The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) Read online

  The Misbegotten

  Book One of An Assassin’s Blade

  Justin DePaoli

  Edited by Clio Editing Services

  Cover Art by Eloise J Knapp (www.ekcoverdesign.com)

  Map Illustration by Jared Blando

  Conduit Books

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author Updates

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Justin DePaoli

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To Megan

  Chapter One

  This wasn’t how Death and I usually collaborated.

  The man’s eyes oscillated. His hands flew outward, knuckling into and spilling the mug of toxic wine. Had the gaunt bastard simply obeyed the very simple rules every man follows when gulping down my poison, his bony head would have fallen with a thump into the wooden table. And I could have stood, patted him on the back, told him it wasn’t personal, and left the village where people shared suspicious relations with cows and pigs.

  Instead, I blinked, which is about the only thing an assassin can do when the man he intends to silently kill thrashes about, jumps up from the table, wobbles around like he has wooden pegs for legs and then crashes shoulder-first into a cabinet.

  Fuck, I thought.

  Stained glass figurines and plates tumbled off the shelves, shattering into thousands of tiny bright green, blue, red and yellow fragments. It looked like a rainbow had been murdered.

  One cabinet fell into the other, which fell into another, and by the time I thought my second fuck, they had all crashed to the floor into splintered wood. Harmon Fillick followed in short order, the side of his face striking the floorboards. The sound made my spine tingle — you never get used to that deadened crack. That cold slap of flesh. It’s the kind of noise people don’t wake up from, and if they do, they’ve got permanently scrambled eyes and a new habit of drooling.

  “What was the point of that?” I said, hoping he was still alive so he could offer me closure.

  He wasn’t.

  From behind the closed door, a girl shrieked. “He’s channeling them! The gods!”

  “It sounds like they’re angry with him,” a boy put in. “Maybe we should help.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” the girl said. “What would you do to gods?”

  “I’d… well, I’d… I dunno.”

  The little ones probably followed Harmon Fillick around enthusiastically — after they got over the frightening lack of meat on his bones — just as most kids shadow savants. Children find something intrinsically wondrous about people who heal others and are supposedly the closest connection to the gods.

  Another boy chimed in. “Wot you doin’?”

  “Ellie thinks Savant Fillick is talking to the gods,” said the other boy cheerfully. “But they sound angry.”

  “Well o’ course they angry. They gods. Why would they be happy?”

  A thin line of blood snaked along a crack in the floorboards, trailing from Savant Fillick’s newly fractured skull. The twerps outside continued chucking out ideas about what the gods wanted with the savant in the first place, and before long, more high-pitched, inquisitive voices joined the fray.

  “Does the savant know you’re all outside his door?” a husky voice called out.

  “He’s talking to the gods,” the girl said. “I heard lots of noises. They’re very angry, I bet. My mom makes lots of noises when she’s angry.”

  “That’s ’cause she’s big and fat and when she moves, the ground shakes,” a boy teased.

  “Is not!” the girl said.

  “Enough!” the man barked. “Or I’ll snatch every one of you up and dump you off at your parents’ feet.”

  A set of knuckles fell against the door. I edged a finger along the hilt of my sword.

  “Savant, is everything all right in there?”

  I dried my palms on the worn leather of my pants. Swinging a sword with sweaty hands rarely works out in your favor.

  “Savant Fillick?”

  The room was square. Solid walls enclosed me. Escaping unseen seemed unlikely, unless Skin and Bones had built a secret passage that led into the great wilderness.

  The door moved. Its hinges creaked. Into the dank and dusty cottage swam slivers of pale light. A hand appeared in the crack, and the crack soon became a yawning gap as the man behind it spotted a thickening stream of blood creeping across the floor.

  “Er, hello,” I said, deepening my voice into what I hoped resembled a celestial boom. “Savant Fillick summoned me. I am the god of…” Which gods did these people believe in again? Wind, fire, water…? No, no, that’s farther west. Maybe justice, death, vengeance, those fabulous caricatures?

  So much for my godly impersonation. That’s the problem with having two thousand bloody gods moseying around up beyond the clouds: too many to remember when you really need them.

  The man’s eyes bulged as they followed the outline of blood up to Savant Fillick. The tight ball in his throat plunged and bounced back up as he took a meaningful swallow. The lovely sound of steel scraping along a leather scabbard shaved away the silence. He took a step back and managed to scream one word.

  “Ass!”

  While it has long been thought by many that I am indeed an ass, this man hadn’t intended to insult me. It just so happens you can’t spell assassin without an ass or two, and you certainly can’t intone the entire word when you have blood fountaining out of your opened throat.

  The black blade that swiftly rived his flesh and in turn his voice winked out of sight behind the door frame.

  “Never a moment too soon,” I said.

