Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “You should get away from me,” he says aloud. “Go back to the village and say nothing. I can find my way.”

  “To where? Back to the camp? You look like you’ve just slaughtered a bull.”

  He follows her. The mud wall ends and the land flattens out. Ahead, a low triangular structure looms out of the darkness. It is a simple sun-tent, for goats and their keepers. At their approach, five or six animals leap up and scramble away.

  They are northeast of the village: he can see the brothels’ glow. But no emergency beacons, no running torchbearers, light up Eternity Camp. “They haven’t sounded an alarm,” he says, amazed.

  “They don’t dare,” says the woman. “Oh, they’ll be sniffing around. But if they raised a stink and later find that he’s just out whoring—well, Ojulan would slit their throats. He isn’t supposed to screw around until six days after the feast.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugs. “None of the sons are. Don’t you know? The Prophet told them it would bring bad luck.”

  Gods, thinks Kandri, maybe she can see the future.

  Suddenly, the woman tenses. Kandri’s hand flies to his machete. But it’s just a boy, a village boy, running toward them like the wind. His bare feet spray earth at them as he slides to a stop.

  “Eshett,” he gasps. “Hurry, hurry, je.”

  Under his arm is a tight bundle of clothes. The woman turns to Kandri. “Strip those things off, the boy will get rid of them. Faru, you run west to the short grass. Find a rat hole, a deep one. Stuff them in with a stick.”

  Faru?

  Kandri steps closer. It really is the boy he rescued from Skem. He looks at Kandri with a mix of gratitude and fear.

  “You have a wicked bite,” says Kandri.

  The child kneels and touches the ground with his forehead, a gesture of deepest respect. But his eyes are still fearful. “Oh, Gods,” says Kandri. “I’m not the yatra. Skem just wanted another way to fuck with us. It was all he could think of to say.”

  The boy offers him the folded clothes. In broken Chilot, he says, “I kill Waxman, Uncle. One day in his sleep.”

  “No, no. Don’t try.”

  “I curse him to burn, have pain forever. I stick the knife up his mulit.”

  “You want to curse him? Stay alive. Grow up and fight all the Skems in this world. Fight to stop them from existing. Eshett—that’s your name, Eshett? Explain to him, will you?”

  The boy nods vigorously. “Yes, Uncle, yes and thank you. Grow up, fight, stop existing. But first, I stick him dead.”

  “Gods damn it,” says Kandri. “In a few hours, I’ll be dead. A lot of people will be dead. Stay alive, you little shit. That’s an order.”

  He takes off his clothes, reaches for the folded shirt and pants. Uncle. It is normal, an everyday honorific for an older man. But Kandri can’t recall ever hearing the term applied to him. Most villagers call soldiers Ghifi, Protector, even if they’ve never witnessed a single act of protection. For Kandri, it is a source of abiding shame. No doubt Faru was still calling his attackers Ghifi even as they dragged him behind that wall.

  Kandri freezes. The rough weave of the fabric, the weight, the feel of the buttons in the dark. “This is a uniform,” he says.

  “Of course it’s a uniform,” says the woman. “What did you expect, pajamas?”

  “But where the hell did you get it?”

  “From sisters,” says the boy.

  “Sisters?”

  The woman looks out over the lightless plain. “I have a lot of them,” she says. “I’m a whore.”

  Now it is she who is naked. The fury in her voice, the struggle. She forces out a laugh. “We help each other. One of your comrades is passed out drunk beside his girl. Ang knows what he’ll wear back to the camp.”

  “And will your sisters cover for you tonight?”

  “Fah,” she says.

  “Where will you go tonight? Where are the rest of your people?”

  “My people? Get your pants on. Are you losing your mind?”

  With that she leaves him, running back along the wall. Kandri dresses, looking down at the village. From where they stand, he can round it easily, in darkness, then follow the thorn fence back to the gate.

  “Don’t let them see you out here, Faru. Faru?”

  He turns in a circle. The boy is a shadow, racing over the grasslands with Kandri’s clothes, that burden of holy blood.

