An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  By the time he had lifted the corpse into the wagon, the wind was in my face. The grass went crunch, crunch, crunch beneath my feet. It’s a vague sound, the pursuit of a predator, but one full of terror. You can hear it coming, but in the darkness of the night, sound has no direction. It envelops you, flings itself at you from every direction.

  And by the time you have the perspicacity to run, it’s already too late.

  The man swiveled around, breath beating hard in his chest. He turned the wrong way.

  I leaped into him, locking my arm around his neck, ebon dagger in hand.

  “We’re going to have a chat, me and you,” I said. “Are you a chatty man?”

  The heat from his gaped mouth warmed my cold hand. He said nothing.

  “I’m going to release you, but you’re not going to run. Are you?”

  He shook his head fervently.

  “Because if you run, you will bleed. And you don’t like to bleed, do you?”

  Another fervent shake of his head.

  “Well, fantastic. I feel like this little talk is going well so far.”

  Like a snake uncoiling itself from the collapsed lungs of its prey, I slowly unwound my hand from the man’s throat. As he promised, he did not run.

  “Sit,” I ordered. “Against the wagon here.” The man did as I asked. I yanked back his cowl, revealing a headful of curly hair and a smooth, pale face. Looking at him, I was surprised he didn’t run off. It’s always the young ones who let terror overcome them and make them do silly things.

  “What’s a boy like you doing out here robbing graves?” I asked.

  He licked his lips and wagged a pleading hand at me. “Please, sir. Don’t kill me, I beg.”

  “I’m not fond of beggars. I’m even less fond of people who do not answer my questions.”

  “I wasn’t robbin’ graves, sir.”

  I crouched down, shadowing the boy’s face. “Firstly, don’t call me sir. Secondly, you’ve got to be fucking me. I’m standing here with the stench of a rotting corpse two feet away from my nose, and you’re telling me you’re not robbing graves?”

  He waved another pacifying hand at me. “Didn’t mean it—” He clutched his stomach, and his cheeks inflated.

  I jumped back, just as the sound of retching preceded a pumpkin-colored stream of vomit spewing from the boy’s mouth.

  That there was a fear puke. Poor defensive mechanism, really.

  He wiped his arm across his mouth and slammed the back of his head against the wooden trim of the wagon. “Didn’t mean it like that. Just mean I ain’t stealin’ nothin’. No rubies or rings or anything like that, sir. Sorry, sir. I mean, sorry.” He looked at his vomit-covered lap.

  “Rings, rubies or a whole fuckin’ corpse, doesn’t matter. You’re still robbing a grave. Who’s paying you?”

  He swallowed.

  I knelt beside him and stuck the spine of my ebon dagger at eye level. “This is ebon. It cuts quick, it cuts true.” I put a hand to my hip and produced another blade. “This is rusted steel. It cuts slowly. It rips, tears and makes even the strongest warriors wail like virgins getting fucked as it rives their flesh. If I don’t get the answers I want, do you know what I’ll get instead?”

  The boy’s teeth looked as though they might shiver right from his gums.

  “The wails of a corpse robber.”

  “Don’t know his name,” he said, whimpering. “He found me one night, piling roughage for my family’s two horses. Gave me lots of coin and said for each body I deliver him, I’ll get that same amount.”

  “How many do you deliver him each night?”

  “Each week,” he corrected. “Only go out once a week or thereabouts. ’Bout six or seven before the wagon gets too overburdened.”

  “You’re meeting this man tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. I mean, yes.”

  I sheathed both daggers. “Good. Go on and collect the rest of your corpses. I’m a patient man.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Pardon?”

  “You have a cadaver merchant to meet. And so do I. So hop to, get to work.”

  I stood up, walked over to the empty grave and stepped inside. Indeed, about three feet. If I had put my brother farther down — say six, seven, eight feet — would he had been dug up like the poor bastard in the back of the wagon? Pigs can only smell through so much dirt, I imagined.

  In the end, I supposed it didn’t matter. Better I’d discovered now that Mizridahl was up to its fucking ears in grave robbers than later. You generally don’t want to be kept in the dark about people who have business with the dead.

