An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  The irony of it all turned a smile up on my face. “Is this the faith-in-a-greater-power thing you were talking about? The reverence?”

  Her bob of black hair bounced springily as she threw her head back and sighed. “I cannot defeat Arken. I am not that…” She searched for the word. “Gifted.”

  “You don’t need to deal a killing blow. Just a rather forceful jolt to the head. To put it another way, you needn’t capture the king. But swiping all his pawns off the board would be wonderful.”

  Ellie turned back, torchlight illuminating her caramel complexion. She paced for a few moments, then faced me again. “The god of life,” she said, noncommittal to my proposal, “tell me about him.”

  I got up from my bucket. “No need to tell you. I can show you. Come along, now, Elimori, time to introduce you to the man who created you.”

  And just like that, Ellie and I were walking away from Scholl, around to the other side of the mountain her cave burrowed into.

  Okay, it wasn’t that easy to convince her. She’d crossed her arms, pointed to my moniker as the Shepherd of assassins — which is completely incorrect; I’m the Shepherd of the Black Rot, not just any assassins — and said I must be mad. I told her I probably did sit somewhere on the madness scale, although in my wholly unseasoned opinion, it was on the lower end.

  I also explained that if I had wanted to kill her, for whatever reason, I could have done so no less than eight times by now. And if I really wanted her dead, why wouldn’t I simply wait for a few more days and let Arken do the job for me?

  That finally convinced her, and we set off out of the city, with no protection from guards or the scary-as-fuck Warden. Once we were out of earshot of the populace, I began Operation Acquire Information. Mostly for my own benefit and interests.

  “Tell me,” I said as plumes of ash rose into the air from beneath our feet. “How does one become the Mother of Conjurers?”

  A flare of lava arced several hundred feet away, splashing onto the charred landscape and cutting a narrow creek of magma across it.

  “Words have many meanings, Astul. I did not birth the conjurers. I was… the one who…”

  “The greatest?” I ventured. “The baddest, meanest motherfucker out there, yeah?”

  She side-eyed me and stepped over a pile of ash. “I didn’t earn the name. It was, I guess, luck more than anything. I was born with it. Born with the mind to conceive the teachings, to understand the way the mind works and how it can link to external manifestations. I prefer genius to greatness.”

  “Genius? And here I was beginning to think you were too modest.”

  “Genius is acquired by chance. I did nothing to obtain it. But greatness? That’s when you spend decades of your life pounding the hammer, or swinging a sword, or molding dough. I will admit that I achieved more through hard work and sweat than I ever could have merely through the talent I was blessed with. So I guess I was a great conjurer.” She stopped before a dimple in the earth filled with soot. “But I was not a great person.”

  We aimed ourselves toward the curving wall of the cliff. “Well, congratulations. You’re like most, then.”

  She snorted. “And you? Are you like most?”

  “I’m worse than most.” I gave her a wink.

  “Maybe. I don’t know you well enough to make that judgment. I don’t know you well enough to make this assertion, but I’m going to anyhow. You and I, we’re very similar, I think.”

  “Oh?”

  I…” She shook her head dolefully. “I could have made the world a better place. A much better place. I could have taught classrooms full of conjurers. Our numbers were enormous, before the civil war took its toll. I could have passed down my theories and my knowledge. But you know what I did instead?”

  I was still too hung up about this apparent civil war to answer her question. Was that how the conjurers had met their eventual end, before Occrum decided to bring them back?

  “I shunned them,” Ellie said.

  There was no sadness in her voice, or bleakness in her words. She’d stripped that admission of all emotion. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you spend a lifetime rehearsing a confession to yourself, in preparation for when the time finally comes to offer it to someone else.

  “I have a wealth of knowledge that no conjurer possesses,” she said. “I know pathways in the mind that reduce conjurer waste by ninety-five percent.”

  “Er, conjurer waste?”

