A Ruin of Shadows

by L. D. Lewis

  “The world knows your mask. You are nothing without it. I—I gave you this power to be more than it! My mother gave you purpose!” He was all froth now, all anxiety and darting eyes. He wanted to scream, surely. But a scream might end the conversation too abruptly. And they both knew what waited at its end.

  “You gave me a means to occupy myself. And now I have no further need of you,” she smiled behind the cracked mask. “‘The Nation provides for the preservation of Our natural rights, among them to unmake the ones made by Our hand.’ ​Code of the Shadow Army. The thing we memorize as children. And so now remind me, Your Eminence, at the start of your unmaking,” she stretched her palms before him, a black dagger in each, “whose hands made you?”

  When he willed a sound like “you,” Daynja jammed the daggers through either side of his neck and up through his cheeks making an X to keep his mouth shut. He would bleed out when they were removed. She looked at him and smiled before the clattering sounds of armored men outside the windows told her it was time to move again.

  She unbarred the main doors and armed herself with Wadjet’s barrels, whipping massed guards as she passed through them. But she would be overwhelmed soon and exits were limited.

  She finally came upon an armory room with its lines of bulky gear and massive battle axes. At the far end was a barred window.

  Guards funneled into the armory toward her. Daynja wondered if she would rip her own shoulders out, but began hammer throwing battle axes in close-set arcs toward her would-be captors, hurling left and then right and the left again as she moved backward. The hall was narrow and it didn't take long for bodies and shields to build up a blockage so she could fling an axe through the window. A hole shattered large enough for her to shimmy out and climb the stone down to a safe jumping distance.

  She found herself in an alley and ran for all she was worth to the southern wall that led down to the city. Alarms in Citadela mingled with shouted reports that no one knew where she’d gone. Panic wouldn't besiege civilians for at least an hour. The remaining Shadows would find her before the regular troops screwed their heads on correctly.

  Rain started and a clock chimed the eleventh hour. Daynja moved quickly through the alleyways and cobblestone streets. Much of the city was asleep save for cleaners, boisterous barflies and the occasional odd insomniacs peering out of bedroom windows in hopes of entertainment.

  Daynja heard sloppy steps on a quiet street, accompanied by giggles and sharp “hush!” sounds. A pair of young lovers out well past bedtime spilled from an alleyway between a late-night coffee shop and a cobbler’s. She ducked in the dark to breathe and wait for them to pass. Both were dressed for work, she with an apron, he with heavy gloves tucked into the back pocket of grease-spotted trousers. The girl carried her shoes in her hand.

  They pulled each other into a space beneath an awning up the block and then pressed themselves together in a playful groping that said neither of them knew what to do next.

  Daynja eyed the driftcycle the couple had left in the alleyway across the street. Steam rose from its cooling engine as the rain pelted its surface. It probably belonged to the boy judging by his boots. The amorous pair were sufficiently occupied, so Daynja darted across the street and walked the bike backward through the alley to start it up on the next block.

  The main roads were empty. Anyone stumbling out of what passed for late-night debauchery here would slip home through the tavern-lined backstreets.

  Daynja could make out the stone goddesses at the gate, their cascading locs and the leopard spots etched into their backs when the hum of new bikes forced her to check her corners. There hadn't been time to register much. Two bikes — loud sorts with tires — and a faint, two-note whistle. The intermittent sharp pop and gold spark of bullets fired and ricocheting off the cobblestones just inches on either side of her.

  She accelerated and braced herself for something incoming. There was still a bomber unaccounted for, and the whistle had sounded a bit off —

  In an instant of white-hot light and a concussive force that seemed to push the back of her ribs through their front, Daynja was airborne. The bike was blasted from beneath her.

  Merda.

  She was blind inside the mask. Her mind reeled to make sense of which way was down so she wouldn’t land unkindly, but the ground faithfully rose to meet her anyway. Cobblestones fit poorly into the grooves of her body. Still, she was relieved to hit the street on her front and not her back where Wadjet would have broken her spine, armor or no.

