One Last Job
Isle Kabak
The assassin was being followed.
He kept his pace slow, almost strolling, and listened. Two sets of steps dogged his; he could distinguish their quicker pace from those of the thin, desultory crowd that shuffled around him. They stopped when he stopped. They quickened their pace when he did.
Amateurs.
He did not change his course, but he kept to the main street, that looked more like a canal made of dirt than a proper thoroughfare.
When he’d docked the Black Storm at harbor that morning, Darrowden appeared as a giant anthill that rose out of flat sea. A city carved into the natural sandstone mounds of the small island, its hovels and homes all worn down and rounded by centuries of wind, their doors no more than holes cut into the yielding rock.
Like black mouths in chubby, eyeless faces.
The streets were not the open walkways of other, more civilized islands but winding, high-walled paths carved around and through the mounds. The citizens of Darrowden shuffled along these paths, corralled on both sides by yellow stone.
The assassin didn’t know what his pursuers could be after. His boots, maybe, though they were in need of patching. His scimitars were plain, sturdy steel but he guessed they’d fetch a kroon or two apiece at the flea-ridden market at the docks. His flintlock was also simple and in good working order, but it was tucked into his belt at the small of his back, hidden beneath his leather coat. It was likely his long black leather coat they wanted. It was worn at the shoulders from years of salt and spray, but still in good shape. It was damnably hot on this dust-choked isle, but he wore it anyway. He wore it always.
These street rats don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.
If they had known the assassin they trailed was named Sebastian Vaas, they would have turned tail and run.
The path wound upwards, and grew steeper with every bend. Few people paid him a glance. They kept their heads down, their eyes on the street. There was no chatter, no laughter. No brays of the drunk or angry echoing in the buildings around him. The soft stone path swallowed sound, and the oppressive heat burnt away the will to speak. Small children sat in clusters on doorsteps, playing games of chance with sticks and rocks. They wore sparse clothing and did not laugh. The adults wore plain spun tunics of wool over skirts or breeches, all the same dun color.
The uniform of misery.
Sebastian smelled piss and dust when he wanted to smell the sea. He walked on and his two pursuers followed. Brushing a lock of dark hair from his eyes, he studied the sandstone wall. An easy height to scale. Easy to slip down to the other side, into the warrens of the city. And if I become lost in this gods forsaken shit hole? I have an appointment to keep.
Sebastian’s destination lay ahead—a rundown structure atop a hill, with a path that snaked its way up. The fortress was no grander than any other structure on Isle Kabak, but larger. Adjacent to it, was what appeared to be a prison. To him, it looked like a lump of dough with iron bars set into the windows.
A prison made of sandstone?
Sebastian recalled a half-season spent inside harder walls than sandstone. Half a season locked away from the sea, away from his ship, suffocating on dry air. He brushed the thought away; it irritated him further, as did the men who dogged him now. The world was too full of fools who thought they could take something away from him.
Old Darrowden, the last section of city before he reached the fortress, showed signs of wealth now abandoned and gone to ruin. The homes were of limestone instead of sandstone, weathered and crumbling, fronted by courtyards overrun with weeds and half-dead cacti. They sat high above the rest of the city, and Sebastian could see the Crushing Sea stretch out across the horizon behind them. His ship was at anchor there. Waiting.
One last job. One more. Do this, and then you’ll be free.
A nervous snicker called his attention back to his pursuers. The streets here were empty; the small sound carried loudly in the flat air, and it was obvious they no longer cared for stealth.
Sebastian spat a curse and turned his steps through the rotted iron gate of one manor ringed by hall walls. He pressed himself against the wall to one side. The pursuers were either stupid, desperate, or both as the two men blundered inside after him.
As they passed under the rusted arch, Sebastian knocked the club out of the nearest man’s hands, wrapped his arm around his neck, and laid a dagger to his pulsing jugular. The vagrant was rank with old sweat and piss, and Sebastian grimaced at the grimy hair that brushed his cheek. The second man, young and scrawny like the first, stopped short.
“He dies,” Sebastian said, testing.
The free man, a dented dagger in his own hands, scoffed. “Yer coat’ll fit me better than him.”
The man in Sebastian’s grip was like a rabbit in a snare: tense with fear and too frightened to struggle. The other licked his lips and danced from one foot to the other, brandishing his old dagger in what he thought was a menacing display of skill. Instead, Sebastian saw where his balance could be thrown, how his fingers held the dagger like a dinner fork—easily knocked aside; how a quick duck and a sweeping kick would be enough to completely baffle the man who thought a blade alone was enough to appear dangerous. Neither stood a chance at besting Sebastian, even on their best day.
