Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “She never slept with you. She probably never even kissed you. You dream shit up and then start to believe it.”

  Mektu answers by humming a tune. For a moment, Kandri simply cannot believe his ears. Then he elbows Mektu sharply. “So what?” he says. “You know that song, so what? You and everyone else in the Valley. What does that have to do with Ariqina?”

  “You know.”

  “I know you’re about to get your ass kicked like never before.”

  Mektu gives an odd little laugh. Kandri’s arms are rigid, his heart pounding, his uniform drenched in wasteful sweat.

  The song is nothing special, of course. Except to a few hayseed Chilotos from the Valley. Except to him.

  Grant me one last hour with my true love, and keep your cold Forever

  I’ll praise eternal life above her golden kisses—never.

  The year is spent, the season chill, our heads are bowed in sorrow,

  But in the hearth’s an ember still to light a fair tomorrow.

  If she’s yet with me come the dawn, I’ll live but for her smile

  And bid a hundred years be gone before I stray a mile.

  And if I forfeit heaven’s joys, in barter for that hour,

  In darkest hell I’ll raise my voice, and sing of love’s last flower.

  What temple fair, what holy place, a sweeter secret’s tending,

  Then how we might in love’s embrace go rowdy to our ending?

  A song for closing down the tavern, arms around one’s mates. Also a song for lovers, obviously. The Old Man had sung it for their mother, once, thinking himself alone with her, while Kandri and Mektu lay eight feet above on the porch roof, astonished. Years later, Kandri sang it to Ariqina—and they, too, had thought themselves alone.

  It was on one of their walking-trysts, through the meadows above Blind Stream. Very late, that particular night, and the season chill indeed. All the same they had held each other, laughed; Ari twisted the copper ring she had placed on his thumb just the day before, and he had found himself singing that song.

  They left the trail and climbed to a level place. Ari spread the blanket and rolled about like a schoolgirl, flattening the thigh-high grass. The place smelled vaguely of goats, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered; it was only their third time in life. She stripped everything from him but the copper ring; he drew his coat over both of them, and what magic he learned of a woman’s pleasures then, of joys more elusive and harder-earned but earthquake-deep when they came. She had loved the song, impossible romantic Ariqina; and he, desperate to call the earthquake, thought Well, Kandri, if your tongue can sing—for his exhausted member was no help; it became a bystander long before her hands tightened in his hair and her head thrashed and one clear cry escaped her and flew over the Valley, like the whoop of some free heretic, the last unorthodox passion east of the sea.

  They were alone, yes, but when they descended to Blind Stream Village, Mektu was waiting. He hadn’t moved; he was still prowling the road where they had given him the slip. Ariqina panicked, dragged Kandri back into the shadows, one hand over his mouth.

  It was her iron rule: Mektu must not learn of their union. He’s too loving, she told Kandri. Too loving, and too fragile. He would never forgive us.

  One day he’ll have to find out.

  Yes, one day. If you and I still—

  But Ari, he interrupted (that was the if he would never contemplate), Mektu’s living in a dream world. This thing with you, this thing between you. It’s all in his head.

  Ari had laughed at that. Where else does love live, Kandri? In a milk jug? In a song?

  She demanded his word, and Kandri gave it: never to tell, never to crush his brother with the truth. Don’t strike him where he’s weak, love. You’ll never forgive yourself, and you’ll lose your brother, too.

  Kandri was jealous of her affection for Mektu—he was jealous when a fly brushed her arm—but also humbled. More than anyone, Ariqina saw the good in his brother and drew it out. Mektu volunteered at her clinic; he cleaned the bedpans, swapped jokes with invalids as he swabbed the drool from their faces, sat up playing cards with addicts in voluntary lockdown, chattering to keep their minds off wax or skyseed or brandy. Kandri was a more dependable volunteer, but it was Mektu the patients loved.

  There were mishaps. He brought hallucinogenic foxberries for the addicts once: “They looked so bored, Ariqina.” True enough, but the second addict he approached had snatched the bag and guzzled handfuls of berries, and spent the next week talking to his thumbs. There were lost keys, outraged nurses. There was the night Mektu was sent to retrieve a package of bedsheets and surgical gowns from the station house in Bittermoon, and was found hours later in the Warhorse Tavern, snoring, the purse entrusted to him gone.

