Black Steel Pt 1

Dusk descended slowly on Tatjana, the walled capital of like-named province, the last rays of the dying sun playing shadows across the battlements. It was a typical autumn evening; the day had been overcast but dry with ashen skies reneging on their promise of rain. Trade was slow at this time of year as the inhabitants of the city hunkered down for the cold of winter and there had been relatively little traffic in and out of the city’s gates for the last few days.

Watching motionless from the shadows of the nearby woods, Azura sat and waited. Tonight was the night he had been waiting for. For eight days he had contemplated the city from various angles, learning the positions and relative blind areas of the watchtowers and the patrols of the guards. He had slept little up until early today and eaten nothing in his stay outside the walls, aware that his senses and instincts would be keener on an empty stomach.

Tonight the moon entered into its final phase, barely visible as a thin crescent before the birth of the next new moon. Combined with the cloud cover, tonight would be as black as soot.

As the sun dipped below the horizon and darkness took hold across the land, Azura remained perfectly still on the edge of the forest, thinking and rethinking his plan of attack. This would be his toughest and most complex assassination yet. The King of Tatjana had been riding roughshod over the interests of several of his nobles in the royal court and passed a couple of laws and taxes that had upset one too many powerful people. One of these people had tracked Azura down with a plan to force the king to pull his toes in – the murder of his youngest son.

He would be paid well in excess of any fee he’d ever demanded for a job before and as the man had told him, it would be a crime that would go down in history, the sort of thing that would truly grant him a foothold into the top tier of professional assassins.

Azura had come prepared. In place of his normal armour, he wore his jet-black infiltration suit, complete with his black facial shawl. Comprised of painted hardwood, fabric and leather, it afforded little protection, but it would help camouflage him with the shadows and it had none of the clinking metal pieces of a suit or armour. On his back he wore his twin scimitars, his deadliest close quarter weapons, although if things went according to plan he hoped not to have to use them.

Strapped to his chest and waist he had his three purpose-built throwing daggers as well as four razor- edged discs each of which he had coated with a thin layer of poison. Azura usually made little use of poison, preferring to rely on his deadly accuracy to hit a lethal area with every shot, but tonight, if he got into trouble, he couldn’t afford to take any chances with injured guards giving him away. Tonight he would shoot to kill.



Almost two hours after sundown, Azura moved for the first time in hours. It was a quick automatic movement, as if someone had suddenly thrown a switch and brought him to life. Running on all fours he quickly covered the hundred-odd metres to the base of the wall. The gates to the city would be bolted shut and well lit, over the wall was the best option.

The walls of Tatjana were legendary, having withstood sieges many years in length. Fifty metres high at the apex, the titanic fortifications of stone and mortar had stood for centuries. In a fluid movement, Azura crouched and launched himself vertically upwards. Catching hold of edge of one of the titanic blocks forming the wall with one hand, he proceeded to pull himself upwards. Using his powerful Kutrahl night-vision and his clawed hands and feet, he pulled himself up the wall towards the battlements.

Reaching the top he paused for a full thirty seconds, hanging from one arm, listening intently for any sign of movement nearby. Satisfied that no-one was around, he lithely slipped over the parapet and onto the stone path that ran along the top of the ramparts.

Azura’s ears had seldom failed him and indeed there was no-one within earshot – well not for a human. There was a pair of guards holding torches some distance to his left and an occupied tower away to his right. They were talking idly and walking away from him. Azura tucked the knife he had drawn away.
If he were not otherwise occupied he may have stopped to listen in on them before moving on, guards were often privy to information that commoners weren’t and many a valuable fragment of knowledge had been given away through idle talk overheard.

Azura stepped across the walkway. The unfenced edge dropped about 2m down to the plateau ringing the outer wall where defenders would rally and mount catapults during a siege. Beyond this, the city sprawled away, scattered lantern lights along the main streets and in houses outlining the silhouettes of the rooflines.  Dropping down, he checked both ways on this level and crossed the open space to the inside edge of the main wall.

Access to the ground level was normally via enclosed staircases located at fixed intervals along the wall. This would mean going inside earlier than he had intended to, so Azura chose an alternate route down. Along the inside of the wall gigantic banners proudly displayed the green and white Tatjana signet, suspended from bollards by thick ropes. Azura located the nearest one and slid down the rope to the pole across the top of the pennant. Grabbing hold with one hand he took a handful of the fabric and forced his claws through the material. He took one deep breath and let himself fall.