Scare them off. No bloodshed.
Sebastian shoved the one man toward the other, and while they fumbled and staggered and tried to regroup, Sebastian’s knife slipped back up his sleeve and he threw the sides of his long coat behind his hips. He unsheathed the two scimitars from their scabbards and brandished them lazily. Or so it appeared. The twin blades caught the sunlight; a nice flourish to his display.
“You want my coat, do you?” Sebastian mused. The two men were frozen. They stared at the assassin with wide eyes, as if even blinking would be a lapse in caution. “Well, you can’t have it. It wouldn’t be much good to you, anyway, seeing as I’ll slice your arms off if you make a try for it.”
One man looked ready to cry. Sebastian Vaas of five years ago would have laughed and cut them to ribbons for their audacity. Sebastian Vaas of seven years ago would have kept one alive to watch the other lose body parts one by one. And the one left alive to watch—pissing himself with terror—would have realized he was in the presence of Bloody Bastian, or Bastian the Bastard, or the Black Star of Eastern Edge as the assassin was variously known, and that he was going to die as Bloody Bastian never left witnesses. Never.
The two men were young and underfed and the Sebastian Vaas of this day was merely disgusted.
“Go,” he told them. “Before I spill your guts over your own feet.”
The men dashed out of the courtyard before his last word was uttered; he could hear one curse the other for selling him out as they ran.
Sebastian sheathed his blades and lit a cigarillo. He could hear his own smoky exhale. A ficus tree clung to life in the shade of the decrepit house. Dappled sunlight danced under its browning leaves. He imagined what it would be like to have a home like this, except not on a shit-stinking island like Kabak. But a bungalow, perhaps, on that atoll he’d found four years ago.
The atoll.
It invaded his thoughts more and more as of late. He wondered if that little beach was still pristine and untouched; if the foliage in its interior was still impossibly green; if the water that kissed its shores was as blue and clear as the sky on a summer day. Probably not. Probably some rowdy bunch of sea dogs found it, stripped it of its fruit, pissed on its sand, and then left their campfires to burn it up. He looked again at the blue expanse of sea and sighed.
Cigarillo finished, he ground it under his boot, careful to make sure it was out and wouldn’t blow away to blaze up all the dried leaves. Or that one struggling tree.
Not that it matters. It’ll be dead before the summer’s out.
Sebastian left the courtyard and resumed his march up to the old fortress.
The passage slithered up the hill, buffered on either side by high stone walls. Soon, the path turned a sharp left, widened a bit, and the old fortress was obscured from sight.
His instincts hummed.
Before he consciously decided to do it, his body danced to the left and he brought his right arm up to shield his head. A boulder the size of a cannon ball exploded on the ground where he’d stood a second before. It had scratched his arm as it came down but his leather coat protected him. He wasn’t even going to bleed.
But these bloody damn fools, they will bleed. They leave me no choice.
He shaded his eyes from the sun with his upraised arm and saw the heads of his two pursuers in silhouette on the wall. There were other stones piled up beside them.
A set up, Sebastian thought with a snarl. They knew I would come this way, toward the fortress. The assassin felt a shiver of cold slide up his spine. Zolin, you old bastard…
Sebastian scaled the smooth sandstone wall like a lizard, and swung himself up among the stones. The second rock his attackers dislodged landed in an empty corridor. The two men scrambled away, and dropped down onto the path on the other side. One fell badly. The snap of his leg and his agonized scream echoed through the quiet passages. The other man ran for his life that he had no hope of keeping.
Sebastian jumped down from the wall and landed on the fallen man’s back. The man’s screams were loud but Sebastian ignored him. He withdrew his pistol from his belt and took aim at the other attacker who fled in clumsy, flapping strides. Flintlocks were scarcely reliable at ten paces let alone fifty. Sebastian took his time. The passage ran straight for fifty spans and then turned. The other man almost made it to the turn when Sebastian’s bullet found the small of his back. The vagrant dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He landed with a whoof and a cloud of dust.
The man pinned beneath Sebastian screamed again, this time in fear as well as pain. He writhed helplessly. Sebastian set the flintlock down and released the dagger held in the catch up his sleeve. He gripped a fistful of that grimy hair and yanked up. With a smooth stroke, he drew the knife across the man’s throat.
The screaming stopped.
