Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  It was the start of his third year in Blind Stream. He had a school uniform and a coin purse and a good pair of riding boots. He had kissed several girls and spied on others bathing, caught fish in Ashfield Lake, joined the brigade that beat back a wildfire threatening the school. He had even learned to swim.

  But when he spoke to Ariqina, these triumphs vanished like dreams. She was a witch, he suspected. She had only to look at him, with that benign blazing intelligence, and he became witless with longing. She rarely blinked. She noticed if he twitched a finger. Her smiles were withheld until he gave her some reason to smile; then they took possession of everything: her dark lips and unkissed cheeks, the corners of her enormous eyes, the space between her and Kandri, his flesh, the daylight, the air in his lungs.

  His brother claimed such feelings too, but Kandri refused to believe him. Mektu’s hands groped at the bed sheets, or his thighs, whenever he lay back speaking of girls. It was no different when he spoke of Ariqina.

  Face to face with her, he was amusing and chattered easily. He could make her laugh. Kandri mostly stood paralyzed, listening to her speak with quiet passion about something astonishing she had read. There’s a spider in the Nfepan jungles that cures leprosy with a bite. What could you say to that? There’s a whale that lives on fish too small to see. In Dresheng, there are no royal families: when a sartaph dies, they choose a new one from the poorhouse. I was poor back in Nandipatar. I stole bread, I found things in the street. Have you tasted the cider this year, Kandri? My aunt gave me a little, I thought I’d die of happiness, I just shut my eyes and held it on my tongue, like this—

  “Draw, if you’re going to,” said the gravedigger’s son, holding up a fist with two straws.

  They drew. Kandri won. As the longer straw emerged, he felt a brightening of the skies.

  Mektu demanded to see both straws, then accused the gravedigger’s son of cheating.

  “W-what? How?”

  “You broke my straw with your thumb.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Mektu,” said Kandri, his heavens already darkening with crows.

  “We can flip a coin,” said Mektu. “There’s no way to cheat with a coin.”

  Kandri shook his head. “Sore loser. Marry someone else. It’s what you’d say if I’d lost.”

  “But you know he cheated!”

  “Cheated! Why would I?” cried the big youth, stamping his foot.

  Mektu glowered, as though the question were unfair. Finally, assembling the theory as he spoke, he said, “You . . . want her yourself. And so you want me out of the way. Ariqina doesn’t care about Kandri, but if I’m the winner, you don’t stand a chance.”

  The older boy’s mouth fell open. His huge hands rose in fists. Kandri, taken by a strange impulse, jumped between them. But the gravedigger’s son only turned, moist-eyed, and stomped into the house. Kandri had a moment to wonder if the young giant really might fancy Ariqina, who was kind to him as she was to everyone in the Valley, and then the boy’s mother stormed out of the house and beat them both with a cane.

  Somewhere outside the tomb, there is a shout. Eshett’s arms clench about him. The voice is muffled by earth and stone but almost certainly a soldier’s.

  They lie rigid. Kandri is shivering slightly. Without her words to distract him, the panic tries to return. No air. Too little light. He should fear the Wolfpack, but what he fears is this dead soil around him, the black jaws of the earth.

  Time passes. He grows desperately thirsty. He muses on the danger of opening his pack, digging out one of the remaining faska. Impossible; any small sound might give them away. But they could be here for hours! The sun will climb; its ruthless heat will inch along the tunnel, drill down from above. Could they last until nightfall? He will have to piss before nightfall. How can she have failed to think of such necessities?

  He turns his head, whispers: “Eshett, I—”

  Something with legs drops into his mouth. He gags, spits. But he has inhaled soil along with the creature, and now he is coughing uncontrollably, great body-shaking heaves. Eshett claws at him, begs him to stop. He thrashes. The air is full of falling soil and dust.

  At last the fit passes. Eshett whispers curses in her mother tongue, then catches herself and stops short. Kandri’s throat is burning. His eyes are full of grit he cannot clear.

  A few terrible minutes pass. The panic waits in his stomach. Then they hear it: the dry earth pounded by approaching hooves. Men’s voices, murmuring. The hooves slow. A shadow flits over the tunnel mouth. When it comes again, it remains. There is a sound of breathing.

