Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Uncertain shuffling. Kandri takes another step toward the gates. They are dismissed, surely? They may quit her holy presence with a murmured blessing and a bow?

  Then it happens. The Prophet’s eyes grow wide. The hand stabs skyward again, and her body straightens and stands tall. A wild passion lights her features. The voice that comes from her now is a shriek that rends the air.

  “On wings of flame that day is coming, and the flame that is our cause will scour clean this land, and all lands everywhere, all the known and secret places, the forest depths of Bathia, the castles of the heretics, the Mountains of the Kasraj, the dark floor of the sea. And those who cling to false ways will earn oblivion. Are we to wallow in their filth? Do we wait for pigs to shamble from our path? Our path is molten silver. We strike no bargains. We sweep the animals aside. The earth shall vomit up her dead, the White Child shall awaken, the land suffer the torture of the wind, flesh melt from the bone, and the small blind beggars will crawl to us, sobbing, and the Twin Abominations dwell in Urrath once more. No matter. They will know our strength when we are done. Go and feast, you men.”

  She is breathless, swaying. Unsurprisingly, no one moves so much as a finger. Then her eyes flash with rage.

  “I AM THE KEEPER OF THE IMMACULATE LAW! GO AND FEAST!”

  In less than a minute, the courtyard is deserted.

  Kandri lives with a double certainty: no one could possibly love the Prophet; no one could fail to love the Prophet. She is a diseased and monstrous animal; she is the Liberator, mother and father to them all. She ignores the most sacred beliefs of the Chiloto nation; she is that nation’s holy core. She is the Giver of Shelter, the Voice of Love; she kills with a tireless commitment.

  It is her love which makes her kill. Before her, the Chilotos had never once found a leader who was not soon slain, or put in irons, or devoured by leprosy, or bought. They assumed contempt; they were a dirty, dung-collecting, artless people of a vast but marginal land. The source of slaves and foot soldiers. Goatherds, horse thieves, “warlords” who were lords of nothing and made war mostly on themselves. True, their coast was green and fertile, but in the eyes of Urrath, this splinter of land was the exception that proved the rule. Chiloto: the people themselves knew the word meant “The Honest Ones” in their own language, but they were helpless to deny the common Kasraji meaning: disorder, a mess or accident, something spilled.

  They were the accidental people, the stain on Urrath. Whom the great southern clans would not allow even to tend their cattle, and northern princes and sartaphs ran down for sport, as they did antelope or deer. The ones all armies hacked their way through, languid and complaining, on their way to worthier foes.

  The Prophet declared an end to all that. She was the Gods’ chosen instrument and never flinched from the task. She united the people no one could unite. In her prisons are Važeks who castrated Chiloto men with hot irons, who burned the vylk trees that housed the souls of Chiloto ancestors, who sorted Chiloto women according to their suitability for rape.

  Or so her troops are told. Kandri has witnessed none of these things, and in recent years, as declaring love for the Prophet changed from a collective impulse to a mode of survival, it has been hard to tell memory from fancy. An old man sells you matches and speaks of Važek crimes: are they what he remembers, or what he knows he is expected to remember? And how long before the two begin to merge?

  Of course, Kandri too has loved the Prophet. All his life. On Candle Mountain, his birth-mother Uthé told him to thank the Gods each night for the gift of the Enlightened One. When his father appeared in the household, he reminded Kandri that if the Prophet had not led the fight against the Važeks they would all be enslaved, or conscripted, or dead. And just days after Uthé’s death and Kandri’s arrival in Blind Stream, Mektu took him aside and whispered:

  “We’re not Orthodox here. But that doesn’t mean we love the Prophet any less. Some pigs in school are jealous because we’re sophisticated people. They lie. They say Hinjumans think they’re above religion, that we’re too proud to pray. But that is horseshit, we pray sometimes. Don’t you?”

  “Every night,” said Kandri. It was the truth, and yet it felt deceitful. He prayed because his birth-mother had prayed beside him. He meant to go on doing so as a way to keep her near.

  Mektu looked unsettled by his “every night,” as though Kandri had issued a challenge. “Praying doesn’t make you superior,” he said. “We know what the Prophet’s done for our people. She freed us. The Chilotos were slaves. Have you ever seen the face of a slave?”

