined it would
be.  For starters, her training schedule for the year involved much less
physical work and was more orientated around mastering her gift, requiring her
to spend lots of time with Serenity Lightwater and occasionally the Divinus,
and less in the Training Arena where Fabian was every day.  True, she did
get to see him most lunchtimes and every night … and morning, but she had
envisaged spending her whole days with him too and felt cheated.  She was
also finding mastering the illusive power of Sight more difficult than she had
imagined. 

Despite all of the work she was
putting in, Mistral had still not been able to develop her ability beyond being
able to read auras.  By contrast the twins were progressing rapidly with their
Gemini gift and had already been offered a classified Council Contract, which
they had returned from with unbearably superior attitudes until Mistral had
pasted them in a sword training session and brought them down to size
again. 

Mistral had been offered
suspiciously few Contracts so far and was swiftly coming to the conclusion that
there was some kind of “keep Mistral safe until she masters Sight” campaign
going on behind the scenes.  She was willing to bet that it had been
agreed between Fabian and Leo but also suspected that the twins had been
coerced into preventing her from doing anything vaguely interesting.  They
always seemed to be conveniently busy whenever she asked them to go out hunting
with her, forcing her instead to accompany them on long, pointless sessions
with Mycroft Casterton.  Mistral had fallen asleep during the last one and
had not been invited back again, for which she was grateful.  Mycroft
Casterton’s knowledge on Council politics and history was both vast and vastly
dull.  The combination of his fondness for the sound of his own voice and
his sumptuous, overheated tower room made Mistral feel sleepy just by thinking
about it. 

Lost in brooding thoughts on how
boring the second year was turning out to be, Mistral didn’t realise that they
had reached the door to Malachi Nox’s tower room until she walked into the back
of Phantasm.

‘It’s polite to knock before
opening the door.’  Phantasm chided when she bounced off him with a
surprised look on her face.

‘Sorry,’ she sighed.  ‘Just
eager to get in there and learn, learn, learn.’

‘Of course you are,’ he murmured
and rapped smartly on the black wooden door. 

With a sinking feeling of
impending boredom, Mistral followed the twins through the door when it was
opened by an unsmiling Malachi Nox.

‘Enter and be seated,’ he said
crisply, waving a thin hand towards a long workbench and a number of tall
stools.

Mistral stole a surreptitious
glance at the room as she walked over to sit on one of the stools.  She
had been inside all of the Magnate’s tower rooms now and had quickly realised
that their living quarters provided useful insights to their
personalities.  Mycroft’s was furnished in plush velvet armchairs arranged
around a fire that blazed winter and summer.  He rarely moved from his armchair
kingdom unless it was to refill the dish of sweetmeats set by his side. 
By direct contract the Divinus’ tower room was utterly devoid of any
furnishings other than a stark throne-like wooden chair.  Leo Sphinx’s
room was scattered with weapons and bits of armour in need of repair.  It
also held possibly the largest four poster bed that Mistral had ever
seen.  She grimaced whenever she thought of it, knowing that Golden had
been in it for most of the previous year.  Serenity Lightwater, the only
female member of the Magnate, did not use her tower room but had a small
bedroom adjoining the Infirmary where she worked.  In effect, the
Infirmary was her tower room and reflected her ordered and annoyingly caring
personality.

Malachi Nox’s tower room was
crammed full of books, tainting the air with their peppery, musty smell. 
Shelves covered the stone walls from the floor right up to the high vaulted
ceiling; all packed with leatherbound volumes.  The overall effect was
slightly claustrophobic but not chaotic.  Mistral could see the books were
all neatly ordered with a framed reference to the contents hanging at the end
of every row. 

Malachi had a narrow single bed
pushed up beneath the room’s only window which looked as though it had been
cut-out of the bookshelf surrounding it.  There was no fire in the room to
protect the books and as a result it was icily cold.  The only source of
light apart from the boxed-in window came from a huge iron candelabra hanging
down from the centre of the vaulted ceiling.  

Mistral slid onto a stool next to
Phantasm and switched her gaze to the workbench in front of her.  Rows of
glass bottles of all sizes were stacked three-deep along the length of the
wooden surface.  Each bottle was made of a different coloured glass and
sealed with a distinctive bright green wax stopper.

