“I’ll get this one,” Kale said, manning one of two winches.
I cranked the other, which opened the inner portcullis. With both gates open, the four of us walked right through the inner and outer portcullises, into the fields of volcanic rock. There we jogged for a while, placing ourselves several hundred feet from Vereumene.
A gust of fire scattered into the night sky as the phoenix broke her idling and set a path directly toward us. With her feet anchored into the black shards of rock, we climbed onto her back, sitting there in as tight a row as we could manage.
Kale went on and on about the excitement of flying, how he could feel the rush of air in his lungs, and how it all looked so very different from up here. He also wondered if we should have set fire to the Red Sentinels. I’d considered it. But Kane Calbid went back on his word, and for that, the sacking of his city seemed like a just outcome.
Plus, I didn’t want to put my phoenix and my passengers in grave danger from whatever remaining archers the Sentinels had left. There’d be enough time for danger by sunrise.
I had an inkling that once Occrum knew of my intention to visit Vereumene, he’d want to beat me to the punch. But once he realized the unlikeliness of that scenario, he’d instead plot my demise and, in turn, Ava and Boon’s.
He could’ve decided to wait for me to come to him, but he’d never struck me as the patient type. No, he’d try to cut me off. Intercept me before I had even a sniff of victory.
And for that, I had a plan. A plan that I’d put into motion once I’d realized what Lysa’s poem had meant. I’d ordered the reaped to all meet up with Lysa, and from there they were to go to Crokdaw Village and beyond, into the forest. And in that forest they’d wait, for the greatest moment of their lives.
This was a plan that wouldn’t only avoid Occrum’s attempts to masticate my mind, but one that would flick him off this world like a flea from your arm. I’d end him, once and for all.
The closer to the Hole we got, the nearer his end drew. He’d be there, waiting to intercept me as I made way for Watchmen’s Bay. A guy like Occrum, he wouldn’t be satisfied watching the blood run from my skull over some random forest. He’d put me down in the place I felt most invulnerable. The place I called home.
And so, as the predawn pinks and blues swam across the sky, I prepared for the inevitable meeting. But we passed by the Hole without incident.
It seemed I’d miscalculated. Maybe Occrum was waiting for me to come to him.
I didn’t have a plan for that.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Hole was as empty on the ground as it looked from the air. We stopped there briefly to grab some skins of wine and water, some bread and salted meat, then flew toward the west.
Kale was snoring an hour into the journey, while Ava and Boon were as silent as two bags of bones. I, on the other hand, felt like I was losing my goddamned mind. I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t rest. Couldn’t stare straight ahead and gaze into the peacefulness of trees and humped terrain and green grass moving below us like clouds race across the sky. I swiveled around on the phoenix frantically, looking here and there for signs that Occrum was following me. That he’d caught a whiff of my scent somehow.
The farther we put the Hole behind us, the more distressed I became. If he sprung a surprise on me here, what would I do? What could I do? My plan of attack resided in my little tunnel beneath the ground, and it was so far away now.
But around noon, I had a bigger problem on my hands. The sun had vanished behind the thickest fog I’d ever seen.
As I took a breath, I realized it wasn’t fog at all draping the horizon. It was smoke.
Keeping the phoenix high, I pressed on her hard with my mind. She beat her wings furiously. The wind ripped and bit at my cheeks, stretching my flesh so tightly over my cheekbones I thought I’d soon look like Boon and Ava.
A quick signal from my mind slowed her smooth, gentle glide. It’d be impossible to get close enough to Watchmen’s Bay to see its innards, but the scent of char and the billowing gray froth of smoke pouring into the sky told me all I needed to know.
Looking down, all you could see was white bone. The sand lay hidden beneath their bobbing shoulders.
Finding a place to land was hell. These dead bastards gathered as thick as mosquitoes in a swamp. You looked two miles one way, and nothing but a parade of bone. Two miles the other way, same thing. They forced me about ten miles wide of Watchmen’s Bay, where uncooperative terrain meant no path to march through.