  “The sickness,” she clarified. “The fatigue. I can speak to the elements with the same ease with which I am talking to you right now. If I passed that knowledge down, maybe the drought and the famine that drove the conjurers to war against each other wouldn’t have happened. They could have moved rainclouds, sucked up the sea with the knowledge I would have given them.”

  Huh. Well, now I knew who Occrum had gotten his idea of bringing a cataclysmic heat wave to Mizridahl from. Probably best to not inform Ellie of that.

  “When Amortis began crumbling,” she said, “I could have looked after myself. Took the same path as I had while living.” She looked up from the ashy floor. “But I felt… gosh, I don’t know. A real need to redeem myself. Right here.” She patted her heart. “I felt it in there. So here I am, leading a rebellion. And you — you’re here for the same reason, aren’t you? To make things right.”

  If I was a man of morals, I might have told Ellie the truth — that I was here simply so I could go on living the good life for a while longer. Keeping hundreds of thousands of innocents from dying off was a nice bonus, but no, I hadn’t come to Amortis to redeem myself. Redemption wasn’t in the plans. Revenge, though? Oh, yeah. I planned on leaving Amortis with nary a god in existence.

  But I needed Ellie’s help, and that would only come from empathy and understanding. What better way than pretend I was walking along the same path?

  “Here,” I told her, breaking off a chunk of dirt from the face of the cliff, “a, er, prize.”

  She lifted a brow.

  “For being the only one who’s figured me out.”

  She chuckled. “So the god of life is truly here? Because of you?”

  “Because of me,” I said. “For more reasons than one.”

  About twenty minutes later, we ducked into a cavern, where my expectations of glowing pinpoints of cataclysmic red were not met. There were certainly a pair of eyes in that cavern, but they did not look like the eyes of annihilation; rather those of a red star behind layers of rainclouds, dull and sheenless. Dying.

  “Ripheneal?” I said.

  His head lay listless on his shoulder. He opened his mouth, dry lips peeling apart. He swallowed. A pained look twisted his face into wrinkles. “This realm… is… ending me.”

  “What do you need?” I asked. “Water, food… some kind of godly medicine? You can’t die on me, pal.”

  “My creations…” He coughed. A dry, raw cough. “I need them… I need them.” Another swallow. “Without… them… I am nothing.”

  “And your creations,” I said, “what are they without you?”

  His eyes rolled back briefly. “Do you… trust… me?”

  “I don’t know.” And unlike many of the statements I’d made in Amortis, that was the absolute truth.

  Ripheneal reached out with an ancient, trembling hand. I put my fingers in his palm, and he closed his hand overtop them. “You… must trust me.” He squeezed.

  I turned to Ellie. “How many days before Arken reaches the city?”

  “Scout reports put him a week and a half out.”

  He’d mobilized slightly faster than I’d expected. I looked at Ripheneal. “Can you—”

  Ripheneal nodded. “Yes. Yes. I will… persevere.”

  “All right,” I said to Ellie, “here’s the plan. Begin the evacuation of Scholl. Only Lysa, Vayle, and Rovid and his family are to remain. Do not, under any circumstance, allow Rovid or his son or his wife to leave. Understand? This is vital.”

  “I need mo
re information before I will commit to this.”

  “Me and Ripheneal here are pulling the greatest trick this world has ever seen. There will be a tear in the center of town. Once Arken arrives, I’m taking Ripheneal through, back to the living realm. And you — you wanted redemption? Here you go. Soon as Arken steps through the tear to chase us, you bring this bloody mountain down on his army. Block them off from the tear, kill as many as you can. Know enough to commit?”

  A small illumination of life glinted in Ripheneal’s eyes, however briefly, as I spoke of the plan.

  “Only if you promise me he will never return to this realm.”

  I smiled. “From what I hear, dead gods go to no realm. In a week and a half he’ll be here, yeah?”

  “My scouts are rarely incorrect.”

  “Well, that means I need to get going. Fragment Four — can you give me directions?”

  She cocked a brow. “What for?”

  “I need a couple bodies. It’s rather important.”

