Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He and Ari had had just three minutes together, maybe four, after they both grew still by the streamside. He brushed her nipples with his eyelids. She turned the copper ring on his thumb.

  Kandri looks east, where perfect darkness has given way to a pale eggwash of light. He thinks: Of course the dawn will break. And we’re running that way, running straight at the sun. And not just to save our skins. It is a great comfort, to think of themselves not as killers but couriers, bearing the words of Garatajik, a good man sprung from the Prophet’s womb.

  And even the Prophet had come from innocence. From the darkness of the orphanage, a prison called New Life. From the weakness of a nine-year-old Lantor Hinjuman, and the greed of Father Marz. From the rage of a childhood betrayed.

  No, Kandri thinks, he won’t give in to regret. He won’t drown in the beauty or the blood. He will be a survivor, like the general; a healer, like Ariqina Nawhal. And someday, when he is much older (but not yet too old), he will be like Uncle Chindilan, a guardian—or like Stilts here, a guide. That is a life worth living, isn’t it? Most certainly, it is.

  The ground levels off: they are near the summit at last. The path divides several more times, braided through boulders. Then, dead ahead, a last, enormous outcropping looms over them, a stone crown on the hill.

  Stilts comes to a halt. Once more, he looks back down the trail. His face is in shadow, but something in his demeanor conveys a great intensity of feeling. Kandri is unsettled. Stilts is not lost in memory, not dreaming of things far away. He is (Kandri is certain, somehow) concentrating furiously on the moment at hand.

  “What is it?” he whispers.

  Stilts blinks at him. “I was thinking about the Quarantine,” he says. “Do you know, the moment the general broke the seal on that letter, all these years of struggle changed? The fight we’ve waged for our own little corner of the world, for the Lutaral: that can’t go on as before. We’re like ants fighting on a leaf, but there’s a tree as well, isn’t there? And we can’t pretend we’re not a part of it.”

  “Is that what the general says?” asks Kandri.

  Stilts shakes his head. “That’s what I say.”

  He beckons the others close. “Listen carefully. Spider should have given us an all-clear whistle. He has not. That means we may have company after all, coming up from behind.”

  “What sort of company?” asks Chindilan.

  “How should I know?” says Stilts. “We can speculate later on. Just keep close to me now, and don’t make a sound.”

  Mektu takes this as his cue to make a sound. “Mr. Stilts, is that a staircase?” He is points at a gap in the looming rock.

  “Quiet!” hisses Stilts. “Yes, a staircase, you impossible fool. This is Alibat S’Ang, highest point in the Arig Hills. Mansari is to turn back here, and I’m to lead you down the eastern slopes into the sand. But we’ll all climb that staircase first.”

  “What, up to the Chalice of the Sun?” hisses Mansari. “Whatever for? If there are enemies about, they could trap us up there like flies in a bottle.”

  “We need to locate the caravan, brother,” says Stilts. “There’s more than one desert track, and if we don’t spot them at daybreak, we might just lose them in the glare. Besides, there is another way down, and you should use it too. If we want to lose whoever’s dogging our heels—”

  “May be dogging them.”

  “—we’ll have no better chance. No chance at all, as a matter of fact.”

  “Another way down from the Chalice? What, hmm, lunacy. There is none.”

  “You see?” says Stilts. “You don’t know about it, and with luck, neither do they. Come along.”

  The staircase is barely two feet wide, a meandering slash through solid rock. The steps are tall and irregular; Kandri cannot see the end of them. Up they climb, higher and higher. Kandri feels light-headed, watching the starry ribbon of sky above them grow nearer.

  “Shame we’re in such a hurry,” murmurs Stilts. “In all Urrath, there’s no lovelier place to watch the sunrise than Alibat S’Ang.”

  Finally, the staircase ends. One by one, they step up onto a huge, square, windswept slab of stone. Wide as a castle courtyard. Featureless, unrailed. Blackness surrounds them; no other peak stands so high.

  Kandri feels exposed and weightless, as if the wind might hurl him from the peak. The stars envelop the earth, zenith to horizon, as though etched in a dome of crystal. Beneath him, the land spreads like a black banquet, even as dawn kindles in the east.

  A strange unease creeps over him. Something is down there, vast and hungry, where the night is bleeding away.

