Part the Seventeenth: The Song Remains the Same

Brass and I had plenty of time to talk on the gryphon to Ironforge. I had briefly considered bringing him back to Stormwind and taking the newly-finished Deeprun Tram but had discarded the idea based on the fact that I had just gotten Brass free of the Defias and, if the rumours were true, they had plenty of allies within the city itself that would have been more than happy to recapture or kill him. Also, gnomish technology is dangerous and not to be trusted.

Turns out the Defias lieutenant I had handed over to SI:7 had told me the truth. Brass knew exactly what I was asking about and gave me all the details I could want. Being a stonemason and, more importantly, a subterranean architect, the Defias had rented him out to the Twilight’s Hammer bunch out at Lord Arkenhill’s place to design some sort of chamber. He wasn’t given many details but the specs he was told to design around indicated the chamber was going to house a pretty massive object. Whatever it was, it also had to be magical in nature, a fact he reasoned out just from his experience in designing structures for mages.

Apparently, the way the structure is designed and built can aid the flow of magical energy in the area. I had no idea this was possible; you learn something new every day.

Imaria had said she’d been hired by a mage named Atalanta to kill Saya. She had also been working with the bunch of Twilight’s Hammer mooks that had tried to do me in. Were the two connected? It would make sense, given the structure the cultists were building; they’d need a mage to do something with all that magical power. That begged the question of whether Atalanta was a member or an outsider. I knew Twilight’s Hammer had their own mages; I’d killed plenty of them during the war, so why would they bring in an outsider, unless Atalanta had some unique quality that made her more appealing than using one of their own. There were just too many unanswered questions and there weren’t many answers forthcoming.

Chief among those unanswered questions was why Saya had to die. You don’t hire an assassin, especially one as skilled as Imaria, to kill someone for no reason, even if that someone is nursing Stormwind’s best thief back to health from the brink of death. It didn’t make sense, especially for a mage working to cure the blood elves’ magic addiction. As far as the bunch who’d tried to kill me were concerned, I was already dead and not a threat. Her death was as senseless and random an act as I could figure, a thought that had been nagging the back of my conscience for some time now.

I supposed there was the small chance that Imaria had been lying when she said she’d been hired to kill Saya. Generally, unless you’ve got stones the size of boulders and made of solid thorium, lying is the last thing on your mind when facing down your worst nightmare made flesh. Which put me solidly back at square one in the motive department. The more I turned it around and looked at it, the more it was becoming apparent I was going to have to have a meeting with this Atalanta person.

I really don’t like dealing with mages. As far as I’m concerned, the whole bunch of them are about as stable as a handcart on a seesaw. Playing with the laws of the world isn’t healthy for one’s mental state; it makes you think you’re more important than you really are.

I was turning all this over in my head as while I rode the gryphon back to Stormwind. As ever, the more questions I answered the more that popped up. I still had no idea what the Twilight’s Hammer’s interest in this whole deal was, unless it was just to sow chaos and destruction. While that wasn’t impossible, it didn’t make much sense. As a rule, Twilight’s Hammer cultists are interested in widespread chaos and destruction only as a side effect of bringing the old gods back, not so much as a goal in and of itself. Maybe my investigation into Atalanta would shed some light on the reason for their cooperation, though I suppose she could just be a member. Stranger things have happened.

I needed to get back to my place and check the file that Krieg had given me. Until Imaria had fingered her as the money, I’d dismissed Atalanta as a minor player, at most. The more I considered it, though, the more it was starting to look like she was a bigger piece of the puzzle than I’d originally imagined. I suppose that made sense, in a way. In any organization, there’s always a magic-user pulling the strings somewhere high up in the chain.

No sooner than I’d handed the reins of the rented gryphon over to the flight master, than my plan to get back to my apartment was derailed. A slender blonde girl, barely into her teens by the look of her, fell into step with me as I left the gryphon stables. I didn’t recognize her, but with the black on black on black leathers she was wearing, there were only two possibilities as to why she would be approaching me. Since she wasn’t trying to put something sharp and pointy into Ma Drake’s favourite son, the options were rather narrowed down a bit.

