Chained to a Kinder Death
The gibbet oak stood on the hill above Morvain, and nobody climbed it but Ashe.
A hundred years ago, the city had hung its worst criminals there in iron chains and left them for the crows, as a warning. The cages were long gone now. But the chains remained, thick and rusted, coiled around the trunk and looped over the dead branches, swaying and creaking in the wind. Mothers in Morvain told their children that if they misbehaved, the Hooded Man would come down out of the gibbet oak and take them away.
The Hooded Man was Ashe. He had heard the story in the market once, while buying bread, and had not known whether to laugh.
Tonight he crouched high in the oak with his cloak pulled close against the cold and his long curved sword held upright before him, the point resting against the bark. Behind him, the moon was rising, so huge and golden it seemed to set the sky on fire. Below him, the fog lay thick over Morvain, and the spires and towers rose out of it like islands, with lights glowing orange in a thousand windows.
Somewhere down there, a man was going to die tonight. That was what the guild believed, anyway.
Ashe had been the guild’s blade for fourteen years. He had taken thirty-one contracts. Merchants and magistrates, a bishop, a ship captain, a lord’s ambitious younger brother. He had never failed once. Every time, within a week of the contract, a signet ring or a seal or a lock of hair would appear hanging from the rusted chains of the gibbet oak, where the guild’s collectors would find it and carry it home as proof.
Thirty-one tokens. Thirty-one names whispered in fear in the taverns of Morvain. Thirty-one reasons why grown men crossed the street when they saw a hooded figure in the fog.
And in fourteen years, his sword had never drawn a single drop of blood.
He looked down at it now, at the long bright blade, clean and cold in the moonlight. It was a beautiful weapon. He kept it sharp. He practiced with it every morning. He needed people to see it.
The secret was simple, really. Nobody ever asks to see the body of a man the river has taken. Nobody digs up a grave the guild has paid for. And nobody looks very closely at a frightened man in a fisherman’s coat boarding a ship for the southern islands at dawn, with a new name and a purse of guild silver sewn into his collar.
Thirty-one people were alive tonight who should have been dead. The bishop kept bees now, somewhere in the hills. The ship captain had opened an inn. The lord’s ambitious younger brother had become, of all things, a schoolteacher. None of them could ever come back. None of them knew Ashe’s real name. Most of them had never seen his face.
That was the price. For them, and for him.
Because the whole city believed he was death. His name was a curse. Children ran from him. Women pulled their shawls tight when he passed. There was no one in Morvain he could sit beside at a fire, no one he could tell the truth to, no one he could ever let close. Every life he saved bound the chains a little tighter around him. He was tied to death, and he had never killed anyone.
Sometimes, in the long nights in the gibbet oak, he wondered which was the stranger kind of loneliness.
He touched the small pendant that hung at his throat on a leather cord. It was nothing, a little fish cut from a scrap of tin, crude and lopsided. A girl named Mara had pressed it into his hand six years ago, on a dark dock at the edge of the harbor, minutes before her father’s ship cast off. Her father had been contract number nineteen. “So you’ll remember us,” she had whispered.
She was eleven years old. She was the only person who had ever thanked him.
He had worn it every day since.
The trouble was that Varrick had started asking questions.
Varrick was the guildmaster, a soft-spoken, silver-haired man with a scholar’s spectacles and a moneylender’s heart, and he did not like mysteries. Three days ago he had summoned Ashe to his study above the old tannery and poured him a glass of very good wine.
“Thirty-one contracts,” Varrick had said pleasantly. “And in all that time, not one of your targets has ever been found. Not one body. Not one funeral. The river is very obliging to you, my friend.”
“The river is deep,” Ashe had said.
“So it is.” Varrick had smiled and handed him a folded paper. On it was a name: Tobias Fenn, junior clerk, the Counting House on Lantern Street. “A clever boy. Too clever. He has been reading ledgers he was not meant to read.”He had paused. “And this time, I think you could use some company. Our newest apprentice needs to learn from the best. He will go with you. He will watch everything.”
The apprentice had been waiting outside the study door. A lanky, quiet boy of sixteen or seventeen, with dark hair falling in his eyes, who said his name was Lio and said almost nothing else.
Now, in the gibbet oak, Ashe heard a branch creak below him.
He did not move. He did not need to. He had heard the boy coming up the hill for the last five minutes, slipping on the wet grass, breathing hard. Lio climbed up through the chains, slower and clumsier than Ashe would have liked, and crouched on the branch beneath him, looking down at the city.
“Is it time?” the boy asked.
Ashe looked out over Morvain, at the tall black roof of the Counting House rising out of the fog on Lantern Street. Somewhere in that building, a young clerk named Tobias Fenn was sleeping, with no idea that tonight was the last night of his life in this city.
One way or another.
“Yes,” said Ashe, and stood, and slid the clean bright sword into its sheath.
They went in over the rooftops, the way Ashe always did.
Morvain was an old city, built crooked and close, and its roofs were a country of their own: slick slate tiles, leaning chimneys, gutters full of moss, narrow gaps where the streets dropped away into fog. Ashe moved across it like water. Lio followed like a dropped bag of tools. Twice the boy slipped on wet slate, and once, leaping the gap over Tanner’s Alley, he landed short and went sliding backward toward the edge with a small, strangled sound.
Ashe caught him by the collar without looking back and hauled him up onto the ridge.
