An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  “Understand,” he said, perching himself atop a shelf of rock, “there are only two worthy gods in any given world: the god of life, and the god of death, each maintaining hold over their own domain.”

  He went on to explain that despite the appearance of equality, the god of life is regarded by the Council as the ultimate being of the two. Yeah, again with this mysterious council — one huge enigma as far as I was concerned.

  Anyway, the god of life can appoint minor gods to serve him, to better stabilize the realm. Enter Polinia and her company of obtrusive gods. They seemed capable enough, what with Polinia spinning storms like a spider spins webs, but here’s the catch: they have inconsequential power to exert over the god of life’s creations. They’re mostly adjuncts, keeping things running smoothly, but not having much in the way of authority, except when their authority figure is parading around in another realm, unable to hold them accountable.

  “What about Klatch?” I asked. “And the goddess of war? Same deal there?”

  “No,” Ripheneal simply said. “I did not authorize Arken to appoint his own gods and goddesses, despite his prodding.”

  “And yet he has a couple.”

  With his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together, Ripheneal sighed. “He created them. I do not believe they are true gods. Mere perverted creations.”

  I took a seat next to the god of life. “You’ll have to explain that one a little better. I was under the impression creation happened under your authority.”

  A drop of water plopped into a puddle on the cavern floor.

  “The god of death can create, but only in death. Otherwise you would pass into a void, where existence was abstract at best and incomprehensible at worst. Nothing he creates is supposed to exist in the living realm. I do not know how the goddess of war is there, right now. Nor do I know her intentions.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’re going to stuff my head full of too much information, which isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. We’ll deal with the goddess of war later. What about Klatch? He seemed to be the centerpiece of your plan, as far as I could glean from the visions you stuffed inside my mind.”

  “Our plan,” he said. “In fact, you’re responsible for more of it than I. Klatch, at his very core, is a deceiver. He also greatly desires his freedom, I imagine. We will use these two facts against him.”

  I muttered petulantly while he skimmed through the book. Our plan. Right. I had about as much a hand in this scheme of his as a chipmunk has in making the world go round. And you know what? I didn’t even know the end result of it all. Seemed like a good time as any to find out.

  When I posed the what-the-fuck-exactly-is-this-for question, Ripheneal placed his finger over a line of text in the book and looked up at me.

  He blinked. “To end the god of Amortis.”

  “What’s in it for you? I mean, surely you’re not doing this out of the kindness of your heart. Maybe, I dunno… there’s some truth to what Polinia said? That you’re on the outs with this mysterious council, and you need something big, something grand to prove you’re still capable of maintaining dominion over the living.”

  Ripheneal removed his finger from the text and began silently reading again. Then, abruptly, he said, “It is my duty.”

  I laughed to myself at that lie. Well, maybe there was some truth in there. Maybe it was his duty to keep a god in line. But other motivations drove him. Motivations steeped in power and control.

  “Riddle me this,” I said. “Why can’t you take care of him yourself? What’s with the need for all the trickery?”

  His jaw shifted as he considered my questions. “Over generations, I have seen rebellions, resistances, uprisings — whatever name you wish to assign them. Most vanish from existence with only a whimper. Those who succeed do so because they conceal themselves. They understand they are babes in the womb, harmless, defenseless creatures that will expire if predators track their scent.

  “So they bide their time. And grow. They mature. Their numbers swell. And before long, a small band of heretics has flourished into a force that can topple cities, kingdoms and indeed worlds. Simply put, Shepherd, I failed to treat the infection before it spread. Now, it’s beyond minor intervention. Something greater is required.”

  Nothing like the god of life to set you straight and make a glum boy out of you. “Vayle and I were arguing over Arken’s actual intentions. Guess I was more right, sadly. He wants to gain command of the living realm.”

  “Both realms, I imagine,” Ripheneal said. “How he means to go about doing so, I cannot more than fathom, but we can guide him along the path of our choice.”

  “Do tell how. I’m so very interested.”

