Master Assassins Read online

  Between the huts he has a glimpse of the badlands, stretching east to the Stolen Sea. Nothing out there, beyond the first few grassy miles. Nothing but death.

  Brothel Row is merry, however: no bloodshed, the night is young. A fat man with a pushcart winks at him, lifting a bottle. “One sip a night protects your privates, friend! Why gamble? You know where those girls have been.”

  He moves from house to house, seeking Chindilan. In the first three, no luck at all. But in the last and largest business, Aunty Boom-Boom’s, a soldier nods. Smiling and very drunk, he points Kandri down a long, narrow passage.

  “Last door on the right, Hinjuman. Don’t knock; it’s another waiting room. Give us that bottle a minute.”

  Kandri passes him the liquor, has to wrestle it back. He moves down the hallway. Painted words on the floor read No REFUNDS. No PAIN GAMES. No BOOTS IN BED. The hallway darkens as he goes, however, and by the time he reaches its end he is practically groping. When he opens the door, he sees Colonel Idaru, Lord Ojulan’s deputy, being serviced by a slender woman kneeling on a pelt. Idaru turns him a furious scowl, and Kandri, panicked, slams the door with a bang.

  His helpful comrade has fled. Those who remain smirk at him over their tankards.

  “Hinjuman,” says one, “is it true that your brother once crawled into a smokehouse and tried to cure himself like a ham? Did he do that? We’ve got this wager, see.”

  Kandri’s first thought is to break the man’s teeth. But Idaru could emerge at any moment. Furious and ashamed, he stalks from the brothel. In the barren yard, men are splurging on plates of uitik—hairless mice drowned in batter and fried—while a boy with a tin whistle kicks at a small chained monkey festooned with girlish bows, trying to make the creature dance.

  He crosses the yard, forcing himself not to run. In the alley, he quickens his pace, turns one corner and then another, losing himself. Coward, fool. The night air cold in his chest. Retreating to a darkened doorway, he lifts the bottle to his lips.

  Uncle, can I truly maim my brother? Crush his foot with a sledgehammer, an iron cartwheel, the anvil in your shop? And would even that be enough to save him? Would they send him home or just chain him to a work station, to a sink?

  Footsteps. Swift and heavy. Kandri swallows his mouthful and takes another, the hell with everything, this night has a feeling of doom.

  But the feet pass him by. He lowers the bottle and sees four soldiers, almost running, locked in a whispered argument. Clearly, no one’s seen him. But before they vanish around the corner, one man raises his voice.

  “I told you, didn’t I? This is the last place he’d go.”

  Kandri steps from his alcove, thinking: that was strange. Huge brutes, all four of them. Akoli Militia, perhaps, or even Orthodox Guard. But who could they be searching for?

  In any event, they are gone. And all at once Kandri realizes that his fear is gone as well. It can’t be him they want—for the simple reason that Idaru cannot have seen his face. The chamber was bright, but Kandri himself had remained in the shadowy hall. The colonel was squinting in his direction, not scowling. And Akoli Militia aren’t summoned to chase down a man for opening the wrong door in a brothel.

  No danger, then. No one after him at all.

  He drinks, feet and mind wandering, thinking of the kiss of the young prostitute, thinking of Ariqina Nawhal. She was only two years his senior, but even in their teens, he rarely thought of her as a girl. She felt too much, knew too much, she had a fullness of heart that left him shocked and sorry for lesser people, grown men and women included. She wasn’t normal. She was Ariqina, a category of one.

  On their last night together he had given her his cap. An old thing of uncombed wool, round, plain, faded from scarlet to fish-gill pink. She adored it. On cold nights she wore it beneath the hood of her shemlad—but only in the hills, when the two of them walked alone. Kandri had tried to make a gift of it many times. Ariqina refused, and took care that no one but Kandri ever saw it on her head. A woman did not wear a man’s clothing unless they were lovers. It was unwritten Valley law.