  After that incident, Ariqina had not spoken to Mektu for two months. But he had repented and worked harder, and she had forgiven him at last. She loved his brother. And Kandri knew he loved Mek as well, in glum confusion. Keeping him ignorant of their trysts, however, was far from enough. People talked, and Mektu talked incessantly. They had to hide their love from everyone in order to hide it from him.

  We sneak around like criminals, Kandri complained.

  Ariqina just smirked at him. Like lovers, you mean.

  That was true enough. In earlier times, lovers in the Sataapre had been left alone, provided they were discreet, but with the rise of Orthodox Revelation, discreet was fast becoming clandestine. Soldiers passed through Blind Stream every third or fourth day; there were barracks in Stone Gate and Wolf Kill, and the various constables, aldermen, barristers, and magistrates all answered to military superiors.

  The resulting changes in Valley life were profound but not instantaneous. Human nature changed more slowly than institutions or rulers; in the shadows, things went on as before. Couples met, stripped, made love, made promises. By daylight, they did not even hold hands.

  So: the long way home. A stumbling walk through the dark meadows above the village, over wooden stiles and bridges over the deep-cut streams. Kandri didn’t mind. They were together that much longer, and at the last bridge, they crept down to the stream’s edge and splashed their faces, their necks, each other, and she guided his wet hand beneath her shirt and arched her back. What you did tonight, oh darling, what if I can’t think of other things; what if I want it all the time?

  I do, he said.

  I hadn’t noticed. She laughed and reached for him. What do you think about when I’m touching you? Do your thoughts race everywhere, like mine?

  He must have answered her. He could not have just sat there on the stones, lost in her hand’s magic, breathing like a bull.

  The closer you brought me, she said, the more my mind flew away into the night. I could see the whole world, I was on the Gods’ mountain, looking down on us and the clinic and the Valley all the way to the sea. I was happy, and so terribly sad. Kandri, what do you want to see before you die?

  The desert, he told her, for he had known it for years. The deep desert, the great dunes, the stars at night reaching down to the sand. What do you want to see?

  You know already, she said.

  Kasralys.

  Yes.

  To find your Dr. Tsireem.

  She told me a secret, Kandri. A beautiful secret. Their work could change the world.

  Spread the blanket, he said.

  I’ll go to that city one day, when it’s time to leave the Valley.

  The blanket, he repeated, then: I’ll go with you. To Kasralys, or anywhere you like.

  Do you know, she said, I almost believe you would.

  Kandri wakes in their shelter of salt-ice and mud, and lifts the bandage from one eye.

  His heart soars. Thank you, Ang All-Merciful.

  It’s not much––a brown blur, his left hand—but he will take it. He can see. And when he crawls out into the red light of dusk, there is another blur that is his brother, kneeling, with his arms around a woman’s legs. Kandri staggers cl
ose, squinting like some ancient grandfather. It is Eshett, beautiful Eshett, footsore and indescribably filthy.

  “Stop that,” she says to Mektu. “Give me something to eat.”

  Underneath her tattered kanut she looks like a ghoul. She has spent five hours standing chin-deep in green mud, hiding from the heat and the sun. Eyes clenched shut, more mud slapped on head and face, her bag lying near her on the ice, windblown grit filling her ears.

  “I kept nodding off. I’d wake up sinking, my mouth and nose full of mud.”

  “How’s your vision?” Kandri asks.

  “Better for the rest, but still awful. Togra, I hate this place.”

  As the brothers guessed, she had used the mattoglin as bait, luring the bald man out onto the ice against his better judgment. “I slid it out across a pool and kept going. He was so close, and I was nearly blind. I didn’t stop until I heard the crack.”

  “And it was you who took the blade off Ojulan’s body,” says Kandri. “You’ve had it all along.”

  Eshett nods. “I thought it would help me get back to my village. To start over and forget the camp. I thought I’d hide it for a month or two and then slip away from the whorehouse and sell it on the road. You don’t have to tell me how hard that would have been.”

  Kandri steps close to her and takes both her hands. “What I have to tell you,” he says, “is that I’m glad you’re alive.”

