He had been making for the veranda, thinking to go back outside where he might stare at the horizon. As he reached it, though, the girl went by again. Havec watched her stagger past and briefly contemplated warning Xar his new student was about to collapse. He would probably be in his office reading at this time of day and would be so grateful for the spontaneous visit that he would happily do anything Havec said.
The stupid girl had chosen to come here, though, no one had forced her to. If it was unpleasant, she had no one to blame but herself. Scowling, he crossed out of the house into the tower, where he climbed to the top of the stairs. In the room at the tower’s apex, he wandered restlessly with no clear idea why he’d come here. One corner of a cage was as good a place to pace as any other.
As he passed his dresser, his eyes fell upon something, and he stopped. One hand reached out, but there was a hiccup of hesitation before it closed around the object and lifted it up: a circlet of tarnished silver with a large aquamarine set centrally, surrounded by murky pearls and pieces of sparkly glass. It stood out amidst the finer things, rings and bangles and strands of beads fashioned of purer metals and real jewels.
He tossed it back onto the dresser, careless of its fate. Instead, he snatched up a long chain of gold studded by lozenges of iolite the color of the heart of a storm. He wrapped it several times around his neck before going to the bed and hurling himself face-down onto the covers, where he went still. He asked himself, as he had been doing since he was fifteen, how much more of this he could take. The answer today was the same as it had been the last six years: enough to go on another day.
M.C. Burnell
Vengeance Is Our Legacy
Visitors in the Night
Havec’s eyes opened upon darkness when he heard the scream. Stifling a moan between his teeth, he squeezed them closed, pressing his face into the pillow so it might soak up his tears. He listened to the crash of breaking pottery and splintering wood, and in his mind’s eye, he saw fire dancing. He shivered beneath the blanket, grinding his teeth. An impulse swept through him to roll over and keep rolling until he fetched up against the warm and solid presence of another, who would hold him until the nightmare went away. It was an old, old habit by now – the sickening urge to surrender, the shame that came from bargaining with fate – and he fingered the familiar self-hate absently while he listened with half an ear to the crashes and shouts.
It was as much as five minutes before he realized he wasn’t hearing this with his memory, but his ears.
He sat up, heart thundering. He was alone in the darkened chamber at the tower’s apex, lit only by stars. He ran a hand across the sheets beside him and felt no residual warmth: Xar anKebbal had gotten out of bed a while ago.
Tossing the blanket back, he slid sideways and stepped silently onto the floor. Keeping his weight on the balls of his feet, he made for the dresser, where he slipped on a pair of loose, knee-length pants. Once he had them tied in place, he went straight to the room’s center, where a single fat column pierced by a hundred hooks held the tools of the trade. He took down one item he favored and belted it about his hips before going to the stairs.
Here at the top of the tower, the staircase was a spiral, an iron frame with wooden steps spinning down into an open area on the next floor. Anyone down there would be able to see his legs the instant he set foot on it. It was dark down there too and the sounds of conflict came from further away, but assuming you were safe was how bad things happened. He had learned this years ago.
He waited for another minute, crouched at the head of the stair with his breath held, listening. The screaming had stopped, and that had sounded like Menca. Either she was no longer in danger or she was dead.
Finally, he decided that the tower immediately beneath him was deserted. Moving cautiously, he descended the stair. The story below the single huge room at the top was made up of sleeping cells, identical narrow wedges that had been occupied back in the day. Before the building’s master decided that, rather than a thriving school full of students, he needed Havec by himself.
The third floor was also reached by the spiral stair, and like the floor above, it was also dark and still. Another level of rooms for pupils, but one of these rooms would be in use. He contemplated going in search of that girl, in order to ask her a few pointed questions. It was funny this disturbance had arrived a mere three days after she did.
The next story was devoted to offices and storerooms meant to serve the school that had used to be here. Light emerged from the hole in the floor where the staircase descended to the ground floor. Here it broke pattern, clinging to the outer curve of the wall to leave the center of the room clear. This was their gymnasium, a tall-ceilinged open space with cabinets along the walls and training dummies cluttering up the mat-carpeted floor.
