Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

“Piece of shit! Stupid bastards! Why doesn’t anyone cooperate?”

  He throws the sentry from the wall. Two fistfuls of shirt, a vicious movement, release. The boy’s face is horribly plain for an instant; he cries out, gripping the spear as though it were anchored somewhere. Kandri wants to be sick, but Mektu has already caught the other spears beneath his arm and is drawing his machete, and Kandri dives into battle at his side.

  One of the men manages to draw a dagger, but there is little contest. As Mektu grubbily slashes and stomps one man to death, Kandri lunges for the other, takes off the arm that reaches for the bellpull, cuts his throat on the upswing, stops the scream, and feels a twist in his brain, a spasm that almost brings him down atop the corpse. Then he is sick, copiously sick, why should he live if the cost of staying alive is this butchery of innocents, if they are the weeds between him and the future, the path he must clear to Ariqina.

  Dr. Ariqina. The healer.

  She will hate him if she ever learns what he’s become.

  Mektu, steaming with blood to the elbows, reaches for the bellpull and begins to raise it, length after length. Kandri sinks to the floor. He cannot weep. He doesn’t have that in him, suddenly. But he cannot go on killing, either. Not for his brother’s sake, or his own.

  “Kandri,” says Mektu, “we’re saved. This thing must be eighty feet long.”

  The coils of rope spill around them. Over the trickling puddles, the sectioned limbs.

  Mektu drags the end of the rope out the door. “It will reach the ground, Kan,” he calls. “Stand up. This is it.”

  Kandri studies the face of the man he’s just killed. Bulging eyes, wide open mouth. It comes again: that inner twisting, that pinch.

  Be reasonable.

  Mektu puts a hand on his shoulder. Reading him, as only Mektu ever could.

  “Do you know why you have to get up?” he says.

  Kandri shakes his head.

  “Because Garatajik was good to us, Kandri. And he put a letter in your hands.”

  He looks up: Mektu, this monster, his kin. But the truth of the monster’s words cleaves down through Kandri’s despair. He stands. He lifts his brother’s shirt and sees that the stitches are intact. There is blood on Mektu’s stomach, but none of it is his own.

  Well, then: survival.

  They wind the rope three times about a solid-looking section of parapet. “Now just tie a loop for me to stand in,” says Mektu, “No length to spare, unless you want me dangling by the arms.”

  Kandri does not want him dangling by the arms. But lowering him is not easy: the rope binds and snags, and leaps when Kandri stops straining against it. Time and again, he must hurl himself with all his might against his brother’s free fall, then relax one muscle at a time, waiting for the next jarring yank.

  He leans into the effort, over the inner wall and the city. Goodbye, Mab Makkutin. Never will be too—

  “No. Oh no.”

  The White Child is standing beside a corpse—beside the body of the sentry Mektu hurled from the wall. She bends and pokes at the shattered skull. Intrigued, she studies her fingers: scarlet on chalk. Then she looks up at Kandri with those dead black eyes. Kandri imagines, with instant horror, that she wears another’s face. A familiar face, but whose?

  Lantor. You would not help me escape.

  Her lips do not seem to move, and yet he hears her. And suddenly, the sky is full of shooting stars. They scatter and flash like scarlet minnows; they skip and go dark and blaze again; they trickle earthward like rain on glass. For an instant, he is aware of nothing but their beauty, a heaven strange and infinite and open.

  The Night of Blood. When the Gods weep tears of fire.

  Distant shouts. Men with torches are running south along the wall, straight toward him. His brother is shouting too: can the word be Horse?

  The rope goes slack: Mektu has reached the ground, or released the rope in any case. Kandri glances into the city once more. The White Child is smiling at him.

  I’ll find you.

  An arrow sings past his ear: the men on the wall are closing. Kandri ties a clumsy timber-hitch in the rope, tests the knot. One shaving of the moon has risen above the Arig Hills. There, backlit, is the Hermit, where the General’s men will be waiting. And there is Mektu, running east, arms flailing like a madman. Abandoning him.

  Kandri tests the knot. Another arrow closer than the first. He steps backward off the wall.

  It is not hard to catch up with Mektu, but it is very hard not to turn him by the shoulder, drive a fist into his teeth. Ditch me now, will you? After everything? After what we’ve done today?

