The Warlord and the Assassin: A Fantasy Romance Novella (5 page)

Tarak struggled against the grip of the poison, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink. It didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, and he knew this wouldn’t kill him.
 

The Taint in him was too strong for that. The Akuna demon trait wasn’t just a myth.

So Tarak was content to lie on the hard, wooden floor, waiting for the poison to run its course, unable to even lift a finger. It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered. He felt too good. The effects of the Black Bellflower were as good as any drug one might find in the pleasure houses of Fortuna.

He remembered the feel of the assassin’s lithe, toned body through the thin silk of her dress. The
ikana
costume looked ridiculous on her, but he’d used his imagination to visualize what she really looked like under the face paint.
 

She was a fierce little thing, with a delicate, upturned nose and catlike eyes that were the darkest green. He had been right about the color. They reminded him of a deep forest, dense and impenetrable. Her rosebud lips had been painted a dark crimson. He recalled them as being slightly parted, with just a hint of her pink mouth showing, tempting him.
 

Oh, this poison was good. Tarak’s thoughts filled him with lust.
 

He was paralyzed, mired in helpless bliss. It was mind-numbingly amazing. And he realized that at least one part of his body hadn’t been paralyzed. His cock had been hard from the time she walked in the door and he registered her unmistakable scent, and the faintest trickle of her
qwi
, which she’d worked so hard to suppress.

She couldn’t hide from him. He had told her as much.

Tarak tried to move his legs as the door opened, with little success. Vicson appeared, and froze, his pale eyes wide with shock.
 

“My Lord!” He rushed to Tarak’s side. “What’s wrong? What happened to you?”

It took the greatest effort for Tarak to speak. “I’m fine,” he rasped. “Get Kietesh.”

“You want me to fetch Amun? But-” Vicson started to protest, his tone of voice echoing his fear of the assassin. No-one liked to interrupt Kietesh.

“Do it.” Tarak ground out, every syllable ground out with colossal effort. Vicson nodded and rushed off, leaving Tarak to study the worn, wooden floor. It was going to be a long wait until the poison was out of his system.
 

He would send Kietesh to track the little assassin. And once he found her, he would show her what it truly meant to raise the ire of an Akuna Warlord.
 

She hadn’t killed him, but she had succeeded in stoking the twin flames of his anger and lust.
 

It was a volatile combination.
 

