Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin (32 page)

What do you want? I roared at them. I spun
around, trying to look at each of them, and for a moment locked
eyes with one. There was less in his eyes than there had been in
Cub's. No clean wildness, only the misery of physical discomfort
and want. I stared at him and he blinked.

Meat. He grunted as if I had wrung the word from
him.

I have no meat, no food at all. You'll get
nothing from me but a fight!

You, huffed another, in a parody of laughter.
Mirthless, heartless. Meat!

I had paused a moment too long, looked too long
at one, for another sprang suddenly to my back. He flung his arms
around me, pinning one of my arms, and then suddenly, horribly, his
teeth sank into my flesh where my neck met my shoulder. Meat.
Me.

A horror beyond thought engulfed me and I
fought. I fought just as I had the first time I had battled Forged
ones, with a mindless brutality that rivaled their own. The
elements were my only ally, for they were ravaged by cold and
privation. Their hands were clumsy with cold, and if we were all
powered by the frenzy for survival, at least mine was new and
strong within me while theirs had been worn down by the brutality
of their current existence. I left flesh in the mouth of that first
attacker, but tear myself free I did. That I recall. The rest is
not so clear. I cannot put it in order. I broke off my knife in the
young one's ribs. I recall a thumb gouging into my eye, and the
snap when I dislocated it from its socket. Locked in a struggle
with one, another pounded me across the shoulders with his stick,
until I managed to turn his mate to meet the blow. I don't recall
that I felt the pain of that pounding, and the torn flesh at my
neck seemed but a warm spot where blood flowed. I had no sense of
damage to myself, no daunting of my desire to kill them all. I
could not win. There were too many. The young one was down in the
snow, coughing blood, but one was throttling me while the other
tried to jerk the sword free from its entanglement in my flesh and
sleeve. I was kicking and flailing, trying uselessly to inflict any
sort of damage on my attackers while the edges of the world grew
black and the sky began to spin.

Brother!

He came, slashing teeth and weight hitting our
tangled struggle like a battering ram. We all went down in the snow
then, and the impact loosened the Forged one's grip enough that I
caught a whistle of air into my lungs. My head cleared, and
suddenly I had heart to fight again, to ignore pain and damage, to
fight! I swear I saw myself, face purpled from strangling, the rich
blood streaming and soaking and the smell so maddening. I bared my
teeth. Then Cub bore the one down and away from me. He attacked him
with a speed no man could match, slashing and snapping and leaping
clear before the grasping hands could seize his coat. He darted
back in suddenly.

I know that I knew when Cub's jaws closed in his
throat. I felt that death rattle in my own jaws and the swift
spurting blood that drenched my muzzle and flowed out over my
jowls. I shook my head, my teeth tearing flesh, setting all the
life loose to run free down his stinking garments.

Then was a time of nothing.

Then I was sitting in the snow, back against a
tree. Cub was lying in the snow not far from me. His forepaws were
dappled with blood. He was licking his legs clean, a careful, slow,
thorough licking.

I lifted my sleeve to my mouth and chin. I wiped
away blood. It was not mine. I knelt suddenly forward in the snow,
to spit out beard hairs, and then to vomit, but not even the acid
taste of my bile could cleanse the dead man's flesh and blood from
my mouth. I glanced at his body, looked away. His throat was torn
out. For a terrible instant I could recall how I had chewed down,
the tendons of his throat taut against my teeth. I shut my eyes
tight. I sat very still.

Cold nose against my cheek. I opened my eyes. He
sat beside me, regarding me. Cub.

Nighteyes, he corrected me. My mother-named me
Nighteyes. I was the last of my litter to get my eyes open. He
snuffed, then sneezed suddenly. He looked around at the fallen men.
I followed his gaze unwillingly. My knife had taken the young one,
but he had not died quickly. The other two ...

