Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Samidya made as if to cuff Lantor as usual. But the hand froze in midair. He looked at the younger boy, but he was not really looking; his eyes were distant and fascinated. Then he blinked and gave them all a cunning smile.

  Two nights later, very late, Lantor awoke to the sound of pebbles striking his window. Down in the street stood one of the older boys, all but dancing with impatience. Lantor lifted the sash. “Get your clothes on,” the boy called softly. “Samidya has a job for you. Five gham.”

  Five gham! Lantor dressed in the darkness, praying his mother would not wake. The gang’s leader had summoned him at night before—to climb a drain spout, to slip under a fence—but this time would be different. Samidya had never paid anyone for their services.

  “Five gham?” he repeated when he stood beside the boy.

  “Six,” said the boy, mistaking Lantor’s wonder for hesitation. “Make it six. I don’t care. Two now, and four more when it’s over. If you do your job.”

  “Who’s paying me? You or Sam?”

  The boy dug in his pocket, slapped two dull coins into Lantor’s hand. “I’m paying. But Samidya said it had to be you. No one but Hinjuman, he said.”

  Without further explanation, he led Lantor at a run down the Sed Hemon road. Lantor was thrilled. He couldn’t guess the nature of the job, but he was almost certain of their destination. Ten minutes later, he was proven correct when they turned up the path to the New Life Orphanage.

  The institution was already some eighty years old. It consisted of a square, squat building, too large for its thirty girls and five keepers, and a miasmic garden that had gone years without a pruning. A high stone wall surrounded both. In the daytime, the girls were allowed into the garden, but the wild exuberance of the plant life kept them confined to an ever-shrinking circle of grass. Their mistresses, aging women from an austere sect known as the Sisters of Ang, were abstracted and poorly paid. They kept order by keeping a tight grip on the keys, and an even tighter one on the girls’ imaginations.

  (“They were pitiless, those Sisters,” says Chindilan. “They told the girls who’d come there as infants that they’d been saved from shipwrecks, rubbish tips, cannibals. That they’d be treated as fallen women—beaten, raped—if they set foot outside the wall before they were twenty.”)

  Until then, the orphans prayed and studied and washed their colorless frocks out with rainwater. And made pillows. Thousands of pillows. Day and night, winter and summer, plucking geese, ducks, greenfowl, babblers. Lantor had seen the dead birds arrive by the cartload and emerge naked, bound for Valley butcher shops. But he had never seen a New Life girl. How had Samidya managed to smuggle one out?

  As it happened, he had not: fear was too powerful a gatekeeper. But Samidya had at least discovered a gate—or rather, a door. It was hidden by a bamboo thicket, and locked of course. But Samidya had both tools and talent, and the girl inside had been whispering to him for days. I want food. I want candy. Bring me candy and you can do what you like.

  (“You have to wonder, by the Gods,” says Chindilan, “what sort of Urrath we’d be living in today, if one girl had not wanted sugar, one petty thief not known his locks.”)

  The door opened into an abandoned potting shed, built into a far corner of the wall. That night, when Lantor and the older boy arrived, Samidya was already inside. He opened the door some eight inches (as far as the bamboo allowed) and snapped at them, “Get in here. What took you so long?”

  In the putrid shed, he lit a candle. He barely glanced at Lantor. His hand was extended to the older boy.

  “Where’s the other fifty?”

  The boy produced a handful of coins, each one thicker and heavier than the two he had given Lantor. Samidya counted them, nodded, and poked the other boy in the chest.

  “If she tells me you went too far—”

  “I won’t, Sam, I promise!”

  “Ten minutes,” said Samidya. “Don’t leave nothing on that porch, you hear me? Not a fucking fingernail.” Suddenly, he grinned, and clapped the other boy on the cheek. “Go on, enjoy it.”

  The boy vanished into the weedy garden. Only then did Samidya look down at Lantor. He was still grinning.

  “Fahetri and I are going to make a pile,” he says. “This is just the beginning. There’s three more up there.”

  “Three more what?”