  Her vision cleared before the ringing in her ears and she lay panting, watching debris and chunks of road fall with the rain. Slightly, imperceptibly she flexed her fingers and her toes in her boots to make sure she could. She’d landed on one of her arms and the pain made her grind her teeth. And then she was still, straining through the pitch in her ears for when her mutinous Shadows would try to strip her of her mask.

  Three was here. She had a chip in one of her front teeth from a training accident and it affected the notes of the Shadow whistle when she did it. The accident hadn’t been her own carelessness, of course. It was a boy’s fault. When Three also lost those three fingers in his poorly-controlled blast, the girl’d taken his arm with a hatchet as retribution.

  She’d missed the target cut a few times. The boy didn’t make it.

  Two sets of footsteps rippled the rainwater pooling in the cracks around Daynja before the boots appeared on either side of her. She fingered the black blades she could reach on the front of her vest.

  “Still smoldering. Good aim,” said Five in an unreasonably jovial tone. He’d been one of Daynja’s prized steel-wielding assassins and carried two black-bladed machetes on his back and a pistol on his hip.

  Neither of them mattered, of course, because Daynja was a goddamned warlord.

  “You going to run her through so we can get out of here?” Three sighed, the callous darling.

  In a blurred instant, Daynja rolled and slashed the tendons in Five’s ankles. He cried out and dropped to his knees, so the General didn’t have to get to her feet to strip him of a blade and his sidearm. The former she used to remove his head. The latter put a bullet in Three’s.

  When Three fell, Daynja got to her feet with a groan. Every bone and most of the tissue in her body protested violently, but she stifled herself when she heard another bike cut its engine. A rubble pile obscured her as long as she stayed crouched.

  A small team of armed guards stood on the other side of the crater the bomb had created at the feet of the stone chimera goddess. They had heard the shot. Rather than wait for them to investigate, the General crawled back to Three’s body, armed two blue bombs and lobbed them at the soldiers.

  The explosions were separated by half a moment and then followed by the thunderous quake of a mountain cracking as the stone goddess broke into boulders and collapsed in the gateway.

  Lights were coming on in the city and damp dust clouds billowed for blocks along the main road. The General quickly tucked what remained of Three’s bombs into the spiderwire bag and used the cover of dust to flee through the space left by the monument. She didn’t know if she’d killed them all. She only knew that no one followed her.

  She crashed through sparse trees giving way to the dense forest outside the city’s limits. Her sprint gave way to a march and then a trudge over tall grass and hidden rocks. All the while, her body screamed. The armor held together what was a tender and probably bruised bag of flesh. Keeping it active took a modest toll on her energy, but it had a way of refusing to leave her if she — if it — sensed danger. There were Shadows to wait for. Their mission was incomplete. If they hadn’t completely abandoned their training, they would be upon her soon.

  She plucked spiderwire from her bag and braided it absently as she walked. The path she took was overgrown now; the only steps ever on this route were probably hers. It ran alongside the main forest road and child-sized Édo had used it for her mischief and thievery back when she needed
to. The main route would eventually cross the monastery ruins where she’d raised herself some kilometers into the forest.

  If everyone really did know her story, they would know to look there for her.

  A chill struck her spine. A couple of somethings were invisible in the trees around her. She sneered behind the mask. It was about time the twins showed up.

  She drew two of Wadjet’s barrels as Six and Seven launched themselves at her with their swords drawn. They fought like a whirlwind and Daynja was at its eye. Every move made by one was complemented by the other. There was a familiar rhythm to the flurry of clashing metal, and Daynja recalled years of watching the two of them spar. They were the only Shadows with any notion of defense.

