An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  He stared at me for a while. Then, seemingly without moving his lips, he said, “Yes.”

  “Good. Get up.”

  He grasped at his ankle. “I twisted it bad. Don’t know if I can—”

  I latched my arm around his and yanked him up. He braced himself against my shoulder.

  “You’re freeing me?” he asked.

  “Not quite. You’re coming with me. I think I could use you.”

  To say Lysa and Cessilo expressed surprise when I came back with a reaper in tow would be an understatement. Anger, however? Sure. At least from the cranky old bog hag.

  “What’re you doin’ with that thing!” she said, snarling.

  “Hand me some rope,” I told Lysa. Then to Cessilo, “Four makes a merry company, yeah?”

  “I won’t have that thing on me wagon. No, sir.”

  Lysa jumped out of the cart with frayed rope dragging behind her.

  “Says he knows Rav’s brother, so he’s coming with us. Here, let me see that.”

  “I can tie a knot,” Lysa insisted. The reaper turned his head toward her, his dead eyes catching her unprepared. She twitched in surprise, fumbling the rope.

  “Would you keep your eyes closed?” I said, bopping him on the back of his skull. “You’re scaring the shit out of everyone.”

  Cessilo continued her protests about allowing the reaper to join us, but in the end, she relented. It was a gamble, truthfully. If I took her at face value — that she was in charge here and this was her cart and her horses and her rules — I could have expected her to snap the reins and ride off into the moonlight, leaving Lysa and me behind. But I suspected Rav had paid her handsomely in whatever currency dead people trade in. Enough that failing to deliver us to our destination would void the terms of the contract. Or, just as likely, she was in debt to the old man.

  We traveled slowly into the night, our four-legged chauffeurs dragged down by exhaustion. We’d set up a small camp in the morning, as always, allowing them some much-needed rest. The key to wading through treacherous lands where people want to kill you is not allowing the night to mask their footsteps. You keep on a path, any path, until the sun comes out and chases away the shadows.

  I didn’t bother with prodding the reaper until around noon the next day. Tossing back some wild berries I’d found earlier that morning, I kicked the black-eyed enigma into alertness.

  “Tired of thinking of you as the reaper,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Rovid.”

  Before I could continue with my calculated interrogation, Lysa interrupted me. “Why are your eyes like that?”

  The terrain underfoot had turned to a mixture of sand and frail grass. The wheels of the wagon slogged along through the sucking soil, rocking its dear occupants into the side walls. Rovid got the worst of it, his head careening into a wooden panel. That’s what happens when your hands are tied behind your back.

  After groaning, he said, “So I can see clearly in the darkness.”

  “Like a cat?” Lysa asked.

  Rovid smiled. “Like a cat.”

  More like a demon, in my opinion. Then again, of the many cats I’d met, the two had often proven to be synonymous with one another.

  “How did you do it?” Lysa asked, taking a childlike interest in the reaper. “Your eyes, I mean.”

  Rovid’s head fell. “I didn’t. He did.”

  “He?”

  “The man you’re looking for.”

  Huh. You know, I thought, all this time I’d been referring to that aforementioned “he” as Rav’s brother.

  “He must have a name,” I said.

  “Many.”

  “Yeah, me too. Shepherd, assassin, fuckhead. But Astul’s the name I was born with. So what’s the name Mommy and Daddy gave him?”

  The sun blossomed from behind the clouds like a blooming daffodil, igniting Rovid’s cheeks in an amber glow. You could see his jaw set, teeth clench.

  “Occrum,” he answered. With a confused shake of his head, he looked up. “Who are you? You’re not dead, I know that. You’re alive. But you’re in this realm. And you’re not a reaper.” He pulled back like a man jolted by a terrible realization. “Did he send you? To make sure—”

  “You’d think I’d know his name if he sent me,” I said. “No. Trust me, the first time he lays eyes on me will be the last.”

  Rovid furrowed his brows, unable to connect the dots.

  “I’m going to kill him, you understand?”

