Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Don’t blame Lantor,” he whispers.

  “Blame him for what?” says Kandri. “Did he make that thing, somehow?”

  “No, no. Fucking hell.”

  “You’d better just explain.”

  But as they round the curve, they find the others stopped and waiting. Mansari watches the stragglers keenly, and suddenly, Kandri knows his uncle is right: they must not speak of the Child now, must not provide Tebassa’s men with any new reasons for fear or mistrust. Not until the general shows his hand.

  “If your little conference is, hmm, concluded?” says Mansari.

  Behind him stands a pair of swordsmen. Spiked to the wall between the guards is something dark and shaggy: a sheepskin. At a nod from Mansari, one of the men lifts it like a curtain, revealing a small door-shaped hole. Within are warmth and firelight, and many soldiers, and dim, smoke-thickened air.

  “After you,” says Mansari.

  The chamber is large but does not feel so, crowded as it is with Tebassa’s men. A rough circle, it has other entrances scattered about the perimeter, and a great fire in a hearth at the center; the smoke vanishes above through a funnel-like hole. Many of the warriors from Oppuk’s Mill are here. Stilts is holding a basket of oranges, tossing them to the waiting men and women with quick snaps of his wrist. A woman wags a finger at a small brown dog. Spider, the bald captain with the birthmark, is arm-wrestling a larger man, and winning. Observing the match from a seat near the fire is the general himself.

  He sees them, beckons them near. Spider too looks up, and his opponent takes the opportunity to slam his hand down in triumph. Tebassa laughs; therefore, everyone laughs. Kandri senses a difference in the way the soldiers look at them. At Oppuk’s Mill, there had been suspicion and little else; now there is excitement, an eagerness almost breaking out into smiles.

  But there is still uncertainty, a waiting to see more. He’s told them we’re good news, thinks Kandri, but he hasn’t told them why.

  “No sign of girl trouble,” says Mektu. “I mean, Trouble Girl. I wonder if she’s—”

  “Talupéké can take care of herself,” says Eshett, with a quick glance at Chindilan.

  They thread a path to the general. He beams at them, and his hands keep beckoning: Closer, closer. When Kandri is less than an arm’s reach away, Tebassa pulls him down and kisses his forehead. He does the same to Mektu.

  “You’re alive. That’s very good. We have a great deal to discuss after you shed those blood-blotters you’re wearing, and wash the stench away. I mean to take good care of you, boys; you won’t be sorry you’ve joined us. Send the wine back this way, whoever’s hogging it.”

  Now all the men are smiling. Kandri forces himself to do the same, but he cannot force himself to believe in this charade. Tebassa’s kiss has put him in mind of a farmer kissing a prize pumpkin before it is weighed at a fair.

  Someone thrusts a wineskin at him; he takes a long, thirsty pull. “That’s the way,” says Tebassa. “Corporal, tell the women to feed these gentlemen—after your first errand, of course.”

  A young soldier salutes, vanishes. Kandri passes the skin to Mektu, then bows low. “General Tebassa,” he says. “The Xavasindrans saved my brother’s life. We thank you with all our hearts.”

  The general’s smile does not change. “Your thanks should begin with Talupéké and with Master Stilts. She’s the reason I spoke to you in the first place. And he’s the one who swore that you were who you claimed to be—Hinjumans, that is.”

  “He knew our father, sir,” says Kandri.

  “We all do,” says Tebassa.

  “You know him?”

  “The last time I checked, Lantor Hinjuman was very much alive.”

  Kandri turns and embraces Mektu. Chindilan, with a rumbling laugh, throws his arms around them both. Hope is one thing; news is another. Tears well in Kandri’s eyes.

  “I knew it, I knew it!” burbles Mektu. “You can’t kill our Papa, can you, brother? Can you?”

  Kandri releases him, grinning, wiping his eyes. “Do you know where he is, General Tebassa?”

  “We know,” says the general, “and we have just sent him word that you’re among us—although the missive may be long in reaching him. Go and rest awhile, though: I must see to various matters now that you are safely arrived.” He looks them up and down, then adds, “I have urged him to join us. No doubt he will be eager to see his sons.”

