I
The ship coursed through emerald waters, beneath a bare and vibrant sky. Gulls wheeled overhead, their beggar cries stilted in the dry air. The vague outline of the port came into view as a dark smear on the horizon.
Three men were seated upon the deck in a loose triangle, sitting on overturned buckets and tubs. They tossed bleached knucklebones onto the boards, trading small coins as the fall of bones decreed. The man who faced the captain’s cabin looked up now and then from the ring drawn shakily drawn in chalk on the deck. Whom he watched, over the heads of his gaming companions, was another man sat cross legged atop the cabin. This man wore loose linen clothing and his skin was a sun-seared brown. An intricately patterned swath of cloth veiled the lower half of his face.
The man, who was sat on an overturned tub, looked back to his game.
“It’s your throw, Behrat” spoke another of the players, his eyes squinting against a sun which glittered on his golden teeth.
“Not so keen to throw now that you’re losing and the port is coming on, huh?” sneered the third player.
Behrat had only met this man on board the ship and he did not care for the way he jostled him over his bad luck as if they were firm friends. The man, this third player, was young but was balding early and kept a cloth thrown over his head and shoulders as they gamed in the sun. Well, nevermind, thought Behrat. Through a series of conspiratorial glances and signs he and his companion, Gohrn the Barber (he of the golden teeth) had made a pact to disabuse the man of his winnings, his stake and perhaps his life as soon as the ship set down and any opportunity presented. Foolish boy; the port of Sol Midan was no place to find one’s feet. He was a pup running amongst wolves.
Behrat scooped up the bones and shook them in his broad fist. The pup stared intently into the clenched hand as if it were his own bones rattling within. Gohrn watched the boy from the corner of his eye and wore a jackal’s smile.
“Gohrn…?”, Behrat spoke as he shook the bones.
“Stop stalling!” bleated the boy with the cloth about his head.
“On top of the cabin. Slow, like” continued Behrat.
Gohrn reached behind him to scratch his shoulder blade and used the turn to catch a glimpse of the man sat atop the cabin.
“Now where did he spring from?” he said as he turned back.
“You’re not any better!” laughed the boy, “You see, I’ll win those gold teeth out of your head before we make land!”
The two men paid no heed to his ill-judged jocularity. They stared down into the chalk circle and spoke in hushed tones.
“He must have been in the First Mate’s bunk. I wondered why the Captain was without a second” whispered Behrat.
“Then why appear now?” replied Gohrn.
“Who knows why he does anything? Perhaps he thought he might send a rumour amongst Sol Midan that he was back in town?” posited Behrat.
“Who?” asked the boy.
“There’s money to be made ashore if we help set that rumour in stone amongst the right people” ventured Gohrn.
“Who!?” the boy pestered.
“I’d sooner cross a sick cobra than him, Gohrn. Think with your head and not your greedy palm”.
As Behrat’s eyes flicked once more to the man atop the cabin, the boy turned and glanced full long at him. Behrat tossed the bones full onto the deck where they clacked and rumbled with exaggerated loudness in the dry air. The boy looked back instinctively, like a dog following the sound of scraps hitting its bowl.
“Keep your eyes down!” hissed Behrat.
His eyes down, but now wide as plates, the boy adjusted the cloth that had slipped back on his head, exposing a fine thatch of blonde hair and his pink scalp to the sun.
“Is that him?” he whispered breathlessly.
Gohrn flashed another surreptitious glance over his shoulder.
“Pick up the bones. Don’t draw attention” he said to the boy.
The boy continued the motions of the game but all attention was now being paid to the figure from whom the three attempted to withhold their eager gaze.
“Why does he wear the mask?” whispered the boy, unable to maintain his silence, “I heard that he tried to take the daughter of a great King to his bed and the King had his teeth filed to points like that of a beast!”
“I never saw Craid with any woman” replied Behrat, curtly.
“It was a woman that did that to him” spoke Gohrn, “but it was his own mother! I knew a man, once, who had seen beneath that veil. He shared a bunk with him on a shop just like this one.” And here he pointed down to the tired, salt worn deck. “The man snuck a look whilst he slept. Craid is a half breed. His mother sired him with a lizard man from the Tantal Heights. He has the snout of a dragon and fangs that drip venom. That is why they can never catch him, he can blend into any wall and squeeze through the bars of any cell!”
Behrat listened to their childish whispers with disdain. He did not know what lay beneath Craid’s veil and he did not know how no legion nor bounty hunter had managed to take him in, but he had heard the same stories and dismissed them out of hand. The world needed an excuse for a man like Craid. And, when it could not find one in the everyday, for none could match his strangeness, an alternative was sought in dark realms. But he, Behrat, had looked into Craid’s eyes once, many years ago, a tiny knife point-small scar just below his own heart was the proof of that if the fools cared to look, and he had seen enough to draw his own conclusion. This much he knew; Craid had abandoned all human apprehensions in a way that the most degenerate corsair, cut purse or assassin could not imagine. He had gone beyond the outer darkness and come back full into the light. A light so harsh that it blinded and burned away the flesh He could not be sought or bound because he existed apart from the rules and expectations of the world of men. Behrat had seen it in that split second, when death was so close that one could only see that which was true. The nature and the true name of things. And he had seen a fool; a lunatic jester dancing in the wasting light, staring back across the void at a feeble court of mortal kings, laughing at a joke that only he knew the meaning of.
“… to take the life of Medici if you ask me.”
The chattering faded in once more as Behrat came around from his reverie, a cold shiver whipping across his broad chest in spite of the furnace-like heat. He caught movement on top of the cabin and he slipped his hand inside his shirt as he felt a twinge below his heart.
“Eyes down, boys” he muttered as he watched Craid stand and stare out to the horizon. He felt a burning sensation at the base of his neck that was not the searing sun that hung overhead but some animal instinct. Some impossibly ancient prey response. He felt his gaze wrenched up beyond his control and he saw Craid looking back at him, a hand slipped within his own shirt, just below the heart. And with that the veiled thief walkedaway across the top of the cabin and disappeared from view.
*
As the ship dropped anchor in Sol Midan, the deck and the quay below came alive. Those who had sought refuge from the burning sky came up from the bowels of the ship and Sol Midan’s soldiers and legions of customs officers gathered to meet them. The soldiers stood at the foot of the gangway with spears and swords as the customers officers boarded, bearing their quills and ledgers with no less menace. The captain came to the meet the retinue of robed administrators and his purse jangled with each step that he took. Sol Midan was the city of merchants and thieves and there was ample room for the gambler and the gamer to collect the coins that scattered in the midst of the chaos. As long as one could play the odds, and the hand that one held, well enough there was plenty to be sheared away as the money changed hands.
Behrat, Gohrn and the boy waited in the shade of the dampening sails, and under the watch of Sol Midan’s guards, as the captain and the stock takers waged their little battle of numbers in the hold. In time there was the sound of rushing feet on the wooden stairs. One of the customs officers came bursting from the hold, his cloak drawn about his face. He pushed, cursing, through the crowds of pirates and privateers who made up the crew and its passengers. He headed down the gangway shouting in the haughty, course Sol Midan accent;
“Swine! Whatever they are transporting in that ship it stinks worse than a whore’s rotten linen!”
Spluttering, he pushed through the line of soldiers and promptly vomited on the hot stones of the quays. Pulling his cloak back about his face in revulsion he shouted, choking, once more at the hollering passengers;
“Northern animals! They should scuttle this tub and you all along with it!”
