“Do you think it’s true?” Lysa asked.
He shrugged. “Who knows. Here they come.”
The whoops and yelps from the rioters fled into the distance, replaced by a chorus of jeers and curses.
I got up and walked over to the window, hands cupping my eyes to block the candlelight from interfering with my vision. Like a parade during a festival in Erior or Edenvaile, the streets were swarmed with an orderly line of marching men and women and children. A twenty-foot gap lay between them and the featured attraction at the head of the parade: two Wardens dragging along a naked, bruised conjurer. Well, what I assumed to be a conjurer. At a mere glance, he simply looked like an unfortunate man who’d found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Cut his tongue out!” someone in the trailing crowd suggested.
“Take his eyeballs!”
“Put spikes through ’em.”
“Worthless shit!”
Along with the hurling of insults and crude language came trash and gems, some sailing over the conjurer’s head, others pelting him in the back.
As the Wardens came to Orell’s shop, one of them let up, coming to a pause. His fat nose sniffed the air, and his massive jaw moved side to side, as if he was tasting the gloomy mist of District Four.
His broad head turned slowly, meaty neck twisting toward the shop. The other Warden continued walking, yanking the conjurer across the bloodstone on his knees. But this one… something had caught his attention.
He stared at me, or maybe through me, or maybe in my general direction. Hard to tell where precisely a Warden is looking when flecked stars swim inside the midnight-blue pools of his eyes.
The Warden lifted his tree trunk of a leg. When it came down, he was four steps closer to the shop, and an unsettling vibration slithered across the floorboards, into my feet and up my shins.
The three spiked heads of his mace swayed as he took another step, this one more meaningful than the last.
Orell turned, trading glances between Lysa and me.
“Don’t fuckin’ tell me she’s a conjurer,” he said.
“You never asked,” I said.
He regarded me with a snarl. Then, in a growling whisper, “Get her downstairs, now!”
Orell sidled up next to me so that our bodies framed the doorway, concealing everything behind it.
Without moving my mouth too much — not drawing attention to myself at the moment was just below breathing in terms of importance — I asked Orell if there was a problem. Which was probably like asking a northernman if it was cold in winter.
He said nothing.
The Warden came to the shop, his face as tight and gashed as old leather that’d been worn to battle.
“Move,” he bellowed.
Orell and I stepped aside, and the big fucker stepped inside, his flail scraping against the door frame, stripping it of thin strips of wood that fell to the floor in thick splinters.
He observed the shop thoroughly, burly neck turning and twisting.
The other Warden outside hollered something. Our unwelcome visitor grunted like a lion who’d sprung for his prey a moment too late and turned his corpulent self around and returned to the conjurer.
As if he had been holding his breath this entire time, Orell’s chest deflated and out came a surge of hot air.
“Didn’t expect that kind of trouble,” he said. He ducked outside, had a look left and right, then shut the door.
The crowd had followed the Wardens into the next district, and District Four became once again a moor of morose smog that crept slowly across the bloodstone streets.
Orell knocked on the basement door. “Bring ’er up. It’s clear.”
“He was looking for her,” I said. “Why? Or, you know what — not why. I know why. Let’s go with how.”
Orell pinched a candle. “Smell that?” he asked, as smoke spiraled into the air. “Wardens can smell a conjurer just like you smell a smothered flame.”
Lysa came up the stairs with Mamus. She looked like she’d gotten into a fight with a bucket of white paint and lost. Her legs trembled.
“They smell her?” I asked. “As in” — I sniffed the air — “that kind of smell? Not some figurative smell?”
Orell relit the candle. “Ellie says conjurers secrete a particular aura that Wardens can identify through smell and vision.”
Lysa rubbed her throat. “Where” — she paused to blink her damp eyes — “where are they taking him?”
“To be condemned,” Orell said.
“To Arken,” Lavery clarified.
Lysa swallowed. “What happens then? After he’s condemned?”
