"Makes sense." Wearing only an identical throwing knife, Vree followed him, sucking air through her teeth at the first icy caress against her thighs. At the rock, she tied a silk rope around Bannon's waist. There was a small danger it could get hung up, but taking out this particular target without their kit was more of a challenge than she'd accept—although during their journey, Bannon had expressed interest in trying. She watched her brother fill his lungs—once, twice, three times—and tried not to grin at his expression as he submerged. It'd be her turn soon enough.

  The dark water was shallow and the moon nearly full. Vree watched the glimmer of Bannon's shoulders disappear, his back, his legs, his feet. The rope played out smoothly through her fingers. She'd counted slowly to a hundred and fifteen when the rope stilled. Four feet, maybe five followed Bannon into the hill all at once, then three short tugs. He'd reached the other side.

  Moving quickly, working her fingers to keep them from going numb in the cold, she tied off both kits, one behind each other. One breath. Two. A sound from the shore. Drawing in the thud breath, she turned.

  The unmistakable silhouette of three ravens watched her from the dead branches of a skeletal tree.

  One hand rose to touch the onyx amulet of Jet she wore on a leather thong around her neck, the other pulled twice at the rope. Releasing the third breath, she dropped her gaze to the water, but even as she followed the two packets in under the rock, she could feel the ravens watching.

  The cold made it hard to think about anything but the cold. There wasn't room enough to swim against the current, nor was it smooth enough to allow Bannon to drag her along with their supplies. Arms outstretched, she pulled herself forward, counting slowly once again.

  At 71, her reaching hand felt waxed linen. It wasn't moving. Pulling herself up as close as she could, she stretched out an aim beneath it, along the bottom. The stream bed narrowed suddenly, went from a horizontal slice through the hill to a vertical one and the first kit had jammed.

  …72…

  … 73…

  … 74…

  … 75…

  The rear kit pressed harder against her shoulder, she punched the bottom of the first as hard as she could.

  … 76…

  …77…

  All at once it jerked free and through. She guided the second as well as she was able and followed, turning sideways and up, the rock scraping almost gently against belly and front of thighs. A six-count delay would have meant nothing in warmer water, but her lungs were already aching and she had a thirty-eight-count to go.

  The current weakened as the passage widened, and by a hundred she had the rope wrapped around one hand while the other kept her head clear of protrusions on the tunnel roof.

  At 117 she surged out into open water. At 119 she surfaced and sucked in a lungful of air that had so much water in it, it was barely breathable. The noise told her she'd surfaced in the spray of a waterfall. Then her feet touched sand, a questing hand touched rock and she pulled herself up onto a ledge.

  "Remind me to thank his Imperial Majesty for that experience," Bannon muttered in the darkness. "My balls climbed up so high they're sitting on my shoulders."

  "Teach them to ask for crackers, and I'd pay to see it." His voice told her he was standing, so she stood as well.

  They spent the next few moments warming up. Fingers stuffed into her armpits, she ran on the spot and heard Bannon doing the same. Had they not just come out of the water, the air underground would have been a cool relief after the scorching heat outside. As it was, it was almost warm and without a layer of wet cloth against skin, exercise was enough to chase the cold. When her feet no longer felt like blocks of wood and dexterity had returned, Vree reached out and lightly touched her brother's shoulder. "I vote we risk a light," she said when he stilled.

  The waxed linen had done its job. A moment later, they were studying the dimensions of the cave.

  "Looks like we climb up beside the waterfall." Bannon's sigh blew out the candle.

  They didn't bother dressing, the climb would leave them almost as wet as the swim although considerably warmer. Vree climbed with her eyes closed—it kept her from straining to see through impenetrable darkness. At the top, they walked against the stream through another passage just high enough to keep their heads and hands out of the water. When the passage opened up, a rising shelf of sand led them to a beach and the silence told them they could safely light the candle again.

  The beach led them to a cleft.

  A climb.

  Another passage.

  Another pool.

  Flood waters had carved only a single path. They couldn't have gotten lost. The three assassins who'd taken this way before them had died in the fortress, so there had to be a way in.

  "Your turn to go first, sister-mine."

  It took three dives before Vree felt the opening in the rock and then one more to fill her lungs and go through it. She'd counted to 70 and had almost decided to go back, when the rock opened up above her. Another thirty count and she surfaced. Her fingers brushed dressed stone.

  "About time," Bannon muttered when she returned. "Too much slaughtering water down here for us not to end up in a well."

  "Commander Jolan has to know that's how the others came into the fortress, but she can't cut off her water supply." Running on the spot, Vree was thinking out loud as she warmed. "She's known from the moment Ganit missed his target. He died the same night he went in, and it had to have been pretty obvious he came out of water. Visolela had to know she was climbing into a trap. Orban, too."