  After all, I thought, tears don’t open themselves. It was too bad they didn’t. I wouldn’t have had to ruin a friend’s life if so.

  Chapter 29

  Fragment Four, the jewel of necrophiliacs everywhere. According to Ellie, this place served as a forge where Preen were created.

  It now served as a derelict stockyard for corpses.

  From what I could piece together, it seemed the assembling of Preen here was for the sole purpose of furthering Arken’s plan to send a massive army through to the living realm. After all, Amielle had said that the conjurers in Fragment Zero had sundered countless numbers of soldiers in an attempt to pass them through to the living realm unharmed and without becoming reaped.

  Anyway, Fragment Four was abandoned, probably because there was no longer a need for Preen. Well, at least the portion of Fragment Four I found myself in was abandoned.

  The phoenix Lysa had conjured landed in a field of idle wagons, all neatly arranged in rows. The field was segmented like a collage formed of dissimilar pictures. In one segment lay enormous pits filled with vats of green liquid that looked like the same stuff the Preen at the Prim had lain submerged in. It seemed it’d been a while since the pits had been given a stir with the oars that stuck out of them; the liquid had crusted to the edges and thickened to a chunky soup in the middle. Also, it smelled positively putrid.

  Another segment of the field featured fifty-foot canvases which lay flat on the ground, hides of cows, horses, oxen and other creatures I could not identify lying atop.

  Yet another segment contained beds of various herbs, most wilted and brown. Some had been harvested into buckets.

  The wagons were arranged identically in each segment, most filled with the respected segment’s harvests. It was as if the drivers had simply jumped off, untethered the horses, and left.

  A chill passed through me from head to toe. “This is eerie as fuck,” I said aloud, as if the sound of a voice — even my own — would calm me.

  It did not.

  At the forefront of this corpse creation command post stood five wooden buildings, all in a row. They were squat and fat at the bottom, thinning out into a narrow column as they rose fifty feet into the air.

  “Well,” I said, “guess I gotta go in there.”

  The doors, of course, were locked. Why wouldn’t they be? Nice thing about wooden doors, though — and particularly wooden doors without iron braces — is that they crack and splinter and get all sorts of holes in them if you whack ’em enough times with something firm and hard. Like, say, an ebon blade. It seemed whoever came up with the blueprint for these buildings failed to realize it was possible to add windows mostly wherever you please.

  An obliterating darkness swallowed me as I went inside. Fortunately, the sun slid between some heavy clouds and winked inside the fractured door, leaking faint golden bands of light into the room. A torch lay inside a brazier over a ways. I grabbed it, withdrew two daggers and struck the flint side of one, till I had achieved the wonder of fire.

  Then I explored.

  Wooden carts were scattered about the circular room, their beds full of materials collected from the fields. Archways had been cut into the severe curve of the wall, each one leading to a series of steps that seemed to take you to a different destination within the building. I chose a random staircase, following it up till it forked off into another staircase and a small landing.

  Feeling no need to exercise the ole calves, I stepped off onto the landing, which led to a single unlocked door.

  Never one to poke my head inside a room whose occupancy is unknown, I withdrew my blade and stuck my torch inside, the flame preceding the blackness of ebon.

  Then I laughed. A raucous laugh that echoed in the room, which had a perceptible mint-green glow. Sitting in caskets on stilts, the tops unopened, were all the Preen I needed and more.

  I spent some time looking for the right corpses. This particular room had a good-looking woman, but most of the men were lanky types, soft chins. Not the type of body you’d fancy for the rest of eternity.

  So I went exploring some more. Each subsequent floor I came to was the same as the first: dimly lit with light the color of mint, Preen submerged in preserves. But I came to learn that not all Preen are created equally. In fact, some Preen are rather large. Rather muscular. Rather similar in appearance to… well, Wardens.

  Fragment Four hadn’t only served as a breeding ground for your run-of-the-mill bodies. It had served as the birthplace for Arken’s hulking, flail-wielding servants.

