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Author information:
Website: http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/books.html
Email: kavrik@hotmail.com
I previously published "Wraith" on the Nifty Archive. It can be found at: http://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/sf-fantasy/wraith/
If you have read "Slipstream", the sequel "Oculus" is now available. If you want to see the cover art, please check my website today.
I like to draw. Artwork of characters featured in this and other stories of mine can be found at: http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/my-artwork.html. Yes, there's a black and white pencil drawing of Kian :). You may want to bookmark the page as I update it with drawings from time to time. Of course you are free to use my drawings for non-commercial purposes if you would like (just give me credit please). I would consider this flattering. Note that there's one new drawing of Andy Callahan from my book "Oculus."
I intend to post a new chapter every weekend. "The Assassin's Apprentice" is a complete fantasy novella. This tale is told in first person present tense.
Chapter Three
An hour has passed, and I fill my stomach with a small meal of bread, meat, and cheese smothered with thick gravy. During this lunch, Talen and I exchange stories, revealing more and more of our past with each word.
His eyes are very big and trusting, and he swallows what I tell him without questioning. When it's his turn to speak, he offers up delightful stories of his own life as a professional thief. Through his narrative, I'm surprised to find that there are kids much younger than I who call this place home. For the first time, I'm surrounded by people who are just as broken as me.
It's humbling to contemplate.
But there are also older men and women here full of wisdom and experience. I listen to their conversations and come to understand they live for the moment, always skirting a translucent curtain that divides the living from the dead.
Talen is loved by the people who live here, and his effect on them is magical.
Even I fall under his spell, wondering what it would be like to make love to him.
I think I would like it a lot, and imagine he's very tight.
Talen brings people together that normally would not mix.
Take Gage and Elliot. These two have been friends for years and were probably very much alike at one point. But with time, they grew apart as each became invested in other things. Gage is about my age, a bit overweight, and a little dim-witted. Elliot is a bit older and is the smart one of the two. However, because of Talen, they remain in each other's orbit. Gage has learned to trust Elliot, and goes along with whatever his friend says.
He's become a born follower. Some people are just like that.
Then there's Trippy. I call him a spook because of his mood swings. They're so huge, they lie somewhere between suicidal and manic, depending on what time of day it is and what drugs he's using.
Trippy's also into knives in a big way...always sharpening them and intimidating whoever happens to be close, by staring at them down the length of the blade. He behaves badly toward me, and I confess to Talen much later that I don't like him very much.
Talen agrees with me, putting his arm around my shoulder. The touch of Talen's skin electrifies my body, but I say nothing, even as my dick swells and pushes down my left leg almost to the kneecap.
"He uses all that knife-sharpening as a means of projecting hostility," Talen states. "He doesn't trust anyone. But I got into a scuffle with him a little over a year ago and almost killed him. I knocked out four of his teeth. Since then, he hasn't messed with me and as long as you stay close, he won't mess with you either. Course, you could kick the remaining teeth out of his mouth, make a necklace of it, and then he'd have a reason to fear both of us."
I've got to admit, a string of human teeth sounds intriguing. I wonder how many teeth are in Trippy's head; Talen's an instant best friend.
Finally, I meet Sly and Misha who seem to complete our gathering of companions. If you've ever met anyone that thinks they're clever and in reality, they're not.... Well, you'd have met Sly. He's a scraggly man in his mid-twenties with bald patches on his skull and the rest of his hair hanging long, limp, and somewhat greasy. Sly's pear-shaped, meaning that his butt and hips are wider than his torso.
Misha, on the other hand, is refreshing in a bright way.
She looks upon the world with the eyes of a woman who has nothing to prove. She's neither a braggart nor a drinker. Physically, she's ugly with a larger-than-normal sized head. But I quickly learn this might be due to a larger-than-normal sized brain.
Misha's very intelligent.
But her hands shake. I think it might be due to nerve damage. You don't pick it out right away, but it's there--that trembling--and it grows more noticeable when she's playing cards.
Nicki's Misha's friend and has gold-plaited hair and a silver laugh. When I say silver I mean it has a clarity to it like the tone of a perfectly made bell. Nicki's part of a troupe that dances in the town square for money. While she does so, another team of thieves sifts through the crowd cutting the strings to pouches and lifting noble men from the burden of expensive jewelry.
I use a piece of bread to mop the gravy pooling on my plate, and Nicki walks over and begins to perform the devil's dance for us.
There's no music in the room, but my eyes can't see anything else except for her narrow, sweaty waist which shines golden in the light. She moves her hips just so, swaying from side-to-side and places one of her feet between Talen's legs near the bulge of his crotch.
That draws my eye as I note a thickening there in his tight pants.
Talen leans against the wall, folding his hands behind his head. And he watches her toss her hair over the shoulder and run her fingers suggestively on the top of her skin. Talen finally breaks down and seizes her about the waist. He pushes his long narrow fingers down the line of her tummy, under the cloth, and they come up wet.
Hell, I can't blame him.
But for the first time in my life, I'm jealous of the girl.
She wanted Talen, and she got him. For the better part of an hour before the dance, Nicki took the curved end of a wooden comb and sucked on it, sliding it repeatedly over her lips, poising it, teasing it on her tongue.
Obviously, she wanted something other than to fix her hair.
I watch Talen and Nicki kiss and share each other's breath. I stare at them...at his soft pink tongue flicking between his lips, which I only see briefly like the flutter of a hummingbird's wings.
Nicki's lips move. A soft moan follows every twitch of Talen's buried fingers.