  Bannon shrugged. "When you know there's a trap, you avoid it."

  "True. It's been…" She counted back. "… fifteen days since Orban. Commander Jolan had to know how many blades Marshal Arnon had with him and that he won't ask one of the other armies for help—he wouldn't want to look weak. She knows the only thing he can do is settle in for a siege, so she won't be expecting us. But she won't have totally let down her guard. She won't have someone staring down the well, but she's not the type to leave an access unguarded."

  Marshal Chela had seen they were as well briefed on their target as time allowed.

  "So we can get to the lip of the well without trouble, but after that we'll have to be careful?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why didn't you just slaughtering say so?"

  Vree sighed. "I was thinking out loud."

  "You think too much, sister-mine."

  Unwrapping their kit, they ate the dried meat and honeyed date bars while strapping on their weapons. They'd kept leather and steel dry as long as possible, climbing into a trap they'd need them at hand. Their clothing they rerolled in the waxed linen and strapped it to their backs—wet clothing would leave a trail, they'd dress once they were safely inside.

  Three quarters of the way up the well, Vree stretched out an arm and touched Bannon's cheek. When he stilled, she signed inside against his skin. He nodded. The well was not only within the fortress wall, but within the fortress itself.

  Just below the rim, they stopped. Listened.

  Nothing.

  Vree straightened her knees until her eyes cleared the edge. The well room was so dark, they might as well have still been in the caves under the hill. No guards hid in the darkness. Soundlessly, she slipped up and over the side, felt Bannon standing beside her, and moved off to the right. A moment later, each having determined half the dimensions of the room, they met again.

  Commander Jolan had secured the well room by simply filling in most of an open arch and putting a door where there'd never been a door. The inconvenience for anyone drawing water had clearly been outweighed by the alternative—throats slit.

  "Guard outside?" Bannon breathed against her ear.

  Vree nodded, pointing to the tiny line of light.

  The only reason to have light was so that someone could see.

  "One or two?"

  Vree pressed her head to the crack and waited. Two soldiers—and all Jolan's traitors were ex-Seven Armies—guarding a locked cellar leading nowhere fifteen days after anything had happened, would be talking.

  After a while, she laid one finger against Bannon's cheek.

  They'd have to convince the guard to open the door without calling for help.

  It had been fifteen days.

  Fifteen slaughtering days.

  And yet here he was taking his turn in the bowels of the fortress—the shitty bowels of the fortress, he amended—waiting for Marshal Moronic-Cousin-to-the-Emperor Arnon to try something stupid. Arnon would if anyone would, but still…

  It had been fifteen days.

  Legs crossed, back against the rough wood of the door, he picked at his teeth with the point of his dagger. He'd never been so tempted to fall asleep on duty.

  Bored, bored, slaughtering bored…

  The sudden scrape of stone against stone inside the well room jerked him erect. A muffled curse spun him around. The distant splash brought both brows in under the rim of his helm.

  Something had fallen into the well.

  Something big.

  There were more distant splashes. Smaller ones. As if someone had fallen and was struggling in the water.

  Marshal Arnon was scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as assassins were concerned. According to Commander Jolan, there were two fifteen-year-olds left in the entire Seventh Army.

  Sword drawn, he opened the door.

  The lantern light spilled into the room and over the well. One of the capstones was missing and the one next to it pulled out of line, the elongated print of wet fingers showing where the assassin had lost a precarious grip. Grinning, he lifted the lantern and moved in for a closer look, but the well was too deep for his light to reach the water and the splashing had stopped.

  A pair of shadows dropped silently down from the ledge of the old arch and disappeared into the fortress.

  The Emperor wanted the situation resolved, and his orders had been explicit.

  But they had to find the commander before they could kill her.

  The bureaucracy in the capital had spit forth a plan of the fortress. It hadn't included the well room, but by the time Vree and Bannon reached the kitchens, they'd filled in the blanks. Skirting a pair of snoring bodies, they made their way to a patch of deep shadow at one edge of the open wall and stared across the courtyard. The Commander would be somewhere in the central tower.

  While they'd been moving through the hill, the nearly full moon had dropped low in the sky, creating bars of light and dark between the buildings. Assassins' paths.

  Useful. But they'd still have to waste time searching the tower. The search had likely killed Ganit. The longer it took to reach a target, the greater the odds of discovery.

  Together? Bannon signed, looking annoyed.

  Vree nodded. They'd lose most of the advantage they had over the previous three assassins if they separated.

  They were about to move from kitchen to tower when a shadow separated from the top of the gatehouse. Then a second. Then a third. The three huge birds landed side by side, with no sound from feathers or claws, on a window ledge almost exactly halfway up the tower wall.

  Vree felt Bannon clutch her arm, fingers digging into flesh. Ravens didn't fly at night.

