Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  A soft sound to their right. The brothers whirl, then swear. Talupéké is kneeling atop the battlements, sweeping the telescope across the land.

  After a moment, she lowers the instrument and creeps toward them along the wall. The brothers meet her at the bottom of the stairs.

  “No one to the east of us,” she says. “The way is clear for you ahead.”

  “That all you have to say?” asks Kandri.

  The girl’s red eyes have a fierceness that shames him. What does he expect her to say?

  She gestures at the twin arches. “We’ll need to go in there for a view to the north. Of course, your enemies could be in there. I doubt it, though: nothing much to be gained from hunkering down in a closed courtyard. They could be in the tower, though.”

  “We watched that tower all day,” says Mektu. “We watched the whole fortress. If they’re here, they’re not up to much.”

  “If they’re here, they’ve seen us already,” says Kandri. “Come on, before the sun sets. A look around is the only damned reason for climbing this rock.”

  They cross the vast courtyard as quietly as possible. Under the shroud of dust and salt, small objects resolve into view: a bent fork, a shoe buckle, a rusted length of chain—and suddenly, a human hand.

  They stop dead. The hand is a ruin, scraps of flesh shriveled to rawhide on sun-bleached bones, two fingers missing, a bronze ring about the thumb.

  “Ghouls,” whispers Kandri.

  Talupéké flips the hand over with her boot. “You know how to fight them, don’t you? A stab with your mouth closed, then a leap back to breathe. Don’t inhale their stench. It can wither you like a curse. Like a cold wind withers flowers, my grandmother used to say.”

  “I can smell them,” says Mektu.

  Kandri smells it too: rotting flesh, the most evil, most unendurable smell in all the world. In silence they approach the easternmost arch, and flatten themselves beside it against the wall. Inch by inch, Kandri leans out, until he can steal a glance into the space beyond.

  Cold terror envelops him. Beyond the arch is a courtyard almost as large as the one they have just crossed, and almost as empty.

  Almost.

  Ranged along the west wall are four towering heaps of driftwood and brush, and atop the heaps are four nightmarish birds. They are twice the size of elephants. Their plumes are dust-gray, but their naked heads and necks are a slick, raw red, and their hooked bills are black. They shift and flutter stiffly, as though newly awake. Bones, human and otherwise, lie heaped around the nests. Dangling head-down from the nearest is the flayed-open carcass of a human being, mostly devoured, a skeleton draped in strips of cloth and skin.

  As Kandri stares, one of the vultures stands and beats its wings, sending a storm of dust across the courtyard. Between its massive talons is an egg two men would struggle to lift.

  People will call anything an Ornaq until they’ve seen one.

  He pulls his head back, aghast. If they had chosen the west arch, they would be standing within ten feet of those birds.

  No one breathes, or hesitates. They simply retreat, past the gnawed hand and the cauldron and the pit. The courtyard feels endless. Only at the gate do they pause to look at one another.

  Mektu gives a whisper of a laugh. “Ghouls!” he says. “Couldn’t it have just been ghouls?”

  Talupéké’s look is wild, hunted. “We need to get off this island,” she says. “And then away, far away, as fast as we can. Those are roosting females. If they catch our scent they’ll eat us alive.”

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” says Kandri.

  “You mean she shouldn’t have.”

  “Don’t start that, Mek. If we’re quick we can be back to the trawler before it’s totally dark. And yes, girl, we want you to come back.”

  But Talupéké is holding very still, looking at a spot somewhere north of the ruined boat. She raises the telescope. Then she grins that same, unsettling grin she wore when she learned that they had come from Eternity Camp.

  “What exactly the fuck did you do to the Prophet?”

  Kandri snatches the telescope. A few miles to the north, three tawny, long-legged felines the size of ponies are gliding across the seabed, with two riders each upon their backs. He cannot see their faces, but he can see the white robes, the belts of scarlet, the weapons numerous and large.

  “Rasanga,” he says, fighting to control his voice. “Six of them, on sivkrin. Oh, Jekka’s hell. Eshett and Uncle don’t even know.”

  “Or,” says Talupéké. “they’re watching and know perfectly well. It’s not as if they can run.”

  “Mek, we—”

  “It will be over by the time we get there,” says Talupéké. “Long over. And then they’ll just kill us, too.”