I killed faster, Nighteyes observed quietly. But
I have not the teeth of a cow. You did well, for your kind. He
stood up and shook himself. Blood, both cold and warm, spattered my
face. I gasped and wiped it away, then realized the
significance.

You're bleeding.

So are you. He pulled the blade out of you to
put it in me.

Let me look at it.

Why?

The question hung between us in the cold air.
Night was about to find us. Overhead the tree branches had gone
black against the evening sky. I did not need the light to see him.
I did not even need to see him. Do you need to see your ear to know
it is part of you? As useless to deny that part of my flesh was
mine as to deny Nighteyes.

We are brothers. We are pack, I
conceded.

Are we?

I felt a reaching, a groping, a tugging for my
attention. I let myself recall that I had felt this before and
denied it. Now I did not. I gave him my focus, my undivided
attention. Nighteyes was there, hide and tooth, muscle and claw,
and I did not avoid him. I knew the sword thrust in his shoulder
and felt how it had gone between two big muscles there. He held his
paw curled to his chest. I hesitated, and then felt his hurt that I
would hesitate. So I paused no longer, but reached out to him as he
had to me. Trust is not trust until it is complete. So close were
we, I do not know which of us offered this thought. For an instant
I had a double awareness of the world as Nighteyes' perceptions
overlay my own, his scenting of the bodies, his hearing telling me
of scavenger foxes already creeping closer, his eyes making no
difficulty of the fading light. Then the duality was gone, and his
senses were mine, and mine his. We were bonded.

Cold was settling, on the land and into my
bones. We found my cloak, clotted with frost, but I shook it out
and put it on. I did not try to fasten it, but kept it wide away
from where I had been bitten. I managed to drag my mittens on
despite my injured forearm. We'd better go, I told him softly. When
we get home, I'll see to cleaning and bandaging us. But first, we'd
better get there and get warm.

I felt his assent. He walked beside me as we
went, not behind me. He lifted his nose once, to snuff deeply of
the fresh air. A cold wind had come up. Snow began to fall. That
was all. His nose brought me the knowledge that I need fear no more
Forged ones. The air was clean save for the stench of those behind
us, and even that was fading, turning into carrion smell, mingling
with the scavenger foxes come to find them.

You were wrong, he observed. Neither of us hunts
very well alone. Sly amusement. Unless you thought you were doing
well before I came along?

A wolf is not meant to hunt alone, I told him. I
tried for dignity.

He lolled his tongue at me. Don't fear, little
brother. I'll be here.

We continued walking through the crisp white
snow and the stark black trees. Not much farther to home, he
comforted me. I felt his strength mingling with mine as we limped
on.

It was nearly noon when I presented myself at
Verity's map-room door. My forearm was snugly bandaged and
invisible inside a voluminous sleeve. The wound itself was not that
severe, but it was painful. The bite between my shoulder and neck
was not so easily concealed. I had lost flesh there, and it had
bled profusely. When I had seen it with a looking glass the night
before, I was nearly sick. Cleaning it had made it bleed even more
profusely; there was a chunk of me gone. Well, and if Nighteyes had
not intervened, more of me would have followed that mouthful. I
cannot explain how sickening I found that thought. I had managed to
get a dressing on it, but not a very good one. I had pulled my
shirt high and fastened it in place to conceal the bandaging. It
chafed painfully against the wound, but it concealed it.
Apprehensively, I tapped on the door, and was clearing my throat as
it opened.

Charim told me Verity was not there. There was a
worry deep in his eyes. I tried not to share it. He can't leave the
boatbuilders to that work, can he?

Charim shook his head to my banter. No. Up in
his tower, the old servant said shortly. I turned aside as he
slowly shut the door.

Well, Kettricken had told me as much. I had
tried to forget that part of our conversation. Dread crept through
me as I sought the tower stairs. Verity had no reason to be in this
tower. This tower was where he Skilled from in summers, when the
weather was fine and the Raiders harried our shores. There was no
reason to be up there in winter, especially with the wind howling
and the snow dropping as it was today. No reason save the terrible
attraction of the Skill itself.

