Dawn would soon punch through the sky, stretching its pinks and yellows across the horizon. Ideally by the time that happened, Lysa and I would be watching Plump Pertha sailing across the River Menth.
Convincing Lysa to stay behind and not join the conjurers on their journey was no small task. But life would be indescribably easier for me with a conjurer by my side. Oh, and a friend too. Lysa ultimately wanted to make an impact. And she came to the conclusion that hoofing it around Mizridahl with me would be more helpful than hiking it back to Fragment Eight. After all, what could she do that two hundred conjurers could not?
The conjurers sat before me, in a mishmash of rows, knees pulled up to chins. I’d just finished going over our preparations for the second time.
“Arken,” I told them, “is scared. He’s afraid not of me, but of you. He knows what power you hold, and he no longer has it for himself. There is a rebellion in Amortis, and they desire nothing more than to topple the god of the dead. Will you help them?”
Some heads nodded, and a couple of ’em voiced their support. Most, however, stared at me with eyes that’d fallen into the abyss, unable to glisten with the hope of a better day. Arken had beaten them into submission and beyond. I wondered how much help they would truly be.
I crept up behind Lysa. She stood on her tippy-toes, head twisting and turning, like a bird on edge.
“Rem—”
With those three letters leaving my mouth, Lysa jumped and spun around, throwing herself back against a tree. She had her hand over her heart.
“Gods, Astul.”
“You know,” I said, “people who are so easily scared are typically up to no good.”
“I keep thinking I see something.” She pointed to the riverbank. “Down there, near the water. A shimmering. See it?”
“No.”
She frowned. “It’s gone now.”
“Have you slept?”
“Some. An hour or so. We don’t need as much sleep as—”
“I know. You dead people have a thousand and one ways in which you’re better than the living.”
Lysa smirked. “Finally! You realize this.”
“Good to see you’re energetic this morning. You’ll need if it all goes to shit down there.”
And away went the smirk. “You’re just stealing a key. Can’t be that hard for an assassin, can it?”
“Just listen for a loud ‘Oh fuck,’ will you? That’s my I’m-in-trouble call. Assuming I don’t have a campful of messengers branding me a thief, I want these conjurers on that boat as soon as you see me take the lock off. Got it?”
“I’ll have them ready. Don’t worry.”
With a serious face, I said, “I never worry.”
She snorted and rolled her eyes.
Lysa likely wouldn’t have been so merry if she’d known how I intended to steal the key to unlock Plump Pertha’s helm. Although, given how long we’d known one another, she should have at least suspected it. I am, after all, an assassin.
With seven conjurers behind me, putting on their best starving wanderer faces, I climbed down the hummock, careful to avoid toeing the stringy vines that stretched out like a carpet of booby traps along the soil.
The conjurers went in first, crossing a wobbly roped bridge strung out across the River Menth.
They hadn’t come out in over five minutes, which probably meant they were being tended to.
I’d counted twenty-one dockworkers, which meant — so long as Sybil was correct with her numbers — only a handful of workers were inside the camp. Most of them, hopefully of all of them plus a few messengers, would be busy with my lovely conjurer-turned-wanderer brigade.
Fewer eyes on me and my doings meant less of a chance that some inquisitive worker or messenger would probe me with annoying questions, such as “what do you think you’re doing with that sword?” and “is that blood on your hands?” and “why is our shipmaster’s head missing from his shoulders?”
Ideally, the shipmaster’s head would not be separated from his body. But assassinations sometimes go awry.
Once inside the camp, I walked nonchalantly toward the shipmaster’s cottage, giving the impression I was merely a man who wanted a chat with an important officer of the Order.
Bodies huddled over an enormous cauldron inside a tent, barely within my field of vision. They were being served bowls, it appeared.
A one-two knock on the door, and I waited. Feet thudded from inside, and the door opened moments later.
