by Tanya Huff
“Governor Aralt commands a great deal of personal loyalty.” Neegan’s harsh whisper quieted the rising mutter of speculation. “His people follow him, not a series of … misguided ideals.” The dead and dying of another, earlier rebellion made themselves heard in the pause. “He promises them glory, a return to days of petty kingdoms and hollow crowns.” With a graceful gesture, the commander sketched that past in the air. “What chance does the Empire’s promise of peace, order, and good government have against that?”
Then he spread his hands, offering the answer. “Aralt is the key. Everything revolves around him. Remove him, and this rebellion falls apart.”
“And how do we remove him?” Chela asked, although she strongly suspected she knew what his answer would be. Although his most recent promotion responsibilities kept him from exercising his skills, Neegan was quite possibly the best military assassin in the seven armies. “Aralt’s locked himself up tight in the governor’s stronghold.”
“I have two who could do the job.”
Leesh snorted in disbelief.
The marshal ignored the interruption. “Aralt’s no fool for all his posturing. He’ll be expecting the attempt.”
“Yes,” Neegan agreed.
“These the two who removed Pahbad?”
“Yes.”
“You’re assuming that two will succeed where a single assassin might fail.” He’d fought to have them trained together using that very argument and had been proven right time after time but, this time, Chela shook her head. “No. They’d never get to him.”
Neegan smiled. “Would the marshal care to place a small wager.…”
* * * *
As she slid her dagger back in its sheath, Vree felt the familiar bleakness that came with the end of a mission. One moment, she and Bannon were a single unit with the use of not one pair of eyes or ears or hands, but two; the next, she stood alone. This time, the dislocation was almost painfully abrupt. This time, they had no retreat, blood singing, back to safety. This time the separation occurred just as senses climaxed at the “kill.”
And there’s nothing worse then melodrama in the middle of the night, she told herself scornfully as she made her way around the table to Bannon’s side, ignoring with long practice the sexual undertones in the original, melodramatic thought.
The marshal fought the urge to touch her throat where she could still feel the cold pressure of the blade. “I’m inclined to believe Commander Neegan’s assurances that you two can target the governor. When can you go in?”
“We’ve been mapping the stronghold since the army arrived, Marshal.” Bannon spoke for them both. “If the weather holds, we could make an attempt as early as tomorrow night.”
Chela nodded. At this time of the year in the southern part of the Empire, there would not be rain. “Make it then.”
* * * *
As they left the tent, Bannon reached out and smacked one of the guards at the entrance on the butt. “Nice work,” he said, loudly enough to turn heads.
“How’d you get in there, you little shit!” the soldier demanded, flushing a ruddy scarlet in the torchlight.
Bannon laughed, dancing back out of his way. “I can’t believe you didn’t see us march right by.”
Well aware that this failure would mean nights spent at other, less prestigious duty posts, the guard weighed the odds of nailing the brother before the sister reacted and decided discretion was the better part of not having his throat slit. “Sod off,” he snarled.
Bannon laughed again and draped his arm across Vree’s shoulders as they moved out into the camp. “How about wasting a quarter-crescent in the baths.”
She glanced over at him, fighting the tremors that started under his touch, telling herself they were caused by the tension of the last few hours, nothing more. His dark eyes glittered in the charcoal mask and she could feel the brittle energy coming off him in waves. “Wasting?” she asked, pointedly wrinkling her nose.
Ivory flashed in the shadow of his face as he lifted his hand to grin at the smudge of lighter skin showing through the camouflage. “Well, there’s always a bit of cold water in a borrowed helmet….”
The baths, one of the many businesses that followed the seven armies with the intent of separating soldiers from their pay, shut down at the end of the second watch. It took an extra half-crescent to convince the proprietors to keep the fires going a little while longer.
Vree lay back in the warm water and tried not to listen to the appreciative murmurs of the bath attendants as they scrubbed her brother. It made no difference that they’d murmur the same nonsense over her had she not made it very clear that she preferred to wash herself. Fingers puckering, she sighed and dragged herself out of the tub.