Orell fell into a chair and put his hands atop his head. “He’ll be loaded on a wagon and hauled to the Fringe. And after that? I don’t know. If it was me or anyone else in this room — ’cept you — we’d be mining gems for the rest of our lives. Conjurers, though? From what we’ve gathered, Arken keeps them away from the gem fields, in their own encampment. Probably performing experiments on them.”
Or, I thought, they’re the ones performing experiments. After all, why perform experiments on conjurers? To make them… what, more conjurerish? But let’s take the flip side of that, turn it all around so that the clinician is the conjurer. Why, the possibilities would be endless. Experiments in which the subjects have their minds perverted without recourse — that’s what I’d do if I was a god looking to raze the living realm with an army whose might could not be challenged.
I’d uncover that conspiracy, if it existed, soon enough. But only if we got out of Devous safely. I now realized why Orell had suggested this could be our invitation to the Fringe. The plan had been to isolate a supply wagon from its caravan as it passed through, but doing so would have likely been difficult. A single wagon carrying a conjurer to the Fringe, however, eliminated that convoluted scheme.
“Give me a timeline,” I said. “How long do we have before Arken condemns this poor bastard, tosses his sorry ass on a wagon and sends him off to the Fringe?”
“Half hour,” Orell said. “Give or take a few minutes. Unless he’s meditating.”
“We need to follow that wagon, without being seen.” I began pacing the room, sweating off nervous energy.
Mamus snatched a hammer from a workbench, turned it upside down and smacked the claws into a scarred table, sketching a gash across the grains. “If we give a wide berth, all the way out here, there won’t be no eyes on us.”
I waited in expectation for Mamus to continue his artwork, but it appeared the bearded hulk of a man was finished, the final design the epitome of grandiosity and awe… if you had the drawing skills of a mentally incapable two-year-old.
“Those are just a couple lines,” I said. “Where is ‘way out here’?”
“Devous is here, obviously.” He tapped his knuckle on the point where the two lines originated. “Way out here is… well, it’s way out here.”
“Escot Village is that way,” Lavery pointed out.
“Ya,” Mamus answered, “but we don’t want to go all the way to Escot.”
“I know. I’m just sayin’.”
I leaned over the table, visualizing Devous and the surrounding territory of Fragment Zero. You’d think a rebellion crew would’ve pieced together some sort of map after having been holed up here for eight years.
“All right,” I said, grabbing a square chunk of sawed-off wood from the floor and placing it in the middle of the table. “This is Devous.” I slid another scrap far to the right. “This is Escot. We’re moving between the two. What happens then? Where’s the Fringe?”
Orell approached the table with folded arms. He placed a finger near the edge. “Presumably here. Somewhere.”
Presumably and somewhere are two words that don’t bring me joy when asking for directions.
I sighed. “We’re going to have to hope the wheels of the wagon leave us some tracks to follow.”
Lysa eased herself into position next to me and hoo
ked a finger’s worth of blond hair behind her ear. “The Custodians. How dangerous are they?”
Orell hunched over the table, hands planted on our roughly drawn map. Breath from his wide nostrils wavered the flame on the candlewick.
“It’s not their strength that worries me, although they’re not a fun bunch to take down. You wonder why they’re posted all over the city instead of Wardens, why they’re the ones escortin’ the condemned? It’s those eyes of theirs.
“Moment there’s trouble, those gems, their shine — shoots right through the Custodian’s skull, straight up to the sky. Like a waterfall of paint from the heavens. You’d see it probably two hundred miles away.”
“Which means Arken will see it,” I said.
Orell nodded. “And Wardens. There’s more, too. These things, they aren’t like you and me. I don’t think they’re” — he pinched some excess skin on his arm and gave it a tug — “real. They start sheddin’ their skin soon as you fight ’em.”
“Except,” Mamus noted, “their skin’s hard as glass and just as sharp. Comes flyin’ off of ’em, cutting you all up.”