  “All right, soldiers. Come out of there.”

  The man’s voice is soft and precise, and definitely familiar. Someone from the camp beyond all doubt. They do not move.

  “I have four men with me, and sixty more in the village. You can’t escape us. Come out.”

  They lie like the dead. The man sighs, and the shadow moves away. Then a new voice speaks into the hole.

  “Kandri. Mektu. Get your asses up here now.”

  “Oh, Gods,” says Kandri. “Oh, Ang’s sweet tears.”

  Eshett gasps in horror when Kandri speaks, but he only laughs and starts to squirm from the tunnel. The voice is Chindilan’s.

  He wriggles forward. The Master Smith is kneeling by the hole. Beside him stands another soldier in riding boots. Two more, mounted, stand a few paces away.

  “Uncle, how—”

  “Just hurry, you fool.”

  Kandri emerges, grub-like, and Chindilan takes his arm and wrenches him from the hole. Kandri grins at him, almost weeping with relief. But Chindilan is not smiling, and the soldier on his left has drawn his sword.

  “Steady,” growls Chindilan, not releasing his arm.

  The man beside him wears the insignia of a sergeant of the Shessel, the Prophet’s lightning cavalry. Chindilan too is holding a weapon, some hideous axe. The two mounted men are also Shessel.

  His smile gone, Kandri twists to look over his shoulder. And cries out in despair.

  Beside the mound stands Garatajik, the Prophet’s Secondborn.

  Kandri’s hand flies to his machete. The sergeant pounces, throws him flat on his back. A heel comes down on Kandri’s weapon. But it is Chindilan, his beloved uncle, who raises the axe over Kandri’s head.

  “Don’t kill him,” says Garatajik.

  That lilt, that schoolboy voice. He should have known it at once.

  He wears a spotless white headscarf and kanut, and like all the Prophet’s sons, a great emerald set in a chunky silver ring. Eyes wide, lips full and troubled. A distressed and thoughtful face.

  Kandri looks up at Chindilan. “Backstabber. Shithouse dog. I loved you like blood.”

  “Kandri,” says Chindilan. “Get your brother out of that hole.”

  “He’s not in there.”

  Chindilan starts to kick him, almost viciously. “Kandri! We do not have time to fuck around.”

  Garatajik props his fine leather satchel against the burial stone, then steps nearer to Kandri and draws a short, broad-bladed knife. He looks at Kandri with wry fascination, as if the man below him were some kind of outlandish insect or frog.

  “Which are you?” he says. “The quiet one, or the lunatic?”

  When Kandri doesn’t answer, he glances at Chindilan. “Kandri’s quiet,” says the smith, “and his brother’s not exactly mad, my lord.”

  “I know that also,” says Garatajik, probing their bush kits with his toe. Once more, he catches Kandri’s eye. “An abused notion, madness. Like cold. It is not really there, you know; cold is just a thing we feel when heat is gone. A void, as it were.”

  Kandri breaks into another fit of coughing.

  “Madness too is a void,” says Garatajik. “My position in life has given me occasion to look into that void. Rather longer than is strictly healthy. A foul netherworld it is, a maze of few hopes and fewer exits. And yet we shut the poor lunatics away in further cages: the asylums, the dark, infested war
ds. I can hear your brother squirming, Kandri. Call him out.”

  Kandri shakes his head. “Mektu’s not in there, my lord.”

  Garatajik looks at him thoughtfully. “Sanity, in my estimation, is merely oil in a lamp. You burn it, you light your way. But there’s only so much to go around. Your supply can be exhausted.” He smiles, wide white teeth. “And then you’re truly fucked.”

  He glances at the sergeant. In a quick movement, the man twists Kandri’s machete from his grip and tosses it away.

  “The quiet one,” says Garatajik. “You had an interview with my mother. You’re afraid of drowning, but you wouldn’t tell her why.”

  The sergeant turns sharply, as though noticing a sound. He squats before the tunnel and peers inside.

  “My lord, there’s a woman in there!” he says. “Harach, get out here, you!”

  “Keep her quiet,” says Garatajik. “Tell her she won’t be touched.”