  He belted out a farcical laugh, the stupid-ass grin on his lips seemingly stuck there forever like a stretched-out belt. Once I informed him he was going to help me, he sobered up.

  “You can’t kill him,” he said.

  “Why not?” Lysa asked. “He’s only a man.”

  “Only a man?” Rovid snapped. “Could only a man do this?” He stabbed a pair of fingers into his eyes without flinching. The tips seemed to sink into the blackness, as if it was jelly. “I had real eyes once. Now all I see are grays. I had a future once. Now all I do is return the dead to misfit corpses in a realm they’d long ago left. Turn around, I beg you. Turn around and go back to wherever you came from. Live out your days until the apocalypse comes.”

  “That sounds real enjoyable,” I said.

  “It’s better than what will happen if you go through with your plan. You won’t kill him. You can’t. And when you fail, he’ll turn you into me. Maybe even something worse than me.” Rovid swallowed. “You don’t want that.”

  I rolled a moldy raspberry between my fingers and thoughtfully flicked it out of the wagon. “Are you going to help us or not? The extra weight is slowing us down, so I’d like to cull whatever we don’t need.”

  It seemed the prospect of death and whatever torture that entailed was a far more abhorrent thought than revisiting the man who ruined his life. “I’ll help you,” Rovid said. “I don’t know how, but I’ll try.”

  Nobody knows how, I thought. That’s the fun part. And the scary one.

  Fatigued by running through scenarios and sketching out plans in my mind as the day wore on, I decided to play a little game with Lysa. I termed it the mystery game. The rules were simple. One person is the spotter. The other is the spy. The spotter reveals a vague clue as to what he spots in the distance, and the spy has three chances to guess correctly. If the spy guesses wrong all three times, then it’s three chugs of wine. Big chugs too, none of that sissy stuff.

  Or at least that was the idea. After Lysa reminded me how poorly our last drinking endeavor had gone, we opted to simply keep score.

  The game wasn’t very fun for most of the evening. Since Cessilo deliberately avoided bustling hotbeds of life — or death, whatever — only the empty plains of sandy grass stretched out before us. Not much of an effort to guess what the spotter sees when the only hints to offer are “something grainy” and “something green.”

  That all changed the next morning. The sand had thickened now, choking out everything except the most resilient weeds. Weeds and an impossibly large and impossibly vast… what was it? A city? Maybe for the gods, because I’d never seen a city like this.

  There were roads on top of roads on top of roads, with inlets of more roads. All made from impeccably smooth stone. Hugging the roads were celestial-sized structures. Looming towers larger than the walls of Erior, some thin as a pick, others fatter than a castle. Rows of wall-to-wall buildings squished together, squat in shape like those belonging to a lord’s manner.

  “They’re so big,” Lysa said, her head inclining slowly, as if trailing a plume of smoke as it filtered into the heavens.

  “And empty,” I noted. Utterly big and utterly empty. A fine film of beige dust clung to the streets, swathed the buildings. It was as if the land had come to take back its property.

  “Relics,” Cessilo commented. “All it is now.”

  “What happened?” Lysa asked.

  Cessilo angled her thumb back behind her shoulder. “Him’s what happened,” she sai
d, her words obviously intended for Rovid. “Used to be called the Prim, place where you’d come and get your bearings after leavin’ behind the living world. Meet your ancestors, if they made it, get to know the whats and whys. Capitol of Amortis, some called it. All gone now.” There was a wistfulness in her voice.

  It seemed to take most of the day before the Prim vanished into the obscurity of the horizon behind us. Then night fell and morning came. Around noon, the wagon came to an abrupt stop atop a ledge of rock.

  “Here we are,” Cessilo said.

  “Here?” I asked. “There’s nothing here.”

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. Down below, there was, inexplicably, a meadow of what looked like hemlocks, conical pink flowers that could have been hyacinths, red asters and a host of other budding flowers and even trees. It was a jarring transition from the dry, sandy terrain on which we stood. Almost looked like it wasn’t even real, like it’d been painted on canvas.