Down the way, the man Sebastian had shot did not scream but whimpered. He clawed the dusty sand, dragging dead legs behind him. In the next moment, Sebastian was straddling him and cursing through clenched teeth that his bullet hadn’t ended the man clean. He gripped his bloody dagger and shoved it through the base of the man’s skull, pressing down with both hands until he felt it scrape stone on the other side.
When the body ceased to twitch, Sebastian sat back, breathing hard. “Gods damn you,” he told the dead man, and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “Gods damn you to the Deeps.”
He tore his dagger free and stood up. Sebastian had no doubts that the manors were homes to vagrants like the two he’d just killed but if anyone had heard the struggle or the gunshot, they kept themselves hidden. He examined the black places for movement. When he saw none, he wiped his bloody blade on the dead man’s shirt and then took up his flintlock. More powder went into the pan and another ball into the chamber. He tucked the pistol into his belt and headed back. The other corpse lay face down in a pool of its own blood that was maroon against the yellowed stone. One leg was bent out at an obscene angle. Sebastian stepped over it and scaled the wall.
His gray-green eyes scouted the territory as he resumed his trek up the hill. He neither heard nor saw any other life until he arrived at the fortress. The assassin guessed that anyone else watching had learned what those two fools did not.
Or the old bastard hired just two, he thought. He must have hired them. As a test, perhaps.
Sebastian looked up at his appointed meeting place.
The fortress was old and perched atop the hill, and more exposed to the elements. If most of Darrowden resembled an ant mound, then the fortress was as several ant mounds of various sizes stacked upon one another and then melted under the meridian sun. The path Sebastian walked opened up into an outer bailey studded with pale green cacti and strewn with boulders. A gibbet stood off to the left, empty. Its rusted chains creaked when the stingy breeze decided to blow. On the right, there was an animal pen that now corralled a small pile of dead men. The corpses were bloated, blistered, their skin black and peeling in the inexorable sun. The stench suggested they were no more than a half-week old. Flies buzzed.
The old man and his minions were victorious in their conquest of this illustrious fortress, Sebastian mused.
Two men emerged from the dimness of the fortress gatehouse. They wore red and black robes cinched at the waist and cut at the sides to allow for movement. Unlike Sebastian’s own scuffed pair, their tall black boots were polished to a high sheen, as were the wicked blades in their hands. Sebastian heard a sound like a whisper and two more Bazira shadow adherents stepped seemingly out of nowhere from behind him. Two more stood atop the one remaining battlement, high above. The sun was too bright to see for certain but Sebastian could feel the arrows trained on him.
Or maybe poison-tipped crossbow bolts. I’ve heard the Bazira are fond of poison.
The shadow adherent was huge and in his hand he carried a mace with head as large as an anvil. He emerged from the gatehouse and stepped from between his brethren. “Julian Tergus?”
For now, Sebastian thought. Aloud he said, “Aye.”
The immense shadow adherent, who seemed built more for armor rather than the cloth, held up one meaty hand. “Weapons.”
Sebastian hesitated, but before he could either protest or acquiesce, he was surrounded and stripped of his scimitars, his flintlock, and the dagger he kept in his boot. He kept his face neutral and pretended cooperation, lifting his arms here and there to help the men divest him of his weapons. With misdirection, he insured they missed the dagger on his wrist that had last been buried under a man’s skull.
“I’ll be wanting those back.” Sebastian nodded at his weapons.
The big man tossed the blades and pistol into the dust. “They’ll be waiting here for you when you’re done.”
Other Bazira snickered and then Sebastian was led inside the fortress.
It was small, enclosed, airless. Three guards flanked him while the big shadow adherent tromped behind. They led him past a rounded entry hall and down a side stairway. Beneath the dust, the assassin could detect the scents of the piss and offal of the vagrants who had lived here and were now piled up and rotting outside.
The narrow pathway canted down and became narrower, and still the Bazira did not stop. Sebastian was beginning to wonder if they were walking circles, the journey was taking so long. His steps slowed, and when the doors on either side of the stony hall began bearing bars, he stopped.
“If you think to imprison me, you’re bloody well mistaken.”
The Bazira only chuckled, but Sebastian sensed the man tense, ready for conflict.
Sebastian studied the four shadow adherents in the narrow hallway, measured the space, their size, his speed. Lightning fast, his dagger was in his hand so when the huge shadow adherent clapped a hand around the back of Sebastian’s neck, the assassin was ready.
He twisted like a snake, spun around, and jabbed the pommel of his dagger under the big man’s chin. The shadow adherent made a gurgling sound and clutched his throat. Sebastian slipped behind him, using him as a shield, and laid the tip of his blade under the man’s ear.