“Thank you,” Lio whispered.
Ashe said nothing. But he slowed his pace a little after that.
The Counting House on Lantern Street was a tall, narrow building with a steep roof and a single skylight, its glass gone milky with age. Below it, at the back of the building, a canal ran black and slow through the fog. Ashe had studied the place for two days. He knew the night watchman drank. He knew the skylight latch was broken. He knew that Tobias Fenn slept in a cramped attic room at the top of the house, because the boy was too poor to rent anywhere else.
And he knew that the window of that attic room looked straight down onto the canal.
They lowered themselves through the skylight into darkness that smelled of ink and dust and old paper. A thin line of candlelight showed under a door at the end of the attic hallway.
Tobias Fenn was not asleep.
He was sitting at a little desk in his nightshirt, surrounded by ledgers, a candle burning low beside him, his ink-stained fingers running down a column of figures. He was perhaps twenty, thin and pale, with spectacles pushed up on his forehead. When the door swung open and he saw the two hooded figures in the doorway, he went white to the lips. He knew exactly who they were. Everyone in Morvain knew.
Ashe crossed the room in three strides.
This was the moment. Fourteen years of practice, all of it for this moment. Behind him, Lio stood in the doorway, watching, the way Varrick had told him to watch. And Ashe could not speak a single honest word aloud.
So he did what he had done thirty-one times before.
He clapped one bandaged hand over the clerk’s mouth and bent close, and his hood fell forward, hiding both their faces. To the boy in the doorway it would look like the last terrible embrace of a killer and his victim. But Ashe’s lips were against the clerk’s ear, and what he breathed there, so softly that only Tobias could hear it, was this:
“Listen. I am not going to hurt you. When I draw the sword, scream, then go out the window backward. The canal is deep. Swim under the footbridge. There is a boat there with a gray sail. Get in it and do not stop rowing until the sea. Nod if you understand.”
The clerk’s eyes were huge behind his crooked spectacles. He nodded once.
Ashe stepped back and drew the sword.
It flashed in the candlelight, long and curved and bright. Tobias Fenn screamed, a real scream, there was nothing false about his terror, and staggered backward. His legs hit the low windowsill. The shutters burst open. And with a great clatter of ledgers he toppled backward through the window and was gone.
There was a long pause. Then, far below, a heavy splash.
Ashe walked to the window and looked down. The black water of the canal was rocking gently in the fog. Nothing else moved.
He slid his clean sword back into its sheath. Then he picked up the clerk’s small brass seal ring from the desk, the token for the gibbet oak, and turned toward the door.
Lio was standing exactly where he had been. He had not moved at all. He was looking at the window, and then he was looking at Ashe, and his young face was very still.
They went back up through the skylight without a word. Back across the rooftops, through the fog. It was only when they reached the hill again, and the gibbet oak rose black against the setting moon, that the boy finally spoke.
“He took the ledger.”
Ashe stopped walking.
“When he went out the window,” Lio said quietly. “He grabbed the big green ledger off the desk and held it against his chest. I saw it.” A pause. “Dead men don’t usually bother to save the evidence.”
The wind moved in the chains of the old tree above them, creaking softly. Ashe did not turn around. His right hand rested lightly on the hilt of his sword. He had never drawn it on anyone in fourteen years. He did not know, standing there in the cold, whether he would draw it now.
“Varrick told me,” Lio went on, “that if I saw you lie, even once, I was to wait until you slept and put a knife in you.”
“And will you?”
Instead of answering, the boy reached into the collar of his shirt and pulled out a leather cord. On the end of it hung a little fish, cut from a scrap of tin. Crude, lopsided. The twin of the one Ashe wore at his throat.
Ashe turned around very slowly.
“Mara made two,” said Lio. “One for the man in the hood who saved our father. And one for me, so I would remember him too.” His voice wavered a little. “She’s my sister. I stayed behind with our aunt when they sailed. I was too sick to travel. For six years I’ve wanted to find you and say thank you. The guild was the only way I knew to get close.”
For a long moment, Ashe could not say anything at all. Fourteen years in the dark. Fourteen years of being the thing people feared. And now someone in Morvain knew the truth, and was standing in front of him with a tin fish in his hand, waiting.
“That ledger,” Lio said, “is Varrick’s. Tobias found where all the money goes. Every bribe. Every contract. Every judge he owns.” He looked toward the city. “That’s why he wanted the clerk dead. And that’s why he wanted me watching you.”
Ashe climbed up into the gibbet oak, slowly, the way he had a hundred times. He hung the clerk’s little brass ring on the rusted chain beside the thirty-one others. It swayed in the wind and caught the last of the moonlight.
Then he crouched there, his sword upright in front of him, and looked down at the city he had haunted for fourteen years.
He had always thought of the chains as his. The weight that came with the name, the hood, the lie. The thing that kept him apart from everyone. But looking down at the boy below him, with the tin fish shining at his throat, he thought for the first time that perhaps a chain could also be something that connected two things together. That held. That did not let go.
Below in the fog, near the old tannery, lanterns were moving. A line of them, bobbing, starting up the long road toward the hill.
Varrick did not like to wait for news.
Lio saw them too. He swallowed. “What do we do now?”
Ashe stood up in the branches. The moon was sinking behind him, enormous and gold, and the chains of the gibbet oak swayed and sang around him in the rising wind.
“Now,” he said, “we find out how fast you can climb.”
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