  She speaks calmly. Kandri almost hates her for it, but her words are undeniable. Even alone, six Rasanga could slaughter a dozen fighters like themselves. And these six are not alone. The sivkrin, the sandcats, are trained to leap on a man and disembowel him at a word.

  All true, and yet he runs. All of them run, sprinting through the last of the ruins to the slope, racing each other to their deaths. Even Talupéké, rushing to defend the man who called her a savage and a dog. Hatred, love, the Gods’ great comedies. I’m losing my mind, Kandri thinks.

  “Wait!” cries Mektu. “They’ve stopped!”

  Kandri skids to a halt. The Rasanga have indeed reined in their cats. “The scope, use the scope!” hisses Mektu. Kandri raises the instrument, focusing desperately—and finds himself gazing at a Rasanga with a telescope of her own, trained directly on themselves.

  “Oh,” says Kandri.

  The Rasanga lowers her telescope. Kandri lowers his. Then the riders turn the sandcats, abandoning the trawler, and begin to race like the wind toward the island.

  A place to hold. A corner. The broken gate is far too wide. The battlements? No exit from up there except a plunge over the cliffs, or a dive into the nests of the Ornaqs.

  The Ornaqs. Will they rise, feast on hunters and fugitives alike? Or just circle, waiting for the slaughter to end?

  There will not be much waiting: the sandcats are blindingly fast. Three minutes, maybe, and they will reach the mouth of the cove. Another five and the battle will be joined.

  Talupéké wants to try their luck with the pit, and whatever caves or dungeons underlie the fortress. “Tie our scarves, make a rope, let go when the rope runs out. Maybe it’s deep and we’re killed. Or maybe we ambush them, or find another way out.”

  Kandri forces himself to lean over the shaft. Blackness, blindness. A fate worse than death.

  Mektu seizes his arm, steadying him. “Forget it, girl. Next plan.”

  “I don’t fucking have a next plan!”

  They return to the gate. The Prophet’s commandos are inside the cove, passing the last of the shipwrecks. He can see their weapons now: jaw swords, mattoglins, axes, bows. Perhaps the pit after all. He shuts his eyes, and his mind fills instantly with blackness. He’s drowning. He doubles over, vomits on the stones.

  “What, is he panicked?” asks Talupéké. “Some fucking soldier. Are you going to freeze?”

  “Leave him fucking alone!”

  “I’m all right, Mek,” says Kandri, although he isn’t. “We need to run. We need a place to fend them off.”

  “Underground,” says Talupéké. “That’s the only place. Except maybe that tower.”

  Kandri straightens, looking at her.

  “The tower,” he says. “It had one door, right? One . . . narrow door?”

  Talupéké nods. “It was partly blocked. And the windows were high off the ground.”

  “How high?”

  The other two look at each other, then at him. “What are you thinking?” asks Mektu.

  The sandcats have begun to climb. The Rasangas’ eyes are calm, unblinking. Their blades already drawn.

  “Is it madness?” says Kandri.

  “Is what madness?” hisses Mektu. �
�Talk, talk, for Ang’s sake!”

  They are halfway to the summit. Kandri says nothing, in the grip of a preposterous idea. Mektu, horrified by his stillness, slaps him hard in the face.

  It is the right thing to do. Kandri seizes their arms and pulls them wordlessly into a run. Not for the pit or the stairs to the battlements. For the arches across the courtyard.

  It must be the west arch. The Gods help us. The west arch and silence, or we die.

  Twenty feet from the arch he stops them, turns back to face the gate. “Don’t move until I do—no matter what. And don’t either of you make a sound.”

  “Let’s put our backs to the wall, at least,” says Talupéké. “If they get behind us, we won’t last a minute.”

  “We won’t have to.”

  Kandri scans the rubble near their feet, scoops up three broken bricks. He gives one to each of the others. “Don’t waste these on the Rasanga,” he says. “Keep them until—oh, devil’s ass. Steady, fuckers, steady.”

  The sandcats are padding through the gate. Three sinuous predators, hissing, baring eight-inch fangs. The riders on their backs have painted foreheads: white stripes for mourning, green for revenge. Three men, three women. All six enormous, muscled like Gods.