  “Girls, Hinjuman. Three more old enough for tricks. They haven’t agreed yet, but they will, once they see what Fahetri’s bringing in. Until then, she’ll do. You can see her titties for five gham, touch ’em for fifteen.”

  “What does a hundred get you?”

  Samidya hugged Lantor’s head to his chest. “Things you’re too young to know about,” he whispered, like a teasing uncle. “That’s why you’re perfect.”

  He extinguished the candle, peeked out through the door, and led Lantor back into the street. When he turned to face Lantor again, he held a small loop of iron chain. At the bottom of the loop dangled a key.

  “Fahetri swiped this from the old bats,” he said. “The lock’s oiled now and working like new. This is what we’ll do, Hinjuman. I’ll send the key to you with somebody on the night you have a job. You slip out and come here and let the customer into the garden. Then you watch and wait. Nobody much on the Sed Hemon road after midnight, and hardly anybody likely to take interest in this dump. But people get nosy, don’t they? Sometimes they come looking for trouble.”

  “I don’t,” said Lantor.

  “‘Course not. You’re the door guard, Hinjuman. You’re a part of the team. You give a whistle if anyone starts up the path. The customer will clear out quick. Shut the door and lock it behind him, and scamper off yourself into the bush. Nothing else. It’s an important job, Hinjuman. You’ll be paid every time.” He handed over the key, along with a piece of chalk. “Make a doodle on the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s your cover. You’re doodling, you’re playing a prank. An older lout like me gets seen here, there’s no way to explain it. But you, you’re practically in diapers. No one could think ill of you, could they, now? You’ve probably never even had a stiffy.”

  “A what?”

  “You see? A stiffy’s what a lick can give you.”

  “I don’t understand, Sam,” said Lantor.

  But Lantor learned on the job. Samidya left him in the doorway, and he looked in just in time to see a girl somewhat older than Samidya emerging from the orphanage, with a finger to her lips. The boy from his gang dropped his pants right in front of the girl and hoisted her frock. So that was a stiffy. And that . . . oh, that. It wasn’t worth a hundred gham, but the boy looked as though he would have paid any price. The girl just looked absent, as though she had taken refuge in some chamber deep in her body, from which the boy was trying in vain to dig her out. Less than five minutes later, she twisted away from him and hurried back into the building, and the boy stumbled dazed and bedraggled to the potting shed. Lantor was so stunned by his transformation—sweaty, glassy-eyed, one hand in his pants—that he forgot to ask for his four remaining gham. It was the only night he made such a mistake.

  And there were many nights: up to four a week, when the news began to spread. For Lantor, the job had a changeless rhythm. The key, slipped into his pocket by one of the boys in the gang. The time, a whisper in his ear. The scramble along the deserted road, the impatient customer loitering in the shadow of the wall. Lantor’s hand extended: six in advance. The ecstasy of earning, of not asking his mother for coin.

  A second girl began to alternate with Fahetri, and then a third. Sometimes, they fought with the men—silent blows, voiceless curses, a weird pantomime of lust and rage. The three girls were nearing twenty and saving money toward the day of their freedom, or so Samidya claimed.

  Lantor rarely saw Samidya at the orphanage: the real money changed hands elsewhere, long before the trysts. If the gang leader appeared at all, it was in the manner of a surprise inspection, a quick nod to Lantor, a propr
ietary squint at the figures on the porch.

  (“But this makes no sense,” blurts Kandri. “All that thumping, all that sex? How did they get away with it, night after night?” “Don’t you see?” says Chindilan. “They didn’t get away with it. They weren’t fooling anyone. That was part of the sham.”)

  The Sisters had tried for fifty percent but settled for a third. It was filthy money, but what else to do with these destitute creatures? Did they have prospects, did they have suitors? Were they ready for life? The Sisters sighed and cursed the coldness of the world, and put the money in their pockets. The hush everyone maintained in the garden was out of consideration for the youngest girls.

  (These last words, Chindilan speaks as though they have putrefied: Consideration. For the youngest girls.)