And, against a barrage of hoots and laughter and jeers from those on board, he disappeared into the crowds that swarmed the market on the dock.
It was only when the captain and the customs officers emerged from below deck five minutes later, laughing and looking fatted with gold, that some of the soldiers cast nervous glances at one another. Behrat, deep in the shade, smiled to himself. The boy was asking Gohrn where they might all find a drink and a woman. His great hand falling on his shoulder, Behrat assured the boy that he knew just the place to rid himself of his winnings.
II
Craid stuck to the back streets, moving amongst the shadows and hemmed in by the high, whitewashed walls. Flitting between the shade and the slats of light which fell between the tightly packed building, he discarded the cloak he had adopted to exit the ship down the first courtyard well that he found. There were few people here amongst the quiet avenues away from the markets, only the odd beggar woman or gaggle of playing children. In the still, shady laneways the smell of lemons and oranges drifted down from the hillside orchards and mingled with the warm smell of freshly washed sheets drying on lines strung between the windows overhead.
Craid found Conigliari’s modest townhouse by way of a mental map that recorded a city which grew as swiftly as a vine. But even after a decade it did not fail him. Conigliari was a shrewd man who knew his business. His home was here amongst the workers quarters. His customers sought out his specific wares and he had no need to peacock in the merchant’s quarter. In addition, the pace of construction and expansion was not so quick here amongst the homes of dockers, textilers and fishermen.
Craid stood in the shade of the small porch and knocked on the large, oak door. It opened and a dark face peered quizzically out at him from the gap.
“I’m here to see Dr. Conigliari” Craid said.
“The master is not at home, sir” came the reply.
A long silence followed as the servant girl stared into the calm eyes of the strange, veiled caller on the doorstop. The reedy smell of books floated in the air as it drifted down the hall and out into the light.
“Will he be long returning?” asked Craid.
“I can’t say, sir.”
“Well, did he give any indication?” Craid persisted.
“No sir, only that he was going out. He did not say where to” came the reply.
Craid narrowed his eyes.
“When did Dr. Conigliari leave?” he asked.
The girls eyes fluttered nervously. She seemed to seek imagined conspirators over his shoulder.
“Three nights ago, sir” she said at last.
*
Craid sat in the parlour. Having, in time, convinced the girl that he had a history with Conigliari, as well as legitimate business, and was not one of the chimeric vultures she supposed were beginning to circle the horde her master had seemingly abandoned to her charge. She brought him tea on a silver tray and poured as Craid readied his line of enquiry. Motes of dust peppered the rays of light that crept through windows across which all blinds were drawn.There was the air of a seige about the quiet house filled with its books, art and fetishes gathered from all corners of the world. And it was not just the girl’s wild fancy that made it so. Word and rumour travelled fast amongst the seedy alleys and taverns that littered the steep hill on which Sol Midan stood. Though Conigliari’s wares were not of the type that most prospective thieves would even begin to know where to fence, Craid knew that the dumbest would not be stopped by this and the that the truly cunning would be drawn by it. Craid knew, for, if he were not so indebted to the man, he would be lurking on the house’s boundary himself.
He took a pinch of snuff and winced as a shiver went across his shoulder blades. The servant girl was walking off to the kitchen with the silver tray.
“Wait” Craid called, “I need to speak to you.”
She set the tray down on the low table in front of them and sat in the seat opposite Craid, looking apprehensive. Craid went to pour her tea and realized, of course, she had brought only one cup. She sat, staring down at her hands which were clasped between her knees.
“What’s your name?” Craid asked.
“Ola, sir” she replied, talking down at her feet.
“How long have you worked for the doctor?” he continued.
“I’m not sure, sir. A good while, sir.”
Craid saw shining tears begin to run from her downturned eyes.
“You’re from Sabtah, am I right?” Craid asked after a time.
She up at him now, surprised and swallowing back her tears.
“Sabtah Shebah, sir.”
“Ah, I was close, though? Near the border?” he asked.
The tiniest flicker of a smile came across her lips.
“Yes, sir” she said.
“I’m glad you give a chitsiru the benefit of his efforts. I’ve been on the end of a blade for making that mistake before”, Craid laughed.
Ola gave him a puzzled little smile now but her hands still shook and she clasped them tight again between her knees.
“Would you take some snuff?” Craid asked, offering the little pewter box.
She looked back to her hands and shook her head.
“It’s Gongg Root. I think you’re in shock” Craid suggested.
She looked up again.
“Gongg Root?”
Craid nodded, took another pinch himself and held the box out to her once more.
Hesitantly, and without looking Criad in the eye, she took a small pinch between her thumb and ring finger and put it to her nose. A violent judder went across her shoulders and she sat back and she closed her large brown eyes. Craid brought the tea to his face and breathed deeply. It had the sweet, sharp scent of orange blossom. He put it down again.
“Have you any idea, Ola, any idea at all, where Conigliari might have gone?” he asked.
“I don’t have any idea. He rarely talks to me about business, Mr. Craid.”
“I know what a servant overhears” Craid pressed. “anyone he spoke with? Any deal he talked about?”
“He talked about you”, the girl replied, languidly, her eyes closing again. “He said that you would come and that you would have something for him. He said that I should not let you into the house if I was alone.” She giggled behind her hands and opened her eyes to look at Craid. Her pupils were like saucers. “I think he’s a little afraid of you. He said you have the voice of a demon. And you do. It is like it comes from the other other side of the room. But he also said that your eyes are cruel and they are not.”
Craid began to wonder if he had made a mistake with the Gongg Root. The girl seemed to have drifted into an exhausted sleep. Craid brought the cooled tea under the bandit’s cloth about his face and poured it down his throat. He sat and waited. She slept til the sun began to fall and the light thrown across her from the window grew pale. Ola awoke as if she had only dropped off for a matter of minutes.
“Where will you stay tonight, Mr. Craid?” she said now, still dreamily but more lucid.
“I can find somewhere, I’m sure” Craid replied.
“Oh no,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide, “It is not safe. There is a madman loose in Sol Midan.
Craid sat forward.
“A madman?”
The girl’s hands once more clasped between her knees as she continued.
“They have found many bodies. Horribly torn as if by some beast. All out in the open. Not a day goes by that you don’t fear to stumble across the aftermath in some alley or down in the market. He is striking in the night.”
Craid narrowed his eyes.
“Do you know any of the names? Of the victims, I mean” he asked.
“One was Medici, I had heard his name before. Another was Colombo. Then Bordelli.”
“Bordicelli, do you mean” Craid interrupted.
“Yes, that was the name” Ola replied.
“Goddammit” whispered Craid, “they’re all merchants. He’s no madman. He, or she, is an assassin.”
III
It was the dead of the night when Craid crept to the side of her bed. Her room, in the back of the house, was spare. An extinguished lamp and a couple of books on the bedside table. A small mirror on the chest of drawers. A brush threaded with curls of her root-black hair. He watched her chest rise and fall with exhausted sleep and then sidled out of the room.
Craid didn’t wish to leave her and he didn’t wish to have her worry that he had left. He had few friends in Sol Midan and none that he could trust with the knowledge that Conigliari was missing from his stronghold.
Craid slid out of the front door and locked it behind him. A small window left open in the room she had readied for him would be the point of ingress upon his return. It was on the second floor and away from the view of the street and he was comfortable leaving it ajar.
