The Killing Grounds Page 2
“I volunteer my services freely.”
He sneered at her, “No one volunteers to be in my service girl.” She didn’t offer a response as he picked a knife from his belt and tossed it in his right hand. He watched her eyes move from his own to the blade as it tumbled end over end, reflecting the flames of the fire. He silently pulled another blade and let it loose at her head, she’d managed to move, but Osari saw a thin trickle of blood run down her earlobe. “You have thirty seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t kill you here and now.”
“Why waste such a glorious blade on a killing that brings you no bounty my Lord?”
The girl reached out for another tissue but Osari held up a finger, “I need no blade to kill you, twenty seconds left.” He could almost feel the panic rising inside of her as she nervously licked her lips.
“I can cook, clean and service you in many ways my Lord.”
“I have no need for any of that.” His eyes were now burning into hers, but his blade continued to somersault in the air and land back in his hand. “Ten seconds.”
He felt her make mind contact and winced, I offer you a chance to communicate with me in this manner. It would add to our partnership and I assure you that you will never miss a bounty again. Once you accept my offer our minds can talk from a distance of two kilometres in any direction, and as my powers grow the distance will increase. You are able to silence my thoughts at anytime and I would never enter your mind without your permission.
He loosed the second blade that flew close to her and bit into the wood on the left side of her head as her eyes closed. “Open your eyes! An enemy will take any opportunity to kill you while you serve me, and you’ll make it a lot easier for them if you go through life with your eyes closed! Now tell me about the blade that nearly ended your life.” It was an instruction not a question.
“It’s a throwing knife with three weights; the weights either balance the knife or offset the balance toward the tip or the hilt. It is approximately twenty-five ounces and made of Arian steel. I may be wrong but I think that it is one of Manak’s creations.”
“Very good, at least the Arbitrators taught you something. You have an eye for detail but learn something now girl, never think, only know. If you do not know, never guess. Guessing costs lives, and I can promise you that your life will mean little should you guess again and cause problems for me. Understand?”
“Yes Lord Osari.”
“Why did I throw the knives at you?”
She looked at him, obviously confused by the question. “You needed to teach me a lesson my Lord,” she answered after a moment's thought.
“That is correct.” A slight smile crossed his lips. “And what lesson is that?”
“To be attentive Lord Osari.”
“That is incorrect girl.”
He ignored the look of confusion on her face, walked to the bookcases and picked a book lovingly from the top shelf. “I expect this to be read and understood by morning. There will be a test at six-thirty sharp, and if you are not ready I will carry on with my day and you will be retired to the mines. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes Lord.”
“If there is time for rest, and I doubt there will be any, you may sleep by the fireplace. Do not let the fire go out, do not eat anything and only move from this spot to retrieve wood from the pile.” Osari walked slowly to his bedroom door, but stopped before entering, “The correct answer is that no spotter of mine has long hair.”
“Yes my Lord, and if it pleases you my name is Alara.”
“I don’t care what your name is!”
***
Alara breathed deeply, as she stood up her auburn locks fell away from the sides of her head and cascaded onto the floor. So that’s what the knives were for, she thought, he could have just said so. She took the book, made herself comfortable next to the fire, and looked down at the cover. “The Physical Laws of Archery” she read aloud, “well at least it’s an interesting read.” She’d studied the book many times since she joined the Guild of Arbitrators, silently hoping that she would get a chance to work alongside one of the senior Lords from the Killing Grounds, and now that she was here, she was determined to make the most of her chance. The position of spotter was one of the minor positions in the Guild, but she came from a poor background, and was forced to start at the bottom of the pile. Time had taught her that spotting was one of the only positions that allowed an Arbitrator to spend time in the city streets, instead of being cooped up in some stuffy office. Alara hoped that being employed by a senior Lord assassin would mean that she would be looked over for promotion, keeping her out in the streets where she felt most at home.
She’d loved spending time in the Arbitrator's library learning as much as she could on her own, but she’d heard that the library in the Killing Grounds was three times as big, and she hoped that she could visit it sometime soon. The outside of the book was covered in a thin dust cover and she carefully peeled off the paper and laid it gently on the ground. She settled down to read the contents, but when she read Lord Osari’s note, she was startled to find it addressed to her.
As you read this you are probably congratulating yourself on having previously studied this in the Arbitrator's library. Well you have wasted your time! This book was written before the ABC wars, and thus has not factored into account the pole shifts that occurred after the holocaust. I have reworked all of the calculations and have left hints for further work in some areas of this book. You may use no other book for this research; everything you need is in here, somewhere. Have an interesting evening girl.
“Huh?” she exclaimed a little too loudly. “How?” She’d only known of this vacancy three hours ago, how could he know she would be coming? “What the hell?” she said to the empty room.