  There are couriers for every vice. In short order, the news spread by dark whispers across the whole of the Valley, and even beyond. It was a glad and generous exchange, a brotherhood of predators. Men appeared who wanted “licks” far younger than eighteen, and in time, such orphans were persuaded to oblige. But even they were not so young as the girl who crept through the weeds one night to speak with Lantor Hinjuman.

  She was fourteen at the most. Thin and frail, with eyes that belonged to some small tree creature, eyes so large they made the rest of her face seem an afterthought. She rose up from a dark corner of the potting shed and touched his arm.

  Lantor nearly screamed. “Who are you? Get out of here, go back to bed!”

  “I’m not one of them. I’m not a whore. I won’t do that.”

  “Good for you,” said Lantor, meaning it, “but get away from me, I can’t talk, it’s not allowed, Samidya will—”

  “Let me out.”

  “What?”

  “I have to leave this place. No one will hurt me out in the world—those stories are lies. I know that. It’s here where I’ll get hurt.”

  “You’re a fool. Samidya will come after you.”

  “I’ll hide from him,” she said, “and from something much worse than him. I know this for certain. A God told me, in my sleep.”

  “Back inside, back inside!” Frightened now (for he had never seen madness before), Lantor shooed her with both hands.

  The girl stood her ground. Their eyes met, and Lantor saw her intention at the last possible moment, and jumped. He was outside with his back to the rock-hard bamboo and his foot against the door before she reached it, flung herself against it, pushed with all her might. But she was a slight fourteen, and the door opened outward. Lantor had the advantage and would not be moved.

  The girl pleaded. Lantor tried not to hear. After a time, he realized that the girl was sobbing—and then she fled into the garden, for the customer’s time was up.

  “Who in Ang’s hairy armpit was that?” the man demanded when Lantor let him out into the street.

  “Nobody,” said Lantor, turning the key in the lock. He had never, of course, been more wrong.

  This was in the seventh week of Samidya’s enterprise. The girl came back the next night and tried again. “Something awful is going to happen,” she said. “I have to get out of here. I’m supposed to be running by now.”

  “Running where? Running from what?” asked Lantor.

  “From my fate,” said the girl. “There’s still time to escape it. The God told me that, too. But I don’t have much longer. Something’s coming. Let me out.”

  She kept a good six feet from Lantor Hinjuman, almost out of the potting shed, but he stood ready to slam the door all the same. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’ll tell me anything to get your way. Anything you imagine will scare me.”

  “I’m scared,” said the girl. “The customer, the one who’s inside now? He saw me this time. And he looked at me funny.”

  Lantor forced out a laugh. “Stay inside if you don’t want them to look. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He didn’t come here for you.”

  She was right, however: the client, a youth from Sharp’s Corner with crooked shoulders and a slight, hopping limp, did look strangely at the girl as he passed through the courtyard. When he was gone, Lantor glanced in through the door a final time: the girl was standing in the moonlight, appalled.

  On the next occasion, her face was like stone. She stood as close as she dared and said he could feel her up. Or have her. Anything he wanted, if only he’d let her go.

  Lantor was blindsided. “I’m too young,” he said, for it was what Samidya had told him. “And so are you. Don’t say such things.”

  At once, the life returned to her big eyes. She was relieved—and suddenly, very pretty.

  “I can’t let you go,” he said. “Not ever. Samidya would cut off my ears. You’ll have to escape some other way.”

  “I’ve looked for other ways,” she said. “There are bars on the windows, padlocks on the doors. This place is a jail.”

  Lantor looked out at the road.

  “Come with me,” said the girl. “I’m allowed to have a friend. I’ll take you where you’re supposed to go.”

  His lips felt dead, his teeth all wrong in his mouth. “We’re not friends,” he told her, “and I don’t want to go anywhere. I belong right here in the Valley.”

  “Are you sure?” asked the girl, and then the customer, drunk and finished with his girl, swatted her aside and lurched into the shed.

  The next morning Lantor walked the four miles to Samidya’s house and told him he didn’t want the job. The older boy slouched in the doorway, looking him up and down. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Someone treating you bad? One of the customers, maybe? One of the girls?”

