Chapter 42.1: Assassins and the First Official Meeting
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 8th Month
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The Arrival of the Messenger
Meanwhile a brief recap with the arrival of the messenger…
The courier's arrival at the access road checkpoint, who was moving faster than someone with nothing to hide, needed to move, which was the first thing the patrol noticed. The second thing they noticed was that he was not trying to hide the urgency, which was different from suspicious in a way that experienced security personnel learned to distinguish. Suspicious people move quickly while trying to appear unhurried. This man was just moving quickly, with the specific body language of someone who had been told his job was to get somewhere before something else did and had been taking that instruction seriously for however many hours he had been on the road.
The patrol after learning the contents of his message escorted him to the village without delay. He was not armed beyond a traveler's protection blade. He was not carrying anything that read as a threat. He needed to reach the village and the village received him.
When the letter reached the remaining elders of the council, the color left their faces in the particular sequence that happens when someone reads something they cannot immediately disbelieve and cannot comfortably believe either. Then Elder Donnel Archer, who had been a tracker long enough to understand that hesitation and speed were two different responses to incoming threats and that only one of them was useful, sent the message through the party chat system before the room had fully processed what it was looking at.
The party chat system activated although it had its maximum range limitations, and there was a delay at distance. The delegation was close enough to the village that the delay was measured in seconds rather than minutes. August received the message on Finnester's back, between Bren and the others, and understood it with the comprehensive immediacy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of situation without knowing when it would arrive.
August's commands went out through the party chat towards the people who could receive it at the village, before Finnester had completely opened his wings (he was perched atop the large wagon Adrianne) that oriented them toward the direction of the village.
There was no moment to waste so Bren and August carried the Talon One members who needed that immediate air transport. The delegates' caravan along with the trailing members of Baron Kirka's own caravan would follow them though August gave order to halt the entire delegates caravan to make sure they and Baron Kirka's own caravan could link up. The team on the other hand would be at the village in less than an hour.
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Hasty Arrival
The village's response to the commands was exactly what it had been trained to produce, which was efficient, coordinated, and fast enough to genuinely impress the people who had spent years building that capability and were now watching it activate for something other than a training scenario.
The elders were moved toward the mountain fortress in Zone One. The security forces went to heightened alert simultaneously, which meant that within the hour the streets of Maya Village contained exactly two categories of people: security personnel in organized groups of ten, fully armed, conducting overlapping patrols, and everyone else who was inside the building they had been directed to return to. The village's walls were fully manned and every guard on them was at their post with their eyes scanning the immediate surroundings as they are supposed to do on top of the wall and towers: looking outward and looking carefully.
The imperial garrison was immediately informed. The garrison captain, whose understanding of what Maya Village was had been continuously revised upward over the months he had been stationed here, received the information with the professional calm of someone absorbing a significant development and immediately issued his own parallel set of orders to ensure his five hundred personnel were coordinated rather than redundant with the village's response.
The temporary residential workers, the visiting merchants, the ordinary travelers staying at the inns, all of them were given the same instruction: return to your accommodation, remain there, as this is a village security matter and you will be informed when it has been resolved. Nobody was arrested or restrained. The instruction was delivered firmly and without the kind of theatrical alarm that produces panic, because Maya Village had learned, through exactly the kinds of experiences that teach these things, that panic was always the enemy's best ally.
Talon One arrived through the air, which was still one of the most efficient methods of rapid transit available to anyone who had bonded aerial beasts, and within minutes of landing every beast within the village's alliance was on alert.
Aetherwing received the notification in the way that a Guardian Beast of a forest region receives any significant threat to the settlement within his domain: with the focused attention of something whose entire function was the protection of that territory and whose capabilities for responding to threats were not constrained by the logistical limitations that ground-based security forces worked around. His communication went outward through the forest's beast networks with the speed that such communications traveled among creatures who had no need for written language or physical messengers.
The beasts at the different territorial boundaries would be watching, especially those that border the imperial highway network. Anything that moved through the forest with the specific quality of intent that experienced predators recognized as wrong would be marked as an invasive threat to its domain and would be dealt with appropriately following the forest's own rule of law.
Team Mandibles, who had already sensed that something was wrong, especially with toto detecting the signals of his own brethren, was ordered back toward the village temporarily. The letter that was quickly disseminated had further given them what Erfet could give: a general description of capability, a rough sense of what was coming, and the confirmation that it was coming whether they liked it or not. What it had not given was the specific numbers of the assassins, because Erfet either had not known the precise count or had not been able to include it without making the message traceable. The team would hold closer to the village until they had better information about what they were dealing with.
Within the hour, the village had transformed into its wartime mode without it appearing to be so, which was the specific achievement that the security council had been working toward since the recognition that Maya Village would eventually attract threats that required exactly this kind of response.