“We think they’re constructed out in the gem fields. Some lookalike flesh gets slapped on ’em and off they go, to Devous. But beneath that flesh, it’s a damn mess of jagged gems.”
I’d battled against some tough bastards in my time. Big fuckers who swung axes heavier than a small woman, nimble swordsmen who’d get behind you within the blink of your eye, conjurers who rived the ground and uprooted walls. But an enemy who burst into shredded gems that’d probably embed in your flesh like the teeth of a saw into wood? That was a new one for me. And not one I looked forward to confronting.
We schemed for a few minutes more, and then agreed on a plan. Could’ve been a detail or two we overlooked — probably was, in fact — but time wasn’t a luxury we had.
Lysa wasn’t very enthusiastic about the strategy we’d cooked up. Mostly because it called for a sacrifice of life. And I admit maybe the sliver of humanity within me that’d grown bolder over the months twitched just a little when Orell and his men pledged their lives. But I hadn’t overcome a conjurer invasion, Occrum’s fascination with extinction, and all that I’d lost since this mess had begun only to become an advocate for morality and wholesome goodness at the last minute.
One way or another, people were going to die in this war. And, sad as it might be — disturbing as it may sound — better others than myself and those I loved.
Orell and his crew went out to round up some boars, leaving Lysa and me alone in the store. They thought it better for us not to fetch the ones we’d ridden in on, in case the Custodian who had eyes on us had put word out that we were to be watched.
Lysa sat at the table, waving her finger back and forth across the flame.
“Sometimes,” I said, sitting across from her, “you’re quite adept at hiding your emotions. This was not one of those times. What happened there, with the Warden?”
An orange glow streaked up her tense cheek, shivering as the candle flame burbled. “Are you ever not observant?”
“When I’m sleeping.”
That brought out a faint smile on her lips, one that she quickly put away. “That Warden, he talked to me. I know you didn’t hear him, but I did.”
“In your mind?”
With pursed lips, she nodded. “It sounded… I don’t know how to explain it. He was very persuasive. He kept telling me to come out. Come out, come out, come to me, he said. Crazy thing is, I was gonna do it.”
I laid my hand overtop hers. “But you didn’t.”
She drew in a deep breath and forced out an agreeable smile. Nothing I’d say would temper her emotions about what had transpired. There’s nothing quite so frightening as the power of persuasion, particularly when it’s used to subdue all your conscious thoughts and desires and needs. Lysa was this close to offering herself up as a lifer in the Fringe, doing whatever it was that conjurers did there. That would shake anyone to their core, I damn well knew.
Orell and his crew returned after a few minutes, with a company of boars in tow. We rode out of Devous without any trouble, swallowed up by the swampy violet air. Glasslike flower petals shattered into tiny bright fragments as our boars trampled over them.
The foundation of sleek black beads seemed to dimple under racing hooves, then slowly regained its shape, as if it had a certain springiness to it.
Before we departed Devous, I heard the cheerful buzz of applause and clapping hands. Orell said that was what happened when Arken announced a condemnation.
After about a half hour of bouncing up and down on the saddle of our boars, we banked hard to the south. Or east. Maybe north. Possibly west. No one had told me in which direction the Fringe lay. Or at least in which direction the wagon containing the conjurer prisoner would be aimed.
“Put on your armor,” Orell said. “By the time we see ’em, they’ll see us.”
This armor he referenced had been gathered by his crew over the years, most of it stolen from shops and blacksmiths. At one point, they’d intended on storming Arken’s keep and laying siege to the god himself. You can’t simply waltz in on the god of Amortis, of course. Custodians apparently gathered in the keep like bees in a hive. Best way to survive a boatload of those gem-eyed fuckers, he explained, is to dress yourself from head to toe in steel.
So that’s exactly what we did. And it took me about half a minute to decide that, while steel is more protective than leather, fitting yourself into it is an absolutely terrible experience. There were shin guards which had straps that had to be tied around your legs, gloves that made your hands sweat, a helmet which made the sound of your breath resemble that of a mouth-breathing oaf, a breastplate with three times the number of straps of the shin guards, boots that… look, it was hell, all right?