  Of course they were lovers by then: the peasant and the genius, Kandri the tree pruner and Ariqina the doctor, the healer, the unstoppable force. That night she’d worn the cap only briefly, then returned it, saying she wasn’t cold. Kandri had crushed the hat into his pocket. But later, on an impulse, he’d slipped it into her shoulder bag, under the medical kit she was never without. It was easy; Ariqina was sleeping with her head on his lap. She stole many such naps on their night walks, pulling him down with her in some distant meadow or shed or cedar grove, holding him, gone in mid-sentence, pinched out like a flame. She was so often exhausted. Sleep was a fugitive thing in the household she shared with two elder cousins anxious to marry, an aunt who took in street dogs, an insomniac rooster forever shrieking of doomsday. And at any hour, a summons might come for Doctor Ariqina. From the clinic, or from any house in any village, up or down the Sataapre.

  This is where I’m safe, Ari would whisper. Here in the darkness with you guarding my sleep.

  A gust of wind blows sand along the alley. He wonders if it is possible that she doubted his love. On Brothel Row his comrades are laughing, fucking, maybe haggling over the bill. Why shouldn’t he find some pleasure there? What is wrong with him? Ariqina likely gave his cap to the first indigent she met on the road.

  He hears a child, weeping.

  Kandri turns, puzzled. He has walked right out of the zone of festivities. Dark walls surround him. He is entirely alone.

  But the child—a little girl, probably—is somewhere quite near at hand. Not crying, exactly, but whimpering, and he thinks: Is that fear?

  He calls out: “Elu, elu. Who’s there?”

  No answer. But to his left there are thumps, shuffles. And the child’s voice again. Yes, that is fear, that is terror in fact. An abominable sound.

  “Whose girl is that? What’s the matter with you people?”

  Suddenly, a door creeks open. An old woman stands there, shriveled, naked to the waist. She gestures at him frantically. Away, go away!

  Then Kandri smells it. Clove oil.

  Skem.

  He moves to the next hut. It is distinctly crooked, listing on its dirt foundation like a man in a stupor. The door, out of true, cannot quite close. A dim light flickers there in the darkness. Kandri sets the bottle down, slides his fingers around the handle of the machete.

  “Skem. You Gods-damned shitting animal.”

  He tries to shout the words, but his voice has withered in his chest. His skin is cold and his hands are trembling. Pointlessly, he reaches out in the direction of the door. “Skem! I’ll fucking kill you.” The words no louder than before.

  From the doorway comes a man’s low grunt of pleasure. In the same instant, a child screams in pain.

  Kandri feels himself go mad. He is through the door with the machete raised. By one candle he sees a man’s rutting hips and the naked child on the bed, and then the man is up and flying at him with a long, bright knife. Kandri sees his death in that knife; the man is viper-quick, but his lunge is hampered by his lowered trousers, and There, dead, Kandri’s machete takes off his ear and splits his throat wide open, dead, dead, two more blows and the man falls in twitching pieces and Kandri’s legs are drenched in blood.

  He staggers, drops the machete. The man is not Skem. The girl, twelve at the oldest, has risen to her feet. Bloodied, cradling herself. Kandri looks around for something to cover her, but when he turns, she shoves past him and flees through the open door.

  By the guttering candlelight, the dead man’s blade gleams like gold.

  Voices, gasps, men and women flitting past the doorway. Kandri curses in a nonstop whisper. He must get out of here, back to his tent; he must somehow clean the gore from his pants. Drunken fights are one thing, murder of a fellow soldier another. If they learn who did it, if someone, anyone talks . . . .

  The corpse lies face-down. Who are you? Why the fuck do yo
u smell like Skem? But in fact, the reek of cloves is gone. Has he imagined it? Is he truly going mad?

  He slides his boot under the man’s ribcage, lifts. The corpse flops over—and Kandri hurls himself back with a moan, not believing what he sees.

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”

  The dead man is Ojulan. He has killed the Prophet’s favorite son.

  II. A VOID

  Wicked child, by whose leave do you play with those embers?

  Were you not raised in a village of straw?

  CHILOTO FOLKSONG

  He picks up the machete. He lurches over the corpse, deeper into the shack. As though it were big enough to hide him. As though he could wait this out under the bed. The man’s half-severed neck is almost in the doorway. The blood is steaming in the chill night air.