  “The desert,” says Mansari softly. “The Land That Eats Men. Crossing it will be a mighty test. I wish you faith and good fortune, Chiloto. You will remember me, I hope.”

  “You’ve certainly made an impression,” says Kandri.

  Mansari actually laughs, a weird nasal sound. “As have you and your, hmm, dear brother.” He starts forward, then pauses, as if weighing his next words. At last he glances back at Kandri, resolved.

  “Your father went to the desert as well,” he says. “Nearly three years ago, it was. Look for him at the Font of Lupriz, if you should go that way.”

  Kandri does not dare to speak. He wants to grip this strange man by the arms, shake out the rest of what he knows. “Please tell me,” he whispers at last.

  “What is there to tell?” says Mansari. “He too sought the general’s aid. I never saw the man in the flesh, but I gather he was quite the, hmm, salesman.”

  “What was he . . . selling?”

  Mansari’s eyebrows lift. “Victory over the Prophet. What else?” He starts forward again. “Now, then, Mr. Stilts: about this second way down—”

  The light grows by the minute. From the north end of the terrace, Stilts beckons to them with some urgency. Mansari glides toward him. Kandri and the others trail in his wake.

  Mist is curling around the edge of the north cliff. Stilts, slow and deliberate now, walks right up to the precipice. Gingerly, he leans over the edge, peering down into billowing whiteness. Kandri bites his lips. The man looks small and vulnerable, with the wind whipping his traveling cloak, revealing pale, thin ankles and a scar below the knee. He is smiling slightly—but Kandri is certain the look is forced. The cliff’s edge is eroded, strewn with gravel. What the hell can he be looking for?

  “Mind your balance,” Stilts calls over the wind.

  “I trust you are not warning me,” says Mansari.

  While the others hesitate, Mansari walks to the cliff’s edge with a nonchalance that is almost arrogant. Kandri draws a sharp breath but resists the urge to call out. Tightrope walker. Circus freak. Still, he finds himself annoyed with Mansari, who shows not the least patience with the older man’s unease.

  Stilts creeps closer, pointing at something far below their feet. Mansari leans back into him, sighting down his arm. For an instant, they look like dancers holding a difficult pose. Then Mansari shakes his head, frowning, and Stilts pushes him from the cliff.

  “I wasn’t, no,” he says.

  The sound of impact is a long time in coming: the cliff must be taller than Kandri thought. But at last he hears it, a flat thud like a sack of grain slapped down on a barn floor.

  “Right, who’s next?” says Stilts.

  Kandri does not think: someone or something thinks for him. He whips his bow from his back and snatches an arrow from the quiver and trains it on Stilts and draws. The Naduman watches him, impassive. He takes one careful step away from the cliff.

  Eshett gasps. Beside her, Chindilan’s expression is horrorstruck—but he is no longer facing Stilts. Bow held steady, Kandri looks over his shoulder.

  Rasanga.

  They are closing already, stealthy as cats. Two women and two men. All four enormous, their eyes blazing with satisfaction, with hate. The men have bows of their own, drawn and pointed at the brothers’ chests.

  “We’ll take that letter now,” says Stilts.r />
  As always, the commandos are led by a woman. Kandri knows her at a glance, by the long straight scars on her cheek like the mark of a bear. She is the one who confronted the Ursad at the city gate, the one who brought the White Child. A mattoglin twitches in her hand.

  “Surrender,” she says quietly. “The chase is ended. My archers cannot miss.”

  “Neither can I,” says Kandri.

  “If you kill me,” says Stilts, “my sisters here will draw out your Parthan whore’s suffering for a year. Or a decade.”

  His sisters. Ang’s tears, the man’s a believer.

  “The Parthan whore,” says Eshett, looking steadily at the archers, “will throw herself over the cliff. And you’ll still be dead.”

  Chindilan sighs expansively and rubs his face. He looks, suddenly, unafraid, merely angry and exhausted.

  “Matter of fucking fact—”

  His big arms sweep outward, catching Mektu and Eshett in a violent embrace. With three long steps he hauls them right to the cliff’s edge. They stand there, conjoined, a few paces from Stilts.

