But that wasn’t enough, was it? No. I had to have a great man and an even better friend murdered, spear right through his spine. Couldn’t even let a six-foot hole bury both him and my mourning. Had to burn him, watch the wreath of fire engulf him, foul the air with the acrid stench of his sizzling hair, his melting flesh. Theory was if the fire takes you, then the corpse raisers can’t. Who knows if I was right?
So, yes, a torrent of hatred shot through me, and I opened myself up to it — because I needed to feel something overwhelm me.
But hatred isn’t a friend. It bloats you up into a monster, then deflates you just as fast once it leaves. I sat in my corner of the cave, listening to an occasional weeping.
My body softened as the humanity inside me took a stand, finally. But what was I to do? Lysa likely hated my guts. Moreover, she was a smart girl — she’d see any attempt at consoling her as a selfish endeavor to mend the fences. It’d make things worse.
After a while, she stopped crying. Or maybe her reservoir of tears dried up. She was playing with something in her hands.
“What are you doing?” I asked softly.
She didn’t answer at first. Then, “Holding the sand. It feels nice.”
“You’ve never felt sand?”
She turned herself more toward the wall — a guarded response. “No.”
“You were here for almost two years, you said.”
“They never permitted me to leave the city. And there is no sand in Vereumene.”
“Erior? You were there for a while. Beach is a short walk down the steppes.”
“Couldn’t leave there, either.”
It finally occurred to me that Lysa had lived the life of a prisoner. What must the world look like to her? So much to discover, from flowers she’d never seen, to smells she’d never inhaled. It must have been exciting. Also rather scary.
“I’m sorry that I called you worthless,” I said, scooting closer to her.
“You’re very mean sometimes.”
“I’m working on it.”
She turned her head, a subdued smile on her lips. “I forgive you.”
That statement cocked my head. “You’re a quick one to forgive.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t an excuse, you know.”
“Come again?”
“You said you weren’t interested in hearing me make excuses for the conjurers. I wasn’t making excuses for them.” She sighed and let the sand filter through her fingers. “I could have hated the world for what happened to me. And I did for a little while, but then I started asking questions. Why was this happening to me? Why were these people so terrible? I asked every question I could, and I told myself I’d never stop asking questions until I thought I had the answer to everything — which I don’t. But I do think I have the answer to something.”
“Could it be how to make a portal and get us out of here?” I asked, grinning.
She chuckled. “No, sorry.”
“What, then?”
“People are people. That’s it. There are no mean people. No evil people. No good people or great people or friendly people or happy people. Those are all symptoms of being a person, don’t you see? We’re just bigger animals, I think, and our symptoms are triggered naturally, without input from our conscious minds. Once you realize that, once you understand we’re all that simple, it becomes easier to accept what people are capable of.”
I considered this. “Well. It’s an interesting theory, but not one that I completely buy. Even the jaded bastard in me knows that people can change. Animals cannot.”
“Hmm,” Lysa said. “Can they? I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen evidence.”
My throat was as dry as the meadow outside these walls. “I believe they can.”
“I guess that’s my newest question, then.” She contemplated in lip-biting fashion. “We really need to get to the library.”
“Out of the question,” I said. “Unless you can pacify a bunch of smelly corpses.”
She poured sand mindlessly from one palm into the other. “I’m telling you that’s the only way we’ll know who or what we’re up against. There has to be something there.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because.”
“Not a good answer, nor a persuasive one. Come on, out with it. If you want me to have a little rendezvous with unfriendly members of the deceased, you’ll need to give me a whole lot better of a reason than a mother would give her child. And no lying. I’ll know if you are.”
She frowned. “There is a place in the library that students were not permitted to enter. I don’t think most conjurers were either. It’s, um” — she tongued her cheek, then lifted a triumphant finger into the air — “like the royal quarters of a castle. Amielle often locked herself in there for days. Anyway, one of the higher-ups brought a letter to her late one night, when I was the only one still in the library. I don’t think she knew I was there, because she came out and talked to this man, sounding very upset. She said — I remember it perfectly — ‘He assures me if the plan fails he will come out of hiding. And the world will know.’”
I waited for more, but when Lysa set her jaw, it became apparent that was the story, wholly and entirely. “That’s it? That’s all she said?”
“Yep. Then she hurried out of the library. I didn’t think much of it, honestly. My brain was so tired from studying. Wasn’t until I heard about the grave robbers on Mizridahl that I put it all together. It scared me.”
A single bygone sentence wasn’t much to go on, and I had my doubts whether Lysa remembered it verbatim. Time often clouds the past and muddles your memory. Still, if she was right, that letter might have remained in the gated-off area of the library. Who knew what else could be there — maybe more information on our mystery man. Plus, it wasn’t like we had many options here. Neither of us had any sense of direction on this land, and as far as I knew, there wasn’t much out there other than dried-up rivers and a scorched earth.
But how would we get into a city commandeered by the dead? That was a problem dwarfed by another: even if we managed to succeed, what would wait for us inside? Someone or something had killed all those people. They hadn’t been raised and then marched over here from some distant graveyard. And how did I know that? Because ragged tunics clung to many of them still.