  That’s the thing about being an assassin: almost all of it is stealth, the art of not being aside for the few moments spent as death’s glorious incarnation. Combat means an assassin has failed to be invisible and Shadows rarely had reason for a fight. As twins, Six and Seven had always existed to one another, and they trained as foreseen and inevitable violence.

  Daynja found that she was enjoying herself. “Faster!” The General barked, not taking advantage of the few kill windows she was offered. Instead, she rapped the boy’s blade-wielding knuckles and whacked the girl high under her arm with a gun barrel. Seven checked that his hand wasn’t broken and Six bellowed as she stumbled back. “You’re small, Six. I shouldn’t have access to your ribs.”

  The girl scowled, doubled over in the tall grass. Daynja turned her attention to the boy and addressed the cricks in her neck with audible pops. She was exhilarated. “Come on, Seven. You weren’t sent here to dance. You mean to kill me.”

  The twins collected themselves. There was a nod between them, confirmation to each that the other was all right to go again. Daynja smiled. They advanced again with new tenacity.

  “The mask! Get it off her!” Two’s voice rang out, impatient and much more authoritative than Daynja had ever heard it. She was waiting in the trees with her rifle, invisible until her voice gave away her position.

  “They may need an extra pair of hands,” Daynja called, salivating at the idea of access to Two, the snake who bit her. “Swing down and help them out.”

  A pair of clipped buzzes shot beside Daynja’s head. She ducked instinctively, but watched the life leave Six’s eyes with the dark spray of an exit wound. Seven fell first, but Six’s sword dropped to the grass before she went with it.

  “No,” Daynja panted over the twins’ lifeless bodies bracketing her in the clearing. “NO!”

  They were mine! She shrieked in her own head. Fury shook her so hard the world quaked around her. Spikes seemed to rise in the armor of her spine and the joints of her hands.

  How dare she?

  Two’s rifle was being cocked again. “One will be here soon. I didn’t have time for you to teach them how to kill you.”

  “Get down here, girl.” The General snarled into the treetops, scanning them until she found the glint of gold cuffs in Two’s locs.

  “The mask, General. This can be over quickly.”

  “I said get down here!” She screamed, ferocious and guttural; a foreign sound that reminded her for a moment of Djinni. She whipped spiderwire rope, severing cleanly the branch on which Two crouched. She watched the girl crash to the ground, obscured by the grass and underbrush.

  Something on the girl was clearly broken as she grimaced, scooting herself backward to the trunk of the tree. She raised her rifle and Daynja whipped the spiderwire again, cutting it in half.

  The defiance in Two’s eyes was insufficient. Daynja wanted terror.

  She whipped the wire a third time, catching Two’s ankle, and a fourth time, lassoing her torso. She wrapped the wire’s length around her fist as she crossed to her traitor, cutting into Two’s flesh slowly, methodically, with every tug.

  “You miserable stain.” Daynja growled. “What a disappointment you turned out to be.”

  “Likewise.” Two groaned, a pained smirk playing on her lips. She had stopped squirming for the pain of the wire now grating into her bones, but she glared up into the General’s face. “I almost had you...”

  She choked on a laugh when Daynja slipped another loop of wire around her throat. The locs caught in it were severed and the knot of them dropped down over Two’s face. A thin line of crimson began to appear as it tightened and she shut her eyes against the burning sensation of being slowly cut to pieces.

  “Oh, Two. Is this how you imagined you’d die? An almost something?”

  “You... everyt... to us once. Did you imag... you’d die Boorhia’s Monster?”

  What a pity the girl thought she would die clever.

  “Look at me.” Daynja tugged on the wire again and Two thrashed and grimaced before the panic of inevitable dismemberment finally took defiance’s place in her eyes.

  “Yes.” She said. The General drew back fiercely on the spiderwire, and Two came apart in a squelch.

  Rage sent Daynja crashing through the forest again, this time to pace in the main road, glowering at the northern darkness and the city she’d just escaped. Her boot prints were thick with the blood of Six or Seven or Two, or...