“Well, I’m beginning to think we’re the only two Rots left on this world,” I said to Kale. “If this all goes to shit and we die, at least the Black Rot will perish unlike any assassination company before it.”
Kale adjusted his trousers. “What about Commander Vayle and the others?”
“The others were supposed to retreat here. And Commander Vayle went to Lith, under the assumption Ava and Boon were there.”
“’Least she’s outta harm’s way.”
I assisted Boon and Ava off the phoenix. “Occrum was also under that impression.”
Kale’s shoulders fell. “Oh. I see.” But a frown never fit Kale, and cynicism simply did not exist in the man’s heart. He predictably flashed a smile and said, “If you fall over dead here, and I, by a miracle, survive, what do you think of me adopting the Herder as my name? It’s like shepherd, only… you know. Different.”
“What exactly are you going to herd?”
He shrugged. “Probably just my ass to a grave.”
We shared a laugh. I busted out two skins from the sack of supplies I’d brought along and gave one to Kale. “I met a mountain clan once,” I said. “They believed if you died while drunk, you got to go through eternity knackered out of your fucking mind. Wouldn’t hurt to test their theory, huh?”
Kale grinned. We smashed our drinks together, then poured ’em down our throats. A big couple sighs and burps later, we tossed the skins over our shoulders, gave one another a nod and started toward the rumble of a moving army.
Boon agreed to take the head, with Ava behind him. We’d know real quick if their presence would placate the reaped or if life on Mizridahl would soon be extinct.
“Think the best option is to lure one over,” Kale said.
We were hiding behind a few sea trees — the kind you find close to warm shores. Nothing but ridged bark on their trunks, all the way till you got the top, then their long stems of sharp leaves unraveled into the trees’ personal cloaks.
About forty feet ahead, a sea of white bone. Moving like ripples across the ocean. Still no sign of Occrum. That was as disconcerting as it was relieving.
“You lure one, you’ll lure ’em all,” I said. “Doesn’t much matter, though, does it?”
“Look there,” Kale said. “Coconuts.” A wry grin formed on his lips. “Watch this, Shepherd.”
With an ebon dagger in hand, Kale attempted to murder a coconut. At least, that’s what it looked like. His first throw gouged a husk, spilling milk onto our heads. His second throw cut down a branch without a coconut. But, as they say, third time… well, the third time, he missed entirely. His fourth attempt, though — brilliant!
A batch of coconuts fell to our feet. Kale picked one up, gave it a kiss, then hurled it at the reaped.
They stopped. Every single one of them stopped and turned, gracing us with their melting flesh and empty eye sockets.
“Yeah, you motherfuckers!” Kale screamed. “Fuckin’ take another!”
He heaved a second coconut at them, splitting it over one’s skull. The thing stared mindlessly at us as milk dripped down its ossified face.
“Er,” Kale said, clearly confused as to why we were still permitted to live.
“Boon,” I whispered to Kale, pointing with my chin at the ex-reaped. He’d squeezed himself between the trees, standing before his kin. Ava positioned herself next to him.
One of the reaped turned over his hand, inspecting it like an inquisitive child up
on discovering something new and exciting. Or perhaps like an old man holding a relic of his youth.
The gesture was mimicked by others, and soon the innumerable rows of corpses were infused with a sense of curiosity they hadn’t felt for so very long. Their minds were thawing, and ancient, severed connections were once again whole.
A reaped poked his head forward. His jaw moved, but for the first few seconds, there was no sound. Then, a simple question. “How?”
Down the line bellowed a raspy voice. The head of a horse vaulted out from the pink rivulet that stretched low beneath the morning sun.
“Who told you to stop? Keep moving. Keep moving!” The loud-mouthed reaper spotted us. He had claws for hands, and he pointed at us with a curved nail. “Kill them!”
