Baron Assassin: Chapters 1-2

While you're all waiting around for me to finish writing today's chapter of Unintended Cultivator, here's the first couple chapters of the thing that my imagination has latched onto with an iron grip. No, that is not the final title. It's just better than me calling Possibly Light Novel Assassin Guy Thingy. Or, if not better, it's shorter. I'll just go ahead and tell you that this is part of what I'm thinking of as an extended prologue to the main body of the story. Feel free to drop you thoughts and impressions, although there will probably be another 6,000-8,000 words dropping on this over the weekend. I'll still massaging some of that to make sure I've got it pinned down right tonally. So, you might want to withhold judgment until after those are posted. Okay, that's enough from the keyboard monkey. I'll let you read now. Enjoy! ~Eric

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Before

Chapter 1

Varal slowed to a stop and, almost unconsciously, pressed a hand to the wall to support a body that was suddenly unsteady. He felt stunned. No, he felt lost. That was why he’d slipped into the city’s back alleys and hidden byways. They were as familiar to him as a lover’s body and far more certain. Especially at night. The night was his time, as it was for so many other predators. Except…he wasn’t a predator anymore. At least, he wasn’t a predator that way he had been for his entire life. The final conversation with Estwhon passed through his mind again. The way it had been passing through his mind over and over for the last few hours.

“I’m disbanding the guild,” said Erstwhon.

“What?” Varal asked, unable to make sense of the madness he was hearing.

“It’s not some kind of stillborn joke. I mean it.”

The man’s dark eyes were still, steady, and resolved. A dull panic started to grow inside of Varal’s chest. The guild was everything to him. It had been his teacher and his home since his earliest memories.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s just the three of us now,” said Erstwhon with a gesture at himself and then at Varal and Gibon, who had been predictably silent. “Gibon was ready to give this up twenty years ago.”

Varal glanced at the other man. Gibon had been there as a mentor and then friend from the very start, but there were telltale signs of age in the man. That was telling in someone as powerful as Varal knew Gibon to be. Gibon confirmed Erstwhon’s comment with a single nod. The man had always been laconic to the point of muteness.

“I’m old, Varal,” continued Erstwhon. “Far, far older than you can possibly imagine. Old enough that things that I knew with the certainty of fact in my youth have started to look a great deal like poorly informed opinions. As for you, well, you’re young enough to do something else. Hell, anything else than this kind of work.”

“Like what?” demanded Varal.

“Start a business. Start a family. Start a country. With your skills, you could anything you want to do.”

Varal couldn’t help but scoff. This was madness.

“A family? What do I know about having a family?”

“Nothing,” admitted Erstwhon, “but here’s the truth. Nobody knows anything about having a family until they have one. It’s the kind of thing you figure out as you go.”

“I’m an assassin! What the hell would I do with a child?”

“Be patient,” said Gibon, his deep voice rumbling. “Be kind.”

Varal had pleaded with them, begged them, but the other two men wouldn’t be swayed. They had their own plans for what to do next.

“I don’t intend to leave you entirely without resources,” said Erstwhon. “There’s an account waiting for you at the Royal Bank. It should be enough to see you through for some time in comfort. Especially when combined with your other ventures. Consider it a parting gift, of sorts, for all your years of faithful service.”

“Will I ever see either of you again?”

These two men had the been the absolute pillars in his life, and the prospect of losing them entirely was a blow that Varal wasn’t prepared to face. Gibon shrugged. Erstwhon gave Varal a long, steady look.

“Perhaps,” said the former guildmaster. “I suppose that it’s almost inevitable that we will, although that meeting might be farther away than you’d like.”

All that came after that were two awkward goodbyes. Varal had stepped out of the guild house, which he’d been told was set to be emptied and sold, and began walking. Then, he’d kept walking, hoping that some kind of inspiration might strike him if he walked long enough. The inspiration hadn’t come and the hard reality had finally caught up with him. The guild was gone. Erstwhon was gone. Even if Varal had wanted to continue being an assassin, he had no easy means to continue that work. Assignments had come through Erstwhon, who had never shared how or where people contacted the guild. He knew enough about the underworld that he could offer his services, but anonymity had been one of the things that had kept him, Gibon, and Erstwhon safe from reprisals.

He would need to expose himself to at least a few people, but even that was a risk he had no intention of taking. It would require giving up the shield provided by the guild’s unfounded but potent reputation for omnipresence. In retrospect, Varal wondered if Erstwhon had set things up that way intentionally to discourage him from continuing on as a highly skilled and invisible killer. Still, the capital was large. He could simply disappear into the life of some ordinary person. It was a role he’d played often enough to do it convincingly. There were those other ventures Erstwhon had mentioned. They were legitimate businesses that Varal had set up under several identities. They only existed to give him plausible alibis for being in particular cities or neighborhoods if he ever needed them. He could take up one of those identities and just become a merchant.

