The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (57 page)

She ignored him, trying to ignore as well the urge to run down the
hill. What was this place? What was it for? Cori sighed. To her client
she said, “Where exactly does this dragon of yours keep himself when
he’s not smashing things?” She’d expected some cave, a building large
enough to act as one.

“I don’t know,” Morin whispered, and added stupidly, “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean? You told me it came from this—this place.
Well, where?”

“But that’s all I know. The wizard—”

“The expensive master of wisdom.”

“He told me it lived here—somewhere—but that’s all he said.”

Cori made a face. She’d have to search the whole area. Later,
without this overdressed fool. She walked back to the road, her client
scurrying after her.

They were just beyond the ruins when Cori sensed the ground
trembling, and then the Earth itself seemed to come to pieces, torn
open like a cloth screen. “Run,” she shouted, and took off down the
hill. Pain entered her through her feet, and a noise like grinding rocks.
She fell, half got up and fell again, before she could break loose from
the Earth’s agony.

The ground was heaving now, and even Morin Jay could sense the
terror. “I can’t move,” he cried. “Help me.” Cori braked, swore against
all clients, and ran back to hoist him from all fours onto her shoulder.
“Stop squirming, you stupid ape,” she shouted.

Noise. A boom, suddenly rising to a shriek, then sinking again
to a shaky roar. Cori looked over her free shoulder—and sat down
with a thud, dropping Morin beside her. On top of the hill the ruins
shimmered like sculptured smoke, then suddenly vanished. A beast
stood there, green scales heavier than ship armor, yellow tongue
longer and thicker than a cobra and snaking out from a gateway of
fanged teeth, hooded eyes bulging in a head all lumps of stone. Four
wings unfolded across the entire sky, and then the largest creature
Cori had ever seen took off into the air with the gracefulness of a gull.

Three times it circled over their heads, while Morin shrieked and
Cori stood over him, staring at the granite-hard underbelly and a
dark red penis as thick as the battering ram the underdemons used
against heaven. At last it flew off toward the sea. When Cori could
breathe again and Morin’s screams had settled into whimpers the
Assassin looked up at the hilltop. The ruins had returned, still and
silent. Gingerly her senses reached into the Earth. No barrier stopped
her, no noise or agony; only a rawness.

Later that day, the news came, via runner, that the dragon had
attacked a grain storehouse on the edge of the town, leveling the
building and scattering the already sold grain with his wings. To
Morin’s loss was added the cost of placating his hysterical workers
and the town at large with extravagant gifts and promises of action.
“You’ve got to do something,” he fumed at Cori, who sat cross-legged
in a corner of his office.

“I already have,” she said. “I saved your life.” She wasn’t sure that
was true, but it sounded good.

“That’s not enough. I mean—oh, you know what I mean.”

“He’s very selective, this dragon of yours.”

Morin squinted at her. “What are you trying to say?”

“He’s attacked six times without taking a single life.”

“What’s the difference? He’s destroyed enough property.”

She stood up. “It’s a pleasure to work for you, Mr. Morin.”

“You’re awful uppity,” he called after her. “I never knew a killer to
care so much about life.” He ran into the hall to shout at her back,
“You better do something about that beast, do you hear me? Or else
I’ll notify your guild. Killer! Murderer!”

Cori made herself a small camp among a group of trees a mile or
so from the dragon hill. There she sat down to work.
At least,
she
thought,
I won’t have to waste my afternoons finding mushrooms and
berries, or whatever vile food grows around here.
For the kind of job she
had to do, the first step was a fast.

Some prey you kill with your body, that exactly trained weapon.
Some you kill with the mind, reaching in to unravel the core of energy
animating the lump of flesh. Either way you release the hunger at the
moment of the kill, losing yourself in that dreadful ecstasy. But there
are some creatures that only the hunger itself will kill. For those that
force must be nurtured, built up until you can direct it, like a needle-
thin spear of fire with the force of a volcano.

First she fasted, not even water touching her lips for days; in some
way, the hunger grew as you denied the body’s more normal appetite.
Fast and concentration. She needed to reach that storm gathering
in her womb, somehow join it and gain control over it. Revulsion
seized her, made her want first to run, as if she could get away from
this thing inside herself, and then to cut herself open and spill the
filth into the open air. She gained control over this horror, using the
energy coiled around revulsion to increase her concentration.

Linnon, the first person to conquer the hunger, described seven
steps to mastery. The last two, denial and emptiness, involved the
actual dissolution of the curse, like picking apart a knot where each
strand is a fire. Cori didn’t know if she would ever master those
last steps to freedom—to try was extremely dangerous, not only for
herself but for the land around her—but she knew from her training
she could reach the fifth level, direction.

From the first level, attention, she passed, three days later, to
empathy, reliving the deaths of all her prey. From the ghost ship, and
the mad farmer who went around mutilating any girl who looked like
his runaway daughter, she worked all the way back to the first “safe”
kill chosen for her by the Guild, an old sick woman whose healer son
wouldn’t let her die, but kept forcing useless medicine into her. The
woman had wanted to die, the woman had hired her—but even so,
the disgust had stayed in Cori for weeks. And now it rose in her again,
only to float away as the recall slipped still further back, to Rann. Fear
tried to shake her loose from her concentration. She sat immobile,
eyes half closed, hands against the hard ground, and let it drain away
into the Earth.