A thousand reaped turned as one. There was a cry, wet as the blood that fountained up from the reaper’s body. Then silence.
Pure, joyful silence. And then a hum. A low murmur on the wind.
I saw it from the corner of my eye at the same time Kale pointed to the sky.
The reaped, or ex-reaped, whatever the proper term, began marching back toward Watchmen’s Bay. Boon went with them. And Ava too.
They told Kale and me they had to go, with no further explanation.
Above, the colorful blaze spun toward the ground, igniting an inverted spire of purples and reds and yellows that gyrated from the clouds to the ground. It moved fast. Impossibly so.
“Keep them safe!” I told Kale, pushing him toward the deserting Ava and Boon.
He tore off in their direction.
He’d never trust me again if he knew the actual reason I sent him off. Ava and Boon didn’t need protection. They weren’t being hunted. The reaped weren’t being hunted. I was.
That phoenix in the sky had its beak aimed directly at me, telling me it had turned personal. That I was worth more than the plan that’d been set into motion.
Why? That’s the kind of question you don’t ask when a madman on a fiery bird is screaming through the sky after you. Questions aren’t very useful in that situation. Running, though? Quite important.
So I ran. Through spindles of thorny grass sticking up out of the sand I ran. Over rocks and through shallow puddles I ran. I stumbled, could barely breathe, and had sweat burying itself in my eyes. But I still ran.
The conflagration chased me, barreling toward me. Maybe if he’d caught me on a bad day, his little birdie would have melted the skin right off my bones. But this day — it was the greatest one of my life.
I threw myself into the smoldering plumes of my phoenix, face deep in her quills. With a rocking of her body, she swung me onto her back, and then, as if we shared a deep, eternal connection, she slung herself into the air without any input from my mind.
A resonating voice crackled, seemingly across the whole of Mizridahl. A voice so loud and so reverberant, you would’ve sworn only mountains or gods could bellow the words.
“Give me the book!” is what the voice said.
Resting my chin on my shoulder, I looked back to see Occrum poised with a spear. Then there was no spear. Or rather, the spear became a blur.
A blur hurling through the air. Rising to meet my skull.
My phoenix lurched to the right, tucked her tail in, almost throwing me off. I dug a fist into her feathers, keeping myself seated. The spear soared through the air, now arcing downward to the ground.
Sitting myself up straight again as my phoenix gave a wide berth around the immense cloud of smoke above Watchmen’s Bay, I glanced back at Occrum.
“I don’t have your fucking book!” I screamed.
His face stiffened into intense concentration. A deafening crackle split the sky in the form of a coruscating bolt of lightning. It imprinted itself in the air beside me, then vanished, stamping its burning warmth onto my cheeks.
“I swear I don’t have your bloody—”
Another crackle of lightning, this one closer. It spooked my phoenix, who jerked and made a noise.
“Drop it,” Occrum said, his voice carrying probably all the way to Edenvaile, “and I’ll let you be.”
Goddammit. I checked my pockets, my crotch, the crack of my ass, and my hair, just in case this magical fucking book had somehow fallen into my possession while, I don’t know, I was sleeping. No luck. I didn’t have the damn thing.
Despite my reassurance, Occrum pursued me, deafening my ears with thunder, blinding my eyes with lightning, and attempting to soak my spirits with rain.
Wait a damn second, I thought. If he doesn’t have his book… he doesn’t know what I’ll do next.
My phoenix cut back toward Watchmen’s Bay. To the smoke that continued to coil and spire into the sky. Through it, out the other side, where the banks of Watchmen’s Bay met the crags of the ocean.
I aimed her slightly northeast, toward the direction of the Hole. It was at this point something strange on the ground caught my eye.
The reaped flung themselves off the crags, into the deep waters below. And there they sunk. One after the other, they splashed into the water, foam rolling over them, the jaws of the sea wrenching them to the bottom.
It began with hundreds. By the time I was far enough away that I had to look back to see them, there were thousands. All jumping into the great blue depths.