I had a good head and a half on her and she had to hurry to match my strides as I walked down the ramp from the gryphon stables. I could sense the wind up even before she opened her mouth and beat her to the punch, “I got it, Shaw wants to see me. Lucky for him, his office is closer than my apartment, so I can graciously spare a few minutes.”

The assassin cub put on a pretty little pout for a second. I’m sure she was used to using it to get her way. She would be quite the heartbreaker in a few years. Provided she lived that long. Most people in Shaw’s employ had a way of getting dead.

Being the grumpy old cuss that I am, and being a bit cranky from the long ride to and from Ironforge, I jumped on whatever else she might have had to say, “Two things: one, the whole black on black motif is way overdone and doesn’t really help a whole lot anyway, unless you’re trying to announce to the world what you are. The idea is to blend in. If you must wear dark colours, go for greys and blues, preferably in some sort of mottled pattern, helps to break up your outline in the dark. You can thank me for that bit later. Two, only one person in this city would have had any idea that I was coming in by gryphon. Or at all. Your boss likes to think I’m still on the payroll and will come at his beck and call.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and sneered, “Reznik warned me you were an asshole.”

I couldn’t help but grin, “I do have that reputation, yes.” I slowed my pace a bit so she didn’t have to struggle so much to keep up, “So did His Secretfullness bother to tell you why he wanted to see me so urgently?”

She shrugged eloquently and put on what I’m sure was supposed to be a haughty expression. It came out rather flat and made her look more like she had a pebble in her boot or some rather painful gas, “Unlike some people, I don’t question my superiors,” her face fell to a disappointed sneer, “Besides, Reznik told me to fetch you and pushed me out the door. I didn’t even have time to ask what you looked like.”

Ah, the glamourous life of an assassin. The kid had my sympathy and I told her as much. Having proven myself during the war, I didn’t have to go through all the initiate crap Shaw put new members of the Assassin’s Guild through, but I’d seen plenty of fledglings give up just based on all the crap he and the Guild’s trainers put them through. Not that the crap didn’t have a purpose. It weeded out the stupid and the impatient. The overall quality of assassins improved and once you made it to full-grade killer, life got much easier. After all, there were always newbies to train. Sure, a lot of people swore they’d never be like that once they became a full member, but it’s amazing how fast one’s opinion changes when you’re facing down a pile of scut work and there are several able and, if not exactly willing, at least resigned to the fact young bodies to do it because you told them to. Yeah, it was a vicious circle.

We were crossing over the bridge from the Trade District into Old Town when I finally relented, “So what is it you’re wanting to ask? You’ve been trying to screw up the courage since I saw you.”

Her frown turned quickly into a scowl, “That obvious, huh? Old Parni says I may as well write my thoughts on my forehead it’s so easy to read my face. I can’t help it.”

“Bah,” I waved my hand dismissively, “There’s more than one way to hide your intentions, unless you ask old Poker-Face. You know he actually injected his face with too much numbing poison, right? That’s why he never shows any kind of expression. He can’t.”

That earned me a ghost of a smile, “I didn’t know that, but now that I do…” she trailed off and I could see the devilry forming in her mind.

“Anyway, kid, you’ve got the kind of open, honest face people trust. Practice using that instead of being a carefully composed blank. Just look wide-eyed and innocent and I guarantee you’ll fool most people more often than not.”

She seemed to take this in and consider it, at least, which I had to give her credit for. Most kids her age would have dismissed anything I said as the rambling of an old fart. Of course, most kids her age weren’t training to be assassins. I didn’t have too many contemporaries my age and ever fewer who were older than me. One thing you learned early on in this business is that your chances of dying quietly of old age, surrounded by friends and family were pretty slim. It paid to listen to those who made it even to middle age.

