Master Assassins Read online

  Two of Atau’s men draw close to him, whispering. Then the whole group begins to fan out around the clearing. They look more cunning than deadly—no, these are not hardened warriors—but there are nine of them, and Atau has already proven that he is more than he seems. And there is his nephew. The enormous youth is staring at the girl with contempt. When he catches her eye, he makes a thrusting motion with his hips.

  “My men,” says Atau, “wish me to remind you to pray with special fervor. They listen to mystics, some of them. I do not. But they would warn you that the Darsunuk, the Time of Madness, is upon us, and that the world’s end is in sight. Pray then for peace in the hereafter. Even dead souls lose their way in the Time of Madness.”

  Kandri looks across the clearing. His brother, Chindilan, and Eshett have drawn closer together. Atau’s men are trying to slip behind them again.

  “Leave your things,” says Atau. “Water, boots, every stitch of your clothes. You’re going to walk out into the flats and wait for sunrise. If you cause no further trouble, I’ll leave you a pocketknife, and you can make the sort of end you choose. A blade to the throat’s much the quicker way, but the sun will do the job as well.” He glances at Chindilan. “Your wife stays with us, old man.”

  “What about the bird?” says Mektu.

  Atau turns him a look of perfect bewilderment.

  Then the girl seems to hug herself, reaching inside her tattered uniform, and when her hands come forward again they are holding knives. She twists backward at the torso, then snaps her whole body forward with a lunging step and flings her arm out straight.

  “Vahg!”

  And—

  “Vahg!”

  Two motions, two animal screams. Atau’s men bolt in panic. Most vanish into the darkness beyond the clearing, but two, including Atau’s nephew, lie twitching on the ground.

  Mektu rushes after the Tirmassil, howling and brandishing his machete. “Stop, idiot!” bellows Chindilan. “Come back, get your pack on! Kandri, get over here!”

  The girl stalks toward the enormous youth. He has managed to pull the knife from his chest and rise to his knees. “Cunt,” he says. “Whore’s cunt, fucking—”

  The girl leaps high and kicks him savagely beneath the chin with the point of her boot. There is a sound like a stick snapped over a knee. She comes out of the leap already marching toward the next man, and this time, Kandri shuts his eyes.

  Tirmassil, he thinks. And we walked up to you like lambs.

  When he looks again, the girl has returned to the giant and is slashing open his leggings with a knife. The cloth rips and she grabs his privates like a handful of seaweed and lowers the knife and once again he cannot look.

  Time to go. Time to lose this cursed place, before Atau’s men find their courage, or their friends. Time to clear out before that mad girl can—

  “You!”

  Kandri gives a small, utterly emasculated scream. She is at his elbow, hand and knives dripping blood.

  “Whose fucking battalion are you in?”

  “Fuck, girl, can’t you stop saying fuck?”

  “Whose battalion are you in?”

  She has two faska clutched to her chest. A muscle in her throat is twitching so hard, it appears to be affecting her breathing. Perhaps he won’t mention his battalion.

  Chindilan storms up to him, dragging his pack. “Put this on,” he snaps. “Girl, you can’t come with us. Not if that’s all the water you have.”

  “It’s not.”

  Chindilan glances at the others. “Where’s your family, then? Where are you bound?”

  “Siakmatarivak.”

  They blink: the name means nothing to them.

  “Who the hell are you people? Siakmatarivak, north of Sendu on the Smoke Road.”

  “The Smoke Road!” says Mektu. “You’re a long way from the Smoke Road. You’ll have to cross the Yskralem, like us.”

  “Cross it? Who the fuck wants to cross it? Your head’s so far up your ass you could kiss your liver.”

  “But you’ve crossed the Sea already,” says Kandri.

  Now the girl just stares at them.

  “Sister,” says Eshett, “what did they do to you? We’re at least five days from the East Rim.”

  The girl’s eyes grow wide. She raises a trembling hand to her forehead, leaving a smear of blood. “Never trust people,” she says.

  Minutes later they are running again, the girl alongside, muttering and swearing. It is quite cold now; their breath puffs white in the moonlight. They see no more of Atau’s men in the vicinity of the island, but as they move onto the wide white seabed, Kandri looks back and sees a dark figure on a boulder, watching their flight.

