Night guild 2, p.1
Night Guild 2, page 1
Night Guild 2
DB King
Copyright © 2022 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
DB King Facebook Group
Want more books about magic using main characters? Grab recommendations and be with folks who share your love for magical books!
Join the Facebook group
Support DB King on Patreon & Hang out on Discord!
Read books before they’re on Amazon, see exclusive artwork, and check out sneak peeks into the writing process on DB King’s Patreon.
Become a Patron today at: https://geni.us/DBKing-Patreon
Hang out with me on Discord
Free progression Fantasy Novel!
Join my email newsletter to receive a free ebook of the progression fantasy novel, Hellion Mage.
Contents
DB King Facebook Group
Support DB King on Patreon & Hang out on Discord!
Free progression Fantasy Novel!
Contents
Series by DB King
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
DB King Facebook Group
Support DB King on Patreon!
Free progression Fantasy Novel!
Series by DB King
Apocalypse Knights
Crafter’s Fate
Dragon Magus
Dungeon of Evolution
Elemental Mastery
Fatehaven Farm
Kensei
Mage’s Path
Night Guild
Ranger’s Magic
Shinobi Rising
Spellweaver Codex: Elder Mage Chronicles
Summoner’s Shadow
The Last Magus
War Wizard
World End
Chapter 1
Ronan Renzo, assassin, thief, trained man of the Night Guild, sat cloaked in the deep shadow of a tall building on the outskirts of Trentum city. The sun shone brightly, but Ronan remained cloaked in shadow as he stood next to a tall chimney stack that cast a veil of inky blackness around him. From the top of his head to the tips of his tools, darkness concealed him.
Hair as black as shadow, dark curls, olive skin, and dark eyes all showed Ronan to be a native of the Twelve Isles, that prosperous and beautiful southern island principality whose master guilds were the wonder of the neighboring nations and the known world beyond.
Trentum City, a sprawling, packed metropolis, spread out all around Ronan in an opulent flow of white stone and red tile, gleaming polished marble and high-quality glass. The Twelve Isles archipelago, each island divided up with narrow canals of sea water crossed by wooden bridges, was almost entirely covered in the densely populated but picturesque urban sprawl of the city.
Now, late in the evening, the low summer sun sinking over the azure sea in the west turned the city into a mysterious landscape of black shadows and brightly-lit stone.
To the north of the Twelve Isles, across a narrow stretch of sheltered sea, the continent of Lithia stretched for hundreds of miles north, east, and west. The guilds of the Twelve Isles were known throughout the civilized kingdoms of Lithia as the center of mastery in any art or trade one could name.
The philosophy and the economy of the island principality was based around this mastery of every craft and skill. While other countries exported goods—gold, silver, coffee, glass, spices—the Twelve Isles exported mastery. From all the lands of Lithia, wealthy families of the many principalities would send favored heirs, servants, or beneficiaries to train at the guilds and then return to benefit their home kingdoms with their knowledge and expertise. The training the Twelve Isles provided was beyond compare. Nobody did it as well as the guilds of Trentum City.
This unique and excellent situation had been developing organically in the Twelve Isles for several hundred years, until the island principality had become defined, ruled, and built entirely on the activity and reputation of the hundreds of guilds and sub-guilds that populated its busy streets.
In the Twelve Isles, a guild existed for everything. The only other aspect of life as ubiquitous as the guilds was the adherence and dedication to their vast pantheon of gods. There were gods for everything, too, from the gods of the largest guilds, like those of the merchants or financiers, down to the gods of the smallest aspects of day-to-day life, or even of individual places. For a tavern to have a specific god who oversaw a particular corner of the bar, or for a baker to have his own unique gods of salt, flour, and yeast, was not unusual.
The people of the Isles had a saying: “As many guilds as there are gods,” but that was not strictly true. Though no one had ever undertaken the thankless task of counting every guild and god in the city, it was commonly assumed that if a count was taken, it would be the gods who would win out.
In continental Lithia, they worshiped gods as well, of course. However, as common as worship was in many places, belief in the deities in most places was little more than tradition, and the gods themselves were treated more like good luck charms, or as superstitions, rather than anything effective or worthy of actual respect or reverence.
Not so in the Twelve Isles. Here, from the bustling heart of inner Trentum’s financial district, to the humblest inn on the outskirts of the smallest residential island, the gods were real, revered, and effective. A man who prayed to a god could expect to have his prayer answered, assuming his request was within the god’s power to bestow. The relationship of the people with their gods was one of the biggest factors in the success of the island and its many entrepreneurial ventures.
