Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Where in Ang’s name did you get that idea?” asked his mother. “We love Ariqina. Both of us.”

  Kandri studied her a moment. She was smiling, but her eyes were moist, and she would not look at him directly. She was, he thought, more upset than the day they spoke about the priest.

  “I hope you do,” he said carefully, “because one day, I’m going to make her your daughter-in-law.”

  “Oh,” she said, popping from the chair as if a spring had been released. “Oh, my. That’s extraordinary. What a beautiful young man you are, Kandri. Goodbye!”

  Days became weeks. The negotiations had evidently failed. One of the guards began to demand half of everything Kandri’s family brought him; when Kandri refused, the man reported that Kandri had lunged at him at mealtime, and in punishment he was denied all visitors for a month. The guard also confiscated all the books Kandri’s family had brought to him to fill the empty hours—all save The Five Atrocities, which Kandri had by now read forward and backward.

  His beard grew long. He paced the cell like an animal. When the month ended at last, his father brought seven-year-old Perch, his baby brother, to visiting hours. In the corridor, the same guard frisked Lantor Hinjuman, then crouched before the child, who was sucking his forefinger.

  “Are you a good boy? Do you say your prayers each night? Or are you another lout like your brother in there? He smells bad, you know.”

  The boy took the finger from his mouth and poked him hard in the eye. Kandri and the Old Man broke into unfortunate laughter, Perch howled and put his head on the floor, the simpleton began to rub his genitals, and visiting hours were cancelled until the spring.

  On his eighty-first day of incarceration, the guard delivered half a sugar cake from Dyakra Hinjuman and a letter from Nyreti. His elder sister, who had never visited, informed him tersely that Cheema had won a maths competition, that the yellow hound had killed a neighbor’s goose, that his father had made something explode in his workshop, and that Ang All-Merciful would very certainly be sending you to hell. Kandri wolfed down the cake, then turned the page over.

  But in the meantime, it appears you shall go free.

  Once more his heart leaped. Surely, this time the nightmare was ending. He waited until sundown; no one came. Through the long night that followed, he stared at the ceiling, sleepless, thinking of Ariqina and the city of Kasralys, wondering who would sell him a horse.

  The next morning he sat against the bars, where he could see a slice of the corridor. He was so exhausted that he dozed, and when he woke, he felt a warm pressure against his shoulder. Mektu sat outside the cell, wide awake but slumped in almost the same posture, hands folded on his legs.

  “Imagine,” he said abruptly, “all of us out here going on with our lives, visiting you of course, but not able to change anything. Watching you rot in there for years, watching you get older, stiffer, like some animal forgotten in a cage.”

  “Thanks for cheering me up,” said Kandri.

  Mektu’s eyes were distant. “It’s all right, brother,” he said. “I’m at peace with it now.”

  “You’re at peace?” said Kandri. “Mek, just tell me what’s going on. Nyreti says I’m to go free.”

  “Is that how she put it?”

  Footsteps echoed in the corridor. Kandri pressed his face to the bars, saw the two men approaching, saw the deal they had struck as if it were written in the air.

  “No, Mek,” he whispered. “Hell, no. Get rid of them, please.”

  But Mektu just sat there, eyes sad and knowing. “Ten years is too long, Kan,” he said.

  The first man was their father. The second was the army captain who had lent him the book.

  The choice was simple: enlistment for both brothers, and a clean record, all charges dropped. Or likely conscription for Mektu within the year—Valley youths were next on the army’s list, the captain confided—and for Kandri, twelve years in jail.

  “Twelve?”

  The captain nodded. “Our discussions with Father Marz were not without incident.”

  The Old Man looked away. Kandri stared at his father’s bald patch. Twelve years in this box. Twelve years of lice and hunger, frigid nights, howling dogs. Twelve years without Ariqina, without even the sensible hope that he could find her. There was no choice; he was caught like a rabbit in a snare. But . . . Mektu?

  “Leave my brother out of this,” he said to the captain. “I’ll enlist. I’ll do whatever you want. But not with him.”

  The Old Man shook his head. “The captain and I have been over this, Kandri. For days.”

