The Assassins of Tamurin

by S. D. Tower

  I didn’t at all like the sound of this “something else,” so I listened very carefully indeed.

  “Because you have felt the wraiths,” she said, “you can now experience certain other emanations from the Quiet World. From time to time, I may need to speak to you from a distance, and it is by this means that I will do so. These emanations are under my control and you need not fear them, although their character may cause you some discomfort. You will be trained to recognize such sendings. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mistress Nilang.”

  “Good.” She clapped her hands and called out loudly, “It’s done.”

  The door opened and Tossi entered the hall. She surveyed us and then said to the sorceress, “Well?”

  “The Despotana has two brave young women here,” Nilang said. “I’ve seen strong men disgrace themselves under the same test. They’ll serve her well.”

  “I’m so glad,” Tossi said, her face suddenly radiant, and she hugged us both. I was so happy I almost wept. Dilara and I had been tested, and we’d both passed. It made me feel proud and superior, as if we’d found a place among a secret and exceptional few. Which, indeed, we had.

  “Come in, everybody,” Tossi called, and instantly the others burst into the hall, surrounding us with laughter and praise. The memory of the wraiths was suddenly far away, and when I looked around for Nilang, she had gone.

  “Scary, wasn’t it?” Neclan said. “Don’t say it wasn’t, because it scared me. But you’re all right now, aren’t you?” “We’re fine,” I said. “But now can we please find out what’s going on here?”

  “You still haven’t guessed?” Temile asked. “How slow of you.”

  “For pity’s sake,” Dilara burst out, “stop it! Tell us!”

  “Tossi?” Kidrin asked, and Tossi nodded. Kidrin paused dramatically, like an actress about to deliver a killing line. “Three Springs,” she said, “is a school for spies.”

  “It’s really a school for spies?” Dilara asked.

  It was early evening, not long before supper. Tossi and Dilara and I were sitting in the courtyard garden of the Fourth Terrace, under the mist trees that were now coming into golden blossom. Beyond the terrace’s stone balustrade was the view: the deep shadowy cleft of the valley, whose far wall was a mountain clad in forest, and beyond that another peak and then another, all the way to the northern horizon. “That’s exactly what it is,” Tossi replied.

  “We call it the Midnight School, partly because of Mother’s nickname and partly because we keep it wrapped in a very secret darkness. The Heron Guardsmen who bring our supplies know it’s more than a sanctuary, because they help the departing girls get on their way. But they don’t know much else, and they’re oath bound to Mother not to ask questions or talk. They also know Nilang’s involved, and that would bridle their tongues, even if their oath didn’t.”

  Mother, she went on, had founded the Midnight School the year after I came to Repose. Tossi was the senior of its first three students, and there were five instructors to teach them, headed by Master Aa and his wife. In the five years since, seventeen young women had completed their training and gone out into the world to be weavers, perfumers, bakers, and owners of wine shops. And to work for Mother. “Where?” I asked.

  “Here and there,” Tossi said with a smile. “You only know that kind of thing when you need to.”

  “But why?” Dilara wanted to know. “What’s it all for?"

  “Knowledge,” Tossi said. “People think that arms, men, and wealth are power—and so they are. But without knowledge, these can be lost between one dawn and the next. An army can be destroyed because it doesn’t know where its enemy lurks. A besieged city falls because its governor doesn’t know his second in command has been bribed to open the gates. A merchant is ruined because he doesn’t know his competitors have conspired against him.

  “So, you see, strength without knowledge is brittle and easily broken. But even a lesser strength, if it’s multiplied by knowledge, can overcome a much greater power. We are Mother’s eyes and ears in the world; through us she gains the knowledge she needs to protect Tamurin from its enemies. Particularly, as you know, from the Sun Lord and his Chancellor but also from the other Despots. Though she does have friends among the Despots, and she helps them occasionally with what she knows.”

  “But how do we get such knowledge?” I asked, feeling very inadequate. “And how do we send it to her? How do we know what she wants?”