  My lovely Commander Vayle, second-in-command of the Black Rot, stepped over the man’s collapsed body. I helped her drag him inside. The kids would probably be back soon and the last thing I needed was for a bunch of brats to shout at the top of their lungs that the gods were on a killing spree.

  After getting the body inside, Vayle held up a burlap sack that looked about thirty months pregnant. “Fifteen skins,” she said. “I would’ve gotten more, but I’d seen you attracted visitors. Tsk-tsk.”

  I sheathed my blade and tiptoed between the rivulets of Savant Fillick’s blood. Cleaning dried blood off your boots is about as pleasant as wiping days-old dog shit off.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s only about three hundred skins back at the Hole. However will you survive?”

  “This wine,” Vayle said, rapping her nail down the bag, “is much better than what we have at the Hole. Very sweet and very wet. That’s what Mrs. Whiskers claims.”

  “Mrs. Whi
skers?”

  Vayle pinched her sun-kissed cheek. “On account of the wispy whiskers that gather on her face.”

  I eyed her suspiciously. “Are you certain you didn’t buy cat piss from a smooth-talking feline?”

  Vayle had a look around at the chaos that had unfolded. “Are you certain you came here to assassinate a savant and not his house?”

  “He didn’t cooperate,” I said, pushing her toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She shoved a hand into my chest. “Wait here. I’ll round up the horses.”

  Vayle sneaked out of the shack and returned a short while later, two horses in tow. They whipped their bushy tails about impatiently. I didn’t blame them. They were probably eager to go back to the Hole and have a decent meal. This village had the kind of roughage that looked about as tasty as a plateful of pinecones.

  I heaved myself up onto the saddle of my mare, Pormillia. I patted her mane and said, “Come on, pretty gir—”

  “I told you!” a voice shrieked. “I told you they was angry!”

  Vayle and I exchanged glances as a young girl with blond curls bounded up a dirt path, her little arms swinging furiously. When she reached the pond of blood outside Savant Fillick’s house, she doubled over, mouth agape. Her big eyes looked as wet and fresh as the yolk of an egg.

  Well, damn. Vayle and I had overlooked the fact that dragging a dead man inside doesn’t help when he leaves behind bright red evidence.

  “Why did they hurt him?” she asked us.

  Now more children were running toward us. Along with a few larger figures, some of them wielding pitchforks, a couple holding crudely made swords.

  “The gods hurt Savant Fillick,” the girl cried.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ ride off on me,” a man hollered, pointing the blunt end of a club at us.

  A pair of feet sliced through the crisp patches of grass behind me. I turned to see a dirty face with a wiry beard coming closer. He held a sword.

  I clicked my heels. Pormillia lurched forward and broke into a trot that quickly transcended into a gallop. Vayle rode up beside me, leaning hard into her saddle, her chocolate hair whipping about her face.

  Something landed with a thud behind us. Probably a rock or a club, one last desperate attempt by the villagers to see justice brought to their tiny hamlet. They would never know, but justice had already been delivered. Savant Fillick was a man whose hands had often wandered up the shirts of little girls and into the pants of little boys.

  But I hadn’t accepted the job based on the knightly virtue of honor. I wasn’t an honorable assassin like my commander, who only took assignments where the end resulted in good old-fashioned justice. Pay me enough glittering gold and suddenly I forget most morals and beliefs I’ve ever had.

  Once we were a half mile outside of the village, Vayle and I slowed our horses to a trot for the rest of the way.

  She reached inside her burlap sack, took out a skin of wine and gulped. “It’s not good for the little ones to see what they did.”

  “Blame it on the savant. Apparently his body’s a fucking sponge for poison.”

  Vayle drained the rest of her wine and stuffed the skin back inside the sack. “Did you use the entire vial?”

  “Did I use the entire vial?” I asked, incensed. “Of course I used the entire vial.” I’d only been in the assassination business for fifteen bloody years.

  When she looked away, I slipped a couple fingers inside my pocket, slid the vial out partway and took a peek, just to be sure.

  A midnight blush smattered the sky as twilight came out to play. The mango sun angled itself behind a cylindrical hill. My cylindrical hill. Or, to be less selfish, our cylindrical hill. Home of the famous Black Rot kingdom known as the Hole. Really, less a kingdom, more a village, and rather infamous than famous.

  I squinted at the crest of the hill. Two horses stood at the edge like guards at a post. White caparisons draped them.

  “Hmm,” I said, “messengers.”

  Having the Order of Messengers pass by the Hole wasn’t unusual. Requests for assassinations often came through their hands, but they weren’t the sort to pull up a seat, take a few skins of wine to the face and bullshit for hours. They dropped off their messages, collected payment if need be, and went on their way.

  “Must be a message without ink,” I said. Those were the type that were sent when the risk of a parchment falling into the wrong hands could be disastrous. “Probably a rich noble fuck who wants his liege to disappear.”