  “Maybe you don’t get along, need a break from each other?” says the captain. “Not to worry; we’re used to that. We can assign you to different units.”

  “No!” cried Mektu.

  “No,” said Kandri, “that’s not the point.”

  “What is the point, son? Mektu knows what he’s getting into. Corporal Betali’s letters made sure of that. He’s healthy, he’s quick, he’s strong as a mountain lion.”

  “He’s a dunce,” said Kandri. “A dreamer; he loves this idiotic verse. You can’t make a soldier out of someone like him.”

  Mektu’s upper lip curled in rage. Before he could spit out a retort, the officer began to laugh.

  “I’ve made soldiers of worse,” he said.

  Kandri looked at him helplessly. No you haven’t.

  “And volunteers get better appointments,” said the captain, “You’ll see less combat than the boys we drag kicking and screaming. When you sign, we’ll hand your mother a nice little purse. And you, Kandri: when you return to the Valley one day, you’ll ride in like a man, with full honors. Serve twelve years in here, and you’ll crawl out pale and feeble, a washed-up bum no woman will look at, no mother speak of with pride. Is that the life for a man like you?”

  Man, thought Kandri. He was not certain he merited the word.

  “It was the best I could do, Kandri,” said his father. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” said the captain, suddenly irate. “What is it with you Hinjumans? The Prophet is offering you much more than a way out of prison.” His eyes fixed on Kandri. “Did you read that book?”

  Kandri took a deep breath. He nodded.

  “Show me.”

  Kandri retrieved the book and tried to pass it through the bars. The captain shook his head. “Well thumbed, excellent. All I wanted to see.” He leaned closer, holding Kandri with his gaze. “Her Radiance needs you, Hinjuman. The Važeks are still on our doorstep. What you read in that book is still happening to our people in the north. If we grow lazy, it will be happening here again by the moon’s next quarter. Your sisters, your little brother, your second mother who loves you more than life itself—they will be dead. You understand me, son? Dead, or worse than that in the case of the girls, if men like you say no. And it won’t end with our defeat. This is a war to save the Chiloto people, of course. But it’s also a war for the salvation of Urrath.

  “I won’t lie. It will be rough. You and your brother will know sheer misery at times. But that’s the way of the world, Hinjuman. Only the dead are free from pain. Those who hide from pain end up hiding from life, cowering behind the strong, until even their own kin have no use for them. They wither, like grass under a rock. They betray their own souls.”

  He looks the boys over again. “That’s the key to all of this, my boys. The Prophet needs the strength of our arms, but she asks for something much greater. She asks us to give our souls. And in return, she makes our souls, like our bodies, stronger than all the pain in this world.”

  He spoke with such obvious sincerity that Kandri’s scornful retorts died on his lips. Mektu looked at the captain, wide-eyed; the speech was new to him as well. Their father gazed at the grimy floor.

  “Are you ready for a new life, Mr. Hinjuman?” asked the captain.

  Kandri shook his head, but only slowly, as though he were struggling in a vat of glue. The captain smiled. He reached into his coat pocket and
produced a key.

  “The jailors entrusted me with this,” he said, “and I trust you. Don’t make me regret it. You’re no runner, are you? Not a piss-yellow coward who would take this and flee?”

  Once again, as if it were his only trick, Kandri shook his head.

  “Good,” said the captain, extending his hand through the bars. “I’ll be here until the end of the week.”

  They left, his brother and father murmuring goodbyes. Kandri stood alone in the dim morning light, in one hand the book of atrocities, in the other the key to his cell.

  “Twenty-seven is finished! Epulu besat! Twenty-seven is complete!”

  Kandri leaps from the chair. The voice is Dr. Skarrys’s, bellowing from some adjacent room. Other voices answer, sharp and excitable, none of them in a language he understands.

  Green light fills the room beyond the window. Half a dozen Xavasindrans are dashing from one doorway to another, debating anxiously. One or two glance up at Kandri as though startled to find him still in the building. Elsewhere, doors slam and boots thump down corridors. Some kind of strident mechanical bell begins to ring. The piano player continues his performance, like a man deranged.