“Eh?” Crank-Ass said, chewing a stick. “Boats ain’t for sale for future payments, done told you that once. Now, ’less you come here with some shiny coin in your pockets — and it don’t look like you have — I ain’t cutting you a deal.”
“I can offer you a favor,” I said, stepping into the cottage and squeezing past the fat man.
Admiral Tucket was what he called himself. And Admiral Tucket looked at me with a slight gape of his mouth, as if he wasn’t accustomed to visitors welcoming themselves into his humble cottage.
When surprise and the unexpected overtakes you and freezes up your conscious mind and knots up your social instincts, you often revert back to basic manners. Things your mother taught you when you were a little boy. Things that may not be appropriate or logical or safe given the situation.
Admiral Tucket closed the door, allowing us privacy.
“I hear many officers of the Order place cleanliness next to godliness,” I said, stepping over stacks of wet, moldy papers. “I see you do not.”
“What, a Custodian? Is that the favor you’re offering? Sweepin’ and broomin’?”
“Trust that I’m not a Custodian,” I said grimly. I put my hands on his desk, leaning over, waiting. He stayed put. So I baited my lure and prepared to reel. “You have loose lips in your camp.”
“Nonsense,” he boomed. And he moved. Walked over to confront me, undoubtedly — to ask me for proof.
From the corner of my eye, his blob crept across the wall in the form of a shadow.
Just a little more, I thought. Had to get him away from the door. Blood tends to quickly find cracks and seep beneath them, after all.
C’mon, big boy. Another step. I subtly lowered my hand to my belt, against the hilt tucked inside. A hilt that usually lay against my shin, but you can’t reach down and snatch a dagger from your leg in an indirect, underhanded manner, can you?
“Best hope you’re bringin’ me some proo—”
Proof. That was the word he would have intoned, if he’d had but another fraction of a second of life. But life, as he knew it, began pouring from his throat.
I’d spun around, dagger in hand, and slipped the flat ebon edge across one vein, then the other. Big men like him, they bleed furiously at first. His warmth spewed like ocean spray from a whale’s blowhole. Squirted me right in the eye.
The desire to snap my head back and avoid the red, iron-smelling fountain currently geysering from Admiral Tucket’s slit throat was strong, but you don’t make it long as an assassin with a weak stomach.
I steadied him so he wouldn’t collapse, my hands under his hot, moist pits. He tried speaking, but the words were wet gurgles that bubbled out from his rived flesh.
His face went pale, and his eyes rolled back.
Admiral Tucket had departed the living realm.
I laid him down gently behind his desk and erected a small wall of stacks of paper and ledgers and unused parchments around his body to soak up the blood flow. Then I thought up a story for the admiral.
His wife had died of disease a decade back. Her loss had hardened his amicable demeanor into an iron shell of hostility and grief. He had risen quickly through the ranks of the Order due to his no-nonsense approach.
Wasn’t much of a story, but it was believable. And far preferable to wondering if he had a child and loving wife waiting for him at home.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t make a deal,” I told him, laying a sheet of paper over his eyes.
Bronze hook
s, or maybe copper — hell if I knew — were mounted in the wall behind his desk. And on the hooks hung a variety of keyrings, each with a single key. I took them all, stuffing them into my pocket, and left the cottage.
Before I closed the door, I shouted inside, “My thanks again, Admiral,” tempering any suspicions that may have been ignited.
At the docks, I boarded Plump Pertha. This did not make one worker in particular very happy.
“Ah, ah, ah!” she gabbled, finger high in the air. “Sir. Sir!”
I turned around, putting a who, me? thumb to my chest.
“This boat,” she said, wielding a clipboard and quill, “is for—”
“Me,” I said bluntly. “Admiral Tucket and I arranged a deal. He’s permitting me to transfer my recruits to the Hole.” In the middle of that sentence, I’d plucked a keyring from my pocket, hoping our conversation would mute the jangling of the other ten keys.
