Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Cow pies, you rascal. Now take those sorry things off.”

  Later they sat at table and gnawed the flatbread his mother had baked the week before. The Old Man produced a flask and shared it with Kandri, not bothering with cups. He told stories about the dead woman, who had come west with her people out of the Great Desert of Urrath. He poked Kandri in the chest: “You’re part sand panther, boy. In all the four hundred clans of Urrath, you’ll find no tougher stock. And one day you’ll prove it.” But he would say not a word about his courtship with Kandri’s mother, or why they had lived here like squatters on the chilly mountainside, while he came and went.

  Kandri had never tasted alcohol. He found himself babbling, then angry, then simply undone by grief. He lost the thread of the Old Man’s words, which meandered over scores of subjects without revealing very much.

  One last remark did emerge through the haze of that night, however. Kandri recalled it later because it seemed so baldly untrue.

  “Your home,” said his father. “Don’t speak ill of it, Kandri.”

  “I just said it was cold.”

  “Not the mountaintop, you fool. I mean the continent, all Urrath. There’s hunger here, and too much bloodshed—and ignorance, Ang knows. But there should never be shame. We lit the fire that warms the world today. Architecture, writing, music, mathematics, law: do you know what made those things possible?” He tapped his forehead. “Urrathi minds, boy. We were dancing before the Outer World learned to walk.”

  “Mathematics?” said Kandri.

  His father nodded. “You heard me.”

  Kandri looked down at the cracked plate his mother had repaired five or six times with a weak glue of bone marrow and mud. The wind moaned over the desolate fields.

  “What happened?” he said.

  The curve of his father’s mouth flattened into a line. He took the flask from Kandri’s hand.

  “Many things happened. Plague happened, and the world blamed Urrath. And there was more to it than that—violence, plunder. But go to sleep now.”

  “Someone plundered our mathematics?” said Kandri.

  His father’s fist smashed down on the table, making saucers jump. Kandri jerked away. He did not quite believe that his father would harm him. But he was appalled by the misery on the Old Man’s face.

  “I would ask you,” said his father, through his teeth, “to respect the land you come from. Can you remember that?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Then go to sleep.”

  Kandri went, his eyes moist again. He hated the Old Man—for lying about Urrath, for leaving them here on the mountain, for shedding no tears of his own. But in the dead of night, he snapped awake, imaging that someone had whispered his name. Finding himself alone nonetheless, he rose and looked out the window, and there was his father, kneeling in the dirt, rocking by his dead wife’s grave.

  The next morning, Lantor Hinjuman brought Kandri and the cook down into the splendor of the Sataapre Valley, with its lilacs and hummingbirds and smells of the life-giving sea. Kandri was frightened. Everything was decadent and damp; frogs croaked in gullies; the wooden signs at the crossroads trailed beards of gray-green moss. The village names were odd and menacing. Wolf Kill. Bittermoon. Blind Stream.

  “This is the one,” said his father. “Blind Stream Village. Welcome home.”

  The place was anything but blind. Faces peeped at them from cane thickets, curtained windows, over garden walls. Dogs snarled, roosters hurled war-screams at the sky.

  “Papa,” he said, “can I tell my new family about the toys?”

  The cook hissed through her teeth. Lantor Hinjuman stopped the cart and put his hand on the back of Kandri’s neck. It might have been a loving gesture, but the hand, the whole arm, were as rigid as wood.

  “Absolutely never,” he said.

  The house, when at last they reached it, loomed impossibly large. There were outer gates and inner gardens, breezeways, porches, a copper sundial, a balcony with a cast-iron rail. Kandri heard laughter, doors slamming, bare feet on stone. Through the nearest gate he saw brown faces, young and old, assembling in a row.

  His father opened the gate and dragged him into the courtyard. “This is Kandri, your brother,” he told his six other children.

  “WELCOME, BROTHER,” they screamed, impassive, obviously coached. Two ancient aunts mumbled prayers; an even more ancient man tapped his cane upon the stone. Kandri’s stomach churned. His old cook was led away into the house. A hound sniffed at his crotch. A smiling, slender-cheeked woman gave his cheeks a ritual dab of rosewater. His father cleared his throat and said that Kandri should call her Mother now.