  Click, whoosh: the door to the front room opens, and the nurse rushes in.

  “Who the hell do you people think you are?” says Kandri. “I was locked in here like a dog.”

  The nurse has lost a good deal of her composure. “You must come with me now,” she says.

  “Where’s my brother, damn you?”

  “The procedure is concluded. Twenty-seven will be returned to you. Oh, hurry, brother escort, please.”

  “Returned to me? Alive or in a fucking box?”

  She crosses to the far door, not glancing once at the wreckage of the room. Kandri follows, biting back another outburst. They enter a narrow hallway. The green lamps in the ceiling flicker. Two neatly uniformed sentries march by at an intersection, spears in hand.

  At the hallway’s end, she opens another door, seizes his elbow, pulls him swiftly through.

  “Kandri!”

  “Oh, Gods, Mek!”

  Kandri rushes forward: Mektu is standing in the room’s center, fully dressed, beaming. Dr. Skarrys is at his side, squinting at a thermometer. The brothers embrace. “Careful!” snaps the doctor. “Twenty-seven is not to stretch or twist for a week.”

  He is wearing a pale green smock. Alone of all the Xavasindrans, he seems untouched by panic, indifferent to the strident mechanical bell. High on his forehead is a strange brass eyepiece held with a strap. A drop of blood glistens on the lens.

  “I’m healed, brother, look.” Mektu raises his shirt, and Kandri finds himself almost in tears. The swelling is gone, the flesh already returning to a healthier color. Black stitches, fine as needlework, close both the entry and exit wounds. Ang is merciful. Tebassa has not betrayed them.

  “Your brother is fortunate to be alive,” says Skarrys. “The infection had spread downward, into the lining of the intestines.” He glances irritably at Kandri. “Those are . . . tubes, if you like. Very important tubes.”

  The brothers exchange a look. “We’ve seen them, Doctor,” says Kandri. “On the battlefield.”

  “They must be treated with the greatest care,” says Skarrys, “and that is how I treated them, brother escort, despite your howls and yammers. My work was impeccable. If I had not intervened, he would have died within a week. If you please, nurse.”

  He moves to a washbasin, and the nurse, frantic, bustles to his side. Kandri starts to babble his thanks, but the doctor cuts him off.

  “Impeccable does not mean perfect, you understand. When disease has intruded this far into a body, not even Xavasindran medicine can guarantee its total removal.”

  The nurse pours water over his hands, pats them dry with a towel. Kandri sees that her own hands are trembling.

  “As a precaution,” says the doctor, “I have left a benign resin inside the wound. The substance kills putrefaction but is quite harmless otherwise. Eventually, his body will dissolve the resin into the blood.” He removes the eyepiece from his forehead, frowns at the spot of blood. “I expect no complications—provided you behave yourself, twenty-seven. No hard labor, no horseplay or running or the like. That wound must not reopen.”

  The nurse tugs at his arm, speaks in a whisper that verges on a squeal. Skarrys responds with a noncommittal grunt.

  “Doctor?” says Mektu.

  “What is it, twenty-seven?”

  “In school, they taught us that every Urrathi carries the Plague inside, like a seed. Is that true?”

  “Nearly all, yes,” says Skarrys. “It resides in the tissue of the lungs.”

  “Then are you risking your own lives, by coming here to fight it?”

  “Not at all,” says Skarrys, still bustling with his tools. “Among Urrathis, as I told you, roughly one soul in eight thousand is susceptible to the Plague. In the Outer World, there is a mirror phenomenon: one in eight thousand or so is immune. Only those rare few may apply to join the Xavasindrans. As you can observe, most of us belong to the same clan.”

  “A yellow-skinned clan?”

  “Obviously. Kvinuks, we call ourselves.”

  “And do Kvinuks get the Plague caught in their lungs, like we do? Are you a danger to your own people when you return?”

  Skarrys, struck by the question, turns to look at him at last.

  “We are a danger,” he says, “and for that reason, we too are quarantined. On an island in the middle of the sea. We remain there in small cottages, keeping apart even from each other. We test ourselves weekly, inhale astringents, cough into tubes. Gradually, our lungs eliminate the spore. When we pass five tests in sequence, we are declared Plague-free and may board the next ship for home.”

