by P. J. Fox
For four days in particular, during late summer—I can’t give you the exact date, we weren’t availed of calendars—112 men died per day. On the fifth day, 278 died and not, as Captain Taschen now claims, from smallpox or the purposeful manipulation of statistics.
Captain Taschen had been executed.
Kisten had watched, and been pleased.
But even as the strangely small-seeming man faced the firing squad, his eyes rolling about in his head as the reality of his situation finally came home to him, Kisten’s mind had been partially elsewhere. He’d survived; he felt no hatred for the commandant at this point, only sadness—for himself, for them all. And as the guns opened fire, he thought about the pretty young girl who’d given him the sandwich and wondered what caused otherwise good people to go bad. He’d never found out what happened to the girl, although he’d tried. He hoped her young man had come home to her, and that she’d had a happy life.
TWENTY-FOUR
Walid died next, and then Ali, and then there was only Aros.
Captain Taschen, the commandant—Kisten had only recently been able to place a name with the face, as there was precious little information exchange between guards and prisoners—had instituted a new punishment for those termed troublemakers. Since those two men had been shot for singing, Aros had grumbled incessantly about “congregating in strange groups.”
“I can’t believe you remember that,” said Kisten.
“I don’t remember much,” complained Aros.
The Dungeon, as the commandant called it, was a sort of oubliette. Except even when men were put into an oubliette, they sometimes came out. The men who went into the dungeon rotted alive. Kisten had learned the commandant’s name after, presumably from boredom, he took to visiting his prisoners in the enclosure. He liked to draw his gun and shoot at clumps of men indiscriminately, wounding as many as he could before turning on his heel and disappearing into the crowd.
Owing to his family’s history of mental defect, Kisten had always harbored a horror of diseases that corroded one’s reason. So it hit him particularly hard when his fellow inmates began raving. There were only a few at first, and then more: men who, in the extremity of starvation and despair, forgot their names, regiments, and indeed their entire origins.
Kisten wasn’t sure if the conditions themselves had driven them insane, or if the lack of nutriment meant that their brains were rotting.
In any case, he took to quizzing Aros on a number of particulars in order to keep his mind fresh. Aros objected strenuously; he didn’t like Kisten and wished to be left in peace. Kisten pointed out judiciously that as all his other friends had died, he’d better make do.
“But you’re awful,” groaned Aros.
“Lower your standards,” advised Kisten.
Later, it was asked how men could have frozen to death in such a comparatively mild climate. What they seemed to forget was that a man, wasted down to precious more than a sack of bones from lack of food and half-dressed, was susceptible to the elements. Some aid organization had sent clothing and blankets, which were promptly distributed among the guards. Kisten saw his old friend Tomas wearing a rather jolly-looking outfit of blue plaid.
Some enterprising soul had even made a rebel flag from some of the garments and forced the prisoners to hoist it. Those who’d refused had been strung up by their thumbs, a far more gruesome punishment than the average person realized. The lucky ones lost their thumbs before they lost their circulation or, forced to hold the unnatural position for hours on end, suffocated.
Kisten had managed to stay under the radar and he was certain at this point that his own mother wouldn’t recognize him, so he’d been surprised when one of the locals who’d been brought in to man the ration wagon spoke to him. Kisten was standing in line, waiting for the food to be distributed and propping up Aros as best he could. Aros hadn’t been feeling well for some time, and leaned heavily on Kisten’s shoulder. Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t have been much of a burden as he couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds but given Kisten’s state of health he might as well have weighed a ton.
The wagon rolled to a stop. Wagons—really? Kisten felt like he was back in the dark ages.
The man, a rough-faced individual with teeth like a horse’s, rummaged around in a barrel of cornmeal for the scoop. While doing so, seemingly without missing a beat, he asked, “Which are more numerous, the living or the dead?”
Kisten checked, before replying, “the living, because those who are dead are not at all.”
None of the other prisoners remarked on the interchange. They were too intent on food to care about anything else. Even Aros said nothing, although his eyelid flickered. Kisten knew that he, at least, had heard; he’d learned not to underestimate Aros, as silly as the man seemed.
He prayed incessantly, lived for stating the obvious and—could he possibly be a twenty-something year old virgin? He claimed not, but Kisten wasn’t convinced. Life with Aros was like life inside a temple.
Kisten carried the blanket’s worth of rations under one arm and steadied Aros with the other. Since concluding that first interchange, the strange man hadn’t spoken again. He’d appeared, instead, intent on dispensing the rations and for all the attention he paid Kisten might never have spoken at all in the first place.
But as Kisten began to turn, he spoke one more time. The voice was pitched low, meant for Kisten alone, and the strange man never wavered from his task.
“On the third night from the full moon. Be ready.”
Eight days, if Kisten had been counting the phases of the moon right. Eight days until freedom.