  At the gate the sentries have been doubled. He walks straight for them in the center of the road. Empty-handed, terrified. Certain he looks deranged. You’re walking like an imbecile, a drunk.

  And suddenly, salvation. That’s perfect. A drunk.

  He twists his face into a smirk. He works his mouth, then forces out a song, lewd and low.

  Oh, to warm my hands at midnight

  In the pockets of my girl

  In the sweet, secret pockets of my girl—

  They wave him by, scowling. They are worried, but not about Kandri Hinjuman. Once more, hope flares in his breast. He’s a slob. He’s enchanted. He staggers all the way to his tent and no one spares him a glance.

  In the tent, there is no light whatsoever. A few men are murmuring; a great many lie asleep. He feels his way to his cot. How many soldiers went to the brothels tonight? Maybe two hundred? What if they never suspect him? What if no one fingers him at all?

  He pulls the uniform shirt over his head. As his head emerges, the obvious answer materializes, a fiend’s face in the dark. What will they do? Burn the village, torture the villagers, torture the soldiers until they cough up names. False names, true names. Your name. Anyone’s.

  Slowly, he puts the shirt back on. The few men awake have noticed his stillness; he can feel their unseeing eyes. Before Mektu’s rashness started, they were never hostile. One or two were almost friends.

  “Well. Goodbye.”

  He has not really spoken, only moved his lips.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Do you still have the bush kits?”

  “I think so. Yes, I have them. You mean it, Kandri? You’re not fucking around?”

  They stand in the darkness outside Mektu’s tent, squinting, barely perceiving each other’s faces; the only light comes from a distant security lamp at the end of the tent row. Kandri has a thick canvas bundle under his arm. His right hand grips a lanyard, to which are tied four leather faska, heavy with water. His left hand is twitching. His whole body aches with fear.

  “I took a sunshield from the unit reserve,” he tells Mektu. “And a long coil of rope—we’ll need it for certain. I have three gold, true gold, from our Mother. All my pay’s in gham coins; it’s heavy, but we can’t help that now. And we can’t use the gate, of course: they’d never believe we were heading to the whorehouse with all this gear. But we can slide under the fence near the Pikers’ latrines.”

  “Under the fence.” Mektu blinks and rubs his forehead, perhaps still tempted to think this all a dream.

  “The village dogs have scratched a hole there,” says Kandri. “I saw it yesterday, on trench duty. They won’t have fixed it so soon. It will be tight, but there’s no other way.”

  His eyes are darting. He must not let them dart. Something is wrong, something is changing; the shouts of late-night revelers are too few. At the end of the tent row, two officers pass through the cone of lamplight, rushing somewhere with urgent frowns.

  “Your boots?” says Kandri.

  Mektu stares at his bare feet.

  “Put them on. But wrap your feet first, we can’t stop to deal with blisters. How much water is there, anyway?”

  “In the tent?”

  “Wake the hell up, Mektu. How much water in the kits?”

  “Six faska each. Kandri, what time is it? We must be too close to daybreak. Unless—”

  Mektu suddenly freezes. His eyes widen with disbelief. Kandri’s chest tightens. You know, don’t you? You can see it in my face.

  “Brother,” whispers Mektu, aghast
, “have you stolen us some horses?”

  “Oh, Pitfire, Mek. Get the Gods-damned kits. Now, please.”

  “Or camels? Camels are no good in the mountains.”

  “Get the kits.”

  “You know when we should run, maybe, brother? Week’s end, just after dark, when everyone’s bellies are full and the whole night’s ahead of—”

  Kandri grabs his brother’s face with both hands, pulls him close, feels his nails biting flesh.

  “Now,” he says.

  The astonishing thing is how little it takes to seal one’s fate. A blind fumbling around the wall of a latrine. A ground-hugging slither under the fishhook-tree fence, a scramble through the oily brush in the bottom of the trench. A few moments of almost suicidal blundering, their packs caught on brambles, items falling from their pockets, sticks loudly snapped underfoot. Curses, hysterical giggles. Shut up, brother. You fucking shut up. You want to live or don’t you? I’ll be quiet if you—

  Mektu stops in his tracks. Kandri has started walking east. The desert? says Mektu’s silence. Not the Valley, not home?

