Page 4 of Zel
Immortality not having been stolen from him was what quelled Lothar’s rage. He had bidden Zel’s parents to prepare for a different outcome to the sorcerer’s pact, one that would benefit them all. They would raise their daughter to be the sorcerer’s assassin and take all the tower’s secrets and treasures for the guild.
Zel being born a boy had not changed that goal. He needed to seduce the sorcerer enough to be kept for the entire month until he discovered a vulnerability in the sorcerer’s immortality and where it originated from, but he could not seduce the sorcerer so much that he attempted to bed Zel before their wedding night.
For many winters, Zel had been taught the ways of both seduction and the blade.
He was talented at both.
“The thief is mine!” Zel affirmed, flying past his father with a leap and crouching into a faster sprint, using speed only someone as delicately built and nimble as he could achieve.
Quickly hitting a cross-section at the end of the alleyway, Zel looked left, right, then forward again toward the main streets.The shadows were too dark for him to discern which direction the bandit had gone, but after another scan with his sharp eyes, Zel spotted a figure escaping into a building to his left and gave chase.
Tonight’s mission was Zel’s most important. With this kill, he would ascend to a full member of the Thieves Guild. The guild had always been an assassins guild when the Queen demanded it—or when Lothar did. They remained the Thieves Guild in name, but every member was trained to fight and kill, even if not everyone ended up having to. Zel had dealt the finishing blows for seven assassinations. Tonight would be his eighth, leaving the sorcerer as his ninth, a number of good fortune to ensure his success.
And he would succeed. He had to, or the lie he had been forced to live for twenty winters would amount to nothing but more misfortune.
The building the bandit had run into was a home, and he had locked it tight behind him. No matter. There was a second story, and the awning over the front door gave Zel the perfect platform to climb and reach the ledge of an open window. He ascended with ease and barely a sound on the awning when he landed or when he leapt from it for the window a moment later. Inside there was a candle flickering, offering enough light that Zel saw when the bandit ran past the room.
Zel recognized him by the bright blue hood he wore, foolishly visible, when Zel’s outfit for such midnight prowling was all dark colors, mostly black, as was standard in the Thieves Guild, but with some deep greens, browns, and a violet cloak, adding dimension to what would otherwise be too flat a black against true shadows. His idea, which Lothar had commended when it proved to work.
He kept his hood low to hide the golden brilliance of his hair, the winding length of it tucked beneath his cloak. It had grownso long that it needed to be braided and further twisted around itself to avoid it dragging on the ground. The weight alone should have caused a permanent ache in Zel’s neck, but perhaps because of his magical diet of self-named salads, he never ached at all, not there nor anywhere.
Zel never got sick. He never got injured. No one was certain if the immortality his mother hadn’t received had somehow been bestowed upon him, but he had never suffered so much as a scratch or scuffed knee. Whenever Sophie had attempted to cut his hair as a child, the shears had suffered for it and became blunt as they failed to give him even a trim.
But while another could not cut Zel’s hair, by the time he was six, he had learned that if the shears were in his hands,hecould. At the time, Zel had threatened to slice it all off, for it was a constant reminder, one of many, of his lot in life, but his parents had pleaded with him not to. Not only did it aid in their subterfuge that Zel was a girl, but if anyone had learned that his hair could be cut by him, they might assume the same was true of any method of harming him. It could have been used against them, when they had needed every advantage on their side to ensure Zel reached adulthood unscathed.
If others wondered how Zel’s face-framing fringe remained short while the rest of his hair grew exponentially, they never asked, probably assuming it was some strange part of his magic—and not that Zel occasionally gave his fringe a snip.
Silent as a slinking cat, Zel once again gave chase. He had to stop the bandit before he harmed the owner of this home or slipped away to another. How brazen of anyone to have left their door unlatched in this kingdom for a thief to slip in, when the fight for resources had become one of life and death.
The troubling harvests since before Zel was born had grown worse over the decades until recent seasons when it had been declared a true famine—the Great Famine. Most people barelyhad one meal with fresh greens, and Zel was gifted magical lettuce daily. It arrived like clockwork on their back stoop every afternoon, and Zel ate it as a salad with dinner. He could hardly complain when the leaves were delicious. What he hated was the envious looks he received from neighbors whenever they saw the lettuce arrive.
Zel remembered vividly the day a childhood bully had attempted to steal some, saying that all the warnings about instant death being the reward for anyone who ate the lettuce other than Zel were lies. But as soon as one of the leaves touched the bully’s tongue, he’d melted into a pile of rotting flesh. Zel would never forget that smell, but it had well prepared him to not be fazed by the sight nor scent of death.
The same had happened to one of Lothar’s guards, Zel was told, for Lothar had not believed the warnings either. He had been sensible enough to bid another to test it, and Zel’s parents had been there to witness the melting of the first flesh pile.
Slicing a throat or piecing a heart or temple with his dagger hardly affected Zel at all anymore. And he could defend as well as sneak. His dagger-wielding hand was covered in a leather gauntlet that extended up his forearm, with several metal plates layered along the backside. With it, he could fend off a blade aimed at him as easily as if he wielded a shield.
Creeping along the wall of the hallway, Zel heard rustling as if the bandit was rummaging through something in the next room. Stealing from some random innocents when he had already been caught in the midst of theft?
Any pity Zel felt for this man fled him, and he readied himself for his duty. He waited. His parents and the other thieves who were called upon as assassins had trained him to have endless patience, for that patience would be tested when he faced the sorcerer.
The bandit exited the room, and just Zel’s luck—he was usually lucky, which others guessed was another benefit from the lettuce—he turned in the opposite direction from Zel, leaving himself exposed.
Zel leapt and tackled the bandit to the floor, stabbing his dagger between the man’s ribs right into his heart. He ripped the dagger free with a twist on extraction to ensure a swift bleeding out and death within less than a minute. Then he rolled the man over to watch the light leave his eyes. Kills only counted if the final moment of death was witnessed, an old Thieves Guild superstition.
A month from tomorrow, sooner if possible but no later, Zel would be watching the light leave the sorcerer’s eyes, or the sorcerer would be watching the light leave his.
“R-run…” the bandit said with his last breath, but he did not keep his fading eyes on Zel. He tilted his head back to look toward a room at the end of the hall.
Zel noticed the sack the bandit had been carrying, spilled now onto the floor beside the body. It was just clothes. Personal items. Nothing of value. This was the bandit’s home, made clearer when Zel looked up and saw a child cowering in the far room’s doorway.
“P-Papa?”
There could be no loose ends, no witnesses. It was Thieves Guildlaw. The Queen did not tolerate revenge quests from friends or family of the deceased left alive.
The little girl in a plain nightdress too small for her clutched a patchwork doll to her chest. She stood immobilized and shivering as Zel stepped over her father’s body to move toward her. She could not have been older than five or six.
“Are there others in this house?” Zel demanded, using his higher, feminine pitch that was second nature to him now. “A mother? Siblings? Anyone at all?”