  “You’ll be trained. For example, when you’re out in the world, instructions will be sent to you from time to time. But you won’t hear from Mother directly. A man may come to your shop, for example, and hand you a letter folded in a certain way, and you will give him a report. Or a woman will say certain words you’ll recognize, and you’ll go to a tree in a certain place to collect a message. Perhaps the message will tell you what information you are to obtain, or perhaps it will instruct you to carry out a particular action on such and such a day.”

  Suddenly struck by the solution to an old mystery, I exclaimed, “Was that who Master Lim was? One of Mother’s secret messengers?”

  “Exactly so,” Tossi replied. “Although I still have no idea why she sent him so far south. She doesn’t tell me everything she’s doing, you see. Just as much as I need to know. It’s better that way.”

  “But then it’s not only us who work for Mother,” Dilara said. She sounded disappointed—as I was also, for I wanted us to be completely exclusive. I remembered the nondescript people who came and went from Repose and realized they were the counterparts of Master Lim. But I didn’t want to be like them.

  “By no means is it only us,” Tossi said. She leaned forward and her tone became emphatic. “But remember this: All rulers are at war all the time, even while they claim friendship and brotherhood with other rulers. These are secret wars, hidden from almost everyone, but their victories and defeats can overthrow a ruler in a night or destroy his army in an aftemoon. We of Three Springs are by far the most important of Mother’s soldiers, because we are the hidden warriors in the thick of the fight, the ones who do the hardest work, the most dangerous, the most desperately needed. All the others—the men who carry the messages, the women who leave you a purse of coins—can be replaced.But you can’t. To Mother, every one of you is a gem beyond price, because it is you who slip into the most carefully hidden sanctuaries of our enemies, to learn the secrets they dare not breathe even to themselves. In doing so you protect us from defeat and ensure our victories.”

  “But how,” Dilara asked, “are we to do such things?” “You’ll be trained, as I said. That will take between one and two years, depending on your aptitude and any special skills Mother may want you to learn.” She tumed her gaze to me. “You, for example, Lale—when you leave here, you’ll probably be going to Master Luasin’s school in Istana.” After several moments, during which I tried to find my tongue, I said, “I will?"

  “I think so, if your promise as an actress holds true. And, Dilara, while you may not become a weaver as soon as you leave the Midnight School, a fine loom awaits you someday. I believe that’s what you want.”

  Silence fell. A flock of wine finches flew down into one of the mist trees and settled in the branches, twittering. The evening sun tumed their violet plumage to crimson and purple, rich amid the flowers’ gold. I stared at them, contemplating the fact that I might become an actress after all.

  “You’ll also be trained to fight,” Tossi went on. “That’s what Master Aa and his instmctors are for. When they’ve finished, not even a veteran swordsman of the Sun Lord’s guard will be able to touch you. That’s why we have no guards here; we don’t need them.

  “But there’s something else you must know, and it’s this: To defend oneself, one must sometimes kill. You will learn how to do that, too, silently and without blood or struggle. You are to be not only spies but also, if need be, assassins.” If the rest seemed strange, this last was unimaginable. I’d heard Sulen cryi
ng out in the sickroom before the fever took her, and I’d seen two or three criminals hanged in Chiran, so I knew what people looked like and sounded like as they died. But the possibility that I might someday kill someone seemed as remote as the ruby mountains of Narappa-lo.

  “Assassins?” Dilara said. She sounded curious rather than surprised. “We might really have to kill somebody?”

  “You might. But all this is for you to learn later. Ah, there’s the supper gong. Come down with me and we’ll eat together.”

  That night, as Dilara and I lay in our beds in the darkness, I said, “Do you think you could really kill somebody?”

  A pause. Then she said, “Yes, if I had to. There are people I’d like to see dead, people from the time before Mother found me. I think I could do it, if I knew I’d never be caught. What about you?”

