Stone Pass Keep - Working Title

Chapter 3 - The Assassin

Chapter 3

 

The Assassin

     

      It was midnight before Guiren had finished up his business in the Abbey’s Library.  Like most monks he was an avid reader and had spent the last five hours after chapel in his favourite pastime.  Normally he would have taken the book to his private chambers and done his study there, but the O’Sharin codex, along with all the other rare texts, was forbidden to leave the Library walls.  At first Guiren had started to read the ancient book to learn a little more about his famous ancestor, Hudan Bashier, but later as he became more interested in the story told by the court bard O’Sharin, he began the slow and painstaking task of copying the ancient text.

      The copy he kept with him and would often sit down to read the stories contained within when he had a spare moment during the day.  When he did his copying at night time he took little notice of the sentences he copied, to do so was a mistake that most scribes learn early in their carrier.  He had found out at an early age that to try to make sense while copying waisted valuable time.  He had also found out that little of the O’Sharin text made sense immediately, a lot of it was recorded in nattering rhyme that seamed to go on about nothing, and yet other parts were as easily understood as any other book.

      Guiren was not a young man, but to most he looked to be near thirty, in true age he was nearly sixty, his youth was one of he benefits of his profession.  He stood at just over six feet tall with reddish brown hair and a flowing red beard.  He was broad chested and for a monk was well muscled, in his younger days he had trained with the rapier and had kept up his training, though in more refined arts, when he had joined the order of Borshak.  Essentially Guiren was like any other monk in the Abbey, he went to chapel, he prayed, he made wine and did the other tasks that were asked of him.  It was about there that the similarities ended and the differences started, from the very first day that he had arrived at the Abbey he had been trained as a Defender of the Faith.

      He was only sixteen when he had declined his right to the thrown and defied his father’s wishes.  At his birth he had been named heir to the Hudan Thrown and was raised to be the king when his father passed it onto him.  Perhaps he would have, if he hadn’t got the calling to join the priesthood.  His father, a proud man, was shamed by what his eldest son had done and vowed that few would know what Huiren had decided.  Thus it was that the then King’s most trusted servants faked a hunting accident and arranged to have a fake Huiren buried.  When word reached the Abbey where Huiren had fled to, it was decided, for his own safety, that the young prince would cease to exist in both title and name.  Thus it was that Huiren became Guiren and all that had known who he truly was where forbidden to ever speak of it.

      Over the months that followed a story was invented to cover Guiren’s lack of parentage.  Although the clergy frowned on open lies, it had developed a system of bypassing its own rules and so through the use of rumour and oversights on the hierarchy’s behalf it became generally accepted that Guiren was a runaway fleeing parents that had treated him bad.  Some members of the hierarchy justified looking the other way on the untruths by the fact that it was close enough to the real truth, to Guiren it just proved that the rules could be bent, or at least when the hierarchy deemed it so.