“No ice,” Sebastian warned, and pressed his dagger into the man’s flesh for emphasis. A fat red drop of blood welled up. The other Bazira lowered their open palms, the words to call their magic dying on their lips.
“It’s just until night,” the big man wheezed. “The High Vicar…he doesn’t like the sun.”
“Then he should have arranged for me to come at twilight.” Sebastian jerked his dagger down the hallway they had come. “Outside.”
They walked the path back out. His scimitars and pistol had been pissed on. By more than one man. Sebastian shoved the big shadow adherent away from him and sat on his heels beside his weapons. He lit a cigarillo.
“I should kill you,” the Bazira seethed.
“But you won’t.” Sebastian rose to his feet. “You can’t, to be more plain.” He strode over to a barrel of water that rested against the curve of the fortress, in the shade. He sat upon it and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ll have my weapons cleaned. I’ll be needing new powder for my pistol since what’s there is now…damp.”
“Fuck you.” The big adherent spat.
“You’ll do as he says,” said a voice. A female voice.
A beautiful woman clothed in black and with hair the color of flame, sauntered out of the fortress to stand before the big adherent.
“We don’t treat our guests so poorly,” she said. She turned and raked her gaze up and down Sebastian’s form. “Especially not guests of such high esteem.” A scowl twisted her face as she turned back to the shadow adherent. “The High Vicar will be displeased, Gregor.”
“High esteem,” Gregor snarled. “He’s a bilge rat—”
Faster than a striking snake, the woman’s hand shot out and she slapped Gregor across the face. The sound was flat and loud in the still air.
“Clean his weapons,” she seethed. “You may use a cloth. Disobey me again, and you’ll use your tongue.”
Gregor’s face reddened and Sebastian was sure the big man was going to strike the woman, and when he did, her neck would snap like a yard in a fierce wind. But he swallowed hard and strode away, barking orders at the Bazira who stood watching to clean the weapons. The men scattered like flies to do his bidding.
The woman turned to Sebastian, a placid smile on her face. “Captain Tergus, was it?”
“As far as they need to know,” Sebastian said with a nod at the Bazira men.
The woman inclined her head. “Of course. My name is Jude Gracus. I apologize for the misunderstanding. The High Vicar will see you now.”
The chamber must have once been a meeting room of sorts. The shadows were thick but Sebastian could feel the emptiness around him. Its lone window, set high on one wall, was small and had been draped with a swath of velvet so that the narrow spill of sunlight appearing on the table formed the shape of a crescent moon. His hooded face hidden in shadow, Zolin, High Vicar of the Bazira, sat with his elbows planted, his fingers steepled.
The red-haired woman, Jude, shut the door behind Sebastian and took her place behind the High Vicar’s chair, beside another Bazira guard whose face was lost to shadow.
“Sebastian Vaas,” Jude said. “He wears a dagger, my lord.”
The High Vicar waved a gaunt hand. “I’m sure he does. How do the songs go? Bloody, bloody Bastian, killed the captain…” Zolin’s voice sounded old and dry from inside the black cowl. “The man of song and legend in this very room.”
Sebastian sneered and took the chair in front of the table without being asked to sit. “Try to lock me up again and I’ll give the bards another song.”
The old man chuckled and reached for the decanter of red wine that stood between them on the stone slab of a table. The wine looked like old blood. “Insolent, aren’t you?” He drank from a crystal goblet. “But deadly, and so useful to me.”
Sebastian kept his face placid. He’d had clients who considered him merely their tool. He supposed that was true in a way but it always chafed him.
I’m a dagger with no handle; I cut both ways.
“You’re useful to me, Zolin, if your coin is the right color and there’s enough of it. I don’t come cheap.”
“Aye, but I wonder for how much longer that will be true?” Zolin replied. “With all the unrest on the Eastern Edge, it’s a short matter of time before your particular services—and their high cost—will no longer be as valued as they once were. Assassination is a burgeoning trade.”
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
The High Vicar smiled. “Indeed, when the time comes. And it will come, I can assure you. But in any event, I didn’t send for you to mince words.”
“True enough. You sent for me.” Sebastian kicked his boots onto the table, tucked a cigarillo into the corner of his mouth and struck a match on the table. The sweet-smelling smoke hung in a gray haze in the airless chamber. “I guess that means time is still on my side.”
“Insolent,” Zolin said again. He leaned back in his seat. “And not what I expected. I imagined a monstrous, hairy beast of a man with madness in his eyes and blood lust dripping from every pore, such as the stories paint you. But no, you’re a comely man and young. Thirty? Thirty-two?”