  She pulls back a little, startled by his fervor. Mektu, still on his knees, is even more so. “I kept your shoe,” he grumbles.

  When she makes no answer, he nudges Kandri with his elbow. “Stop fondling her. Tell him, Eshett. Tell him about Chindilan and the girl.”

  “What, you’ve seen them?” cries Kandri. “When, where?”

  “Midday,” says Eshett. “They were running east. Talupéké was still crazy, wailing like a cat. Chindilan was running after her, trying to calm her down. They went right past me. I shouted, but the girl just stabbed the air with her knife, and Chindilan covered his ears. Maybe he thought he was going crazy, hearing voices from a pool. He was nearly blind, after all. In any case, he kept after her, begging and pleading: ‘Girl! Talupéké! Girl!’ He even called her ‘Trouble.’ She didn’t stop.”

  “They must have run out of water hours ago,” says Mektu. “If they’re sane enough to stop and drink, I mean. And if they haven’t lost their packs.”

  “Chindilan had his pack, and the bow too,” says Eshett. “Not the girl, though. She was carrying nothing but her knives.”

  Kandri tries to picture them out there and shudders, hating what he sees. “They won’t live through tomorrow. We have to find them. And we have to start now.”

  The others instantly agree. But as they make ready to depart, Kandri feels a deep ache in his chest. Find them. The idea is almost laughable. Two half-blind people, led by a third squinting through darkened glass. Searching a wilderness. Marching into the night.

  “I’ll lead you until it’s pitch black,” says Mektu. “Kandri, keep your bandage on, heal those fucking eyes. If I catch you peeking, I’ll—say the kinds of things you hate.”

  “You will anyway,” says Kandri.

  He ties one end of his headscarf to Mektu’s belt and puts the middle of the scarf in Eshett’s hand. The other end he holds tight himself.

  “That’s good,” says Mektu, “but keep your distance, and mind my shins. Ready, ducklings?”

  At first the going is easy. They fall into a rhythm almost at once, and Mektu steers around the rare hole or obstacle in the scree. Kandri is surprised at his own confidence, the headlong way he lunges forward, the trust he still grants his brother, somehow. For a time, they even break into a shuffling run.

  But more than ever, he feels the hopelessness of it all. Chindilan and Talupéké might have changed direction again. And even if they were sane enough to try to hold eastward, how could they? Even for Mektu it is growing harder as the hills fade from view. Their lost comrades could be ten miles off course, or even farther. If we could fan out, cast a wider net . . . But they cannot fan out. They are playing darts in a room with the lamps extinguished. Not even certain they are facing the target. And anything but the bullseye losing the game.

  They shout and shout, but no answer comes. The wind whips their voices away like flakes of ash. The light dims; Mektu begins to stumble and swear. Somewhere on high they hear the scream of an Ornaq, angry and forlorn.

  The plain begins to climb. Mektu, amazed, reports signs of life: bulbous cacti sprouting from hillocks of earth, tufts of wiry grass. Kandri too is stunned; they have seen no vegetation since Balanjé.

  “Stop crowding me,” says Mektu. “My eyes are in bad shape too. And those cacti have more spines than a fishhook tree.”

  They slow to a walk and fare better, but then the night grows deeper still. “No good,” says Mektu at last. “I’m as blind as you are now. Until the moon comes up, we’ll have to creep along like grannies. And not Talupéké’s granny, either. I don’t believe she learned knife-throwing from some old woman, do you? No, she must have taught herself; she must have natural talent. Kandri and I were just talking about natural talent, weren’t we?”

  Provocation, that’s the word, Kandri thinks. And should they find two dead bodies waiting for them—more provocation, more sly little stings. Two minutes of crocodile tears. Then again with his fantasies, his hints about Ariqina, his lies. One day you’ll go too far, Mektu. One day you’ll wish you hadn’t pissed on everyone who tried to care.

  Hour after hour, they walk and shout. Kandri is plagued with visions of their missing friends, parched and sunburned, throats too dry to swallow, to speak. Their own water supplies are so low—four faska, maybe part of a fifth—that Kandri can think of no way of managing his thirst but to refuse to feel it. But what will they do when they reach the others? How can they possibly make it to the rim? You won’t face that problem, says a voice in his head, because you’ll never find them.