There were three people advancing toward the stair, all of them dressed in the comfortable black cottons people donned when they set out in the dark of night to kill. Only one of them had noticed him partway down the stair; the other two were fixated on that cursed girl, spreading to flank her as she backed toward the staircase she was never going to reach. The one who was watching Havec waved to his fellows, indicating with hand gestures that his attention was needed elsewhere before moving past the girl toward the rear.
It would be easier to let him come. Face him one-on-one while standing on a height. That girl was down there, though, and a few days into training: a child could kill her with a bread knife. Cursing under his breath, he threw himself from the stair.
The girl screamed when he landed in front of her. He heard a scrabbling sound followed by a thump, by which he gathered she had stumbled back, tripped over her own feet, and fallen on her butt. That was good: if she was on her ass somewhere behind him, she wasn’t in the way.
He closed with the hood-shrouded figure on the right. It was hard to tell with only a single lamp burning at this late hour, but he thought he saw the curve of breasts. He drew the sword at his hip and slashed at her, and she retreated, radiating shock. No one would ever do something so bizarre as to assault one of the Empire’s preeminent academies of martial arts without cause, because they thought there was something here they wanted badly enough to take this risk. They would have asked questions, and when they did, they would have been told what everyone thought they knew: Xar anKebbal didn’t have any students anymore.
Before she could set her feet, he charged. He cut at her, and she sidestepped, twisting back to strike at his arm. Havec spun with her, putting his back to hers and kicking the back of her knee with the sole of his foot. When her leg folded, she didn’t fight it, lashing out backhanded as she sat. He hopped over the silver streak that was her sword but had no time to retaliate as the men joined the fray.
One of them ran straight at him, and he kicked the seated woman in the head, then leapt over her when she buckled. He had a moment to gather himself while the other two maneuvered around their colleague, then they came at him from either side. One man had a knife in either hand, the other carried a long wooden pole.
Two-Knives slashed at him, slash slash slash, taking a step forward each time with a flair more appropriate to an exhibition than a fight to the death. Stave hung back, sidling around the action as he sought an opening. When he closed, it was so unexpected Havec almost took a blow to the temple and was forced to leap away.
Blade didn’t feel like waiting for the men to do the job and get the credit, she was back on her feet and came for him in a rush. She slashed at his legs, and when he stepped back, she whipped around and slashed at him again, striking this time at the hips. He caught the blow, kicked her in the pelvis, then spun to the side as Two-Knives came back for more.
Stave was already waiting for him, thrusting at his belly, anticipating where he would be. Havec didn’t care to be anticipated and kicked his staff, then stepped on it, knocking it out of his hands. Before he could pick it up, Havec kicked him in the face, and he would have finished it if it hadn’t been for Blade.
He was forced to retreat, dancing to the side as her sword cleaved the air where he had been. As he sidestepped, Two-Knives got close, and Two-Knives wasn’t pissing him off nearly as much as Blade, but Two-Knives was the low-hanging fruit. He let the man get inside his reach, and while Two-Knives was making a clumsy strike that sailed past his head, Havec kneed him in the thigh. When he stumbled, Havec stepped on the inside of his foot, bulled into him with his shoulders, and cut him along the length of his left side as he fell. It hadn’t killed him outright, but he would bleed to death before he got up again.
Stave and Blade stepped back, trading glances. It didn’t seem smart to let them come up with a plan. Blade was cunning and quick and fought with the weapon he preferred, he wanted to face her one-on-one. He ran at Stave as the man raised the length of wood he had retrieved from the floor. Havec leaned around the first thrust once Stave was committed, stepped inside, and lashed out. Stave had expected this attack, though, and was already stepping out of the way, smacking his sword as it passed and almost knocking it from his hands.
