Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Mektu gives a wordless scream. Halfway through the rending cry, something muffles his voice—a hood, a mask, a pillow held down . . .

  Kandri goes to the table, lifts the round sculpture, hurls it at the window with all his might.

  The sculpture bursts in a thousand pieces. The window is not even scratched. He lifts a chair and swings it too, and only manages to crack its wooden leg. He is reduced to screams himself.

  “What’s happening? What the living fuck are you doing to him?”

  He can see only one side of the watchers’ faces. They lean forward, talking, gesturing, fascinated by the procedure. But one chair stands empty. The pudgy man with the braid has slipped away.

  Hours later, Kandri is slumped in the chair. No one has come. The watchers have drifted away; the room beyond the window is dark. His throat is raw from shouting. In his hands is a small brass plaque: the faceplate of the shattered sculpture. He stares at the neat Kasraji words.

  THE HUMAN BRAIN

  It might as well be his own brain, there in shards under the window. He is brain-sick, brain-weary, undone by a presentiment of death. Mektu’s death. A thing he has wished for sometimes, may the Gods forgive him. A thing he will never recover from, if it should actually come to pass.

  It was Mektu who showed him how to scale a palm tree, hugging the trunk with all four limbs, a rope loop joining the feet. Mektu who taught him to play the fiddle: a five-song repertoire, the same five as Mektu himself. Mektu with whom he built a still in the loft of a neighbor’s barn, from bamboo and glass milk jugs and an old oil drum. Mektu who shared his guilt when the barn caught fire, and the next six months rebuilding it, nail by nail.

  Mektu who carried him over the River Shev, his head cracked open, the Ghalsúnay arrows falling like rain.

  The screams have long since ended. The piano, however, plays on, faint and tedious. The tune changes, but the musician never pauses for more than a breath or two. No one claps. No one speaks or even clears a throat. It is as if there is no human involved, as if the keys are being struck by some tireless machine.

  And now—Jeshar, is it possible? Yes, it is. The man is playing, butchering, his and Ariqina’s song. Give me one last hour with my true love, and keep your cold Forever. Kandri laughs: such a shameless kick in the gut. He leans back in the chair and pummels the wall.

  “Play something else, you hear me? Play anything else!”

  The tune does not falter. Kandri groans and covers his ears.

  For a few weeks that summer, the stories from Blind Stream became almost unbearably rich. First the young Dr. Ariqina vanishes. Then Kandri Hinjuman assaults a priest. Certain townsfolk came to the prison, knocked on the wall, shouted his name. It was not done out of solidarity but merely to prove to themselves that it was really happening. When Kandri answered, they had few words of comfort for him, but many questions. He answered with questions of his own, all concerning Ariqina.

  The gossips put two and two together. The boy had clearly lost his mind, and what but love could account for it? Father Marz broke his silence only to confirm that Ariqina had come to him with “a crisis of virtue” on the night of her disappearance; he made no mention of the cleansing ceremony. Surely, the youths were lovers, then—or fornicators, rather, brazenly defying the Prophet’s chastity edicts.

  But Ariqina had repented, and it was to her credit that she had laid her guilt before the Valley’s elder priest. What form of atonement had Marz demanded? Some public humiliation? Whatever it was, the young doctor had balked, fled the Valley in shame. And Kandri had taken out his frustration on her confessor.

  All this made a salacious kind of sense. But then came the oddest twist of all: Mektu Hinjuman’s announcement that he and Ariqina had been secretly engaged.

  It was more than an announcement, in fact: it was a performance. He wept out his heartbreak, rolled in the dust, cried to the Gods to bring her back unharmed and take his own life instead. His speech borrowed liberally from the War Choral and other poems. “Ariqina! The cold mists have taken you! Come back, return the sun! You’re the blossom of the Valley, the woman of my destiny and dreams!”

  That his brother was dreaming was plain enough. Mektu’s public agonies only underscored his guilt in Kandri’s eyes. He had spied on their lovemaking, and jealousy had driven him out of his mind. There was no other explanation. Who else but Mektu could have betrayed them to Father Marz?

