Watcher in the Woods by Robert Liparulo Page A

clawed for the trees and grabbed a branch. His descent jerked to a stop, then the branch snapped and he kept falling. His fingers tore at leaves and twigs. Like a freight train, the ground rushed at him.
    David screamed.

CHAPTER thirteen
    The assassin tumbled over the body of the prince. He realized instantly that the man was intact; it must have been a trick of the light, the shimmering, that had made him think the prince had been torn apart.
    The assassin crashed down against a wood-planked floor. His ankle twisted; the puncture in his side flared with fresh pain. He ignored it. Instead, he rolled away from his adversary, away from any slicing blades the injured man might swing at him. A wall stopped him short. So he twisted and spun and plunged his knife into the prince’s back, cracking through the left shoulder blade to reach the heart. The prince did not utter a gasp of death. He did not spasm in a final effort to retain life. The man had been dead before the assassin’s knife–from the arrows, surely. But the assassin was trained to consider all possibilities before a normal person would think of even one. Could someone else have killed him, someone now hiding?
    He looked around. He was in a small room with doors on opposite walls. A wooden bench, some items hanging on the wall above the bench—a helmet, tunic, an archer’s bow. One door was open, revealing the walls of the crevasse into which he had jumped in search of the prince. Beyond the crevasse, black smoke streaked through a blue sky.
    The door slammed shut. The assassin leaped for it. He tugged and pushed at a circular metal protrusion, but the door did not budge. Light glowed from a torch mounted on the ceiling, but it did not flicker with flames, and when he held his palm up to it, the light did not warm it. He squinted suspiciously.
    A banging noise came from the other door. Quickly, he pressed his foot against the back of the prince and extracted his knife. He swung it toward the door, crouching, ready to spring. With no place to hide, he would simply have to fight whatever confronted him.
    The banging continued, and he realized it was not coming from the door itself, but somewhere beyond. He stepped silently to the door and listened.
    Bang, bang, bang.
    It was not at this door that someone pounded. Perhaps, he thought, the people here knew an intruder had entered their midst. Maybe this banging was an alarm.
    He must have stumbled into secret caves the Sidonians used to escape from their enemies. But why would they have put so much effort into the construction of a subterranean hideaway? The room was a perfect box, its walls smoother than he had ever seen outside of a king’s palace. That’s it , he thought, this place must be a sanctuary for Sidon’s nobility. That’s why the prince, and not commoners, had fled to it. Only a select few knew of it.
    Bang, bang.
    And one of them was beyond the door, obviously deeper into the cave. He put his fingers on the metal knob and pulled. The door remained shut, as he had expected it would. Like the other door, its latch was hidden. Then his hand moved, and the knob turned with it. He heard a click, and the slab of door came loose from the wall. He inched it open and peered through the crack. He saw a corridor stretching out of sight. It was narrow, as a tunnel should be. Like the room, however, the walls had been carved smooth and shaped into a rectangle. Fifteen feet away, a man studied the frame of another door on the other side of the corridor. While the assassin watched, the man slammed a tool into it: bang, bang .
    What would he be doing at a time like this? Certainly, he knows about the city’s besiegement.
    But the man’s relaxed posture and casual movements indicated no knowledge of the war outside or of the assassin’s intrusion.
    Good, the assassin thought, the man will be dead before he realizes his ignorance.
    At that moment the first door blew open.