“Close enough.”
“I should think it would take more time to acquire the level of killing mastery you are reputed to have, not to mention the bloody reputation to accompany it.”
“It only takes two acts of real fucking depravity to make a reputation.” Sebastian counted off on his thumb and forefinger. “The first to get everyone’s attention and the second to show you were serious the first time.” He took a drag off his cigarillo. “I’ve been for hire for ten years.”
“Ten years? If I recall, you reserved your most delicious depravity for the Zak’reth, just after the war, and I haven’t heard word of your exploits in almost four years. Taken time off, have we?”
Sebastian hardly heard the question. The Zak’reth. Memories of the war arose at once, summoned by the name and filled with blood. He could see thousands of warships, and red armor-clad men swarming over his home island, like locusts, ravaging and burning and consuming all until there was nothing left. Nothing left of his home. Of his father or sister.
Mina…
Sebastian blew a perfect smoke ring, and reburied the memories before they could reveal themselves on his face. “A man’s allowed to enjoy the fruits of his labor, isn’t he?”
“You have to understand my reservations,” Zolin said. “Before I entrust the infamous Sebastian Vaas with this task—and pay him a bloody fortune in gold doubloons—I want to make certain I’m getting who I think I’m getting.”
Sebastian held up his hands. “You take my word or you don’t. But I’m getting tired of sitting in this dark, smelly dungeon waiting for you to tell me just what it is you want.”
“I want,” the High Vicar said, “for you to get your bloody feet off my table.” He made a fist and then opened it again. “Krystak.”
A shaft of ice lanced out of his palm and struck Sebastian’s nearest boot, riming it with frost and giving his foot an excruciating chill. The little blast caught him by surprise for exactly half a heartbeat.
Sebastian righted himself, drew the knife from the catch on his wrist and lunged forward, like striking lightning. Zolin reared back, drawing another breath to call ice, but Sebastian flipped the knife in his hand and laid the tip onto the table. With a deft flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning; a silver sliver that danced in the crescent moon-shaped light cast on the stone table.
Then he disappeared into the dark.
In the space of a moment, he’d crept up behind Jude, silent as the shadows that concealed him. He snaked one arm around her neck and thrust upward so that her chin was tucked into the crook of his elbow. He squeezed and twisted, contorting her neck to the point of snapping it. Her sword hung from nerveless fingers. Before she dropped it, Sebastian wrapped his hand over hers and laid the tip of her blade against Zolin’s back.
“I wouldn’t,” Sebastian warned the other Bazira, the young man whose face was concealed in shadow. The man backed off. Zolin remained still, but at ease, as if waiting. The knife on the table spun.
“You smell of cinnamon,” Sebastian told the woman in his grasp. “Cinnamon is a common spice on Isle Juskara. The sand barons make a bloody fortune off it. I know this, because it was on Isle Juskara that I learned to move among shadows.” He gave her head a jerk. “But not this maneuver. This maneuver will put you to sleep in a minute and kill you in three. I learned this on the Isles of the Painted Kings. They enjoy hand-to-hand combat there. The painted kings feel that killing a man ought to be done bravely, with bare hands and not with the advantage of blades and certainly not with the cowardice of pistols. I can appreciate that. But I use everything. I use it all.”
Zolin chuckled, watching the dagger spin.
Sebastian released Jude and she fell to one knee, gasping for breath. He disappeared into the shadows and reemerged to take his seat. The dagger was wobbling now. Sebastian caught the point between two fingers and put it back in its place, up his sleeve.
“Any other questions as to my qualifications? Or can we get to the bloody point of this meeting?” He leaned back, knocked the ice from his boot and lit another cigarillo, his first having fallen to the ground in the flurry.
Zolin laughed heartily. “Quite so, quite so.”
Jude got to her feet and, despite the redness marring her neck, favored the assassin with an approving smile before retreating into the shadows.
The High Vicar poured a second glass of red wine and slid it across the table.
“Bloody Bastian, in the flesh. I have to tell you, I had my doubts. Not just because of your youth, but the speed in which you agreed to this meeting. There are many words one could use to describe Sebastian Vaas. Desperate is not usually one of them.”
Sebastian thought of his Black Storm. How the sails needed mending, his crew needed paying. How four years of odd jobs—menial, humble labor— weren’t filling his strongbox fast enough. Honest work, turns out, didn’t pay as well as murder-for-hire.
Sebastian held up his hands. “I happened to be in the vicinity.”
“And good fortune for both of us that you were.” The High Vicar took another long draught from his wine glass. “The job I have for you is lucrative but far more dangerous than those you’ve been accustomed to, I’m sure.”
