That was my experience, coming to after conking out. Only thing I could remember was riding in the back of a wagon and hearing the whisper of a subtle threat.
“Up you are now,” rasped an old voice. He stabbed the toe of his boot into my ribs, at which I complained with a childlike groan. “Lots of work to do still.”
My hands swam through an abrasive sea of what felt like finely ground beads. They were hot and dry to the touch.
I got to my knees, yawned and patted my hips. Swords were still in place, so that was good. Arm ached, but that’s going to happen when metal pierces you right down to the bone.
After blinking away the grogginess, I became painfully aware that my lips were cracked, perhaps bloodied, and entirely devoid of moisture.
Something shuddered against a wooden frame, then Rav spoke. “Here you are,” he said, handing me a mugful of what appeared to be chilled water. I gulped the stuff down, rose to my feet and took a long look at my surroundings.
Everything was the same in all directions, although if I gave a real good squint, the crest of a mountain range faded into view. Or perhaps the endless desert played tricks on my eyes. Besides a few cacti and some weathered rock, sand seemed to pour in from the horizon, rendering a baked expanse dry as dust.
Lysa stood beside me, drinking from her mug.
“I hope you’ll note,” Rav said, “your weapons remain in your possession. A gesture of goodwill.”
He stood with his birdlike arms crossed over his concave chest, framing what looked like a house behind him.
“Nothing like a gesture of goodwill, then knocking us unconscious, right, Lysa?” I said.
“Put to sleep,” Rav said. “That’s the phrase you’re looking for. Did you enjoy your rest? Your skin looks healthier. Eyes are more awake, less dark around the edges there.”
“I’m starving,” Lysa said.
“Plenty of food inside, but there’s a small conundrum to solve first. Before I welcome you into my home, I must know something very important. Do you have any regrets?”
That’s the kind of shit that makes me not trust someone. Not once in all of mankind’s existence has someone asked, “Do you have any regrets?” and not followed that question up with an expression of ill intent. It’s just a nicer way of asking for the condemned’s last words.
“Yes,” Lysa said. “Lots.”
“Less than a hundred,” I said, “more than ninety.”
Rav folded his hands. “Understood. Be advised you may experience a, er… slight twinge o’ sorts when you walk in.”
“Why?” Lysa asked.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’ve rearranged his thoughts,” she said with a turn of her head toward me, a reference to a time I did not care to remember; one in which I played the part of Amielle’s slave thing. “Complicated is part of what I do. Or what I’ve done.”
“And part of who you are,” I jabbed, smiling.
She turned up her nose at me.
“You don’t have the basics,” Rav said dismissively.
“Try me,” Lysa said.
The old man drew in a patient, or perhaps impatient, breath. “As you walk inside that door, you will experience a change in vectors relative to your current existential position, resulting in an uncomfortable needling inside what a woman long ago termed your cerebellum. The cause cannot be explained without the inclusion of horrible ten-syllable words, various diagrams and approximately three weeks of time in which you will read from a large tome and sleep for two hours a night. Now, you are giving me more trouble than Molly after waking from a short nap, so please, go inside. Slowly.”
“This sounds rather poor for my health,” I said. I’d walked through plenty of doors, and indeed into plenty of doors too, when the wine was strong. Other than punching the frame with my nose, none of those entrances or exits caused me pain. Well, unless you count the one evening when a fat man reared back with a mug and introduced my forehead to splintered wood.
“I haven’t let a lick of harm come to you yet, have I?” Rav said. “Hells and bells, if I wanted to see you drop dead, I would have let the reaped grab hold of you back there as Molly and I dashed outta there. You will be fine. Aside from minor emotional trauma.”
My brow formed a suspicious arc. “How minor?” Emotional pain was my least favorite. I could handle rusted metal carving me up. But the misery of sadness, regret, longing, fear, and those sort of wonderful intrinsics? No, thank you.