  Stepmother, he thought. Replacement mother, fake.

  But the woman scolded her husband: “That’s not up to you, Old Man.” Then she fixed her big, lambent eyes on Kandri. “My name is Dyakra. I’ll be your mother if you’ll have me. But we have a duty to your birth-mother as well, child. You must honor her memory; I must honor her place in this family, and the gift she’s given us today. So call me Mother if you want to. But sometimes also call me Sepu, second mother. It will help us remember the one who came before. She will be a bond between us, not a wall.”

  Kandri bowed his head, astonished. It had never occurred to him that such kindness could exist. “Lovely, charming,” said his father. “Now come and meet your Sepu’s pack of weasels.”

  Six new siblings. Four girls, all younger. One boy still in diapers. And a second boy a little taller than Kandri, though slightly crooked at the ribs.

  This boy stepped out in front of the others. His upper lip curled. His eyes locked on the newcomer, this novelty his father had produced from thin air. Kandri could not tell if he was elated or appalled.

  “You and Mektu are the same age,” said the Old Man. “From now on, we’ll celebrate your birthdays together. Lend him those shoes, Mek, until we go shopping in town.”

  “What’ll I wear?” said Mektu.

  Morning: a smell of bile and cinders haunts Eternity Camp. Kandri is climbing the ladder of an eastern watchtower, which happens to be at the center of a camel stockade. The animals churn below him under a mantle of flies, bellowing and screaming for their morning meal. Kandri feels strong and clear-headed: to his surprise, he has slept like the dead.

  It is midwinter, the gentlest season in central Urrath. The light is crystalline, the savage heat still many weeks away. The crescent bushes that surround the camp have opened flowers small as melon seeds, and swarms of stingless wasps have appeared to lap the bounty of their juices. It cannot last, Kandri knows. Already this morning, the wind is flowing west out of the infinite desert, slow and determined, a foretaste of that scorching wind the villagers call amiuk, the dry-mouthed kiss.

  He pushes open the trapdoor. The two soldiers on the tower platform have to shuffle aside. One is a youth of no more than eighteen. He is fresh from the Sataapre, his skin still flush with the Valley’s abundant water, his expression one of perpetual, if muted, shock. The other soldier is Mektu. He scarcely glances at Kandri. He is rolling a cheroot on the rail.

  “Corporal Hinjuman,” says the new recruit to Kandri. “I chewed a silverwood twig like you told me, sir. For my throat. It stopped hurting. Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it,” says Kandri. “You’re relieved.”

  “Corporal Alar’s supposed to relieve me.”

  “We traded posts. Go on, get some breakfast.”

  The youth takes a dubious glance from the rail. “I’ll wait until they feed the camels, sir. Those sons of bitches, they bite.”

  “Only if they think you’re a lulee,” says Mektu. “You have to stand your ground. And if one of them bites you, take a stick and beat the shit out of him. It won’t happen again.”

  They bustle the youth down the ladder. Alone, neither brother finds his voice. The camels bump and jostle the tower. Mektu smokes. Kandri picks up the telescope and trains it on the south.

  “Dust on the road,” he say
s at last.

  “That’s the Fifth Legion,” says Mektu.

  “Is it, by damn?”

  “The last of them, anyway. Most crossed the Obic in the night.”

  Kandri has them in focus now: a few thousand men trudging south along the distant river, in ragged clothes but tight formation. Bound for Kiprifa, a rain-blessed land of green pastures and rice paddies, taken with ease four years ago. Kandri feels a burning envy of the Fifth Legion’s soldiers. They would see nothing of the Ghalsúnay campaign.

  “Betali’s applied to join a mounted division. The Shessel cavalry, he says.”

  Kandri shakes his head. “No one’s going to put that man on a horse. Listen, Mek—”

  “I know,” says his brother. “I have to stop talking about an escape. Well, quit your worrying. I can keep my mouth shut.”

  Kandri sighs. No, you can’t.

  As if on cue, Mektu grumbles, “Not as if you have a better plan.”

  “Suicide’s a better plan,” says Kandri. “Find a mirror. Take a look at your eyes.”

