Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Thirty-Two

Sephara

Empyria, the Imperium

17th of Tantus

Under the cover of night, Empyria's streets seeped into one another, making it almost impossible to navigate. The houses were crooked teeth against the dark. The streets split apart and branched away like a tangled delta, affording the entire city an element of boisterous chaos.

The would-be assassin had fled south from Iana's estate, using the gradual downward gradient of the northern Myriad District to maintain a punishing speed. He'd wrapped himself in shadows once more, but he revealed his position each time he strayed into the overhead glare of the moonlight.

Their course adjusted when the assassin burst into a small side street to avoid traversing a larger thoroughfare. Sephara and Lexia emerged into a wide courtyard used by one of the many daily markets scattered through the district like fleas on a street dog. At this time of night, the stalls were covered and pushed to the side, their wares removed for the next day's trading. Sephara spied the assassin ahead; he was flagging, his strides long and irregular.

That neither Sephara nor Lexia had reached such a point of exhaustion suggested their prey must be slowing deliberately, not out of tiredness.

Sephara slowed her pace to match and pulled Lexia to her side.

"He's getting close to his hideout," she said. "Best not to charge in. Make him think he's lost us."

They fell into a gentle jog, dropping further and further behind. So intent was she on their prey, Sephara didn't notice they'd left the market and approached an intersection between four wide streets. The building that punctuated this crossroads resembled the spire of the Empyrian Tower in miniature, cylindrical where its neighbours were angular, with a domed roof uncharacteristic of Imperial architecture. The exaggerated archways of its many windows and balconies gleamed gold, and the rest of the stonework was the sheer, pure white of the original city. Purple banners decorated its flanks, emblazoned with the Castrian League's favoured emblem; its native feline kulosa, captured in rich gold.

"The Castrian Embassy?" Lexia asked as they came to a halt.

Two guards flanked the building's front entrance. Rather than challenge the black-clad assassin, one of them dipped his head in greeting as the other produced a key, unlocked the door, and waved the shadowmancer inside.

After a strained moment, Lexia asked, "What now?"

Sephara shrugged, watching the entrance and the pair of guards, willing something to happen. They had no explicable reason to require entry to the Embassy, so Sephara saw no option but to wait and hope the assassin reemerged.

She glanced across at Lexia, who quivered with unspent energy. "Your mother knew she was going to be attacked."

The younger woman nodded curtly. "After Father, it seemed safe to assume so. And then with the attack on your father, it seemed almost a certainty."

"How many nights has she been sitting out in the garden alone?"

Lexia frowned, no doubt latching onto Sephara's own train of thought. "Every night since we heard about Father, now that you mention it."

Sephara nodded, newfound respect for Iana blossoming in her ribcage. By placing herself within easy reach of a shadowmantic assassin and removing herself from the confines of her house in the meantime, she ensured her killer wouldn't happen across Lexia during the planned murder. If the assassins only targeted those they'd been aimed at, Iana's daughter would remain safe and ignorant.

When Sephara had stumbled into Iana's estate earlier that evening, she'd wondered at the insensibility of Iana placing herself amidst the encroaching shadows of her cultivated garden, of making things easier for the potential assassin than they needed to be.

But now she understood the woman had protected her child in the only way she could.

But why not hire guards, then, to protect them both? Sephara asked Lexia as much.

"Noster's death and the destruction of the armoury meant Father's new contract couldn't be fulfilled, so Mother wouldn't accept his payment," the young woman replied with a habitual shrug. "There're other contracts, too, that can't be fulfilled. We lost several months' pay, and will lose more before everything's up and running again."

"You can't afford guards?"

Lexia bristled and turned away, projecting her anger and her focus on the Embassy.

How unjust it seemed to Sephara just then that members of her family, of Valerian's family, suffered in silence because they lacked the Boratorren name and knew they couldn't turn to him for help. Such a trivial thing as lack of funds, an issue that would never plague her uncle or father, could've easily cost Iana her life tonight.

"Why didn't she take Uncle's money?" Sephara asked, knowing even as she spoke that she did the opposite of calm Lexia's temper.

Lexia huffed. "Pride."

"Pride would've gotten her killed."

"Pride is all we have left when we're denied your name."

Sephara was about offer some noncommittal reply when the Embassy's main entrance swung open again and two dark figures, the first their original quarry, the second slightly taller, paced out.

"Don't think much of their uniform," Lexia whispered. "Black for assassins is just plain unoriginal."

Sephara waited until the assassins had moved to the other end of the crossroads before following.