  Without sound or hurry, they advance into the courtyard. They ignore Talupéké but gaze at the brothers like starvelings approaching a feast. At the lead is a woman bearing a war axe, double-bladed and black.

  At a distance of some hundred feet, they rein in the cats, and two of the riders slide to the ground. Each carries a cruel, hooked mattoglin—and wears, strangely, a single iron gauntlet on the opposite hand. Before Kandri can even wonder at the purpose of these gauntlets, they burst into flame.

  He feels his brother’s twitch of horror. The flames, blue and orange, writhe like fistfuls of snakes in the Rasangas’ hands, but the warriors show no sign of pain. Their eyes, unblinking, do not leave the brothers for an instant.

  Their leader lifts her axe and speaks.

  “Kandri Chamkarra Hinjuman. Mektu Malachat Hinjuman. You who shed the blood of the Sons of Heaven. You who spit on the Mother of Us All. You traitors to five hundred thousand Chiloto. You beloved of the Lord of Hell. Surrender. It is the last act of wisdom you may take in this world.”

  Kandri’s grip tightens on the others’ arms. The woman’s voice is sibilant and low.

  “You may say to yourselves, ‘We are Chiloto also,’ but that is not true: the Prophet has cast you from the clan. And she has ordained that every Chiloto man, woman, and child learn your names, the better to curse them, curse you, speed the punishment of your souls. Surrender. Embrace her justice. Name the foreign prince you serve, and your agonies will be reduced. There is no other path.”

  Kandri is cold and his flesh feels remote. He cannot control his heart. But in a slow, deliberate motion, he releases Mektu and lowers his hand to his crotch. His voice is barely more than a murmur, but in the windless yard it is enough.

  “Her Radiance. I wish her death. She’s a prostitute, a whore, she goes with animals, she gives diseases to her sons—”

  The commander snarls an order. Spurred heels kick, and the great cats hurl themselves across the yard.

  “Wait,” hisses Kandri.

  Mektu and Talupéké look feral, deranged. Once more, he grips their arms. Do you see it? Doesn’t matter. Forty feet. Wait for them, wait—

  “Now!”

  They turn and sprint for the arch. Behind them, the Rasanga scream out the kill-song of the Army of Revelation:

  Oorlulu-Kralulu-Ke—

  And no more. Their voices obliterated by a hideous, torn-metal shrieking, so loud it is like a kick to the chest. Over the wall between the courtyards the Ornaqs rise, dark wings blocking the last of the sun.

  Terror grips the sandcats. The Rasanga haul savagely at their leads. The brothers and Talupéké plunge through the arch, so fast that Kandri all but impales himself on the closest nest. No reason to throw the brick: he brings it down like a hammer, feels the eggshell crack. He spins away, flailing for the tower like a madman, expecting at any second to feel his spine snapped, his body lifted and torn like the corpse flashing by on his left.

  The startled Ornaqs have risen high over the courtyard. Now they dive, screaming. The tower so distant. The narrow doorway half buried in stone.

  Talupéké screams. Kandri whirls, she is lifting away from him, he leaps, they lock hands, they are both rising, three humans are rising, the vulture has pounced on a Rasanga and the warrior has Talupéké by the belt.

  The ground falls away. Talupéké’s clothes are burning, the Rasanga has seized her with a fire-gauntlet, she arches and kicks but he is behind her, Kandri cannot reach him, she is screaming, the Ornaq gulps and half the Rasanga vanishes into its beak, a talon rises long as Kandri’s forearm, he swings his machete and just stops it from disemboweling the girl, the beak closes, the gauntlet goes limp—

  They fall.

  Black wings, bellow-churned air. Talupéké is torn from his grip. The head of the bird enormous and obscene as it stabs at him midair, and missing by so little that the dead man in its beak grazes his lips with a burning finger, but where’s the ground, the fucking ground that will kill him—

  Crack.

  Driftwood shatters, brush explodes. He has struck a nest, it has saved him, he writhes in the bird shit and feathers, seeking solid ground—he’s gone mad, a thing of slime and cinders rises wailing beside him, wielding two knives. It’s Talupéké, yolk-drenched, no longer burning, she has shattered an egg with her fall.