  “Or maybe someone wants a king to disappear,” Vayle said, smirking.

  I laughed. Years ago, under the veil of anonymity, someone had requested the Black Rot fetch the head of Dercy Daniser, Lord of the Daniser family and King of Watchmen’s Bay. There are two kinds of people the Black Rot does not assassinate: children and kings. The former because even assassins have a smidgen of morality, and the latter because we are not suicidal.

  See, the concept of life as an assassin is simple. You want the world to be on edge. You want families and lords and ladies and brothers and sisters and queens and kings to contend with one another and have the perfect amount of animosity for each other so that they hire mercenaries like yours truly to put blades in the throats of those they hate. What you absolutely don’t want is for them to be so bold and desperate that they do the deed themselves, because then they don’t need you. At that point, assassins become hindrances. And being a hindrance is not good for your life expectancy.

  Pormillia aimed her nose toward the winding ramp of dirt and rock that twisted around the hill. Vayle’s mare fell into position behind me. The path up was too narrow to ride two abreast, which is often inconvenient, but fantastic for defensive purposes.

  I inhaled the sweet scent of burning pine deep into my lungs as we neared the plateau of the hill. Nothing quite like the smell of home.

  The two messengers clad in snowy plate shifted in their saddles as Pormillia rocked forward onto the plateau.

  “I’ll be fucked if that isn’t Grom,” I said, shoving a playful elbow into the pauldron of the lankier of the two messengers.

  “Astul,” he replied, winking. Or maybe he was simply blinking. Hard to tell the difference when a man only has one eye.

  “Been a couple years since you showed your ugly mug around here.”

  “Been running a new route recent—”

  An explosive whoosh erupted across the way, followed by a plume of flames that licked high into the murky sky. Throaty laughter erupted soon after, and one of my Rots fell onto his back, cradling his stomach and probably trying not to piss himself. Apparently tossing a skin of wine into a fire is goddamn hilarious when you’re drunk.

  “They’ve been doing this all day,” Grom said.

  I shrugged. “You know what they say. When you’re not killin’, you’re drinkin’. Well, that’s what we say anyhow. Anyway, I’m guessing you’re not here to watch in awe as a bunch of assassins make asses of themselves.”

  “King Chachant Verdan requested a verbal message be delivered to you.”

  My heart tap-danced in my chest. “King Chachant Verdan? Since when does Chachant go by that title?”

  Grom cleared his throat. “Since his father was assassinated six days ago.”

  Chapter Two

  On the torn, piss-stained pages that smell of mothballs and tell you all about history, you find there are two kinds of king slayers. First, there are the sort who aren’t particularly adept at clandestine operations and find themselves sitting in a torture chamber until they cough up a name or two. And then there are those sneaky assassins who wiggle their way in unseen and sneak back out just the same, leaving an empty throne in their wake.

  The Verdan king slayer was apparently an example of the latter. After revealing Vileoux Verdan had been assassinated, the messenger went on to tell me his son, Chachant, had requested my assistance, which meant the new king had little information on the old king’s death. He wouldn’t send for me i
f he knew who was responsible — he’d simply march his army to war.

  See, I’m not only an assassin, but a purveyor of information. Better to have two careers in case one goes to shit, I’ve always said. Plus, information will forever be a hot commodity.

  I descended into the Hole, which was an actual hole, not some symbolic name

  Dank and musty air clung to the rims of my nostrils and scurried inside like spiders hurrying into their funnels. Some would find the smell disturbingly similar to an abandoned cellar that was more cobwebs than stone. But for me, this was a place of tranquility.

  A few pronged candelabra were stuck into patches of spongy mud along the walls, seething with orange-tipped flames that fought one another to show the way. Even with the help of fire, darkness was the Hole’s closest friend. It embraced you down here, took you in like its guest and wrapped you up in an onyx hug.

  I kept down a narrow hallway enclosed with wooden boards. A couple steps and one turn later, I was in a room that looked as if every bounty hunter had come to die here. I filled a few small purses with gold, hardly making a dent in the stockpile. After gathering some stale bread, skins of wine and bundles of wool, I emerged up top, with fresh sizzling timber burning the stink off my clothes.

  “Shepherd,” Big Gruff roared, invoking my name as the shepherd of assassins. Big Gruff always roared, never simply spoke. If you found yourself in a drunken brawl against him, you'd likely take your own fist to your jaw just to get it over with. Large and mean-looking was one possible description of Big Gruff. Monstrous with a dash of unhinging charm was a better one.

  “You got a case of dead animal breath, big man,” I said.

  He flashed a massive grin and clenched my shoulder. “Somethin’ ’bout the wine interactin’ with my spittle. That’s what Commander Vayle says, anyhow. Heard me a tale about you going up North to track down a king slayer.”

  “I see Vayle doesn’t waste time informing on every one of my doings.”