The streets of Sol Midan were perturbingly quiet. Even the accustomed light that glowed down in the harbour as the ships land and unloaded through the long night was dimmer than in days past. He slunk into one of the dark alleys and began to move towards his destination, a high and brilliant moon painting the white walls of the buildings a sickly blue.
He had not seen a single other person by the time he arrived and was crouched on a roof on the edge of the merchant’s quarter and was plotting his route amongst the new development. The merchant quarters nighttime crowds were less diminished than the rest of the city despite the, obviously quite targeted, slaughter that had descended on Sol Midan. Those who basked in the opulence and decadence that this corner of the city radiated were less likely to fear a madman and more a knock from the taxman at their door.
Craid, conversely, was more concerned with the threat which this particular part of the city posed him. A docker wouldn’t recognize him as anything but one more shadow sliding around the great warehouses on the quay, but a merchant, or any member of one of their their little private militias, may remember a scar he had left on their faces or inventories.
He made his way towards Francini’s mansion with caution. It, like many of the other buildings here, had grown new wings and towers in the interim, swallowing or incorporating adjacent buildings like a creeping fungus. Nonetheless, Craid found he still had enough memory and intuition to find his way in and soon enough he was lurking in a dark corner of one of the servant’s passages, listening as the muted roar of the party taking place in the great hall below, bounced between the walls around him.
Eventually he found Francini’s private quarters: in the opposite corner of the house to that which they had previously resided. But they were no less ostentatious for the move. Francini, the self-appointed mediator and facilitator amongst the ever warring guilds and factions of merchants, under the figurehead of the prince of Sol Midan, was like a mongoose amongst a pit of vipers and his riches had only grown. Craid turned over the possibility that he, Francini, was the dark aegis of Sol Midan’s spate of assassination. But Craid knew only half the story, a scared servant girls nightmares and a few deserted streets were slim intelligence. He knew that he would need to bleed a pig and see how it squealed to hear the other half.
Within the hour the great double doors were flung wide and the pig came shuffling back to his sty. Craid watched on from the shadows of the grand bed chamber in which he had lain in wait. Francini was accompanied by a lithe and drunken girl who hung from his fat, sweating neck. The two sodden dancers wheeled about the room knocking over standing tables and lamps, laughing giddily. Craid watched the girl playfully push Francini onto the huge bed where he fell into it with exaggerated shock. She slid the, almost sheer, dress that she wore from her shoulders and it floated to the floor. She climbed, nude, atop Francini who giggled and grunted with pleasure. Craid slid from the shadows and crept, keeping low, towards the bed.
The girl was leaning down towards the leering and satisfied face that stared up at her from the pillow when Craid took her. Francini barely had time to gather his dulled and disoriented senses as Craid slipped the sedative soaked cloth about the girl’s face and pulled her from the bed, laying her naked body, already insensate, onto the soft rug. As Francini regained his consciousness there was a new figure atop him and staring down into his eyes. This one was less becoming; veiled and with eyes that burned out with horrid mischief. At the end of one down stretched arm was a blade and its tip pressed lightly against Francini’s adam’s apple.
“Now, I’m sure you’re paying for this young ladies’ company by the hour so I’ll try to be brief. I may even pay my share for this little interruption as I leave. Do I still have credit here?” Craid whispered, mockingly.
“Craid!…”
“You might need to help me with the calculation” Craid continued,”how much is a whore in Sol Midan nowadays?”
“Guar…” Francini began to spit out before Craid cut him short with a minute increase of pressure on the blade.
“Come now, Luca, you may be fatter and drunker but you wouldn’t still be here if you’d grown that much more foolish” he chuckled.
Francini sweated and grew a little pinker as his only response.
“Very wise, we’re on the clock after all” quipped Craid, “I only need some some information, Luca, and then I’ll be gone once again. I need to know everything that you know” and here Craid traced a tiny circle on the man’s larynx with the razor point of the dagger, “about the nasty things that are happening at night in these parts.”
“Why… would I trust… you…” Francini gasped, and with each word that he spoke he felt the tickle of the blade against his delicate skin.
Craid withdrew the blade but kept it poised in the air where it gently bobbed back and forth before Francini’s eyes like a swaying cobra. Francini swallowed hard.
“Who’s been killed?” Craid asked.
“Medici. Colombo. Bordicelli.”
“And who’s responsible?” Craid continued, his eyes narrowing.
“I don’t know, I swear it. I’ve felt around, as much as I dare, and found nothing” Francini whined.
“The Prince? Is he losing his grip on the merchants?”
“No” Francini slurred, “Perhaps a few years ago. Perhaps Medici might have been a target. But not now. His father’s might in the capital is greater than ever; there is no reason.”
“Then a thief? A shipper? A priest? Who might have a vendetta against the merchants?”
Francini choked out a mocking laugh.
“I’m as lost as you, boy” he grinned.
The dagger danced back and forth in Craid’s hand.
“Have you considered Conigliari?” Francini spat, “the old sorcerer has always been apart.”
“He has no need to assert his will in such a way, we both know that” replied Craid. But Francini was right, he was lost. And it was apparent that the corpulent merchant, transparent with drink, was hiding nothing. But then something came to him.
“Who’s competing with Conigliari?” Craid asked.
Francini laughed again.
“Who ever competes with him in that line of work!? Even with you gone he still deals in his usual unique line of arcana” he said.
“There was always one” retorted Craid.
“Well, I suppose D’Agostini runs some merchandise like that” Francini mumbled. The fire was going out of the situation and the drink was overcoming him.
“The watchmaker?”
“No” Francini replied, “his son. D’Agostini the Elder is long dead. But the boy is quite the up and comer, now. Purveyor of a few choice finds that even Conigliari would be proud of. The sort of thing that you used to bring him “ he said with a sneer.
“Where do I find him?” demanded Craid.
“In his father’s old workshop up on the hill. He runs his office out of there. I’m sure you remember; I recall the old man sparing your hands with a kind word to the Prince after finding a certain masked youth with his fingers feeling out his safe, all those years ago.”
Francini was getting sloppy and bold through drunkenness and with the atmosphere of fear giving way to advantage. Craid decided to cut their interview short before the merchant did something stupid like call out for help. The knife still poised, Craid slipped a hand inside his shirt and and pulled out a gold coin
“For your time. And hers” he whispered.
As Francini opened his mouth to scream and curse, Craid slid the coin into the merchant’s mouth and then smothered it with the soporific cloth. Francini’s eyes flared with anger and his pupils expanded like sinkholes before rolling back into his head. Craid pulled the bed sheet from under the titanic mass of flesh and laid it across the girl who still slept on the floor. He climbed onto the windowsill and looked out over Sol Midan. The sun was just beginning to break the horizon, far out at sea.
IV
Craid snuck back through the streets in the hazy light of dawn. The smell of the ocean hung in each damp particle that was suspended in the air. He passed a tavern and saw through the window, slumped over a table, the man Behrat and his gold-toothed companion whom he had seen on the ship. They seemed to have obtained, then blown on rum and women, some kind of purse since having made land.