Rav shrugged. “Like I said, a slight twinge. Your choices are supremely limited. The nearest watering hole is two days away as a mule and donkey ride. And if the sun doesn’t kill you before then, a roving pack of reaped most certainly will.”
“You said you wouldn’t let us die,” I noted.
“No, but I will make your life as uncomfortable as possible until you submit and drag your sorry draught-ridden behind inside my house. We don’t need it to come to that, do we?”
“It’s just a door,” Lysa said innocently.
She had a point. Maybe Rav had conjured some sort of ward against ne’er-do-wells, and passing through crippled you for a few moments. Really, what was the worst thing a doorway could do to you? I laughed to myself. Nervously.
“All right,” I said. “See you on the other side, Lysa.”
In hindsight, perhaps uttering words that Vayle and I shared was a poor idea. It seemed, after all, the harm inflicted by this mysterious doorway hinged upon the regrets bobbing about inside your mind like bubbles in a cauldron of boiling water. As those words left my mouth, the memories of my commander came out of hiding as oppressed memories are wont to do.
And I stepped inside Rav’s house, pushing myself through the doorway. And then, I died.
Death was the only explanation. Upon leaving this world, I always believed you bore witness to the timeline of your life. The dramas, the maladies, the glees. Everything good and bad and all the stuff in between.
I was half right. Into the black abyss that had entrapped me poured demons of my past, like swirling snow across a frozen night lake.
They morphed from twirling steam into familiar shapes. Into that old mud roof I grew up under. Into the hearth that cooked the stews that warmed my little belly… that hearth I had run to when I’d heard my mother’s shrieks. I was too late. He’d already beaten all the life out of her.
One of the streamers of smoke cried out in pain, blinking in from what seemed like miles away, stopping abruptly before me.
It’s your fault! she howled, borrowing my mother’s voice. Then she borrowed my mother’s face. Those freckles, that warm chestnut hair… if I could just touch her again, this mirror of my mother.
I tried, but another scream made me jerk my hand inward.
You were never supposed to be! His temper was your fault!
This wasn’t a mirror, was it? It was my mother’s soul, trapped in this terrible, sightless place.
“Please,” I begged her, stretching my hand toward her frail arms.
You were never supposed to be. She grinned, as if the topsy-turvy feeling in my chest fed her happiness. Then she cackled and spun into a wisp, vanishing into the colorless haze.
Ribbons of fog darting in and out like shooting stars coalesced into old friends whose deaths hung on my shoulders. The dusty eyes of bygone souls I’d ushered into this afterlife — bounties that had once brought me a lot of gold — whirled like a cyclone before me, spitting out agonizing wails and blaming me for the torture of leaving their children fatherless and motherless, their brothers as only siblings, their sisters without a friend to turn to.
They were forlorn figures with sullen faces. I remembered each and every one of them, what prices their heads had fetched, their pleading eyes, their last words.
Here came a dog, a small pup who’d gotten caught up in a botched assassination. The house wasn’t supposed to burn. I’d fallen into a candle. The drapes had gone up in flames. I’d tried to reach for him, but he hid, and the smoke�
�� it suffocated me. I had to leave him.
He barked at me now, hackles rising like spikes. He broke into a full-out sprint, then rammed his thick skull into my chest. The mob of regrets piled on top, their voices a slush of accusatory whispers and deep percussions. Their tongues lapped up the tears that stung my eyes, and they told me to cry more, cry till I didn’t have any tears left. They said my eyes would bulge right out of my head then, and they’d eat them and laugh at me while I passed through eternity sightless.
I wanted to die, forever. My throat had swollen so much I couldn’t swallow.
Heartache — it’s supposed to be a metaphor, not a literal definition. But I felt it above my ribs in this new life, and it ached. Felt like someone had cut me open, stuck their hand in and squeezed it hard as they could.
Where was my sword? If I could take it and plunge it through my chest, stick it right in that throbbing red muscle… maybe it’d be all over. Maybe eternity had two doors: one which you pass through to exist forever, and one where you go to sleep and never awake. Yeah, I needed to go sleep. Take the long nap.