  “Get up, get up! Don’t fucking stab me!”

  They’re on their feet, sprinting again. Somewhere a cat is screaming, blood is pouring from the sky. Then suddenly (he can scarcely believe it) they’re at the tower door, Mektu gesturing from within, Ang still loves them, Talupéké dives through the gap—

  A shadow. Kandri flings himself away as an Ornaq strikes the stone like a battering ram.

  Within him, something accelerates. He sees nothing but beak and claws, the bird’s great killing devices. He rolls, kicks off its leg, his machete is gone, the beak strikes, he twists away. When the vulture makes a hopping turn, he dives again for the doorway.

  Agony. He’s dragged backward from the tower. The reek of death envelops him, he is rising, he is in the vulture’s beak.

  For an instant there is nothing in the world but that beak, and the yellow pool of the Ornaq’s eye. Then release, and the bird’s sounds of agony. And Talupéké’s knife buried deep in the eyeball.

  He strikes the ground. He scrambles backward for the door. Hands seize him, lift him, drag him into the dark.

  “Blades, blades!” Mektu is shouting. “If one of those shits fights his way in here—”

  One of them does. The screams come from the floor above, mingled, indecipherable. They race up stone stairs into a scene of horror, a sandcat wedged in the narrow window, its hindquarters still outside the tower, and trapped against it a Rasanga, her cheek cut to ribbons and her leg caught in the twisted stirrup like a tourniquet, reaching back with her only remaining weapon, her war-axe, trying to saw herself free.

  It is the leader, the one who spoke their names. If she frees herself, we die—some of us, all of us.

  The mayhem is like nothing Kandri has ever faced. The whirlwind of claws, the spit and fury and feline screams. The astonishing skill of the Rasanga, holding off all three of them while being thrashed against the wall by her mount—and somewhere above, Ornaqs landing, ripping at the tower, trying to tear the structure apart.

  They cannot best this woman. She fights them all, shouting Dhagrii, Abominations, as the walls tremble and the pool of her own blood widens on the floor. Above, the ancient timbers supporting the ceiling start to crack.

  Stones plummet, dust blackens the room. For several moments, they are fighting almost blind. Then the sandcat gives a piercing wail: an Ornaq has seized it from behind.

  The Rasanga looks over her shoulder, see
s her death in the darkening air. Together with the cat she is hauled backward, one sharp jerk after another, her arms braced uselessly against the window, her mount’s claws cutting grooves in the stone, and then she twists and brings the axe down and severs her own leg at the knee.

  The cat is gone, its screams extinguished in an instant. The warrior keeps her balance a moment, even lifts the axe again—and then falls, thrashing in her own blood, the weapon gone from her hand.

  “The Prophet”—she is frothing, spitting her final words—“freed us, freed your ancestors. Without her . . . you would not exist.”

  She lies still. Outside, the battle rages, stones plummet from the roof. They descend the stairs again, praying that the ceiling holds. Through the doorway they see the scarlet courtyard, the broken eggs, the bodies like rag dolls torn by spiteful children, and Mektu turns to Kandri with something like admiration in his eyes.

  “Six down,” he says. “Half a million to go.”

  They stand on rubble. The inner floors have collapsed: they can see right out through the stone funnel to the darkening sky. The Ornaqs scream and flap and take the spire in their talons, dislodging bricks that whistle down the shaft and explode. They press themselves to the walls. Splinters of stone pelt and cut them. In time, the Ornaqs’ furies cease, but they can still be heard in the courtyard, ripping and feeding on the dead.

  “Jeshar, Kan,” whispers Mektu in the darkness, “you called the Prophet a whore.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Kandri.

  “Why the hell should you be sorry?”

  “I don’t know. But I am.”

  It is the simple truth. He has completed a process that began with his wound in the Ghalsúnay campaign. He has torn out a part of himself, a shameful part, maybe, but what mortar will ever fill that hole?

  He looks out across the courtyard. Halfway to the arch, a small fierce fire dances, blue and orange. It is one of the Rasanga’s gauntlets, still attached to an arm, still fed by whatever arts or curses the Prophet lends these most faithful of her servants. He can almost imagine that the arm still lives, that those blazing fingers will drag it slowly toward the tower as they sleep.