  Kandri hears Eshett scrambling from the hole. She crawls into his field of vision, face clenched in horror, caked with mud. “Devil’s teeth, she’s one of the village floozies,” says the officer. “Don’t scream, girl. Kneel down.”

  She kneels; his sword is close to her neck.

  “Where is that amusing Mektu, then?” says Garatajik. “We have searched the graveyard and found only a few empty tunnels. Has he fled?”

  “My lord, we must make haste,” says Chindilan. “The others—”

  “Quite right,” says Garatajik. He crouches, takes his knife in a stabbing grip, and lowers it, until the point touches Kandri’s chest. His gaze is fierce.

  “Did you kill my brother Ojulan, corporal?”

  “No, no, my lord, I’d never—”

  “Did your brother kill him?”

  The poised knife. The heavy axe. Kandri shuts his eyes, but that is worse: a flood of dreams and faces, a path to the future, hopes too beautiful to bear. The temptation is a thousand times stronger than the moment with Idaru and the ash locust. To solve the problem of Mektu! With a single word. With a nod of the head.

  He opens his eyes. The world is bright through his tears.

  “I killed him,” he says. “My brother ran with me because I asked him to. He had nothing to do with Lord Ojulan’s death. He doesn’t even know.”

  “You killed Ojulan?”

  “Yes, my lord. With my machete, in the dark. This woman, she’s innocent too, she’s—”

  “Enough.”

  Garatajik sheathes the knife and straightens. Chindilan lowers the war axe, and the Prophet’s son extends his hand.

  “My mother would not show us the corpse, you see. I don’t greatly care who did it. Just as long as the beast is dead.”

  Kandri sits up. The world has gone senseless, the men around him are counterfeits, or ghosts. The sergeant releases Eshett. Chindilan is smiling now—a crazed smile like the grimace of a bear.

  “Hinjumans!” he says. “Walking Gods-damned calamities, every one of you! Where’s Mektu, damn your eyes?”

  “I think,” says Garatajik, “that I shall need a few minutes with this man.”

  He turns to the pair of riders. “Return to the village,” he says. “Tell the Pack we have a lead at the gypsum mines. Take them all; we will join you presently. Hurry, now, and see that there are no stragglers.”

  The riders wheel their horses about and set off for Balanjé at a gallop. Then, as Chindilan watches from a few feet away, the Son of Heaven crouches down beside Kandri.

  “Have no fear. Both the riders and this good man”—he nods at the sergeant—“are as loyal to me as your uncle here. They will not betray you. Alas, the remaining sixty riders I led to Balanjé would slay you in an instant. Their hearts belong to my mother, you see. Like most of the half-million Chiloto in this world.”

  “My dearest lord, you—”

  “When my body came of age,” Garatajik continues, “I kept the matter to myself. But not Ojulan. He woke the household, shouting about his wet dream, exultant at the stain on his bedclothes. He deserved women now, he told us, and would fight for his share. He sent word to our mother in Techerepind, demanding young girls to practice on. The next day her answer came: Give him anything he wants. Ojulan began to scream for his pleasure: ‘Two brown girls, two olive. All clean, and none too skinny!’ Our eldest brother, Jihalkra, had his men build wooden frames. Girls were tied to these frames with their legs apart. For Ojulan’s safety, you understand.

  “Later that year, his pleasures took a darker turn. He began to kill the ones who displeased him. Then he asked for a new job: to rid the province of ‘ugly girls’ before they grew old enough to breed. My mother did not endorse this idea; she merely frowned and told him to be discreet. He was not discreet. He killed two girls that first evening, and only stopped when I convinced him that killing so many innocents put him in danger. That the helpless become just the opposite in death—in short, that their ghosts would shrivel his manhood. I spun the tale in desperation, over the body of the next girl he meant to stab. And that night I began planning my escape.”

  He spread his hands. “I have not escaped. Oh, I left all this behind for a while—studied the arts of the enemy, as I told my mother, though in fact I found more friends than enemies in the east. I came to love their great cities, their blessed libraries, their songs. I was happy in those lands, but my soul remained caged. The more I learned of the world, the less I could bear the thought of my family’s desecrations. I grew ill, then almost mad for a time, and the madness only lifted when I resolved to come back and fight. Now I doubt if shall ever truly escape. But I will stop them, stop her. You will hear of it, no matter how far you run.”

