by Micah Yongo
Neythan ran his tongue around the gash in his mouth. He spat a gob of blood to the side. “I do not lie, master. I know how this seems. I’d thought the same. I pursued Arianna, thought her the guilty one until I learned the truth.”
“Truth? What truth, Neythan? All I hear are half-answers and fables. If it was as you say then why did you not return here, as you were taught, and show it? It is sinners who run, Neythan. Just as it is sinners who lie.”
This time Johann came in low, sliding feet first, blade swinging. Neythan leapt and flicked his heels up as Johann skidded by, landing with a roll to take him out of reach.
“Master, please. You must listen to me.”
“Ah, listen. Is that what I must do? What we must do?” Johann gestured up to the steps. Others had now entered the chamber. Four figures, all dressed in the same ceremonial linen, and hooded, their faces shrouded from view. “Tell us, what other lies do you require us to heed here in this sacred place? What other blasphemies? I suppose you will deny that Abda, the sharíf’s bodyguard, fell by your hand too?”
“We slew her only to defend ourselves. Only to escape.”
“He admits to the blood of our kin,” the blind elder announced to the others. “First he says he has slain none of ours, now he says he has. You see, Neythan. You barely know who you have slain and who you have not. So cheap have the lives of your fellow Brothers become. Your very mind is bent away from truth.”
This time Neythan rushed forward, sprinting toward the elder. He leapt high, swinging down from overhead with his blade as the blind elder stood there waiting to be met by the savage cleave of his–
Johann came in from the side and cut him off. Their swords locked together as he came down. They staggered sideways, embracing clumsily as Johann tried for a trip. Neythan saw it coming, locked his arm instead, twisted, wrenched the sword loose. Followed up with a knee to the ribs. The other man flipped, shrugged loose and kicked out again as Neythan danced back out of reach.
“Better, Neythan,” the master said, smiling wryly as he rubbed his elbow and flexed his now swordless hand. “You have not forgotten everything.”
Neythan spat another gob of blood. His teeth and tongue were red with it. He glanced to the blind elder standing serenely on the steps. “I know it was you, Safít,” he said, breathing hard. “I know you met the sharíf’s chamberlain in the harlot house. I know you are not what you pretend.”
But the elder was unmoved, almost sympathetic. “Your sins and madness will perish with you, Neythan, and be purged from this order. As will Arianna’s.”
Neythan felt at the bloody wound on his flank and watched the man who’d taught him all he knew circling opposite, measuring him like prey.
“I am not your enemy, master.”
“Your uncle told me the same thing when he was exiled. I’d hoped his blood in you would not render the same rebellion. We all hoped, Neythan.” He stopped circling and began to approach, edging carefully across the floor, hands loose and open. “You do not need to be my enemy. You are an enemy of the Shedaím. But I see now, like your uncle, you never understood these ways. A man cannot understand what he is not.”
He sprang at Neythan, fists flurrying. Neythan avoided the swordless strikes with ease. He blocked with the shortsword as he leaned back, slicing Johann’s forearms and cutting him off as he tried to retrieve the dropped blade.
Johann veered and ducked, stepped inside Neythan’s chopping arc and stamped at his ankle, trying to take the fight to the ground. Neythan was still trying to counter when Johann leapt up head first.
Neythan’s vision whited out, eyes rolling as Johann’s skull smashed into his chin. He reeled, felt his legs kicked out from beneath him, blurrily saw Master Johann already in the air as he began to fall, leaping up to come down on him knee first before his back had hit the wood canvas beneath.
Neythan shifted, letting Johann’s shin land on his shoulder instead of his chest as he lifted the shortsword in his other hand.
They hit the ground together and rolled. Then remained there, unmoving.
Neythan groaned. His shoulder throbbed. He eventually rolled to face Johann. He saw the blood first, seeping from where his blade had sunk deep into the other man’s gut. It was already pooling. He looked at Johann’s face. Saliva drooled lazily from the the old man’s mouth. His black eyes fixed on him.