  Mektu, forgetting himself, squeezes the uncapped wine skin, spraying Chindilan below the belt. Tebassa roars with laughter at the smith’s embarrassment. “Go! Mr. Stilts, rid me of these brave buffoons! The high chamber, I think, and some privacy for Mistress Eshett. Food will follow, along with such comforts as we can provide. Be gone now, Chilotos. I will send for you presently.”

  Stilts claps a hand on Kandri’s arm: the interview has ended. The older man takes a torch from another’s hand, and the travelers follow him out through another sheepskin-cloaked doorway. They stand now on a kind of landing at the foot of a narrow stair. “The general means it, you know,” says Stilts as he begins to climb. “You’re to meet again in two hours, and privately. Be careful, now: some of these stairs are broken.”

  “The hell with the stairs,” says Mektu. “Where’s our father, Mr. Stilts?”

  But Stilts, to no one’s surprise, dodges the question with a hazy promise: the general will reveal everything in time.

  “What about sleep?” says Eshett. “Are we ever to be left alone, to sleep?”

  Stilts just chuckles. His torch knocks along the ceiling, black and glistening with untold ages of soot.

  The staircase meanders upward through the stone, like a worm wriggling toward daylight. They pass other landings, where corridors branch off into the darkness, some sealed behind iron gates, others simply vanishing into the dark. They climb higher and higher. Kandri thinks of the rooms and balconies he had glimpsed on their arrival: surely, they have passed the highest of these already? Which means they are bound for some secret place, without windows on the canyon. A place never meant for common folk.

  At last the staircase ends. Before them another corridor opens, wide and straight and lit by several torches. A chill breeze travels it, tossing sand about their feet. Eshett hugs herself, and Mektu puts his arm over her shoulder. Further along the passage, more sheepskins are pegged to the stone, cloaking further openings. From one, a gleam of firelight escapes, from another a whiff of steam.

  Stilts leads them down the passage. “You’ve nothing to fear tonight,” he says. “Our forces are mainly here in the north galleries, but we’re watching every approach to the Cavern. The general has shown you rare favor, by the way: these were his own quarters in the past. Tonight, men begged for the honor of carrying him up those steps, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I’ll curl up with you, lads,’ he told them, ‘one more dog in the den.’”

  “Do you mean we’re to be left alone up here?” asks Mektu.

  “Officers will bed down in the side chambers,” says Stilts., “and there are servants about, of course. Good hill-clan people, from families well known to us. I selected them myself.”

  The passage ends in a dramatic archway engraved with odd images: horses, camels, wriggling serpents, radiant suns. Actual curtains, not skins, have been mounted on the stone there, and when Stilts parts them, a sumptuous chamber is revealed. Like everything they have seen, it is carved from the living rock. There is no furniture at all. But here again, a generous fire is blazing, this time in a hearth emitting a low moan, wind on the distant chimney. The floor, swept clean of sand, is strewn with rugs and pillows. There is a samovar on a stand by the fire, a rich smell of brysorwood, a small pyramid of folded clothes.

  Slender hands part the curtains on the far wall, and a young woman appears, dressed humbly like the peasants below. She is carrying a wide brass dish upon which something smolders: incense, perhaps. She jumps at the sight of them, then shyly lowers her eyes and advances into the room. Stilts walks forward and
takes the dish; the woman bows and flees.

  “So much room,” says Eshett. Her eyes seek out Kandri, and for the second time that evening, he feels the sharpness of her look. Not a coincidence. What is it you need to tell me, Eshett?

  “There’s a bath chamber,” Stilts is saying, “just off the passage; you saw the steam. And if you follow the girl through that doorway, Mistress Eshett, you’ll find an alcove when you can sleep apart from these hairy beasts. Your clothes will be in there already.”

  “But we bought clothes,” says Eshett. “Dry food as well, and faska. Everything you told us to buy.”

  “Did you?” Stilts looks mildly chagrined. “Well, it seems the general is in a lavish mood. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  “Where’s that girl gone, by the way?” asks Chindilan.

  “To fetch your dinner, I expect.”

  “I meant Talupéké,” says the smith.

  He speaks with a casual air any fool could see through. Kandri and Mektu exchange a look. They have not mentioned their glimpse of her riding west over the plain.