The woman’s face creased. “And you are…?”
“Astul, Shepherd of the Black Rot.”
She parroted the name silently, patting the top of her head, where two braids, one from either side, met one another. “I suppose if the admiral has granted you… okay, well. I’ll need — how do you spell your name?”
I told her.
She dipped her quill into the ink tray fastened to the clipboard. “Right. Astul. Okay, I will need the names of all the travelers, along with their possessions, and any and all goods you intend to sail with.”
Great. I had to complete a bloody manifest featuring almost two hundred conjurers.
“They don’t have names,” I said. “They’re” — I thought about it —”slaves.”
“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips in apparent disapproval. She wrote something on her clipboard. “I see. And your—”
“No possessions,” I added. “We travel light.”
She squinted at me, huffed once, then asked for my signature on the parchment. A few minutes later and the dockworkers were untying Plump Pertha’s ropes, and my brigade of conjurers filed on down from the hillside.
Yoll informed me that Donnela Kratch, a conjurer from supposedly two hundred years ago, was an expert nautical navigator. So she took the wheel, and — after I wished them all good speed and good luck — directed Plump Pertha down the narrow channel of the River Menth.
Lysa had distracted the mistress of the manifests long enough for me to sneak off the ship and up into the trees. Lysa joined me soon after, and we watched the conjurers sail toward the Hole.
“There!” Lysa said. “You must see it now, or you’re blind as dirt.”
Limbs hanging out over the River Menth flinched as something seemed to terrorize them.
“Probably two horny squirrels,” I said.
A malevolent wind gusted in, bending the canopy above us. Rain began falling. Or rather, spraying sideways — a sheet of cold, stinging spit from the clouds.
Speaking of clouds… they looked as baleful as ever. Stuffed with the ominous gray of a gargoyle’s statue, hovering overhead, moving so slowly you might even suggest they’d paused here over the River Menth.
“Oh,” Lysa said, pointing. “It’s an owl. I didn’t know they lived around here.”
The River Menth began to swell, its water pouring over the shoreline and flooding the messenger camp.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”
Lysa stumbled back into me. “Astul,” she said, her casual pointing turning frantic. “It just… the owl just turned into a woman!”
No, Lysa. Not a woman. A goddess.
Chapter 23
The river sloshed and churned, and Plump Pertha rocked unsteadily.
“Fuck me,” I snarled. And a moment later, I was running down the hillside, toward the shore, ebon sword in hand.
Lysa followed close behind. Together we probably sounded like a pack of mules crashing through a forest, snapping stems and barreling through thistles and briers.
Probably. Couldn’t say for certain because all you could hear under the low sky of seething rainclouds was an endless roll of thunder. It lingered there, unmoving, unending. One continuous booming ripple boring into your skull.
The River Menth rushed downstream faster now, white effervescent bubbles cresting its surface.
Behind me, a curse. “Shit!”
I turned back and helped cut away a cord of vine from Lysa’s feet. Then we were running again. We jumped from a rock and onto the muddy banks.
Water had risen halfway up our shins. Sloshing and splashing, we forged ahead, pelted with icy rain all the while.
The white bubbles evolved into tiny waves folding over themselves.
The river continued to swell.
Polinia stood a hundred feet away. We had to move faster. We had to—
“Move!” I shouted at Lysa, shoving her into the ramp of mud that began falling into the water.
Half of the visible River Menth had been upended. It had been stretched upward like a sheet, forming a curtain of brown sludge that surged downstream.
It was taller than Plump Pertha. It was heading toward Plump Pertha.
“Lysa! Get your ass up there!”
Lysa had her eyes closed, hand resting in the muddy embankment. She breathed deeply, held it, then made a grunt as her body sucked in another breath.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered, crawling up the embankment. I paused on all fours. Polinia’s head snapped our way. We exchanged glances, then I followed her eyes as they shifted to the river.
