Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Not when Orthodox Revelation swept the Valley, and the hour grew so obviously late. Not when Ariqina took a copper ring from the neck of a fever-syrup bottle and slipped it onto his thumb with a laugh:

  “Now I have you, Kandri Hinjuman. That’s a totem ring. I’m the master of your soul.”

  Not when they kissed a moment later and he thought, My soul? Keep it, why else would I need it, I never noticed it before.

  Not on their last night together. Not when she told him, a matter of hours before she vanished, exactly where she meant to go.

  The shift ends at sundown. There are barrels of water for the trench crew; Kandri strips and scrubs, racing against the night’s oncoming chill. Racing too against the time of evening prayer. The great bell in the Palace of Radiance will toll at any moment, and he is still far from his unit. He is in no danger of reprimand (prayers may be offered anywhere outdoors), but he is in danger of going hungry—again. If his comrades beat him to the dinner line, he will be left with scraps.

  Kandri jogs across the camp, searching for landmarks. He barely knows this sector. Latrines, armories, endless identical tents. A lumber yard. An archery range. The horror of the blackworm pits somewhere off to his right. Already men are gathering in the open areas, facing north, hushed before the evening rites. Kandri weaves among the warehouses, the drab canvas triangles. The orange sky has faded to gray.

  “Oh, flaming shit.”

  Wrong turn. A high brick wall blocks his path. Desperate now, he follows it north, wondering what it encloses, how much of a detour it entails. Then his luck turns: just ahead is an iron gate, heavy and imposing, but ajar. Perhaps they will let him through just this once.

  Inside, a wooden stool, but no sentry. No one at all. Kandri pokes in his head and sees a great dusty courtyard, entirely walled. The yard is a curious shape: an octagon, in fact. It is quite empty save for an ornate little structure at the center, with a gabled roof and narrow windows. Kandri squints: a shrine? A carriage stripped of its wheels?

  Well, there are the guards, anyway: half a dozen, straight across the courtyard, by the only other gate. Kandri waves, but they do not see him. They are assembling for prayers themselves.

  To hell with this. He’s famished. He steps into the courtyard and makes right for them. The gate was open, brothers, no one was there. And I couldn’t shout to you at prayer time, could I? That is what he will say if they are angry. But perhaps they won’t be angry; perhaps they are people he knows.

  CLANG. The brass thunder of the first bell, the summons. I’m so hungry, brothers. I’ve not even tasted any boar. Have mercy. One day you’ll need kindness too.

  His path brings him closer to the ornate structure. It is neither shrine nor carriage but something odder still: a palanquin, such as one sees in drawings of the bad old days of the Occupation, or even the Empire. Something for sartaphs to ride about in on the shoulders of slaves. The object is lavish, with faded gilt trim and stone inlay that must surely gleam in the daylight. The windows are barred. Heavy bolts and padlocks secure the doors.

  Faint lines in the dust of the courtyard. Vague chalk shapes: circle, triangle, square. All of them centered on the palanquin. And by its locked door, fresh flowers. Something he has never seen in Eternity Camp.

  He should stay well clear. He does not. His running feet have their own ideas. A quick look, that’s all. Then the far gate, his plea to the sentries. One glance. He will not even stop. Or perhaps for only an instant, just long enough to see—

  There is no glass in the window, only those heavy bars. Inside, there is no finery, nor even any seats. The palanquin contains just one object: an urn, lidded, massive, carved from cold white stone. The urn has no markings of any kind.

  All at once Kandri knows that he has made a terrible mistake. Nothing has visibly changed, but a dreadful unease has pounced on him, like the moment before a massacre. He wants to run, but something (is it guilt, is it fear?) slows him to a wobbly march. And now the guards see him. They are leaping, waving. Not one of them makes a sound.

  He slows still more. He is walking underwater, against the current, very nearly adrift. The silence is hideous. Something behind him does not want him to go. Then a sound does reach him—but is he dreaming? Of course, Gods of Death. It isn’t real; it’s his fancy. He has not just heard the scraping of stone.

  Why has he stopped?

  Another sound from behind him, now: a child’s voice, high and meandering. The voice of a small girl talking to herself.