  “No,” said Lantor.

  “How about seven gham a night? I was going to give you a raise anyway, soon.”

  Lantor shook his head. “I just don’t want it anymore.”

  “The thing is, I trust you, Hinjuman. You make a good dog—a good watchdog, I mean. Better if you stick around until I find a replacement.”

  “No, Sam, I won’t go there again. I—resign.”

  “Resign? Resign?” Samidya grabbed him by the shoulder. He said that Lantor’s mother would be told that her darling boy was a pimp’s assistant. “And so will everyone in your life. Your teachers, your brother and sister. Your worthless Papa, if he ever comes back. They’ll know you took money from men who screw little girls. Your whole family will be disgraced, Lantor. Other women won’t let your mother scrub their floors. They won’t even speak to her, the mother of a pimp. You want that, do you?”

  Lantor stared at his feet. He did not want that. Two nights later, he was back at the New Life Orphanage.

  I won’t look at her face, he reasoned. For he could not be strong enough to deny her again, if he saw those pleading eyes. But of course, he had to open the door for the customer—a large stranger in a mud-spattered cloak who smelled vaguely of horses—and he was supposed to keep an eye on the man as well as the road.

  He compromised: he held the door open an inch. When the girl drew near, he saw a ribbon of cheek. “Who gave you that bruise?” he whispered.

  “Fahetri,” said the girl. She brought the dark welt close to the gap. Then she shifted, and he saw her mouth, her thin nose, one probing eye.

  Someone’s going to kill me, Lantor thought.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Lantor.”

  It didn’t matter if she knew. It didn’t matter what he said to her. She was going nowhere for six years. “What’s yours, then?”

  “Tamahín,” she said. “It’s a Kasraji name. I’m not pure Chiloto. But in the future, everyone will think so.”

  “Did your God tell you that?”

  She nodded seriously. He was shaking like a leaf.

  “Lantor,” she said, “you have to make up your mind.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I will.”

  “Not eventually,” she said. “You have to decide right now. Because if you don’t let me out now, it will be too late.”

  Her conv
iction shattered what was left of his poise. What if she did talk to Gods? What if he was fighting more than a crazy girl? She slipped a hand through the crack and he shoved hard, a warning. The hand snapped back.

  “No tears,” he said, for she was crying again. “It won’t work. I’m not listening.”

  “The man on the porch,” she said. “The man with Fahetri right now. He stared at me on the way in, Lantor. He told me, told me with his look.”

  “Never mind,” Lantor heard himself say.

  “Never mind? Are you crazy? Are you just like the rest of them, the same kind of beast?”

  “That gimp from Sharp’s Corner stared at you too,” he said, “but so what? They’re just looking. They want older girls. That’s what they paid for, isn’t it?”

  “Let me go, Lantor.”

  He was going to obey her. He was falling into a pit. The girl knelt down, said she believed in him, that she knew he was different, that his kindness could change the world. He took his hands from the door. Go ahead, he thought, just push. She didn’t notice. She was sobbing, repeating his name. He closed his eyes, shut out her voice with the first thing he thought of: a prayer.

  “Ang All-Merciful, protector of multitudes, nearest in our need . . .”

  The door smashed open. Lantor was crushed against the bamboo. The man in the mud-spattered cloak stepped out with the girl under his arm. She was not screaming, only groaning for breath; he had dealt her a blow to the stomach. With his free hand he lifted Lantor clear of the ground.

  “You didn’t see me take her,” he snarled. “I left alone, like anybody. That’s the only fucking thing you saw.”

  He slammed Lantor’s head against the wall, then flung him aside. Bleeding and all but senseless, Lantor watched him toss the girl over his shoulder and start down the path. The man paused only once, when another figure stepped from the shadows. It was the crooked-shouldered youth from Sharp’s Corner, his hand extended, a nervous smile on his face. The man flung a handful of coins at him, contemptuous. From farther down the path, near the Sed Hemon road, came another man’s voice (Hurry the hell up, will you?) and the stamp of horses eager to run.