  For three hours they do not speak, except to debate the path eastward, the signposts of the wheeling stars. When they rest at last, Kandri hands the girl a faska and she drinks it dry. Chindilan looks at Kandri and shakes his head. Kandri knows. They should have asked more questions. They should have demanded to see the water in her pack.

  She asks again for his battalion. When he explains that they are deserters from the New Orthodox Revelation Army, the girl laughs so hard, the water comes back up her throat.

  “Enemies of the Prophet,” she says. “Now you tell me.”

  You don’t know the half, thinks Kandri, but it is too soon to mention their crimes. “Listen,” he says, “at nightfall, before we came to the clearing, we saw men heading north across into the scree. Were those Atau’s men as well?”

  The girl shakes her head, still grinning oddly. “I think you know who they were.”

  Chindilan swears. Mektu hides his face in his elbow. “Army of Revelation?” says Kandri.

  The girl nods. “And not just any grunts. They were elites of some kind.”

  “Rasanga?” says Kandri, feeling his heart sink like a stone.

  “Yes, that was what they called themselves. Real bastards, too; I’d hate to fight them. I wondered how Atau had convinced them to leave us in peace. Now I can guess. He must have promised to keep a lookout for you. If you had surrendered, he wouldn’t have left you to die. He’d have delivered you to the Prophet.”

  “Or our heads at least,” says Kandri, “packed in salt.”

  “Rasanga,” says Chindilan. “They’ll probably check the northern islands and be back at Atau’s camp this time tomorrow. And Atau will have something marvelous to tell them.”

  A grim silence falls. More to break it than because he expects the knowledge (any knowledge) to improve their plight, he asks the girl if she overheard anything that passed between Atau and the Rasanga. The girl shakes her head and tells him that she was keeping her distance. That Atau’s men were goatish and stealthy, always trying to come at her from behind.

  Then she lifts her chin, frowning with concentration. “One thing,” she says. “It was strange. All the time those big fuckers were speaking, they treated Atau and his men like spittoons. Wouldn’t even look at them. But just before they left, I saw their leader’s face change. Really change, like he was thinking of something that scared him. And so I listened for a moment, and he said, ‘They have awakened the White Child. No one wanted this, not even Her Radiance.’ I had forgotten all about it until just now.”

  “The White Child?” says Eshett. “What the hell is that?”

  The brothers look at each other blankly. “No idea,” says Kandri. Then he sees that Chindilan is staring at the girl, aghast. When he notices Kandri’s look, he quickly drops his eyes, but the effort to hide his response only makes it seem stranger. Ask him, Kandri tells himself. But a part of him is afraid of what the smith might say.

  “I know what it is,” says Mektu. “Her fucking baboon. Has to be.”

  He looks to the others for support, finds none. The Prophet does love the animal inordinately, but she has not set it up as an object of worship, or suggested it might possess any special role in Orthodox Revelation. And the creature was always awake; it screamed half the night.

  No one wa
nted this. Suddenly, Kandri’s mind is racing. An eight-sided courtyard, a palanquin with fresh flowers by the door. A barred window, a white stone urn. The guards’ unreasonable fear . . .

  “Is something wrong, Kandri?” asks Eshett.

  Kandri jumps. “Nothing’s wrong,” he says, wiping sweat from his forehead.

  “A baboon,” says the girl. “You’re telling me that the Prophet keeps a pet baboon?”

  The men just grunt. It’s embarrassing. Mektu asks the girl where she learned to throw knives.

  “From my grandmother.”

  The others smile. The girl does not. Kandri clears his throat and asks if Atau truly hired her to scale those cliffs.

  “Hired?” She looks at him with sudden anger. “I’m not a whore, you know. I don’t sell myself to anyone who chances by. I traveled with that pig because he promised there was a doctor where we were going. And because a God whispered in my ear.”

  Once more, she is perfectly serious. “Which God?” says Chindilan, and Mektu asks, “Which ear?”

  Kandri waves at them in annoyance. “I didn’t mean to insult you, sister,” he says. “I just wondered how you came to be in the Yskralem at all.”