  The ravens had gone from the window when Vree and Bannon reached the commander's room. They'd left two bodies behind them, silently and efficiently dispatched when there'd been no other way to move on. Hiding the bodies had taken more time than the killing.

  Commander Jolan's small room had been set up like a command tent, her bed shoved up against one wall, less important than the map table and the strategies planned on it. She slept with one hand thrown up over her head, the paler skin on the underside of her arm defining her place in the dark.

  She wasn't alone.

  A silent crossing from door to bedside. The edge of Vree's dagger slid through the soft tissue of the throat too quickly for pain, found the spine, slipped between two ridges of bone, and ended it.

  The commander's companion was considerably younger, probably Bannon's age. He opened sleep-blurred eyes at exactly the wrong time.

  Vree tossed a small square of leather stamped with a black starburst onto the bed. The Emperor's first order had been carried out and his point had been made. Treason could not hide from the blades of Jür.

  Now, they had to get the barbican over the gate with only the soft shadows between moonset and dawn to hide them.

  Bannon glanced out the window and grinned. "We take the high road," he said softly.

  Measuring the distance between the window and broad top of the fortress' encircling wall, Vree nodded. The only guards were in the barbican. No point in wasting soldiers on a patrol when there was only one possible point of attack.

  There was no room on the ledge to stand and jump. There was no room on the ledge for three ravens either but Vree didn't have time to worry about that now. She slid out, feet first, then gripping the ridge of stone, braced her feet against the wall, knees up beside her ears.

  One breath, two…

  Push off.

  Turn in the air.

  It had been a long night. She landed hard and too close to the edge. Training threw her weight back before her brain acknowledged the danger and sucking air between her teeth as her elbow slammed into stone, she rolled into the vee of shadow between wall and parapet.

  Bannon's landing was messier still, but she grabbed his waistband and yanked him down beside her. He pillowed his head between her breasts, mouthed, "Quick nap?" then grinned at her expression.

  They'd taken out a target, and that always left Ban-non a little giddy.

  Vree jerked her head toward the gate. The night was nearly over.

  There were four soldiers on guard.

  They weren't expecting an attack from inside the fortress. Vree wondered what they thought when Bannon walked in through the arched door overlooking the courtyard although she supposed the first two died too quickly to think anything. The third had her mouth open to cry warning, and the fourth actually got a hand around his sword hilt.

  Commander Zayit watched a burning rag drop from the barbican and extinguish itself on the road. "Move them up," she said quietly to the Squad Leader beside her.

  The order repeated itself, and the company crept forward. She could hear it creaking and rustling like a huge beast rolling over in its sleep.

  When the second flame dropped, she stepped out where she could be seen in the pale dawn light and pulled her sword. "Now!"

  "They're moving," Bannon announced, wiping oil off his fingers. "Good."

  As Vree raised the inner gate, Bannon picked up a discarded crossbow. A rooster crowed.

  Marshal Arnon rode into the fort when it was all over.

  The traitors' bodies were stacked on one side of the courtyard, the dead of the Seventh Army on the other. A bloody rag tied around one arm and a smear of blood not her own over the front of her armor, Commander Zayit walked forward to meet him.

  Vree braced the stiffening body of the guard against her shoulder and shuffled it forward. Still hidden behind the edge of the arched doorway, she paused and her fingers tightened on unresisting flesh.

  The sun had laid the shadow of the barbican across the courtyard crowned by the impossibly darker shadows of three ravens.

  She met Bannon's gaze across the arch, and together they looked up.

  The marshal's horse stopped at the edge of the ravens' shadow. Shied sideways when he spurred it, but wouldn't go any farther.

  In the moment between one heartbeat and the next, the ravens screamed.

  Marshal Arnon turned, one hand raised to block the sun from his eyes.

  Bannon pulled the trigger on the crossbow.

  The marshal jerked in the saddle, and began to fall, a crossbow quarrel buried deep in his left armpit.

  Someone yelled, "There!"

  An arrow hit the body Vree held.

  She shoved it forward.

  It hit the stones of the courtyard at the time same as the marshal.

  The Emperor's orders had been explicit.

  Throats slit in the night. Black starbursts left behind.

  So many people never bothered thinking past the obvious.

  Commander Zayit barely heard the beating of ravens' wings over the pounding of her heart. Then they landed, one, two, three by the marshal's body.

  "Commander?"

  Without knowing why, she looked up. Past the traitor's body broken on the ground, up to where black shadows moved back out of the light. And she remembered another broken body that had lain like a shadow on the road.

  "Commander?"

  Some urgency in the question now. The fortress was so quiet, she could hear the impact of a heavy beak through flesh.

  Marshal Arnon had been right.

  The Emperor had taken care of it.

  "Let them feed."

 

 

  Tanya Huff, Death Rites

 

 

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