It was four am when Lord Osari returned to the room where Alara had been up all night studying his notes on how the pole shifts had changed the flight properties of arrows. It seemed to Alara that all the hours she had spent studying in the library had been a complete waste of her time. She’d contemplated giving up more than once and taking the test on her original knowledge, but she’d waited a long time to have the opportunity to work alongside someone like Lord Osari, and she swore to herself that she would do the very best that she could to remain in his employ. The decision to apply for his spotter position had been a difficult one. She was two years away from completing her studies, and her tutors had advised against any applicant making the move too early, but she was young and hungry for success. She was sitting fourth in her class, and if she had left it too late to offer her services she would have been allocated a position with a lesser assassin, which was unacceptable. She would have to finish her studies in her own time; her focus was now on fulfilling Lord Osari’s needs and meeting his standards.
The master assassin greeted her with a dismissive wave when she tried to engage with him, he obviously wanted to be left alone, so she went back to her reading. From what she could make out of Lord Osari’s notes, the pole shift had happened due to the fallout from the bombing during the network wars that ravaged the planet some fifty years ago. Hundreds of millions of lives were wiped out on the first day, large swathes of the population had been decimated and cities levelled as the two warring factors tore into each other. The fallout alone had killed countless millions more across the globe. Scientists had put the pole shift down to the network bombs releasing a mass of iron particles into the earth that mixed with the existing iron particles causing huge patches to grow in size and dominate the Earth’s liquid inner core.
The pole shifts had been hard on the human population that managed to survive the wars. Satellites, television, the internet and all radio communications failed, leaving civilisation on the brink of collapse. But the real catastrophe had been on the animal population. Any species that used magnetic waves to navigate were annihilated overnight. Whales were washed up on beaches across the globe, bee populations plummeted, salmon and turtles were obliterated and
pigeons fell from the skies across cities all over the world. Ecosystems that had been thriving collapsed, killing millions of species that were already under threat from the human population. The pole shifts opened massive holes in the ozone layer allowing solar particles to bombard the Earth, causing cases of skin cancer in humans to increase exponentially. The holes opened and closed over time, but what remained of the Earth’s scientific community was unable to predict where and when this would happen, resulting in millions more people being wiped clean off the face of the planet. But the changes had also brought gifts. The pole shifts had released something magical from within the Earth that had been hidden away for millennia. Many remaining humans who had not been affected by the changing environments developed powers which some called the gift of magic, and others the curse of the ancients. Alara had always found it funny how perspective played such an important part of the makeup of the human race. To her the gift was a marvel, and to Lord Osari it was an evil. “And never the twain shall meet,” she said aloud, without thinking.
“Rudyard Kipling,” Osari said, paying attention to Alara for the first time.
Alara was startled; she hadn’t expected a response to her comment. “Yes Lord, The Ballad of East and West.”
“And what do you make of its meaning girl?”
She recited the poem in her head, concentrating on each word.
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
She stopped thinking and started speaking when she saw her Lord's eyebrows rise at her silence, “From what the scholars say...”
He raised a finger to stop her. “I asked what you make of it, not what you’ve read on someone else’s opinions.” His stare grew darker with each word.
Another test, she winced. “I think that it is purely conditional on the present circumstance Lord, the poem is based on a border dispute, but its meaning could change depending on the context in which it is implied.”
“And what was your point of reference when you decided to share your poetic acumen with me?” his voice was harsh and bristled with barbs.
She debated whether or not to answer him with her true feelings but chose honesty over subterfuge. If her comments to him would mean pain for her, then she would own the pain and stay true to her own beliefs. She lifted her chin and said, “I was thinking of what caused the pole shifts, the impact that it had on the Earth and the release of the Arts into the world Lord.” She refrained using the word magic, as it would probably only annoy him more.
“And who are the twain?”
He now faced her head-on and she could see that he was fully kitted out, dressed with his knife belt tied neatly around his waist. His right hand was hovering millimetres from the nearest blade. “I suggest the twain, in this instance, are the believers in the Arts and those that fear them Lord,” she said, expecting a quick death. Instead she saw Lord Osari studying her intently.
“And you suspect that I fear, girl.”
This again didn’t sound to her like a question. “No Lord, I am the one that fears,” she said sincerely.
“Enough of this poetic nonsense, men are men and it makes no difference to me what they chose to believe. Fear only breeds more fear, and fear is for the weak of mind.” He turned his back on her and poured himself a cup of water from a ceramic jug and drank deeply. He walked to a nearby window, opened it and gestured for her to join him. The freezing air blew across her face and she shivered as she looked into the quad below his quarters. It was still dark, but there was a light tinge to the sky that marked the impending arrival of the sun. Servants busied themselves in the courtyard setting tables for the senior Lords’ breakfast; they worked in silence, quickly setting placemats and silverware, readying the area for the arrival of the residents. “Pick one,” he announced.