  The girl looks at him as though considering whether he merits a reply. At last, she says that she is part of the Lutaral-Lo’ac Unified Survival Forces, under a General Tebassa. The names mean nothing to Kandri. Chindilan, however, looks at her with amazement, and more than a little suspicion.

  “Black Hat Tebassa? He’s still alive, that old fox? The man who killed the Sartaph of Sendu with a brick?”

  The girl’s face is impassive. “He deserved death,” she says.

  “Did he, now?” says Chindilan. “Well, the Prophet has no love for your general, I’m afraid. Used to say she wanted his head on the end of a pike.”

  The girl looks hard at Chindilan and says she will not get it. But then she confesses that she has not seen her general in months. That his second battalion was massacred by Orthodox Revelation forces at a place called the Megrev Defile, somewhere in the northern Lutaral. That her unit was pursued into the Stolen Sea, attacked anew by night, and scattered. That she and her sergeant took up with Atau’s band out of sheer desperation. He was bleeding to death, she says.

  Chindilan studies her with narrowed eyes. “You brought a dying man across the Yskralem because they claimed to have a doctor?”

  The girl looks down at her knees. Her eyes are moist, but her face is all fury. A twitch has begun in her left hand.

  “I missed my throw,” she says. “The second knife was for Atau. The first one had to be for his nephew, that giant prick.”

  Mektu is openly gaping at her. Kandri prods him with an elbow.

  “I see it now,” says the girl. “They tricked us. They made us drink foul wine, saying there was no water to spare. I thought I had a fever, but it was the wine that hurt me, or something in the wine. Maybe they marched us for a week through the Yskralem. I can’t remember. Things are missing in my head.”

  “Well,” says Kandri, “do you remember your name?”

  “Trouble,” says the girl.

  Mektu cackles like a crow.

  “Trouble,” says Chindilan. “That’s just dumb. ‘Hello, Trouble. Good morning, Trouble.’ I’m not going to call you that.”

  “Then fuck you.”

  “Fuck you and your tall tales,” says Chindilan amiably.

  “Uncle!” cries Kandri. “What’s the matter with you? Jeshar, as if we weren’t a bit—strange.”

  “Strange is one thing. Lies are another.” He looks sharply at the girl. “I’ve seen faces like yours. Heard accents, too. You say you come from down the Smoke Road? Well, maybe that’s right. Two thousand miles down the Smoke Road, in the Nfepan Jungles.”

  The girl’s cold eyes are locked on Chindilan. “You don’t know shit,” she says.

  Chindilan holds her gaze a moment, then turns and addresses the others. “I have nothing against this little killer,” he tells them, “but she said it herself: never trust people. Why should we make an exception for her? And even if she’s telling the truth—if she was really under Black Hat Tebassa—then she’ll have a hell of a lot of enemies in the Lutaral. We don’t need them, Kandri.”

  The girl leans toward Chindilan, unblinking. “You,” she says, “don’t need mine?”

  Eshett touches the smith’s burly arm. “Why don’t we all just take a deep—”

  “Trouble!” shouts Mektu. “Say, Trouble, is that your sister Calamity over there? You’re not related to old Doc Disaster up in Nasty Town, are you? Or his understandably fucked-up wife—”

  “Be quiet, Mek,” says Kandri. “Listen, girl, isn’t there something else we could call you?”

  “Eshett’s right, this is pointless,” says Chindilan. “Let’s have a look at that water you say you’re carrying, girl, or else—”

  “Call me the Wind,” booms Mektu, spreading his arms, “for I am he who BLOWS and FLOWS and NIPS your little—”

  “Mektu!” shouts Eshett, leaping to her feet.

  Mektu buries his face in his elbow. The girl looks from one to another. “I can leave right now,” she says.

  “I’m sure you can,” snaps Eshett. “You can walk out into the flats and be dead of thirst by midday. Or get cornered by more Tirmassil than you can kill with those knife tricks. And I’m sure all of you can get into a fight over nothing. Go ahead, do it! Stab each other, use your skills. The carrion birds will be impressed.”

  The girl looks at her steadily. With one hand, she frees the buckles of her pack and flings it open. Inside are five bulging leather faska. The men glance at each other, abashed.

  “Get up,” says Eshett, “and stop this foolishness. You don’t have officers to think for you anymore.”