Azura had planned to descend here from the maps he had studied as there was a tall building only 2 or 3 metres from the main wall. Fortunately for him, the banner was of quality construction and the material tearing against his fingers regulated his fall. As he fell, he watched his target building loom into view. With just a few metres to go until the banner ran out almost three stories above the ground, Azura coiled his legs and kicked off against the wall with all his strength towards the roof of the building. His timing was perfect and despite his speed he landed in a roll, making next to no sound as he hit the tiles of the roof.

Aware that the huge standard tearing had made more noise than he had hoped for, he paused for a full minute, listening intently for any sounds of discovery. Nothing. Excellent.

As was typical of most fortified cities of its age, Tatjana had become overcrowded and had been expanded on many times, with new districts cropping up every few decades as more and more residents sought shelter within the walls. As such the buildings fought for every inch of room upon their allotted sections and looking out across the city was like looking across a solid patchwork quilt of coloured tiles, sloping wooden gable roves and landings. Upper stories of houses overhung the small alleyways upon which they were built until they were almost touching and there was seldom more than about 2 metres between consecutive rooftops.



Azura surveyed the city from his vantage point, mentally picking out a path across the roofs. The palace district was a separate walled citadel several blocks away to the North of his position. The palace was a stronghold within a stronghold, where the royal guard would make their last stand if the outer wall was breached. The spires of the keep were the most visible landmark in the city as well as the surrounding countryside. Settling on a likely path, Azura started on his trek towards it.

The roofline sloped upwards gently towards the palace which had originally been built on a raised plateau. Azura darted between chimneys, barely slowing down to asses jumps. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop he encountered no threats to his discovery. Several times guard patrols passed below him as he vaulted across streets and alleyways but no one so much as gave a glance skyward to his fleeting figure.

‘First cardinal rule of not being seen’ mused Azura ‘Stay above head height’.

The distance to the fringe of the palace district wasn’t more than a few hundred metres and Azura covered it quickly. The last fifty metres to the citadel was an open stretch of paved ground, designed to give defending archers clean shots at enemies advancing from the city. The walls here were much more ornate than the outer city walls, coated with a smooth white plaster finish. Each of these posed a unique problem. No matter how he chose to address it, even with the weak moonlight, in the few seconds he would be exposed in a dash across the plaza, he would be rendered visible to any alert guard who happened to be looking in his direction. Also, the surface of the walls, although not strictly unassailable would be very difficult to ascend, especially without being noticed by someone in town.

Azura had planned for and expected these problems and developed a solution. If you can’t go over, go under. Rather than moving to the closest rooftop to the plaza and risk exposure, he stopped several houses short. Climbing down from the roof onto an empty balcony, he proceeded down to ground level via a support pillar.

The dingy alleyway in which he now found himself was perhaps 1.25 metres wide; Azura could easily touch both walls at the widest point. The cobbled ground was damp against his bare feet and rather grimy by human standards – to most Kutrahl it would have been positively immaculate. Azura followed the alley down between the houses running parallel to the palace wall until he found what he was looking for.

Like most modern human settlements, Tatjana had a large and extensive sewer system, carrying waste and storm water out of the city via underground waterways. Azura’s employer held sufficiently high position to have been able to present him with a complete plan of where the access ways to the sewers were and where they went. Secure in peacetime for several decades now, the lust for luxury had overtaken strategic impregnability in the eyes of the city planners and the sewers were also linked to the royal palace. Beneath Azura’s feet ran a pipe large enough to move through leading right underneath the palace walls. Azura inspected the latch on the manhole cover he had located. The lock was a simple type, designed more to help keep the cover firmly closed than to actively keen a determined invader out. Although lock picking was not a skill that Azura could boast that he was particularly good at, the incomplex device provided little challenge.

Shutting down the hatch behind him, Azura slid down the ladder into the bowels of the city. As his powerful night vision adapted to the near perfect darkness, punctuated only by feeble moonlight filtering through drains from the street, he saw he was standing on at the top of a short staircase which led down to a stone walled room. Away to either side parallel to the road above was a tunnel that linked two of the main arteries of the sewer system. This room was an access which workers could use to get to either of the larger pipes.

The air down here was moist and earthy and smelled strongly of sewage. This was potentially the only drawback to using the sewers, upon resurfacing; the smell on his clothes would make it harder to remain undetected. He’d just have to be extra careful. Besides, humans in particular tended to move away from a strong smell rather that towards it.