  Stilts studies Chindilan for a moment before he answers. “My niece,” he says at last, “is following her heart’s desire, and taking revenge for the slaughter at the Megrev Defile. Few of your Prophet’s cavalry will make it back to legion headquarters. The word Megrev will be written on the foreheads of the slain.”

  “It’s quite a party, this Night of Blood,” says Mektu.

  “Keep that flippant tongue in your mouth,” says the Naduman. “This is no party; it’s a reckoning. Whether you believe in the Darsunuk or not hardly matters. The clans of the Lutaral have seen one invasion after another, one bloody tyrant after another. They march in and take what they like—cattle, grain, children, hope. If they’ve exploded with anger and frustration, the only wonder is that it took so long. The brush has been piling up for decades, for generations. The spark had to come.”

  His vehemence catches them all off-guard, as perhaps it does Stilts himself. With a vaguely apologetic grimace, he starts to fish in his pocket. “Here’s a trinket. Don’t let me catch you praying to it, though.”

  He flips a coin in Mektu’s direction, but it is Kandri who snaps it from the air. The coin is large and bright, newly minted silver. On one side is the image of the Palace of Radiance. On the other, the Prophet herself—or rather the Prophet as she was nearly fifty years before, and as she likes still to be portrayed. The young visionary, not yet a mother, soon to launch a war.

  “The future Empress of Urrath,” says Stilts dryly. “Well, I’ll be off. A good meal’s coming, but for the love of Ang, go and bathe while the water’s hot: you boys look like cannibals. And lads—” He raises a warning finger. “Don’t go exploring. The exits are guarded, but the Cavern’s immense, and something of a maze. Stick to these chambers until you’re sent for again. Do I make myself clear?”

  “As a bell,” says Chindilan. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep them in line.”

  “Do that,” says Stilts. He pulls the curtains shut behind him, and his footfalls echo down the hall.

  Kandri turns on his uncle. “Keep us in line,” he says. “Still counting on that, are you?”

  The others look at him, speechless. “Don’t talk to him that way,” says Eshett at last. “He’s your elder, no matter what he’s done.”

  “What’s he done?” says Mektu.

  Kandri flips his brother the coin. Mektu holds it up to the torchlight, reverses it—and freezes.

  “Oh.”

  “Mektu?” says Eshett.

  Mektu hides his face in his elbow. The coin falls, landing soundless on the rug between them. It winks, the silver contours of a young woman’s face in profile, slender cheeks, dimpled chin, deep enormous eye.

  “That’s her,” says Kandri.

  The smith looks slightly crazed. “Of course,” he says. “It’s the Prophet, the Prophet in her youth.”

  From Mektu’s chest, a barely audible moan.

  “Do you mind telling me,” says Kandri, “why she has the face of the White Child?”

  Mektu jerks like a snapped bowstring, turning from them, careening for the doorway. Eshett rushes after him. She tells him not to be a coward.

  “This isn’t cowardice, this is intelligence,” he shouts. “Don’t tell him, Uncle. Don’t say another fucking word.”

  Eshett steps into the doorway, blocking his escape. “You need to hear this, whatever it is,” she says. “Maybe he should have told you a long time ago, but all the same you need to hear it. You can’t stay ignorant forever.”

  “Hell if I can’t,” says Mektu. He lunges past her and through the curtains. Eshett follows, calling his name. Kandri rounds on his uncle again.

  “We have two hours,” he says. “If you want to keep me in line, you’ll tell me everything. I’m liable to get very far out of line if you put me off again.”

  “I don’t know everything,” says Chindilan. “I can’t explain where she found the Child, or how it was made. If it was made.”

  “Stop telling me what you don’t know.”

  “Shouldn’t you bathe first? They’ve heated water, by damn, and you smell like the back of a butcher’s shop.”

  “Uncle.”

  “Right.” The smith makes a gesture of surrender. He rubs his face, big hands trembling. Then he jabs a finger at the samovar.

  “Is there tea in that fucking thing?”

  They were children, all of them. A pack of boys, the eldest barely sixteen, the youngest, Lantor Hinjuman, a gangly nine. He was the mascot, the tagalong. Bright, foolish, everybody’s darling. Educated, too: his father was the headmaster of the Secular School in Ashfield. Well fed on rice and milk and mutton. Barefoot half the year.

