Lynn Flewelling - Raven's Cut

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2024-12-23 0 0 20.39KB 6 页 5.9玖币

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Lynn Flewelling created the world you are about to enter in her highly acclaimed Nightrunner series and

will explore it further in a forthcoming trilogy. She assures us, however, that no prior knowledge,

passports, or inoculations are required to read this story.

The last glow of sunset faded to purple on the horizon across the broad bay. Up the beach in the

distance, the lights of sprawling Khouimir twinkled like a cloud of fireflies against the vastness of the

Zengati desert.

In this gentle, failing light, the brown young men sprawled comfortably around a fire in a sheltered circle

of dunes might have been mistaken for a group of merchants' sons, smoking kif and sharing tales away

from the heat of the city. All of them, that was, except the lighter-skinned Skalan man who commanded

his companions' attention just now. Tonight it was his turn to amuse the group.

"The best assassin I ever knew?" Fourteen pairs of dark eyes followed the young foreigner who called

himself Mijar—in their tongue, "stranger."

A frown creased Mijar's sunburned brow as he threw another stick of driftwood onto the fire and

set-tied back against the bleached log he was using as a backrest. "I don't know if I want to talk of that."

"Come on, Mijar!" his companions urged, offering him cups of wine and the stained kif pipe. What

performer didn't like to be coaxed?

This new guild mate of theirs was a middling assassin at best. He was quick and silent, spry as a mirka

when it came to housebreaking, but he wouldn't kill children or women, no matter how much was

offered, or use the slow poisons that brought agony to the victim and well-placed fear to those who

witnessed the death. No, it was his stories of the strange lands he'd traveled that had quickly endeared

him to the others in the months since his arrival in Khouimir. His heavily accented voice was as sweet as a

priest's, his thin, plain face wise and innocent as a child's as he spun out his tales. Who knew if he spoke

the truth or not? It didn't matter. The man was an artist of words.

Mijar took a long pull on the pipe and his strange blue eyes glazed a little. For a moment he seemed to be

listening to something—the murmur of the waves, perhaps, or the distant tinkle of mule bells.

"The best assassin?" he said again, and sighed. "I suppose that would have to be Raven, back in the city

of Rhiminee where I was born."

"He called himself after an animal?" young Tahan asked, all attention as he leaned forward in the firelight.

"Lots do, in Skala: Farren the Fish, Eelmouth Wil, the Rhiminee Cat. I was called Skut the Mouse back

in my thieving days. It was the fashion."

"Does such a name have significance?" asked bearded Zaghar, the eldest of the gathering.

Frowning, the foreigner took another deep pull at the pipe. "With him, it did."

Beautiful Rhiminee glitters like a wizard's illusion on her shining cliffs, but for those of us who lived in the

shadows of the lower city along the harbor front, life was hard, brief, and ugly.

I was a whore's castoff, abandoned so young I could scarcely remember my mother's name to curse her.

The closest thing I ever had to a protector was a thief named Tym. He was a mean bastard, but he kept

a bargain and paid what he promised. He was one of the best, Tym was, but he got killed all the same,

shoved off a roof during a job.

I wasn't quite eleven when he died, but by then he'd taught me enough to fend for myself. I was beaten,

buggered, starved, and pilloried more than a time or two, but still came up every morning in one piece

and breathing.

Skala went to war with Plenimar again about then—I remember because that made for lots of drunken

soldiers to roll. I did well for myself at that and as I got older and stronger, I began to think life might

have more to offer a fine fellow like myself, if I could only find out what. I hadn't counted on it being the

assassin's guild. They found me, rather than the other way 'round, but thafs how it works in Rhiminee.

You don't just walk into a tavern somewhere and say "Sign me up." No, they keep an eye out and make

their own choices.

I'd never given any particular thought to being a snuffer. I avoided fights when I could, and never thought

of killing anyone until one foggy spring night when a drunken noble dragged me into an alley for a quick

bit of in and out. I struggled and he started slapping me around, hard enough to make my ears ring. If the

bugger had punched me properly, I might have answered in kind, but something about being slapped as if

I was some cheap whore to have against the nearest wall—I don't know. Something in me just let go. I

got my belt knife free and did a little in and out of my own on him with it. Afterward I jumped off a wharf

to wash off the blood, but I felt all clean and free before I ever hit the water.