  He is reaching for that shoulder when Mektu hears him and turns. “What the fuck took you so long? There’s a horse, help me catch it! Scared to death, poor thing, it must have bolted—”

  Kandri hears the animal, snorting and stamping. They follow the sound into a stand of wiry trees, and there it is, a dark, skinny mare, hauling at reins snagged in the underbrush. Terrified, not wounded. And the stab in his chest is sharper than any other that evening, for it is hope again, that crazed persistent suitor, that tease who cannot break with him, or stay.

  The mare has no saddle. Also no wish to remain anywhere near Mab Makkutin. The trouble is not catching the lean animal or even riding her, with one arm clamped around Mektu’s belly and the other gripping both reins. The problem is her fear. Once the reins are free, she runs like a mad thing, and it is all Kandri can do to guide her out of the advancing brush fires.

  The next hours pass in a bewildering dream. A level mile they race over in silence, a blazing silo, a pair of jackals licking their lips. Three enormous shooting stars raking the heavens, the last unmistakably striking the northeast plain in a burst of fire, and a shockwave he feels through the body of the horse. A crowd of farmers joining hands around a temple in flames, singing a prayer-song. A ghoul tugging a corpse from the ground with hands and teeth.

  Another soundless mile. Then hoofbeats, many hoofbeats, and a storm of riders engulfs them, charging west toward Mab Makkutin, sixty or seventy warriors flowing indifferent around them as though their horse were a stump. The light is too dim to see them clearly, but then a last red star streaks overhead, and Kandri sees a dozen faces he recalls from Tebassa’s bunker, and with them Talupéké, mounted behind a stranger, a glazed ferocity in her smile.

  No one looks at the brothers. The host is gone, and what are they to do but keep riding? They keep riding. There is no pursuit. The hill called the Hermit rears up, and the mare, not calm but exhausted at least, bears them quickly around its southern flank.

  Kandri too is bone weary: they have been awake for some thirty hours, and he cannot keep his thoughts from the morbid question of when, if ever, they will again know a night of untroubled sleep. But there ahead, just as Stilts promised, is the rock wall. They halt the mare, and almost at once, the sound of other hooves reach their ears. Down from the shadowy hillside come five riders, their clothes and horses so dark that at first, Kandri can perceive no more than their eyes. At their lead is a small, broad-shouldered figure in a tight-fitting leather jerkin.

  “The man in the hat sends his greetings,” he says without preamble.

  “We’re not too late, then?” says Kandri.

  “You are quite late,” says the rider, “but three hours ago, our orders changed. If the moon had climbed another finger, we were to ride out and seek you.”

  “Seek us?” says Mektu. “I didn’t think your boss particularly cared whether we showed up or not.”

  “If he did not care, would he have helped you to begin with? Come, shift over: that poor animal of yours is weak with fear.” At the man’s gesture, a spare horse is brought alongside their own, and rough hands help them slide from one animal to the other. “Now follow,” says the first rider, “but make no sound.”

  The path is long and circuitous, winding deep into the smooth-sided hills. They climb steadily, and the wind grows strong and cold. Once, they halt in a patch
of moonlight. From a hilltop above comes a faint cry, like the echo of a curlew’s call. One of the riders cups his hands to his mouth and gives an answering cry, and the journey resumes.

  Kandri is nodding over the saddle horn, Mektu is snoring on his shoulder. As his eyes grow heavier, the despised sound infiltrates his dreams, mutating into the bellow of a camel, until he is certain the spiteful creature has begun to gnaw at his shirt. He tries to pull away, but another camel has locked its jaws on his leg. Their obtuse lowing surrounds him; perhaps they will gnaw him to death.

  “Wake up, Chiloto.”

  The horse has stopped; their escort has disappeared. In their place stands Mansari, Tebassa’s oddly feline warrior, shaking Kandri by the leg.

  “Dismount,” he says. “You’re to be welcomed, earnestly this time, despite that cloud of, hmm, misfortune that clings to you.”

  Kandri can still hear the camels—and now, fully awake, he detects their oddly agreeable, scalded-milk stench. His brother, already dismounted, is leaning against the horse like a drunkard. Kandri swings a leg over the mare’s rump and slides to the ground, and is startled to find himself on sand. He pulls Mektu upright.