“Try me.”
“My informant on Isle Lillomet tells me that the Alliance has sent an Aluren Paladin to kill two of my adherents. One of my Bazira is no longer welcome in our fold. Accora has long outgrown her usefulness to me. By your hand or the Aluren’s, she may die. But Bacchus is another matter. It would displease me to lose him.”
“Who’s my mark?”
“The Aluren bitch sent to kill them, of course. She can succeed in her first endeavor; she must die before she accomplishes the second. It will not be easy for you,” Zolin said. “She is a tremendously powerful Paladin.”
Even though his face was mostly swathed in shadow, Sebastian fought to keep it expressionless.
An Aluren and a woman. Bloody bones and spit, what did you expect from the Bazira?
He took a drag on his cigarillo and mulled this information over.
“To be clear, you want me to wait to kill the Paladin until after she kills Accora?”
The High Vicar smiled through his words. “I’m not one to presume to tell you how to do your job.”
“Well, that’s a different job altogether,” Sebastian said. “It means I have to trail the Aluren until her first target is dead. That’s going to cost more than a straight hunt-and-kill. A lot more.”
“We are prepared to compensate you accordingly.”
Good. This could be good, Sebastian thought. This, my last job. My last…
“What happens if my target fails to kill Accora?” he asked. “What then?”
Zolin snorted. “Accora is weak and cannot hope to defeat Selena Koren.”
“Selena Koren.” Sebastian tasted the name. He did not find it unpleasant.
“Yes,” Zolin replied. “Although, like you, she is known by another name: the Tainted One.”
“Why?”
“Have you not heard of the Tainted One? Why, I had thought her story was legendary, especially in the Eastern Edge. Or have you been too busy fucking and drinking the fruits of your labor away on the Pleasure Isles?”
“Something like that.” One lesson no one had taught Sebastian, but one he learned himself, was that it was always better to let the other person think they knew more than he did. “What happened?”
Zolin wet his palate with more red wine; his third glass. The assassin’s remained untouched.
“It was the end of the Zak’reth war,” the High Vicar said. “Isle Calinda. The Zak’reth savages were set to land ten thousand warriors on that little island. Seventy-five warships, all told. It was to become a midway point from which the Zak’reth would launch the full might of their armada into the northern seas of the Eastern Edge. The Isle of Lords, the Ho Sun Empire…they’d all fall. But Skye—surely you’ve heard of Skye?” Zolin tittered.
Sebastian’s lips curled. One last job…
“Skye, in command of the Alliance Armada, got wind of the Zak’reth plans and ordered Selena Koren to stop them,” the Bazira continued. “Koren is possessed of a unique ability. I told you she was powerful, but I did not say that she is likely the most powerful Aluren next to Skye herself.”
“In what way?”
“She can call the sea to do her bidding,” the High Vicar said. “At Skye’s command, she used her magic to draw an immense tidal wave to the coast of Isle Calinda, and sent it crashing over the Zak’reth. That Aluren bitch killed every last Zak’reth warrior, and destroyed ever last ship.” He made a cutting motion with his hand. “Every—last—one.”
Sebastian stubbed out his cigarillo that suddenly tasted foul. “I’ve heard that tale before. I didn’t realize the Aluren— Selena—still lived. I had thought she died in the aftermath of the spell. Or became ill…?”
“She is very much alive,” Zolin said. “For now. Until you.”
My mark is the Aluren who destroyed the Zak’reth?
There was a silence and then the High Vicar asked, “Does that bother you?” His words were slurring now. “I know you reserved your bloodiest talents of assassination for the Zak’reth. They were the teeth you cut your bloody reputation on, as it were, yes?”
Sebastian didn’t reply as memories assaulted him again: the Zak’reth attacking his island, laying waste to his village, murdering his father. The Zak’reth warriors in his home, one bent over his sister, rutting like the fierce animal carved into his red armor. He could still hear Mina scream sometimes when he closed his eyes at night.
And now I must kill the woman who destroyed those bloody shit-eating bustards?
He lit a new cigarillo and then turned back to the High Vicar, fumbling for something to say without appearing to.
“That was ten years ago,” he said. “Why do you call her the Tainted One?”
“Not I. That name originated among the Aluren, her own people. Because when little Selena Koren—not more than a girl she was at the time—cast that spell, she killed the Zak’reth, aye, but she also massacred the four hundred people who called Isle Calinda home. The Shining face of the god was not pleased. The Two-Faced God, in its wrath at that innocent loss of life on Calinda, struck Selena Koren down and left its mark on her sweet little breast.” Zolin tapped a bony finger on the crescent of light spilled on the table.