As Craid was coming down into the quays the broadening sunlight was beginning to creep up out of the sea and onto the flagstones, as if brought in with the tide. He aimed to procure some provisions from the early market stalls before the crowds began to gather. As Craid stepped out onto the dock he saw a strange figure walking in his direction. The detail was lost in the deep shadow that was thrown from the sun behind, but the light was not enough to obscure, in fact it only highlighted, that from which the figure walked away. It was a man slumped on the ground, the growing pool of fresh blood around him sparkling and shimmering in the dawn. The figure, walking with a strange and stiff gait, drew nearer and Craid freed his blade.
“Good morning!” he called with glib humour.
The figure kept walking. Craid glanced over his own shoulder down the alley from which he had emerged.
“Heading to the coffeehouse for an eye opener?” he shouted.
But the figure made no reply. It was within 30 foot now and Craid tried to piece together the collection of bizarre traits that it presented. It wore a hooded robe that was drawn across its broad chest. It bore a mask of shining bronze, the features plain. Neither comedy nor tragedy emanated from the black apertures of its eyes and mouth. In a hand that was not of flesh it carried a blade not unlike his own.
“It’s an early morning to be so active” snarled Craid, beginning to walk towards the figure. “Perhaps… best to return to sleep!” and he lunged forward, parrying away the knife that the figure thrust to meet him and tying up its other arm behind its back. But almost as soon as Craid noticed that the arm upon which he laid his hands was, beneath the cloak, as hard and jagged as cliff rock, the arm was torn free from his grasp as if it were only a swathe of cobweb and a series of thrusts and slashes of the dagger were thrown at his face.
Craid ducked, weaved and moved in, lashing out with his own knife. He was face to face with the thing now, inches from its hollow eyes. And his blood ran cold as he realized that no human, or even animal, eyeballs lay behind the mask.
Only perceptible in the quiet dawn, Craid heard the insect ticking of clockwork gears spinning and biting into one another come from the figures body. It grasped Craid’s knife hand at the wrist with a vice-like grip and pulled it and the dagger away from its body. With the other arm it levelled its own blade at Craid’s face. Unable to break free, Craid fell back with his whole weight. As he reached the friction point the strange machine man stumbled forward with him and let go of his arm in order to steady itself. Craid reached forward and pulled the hood over its face and, leaping into the air like a cat, planted two feet directly into its wide chest. The thing stumbled back, crazed and tearing at its cloak. The sound of the thick fibres being wrenched apart was quite audible over Craid’s own heavy breathing as he picked himself from the flagstones and tried to plan a method of attack. Or, potentially, escape.
The figure got a hold of the tattered remains of the cloak and threw them to the ground. Craid, for all the danger that he had foolishly invited, could only stand and stare, drinking in the strangest vision that even he had ever seen.
It was a man of wood and bronze. The arms, legs and torso were panels of polished oak, he could could even see the nick his knife had made in the wood above where a man’s kidneys would be. At each and every point of articulation, from the knee to the knuckles, there was a gap in the wood filled with joints and gears of shimmering bronze and silver that whirred and turned in intricate patterns. It was like an artist’s anatomy doll grown to the size, and beyond, of a man. And it moved with a sinister simulacrum of human articulation. Not quite as flexible, but with a ferocious strength and purpose that bettered the flesh on which it was modelled. Its face, that serene skull-like mask, glowed in the burgeoning sunlight like an impassive Angel of Death.
It moved, again, towards Craid in an affected fighter’s pose and with a complete absence of fear. As it struck out at him, Craid dodged its blow and, realizing that the his blade was useless, hammered the set of gears at its elbow with the hilt of his knife. He heard the metal bend ,but it became apparent that the damage that was being dealt was minimal when it used the very same arm to fling Craid to the ground.
Craid was quick and, when he fought, it was with the reactions and instincts of an animal on the plains, but he was barely to his feet when felt the cold blade slide in to his flesh to the hilst, penetrating his lower back. Craid knew where a man felt pain and where in the body the Gods had desperately buried the vital workings that sustain something so fragile as a human being. Perhaps this strange imitation of mankind did not know by instinct what a killer like Craid knew and utilized, for it made a mistake that saved its victims life. The blade had slipped between, by inches, the kidney and spleen.
Inundated, now, with adrenaline, Craid managed to roll onto his back and, as he did so, he slipped a hand inside his shirt. As the relentless automaton came in to deliver the fatal blow Craid flung into its face a handful of powder, praying that its action would be effective against this new and singular foe. As the powder was exposed to the searing light of a Sol Midan morning it exploded into flashes of silver and gold.
The thing staggered back and away, clawing at smoke and the thousan minute explosions the powder had let off. Craid clawed himself to his feet and, pushing through a pain that threatened to flaw him, he half-loped and half-ran to the edge of the quays and, choking out an agonized cry, hurled himself into the brilliant, blue water.
V
Ola opened the door and there Craid stood in the gloom of the porch. But it was as if a shadow had arrived twenty four hours behind its master, because the form in the doorway was only a dark imitation of the man who had preceded it. Shivering in spite of the heat and slouching against a pillar, the eyes that stared back at her were like dim and guttering lamps. He barely made it across the threshold, muttering some indistinguishable curse, before he crashed to the floor. Ola managed to get Craid into the low sofa seat in the drawing room and, when she turned to fetch water and bandages, she felt his hand grab her own, weakly. She had to lean in to him to hear what he said. His breath smelled of blood and seawater.
“In his room… the treasure hoard… an earthen pot with a man biting a snake drawn on…” he whispered.
Her eyes searched his.
“Craid, where in the room?”
He drew a ragged breath.
“Go!…” he spluttered.
What she found in the dusty and ancient pot was a wax like substance the colour of dead flesh and with a smell that matched. By the time she had got back to Craid’s side he had slipped into unconsciousness. Assuming his instruction, she took a handful of the salve and rubbed the deep, puckered wounds on his back before binding it in clean cloth.
*
When he awoke in the dead of the night, several days later, Ola was by his side. Craid tried to speak and found his mouth so dry that his gums stuck to the sides of his cheeks. He motioned to Ola to bring him water and his pouch of snuff. When she returned with them he was trying to drag himself to an upright position. She put down the water and the pouch and helped him to settle into the corner of the sofa. She down next to him and handed him a cup of water. He turned away from her and drank.
“You can take off the veil if you’d prefer?” she said, quietly, “I had to remove it whilst you were recovering. You breathing was so weak…”
Craid took two pinches of snuff into each nostril and lay his head back, closing his eyes.
“Then you’re probably used to this way that I look, But I’m not” he said in a whisper, “the last time I saw it was in the reflection of a dying man’s eyes and I intend to leave it there.”
“What was that salve in the pot?” Ola asked.
“I have no idea. But I’m glad I stole it for him all those years ago” Craid replied, dreamily.
They sat for a long time in silence. Ola assumed that Craid was sleeping but when, in time, she asked a further question out loud without having meant to, he replied immediately.
“Do you think he is still alive?” she had asked, meaning Conigliari.
“I’ve always known that he is” Craid replied, “that is why he’s disappeared and not turned up as some many-punctured corpse lying in a busy street. The rest were a message. His disappearance is something different.”
“Do you know who’s the person doing it?” she asked, nervously.
“I’ve met them quite intimately” Craid replied, and shifted painfully in his seat, “but it’s who’s picking the targets that I’m interested in. I have some idea about that, too.”
It took a further two days for Craid to be able to stand unaided. He took plenty of the soups and teas that Ola prepared and the same again of the pinches of narcotic snuff and daubs of the arcane, healing unguent.
