King of Dust

Chapter 28

"Who are you?" Yra demanded.

The assassin gave no response.

Yra hit them across the face. He pulled the hood away to reveal a young person, far younger than I had assumed, and Stas' breath hitched as he watched.

"Ignat?" he muttered. "How could you do this?"

The assassin smiled. It seemed the two knew each other. We had tied them up and tethered them to a tree. When the hood fell, I took a good look at them. Their skin looked dry, cracked (granted, Starkovian skin care wasn't great but this was bad), and clouds obscured the color of their irises. Dead, certainly, but not my kind of dead.

"Hello, Stas," they replied. "Sorry about this. Really am. You're just a part of the problem."

"What problem? Who did this to you?"

"I did this to myself." They rolled their eyes and shifted in their bonds. "Everyone always assumes that something horrible had to have happened for someone to want... this. What I've become. Is it so surprising that I took this path?"

Stas covered his eyes and sighed. "You know that meddling with the realm between life and death is forbidden. You've broken the reincarnation cycle, and you'll be punished for it."

"Does it look like I care?"

Yra held up the assassin's cloak, looking at the symbol embroidered into it. The same design that had graced the cloaks of the cultists in the hell house. "Are you a part of some... group?" he asked.

The rest of the assassins – the ones that weren't totally burnt to a crisp, anyway – wore the same regalia. What I had thought were illusory duplicates to begin with were actually just very nondescript individuals. Same uniform, same colors. As we interrogated the intruder, the residents of Nessden tried desperately to put the temple out. The burgomaster's son stood at the front of the building with a spell book at arm's length and muttered incantations, summoning storm clouds to put out the fire. The flames died down and the people of Nessden mourned the loss of an important building in their community.

"Use your eyes," the assassin spat, scowling in Yra's direction. "You may have stopped us here, but you'll never stop all of us."

I flew to tower over the assassin, my eyes glowing in the moonlight. "Who sent you?"

"Oh, so you're Darius?" they asked. My eyes widened as I realized I had never put my hood back up in the chaos. I turned to look at the crowd behind me, and several of them whispered and talked among themselves, but did not approach. I sighed. My cover had been blown.

"I am Darius Starbán," I boomed. Let them hear. "You will answer my questions or suffer the consequences."

"What consequences?" they chuckled. "I'm the same as you. Your claws and death magick can't touch me."

"But this can," Urien growled as he drew Reckoning. The assassin flinched away from the scalding blade, their teeth grinding in pain. I could hear their skin boiling where I stood. "Explain yourself or taste sun."

"I don't know all of the inner workings of the Hand. We are merely the fingers."

"Cut the cryptic bullshit."

"Honest. I don't know. We're assigned to groups and then given targets. The Hand has his own ideas about who to kill and what to do."

"Why kill? What's in it for you?"

"Freedom. Money. Power. Everyone's desires are different."

"And what did this... Hand do to turn you into a walking corpse?"