The Assassin King

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAP

  ODE

  THE POEM OF SEVEN

  SONG OF THE SKY LOOM

  THE WEAVER’S LAMENT

  PART ONE - An Ill Wind

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART TWO - The Eve of a Building Storm

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  PART THREE - Ashes on the Wind

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  PART FOUR - The Tempest Rising

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  The Symphony of Ages Books by Elizabeth Haydon

  Praise for the USA Today Bestselling Series - The Symphony of Ages

  Copyright Page

  For Rhiannon

  and Brayden,

  with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to express my grateful appreciation to my editor, Anna Genoese, for her patience and vision, and to my family, for all their support and love.

  ODE

  We are the music-makers,

  And we are the dreamers of dreams,

  Wandering by tone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

  World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams:

  Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world for ever, it seems.

  With wonderful deathless ditties

  We build up the world’s great cities,

  And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire’s glory:

  One man with a dream, at pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

  And three with a new song’s measure

  Can trample an empire down.

  We, in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth,

  Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

  And o’erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world’s worth;

  For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.

  —Arthur O’Shaughnessy

  THE POEM OF SEVEN

  Seven Gifts of the Creator,

  Seven colors of light,

  Seven seas in the wide world,

  Seven days in a sennight,

  Seven months of fallow,

  Seven continents trod, weave

  Seven eras of history

  In the eye of God.

  SONG OF THE SKY LOOM

  Oh, our Mother the Earth;

  Oh, our Father the Sky,

  Your children are we,

  With tired backs.

  We bring you the gifts you love.

  Then weave for us a garment of brightness … .

  May the warp be the white light of morning,

  May the weft be the red light of evening,

  May the fringes be the fallen rain,

  May the border be the standing rainbow.

  Thus weave for us a garment of brightness

  That we may walk fittingly where birds sing;

  That we may walk fittingly where the grass is green.

  Oh, our Mother Earth;

  Oh, our Father Sky.

  —Traditional, Tewa

  THE WEAVER’S LAMENT

  Time, it is a tapestry

  Threads that weave it number three

  These be known, from first to last,

  Future, Present, and the Past.

  Present, Future, weft-thread be

  Fleeting in inconstancy

  Yet the colors they do add

  Serve to make the heart be glad.

  Past, the warp-thread that it be,

  Sets the path of history

  Every moment ’neath the sun

  Every battle, lost or won,

  Finds its place within the lee

  Of Time’s enduring memory.

  Fate, the weaver of the bands,

  Holds these threads within Her hands,

  Plaits a rope that in its use

  Can be a lifeline, net—or noose.

  PART ONE

  An Ill Wind

  1

  Western seacoast, Avonderre

  On a morning of unsurpassed fineness, the sun rose over an incandescent sea, rippling with light so bright as to be painful in its radiance. The winter wind dancing over the gleaming waves, fresh with the sweet hint of a spring coming far away in the southlands, carried with it the scent of blood.

  Rath cursed and lowered his head to his chest, pulling his brown hood farther down over his stinging eyes. He waited for the water beneath his translucent eyelids to clear, then blinked several times and looked up again at the shoreline. The sea was so calm that the edge of the land barely wavered in the distance. Rath clutched the oar in his sinewy hands and put his back into rowing for the beach.

  With each stroke, each pull, each screech of wood against the oarlock of his small boat, he canted his list of targets, every one of their names engraved permanently on his memory. Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken, he whispered in the odd, buzzlike language of his ancient race, the one form of speech that was inaudible to the wind. Rath was always careful not to put information on the wind, especially the sea wind, where it would blow recklessly about the wide world, to be heard by any ear that knew how to listen. Rath was well aware of the loose tongue of the wind; he had been born of that ephemeral element.

  He gritted his teeth as he rowed, mentally cursing the waves over which he traveled. Water had long blocked his Seeking vibration and kept him from his quarry. Each stroke moved him closer to being free of it, but that did little to calm his growing ire. Until he was away from the sea and the cacophony of thick vibrations that it generated, he would be unable to hunt. So he concentrated, as always, on his list.

  Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

  Once through the roster of would-be victims that had been his agenda for as long as he could recall, he silently intoned one last name that had been rece
ntly added.

  Ysk.

  It was not a name in the language of the others, but rather one that had been conferred on its owner by an ignorant species, a demi-human race that barely formed words at all. Ysk was the Firbolg word for spittle, for the regurgitation of something foul. That monsters had given someone such a title could only convey the deepest disgust, contempt that had no limit.

