A faint orange glow bled into the blackness. I saw my hands, but the shadows concealed all else. Bits of jagged rock needled my back. A puddle gathered on the dusty dirt floor under my crotch. I tried ignoring the fact I’d probably—
“Looks like ya wetted yerself there,” croaked a man.
“What do you have, the eyes of a feline? Can’t see shit in here. Where am I?”
There was a metallic jingling followed by a dry cough. “Well, you musta got hit pretty hard over the head. Yer in a dungeon. Some of the fellas call it the House o’ Death. ’Course, that was when they was still living that they called it that. Only you and me down here now. Dark at first, I’ll give you that, but them eyes of yours’ll come around.”
I squinted but still couldn’t see the man. “What city? Vereumene? Erior? Did that fat bastard Braddock Glannondil con me?”
“Er, sorry? Don’t know none of those names. Where you from? Way out in the wilds? Yer in Lith. Well, under Lith, actually. They say the conjurers have quite a city up there, but you wouldn’t know it from down here, would ya? Name’s Tylik, by the way.”
“Conjurers,” I said aloud. “Oh, fuck me.”
I traced a swollen bump the size of a pear jutting out from the side of my head. Last thing I remembered was a broiling heat sizzling the hairs of my neck, immediately before a pair of heavy feet — talons, perhaps — punched into my back and drove my face into the unforgiving floor of volcanic rock. Actually, I remembered what happened just before that as well. I remembered my eyes looking helplessly toward the keep doors that were shutting as Braddock Glannondil heaved them closed in terror.
“Heard you was a shepherd,” Tylik said. “All the guards been talkin’ about is you. And the crummy food they have to eat, but they always talk about that. Ever since I been here, mm, what, fifteen years now?”
I opened my mouth to speak. How foolish of me to think I actually had a place in the conversation.
“Maybe seventeen years,” the man said. “Somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. What do you shepherd? Goats? Lots of goats ’round here. Or maybe you’re from the West, lots of cows out there. Well, not anymore, but way back when there were. You know, I even heard of duck shepherds. Someone might have been lyin’ to me about that, though.”
“Assassins,” I said bluntly.
“Oh.”
My eyes slowly acclimated to the darkness, lifting the foggy veil enough that a thin outline of the man who called himself Tylik appeared. Like morning mist evaporating under the sun’s burning eye, the shadows surrounding him melted, revealing less a man and more a thing. He slumped against a pillar and fiddled with hands so bony I wasn’t convinced his corpse hadn’t been reanimated. If flaming birds can exist, then nothing’s out of the question.
“Call me Astul,” I said after a while. “I come from a place called Mizridahl. Ever heard of it?”
“Misery-what? No, I don’t think I have.”
I kicked my foot out. The bracelet bit into the bone of my ankle. No getting out of this. “What’s this land called, Tylik? The whole land, the world. What’s it called?”
The man smacked his lips and wagged his finger, as if he was trying to usher out the words. “Oh, my. My, my, my. So it’s true? Guards said you was from across the water, but I didn’t believe ’em. They been tryin’ to make us believe there’s another world on the other side since I was a little one, and they still tryin’ to get the young’uns to believe it. Say gold coins grow from trees, say there are more apples and pies and fish and cakes and cows than you could ever eat, more water and wine than you could ever drink.”
Gold from trees? I needed to find these trees when I got back to Mizridahl. If I got back. “Sounds like a nice place,” I said.
Tylik coughed a raspy laugh. “Always knew it wasn’t true. Probably suffer just like us, don’t ya? Eatin’ roots and hoping there’s some water in the dirty, stringy things. Truthfully, I didn’t doubt there was another world somewhere. It ain’t that hard to believe, y’know? But a place where water runs free and you can stuff your belly till you get big and fat? Naw. You’d have to be a fool to believe that. Scary thing is, lots of young’uns think it’s true nowadays. Anyways, no real name for the whole world here. Just north, south, east, west, that sorta thing, and the names of the cities and provinces, o’ course.”
It had been years since I talked to a stranger without having an ulterior motive. It was rather… comforting.