He wondered what had taken his brother so long, and knew at the same time that whatever had delayed him had been vitally important. That it was his brother he had no doubt, because no one else could have sent such a message. Those seemingly innocuous words had been code, part of a long interchange of questions and answers known only to the initiates of a very specific group and the even smaller handful of men who’d trained with them but declined to undergo the final rites that would bind them to the group and to its cause forever.
Kisten had been one such man, not out of any independent interest on his part but because he could hardly avoid an entanglement with the group that his identical twin and other half had joined.
He shouldn’t have been surprised that the message, when it came, came from such an unexpected quarter. The Order of the Dragon, as it was known to the outside world, had members and affiliates in every corner of the galaxy and at every level of society, too. Prince, slave, rug merchant, one’s position was irrelevant to one’s value.
The ration wagon moved on.
Be ready. He knew what that meant.
Acting as though he hadn’t heard anything, Kisten returned to their campsite, helped Aros sit down and went about the slow process of distributing food to their group of hungry men.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Order of the Dragon was a highly skilled group of assassins that theoretically served the empire but that, in reality, followed their own inscrutable agenda.
Next to nothing was known about them. Even their true name was a mystery. The Order of the Dragon was a name given to them near the founding of the empire, by an emperor who’d had reason to be grateful. But it wasn’t what they called themselves.
In addition to serving the Emperor—which it did do—the order also took private contracts. What made its members accept some clients and reject others, no one knew. They reported to no one, except their own leader and the Emperor himself. And although much of what they did was illegal, people rarely spoke out against them. To say that this was the most feared organization in the empire and its members the most feared citizens would be a drastic understatement. Rumors had spread for centuries about their dark initiation rites and the powers those rites supposedly granted: ritual murder of victims both willing and unwilling, drug-induced psychosis, brainwashing, perverted sexual acts and religious mania
.
Nothing concrete was known of their practices, because those who revealed even minor details were swiftly executed. Even Kisten, who’d trained with the group and shared a bond with his brother that most people never shared with anyone, knew nothing of the life of an initiate. He’d studied martial arts, nothing more. Nonetheless, he’d taken his own vows not to reveal certain things.
Some, like his brother, did nothing to disguise their affiliation. As a prince of the blood, Keshav was immune from prosecution. Which made him a perfect choice to draw attention away from the rest of the Order. He’d never openly admitted to anything but never denied anything, either. The less intelligent people dismissed the rumors out of hand, because of his reputation as a fop and a dandy. The more intelligent were terrified of him and the way his flat eyes tracked them across the room even as he was busy doing other things.
Others could never be traced. They bore no identifying marks. Some went their entire lives without doing anything that, to anyone, might seem in the least suspicious. In those instances, their value to the Order—and what they may or may not have done to serve it—was known only to the Order. It might be something like passing on a message, or it might be waiting for a call that never came.
And as to how often the Order struck…its trademark was that it had no trademark. It specialized in murders that weren’t murders: an unfortunate accident at a construction site, a key mechanical failure. Heart disease. A fall from a ladder. Even if some intrepid soul suspected…once the Order selected a target, there was no escape. One man, who’d famously dodged it for years, was found dead in bed by his slave. The same slave who, unknown to the outside world, had slipped him the poison that stopped his heart.
But prince or pauper, visible or invisible, all members were equally dedicated and equally expendable in service to the Order’s objective. An assassin had no name; he had no face. Whatever he’d been before served no purpose, except to disguise who he was now.
Keshav had sought training at a young age, and sworn allegiance to the order the day he turned twenty-one. By that time, he’d already killed six people. That Kisten knew of. His vows—whatever they were—were for life, and something about his experience had…altered him. He looked at the world differently, after. There were topics he refused to discuss. He’d always been reserved, even as a child, but as an adult Keshav radiated an aura of…ice. And he was calculating, and he was ruthless, and no one—not the lovers he took to his bed or the woman, Kisten thought, that he’d claimed at one time to love—had touched him. That woman, of course, had died. And Keshav had mourned, and Kisten had mourned with him even as he’d thought that there was something missing from his brother’s pallid face and cold gaze as he’d watched Jacintha burn.
But nothing had, or could, change the bond he shared with Kisten and in the years to come they’d remained as close as ever. Their parents were aware of Keshav’s true vocation, of course; surprisingly, it was their father who disapproved. But Keshav was not the first scion of House Mara Sant to become entangled with the Order, nor would he be the last.
Kisten knew something of the Order’s history; most educated people did.
He’d jokingly accused his brother of practicing the dark arts but in truth he might be closer to the truth than he realized. He wasn’t sure, and didn’t press the issue. Keshav couldn’t discuss it with him anyway. But what was generally known was that the Order had its own religious observances based, at least in part, on those of the old religion. As to what those observances were, specifically, Kisten could only guess.
He wasn’t certain that he wanted to know.
The Order of the Dragon dated back thousands of years, almost to the dawn of the empire. Its founder’s motives were obscure, but historians who’d studied the subject in depth claimed that he’d acted for political and perhaps even personal gain. And naturally the destruction of his enemies had figured in, as well. His enemies, at the time, had been the Emperor’s enemies and the two had benefitted each other tremendously. The Order had fought for the colonists-turned-imperialists during the rebellion and helped to create what ultimately became known as the Alliance.