Shredded stitching of purple dorsal fins and of thick, aquatic tails and of crimson manes and of powerful jaws, of two golden swords that had lost their third sibling — they blew in the wind as the cadavers had chased us.
We weren’t simply facing an army of well-equipped corpses, but rather the army Mizridahl had sent here to exterminate the conjurers.
Oh, and whatever was responsible for butchering an entire army and then bringing it back to life.
Hoo-fucking-ray.
Chapter Seven
After Lysa agreed that we should sleep the night in the cave, I nodded off. Then awoke wet with sweat, hand on the pommel of my sword to deflect the spear surging at my face. There was no spear, just a past too close for comfort.
And so I closed my eyes, slept for a few moments more, and repeated the process until I’d gotten tired of the uncomfortable pounding in my chest each time the nightmares woke me.
Lysa’s head lay in my lap. She purred softly as the mild night air glided in from ocean waves. Apparently my legs made for better pillows than the crude walls of the cave.
I reached into one of the satchels we’d brought along from Crooked Crags, snapped off a chunk of stale bread and swished it around in my mouth, till it got soft enough to chew. Didn’t do much for my growling stomach. Daily servings of bread get old quickly, even if you supplement them with the occasional berries or plants. A haunch of mutton sounded delightful right now, with some potatoes mashed up in butter and salt.
Would Lith have anything of value still, other than old crumbs that had hardened and rotted? Probably not. The reaped likely had no use for food, given that, you know… they were dead.
At least I hoped they were dead. Something bothered me about these reaped. Well, lots of things bothered me about them, but one thing in particular. And that was this: what exactly were they? Given the whole corpse harvesting business taking place on Mizirdahl, it seemed a safe assumption that we were dealing with reanimated corpses.
But there was one problem with that assumption, besides the whole how-the-hell-does-that-even-work question: these reaped seemed… cognizant, if barely. As if there was a soul inside them, one that had been rived and bent and twisted but still held a faint spark of life — a modicum of existence.
At least it was nighttime. With the strange weather boiling the sweat right off my head during the daytime, I’d begun to despise the sun. Under the black sky, the sea had surged high onto the shore. Sometimes the waves would crash against the rocks with such ferocity, a salty mist would spray into the cave.
Slowly and unfortunately surely, the soft white beam of moonlight bled into the morning light sweeping over the land. A swirl of orange and pink stretched across the horizon, ushering away the stars. And that was when I heard a whistle.
Had I gone mad? Maybe the wolf’s leaf hadn’t done its job, and my wound had festered, and the little bugs were eating away at my brain.
Or maybe it was a bird, singing a song.
And whistling. It wasn’t a bird, unless in addition to phoenixes, conjurers had also created performing fowl.
I rustled a hand through Lysa’s knotted hair. “Wake up.”
“Wha—”
“Quiet,” I said. “Someone’s out there. Hear them?”
Lysa yawned, which of course made me yawn. Then she wiped her eyes on my lap, which I thought was terribly rude, and cocked her head.
“What is that?”
“A song,” I said.
She sat up. “Maybe it’s a merchant, or a wanderer.” Her tired eyes grew big and she said, “Astul, we have to warn him! The reaped will—”
I shushed her with a hand. “Do you know how to wield a sword?”
She hesitated.
I withdrew one of my blades — thankfully Tylik had only bartered one of my two daggers and not one of my swords. “Hold this end,” I told her, offering her the leather-wrapped hilt. “Swing that end, preferably not at me.”
The whistling seemed louder. And I could make out a word from the song now, but only one. Sing.
“Come on,” I said, crawling toward the mouth of the cave.
“Wait! You’re not going to kill him, are you?”
I glanced back. “I don’t know who he is. Until that’s clarified, then killing is a possibility. Stay close.”
Once we got out of the cave, I rose to a crouch. I gestured with an open palm to the ground, silently instructing Lysa to keep low.
The whistling was crisp and clear like a perfectly tuned stringed instrument. The voice bellowing the lyrics, however, was raw, weighty and perfectly ancient.
Sing me the song of your people, whoa-whoa-whoa-uh.
I want to hear the bones go snap-snap-snap!
I want to hear the hands go clap-clap-clap
Come on and sniff the powder I’ve got for you
And sing me the song of your people, whoa-whoa-whoa-uh!
Lysa and I exchanged bewildered looks. We edged along the shelf, till it was low enough for us to peer over.
This was what greeted us.
A cart pulled by one donkey and one mule, with a yellow-billed duck perched atop the mule. A canopy shadowed the cart, and inside sat a man wearing a hat. Or rather, a hat wearing a man. It was wide-brimmed and concealed his face.
A wrinkly hand darted out of the cart, wagging about and depositing black soot in a fine line. When the soot ran out, the man pulled his hand back inside, apparently scooped up some more, and went back at it.
He whistled, and he sang.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lysa said.
“Frightening,” I said.
“Frightening?”
“When you get to be my age and you’ve seen the depraved shit the world has to offer, you learn that the strange often precedes the terrifying. I wonder what he’s spreading on the ground.”
Lysa rested her chin on the earthen shelf, with no regard for her sword.