  I remembered Riversong and its villagers, and Feriti and Adumar who would have kicked me to death if the priest hadn’t stopped them. I remembered all the others who had bullied me, hit me, starved me, and called me a useless good-for-nothing and a thief. I hadn’t thought about them for a long time except fleetingly. But now a breaker of rage swept over me and I saw Adumar with a knife in her belly, her eyes staring in shock, blood sliding out of her mouth. I saw Feriti choking her breath out in a hemp noose, and Detrim with his head lying beside him in the dirt.

  Astonished at my fury, I tried to drive it back into its lair, and more or less succeeded. My heart slowed and I unclenched my fists.

  “Well, would you?” Dilara prompted.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Dilara emitted a low laugh. “But I doubt if Mother would let us do away with somebody just because we were mad at him. She’d have to order it, wouldn’t she?”

  “I suppose.” I pondered this. I reckoned I could kill if I were defending myself. But could I take a life only because Mother said I must?

  Then I realized that Mother would order only the deaths of our enemies, so obeying her would be the right thing to do. Moreover, we were soldiers in a secret war, and war made the whole business different. Nobody thought soldiers did wrong because they killed other soldiers in battle. In fact, the more enemies a soldier dispatched, the more highly his officers and fellow warriors thought of him.

  “Maybe it’ll never happen,” I said. “Maybe we’ll just have to find information for her.”

  “Maybe,” Dilara murmured.

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” I said. “It might be fun.”

  “It might be,” she answered, then fell silent. Through the open window I could see stars. I thought again about Riversong and that made me think about being a foundling and about my real mother and father. I rarely did this any more, although I vaguely recollected that searching for my family was one reason I’d left Riversong. Maybe, once I was out in the world, I could try to find out who I really was.

  But then I realized that even if I did find my real blood, I wouldn’t dare tell them I was their daughter. Being at Three Springs had already given me too many secrets. I could never risk betraying Mother, even by accident—and not just because of what Nilang’s wraiths would do to me if I did. It was because I loved Mother so much.

  I would never find my parents, anyway. It was a big world, and there were so many people in it. My only small comfort was to remember that I did have ancestors, because Nilang herself had said that one had helped save me in the Quiet World. Back when I was fifteen. I’d twice secretively tried to summon that ancestor, but nothing had happened and I’d never tried again.

  “Dilara,” I whispered, “do you think about your mother very often?”

  But Dilara only snored, and after a while I fell asleep.

  Ten

  Discipline at Three Springs was very strict. We rose at dawn and meditated for an hour before breakfast, no matter how our stomachs complained. Our instructors took these sessions seriously. Master Aa’s wife, Mistress Ipip, supervised them, and she would apply a light cane smartly to the shoulders of anyone who dozed off.

  We had five instructors, of whom Mistress Ipip was the only woman. Like Nilang, they were of the race called the Taweret, from the Country of Circular Paths. I believe all five were related, although I never understood exactly how, because they calculated kinship differently from us Durdana. Cousins appeared to be more important kin to them than brothers or sisters, and uncles and fathers seemed indistinguishable.

  These five were, in fact, the followers whom Nilang had brought to Chiran several years previously, when Mother gave her sanctuary from her enemies. She was related in some manner to both Mistress Ipip and Master Aa, and they and the other three were devoted to her. Tossi told me they’d all been condenmed to death at home and that Mother had offered them sanctuary and protection in exchange for their service.

  At least, this was what Tossi said. But I remembered, or thought I remembered, that Mother had obscurely threatened Nilang on that fever-ridden night when I saw the Quiet World, and that there might be more to the arrangement than Tossi let on.

  But then I told myself I’d misheard Mother’s words, or more likely imagined them in my sickness. It was not possible, I thought, that Nilang would serve Mother unwillingly, for surely not even a Despotana could place such a powerful sorceress under duress.

  Nilang spent a lot of time at Three Springs, for she was the chief instructor there, and this explained why she used to vanish from Repose for such long periods. I was always nervous around her because of the wraiths, and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way ; none of us, even Tossi, was ever fully at ease in Nilang’s presence.