  CLANG. The second bell. Instantly free of whatever madness afflicted him, Kandri races to the gate in a transport of joy. “Brothers—” he starts to whisper: but no, that is forbidden; it is the moment of prayer. They are on their knees, arms raised to the northern sky, murmuring the first words of the evening canticle. Kandri joins them, melting with gratitude. He is safe; he is kneeling with his thirty thousand comrades. What does a Soldier of Revelation have to fear?

  For ten long minutes, peace reigns in his heart. Then the prayer is over, and the guards explode to their feet. Two run headlong for the gate by which Kandri entered—steering well around the palanquin. The other four, among them a lieutenant, lift Kandri and slam him against the wall.

  “You little fuck,” snaps the officer. “What in Pitfire are you doing here?”

  “That’s Kandri Hinjuman,” says a private. “He’s the brother of that cuckoo bird.”

  “The gate was open, sir,” says Kandri.

  “The padlock’s faulty,” snarls the lieutenant. “We were repairing it, filing it down.”

  The other soldiers are whispering together, and all at once, Kandri knows that they are not only furious but afraid. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he says. “I don’t know anything about this place. I just needed a shortcut.”

  “A shortcut. Why you prick.”

  “What’s in the urn, sir? Is it the yatra? Did Her Radiance trap it? I won’t tell.”

  “Listen to him, Gods, he thinks we have the fucking yatra.”

  “Hinjumans,” says the private. “I know that family, sir. Back in the Sataapre, they’re always in trouble. His brother Mektu—”

  “Shut up.” The lieutenant’s eyes scan the courtyard. “Did anyone see you, Corporal?”

  “No, sir. Not one soul.”

  The lieutenant reaches behind his back and unsheathes a knife. Kandri stiffens; the men holding him tighten their grip. The lieutenant rests the point of the blade on Kandri’s neck.

  “That gate was not left unguarded,” he says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That gate is always locked. You saw nothing. You were never here.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. I mean no, no sir, never.”

  “Look me in the eye, Hinjuman. Can I count on you?”

  “I was never here, sir. I swear on my mother. I swear on the mother of us all.”

  The lieutenant draws a deep breath—and suddenly smiles. “That’s just fine, then. Let him go. On your fast fucking way, Corporal Hinjuman.”

  He is very nearly the last to arrive. As the dinner line inches forward, he sees his brother through the open side of the kitchen tent, washing dishes under the moth-crowded lamps. Mektu is in fine form. Laughing, shouting: What about the afterlife, brothers? Will there be nipples, do you think, and will we be allowed to touch them? And what about our scars, our dirty nicknames, belching contests, tattoos? The other workers cringe, avert their eyes.

  Anyway, Mektu adds with a shrug, we’ll know the truth soon enough.

  When at last he is served (more than scraps, but not much more), Kandri sits on a stump and wolfs his food. He is still shaking, and his mouth feels numb. Something horrifying has occurred. But did it happen in the palanquin, or in the dark box of his mind? Is he feverish? Did he swallow rat poison somehow? These are comforting thoughts, given the alternative.

  But even if he was temporarily mad, and the white urn’s lid never scraped open, and that singsong child’s voice never called out—even then, so
mething must explain an antique litter in a walled courtyard, and the fear in those men.

  He decides to take himself in hand. No business of yours, Corporal. Not your sector, and you’ve just sworn to hold your tongue. Besides, you have enough to worry about. Your brother’s death-wish, for starters.

  He cleans his plate with a last bit of flatbread. He will have to threaten Mektu into silence; he has tried everything else. But that will not be easy. Mektu is no coward and does not take well to threats. He hears his brother’s whinny of a laugh. An irritating laugh: and that too is a problem. Some men die for heresy, others because their mannerisms grate on the nerves. Mektu could die for either. A mid-level officers’ mess is just a few yards away.

  But luck is with Mektu tonight, for as the meal ends, there are cries of alarm. Plates are dropped, orders howled, buckets filled from any source whatsoever, including the soup cauldron. Everyone breaks into a mad stampede. The yatra has set fire to the Prophet’s house.

  Kandri, bucketless, races to the scene. The rumor is horrifying, thrilling. Could she possibly be in danger? If the building collapses, what then? Surely, the Gods will let her pass through the fire unscathed?

