Chapter 6 Controlled Endings
They came through both openings at once, three of them, the window and the side door, blades already drawn before their boots hit the floor. Afternoon light caught the edges of the knives. Their faces were wrapped in dark cloth up to the eyes, and those eyes were calm in the particular way of men who did this for money rather than anger.
"Stay behind the counter, Mira." Darius didn't raise his voice. He didn't move for a weapon either. He just stood there, hands loose at his sides, and watched them spread into the room.
Mara didn't move at all.
The lead assassin came first, fast, controlled, knife angled at Darius's throat in the kind of arc that had clearly worked before. The second man was already circling left, looking to come in low on the follow-through. The third stayed near the broken window, crossbow raised and tracking with the flat patience of someone waiting for his partners to stop obstructing the shot.
Darius stepped back once, unhurried. His eyes moved across all three of them.
"Eastern guild on the grip," he said, watching the lead man reset his stance. "Border company footwork on the second. And you…" his gaze flicked to the crossbowman "...you're hired separately. Different contractor. Someone is spending real money on this."
"Shut your mouth," the lead assassin said, and came in again.
Darius moved aside just enough. The knife passed close enough that he felt the displacement of air against his jaw.
Mara watched. She wasn't watching the assassins, she was watching him. The same focused attention she'd brought to the tea, to the ledger, to every quiet moment since last night. Cataloguing. Measuring.
The second man darted in low, targeting the back of Darius's knee. Darius shifted. The crossbow fired simultaneously, the bolt split the air where his shoulder had just been and hit the far wall with a sound like a fist against wood. Mira flinched behind the counter.
"Now," Darius said, to no one in particular.
He reached for the power. It came the way it had come the first time, not like pulling something foreign into himself, but like unclenching a hand he'd held closed for a long time. The plague moved through him in thin, deliberate threads, and he directed it the way he might direct water around the edges of a stone. Not flooding. Not spreading. Just, going where he told it.
He sent it to the lead assassin first.
The man's sword arm blackened at the elbow. Not the sleeve, not the wood of the table beside him, just the arm. He dropped the knife with a sound that was half scream and half something he didn't have breath for. "Get it off…what is this…"
The second man broke for the door. The plague tracked him precisely, threading through the gaps in his armor, finding the specific points where skin met air. He made it two steps before his left knee buckled, the boot rotting through at the ankle joint. He caught the doorframe going down. "This isn't possible. You're not even… you haven't touched us…"
Darius kept his breathing even.
The crossbowman was trying to reload. His fingers went one at a time, the decay moving joint by joint in a sequence so controlled it looked almost methodical. The mechanism fell to pieces in his hands. He looked up at Darius with an expression that had passed through fear and arrived somewhere quieter and more bewildered.
"You're not supposed to be able to do this," he said.
"I know," Darius said.
The man's legs gave.
All three of them were down in under a minute. Darius stood in the center of it and felt the power retract cleanly, like a drawn breath released. He looked at the floor. Not a single board was marked. The walls were untouched. Mira was untouched.
Only the men who'd come to kill him.
He lowered his hand.
The trading post was very quiet. Outside, a bird called twice and went still.
Mira had slid down the far wall until she was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, staring at the three bodies with the expression of someone running out of ways to be surprised. "You killed them," she said slowly. "With her power. But nothing else… you didn't touch anything else."
Darius turned to Mara.
She was looking at him with an intensity that was different from anything he'd seen from her yet. Not unsettled, exactly. More like a woman who had just watched a locked door open from the inside.
"You are using my nature incorrectly," Mara said.
"Incorrectly."
"Plague does not spare." She took one slow step toward him, and the air around her pressed against the space between them like a cold palm. "It does not negotiate with walls. It does not stop at the edge of a man's sleeve because you would prefer it to. My power exists to spread… that is the fundamental rule of what I am. There are no boundaries. There is no surgical edge." She looked at the three dead men on the floor, then back at him. "What you just did should be impossible."
Darius considered that. "It worked."
"Yes." Something moved in her expression that he didn't have a word for yet. "That is what I said. It should not work. And it did. Completely." She studied his face the way she had studied the stew… with a kind of careful, unhurried attention. "This is the second time."
From the floor, Mira said, quietly, "What does that mean? For him?"
"It means the empires are moving faster than I expected," Darius said. He stepped over the nearest body and went behind the counter, pulling dried provisions off the shelf with the same efficiency he'd used packing trade manifests as a child. "Three killers in broad daylight. That's not a warning…that's the opening move. They'll send more next time and they won't be careless about the spacing."
He found a length of rope, two waterskins, a wedge of hard cheese that was still good. Added them to the pack. Then reached past Mira's elbow and took the tin of tea.
"You took the tea," Mira said, a little faintly.
"Old habit. I think better with something warm." He laid the pack on the counter and looked at Mara. "I need to understand the edges of this before we walk into Veth's territory. The War Incarnate's battlefields are not a good place to discover a limit I didn't know I had."
Mara was still studying him. "You weren't afraid when they came through the windows."
"I was paying attention. There's a difference." He pulled the strap through the buckle. "Fear costs you the first three seconds. Those three seconds told me everything I needed… their formation, their coordination, who was leading and who was waiting for a signal. If I'd panicked, I'd have missed all of it."
"You learned that on the trade routes."
"I learned it the first time someone decided a merchant's son was an easy mark." He slung the pack onto his shoulder. "First light. We head toward Veth."
Mara was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice carried the particular weight of something she meant fully. "I will come. But I am watching you, Darius Valeborn. Closely. The way I watched just now." She paused. "What you are is not what anyone told me you were. I intend to understand what that means before we reach the next Calamity."
"Good," Darius said. "I've been trying to figure that out myself for twenty-three years."
The three assassins lay where they'd fallen, their faces still wearing the last thing they'd felt, not pain, but confusion. The kind that comes from a world not behaving the way it agreed to.
Outside, faint and distant, hoofbeats moved through the hills again. More riders. The news was still spreading.
Darius picked up the ledger and tucked it under his arm.
Six left.