  “You’ll take no prisoners back to Eternity Camp,” says the smith. “Corpses, maybe. But corpses feel no pain.”

  “Very good, Mr. Chindilan,” say Stilts. “You’ve discovered the second way down I spoke of. The only way. But shift a little to your left.”

  “Shut your dog’s anus of a mouth,” says Chindilan. “Kandri, if that bastard moves a finger—”

  “He dies,” says Kandri. “That’s a promise, Mr. Stilts.”

  “Naduman,” says the Rasanga with the bear-claw scars. “Which one of them carries this letter of cure?”

  “The one who just promised to shoot me,” says Stilts. “It’s in the pack he’s wearing, along with some suicide pills I expect he’s wishing he’d thought to distribute. But the letter is a fake, holy sister. An attempt to divide us by casting doubt on Lord Garatajik. They’re clever, these four. They chose Garatajik because he’s a scholar and a pilgrim, and has walked in far-off lands. As if either fact could turn a Son of Heaven into a traitor.”

  “Lord Garatajik speaks for himself,” says Bear Claw.

  Even now, with death staring him in the face, some part of Kandri registers the word. Speaks. Garatajik is alive.

  “Kandri,” says Stilts, “you must step off the cliff. Do it now, while you can.”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “If they take hold of you—”

  “Be silent, Naduman,” growls Bear Claw. “The Prophet wants them alive.”

  “And you have never understood these two,” says Stilts. “First you mistook them for killers in the service of your enemies. Now you mistake them for cowards, afraid to jump. You have a problem on your hands.”

  “What problem, harach?” says the second archer, with a twitch of his eye. “If they choose to jump, that is the will of heaven.”

  “Not the devil?” says Stilts. “These are the Twin Abominations. Surely they answer to him?”

  “The old one’s tongue is free today,” growls the second woman, turning a knife in her hands. “I can change that, mistress.”

  Bear Claw studies them in silence. As when she stood at the gate of Mab Makkutin, facing a mob hungry for her death, there is nothing in her expression but confidence and purpose.

  “Kandri,” says Stilts, almost pleading. “Jump.”

  Deep in Kandri’s mind, a voice is howling: torture, misery, defeat. He pushes that voice aside with all his strength. They want us above all things. But they also want the letter. To clear Garatajik’s name, or condemn him. Use it, threaten to destroy it, pull it out of your pack.

  Impossible. As impossible as fighting your way past these monsters. Even if their arrows somehow missed.

  Bear Claw walks over to the first archer, rock solid behind his bow, and pulls something free of his belt. A coil of rope, light and strong. She reaches into his quiver and removes a second arrow and ties the rope to the base of the shaft. Tests the knot. Then whispers in his ear.

  The archer, blindingly fast, relaxes his bow just long enough to drop his own arrow and aim again with the arrow tied to the rope.

  Bear Claw looks directly at Kandri. “The Naduman is right,” she says. “You’re no fool. You can see what will happen if you do not relent. The arrowhead is barbed. Our brother will shoot your brother in the shoulder, and the rope will detain him long enough for us to take him in hand. Then the agony will start. But who can say how long it will endure?”

  Mektu’s eyes are downcast. The howl in Kandri’s chest will not much longer be silenced.

  “The blackworms will not be the worst of it,” says Bear Claw. “The Prophet’s interrogators have rooms full of wasps. Rooms of heat, rooms of drowning, rooms like iron jaws that slowly close. He will be starved, then offered a meal of human fingers. He will be given drugs to induce madness. Although the latter will not be needed very long. And then there is the Child—the White Child, that is. She will feast on his soul. Already her mouth waters for it. You may kill yourself, but your brother will live on in pain beyond all description.”

  Kandri’s mind is bleeding. No way out, no way out. Tell Mek to jump before they shoot him. Once he’s airborne the rest of us can follow. End it now—brother, uncle, lover, you yourself, in a last splatter of limbs.

  Or shoot Mek yourself, Kandri. That would do it. Shoot your brother, in the heart.

  “No.”

  All eyes snap to Mektu, standing there crooked by the cliff.

  “No,” says Mektu again, “that is not what is going to happen here. You Rasanga, you are going to ride away and tell the Prophet that you could not find us. That we were not in Mab Makkutin after all. That the trail has gone cold.”