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The Mountain Fort Meeting
The council chamber inside the mountain fortress was colder than the assembly chamber in Zone Two, owing to the stone depth and the natural cooling that deep rock produced regardless of season. The elders sat around the table with the particular attentiveness of people who had just been moved from their usual seats to a fortified location and were processing the implications of that transition.
August presented the situation without embellishment, as was his practice with the council. An anonymous tip had been received from a source that could not be verified but whose content was specific enough to be taken seriously. A bunch of elite trained kingdom assassins were moving toward the village with orders to eliminate its leadership. The timing was not confirmed. The precise number was not confirmed. The capability level was described as ranging from high expert to master rank.
The council absorbed this with a somewhat calm demeanor.
Elder Donnel Archer was the one who articulated what several others were already thinking. His voice had the particular quality of someone who had spent his life tracking things through dangerous terrain and had developed opinions about the difference between responding to threats and letting threats dictate the terms of the engagement.
"Then how about we use ourselves as bait so we could capture them," he said. "I have full faith that our security forces can handle people at that capability level. They have handled worse before. If we could handle beasts more powerful than most humans without faltering, then I have all the confidence that we can take down and arrest this threat. And this village is unique. We are all warriors here, bred and bled with martial prowess, born from the fires of the Beast Dominion Wars. I do not think our elders are weak enough to be compared to anyone outside this village, because our leadership here has been reborn and bred from the previous war, and we are all still undertaking supplemental lessons in warfare and defense even in our busy schedules. As is our Council motto: always be prepared, at any time, for anything."
He looked around the table with the particular expression of someone who had been waiting to say something that had been accumulating for a while.
"In fact I would like to propose that this be made into law. Anyone seated in a position of village leadership should always be prepared for war and should be capable of defending themselves and leading from the front regardless of the circumstances. Those who agree raise their hands."
The majority raised their hands. The vote was not close.
August, who had been listening with the patience of someone who had already worked out what he needed the council's agreement for, presented his addendum.
"Well then Elders, since it has come to this, and since our enemies are clearly still underestimating us — let us create a false sense of superiority for them. Act as though you are exactly what they expect: accessible, under-defended, normal. If you agree to this, since they already believe you are easy targets, we might as well play the part. And when they begin to move, we will already be in position around you."
The council agreed to this arrangement with the collaborative practicality of a governing body that had long since learned the difference between civilian administration and the kind of leadership that a settlement inside the Great Forest of Lonelywood actually required.
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The Act Begins: Return to Normalcy
The temporary martial law was lifted. The official explanation was issued through the appropriate village channels: this had been an unannounced emergency preparedness exercise, a test of the village's response time and internal coordination. The exercise had produced useful data. The data would be used to improve the existing protocols. The exercise itself would become a recurring fixture of village security practice, conducted at irregular intervals so that the population would never become complacent with their own safety.
This explanation was entirely true in every respect except for the part about it being an exercise, which made it one of the more effective cover stories available, because the parts that people could check were accurate.
The streets returned to their ordinary pattern of movement. The merchants and travelers and temporary workers came back out of their accommodations. The market stalls reopened. The morning training groups ran their circuits. The forge smoke resumed. The Grimfangs on and outside the walls continued to watch the forest's unusual movement, they have already tracked from which direction this assassin's would generally come to Rexy who would in turn communicate it with Erik and Erik to the rest of the security force, they continued this with the same attention they brought to everything, which was complete, and which to an outside observer looked exactly like their ordinary patrol posture.
Anyone who did not know where to look would see a village going about its day.
Anyone who looked carefully and knew what normal actually looked like here would notice that the security patrols were slightly larger than their standard composition, that the wall guards rotated slightly less frequently than usual and in slightly different patterns, that the Mighty Peregrine Eagles circling above the canopy were maintaining a tighter orbit than their ordinary reconnaissance altitude. But these were small things, visible only if you knew what to look for, and the people currently moving toward this village did not know what normal looked like here because they had never seen it first hand.
Everyone with knowledge of the actual situation had been issued a direct order not to speak of it. The order was enforced with the specific authority of a village in which the Supreme Military Commander had issued it personally, which was sufficient authority for anyone within the security structure and a strong suggestion for everyone outside it.
The village would wrap this as cleanly as possible. Whatever happened next, it would happen on Maya Village's terms.
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Hell's Pits
The man at the front of the approaching group was named Dragnov, and he was already in his middle ages at eighty-something years old, and he had been doing this work for longer than most people his age had been doing anything.
He did not think about his age. He had stopped thinking about most things in the personal category sometime in his sixties, when the last of the habits that counted as personal had been so thoroughly suppressed by the professional conditioning that they no longer generated accessible thoughts. He existed in the functional space of a tool that was aware of its own function: a thing built to do one specific thing very well and to continue doing it until the mechanism failed.