“Neythan…” One long wheezed breath and then he grew still, eyes staring but no longer seeing.
Neythan stayed like that, looking into Master Johann’s sad, frozen gaze, his stomach turning cold as he stared.
He heard the elder step down to the arena floor. “It seems you have done your work well,” she said.
Neythan rolled away from his master’s prone body and slowly lifted himself, holding his shoulder. He looked at the elder, now standing across from him on the wooden floor. He could feel a cold black rage rising through him like a song. “I’ve not finished my work yet.”
She smiled thinly and gestured to the other four elders on the steps. They were standing in pairs. Neythan expected them to come down, join him on the floor, attack him, but they didn’t. Instead he watched as one elder from each pair drew a small knife and calmly slit the throat of the elder next to them. Blood spurted from the cut elders’ open necks as they gagged and gurgled. And then they fell, rolling down the steps to a dead stop at the arena’s edge opposite him in a bloody heap.
And silence.
Neythan looked at the two bodies, tangled limbs soaked red, and then back to the blind woman, stunned.
“I expect you are a little surprised,” she said.
Neythan said nothing.
She took a pace toward him.
The two remaining knife-wielding elders, their pale linen garments smudged and speckled with bloodspray, turned and began to ascend the steps to leave.
“I’ve been waiting some time for this, Neythan,” the blind woman said.
Neythan began to kneel and reach to Johann’s body for the sword but what came next surprised him even more than what he’d just seen. The blind old woman rushed toward him, impossibly quick. She grasped and held his arm before he could retrieve the blade. She pulled him back, slamming him to the ground, and then came down on top of him, driving her knee into his injured shoulder and pinning it there. Sharp pangs shot through the joint. She grabbed and locked his other arm as he reached up, and then shoved it down, snatching the shortsword and driving the blade hard into his hand, through it and into the wood canvas beneath. Neythan screamed. The blind elder stayed there, leaning over him, letting him feel her strength, her blank sightless eyes staring into his.
“Finally,” she said. “We at last have a little privacy. To speak freely, without pretence.”
Neythan couldn’t breathe, his chest shallow, from her weight, from fear, from the pain. And then he suddenly knew, the answer he’d come all this way for was now looming over him. His words came out tight and whispered. “It was you.”
The elder laughed quietly and inhaled, breathing in his scent, savouring it like perfume. “You were always my favourite, you know,” she said. “How long I watched you. So keenly I watched you. It’s how we chose you.”
“You killed them.”
“You’ll have many questions, Neythan, I know. And I shall answer them. I shall. We owe you that much.”
Neythan struggled and twisted, trying to free himself. She pushed him down again and pressed the heel of her palm against the pommel of the blade in his hand, leaning on it. He screamed again, louder this time, and stopped struggling. She lifted her palm but let it hover above the pommel until he became completely still. Then her face lowered to his and hung there; a cold moon of pale, papery skin, almost translucent, as though showing through to the bone beneath.
“I will explain everything, Neythan, but you must calm yourself. You must behave. There are things I must tell. Do you understand? It’s important you understand. That you see what was done. Why you are here.”
/> “I know why I am here.”
She smiled. “No. You do not.”
“I came here to kill you.”
“You came here because I willed it.”
Neythan stared up at her, panting, hate and fear like bile in his throat.
She reached down. Her cool, bony fingers took hold of his jaw and held it. “You were chosen, Neythan,” she said. “Most are redeemed to this Brotherhood by payment. Most every disciple is bought from some impoverished family weighed down by too many debts, destined for slavery, under a yoke that will never lift. And so when we come, the Brotherhood, with gold and silver enough to spare them, to free them, asking to take but one child in return – the choice is easy. Easy, Neythan. So desperate are they, you see. And desperation is the thing. The strength of the soul. It allows us to do what would otherwise remain undone. And it is this desperation that is your great gift, your greatest talent.”
“You know nothing about me.”