  Stilts chuckles. The Rasanga gape. But they do not speak the lines Mektu needs them to speak, so he plays the part himself, cocking his head to one side, and offering a fair, almost excellent, impression of Bear Claw’s voice.

  “Ride away? Are you a lunatic as well as an assassin?”

  Mektu answers the question in his own voice: “I don’t believe I am.”

  And again, as Bear Claw: “Ride away. Lie to Her Radiance? Why would we do that, you maggot in the offal of hell?”

  His own voice: “Because I’m not a maggot. And I’m not Mektu Hinjuman, either. Do you know what I am? I think you do. I think you’re beginning to see.”

  No one breathes. Mektu’s eyelids droop a little. He gives the Rasanga a sly little smile.

  Liquid fire fills Kandri’s temples. He screams, so loud that birds lift from the rocks beyond the terrace. His vision reddens. But somehow, he keeps the arrow trained on Stilts.

  Mektu’s eyes roll back in his head.

  “You will go now,” he says.

  The pain in Kandri’s head ebbs almost as swiftly as it came, but the horror only deepens. Mektu’s voice is not his own—not even a distorted version of his own. Chindilan snatches his hand from Mektu’s shoulder, appalled.

  “You will go, because you love your Prophet, honored Dreamers. And I do not love her, nor any creature of blood and bone and awkward flesh.”

  An unearthly voice, reedy and sharp, like wind sighing beneath a door.

  “You know me by my deeds,” says Mektu. “I am the thief of souls. I came among you quietly. A petitioner. I joined you at the Feast of the Boar. I paid homage to your Enlightened One, but she spared me no thought, no simple courtesy. It is hard to cross all the wastes of Urrath only to be turned aside.

  “I departed, honored Dreamers, but I left my calling-card. That was my right, you will allow. I took the Brothers Hinjuman as my instruments. I led them to Lord Ojulan, and they bid him goodbye on my behalf.”

  “Playacting!” snarls Bear Claw. “You take us for children! A mummer’s jape will not save you, we will—”

  Another cry of pain. It is Stilts, this time, bending double, hands on knees. His face is clenched and his eyes squeezed shut.

  What the fuck is happening? Kandri is a
s lost as his enemies. His brother makes a mewling sound, like a cat.

  “The Naduman is in league with them,” says the archer with the tethered arrow. “Let us shoot him first, mistress. He is mocking us, mocking Her Radiance.”

  Stilts waves his hands at them desperately. He sucks in a great breath as though surfacing from a dive. But before he can exhale, a new spasm of pain wracks his body.

  His knees buckle. He sways toward the precipice, making no move to save himself.

  Soundless, he rolls over the cliff.

  I’ve gone mad, thinks Kandri. The whole world has gone mad. But madness does not stop him from swinging the bow to point at Bear Claw.

  “The Emperors of old loved me better,” says the thing that is not Mektu. “They knew what some forget in latter days: that only courtesy divides us from the beasts. Withdraw, noble Rasanga. These brothers shall be my conveyance across the sands.”

  “Mistress, it is the yatra!” says the second archer. “Let me kill it! Give the word!”

  “If you kill this body, I will seek another,” says the thing, “Yours, perhaps. If you are strong enough. If the vessel does not . . . burst.”

  “Yatra!” says Bear Claw. “Do not threaten us. You know nothing of the Rasanga if you think we bow to fear.”

  “All the world knows your courage,” says the voice. “No, you do not fear to die. But have a care, have a care. Is there not one death that would frighten you? Is there not one whose passing would extinguish the sun?”

  “Shoot him,” says the Rasanga with the knife.

  “She would not receive me,” says Mektu, “though I came with gifts and compliments, and a message from the pilgrims of the Void. What could I do, great warriors? I went away, but I left my gift, so carefully chosen, a thing made just for her. It is a shawl of darkness, and she wears it yet.”

  “Creature—”

  Mektu’s body jerks. His arms snap up, his posture straightens. “Guard?” he shouts, in an entirely new voice, a woman’s, reedy and thin. “Why don’t you answer me? Jihalkra, are you there?”

  Sheer horror on the Rasangas’ faces. The voice is unmistakable. Even Kandri feels a chill.