  “Of course.”

  “Liar,” said Mektu. “Where, up on your mountain? In your barn?”

  “People pass on the road,” said Kandri.

  Mektu sighed expansively. “Come upstairs.”

  He led Kandri into his new mother’s dressing chamber. Above a table littered with combs and bangles hung a portrait of a couple in wedding finery, seated and holding hands. Their faces smiled, but their eyes were deep-set and haunted, as if searching some desolate vista for a trace of whatever they had lost.

  They were his mother’s parents, Mektu explained. They had been raised in slavery under the Važeks, suffered unspeakable cruelties, watched nearly everyone they knew die of starvation or abuse, watched the sick or wounded tossed into mine shafts, alive. When the Prophet’s army liberated the slave camps, they had come to Blind Stream, built the family home, raised children and dogs.

  Their lives were peaceful enough, although the war raged on east of the mountains. But in time, their oldest child, Peyar, came to understand how wounded, how broken his parents remained in their hearts. The boy swore vengeance. He wanted to join the army and fight the Važeks, but no one would hear of it: he was only thirteen.

  One day word reached the Valley that the enemy had made a lightning advance and were closer, in fact, than at any point in years. Then Peyar knew what he had to do. He stole his father’s machete and slipped away in the night. The next morning, the parents found the note he had left and gave chase. And not one of them returned.

  Kandri looked at his brother, aghast. “What happened to them?”

  Mektu hesitated. “You can never speak to Ma about it. She lost her parents and her brother in one day.”

  “I won’t talk,” Kandri promised.

  Mektu lowered his voice to a whisper. “Uncle Peyar must have gotten close to the Važeks. He was captured, and so were our grandparents. They died horribly, Kandri. They died in the Theater of Bones.” He squinted at Kandri. “You do know about the Theater of Bones?”

  “Of course,” Kandri lied.

  Mektu waited for him to prove it. Cheeks burning, Kandri stammered, “What’s the matter, what do you want me to say? I love the Prophet as much as anyone.”

  After a long moment, Mektu nodded, and even patted his brother awkwardly on the back. “That’s the main thing,” he said.

  So it was: the main thing. At least for as long as love was enough, and worship something you could take or leave. For in fact, the Hinjumans were indifferent to the faith. The only exceptions were their other grandfather, Lantor Hinjuman’s father, who had fought in the worst battles of the Sataapre and made a pact with the Gods at the time; and Nyreti, Kandri and Mektu’s eldest sister, whose devoutness nobody could explain. These two prayed together at dawn and dusk, and went to temple together; otherwise, Kandri rarely heard so much as a mumbled prayer. He himself prayed less often with each passing season.

  But from that day, standing before the portrait of the grandparents slain before his birth, Kandri’s love of the Prophet grew. He saw the lines of sadness enclosing Dyakra Hinjuman’s eyes, and love for this new mother became commingled with love for the Mother of All Chilotos. He listened to the priests when they visited the school, and the love blazed stronger. At last it simply dwelt in him, warm and nourishing, a bed of embers against the cold. The Prophet saved your people. She freed the slaves, she freed the Valley, she routed the shits who killed yo
ur second mother’s family and left her grieving for life. The Prophet fights for you still. Although you fail her, she never fails you. Even when you pray for selfish things, she prays for you. Morning and evening, each day without exception, all her life.

  She herself said it often: My people are the reason I draw breath.

  Tonight, her delirious words still ringing in his ears, Kandri flees the palace compound with his comrades. Desperate to obey her, to be worthy of her prayers. Is it gone forever, that warm embrace? Has any shred of it survived the Ghalsúnay massacre, his cracked skull, these sickening displays? Is love for that jangling, shrieking creature, that woman scrawny as a boiled stork, that murderer who spawned eleven murdering sons, even possible?

  How can he doubt it?

  How can he feel anything but doubt?

  Mektu is waiting for him outside the gate. Kandri, appalled at his thoughts, storms by without a word. His brother falls into step beside him, snickering, pawing at his arm.

  “‘Go and feast,’ she tells us. As if all of us had a great cut of boar to look forward to. Did you get to taste it, Kandri? Do you want me to sneak you a bit of fat?”