That pissed him off. Xar had complained any number of times about his temper, had tried to tell him that a temper was predictable and being predictable would get him killed. But he was filled with angry fire indistinguishable from joy. While it burned inside him, danger was nothing to him, which did for common sense.
He could feel Blade closing at his back, trying to capitalize on his loss of composure, but Stave was alarmed and gave ground. He struck at the man, a blow that was deflected. He turned with the force of the parry, keeping careful hold of his weapon as he let Stave turn him. Foolish to present your back to an opponent when they could so easily stab you in it, but Stave didn’t have a sharpened edge to work with, so screw him. He kept going, turning a full circle, already cutting.
Only to find that what he had thought would happen hadn’t.
Instead of attacking his head or neck as he expected, going straight for a killing blow, the man tried to tangle the other end of his stick in Havec’s legs while his back was turned. He hopped to one side hastily and gracelessly so the staff couldn’t get between his knees, but the man whacked his shin before he had his feet set, hard enough he stumbled. As he went to one knee, he lashed out frantically at the woman closing on his back, and it shocked him when his sword slid under hers as if by accident, biting deep into her middle. Lurching back to his feet, he turned and drew his sword across Stave’s neck, and it almost felt like an afterthought.
Then he stood there, chest heaving. That had started off pretty well but degenerated at the end into a clumsy mess. He’d gotten reckless and done something foolish, and instead of dying, he won. He felt a sense of disappointment that his first real fight had been against a bunch of losers who let him kill them far too easily.
They were dead, though, it wasn’t like he could request a rematch. He gave the sword a shake to cast off the blood that clung to it and turned to the door in the far wall. A choked sob got his eyes on the girl still huddling on her ass by the staircase, wide eyes fixed on the bodies on the floor. He had come from the top of the tower down, finding it empty, and this room had no windows; she was safe here unless there were another fifty people outside climbing up the walls, and if there were, there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t about to give her a fucking hug, and aside from the nightmares she had coming, nothing was threatening her. With a shrug, he left her where she was.
Immediately beyond the door, he found Yob lying in a puddle of his own blood in the hall. Yob had been run through from behind, his throat cut once he was down. The way the old man lay sprawled on his belly, reaching toward the door, made it obvious he had been coming for Havec. He had heard the disturbance and run for help like a hero instead of hiding in his room. Havec knelt to close his staring eyes.
He took a left at the first intersection, making for the sounds of ongoing conflict that seemed to emanate from Xar’s office. Past the perpendicular way, he came across an open door. “Etheg?” he called softly. And again, “Etheg?” There was no answer.
Not turning aside to investigate, he walked on. That place inside him that had been filled with gleeful fire had gone cold. The sounds of struggle had died down to almost nothing, so he was barely surprised when he stepped through the doorframe of his master’s office to find only two of them alive. The room was littered in bodies, black-clad, masks rendering them anonymous. They lay scattered in dramatic poses across the furnishings, looking more like an image of hell from Hethqar’s Allegories than anything that could happen in real life.
Xar was still alive but badly injured. Havec could tell without seeing the wound because the man remained upright only by sitting on the forward edge of his desk, and he was grappling with a person he would have been able to throw across the room if he were well. Nodding to himself unconsciously, Havec closed the distance between them and drove his sword into the assassin’s back.
As he did it, it struck him that he might have done better to leave the man alive to answer questions. These had been trained killers, though; probably their capacity to resist torture was greater than his capacity to deal it out. It wasn’t something he was sure he could do, and he was just as glad not to find out.
The man who was his master was watching him, panting through a gaping mouth. There were multiple bloody gashes on his extremities; much more worrying were the two holes in his belly. Being stabbed in the gut wasn’t necessarily mortal, but he didn’t look well. His breathing was a pained rasp and greasy sweat coated him.
Dropping the sword, Havec went to him as he slid down the desk to sit on the floor. Menca was their healer, but there was no sense shouting for her help. They had killed all the servants, putting forth the extra effort to find them in their bedrooms and murder them.