Stepping out into the pipe he started down the right hand tunnel. The tunnel was just over a metre in diameter and Azura had to duck a little more than usual to fit through it. Water came up almost to his knees and he waded along following the flow. As a Kutrahl, the idea of trudging through raw sewage was nowhere near as abhorrent as it might have been for a human of the time, in fact he noted;  the pipe through which he now walked  was potentially cleaner than the main streets of several Kutrahl settlements he’d been through. The humans were a compulsively clean race he mused, just like them to keep all this under the ground.

He reached the main conduit presently which flowed along under the main street, leading to the gateway of the royal palace. Here the tunnel was a lot wider and featured a walkway alongside the main canal. At a quick trot, Azura set off towards the palace.

Following his memorised set of right and left turns, Azura worked his way slowly but surely through the aqueducts, using whatever walkways were available and wading through the water when necessary. As the pipe divided off to draw waste from various areas, it got steadily thinner. At one intersection Azura had to pick another lock to open a rusted grating as the sewer broke down into further capillaries.

The last few metres to his destination were so tight he had to crawl on all fours with both shoulders touching against the slimy walls. At last the drain opened up into a chamber large enough to stand in. By his reckoning this was the one of the central nexuses for the pipes coming from most of the palace district. On the wall alongside an array of pipes too thin to fit through an alcove held an access ladder leading to a basement access inside the main palace building.

Azura flicked the latch and slowly raised the metal cover of the access. The room was dark so there was unlikely to be anyone there, but Azura still refrained from emerging immediately – patience was a virtue that served the assassin very well indeed.

After hearing nothing to arouse suspicion in the nearby vicinity, he opened the hatch all the way and clambered out. The room he was in was being used as a general storeroom and crates containing various foodstuffs and cloth competed for space in the little chamber.

Across the room, several rolls of linen were stacked in a corner. Azura picked up the closest one and used the fabric to dry his feet and body off as best as he could. Wet footprints throughout the castle would be an unnecessary giveaway.
Content that he had done his best against the grime, he tossed the soiled cloth aside and proceeded to the door.

With his usual caution, he checked for the presence of danger and stepped out into the stairway leading up from the basement. The steps ran upwards in a spiral fashion, bleak stone walls lit up my sparsely separated torches. Staircases inside most castles and fortifications usually went up clockwise, advantaging the right-handed defender fighting against an ascending attacker. Although it wasn’t far to the door at the top, Azura carried his blade in his left hand, just to be safe.
The hallway in which he found himself after emerging from the stairwell was a step up in decoration from the blank walls. Here, banners hung from the plastered walls and torches held in elaborate metal holders provided a warm light. This corridor Azura judged to be part of the guard’s quarters – a high traffic area, even through the night, definitely not somewhere he wanted to spend any more time than he had to.

At the end of the passage, a window looked out into the night from the corner. After checking the coast was clear, he quickly unbolted the shutters and climbed out. Above the window, a ledge ran around the building at the top of the ground floor. Standing on the windowsill, he flicked the shutters closed with his tail and pulled himself up onto the ledge.

The prince’s room was on the top floor of the four storey building. Azura’s plan required he get to the roof first and drop down. Three more stories to go. The walls of the palace were of smoothly finished limestone and plaster. Too risky to climb unless he absolutely had to – even if he could dig his claws in, he would run the risk of the stone crumbling under his weight. He would have to find a new way up.
The ridge on which he stood was too thin to stand with both feet side by side, but Azura negotiated it with a speed little different from his normal two legged run. He followed the course of the ridge around the outside of the palace. On the ground floor, the roof overhung a colonnade running around the edge of the building. This was a double bonus for Azura, since not only did it keep most of the guards in a position where they couldn’t see him, but anyone further away trying to spot him in the shadows above the row of columns would have their night vision so completely obscured by the brightly burning torches, he might as well be invisible.

Rounding a corner onto the west facade of the building, the ridge was broken by a large brick chimney leading up from one of the large banquet halls on the ground floor. This was what Azura had been looking for. Checking the shadows below for anyone who might spot him, he mounted the coarse brick surface and began his climb upwards.

At the top of the flume, Azura paused. There would be at least one or two guards patrolling the rooftop. He drew a knife from his belt and carefully slipped around onto the edge of the battlements and onto the roof.

On the inside of the ornately decorated battlements, the roof was fairly barren, paved with simple stone blocks for strength. At various points, more chimneys snaked up from the bowels of the palace and small blocky looking structures gave access into the palace. The prince’s room was on the edge of the palace’s front face, to the east. Azura was on the right side of the building laterally, but the chimney had come up on the rear and he had to traverse the rooftop to reach his objective.

Across the gloom, Azura quickly spotted a glowing torchlight. The two guards were standing talking under the flame some distance along the battlements. Azura considered the situation. He would have to come back this way once he was done with the prince and if they moved they would be in a position to intercept him on the way back up. This he could not allow.

