Mage Assassin 3 Chapter 6

I lifted the weight of my hand off the scroll I’d been holding flat against my desk, and the rich parchment snapped back into a furled shape. I pushed it away from me across the desk, but I felt like the king’s scrawled summons was staring at me when it sat on the wooden surface.

I snatched it up again, opened my desk drawer, and dropped it inside.

Ephy was watching me with a concerned look.

Before she could say anything, I had made up my mind.

“The king is just going to have to wait,” I announced. “I have business to take care of.”

I tried to focus on the things I needed to do instead of the stress that buzzed in the back of my mind, but Ephy still seemed to sense my tension, and I could tell it made her sad.

“Can I help, Dex?” she asked in a voice so sweet it made me smile.

“No, Ephy,” I said gently. “I have some things to do, but I need to do them alone. Unless… Well…”

“Yes, Dex?” she probed.

I let out my breath in a whoosh like I could blow out some tension with it.

“Well,” I hesitated. “Those weird things I mentioned that have been happening… they’ve almost all been something to do with water.”

“Like what just happened with the fountain?” she asked with a thoughtful crinkle in her light green forehead.

“Sort of,” I replied. “Except the other times have been in the forest. Suddenly I’ll notice little streams of water, like creeks, but I know they weren’t there before. It’s almost like the water is… following me.”

I said this with a little chuckle to show I knew how strange it sounded, but the thoughtful look lingered on Ephy’s delicate face.

“I think I have an idea,” she murmured while she twirled one of her periwinkle locks around her finger.

Then she got to her feet to come over and wind her slender arms around my neck.

“You take care of your business, Dex Morgan,” she lulled with an unusual hint of firmness behind her musical voice. “I’ll do some thinking about the water.”

“Thank you, Ephy.” I returned her hug and then pulled her into my lap and kissed her to show her how much I meant it.

She kissed me back eagerly, but then she wormed her way out of my grip and stood just out of my reach.

“You can thank me later,” she murmured, and the shy, sweet siren wore a teasing expression I didn’t often see on her.

“Of course.” I grinned at her and watched every move of her lithe form while she traipsed out the door. She shot me a last look before she gently pulled it shut behind her.

I felt calmer and more purposeful as I started to gather my thoughts, and gratitude toward Ephy swept over me.

Then I glanced around my office while I pondered what to do first. I was still expecting Incrassatum in here soon, so I got up to open the door part way so she knew it was alright to come inside.

When I turned to head back to my desk, my gaze fell on the crate Mazne had lugged in earlier.

“The special fruit I asked for,” I muttered to myself. That’s what the secretary claimed Eroven had told her it was when he insisted on making something fresh for her to bring home to me.

But I hadn’t asked Eroven for any special fruit. I hadn’t asked the wizard for anything.

Except…

I picked up the crate and lowered it to the ground between my feet when I sat back down in my desk chair.

Inside of it, on top of the blue screwbler fruits Mazne had picked up, there was a brown parchment bag. It was the crinkly kind that Eroven usually put his smaller fruits in to sell. There wasn’t anything else in the crate, so I assumed this must be my “special fruit.”

When I looked inside, I saw the bag was filled with orange rolls of dried fruit leather that had something crumbly like crushed nuts in them, and a pleasant smell wafted up to me. It was a citrusy, sunshiney scent that also had a hint of sweet nuttiness to it.

I had seen Eroven roll his fruit leather before, and I remembered that he always stretched each piece flat over a long strip of parchment paper and rolled it up along with the fruit leather so it wouldn’t stick into one big glob later. I could see these papers sticking out of the rolled fruit leathers in the bag now. But there was also a stray piece of the paper sitting on top by itself. It was furled up like a scroll and tied with a long fruit stem of some kind.

Its resemblance to the king’s summons made me snort with laughter.

I reached in and pulled it from the bag, and then I slid the stem off it and spread the paper in front of me on my desk.

A short message was scrawled across it. It had smeared a little when it was rolled up, so I had to hold it closer to me to make out the words.

“Honeyed sun-Bael with crushed Ucro nuts,” it said. This explained the fruit leather’s enticing scent.