  It was perhaps the worst name that Rath had ever heard.

  It was also a dead name, a name whose power had been broken more than a millennium before, whose history lay at the bottom of the sea on the other side of the world. A name all but forgotten, indeed, completely erased from the wind and from memory, except for the recollection of Rath and his kind.

  It was the last name on his list, but the first one he would actively seek upon landing.

  When the beach was finally close enough that rowing was disproportionate effort, Rath climbed out of the boat and left it drifting in the tide. He had sighted his landing carefully so as to be able to come ashore unnoticed in a small, rocky alcove between two fishing villages. His luck was holding; there was no one in sight for as far up and down the beach as he could see.

  He turned away from the sea wind with one last glance over his shoulder; the little boat was slowly backing away in a graceless dance, spinning aimlessly in the current. Rath waded to shore, ignoring the pebbles and seaweed that coated the sand beneath his feet. His soles had no nerves in them anyway, the calluses from millennia of walking through fire were almost as thick as a boot would have been.

  Once on the beach, he hurried forward until the scrambling froth of the waves was no longer able to reach him, then stopped in the cold, dry sand, pulled back his hood, and tilted his head to the southwest, listening to the wind. He waited for the span of a hundred heartbeats, but no voices akin to his own could be heard; none of his fellow hunters had anything to report, as was the case most of the time.

  As it had been for centuries into millennia.

  Rath lingered a moment longer, then turned his back to the west, away from the crashing of the waves and the rustling of the foam. He took a breath of the salt wind, inhaling over the four openings of his windpipe, clenched his teeth, and loosed his kirai, the Seeking vibration by which his race sought their prey. The buzzing sound came forth from the deepest opening in his throat, a vibration heard only by him.

  Then he opened his mouth, allowing the air that was rising from within his lungs to pass over the top opening in his throat, forming words again.

  Hrarfa, Fraax, Sistha, Hnaf, Ficken.

  One by one he canted the names of the demon spirits he was hunting, feeling the slight variation in tone as he changed from one name to another. If the kirai matched any of those names to a vibration it detected in the air, his throat would burn as if with caustic fire; he would taste the beast’s blood in his mouth, feel its heartbeat in his own chest. He could lock on to that rhythm and follow it.

  But, as always, there was no taste of any of the names on the wind.

  Finally, he intoned the last name.

  Ysk.

  This name, of course, was different. Unlike the others, it was the dead name of a living being, a name once given, in another lifetime, to a man with a soul. However tainted that soul might be by the ravages of time and personal failure, it could never be as acidly evil as the essence of the demonic beings Rath and his fellow demon hunters regularly pursued. And however dead the name might be, Rath had reason to believe its original owner was, in fact, still alive, though his vibrational signature had changed along with his name.

  And not long before, he had heard the dead name, spoken aloud, on the nattering wind. He hoped to get a taste of it once more, now that he had crossed the sea and finally come ashore in the place to which he had tracked the name, the place it seemed to have been last spoken.

  He inhaled, letting the wind pass over his tongue, then canted the name.

  Ysk.

  There was a remnant of it still on the wind coming from the southeast, though faint and hollow; perhaps it had been years since it had been voiced. Still, this continent, this place known in old lore as the Wyrmlands, was the place where the name had last been sounded. Rath could taste that much.

  Satisfied, he stripped his pack from beneath his cloak, opening it carefully on the sandy ground as the wind whipped off the sea, buffeting the skin of his naked head. He quickly checked his provisions and the minimal tools of his trade, as well as the dagger he wore in a calf sheath. The weapon was little more than a child’s knife, meant only for the meanest of self-defense against any beast or man that he might not be able to otherwise avoid. No one who observed him would consider him armed.

  Rath carried his deadliest weapons in his head.

  Determining his water supply to be sufficient, he quickly repacked his provisions and slung the pack beneath his flowing brown cloak. Then he glanced at the sea one last time; the little boat was no longer in sight, lost in the blazing glare of the rising sun.

  A moment later, to any eye other than his own, so was Rath.

  2

  The forest of Gwynwood, north of the Tar’afel River

  The same sunlight sparkling on the sea thirty score miles away was illuminating the frosty dew that lingered in the air of the forest, bathing the wood in hoary radiance. Shafts of dusty gold illuminated the bare trunks and limbs of the white trees, making them gleam even more starkly against the neighboring evergreens, patchy with frozen snow.