  “You can only see the stains up close,” says Mektu. “And the Valley’s a big place. We can stay away from Blind Stream. Ma can say she doesn’t know where we are.”

  “While they’re tearing out her fingernails.”

  Mektu’s body twitches. He hides his face in the crook of his elbow, a gesture he has made since childhood when overcome with feeling. Then he lowers his arm and blinks down at the camels. “You’re right,” he says.

  After a moment, Kandri says, “You were right about something too. The Offensive—”

  “I’m right about lots of things,” Mektu shouts. “I’m right about the yatra. You don’t believe in them, that’s fine, be a fool. But you, you have to laugh—”

  “Lower your fucking voice,” hisses Kandri. “I won’t laugh anymore. But promise me you’ll drop this shit about desertion.”

  Mektu’s cheroot has gone out. He sucks at it anyway, then flings it down at the camels. After a moment, he says, “Do you still think about her?”

  “About Ma? You have to ask?”

  “Not Ma.”

  Kandri grows still. He lowers the telescope. He feels as though Mektu has just turned and kicked him in the gut.

  “Of course I do,” he says.

  “I dreamed of her last night,” says Mektu. “We were on her cousins’ porch. She was playing the bandalia. I think her feet were in my lap.”

  For the first time that morning, he turns and looks at Kandri. “Do you dream about her?” he asks.

  Kandri is seething. “What kind of shit question is that? Yes, sometimes.”

  “She said she loved me. Did she ever say that to you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her, Mek.”

  “She said it more than once.”

  “Then I guess she loved you. Now shut up.”

  The second silence is deeper. All the wellbeing Kandri brought with him to the tower is gone. Love is an illness, a savage enchantment. He raises the telescope again.

  The lands about him are beautiful, blinding, cruel. Eternity Camp squats at the center of the Mileya, or Windplain. A sparse grassland, dabbed here and there with stands of brush, solitary vylk trees like giant crones buried to their necks, button cacti, villages of thirsty Chiloto goatherds. The Prophet rules the whole of the Mileya. She rules the lands beyond it also, in every direction, as far as the eye can see. It could not have been otherwise; heaven has singled her out. Ang and Surthang, supreme Gods of Life and Death respectively, have jointly informed her of her fate. She will be Empress and Lawgiver to the continent of Urrath. She will restore this land to glory and see it mocked no more by Outlanders, nor starved by their Quarantine.

  East of Eternity Camp, the grasslands start to die. There is a palsied twelve-mile swath where a few villages scratch out a living. Then dead earth. Then clay. And finally, sixteen miles off, the glittering white of the Yskralem, the Stolen Sea. It is a place of death, the Yskralem: a monstrous canyon that was once a true sea, until the rivers that fed it were diverted by the Kasraj. Beyond it somewhere are the nations of the Lutaral, still unconquered. And beyond that the desert, wider than the reach of any tales.

  Kandri swings around to face west. The mountains of the Coastal Range, the high wall between him and home. His gaze lingers on the peaks: white mists, here and there a wink of snow. He picks out Green Pass, where the road leaps the ridge and starts its winding descent to the Sataapre Valley and the sea. The pass Mektu claimed he could reach “on a fast horse” before anyone noticed that he was gone.

  A fast horse. The thought rekindles Kandri’s anger.

  “Has no one ever told you,” he says aloud, “that the Rasanga’s stallions can outrun any other horse in this army?”

  Mektu grunts, a concession. The Rasanga are the Prophet’s elite commandos and the deadliest killers in the Army of Revelation.

  “If you think for one instant that you could steal one of those horses—”

  “I don’t,” says Mektu.

  “You couldn’t steal a sandcat, either—the damned thing would kill and eat you. You might be able to steal a camel or some common horse, but even then, they’d catch you soon enough.”

  “Kan,” says Mektu, “do you want to stay here until we die?”

  To Kandri’s irritation, he has no ready answer. Mektu glances at him, fidgets, tries to straighten his spine.

  “I thought Ariqina—”

  “You bastard.”

  “We have to talk about her someday, Kandri. I thought she might have gone to Loro Canyon, or the Cotton Towns. If we went there together, if we asked around—”

  Kandri could throw him from the tower.