Two nights later an older boy tried to bully me out of a fat purse I'd cut, and without even thinking about

it, I drew steel again. He was too quick and smart to get killed, but I opened his arm up in good shape

before he got free of me. I laughed like a loon when it was all over. It wasn't much of a victory, but it

made me feel strong.

That same night a stranger with gentleman's clothes and a hangman's smile invited me to "join the choir,"

as he put it. I accepted on the spot.

The assassins of Rhiminee have a fine house hidden away in a poor section of the city. From the outside

you'd take it for a tenement, ripe for burning, but inside there are clean little rooms for everyone to kennel

in, and bigger ones with proper furniture and wax candles.

It was all run by a blond rail of a man we called Master, and he ran it well. He kept the guild small, no

more than fifteen people or so, and made sure we all knew our business—work quiet, no fuss, never be

seen. We were the best, and in great demand. Our members got called out for jobs in all the great cities

Skala and Mycena, Plenimar even, when there wasn't a war on. There was plenty of work that way, and

it kept folks on the move, not too visible around town.

Those first couple of years I was with them were the best of my life. For the first time I had enough to eat

every day, a safe billet every night, and companions who kept their hands to themselves. Even small jobs

paid in gold, and most of what they used me for didn't even call for any killing. I got to be a lookout, a

pickpocket, a jilt. Tym's lessons served me well.

I was the youngest in the house, and they made a pet of me, especially Master. He took me along to

plays and gambling houses with my pockets well-filled, all dressed up like a gentleman's son.

Mijar paused, looking around at his audience through the wavering blue cloud of kif smoke. "If I ever

loved any soul in this life, it was Master. He taught me my lessons himself: how to kill quick and quiet

with knife or neck wire, poisons, hand fighting— just like a real father would. Bilairy's balls, I'd have

walked over fire for him if he'd asked me to! But he never would, not him. I never once saw him angry,

even.

"Things went on like that for better than a year. It wasn't like it is here, with all your chieftains and

courtesans and sneaky lordlings having each other killed just for fun and spite. No, Skala's a civilized

land, and Rhiminee the most civilized city I've seen. That meant less work, of course, but when we killed

someone, it meant something! It made you proud, even if it wasn't you done the job."

We lost people from time to time, as you'd expect in our line of work. One night in early summer Master

told us to be on the lookout for new recruits. I made up my mind to find him the best new man who could

be had. Sort of my way of thanking him for all his good treatment.

It was a hot summer that year, deadly hot. Tempers run high in that sort of weather, and there were more

killings than usual. It wasn't too difficult to observe a few, if you knew where to look as we did.

Right off, I ruled out brawlers and jilted lovers. Anyone can kill if you get him mad enough. No, I wanted

someone with a cool head and a taste for killing. Maybe because I was paying such close attention, I

soon picked up a rumor of just such a killer. No one had seen this fellow, but it was said that he left his

victims with a special mark of some sort, one after the other. In fact, there seemed to be a new one every

couple of days, regular as the butcher's cart.

So I took my search to the dead houses and sure enough, I soon learned that the Scavenger Guild had

been finding bodies of men with their chests slit a certain way, just below the breastbone, though they'd

been killed by strangling. Not robbed, by all accounts, just killed, cut, and left. These particular corpses

turned up in the worst neighborhoods down by the harbor, so maybe they had nothing worth the .taking

anyway, but there were already over a dozen when I first found out about them. That seemed like a lot of

killing for one man, and a lot of work for no profit. Some folks whispered it was some necromancer at

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摘要：

LynnFlewellingcreatedtheworldyouareabouttoenterinherhighlyacclaimedNightrunnerseriesandwillexploreitfurtherinaforthcomingtrilogy.Sheassuresus,however,thatnopriorknowledge,passports,orinoculationsarerequiredtoreadthisstory.Thelastglowofsunsetfadedtopurpleonthehorizonacrossthebroadbay.Upthebeachinthed...

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