“Out with it, then. You’re dying to ask me something.”

She looked up at me as we walked, favouring me with a look that was more respectful and less barely disguised contempt than before, “Did you really slug Mr. Shaw in the jaw when you quit?”

I snickered and grinned broadly, “Where did you hear that?”

Her disappointment was almost palpable, “It’s just a rumour. People mention it whenever your name comes up.”

Shaw had been smart sending her to come fetch me. She was just wet enough behind the ears that, kind and helpful soul that I am, I couldn’t help but take her under my proverbial wing. The well-faked concealed hero-worship was really the icing on the cake. She was nothing but pure ego food and Shaw knew it. I probably would have ditched any other escort long before now.

“That was the first time I quit,” I smirked at the memory. What had started as a shouting match ended with me belting Shaw one across his smug mouth. I didn’t see any reason to mention getting beaten half to death by four of his guards and tossed into the street. If it really was true that people talked about me hitting Shaw, it was only as a cautionary tale not to cross him. “The second time was the real show-stopper,” I said, the smirk fading quickly.

She caught on fast, “No one talks about that. Ever.” I got the impression she was telling the truth about that. I didn’t like to talk about it. One of the skills that makes Shaw such an effective spymaster is his quite uncanny skill at judging a person’s reaction to a given situation. I’ve never quite been sure if that was because he manipulated events to force the outcome he wanted or if he really was just that good at reading people. Whatever the truth may be, one of the very few times he’d been wrong was in sending a man I’d once regarded as a friend to bring me back into the fold, dead or alive. I hadn’t wanted to kill him, he had been a friend, after all, but his fanatical loyalty to Shaw didn’t leave me a choice in the matter. After it was said and done, I’d taken his body back to SI:7 for proper burial and so they wouldn’t be able to screw his widow out of her pension for his death in the line of duty. Despite my efforts to make sure he was afforded everything due to him, most of the members of SI:7 and the Stormwind Assassins regarded me ever after as little better than a kinslayer and he as a posthumous hero. I harboured no doubts that should he have succeeded in killing me, he would have been a hero that brought down a dangerous rogue. Very few, if any, of the operatives appreciated the irony.

I might have said a word or two more about what had happened, if only to explain my side of things, but by that time we were climbing the steps to SI:7.

Go to any human city worth the name and somewhere at its heart you will find a fortress or fastness of some sort. It’s the natural order of cities to grow up around easily defensible areas. Stormwind is no exception to the rule, though after the orcs razed the city at the end of the First War and the city was rebuilt, the old fortress ended up at the edge of Old Town. Once the new Stormwind Keep had been built, the old fortress was converted into the command center and headquarters for the Stormwind Army, providing a central location for operations, logistics and intelligence to work together cohesively. Removing the sharp end of the day-to-day operations of the Army from the environs of the Keep and, more importantly, the nobles within it had the additional effect of freeing up the Army to go about its business unencumbered by the brilliant, yet completely idiotic and insanely unpractical, ideas often foisted upon the military by people with too much time on their hands and precious little to keep their tiny minds from wandering, whose only qualifications to command were a happenstance of birth.

Me? Bitter? Never.

Surprisingly, Shaw met my escort and I in the practice yard. That was unusual enough in and of itself to make me mentally sit up and take notice. Compounding surprise with shock, he seemed pleased to see me, which is to say he wasn’t snarling and glowering at me. In point of fact, he looked reasonably pleasant. Taken separately, each of these points wouldn’t have fazed me much. All at once, however, they got my back up as surely as if I had been a startled cat. I could tell Shaw noticed me tense up, though he was polite enough not to make any indication of having done so.