Sebastian raised a brow. “The crescent moon? A Bazira symbol.”
“Indeed.”
Sebastian blew a smoke ring and watched it waver and then dissipate in the gloom. “A Bazira mark on an Aluren Paladin.”
“Paladin, yes,” Zolin said. “Selena Koren is a woman who has dedicated her life to heal, weave light, and spill blood for the Shining face. And her reward for doing all three during the Zak’reth war was a terrible smiting.” The pleasure in Zolin’s voice was tangible.
Sebastian snorted. “Nothing’s ever good enough for the gods, eh?”
Zolin leaned back in his chair, his voice now distinctly absent of pleasure. “You show contempt of a great power with such words.”
The assassin shrugged. “I respect the sea and nothing else. Any sailor who doesn’t is a fool.” Sebastian waved a hand. “You still haven’t told me why the Aluren aspect of the god would punish the girl with a Bazira mark.”
Zolin snorted. “The answer is rather obvious. Pain.”
The assassin cocked his head.
“The two halves of the god are not ignorant of one another. The Shining face wanted to punish the girl, so it turned to the Shadow face for the means. And the Shadow face did not fail.”
Sebastian shifted in his seat. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Cold. Simple. Devious. Torturous cold. The crescent wound Paladin Selena Koren bears prevents her from ever knowing warmth. Not in ten years since the war’s end has she felt anything but cold, in various degrees.” He sighed lustily. “An ingenious, delicious torture. Almost a pity you will kill her before I can see the wound for myself.”
Ten years of cold…
The chamber in which they now sat was growing cooler in the shadows of the setting sun. Sebastian tried to imagine a decade of it. Of basking in the hot summer sun, or soaking in a steaming bath and feeling none of it.
Might not be so bad, this last job. I’ll put the girl out of her misery.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair and blew a smoke ring.
“You seem unimpressed,” Zolin said. “Or is this the mask of the hard-hearted killer I see before me?”
“War is war,” the assassin said. “Innocent people die. Gods exact revenge.” He shrugged. “It’s the price that’s paid.”
“You would be the expert on the deaths of innocent people, now wouldn’t you?” The High Vicar smiled slyly, his voice taking on a false lilt of innocence. “For instance, two poor young men—beggars even—merely in want of a coat or a pair of boots…”
“They tried to drop a rock on my head.” Sebastian smirked. “I’d hardly call that innocent. Yours, I presume?”
“Of course. Another test. After four years of silence from the dastardly Sebastian Vaas, I wanted to be sure you still had the lust for it.”
“They’re dead now, aren’t they?”
“So they are. Finally.”
Sebastian didn’t like the knowing tone in his voice. “To the matter at hand,” he said abruptly. “If this Aluren is so powerful, what makes you think I can kill her?”
“Bastian the Bastard doubts his own talent? This is hardly inspiring.”
“A fool’s first and biggest weakness is thinking he doesn’t have one,” Sebastian said. “And if it were so bloody easy you would’ve hired one of my cheaper competitors, yes?”
“Yes.” Zolin leaned forward with sudden zeal so that the moonlight touched his features in feathery strokes: Sebastian saw glittering eyes, a hawkish nose, a sagging chin. “You speak true. I want her death to be one of those—what did you call them?—acts of pure fucking depravity that bought you your reputation. That is why I hired you and not some nameless riff-raff. How you do it is not my concern, only that you will, and do so with your signature flair for the violent, the gruesome, and the deplorable.”
He stabbed a gnarled finger on the table, as Sebastian had with his dagger. “I hired you, Bloody Bastian, because I want Selena Koren to suffer.”
Sebastian fought to keep his features as placid as a becalmed sea, but Zolin’s eagerness for this murder brought bile to the back of Sebastian’s throat. He pushed it down; down, down into the depths of six years’ worth of spilled blood.
One last job. This one, and then I’m done.
“You have doubts,” Zolin began.
“No…”
“You do,” the High Vicar said and his sleepy, slurring words took on a sharp, biting edge, “Usually, I can read a man as if his inner heart and soul were spilled upon parchment for my perusal. But you…you’re a wily one. Walled off. A closed man, one might say of you.”
Sebastian shifted in his seat, suddenly acutely aware of the other two Bazira behind Zolin. Powerful shadow adherents, it was said, sometimes could delve into a man’s mind; read his secrets. Psyonicists, they called them. Zolin was one, surely. Sebastian wondered if any one of the two Bazira in the room were as well, attempting to read him now; crawling around in his mind like thieves searching for something shiny and valuable amid the dark clutter.