“What about you, Tylik? Any young’uns of your own?”
The man snorted and paused. When someone hesitates to answer your question, you’ve already got your answer. “A boy and a girl,” he said. “They wanted to make my little boy”—he drew in a deep breath—“wanted to make him a conjurer. Know what that does to yer mind? Ruins it, I hear. Naw. I know it does. Seen folk before they were conjurers and after, and they ain’t the same, lemme tell you that.” Tylik grumbled throatily and added, “So I planned to leave, see. Over to the West, on the beaches, where the conjurers don’t control. Yet. But one of the townsfolk, they spilled my plans. Probably got a big reward, too.”
“They arrested you?” I asked.
The silhouette of the man’s head nodded. “Sure did. Conspiracy against the Council of Conjurers, they claimed. Thought I’d die real quick, but here I am.” Tylik hacked and cleared his throat. “Say, Astul — or do you prefer to be called the Shepherd?”
The Shepherd, I thought. What did I shepherd? A bunch of assassins to their death? Fantastic shepherd I was, killing off my herd. Do that as a town’s goat keeper and they’d stone you. Come to think of it, a stoning seemed like a better outcome than whatever the conjurers had in mind.
“Astul is fine,” I said.
“Well, Astul, you seem all right, far as assassins go. When them guards feed us, they put it between us and expect us to fight like starving pups. Is why they put us so close together. Well, one reason. I’d much like to not fight for the food, if ya don’t mind sharing half.”
Before I could accept Tylik’s proposal, something squeaked. Something thundered from above, like a door shuddering against its frame.
Hot, orange swirls illuminated a series of steep steps and streaked along the dungeon floor. Mashed chunks of waste were piled halfway up Tylik’s pillar. And a foul green gunk puddled before him. It seemed to ooze from his toes. Well, where his toes should’ve been. Something had eaten off the tips, leaving behind some fleshy nubs glazed over with a swampy ichor.
Two men stumbled down the steps. One carried a torch and waved it disconcertingly.
“Take a whiff, boy,” said one of them. “This is your life now. Just wait till Captain Gorge makes you clean this shit up.”
There was a groan, followed by, “Clean it up?”
The other man laughed and stopped few paces away from my pillar. He pointed the torch at me and elbowed his partner. “Go tell ’er he’s up. And move your ass. I don’t wanna stay down here in this shithole any longer than I needs to.”
For a moment that could only be measured in the quickness of a spark splitting from a piece of charred wood, the underling boy looked at Tylik. Poor kid’s mouth tightened, and his nostrils flared. Whatever innocence he had left was now gone.
“You know,” I said to the tall guard in front of me, “it’d smell a whole lot cheerier in here if you’d sprinkle some rose petals. Maybe plant some lavender in the dirt.”
The man smiled. Discombobulated teeth filled his mouth, curling and pointing in directions teeth ought to not curl and point. “I only gots to smell it when I feed you dogs.”
I didn’t know what the guard’s name was, but Crooked Tooth sounded like a good one.
Crooked Tooth shoved his torch close to Tylik, and the poor man jumped back in horror, whimpering.
“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” I said. “You remind me of a big, fat slaver. He’d poke his slaves and torment them, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. Till one day my assassins rode into camp and butch
ered him.”
Crooked Tooth crouched down in front of me, the flames from his torch shimmering off his greasy, angular cheeks. “You wait till you see where your assassins are now.”
A door opened and shut, and a pair of feet raced down the steps.
“She says bring him up. No burns, she says.”
“Yer lucky,” Crooked Tooth told me, grasping the clasp around my ankle and producing a key. “If it were up to me, I woulda burned off your little toes.” He nodded toward Tylik. “Just like I did to him.”
After freeing me from the chains and clasps, Crooked Tooth hooked a hand under my arm and yanked me to my feet. He and the young guard escorted me up the stone steps and into the great outdoors of Lith.
The dungeon door swung open and a gaudy light stabbed into my eyes. I kept my head down, shielding it from the midday sun hot as any I’d ever felt, until a passing cloud offered me reprieve.