Varal turned and let his back rest against a wall. He took deep breaths, barely noticing the icy winter air. There was a tightness in his chest he didn’t recognize. His heart was beating too fast. For a moment, he wondered if he’d been poisoned. The sensations were so foreign and frightening that he didn’t even hear the footsteps until something wrapped itself around his leg. He almost lashed out before his mind registered what his eyes had unknowingly seen. The something was a little girl. There were tears streaming down her cheeks, and she looked terrified. That was something he was used to seeing in people’s eyes, but what he wasn’t used to seeing was someone looking at him with desperate hope.

“Help me,” said the girl. “Please. Help Mama!”

Before Varal could even begin to formulate a response to the child’s mad request for help. Her eyes rolled up and she collapsed to the ground. It was only then that he saw the wound on her back and facts began to pile up. The child wasn’t dressed for the winter, wearing only a worn old dress. She had no shoes or coat. She’d clearly run into the night in a panic. Then, there was the wound. He recognized it as the work of a barb lash. It left a jagged, tearing injury. He’d been trained in its use, along with most other kinds of things that could inflict pain and death. It was a brutal weapon, primarily used as an implement of torture. Even as a man long inured to fact that all lives end, he struggled to imagine what kind of a sadist would inflict that torture on a child?

A part of Varal urged him to simply walk away. This was not his problem, nor his concern. But what were his concerns now? There were no assignments waiting for him. There was no particular need to maintain absolute anonymity. If anyone had asked him later why he did what he did, he couldn’t have answered them. He could only assume that it had been a result of the terrible blow his psyche had taken. Rather than walk away and let this random child and her pleas be carried off by the cold of winter and death, he reached his hand down and spoke.

“Heal.”

The wound began to slowly close. Varal knew that most people would have been shocked to learn that an assassin of all people knew healing magic, but that was simply a lack of imagination on their part. His healing magic wasn’t especially powerful, but it was necessary. Not all assassins were as well-trained and careful as him. It was routine for them to be injured. And how much easier would it be for angry families or authorities to track down killers if they had to run to a healer with their wounds. Of course, his healing wouldn’t be as good a true healer’s work. If he tried to heal the girl completely, he’d leave her with a terrible scar on her back. That wasn’t an issue for someone like him. He had many scars. It would, however, be a flaw that could trouble the girl later in life. Grimacing, he withdrew his healing magic. He could find a healer for her, even at this late hour. All it took was money.

Before he could so much as pick her up, he heard the footsteps this time. Two men with hard faces and rough clothes approached him slowly. One of them had the barb lash exposed in their hand, while the other carried a dagger that looked rusty. That one with the lash gave him an evil grin.

“You picked the wrong time for a late-night stroll, your lordship. Afraid we can’t have you wandering off and telling tales.”

Varal wanted to laugh at the man and his weak attempts at intimidation. He rose from where he’d been crouched by the child and considered the two men who had stopped. They both wore uncertain looks, perhaps because Varal was so obviously unconcerned by them.

“You know, I usually get paid for this kind of work, but I think I’m going to do this one for free,” he observed to the men.

“Do what for free?” asked the one holding the dagger.

“Murder,” said Varal as he started walking toward the pair. “Any other night, I might have walked away. But I don’t like the look of you. I don’t like people who use barb lashes on children. And I’m in a very bad mood.”

Between one step and the next, Varal activated one of the spells that made him so very effective at his work. Shadow Step. He merged with the abundant shadows in the nighttime alley. The two fools looked around wildly, but it was already too late. He emerged from the shadows behind the one with the lash. He seized the man’s arm, twisted it, and brought a fist down the elbow. The man started to let out a scream when a sharp blow to his head rendered him unconscious. The one with the dagger let out a panicked cry and started to back away, waving the blade wildly to try to fend Varal off. Varal slipped a hand beneath his cloak and drew a dagger of his own.

“You like to play with knives?” he asked. “That’s fine. I like to play with knives too. Shall we find out who plays better?”

“Stay back!” shouted the dagger man.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. Well, I’m not going to kill you yet. I’ve decided that I have questions for you two. Fortunately, you don’t need that hand to answer them.”

It was over before the dagger-wielding fool even knew that Varal had moved. He simply stared in horror as his hand fell away from his wrist. He never felt the blow that left him unconscious. Varal healed the wrist enough to keep the man from bleeding out. It left a hideous, puckering scar. With the immediate threat taken care of, he found himself with competing priorities. The girl needed medical attention. Soon. But he also needed to put the fools somewhere they wouldn’t be found.

“What to do?” he muttered.