  Shut up.

  Throwing darts in the darkness. You’ll never see them again.

  “Gods damn it.” Kandri halts the others. He throws his pack on the ground and slips the bandage from his eyes. Blackness, blurred shapes. A lamp seen through water: the moon. Ignoring Mektu’s protests, he bends and gropes in his pack. Arrows. Matches. The medical kit. And within the latter, wrapped in goat skin, the glass bottle of wound spirits.

  He pulls the jar out, then takes the end of his bandage in his teeth and rips off a three-foot length. He puts the bottle and the length of cloth in Mektu’s hands. “Drench it,” he says.

  “What happened?” says Mektu. “Did you cut your foot?”

  “Just hurry up,” says Kandri. He gives the matches to Eshett, who has also lifted her bandage. When Mektu has soaked the cloth, Kandri ties it tight to an arrow shaft. He looks at Eshett, who nods.

  “I’m ready,” she says. “Aim high.” Kandri nocks the arrow, points the bow skyward, draws. Eshett strikes a match.

  A great flame springs to life by Kandri’s shoulder. He lets fly. The arrow streaks upward in a dazzling arc. Three hundred feet above the wasteland, it goes out.

  “Now look hard, pain or no pain,” he says. “Uncle Chindilan has a bow as well. He’ll answer, if he can.”

  Their eyes sweep the dark world, horizon to horizon. Minutes tick by, and the cold dread deepens in Kandri’s chest. “Uncle’s not the only one who might see that flare,” says Mektu.

  “You have another idea?” says Kandri.

  Mektu doesn’t answer. They wait on, but the darkness is unbroken. “Do it again, Kandri,” says Eshett. “Do it until you run out of arrows.”

  Kandri shoulders his pack. “Later,” he says, too miserable to elaborate. There are arrows aplenty, but the wound spirits will be exhausted much sooner. They walk another mile and climb the first of the hills before he sends a second flare into the sky. Again, there is no answer, and their shouts return only echoes. Kandri’s mind ticks off the possibilities: the bow lost, the
arrows lost, matches lost or soaked to uselessness, nothing that burns like wound spirits in his uncle’s possession.

  Or their faces turned away. Or their deaths already a fact.

  They descend the eastern slope of the hill and climb another, much taller, and from its barren crown he sees dawn in the east. He thinks: That dawn will kill them. Very soon, mere minutes from now, their flares will be invisible in the light.

  With great haste, they signal again. Mektu hisses a flat little tune through his teeth. Eshett’s puffy eyes are on Kandri, imploring, and Mektu snaps at her, “Look for them, not at my brother!” His voice thick with heartbreak. Is there any torture like watching hope drain away, water through your fingers, dry despair on your tongue?

  Dawn spreads from the east. Kandri shoots a fourth and final time; he has smashed the bottle and swabbed it out with the rag. As they wait, barely breathing, Kandri glances over his shoulder. And there it is: the East Rim. The sun is very clearly rising over a distant, jagged wall. It should have been a moment of joy, that first glimpse. The Lutaral is there; water and food and caravansaries are there. He and Mektu and Eshett will not die in the Yskralem. They will go on, devastated, toward that heartless sun.

  In the Sataapre, we almost worshipped you, Samitra Sun-Goddess (look at my madness, talking to an ember in the sky). You took so long to climb above the Coastal Range. You gave us long cool mornings for labor, for making love (she does not listen, she does not care). Here, a man could come to hate you. And you know it, bitch, you’re still stabbing at my eyes.

  Kandri turns away—

  A sputtering fire dances on a hilltop, two or three miles to the north. It waves fitfully in the half-light, two seconds at the very most, and dies. The brothers and Eshett roar as one, an appropriately hysterical sound, then fall dead silent, not daring to breathe.

  Over the dead hills, a living voice: Chindilan’s.

  . . . eeeeeers . . . kuhhhhhhh . . . eeeeee!

  Seconds later, they are racing northward down the hill. They have not understood the smith’s words or stopped to worry about the fact. But the sounds reverberate in Kandri’s thoughts until they sort themselves out. Tears and laughter burst from him, commingled.