  His finger pounded against the dusty pages of the book. “By making a revision. A duplicate book. It shouldn’t have come to this.”

  The red of his eyes showered his face in the glow of a final sunset, and I bit my tongue. Had I ever seen such cheerlessness in a face before? It was as if depression had settled in his cheeks, smothering all sense of joy.

  “I should have known,” Ripheneal said. “I told him, I said to him — I promised him that if he held honest, respectable dominion over Amortis, the Council would notice. They would elevate him. He would become a god of life — a god of his own world. But that day I saw jealousy in his face, and greed in his eyes.” Ripheneal’s jaw trembled. “I should have murdered him then. When I had the chance.

  “Now the solution may come at the cost of something I hold very dear.” One of his cataclysmic eyes widened. “My own life,” he said with one eternally long blink. “End me, and you end my creations.”

  “What?”

  “That is the revision. End the creator, and you end his creations. Tell Klatch to insert the revision here, on page 209,402, immediately above paragraph three. In exchange, you will free him. Here is the key to do just that. I obtained it while Elimori was away one day.”

  I pinched the wrought-iron key between my thumb and a couple fingers, my eyes flicking between it and Ripheneal. “Uh. Free him? That doesn’t seem like… well, seems to me that’s a shitty plan.”

  “He will only be free momentarily. Right up until the point when he walks into my arms. I never authorized gods in this realm, and while I may not be able to kill his creator, I will — I will — vanquish him. Forever.” He pushed his leathery face closer to mine. “For eternity.”

  I nodded uneasily, stuffing the key into my pocket.

  “I’ll be at your heels,” he said, “but take care to not look back. It will seem suspicious.”

  “Oh, really? It’ll be suspicious? I had no idea. I’ve only spent the better part of the last twenty years as an assassin. What happens after we get the book? Er, the duplicate one.”

  Ripheneal placed the book back in its satchel and helped me sling the straps over my shoulder. “Then my part is finished. You must get the book to Arken, any way you can. He needs to know that I am here, among the rebels. Allow him entry into the living realm — understand he knows how — and this will be for naught. You will have a new creator, a new god of life, or a tyrant as it were.”

  I added one and one and came up with… what do you know, two. Not three, as Ripheneal would have me believe. “Let’s skip over the how-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do-that part and get straight to the meat of the problem here: if I’m to believe Ellie, Arken has the might of an army that’ll squash the rebellion before you even get a glimpse of the god’s face.”

  Ripheneal held a single stubby finger in the air. “Which gives rise to need number two: acquire an army that can match his.”

  In such situations, when I was asked to do the impossible, I usually flung my arms up or belted out a yeah-fucking-right laugh. Normally, though, those situations didn’t involve continued existence as the result of success and guaranteed death as the result of failure. I didn’t know how to respond to Ripheneal’s so-called plan. Getting to work seemed like a good idea, though.

 
“What happens if we don’t lure Arken here? He can’t exactly claim lordship over all living things if you’re still in existence, yeah?”

  “If he outmaneuvers me,” Ripheneal said, “shows that he played me for a fool… then I will look weak. Undeserving. The Council will elevate him. He must be purged.”

  Great, I thought. I’d caught some big fish before, but this would be the biggest of ’em all.

  “By the way,” I said as we exited the cavern, “what really happens if you die?”

  He said nothing.

  Chapter 12

  As I waited for my commander to show, I attempted to — temporarily at least — purge all memories from the night before. ’Cause I couldn’t quit bloody thinking about them. I’d successfully met with the god of fragments. That ill-shaped monster of coruscating shadows had agreed to do business with me once I’d shown him the key. Got the duplicate book — which was quite a bit lighter than the real thing — and then I heard a brief wail as the hands of Ripheneal took him by the throat and… did things to him.

  So step one was a success. Step two of getting the book to Arken was a question mark, and step three of getting ourselves a big-fuck army was an even larger question mark. One I’d have to entertain after meeting with Ellie, who’d requested our presence this morning.