Next came fever, the body turned to oily mud, the mind lashed
by hallucinations. She saw the Guild surrounding her, led by Morin
Jay, who stood and laughed while her friends and teachers spit at her,
kicked her. And then they changed into demons, clawing the skin
from her face and belly—all except Morin Jay, who grinned, his face
a mask. (Mask? The thought whisked away in a wave of fright.) Cori
made herself a rock whose top alone jutted into the air while the mass
remained invulnerable, rooted deep in the Earth. Against that rock
the fever fell to pieces. And the hunger grew.

Finally the most dangerous stage came, forgetfulness. Her
knowledge of herself, her purpose, dissolved, blown away like a fluff
in a breeze, and every time she caught it there was less of her. Worst
of all, the need to remember became less and less real, more and more
an illusion that at last was slipping away. Peace, it offered her. Let go.
You’ve reached the emptiness. Let go. It’s only the fore-mind, after
all, just a mask. Release it.

Soundlessly, over and over, Cori repeated her true name, and when
the syllables threatened to become a meaningless chant she carved
her face into the world, on the rocks, the trees, across the moon and
under the sea. When her face became meaningless lines and blotches,
Coriia imagined herself naked, stripped down to her true self, that
which can never be dissolved or blown away. Motionless, more real
than the universe.

And when she’d overcome forgetfulness Cori dove into the hunger.
She took hold of it, pressed it into a tight ball, then pulled and shaped
it to a whip, a wire. On the eighth day of her fast Cori stood, feeling
her mass greater than the Earth itself, lighter than the wind. She
turned to the hill, and from her eyes the hunger snaked out. The rock
appeared as a sponge with a thousand holes for the hunger to enter.
And probe; and push.

There, in the center, that thick green mass. She pushed it, and the
hunger whipped back at her. Again, and suddenly a roar of pain and
fury battered her. She pushed again. Another roar, a shriek. All at
once, like a creature buried in mud and suddenly awake, the dragon
lifted into the air, biting its wings and shrieking.

Cori bounded it, using part of the hunger to make a fence. The
creature crashed and kicked and beat its head against the ground.

For a moment Cori wavered. The noise—as blindly beautiful as
a hurricane. Her hands clenched and opened, the sweat poured off
her, the mark in her throat grew cold as ancient death. Before her
the dragon’s eyes hovered, begging for release. With a shout Cori
tightened the fence.

The Mark appeared, the curled arms spinning before the dragon’s
face wherever it turned. Through the still center Cori drove the
hunger down between the dragon’s eyes, probing through the
complex streams of being for the image that formed the dragon’s true
self. When she found it she would kill.

Layer after layer burned away, until she saw, like a carved jewel,
the tiny image. The hunger lashed out—

No! Desperately Cori tried to pull back, send it somewhere else,
anywhere. For what she saw was not a beast but a man, naked and in
chains. And at that moment she heard the laughter of the thing that
had called itself Morin Jay.

Wildly Cori turned the hunger around—she had only an instant
before it would escape her to rage across the land, picking up energy
from anything alive in its path. She threw the hunger at Morin Jay—
only to have it thrown back by a mind shield stronger than Cori would
have thought possible.

No time. As best as she could she barricaded herself. Then she
called the hunger home.

Light. Blinding, a thousand colors, all the cells of her body burning
into light. Her mind burst apart into screams, rage, agonies of hate.
A thousand years of pain passed in a moment, wave after wave of
blinding fire—until the Earth took pity on her, and darkness, blessed
empty darkness, swept it all away.

3

Sky—hazy, grayish blue, a summer morning trying to decide whether
to be clear or overcast. Whispers—leaves? people?—maybe the rocks
and pebbles were talking to her. When she strained to hear it the
sound receded.

She was lying naked on her back, she realized. On what? She
patted a hand to the side. Something resisted, something as hard as
packed dirt or stone; so why couldn’t she feel it? She touched her
naked thighs, belly—solid, too smooth, too hard and cold. She made
a frightened little noise.

“You’re awake. Hello,” said—what? Cori turned her head, saw
for a moment a vast scaly—No, it was a man, wide shoulders and
terribly white arms crossed on his chest, a smiling somewhat pointed
face, with a smooth chin, a narrow nose, and very round lovely eyes.
Curled blond hair fell loosely almost to his shoulders. Naked, he
was squatting on his heels, his knees up covering his genitals (a red
battering ram?).

“What happened to your chains?” Cori asked, her voice sounding
flat.

He made a sound between a laugh and a grunt. “They’re all
around.” Stupidly, she looked about, then tried to get up. Incred
ibly weak, she sank down again. “Relax,” he said. “You’ve been away,
asleep, a long time.”

Angry at her weakness and dependence (an Assassin doesn’t need
anything from anyone), she asked, “Where the blood am I?”

“Nowhere.”

“It sounds like a title.”