  Of course, the Chilotos remained a subject clan and had to yield a quarter of all they grew or built or earned to the Važeks. They were expected to embrace the obscene idea of a single God, and to kneel if the regional governor should pass. But the conquerors’ presence in the Sataapre Valley never amounted to constant, day-to-day control. They were simply too few. They seized Nandipatar and slaughtered its ruling families, billeted soldiers at Green Pass and Bittermoon, now and then staged an execution. But the great purges happened elsewhere. The Valley, never known for courage or resistance, coughed up treasure without much prompting, and so escaped the worst.

  Lantor Hinjuman knew about Važek atrocities, which had claimed some of his distant kin. He had also heard of the Quarantine and the Plague. Yet he was happy in those early years. The summers were warm, the winters bearable. His father indulged his love of tools and tinkering, let him dismantle an accordion and his mother’s wind-up music box, and called him “a whip crack” when both devices, reassembled, sounded better than before. They were well off. They had livestock and windows that sealed. They had cords of dry firewood, a cask of wine in the basement, an icebox filled each year with a thick slab cut from Moti Lake. Lantor’s good fortune embarrassed him. He wondered if anyone else in Blind Stream had half so many things.

  Then his father met a Lañatu woman of exceptional beauty and ran off with her to the south, and overnight, they were poor. They gave up meat, sold the cow and horses and even the barn that had housed them. Lantor’s elder brother and sister quit school and took jobs in Nandipatar, sending home any money they could save. Lantor’s mother worked like a fiend, sewing clothes, buying finished leather and fashioning it into bridles and belts, hawking her creations door to door, from Sed Hemon to Ashfield and beyond. Some days, Lantor imagined that all that labor was for him, the youngest, the darling, the one who earned no money. How could they help but despise him?

  That same spring, Lantor’s pack of friends was abruptly decimated. One boy was killed by fever, another in a fall. Two others, cousins to Lantor, were snatched up by Važeks and marched away to the Loro Canyon, where they died in one of many attempts to repair the Imperial bridge.

  Hunger, fever, death: it was all mere happenstance. (“But what compares to happenstance
,” says Chindilan, “in the shaping of our lives?”) Nine-year-old Lantor was crushed and frightened. He had many evenings alone while his mother dragged her wares about the countryside. He needed someone. He fell in with older boys.

  They were nothing like his former friends. They called themselves the Strays. They made him walk a little behind, cuffed his head if he spoke up or laughed too loudly, especially in front of girls. But they were also fond of him. He cut capers, did impressions of adults. He made them laugh. And young though he was, Lantor Hinjuman could be counted on to notice things: a shortcut, a spot in the river where the fish were plentiful, an unfriendly glance.

  Their leader’s name was Samidya. He was a tall boy with a long, flat brow and shoulders that rounded forward, as though he were pulling a cart. At sixteen, he was already a thief, a small-time counterfeiter, and a peddler of his father’s dubious moonshine. He did not boast of these pursuits; in fact, he rarely spoke of them at all. This had the effect of making them all the more alluring. Samidya was careful. He inducted the boys only gradually into his secrets, his petty crimes. But a day came when Lantor, licking his fingers after his share of a stolen lamb pie, looked around at the older boys and thought, Pitfire, you’re just a gang of crooks.

  And these crooks were all he had.

  That night Samidya told them something startling. He had a girlfriend—or as he called her, “a lick.” Lantor did not understand why Samidya spoke of her in this vulgar way, nor exactly what a girlfriend was. He did understand that they were valuable, something to be coveted, something likely to be stolen when your back was turned. “Who is she?” someone asked.

  Samidya explained that she was the oldest girl in the New Life Orphanage. “She’s not even a Chiloto. She’s fair-skinned, like a Jút. She’s a nasty piece of work, but she gets away with it because she’s built. Just you remember that she’s mine, though. Don’t look at her. Find your own.”

  “How are we to do that?” said Lantor, dejected, for Samidya would leave them now, and once again the circle would collapse. Girlfriends had this curious power: they made boys forget friends, husbands walk out on wives.