  While Roo — the village boy’s name, I’d learned — excavated his dead, I tended to my horse, Tyla. Good mare, that one. She’d brought me from Edenvaile to the outer reaches of Writmire Fields, all without complaint. I patted her inky snout and checked the rope I’d tied around the trunk of a tree to keep her from wandering off.

  “I’ll be back,” I told her, offering her a couple old carrots from the saddlebag. “Got to take care of decaying corpses. You know how it is.”

  Somewhere around midnight, Roo and his cadaver-sniffing pig had collected seven bodies. I climbed into the bed of the wagon, and off we went, to meet a purchaser of the dead.

  It was during this time I discovered no matter what sort of foul stench you’ve experienced in the past, there is nothing that closely resembles the fetor of lying atop bloated bellies oozing corpse nectar. The burn of bile had surged up into my throat and mouth, resting permanently in the pouches of my cheeks.

  Lifeless hands slapped my thighs as the wagon rocked and rolled. A bony appendage tried fingering me, a foot tried seducing me, and I’m pretty sure there were teeth kissing the nape of my neck. This was the worst brothel I’d ever been to.

  Finally, Roo brought the wagon to a stop. His voice echoed into the covered bed.

  “Got seven for you.”

  The plan was to wait for Roo to clamber down from his seat in preparation for unloading the bodies. Then I’d crawl out into the front, sword in hand, and have myself a nice little talk with the purchaser of the deceased.

  However, Roo did not clamber down from his seat. He remained there, still and silent.

  I tried peering through the hide covering of the wagon, but the leather was too thick.

  Something moved to my left. Or was it my right? A pair of feet, shifting cautiously.

  I reached for the pommel of my ebon blade. The moment my fingers grazed the sphere, I almost died.

  A roar of thunderous ripping and tearing exploded into the wagon. A silver spear plunged through the hide, its serrated tip glimmering inches above my eyes.

  I grasped the wooden shaft as my hopeful executioner outside tried wrenching his weapon back out. It turned harshly in my hands, burning the skin from my palms, but that was nothing compared to the pain I’d have with a pierced jugular.

  I shoved the spear up toward the canopy, using the momentum of my attacker to push it away from my vitally important face and throat.

  Beneath my writhing and twisting body, the fat bellies of the corpses deflated, the mixture of air and spoiled innards winnowing out of them. I retched, coughing up partially digested stale bread onto myself.

  The spear punched through the top of the canopy, and at this point, everything went to hell. The horse got spooked and the wagon flipped. My face smashed into the ground, and seven oozing corpses smashed into me. Luckily, I didn’t have a spear sticking through my spine. Yet.

  I crawled on all fours out of the wagon, jumped to my feet and violently wrested my blade from its sheath.

  Spear-man stood about ten feet away, his weapon lost in the wreckage. He cocked his head like an inquisitive animal. His eyes thinned into pinpoints of blackness — into a cold emptiness.

  He backed away, hunched over. I made a move toward him, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t a he, or a she, but rather an it.

  The thing shrieked. Its jaw fell away from its fac
e as it bared its barbed teeth. Its eyes widened into two ovals of glossy darkness, and the flesh from its face melted away, revealing pale cheekbones.

  Then it turned and scuttled into a forest at a speed I pretended something on two feet wasn’t capable of.

  Roo climbed out from the overturned wagon.

  I looked at him. “What the fuck was that?”

  Between his labored breaths he spoke. “I got no idea. Didn’t look that way when I talked to him last.”

  “If I were you,” I told him, keeping my eyes on the forest, “I’d take all the coin he paid you and go far away from this place. Far away.”

  “Will you hunt him? That thing?”

  I looked at Roo like he was bloody mad. “Are you kidding me? No, I’m not hunting that fucking thing.”

  “Wherever you go, can I come? I’m not good with a sword, and I never been away from home. But I like… well, I think I’d like an adventure.”

  I backed away from the forest. “I go on fucked-up adventures, kid. You don’t want to come with me.”

  I suddenly had a very bad feeling about something Amielle had told me in Lith. She’d said a conjurer never dies. I wondered if Lysa Rabthorn knew anything about that.

