Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  PRAISE FOR MASTER ASSASSINS

  “This book has everything I love: Clean, crisp worldbuilding. Characters that live and breathe. A story that teases and surprises me. I like Master Assassins so much I wish I’d written it, but deep down, I know I couldn’t have written it this well.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss

  “The prose is spectacularly good. Your adrenaline will flow. Your emotions will be toyed with. You will find yourself drawn in, turning the pages and worrying that fewer and fewer remain. I read a lot of good books. Quite a few very good books. This is one of the rare 6-star series openers I’ve encountered.”

  —Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns and Red Sister

  “Robert Redick really nailed this one. What a great story! Fascinating plot and characters, and all of the author’s formidable skills at play. I cannot wait to read the next one.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Terry Brooks

  “An exquisitely written mix of heart-stopping action, masterful storytelling, and enchantment. Redick is a gifted wordsmith with a ferocious imagination. Master Assassins will produce many sleepless nights. I guarantee it.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Mira Bartók

  “A blazingly smart thrill-ride of an adventure. The world of Master Assassins is deep, mysterious, terrifying, and utterly real, and I’ll follow Redick’s heroes, the mismatched brothers Kandri and Mektu, wherever they go in it. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.”

  —Daryl Gregory, author of Spoonbenders

  “With spare, sharp-edged prose, Redick balances his rollicking adventure story against a tale of love and uneasy brotherhood, offering a thrilling glimpse into a world both haunting and haunted. His finest work to date.”

  —Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection

  ALSO BY ROBERT V.S. REDICK

  THE CHATHRAND VOYAGE QUARTET

  The Red Wolf Conspiracy

  The Rats and the Ruling Sea

  The River of Shadows

  The Night of the Swarm

  Copyright © 2018 by Robert V.S. Redick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Redick, Robert V. S., author.

  Title: Master assassins / Robert V.S. Redick.

  Description: New York : Talos Press, [2018] | Series: The Fire Sacraments ; book 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017031355 (print) | LCCN 2017037004 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781945863202 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781945863370 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.E4336 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.E4336 M37 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031355

  Cover artwork by Lauren Saint-Onge

  Cover design by Shawn T. King

  Map illustration by Thomas Rey

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Bogor City, and the kids who teased me there.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Even a cursory reading of this book should make clear that the religions of Urrath are fictions with no Terran equivalents. Given the extent of prejudice and misinformation about Islam, however, I wish to state unequivocally that the Prophet of The Fire Sacraments is neither inspired by nor derived in any way from the Prophet Muhammad.

  Down the fanatic, down the clown;

  Down, down, hammer them down

  YEATS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  I. ETERNITY CAMP

  II. A VOID

  III. YSKRALEM

  IV. VISION

  V. GIVE YOUR SOUL

  VI. A LIFE WORTH LIVING

  I. ETERNITY CAMP

  Here is the door you have been seeking,

  Behind it the promised flood.

  KASRAJI INCANTATION

  By the third day the rumor can no longer be contained. It is whispered in the black tents, shared like smokes among the men on patrol, murmured in the drill yard before the bellowed morning prayer. It is weird and horrific and yet a curse no one can fail to understand. Someone’s mind has been stolen, and the thief still walks the camp.

  The signs are innumerable. The Master of Horses finds two stallions lamed overnight. An armory clerk displays a broadsword twisted into a spiral like a blade of grass. A cook discovers worms thick as men’s fingers writhing in the belly of a well-roasted boar. And the Prophet’s eldest son has a toothache.

  These calamities, and others shared over dawn biscuits or evening rubbish-fires or blazing midday marches, point to a single conclusion. The camp is under attack, and the assailant can only be a yatra, a spirit-thief, which as everyone knows can work dark magic from within its victim’s pilfered soul.

  Kandri Hinjuman, Distinguished Corporal, smiles at this talk of possession, but the frowns of his fellow soldiers bring him quickly to his senses. The Prophet’s Firstborn! Nothing touching that family is a matter for mirth. The son’s toothache, moreover, has struck just hours after he announced the date of the spring offensive. And isn’t the boar his gift to the soldiers, in honor of the victories ahead?

  Kandri tries to drop the matter—sorcery isn’t high on his list of preoccupations; they’re at war—but to his surprise, the hostile looks only multiply, as though he has crossed some threshold of recklessness. Finally, one evening after final prayers, a sergeant beckons him near.

  “It’s not you,” he whispers. “It’s that half-brother of yours.”

  “Mektu, sir?” Kandri jumps, startling the man. “What the hell has he done now?”

  “Talk, that’s what,” says the sergeant. “He won’t shut up about the yatra, and he’s got the men scared to death. It’s the way he tells the stories. It’s the look on his face.”

  Kandri understands the sergeant all too well, and that night he barely sleeps. In the morning, anxious and miserable, he prowls the camp until he locates his brother.

  “You jackass,” he says. “You’ll get us killed, talking like that.”