*
One night, as he sat and pored over Conigliari’s papers, Craid heard a scuffing in the upper part of the house. He took his and knife and doused it in a particularly fast acting nerve poison which he had found amongst the various alchemical agents within the house. He passed the sleeping Ola, collapsed on a sofa seat, as he made his way to the staircase, a horrible deja vu creeping over him as he did so. He took the stairs one at a time, wishing that he had taken a pinch of the snuff.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Craid sidled up to the doorway from whence the sound came. He took a sidelong glance into the room and saw a dark figure halfway across the sill. The bunched shadows behind and the low, sinister muttering told of a further two would be intruders waiting in line. Craid slipped the tainted dagger back into its sheath and drew another, clean, blade. He drew a deep breath. The goal was to deal sufficient damage to force a retreat but not so much as to bring on a siege mentality in the jumpy figures behind and force a confrontation that, in this state, he was not sure that he could succeed in. Craid let out the breath in a long, quiet sigh and whipped around into the doorframe.
The knife sang as it flew through the dark and, as it found its mark, it sunk into flesh with the sound of tearing cloth. The victim howled and, to Craid’s disquiet, fell into the room rather than out of it. One of the shadows behind was now beginning to climb in through the window. As the one who had been felled by the knife stood once more, Craid picked up and hurled a chair that had sat just inside the doorway. It clattered into the recovering burglar who stumbled into the window, knocking out the one who had been coming in. Craid’s back burned where the exertion had split his healing wound. He took a few loud steps into the room, unsheathing the poisoned blade with exaggerated force. It made an unmistakable whipping sound, even amongst the groaning and confused shouts at the window. Summoning all the pain and bitter fury that had been welling up within him, Craid spat two words into the dark;
“Get. Out!”
And, chancing his fate on the way that the bones would fall, he flung his knife into the huddled mass where it embedded itself in his target – the frame of the window. If the would be thieves had looked back as they fled they would not have seen the imposing resistance that they imagined but, instead, the figure of Craid on his hands and knees, retching in pain.
Ola found him this way as she cautiously peered around the doorframe. She bore him down the stairs and to the sofa, where he struggled weakly against her ministrations, muttering that time was growing short. She applied another handful of the salve to his ragged wound and managed to calm him until he fell into an uneasy sleep. As he dreamt, she did what she could to restore the security of the upstairs window.
*
When Craid awoke with a start the following afternoon she was sitting with her head in her hands.
“I need to go tonight” was the first thing that Craid said.
She looked up.
“You are still not well” she replied.
Craid ran a hand across his face.
“No. But word has got out. Either we get him back, the conjurer that they fear, or we both leave.”
“If you go then I stay here” she said quietly.
“No, that isn’t going to happen” he said firmly, “you need to go somewhere you’ll be safe.”
Without further comment she drew from beside the chair the dagger that Craid had doused in poison. It had been further marred with blood which had dried along its edges.
“They came again” she said, “or others. I am safe here, at least for a little while. What you have on this knife, it is like the violet flower from my village. But far worse. When the master comes back there will be something to take care of”, and her eyes rose to the ceiling.
“Well, I doubt that will cause too much of a problem” Craid replied, “but we need to get him back first.”
“You can’t go out at night” Ola said with icy calm, “the body down in the docks that you saw was one of the Moretti brothers. Bruno has his whole militia patrolling the city by dark.”
Craid sat in silence for a long time.
“Dawn, then. I need to gather some things.”
Ola turned the dagger over by the handle as Craid watched. Its blade still had the dull, fatal look of a poisoned weapon. He held out his hand. Ola stuck it forcefully into the wooden floor where it stood upright. He pulled it free and went slowly up the stairs without saying another word.
VI
Craid stood by the front door, next to the satchel that he had carefully packed through a night where he had stopped only to rest and doze for a couple of hours. Ola came from the kitchen with a length of gauze and the earthen pot. Craid peered through the window shutters. The blue-dark that was a Sol Midan dawn was just beginning to break through the night. He watched the backs of two of Moretti’s men disappear down an alley.
He turned back to Ola who was waiting, staring down at the floor. He delicately removed his shirt as she soaked the bandages in what remained of the salve. He stared up at the ceiling, his arms held wide, and listened to her quiet work. She barely flinched when she looked up to begin her task and saw the reams of bizarre, arcane text that was burned, tattooed and scarred all across his naked torso. In the silence of the pregnant dawn she bound his body in the soft cloth and then turned away.
As she flicked the water from her hands she turned back round and watched him draw the hood of his long jacket up and over his head. She had heard him take several huge pinches of a new, acrid smelling snuff mixture and his eyes burned out from the slit between his hood and the cloth wrapped about his face. They had not said a word to one another the whole night. She wondered if he would speak before picking up his bag and leaving and was almost surprised to hear herself speaking first.
“What will you do? If it beats you again, I mean. You are sick and it will not let you slip away another time.”
Craid slung the bag across his shoulders.
“My body is weaker, perhaps, but I’ve learned from our last meeting. It is only a machine of some kind. Machines don’t learn” he said.
Ola half raised a hand towards him and it hung in the air.
“But it moves and kills as if it were a man” she said.
“Well, men don’t learn either” Craid replied and, with that, he slipped out into the blue dawn.
*
The streets were deserted but for the occasional pairing of the surviving Moretti brother’s men, whose drunken footsteps Craid had no problem identifying in the still air and then evading.
As he slunk up the hill he came to D’Agostini’s watchmakers. The windows were dark mirrors and Craid had to step into an embrace with his shadowy reflection to see inside. The mechanisms, half stripped, and the tiny cogs and gears on the benches, like the aftermath of a surgery, all lay beneath a fine coating of dust. The shadows in the workshop were deep and impregnable. Craid smiled to himself. It was just as he had pieced it together in his head; tiny cogs falling into place.
Craid continued up the hill by the backstreets and, with some effort, climbed onto a roof that afforded him a view of the palace. It had not changed as the merchant’s houses had. It had always eclipsed the other buildings of Sol Midan and still did. A couple of sentries were posted at the gates, in the pillars of which flaming torches gutted down to nothing.
Craid dropped down from the roof and began to search amongst the detritus that littered the little back alley. He only hoped that, in the intervening years, no-one had worked out how he had found his way into the palace, all that time ago, to liberate the Prince’s most treasured sabre. Beneath an overturned and abandoned handcart he found it; a flimsy cover hiding the way down into the sewers.
Craid moved through the dry, crumbling passages, following a set of mental directions at each junction that he had dredged, turn by turn, from his memory as he had been recovering. Ancient plaster dust rained down as he made his way, slowly and bent double, towards an opening in the palace cellar that he prayed would still be accessible.
At last the passage opened out and he found the dry and decaying wooden ladder that rose into the darkness above. He tested it with a little of his weight and, though its rungs bowed a little, it appeared stable enough. The weight that he had lost during his convalescence was perhaps a stroke of luck.
He climbed the ladder and reached the covered opening in the ceiling and dropped his torch to burn out in the dirt below. With his heart in his mouth, Craid reached out and pressed against the slim, stone disc that, he hoped, would raise up from the floor of the palace’s cellar. But it did not move. Craid pushed harder and the decrepit ladder creaked beneath him. He considered the flash powder he had in his bag. The noise that it would create would call every guard in the palace down into the cellar and he had to consider the possibility that opening had been covered over on the other side.