  Chapter 2

  Memories are the worst. They’re tools of self-mutilation, and ones you can’t control. A memory is a pinprick inside your skull, a small jab that makes you recall a past you no longer possess. As I looked upon the vast walls of Erior, the memories from five, six, seven months ago — they were dredged up from the deep. The place where you stuff your horrors and hide away your terrors.

  It was there, above the bustling market and the caws of desperate merchants, that those grim three months had been set in motion. And although the warmth of an ocean sun burned into my flesh as I set upon the opened gate, I could not help but feel the grasp of a cold remorse. The lifeless eyes of my eviscerated Rots, the two hundred innocent Vereumene city guardsmen, the shattered soul of my dear Commander Vayle — that was what I associated with Erior.

  But Lysa Rabthorn was here, which meant this was where I needed to be. Well, at least I hoped Lysa still remained here. Braddock had promised to send her back to his kingdom to ensure her safety, those many months ago, after she’d returned my mind to me. But she wasn’t bound to these walls. Still, given she’d made it her goal in life to help mend broken minds, Erior would be a good place to settle down. Lots of fucked-up people here.

  My mare trotted inside the sixty-foot-high walls of the kingdom, and that’s the precise moment happiness and relief chased away all other emotions. And no, my joy didn’t come from the stuffy-nosed, mouth-breathing fisherman shoving a heron in my face, but rather from a pair of chestnut eyes. They were deep and alluring eyes that reflected a shared past.

  “Pormillia!” I shouted, jumping off my horse that I’d taken from Edenvaile.

  My girl snorted at me and swished her tail about. She probably would’ve reared up in excitement, but she was well-trained and never bucked with a rider upon her saddle. Wait. Why was there a rider upon her saddle?

  “Get your grimy fuckin’ hands away from my horse,” said the bearded man who mounted her.

  I brought my hands together in civil fashion. “I see there’s a small misunderstanding. That there is my horse.”

  “She’s mine. Bugger off.”

  I cleared my throat in not-so-civil fashion, but I did so while smiling. “I’ve raised her since she was a foal. Her name’s Porm—”

  “Don’t give a fuck what her name is. She’s a huntin’ horse. Now go fuck off.”

  The stable boy who’d I trusted Pormillia to those many months ago twiddled his thumbs nervously. He recognized me much in the same way you might recognize your dear old aunt after you’ve sold off her pearls under the assumption she’d croaked while out on her travels.

  “Sir,” the stable boy said, licking his lips, “Lord Brend purchased her. She’s been here alone for a great while, sir.”

  “Are you this Brend character?” I asked the man on my horse.

  His stalky neck twisted in a bout of fury. “Lord Brend, Master of the Hunt. And the little lady wants a fresh meal, so if you wouldn’t mind fucking out of my way, that’d be great.”

  “Little la — never mind.” I walked casually over to Pormillia. She flicked her ears and sniffed in my scent. “Here’s how this is going to end,” I said. “You, Brend, are going to remove yourself from my mare, or I will remove you from her. I highly suggest option one, because I don’t play nice. It’s a habit of mine since I was a child.”

  Brend reached for the pommel of his sword. I snapped my hand over his wrist and dug my nails into his flesh.

  “That,” I growled, “is a poor choice and an option I would not recommend.”

  His jaw shifted like the crust of the earth. “I am a member of Lord Braddock’s court. What you are doing will have your head severed from your shoulders.”

  Braddock wouldn’t imprison me after all we’d been through — not for this, anyhow. But putting a blade into the calf of a lord — and that’s all I’d planned to do — would likely see me sitting in Erior’s dungeon until word got to Braddock. And dungeons… ugh. Not fond of them.

  “Let’s settle this the old-fashioned way, shall we?” I said. “Fist-to-face.” A man’s got to protect his horse. Particularly when she’s one of the only things he’s got left in this world.

  Brend swore under his breath. With a careful eye never leaving the hilt of my blades, he pulled his foot from the stirrup and clambered down. “Take your bloody horse.” He glared at the stable boy. “You chirp to your master that I expect a full return of my gold, you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the stable boy said.