Chapter 2

Varal had ultimately found an abandoned building nearby where he could leave the fools. He tied them up thoroughly, gagged them, and broke all their remaining fingers to discourage escape attempts. With a sigh, he threw some musty blankets he’d found over the men. While the prospect of them freezing to death didn’t bother him, it would be irritating if they froze to death before he could ask them some questions. There was no reason why two grown men should have been chasing a child through the alleys in the dead of night. He wanted to know why they were doing it. Did it have something to do with the child’s mother? The mother she was so worried about that the girl ignored her own pain to ask him to help the woman? Too many unanswered questions, he thought.

He picked up the girl he’d wrapped in his cloak and tried to decide where to go. He could take her to an inn. Those dotted the entire capital, and they generally had people on staff all night in case guests arrived very late or very early. Then again, walking in with an unconscious, injured child was bound to raise questions he honestly had no answers for. He didn’t even know the girl’s name, let alone where she had come from. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the city guard would not be impressed with his complete ignorance. The assassin in him urged Varal to simply put the girl in a coach and pay the driver to take her to a healer. That thought was almost unnaturally tempting. Yet, he knew that the uncertainty of her fate would gnaw at him. Varal was a man of meticulous planning and cold discipline. Trusting chance to see things to a satisfactory end wasn’t in his nature.

That only left one, far less appealing option. He gave the bundle of cloak and child in his arms a half-hearted glare.

“You’re lucky we’re so close.”

Sighing, he started walking toward what passed as his home. It took a couple minutes of walking before he realized he’d been circling that location for several hours. Shaking his head, he was just glad that he’d picked a location where most people would be asleep at this hour. The idea of trying to explain what was happening to some well-meaning citizen made him shudder. He suspected that some of that might prove unavoidable, depending on how things turned out with her mother. Varal didn’t have a good feeling about that woman’s fate. However, everything would be much easier to explain if the girl was healed, conscious, and he could get trivial bits of information like her damned name.

He climbed the wooden steps to the small apartment he’d rented under the name of one of his many business aliases. It took some maneuvering that elicited a pained sound from the girl, but he finally got the door open. Uncertain where else to put her, he settled her on narrow bed he used and covered the girl with a heavy blanket. She likely did not enjoy his temperature insensitivity. He took a few moments to stoke the remains of the fire and add a bit of wood. That ought to bring the temperature in the place up a little. Satisfied that the girl was out of immediate danger from freezing to death or murder, he turned his attention to securing her some healing. He needed someone competent but not particularly reputable. Someone Varal could get to parrot lines for the right price.

He locked the door behind him and, no longer burdened with an injured child, he leapt from narrow landing to a nearby rooftop. He ran from rooftop to rooftop wrapped in shadows and light as a feather. If anyone saw anything, all they noticed was a shadowy blur that passed into and out of sight in a second. The buildings grew increasingly shoddy the closer he got to his destination. It was child’s play to circumvent the pitiful wards the healer had put around his business and home. The man was alone in the small dwelling over the clinic he ran, which Varal took as a stroke of good fortune. It wouldn’t have been impossible to deal with the problem of a bystander, but it would have been tedious. The healer had apparently not been well-trained, because his eyes didn’t open until Varal clamped a hand over the man’s mouth. There were a few muffled screams and some useless thrashing.

“Stop it!” snapped Varal. “You wouldn’t have woken up if I came here to kill you. Do you understand?”

The healer nodded.

“Good,” said Varal lifting his hand from the healer’s mouth. “You’re going to come with me.”

“Why—” started the healer.

“Just listen. If you do what I want and don’t make my life difficult, you get this,” said Varal, holding up a money purse and shaking it.

At the clinking of coins, the healer seemed to calm down.

“Okay.”

“If you don’t do what I want or make my life difficult, you get this,” Varal held up a dagger. “Which would you prefer?”

Licking his lips nervously, the healer answered, “I’d like the money, please.”

“Excellent. Now get up. We have a little trip to take.”

It took longer than Varal would have liked for the healer to gather his wits and get dressed. Then, they had to walk to a better neighborhood before they found a particularly desperate or hard-working carriage driver ready to pick up two men in the dark of the night. Once they were inside the carriage, the healer finally found the courage to ask a question.

“What do you need me to do?”

“The only thing you’re good at. I need you to heal someone. Heal them properly,” said Varal.

“Properly?” asked the healer.

“No scars.”

The answer seemed to baffle the healer rather than make the situation clearer. Varal found the man’s confusion inconsequential. As long as he did what he was told, that was sufficient. The rest of the trip was made in uncomfortable silence. At least, the healer seemed uncomfortable from the way he constantly shifted in the seat. As directed, the driver let them off near to Varal’s home, but not directly outside of it. The assassin tossed the driver a gold coin.