  “She didn’t go either of those places. We’d have heard. She went”—he forces the words out through his teeth—“somewhere very far away.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  “Gods damn it! No!”

  “I don’t know why you’re so certain. Did she tell you something?”

  “You’re fucking cracked.”

  “The Old Man was strange too, wasn’t he, when he learned that she was gone? You remember, he looked guilty, we should have stood up to him then. But we could try again with her cousins. Or the people at the clinic, or her aunt. Someone knows and isn’t talking. A person doesn’t live her whole life in a place and just disappear. She had no enemies, everyone loved her; what’s the matter with you, brother, are you sick?”

  “Mek,” he says, turning away, “nobody knows where she went.”

  After his shift in the watchtower, Kandri’s captain puts him to work on the perimeter defenses. Beyond the wall of fishhook-thorns, an earthen trench encircles the camp. The trench is divided into sections, each of which is filled waist-deep with palm fronds dipped in thick black oil. If the camp were ever besieged, any section could be set ablaze with little more than a match.

  Such barriers discourage the Prophet’s enemies, but not so the yellow mole rat, whose relentless digging crumbles the walls of the trench. Kandri and his team are walking the trench floor, stuffing arsenic-laced bread into the rodents’ burrows and sealing them with clay. It is a job he detests. The rats have other exits; some crawl out to die twitching in the moonlight. Kandri’s clothes, his skin, will reek of oil for a week.

  Mektu, as usual, has been sent to the kitchens. Kandri can picture him, grating yams, shelling palm nuts, sweating over cauldrons of soup. This morning they had parted bitterly. “You used to care about her,” Mektu had accused. “You used to grin like a fool every time she walked into a room. I was almost jealous.”

  “Almost?”

  “I should have stopped you. Told you to find your own girl. But now it’s like she never existed. You won’t even say her name.”

  The last jab is true enough. For three and a half years, Kandri has avoided speaking her name in Mektu’s presence, anyone’s presence; he has tried not to say it even to himself. And for three and a half years, Mektu has respected t
hat silence. As well he fucking should.

  Now the truce is broken, the silence gone. He will hear her footfall everywhere, hear her breathing when he breathes. At night she will speak his name with quiet laughter, drive him over hills and swamps and badlands until he wakes, bereft, groping at the air or holding his dick like a talisman, watching her fade with those sordid dreamscapes in an eyeblink or two. Even then, he will not say it. Her name, Ariqina, will be the word that dances on the tip of his tongue, the clear note above the harangues and recitations, the sour trumpets, the curses and cackling and threats, Ariqina, the name that stitches all the scraps of him together into something he admires, something worth the trouble to recall.

  Too late, he’s smiling. Broad daylight in this stinking trench and yet she’s here with him, leaning close, forcing him to meet her eye. The spark, Kandri. You can’t hide it from me. The twitch at her lip’s left corner, so small and private. He will pay for this memory with tears.

  “Hinjuman’s thought of a joke,” says the man to his right. “Either that or he’s cracking before my eyes. Make it a joke, will you, Valley boy? The filthier the better?”

  He stuffs poison into the earth. He slaps in clay. This morning he lied to Mektu. A lie he has often repeated, a lie of which he cannot repent. Ariqina did vanish, of course. Vanished utterly, and the Sataapre Valley grieved. Hundreds of men and women searched the countryside, from the lowlands to the peaks and even beyond. Her aunt consulted oracles, offered a reward. Her cousins wept; the priest who had tried to prevent her from studying medicine wept; nurses at her clinic for indigents wept; patients rose from their sickbeds to join the search. Doctors who had tried to seduce her wept on the shoulders of their wives.

  Mektu’s tears were open taps. He shouted at anyone who would listen that he had planned to marry Ariqina, that she was “the blossom of the Valley” and the woman of his destiny and dreams. And Kandri wept in secret, his grief walled in like these rats.

  He never once told Ariqina that he loved her. Not when he first understood. Not when they began to lie about their walks in the hills, hiding from Mektu, hiding the stains on their clothes. Not when her eyes grew moist and she spoke of her own love, saying she trusted him with her weakness, her ugliness, the parts of her she couldn’t love herself.