"What if it's a trap?"

Sephara assessed the killers, trying to decide if she and Lexia were being lured away. The pair were almost certainly aware of their pursuit. "We spring it."

"Are you insane?" Lexia demanded.

She shrugged. "It's either that, or we return to your mother and wait for the next assassin to strike. We might get some answers this way." Not her finest plan, of course, but this was one of the only solid leads she'd uncovered so far, and she knew to turn back now was to practically abandon her investigation.

The assassins ambled at a slow and easy pace, adopting the casual ease of tourists digesting the city's shallow majesty. She started to worry the shadowmancers might've been dispatched to finish off Iana, and that she'd left the woman unguarded, when they instead turned south, towards the Slates. Tension boiled in her bones and her fingers tightened around the short-sword Lexia had given her.

The streets narrowed as they neared the Slates. The city's poorest district had a habit of leaking into its neighbours, a particularly potent weed spreading through a field of healthy grassland. Because Empyria was walled, it was difficult to spread outwards and, as the population grew, people tended to swarm to the Slates, rather than leave the confines of the capital and establish a settlement beyond its border. Although she'd scoured tiny parts of it in her attempts to build up a network of the destitute within, Sephara knew she and Lexia would soon become lost if the assassins intended to draw them much further in.

Their targets turned into an alleyway, and Sephara waited at the mouth for a count of twenty before following. She knew from her contacts in the Slates that gangs often camped at dead-ends and would have associates lure hapless citizens down them to be robbed, beaten, maybe killed.

A primitive trap, but effective.

An impregnable darkness filled the alleyway, deepened by the steep, looming walls of the buildings on either side, so that not even the moon could pierce these depths. Sephara glimpsed a cluster of shadowed figures—thugs—at the end but refused to retreat now.

The taller of the assassins distinguished himself from the small group of brutes and folded his arms across his chest. His fellow assassin moved up beside him, the thugs arrayed behind. "We failed to bring down one noble target," the taller one said, his voice muffled. "And now, two practically walk onto our blades."

"I'm afraid not," Sephara said. "I'm just a humble bodyguard, you see. And my companion is… well, I suppose she's…"

"I'm a bastard," Lexia supplied.

The assassin snorted a laugh. "You are Valerian Boratorren's guard; there's nothing humble about you. And the bastard is one of the Iron Wolf's whelps. We failed to kill the Boratorrens themselves, but I suppose you'll do instead."

Lexia crouched down and found a fist-sized lump of rubble. "You know, you shouldn't talk yourself up to a fight or give your opponents time to prepare." She tested the rock's weight in her hand and seemed to be assessing it when she snapped her arm back, took a short run, and lobbed the stone straight at the assassins. It thunked into the head of the shorter assassin, the one who'd almost killed Iana, and he crumpled without a sound.

The younger girl shot forward, an arrow loosed by an expert marksman, and Sephara followed, ripping free her side-sword and swinging with purpose. She and Lexia kept themselves pressed together, circling slow as their attackers decided the quickest way to end this fight. A quick surveyance of their opponents proved they were outnumbered six to two, with the remaining assassin's five companions comprised of the typically mangy street thugs endemic to the Slates. They all wielded rudimentary weapons; butcher knives, battered old arming swords, even a wooden club spiked with nails.

The first flicker of worry invaded Sephara's mind.

She envisioned the disappointment on her father's face when he was told she'd been killed in a back-alley like a common street rat. Her brother would smile at the news, Valerian would pretend to mourn for a while, and maybe her uncle would regret ever asking her to investigate on his behalf. A hopeful part of her thought Dexion might be wounded by her death, but there'd be no one else to remember her.

She hadn't lived long enough, nor accomplished enough, to have left a mark on the world. Not yet.

Her despair ignited desperation, and she pushed herself away from Lexia, using the girl for added momentum, and ploughed into the pair of street toughs opposite her. She caught the spiked club with the blade of her sword and twisted it out of the thug's hand. Before he could react, she sliced open his unarmoured chest and sent him toppling sideways into his neighbour in a spray of gore. As the pair collapsed into each other, a third thug, this one broad and bulbous with fat and muscle, aimed a fist at her face. She ducked, the knuckles clipping the top of her head and still managing to send her sprawling. Lexia dodged around the two remaining thugs and sunk her own blade into the back of the broad man's thigh. He crumpled to his knees, a soundless wail building in his throat.

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Throughout this first exchange, the taller assassin had pulled back, content to watch from the side-lines as she and Lexia were set upon.