Below that, the message continued: “Eat the one that appeals most to you first. You’ll find the ingredients are just what you asked for.”

That was all it said.

The ingredients were just what I asked for? I frowned and then scanned the fruit rolls in the bag for the one that looked tastiest to me. They all had subtle differences-- some were a slightly different shade of orange, and the amount of crushed Ucro I could see protruding from the fruit leather’s edges varied from barely any to… the one that appealed most to me. I reached down and retrieved the roll with so much Ucro sticking out of it that the fruit leather was barely even visible.

I unrolled it, and right away I could see the parchment it was rolled on also had writing. It was scrawled in the same rough hand as the note I’d just read.

“The sheep are harmless without their shepherds,” the message said. “I am fairly certain there will be no more trouble. But if you’re still worried, you can check with the secret that speaks.”

I immediately realized what this cryptic message meant.

Not too long ago, a group of young wizards had collectively wreaked havoc on Nara’s coven with the aim of getting the witches banished from Ocadia, or even killed if they could manage it. As far as I knew, this had all come to a screeching halt after I personally took out their leaders, a pair of identical twins named Finneus and Verlius. Not that the young wizards were aware of this. I had arranged it perfectly to look like the twins had killed each other.

Without those two vicious bastards to lead them into such things anymore, I doubted any of the other wizards would be a threat to Nara, her coven, or Ocadia. But I had put a few feelers out to keep tabs on them for a while just in case, and Eroven was one of them.

Eroven wasn’t exactly my usual type of source for intel. He didn’t even know me to be an assassin, much less one who had secretly stepped in to murder the two young wizards, and I planned to keep it that way. I would never put the kindly old wizard in any sort of danger.

But I had hoped he could point me in the right direction if I asked some innocent-sounding questions, and this note seemed to do exactly that.

Wizards didn’t technically have an estate the way the assassins or witches did, among others, so even if I had wanted to involve Eroven in this situation, he likely wouldn’t have been able to do anything along the lines of spying. But he had previously mentioned to me that the troublesome group of young wizards had been trying to set up meetings with the older, more experienced ones.

The older wizards generally weren’t evil or malicious, so it wasn’t surprising that according to Eroven, none of them had accepted the invitations.

But after I’d murdered Finneus and Verlius, I had asked him to explore things a little further and see if there were any exceptions, and just to keep an ear out. Because even though it wasn’t exactly common for the older wizards to mingle with their younger counterparts, I had come to learn the older ones gossiped like nosy old women when they came into any sort of conversation with each other. So I knew there was a strong chance that if an older wizard did somehow gain knowledge of the younger ones’ activities, it would become known among the elders.

Not that they would be able to do anything to keep the young wizards from their illicit activities. The wizards’ lack of cohesion as a group would prevent this. But I didn’t need them to act. I just needed to gain an idea of whether any more shady plans were being cooked up by the young wizards, especially if those plans had anything to do with the witches.

I gathered from Eroven’s note that he believed the young wizards, or rather “the sheep,” were no longer a threat now that the two ringleaders, who he referred to as “their shepherds,” had been so mysteriously eliminated. The old shopkeeper may have been blind to a lot of things about me and my doings, but he knew I was a thorough man, and he saw me as a well-meaning person who wanted to know what was going on. This was likely the reason why he had suggested an additional source of “the secret that speaks” for me to probe the wizards’ activities if I saw fit.

And conveniently for me, one of my assassins had just spoken to that very source on my behalf in the early hours of the morning. I was expecting her at any moment now.

“Good old Eroven,” I chuckled to myself as I shredded the parchment into tiny pieces. I pulled off a piece of the fruit leather to taste.

The Ucro nuts were both crunchy and buttery, and their nutty sweetness combined with the honey softened the sun-Bael’s eye-wateringly acidic flavor, but somehow kept its bright, tangy flavor intact.

I reached for another piece and decided I would find a way to thank the old wizard properly for both of these gifts.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sharp rap I’d been expecting on my half-open door. I looked up and saw it was made by a weathered, claw-like hand.

“Come on in, Incrassatum,” I called.

The hand pushed the door open, and the woman it belonged to came strolling in with her hands in her pockets. Incrassatum wasn’t smiling, as she rarely did, but I could read the pleased expression on her vulpine face.