In many ways, Ronan Renzo and his two closest companions, Eric and Diana, were no different from any other member of the Twelve Isles population. In other ways, however, they were very different. Not all guilds in the Twelve Isles were respectable or widely known. The same was true for the gods that went with those guilds. There were many secret guilds, small organizations of people who, for whatever reason, did not wish their business to be known. There were guilds of criminals, guilds of smugglers, guilds of the kind of low thugs who could be hired to undertake dirty work for a good price and keep their mouths shut afterwards.
But Ronan’s guild was unusual in that it straddled the fine line between secrecy and fame, between darkness and respectability. Those who belonged to the Night Guild were adherents to the Night God, and their power was in the shadows.
As the shadow from the chimney stack shifted with the changing light of the sun, Ronan subtly moved his position to stay in the shadow. His clothing consisted of soft boots of black leather, a tunic, leggings as tight as a second skin, and a cloak that fell as supple water from his shoulders and down to the backs of his knees. The boots were soft enough to allow him a perfect grip while climbing and a silent step when tracking a target. His gloves were made of a similar black leather, so that he would leave no mark on a window pushed silently open, nor leave a trace of blood from a cut on a wall he had climbed.
Around his belt was a toolbelt made of soft black fabric, in which was contained in a multitude of pockets the many tools and tricks of his assassin’s trade.
While Ronan’s boots and gloves were made from a well-dyed, supple leather, his cloak, tunic, and leggings were of an extraordinary fabric darker than dark that absorbed all light and reflected nothing. An assassin wearing this clothing with his hood raised would appear as a void, an absence of light and color, rather than as a person—a living shadow.
The clothing had the remarkable ability to keep its wearer warm in cold weather, cool in hot weather, and dry in wet weather. Ronan had never figured out the exact make up of the fabric, and he had never asked. He had never seen a fabric like it before, and its strangeness stoked his curiosity; however, part of the philosophy of the Night Guild was that a member should not ask too many questions unless absolutely necessary. So, for now, Ronan just accepted the marvelous power of his ultra-black garments and the fact that the secrets of their creation were a mystery.
The garments being magical did not surprise him. Magic was part of his trade. Before he had begun his training at the guild, he would not have used the word magic to describe the abilities he had learned. In the Twelve Isles, those powers and strange effects which could be conjured through the intercession of gods were not commonly referred to as magic. However, in the other countries, where the relationship with gods was different, the powers that the Night Guild members used would have been referred to as magic, sorcery, or with even darker and less kind words.
Ronan had become used to using the word.
The magic of the gods of the Twelve Isles did not usually manifest itself in as dramatic ways as the magic of the Night Guild assassins. The Night God granted allowed incredible powers to his disciples; an accomplished assassin could manifest the power to regrow a severed limb, o r even, if the Night God favored such an extreme effect, to return from death.
But it was not for any such dramatic reason that Ronan was now sitting quietly and still in the shadow of the tall chimney stack on top of a tower that housed a small sub-guild of medicine mixers. He was waiting here for Diana, his companion and close colleague in the Night Guild.
Her presence nestled in his mind.
During their training over the last two years, they had slowly managed to become proficient at the art of transferring their thoughts to one another and being continually aware of the other’s presence through this telepathic connection.
For assassins, the ability to communicate silently was a very powerful tool, though as with all things it was not infallible. Stress, excitement, a sudden fright, all these things could disrupt the magical effect of the assassin’s abilities, sometimes with the potential for disastrous effects. This not only applied to the ability to communicate telepathically, but also to the ability to hold powerful disguise spells in place. Only with constant meditation and practice could the assassins get better at maintaining these skills, and they used them every day.
Ronan had been watching a house for two days, moving with the shadow of the chimney stack to keep himself hidden, and waiting for any sign of movement from within. So far, he had seen nothing. Diana, for her part, had been elsewhere in the city, investigating a lead they had picked up on the presence of a cell of rival assassins within their city.
Now, Ronan was waiting for Diana. She had sent him a message to let him know that she had discovered something. She wanted to speak to him face to face.
As he waited, he kept a lookout over the rooftops around him. As he felt Diana’s presence in his mind grow stronger, he knew she was approaching. Like him, her stealth abilities were so advanced that even without her using any magical power, she would be hard for him to spot. Eventually, three rooftops away, her shifting shadowy figure caught his eye. He glanced over and saw a small flicker of movement. She leapt from roof to roof, approaching him, and then disappeared from view again. A moment later Diana appeared on the edge of his rooftop, jumping up onto the tiles and moving as lithe and as silently as a cat across the red clay tiles that were ubiquitous on the roofs of the buildings in Trentum city.