  We all had to learn to recognize her sendings. They were eerie, especially since the voices did not come through our ears but seemed rather to emanate from within our heads. The first waming of one was a tingling at the back of the neck and a numbness of the lips, after which we would perceive the manifestation.

  This was weirder than it sounds, because of the caprices of the entities she employed. Once I was confronted by a fringed salamander that took on a child’s face, delivered Nilang’s words, and scurried away. The things were capable, however, of bearing only the simplest messages; they were like those southem birds that can leam to imitate, but not understand, a few words of human speech. As a result, messages of more than a simple phrase had to be committed to paper, and for this we learned various Taweret codes and ciphers.

  Sendings were useful, though, and one day, egged on by the rest of us, Kidrin asked why we students couldn’t leam to do them ourselves. At this, the sorceress gazed silently at the poor girl until she began to look quite frightened. Then Nilang said, “Because none of you has the talent, and even if you had, you would need twenty years to learn it, as I did.”

  I soon learned that Nilang was versed in much more than sorcery. In order to survive in their turbulent realm, Taweret lords spied with feverish intensity not only on their enemies but also on their allies and their rulers. Those who prospered did so by constructing vast and intricate webs of observers, agents, double agents, and assassins. Nilang, a cousin of such a magnate, had become highly skilled in such clandestine work, and she and her five companions had served him with their own special skills of combat, concealment, treachery, and subterfuge.

  Of course, Mother was no stranger to spying—no Despot was—but Taweret practices were far more sophisticated than those of the Durdana. So Mother recast her methods according to the Taweret mold and Nilang’s advice, and thus the Midnight School was bom.

  Our studies were interwoven with rigorous physical training, but strength and endurance were merely die foundation of our craft. As the months passed, I learned to make fire with a rawhide thong and three sticks, to take game with snare and bow, and to eat well in a winter forest. I learned to climb sheer rock walls using my fingertips, toes, knees, and elbows; to walk along a rope fifty feet above the ground; to use an inflated sheep’s bladder to support myself through a long swim. I could throw a hunting javelin or a climbing grapnel and almost never miss my tar
get, although Dilara, somewhat to my chagrin, never missed at all.

  We also became adept in the Taweret modes of fighting without weapons. There was nothing honorable or fair about this form of combat, the ideal being to strike lethally from ambush. Surprise and speed were of the essence: a foot broke a leg; an elbow, a rib; a stiffened hand crushed a windpipe.

  Weapons were not neglected, however. Many Durdana women, especially those whose husbands spent months away from home as mariners or traders, had swords or spears in the house and knew how to use them. But our training went far beyond that. We learned the long knife, throwing knife, short sword, short halberd, long spear, bow, quarterstaff, and others. Some of those others were quite strange, being Taweret devices: weighted chains, fighting sticks, the hand trident, and clawed gloves. I was good at chain work and delighted in tangling my opponent at the knees, sweeping her off her feet, and finishing her off with the edge of my hand.

  But all this training was a tool, not an end in itself. Nilang taught us that the real foundations of our success must be concealment and deception, not combat. If we had to use our fighting skills, it meant an enemy had detected us, and this was next door to failure. Being detected was not, as Nilang put it, elegant, even if we got away unscathed. We would have exchanges like this with her:

  “Kidrin! What is the pinnacle of elegance in our profession?”

  “Mistress Nilang, it is as follows. That we act without being detected, so that the enemy does not know who has carried out the attack against him. He is befuddled and does not know whom to blame.”

  “Wrong! You are lax in your application! It is that the enemy does not know that there has been an attack, until he discovers that his strength is dispersed, his defenses nullified, and that he is suddenly in the hands of his enemy.” She tumed to me. “Kidrin’s position, however, has an element of virtue. Lale! Tell us why.”

  I said, “Because, in the world as it is, the pinnacle is the ideal and therefore difficult to achieve. Thus, while we should strive for the ideal, we must not always disdain the less elegant solution. Through reaching too high, one invites failure.”