Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:48:50 +0000
From: Michael Offutt <kavrik@hotmail.com>
Subject: The Assassin's Apprentice Chapter Three -- Gay Science Fiction

This story is protected under international and Pan-American copyright
conventions. Please remember to donate to Nifty if you are financially able
to do so.

      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.