Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

“Close gently. That’s right.”

  The colonel withdraws his hand. Kandri stiffens: Idaru has placed an object in the pouch of his cheek. And his men, all of them, have aimed their spears in his direction.

  “Speak through your teeth,” says the colonel. “Don’t move your jaw until I say so. Your life depends on your obedience.”

  Sweat breaks out all over Kandri’s body. The thing in his mouth is light and brittle, like a hollow egg. A hint of sugar teases his tongue.

  “Colonel, what in Ang’s name—” Chindilan starts forward, but Idaru’s look stops him cold.

  “Keep still,” he says. “This is no punishment. Corporal Hinjuman is among the first to be honored with this chance to prove his loyalty. And to place a new tool in the arsenal of the Prophet. We hope to use this test often in the future—if all goes well.”

  The new test, Kandri thinks. It’s real. Ang all-merciful, I’m going to die.

  “There is an insect in your mouth,” says the colonel. “Or more precisely, a chrysalis. The vermin itself is dormant, but the warmth of your blood will change that. Any moment now—”

  Kandri gives a distorted cry. Something has twitched inside the shell.

  “Do not touch your cheek!” snaps Idaru. “Stop that shaking at once.”

  “I’m loyal,” Kandri pleads through locked teeth. “I love the Prophet, her feet walk Heaven’s—”

  “The insect is an ash locust,” says the colonel. “It has neither bite nor sting. But the fluid inside the chrysalis is a contact poison. Should it touch your flesh, you will be paralyzed. First your facial muscles, then your throat. Eventually, your lungs and heart.”

  Kandri starts to plead again, but the colonel silences him with a gesture. “If you are loyal, you have nothing to fear. The chrysalis alone is almost too fragile to touch, but we have glazed it with another substance. A rather extraordinary substance: a sugar that dissolves more quickly in a liar’s mouth than that of an honest man. Do you follow? Speak falsely, and the shell will rupture before I finish my questions. Speak the truth and live.”

  Kandri stares at the colonel, rigid with horror. He can distinctly taste the sugar now. His uncle’s chest is heaving, his big hands forming fists.

  “Kandri Hinjuman,” says Idaru, “are you a loving servant of Her Radiance the Prophet? A nod will suffice.”

  Suffice to kill me? He cannot help the thought. He dares not hesitate. He nods.

  The locust twitches, and so does Kandri—every part of him, save his face. “And are you a willing soldier in this war?” asks Idaru.

  Sweetness coats Kandri’s tongue, but in his mind a strange cold has descended. Is he willing? Is any part of him still true?

  He nods. The locust is squirming violently, now; the shell quivers and jumps.

  “Colonel Idaru,” pleads Chindilan. “This is a flawless soldier you’re experimenting on. He nearly met his death in the Ghalsúnay campaign. He had an audience with the Prophet herself. He’s one of us. I’ll stake my life on that.”

  The colonel turns to Chindilan with deliberate slowness. “If you value him so, why delay me with these outbursts? You may doom an innocent man—if he is innocent.”

  Another extravagant pause. At last, his gaze returns to Kandri.

  “One more question,” he says. “Is there any person in this camp—anyone at all—whose loyalty you doubt?”

  Kandri closes his eyes, and in the darkness, Mektu’s face appears like a sallow bloom. His crooked grin, his provocations, his hopeless dreams of escape. The insect writhes; the shell bulges. He shakes his head.

  “Spit it out!” snaps the colonel.

  Kandri doubles over. The chrysalis drops from his mouth, slick and translucent. Even as it strikes the dirt it ruptures, and a barbed, black leg twitches free. Then it’s gone, crushed by the colonel’s boot. Idaru sets a hand on Kandri’s arm.

  “Rejoice,” he says. “This too is part of winning the war. You have both faith and courage—and from this moment, no one may question them. Our Prophet shall hear of your strength today, Corporal Hinjuman. That’s a promise.”

  He is seated in the dust, knees raised, head thrown back against the wall. Chindilan is cleaning his tools, hands shaking; he has yet to breathe a word. Idaru and his men have departed with the golden blade.