"Alive, please," he called, his voice infuriatingly accent-less. "My master will want to know why they're eavesdropping on his work."

By then the thug who'd been knocked down by Sephara's first victim had clawed his way free of his unconscious fellow and swept at Lexia with meaty fists. The young woman was lithe and quick, dancing around and beneath the barrage with the same grace her mother had displayed earlier that evening. As Lexia ran circles around her opponent, Sephara picked herself up and turned to face the two remaining combatants, who'd been trying to circle behind her and Lexia.

In the storm of adrenaline and fear, Sephara had forgotten most of her ten years' worth of martial training. She'd attacked sloppily and recklessly, and almost had her head caved in for her troubles.

She heaved in a deep breath, tried to force her raging heartbeat calm, and reaffirmed her grip on her sword. The two thugs left standing sprung at her in unison. Both were men larger and stronger than she, so she called to mind her training and skidded down to her knees as they approached.

Never meet an advantaged opponent head on, her instructors had always said. If she tried to match blows with them, she'd crumble as surely as the assassin Lexia had felled with a rock.

She lashed out with a foot to catch the man on the right and raised her blade and sunk it into the groin of the man on the left. Blood, hot and sticky, rained down upon her as her victim flew overhead, and her legs were jarred almost out of place as the other thug tripped over her. The latter smashed face-first into the grimy floor of the alley and knocked himself out with a sickening crunch. The former rolled onto his side and was still trying to haul himself up when Sephara lashed out an aching foot and kicked him in the head. From the sheer volume of blood pumping from the wound she'd inflicted on his groin, he wouldn't wake up again.

Sephara was about to turn and see how Lexia fared against the final thug when something wrenched her sideways and forced her onto the floor on her back. In her distraction, she'd forgotten about the assassin, who'd wreathed himself in shadows and approached her soundlessly. He sat atop her now, his hands latched around her throat, his superior weight suffocating.

"You did better than expected," he whispered softly, "but it's over now. You can tell our master all about how you knew where we'd be when you wake up."

His grip strengthened and she tried to rasp in a breath, failed. Panic fluttered in her chest as she clawed at his face. Her fingers found the cloth of a mask obscuring his mouth and, in her struggles, she managed to pull it down and dislodge his disguise.

An unfamiliar face of dubious ethnicity. No answers there, then.

In response to her fumbling, the assassin smashed her head into the ground once, twice, three times. Brutal agony flared in her skull. For a heartbeat she forgot she was also being strangled.

Her eyes blurred, blackening the already dark alleyway, and her lungs were on fire. She could almost feel her grip on consciousness slipping away when the hold on her throat slackened and the weight atop her shifted. She filled her lungs with sorely missed air and waited as the throbbing in her head and neck and chest receded to a dull pain before she tried to focus her gaze on the assassin.

He still loomed above her, but his hands had dropped to his sides, and his mouth gaped open in comical confusion. An arrow jutted from his head—the source of his confusion, she supposed—and his lifeblood oozed out of the wound and trickled down his chest, where it pooled on her coat. In disgust, she shoved him aside and he fell limply, dead the moment the arrow had pierced him.

She looked across to Lexia and found the girl standing over the burly thug, who she'd dispatched with a wicked stab to the gut. Behind her leered the man with the spiked club, his chest smeared from a wound Sephara now realised was superficial.

"Lexia, look out," Sephara called.

The younger girl turned and flinched, but the thug didn't move. When Lexia prodded a finger into his chest, he toppled with the slow, confused weight of an actor exaggerating a death on the stage for comedic effect. Sephara saw an arrow sticking obscenely from his right eye socket.

A silhouette waited at the alley's mouth, illuminated, a bow hanging loosely from their hand.

"We could've handled it," Lexia called, then stormed over to the figure. It was only when she pulled them into a fierce embrace that Sephara recognised the looming bulk of Kesa's son, Bekker.

"I see that," Bekker replied, nodding to the battlefield they'd made of the alley.

Sephara gathered her thoughts before approaching, having to step over and around fallen bodies. "You followed us."

Bekker pulled away from his half-sister and regarded her with a severity far too mature for such a young man. "Course," he replied.

"Kesa knows where I am."

"Course."

It was the first time she'd heard him talk, and she understood why he preferred to remain silent; his voice was surprisingly light, higher than one might expect of a son of the Iron Wolf. He looked far more menacing stood in the corner of a room, glowering silently, his heavy brows speaking for him.