  My commander had returned from her drink-seeking-adventures with… nothing. All I’d wanted was wine. Turns out that Fragment Eight didn’t have grapes, nor did they receive grape shipments from Fragment Three, so I was out of luck. No such thing as ale or mead here, either, so I was stuck with either water that the city hauled in from various nearby springs or, you guessed it… Vayle’s lemon tea.

  “It’s not wine,” I told her, sipping it from a cup of black glass, “but it’s…”

  “Soothing?” Vayle ventured.

  “Yeah, soothing works.”

  My commander and I descended into the cave. Behind us followed a meek voice.

  “Er, my hands are a little, uh. Um. Oh. There they are. Couldn’t feel them, but I can now. They’re back.”

  “You,” I told Rovid, “are never smoking black dust again.”

  Black dust, I’d learned from a baker offering me a pipe, came from these three-leaved plants that grew in the lava fields. You grind up the leaves with a mortar and pestle, pack it in a pipe and voilà! You’ve got yourself black dust, which has been known to make a man see, among other things, colorful and friendly apparitions, eight-legged bears, a smiley face in the sky and, occasionally, the inside of his own body. It has other effects too, as Rovid was learning.

  At the end of the cave, Elimori had set herself up a fancy war council. There were chairs, each of which was supplied with huge sheets of folded-up parchment paper, tiny sheets of folded-up parchment paper, inkwells and quills.

  Also, a piece of chalk art had been drawn on the far wall. It was a honeycomb of ten hexagonal cells. Each cell was numbered, zero through nine.

  “Looks like you’re about to address a bunch of uptight nobles,” I told Ellie. She was wearing a full-length skirt that opened out into a wide mouth at the bottom, half plum purple and the other half cream white. Her hair was tied back, ears glittering with swaying gems.

  “I’m meeting someone very important tonight,” she said. “Appearances matter greatly to some. If you’ll have a seat, we can begin. Please wait until I am finished to dissent.”

  I hadn’t been involved in a great deal of war councils, but the few I had attended were nothing like this. Lectures did not interest me. I much preferred chaotic meetings, where one stupid bastard proposed an unfathomably ludicrous plan, and then got shut down by all the others. I enjoy dissenting, what can I say?

  Lysa already had her seat picked out. She’d arrived a few minutes before Vayle, Rovid and me, mostly because Vayle and I had to go on a bloody excursion to find Rovid’s hallucinating ass making sweet talk to the palisade.

  “All right,” Ellie said, sauntering over to the chalk drawing. “This is a rendition of Amortis. It—”

  “That’s a beeeeeeee-hive,” Rovid said, giggling to himself. “Rhymes with beeeee-hind!”

  Everyone looked at Rovid until he shied away and mumbled something resembling an apology.

  “The numbers,” Ellie said, “indicate each respective fragment. This is Fragment One, Two and so on. There are pieces of the rebellion in every fragment, except Zero. Fragment Zero is Arken’s stronghold. It’s where the Wardens come from, where he keeps his army, and” — she glanced at Lysa — “indeed where many conjurers are imprisoned. We will initiate a systematic rebellion in each fragment, starting with Fragment One.”

  I opened my mouth to voice my opinion, but Vayle kicked me to shut me up.

  “Write it down,” my commander whispered.

  “Write what down?”

  “Your concerns.”

  I gave her an are-you-fucking-kidding-me look, but in the end I relented, dipping the provided quill into the provided ink tray and scribbling Systematic rebellion? onto the provided parchment paper.

  “Prior to each rebellion,” Ellie said, “we will siphon as many supplies as we can, ideally emptying at least fifty percent of the fragment’s collective provisions. Fragment One” — she tapped her finger on the corresponding hexagonal cell — “will rebel first. And then Two, Seven, Six and Four. Upon Fragment Six’s rebellion, siphoning of supplies from each fragment will be complete. At that time, we will march into Fragment Three, mobilize, and strike Fragment Zero.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “Those are the basics, yes.”