The twins were sat as though
carved from stone but Mistral wasn’t fooled; she knew their green eyes would
have taken in every detail of the room.  She hid a smile, knowing they
would spend their evening talking about what they had deduced from their
observations.

‘I will begin by attempting to
introduce you to the subtle art of poisons,’ Malachi Nox’s clipped tones broke
into her musings and drew her attention to the dark-robed figure stood before
them.  He was tall and angular with unnaturally pale features accentuated
by closely cropped black hair that grew into a widow’s peak at the front. 

‘However, I do not expect you to
excel at, or even appreciate the art; few do.’

Mistral kept her face expressionless
while she wondered privately how hard it could be to brew up poison.  Cain
was a dab hand already with no real instruction and Fabian concocted his own
blend that was particularly potent.

‘Try to comprehend that poison is
not just limited to its ability to kill quickly and silently,’ Malachi
continued in a curt tone.  ‘There are poisons that will induce a coma so
deep that it is virtually indistinguishable from death, others that force the
taker to reveal the innermost secrets of their soul and some that are capable
of causing indescribable agony to the victim yet leave them resiliently healthy
in every other aspect.’

As he spoke Malachi reached out
to caress a bright red bottle with one long finger.  Mistral suppressed a
shudder of repulsion.  She was willing to bet that bottle contained the
agony-inducing potion he was describing. 

The morning dragged by slowly
with them reading through and making notes on basic recipes for different types
of poisons.  The lack of natural light in the room gave it a strangely
timeless feel and it was only when Mistral’s stomach rumbled hungrily that she
realised it must be midday.

‘I will see you back here in one
hour,’ Malachi dismissed them shortly, holding the heavy door open for
them.  They filed past him silently and ran lightly down the stairs from
his room.

‘Well, that was fun,’ said
Mistral heavily.  ‘Let’s go to The Cloak.  I can’t stand the thought
of eating another of Bernadette’s vile concoctions.’

‘Why don’t you say what you
really mean?’  Phantom huffed.  ‘You want to have lunch with your
Mage, not us!’

‘Please forgive me for trying to
have some enjoyment in my sorry excuse for a life!’  Mistral snapped and
abruptly stalked off ahead of them.

‘That was rather tactless brother,’
murmured Phantasm, watching Mistral vanish down the second flight of stairs to
the ground floor.  ‘You know how hard she’s finding the idea of a second
year.’

Phantom sighed, ‘But she used to
be such fun and now she’s either brooding over her Mage or drooling over him
and I don’t know which is worse.’

‘The brooding,’ said Phantasm
firmly.

By the time the twins had walked
through the heavy snow down to The Cloak and Dagger Mistral was already talking
to Fabian at the bar, gazing deeply into his eyes with an expression of such
utter happiness on her face that even Phantom began to feel guilty for his
harsh words.

They wandered over and greeted
Fabian before ordering drinks and meals from the red-cheeked bartender.

‘How was your morning?’ 
Fabian enquired, passing Mistral a tankard of ale.

‘Duller than dull.’  Mistral
replied, taking a long drink from her tankard before setting down it on the bar
again.  ‘How was yours?’

Fabian shrugged lightly and
smiled, ‘Quite entertaining.  I oversaw the first years out on their first
knucker hunt.  Considering that they are all tribe born they have rather
lamentable hunting skills.’

‘Where are they now?’ 
Mistral asked, gazing around at the empty bar.

‘Two are in the Infirmary with
concussions from falling off their horses and the rest are still hunting.’

Mistral laughed, ‘Let’s hope none
of them die, I don’t think it would look too good on your record as a Training
Lieutenant.’

‘Ours didn’t do too well last
year did they?’  Phantom interjected with a wry grin.  ‘Two died and
you practically lived in the Infirmary.’

‘Good times,’ Mistral sighed and
took another long drink from her tankard.  ‘At least I was doing something
to get injured.’

‘You will if you keep drinking at
that rate – don’t forget we’re going to be handling dangerous substances this
afternoon,’ said Phantasm, looking pointedly at her nearly empty tankard.