  After deciding on two appropriate corpses — the non-Warden type — I had to contend with the trouble of getting them out of their caskets, down the stairs and onto my phoenix. But I am nothing if not resourceful.

  I disassembled the bed of a wagon, beating the motherfucker into submission with my boot and the pommel of my sword. This dismantling business freed some nails in the process. I placed several of the detached planks on the ground and fastened them together with the bent nails. A well-made pommel makes for a good substitute hammer.

  Then I took my homemade stretcher inside the building, went up the stairs and proceeded to empty one casket of its cadaverous inhabitant.

  She was gooey. Quite so. I placed her on the stretcher, then hauled her out of the room and down the stairs, one end of the stretcher in my hands and the other sliding along the steps.

  She fell off a few times, but corpses can take a bounce or two, right?

  I apologized to my phoenix for the stickiness, then hefted the Preen onto the bird’s fiery spine. After retrieving the male Preen and loading him on top of the female, I ske-right-the-fuck-daddled out of Fragment Four. There was business to take care of. The killing kind.

  Before departing Scholl, I’d told Vayle to keep an eye out for the faint flare from my lovely phoenix in the sky, a good ways east. She was to meet me a fair distance outside the city, because we needed to talk.

  The phoenix settled herself atop a small earthen mound, her talons sinking into the floor of ash. My commander came galloping forth on a boar about an hour later.

  “I expected you to be gone longer,” she said.

  “You didn’t believe me when I said I’d be back by sunset tomorrow?”

  “Things happen, and what are those?”

  “These,” I said, smacking the wet backs of the corpses, “are Preen. Corpses the dead can—”

  “Yes, I remember you telling me. What are you doing with them? You said you were going to scout Arken’s forces.”

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah. I lied about that. Look, you’re not going to like what I have to say at first. But after I finish, I think you’ll commend me. Both for my foresight and for my honor. Mostly for the latter.”

  Vayle blinked, still holding the reins of her boar. Then she climbed off the snorting beast and cautiously onto the mound.

  She sighed. “Tell me.”

  I clapped my hands together. “Right. So, I’m going to kill Rovid’s wife and son.�
�� I let her digest that horror for a moment before sticking up a finger and saying, “But! It gets better. Once they die — er, or rather, are sundered — they’ll inhabit these Preen. I think his son will enjoy the new look, given that he won’t be parading around in a boy’s body any longer.”

  With an experimental touch, Vayle placed her finger on the corpse’s arm, then quickly withdrew her hand.

  “It’s harmless,” I said. “Er. Well, as far as transferring into a new body. You don’t want to stay sundered very long, from what I’ve been told. Anyhow, once they’re back in the flesh, that’s where you come in. Ellie has begun the evacuation, yeah?”

  “The Warden escorted most toward Fragment Nine yesterday.”

  “Good. That means there will be plenty of free cottages. You take his wife and son to one of those cottages and keep them there. Tie ’em up, stuff some rags in their mouths… they’ll understand once this is all over.”

  Vayle crossed her arms. “You are rambling. I want to know the point of all this.”

  “You’re going to tell Rovid it was a revenge killing, for him failing to bring me a wraith. And you’re going to tell him I fled to Vereumene. And then you’re going to watch as a reaper snaps and becomes the very wraith we desperately need.”

  Vayle thoughtfully massaged the pommel of her blade. “You were correct on one account. Your quest for honor is admirable.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the disgust seep into your bones when I mentioned killing them.”

  She smiled. “I know you well enough to know that you enjoy putting on a show. Your drama is unmatched. But have you considered this: what happens to Rovid?”

  “I’ve considered it.”

  “And?”

  “Well, we know he becomes a wraith.”

  “Yes.”

  “And,” I said, “that means he can open a tear.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And, voilà! He gives us exactly what we need.”

  She set her eyes in the manner of a disappointed mother. “Astul. What happens to Rovid once he snaps? What kind of creature does he become?”