  “My lord, we’re still in danger,” says Chindilan. “If someone sees us here, a villager, a child—”

  Garatajik waves for silence. “Listen, boy: did you take my brother’s mattoglin? If so, I should like it back.”

  “I don’t have it, my lord,” says Kandri. “I left it on his body. I didn’t kill him for the knife.”

  The older man studies him a moment. “I’m told it was gone when they found him. It’s worth a fortune, of course. But you’d be foolish to keep it. That knife is a legend, and could make you a target even for those who would never willingly help the Prophet or her cause.”

  “I left it, my lord! Jekka take my soul if I lie! Besides, Uncle Chindilan told me it was cursed.”

  Garatajik looks at Chindilan, who shrugs. “Ojulan believed it to be cursed, my lord. But he said that the Sons of Heaven were immune to such hexes.”

  “Evidently not,” says Garatajik. “Well, that is a pity. Our mother will post a substantial reward for the mattoglin—nothing like the one for your heads, but substantial—and I might have arranged for it to go into the coffers of her enemies. They are mostly empty, those coffers. I have little funds of my own.

  “But to your plight. I shall report that we found no trace of you here. I have already made arrangements for your family. They may not suffice to protect them, but they were the best I could do at a moment’s notice. I can’t give you a horse, either: how would I explain the loss of it? Besides, you have no means of lowering a horse into the Yskralem.”

  “Is that where you’re going?” says Eshett suddenly.

  The four men turn to look at her.

  “You can’t,” she says. “There’s nothing that way. Just salt, heat, ghouls, animals. And the ghosts of fishermen. You’re not ready for the Yskralem. You’ll die.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that,” Kandri tells her.

  “Do not reprove her,” says Garatajik. “There are Ornaq vultures in the Stolen Sea. And worse beyond, though you may find some respite in the green Lutaral. On the East Rim, there is an actual city, believe it or not. But unless you make nothing but wise decisions henceforth, you’ll never live to see it. Do you hear me, boy? Never, except as meat in a vulture’s stomach, or dust on the wind.”

  He turns and walks back to the satchel beside the burial stone. “Travel
at twilight, or in darkness,” he says, “If you walk in the sun, you’ll sweat out your water before you’re halfway across. Tell me, have you served in a desert campaign?”

  “I’ve served in the Gathen Wastes, my lord.”

  Garatajik shakes his head. “Then you’ve seen nothing. That’s unfortunate. You listen to this girl of yours.”

  “I’m not his girl,” blurts Eshett. “I’m not going anywhere with these fools.”

  Garatajik looks at her with a hint of suspicion. Then he shrugs and waves his hand. “Get back in that hole, then, while we clear out. I can’t think what else to do with you. As for the killer—”

  His black eyes fix on Kandri. “You may think this first desert, the Yskralem, is far enough. It is not. The Lutaral beyond is not far enough, nor the depths of Misafa Wood, nor the distant peaks of the Baluk Range. My mother has lost her favorite son, and her wrath is beyond description.

  “Still, you were wise to run east. I thought you might. Anyone clever enough to ambush my brother in a house where not even the Prophet knew to seek him is clever enough to flee in the right direction.”

  Kandri looks at Chindilan, beseeching. Ambush?

  “For what is the alternative?” says Garatajik. “You could throw yourself on the mercy of the Važeks; but you are the Prophet’s man, and they will show no mercy. You could make for the deep wilds of the South—but that journey would require weeks or months of travel in lands my mother now controls, and nothing but lethal jungle at the end of it—and again, no likely welcome from its peoples.”

  “My Lord speaks the truth,” says Chindilan. “The forest clans already fear us. The Prophet wants lumber; they have trees. If they refuse to sell, she drives them from their land with raiding parties.”

  “We are years from conquering those people,” says Garatajik, “but they have learned already that the price of freedom is constant terror. And terror has your eyes, young assassin.”

  Assassin. Kandri gazes up at him, wanting to deny the word, to explain his predicament. But how can he? And what does it matter who believes him? Assassin or fool, he has killed a Son of Heaven. There can be no forgiveness; he is a man marked for life.