  The gate of the palace compound stands open to the wider camp. Loud cries of Odulche pam di Ang!—Ang loves the Enlightened One!—echo among the walls. Thousands have squeezed already into the Old Gallows Courtyard, cheering and chanting, surrounding the Prophet’s tiny house. Atop its thatched roof, twenty men with empty buckets dance and cheer, as if at some great victory. A little smoke hangs in the air, but the fire is dead. From his spot at the edge of the courtyard, Kandri can see no damage at all.

  One of the roof-dancers lifts his hands in exaltation. “Yatra, yatra!” he shouts. “Flee our Mistress, who scours evil from the earth! Flee Eternity Camp! Flee her anger, and go your lonely way!”

  The soldiers below give an answering roar: Flee! Flee!

  Kandri cannot bring himself to shout. There are no yatras, the whole army has gone mad. Then his nose wrinkles at a familiar scent. Clove oil. He looks over his shoulder: the pusher Skem is an arm’s length away.

  For a moment, they are both quite still. Then the Waxman speaks. Kandri cannot hear him over the roaring, but Skem enunciates slowly, letting Kandri read his lips.

  Dead man.

  Kandri flashes him a bare-toothed snarl. Now that he has a mortal enemy, he knows he must be taken for a lunatic, a man capable of any horror, a man the practical Skem will choose not to provoke. An eager killer, that is: the opposite of the truth.

  The crowd gives a violent surge, pressing Kandri against the wall. Twisting, he sees that the Prophet herself has stepped into the courtyard. She moves at the center of her phalanx of Rasanga commandos, gripping the chain of her cherished white baboon.

  The roaring stops, a snuffed candle. The Enlightened One moves with mincing steps. As always, she wears a wrap of blood-red wool, stripes of white greasepaint on her face and forearms, and the necklace of dog’s fangs that symbolized the martyrdom of her people. Short, thin, wrinkled: a woman slight enough to be carried away on the breeze. Her eyes are wandering, her dry lips slack; she might well be unaware of the crowd. It is a face both haunted and frail, but the whole world knows the speed with which those eyes can awaken to deadly purpose, those lips form words of holy rage.

  The crowd squeezes farther back. Forty Rasanga with spears and swords, crossbows and mattoglins glare at the soldiers as if daring them to look at their mistress askance. Up close, they are terrible to behold: enormous, scarred from old battles, shoulders like the haunches of bears. Rasanga: Innocent Dreamers. Each one chosen personally by the Prophet, and each entrusted with a glimpse of her ethereal visions. Strangest of all, about two thirds of the Rasanga are women. Kandri has never understood this: everyone knows that the Gods disapprove of women soldiers. The barbarous Važeks send their women out to kill, but Chilotos tolerate no such obscenity. And yet here they are, women Rasanga, the deadliest fighters alive. Once, greatly daring, Kandri had asked his captain to explain the contradiction. The man’s response was cryptic.

  “Rasanga are more than human, corporal. They are changed by faith, by their encounter with the holy mysteries. Our rules don’t apply.”

  The tightest ring around the Prophet, however, is reserved for her sons: the Sons of Heaven, Lords of the Orthodox Dominion. No father sired these boys; Revelation alone kindled life in her womb. The elder sons are the Prophet’s ministers, war counselors, interrogators, and executioners at need. The Chiloto people pray for them, and cry out in joy or terror when they pass, knowing they will one day rule the continent.

  Kandri stands on his toes. He cannot tell just how many of the eleven sons are here in the crowd. But there for starters is Lord Jihalkra, the Firstborn. Tall and severe, with bright eyes and a broad, chiseled forehead, he wears a salt-white desert tunic fastened with ebony pins. Jihalkra the Silent, he is called: each of the Sons has such a title. He is the army’s field marshal, the manager of all the war’s far-flung campaigns.

  Jihalkra studies the men on the roof with grim disapproval. Instantly, like whipped boys, they turn and rush for the ladders.

  Then the Prophet speaks. Not in her terrible war-voice; this is a murmur, audible only because no one is breathing.

  “Little one,” she says to the enormous baboon, “what has happened to my men? Something has stolen all their tongues.”