  They are behind a recreation tent on the camp’s southern perimeter; the air reeks of cane liquor and unwashed men. An impenetrable wall of fishhook-tree branches cuts off the view of the drylands beyond. It is very early: Kandri hears the flat, tireless tolling of goat bells as a herd flows around a corner of the thorn wall, and a child’s laugh, and the rising chord of the fiddler trees, aerial roots rasping one on another, singing home the little brown bats that roost in their arms.

  “Us?” says Mektu.

  “Of course us,” Kandri snaps. “The Prophet knows who our father is. She knows everything about the Old Man.”

  Mektu raises an eyebrow, as if to say, Not everything.

  Kandri shakes his head. “What a pig you are,” he says. “I hope they send you off to fight ghouls in the marshes. I’d do a dance, I swear.”

  Mektu shakes his head. “You’d miss me. Everyone needs someone they can trust.
”

  Kandri can’t quite keep the smile off his face. Mektu laughs aloud, throws an arm over his shoulder, kisses his forehead. Kandri is laughing too, but perhaps he tenses at his brother’s touch, for Mektu abruptly releases him and steps back.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  He is a lean soldier with a spine that is never quite straight. His laugh has something of a horse’s whinny; his eyes meander like gnats. Kandri is shorter but more sound. He has bested Mektu often at wrestling and battle-dance, which are juried sports in the Army of Revelation. But he has also seen his half-brother drunk and brawling, and hopes never to fight him in earnest.

  “How do you know it’s a yatra?” Kandri demands. “Bad things happen all the time.”

  “That’s the proof,” says Mektu. “Each day’s worse than the one before. Betali thinks it was called out of the desert by a witch.”

  “Betali’s a fool. And high before breakfast. Last week he said he was engaged to a goat.”

  Mektu’s face darkens. “It’s here, brother,” he says.

  “Then whose mind has it taken? No one knows. No one ever knows.”

  “What if I told you I did?”

  Kandri turns him a wry smile, but the look fades quickly into one of alarm. “You don’t really,” he murmurs. “Do you?”

  Among the worst powers ascribed to a yatra is the ability to sense when it has been detected. To look out through stolen eyes, read the faces around it, and know who has guessed the truth. Such persons are doomed; the yatra will not rest until it kills them.

  Mektu snaps a branch from the fishhook-tree fence. He draws his thumb over a long, savage thorn.

  “You’ve never faced one,” he says.

  Kandri bites his lips. He’s heard the stories, from the time before he came to live with Mektu and the rest of the family. Absurd stories, conflicting, intractable as weeds. How a yatra assaulted their little brother, the youngest, who still sleeps with a knife in his hand. Or was the target that spinster aunt, who set the orphanage on fire? Or their father, who rises, dresses, unlocks gates, walks for miles in his sleep? Or Mektu himself?

  “There’s never any proof,” Kandri hears himself say. “I don’t believe the damned things exist.”

  “Four cases last year.”

  Kandri chuckles. Four rumored yatras in the world’s greatest army. All of them elsewhere, naturally: in some mountain division or wilderness fort, never here in Eternity Camp where the question might be settled. But perhaps this time it will be settled. The eldest son has a toothache, after all.

  Then he sees the flash of red on Mektu’s finger, bright in the morning sun. “Never laugh at them,” says his half-brother. “They can’t stand it when you laugh.”

  Many nights thereafter, in the wastes and hovels and palaces of Urrath, Kandri will lie brooding on the power of shame. What did he unleash, by laughing at Mektu then? If he had summoned more patience, if he had listened to his half-brother’s ravings a bit more generously, if he had simply kept his silence, everything might have been different. Even the murders, even that catastrophic night. His feet might have carried him elsewhere; he might never have glimpsed the crooked shack or heard the cries from within. He and Mektu might still be as they once were: unnoticed, invisible, far less than a footnote to this war.

  Imagine that, he will think. To be ordinary, to be something the world overlooks. No one’s obsession, no one’s idea of evil incarnate, blood traitors, spears hurled with cold precision at the Gods.

  That evening the brothers meet again. Kandri is in their unit’s dinner line, which snakes out of the mess tent and into the yard. The area is crowded with fighting men seated on stumps and makeshift benches, eating from tin plates and calabashes, waving away flies. Boys from the village hover about the edges of the yard, laughing and horsing around, waiting for the peels and bones and gristle their mothers will transform into soup.

  Mektu steps from the tent and approaches him, wearing an odd little smile. “Bugger off,” he says.

  Kandri scowls. “What the hell is your problem? You walked up to me.”

  Mektu shakes his head. “They’re going to throw us at the Ghalsúnay again. Just us, the Eighth Legion, against the same pricks who cut us to ribbons two years ago. I meant Crol kira. Bug over, bugger out. You’re with me, aren’t you?”

  His brother is still smiling. Kandri feels his blood run cold. He turns away, furiously composed, and walks straight out of the yard. Mektu is speaking of desertion, of bugging out. He has garbled the phrase in Kasraji, the world’s dying common tongue, but then helpfully repeated himself in the language of their clan, which nearly everyone in the army speaks. It is the act of a lunatic. Only your love, children, can light the way to Heaven’s Path, the Prophet teaches. Without that flame we are lost, all of us, and the world shall wither like a seedling in a cave. Love is compulsory. Even a dispirited sigh can mean punishment. Desertion means death by torture, live coals in the eye sockets, shards of glass down the throat.