  The first time his brother came to see him in prison, Kandri had reached through the bars and taken a hopeless swing at his chin. But as the days wore on, a portion of Kandri’s fury was transmuted into awe. Deluded or not, his brother was doing some good.

  “We had no carnal relations,” Mektu told the villagers, “but I will tell you the truth, people: it took all my strength to resist her advances. Ari was feverish. I reminded her of Our Prophet’s teachings on the matter of lust, and she heeded me. She went to Father Marz for moral correction, and to confess.”

  You? asked a great many, bewildered. Not your brother, not the one who jumped the priest?

  Mektu bowed his head. “Kandri loves her too, of course. We were rivals, and he never could accept that I’d won. He’s gone just a little mad. And somehow my poor brother’s decided that it was Father Marz who swayed her, convinced Ariqina to choose me. Don’t blame Kandri. Love makes fools of us all. I’m sure the good Father has forgiven him already.”

  Why did she run off, then? asked the skeptics.

  “Don’t you see?” Mektu barked at them. “She didn’t run. She has no reason to run. She’s still out there—lost, hurt, caught in a wolf trap, pinned under a rock. We have to find her before it’s too late.”

  This last claim, at least, he believed with all his heart, and his conviction persuaded more than a few. The search continued, and Mektu gave himself to it body and soul.

  The wilder part of his fantasy—that Ariqina had been his fiancée rather than Kandri’s lover—also had some good effects. It cleared the taint of promiscuity from Ariqina’s name. It even won some sympathy for Kandri, would-be priest killer, as the law pondered his fate.

  But the days wore on, and Ariqina was not found. The search parties dwindled, then suddenly ceased. Mektu went on alone. Some time on the eleventh day, he too went missing, but before a new search could begin, word came that he had walked all the way to the tavern at Wolf Kill and drunk himself into a stupor.

  When he returned, his story appeared somewhat tarnished. Perhaps Ariqina had wanted to break off the engagement—if she had ever truly pledged herself to Mektu Hinjuman? Perhaps there was someone else altogether, in Nandipatar maybe? Or brigands, kidnappers? The lands around Blind Stream had been scoured. Wherever the truth lay, it grew hard to credit that Ariqina herself was lying in a ditch.

  Kandri feared he really would go mad in that cell. Ari could not be dead. She had left the Valley the way she had entered his life—in pitch blackness, guarding her secrets, hiding her tears. He knew now that his love for her was beyond anything he would ever feel again, and that to lose it would be to pass through this world condemned to half measures, meaningless pursuits. He should have proposed months before. He should have stood watch outside the temple; he should have gone with her when she fled. He should be on the road with her that very minute. Even if she refused him. Even if she were bound for a place so strange and distant that it was hard to believe it could exist.

  Physically, matters could have been worse. His discomfort seemed paltry compared to that of the dogs, who bayed and whimpered through the nights. Kandri at least had visitors. His mother came often, and so did all his siblings (save for Nyreti, who had not yet recovered from “Ang’s cunt”). Several friends visited as well, with gifts of bread or sweets or lighted cheroots; matches, of course, were not allowed in the cell. Most wanted nothing to do with him, however. Kandri had assaulted a priest, a defender of the Prophet’s word. Heartbroken or not, he could only be shunned.

  His very first visitor, however, was Lantor Hi
njuman. The Old Man was disheveled and exhausted: his part in the search had been a hard ride to Nandipatar, and a frantic survey of everyone who remembered the girl from six years before. Afterward, he rode straight to the jail, contemptuous of visiting hours, and simply blustered his way past the guards. He stared at his son with similar belligerence. For several minutes, he did not speak at all.

  “Papa?” said Kandri at last.

  “What did she tell you?”

  Kandri stood up and walked to the bars. “Ari? Nothing. She didn’t say a damned thing. What’s the matter?”

  “You’re not lying, are you, Kandri? I won’t forgive you if you lie about this.”

  “Lie?” shouted Kandri. “Go to hell, Papa. I haven’t lied to anyone.”

