Chapter 33 : The Assassin
Tina had exhausted herself and was asleep against the fire, the thick grass and reeds Evan had gathered making something like a bed. He sat across from her, eyes closed, attention divided between the internal review he'd made a habit of and the countryside around him.
He didn't need sleep. He used the quiet hours the way he always did — working back through the day's events, looking for things he'd handled carelessly or missed. Tonight he didn't go all the way through before leaving a portion of his awareness outside. Something about today felt unresolved.
The fire burned low. Autumn insects worked at their indifferent music in the dark. No moon. Stars.
He had been thinking, too, about magical cultivation. There were three broad traditions he knew of: the first was direct elemental absorption through meditation, fast to start but slow once a mage crossed into the Mage stage; the second was visualization of elemental guardian-figures or archangels, slower at the beginning but more consistent over time; the third, used primarily by Church clergy, was prayer — simple in form, powerful in result for those who maintained genuine faith, less effective for practitioners whose belief was conditional. He had inherited Nicholas Andrew's method of visualization, centering on the image of the Death God, and had discovered through experimentation that the object of visualization didn't much matter — what mattered was the quality of attention. He had shifted to visualizing a black lotus, and the results were slightly better than what he'd been getting before.
Tonight he didn't visualize anything. He sat empty and listened.
Three in the morning, by his internal sense of time. The hour when sleep is deepest.
Behind him, at some distance, a shape on the ground that might have been a stone moved. Just slightly. Then it held still again, longer this time, before drifting a fraction closer. The shape moved like something with patience built into it — not hurrying, not wasting motion, each movement designed to look like no movement at all.
Evan was facing away from it. He appeared entirely unaware.
The shape moved again, closer this time, and this time kept moving — not a stone but a figure in a dark cloak, rising from the ground with the silence of something nocturnal. A blade came out of the cloak. It crossed the space between them in a line aimed at Evan's back.
The blade passed through nothing.
The assassin understood immediately. He had struck a projection — something solid enough to fool the eye but not the blade. His mind identified the situation and registered not good before the analysis was complete, and then a line of sword-light appeared from the open air to his left, and a body materialized alongside it, and the air around him went thick.
Wind Bind. He could move, but the movement required effort it shouldn't have required, as though the air had become partially solid.
Evan's blade found four points before the assassin could struggle clear: both wrists, both ankles. The man hit the ground with a sound that came out sharp and involuntary. Tina woke.
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From the moment Evan had begun teaching her that evening, the man had been watching from distance. Evan had noticed him then and had decided — without showing any sign of it — that if someone with real skills was observing his swordsmanship with that kind of focused attention, an approach tonight was likely. He had prepared while appearing to teach. The warning array he'd laid down in the surrounding ground used a simple spell with almost no magical signature — something brushing against it produced no sound, no visible response, only a faint internal impression of direction. By the time the assassin settled in to wait, Evan already knew where he was.
The projection had held the fire's warmth reasonably well. The wind had been in the assassin's favor — he had planned the approach to keep his scent from Evan's direction. He had thought of most things.
Evan crouched beside him. "Who are you, and who sent you?"
The man's face produced a thin, unpleasant smile. "Come closer. I'll tell you."
The eyes said something different. Evan walked toward him, and when he was within a pace, the man's jaw opened and a jet of fine metal fragments drove outward on a mouthful of expelled air.
Evan's hand came up. Wind shield. The fragments stopped short.
But the man's mouth was already closed again, and the color leaving his face was the color of something working fast. His jaw clenched once, his body pulled against itself, and then he was still.
Evan opened the man's mouth. Between the upper and lower teeth, a hollow molar, bitten through. He could smell the faint bitter-almond trace — cyanide compounds, or this world's equivalent.
He shook his head. The man was dead, and he'd learned nothing.
Tina was sitting up, watching with the expression of someone who had seen enough in the past few days to have stopped screaming at things. "Another one," she said.
Evan searched the body. No identification, nothing to connect the man to a name or an organization — that was expected. What he did find was a folded piece of paper with two portraits drawn on it. His own face, recognizable despite not being a perfect likeness, and Tina's beside it.
Someone had hired professionals to kill both of them. Baron Iden was the obvious candidate — the man had means and motive and a very fresh grievance. The girl's presence in the portrait confirmed it wasn't just Evan they wanted.
He kept the conclusion provisional. Without proof it was just inference, and he wasn't going to do anything about it either way — he and Tina were already outside Iden's territory, and outside Earl Edward's territory beyond that. Going back would be pointless.
He looked at the man's left arm and found a small mark — a symbol he recognized from Nicholas Andrew's memory as the emblem of the Silver Hand. An assassins' organization that worked for coin, asked no questions, and maintained its reputation through consistent delivery.
One failure would produce another attempt. A second failure would escalate the commission and raise the fee. If the client refused the higher price, the contract would be cancelled. These were the mechanics he understood from what Nicholas Andrew had known.
He thought about it for a while and decided he didn't particularly mind. If someone wanted to test him, he would accept the test.
He opened the ground with a gesture and let it take the body. Tina watched with wide eyes and said nothing. She was learning that there were things he did that she didn't have a framework for yet, and that asking before she had the framework wasn't going to help her.
"You're not going back to sleep," Evan said. "It's almost light. Practice."
She found her feet and her sword and ran through the forms she'd learned the night before. Evan sat and watched, and while he watched, he also practiced — the same forms, run in his mind, his body producing the tiny muscle movements of mental rehearsal without the visible motion. His eyes were open and his face showed nothing, and anyone watching would have seen a man sitting beside a fire doing nothing at all.