I made a quick mental accounting of the last couple of weeks, trying to remember if I had done anything that might make Shaw suddenly decide I was more valuable dead than alive. As it happened, the main reason I was still alive at all was because I had taken great pains to make sure Shaw was very much aware that even though he no longer signed my paychecks, I was still very much on his side and was much more useful to him alive. That was the main reason he had only send one guy after me way back when. Shortly afterward, I’d gotten wind of a scheme to undermine the city walls so one of the noble houses, who just happened to own a very large stake in several stone quarries, could make a killing selling stone to the city to repair them. After that, Shaw had decided that I had more value as a freelancer since I could come by information that might take his agents weeks or months to discover otherwise.

Strangely, you tend to come by a lot of information when you spend a lot of your time pilfering the homes of the wealthy.

Still, I wasn’t able to come up with anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something I’d done to make Shaw believe I was now a threat, or at least no longer of value. That was the problem with his particular brand of fanaticism: there was no room from grey in his world view. Either you were a threat to Stormwind or an asset to be used and discarded as soon as you were no longer useful.

Shaw favoured my escort with something that resembled a paternal smile, one that was almost believable, had I not known the man in the slightest. It also might have been intensely creepy coming from just about anyone else. From the master of both the Stormwind Assassins and SI:7, though, creepy was rather the norm.

“Thank you for escorting Mr. Drake, Shannon. I believe Reznik has another assignment for you.” Watching the proud father-figure act set my teeth on edge and turned my stomach sour. It was akin to watching a viper coo over a newborn babe. For her part, Shannon just about burst into flame from the joy that came with knowing that the boss not only knew her name but could match it to her face. Faked hero-worship certainly had nothing on the real deal.

To her credit, Shannon did manage to give Shaw a proper salute before scampering off. She was also polite enough to say she would work on the things we talked about. It was nice of her to say, but I believed it about as much as I believed Shaw’s saintly patron act.

“She’s a good kid,” I said, still smiling pleasantly after her, “You should try to not get her killed.”

Shaw’s proud father smile didn’t falter in the slightest, “She’d killed three men by the time she was twelve and two more when I found her in the Stockades.”

I wasn’t about to be out-blaséd, “Hm. Well, then, even you should have a hard time.”

Shaw let the matter drop. Most likely because he found my witty banter banal and annoying. Personally, I always rather suspected that was just because he couldn’t keep up.

No sooner was Shannon out of sight than Shaw’s manner cooled considerably, “Walk with me, Drake,” he said with all the hallmarks of an order. Judging by the way he marched off without so much as glancing to see if I would follow, indicated that while I had a choice, only one option would have an outcome that I even remotely liked. As much as I enjoy antagonizing him, I know well enough when to shut up and do as I’m told. I still couldn’t help but come back to wondering if Shaw was planning on getting rid of me in that oh-so-permanent way.

It was no great feat to catch up and fall into step with him as he led the way up one of the towers and out onto the wallwalk. Being the headquarters of the Army, there was usually only a couple of guards up here and a watchman who came up as part of his patrol route. As we made our way toward the middle of the wall, I could only see one of the guards and he pointedly moved himself out of sight and out of earshot. That certainly boded ill.

Shaw stopped around the middle of the wall and leaned on his crossed arms on a crenel, staring out over Old Town. I stopped next to him and leaned against the opposite side of the wall, trying hard to appear relaxed, but very busily looking for where the attack might come from. There would certainly be a diversion first, just to draw off my attention, then the actual strike. Shaw’s silence was not helping. After several long seconds, he finally let out a long sigh.

“You know, Drake, despite our differences, I actually like you.”

That was exactly the sort of opening statement that usually finished with, “I’m sorry I have to kill you.”

Shaw continued, “You’re a good operative, when you want to be. It’s a shame we don’t see eye to eye on things. You could go far with SI:7.”

Maybe he was going to do it himself. That would almost be an honour, really, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d be, you know, dead.

Apparently, Shaw can sense tension in the air, “You can relax, I didn’t call you up here to kill you. If I wanted you dead, you’d never know it and certainly never see it coming.” He turned and faced me, putting his back against the crenel, “Your name is coming up a lot over in the Keep these days. Seems a certain lord you attacked in his home has been rather vocal about it to the other nobles. There’s a lot of pressure coming down from on high to do something about you.”