If his name had ever been recorded, it was lost to the sands of time. Known simply as the Dragon—presumably as a nod to the Emperor, but no one was entirely sure—he’d disappeared from view after the end of the war. He’d gone, as it turned out, in search of a suitable location in which to build his headquarters. Selecting a cliff that overhung the sea, he did exactly that: enclosing what would become his headquarters in a massive fortress.
Upon its completion, he went inside. And never came back out.
The fortress served as a defense against hostile forces—and there were many, in those days—and also as a home for his followers. There, deep within bowels cut from living rock, he set about the work of indoctrinating them. What emerged, some time later, was a group of fanatics loyal only to the Emperor—and, some claimed, not even to him. Whatever their ultimate cause was, no one knew. They worked toward it in silence. There might have been ten members; there might have been ten thousand.
And then, one day, they’d left their fortress and begun infiltrating the empire.
They weren’t required to be celibate and, as far as Kisten had learned, none of them were. They weren’t forbidden to marry, either, although few did—at least, few did for personal reasons. More than one woman, over the years, had woken up to discover that the man she’d married, the father of her children, was an assassin. Sent to kill her brother, perhaps, or her father. Some even accepted the situation, out of love or terror or both. What the assassin thought about his situation, Kisten had often wondered.
The Order of the Dragon was hierarchical in nature. Below the ultimate master of the Order, who had come to be known as the Grand Dragon, was a second in command known as the Greater Dragon. Beneath these two men was a secondary tier of men, known as the Companions. Beneath the Companions were the Adherents. And although one could and did advance through these ranks, men of all ranks were considered equally expendable.
As to who occupied what role, no one outside the Order knew.
Marrying, accepting political appointments, assassins did whatever was necessary to secure their targets. They were patient, cold, and calculating. And, in addition to being extremely good actors, they were generally educated and exceptionally literate. They could move easily in the highest circles. Some had become experts in their fields, garnering tremendous respect from academic colleagues who had no notion of their real occupation.
Keshav, of course, was a field agent with the Imperial Intelligence Service. There were several different branches of intelligence serving the government; the IIS was the best. When Keshav had joined, immediately after finishing university, he’d already been an assassin and his new job had, presumably, filled some criteria important to both him and to the Order.
His choice to become an assassin would remain, for the rest of their lives, one of the few issues that Kisten and Keshav never discussed in depth. Kisten wasn’t sure, in retrospect, that they’d needed to, because on some level he’d understood. Even then.
And now, at long last, Keshav was coming to rescue him.
He’d expected Keshav to act in his role as an IIS agent; that he was coming as an assassin instead made Kisten wonder what, exactly, had been going on in the outside world. He’d find out later that attempts to ransom the troops had been made, and might have even come to something if Karan hadn’t vetoed the effort. Acceding to the rebels’ demands would, he’d assured the senate, make them look weak. The Chancellor had railed. Influential senators protested Karan’s nonaction. In the end, they’d been outvoted by Karan’s cronies. Most of whom had no personal stake in whether these soldiers came home and had been only too happy to accept the bribes that Karan had offered.
The Emperor could have overruled his son, but he’d always been a diffident man and long in thrall to his advisors. He was, Keshav had long suspected, frightened of hi
s son and only legitimate heir. Karan, as senate minority leader, shouldn’t have wielded the power he did but nothing had been done to check his growing influence until it was too late.
Keshav, in his official capacity as an IIS agent, couldn’t act without orders unless he wanted to risk his career—and access to resources that he and Kisten would one day need. His superiors wouldn’t sign off on a rescue mission that had been expressly vetoed by the heir to the throne but they would allow him to conduct some general reconnaissance. There was, as his section director had told him, a significant lack of information about how the rebels were moving supplies. And so Keshav, armed with this half billet, turned to the Order. The IIS would deliver him to Charon II; he and his fellow assassins would do the rest.
Be ready.
The dictate was simple: somehow, he had to reach the other side of the stockade.
TWENTY-SIX
The rain poured down, matting Kisten’s hair to his head and dripping into his eyes. Gusts of wind blew through the camp, chilling them all to the bone. Silently, he worked on the soup. Next to him, Aros sat shivering in the mud with his knees drawn up to his chest.
Kisten, to his delight, had found a cabbage. Cabbages were high in vitamins and thus good proof against scurvy. Prior to his incarceration, he’d hated cabbage. He’d held it up in the rain to wash it, and then chopped it up as finely as he could with the worn old knife that now just he and Aros shared.
Aros hadn’t felt like doing much lately. Setting their communal pot down beside him, Kisten had given his friend some of the leaves to shred. Aros had done so, but listlessly, and watched without interest as Kisten boiled the results as best he could.
What resulted was a green-colored liquid. Kisten stirred in some flour that, once the weevils had been sifted out of it, was tolerably edible. Lastly, he added a few shreds of pepper.