“I take it you followed up about the wizards,” I said with raised eyebrows.

Incrassatum was my go-to choice for someone to meet with intel sources if I wasn’t able to do it myself. She was a sharp woman and always got straight to the point. She also had a knack for getting quick and truthful answers to her questions, probably because she fucking terrified nearly everyone.

“Can’t believe you’re using that wretched cryptid for a source,” she snickered.

“Do you doubt his reliability?” I asked.

“No, just his ability to use the brain that presumably lies somewhere within that thick, knotty head of his.” She rolled her eyes at the thought of it and then went on. “The wretch has sharp ears, though, I’ll give you that. And his tactic is… so stupid, yet so smart.”

She shook her head, and I couldn’t tell if it was in admiration or disgust.

This thick, knotty-headed source was a creature who almost every inhabitant of Ocadia both feared and doubted the existence of. He was known by dozens of different names, at the very least. Some were sort of mysterious-sounding, like Veldyr. Others were a bit laughable, like the Pingledwyn. Locally, he was often simply called Scree.

But I knew his true name, Xedavi, and he was the perfect informant.

He was also the wizards’ “secret that spoke.”

No one was sure exactly what kind of creature he had originally been, not even those who had spoken to him. But what a few did know, including me, was that several years ago, an odd group of elderly wizards had accidentally dabbled in some sort of dark magic and essentially transformed him into what he was now. Most of the wizards were completely unaware of this fact, but really, this was what made it all the more amusing.

Now, Xedavi had a disturbing appearance that morphed frequently, so he always looked a new and interesting shade of terrifying. He also had an immense arsenal of ghastly-sounding shrieks, moans, howls, whistles, and all other sorts of utterances.

As a source of intel for the Assassins’ Estate, he had one move, but it nearly always worked due to his frequently changing appearance: He would closely stalk whoever he was observing and listen in on every detail. He would get perilously close, as I never would allow my own scouts to do, and eventually, when he was discovered, he would just run directly at the person waving however many arms, tentacles, or other appendages he possessed that day, and filling their ears with hair-raising cries.

And then that person was added to the long list who’d had a run-in with the terrifying monster who roamed Ocadia.

I wouldn’t use Xedavi for a mission that required extreme delicacy, but to sound out this nonsense with the young wizards, he was perfect.

“Anyways,” Incrassatum went on. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about from those sniveling wizards, even without them being chased around by a legless stork the size of a horse that bounces around on its stomach and belches out human skulls.”

“Ahh, so Xedavi is stuck in the ghastly stork form again,” I muttered half to myself. “Been a while since I saw that one.”

Incrassatum offered a frank nod. “But the little wizards are utterly spineless, and they’d never act without someone there like those twins to bully them into it. Even if they were smart enough to think up something to do.”

She snorted at the thought.

“Great,” I said, but I could tell she was dying to tell me something but wanted to draw it out a little. “What else?”

Incrassatum leaned back in her chair and stretched out her stumpy-ankled legs. The look on her face made me think of a cat who had just eaten a mouse.

Or several mice, all wearing pointy wizard hats. It was impossible to tell just yet.

“Apparently,” she said in an airy tone, “someone put out word that the wizards are all cursed, and in light of recent events, they’re convinced it’s true, so they’ve been busy trying to… uncurse themselves.”

Incrassatum said the words “someone” and “recent events” with a look of such malevolent satisfaction that I knew she was behind this, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Especially because if anyone deserved it, it was those shitbag wizards.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“Wellllll,” drawled the bloodthirsty woman as she rested her fingers together in a steeple shape under her chin. “It seems someone heard talk that one of them was getting a little uppity, considering himself the new leader. However, that poor brave boy mysteriously vanished early this morning…”

Incrassatum trailed off delicately, and I allowed her to have her dramatic pause.

“… but he left something behind,” she added.

“What was it?” I asked.

“His head,” she told me solemnly.

We just sat and looked at each other for a few seconds before I spoke, and her poker face was as impeccable as ever.

“Thanks, Incrassatum,” I said with complete sincerity.