  Kandri turns on him, growling: “We’ve talked about this.”

  “I know,” says Mektu. “But I was just thinking, we could—”

  “If you say ‘draw straws,’ I’ll break your teeth.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” says Mektu.

  And yet he stands there, wonderstruck, impervious to words. Kandri’s stomach is churning. He is on the verge of tears.

  I’ll leave you. Ang as my witness, I won’t stand here arguing until they wake up and surround us.

  Then Mektu starts and looks at him anew. “We could get away.”

  “Yes! Come on—”

  “I mean entirely away.”

  “Yes, yes, yes! That’s the fifty-times fucking idea!”

  “Well, let’s do that.”

  And suddenly his brother is running, and Kandri is beside him, laughing with terror and relief, and they are Soldiers of Revelation no more.

  At fifteen, they went mad for a girl named Ariqina Nawhal.

  Neither brother had yet spoken to her, but what of that? This was true love, and only one boy could claim her, and so they fought with fists and words and mocking laughter and lies. Kandri has forgotten much about that foolish war, but he distinctly recalls dragging Mektu’s best pants through the filth of the chicken coop, and spotting his own school compositions book at the bottom of the outhouse hole. And the fistfight behind the kennel, egged on by four friends and nineteen hunting dogs. His swollen lip, Mektu’s black eye, the fight’s sudden end when one of the bystanders stepped backward into a rubbish pit and broke his arm.

  Their feud was a nightmare for the family. Their sisters briefly took sides, then settled for even-handed contempt. Dyakra Hinjuman (who Kandri had by now come to cherish) implored the Gods to reveal how she’d earned such punishment. Their baby brother wept. He was large and plump and his voice was astonishing. At table, if no one else managed to break the tension, he would rest his face in his food and just howl. The family dogs bayed in sympathy. The Old Man would look from Kandri to Mektu and back again in bewildered rage.

  One night, he exploded from his chair. It was so unexpected that both boys leaped up in alarm. Lantor Hinjuman grabbed them by the arms and hauled them out into the courtyard, scattering dogs and chickens. He made the brothers stand side by side. He ran his fingers through his hair.

  “How many real sons do I have?” he demanded. “Just one—that screaming butterball. As for you two: I think gremlins came and snatched my two eldest from their cradles, and left me a Northy and a Southy in their places.”

  “Kandri didn’t have a cradle, he had a pig trough,” said Mektu.

  The Old Man smacked him sideways.

  “Horse trough,” he said. “And that isn’t true either, there was bedding, so shut up. Southy.”

  Mektu’s eyes filled with tears, more from the insult than the blow. It meant the lesser of two bad specimens. The weaker of two runts.

  Eighty miles south of Blind Stream, a deep rift called the Loro Canyon slashed through the Coastal Range. During the fall of the Empire, the central span of the great Loro Bridge collapsed, leaving two stone arches yearning for each other in vain. In like fashion, the villagers on either side of the abyss lost all contact with each other. Neither wall of the canyon allowed for a descent, and restoring the bridge was as unthinkable as learning to fly. So the villages turned their backs on each other. “Northies” married and traded with the folk of the Valley; “Southies” kept to the high country and married each other and devolved into crude, cruel dimwits—or so the Valley folk contend.

  For well over a century, the two peoples grew apart. Then the Prophet arrived, and her army set about proving itself the equals of the vanished Empire. Five years and three hundred lives later, the bridge reopened, connecting the village for the first time in eight generations.

  One might have predicted a joyous reunion. Not so. Competition for trade led to the first quarrels, but soon other conflicts arose. The slang of both groups had changed. Often these mutations were weird, but harmless. The Southy word Eku? (“What?”) had come to mean “When?” north of the Loro, whereas the Southy Eef? (“What?”) survived among Northies only as a request to speak up (“Louder, please?”).

  But sometimes, the confusion went deeper. Certain Northy phrases had changed among Southies into terms for sexual lust. This delighted just about everyone. In Eternity Camp, teasing Northy and Southy recruits was one of the durable joys of army life.

  Northy woman: Is your husband thirsty? [“Would your husband like a fuck?”]