  His father waited. Kandri threw up his hands, turned and kicked his cot, stormed back to his father and whispered, “She’s obsessed with Kasralys City, and that plague doctor, what’s her name, Tsireem—”

  “Yes, of course,” said the Old Man, “but did she say nothing else? Tell me the truth, I say. On your life, Kandri. On all our lives.”

  He was even more frightened than angry, but stranger than either was his odd look of guilt. “What’s going on here, Papa?” hissed Kandri, seizing the bars. “Do you have something you should tell?”

  The Old Man stood rigid. He raised a hand, trembling, and brought it near Kandri’s own. “I have something I should never tell,” he said, “and if you care about her, or your family, you’ll never ask me about it again.”

  Two weeks later, Kandri received a visit from Father Marz himself. The old man was escorted by a pair of younger priests and an army captain. He kept a good six feet from the bars.

  “I’ve brought you this,” said the army captain, passing Kandri a book. He had a rather kindly face.

  “Thank you, sir. Do you know what’s to become of me?”

  The captain shook his head. Then one of the young priests spoke up sharply: “Father Marz wishes to know if you have anything to say to him, Kandri Hinjuman.”

  Any groveling pardon to beg, that is. Kandri looked the old priest in the eye. He could accuse the man right there, before that officer. But would it matter? Who was the more powerful, a young captain or a senior priest? And why did Kandri imagine that this captain would wish to help him at all?

  They were busy men, impatient with his silence; if he did not speak quickly, they would be gone.

  “Did you rape her, Father?”

  It was a whisper, but it reached their ears. The younger priests all but burst with indignation. Marz restrained them with a gesture, his own eyes blazing. “Jeshar, is that what you think? What devil’s mouthpiece whispered that in your ear?”

  “His own sick fancy,” said one of the younger priests. “Let us go. This one will not avail himself of your kindness.”

  “I thought you rather sane for a Hinjuman,” said Marz. “Not mindful of Our Prophet’s teachings, but then you started life on the barren mountain, with no priest at hand, and your birth-father rarely seen beneath your roof. His sins were not yours. And your brother Mektu’s behavior, his disgraceful playacting, his ugly ideas of mirth. None of this I ever thought to hold against you. But then this disgrace—”

  Greatly daring, he took one step toward Kandri. “My task,” he said, “was to cleanse the girl, in keeping with our Prophet’s law. Anyone who claims I did else but that is a liar and an enemy, a stooge of blackest hell.”

  “Beg the Father’s pardon, wretch!” growled one of the priests.

  “Nay, not my own,” said Marz. “Let him beg the pardon of Ang Most High, in our holy Prophet’s name.”

  With that, he tottered away, and the priests trailed after him. The army captain lingered a moment, considering Kandri almost wryly.

  “What’s to be done with me, sir?” Kandri.

  “Get some rest,” said the captain, starting away. “I think you’re going to need it.”

  The weeks that followed were the lowest Kandri had ever known. There was his suspicion of Mektu, who visited him often in the cell, but who chattered in such a tactless manner that Kandri often wished he would stay away. There was his fear for Ariqina: how could she possibly manage such a journey on her own? There was the ache of her loss, a shard of glass lodged in his lungs, stabbing him with every breath.

  But worse than any of these was the lingering mystery. If Marz was telling the truth, and no one had harmed Ariqina, what had made her flee into the night?

  Of course, his own fate too was waiting to be decided. Someone had heard the priest mutter, Ten years for Lantor Hinjuman’s brat. Ten years! He would be an unimaginable thirty by the time he stepped out of that cage—if the lice had not devoured him, or killed him off with some disease.

  The simpleton made animal noises. Goats, cows, roosters, especially at night. Sometimes, he rambled about friends Kandri suspected were imaginary. The old murderer just watched him, small eyes bright under a shock of greasy gray hair.

  Ten years. Kandri dared not contemplate such a sentence. But what else did he have to think about? What else but Ari’s fate, Mektu’s guilty expression, their mother soaking her sarong with tears?

  In desperation, he picked up the book from the army captain. It was called The Five Atrocities, and it described, in horrific detail, the crimes visited on the Chiloto people throughout history. There were far more than five. But the book began with an essay on the origins of the Chiloto clan, and that is where Kandri found himself spellbound.