If I could just find my sword.
There it was. On a dresser. Wait a second. A dresser?
I polished the cloudy confusion from my eyes with a vigorous rub of my arm. The abyss had retreated, replaced with chipped wooden panels the color of aged oak. Ghastly wisps were no longer binding my wrists and fucking my ears with their unpleasant voices. I seemed to be in a room, dry and dusty. A small bed of singed grass supported me, framed by what looked like driftwood.
I swung my feet off the bed and planted them onto the safety of the floorboards. Then I rubbed my eyes again, yawned, and stood.
Something smelled of fresh lavender. A hint of lemon too. I cocked my head and sniffed. Then I grabbed a string of wet hair and sniffed again.
My hair had been washed. A cursory glance down the front of my body revealed a thin linen robe. It’d been a beauty back in its day, but now the stitching was loose and time had faded the woad dye.
Reaching for the scabbards of my blades on the dresser, I hesitated. Where would I put them? Robes aren’t well-equipped for carrying swords, and I sure as shit wasn’t about to haul them around like a little boy afraid of losing his teddy bear. Way I figured, Rav wasn’t the sort of guy one should be eager to entertain in combat, so I had little use for the swords here.
Assuming, of course, I was still in Rav’s house.
A quick inspection outside the room confirmed my assumptions. Molly the duck shot me a glare from her bed of yellow grass. Slowly, she opened her bill.
Quack.
“Yes, good morning to you too. What is that smell?” I said to her, my nostrils probably resembling a rabbit’s as I took in a bigger whiff. “Eggs? Oh, yeah, that’d be eggs. And that” — I wagged my finger at a sharp hiss — “is a pan frying eggs.”
My stomach growled in anticipation as I rubbed my hands together and hurried down the steps, where the hissing grew louder and the smell — oh, fuck me, it was tasty.
The stairs spilled out into a room featuring a long table. Oh, sure, there was other stuff in it too — paintings on the walls, drapes covering the windows, another straw bed, presumably for Molly — but none of that interested me. After suffering through stale bread for — how many days had it been? Much too long, at any rate — I was ready to chomp down on the smokiness of poached eggs that Lysa herself stuffed into her belly.
“You slept…” Lysa paused, chewed some bread, then finished with, “a really long time.” Her cheeks looked like a squirrel’s after harvesting fresh walnuts from a tree.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. Or maybe she did know. Maybe she’d experienced the same torture as I had. Wasn’t about to prod her for answers. The less I thought about that nightmare, the faster it would take its jolly ole ass and skip right out of my mind. Although I had this strong inclination that it hadn’t really been a nightmare. It’d been real.
“Eggs?” Rav called out. I could see him clearly from the dining room. He stood in front of a blazing hearth, surrounded by a workshop of tools and a litter of eggshells.
“As many as you can give me,” I said, taking a seat across from Lysa.
He wiped the iron pan down with some lard and cracked several eggs into it. It sizzled as he used a pair of forceps to lift it above the licking flames.
I tore a chunk of bread from the steaming loaf in the middle of the table and dipped it in a mixture of something or other. I barely chewed before it slid right into my empty stomach.
“Mm,” I grunted, ripping off another piece, “what is this stuff?”
“Oil,” Lysa said, soaking up the yolk of her egg with a square lump of bread. She shoveled the whole thing into her mouth, her little jaws masticating it into swallowable mush before another heaping arrived. Yolk squirted out between her lips and ran down her chin.
“And herbs,” Rav clarified.
Lysa swallowed hard and ran her tongue along the folds of her cheeks to collect the leftovers. “I was going to say that.”
Rav delivered me six eggs in an old clay bowl. He said he had cutlery available, but I declined. Hands would work just as well.
There were no words exchanged for a while, only the sloshing of food being ground up by gnashing jaws. I barely took time to breathe, stuffing half an egg in, following it up with a chunk of bread dipped in oil and herbs, then sucking down some cold water Rav provided for us.