  Fuck’s sake. I scratched my head, regarding the notes I wrote down. The ink from each letter had bled into one another, and I couldn’t read shit.

  “All right,” I said, throwing the paper aside. Rising up from the chair, I marched over to the chalk honeycomb. “I’m going to throw out a guess that not every soul in every fragment is keen on joining this rebellion.”

  “Between five and seven percent of inhabitants in each fragment have pledged their support.”

  “So figure between two and three,” I said. “Because a showdown with Wardens and Arken’s army will winnow the chaff from the brave.”

  “Two percent of the dead is a sizable number,” Vayle noted.

  “Fair enough, but I imagine Arken has enough resources to render that number meaningless.”

  “Hence the systematic rebellion,” Ellie said.

  I turned up my hands in confusion. “Which serves what purpose?”

  My commander walked over, took a serrated rock sitting before the wall and stabbed it into Fragment Zero, making a tiny chalk mark. She dragged the rock across the cave wall, into Fragment One.

  “To draw out the Wardens and Arken’s army,” she said.

  Ellie smiled. “Exactly. We have scouts inside Fragment Zero. Once Arken’s weapons move out, the rebellion in Fragment One will move into Fragment Two to join with the rebellion there. By the time Fragment Six rebels, the Wardens and, hopefully, Arken’s army will be spread thin and far away from Fragment Zero.”

  “The way I see—”

  “They’ll only fall for that once,” Vayle said. “They’ll recognize what you’re trying to do and cut the rebellion off at the subsequent fragment.” She drew a horizontal line through Fragment One. “Split your forces. Leave behind a small defensive effort to stall the attackers.”

  Ellie touched her ponytail. “Purposely sunder lives?”

  “People are going to die in your rebellion,” I said. “Well, or get sundered, whatever the appropriate term is.”

  “Also,” Vayle said, “this will give the appearance of an organic rebellion, not a predetermined one. It will lend to the impression that the other fragments have heard the eruption in Fragment One and have chosen to rebel themselves. Arken will likely not take this lightly. He will want to quash it before the wildfire ignites further.”

  “Which means sending more Wardens,�
� Ellie rightly concluded, rubbing her lip, “and more of his army.”

  “Which gives you a bigger opening to attack,” I said. “We have a very rough plan here, but what about logistics? What kind of supplies are you siphoning and how many?”

  With a pointy finger smacking each cell of the honeycomb, Ellie went on to explain what each fragment specialized in.

  Fragment One was all about iron. Forges were strewn across the land, the furnaces always hot and the hammers always striking.

  Fragment Two had a sheep fetish… along with sprawling fields of cotton and flax and hemp, and pockets of foxes and buffalo and other furry wildlife. Basically the clothing empire of Amortis.

  Fragment Three seemed like a nice place, what with its endless swaths of jungles. Here, slaves spent their mornings and days and nights chopping trees into timber, which went on to make wooden wheels, wagons, things of that nature.

  Fragment Four… well, Fragment Four seemed rather fucked.

  “They harvest bodies,” Ellie had said.

  Turned out it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but it was still rather unhinging. The bodies were Preen, the so-called vessels we’d hauled out of the Prim and delivered to Crokdaw Village. The harvesting of Preen seemed entirely out of place, given the other fragments’ resources, and Ellie couldn’t give me a clear answer as to their part in Arken’s plan.

  Fragments Five, Six and Seven weren’t so much farmlands as they were conservatories of misery and hardship, along with brief glimpses of freedom and happiness. Ellie explained that Arken had been conducting behavioral experiments in these three fragments, although she didn’t know why.

  And, of course, Fragment Eight specialized in black glass: the procurement of obsidian.

  Besides Fragments Five, Six and Seven, it became quite clear that Ellie’s premonition of war had been spot-on. But she’d been wrong about who the war would be waged against. I had to entertain those thoughts, though, keep her happy.