  She waited there for One to appear with whatever legion he would bring to destroy her.

  It would take a legion.

  He hadn’t materialized when the adrenaline began to subside. That niggling ache in the soft spot of her soul returned and threatened to crack the bones in her chest with its weight. A savage sort of anguish ripped through her in a howl. She clawed at the mask and stared at it with its little gold ring and the bullet like a mole lodged in its cheek. She wanted so badly to be rid of it, to crush it in her fist or throw it into the trees where it would rot in obscurity.

  It stared back at her.

  “Tough night?”

  Reflexively, Daynja turned and flung a fist of knives at what turned out to be the Artful Djinni. They ducked and the blades nailed a tree trunk instead.

  “Oh.” Édo moaned. They were the kid again with the odd eyes, peering curiously at her from the edge of the road.

  “A little high-strung. Maybe bring it down a little,” Djinni frowned and plucked a blade out of the tree.

  “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “From Citadela? I was just there. It’ll be a bit. There’s a huge mess and someone’s gone and killed the Emperor. Wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Djinni blinked, hands casually in the pockets of their dingy trousers.

  Why, she had killed the Emperor, hadn’t she? However fierce her grudge against her traitorous Shadows, she remembered that more was meant to come of this night. She tapped a fingernail pensively against the bullet in her mask, spit the last of her fury into the dust and sighed herself back to center.

  “Want to help me with something, Djinni?” She asked with a final glare at the north.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” they replied with a grin.

  ∴

  The Os Vazios monastery had been ruins already when Daynja was a child; and time hadn’t stopped corrupting it when she left. Much of the roof she remembered sleeping under was on the ground, damp and covered in silt and vines. Remnants of stained glass windows crunched beneath her boots. Old porticos were just collapsing pillars. Signs she’d ever been here, ever existed before Citadela, were buried.

  It was bright morning by the time she and Djinni arrived, caked in hours of dust and sweat. They’d been up the rest of the night lacing a long stretch of the main road with spiderwire netting and the rest of Three’s bombs. Her armor fading meant she was in a place of relative safety.

  She drank from the over-full stone well hidden in a jaboticaba grove behind the monastery. The air here was tart and floral, thick with the scent of the blackening fruit burdening the trees. The clean water pulled drying blood and clay from Daynja’s hands and arms. She dropped the mask and her weapons, stripping to the mesh armor that wrapped her torso and dunked herself in the well. She was just as
bruised as she thought she might be and her skin was marked with inky purple spots.

  Djinni was sitting in a tree, slurping on a jaboticaba when she came up for air.

  “So. Have you convinced yourself this is really about saving the Queen-Saint of Eros?”

  “What else would it be about?” Daynja sputtered, using her shirt to towel off.

  “You. What hasn’t been about you yet?”

  “I didn’t make this about me.” She gathered her things, climbing to a high wall remnant for the view. Her knuckles scraped climbing the stone without her armor. It was strange to see the power of her hands without it.

  “No judgments here. I just want you to know that I know.”

  “Noted, Djinni.” She slugged from her bladder of cachaça and peered through Wadjet’s scope at Citadela glistening just short of the horizon. Nothing indicated they were mobilizing toward her. Not for now, anyway. One would come eventually and bring what remained of the might of the empire with him for what she’d done to Negus.

  Daynja relaxed against the warming stone and took in the blue of the sky and enough cumulus clouds to threaten a storm if they wanted to. She ran her fingers along Wadjet’s knicks and weathered spots and marveled at how it’d been largely undamaged in all this. Her eyes closed.

  “They turned on me. All of them,” she whispered to Djinni.

  “They’re Boorhian. Were they ever capable of being for you?”

  “No.” She pulled her mask over her face just enough to shade her eyes from the early afternoon sun. She had never been so tired. “Just as well. One will be here for the mask soon. I intend to give it to him. He’s earned it.”

  “And then what?”