“Yeah, yeah,” she drawled as she waved me off. She seemed satisfied now that she’d been able to feed me this bit of knowledge, and she got to her feet.

Before she prowled out the door, Incrassatum turned back.

“I threatened to pick them off one by one just in case the head didn’t do the trick,” she said carelessly, like this was just some bit of information she’d forgotten. “But I didn’t tell Xedavi to quit chasing them wizards around. Should I?”

I paused for a long moment. “No.”

Incrassatum didn’t even blink. She just nodded and went on her way, and I smirked as I watched the woman stroll out my door as if she hadn’t decapitated a wizard today.

Now that I’d taken care of that, I put it out of my mind and turned to my next task.

What the hell was I going to do with these two kilos of gold?

I was proud I’d managed to provide the gold for my estate, and it made a nice little safety net. I hadn’t really thought much of it at first honestly, just like I didn’t think much of a lot of things the king said or promised. But now that I saw the enormous stacks of gold with my own two eyes, the meaning struck me a little more.

The tempting idea of buying a large amount of highly sophisticated deadly weapons leaped into my mind, like it had been there just waiting for the moment in life when I sat with a heap of gold at my fingertips. But I brushed it off. There was no denying that I salivated over the thought of adding an exciting new tool to my arsenal of lethal ranged weapons, but considering the nature of my job, this was rarely a good idea. Those types of weapons were nearly always too conspicuous, so someone could easily trace a particular kill back to me or my estate by something as simple as an arrowhead, provided they were ambitious enough to pull it out of the person I’d just killed.

If I paid extra to have these weapons made to be less conspicuous, then the person I was paying to make them would likely realize they could double their wage by finding the right person to rat me out to.

I sighed. Heaps of expensive weapons were out, then.

I asked myself what my priorities were, and my mind quickly went to Cinis, Ephy, and my estate members… and Nara. My mind lingered on the witch for a moment. I had felt a growing bond with her ever since I slaughtered those two wizards on her behalf and she helped me rescue Ephy from the water goddesses. The fact that I had tasked Incrassatum with “keeping an eye on the wizards,” knowing full well that it would probably go in a much more violent direction, was just more proof of that.

The kingdom of Ocadia as a whole was important, too, as was the Ardere, because if either of them went down, then so would the people I cared for.

Damn it. The thought of the kingdom brought my mind back to the king.

“The gold will find its way to you,” he’d told me the last time I left his castle.

And it had found me at such an opportune moment, hadn’t it?

I had known when Mazne set the scroll in my hand that the king needed something from me. This wasn’t anything new. But the things that came with it were.

The king hadn’t just sent me a scroll. He’d also sent me another kind of message, and even though it wasn’t written out in words, its meaning was plain to me. It wasn’t a coincidence that the summons arrived at the same exact time as the staggering amount of gold and the regular bounty of grain my estate depended on.

The king wanted me to ride up to his castle on the magnificent horse he’d left in front of my estate, with these things fresh in my mind. Maybe he even wanted me to walk in there thinking I owed him everything I had, including the livelihood of my people. Like I had been nothing before I ever had any dealings with him. Like I hadn’t killed Ignis of my own accord to take care of me and mine before I even met his royal highness.

Well, not that he knew of, anyways. I smirked as I recalled strolling into his castle mirroring a druid when I was getting the digs on how he’d been handling the whole Ignis situation before I stepped in.

The gold was a tangible reminder of my ties to the king and what that could mean down the road, but I wasn’t going to let it be the kind of reminder he wanted it to be.

I decided on the spot that now was the time to respond to the summons.

I left Nimith the baby nipitar with a delighted Mazne, and then I snatched a cloak off the peg by my door and threw it over myself as I strode outside. I worked to marshal the thoughts that marched quickly through my head as I walked toward the city centre.

I had already practically roped myself into these dealings with the king just by stepping into Master Abbot’s shoes. Not that I’d had all too much of a choice in this. I hadn’t even known it back then. But I’d been the best man for the job at the time, and I had an unfortunate feeling the king thought I was the best man for whatever the hell job I was about to walk into.

The real question was whether the job was best for me, and most importantly for the people I felt responsible for. My gut told me the king probably wouldn’t want me to find that out.