  Kandri shakes him off. There is a strange light in Mektu’s eyes. His head makes little bobs in Kandri’s direction. He is not so much walking as leaning over him, making them jostle and bump. He reaches for Kandri’s arm again.

  “I have an idea, brother.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” says Kandri.

  “Do you know who comes and goes from Eternity Camp without applying for leave? Without even carrying a pass?”

  “The mole rats.”

  “No, fool. The Xavasindrans.”

  Kandri has to close his eyes.

  “They’re the answer we’ve been looking for,” says Mektu. “They can free us. Don’t they claim they’re here to help?”

  The Xavasindrans are a medical mission from the Outer World, beyond Urrath, beyond the Quarantine. Under the Plague Protocols, they are the only ones allowed to come or go from the continent. Urrathis are generally immune to the World Plague, and that is strange enough. But the foreigners also claim that every last Urrathi carries the disease—dormant and harmless to themselves—in their lungs, of all places. One cough, it is said, could kill millions in the Outer World, and so the Outer World has made a jail of the continent. Urrathi princes never meet their foreign counterparts. Urrathi ships are sunk on sight.

  But there is a softer face of Quarantine. Xavasindran doctors are sprinkled across Urrath, treating lesser diseases, binding wounds, drawing parasites from the blood. And above all, hunting for the secret of Urrathi immunity.

  “We can reason with those doctors,” says Mektu. “We can explain that we don’t want any part of this war.”

  “And then?”

  “We get one of them to say that we’re ill. That we need to be taken to one of their special hospitals.”

  “You’re a genius,” says Kandri. “I’m sure no one’s thought of that before.”

  “Don’t be nasty, it’s a decent plan. And you have the imagination of a stump.”

  “The doctors take an oath of noninterference,” said Kandri, “and they travel with army escorts. Also, they’re not here.”

  “Not here?”

  “The captain told us last week. Not one Xavasindran left in the camp, and none expected before midsummer. Otherwise it’s an excellent plan.”

  Mektu, silenced, walks stiffly at his side. Kandri considers whether or not he has been cruel. One hides certain crushing truths from children; why not from soldiers? Are they any more likely to know what to do with them? Are they any stronger, in the end?

  “Forget the Xavasindrans,” says his brother at last. “They’re not what I came to tell you about. Listen, I have something for you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “And one for me, of course. We’ll need them. It was worth the risk.”

  “What risk, Mek? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I took two bush kits,” says Mektu.

  “You what? Devil’s rectum.”

  Kandri’s cry turns heads. The brothers march, frightened as two beaten dogs. But no one approaches, and after a few paces, Mektu is buoyant again, prancing, smirking. I will never be rid of you, Kandri thinks.

  Bush kits are survival packages, kept ready for couriers or commandos: anyone the army might dispatch in haste on some urgent errand. Kandri has never touched one. They are more an idea than a physical presence in the camp.

  “No one knows, no one knows!” hisses Mektu. “We were unloading fifty wagons from the north. The kits were at the bottom of a mountain of loot from the siege of Misafa Palace: rugs, silks, leopard skins, lady’s slippers. But when we cut off the tarp, we found it was infested with blackworms. They told me to burn it all.”

  “Stay away from me,” says Kandri, “until you wise up. I’m sorry, I just can’t—”

  “The worms never reached the bush kits, Kandri. They’re sealed, they’re absolutely fine. I burned the rest, but I put the kits in a sack under my bed.”

  Under his bed.

  Kandri twists on his heel, drags his brother into an alley between two tents. When he is sure no one can see them, he grabs Mektu’s uniform just below the throat.

  “You shit. Listen close. If you can’t stop this nonsense, I’m going to report you myself. Do you hear me? I’ll tell them you’re a nutcase. What else can I do? Maybe they’ll just lock you up instead of feeding you to the fucking dogs.”

  His brother’s hands are in fists.

  “A nutcase,” he says. “I want to get out of here. You want to stay and serve Her Radiance until she sends us off to the Ghalsúnay slaughterhouse. But I’m the nutcase, am I?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you are. But I swear on our mother—”

  “My mother. Yours died in a barn.”