She looked at him questioningly, “Pick one Lord?”
“Do you not see the servants below?” he asked, without looking at her.
“Yes Lord.”
“Then pick one girl.”
She gulped, where is this going? She pointed at an elderly servant dressed in chef’s whites and black trousers. He flitted from table to table, issuing instructions to the other servants, often raising his voice and pointing to mistakes.
“So be it,” Osari said in a matter-of-fact tone, and reached behind the heavy black curtain to pull out a black wood bow and a quiver of black-stemmed arrows fletched with red feathers. He pulled on the drawstring, testing its strength and said, “From what you have learned tonight tell me where I should aim to get a clean kill. Heart, eye or jugular?”
She hoped that this was only a test, but she could taste copper in her mouth and that always meant trouble to Alara. “The eye Lord.”
“Good choice,” he said and inserted the arrow into its firing position. “Anything I should take note of with regards to wind speed, weather, or distance?”
She steeled her resolve, if he chose to let loose the arrow and kill the man, the death would be on him and not her. Even so it didn’t sit well with her and she cringed at the thought. “Approximately twenty-five metres to target, zero wind speed, weather conditions are uncertain from this position.” She could use her magic to find more about the weather conditions but she chose not to antagonise him. The decision was a poor one.
He glanced at her, annoyance on his face, “I think you are forgetting why I chose you to come here girl.”
Why he chose me? “Yes Lord.” She let her mind drift into the courtyard and sensed the ice particles in the air, it was close to snowing, but there was something else. There was magic in the air that ebbed and swelled around the courtyard. Her mind relaxed and she searched for the source of the spell. It belonged to the old man in the chef’s whites and was a simple time spell that added a five second delay to his movements. She would have to approximate where he would be standing in five seconds time, otherwise Lord Osari would never be able to kill him. She carefully connected with the old man and entered his mind, being cautious not to alert him to her presence. A second was all it took for her to gain the knowledge she needed and she pulled back out of his head without him ever knowing she was there. “Aim directly to the chair one metre to the left and twenty centimetres higher to where he currently stands. The arrow will pierce his eye as he looks up to investigate the bird that will fly into the air from this balcony.”
“There is no bird, girl,” he spoke more softly now as he raised his bow and took aim where she had instructed him to.
“There will be Lord.”
He snorted and whispered, “On the count of three, two, one.” He released the arrow. Alara startled the bird that she had sensed roosting above the window, and the servant jumped into the air as the noise broke his concentration and forced him back into the correct time frame. Alara closed her eyes and felt sick, knowing that the old man would be dead once she opened them. She heard applause coming from the courtyard below and opened her eyes looking for the corpse, but the old man stood in the exact spot Alara had predicted him to be, bowing to Lord Osari. The red fletched arrow was embedded in the table before him. Osari returned the bow to its hiding place behind the curtain and closed the window. “And never the twain shall meet indeed.”
Alara stood back from the window, her skin glistening with sweat, her breathing shallow and fast. “You never meant to kill him?”
“Why would I kill Nerian? He’s been a faithful servant of the Guild for more than twenty years. His life is worth more than yours girl!”
Alara realised how naive she’d been, at letting her feelings get in the way of her actions. If she was going to be successful as Lord Osari’s spotter that habit would have to stop immediately. Realising everything would be a test from now on, she vowed to fulfi
l his requests no matter the consequences. Damn him, this man is a monster. Sleep deprived, but with no chance to rest, she was angry, but so much more angry with herself than him.
“You seem like a quick learner girl, but you need discipline and practice if you are to become my apprentice.” She regarded him with a confused look on her face and began to babble, but he held a finger up to silence her. “All in time girl, you start your apprenticeship today. Go to the Quartermaster and bring me back five bounties. Make sure that they are pro bono. I don’t need any complaints about your shoddy work.” He dismissed her and went back to his chambers.
Thoughts were racing through her mind. Apprentice? I never asked to be an apprentice! I applied for spotter. But the more she considered his comments, the more she liked the idea. There had been many successful female assassins, but none of them had been an Artist like her. Well, none that she knew of.
“Be gone with you girl!” he shouted from behind the door. She raced out of his rooms reenergised, as a million thoughts swirled in her mind while she tried to make sense of what had just happened. She tripped on the carpet and came close to falling down the staircase that led to the Quartermaster’s office, but managed to steady herself and dismissed the thoughts. It was time to concentrate on what lay ahead of her. If she were to become an assassin her personal training started now, so no more running around like a little girl on a shopping spree. She stepped into her future one foot carefully placed in front of the other.
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