But she only smiled. “How can you say that, Neythan? After everything. Of course I know you. I have always known you. I watched over you. You were not like these others who came before: the offspring of mere debt and poverty. You were an orphan, and remain so, as do those of your sharím, each of them fatherless or motherless or both. That is what makes you all so special, but none more so than you, Neythan. You were the only one to witness your loss, see them die, and though you do not remember, your sha does. The sha forgets nothing, keeps it all, uses it all, as it has with you. As I knew it would…”
Neythan wanted to struggle but didn’t. Her hand continued to hover above the blade in his palm. She leaned in further, whispering now, as though conferring a secret, as though confiding. “You feel it, don’t you, the loss of your parents. A deep loss within yourself, like a worm in the gut, ever hungry, never sated. It’s how you’ve felt your entire life. It’s what’s made you as you are, able to do great and terrible things, to others… to yourself… that same worm, gnawing within.” Her fingers crept from his jaw to his face, gripping his cheeks, pressing in hungrily. “Do you see?” she said. “Do you see your own perfect and beautiful predictability? We knew you would not return when Arianna slew Yannick. We knew how relentless your pursuit of her would be, how unceasing, just as with every other task given you. And so we knew you, with her, would provide the perfect distraction. And so you have.”
“Distraction?”
And she smiled again. “From what is coming. From what the Watcher sought to warn you of. Yes, that’s right, I know of her visitation too. I feared for you then, Neythan, when you met her. I thought you would be lost to us, but you remained true to the way we set for you. It’s why we are telling you these things, telling you the truth, because we are grateful, and because you can bear it. You can hear our side. So many play at such things, you see. They pretend to want to know, to seek truth, but underneath it is a fiction. Men do not truly want truth, they reject her. She is a demand, you see, Neythan, a demand on every soul that would receive her. And that’s why so few do, until they come before Death’s lonely door only to find her there, loitering at his elbow, ready to tell all, ready as she has always been, awaiting a willing ear… Are you that ear, Neythan?”
Neythan just stared at her, her white birdlike skull, her quick crinkled lips, the slim silvery capillaries marking her forehead and temples. Every detail of her newly alien, looming over him like some decrepit vulture, waiting to pluck his flesh. “What do you want with me?”
“I only want for you to hear our side, Neythan. That’s all. From the beginning, our side.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then listen to me now, Neythan. Listen to the truth that has always been. Sharíf Karel did not do away with the old faiths because he deemed them folly and lies. He did so because he knew they were true, and that their gods were true, and he wanted their power. He killed the priests so he could take their place.” She pointed across the floor to the scroll still leaning by the step, the book that had first drawn him into the room. “And steal their books, learn their ways. Do you understand, Neythan? The ways of the Magi are not dead, they continued through Karel on to this very day. I know. I am one of them. I serve those old gods.”
Neythan’s brow hitched, refusing to believe.
“Yes, Neythan. The old gods. It is they who wrote the words on these walls, as they did the words in that scroll, and the words in your scroll too. Yes… we saw when you took it. We were glad when you did. It is such a precious thing, and a gift we did not expect, that you would take it from Karel’s dead queen and bring it here, to us. It is why we are so grateful, why we are telling you these things.”
“We?”
She grinned then. Her face contorted, shifting somehow, like it was no longer her own. “Yes…” she stretched the word, relishing it. “That’s right… How else would a woman, aged as I am, be able to best you?” Her voice lowered abruptly. Like the voice of a man, or the voice of several men speaking as one. Neythan stiffened. “You cannot have believed these feeble bones, this aged flesh, to be… alone. We are here together. We have always been. It is how we watch.” And Neythan could suddenly feel it, a new weight to the air, like shadow on skin, an unseen gaze. “Imagine, Neythan. Imagine what it would be for us to abide with you. How strong we would be together. How powerful. All you need to do is understand, see our side.” The woman’s knuckles were stroking him now, softly skimming his cheek, like a mother to a child. “We can show you, we can show you such beautiful things, Neythan. We can heal you, all your sorrow, all your pain.”