  Kandri is speechless. Once again, that blow to the stomach, that pitiless assault. He looks his brother coldly in the eye. “I swear on our mother,” he repeats, “that if you run for the Valley, I’ll denounce you. I’ll tell them our family’s not responsible, that they didn’t know your plan. I’ll tell them I did everything I could to make you stay.”

  Mektu stands frozen. Then his eyes move, up and down Kandri’s body. It is a look no one accustomed to violence can mistake.

  “You wouldn’t really do that.”

  “I just swore to do it, Mek.”

  Late evening. Kandri has purchased a bottle of fine cane liquor at the cost of six days’ pay. A moment of weakness, or inspiration perhaps. He has tried to share it with such friends as he has in Eternity Camp, but they are suddenly busy at his approach, recalling promises to be elsewhere. Well, fuck them. He takes a long first swig: bliss and pain commingled, sweet honey and a blow to the skull.

  He has become a pariah—but why exactly? Has Mektu’s chatter reached an officer? Has Skem been talking of his plans to put a knife in Kandri’s ribs?

  Whatever else is happening, the Feast of the Boar rolls on. Tonight, the pig’s organs and viscera have been fried with chilies and scarlet palm oil; the smell wafts through the camp, irresistible, driving men mad. Kandri, his timing lucky for once, queues for an hour and receives three inches of intestine and a grape-sized cut of lung. The men ahead and behind him keep their distance. Not even the server meets his eye.

  He wolfs the meat and chases it with liquor: a private feast, a celebration of solitude. Then he goes in search of Chindilan.

  In the two hours since his standoff with Mektu, Kandri has felt a burning need to speak with the smith. Their last meeting shook Kandri to the core, and somehow, he knows that their next will change everything. What he does not know, however deeply he probes his own heart, is what he will say to Chindilan:

  Uncle, I’m on my knees now. You have friends among the officers. Call on them.

  Uncle, I am no longer joking. I will shatter his foot, leave him crippled but alive.

  Uncle, I’m abandoning the
fool.

  Chindilan is not in the weapons shop, however, nor any of his usual haunts. When Kandri inquires with the men in his unit, they shrug. Only when he refuses to leave does one of them face him directly.

  “The Master Smith went off to the village. Hours ago.”

  “The village? What for?”

  “What the fuck do you think?”

  From the back of the tent, another soldier says, “Pussy, Hinjuman. Some of us like it. We’re strange that way.”

  Kandri walks. The village begins a quarter-mile east of the camp, just beyond the barren security zone declared by the army. He is deeply unsettled, but not by the soldiers’ derision. Something is wrong: Chindilan does not go whoring. He has occasional liaisons with a widow from Dholédd, a fruit vendor who supplies the officers’ mess. “She’s trouble enough” is all he says if the subject arises. Kandri has never once seen him on Brothel Row.

  Tonight, for the first time in months, the East Gate stands open. Twenty sentries guard the narrow exit, glumly sober, patting down the revelers for contraband, for theft. Press-ganged Chiloto boys stagger across the drawbridge over the pit. Grabbing their crotches, jingling coins. Once outside, prostitutes descend on them like crows.

  Kandri too is quickly surrounded. “Bargain, bargain,” say the women, their labor-roughened hands traveling his skin. He keeps a grip on his coin purse, but he passes the bottle around. Have they seen Chindilan, the blacksmith? The women shake their heads, cooing and sighing over the liquor. When he takes the bottle back, it is two-thirds drained.

  No, he’s not buying sex. Their smiles harden into scorn. Lulee, they mumble, predictably. But a young woman in a tattered sarong puts her arms about his neck and kisses him, long and deep.

  “Thanks for the drink,” she says.

  The village is almost lightless. Most of the huts are closed tight as drums, the dogs cringing and slinking back from the soldiers (village dogs learn quickly), the chickens caged for the night. Chickens, daughters, sons. Because of his injury in the Ghalsúnay campaign, Kandri has not seen the village on a feast night in over a year. Now it all comes back. The shattered bottles, discarded bones. The silent paths between these homes of mud and straw. The Kiprifani merchant in the village center, hawking drugs to promote virility, ward off disease.