No, I’d feel it. My thoughts are mine.
“But I’m not all together empty-handed,” Zolin said, jarring Sebastian. “Would you care to hear what I have deduced?”
“I can’t wait.”
“You want my gold. No, you need my gold,” Zolin said and the slight slur in to his words was gone. “Your boots are shabby and so is your coat. It could be a ruse, a disguise to keep me guessing about your situation, but I don’t think so. I think you haven’t worked in some time—those four years, perhaps—and not because you’ve been drunk on a beach. I think you’re not working by choice. Losing your taste for it, is my thinking. You killed those two young fools I set on you, but only after you let them go first. So here you are,” Zolin said. “One big job. Maybe your final job. Maybe you’re after retiring; hanging up Bloody Bastian’s bloody boots for bloody good.”
The High Vicar chortled then, to watch Sebastian’s face grow pale. A slow smile spread over Jude’s face behind him.
“So to that end, I’m going to have to change the terms of our agreement.” Zolin emptied his wine glass and set it down hard enough to crack its base.
“Is that a fact?” Sebastian said, not bothering to hide his anger and hoping that anger concealed the fear that iced his heart. “You promised me four hundred gold doubloons. Two hundred now and two hundred when the job is done. That is standard.”
“It is standard. Our situation is not. I’m going to pay you just enough to purchase whatever supplies you might need for your voyage and not a penny more. You will sail to cut off Selena Koren’s passage. You will follow her or join her, befriend her or fuck her, and after she has killed Accora, you will kill her. And that’s it.”
Sebastian barked a harsh laugh. “Yes, you’re right. That’s it. This meeting is over and thanks for wasting my bloody time…”
“Sit down,” the High Vicar said when the assassin rose to his feet, and his adherents drew their swords. “I wasn’t finished. Sit.”
Sebastian clenched his teeth. “The last man who talked to me as if I were a dog, died with a sword up his arse for a tail, and with his tongue hanging out of his fucking throat.”
“Chilling,” the High Vicar said, “and I’m relieved to hear a little violence out of you. Please sit, my young friend. I haven’t yet told you our new arrangement. I believe you will find it acceptable.”
Sebastian sat. Slowly.
“I am in quite a quandary,” Zolin said. “I don’t believe there is anyone on Lunos but you who can kill that Aluren bitch, except for Bacchus himself, and that is not a battle I wish to risk. However, I cannot trust you. There is weakness in you. A churning tempest in your little black heart. A hesitation—”
“I have no hesitation—”
“Liar,” Zolin snapped. “Your olive coloring speaks of the Forgotten Isles where the Zak’reth committed the worst of their war crimes. Your most violent atrocities were perpetrated on them. Selena Koren killed many thousands more. Therefore, you might think twice before killing the woman who wiped out their armada, ended their hopes of conquest, and sent the few survivors back to their islands like whipped dogs. You might,” Zolin said, “admire the bitch for such a deed.”
“I told you,” Sebastian said, “my word is my oath.”
“And I say your oath is whale shit. But your talent is worth the risk. That is why when you bring the heads of Selena Koren and Accora to me in a bag and tumble them out at my feet, I shall give you eight hundred gold doubloons. I will pay you for Accora’s death no matter if she met it at your hands or not.”
Eight hundred. Sebastian fought to keep his expression blank. I could buy my own atoll…
Zolin lunged forward, jarring Sebastian from his thoughts.
“But if you betray me, I will send every last Bazira to scour the oceans until you’re found, and when I do, believe me, you will consider death the richest remuneration.” Zolin smiled. “You will find, Bloody Bastian, I can be pretty fucking depraved too.”
Sebastian’s palms were greased with sweat and his breath was short. The chamber was wide and drafty, and yet he felt just as trapped as if they’d put him in that cell. He could feel the old man’s triumph.
“Do you accept?”
He’s right. He’s right about all of it. Do I accept? Do I agree to kill the woman who did what I have done in my dreams a thousand nights? The woman who laid waste to the Zak’reth?
“Sebastian Vaas. The Black Star. Bloody, bloody Bastian, killed the captain…” Zolin’s singing was like a small animal strangling to death. Then he ceased his tune and leaned forward.
“Do… you… accept?”
One last job.
There was a heavy silence. Sebastian could feel the gaze of the other Bazira guards on him, the young man and woman.
They’re laughing at me. I should kill them all...
“I accept.”