  Kandri smokes for an hour behind his legion’s stables, hiding from Mektu, squatting low on his heels. Dinner is over; he won’t get a crumb before breakfast. And tonight he will have to avoid the drinking areas. His brother will appear in one of them to play his allotted role in the camp, somewhere between daring eccentric and despised clown. It has always been the same with Mektu: the amusing stories, the elaborate jokes. The poetry committed to memory, lofty or obscene. The brilliant vocal impressions. Kandri’s brother can draw an audience just by opening his mouth.

  But only a fool seeks attention in Eternity Camp. Before the yatra panic began, there was talk of a new and horrific loyalty test, conceived by the Prophet’s seers in the bowels of the Palace of Radiance, a means of distinguishing between the faithful and the false. Does such a test truly exist? And if it does, how would each of them fare?

  I might pass, Kandri thinks. I might get that lucky. He would not.

  For Mektu has a gift for saying the wrong thing. You can take him to a birthday party and count the minutes until he makes a child cry. At weddings, he is apt to mention the last woman the groom has slept with (“You’re a lucky girl, Chelli. Just ask Sukina.”) Kandri once dragged him to the hospital to visit their dying grandmother; Mektu lectured her about the dangers of sunstroke, and propositioned the nurse.

  You could only shake your head. And find a way to protect yourself, of course. To help your brother without wearing him like a chain.

  They are not close, Kandri reminds himself. They call each other “brother,” dropping the half-, and burn sage for their ancestors, and swap shirts on New Year’s morning like all brothers in the Chiloto clan. Yet what do such courtesies change? Blood means nothing, finally, and a man who pokes tigers with a stick will one day be mauled. You can take the stick away, but he’ll find another. Last week the Prophet’s youngest son, a boy barely into his teens, stabbed the village tailor and set fire to his shop. The old man had mended his vest with the wrong color thread. Sticks are everywhere. You have to walk about with closed fists or they will jump into your hands.

  But can it possibly be true? Another assault on the Ghalsúnay? Kandri nurses his cheroot down to a lip-scorching bud. He thinks: Chindilan, that’s a question for Chindilan. The Master Smith knows more about what is going on in the sprawling camp than anyone. He is no gossip; it is merely that the officers confide in him while he repairs their sabers, their bejeweled daggers and qamas and mattoglins, all those distinguishing blades. They like him, those officers. He asks no favors, drops no hints about the lightness of his purse. He simply works, and listens to their chatter, and no one ever learns what he overhears—no one save the brothers, that is.

  Kandri leaves his hiding place, wades back into the evening throng. Great rows of tents and barracks, some a mile long or more, channel the men into surging lines. In the twilight, cheers and laughter, empty bottles, ribald songs. Priests in plum-colored robes move among the soldiers, lofting shepherds’ sticks. From each stick dan
gles a paper lamp, and within each of these fragile spheres dances an uncanny flame, some mixture of oils that shimmer from green to blue to yellow, and moan like the wind in a cave. Ghost lamps, calling to the ancestral dead, seeking their aid against the yatra.

  Kandri squeezes north through the crowd, in the direction of the weapons shop. Eternity Camp is a ramshackle city, a glued-together mass of shabby wards pertaining to the many branches of the Army of Revelation. At its center squats the Palace of Radiance, a hulking complex built on the spot where the last Važek governor was hanged, ending six centuries of occupation and massacres for the Chiloto people.

  Around the palace walls, thirty thousand soldiers make their homes under canvas or tin. Another forty thousand are dispersed among the various fronts. Recently the most savage fighting has been in the north. The Prophet has taken land from the Važeks there; she will take everything from the Važeks, one day.

  The brothers made the march into Važenland during their second deployment. Perhaps because they had some slight medical training—or perhaps because Chindilan had called in a favor—they were sent into the front-line carnage less often than many. Long weeks of guilt and nausea lard Kandri’s memories of that campaign: prayers for the men he dragged back from the lines, prying their hands from arrows before they ripped them out and bled to death, stuffing viscera back into bellies, trying to distinguish burned clothes from skin.

  They were resented: in that medical rear guard, survival was more likely than not. A year later, when they fought the Ghalsúnay, there was no rear guard, and no true front for that matter. Only doomed incursions into dry wooded hills, blundering and panic, slaughter from every side.

  He shakes his head. There are memories and memories, the Prophet teaches. One sort is a chalice of fire and a sacrament, the other a cup of poison, drawn from black swamps of despair. He will not drink from the swamp. After all, it is a night of comforts: the first of three comprising the Feast of the Boar. The holiday is a great favorite, the army’s only bacchanal. It ends on the solemn Day of Revelation, which marks the Prophet’s first encounter with the Gods and the start of her journey on Heaven’s Path.