  The test failed. Kandri dares not say it, even to Chindilan. But in his mind there is no doubt. Perhaps, in some wildly unlikely way, he was truthful in his first two answers. But not the third. Mektu is no more a loyal soldier than he is a lamb chop. Kandri has just lied for him. By rights he should be dead.

  Kandri looks at the flattened insect. A new tool in the arsenal of the Prophet. A useless tool, apparently. How many times has it been tested? Has it killed true believers, just because their nerves betrayed them? Or did something more than blind luck save Kandri’s life?

  “Uncle,” he says, “my brother wants to bug out.”

  Chindilan leans hard on his workbench.

  “He said the same to me this afternoon. I kicked him right out of the shop. You can’t fucking run, I told him. You can bitch, drink, use wax, chew gumroot. You can fight and whore around with village girls. But not run. A man who runs is a man who’s stopped believing, and that can’t be overlooked. Now go and straighten out your head.”

  “He didn’t listen, did he?”

  The smith turns, his upper lip curled in anger. “Do you know what he was doing, the whole time I spoke? He was staring up at the mountain. And when I finished, he said, ‘With a fast horse, I could be there before anyone missed me. In two days, I’d be home.’”

  Kandri shuts his eyes. Mektu would never make it home. And if he did, he could only bring death to their family and friends. The Sataapre Valley is still beautiful, still green. But its rulers serve the Prophet now, and every street has its spy.

  “That’s what he meant when he asked if I was with him,” says Kandri. “Gods, what can you do with such a fool?”

  He locks eyes with Chindilan, and there is a wariness between them, sudden and immense.

  “Because you know, even if someone thought they had a chance—”

  “Not that way,” says Chindilan.

  “Not that way, exactly. Any idiot could come up with a better plan—I don’t mean better, I mean smarter. A more cunning plan.”

  “As a pastime. As a game in the head.”

  “The smartest way to run off. I mean for a traitor to run off. We’re just thinking, for the sake of a game.”

  “No crime in that,” says the smith.

  They cast nervous glances at the doorway. Kandri can feel his own face, his false smile, like something carved out of wood. “You’d . . . have to run east, I suppose.”

  Chindilan nods, looking strange and miserable. “Straight east,” he says, “like fire-walkers running through coals. Across the Windplain, down the cliffs, through the wastes of the Stolen Sea, if that’s even possible. And then, Gods help you. Because—think about it, now—where could you be aiming for, ultimately? The desert, Kandri? The Sumuridath Jal?”

  “You’d have to be crazy,” says Kandri. Sumuridath Jal: the Land that Eats Men.

  “And what about your eyes?” asks Chindilan. “The whole world knows what the Prophet pays for deserters. What’s the first thing a bounty hunter looks at?”

  “The eyes, Uncle. I know.”

  New soldiers in the Army of Revelation are taken to a darkened hut where the extract of a certain cactus is dribbled into their eyes. The pain is terrible but fades within hours. What never fades is a slight purple staining of the eyeball. The stain is invisible beyond a yard or two, but up close, it is unmistakable. Every last soldier bears the mark.

  Chindilan shakes his head. “Bounty men, bandits, slavers. They’d pounce on a deserter like cats on cream.”

  “You’d have to run far,” says Kandri. “Impossibly far. South of the Blue Mountains, maybe. Or Kasralys City, where the desert ends. Is Kasralys as magnificent as they claim, Uncle?” />
  Chindilan shrugs. “It’s a wonder of the world, boy. Everyone knows that.”

  Kandri’s voice quickens. “Our captain says that before the Quarantine, people crossed the ocean just to see Kasralys. Which means there’s nothing like it anywhere, not even in the Outer World—”

  He jumps. Chindilan is scowling, as though visited by a dreadful thought.

  “Uncle,” says Kandri, “you know I wasn’t really—”

  “Shut the fuck up. Of course.”

  Their mouths close like drop gates. They watch the bats fly in circles. A lamp abruptly winks out.

  “Mektu saved my life,” says Kandri. “At the end of the first Ghalsúnay campaign. We were fleeing, the bastards had chased us to the river, someone cracked my skull with a stone—”

  “I heard all about it,” says the smith. “Not from Mektu; he never boasted about that day. It was that friend of his, old flappy-ears.”