“You’re too skinny, sister-mine. You should eat more.”
Vree snorted and straightened, reaching for one of the soft cloths hanging on the line beside her. “I’ll remind you of that at the next wall we have to go over.”
“And I’ll deny every word.” He lifted an arm and tried to snake it around the slender waist of the departing attendant. She twisted lithely away, damp braid flicking a practiced dismissal as she left. Bannon turned to her companion who backed up a step.
“Forget it, Bannon,” the young man declared, tossing a cloth at the tub and covering a yawn. “You’re finished, and we’re closing.”
A few moments later, as the lamps went out behind them, Bannon rubbed a dribble of water off the back of his sister’s neck and asked, “Coming with me?”
Vree shook her head. “No.” He always asked. The answer never changed. After a kill, he needed distraction, but she needed quiet. “You going to Teemo’s?”
The whores at Teemo’s were regularly inspected by the army healers. An empire had not been won by either ignoring the needs of its soldiers or the consequences of disease.
“I thought I might.”
“Remember we’re working tomorrow night. Don’t stay too late.”
His sigh lifted the damp hair off her forehead as he leaned forward and smacked a kiss down on the crease between her brows. “Don’t fuss, sister-mine. I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
Old enough. As she watched him stride away, Vree heard the echo of a piping voice demanding to know why she always had to be older and when would it be his turn. Sometimes that one-year difference stretched impossibly far. The one year between six and seven; the corporal had brought the news of their mother’s battlefield death to her, she’d had to tell Bannon. The one year between fourteen and fifteen; Neegan had wanted them both in his command, had been able to pull enough strings to get them there, so she’d been held back for further training until army regulations said Bannon was old enough to be posted. The one year between twenty and twenty-one … Old enough.
Except he’d always be her little brother.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? she asked herself as he disappeared into the night. Spitting the taste of self-pity out of her mouth, Vree started back to camp. Mooning about it wouldn’t change anything. There wasn’t anything she could change.…
The baths, the brothels, all the extras, were officially outside the patrolled perimeter—although the marshal had been heard to remark on more than one occasion that she knew what the Sixth Army would rush to defend if it came to an attack. Vree slipped unseen past a sentry grown bored near the end of an uneventful watch and picked her way carefully around snoring bodies until she came to the place where the Fourth Squad, Second Unit, First Company, First Division, Sixth Army had been ordered to sleep. The weather had been hot and dry, so hardly anyone had bothered unfolding the tiny, oiled-canvas tents the army issued as shelter to the common soldiers, and she found her gear right where she’d left it, piled next to Bannon’s. Others might lose possessions to petty pilfering, but no one messed with an assassin’s kit.
She nodded to Corporal Emo hunched over his wineskin, then glanced up at the sky. The Road to Glory arced overhead and The Archer continued to a
im away from the heart of the Empire. A priest of Assot, God of Music and Prophecy, had long ago declared that the Empire would endure until The Archer turned his bow. Vree, inclined to believe that the priest had been sucking back too much sacramental wine, checked anyway—just to be certain.
Head pillowed on her arms, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the army. It was like being in the belly of a great benevolent beast, wrapped in protection, secure in the knowledge that if death came in the night, it would have to come a long way and through many lives to get to her.
Tensions the bath had been unable to touch leached out of her muscles. Slowly, her breathing slid into the cadence of those breathing all around her, and it was as a part of the greater whole that she finally slept.
* * * *
One moment she was asleep, the next she knelt on the shoulders of a young recruit, her dagger point hovering over the wildly rolling surface of his left eye. As her brain caught up with the responses trained into her body, Vree could hear Corporal Emo and several others howling with laughter, could see the terror on the boy’s face, and could smell the result of his fear.
She flipped the knife in the air, caught it, sheathed it, and stood. “You joined us just before we left the garrison, didn’t you?”