Occrum was standing on his phoenix like one would stand on a horse, head moving slowly across the crags, spanning the entirety of his suicide army.
He settled back onto the beast’s back, leaned forward and met me with eyes so heinous, a chill crab-walked across my neck.
I turned around, told my girl I was sorry, then pushed her as hard as I could.
Occrum kept pace, never falling more than forty feet or so behind. But he also never approached at a threatening distance, which was exactly what I’d planned on.
He didn’t want to kill me. Not up here, where death would mean a painless bolt of lightning between the eyes, or a quick splatter onto to the ground below. Torture was more his flavor, and death — that probably wasn’t even in the cards. He would make me a creature I despised more than anything else.
And he knew a phoenix could only endure so long. Eventually exhaustion would settle in, and the wings wouldn’t flap as well. And the signals from my mind to hers would slow, and she’d falter. And she’d bob in the air, desperate to keep afloat. Into the dirt or trees or rocks she’d plummet.
Then I’d be fucked. Unlike Occrum, I couldn’t conjure another phoenix. And I couldn’t run away. He was faster. I couldn’t hide. He’d see me.
My only hope lay beneath the ground, where it’d been this entire time — since I’d departed Occrum’s island in the sky.
Maybe my plan would work after all. It’d have to.
Lightning spat from the sky like rain, a torrential downpour of serrated bolts glowing hot with white fire. My phoenix navigated them as a captain navigates the gale winds of a seaborne storm, gliding between their jagged points effortlessly.
Thunder snapped like a whip. I could feel it seeping into my bones, each crackle that seemed to shake the earth.
The blue sky ahead cowered away, allowing tufts of slate-gray clouds to fill in like morose brushstrokes from the hands of a despondent artist.
Rain stung my face, and the wind burned my nose and my cheeks and my hands and every exposed part of my body. Occrum seemed unaffected, a grin on his face as he pursued me over flat prairies and shallow forests and rolling hills.
He knew my girl was slowing. He knew she wasn’t flying as high anymore, or diving down through a headlong wind quite as fast.
Exhaustion had its claws softly around her. And with each whoosh of her wings, it gripped firmer.
The chase had gone on for hours. As my phoenix fell and rose — each drop deeper than the last, and each rise shorter — I sensed it was about to conclude.
Occrum sensed the same. He came up beside me, his phoenix gliding calmly. “Give me the book,” he said, “and this debt will be forgiven.”
With a flick of my mind, my phoenix dove sharply toward the ground. Toward a spiral of rock that plateaued into a fat stretch of land. If this would be her last hurrah, I’d take her for everything she was worth.
For the first time in a while, I had a good look at the Hole. The entrance to my homely tunnel looked… off. For starters, it glowed with a golden aura. Secondly, there was a book larger than life propped up against it. Larger than life is quite literal in this sense. It was about five times the size of the man standing next to it.
Before I could ask myself what was happening, everything went to hell.
Wings tucked tight, my phoenix landed hard, talons ripping into the soil, launching me head over heels. I skidded across dirt and rock, skin flayed right off my arms.
I got up, felt wobbly and fell to my knees. Stars dashed across my vision, but I fought ’em off and crawled to my feet. Just in time to see a vaguely familiar shape emerge from the Hole, the stock of a crossbow braced against her shoulder.
I also saw the crossbow bolt. Aimed right at my head. I hit the ground so fast and hard, my chin bounced off the dirt.
A loud thwack made me flinch. Thankfully, the fired bolt sailed high above my head. In fact, it would’ve sailed high above my head even if I’d remained standing. This is because of one simple fact: its target was in the air.
Was being the key word. Occrum’s phoenix screeched, a cry of agony that culminated with it falling topsy-turvy to the ground.
It did not bounce, but Occrum did. The slight movement of his hand told me he wasn’t dead. The quick rise to his knees told me he was very much alive.
The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Page 31