Sephara turned back to the fallen assassins, surrounded now by their defeated lackeys, when she heard an audible groan of pain. Stunned as he was by the rock, the original assassin was only now regaining consciousness. She supposed one or two of the thugs might also survive their wounds if they woke up, but she didn't care about them.

"We need to question this one," she said.

Bekker nodded and wove his way towards the assassin. "We take him to my mother."

―

They carried the assassin to the Heaven's Paramours, though had to use a hidden entrance at the rear of the complex to avoid being seen by clients. Sephara hadn't known what to expect, for surely the Paramours didn't keep prison cells on their premises. Instead, they were led to a small, cramped room adjoining Kesa Hult's private quarters, itself tucked away behind her office.

The hidden room—a cell, really—was stripped bare, its stone interior uncarpeted, its walls unpainted, the only furniture a wooden chair, a lit iron brazier, and a small table. There was a drain at the room's centre. When Sephara looked closer, she noticed iron manacles attached to the arms and legs of the chair, and various types of vicious blades rolled out across the table.

Kesa leaned over the table, examining the blades. She wore a red robe, still queenly on her form for all its plainness. Red, no doubt, to hide the blood they'd spill tonight.

"You have a torture chamber," Sephara noted. "Why?"

The assassin was lowered into the chair and bolted in place. Over the course of the journey here, he'd returned to consciousness in small increments, slurring and trying to cradle his head and the open wound Lexia's rock had left. By the time they'd reached Kesa's chamber, he was alert.

"Sometimes a client thinks they're entitled to more," Kesa said. She selected a blade, a thin shard of metal with a triangular point like an arrowhead. "I dissuade them. If necessary, I hurt them."

She glided over to the assassin, her movements sultry and ominous, and tore off his mask, revealing the unremarkable face of a pale man in his early thirties. Not a Castrian, then. His eyes were large and fearful, though his mouth was pressed into a thin line. Kesa set the tip of the blade against his cheek and pushed hard enough to draw a dew drop of blood.

"A woman of many talents," Sephara said.

Kesa drew the blade along the man's face, parting flesh. He hissed through clenched teeth.

"I spent far too long with the Iron Wolf to be afraid of a little blood," the woman replied. "Besides, you want answers, I want answers, Valerian wants answers."

"I want answers," Lexia interjected, holding out her hand for a blade, which Kesa willingly handed over. The girl plunged it into the man's thigh with a meaty, gristly thunk, and he rocked against his bonds. "These fuckers tried to kill both my parents." She twisted the blade, earning a strained growl from her victim, then retracted it with a powerful tug. A spurt of blood followed.

"Bekker, remove the man's coat and shirt," Kesa instructed.

As the young man followed her orders, Kesa selected another blade from the table and handed it to Sephara. A serrated dagger, it looked suited to carving up loaves of hard bread.

"I can't," she said.

"You can and you should," Kesa replied. "Sometimes a horrific act is required to prevent something even worse."

The older woman sounded nothing like the sleek seductress she'd been when Sephara had first met her. Whether it was a persona slipped off to reveal this more bloodthirsty version of herself, or yet another mask she wore, Sephara was unsure. Now she read in the woman's stance a potent menace she hadn't noticed before.

She looked down at the knife in her hand and couldn't help but admit she wanted to inflict pain on somebody. Her anger at having her father targeted festered deep within her still, and she imagined it would feel good to slide steel into some living, guilty flesh. That's probably how Uncle feels. That's why everyone's scared of him.

Better to have her enemies scared, though.

"Are you actually Caesidi?" she asked, levelling her blade at the captive. "Or just given that name?"

When he stared her down without any intent of talking, she set the serrated edge of her weapon against the first joint of his forefinger and pushed down. The steel eased through skin and caught on bone. She sawed through it, down to the wood of the chair, and the digit's tip dropped to the floor in a small welter of crimson. To the man's credit, he choked down his cries of pain and released only strained whimpers as he struggled against his restraints.

"We are Caesidi," he snarled.

"How is the Caetoran involved?"

The assassin shook his head and clenched his jaw.

She took the next joint of his mangled finger, then sheared it down to the knuckle. His blood stained the wood of the chair, his forefinger now an ugly, jagged mouth ripped into the meat of his hand. His whimpers became shouts, his shouts became sobs wracked with agony. Something in the depths of her chest wrenched at the sounds, and she wanted to withdraw. But another part of her, a louder, more insistent part, was glad to finally be making progress, to finally punish someone, rather than slinking around the Praevin compound or trying to carefully charm answers out of Dexion.

"Can someone heat a blade? I think I'll need to cauterise."