  It seemed his people were the first true kings of Urrath. They ruled the continent long before the slave-built empire of the Kasraj, before the still-earlier kingdom of Ut’xing the Conqueror, before even the ancient sartaphs, the builders of stone cities long since drowned in desert sands. But none of these were instructive. For the Chilotos (the book explained) had built a different kind of kingdom, one not of masters and servants but the natural fealty paid by a grateful continent. They had treated all peoples with justice, defended the weak against the strong, lifted the poor from their misery, built schools, consecrated temples. Under their stewardship, all clans had prospered. Few if any had seen a reason to resist, for it was clear that this arrangement was better than any feasible alternative. Some clans were born to grow wheat, or brew palm wine, or quarry stone. The Chilotos were born to rule other clans and help them forward into the Light of Ang. This might seem strange today, but in the beginning, everyone understood. The conquered peoples thanked the Gods for their rulers. On the fringes of the Empire, clans begged the monarchs to enter their lawless territories and plant the Chiloto flag.

  Kandri’s ancestors, the book continued, were also the most learned people of the ancient world. They had invented matches, windlasses, bore wells, cotton fabric, leavened bread, fiddles, oil paints, arithmetic, astrology, stoneware, steel. Princes from foreign lands came to learn the secrets of the Chilotos (for the Plague would not appear for centuries) and apprenticed their sons to the clan’s master craftsmen. The Chiloto, open-hearted, shared their knowledge gladly, with no thought of recompense.

  But they learned to their sorrow that not all the world’s clans were so benevolent.

  One day Mektu burst shouting into the jailhouse: “You’re to be pardoned tomorrow! I heard them! Marz is willing to forget the whole thing!”

  Kandri jumped up with his heart in his mouth, but Mektu had not come during visiting hours and was driven roughly away. Tomorrow came and went, and the next day, and the next. Dyakra Hinjuman told him to keep his chin up: “Lantor is negotiating. He’s sure to cut some sort of deal.”

  Her words did not reassure him: the Old Man was the last person who should be pleading his case to Father Marz. The two men were enemies, and rivals of a sort: both were considered men of influence, but their beliefs and instincts could not have differed more.

  “Sepu,” said Kandri, resorting to the name she’d given herself the day they met, “would you talk to old Marz? Could you, please?”

  His second
mother was, without question, the gentlest soul he had ever known, a fact that made her response all the more startling. She looked away from him, gazed fixedly at the small, clouded window at the end of the hall. She hugged herself, washtub-rough hands enfolding knobby elbows. “If I must,” she said, “but that should be the last thing we try. Your father is dramatic, yes—Mektu gets it from him. Still, Lantor can keep his cool with Father Marz. I manage as well, Ang knows. In the street, at the festivals . . .”

  She rose, straightened her sarong, making to leave although she had arrived just minutes before.

  “But leave me in a room alone with that man and only one of us will come out alive.”

  The next day Dyakra told him that Mektu had given up the search. He had gone instead to work at the clinic, but the nurses had sent him home because his compulsive spewing of mawkish poetry was upsetting the patients.

  Kandri was far more curious about his father’s secret, but somehow, he knew that he must respect the Old Man’s admonition—if not forever, at least for a time. Nor did he dare ask his second mother about her hatred of the priest. She had walked out once already, and he looked forward to her visits more than he liked to admit. She also brought him bread, sometimes fresh from the oven, with a white knob of butter melting inside.

  So, a safe topic of conversation. He told his mother that he really did love Ariqina. She nodded. “I know that. You always have. And I hate their sense of humor.”

  “Whose?” said Kandri, sitting up. “Are people making jokes about her?”

  “Not people. The Gods. They make jokes of us all. Very cruel and senseless jokes.”

  “Well, there’s nothing funny about it,” said Kandri, confused. “She loved me too, Mother. Loves, I mean. All Mektu’s talk about a secret engagement is just his craziness.”

  “Good!” she said brightly. “There’s a bit of mercy, anyway.”

  “You and Papa don’t like her much, do you?”