I expected to emerge into the city of Lith itself, with a congregation of buildings above me and cobblestone paths beneath my feet. Or perhaps inside a heavily fortified keep. But an unbridled wilderness of yellow grass lay before me, with a dense gathering of flowering trees off in the distance. And then Crooked Tooth wrenched my arm, turning me around, and the city of Lith swallowed me up.
Two enormous hills mirrored one another, each rolling to a jagged peak. In their bosom sprawled a mass of structures strung together in orderly fashion like the wax cells of a honeycomb. Thatched-roof houses ran along the outer edge and clung to the slopes of the hills as if they were trees that stupidly took root on the face of mountains.
Strangely, the streets were empty.
“Is Lith home to ghosts, by chance?” I asked.
The toe of a leather boot scuffed the back of my calf. My feet crisscrossed one another, dropping me to my knees in the dry, crunchy grass.
“Ain’t nothin’ said about kickin’ your ass,” said Crooked Tooth. “Shaddup.”
Both men yanked me to my feet, and we continued walking. In the thick of the silence, voices droned from within the deep recesses of the city. Hundreds, thousands of voices. The hiss of jeers and the thunder of applause.
A chill crawled up my spine like a jittery spider. Funny thing to feel cold inside when sweat pours down your face and your skin feels ablaze. The worst kind of shivers are those rooted in a hidden terror. At least when snow’s falling and ice is underfoot, you know why your teeth are chattering and your skin is bumpy.
We walked toward a cove embedded inside one of the hills, where something glittered and sparkled as the sun came out to play again.
It was a tower.
Now, I’d seen my fair share of towers. They’re usually made of dull gray stone and are about as artistic as what flows down a latrine during a storm. But what lay in that cove was a tower unlike any I’d ever witnessed and one I wouldn’t even have thought to imagine.
It spiraled high into the air, crowned with what looked like a massive halo. Its walls were constructed from stained glass, etched with intricate designs. Light seemed to bend around the tower, reflecting multicolored prisms of blues and purples and yellows and reds and pinks and oranges.
Before the tower emerged a tree that looked as though it’d been crafted from celestial hands. Its trunk curiously threaded horizontally across the ground, for at least twenty feet, before rising vertically into a canopy of golden flowers that seemed to wink at me. I had the faintest notion I’d seen that tree before, but nothing like this grew in Mizridahl.
The guards pushed me onward toward the tower centered by two massive black banners. A white outline of a C with a shrewd eye carved in the middle was inscribed upon them. We eventually came to the tower and stepped inside. We went up a winding staircase made of stained glass with a golden-brown hue. Every fifteen feet or so, the steps spilled out into a circular platform or, if you continued walking them like we did, they went around and around and up and up.
When we could go no farther, a door greeted us. Two guards posted there opened it, and Crooked Tooth flung me into the halo.
The door closed.
The halo, as it turned out, was an enclosed balcony of stained glass. Not a fun place to find yourself in, suspended over the earth in something that can crack and shatter. Glass in Mizridahl was used only in the keeps of queens and kings as bombastic shards of art. It typically didn’t separate you from Death’s embrace.
A woman with a weighty, resonant voice said, “Do you know how it was made?”
She walked across the prismatic surface in silk slippers. A translucent white dress dragged behind her.
“Fifty years ago, the Council of Conjurers took the bones of those who resisted our rise to power, and we ground them into sand and made them into glass.” She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear and touched my arm with smooth, luxurious fingers. “Does that seem mad to you?”
I forced a swallow past the lump in my throat. “Ruining innocent minds seems mad to me.”
She furrowed her brows. Her long face reminded me of a girl I chased after before I made a living killing people. Except that girl didn’t have quite the same glow to her cheeks, the fullness to her lips or the shimmering hazel of her eyes.
“We all have our reasons, Astul, Shepherd of the Black Rot. Consider yourself. You murder, but you don’t do it haphazardly, do you? It’s logical. It’s reasonable. It’s certainly not madness, is it?”