He took out his blade and ran it around the rim of the opening, hoping to loosen decades worth of seizing. He pushed it again and it seemed to move a little more. But the ladder gave a rattling groan in response that made his heart skip in his chest. He looked to the gutting torch thirty feet below. In his current condition he did not like his chances.
Girding himself, Craid wrapped his legs around the frame of the ladder, fancying it more than the rungs. The exertion it took to hold himself aloft like that made his abdomen, with its unhealed wound, burn and clench. Using both hands now, he pushed upwards against the stone and, with a crack, the lid launched upwards. As his aching back creaked, so did the ladder. It spat dust and debris which he heard crackle faintly in the torch flame below. And then it collapsed entirely.
Craid’s body was wrenched downwards and he stifled a pitiful scream as his torso was jerked by gravity. His fingers dug into the stone floor of the cellar above him as his legs dangled and kicked in mid air. He took several deep breaths as soon as he began to feel his sweat soaked fingertips begin to fail him. Roaring out a noise which was cut to abrupt silence as he mustered all the strength he had left, Craid hauled himself up and out of the hole and collapsed onto his back on the cold, stone floor. He lay there like a newborn baby, unbreathing and unable to move. And then, actuated by the capricious ghosts of life, he drew a huge breath of air, rolled over and screamed into the dirt.
*
Craid pushed on the door of the cellar and listened at the crack. His head swam with the bitter memory of intense pain and yet was sharp with the effects of the snuff he had taken between ragged breaths. A shaking sense of unreality came over him. The footsteps that came closer and closer seemed to echo with a strange resonance. Craid shook his head clear. As the footsteps began to retreat he slipped through the door, closing it softly behind him. He followed the echoing footsteps to a bend in the corridor and peered round.
Craid watched as the palace guard, owner of the footsteps, ducked into a doorway and listened to the murmured conversation that began to issue from within. There was no reason for a guard to be patrolling these lower depths of the palace where only storerooms and servants quarters resided.
Craid crept closer to the doorway and listened. The conversation was carried out in hushed tones.
“How do you know it will be him?” whispered one of the voices.
“The same way I knew it would be Moretti. Now, do you want the name or not?” the other replied.
The city had not changed, Craid thought, even after so much time and amongst such new madness. In the dark recesses of the palace men’s lives were still bet upon and their advantages taken advantage of as if they were nothing more than fighting cocks.
There was he sound of clinking coins.
“No, no, no; we agreed, another half again for this one” said the voice that Craid had deduced was the guard’s. The other voice mumbled a non-committal response, blaming their weak memory.
“Then you’ll need to gather your advantage elsewhere, Beppe” the soldier sneered.
There was disgruntled mumbling in Beppe’s tone and then a further clinking and rattling of coins.
Craid had intended to wait for the gambler or rival merchant, whoever he was, to leave before he introduced himself to the guard, but it was his experience that even two men barely possessed the awareness of half-a-man when gold was glittering in their eyes. And he seized the opportunity.
Beppe, in the midst of trying to tip fate in his favour, was dying with a blade driven under his chin almost before he could react. Craid leered at the guard over the man’s shoulder. The guard held out a hand in an instinctive defence and in a split second found the blood soaked blade thrust into it and his body being pushed back to the wall with another knife at his throat.
“Who…who…” the guard stammered. And the veiled figure replied in an unearthly voice that came from everywhere at once and sent a shiver down the guard’s spine;
“No-one, really. Just passing through an old haunt. Tell me where I find Conigliari and I keep moving.”
“The tower!” the guard snapped back.
“And D’Agostini?” Craid continued.
“How did you kn…” the guard began but his voice was arrested by a twist of the knife that was embedded in his hand and the beginning of his cries were answered with an increase of pressure to the blade at his throat.
“The tower” the guard choked out, “he is in the tower trying to get answers from the old man!”
Craid looked the guard up and down.
“What’s your name?” Craid asked.
“Sar…Sar…Sar…” the guard stammered out. Craid grinned;
“Well, you look like a bleeder SarSarSar. Lucky you.”
And with that he clubbed the man behind his ear with the hilt of his knife and lowered the slumped body to the ground. Checking the unconscious man’s uniform he was pleased to find it spotless.
VII
Craid affixed the face cage to the palatial guard’s helmet which he now wore and stepped out of the cellar door and into the hallway. SarSarSar lay at the bottom of the sewer tunnel from which Craid had climbed. The torch had gone out but he assumed the man was still breathing down there. He had flung his own clothing down first to act as some kind of cushion and had tried to drop the body in such a way that any bones broken would not be the neck.
Craid marched with the exaggerated dignity and scorn that the palace guards adopted in order to properly represent their liege. He passed servants, subordinates and other guards without incident. It was strange; in what would ordinarily have been the strict regime of morning there was a hint of chaos in the palace. At first Craid worried that it betokened some knowledge of an interloper in their midst but there was a weary, resigned undertone that told him that this was part of some ongoing breakdown. And it played to his advantage. With the palace faintly manic and, thus distracted, Craid found his way from the gold and glittering halls and passageways to the grimmer, flagged avenues that led to the tower without suspicion.
As he unbarred and pushed on the great oak door that allowed entrance, Craid caught the first faint scream as it tumbled down the winding stair. Craid leaned the spear he had been carrying against the brickwork and pushed the door closed. If he were to meet the singular, clockwork assassin again he would have no more success with the spear then he had achieved with the knife. He knew exactly in which direction success lay and it was within the very reason that had caused his return to Sol Midan. He smiled to himself. Small cogs falling into place.
The screams grew in volume and intensity as Craid climbed the stair. He turned the knife over and over in his hand. His quiet rage grew as pain stabbed him with each step. Craid was no stranger to pain. He fed on what it offered and spat the cold remains into the stone at his feet.
Only one door led into the keep at the tower’s pinnacle. Craid, as he had done so often before, took what most men experienced as fear and made of it an amusing little pet. A pretty bird that sang on his shoulder a chorus of the absurdity of death and the ludicrous fragility of life. He slid a thin blade between the door and its frame and, thus, flicked up and away the bar on the inside.
“Little Mario D’Agostini” Craid announced as he stepped through the door, “how you’ve grown!”
D’Agostini stood at the far end of the room, bloody water dripping from his fingers and the towel he had dropped on Craid’s entry settling at his feet.
“Craid!” he cried in shock and fury.
“I’m glad you still remember the little people” Craid smirked.
D’Agonstini’s eyes flicked about the room, back and forth between Craid and Conigliari who sat, tied and bloodied, in a chair between them.
Craid strode into the room, the dagger twitching in his hand. As he passed the semi conscious Congliari he placed a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder. Craid stepped nearer D’Agostini who backed away, his hands held in front of him. Craid picked up a cup of wine that sat on a small table against the wall. He pulled loose the helmet face cage and tossed it to the ground. D’Agostini gasped. The lower half of the thief’s face was a mutilated mass of bare muscle and tendons, the skin wasted or torn from its bed. Craid poured the wine down his throat. Thin rivers of crimson ran between his permanently bared teeth. He smiled at D’Agostini and it was the nightmarish leer of a naked skull.
“Craid, the old man is just a tool. He’s hurt but he’ll live. I only need his knowledge. You can persuade him and then you can both walk free.”
D’Agostini had been petrified. If no man alive had seen Craid’s true face it was assumed that this was because he had let no such man live. But as his slippery tongue worked he was talking himself back into a state of confidence.