  No one argues. They march on, stomp-crunch-stumble, over the glittering seabed. Except for their footfalls, the hours pass in silence; not even the buzz of an insect cracks the night. It is now bitterly cold. The moon, well past its zenith, throws their shadows before them on the salt. Kandri thinks of Ariqina. Her hands are like this girl’s hands, strong and capable, good at what they do. He can close his eyes and feel them. He can still his thoughts and hear her voice.

  “I have a clan name,” says the girl.

  “Of course you do,” says Eshett. “Well, what is it? Don’t be shy.”

  “Talupéké Orolekitju ukka Ilammad uk Itri.”

  “How about ‘Girl?’” says Mektu.

  “My sergeant just called me Talupéké. You can call me that.”

  “See, now that’s a lovely name,” says Chindilan. “Talupéké. What does it mean?”

  “Trouble,” says the girl.

  IV. VISION

  “When the Gods return,” said the yatra, “you and I shall both be judged, O Prince of Many Splendors. Your empire is great, and my life is very long. You dispatch envoys, soldiers, assassins to work your will; I slip in at the ear, and change the will in the place where it is born. You break bodies on the rack; I pinch souls. Oh, we are both very wicked. But my wickedness has earned me only the freedom of Urrath, her barrens to embrace me, her wastes to praise my name. Yours has brought you the obeisance of the four hundred clans, a vault of silver, meals of hawks’ hearts and foxes’ tongues, emeralds for your fingers, young men and women for your bed.”

  Ut’xing laughed. “That is because the Gods love me, their finer creation, above a cold spirit who tumbles on the winds. Their judgment? It is here already: they judge me fit to rule. My word is law from the shores of Važenland to the mouth of the Ghel.”

  “None doubt your strength,” replied the yatra. “But the play has many acts, auspicious king. Are you so certain of the playwright’s favor? Does not every story turn before its end?”

  ANNALS OF UT’XING

  In what remains of the night they march unhindered. The moon lifts and fills the canyon with its radiance, but it reveals no man or any other living thing. Toward dawn, they find a boulder fi
eld and erect their sunshield in its midst: canvas above canvas, four inches of air between the two, a channel diverting the heat.

  Talupéké lifts a bundle from her pack and throws it to Chindilan: “Red figs, old man.” The smith grunts and chooses the smallest, but he cannot hide his pleasure when he bites into the fruit. Kandri grins. He unwraps a seedcake and cuts it into fifths. “Where will you go, once we climb out of here?” he asks Talupéké.

  “Wherever my general leads our forces,” she says, looking at him warily. “I’m not a deserter.”

  “Those Tirmassil must be wrong in the head,” says Mektu. “How do you take a goose and make it stink so badly? Did they stuff it with shit?”

  “Not a goose,” says Talupéké. “That was an Ornaq vulture. I told them they were fools to cook it. I told them to bury it far from the camp.”

  Roasted carrion bird: Kandri’s stomach gives a tiny lurch. Although in fact, he’s seen men eat worse on the battlefield. There is an art to putting things out of your mind.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” says Chindilan to Mektu. “Ornaqs are big but not monstrous. Ang’s tears, though, what a filthy thing to cook!” Then he turns, feeling Talupéké’s eyes on him. “What’s the matter, girl?”

  “It was a hatchling,” she says. “It fell out of a nest on the clifftop. Atau’s son found it and killed it with a stone. I tried to warn them. Don’t handle the feathers, I said. They didn’t believe me at all.”

  Kandri finds he has no wish to believe her, either. “That ‘hatchling’ of yours must have weighed thirty pounds.”

  “People will call anything an Ornaq until they’ve seen one,” says Talupéké.

  Roasted carrion bird hatchling. Now Kandri does feel ill.

  “I told them the mother would return, and that she’d hit them like a demon out of hell.” Talupéké tilts her head, perplexed. “But she never did return. She must have been hunting far from the islands. Atau’s son was a lucky man.”

  “That’s an odd way to put it,” says Kandri.

  Sleep eludes them for a time. Even beneath the canvas, curled into the shadows of the boulders, it is hellishly hot. They keep very still and say nothing. Under the midday sun, the salt wastes turn to sheets of fire, dazzling them at a glance.