  Ojulan had lunged with the mattoglin. His severed hand still clutches the priceless weapon, blood smearing the golden script. Mouth and eyes both open. His bare legs look strangely contented.

  The candle goes out.

  Kandri gropes in the darkness. Something clean. On the straw mattress are underthings, a doll, and a reek of different blood, the girl’s. He turns and plunges across the room. A bucket. A stool. At last a second bed, and a rough woolen blanket.

  In the street, a woman calls out, her voice low with terror: Sadina, where are you?

  Kandri wipes furiously at his arm. Then he crouches and begins to swab his boots.

  There is a blaze of lamplight: half a dozen figures are crowding the door. Villagers, silent and gaping. The one with the lamp, an old man with a face like a shriveled plum, bends to peer at the corpse. Then his eyes stab up at Kandri.

  “You son of a worm-eaten bitch! They are going to kill us!”

  “Help me,” says Kandri.

  “Help you! We should cut off your balls! Or lock you in here and burn the place down. Save your army friends the trouble.”

  “The girl,” says Kandri, “is she—”

  “What girl, you talking turd?”

  Kandri’s head is reeling. “He was fucking her.”

  “And for that you kill him? Was she yours or something?”

  “Not a whore. A girl. Didn’t you see her?”

  The change that comes over their faces is something he will never forget. They look at one another, naked with horror and revulsion. A woman hides her mouth in her hands.

  “Sadina. Where is Sadina? Athiri Ang—”

  Hers, the voice that had called in the street. She breaks and runs. Kandri points a finger: the doll has fallen to the bloody floor.

  “I had to,” he says. “She was screaming. Can’t you see I had to?”

  Silence. The old man passes the lamp into another’s hands and steps up to Kandri. His eyes are streaming but his movements are precise. He looks at Kandri’s blood-spattered clothes.

  “Boy,” he says, “you should kill yourself. Hurry and do it. For your own sake, not ours.”

  There are murmurs of agreement. Kill yourself, kill yourself. Someone fetch him a razor, better this way than—

  A jolt, a whisper. Suddenly everyone is fleeing for the lives. Someone is coming; there can be no other explanation. In seconds, he is once more alone.

  Except for one figure. A thin, sharp-elbowed woman, his age or slightly younger, has pushed forward while the others fled. Now she tears the blanket from his hands and spreads it on the floor. She takes the corpse by the ankles.

  “Lift!”

  He obeys, grabs Ojulan under the armpits. A bad dream. The head dangling, the mouth still open, the gleam of golden teeth. They place the corpse on the blanket, toss in his clothes and the doll and the mattoglin, the girl’s clothes, the bloodied sheets. They fold the blanket shut and lift. The woman gasps, and he recalls the first time, his first body, the shocking weight of the dead.

  They step out of the shack. The old man is waddling toward them with a bucket of water. He waves at them, frenzied.

  “Run. Run. Take it away.”

  “Is the girl with her mother?”

  “How should I know? Harach, Eshett, just get out of here!”

  They run, Kandri and the woman, the leaden corpse swaying between them. Down alleys, through gates, over the tilled earth of lightless gardens, the young plants crushed beneath their feet. The moonlight weak and watery: he can barely see the woman, let alone the path ahead. Voices blow on the night breeze, clipped oaths, muffled cries. He braces for the roar of soldiers, the sudden barked command.

  Or nothing. Arrows. We’re obviously stealing, and thieves are shot on sight.

  The walls about them vanish. Tall grass sighs around his legs. They have left the town and are thrashing across some fallow field. The woman falls, curses, rises with a groan. He can’t recall if she has shoes.

  He understands why they must do this, why they must bear Ojulan far from any home. The old man will be furiously cleaning, tidying, trying to wash away the blood. It will not be enough. The Prophet will have vengeance. If she cannot blame someone, she will blame everyone; she will put the whole village to the torch.

  The grass turns to thickets. They pass through a dry wash and over a low hill, and then the woman drops the blanket, letting the corpse fall to earth. She bends double, utterly winded, her gasping so loud he fears it will give them away.