The assassin's eyes widened and his features paled. Bekker moved to comply, selecting the widest available blade and balancing it over the brazier.

"How is Castrio involved?"

The assassin spat at her feet.

She swung the knife down into his wrist and it sunk to the bone. As a scream formed in his throat, she began sawing, grimacing at the sickly crunch as she splintered his wrist bone and then severed it fully. His hand hit the floor with a slap, propelled from his arm in a thick gout of blood. His pain seemed to gurgle in his throat, as if he were determined to choke on it.

Bekker handed her the heated knife and she pressed it to the fleshy, dripping mess of his wrist. The bone glistened wetly at the centre and Sephara fought the urge to vomit. The smell of burning meat and the sound of sizzling muscle made her stomach cramp.

"Who is giving you your targets?"

He whimpered but said nothing. In reply she pressed the serrated knife to the crook of his elbow and he tried to squirm away. She bit her tongue, gathering her resolve. She needed to bleed the answers from this man to save her family. One killer's suffering in return for her family's survival. A fair trade. Her father and uncle had done far worse for the sake of family.

The blade skimmed into the assassin's flesh. Reluctance kept her from carving deeper. Lest the man see how she wavered, she clenched her jaw and gripped the dagger harder, then set her stance as if she planned to lean her entire weight into severing the arm.

"Are the Caesidi based at the Castrian Embassy?" she asked softly.

He nodded in jolting, panicked movements. His eyes were wide and wet.

She'd broken him.

"When…. when we're in the Imperium… it's our base."

"So, you don't originate here?"

Another shake. "All over," he managed. "Some are Castrian… some Imperial… some neither."

"Did you attack Valerian Boratorren?" Sephara asked, needing an answer. This couldn't be him because that shadowmancer sported an arm that was surely still broken, but she wanted to ask, wanted the answer to fuel her hatred.

"Novissa was my target. And then Iana."

She heaved a sigh at that, in part to smother the hot rise of rage in her gut. This man, then, had sparked war between the Imperium and Kalduran in his killing of Warmaster Boratorren. Though he was just a tool in the larger plan, everything that had happened as a result of her great-aunt's death could be attributed to this shadowmancer and the curved dagger he'd thrust into Novissa's chest that day on the Path of Triumph.

He was the man her uncle wanted uncovered—the man the innocent envoy had died for—yet he was insignificant, a paltry component in a larger machine. With that in mind, she asked the most important question: "Who leads you?"

The assassin swallowed. "He can't be stopped."

"Who is he?"

"An Arisen," he spluttered. "He's an Arisen. He's been here for years. Hiding in plain sight. Powerful."

An Arisen. An immortal. The immortal. Or one of them, at least.

"I told you it was Arisen," Lexia huffed, but Sephara ignored her.

"Why are you targeting the Boratorrens?" Kesa asked, stepping into the assassin's sight.

"Because we were contracted to kill them."

"Who contracted you?"

A shrug. Or the best shrug he could offer when bound and in pain. "We aren't told. Only the Arisen knows."

"Who controls you?" Sephara asked. Whose name did she want to hear the man utter? The Caetoran or the Warmaster, or even Dexion? Or someone else entirely?

Instead, he said nothing.

"You won't tell me his name?"

"He'll do far worse to me than you've already done," the assassin said. "He'll kill you all; it doesn't matter what I tell you. He'll kill everyone. He'll kill your families and make you watch. He'll burn your houses to the ground and drag your names through the dirt until you're reviled throughout history. He'll tear cities down and watch empires burn, as he once did." He descended into a fit of pained laughter, and Sephara realised she'd gotten all she could out of him.

Sephara shared a glance with Kesa, who'd watched the entire scene with a grim expression. Bekker, behind her, regarded their mutilated captive with the kind of detachment she'd expect of a hunter regarding a recent kill.

Any thought of using this man to posthumously exonerate the Drasken envoy of Novissa's murder curdled when Sephara forced herself to look at the ugly stump she'd made of the poor bastard's hand. The Caetoran, if challenged, would only claim Sephara had forced an untrue confession from the Caesidi agent, and then have her arrested.

She turned to Lexia and nodded. The girl grinned like a fox and slashed her weapon across the man's throat in one brutal flourish.

He choked, took a few moments dying, his lifeblood spilling from the grotesque canyon in his neck, drip-drip-dripping onto the stone floor, and then swirling down towards the drain, erasing their crime.

If only memories were easy to clean as blood, for Sephara knew she would remember this night for the rest of her life.