  “You bleeding?”

  “No. Stop asking me that.”

  Mansari smiles thinly. “You are most certainly brothers,” he says.

  They are in a narrow canyon with a floor of soft sand. The vertical walls are smooth and undercut, as though by some vanished river. But human hands have shaped this place as well: carved into the cliffs are five or six levels of galleries, revealed in the dark outlines of pillars and porticos, windows and stairs. The openings throb faintly with firelight.

  Here at ground level, however, is the largest opening by far: a rough cave mouth, ten feet high and many hundreds wide, like the maw of some primitive whale. A line of guards stands at this threshold. Behind them, in the vast interior, Kandri dimly perceives a throng. It is not an army: there are children and frail elders, a few dogs, many camels. Some of the people are asleep, wrapped in blankets or crowded onto rugs, but most are awake, murmuring, busy with inscrutable tasks. Deep inside the cavern, a few small ground fires burn.

  “Are these people your prisoners?” asks Kandri.

  “Idiotic question,” says Mansari. “This is the Cavern of the Owls, and a holy place. The hill clans have always sheltered here in times of war and disaster. Tonight, they are sheltering from the celestial fires—and from your, hmm, comrades.”

  “Former comrades,” says Mektu.

  “Have the Prophet’s forces come this far, right into the hills?” asks Kandri.

  “Not as far as we know,” says Mansari. “But one can see their handiwork from many a hilltop. The fearless New Orthodox cavalry, crossing blades with goatherds, laying siege to barns.”

  “Why are you guarding the cave mouth, then?”

  “Try thinking; it is a beneficial habit in a soldier,” says Mansari. “This Cavern is far from the Lutaral plain and little known to outsiders, but it is not impregnable.”

  “So you don’t trust these hill people.”

  “No clan is without its, hmm, deviants,” says Mansari. “Some wretches in the Lutaral have even embraced your Prophet’s cause. We can take no chances tonight.”

  And someone betrayed your general, Kandri thinks.

  “This is a box canyon, isn’t it?” says Mektu, squinting at the darkness. “Just one way in or out?”

  “Climbers and mountain goats might find another way.”

  “Mansari,” says Kandri, “what about our friends? The Parthan woman, and the smith—”

  “Turn around, Kan,” says Mektu.

  Chindilan and Eshett are standing just beyond the line of guards. The smith is bickering, pointing at the brothers, demanding to be let through. One of the guards looks at Mansari, who nods. A spear rises, opening a path, and their uncle barrels toward them. He does not shout, for the hush upon the crowd is somehow law, but there is no disguising his relief.

  “You mad lost dogs! We were going out of our minds. What in Ang’s name happened to you?”

  Not waiting for an answer, he throws a burly arm around each brother’s neck and pulls them close. Eshett, coming up behind him, crosses her arms over her chest and says nothing. But then she catches Kandri’s eye and holds him there, a moth on a pin, wondering if she is going to laugh or break down in tears. But this is Eshett; she does neither. Her gaze slides to Mektu, and Kandri wonders if his brother still has a chance.

  “You’ve bathed,” he says to Chindilan.

  “I have,” says his uncle. “And someone’s going to trim this wild hedge of a beard, thank the Gods. You’re supposed to walk out of the desert looking like a crazed holy man, not go in that way.”

  “Very witty, very droll,” says Mansari. “Come, the general is waiting.”

  So he can ride, somehow, thinks Kandri.

  Within the cave, animals outnumber people: there are donkeys, mules, goats with soft satin ears. And camels. Two or three hundred camels, filling the low space with their brays and snorts and snuffles, their flatulence and flies. Some are asleep beside their handlers, necks and chins flat on the ground. Others stand with great loads strapped atop them like peddlers’ bundles, seemingly ready to depart.

  A boy appears with a torch. Mansari takes it and chucks him under the chin by way of thanks. The people grow quiet as they pass, their dark eyes staring: Kandri and Mektu are a terrible sight. Most of the huddled figures are small and sun-wrinkled, dressed in kanuts or the plain tunics and sarongs of the Lutaral. But a few are clearly wealthy, resembling in their attire the seated guests in Tebassa’s bunker.