I was coming to view these goings-on with the king as something akin to the weather. I couldn’t stop a tornado from descending out of the sky if it decided to, but I had considerable resources to change how that affected me.

In other words, the king would do what the king would do.

It was up to me to deal with it how I saw fit.

I didn’t quite trust the king, just like I wouldn’t quite trust a tornado swirling overhead, but it was nothing personal.

As I strode through the city centre, I brooded on how I should get the king’s horse back to him. What the hell was he playing at, anyways? Regardless of his real motivation for sending it, he should’ve known by now that I wasn’t about to come galloping into his courtyard in broad daylight on the most conspicuous steed imaginable. I scowled and thrust my hands in my pockets, and I grasped the scroll I had in one of them to make sure I had the king’s summons with me.

The castle guards admitted me immediately, and instead of being taken into a room to sit and wait for the king, I found the king sitting and waiting for me.

“Master Morgan,” the king grumbled. “You took your time getting here.”

He didn’t seem all too surprised by this.

“Well, you did leave your prize stallion sitting in my front yard,” I reminded him in a mild voice.

“Thought it might encourage you to get down here in a reasonable amount of time,” he muttered as he stroked his beard. Then he waved his hands impatiently as if swatting away the thought like a fly. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.”

The king got up and paced restlessly like he couldn’t sit still anymore, and I waited patiently for him to speak. He paused a few times and inhaled like he was about to, but then seemed to change his mind and resumed his pacing. His expression was intent, like he didn’t want to dance around the matter, whatever it was, but he was worried of chasing me off.

I could tell he was trying to decide the best way to approach something delicate with me.

This happened a few more times before he stopped to face me and told me the most basic and obvious piece of the matter.

“I have a job for you,” the king said at last.

His brief pause after this seemed to only be cursory and without an actual expectation behind it, just on the off-chance that I had something to say before he continued. He knew I would want to hear the meat of things first, and he didn’t seem perturbed by my silence the way he had been back when we first met.

“A group of men has arrived from Altaya,” he told me as he took up his pacing again. “I need them dead.”

He must have known I would ask why, but that was all he could seem to bring himself to say without being pressed on the matter.

“Who?” I asked finally. “Why?”

“Because otherwise I’ll be dead,” he said agitatedly. “They’ve been sent here to kill me.”

I cleared my throat to buy myself some time while I tried to think up the right way to approach this statement. I didn’t mean for it to be a skeptical sound, but I thought it must’ve been, because he spoke up again.

“My intel has confirmed it,” he insisted.

I leaned forward with my fingers woven together under my chin.

“How many of them have been spotted?” I asked.

“My sources believe there are five men.” The king sounded extremely unhappy. “But it’s hard to be certain. They rarely appear together in the same place, and they seem to come out of nowhere. Sometimes they look to be heading off to the same location when they’re being tailed, but then they disappear at the drop of a hat, so I can’t confirm this.”

“Interesting,” I muttered curiously. “Could be some kind of magic involved, I suppose. Though I wouldn’t be too sure, given--”

“My people are certain of it, but none of them seem to have the slightest notion of what sort.” The king’s frown deepened. “Sometimes these men will dart into cover and just disappear. Can’t be flushed out. I had the whole royal arboretum torn up looking for them.”

“Hmm.” I furrowed my brow.

It seemed like a bit of a stretch to me to assume magic was absolutely behind it just because the men had been successful in evading the king’s scouts, and this skepticism must have shown on my face, because the king reluctantly went on.

“My people couldn’t even get close enough to engage in a fight. They’d come back to me with all sorts of nonsense. ‘Sun in the eyes,’ they’d say. ‘Dust in the face.’ Once, my scouts claimed their fellow was attacked by a bloody bird. The man was babbling, driven completely mad.”

This sounded a little more plausible. While I knew the king’s intel wasn’t perfect, they had dug up some things that made me sure they at least weren’t foolish enough for so many repeated mishaps. Something I had learned was that often the most powerful magic was the most difficult to detect.

Power as potent as this wasn’t all too common, though. Something about it didn’t sit right with me.

“But…” I objected. “Why would someone from the South Kingdom go to so much trouble to kill…?”