  Southy woman: What?! [“When?”]

  Northy: Right now, of course.

  Southy: Are you insane?

  Northy: Well! Forgive me for trying! And it’s so hot today. [“I’m so horny today.”]

  Southy woman gapes, sputters.

  Northy: See? You’re looking flushed yourself. Maybe you’re thirsty?

  Southy: You damned dirty whore!

  Northy: What?! [“Louder, please?”]

  Southy: YOU DAMNED DIRTY WHORE!

  And so on. The jokes no longer depend on linguistic truth; they have taken on a life of their own. But the mutual hatred of the Loro Canyon peoples is (and was) quite real. Kandri can still hear the Old Man’s final rebuke:

  “They were a family once. Now they’re the laughingstock of Urrath. Is that how you want to end up?”

  With that, he had gone back to his dinner, leaving them alone. Kandri will never forget the shame of that evening. But for his brother, the incident has always meant something else. Southy. That one word. Had their father chosen at random? Or had he known exactly what he was doing, when he labeled Mektu the lesser of his sons?

  This is freedom: the stinking camp vanishing behind them, the pitch-dark Mileya underfoot, morning cold like a snakebite, the silence broken only by themselves. Sweet odor of gingerweed, memories of mountain dawns. Their path, due east. The faintest dab of milky light on the horizon, better than a guiding star.

  But that light will grow into an enemy, Kandri thinks. Mektu is perfectly right: they have started hours too late. How far can they hope to get before the day reveals them, reveals everything? Before the Rasanga issue from the camp like devils on horseback?

  They run parallel, long straight strides. The packs are enormously heavy; the water alone adds thirty pounds to each. Still, they are riding a wave of fear and elation, and Kandri feels he could run this way forever.

  Mektu shoots him a sudden glance. “The Yskralem,” he huffs. “The fucking Stolen Sea. That’s your plan, isn’t it?”

  Kandri nods as he runs. “We have plenty of rope. The cliffs won’t stop us, but they’ll damn sure stop a camel or a horse.”

  “They might follow on foot.”

  Might. Kandri winces.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “We’ll find places to hide. If we make it to those cliffs, we lose them.”

&nbs
p; “But we won’t make it.”

  “Yes, we will. Shut your mouth.”

  As a soldier, Kandri has developed another useful schism: That way lies death can coexist in his mind with That way I must go. The ability has saved him more than once, given him the clarity to charge the enemy or to flee over swollen rivers, burning fields. He knows also that they are fast, both of them. Running, fighting, fleeing: they do it all with impressive speed. It is one reason, besides blind luck, that they have survived three years of war.

  But horses are faster, and the cliffs lie sixteen miles off. Mektu is right again: they will not make it, unless no one bothers to look east, or the sun fails to rise.

  He wrings more speed from his legs. Idiot. Face facts. Someone will look east. Wolfpacks (the army’s term for death squads) will ride out on their trail. He and Mektu will be captured, miles before the cliffs. Before the day’s end, they will be flung at the Prophet’s feet. They will die screaming, mutilated, mauled. For the sake of a village girl, a stranger, a naked child in the dark.

  “Mek,” he cries into the wind, “we’ll buy horses in Balanjé.”

  “What?”

  “Balanjé, the village. We have to run through it, almost—”

  “I know where Balanjé is! What kind of horses are we going to find in that dump?”

  “Kind with four legs. What do we care?”

  Balanjé, the last settlement, lies just three miles ahead. They can hope to reach it in darkness, or at worst half-light. And with horses, they will reach the cliffs in time.

  There, already: the spur trail leading into the village. The ground is firmer, better for running. A whiff of a cookfire. Mektu, a few paces ahead, calls to Kandri over his shoulder:

  “We’ll steal the horses. We won’t pay them a gham.”

  Right again: better to rob the villagers, leave them blameless. The thought brings Kandri another flash of understanding: they have not just become the Prophet’s enemies. They have become enemies of all who love her, or try to love her, or pretend. Yes, this is freedom. They have escaped the madhouse by leaping from a high window, barely glancing at the earth beneath them, laughing as they fall.