10
That last
night, Jordan slept fitfully. While his tired body clamoured for the peace of
slumber, his agitated mind couldn’t surrender the thoughts churning inside. In
a seemingly never-ending cycle, his eyelids would grow heavy, would close, and
just as the welcoming darkness would begin to assert itself, Jordan would snap
awake as a new revelation burst like a firework inside his brain.
Across the carriage, Melvin had no
such issues. Even now, his snoring rose and fell in irregular patterns, interrupted
every so often with a rough snort. Beneath him, Felipe Belsair snoozed—Jordan
couldn’t entertain the notion that a man such as he would actually sleep. Nonetheless, the great man had
stirred not a jot for well over four hours. If any of this last minute
reorganisation affected him, it certainly didn’t show on the exterior.
Jordan, though, found himself in an
entirely different position. It was the first time such a scenario had played
out in his life, and he wasn’t entirely sure whether to welcome this heightened
state of awareness, or to dismiss it as nervous folly. Sure, the breeding
ground for this sleeplessness was the change of plans, but that fundamental
notion was nothing new to Jordan. Plans are made to be changed, and several
previous plans had been altered mid-mission with nary a thought. You did what
was needed to guarantee success, even if it meant pulling the pin entirely and walking
away. Despite popular misconception, an assassin’s record of achievement was
measured in successes, and not all of these include leaving behind a corpse.
So, what made this mission so unique
that Jordan found himself tossing so many disconnected thoughts around inside
his mind?
It wasn’t just the fact that Julian
was sovereign. Such a concept was indeed moot; after all, beneath the robes of
state and the crown perched atop his flowing locks of blonde, Julian was a man.
His blood would flow as red as Jordan’s, and a knife drawn across Julian’s
throat would render him dead as surely as the next person. No, Jordan had long
ago divested himself of the burden of empathy. A crowned prince Julian might
be, but from now until the deed was complete, he was just another man.
Then what was the source of this
insomnia? Anxiety? No. It wasn’t aspects of the mission that stirred in his
head. The plan, though not set in concrete, was satisfactory enough to eliminate
undue stress. Even if it involved some spontaneity at Ma’arnar, Jordan was
confident of his abilities to adapt. After all, your livelihood as a Black Hood
depended on your ability to detect trouble and take necessary evasive action...
...so, why couldn’t he sleep?
His mind kept throwing back images
from that final half hour of conversation. He recalled the visage of Belsair in
the window, a wraith-like figure floating on a mirrored reproduction of their
carriage, speaking softly of impending doom. While the topic itself was reason
enough to make Jordan’s flesh crawl—especially delivered as it was by Belsair’s
master storytelling—there was only now, some hours after the event, the first
niggles of... well, doubt.
The most obvious doubt was the
importance of Jordan’s mission. To have so much extraneous weight attached to
the mission gave proceedings a surreal feeling that rang warning bells inside
Jordan’s head. King Julian’s growing ego was common knowledge to anyone with an
ear to the ground; the extent of such growth, though, was somewhat enigmatic,
if not outright spurious, at least from the outside looking in. And this,
Jordan realised with the sudden giddy sensation of falling from a great height,
was the crux of his current misgivings.
To offer insights from the
standpoint of a collective consciousness with such powerful insights that
Belsair demonstrated, and to attach to these an empathy far removed from that
of a casual bystander led Jordan to believe that Belsair’s proximity to a
certain Darellion Kraithé was more than their being passing acquaintances. Even
the information itself—much less the personal anecdotes of pulling fish from
the Ma’arnar River—reeked of a complicity that made Jordan apprehensive. He
didn’t think Belsair was pulling the wool over his eyes. But he was more than
one hundred percent certain that the Master of the Knife was holding back more
information than that Jordan could surmise with his own meagre bank of
knowledge.
Jordan was therefore a minion, a
position that he hadn’t found himself in since his fledgling days as a Black
Hood novice. It was like suddenly finding himself in Melvin’s shoes, minus the inexperience,
the puerile braggadocio and the wispy curls of bum fluff on his chin. Part of
him rallied against this pseudo-demotion, that obdurate part of his nature that
fed off the pride of having worked so hard to get so far. Yet, he also conceded
that given the dire nature of the mission,
(your
mission has been compromised)
he couldn’t allow his pride to reduce
him to the same level as his protégé. Not if he wanted to come out at the other
side with his neck unbroken.
Wisdom therefore dictated he toe the
line. And while there was a certain level of safety in doing so, he couldn’t
help but feel somewhat exposed. After all, he was supposed to put his faith and
life into the hands of a person who was, until the last two days, a figment of
his imagination. Furthermore, his only colleague was a naïve street urchin who would
have felt no compulsion at opening his throat just for the sake of doing so.
Even now, they were wending their way towards the largest city in the Empire,
the ancestral home of the man they sought to assassinate, a place that was
doubtless loyal to their patron, if only to maintain their pre-eminence in a
status quo that was very quickly reaching a tipping point.
Each way Jordan chose to view this
situation, the odds were long. He was either a lamb being led to the slaughter,
or the knifepoint upon which salvation had been vested. The last thing he ever
expected to be, though, was a martyr to a cause that, quite frankly, held
little personal interest to him. He cared little for the machinations of state,
or the liberties of the people. His status outside of society meant that
whichever way the supposedly ensuing civil war should fall, he’d come out
smelling like roses, unscathed and still capable of garnering meaningful
employment. Yet, in less than twenty-four hours, Felipe Belsair had unloaded a
raft of concerns that gave the potential knife thrust far more value than
Jordan wanted.
He closed his eyes briefly, and the
carriage, clothed in shadows, disappeared from view. His world then was
blackness filled with the steady chug of the locomotive far out the front of
the train and the various creaks and groans of the carriage. Somewhere over
this he detected the regular pulse of his heart and the oceanic rise and fall
of his breathing. In his mind, the perfect darkness behind closed eyelids
became to refocus. He saw colours, an imagined vista of Ma’arnar, seeing as he
had never before in his life ventured this far east.
He envisaged narrow cobbled streets
and the bustle of multitudes of people. There was a smell, too; an over ripe
smell that could have been sewage, but was most likely the noxious vapour from
the factories. This mixed with the briny odour of the Eastern Sea and the heavy
scent of the river’s estuary to form a terrible concoction that would stab
knifelike into Jordan’s brain if it were real.
In this crowded urban sprawl, they
walked as a trio: the Master of the Knife taking the lead, with Jordan tailing
close behind and Melvin, somewhat the gawking tourist, lagging several paces at
the rear. They moved briskly, as was wont in such a place as this, pushing
through throngs and jostling as much as they were jostled. Jordan knew that
they were heading for the main Palace, but also knew, in this dreamscape, that
they would never reach their destination.
Instead, they were destined to walk
through endless streets clogged with a surging tide of humanity. All the while,
Melvin would gape and gawk, and after sufficiently taking the fill of his
wonder, scramble after Belsair and Jordan to catch up with them. It was during
one of these escapades that Belsair suddenly stopped, turning his hoary body
around in much the same manner as he had when first coming into Jordan’s life,
fixing him to the spot with those eyes of slate. For several seconds, the whole
world was as quiet as a graveyard; Belsair was moving his lips around words
that Jordan couldn’t hear, but as the throngs about him began to move anew, and
their sounds washed over him, he realised he didn’t have to hear Belsair’s words. He could
understand fully just by lip reading.
“Deliver
him to his destiny,” Belsair was saying.
Deliver him to his destiny.
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