  Kandri blinks. It is more than a resemblance: there, in a cloud of blue smoke from the water pipe he is smoking, is the very merchant who complained to Stilts about the general’s priorities. And there is the mysterious Prince Nirabha, not alone this time but attended by some dozen guards, all of them slender and olive-skinned like the young monarch. The prince is seated in some manner of canvas chair, studying a book by the light of a small oil lamp. The lamp in turn dangles from a kind of shepherd’s stick at his elbow, thrust deep into the sand. Goats and dogs trot about him; moths swarm to the lamp; peasant children watch him, dumbstruck. The prince takes no notice; he reads.

  And there, finally, is Dimas, the caravan owner: the short, plump man who had identified the severed heads, the man who had told Eshett to come back with thirty soldiers.

  “What’s Dimas’s business here?”

  “Profit,” says Mansari, “if he can convince Mr. Ifimar, the caravan master, to port his wares across the desert. That’s Ifimar on his right.”

  Dimas looks even smaller beside his companion: a tall, sinewy man dressed in kanut and headscarf, dark jewels on his fingers, massive broadsword on his belt. He turns, and Kandri sees his profile. Long face, thin eyebrows like wires stitched to his forehead. Ifimar and his employer are inspecting a row of camels jostling at a water trough. The beasts drink with abandon, noisy as drainpipes in a storm. Ifimar feels their stomachs, groins, ankles, utterly absorbed in his task.

  “Caravan owners rarely brave the desert,” says Mansari. “They hire masters to take that risk, but when the profits are tallied, they still claim the, hmm, lion’s share. Ifimar’s fees are twice that of other masters, but that is the privilege of excellence. He is one of the finest masters ever to work the Ravenous Lands.”

  Kandri starts. “You mean the caravan might be setting off after all, without the thirty guards Dimas wanted?”

  “It might,” says Mansari, “if he opens his purse a little wider, and Ifimar agrees.”

  “Then we have to speak with them! Uncle, Eshett, have you—”

  Eshett shakes her head. “Dimas said he was through with discussing men he never met. Kandri’s right, Mr. Mansari: we must go to them, right now.”

  “What you must do, Parthan woman, is greet your host and benefactor. Don’t worry about the caravan: no one leaves this place without the general�
��s blessing. Come along.”

  The cave stretches deep into the hill. They pass doorways, side chambers, stairs. Mektu begins to chatter at Eshett (“A nurse was flirting with me, I tried not to notice”). Kandri and Chindilan bring up the rear.

  They turn left into a straight, breeze-swept passage. Kandri grips his uncle’s arm. “I’m going to ask you something,” he says, “and I won’t take kindly to evasion.”

  Chindilan is startled. “Harach, boy, that’s a hell of a way to pose a question. Can’t you just—”

  “What is the White Child?”

  His uncle misses a step.

  “You know, don’t you?” says Kandri. “You’ve known this whole fucking time.”

  “No, no, I don’t. It’s not what you think.”

  “Forget what I think. Talk to me.”

  “Kandri, the general’s up to something.” Chindilan’s voice is very low.

  “Evasion.”

  “The hell it is.” Chindilan slows his pace, letting the others vanish around a curve. “Listen to me: in that mill, Tebassa barely spoke to us. Tonight, he’s been shouting for you every fifteen minutes: The brothers! Why haven’t they arrived, what’s keeping those Chiloto fools? I don’t know what his game is, but he’s itching to have you and Mektu under his thumb. We need to think fast, Kandri. We need to know what to say to him.”

  “How about the truth?” says Kandri. “A little more truth from everyone—that couldn’t hurt.”

  “Couldn’t it?”

  “Have you seen that creature, Uncle? It . . . smelled us, from blocks away. It picked out the building where we’d hidden ourselves and made right for us, as if it could see through walls.”

  “Kandri,” says Chindilan. “you’re upset and exhausted, I realize that. But shut up about the Child! The Prophet collects freaks: so what? We have bigger problems.”

  “Her face was familiar. Why is that, Uncle?”

  “Because you’re upset.”

  Kandri spins his uncle brutally around. “You’re fucking right I’m upset. That thing killed with a touch. And it called us by Papa’s name.”

  Horror in his uncle’s face. He clutches at Kandri, mouth working, and Kandri realizes the smith has been fighting panic from his first word.