I peeled my eyes away from the illustrious lady and prowled the far glass wall.
“Fascinating structure, don’t you think?” said the woman. She sneaked behind me in silence and grazed my shoulder with a craggy nail.
Tucked far away in a gully along the opposing hill, a lion raced across a rectangular plot of dirt. It ducked between stone pillars, trailing a horse and the man riding it. As it lurched for its prize, two spears soared from behind it. One missed, but the other impaled the beast’s skull, driving its head into the ground. The lion tumbled over and skidded lifelessly into a pillar. Every seat in the arena emptied as the people jumped and enthusiastically applauded.
“That was just to set the mood,” the woman said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The woman curled her hand around my shoulders, as if I was her child and she was showing me the grandeur of an exotic kingdom. The thought of some royal twit demeaning me made my mind twitch, but that was it. I’d always dreamed, in a sick sort of way, of being held captive by a pompous king or queen, just so I’d see the horror on their face as they discovered I was not like the proper, obedient underlings they were so accustomed to commanding. I’d refuse their orders, kick them, spit on them, show that Astul, Shepherd of the Black Rot, did not lose his pride, ever.
But somewhere between Mizridahl and Lith, my pride decided to jump ship. I stood there passively. My skin tingled.
“Look,” the woman said.
The lion had been carried off, and now in the center of the arena stood a group of what looked like barbarians dressed in rags.
“Do you recognize them?” she asked. She clicked her tongue. “Those are your Rots.”
I shrugged her hand off my back and lifted my chin defiantly. “Lay a finger on them and—”
“Shh,” she said. She lifted a finger to my face, but I swatted it away.
I smiled as the revelation dawned on me. “I know what this is. This is a ploy, isn’t it? A ploy to weaken my mind so you can take it. I don’t know why you’d want me, though. I’m just an assassin, a drifter who’s not all that important to the conjurers’ endgame.”
“Assassins,” she said, “are very important. They can kill kings. They can start wars.”
I licked my lips and punched a finger into the stained glass. “Those are not my Rots. What are there, fifty of them out there? Black Rot’s a hundred strong. You could’ve at least made your lie more believable with some research.”
She frowned. “Regretfully, the phoenixes that swept across Vereumene were unable to retrieve everyone they’d co
me for. But I won’t allow that to spoil the fun.” She pulled at my hand. “Walk with me, Astul.”
She led me out of the room and down the steps, eventually exiting the tower. A carriage drawn by two black stallions waited for us. As I climbed inside, a bizarre event transpired in my mind, one that I seemed unable to control.
She’s not evil, a voice told me.
You could strangle her before the guards could separate you, said another voice.
Maybe she has her reasons. Just like you.
She means to ruin your mind. She deserves to die.
Back and forth the voices went, until they bled into one.
She’s much more respectable than Braddock Glannondil or Dercy Daniser or any of the others. She fights for what she wants.
A good point.
Do what she asks.
That’s the best choice possible.
As if I had awoken from a dreadful nightmare, I found myself standing on a platform, thankfully not one made of glass. They were staring at me. Forty of them. Maybe fifty. I didn’t know the exact number, but anything greater than zero was too many. Dust stuck to their bloodied faces. I could have listed them off by name, but why torture myself?
Rivon Eyrie’s cheek was missing. His eyes were swollen, but through the puffiness he saw me. And he looked away, out of embarrassment… or anger.
The air inside the arena was stuffy. Voices trembled in my skull. Hundreds and thousands of them, talking about nonsense, or about what surprises the murderers and rapists inside the arena would face.
“You have two choices,” said the woman, who seemed to materialize from the ether and appear right next to me. “Willingly help me take Mizridahl and I will spare your Rots. Or I will kill them and force you to help me.”
I closed my eyes. As the words formed in my mind, I felt weak and pathetic. A feeble, woeful man. But I said them anyway. “What do you want me to do?”
“Assassinate Braddock Glannondil. That’s it. Then you and your Rots can do whatever is that you do. Nothing changes. Even the conjurers could use assassins, you know.”
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 12