“Whoa!” I said, grasping her hand and redirecting the blade away from my face. “Watch it, will you?”
“Sorry. I was trying to get a better look. Maybe it’s soot?”
“Looks it,” I agreed. “But I’m not aware of the benefits of spreading soot across scorched plains. Maybe it’s a weird religion out here.”
“Is he going toward Lith?”
“Well,” I said, watching as dark shadows blotted out the city gate, “you could argue that Lith is coming toward him.”
The black blob bounded from the walls like a ball of spiders taking flight in an angry wind. Silver flashed under the morning sun, the tips of swords and pikes charging headlong toward the wagon.
The whistling and singing had ceased.
The horde chewed through the brittle field, charging as one mass of rotting flesh and white bone. They screeched and screamed, a deafening, unintelligible war cry.
The mule and donkey scrambled, swinging the cart around. The animals broke into a sprint, and the duck climbed back inside the safety of the wagon.
“Oh my goodness,” Lysa said, hand cupped over her mouth. “What was he thinking?”
“Likely a madman,” I told her.
The old man in the cart had no advantage over the reaped who hungrily pursued him. His donkey and mule pals were quick and strong, but the swarm gained on him.
The cart rocked to an abrupt stop. A hand appeared outside the cart, holding something that flared a bright orange.
“Sing me your song, motherfuckers!” he shrieked.
He held a stick. A stick engulfed in flames. A stick engulfed in flames that fell from his hands and onto the ground.
What happened next pulled the words “Holy shit” from my mouth.
A burst of fire swelled into a rolling conflagration of searing waves that roared down the path from which the cart had come. The path laid with black powder.
The reaped paused. Then, the fire swallowed them. They danced, flapped their arms and sang their song. It was a song of gurgles, of croaks… of hellacious cries.
The flames dropped each of them like an ax to a tree. They crawled for a short while, then apparently expired. Again.
Lysa and I watched in silence. There were very few words that could reconcile what we had just witnessed with our thoughts, and apparently we knew of none of them.
The cart now turned again, heading back toward Lith. It stopped before the newly sprouted mass grave. The old man stepped out and prodded a few bodies with a stick. Seemingly satisfied, he climbed back inside and continued on toward the city gate, disappearing inside.
“We have to follow him,” Lysa said finally.
“Did you see what he just did to those things?”
“He helped us.”
Gods, was Lysa sheltered. If she’d had it her way back on Mizridahl — escaping Braddock’s prison and running free — she would have found herself as a slave worker for the rest of her days. Someone would have befriended her, and she would’ve trusted them, and that would have been that.
“He helped himself,” I told her. “And we don’t know what he wants. I’ve never seen someone conjure fire before — aside from phoenixes — so pardon me if I’m a little wary of confronting him. Could be a conjurer looking to take back his city, and I’m not on friendly terms with conjurers, in case you’ve forgotten.”
She tilted her head curiously. “You seemed a lot more… I don’t know… bold when I first met you.”
Ignoring that thinly veiled insult, I explained we could wait for the old man to depart Lith and then explore the city. Lysa smartly countered with the fact that, at the moment, this place was devoid of the reaped. We had no way of knowing if it would remain that way.
>
“Fine,” I said after lengthy consideration. “But keep your eyes open for black powder, will you? I’m not in the mood to try my hand at becoming a human pyre.”
We hoisted ourselves over the shelf, and that was when I saw something that made me look to the heavens and swear.
His body had flattened out like a loaf of raw bread, lying in a pit of sand besieged by singed grass. I went limp as I approached him, shoulders feeling as though they were going to roll right off my back.
The fire hadn’t eaten Tylik’s body like I’d hoped. His squat frame glistened with the gleam of blistered flesh that wound remarkably tight around his bones.
He didn’t deserve this. People a lot of times don’t deserve what they get, but this… ah, fuck. This was an injustice beyond the typical.
“Are you crying?” Lysa asked.
“No. My eyes are sweating.”
She touched my arm. “I’m sorry.”
“He won’t become a reaped,” I said, looking toward the sea. “I won’t allow it.”
“They won’t find him here,” Lysa said.
“They have pigs that sniff out corpses. I’ve seen them. Still have some rope in that bag?”
Lysa peered inside the satchel. “Yes. Why?”
I knelt before Tylik. “Told you. He’s not becoming a reaped.”
Memories shook my mind as I heaved Tylik’s sticky, burnt corpse into my arms. The atrocious smell gagged me, but soon the heady scent of salt masked the charred stench. It took me a few minutes to find an appropriate rock — it had to be heavy enough to keep a body from floating, but light enough that Lysa and I could wade into the water with it.
After looping the rope around Tylik’s torso, just beneath the gaping hole in his spine, I fixed the excess around the rock, tying it in multiple knots.
Tasking Lysa with carrying the rock, the two of us slowly walked toward the ocean, Tylik in my arms. Lysa grunted as the heaviness of the rock threatened to buckle her lean frame, but she battled on. I knew she would — tough girl, that one.
The water lapped against my chest, sometimes splashing into my face. I was as far as I could go without swimming, which isn’t a good idea when you’re carrying a corpse.
The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Page 8