Unable to move, sprawled on the hard, cold floor, Tarak Chul decided that he wasn’t finished with the Inue woman yet. Now it was her turn to be the hunted.

~~~

Tarak must have drifted. When he opened his eyes again, he saw two pairs of feet before him. Vicson’s soft leather court shoes twitched nervously. He recognized Kietesh’s worn, black leather boots.
 

The owner of said boots squatted down. “Leave us, Vicson.” Kietesh’s voice was soft, but his words carried a quiet menace. Vicson disappeared without any further questions.
 

“You let yourself be poisoned.” Kietesh’s tone was dry. “You must be getting soft, brother.”

“Fuck you, brother.” Tarak strained his eyes, catching a glimpse of Kietesh’s face. He might be imagining things, but he thought that a corner of his mouth was curled upwards, as if amused.

He knew Kietesh too well. The bastard was laughing at him.

“Vicson told me it was a woman. I’ve never known you to lose your head over a woman, Tarak.”

“I’m lying on the floor, poisoned, Kieh. Have some sympathy.”

“It won’t kill you. Not with your blood.” Kietesh shrugged. “What did she poison you with?”

“Black Bellflower.”

“Hm.” Kietesh lifted one of Tarak’s eyelids. “You won’t be able to move until sunset. I bet you’re feeling good right now.”

“Amazing.” Tarak laughed. He couldn’t help it. The ridiculousness of the situation was too much.

“There’s no antidote, you know.” Kietesh stood and moved behind Tarak. He slid his arms around him and lifted him into a sitting position, then dragged him across the floor so he was supported by the wall. Tarak was aware of every sound, every movement, his senses hyper-acute.
 

The only problem was, he couldn’t move.
 

But he didn’t care. With Kietesh here, he was safe. Kietesh was the only person he trusted completely in this world.
 

He had regained some degree of control over his neck muscles. At least he could keep his head up. Tarak’s right eye started to twitch. Perhaps that was the effect of the poison, starting to leave his system. “When you’ve finished gloating, brother, I have a job for you.”

Raising an eyebrow, Kietesh sat down beside Tarak. He lifted his curved sword from his waist and lay it on the floor. Kietesh was dressed in the loose, black robes that were so characteristically Akuna. His long, black hair was bound in a high topknot. He stared at Tarak with a flat, impenetrable gaze. “You want me to kill her?”

“No.”
 

“When she finds out you’re alive, she’ll try again. That’s the way of the Inue.”

“I know.” Tarak closed his eyes, remembering the feel of the female assassin’s body against his, the way they fit together, her lithe, muscled figure moulding into him. It had been almost perfect.

Save for the fact she had injected him with a lethal dose of poison.
 

“You’re smitten, brother.”
 

“Shut up. It’s just the poison.” Tarak wanted to sit here and think about her until the last of the poison had been cleared from his cursed body. But he was the Warlord of a lost tribe, and he couldn’t afford to let his guard down. Daydreaming about women was for hormonal, teenaged brats. With great effort, he fought through the false euphoria, the sense of detachment the Black Bellflower brought, and found the scattered tendrils of his
qwi
. He pulled his aura around him, searching for that icy centre of control in his mind that had served him so well in the past.

It had served him when the Eratean slavers had tied him to a post and whipped him, leaving him in the relentless sun for three days and nights, without food or water. It had served him when he had endured the depravity of his Eratean masters, forced to do the unthinkable; to pleasure them.
 

His childhood had been a far cry from what it was supposed to be. The Akuna had been driven out of their homeland by the Erateans, and sold into slavery or forced into hiding in the labyrinthine network of caves and tunnels beneath the Esskar mountains. Before the Erateans came, they thrived in the rocky, forbidding peaks of their winter-bound homeland. Any Akuna craved the wild, wind-whipped slopes and endless blue skies. And they needed to revel in the thrill of the hunt, to stalk the vicious mountain cats and lesser dragons, to find an outlet for the Akuna bloodlust. If the bloodlust was kept suppressed for too long, the Akuna suffered a special kind of madness.
 

They called it the Taint, and nobody could really explain it, aside from the theory that there had been a demonic ancestor in the Akuna bloodline. Some said they had inherited the blood of Imril, the God of Death himself.

Tarak’s Taint was stronger than most. He healed better. He was bigger and faster and stronger. And at first, when the bloodlust came on, he had found it difficult to control. But over time, he had learnt to suppress it, had learnt to channel his anger. A childhood in slavery under the Erateans had taught him that. The only other option had been death. But sometimes, the bloodlust still threatened to overtake him. Like all Akuna, he needed the fight. So he sated it on the battlefield.
 

If peacetime ever came, he didn’t know what he would do.

Tarak reined in his wild thoughts and tried to look at Kietesh. It took great effort to get his neck to move, even a fraction. “Kieh, I need you to follow her only. Find out who she reports to.”

Kietesh’s expression was blank, his face a cold mask. Any trace of his earlier humor was gone. “And then?” His intent was obvious and chilling. Tarak knew Kietesh could kill the woman without blinking an eye, no matter how skilled she was. She would never see him coming. He couldn’t let that happen. Not yet.