I tap mine nervously on the table wondering what the other guys around me are thinking. Secretly, I wish I could rub one out because my balls ache.
I know these men wish they were in his place. I'm the only one wishing I was in HER place. I wish for the pleasure of a dark room and Talen's heated sweaty body looking magnificent by the light of the moon. He's got a torso that I imagine resembles mine. But he's probably never been touched by a boy, and I want to be his first. It's one that I can explore and finger and wait until a hole loosens enough that I can comfortably fuck it and still bring pleasure to his throat.
I leave Talen alone, which is more than I can say for the others in the room.
Nice.
My new home belongs to the city, which is a stench-ridden, noisy, and crowded place. It's surrounded on four sides by garbage-choked alleys and narrow streets so unimportant that they have no names. From what I can tell, the building proper has three stories, with each story hanging over the one just below it by a few feet. The walls of the place are white-washed and there are windows all along the main floor and a few narrow ones on the floor directly above and on top. I count several stone chimneys on each side of the building. The bricks are old and pockmarked with ivy and easily climbable. As I'm standing there, I spot a pair of eyes staring down at me from the highest visible point. But when I squint and look again, there's no one there.
Constantine.
The name that Marcel dropped from his lips in my first meeting surfaces in my mind. "Who are you?" I ask to no one. Something tells me that Constantine already knows everything about me. Yet I know nothing of him.
After Talen finishes with Nicki, he catches me rubber-necking a hungry crowd that has encroached on the prone body of a street urchin perished from starvation. I'm two blocks from the thieve's guild. I came here to watch a parade. Everyone I passed for the last hour spoke of one, but this is all I found.
"It's the plague!" some of them exclaim.
How ignorant, I think to myself.
Talen athletically alights the wall where I'm sitting. I smell his clean sweat, but I don't say anything. I watch this drama of marvelously simple people, gasp and point fingers, gathering their expensive clothes and robes about them to save themselves from a disease that doesn't exist.
"Have you ever been anyplace else?" he asks me.
"I've dreamt of other places," I say. "In my mind's eye I've seen faraway lands of forests and jungles. I've seen towering mountains clouded over with mist, revealing their majestic beauty for my eyes alone to behold."
I glance at Talen. He jerks away--a reaction that indicates he might be attracted to me, but is uncomfortable with this feeling. Or am I reading him wrong?
"I've never been out of the country," he says, remorsefully. "I'm seventeen, and I don't know what lies to the north or to the south or across the Bay of Dreams. I was a broken lad when I came to stay here almost a year ago."
He trails off with another story, and I suppose that he's thinking about something that he doesn't necessarily want me to know. I won't prod him for his hidden truth. Everybody that comes to a place like this has a thing buried deep inside. It's a vault in the heart which locks away the tender remains of innocence.
If Talen wants me to know, he'll tell me.
There are three suns in my world, and though I suspect other worlds to exist, I could never imagine a sky not filled with their fire. I watch as first sunset (that time when the first of the three suns disappears completely beneath the horizon) embraces the world. For a moment, everything is brightened with simple colors of yellow and red. Then purple closes in, and the skies darken.
The shadows lengthen.
I feel hungry again. "Can we go inside and eat?"
Talen's sharpening a knife on a stone. "Yeah." He feels around in his belt and pulls out two small engraved copper coins. "I can buy us dinner, Kian."
"I'll pay you back," I say.
Talen regards me with a sober expression. God his eyes are beautiful. Then he laughs. "You're the first thief I've met that's said that! How splendid. If we eat at the guild it costs us less. That way you won't work up much of a debt." He hugs me and for a moment I almost kiss him. "Come, my honest thief. Let's eat."
I follow him joyfully into the guild house where I get a meal and follow him up a set of stairs I've never explored. They're much the same as every other stairwell in the house. But to my surprise, Talen shows me a room at the top that looks out above the entryway and into the guild through a set of double windows crisscrossed with wooden mullions.
I love small wooden rooms.
Talen invites Sly, Misha, and another girl named Ashley to join us. There's a plate glass window just opposite the small fireplace and it fills the apartment with heat.
Over dinner, I crouch back on a stuffed leather chair next to the window and sip from my ale cup. Animated from the alcohol in his blood, Talen devises several clever stories and outlines them for us on the surface of a worn table using his finger.
After dinner, we play cards and take partners. Ashley lays her head experimentally against my shoulder. Misha changes our game to canasta at the turn of the hour, and I wait for a few minutes before I suggest strip poker.
All I want is a chance to beat Talen, to see him naked. Strip poker seems a safe bet.
But it never pans out.
Ashley whispers something to Talen. I can't make out the words...an invitation to fuck her perhaps?
But the change in his mood is considerable. Talen balls his right fist and his angelic mouth that I can only dream of having wrapped around my cock, goes sullen. He tosses his cards and sits back in his chair, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. Then he steeples them before his chest.
There's silence at the table now. I've heard say that an uncomfortable silence breaks every seven minutes. I lament that I'll not see him naked.
"Are you ready for bed, Kian?" he asks.
"Yes, I suppose," I say.
"Let's go and get you a room; tomorrow's going to be a busy day for you. Good evening, gents. Ladies," Talen says, nodding at Ashley and Misha. I could tell something weighs heavily upon his person, but I've no idea how to ask him about it.
I pause at the door.
Unexpectedly, Talen hugs me, and his eyes are filled with sadness and concern.
I realize what must have been said probably concerns me.
I shall strive to post Chapter Four next weekend, but may be a little late or early depending on Thanksgiving. Have a great turkey day, and if you've the time, check out my website.