The boy stuttered out an affirmative as he scrambled to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“Avotic.” He noticed the moisture spreading over the front of his kilt, realized suddenly what it meant, and flushed a deep red. Although he had to be at least fifteen to have been posted, embarrassment dropped his age a good four years. “Th-they call me Tic.”
Vree shook her head. “Let me give you some advice, Tic. When a corporal orders you to shake someone awake who wears a black sunburst …”
Tic swiveled his head to stare down at her pack. Scuffed and faded from years of use, the six sunbursts stamped into the worn leather still showed they had once been dyed black. His eyes widened and he swallowed, hard.
“… you tell that corporal to stick his head up his ass and salute it.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the laughter. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Tic?”
“Y-yes.” It didn’t seem to matter that he was at least a foot taller than the woman he faced.
“What?”
“If I wake you up again, you’ll kill me.”
Watching from his bedroll, Bannon snickered and Vree tried not to smile in response. “Close enough. Go clean up, you stink.” As the kid ran off, she turned on Emo. “One of these day, I will kill one.”
“Not a chance.” Wiping streaming eyes, the corporal heaved a satisfied sigh. “You’re too good. And now the little shit knows he can die. Thanks to me, he’s a better soldier.”
“Thanks to you?” Vree snorted, bending and dragging her kilt out of her pack. “Which brings up another question,” she continued, buckling the limp, blue pleats around her waist. “Why am I always chosen to give these little lessons of yours?”
“Because you look so sweet when you’re asleep,” Emo told her, secure in his rank. Those of the Fourth Squad standing closest to him made exaggerated movements away. “That pointy little face of yours goes all soft and you have the cutest habit of cupping your cheek with one hand.” His voice lost its false, syrupy tone, and he snorted. “Your brother, on the other hand, looks dangerous only while he sleeps.”
“That’s because I’m dreaming of you, Emo.” Bannon stood and scratched at the triangle of brown hair in the center of his chest. His nose wrinkled at the smell of unwashed bodies, latrine trenches, and great vats of boiling mush. “Life in the army,” he murmured. “Gotta love it.”
“ ’Cause you can’t do shit about it,” several voices answered in unison.
* * * *
“Vree? You going out tonight?”
Vree turned her head and stared incredulously at the woman standing just beyond weapons’ reach. “No, Shonna. I was feeling bloated and I thought I’d check if my black breeches, my black tunic, and my black ankle boots still fit.”
Shonna shrugged and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand while the other traced circles in the night air. “Yeah, well, I mean …” She sighed deeply and started again. “Look, do you think that maybe, on your way back you could pick up a chicken or something?”
“I’m on target, Shonna.”
The other woman looked uncomfortable but dragged up half a grin. “So kill a chicken, too.”
The food provided by the seven armies was nourishing but monotonous. A number of establishments outside the perimeter took advantage of that and for a price no one had to live on mush, black bread, and sausages.
“You lost at dice again.” Vree knew her too well for it to be a question.
“Yeah, but I’ll come around. It’s just …”
“It’s just more of the same. And the answer’s no.”
“Then lend me a crescent.” Shonna took a step forward, hand outstretched. “Until payday.”
“No.”
Shonna’s hand dropped under the weight of Vree’s response and she wiped her palm against her kilt. “I thought I meant something to you.”
A few hours of pleasure, an attempt to raise a barricade around other desires … “Not after you tried losing my money at dice.”
“I should’ve known better,” Shonna muttered sullenly. “Your kind doesn’t have feelings.” Her voice straddled the line between challenge and insult.
Vree merely stared, expressionless, until the other woman nervously began to back away.
As she turned and stomped toward the center of camp, sandals slapping against the packed dirt, Bannon separated from the shadows to stand at Vree’s shoulder. “She wasn’t good enough for you, sister-mine,” he said softly. “But then, who is?”