“You won’t lay a finger on her. You report to me.”

“There’s a camp of three thousand retreating Erateans just across the border. It doesn’t take a Rageshi wiseman to figure out who might have hired her. It would be better if I killed her.”

“No Inue would willingly serve the Erateans, brother. You of all people should know that. I need to know why she’s under their thumb.”
 

Tarak realized he had regained some function in his hands. He flexed his fingers a fraction. “Besides, the Erateans will soon think me dead. I intend to use that to my advantage.”

Kietesh rose to his feet in one fluid motion, in that eerie, soundless way of his. He retrieved his sword and offered Tarak a small bow. It was so typically Inue, and from Kietesh, most unexpected.

“This is why I let you order me around, brother. Most of the time, you know what you’re doing, and you have the ability to turn shit into gold.” Kietesh slid his sheathed sword into a loop at his waist. The curved callidum blade had tasted too much blood in recent years. It was designed for speed, not trading blows. Most of Kietesh’s opponents were dead before they could even unsheathe their weapons. Kietesh started to walk away. “I’ll get Vicson to take you to your room. Just remember,
Katach
, that I trust your judgement for now, as always. However if you go astray on this, I will take matters into my own hands.”

Tarak didn’t doubt the assassin for one moment. After all, he had done it before.

When Tarak opened his eyes again, he was lying in his bed, covered in a fine sheen of sweat. He vaguely remembered being carried down the stone halls of Larion Fortress by his Akuna guard. Even now, they would be standing outside his door.

Bright morning light washed over him, and he blinked, wondering how long he had been asleep.

The dense fog of euphoria clouding his mind was gone, and he stretched in relief. The Black Bellflower had released its grip on his limbs. He could move again.
 

The sensation of detached bliss had been replaced with a dull, throbbing headache. As Tarak reached over for a pitcher of water, he saw a shadow pass across his window.
 

Tarak pulled on a pair of loose, cotton pants and walked over to the balcony. Kietesh sat on the railing, staring out at the fortress grounds.
 

“Sleep well?” The assassin raised an eyebrow.

“Well enough.” A chill morning breeze tugged at them, brought down from the mountains. Tarak tasted a hint of the coming winter on the wind.
 

“Your female Inue is working for the Erateans. I followed her straight to their camp, cross the border. She went into the commander’s tent.”
 

“So she’s working for Garul?”
 

“Evidently.”

Tarak wondered why a woman like that would do the bidding of a spineless thug like Jerik Garul. The former Lord of Larion Fortress and Wider Varanada hadn’t even given them a proper siege. As soon as supply lines were cut off, he had held up the flag of surrender and taken his men back across the Eratean border.
 

Tarak had allowed them to go, not wanting the native Varanese to witness any more slaughter. They had suffered enough when the Erateans had occupied their lands. He had expected Garul to withdraw his men back to Adalan, Eratea’s capital. But the man had stubbornly remained just over the border.
 

“They’ve started to move. I expect Jerik thinks you’re dead. They’ll try to surround our army from both sides, and take back the Fortress at the same time.”

Tarak grinned. “So the little Lord thinks the Akuna are any less savage without me? Let them come, brother. Send word to Mistress Enki to prepare the men. But tell her to keep the cooking fires burning and the tents erect. I don’t want Garul to suspect a thing. We’re going to draw them onto the mountain and into the fortress and send a message to the Eratean Empire. I was happy to let them retreat, but their idiot commander is leading them to their deaths.”

“And the woman?”

“You and I are going to pay a little visit to Chukol village.” Tarak turned to the north, watching a lone hawk crest the swirling eddies of wind at the base of the mountain ranges. A thin haze of woodsmoke hung in the air. From Varanada Town below, the cries of a lone cockerel pierced the morning stillness. “I assume you know how to find the secret village?”

Kietesh was giving him that look again. Tarak knew what it meant. Kietesh disapproved, but he was content to play along, for now. “Yes.” He didn’t reveal anything further. When it came to the Inue, Kietesh never said much. But Tarak knew he’d received training from an old Inue master.
 

Kietesh never spoke of his time with her.

Like the forbidding Esskar ranges themselves, Kietesh was a man of deep secrets and layers, with a facade as cold and hard as winter ice.
 

“Then we’ll go and pay the Elders a visit, just you and me.” Tarak slapped Kietesh on the shoulder. He was the only person on the continent who would dare such a thing. “It’ll be just like old times.”

Kietesh only offered him a flat stare in exchange.

What he didn’t tell Kietesh was that he craved to see
her
again, to feel her warmth and inhale her alluring jasmine scent. He intended to teach the Inue assassin there was more to life than blindly following the Inue killer’s code.
 

And when he was done with her, she would regret ever trying to kill him.
 

Amina knelt before Elder Okuro, breathing in the faint, aromatic scent of herb smoke. Dried leaves had been thrown onto the hearth, as they burned, they filled his hut with a medicinal smelling haze.