  That was surprisingly… simple. Reasonable man, that one. “Seems to me,” I said, “the Master of the Hunt should have his own horse.”

  Brend crossed his arms and studied the other horses in the stables, inspecting their haunches. “Boar impaled him two days ago.”

  I led Pormillia to an empty tie stall full of tasty roughage and looped a rope around her reins. I patted her on the butt, told her I’d be back and then set off for the Gleam, the section of Erior which lay claim to the bathhouses, horseshoe pits, questionable occupancies where drunks often wandered out of pantless, with women in tight corsets chasing after them, and of course Erior’s fine and dandy rooster coop. I wondered who’d taken over as the rooster keeper in Rivon’s stead. Then I thought about Rivon, and I regretted wondering. My friend’s face had haunted me every night in my sleep. Not his real face, either. No, that fleshless face with cheeks of jutting bone that smiled like a skull. Had he truly been alive, there in Edenvaile? I’d convinced myself he hadn’t been. Took a long time to believe, but you can lie to yourself better than you can lie to anyone else. But lies so rarely stay buried. Same as corpses, it would seem.

  “Pervert! Pervert!” screamed a woman.

  Out of a bathhouse in the Gleam ran a man, his waist covered with a towel which bulged from the center. The angry woman chased after him, her bare breasts flopping up and down, and the thick hair of her crotch fluttering in the wind. She pounced on the man, wrapped her arms around his neck and drove him into the ground. He landed on his aforementioned bulge.

  “Oooh,” I groaned, and so did a few drunks near Stag’s Tavern.

  The man was crying at this point. He screamed and grabbed at his malformed penis.

  “He put his cock on me!” the woman asserted. “Right on my leg here!”

  A guardsman came over and attended the matter.

  “Won’t ever pissh straight again in his life,” said a drunk. He seemed like a talkative man, as most drunks are. So I walked up to him and nodded at the long set of steps leading up to a flat expanse of land above, which housed Erior’s keep and, at the moment, a gathering of crimson cloaks and brushed steel helms.

  “Got a guard gathering going on, huh?”

  He leaned in close to my ear, reeking of a
le. “Gots ourselves a corpse fucker! Or somethin’ like that. Don’t know why else you’d want to be diggin’ up the dead.”

  “Digging up the dead?”

  “That’s the word,” he said, scratching his unkempt beard. “Some looney got inside the ossuary and stole himself all the corpses. Every last one! How you think he did it? Beats me.”

  Robbing graves in the middle of fuck-nowhere is one thing. That’s easy enough to do without getting caught. But sacking an ossuary inside the most powerful kingdom on Mizridahl? That’s brazen. Needlessly so.

  “King’ll be as pissed as the bottom of a babe’s bassinet when he returns.”

  “He’s not here?”

  “Gone for a bit of a fight is what I hear.” He mimed holding a hilt in his hands and swung the invisible blade at me, then had himself a hearty laugh. “A battle or some such.”

  Fucking Braddock. Probably waging a conflict with some minor family who didn’t fork over their taxes. Apparently a massive war with the conjurers wasn’t enough to sate his lust for bloodshed.

  “Let me guess,” I said, gesturing to the throngs of guards who congregated near the plateau steps. “No one’s allowed up there?”

  “Not from what I can tell. ’Course, I ain’t been allowed up for two years. Caught me pissin’ in their grand fountain.” He snickered, then pulled down his pants. “Speakin’ of which.”

  I moved my foot away from his aim and pondered my situation. Lysa Rabthorn, if she was here, would most likely be inside the keep. Guards here knew the Black Rot, but that name alone wouldn’t grant me access to the keep. Whoever was serving in Braddock’s stead probably wouldn’t give two shits that I wanted to see Lysa; they wouldn’t allow me an audience without Braddock’s approval.

  The only logical choice was to sneak in. It’s important to note that sneaking doesn’t always insinuate stealth. Sometimes it’s a matter of deception.

  Putting on a mask of urgency, I hurried to the winding steps of the plateau. The guards halted my advance.

  “No one goes up without approval from the princess.”