  “How long does this . . . process, keep you stuck there?” asks Kandri.

  “Three years, normally, but in some cases, as many as twelve.”

  “Twelve years? You’d give twelve years of your life to fight the Plague?”

  “If necessary.”

  “I hope you’re paid well at least,” says Kandri. “Are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  But Skarrys does mind, apparently. He turns his back on them again. “The clerk will return your weapons in the vestibule. Provided you have not lost your coin.”

  Minutes later, they are standing in the same long, windowless alley where they took leave of Stilts. The iron door clangs shut behind them, and the warmth of late afternoon bathes their skin. Mab Makkutin. Even in this sterile alley, he can smell her cookfires, her rubbish and latrines. It is like returning to Urrath from some cold foreign netherworld.

  A world they could destroy just by breathing on it. A world they’ll never see.

  Mektu straps his machete to his belt. “You should let me keep that,” says Kandri. “You’ll forget, and tear your stitches. And then Eshett will kill you.”

  Mektu shakes his head. “I won’t forget. And I still want people to think I’m dangerous.”

  “You damn well are.”

  The brothers lock eyes, then burst out laughing, stupid with relief. Mektu has just stepped back from a cliff.

  “Mek,” says Kandri. “Those tools of theirs, those lights. What in Jekka’s hell are they?”

  “That cold,” says Mektu, shaking his head.

  “Exactly, the cold. Not even the old man could explain that. Are they magicians? They seem more like . . . tinkers, mechanics, I don’t know what. Brother, can the whole Outer World be full of those people, those tools, while we’re stuck here inside the Quarantine like pigs in a pen?”

  Noises in the distance: a wash of shouts and bellows, a crash, the nicker of a horse. “I really think we should leave,” says Mektu.

  They rush down the alley. It is hours past noon. They will have no time for a proper rest at Yehita’s farmhouse. Perhaps, thinks Kandri, they can at least wolf down a meal, stretch out for five minutes on the good woman’s floor, watch the dog and the chickens
, pretend for a moment that the world still makes sense.

  The cries grow louder. “A fight’s broken out,” says Mektu. “Bit early for drunks, isn’t it?”

  “Mek,” says Kandri, “what were you shouting for, when they took you away?”

  Mektu’s glance is confused. “I didn’t shout,” he says.

  “The hell you didn’t! ‘No, please, take it away!’ You scared me out of my pants.”

  “Kandri,” says Mektu, “I didn’t shout. They gave me some kind of liquor, and it made me sleep. I never felt a thing.”

  Kandri stops in his tracks. A vague dread, like a scream from some locked and distant chamber, is stealing over him. The voice was Mektu’s: of that he has no doubt. What is happening? Can his brother be lying again? He glances over his shoulder at the cold iron door. But the Medical Mission is sealed like a fortress. The Xavasindrans are finished with them.

  At the mouth of the alley, something gleams on the cobbles. Kandri peers at the dark red puddle.

  “Jeshar, that’s fresh blood.”

  “Charming,” says Mektu. “Turn right.”

  For three blocks they walk in silence. A boy sprints past them, a worried-looking dog at his heels. They see more blood: this time, a smeared handprint on a whitewashed door. All the while the distant shouts crash and echo, waves among rocks.

  Kandri is impressed by his brother’s calm. Perhaps the drug has not quite worn off? How useful to have a supply of that, something you could, every so often, slip into his tea—

  Mektu jumps with great violence.

  “Harach,” cries Kandri. “What’s the matter? Stepped on a nail?”

  “Oh, Gods,” says Mektu.

  “Your stitches? Your wound?”

  “No, Gods, shit.”

  “Mektu—”

  “We’re dead, Kandri! Flaming shit!”

  “Mektu, talk to me!”

  “The man who was watching you, with the beard. We damned well have seen him before. He’s the third Tirmassil, the one Atau left behind with the camel when we descended that ridge.”

  “No,” says Kandri. “No way in hell. That man’s beard—”