  Oh, and there was something else too. It lay amid a patch of rock and trees. Threads of lime-colored moss dressed it in camouflage. It looked like the mouth to a shallow cave. At least to the naive eye. But to someone who’d seen it in over thirty paintings, it wasn’t a cave.

  It was a cove.

  Chapter 13

  The troop of Lysa, Rovid and myself stood before the cove. Rovid’s ankle seemed better, although he still walked with a slight limp.

  Cessilo had high-tailed it the fuck out of there like fungal spores had taken to the air and were coming for her. We managed to take what supplies we could before she left.

  “Eww,” Lysa said, her finger recoiling from the moss. “It’s mushy.”

  I clicked my tongue. What to do, what to do. “This is the exact cove I saw in Rav’s paintings. Had to be a hint. I don’t know why he wouldn’t just tell me, though.” I looked at Rovid. “You’ve never seen this?”

  “Never.”

  “Where do you come and leave from, then?”

  “Various locations,” he said. “Never here. Actually” — he leaned in to inspect the spongy texture of the rock — “this does look a little familiar. Can you untie me?”

  “Not happening.”

  “How am I supposed to help you with my hands bound behind me?”

  “He doesn’t have a weapon,” Lysa said. “You won’t run, will you?”

  Rovid stood straight. “You’ve my word.”

  His word was about as valuable to me as virgin wine is to an alcoholic. Still, he had a point.

  “Fine,” I said. “You keep your hands out of your pockets at all times. And stay in front of us. If you run…”

  “I know, I know.”

  I pointed the tip of my sword to the meadow. “Turn around.”

  A swift swing of the blade — close and violent enough to send an uncomfortable breeze up his arms — cut the rope.

  Rovid tested his newly freed hands, curling his wrists and massaging his fingers. He edged his palm down the rugged face of the cove. “You feel this? It’s porous.”

  “So?”

  “You ever seen porous rock before? I haven’t, except on the island.” He faced me. “It’s where Occrum lives.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  He thumbed his eye. “It’s where these were put in.”

  “Well, I think we’ve found our gateway back to the living world.”

  “Tear,” Rovid said. “Not a gateway. A tear. As in, you’re tearing a hole in the fabric of life. In time. In space. A tear,” he reiterated with emphasis. “Not a gateway.”

  I blinked. “A man of your definitions, are you?”

  “How are they made?” Lysa asked.

  “Something about fragments,” Rovid said, “and particles and manipulating their vectors and… I don’t know. Only the reapers who break know how to do it.”

  “Break?” Lysa asked.

  Rovid snapped his fingers. “Or snap, whatever you want to call it. Occrum… he poisons every reaper with — look, I don’t know what it is. It’s from the concoction he makes us drink when we’re first brought to him, that’s when I think it happens. It’s a poison that lies dormant, till activated. Then a mere reaper becomes something greater. Occrum calls ‘em wraiths, but I prefer the demented. They’re the ones who open tears.”

  Hmm. That information might prove helpful in the future, I thought. “Er, not to suggest you should, but can you activate it yourself? This poison?”

  “Why would I want to? Those wraiths, I’ve seen ‘em. They’re not right in the head anymore. They’re, I don’t know. Disturbed. Something terrible has to happen to a reaper for him to break. Something that touches his core. Only the reaper himself knows how to inflict that sort of pain. And Occrum. He breaks reapers as he sees fit, depending on his need for new tears to bring reaped through.”

  “All right,” I said, deciding to move on from what appeared to be a sore talking point for Rovid, “so, soon as we step into this cove, then what? We’re there, on his little island? Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” Rovid said.

  Lysa lifted a finger. “There’s a problem.”

  “Only one?” I said.

  “Soon as we step through, the book will capture our thoughts. He’ll know we’re there.”

  “And then there goes the surprise.”

  Rovid groaned. “That fucking book. All he does is read the thing. He’s paranoid, says he’s always coming for it. Who’s he? Not got a clue.” He shrugged and added, “Maybe he means you.”

  “I’m not coming for his book,” I said. “Not to steal its secrets, anyhow. Listen, does Occrum trust you?”

  “I don’t think he trusts anyone.”