Diana was not a native of the Twelve Isles. Unlike Ronan’s classic dark islander coloring, her hair was light brown, and her eyes were a light blue-gray. Though her face and hands were tanned from her years in the sunny southern climate of the Twelve Isles, this was not the natural tone of her skin. When she had first arrived, Ronan had noted the pale bands of skin at her wrists, where the sleeves of her robe had shaded the skin underneath from the hot sun. She had a thick crop of freckles around her nose and cheeks, and that was also unusual for this part of the world. They were still just visible under the deep brown of her Twelve Isles tan.
Diana came from the small Kingdom of Ghennet, a landlocked country in the north-western portion of the continent of Lithia, hundreds of miles north of the Twelve Isles. When Ronan had first met her and heard about her origins, he had not known how close a part the Kingdom of Ghennet was destined to play in his own story.
All unknown to him, the fates had conspired to drag both him and Diana, and their companion Eric, into a tangled conspiracy which revolved around a secret organization from Ghennet. This was the Silent Brotherhood. They were ruthless, a fanatical sect of worshippers of the northern god Mala. They were not unknown in the Twelve Isles, and Ronan had heard of them before, but they had seemed but a distant and irrelevant curiosity in the past.
That was before they killed his father.
Ronan and his companions had come up against the assassins of the Silent Brotherhood, a strange, gray-clad group, and discovered that they were hunting a cadre of dragon eggs that had been stored in a bank vault in Trentum city. The inexplicable thing was, however, that as far as Ronan and his friends could tell it was the Silent Brotherhood themselves who had stored the eggs in the vault, and then sent their own assassins to steal them back.
Whatever the answer to that riddle might be, Ronan and his companions were on the track of the gray Silent Brotherhood assassins, with the goal of hunting down any who remained in the city and finding out, if possible, what their story was and how they had come to be tunneling into the vault to steal dragon eggs that their own organization had placed there.
“Wait till you hear what I’ve found out,” Diana said with a grin as she joined him in the shadow of the chimney stack.
“What have you discovered?” Ronan said. “Have you found out why the Silent Brotherhood would send a group of assassins to rob their own bank vault?”
“Not exactly,” Diana replied, “but only two of the gray assassins were involved in the tunneling. We were told by one of the diggers that there were ten assassins in total, but I’m hesitant to take his word. We know for a fact that there were at least two more, besides the tunnelers, plus that strange old woman who had the brain-fogging magic. I may have found out where they went.”
Ronan raised his eyebrows and gestured for her to tell him more.
“When the Silent Brotherhood assassins were tunneling into the vault,” she said, “they started their task from that disused building a couple of blocks away from the bank,” she said, gesturing over the street.
“The building I’ve been fruitlessly watching for the last two days,” Ronan said gloomily.
“Exactly,” Diana said with a grin. “Well, while you were watching the building, I scouted the surrounding area. I came across a street vendor who passed up and down that road at least six times a day. I approached the vendor in disguise and got her talking. The Silent Brotherhood thought they were being secretive; they did not account for the observant nature of some of the more humble Twelve Isles residents. This woman had noticed the gray-clad strangers coming and going from the building. She thought their garb was unusual and mentioned it to her husband. The husband is a member of a pie maker guild, and he works selling his wares in another part of the city. The pie maker guild has a guildhouse near to the Outlander Dock, in the north of Trentum. It was the husband who spotted more of these unusually dressed strangers, going in and out of a small house near the place where he works. He mentioned it to his wife, who mentioned it to me. She wasn’t able to give me the exact address, but I know which street it’s on.”
“Excellent work!” Ronan said. “That must be their other base. Have you gone to have a look at it yet?”
Diana shook her head. “I thought it would be best to get in touch with you first and see if you wanted to come along with me. It was a while back that the street seller’s husband saw the gray-clad figures going in and out of the house, at least a week. To be honest, I don’t think that there is much chance of finding them still in place, but I think we should go and have a look as soon as possible nonetheless.”
“I think we should get in touch with Eric,” Ronan said after a moment’s thought. “Just in case there are any of the gray assassins still there, it would be well for us to be at our full strength if there is any fighting to be done.”
“I agree,” Diana said. “Eric is back at the Night Guild working on his research into the dragon eggs. I will send him a message.”
She closed her eyes, and her face became abstracted and thoughtful. Ronan half heard, half felt the hum of her thought transference magic as she aimed a powerful stream of communication across the city to where Eric sat in the library of the Night Guild, several miles away.
Ronan smiled to himself to see Diana’s progress in this magic. Of the three of them, it had been Diana who had encountered the most difficulty when they had begun to learn the thought transference technique. Now, she was as proficient in it as any of them, and more focused and powerful in it than Ronan, though Eric was perhaps more instinctively controlled when using the magic.
When they had begun doing the thought transference magic, Diana would not have been able to effectively transfer her thoughts to Eric without Ronan being able to pick up on them too. Now, she sent a focused communication, and Ronan could tell that keeping that focus was an easy thing for her to do.