“I’m glad I don’t have long hair,” Lysa said, her voice muffled behind the brushed steel of her helmet.
“I’m glad I don’t wear this shit all the time.”
After everyone slid into their new armor, we clicked our heels against the ribs of our boars, and off we went again.
Into the Fringe.
And that was when our plan came apart — when I heard Lysa scream and felt my heart in my throat, followed by the ground skidding across my now-helmetless face.
Chapter 18
We were a good three hundred feet away when their heads swiveled around. About ten feet later, the prisms framing their eyes flared across the beady ground.
“Balls!” cried Mamus. His boar, which had headed the charge, squealed like it’d been stuck with a hot poker, then catapulted head over heels.
Mamus soared through the air like a bowl of jelly, flopping and flapping. I imagined he landed, but I didn’t get to see that part.
Soon as the torrent of vibrant colors washed over my boar, there was another squeal. The tiny-hoofed animal twisted, turned and lost his balance. That was the moment a coin-sized chunk of flesh was ripped from my face. I skidded across the ground, tumbling over and over, losing my helmet in the process.
“Lavery!” someone shouted.
“There, there! Go over there. No, over — fucking hell.”
The voices seemed to echo endlessly in my skull, dying off into disconnected whispers.
I lay on my back, looking into a blurry sky. Feeling the breath leaving my chest faster than it was coming in.
Footsteps raced from somewhere nearby, their thumps rippling into my bruised side.
As…
Ast…
Astul.
“Astul!” That voice shot into the side of my head suddenly and sharply. “You’re bleeding, but not bad. Can you feel—”
Tink.
A piece of blue agate, no bigger than a clipped nail from your finger, deflected off Lysa’s pauldrons and fell onto my chest.
She turned her head in the direction of what appeared to be the personification of savagery.
And savagery was walking toward us.
She yanked at my arm, attempting to pull me to my feet. After a few tries, I finally had the clarity of thought to act with a little urgency, and sat up.
“Fuck!” I said, throwing myself into Lysa, knocking her to the ground. A fan of splintered gems whizzed overhead.
The Custodian strolled forth, a bodily illumination of jasper and malachite and bloodstone and a hundred other gems, all glinting. Pieces dislodged themselves, breaking from the Custodian’s arms and legs and torso, as if invisible fingers were prying them away. They hovered in the air for a moment, then shot outward, racing toward Lysa and me.
Tink, tink, tink. They deflected away harmlessly.
A shadow lurched in from the violet haze.
“Hey, you ugly bastard!”
The Custodian turned, spinning a brilliant flash about. Lavery’s sword cut through the air and sliced into the gemmed side of the creature. Chunks of rubies and sapphires fell to the ground.
“Oh, shit,” I said, watching as Lavery struggled to free his sword. “Stay here. Do some crazy stuff like you did to the Wardens if we get in trouble.”
“But—”
I didn’t stick around to hear Lysa’s buts and what-ifs. I had to go. We couldn’t afford to lose Lavery, or any member of Orell’s crew. The time for their sacrifice hadn’t come just yet.
With an ache in my ribs and burning gashes across face, I willed myself to my feet. One step later, something clonked against my greaves.
“Good idea,” I said to Lysa, grabbing my helmet and taking off.
Lavery collapsed into a heap, his face smashed in by a jeweled fist. His sword dangled from the Custodian’s ribs, or where its ribs should have been.
“Bagh!” a voice cried out in the distance.
My eyes darted left and right, my feet keeping a straight path ahead. Somewhere over there a waterfall of liquefied rubies poured from the purple clouds.
Another scream. “Cut the fookin’ head off!”
“I’m tryin’!”
“Try harder!”
A crack. And another. Crack. Like a pick being driven into iron. Crack. Crack.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 84