“You never saw us.”

The driver turned out to be the pragmatic sort who knew a good thing when he saw it.

“I’ve had a terrible night, sir. Not a single customer.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” offered Varal in mock sympathy.

“I’m sure the goddess will take pity on this poor driver,” said the man with a grin.

With a jaunty wave, the driver gave his reins a little shake and the horse started to plod away. Varal turned back to the healer, who flinched a little when the assassin’s gaze landed on him.

“Let’s go.”

The healer fell into step behind him, although the assassin could hear the man’s breathing getting a little faster. Like I’d take the fool somewhere like this just to kill him, thought Varal. It wasn’t until the healer saw the little girl that seemed to calm down.

“Where is she hurt?”

“Her back.”

The man turned the girl over and took a sharp breath.

“Goddess above,” the man whispered. “Is this from a barb lash?”

“Yes.”

The man hovered his hands over the girl’s back. They started to glow and abruptly stopped.

“This has already been partially healed.”

“Is that a problem?” demanded Varal.

“No. I just—” the healer trailed off. “Who healed her?”

“I did.”

The healer blinked up at him before sudden understanding dawned.

“Heal them properly,” said the healer, echoing Varal’s earlier comment.

The man shook his head, and his hands took on that same glow. The wound that Varal had partially healed began to close very slowly. The assassin frowned at that before it occurred to him that the scarless healing he’d demanded might require it. By the time it was over, sweat had beaded on the healer’s forehead. The man looked pale and shaky. There was the faintest mark on the girl’s back, but nothing like the grotesquery that Varal knew he would have left.

“This is…This is the best I can do,” whispered the healer, looking up with fearful eyes.

Varal held out the money pouch and said, “It’s fine.”

The relieved healer took the pouch before he looked at the girl, who seemed to be sleeping much more peacefully.

“Who is she?” asked the healer.

It wasn’t a question a smart man would have asked, but he supposed the man had probably taxed himself to a state of exhaustion. Plus, it wasn’t like there was any information to give away.

“I honestly don’t know,” said Varal. “Someone the goddess hasn’t been kind to.”

He held out another pouch to the man and gave him a meaningful look. The healer considered the pouch before he responded.

“I was never here. I never saw anything.”

“Good.”

He dropped the pouch into the healer’s lap. The man got to his feet, if a little unsteadily, and started walking toward the door. He paused and turned back.

“If you don’t know her, why help her?”

Varal let that question hang in the air for several long seconds. Then, he shrugged and gave a non-answer.

“Because I was there.”

The healer chewed his lip for a moment before he spoke again.

“I don’t know if you care about this, but that injury on her back wasn’t her only problem. She was sick. Had been for a while now from what I could tell. It’s been going around in the slums. Killed quite a few people already. I took care of that, but she’s also malnourished. I don’t know what she’s been eating. All I can tell you is that it hasn’t been good or enough. There isn’t anything I can do about that, and healing is hard on the body. She’ll need something to eat when she wakes up.”

Varal frowned at all of that information but nodded.

“I’ll see to it. How long until she wakes up, do you think?”

“Given her condition. Probably not for a while. Several hours at the least.”

“Thank you,” said Varal.

The healer took that for the dismissal it was and didn’t quite flee out the door. Now that he had a better idea of when the child was going to wake up, Varal finally felt like he could go and have a serious discussion with those two fools. He still wanted to give the healer time to clear off before he took any action. After adding a bit more wood to the fire and settling the blanket over the girl again, he slipped out of the apartment and made his way back to where he’d left the future corpses. He found them vainly struggling beneath the musty blankets. He grabbed a fistful of the material and jerked it away from the men.

They took one look at him and started thrashing in their bonds. Leaving them to their futile struggle, he looked around the abandoned building. He found an intact chair, set it down near the men, and settled onto it. Then, he waited. It was only after another ten minutes that both men seemed to realize that their animal panic wasn’t going to allow to them to escape. He walked over the bigger of the two and removed his gag. The fool started bellowing immediately.

“Do you have any idea who we work for!”

Varal backhanded the man hard enough to send blood and tooth flying

“It’s not time for the screaming, yet. And, no, I don’t know who you work for, but I am very interested in learning their name. Their location. Their business. You will tell me these things. If you tell me quickly, you’ll suffer less. You’ll also tell me why you were chasing that girl,” said Varal before he gagged the big one again.

The men gave him confused looks.

“Oh, you’re wondering how you’ll answer my questions with the gags in. The answers come later. This comes first.”

The assassin reached into the deep pocket of his greatcoat and withdrew the barb lash. He drew his arm back and let the lash unfurl. The fools’ eyes went wide, and they started thrashing again.

“In case you were wondering,” offered Varal in a bored voice, “this is the time for screaming.”