“Once I have what he hides” D’Agostini continued, “I’ll rule this city. I’ll have the power to write off a lot of debts and wash away a lot of bad blood” he implored Craid, suggestively.
“And the Prince?” Craid enquired.
“That inbred fool? What of him? He hides in the capital whilst I take control so that he can return on more favourable terms with myself than against a cabal of merchants. He loans me his palace and his guards to complete my work? Pah! Once I have the secret to animating legions of automata I’ll tear his palace and his guards to shreds! Father took the secret to his grave. But he is the one who showed it to father” and he pointed to the slumped form of Conigliari.
“And you can build an army of those things?” Criad asked, placing down the empty cup.
D’Agostini smiled, “Whole battalions. Sol Midan is only the beginning.”
Craid leant back on the wall and let out a sigh as he considered the information. In truth, his back was on fire with pain.
“You’re father was a great man, D’Agostini. I mean that”.
D’Agostini took a solicitous step closer to Craid, “Indeed. But he had spent a lifetime peering into the tiny workings of watches and it limited the scope of his vision. He built the greatest work of mechanism the world has ever seen and imbued it with life and, do you know what he planned for it? To protect his workshop and safeguard his deliveries!” D’Agostini laughed from the depth of his father’s shadow. “But when he died I was the one to see its true potential. And, it’s strange that you should be here to see the culmination, because it was you that helped me see. That relentless purpose and lack of fear you have and which Sol Midan cowers from. I sent it out into the world as Conilgiari had directed you, intractable and ruthlessly efficient. To the cold tombs and hot jungles from which you brought him fabled treasure. To the emperors and warlords on whom you enacted countless bounties. And the money that it brought me, the influence and power to enact my will, have led us here.”
“I’m glad I was such an inspiration” Craid replied, stepping away from the wall.
D’Agostini stepped forward again, a triumphant, slimy grin on his face.
“You’re right about one thing, Mario” Craid said, “your father was a man of small vision. But he was enough of a man to know how little that mattered. No wonder he was always so desperately disappointed in you.”
D’Agostini stopped short. He sneered back at Craid;
“I should have known that a petty thief, especially one stupid enough to come and take a second beating, wouldn’t have the wisdom to join me. Well, time to give you a death ugly enough to match the one you wear on your face.”
D’Agostini gave a high pitched, undulating whistle and, from the darkest corner of the keep, came a reply. The steady and intensifying ticking and clanking of gears falling into place. The creak of wood and whine of copper joints loosening. The fall of heavy footsteps on the flagstones.
Craid watched the clockwork terror step out of the shadows. Even in his drugged and nihilistic state, the sight sent a twinge of discomfort through his heart. It showed no fear, no hesitance. Their last encounter had nearly proved fatal for Craid but this implacable machine strode as surely and purposefully towards him as it had done when he first saw it walking towards him from out of the glow of a sun rising beyond the docks.
As the first blow was launched towards Craid he was staring straight into the pits of the thing’s eyes. He had learnt to avoid his natural inclination to watch for the telltale jerk of muscle that forecasted an attack. It was a tell that the material of its body did not possess. Now, he relied on his years of experience in combat to tell him what assault made the most logical sense, this was the one that his strange opponent would employ. The blow that the assassin had launched came down in thin air. As the next attempt flew out in a wide arc, Craid ducked it and reached inside the guard’s tunic that he wore. He had been forced to abandon his satchel and the equipment inside in order to maintain his disguise. But he still had one piece of singular ordinance. He pulled the cracked, fist-sized black stone from his clothing and prepared to strike. But, then, something for which he had not planned happened.The lead footed thing swung a fierce kick towards his face. Craid’s hands flew up to protect himself but the blow simultaneously knocked the stone from his grasp and sent him skidding across the floor.
“You see, Criad” D’Agostini called from across the room, “if one of these can dominate even you, then imagine how many ordinary men it could best? Imagine how many a thousand of these clockwork soldiers could overthrow?”
Craid came back into coherence with hot blood running from the wound in his back and the thing almost atop him. He was not sure if the warm smell of copper in the air came from his blood melting into the stone or the frenzied gears and joints within his adversary. A knife came down at him and Craid flung himself free, tiny splatters of crimson soaking the floor from which blue sparks flew as the metal struck the stone.
Craid sprung to his feet and the assassin continued its advance. He scanned the floor in search of the stone he had dropped. Its blackness hid it perfectly in the shadows. As he backed away from the oncoming foe he had an idea. Almost backed to the corner, now, he bent to the floor, never taking his eyes from his opponent, and scooped a handful of dust and debris from between the cracks in the flagstones. He heard D’Agostini laugh;
“How do you intend to blind that which has sight beyond mere flesh, Craid?”
Craid flung the dust and dirt high into the air and, as it rained down, just as he had hoped, some of the debris hit the stone that was enshrined in darkness. As it did, the veins and cracks that riddled the stone’s surface glowed a fierce red, just for a second.
Now aware of its location, Craid turned his attention to the assassin. He had no more tricks to play and he could feel blood running freely down his leg. The assassin thrust its knife forward and Craid stepped to one side, lowered his shoulder and launched himself into the solid torso of the thing. The assassin stumbled, just a little. But it was enough. Craid rushed towards the stone, his breath held in anticipation of the iron grip that might fall on him as he passed; his arm clung to his side. As he had struck the thing bright flowers of pain had bloomed before his eyes. It was as if he had tackled an oak tree.
As he stumbled across the room, Criad was aware of great peals of laughter coming from D’Agostini, directed at his desperate flight. Craid reached the stone and bent down to scoop it up. Just as he did so, he felt something that approximated the power of a hammer falling upon an anvil strike him upon his wounded back. He fell forward, the world reduced to only two things; an exquisite white light of agony and the awareness of his hand wrapped like a vice around the stone. He came back to reality on his back and unable to breath, with two metal hands clasped around his throat.
“You know” called D’Agostini, “I think I will make a gift of your fabled knife. The next of these soldiers that I build, the next of many; I’ll close its hand around the hilt before I animate it. So that it might be born with blood already on its hands.”
The voice came to Craid from far away. His body was in shock, drifting, the life ebbing from it, and the stone lay in a hand over which he no longer felt he had direct control. But another voice came and, in his delirium, Craid did not know whether Conigliari, the old sorcerer and merchant in the arcane, had awoken or if the voice sailed directly into his mind on seas of bizarre conjuration.
“Old friend” it began, “do you know what you hold in your palm? Perhaps some of it, but barely half of it. It belonged, once, to a great Emperor of Wushii. The fable says that it is the petrified eye of the last dragon who roosted in a nest stop Mt. Wujin, and who roamed the misty skies bringing rain and fire. I suppose you imagine that I tasked you to bring it to me for the purpose of slaying this foe? But I did not. The world is a stranger place than either you or I know. Fate twists and turns like the coils of a dragon soaring in a leaden sky. It wheels like tiny gears falling into place…”
Reality crashed back in. Craid heard the guttural laughter of D’Agostini and the laboured breathing of Conigliari. He saw the hollow eyes of the clockwork assassin, its face appearing to glow with a golden aura all rimmed with red. The face filled his dimming vision, seemed to float like light at the end of a great tunnel. But he felt nothing, at first, as if he was suspended in a nighttime sea. But then, almost as if it were only some manifestation of clockwork, he felt his hand twitch and jerk with the involuntary animation of an automaton.