After we had our fill — which meant I brooded in deep regret over eating an entire loaf of bread along with six eggs — Rav brought an amphora of honey mead to the table, then disappeared with our dishes.
“Find a new book to pique your interest?” I said to Lysa, noting two leather-backed tomes lying on the table.
“This one,” she said, pointing to The Sepulchering of Self, “is really draining. I got this one” — she held up the other, which was titled Healing: The Secrets to Extending Life — “from Rav’s library. It’s very interesting.”
“He has a library?”
“The house is much bigger than it appears. Did you know,” she said, tapping the spine of Healing: The Secrets to Extending Life, “that Savant Fiona Marlee discovered that arteries leading to the heart clog with gunk as we age?”
“How’d she do that? Start cutting people open?”
“Well, pretty much, yes. She dissected over three hundred corpses, if you believe the stories. But that’s not the interesting part. It says here that she discovered a cure for this — because all that gunk stops the blood flow, which kills you — but then the cure was lost. How could something so important become lost?”
I carefully poured a small dollop of honey mead onto my tongue. Not bad, I thought. “You said if I believe the stories. Are these stories passed down from long ago?”
Lysa thumbed through the book like she had every chapter memorized. “She lived somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand years ago.”
“Religion dominated cultures back then. Could be a few zealots thought Miss Marlee was trying to play the part of gods. Sacked all her work.”
“Close,” Rav said, his voice echoing throughout the house. “You’re thinking along the right lines, anyhow.” He appeared in the dining room. “I would like to show both of you a magic trick. Come.”
Maybe it was because I’d finally filled my stomach with good food, but a magic trick sounded quite pleasant to me. I was at ease with the world for a moment, which seemed strange since the world was crumbling around me.
Until I realized Rav was leading us outside.
“No, no, no,” I protested. “I’m not leaving only to come back through that cursed doorway again.”
“It’s a one-time experience,” Rav said. “I promise.”
“You also promised it would result in a slight twinge. There was nothing slight nor twinge-y about the shit I went through.”
“I’ll go with you,” Lysa said cheerfully.
Rav gave me an admonishing s
mile. “Come, then.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered, trailing behind Lysa.
An engulfing heat sucked every emotion except apathy out of me as I walked into the great outdoors. Great in the sense of terrible. Nothing good comes out of feeling your eyes burn and your lips pucker up like prunes.
The hot sand seared the soles of my feet, till I found some shade beneath an outcropping of roof.
“You didn’t give me your approval,” Rav said, “but I felt our current needs triumphed over such petty morals.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, which was, from the little I’d known about him, par for the course. He seemed to enjoy making you wriggle a little by making a vague, abstract announcement and then forcing you to ask for clarification. It was bloody annoying.
“Approval for what?” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Linking your mind with this book.”
I refused to ask, ‘What?’ I’d stubbornly stand here all day before I’d ask ‘What?’ Because he knew — he bloody knew what he said sounded absurd.
My silence, along with Lysa’s, finally broke him. He handed me the book and said, “Look for yourself.”
I did look. Well, perhaps look isn’t the appropriate word. Look implies a method in which your mind creates a rough sketch of what lies before your eyes. The more accurate term here would be read. Because that’s what I did. I read the pages as they filled with what appeared to be dried ink.
After a short while, I caught on, and I predicted each word that would follow. How? Because I had just thought them.
“Turn to the middle there,” Rav said.
I did, and the text at the very top read, “Lysa Rabthorn.” This was what followed.
What’s he
I handed the book to Lysa and considered what just happened. I thought back to my first assassination. What was I, sixteen? Some old coot wanted his wife’s secret lover dead for a measly couple gold.
It was warm that night. Spring was on the cusp of turning into summer. I’d left Pormillia on the outskirts of the village. Dressed in the darkness of the night — out of the naive paranoid fear that another color would make the villagers scream the assassin had come — I climbed up the shelf of rock behind the hamlet.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 45