  “Betali.”

  “Right,” says Chindilan. “He said that when you fell, the others left you for dead. That they were trampling you.”

  “I can’t remember a thing after the stone,” says Kandri.

  “Mektu carried you for five hours, on his back. They tried to make him abandon you. One man even seized your arm and tugged. I guess he thought that if Mektu dropped you, he’d never have the strength to pick you up again.

  “Mek didn’t drop you, but he did lay you flat. Then he turned to the man who had grabbed you and beat him until the man curled up, begging for mercy through his broken teeth. Mek lifted you up again and carried you another four miles, to the field camp.”

  “He did that? For me?”

  The blacksmith nods. “You had better learn to talk to him, Kandri. Now give me a hand.”

  They lower the chains, extinguish the oil lamps one by one. When the last flame dies, only the glow from the furnace remains. They stand before its scarlet maw, warming themselves, two shadows reluctant to fade into the night.

  “I promised the Old Man I’d protect you both,” says Chindilan. “I swore it the day you enlisted. But there’s nothing else I can do for your brother. I’ve tried, Kandri. I’ve tried more than you know.”

  “Never mind,” says Kandri. “I’ll make him listen, or I’ll break his legs. The crazy fuck. He shouldn’t be here at all.”

  Chindilan looks up sharply. In his eyes, further treason, another glance at the abyss. None of us should be here, says the look.

  The half-brothers were born three days apart. For over a decade neither suspected the other’s existence.

  Kandri lived in a ramshackle house on Candle Mountain, in the Coastal Range, with his mother and a blind cook and a stream of orphans delivered without comment by the Old Man. Kandri could not see the ocean, but late afternoons he could see the sunlight glancing off the ponds, streams, and fish tanks of the Sataapre Valley. Turning east, he looked up at Green Pass. That name was a stale joke: nothing was green at those altitudes save the lichen and the mold on the flatbread.

  The house wheezed and shifted in the constant winds. In plain truth it had once been a horse barn, and was still divided into stalls. For years Kandri slept under the words SPECKLED HEN, painted in a ghostly blue above his bed. He supposed it referred to a particularly favored horse.

  Kandri’s mother Uthé kept goats rather than horses. She made goat cheese for the mountain farmers and sold their wool in fine black bolts and worked their dung into the stony soil. Kandri held her in awe. She wove snares for grouse and partridges. She fried goat intestines with salt and chilies. She coaxed beans and root vegetables from their fragile garden, and somehow, even in the dead of winter, the food never quite ran out.

  But she drew the line at the orphans. “Not one night,” she told Kandri’s father. “You bring them with coin enough to pay for their food, or don’t bring them at all.” Lantor Hinjuman grinned and shrugged his shoulders, but he never crossed Uthé in the matter.

  The orphans came from the east, from the desert or its margins. There was fighting in those lands, and also something that drew his father, who crossed the pass several times a year. Kandri dreamed of these visits. His father was no good, of course (all the mountain folk concurred in this), but when he stomped into the yard and sought them out with his gaze, something kindled in Kandri’s heart, and his breath came easier for a time.

  In his earliest memories, his father brings gifts. If he had come from the Sataapre it was fruit and sweets—and occasionally, astonishing toys he built himself. These creations were the pinnacle of wonder in Kandri’s first years and left him in no doubt that his father was a magician. There was a delicate spider—bone, wire, bristle-covered feet—that could scurry across a floor and, meeting a wall, ascend it all the way to the ceiling. There was an iron dragon with a water reservoir in its chest and a space for live coals in its belly; it whistled, blew clouds of steam from its nostrils, opened its jaws and spat sparks. Most beloved of all was a gleaming, articulated copper snake (“A sidewinder,” said the Old Man) that slithered with a strange hypnotic pattern when set on the hot stone of the winter hearth, and wound itself into a perfect coil, as if going to sleep, as it cooled.

  “Our secret,” his father would proclaim with a hard but happy glance before presenting one of these marvels. “Never a word about these to anyone, save your mother and the orphans, you understand? And never outside the house. And hide them all away if a visitor should call.”