There’s a noise a boat makes when it slopes up and crashes into a wave. I knew this noise well because I’d spent many nights gazing into the ocean when my journeys and jobs took me to the coasts, and I’d listen to the water lap against the docks and the storms jostle the ships.
It’s a clash between elements — a battle of wood and water. The clatter between the two creates the unmistakable sound of nautical thunder.
Plump Pertha did not make this noise. Plump Pertha made a noise that a tree makes as lightning punches straight through its trunk and splits it in half.
The wave took Plump Pertha, threw her backward, and slammed her into the shore. Cleaved her bowsprit clean off, fractured the hull, which was now pointing at the clouds.
With a sudden sucking sound, the wave collapsed. The River Menth flattened out again, dispersing water evenly throughout its channel.
And Polinia had taken to the air, a snowy owl making her escape.
But there was one thing she hadn’t counted on. Well, two things, actually. The first being Lysa Rabthorn. The second being the branch that Lysa Rabthorn felled, swiping Polinia right out of the air and pinning her wintry body to the shoreline.
I clambered up to my feet, mud caked on my fingers. “Swim across and see if there are survivors,” I said. “I’ll deal with the owl bitch over here. Lysa?”
Lysa had fallen to her knees. She rocked herself back and forth, palms squashing her temples.
“Sickness?” I asked her, as if I had any fucking clue what happened to a conjurer after doing, er, conjurerish things.
“Go!” she cried, shrill as a knife against a whetstone. “Just go!” Her teeth clattered together and she bleated and bayed.
In case things got hairy and she was able, I left her my sword, then took off across the shore. Throwing a glance or two toward the overturned Plump Pertha gave me no information aside from that the ship had magically righted itself and there appeared to be no bodies floating in the river.
You had little chance of surviving a shipwreck like that, I figured. Which meant… well, I’d have to calculate just how fucked I was after dealing with the goddess of nature.
She’d cast away her anthropomorphized owl form, because kicking out from beneath a heavy branch isn’t easy with wings, apparently.
I lifted my boot up and stomped on her outstretched fingers.
She howled.
“I despise lies,” I said, stepping onto her busted knuckles with all my weight.
“I never spoke of—” she whimpered as the bones in her fingers crunched and cracked.
“Never spoke of what? Lies? You told me you and your troop of gods and goddesses were out to relieve Ripheneal of his duties, not ally with the god of Amortis.”
She fought with the branch, which looked more like a small trunk. It was wedged inside a hole and against a nearby tree.
“It’s not budging,” I said. I knelt beside her, sliding the spine of an ebon dagger along her cheek, under her nose, across her eyelids. “What happens when a goddess dies, hmm?”
She swallowed.
I flipped the dagger over, the serrated edge staring willingly into her eyes. “Why the fuck are you here, Polinia?”
Her flesh had always been the color of a translucent opal whenever I had seen her. Now it was charcoal gray and streaked with rust. The necklace around her neck had been severed and the bark pendants had slid off, onto her chest.
“H-he said—”
A firm push of the dagger drew blood. “Names. Not hes and shes.”
“Arken,” Polinia spat. Her eyes were wet, almost… sympathetic. “Dear Shepherd… oh, dear boy.” Was the madness of impending death taking her? “You were not supposed to find out like this. It was for a good cause, I promise.”
I looked into the river, at the wreckage. “Death is a good cause?”
“Those conjurers were already dead. I did nothing to them that they had not already faced.”
“Forget the conjurers,” I said. “What about the living realm?”
She shook her head. “What about it?”
“All of creation,” I said, my voice rising as anger swept me away. “All that is and was! And you don’t care about it, do you? You wanted your own fucking world, your own bloody creations. I’m fuckin’ selfish, but this, Polinia — shit. This is a whole other level of selfishness.”
She put on a confused face, squinting her eyes, drawing her head back in surprise. “You believe I want this world to end? Why would I ever want that?”
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 90