  No winterbird broke the morning stillness with song, no rustling in the branches or undergrowth signaled the presence of any of the forest residents that traditionally braved the cold months or felt the beginnings of Second Thaw that had been evident for a full turn of the moon. This place, always alive with wild music, emitted no sound, not the fluttering of needled boughs, nor the cracking of icy burdens in the diffuse sun. Even the wind itself, a customary singer that rattled the empty branches and whispered through the laden pines when all other noise had abandoned the wood, was still.

  Deathly still.

  As the sun climbed higher, the frigid moisture of the morning air dispersed somewhat, bringing clarity to the scene, if not warmth or sound. The low-lying fog began to lift, frosty air swirling above the ground that was warming as winter neared its end. And as the air began to grow clearer, the light spilling into the silent glen came to rest upon a gigantic edifice that loomed in between the broken trees and burnt expanses of grass, marking the place where part of the world had died.

  At first, while still shrouded in mist, the structure appeared to be nothing more than an outcropping of gray boulders flecked with copper mica, improbably rising up from the soft loam of the greenwood. But as the sun broke through the frosty air, the shape of the stone became clearer, its smoothly sculpted edges revealing draconic attributes—stone spikes that rose over the curled backbone, taloned claws and feet wrapped protectively around itself, a curved tail terminating in a cruel barb. The brightening of the morning revealed, moment by moment, what appeared to be an immense statue of a dragon, crouched in a defensive posture, perfect in detail down to the tiniest scales in its stone hide, streaked with ash, a gaping hole gouged into its side.

  The eyes in its weathered face were open. Even the greatest of sculptors in the Known World would have been unable to replicate the depth of sorrow and the peace of resignation in its expression.

  The hovering mist swirled but continued to hang, heavy in the cold air, as it had each morning since the new moon.

  Then, beneath the mist, a swirl of light appeared, spinning evanescently below the frosty layer of clouds.

  Then another. And another.

  One by one, from all corners of the greenwood, great serpentine bodies began to appear. Had any human eye been there to witness, it might not have been able to discern them at first. Most of the beings that were gathering had taken ethereal form and, bodiless except for their own will, composed of starlight older than the world was old, they hovered, ligh
ter than the air, in the heavy fog of the glen. Their journeys concluded, their destination achieved, the great wyrms of the world began to solidify into the flesh granted them by their tie to the primordial element of earth.

  The power that they brought with them pervaded the air of the wood, making it heavy with ancient life. To have stood among them too close would have been like drowning in a quicksilver avalanche, or being ground to bits by ruby millstones, these primeval wyrms, giant repositories of all of the world’s lore, wardens of the earth, who shared an uneasy stewardship marked by traditional wariness, distrust, and territoriality.

  The first to arrive was Valecynos, one of the eldest, daughter of the Progenitor of their race and a Guardian of one of the five World Trees, Ashra, that grew within the Fiery Rim half a world away. Always regarded as one of the bravest and rashest of their kind, like the tree of living flame that she guarded, Valecynos remained in a semi-fiery form, her gleaming hide changing from flickering scarlet to burning gold to the darkness of smoke, all within the span of a heartbeat.

  She waited for a moment in the fog, her fiery eyes taking in the sight of the stone dragon before her. Then, as the heavy mist began to evaporate in the heat of her presence, she slowly approached, staring at the sight before her as if she were seeing the very end of the world.

  Next to come into the glen was Mikanic, the dragon who held sway over much of the expanse of the Great Overward, the southernmost land mass of the earth. His power and dominion were undisputed among his kind, his counsel never ignored, though he seldom offered it and kept to himself beneath the shallow surface in the vast sands of the desert wastelands that comprised the center of his domain. His dry brown hide and multitude of slender spines were a stark contrast to the fleeting colors of the Guardian beside him; in normal practice he would have bowed in greeting to one of the Five Daughters, but the import of the moment was too heavy, the portent too fearsome to call for the observance of protocol.

  The ground within the greenwood rumbled as others appeared, having chosen to travel within the earth rather than take to the wind in ethereal form. Sidus, a coal dragon from the lands of darkness beyond the sea, emerged from a yawning fissure in the ground, his quick black eyes glancing about suspiciously. Near him a moment later Witheragh arrived; born to reign deep within the mountains in a place where gold ran in hot rivers, his skin was encrusted with the gemstones that the Nain miners had cut, polished, and offered as tribute to him. He was followed by Salinus, a wyrm whose white hide was streaked with yellow and gray like the vast salt beds where he held dominion. They, like the other great wyrms appearing in the glen, fell silent at what they beheld there.