I had felt that lure, I reminded myself as I
gritted my teeth and began the long climb to the top. I had known,
for a time, the heady exuberance of the Skill. Like the clotted
memory of long-ago pain, Galen the Skill Master's words came back
to me. If you are weak, he had threatened us, if you lack focus and
discipline, if you are indulgent and inclined to pleasure, you will
not master the Skill. Rather, the Skill will master you. Practice
the denial of all pleasures to yourself; deny all weaknesses that
tempt you. Then, when you are as steel, perhaps you will be ready
to encounter the lure of the Skill and turn aside from it. If you
give in to it, you will become as a great babe, mindless and
drooling. Then he had schooled us, with privations and punishments
that went far past any sane level. Yet when I had encountered the
Skill joy, I had not found it the tawdry pleasure Galen had
implied. Rather, it had been the same rush of blood and thunder of
heart that sometimes music brought to me, or a sudden flight of
bright pheasant in an autumn wood, or even the pleasure of taking a
horse perfectly over a difficult jump. That instant when all things
come into balance, and for a moment turn together as perfectly as
birds wheeling in flight. The Skill gave that to one, but not for
just a moment. Rather it lasted for as long as a man could sustain
it, and became stronger and purer as one's ability with the Skill
refined. Or so I believed. My own abilities with the Skill had been
permanently damaged in a battle of wills with Galen. The defensive
mental walls I had erected were such that not even someone as
strongly Skilled as Verity could always reach me. My own ability to
reach out of myself had become an intermittent thing, skittish and
flighty as a spooky horse.

I paused outside Verity's door. I took a very
deep breath, then breathed it out slowly, refusing to let the
blackness of spirit settle on me. Those things were done, that time
was gone. No sense railing to myself about it. As was my old habit,
I entered without knocking, lest the noise break Verity's
concentration.

He should not have been Skilling. He was. The
shutters of the window were open and he leaned out on the sill.
Wind and snow swirled throughout the room, speckling his dark hair
and dark blue shirt and jerkin. He was breathing in deep, long
steady breaths, a cadence somewhere between a very deep sleep and
that of a runner at rest and catching his wind. He seemed oblivious
of me. Prince Verity? I said softly.

He turned to me, and his gaze was like heat,
like light, like wind in my face. He Skilled into me with such
force that I felt driven out of myself, his mind possessing mine so
completely that there was no room left to be myself in it. For a
moment I was drowning in Verity, and then he was gone, withdrawing
so rapidly that I was left stumbling and gasping like a fish
deserted by a high wave. In a step he was beside me, catching my
elbow and steadying me on my feet.

I'm sorry, he apologized. I was not expecting
you. You startled me.

I should have knocked, my prince, I replied, and
then gave a quick nod to him that I could stand. What's out there,
that you watch so intently?

He glanced aside from me. Not much. Some boys on
the cliffs, watching a pod of whales sporting. Two of our own
boats, fishing halibut. Even in this weather, though not enjoying
it much.

Then you are not Skilling for Outislanders
....

There are not any out there, this time of year.
But I keep a watch. He glanced down at my forearm, the one he had
just released, and changed the subject. What happened to
you?

That's what I came to see you about. Forged ones
attacked me. Out on the face of the ridge, the one where the
spruce-hen hunting is good. Near the goatherd's shed.

He nodded quickly, his dark brows knitting. I
know the area. How many? Describe them.

I quickly sketched my attackers for him and he
nodded briefly, unsurprised. I had a report of them, four days ago.
They should not be this close to Buckkeep this soon; not unless
they are consistently moving in this direction, every day. Are they
finished?

Yes. You expected this? I was aghast. I thought
we had wiped them out.

We wiped out the ones who were here then. There
are others, moving in this direction. I have been keeping track of
them by the reports, but I had not expected them to be so close so
soon.