He remembered where he had come from. This was unusual among his cohort. Most of them had the mercy of not remembering, the childhood trauma sufficient to create a blank space where the earlier memories should have been. Dragnov remembered his parents. He remembered the street he had grown up on. He remembered the day the Sovereignty's agents came for him, which he had been young enough to believe was something good happening, that the rumored orphanage was real and he was going to it.
But he had not gone to the orphanage. He had instead gone to a place so secretive that he only knew of its name later on, the Hell's Pits.
The Pits were not a metaphor. They were a literal rift in the earth in the southern desert territory of the Sovereignty, two kilometers long and three hundred meters wide, descending two and a half kilometers into the ground. The barren desert above it was both a border and a natural barrier: the heat in the day was enough to kill unprepared people within hours, and the cold at night was a different kind of death entirely, and the sand dunes that stretched in every direction as far as any eye could see from the rim were a sentence by agent of Death, it was not a pleasant landscape.
Below the rim was the actual Pits. The lighting was minimal. The economy beneath it was the economy of scarcity and violence. Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people occupied the space at any given time, a population that varied because the Pits was not a static prison but an active sorting mechanism. Orphans, criminals, people the Sovereignty had decided to convert into something useful rather than simply discard, all of them were fed into it at intervals and given six months to demonstrate what they were made of.
But what they were made of later on, in the Pits, was whatever survived the brutal reality of existing beneath the surface of the earth above it. The people who entered at the bottom and who were not capable of defending themselves tended to become resources for those who were. The resources in question were not discussed in polite company and the screams that echoed off the stone walls of the rift at all hours were not distinguishable by gender or age because the Pits did not operate along those organizational lines. There were five cages at the cardinal points of the rift's floor and center, housing beasts that the administration used on anyone who violated the specific rules that kept the Pits functional as a production mechanism rather than just a killing ground: no attacking the administrators, no attempting to scale the walls, no harming the structural elements that the administrators used to access the space. Everything else was subject only to the informal law of one's own capability to survive: "The Survival of the Fittest".
Those who survived the brutal six months were extracted, debriefed, subjected to a desensitization process that lasted approximately a month and was designed to convert whatever psychological state six months in the Pits produced into something that could follow instructions, and then trained as junior operatives for another six months. A year total from intake to field-ready.
Dragnov had survived his intake year before most of the other survivors he knew had been born. He had graduated into the senior ranks through the simple accumulation of years and successful operations, and each successful operation extended his career because failed operations ended careers in the Sovereignty's shadow unit through a mechanism that was not euphemistic.
The magical oath they took at graduation was the final binding. Never betray the Sovereignty. Never attempt to leave its service. Accept the forced expendability that came with the role. The oath was not ceremonial. It was a genuine magical contract, and breaking it had the kind of consequences that discouraged experimentation.
Dragnov had wanted to die for a considerable portion of the last several decades. But the survival instinct that the Pits had burned into every fiber of whatever he was did not allow this to progress beyond wanting. His body continued to operate with the reflexes of a master-ranked professional regardless of what the quieter part of him had concluded about the value of continued operation.
He was moving toward Maya Village with the rest of the unit. He had assessed the mission parameters. He had assessed the target. He had done his work.
What he had not foreseen and had assessed, because the intelligence available to them did not contain it and because the kind of settlement that would provide these fantastical accurate intelligence on these matters to an assassination unit was not the kind of settlement that existed, was what he was actually walking into.
But he and the others were about to find out.
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The Crossroads
At the junction point where the road branched toward the village, the other units that had integrated naturally into the flow of travelers with the competence that their training produced. They looked like normal merchants, they moved like merchants and they had the papers of merchants, professionally forged, carrying the correct stamps for the correct trade routes.
What they did not know was that the Grimfangs had already marked them, along with those that were lurking in the forest.
They did not know that the entire Girmfang pack had already transmitted the needed information to the village since yesterday. They did not know that Team Mandibles had already repositioned in response to that information, in ways that were not visible from the road but were very present in the forest to either side of it.
They did not know that the elders of Maya Village were currently sitting in visible locations within the village, conducting their ordinary business with the appearance of people who had no idea that something was coming for their heads, while the security infrastructure of a settlement that had survived the Beast Dominion Wars maintained an alert posture that no one had thought to warn them to expect.
They passed the checkpoint at the road junction the way they had passed the earlier checkpoints: with the proper documentation, without incident, at a pace that communicated nothing worth stopping.
The guards checked their papers. The guards were professional and thorough and gave nothing away. The guards also, after the unit had moved far enough down the road to be past hearing range, communicated the unit's entry through channels that the unit could not detect.
The village knew they were coming.
The village had already been waiting for them to arrive.
Dragnov felt something within him, somewhere in the accumulated instinct of eighty-something years of doing exactly this kind of work, that he did not have a name for. An animal's awareness that their current situation felt very wrong. That the terrain was not what he had been told it was. That something in the gap between what intelligence said and what his body was receiving did not add up.
He was not wrong with his gut feeling.
But he was just too late, when the time finally came.