Craid smashed the stone against the forearm of the assassin and the room exploded into light. The assassin lurched backwards, releasing Craid who lay choking and gasping on the stone. Its wooden arm was ablaze with a fire that held a ghostly, green tint within it and stank of sulphur.
D’Agostini cried out in alarm as the clockwork soldier reeled around the room, vainly swatting at its engulfed arm. Craid dragged himself to all fours, drooling and spitting at the ground. In his hand the stone was smouldering and expelling large quantities of black smoke. The cracks and fissures glowed a fierce, lava-like orange. But it was not hot, not even warm, and Craid clutched it tight as he got to his feet.
The assassin was frantically clawing at the flames that roared where Craid had struck it. It looked up as Craid emerged through the billowing smoke and, though its face was only a mask, Craid, bleeding and numb, revelled in the fancy that he saw fear in its eyes. He thrust the stone into the broad wooden chest of the assassin. A burst of brilliant flame exploded into violent life where his blow had landed and he leapt back as an inferno of green-hued fire roared amongst the wood. The assassin tore at the flames and Craid smelled the acrid fumes of the copper beginning to melt. He struck again as the thing turned it back and another gout of flame went up.
“No!”
It was D’Agostini’s cry that turned Craid’s fire lit, shining eyes from the destruction. He advanced on D’Agostini, who backed away in terror and repeated;
“No!”
Craid snatched the watchmaker’s son-turned-would-be-ruler’s hair and twisted an arm behind his back.
“Look, boy” Craid snarled next to his ear, “look how easily power can burn.”
The clockwork automaton was almost invisible now in a ball of flame and rolling clouds of smoke. It moved desperately this way and that, but its movements became jerky as the pistons and rods that were its skeleton became liquid in the heat. When Craid released D’Agostini and he fell to his knees on the stone, all that remained was charcoal, ash and the copper mask that had been its face, melted and contorted into an agonized grimace by the inferno.
Craid went over to the smouldering remains and plucked the scalding mask from the ashes with a cloth wrapped hand. He advanced on D’Agostini, who scuttled backwards like a crab when he recognized Craid’s aim. But Craid drew nearer; the red hot mask held before him, concave side forward, watching D’Agostini pray, plead and scream, through the glowing holes of the former clockwork assassin’s eyes.
VIII
Conigliari lived. Whilst the healing salve was expanded there was no need for a doctor. The herbs and potions he directed Craid and Ola to prepare were of almost equal effect. The attacks on the house were ended, swiftly and lethally, with a common thief slitting his own throat in the middle of the merchant’s quarter, howling about demons that followed him through dreams and into daylight. Conigliari did more with a scrying mirror then Craid could do with a blade to restore order. The stone, The Dragon’s Gaze, went into its vault alongside the other terrible wonders. And, in time, it was the hour for Craid to leave.
“Here’s the payment for your initial charge” Conigliari said to him as he dropped the purse into Craid’s hand, “I’m not sure what payment I can offer for the other services you’ve rendered?”
“None are needed, old man” Craid replied, “I wouldn’t be taking this one if I’d done nothing, would I?”
Conigliari smirked, “You’ve indirectly done a favour to a great many of the merchants. I’m sure that word will spread of its own accord but I might ease its way to the right ears? It might striked off a lot of bad debts. You might even stay?”
Criad slipped the purse into his bag;
“I don’t stay away from fear, you know that. It’s a big world out there, I have to see a little more before the best parts end up in your vault” he said.
“When you get bored of running from boredom, there’ll always be a place here for you, Craid” Conigliari replied. “There is warmth to be found if you step out of the four winds and wait a little by the fire.”
Conigliari looked to Ola who stood in the drawing room doorway.
“Ola?” he called, “see our friend out, I must get back to my work.”
And with that he placed a hand on Craid’s shoulder and began to climb the stair.
Ola stepped forward;
“Your ship is waiting” she said.
“I know. But first…” and he pulled something from inside his cloak and placed it in her hand. It was a black stone all riven with cracks.
“But, isn’t this…” she started.
“Dragon’s have two eyes” Craid stopped her, his eyes gleaming, “and I owe you something for my life.”
“No, Craid” and she tried to press it back into his palm. He took her wrist, gently.
“Conigliari will not live forever. One day all this will be yours to take. He wouldn’t have brought you in if he didn’t believe it. The docks are swarming with servant girls from which to choose. Just remember what I have learned; never trust him but learn everything you can from him. It is the only deal one can do with the Devil and win.”
She took back her hand and slipped the stone inside her dress.
“He is a broken man. And so are you. Why would I want what it is that you have?”
Craid opened the door and turned back;
“He has knowledge and will die knowing that which other men waste their lives hiding from. It’s all you can ask for. What else, Ola? A child on each hip? A husband to serve?”
Her dark eyes gleamed. Inside was resentment, anticipation, defiance and fierce ambition.
“Come and see me one day, if you find anything that I might like” she smiled, “we can discuss the price over tea.”
And with that he closed the door and made his way to the docks.
*
The ship was at sail and Sol Midan was being swallowed in a thick mist as Craid stepped away from the gunwale and took a seat upon a barrell with his new travelling companions. Before him was a small gaming table and upon the table were knucklebones and coins, waiting for the game to commence.
“You get seasick, friend?” said the larger of the two, his black expansive forehead glistening with sweat.
“No, no, just taking in the sights” Craid replied.
The smaller of the two was a withered old buccaneer, but no wiser for his age;
“You never been to Sol Midan?” he croaked.
“Of course. But I didn’t get to see it from the way out, last time” said Craid.
The two looked at each other quizzically but their vulture gazes returned to Craid at once. Much like Behrat and Gohrn, they were sizing up their latest “friend”. Criad didn’t have the energy to alert them to their mistake. Already he saw from the corner of his eye some of the other crew and passengers whispering behind hands and chuckling at the hapless fools who were trying to groom him for a victim. Whatever; Craid could pass the journey playing knucklebones or cards as he played with these foolhardy cutpurses. He would announce himself in time – if no kind hearted soul from the crew warned them first.
“Strange things happening in Sol Midan, no?” said the large, dark sailor.
“Oh really?” Craid replied, toying with the bones on the table.
“You didn’t hear?” smirked the sailor, “some thing with a face of gold killing men in the dead of night.”
“Oh, that?” Craid replied with disinterest, “I may have heard something. But I thought it had been killed?”
“Pah!” snorted the old man, “who could kill such a thing!? I saw it, only last night, down an alley by the docks. Its golden face was glowing in the moonlight. Its eyes were wild, staring out from its mask, and it was howling as if the tongue were burned out of its mouth!”
“Goodness” Craid exclaimed with mock surprise.
“That’s right” smiled the old man, and he and his broad companion traded conspiratorial grins with one another before their quarries naivety, “it had only found a new victim, I’d say, for it clung to and adored an exquisite pocket watch.”
And now Craid smiled to himself;
“Well, better we’re free of such terrors, gentlemen” he said, “shall we play?”
And he picked up the knucklebones and rattled them in his palm, watching the hungry looks of his companions from under his brow. The bones clacked on the board as he threw them down.
“What luck! It isn’t your day, boys…” he chirped with a knowing good humour. He pulled the small pot of coins towards him. All the small bones had fallen right into place.
THE END
If you’ve enjoyed this work be sure to check out my other Craid story “Siege Machine”
God's Only Toys 