“If that was supposed to calm me…”

Shaw shook his head, “No, just so you know what’s going on. Whatever you’re into, it’s getting a lot of noses out of joint. I’d suggest laying low for a while, but I don’t think that’s going to be good enough this time. Highlord Fordragon is staying out of it so far, going on my recommendation that it was an isolated incident, which it was, of course.” His tone of the last statement left no wiggle room and contained all the warning I would get. If I pulled another stunt like that, I was a dead man.

Shaw leveled his most serious look at me, which, for a man with no sense of humour, is quite serious indeed, “I showed Fordragon your record and, criminal activity notwithstanding, he’s content to give me the benefit of the doubt. He is not the king, however, and cannot deny the demands of the nobles forever.”

I chewed my lip for a few seconds, taking that in. While some might take what he had said for a threat, anyone who understood Shaw would realize the statement for the warning it was. This was just his subtle way of telling me that he was willing and currently able to protect me, for now, but I’d better finish what I was doing and vanish soon or he wouldn’t be able to shield me much longer.

“How long do I have?” I asked.

“That will largely depend on how much longer Arkenhill can hold the ‘Lady’ Prestor’s favour,” the air quotes around Lady were audible, “The bitch queen is the one howling the loudest for your head. Arkenhill doesn’t have nearly the influence on his own to even get audience with Fordragon, let alone move him to give me orders. For whatever reason, helping Arkenhill raise a stink serves her purposes, so I wouldn’t count on her giving up any time soon, which leaves you very little time.

“Of course, if you were to fill me in on just what you’re up to beyond spreading chaos and mayhem and sowing seeds of dissent, I might be able to give Fordragon a reason not to order you tossed into the Vault.”

I smirked on the inside, but kept my face appropriately somber, “Not yet. Maybe once I have more than crazy theories and wile accusations.”

He favoured me with a look that told me he knew exactly what I was thinking and he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying, “That you cover your tracks is all I ask.”

This time I let the grin creep to my face, “If I’m right, my tracks will be the least of your worries. Your boys and girls will be busy little bees.”

“So I’ve gathered,” he shrugged eloquently, “Your name has been popping up quite a lot in the local Twilight’s Hammer chatter. The Defias, too. I take it you’ve been making all sorts of good friends these last few weeks.”

“What can I say, I’m a likable guy,” I said, spreading my hands in the very essence of innocence and giving him my best trust me smile. Sadly, Shaw was not convinced.

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.”

I snorted and waved my hand dismissively, giving a good show of wounded pride, “Bah, you’re biased. You already know me.” Since it seemed that Shaw had passed on all that he had wanted to, I moved away from the crenel, “Anyway, I do have chaos and mayhem to spread and seeds of dissent to sow, if there’s nothing else?”

Shaw shook his head but then caught my arm as I started away, “I’m serious about this, Khol. You’re racking up some powerful enemies. The kind of enemies a fast sword and a smart mouth can’t touch. The fact that Prestor has gotten herself involved should be enough to give you pause; you’re also in the sights of the Twilight’s Hammer and Defias. Watch your step.”

That caught me off guard. One, Shaw had addressed me by my first name, something he never does without reason. Two, he actually sounded concerned, which might have been faked, but in all the time I’ve known him, Shaw had only rarely ever shown his true feelings. Maybe he’d just gotten that good at faking it, but his concerned seemed…genuine.

Talk about creepy.

Much later, after all the fallout had settled, it would occur to me why he’d sounded so concerned. Despite our differences, Shaw had never questioned my loyalty to the kingdom. For him, this was worth more than all the gold in the world, as his main driving goal in life was the safeguarding of Stormwind by any means necessary. It meant that I was a valuable asset to the protection of the kingdom, freelancer or no. While he would never say as much out loud, that was about as close to actual friendship as he ever got.