  Kandri promised, but disaster struck all the same. In his sixth year, on midsummer’s day, he yielded to the temptation to see if the patio stones, throbbing with heat, might bring his snake to life in the same manner as the hearthstone. The question was answered in a matter of seconds: the snake took off across the patio, a wriggle of copper lightning. Kandri laughed and gave chase—and then the old tomcat that roamed the fields appeared out of nowhere, pounced on the snake, and vanished with it into the sloughberry thicket behind the house.

  Uthé Hinjuman turned pale when Kandri admitted what he had done. The wild sloughberries ranged over six acres, giving way eventually to brambles and gorse. Kandri’s mother slashed her way through the thicket for days in search of the toy—and not, Kandri knew somehow, out of any concern for his loss. When Lantor Hinjuman paid a visit a fortnight later, she made Kandri stand before him and confess. The Old Man stood frozen for a few seconds, then turned and left the property. An hour later, he was back with a neighbor’s ox and plough. He spent the next day cutting a wide furrow around the sloughberries. When nothing flammable remained in the furrow, he set the berries on fire and burned the whole six acres to ash.

  He never told Kandri whether or not he had found the snake. He never grew angry or spoke a word of reprimand. But that night he searched out every wondrous toy in the household, and took them away when he departed, and never brought such things again.

  With the years, Kandri began almost to wonder if those little miracles had been a dream. Had the dragon really belched fire? Had the spider truly climbed? It grew hard to insist on the reality of these toys when no one would speak of them, or even confirm that they had existed.

  His mother grew silent and troubled. She and Lantor Hinjuman talked less and less, but he still smiled his wolfish smile for Kandri, and he still, after a fashion, came with gifts: weird artifacts of his travels (square coins, sharks’ teeth, lizard eggs turned to stone), and once the blind cook—and often, as the war crept nearer, orphans.

  But the orphans never stayed. After a month or two, strangers would appear in the evening, share a quiet tea with Kandri’s mother, and lead the children off by the dry mountain trails. Kandri wept at these partings, even though it meant more food for the rest of them. Never once did these frightened, stick-thin waifs show the least disrespect to him or his mother or even the cook. Some spent whole days in corners, staring at the nearest window or door. Others woke howling as though stabbed in their sleep. One girl fled the house without waking and was fetched home the next day by the dog.

&nbs
p; So, life. Fourteen years in this vein. Then came a day when Kandri found his mother seated at table, stone dead, her left hand swollen and purpled like some obscene fruit by the bite of a rare plumage viper. Chin on chest. The book she’d stolen a few minutes to read before the day’s work began still open on the table. Steam rising from her teacup.

  The viper, an undeniably beautiful coil of feathery, silver-white scales, lay in the iron cauldron near the fireplace, where it had apparently crawled for warmth.

  Kandri walked to the adjacent farm, and the old couple there hired a messenger. The next day his father came from the Valley with a shovel and a mule. He chose a spot with a view of the lowlands, and with his own hands he assaulted the stony ground. Kandri watched, sick and stupid with grief, an orphan girl on either side of him clinging to his hands. Slowly, impossibly, his father cut a rectangle, a narrow wound in the earth. Kandri bethought himself and asked to take a turn with the shovel.

  “Damned right you will,” said his father, scrambling out of the grave. “Go on, the last foot is yours.”

  He slid into the hole; the earth was hard as a dish. This was where his mother would rest until the day the Gods returned.

  “No tears in the grave, boy. That’s for later, when we’ve had some rum.”

  “You’ll let me drink rum?”

  “If you stop digging like a girl, I might. Oh, quit bawling, it’s a joke. You’re a fine strong boy, she’d be proud. You can help carve her gravestone, too.”

  They buried his mother as the scriptures required: without a coffin, in a shroud of undyed wool. The stone was a mere fieldstone, dragged into place behind the mules, but when the chiseling was done, her name looked beautiful and permanent, and his father said they could come there and talk with her for the rest of their days.

  After sunset men came for the orphans. It was the last time Kandri would ever watch the strange ritual unfold. Their father paid them, something his mother had never done. No names were spoken. Kandri’s father told him to give the older girl his shoes.

  “What will I wear, then?”