He quickly picked an attack line through the chimneys to bring him closer undetected. The fact that the two men were engaged in conversation would complicate things and make it almost impossible to down one without alerting the other. He would just have to be quick about it. Nearby, a paver had been chipped at the edge and Azura reached over and picked up the broken piece. This could come in handy.

Slowing down to completely silence his steps, Azura closed in on the untoward pair. Stopping just a few metres away, he crouched down, body coiled, adrenaline flowing in anticipation of the kill. With a dagger clasped in his right hand, he aimed the small piece of rock up and over the heads of the unsuspecting guards. It fell with a clatter some distance behind them.

Perfect. The two instantly broke off conversation and the man facing Azura turned to face the source of the sound. Like a spring suddenly released, Azura launched forwards. The closest guard never saw what hit him. With a lighting movement, Azura reached around the man’s neck and drew a curved line halfway around his neck, slashing both Carotid arteries. The man let out a choked gurgle and began to fall backward. The second man spun back alarmed, just in time to see Azura throw his companion’s body aside and lunge forward with his left arm, hand open, palm up, with index and middle finger outstretched.

He opened his mouth to shout out, but too late. Azura hit him head on with a rising uppercut. The Kutrahl’s clawed fingers punctured the skin of his neck and tore through veins and arteries until Azura’s knuckles pressed against his chin.
Azura paused for a split second to soak in the silence then pulled his arms into his body, letting both men collapse to the ground. ‘Wrong place, wrong time’ he muttered under his breath as he flicked the blood from his hands and stepped nimbly over the bodies.

The prince’s room featured a large, open balcony which provided a sweeping vista out over the palace gardens and the city stretching beyond the palace walls. The red-paved patio was surrounded by planters containing exotic plants from all corners of the continent brought here at great expense for the young royal’s pleasure and the pillars supporting the veranda were ornately carved with images of fish and birds. No luxury had been spared here.

On the deck two of the elite royal bodyguards stood a silent vigil over the courtyard far below. However neither of them suspected any danger from the roof behind them until a pair of silver knives arced out of the darkness, each striking with pinpoint accuracy into the back of their targets’ spines.

Azura dropped onto the ground, as silent as a shadow, a weapon in each hand in case there were more guards he had failed to notice but there were none. He bent over to retrieve his blades, briefly checking for the pulses of each guard just in case his aim had been off by a few centimetres. There was no door through to the inside of the prince’s private quarters the room simply opened up through the columns onto the balcony.

Like a cat stalking its prey, Azura passed through the row of columns and into the prince’s room. The sheer magnitude of the ornamentation staggered him. He remembered thinking that several Kutrahl chieftains had been overdoing it with the decoration back in his homelands, but none of them had anything on this.

All the furniture was of finest quality aged oak with gold trimmings adding colour to their intricate carvings. A small banquet table stood adorned with a complete set of sterling silver cutlery and crockery. As he slunk past, Azura wondered how many extra people could eat at the table if the cuttlery were redistributed so that each only had one knife and one fork.

On the walls, paintings by the kingdom’s most famous artists recreated scenes from the countryside in vivid colour. Of more interest to Azura, several highly polished trophy weapons also hung on gold bracings in several places around the room. Among the Kutrahl, by tradition, the most prized blades were those that had killed their original owners. Azura’s own scimitars had been the undoing of almost ten dynasties of Kutrahl chieftains, each ruler deposed at the end of his own sword by his successor.
He had half a mind to take one of the blades on the wall down and leave the king a real trophy weapon.

The prince’s bedchamber was a small enclave within the larger room. While a dim torch provided some light to the main chamber, this area was cloaked in darkness. Azura stepped up to the edge of the four poster bed with its lavish silken sheets and finely embroidered covers and looked down at the sleeping adolescent. The prince was still only a boy, of perhaps thirteen or fourteen summers and completely unaware of the dark figure standing over him.

Azura was completely unphased by the task of having to murder such a young man in cold blood. In his long and violent past he had taken the lives of children barely old enough to walk, it had been a long time indeed since the last shred of his conscience had slipped away from him. His victims were young or old, rich or poor strong or weak and he was coldly efficient and without remorse.

The boy lay on his back, sleeping soundly. Careful not to wake him, Azura drew a long, straight edged throwing knife and placed one hand gently on the prince’s bare chest, raised the blade and brought it straight down between his thumb and forefinger.

"Never knew what hit'm."
The youth’s body gave a jolt under the impact then sank back into the bed.