  “Can you pry him away from that bloody book for a few minutes?”

  “How would I do that?”

  Lysa clapped her hands cheerfully. “With my help! Okay, so pretend… hmm, wait a minute.” She scoured the meadow for a moment, then returned with a thick stem. “What does the island look like? Describe it to me.”

  “It’s triangular,” Rovid said. “Cove sits right near the narrow tip. Then smack dab in the middle there’s a… I don’t know what you’d call it. Maybe a fortress? That’s where he stays, in that damn thing all day long, every day, far as I can tell. Only been there a few times, mostly when he wants to discuss plans with the reapers.”

  Lysa began drawing the description of the island in the sand. “Are there any walls?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Here’s my idea. Rovid and I go into the cove together. You stay back.”

  “Uh.”

  “Just wait,” she insisted. “I’m going to be Rovid’s prisoner. He found me here in this realm, saw that I wasn’t dead, and knew that Occrum would want to have a look at me. But I’ll break free before we get to that fortress, and I’ll start running. Swimming! I’ll start swimming for my freedom. That’s when Rovid alerts Occrum, who will storm out of his fortress and capture me.”

  Lysa took a much-needed breath, then continued, “That’s when you come through. And you sneak inside the fortress, find the book, and you wait for him to come back. Sword in hand.” She stood back proudly. “How’s that for a surprise?”

  “Yeah, great,” I said. “Just how the hell am I supposed to know when to waltz on through?”

  “Oh. Well, you could wait here for an indeterminate amount of time. Five minutes or so. That’ll give Rovid and me time to pull off our trick.”

  “Problem,” Rovid said. “I’ve never actually seen the water.”

  “But you said it’s an island,” Lysa noted.

  “It is. Just… lots of fog around it. Water probably lies beyond. I don’t make it a point to stop and gawk at the features when I’m there. You also have a second problem. Occrum’s likely reading your thoughts as you speak. Before you speak, actually. He’ll be prepared.”

  Huh. I would’ve expected Occrum’s corpse-reviving militia to know the limits of his special book. When I clarified that our thoughts couldn’t
be recorded from this realm, he looked startled.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “Trust me,” I said.

  “And me,” Lysa put in.

  Rovid put his hands on his hips, abysmal eyes swiveling from me to Lysa. “Who are you people?”

  “A guy and a gal,” I answered. “That’s all. Tell you what, reaper man — if we survive this little encounter, I’ll tell you all about myself. No question left unanswered. But for now, let’s get on with it.” I faced Lysa. “Pull your pant leg up.”

  “What?”

  “Pull it up.”

  We both pulled a pant leg up at the same time. I unclasped the sheath from around my shin and tightened it around hers. Her leg was too thin. The sheath slid right down to her ankle, so I took the blade out and told her to tuck it in the waist of her pants.

  “Try not to get yourself killed, yeah?” I said. “This should help.”

  A big smile scrunched up her freckled nose. She slammed herself into me, face in my chest, arms wrapped around my back. “No matter what happens, thank you.”

  Standing there awkwardly for a moment, unhinged by this rather abnormal affection, I patted her back. “For what?”

  She pulled away from me and sucked in a huge breath. “For the experience.”

  I stood with my thumbs tucked inside my belt as Rovid took her by the arm like a guard escorting his prisoner to the dungeon. Together, they walked into the cove. Together, they vanished.

  I thought for a moment of returning Lysa’s thanks, even though she was no longer there. But this wasn’t the time for sentimental bullshit. I had about five minutes to prepare myself for the assassination of a lifetime. Of all lifetimes.

  And how do you prepare for something like that? You don’t, I discovered. Short of chugging two skins of wine — which you absolutely should not do unless you want to be known as the botcher of the assassination of all lifetimes — nothing could numb me. Nothing could dull my emotions. I was excited and afraid. Nervous and aroused. Charged like a spark from a blacksmith’s hammer falling upon ebon.

  Oh, there’s nothing like the feeling of being alive. Now to keep hold of it. Speaking of which, it’d been about five minutes, hadn’t it?