And Neythan could feel the words, the strangely blurred deep voices, like the thrum of music, tugging him, touching him, like warm rain, like a gentle breeze, and he was drifting, as though to slumber, lifting from himself, the words becoming his own, their thoughts becoming his own and the weight of everything slipping away, his pain, his rage, his fear, his need, to some other place, to stillness.
“See our side,” they said. And suddenly he could, he could feel their words and power and…
The arrow came suddenly, tearing through their throat. No. Through her throat, its pointed tip and shaft abruptly there, protruding from the woman’s neck, and the shining, the light, everything, suddenly shrinking away. He was back to the arena floor and the old blind woman kneeling over him. But now she was thrashing, gagging, clutching at her split neck as blood sprayed.
“Neythan!”
And he was coming to, groggy, looking up.
Caleb on the steps, bow in hand.
Another arrow loosed. The blind elder fell from him, a quarrel in her back. She was screaming, twisting, jerking, voice more beast than man.
Neythan pulled the blade out from his pinned hand and rolled sluggishly to one side, tried to climb to his feet. The room lurched. Caleb was shouting something.
Neythan looked up and saw Master Johann’s shortsword. He turned as Caleb loosed another arrow to the elder’s chest. The old woman had been coming to her feet. She collapsed again, choking, trembling, howling.
Neythan scrambled toward the sword and took it.
Caleb fishing for more arrows.
Neythan rising.
The woman standing again. She was staggering toward him, Caleb screaming, her face all sorrow, pain, coming closer, pleading. A few paces away. Caleb was shouting but his words were blurred, just noise. The woman reached out, clutched Neythan’s shoulder. She was speaking but he couldn’t hear. He wanted to hear. Wanted to know that warm relief she’d shown him. And then her face, suddenly, was somehow no longer her face but something else, abruptly hollow, enraged, eyeless, shrieking, reaching for him.
Neythan recoiled and shoved the sword through her chest. The woman’s spine stiffened and quaked, she staggered back, eyes rolling, and then looked at him, her eyes suddenly clear, no longer glazed blind whites but instead cloudy black irises almost socket-wide staring at him, into him, through him. And then she smiled.
“This is only the beginning,” she whis
pered. “You are too late. We are coming.”
Neythan yanked the blade from her chest and then swung full-bore at her neck. The sword went through. Her head lopped off like a snapped twig and rolled. Her body stood there, headless and still, and then finally slumped slowly sideways and collapsed to the ground.
Neythan didn’t move. He just stood watching, panting, continuing to stare down at the decapitated body, waiting to feel sure she was dead.
He flinched when Caleb came up to pat his arm. They stood there together and watched the body. It didn’t move.
“That’s the thing with some people,” Caleb said, looking down at it. “They just can’t help but talk too much.”
Forty-Six
H E R E T I C S
Caleb bandaged Neythan’s hand with a torn strip of cloth from his cloak as they sat on the steps. Neythan stared without expression at the still headless corpse of the elder and the crumpled body of Master Johann as Caleb worked and mopped. He couldn’t get the blood to stop; it kept oozing from Neythan’s hand and running down his trembling fingers, dripping from the tips.
“Where’s Arianna?”
Neythan continued to stare at the dark pool puddling around Master Johann.
“Neythan.”
Neythan blinked.
“Where’s Arianna?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right… well, we’ll find her.”
Caleb helped Neythan up and had him lean on him as they went up the steps to the door they’d entered.
“What did the elder do to you? What was she doing?”
But Neythan didn’t answer. They followed the long and dark passageway back to the first chamber and then waited there awhile, listening for others, resting. It was more than half a day since either of them had eaten. Neythan looked at his hand and held it as it continued to bleed steadily, soaking through the loose wrapped rags and dripping on the floor. He felt weak, groggy, drained by the elder somehow. He leaned against the wall and forced himself to his feet.