  But there is no sound of pursuit, only the distant croaking of frogs about some wallow or water tank. And by the dim moonlight he sees why she has stopped. A shoulder-high barrier stretches across their path. It is a wall of beaten mud.

  After a moment, she gestures at the wall. “This is the place. We’ll heave him over. No one lives nearby.”

  “They’ll find him.”

  A snorting laugh. “You think?”

  He could almost laugh himself: the hopelessness, his idiotic words. This is Lord Ojulan. They will find him anywhere. They will peel the skin from the earth.

  Now he can smell it. Ojulan’s blood, soaking through his trousers, drying on the hairs of his forearms. He is shaking, he is damned. He sets his back to the cool mud wall.

  They are common, these walls, the remains of cattle stockades from a time when the Mileya enjoyed more rain. The woman staggers about, catching her breath. After a moment, she nears him and brings her square-jawed face close to his own.

  “Did he shove his prick in her?”

  Kandri cannot speak, and so his silence speaks. The woman turns and kicks savagely at the corpse. She drops, stifling a scream, both hands gripping her foot. Kandri winces: she was shoeless after all.

  “You kicked his mattoglin, I’m guess,” says Kandri. “You’re lucky you didn’t break a toe.”

  “Maybe I did. Togra katakuch! The shithog. That girl is nine years old.”

  Kandri gropes for the edges of the blanket. Still cursing, the woman rises, and together they lift the body and tip it over the wall. A soft thud and a crackle of underbrush. It is done.

  “I’m sorry,” says Kandri.

  The woman snorts again. “You just threw your life away, for a girl you don’t even know. We call you names, threaten you, tell you to take your own life. And then you help with the corpse. You’re sorry? We should be kissing your feet.”

  Kandri thinks of those moments of stillness, of cowardice. Staring at the cracked door, whispering his threats.

  “The Pilgrim is returning,” she says.

  Her words startle him, although he already knows. The Pilgrim is the world’s second moon. A nomad, it appears in the skies every twenty-one years, and stays barely a month. But in that brief season, nature loses her mind: darkness never falls, things weigh less than they should, ocean tides swallow the shore. Kandri has seen the Pilgrim only once, as a child of three. But he can still recall that reddish eye over the mountains, the trembling of the earth, and the feeling of precarious lightness, as though at any moment his small body could take to the sky.

  This time next year it will all be happening again.

  “What does the Pilgrim have to do with Ojul
an?” he demands.

  “Nothing, until you killed him,” she says. “But there’s talk of ruin next year, of madness. And there are signs already. People say the yatra strangled a man in his bed. Maybe that’s a lie, but what about the other stories? A blue dog outside the temple, scratching at the door. And a rattlesnake, a sidewinder, curled up in the alms bowl, behind a locked door. The villagers are out of their heads with worry. They brought in an old priest to bless the town, but he just pissed everyone off. Instead of telling them how to stop the bad luck, he said it had barely started; he raved about death and blood and fire from the Gods, until no one could stand it anymore. We couldn’t sleep. That old man had no mercy.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Stopped feeding him. The next morning he was gone.”

  What is that accent of hers, singsong and bitter at once? Kandri cannot place it, but he knows he has heard it before—years ago, or decades.

  In the darkness, a slurping sound: the woman is sucking the loose end of her sarong.

  “Why are you doing that?” asks Kandri.

  “Blood spots.”

  He’s impressed: this woman means to survive. They get to their feet, and she leads him south along the wall. Somewhere ahead he hears the clanging of goat bells.

  “Listen,” he says, “was there a drug seller in the village tonight? A mean bastard, pushing wax?”

  “You mean Skem?” she says. “Of course he was there. He arranges everything for Ojulan when that pig wants a young girl. Wanted, I mean.”

  Kandri draws a hand over his face. All so simple. A whiff of clove oil, a death. But what if he hadn’t thought he was fighting Skem? Can he even pretend he would have found the courage to fight a Son of Heaven? Or would he have pretended to hear nothing, walked right by?

  The image of the girl rises suddenly in his thoughts. Naked and so very tiny, like something skinned. What if they come looking for her in the morning? And this woman—