  A rebuke. The soldiers freeze for an excruciating instant. Then a frightened voice cries out: “Her feet walk Heaven’s Path!”

  The Prophet allows herself a smile. The crowd erupts, repeating the blessing seven times. Kandri shouts as loud as anyone: he stands just yards from her, after all. The white baboon puts its head back and screeches. Its mistress studies the creature with concern.

  “Gently, Sleepyhead. I’m not leaving for heaven just yet. And you shall go with me when the time comes.”

  The baboon’s name is Sleepyhead. It is rumored to have developed a taste for human flesh. Kandri knows for a fact that the creature attends executions, crying and leaping and running circles on its chain. The Prophet is rarely without it. Her servants, regularly mauled by the animal, taste its food for poison as they do the Prophet’s own.

  The Enlightened One steps closer. Kandri curses himself for letting the mob sweep him into the courtyard. With great effort, he slides one foot in the direction of the gates. He sees the hard, flint faces of her younger sons, the medals on their chests, the savage eyes of the Dreamers, who seem enraged to find no one to kill among the soldiers.

  And there, by damn, is Garatajik. This is a much rarer sighting: Garatajik the Merciful, the learned son, the mystery, the one who reads. Even now he is clutching several books to his chest: perhaps they were in his mother’s house, and he feared to lose them in the fire.

  Garatajik is the Secondborn Son of Heaven. Like Jihalkra, he is over forty years old. He is perhaps the least dangerous of the brothers (out of eleven rattlesnakes, one must be least dangerous), and the only one not to serve in his mother’s wars. He has returned but recently to the camp, out of the distant east, along with a few strange, bookish men and forty emaciated nomads. The Prophet had shed tears of joy, embraced him in public, made him gifts of gold and horses and weapons and wives. Garatajik had been missing for two years.

  Now the frail woman stops, and her entourage with her. She raises a spidery hand, glass bangles dropping past her elbow, and the hush that falls is total.

  “I do not fear this thief of souls,” she says. “Nor should you, believers. Fear is idleness, fear is sand blown under the door. But are we helpless, that we cannot seal the crack beneath the door?”

  A pause, in which the men dare no more than slight shakes of their heads.

  “Like that whisper of sand,” she continues, “death seeps in through the crevice of fear. But for those who know Revelation, there is no final death. True, this yatra is a mighty one. I sensed it, away there beyond the Stolen Sea, raging in the desert
, among the dry wells and wastes of sulfur and the tombs picked clean by ghouls. This yatra drifted for centuries. Bodiless, it cursed the winds, cursed the sun, burrowed under dunes by daylight. It thirsted. Not for water, not for wine or even blood. It longed for green grass, my soldiers. It thirsted for the west. But it erred when it invaded my camp.”

  She twists her body, waves a hand at the roof. “The little stings it has dealt us? Nothing, nothing: they were inflicted in our sleep. But we are awake now, and we will slap and crush this yatra, or drive it back into the sands. It is the will of heaven: no man or spirit or plague or storm can turn us aside. My son Ojulan—he is not here tonight—my son takes any woman he wants, the virgins, the most fertile, they praise the Gods when he enters them, and the force, the force of his love—”

  She stops, gazing at them almost with accusation. The mob holds its breath. Kandri fights the urge to glance at his fellow soldiers: to do so, even to shift his eyeballs left and right, would be unutterably dangerous. But some of them, surely, are seeing what he sees? For never before has her madness been so plain, exposed like a boil on her cheek. He feels ashamed for her and wishes he could run.

  My son Ojulan. Not here tonight. That’s one blessing, at least. For Ojulan, her favorite, worst of the rattlesnakes, would have found some excuse for bloodshed in the chaos of the fire. But where is the maniac, anyway? Is he indifferent to his mother’s fate? Is he up in the palace, surrounded by courtesans, fondling that golden knife?

  “Radiant mother,” cries Garatajik (his schoolmaster’s voice, water dashed in all their faces). “Night has fallen, and the great boar is roasting on the spit. May we send your loyal soldiers to their feast?”

  The Prophet gazes at him, startled, then slowly lowers her hand. “You may go,” she says. “My son is right, this night is for feasting and joy. So go, go and find some. Eat the pig. The day comes all too soon.”