Her gaze pulled around by his tone, Vree caught a glimpse of an expression she couldn’t identify and wondered, not for the first time, how much he knew.
* * * *
The Sixth Army had camped close enough to Ghoti to intimidate and far enough away to maneuver, leaving a large expanse of scrubby ground to be crossed under the eyes of enemy sentries perched on top of hastily erected earthen defenses. Fortunately, shadows were plentiful and the sentries were distracted—not only by the might of the Empire arrayed against them but by the growing fear that they just might have made a fatal mistake.
Access to the town was limited but far from impossible.
Did they honestly think that would stop us or do they just not think? Vree wondered as she followed her brother into the wedge of darkness between two buildings. She sifted the night, searched the sights and sounds and smells for threat, and signed, “All clear.” The town could be empty of life for all the notice it took of them. When Bannon nodded, she led the way down a garbage-strewn alley toward the governor’s stronghold.
In this, the southernmost part of the Empire, walls were made of formed mud, broader at the bottom out of necessity and angled gently upward toward a red-clay tiled roof. By sunlight, the city was an attractive patchwork of orangebrown. By starlight, the vibrant colors had muted to shades of gray. The smell of chilies fried in oil lingered in the shadows and through the shutters that closed off one deeply recessed window, Vree could hear a low voice singing to a fretful baby.
“… I will feed you bits of rainbow/red for laughter, blue for sorrow …”
… yellow kisses, green tomorrows. Their garrison-mother had been fond of the song, and Vree wondered if she’d been from Ghoti or if the lullaby had traveled across the Empire. She glanced at Bannon to see if he’d heard and found him waiting for her to confirm that no danger lay concealed in the open market they had to cross. Calling herself several kinds of fool, she slapped her mind back to the job at hand. The danger in an easy target came from falling off the edge.
The governor’s stronghold—an octagon-shaped wall enclosing a tall central tower and a number of squat outbuildings—was both the oldest structure in Ghoti and the only one ma
de of stone. The wall showed signs of recent reinforcing and the massive gates were shut, barred, and guarded.
Vree gestured to her left and Bannon nodded, slipping past her to take point. She could feel herself responding to the new level of danger, could see the same response in the way her brother moved.
Over the last few months of rebellion, Governor Aralt had swept clear the area around the stronghold, destroying anything that might provide shelter for the enemy should they force him back to a final stand. The darkness, combined with one of the eight angles, provided all the shelter that Vree and Bannon needed. Fingers and toes found purchase in cracks a lizard would have ignored. Head to head, pressed flat against the wall’s rough capstones, they scanned the enclosure, hidden by the uneven ridge of an unfinished and unusable sentry box. They’d come this far once before, but from now on, every move would be the first move.
“Aralt’s no fool for all his posturing. He’ll be expecting the attempt.”
Vree touched her brother lightly on the shoulder. He winced as he saw the three heavily armed and wary rebels march across the court and disappear behind one of the outbuildings. Up in the tower a trio of shadows bristling with weapons carried a flickering lamp past a narrow window.
Patrols, he mouthed.
She nodded. It looked like Aralt was, indeed, expecting them.
The stone grew warm beneath them as they watched.
No pattern, Bannon signed at last.
They both knew that a pattern would eventually emerge; that people were incapable of sustaining truly random action. A pattern would make their job easier, safer, but could take several nights to determine. A delay would please no one except, perhaps, the governor.
As yet another three-rebel patrol paused directly below them, Bannon nudged her and flicked his thumb up. No surprise, Vree mused. In five years, he’d voted they turn from the target exactly twice. The first time, they’d returned the next night equipped to deal with the unexpected, four-legged guards. The second, they’d gone in farther than they should have, started back too late, and ended up trapped together for a full day in a hidey-hole barely big enough for one of them. Unable to move, barely able to breathe, it was the only time Vree had ever had more than enough of her brother and had found herself, after hours of his chin digging painfully into her shoulder, wishing that she worked alone. And why am I dwelling on old failures now?