“Me?” the king chuckled darkly.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “What do you have that they want?”

“It’s not what I have, Dex,” he told me in a grave voice. “It’s what Ocadia has.”

“So in other words, it’s not your problem, it’s our problem?” I tried to keep my voice from sounding insolent. Sort of.

“Master Morgan,” the king blustered. “Ocadia stands between the North and South. My intelligence tells me the two may be opposing each other. This would make us a likely target for attack. It’s logical.”

I frowned at him, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was being a bit paranoid. On the other hand, we’d almost warred with Altaya only a decade ago about their plans to expand their northern border in this direction, and we’d never been on friendly terms since then.

“But what would come of targeting you specifically?” I asked. “And why now? Whether you’re dead or alive, Altaya wouldn’t dare to send an army here. Not with Hud surrounding us, and with the estates to defend us.”

“Exactly. They can’t take us on directly. They plan to topple our kingdom by destabilizing its centerpiece, the throne. Think about how the estates reacted to Ignis, even with me there to scold them into playing nice with each other. Think about how they would have acted if I wasn’t!”

He was growing more and more agitated, and I decided to just let him talk until he was finished.

“With me out of the way, it would be easy for them to snatch the throne or otherwise dismantle the kingdom, because I have no male heir, and my niece, my Maggie…” The king trailed off, and a fat tear rolled down his reddened face.

I was caught off-guard by how genuinely emotional he seemed. I thought back to Maggie and her sweet innocence, her delight over nipitars… And then I thought about an invader sweeping in and ruining all she held dear.

And all I did, too.

I couldn’t let that happen, but I tried not to let this turmoil show on my face, because I still had my misgivings about the king.

He was still sitting half-bent in his chair like a man in grief, and for the first time since I had seen him, he was starting to look his age. But after a moment, it was gone. He pulled himself together so quickly, I wondered if I had imagined it, and he waved a hand irritably.

“You’ll want to do your own looking, I know, but I have two requests.”

I didn’t answer, but I looked at him to show I was listening, and he seemed to expect this again. I had a feeling this longer pause was so he could steel himself for what he was about to say next.

“Be careful,” warned the king in his usual gruff voice. And then, more quietly, he added, “And be quick, if you can… please.”

The last word was so quiet I barely caught it.

I opened my mouth, closed it, and then nodded.

We held eye contact for a moment, and then he clasped my hand in a firm shake.

“Thank you, Master Morgan.” His solemn voice was so hoarse it almost came out as a croak. All the vigor he’d shown earlier was gone. He just seemed like an aging man who was sagging in relief as he took my word.

When he started in about a reward, I shook my head and got to my feet.

“We’ll discuss all that later,” I told him as he walked me to the secret passage. “I have enough gold to last me for quite a while, to be honest, and as usual, I haven’t formally accepted the work yet. But I’ll keep you informed.”

All he managed was a nod before I turned and ducked into the hidden tunnel without a glance back.

I thought hard as I walked. The king seemed sincere, and what he said made sense on the surface, but something seemed off about the whole situation. I had an unshakeable feeling that he was leaving something out.

I was nearing the end of the tunnel when suddenly my foot made contact with something. It was small and hard, and it made a clattering sound as it skipped down the last several feet of the tunnel and smacked into the door that led to the ladder.

I crouched when I got to it, and I gave it a cautious prod and then picked it up and rolled it curiously between my fingers. When I opened the door, there was the palest, circular fracture of light shining down through the edges of the fake drainage lid overhead, but I could barely make out the details of the object as I studied it here for a moment.

It felt like a rough stone of some kind, and it was small enough to rest easily in the hollow of my palm. It was also cold in a strange way that bit at my hand as I held it in the tunnel’s darkness.

To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one the king had given access to these tunnels, and I knew for sure I’d never dropped such a trinket here. I’d never held anything like it, in fact, but it didn’t strike me as the sort of thing I’d expect the king would carry around.

My brow furrowed in utter confusion, but I gathered the object into my cloak’s roomy inner pocket.

Then I reached for the bars of the underground ladder, and I instantly narrowed my eyes.

The metal already felt warm against my palms as I started to climb.