Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Kandri filled his school days with what was still allowed—math, sport, the Kasraji language, and of course religion. The latter subject was by then almost purely Orthodox Revelation, but the teacher was one of the old philosophers for whom the Prophet had a curious soft spot. Kandri loved his meandering lectures, which touched on everything from the moral superiority of animals to the wailing in the desert that was the voice of the Goddess Kumnai, Daughter of the Wind.

  Kandri was strong and excelled at sport. He liked farming, too, and above all the care of useful trees. But he knew very well what was missing from his education.

  One morning he brought his father breakfast in his study. Poached eggs, warm bread and butter, half an orange, coffee with a splash of rum. Lantor Hinjuman smiled, closed his book, and began to wolf the bread.

  Eyes discreetly lowered, Kandri asked for some lessons in history. Lantor’s chewing slowed as though the bread had turned to caramel.

  “What does a farm dog like you need with history? Learn a trade, boy. Find a wife.”

  “A wife?”

  “Don’t you dare say, ‘Or two.’”

  “I’m just sixteen, Papa.”

  The Old Man blinked at him, startled. “Whose fault is that?” he said at last. “Anyway, who’d be fool enough to teach history these days? I mean honest history. What if someone found out?”

  “You could teach me.”

  “Bugger off. Learn a trade.”

  “Then teach me a trade,” Kandri begged. In a lowered voice, he added, “Papa, teach me about machines.”

  From his first day in Blind Stream he had obeyed his father’s edict, never mentioning the walking spider, the iron dragon, the beloved copper snake. Even with Mektu he held his tongue, tempting though it was to take just one person into his confidence. Nor was there any trace of Lantor’s mechanical genius about the house. Everything was well built; nothing was remarkable. The only proof of what the Old Man could do was in Kandri’s head.

  His father locked eyes with his eggs. “Listen to me, boy. It takes a rare mind to build machines, and a rarer one to use them correctly. That’s not the sort of mind you’re equipped with. You’re a farm dog, nothing more. And one day you’ll thank me for saying so.”

  “I could have been smarter,” said Kandri, blinking back tears. “I could have started school with Mektu years ago, if we’d lived in Blind Stream. Why did you make us spend all those years on the mountain?”

  “Your birth-mother chose that place.”

  It could only be a lie; Uthé Hinjuman had detested Candle Mountain. “What could make her do that, Papa?” he asked, trying to keep the scorn from his voice. But the Old Man had turned away from him, back to his breakfast and his book.

  A week later, Kandri had lingered after school with several friends. He returned home to an astonishing scene. His sisters were flailing about the courtyard, screaming as if deranged. His baby brother was hiding under the chicken coop. Rushing into the house, Kandri found Mektu backed into a corner of the kitchen, holding a large green musk melon above his head.

  The Old Man, shirtless, stood in the middle of the room, his face dark with fury and his belt dangling from his hand like a whip. And between them stood Dyakra Hinjuman.

  “I dare you, bastard!” she shrieked at her husband. “Go on, do it! See what happens!”

  Her words frightened Kandri to his marrow. Lantor would go through her like a bull. “Run, Mek!” he shouted, preparing to do the same. His father’s breath was deep and loud.

  “I forbid it,” he said. “Do you hear me, boy? I forbid it, as your father and master of this house.”

  “Go upstairs, Lantor,” said Dyakra.

  With a terrible quickness, their father swung the belt over his head, cracking the buckle against the floor so hard Kandri could feel it through the floorboards.

  Then his pants fell to his ankles. “Go upstairs, you stupid man,” said Dyakra again.

  Lantor raised his trousers, stunned by his own violent gesture. He went upstairs. Dyakra sighed and brushed past Kandri into the yard. There, for the first and last time that Kandri would ever witness, she lit a cheroot.

  The brothers looked at each other. Kandri struggled to find his voice. “What’s the melon for?” he said at last.

  “To defend myself.”

  “Put it down. Come here.”

  Mektu was shaking; Kandri pulled him into a hug. “What the hell did you say to him?” he asked.

  “That we were going to start a troupe.”

  “A what?”

  “An acting troupe. You know, for plays? Betali and I and Sar and Ubrin. I want to be a performer, I told him.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He’s crazy, isn’t he, Kan? What if he stabs us in our sleep?”

  The Old Man was late for dinner that night. When he finally shuffled into the dining room, all six of his children took fright: he was a wreck, and still quite angry. But rather than shout he spread his arms like a man facing execution by archery.

  “Mektu my son, I’ve wronged you. I’m ashamed.”

  He dropped into his chair and began to eat, and said no more to anyone that night. And although Mektu never again dared to speak of his “acting troupe,” he woke the next morning to find nine musty volumes of epic poetry on his bedside table. His father had plucked the books from one of his tall, locked bookcases in the study. Just poetry, nothing else. The other books, all six hundred of them, remained a forbidden land.

  Kandri hated that poetry. Talking rats, hysterical lovers, fairies born in buttercups. The only book he could stand was the War Choral, a four-hundred page reminiscence about a seaside kingdom torn apart by jealousy and greed. It was an awkward poem, swinging from gruesome accounts of battlefield slaughter to abstract and interminable philosophies. Their sister Nyreti called the book a sacrilege, but Mektu fell in love with the Choral and declared his intention to commit it to memory.

  Kandri gazed at the shelves with longing: were those the sort of books Ariqina read? Travelogues and histories, true life accounts? Books about the whole of Isp’rallal, beyond Urrath’s shores? About what really happened in the world?

  One morning as Kandri was feeding the chickens, his father stepped out into the courtyard to light his pipe. Kandri took a deep breath and turned to face him.

  “It’s other people, isn’t it? Any other people, except the ones in fairy tales. You don’t want us learning about them.”

  Lantor Hinjuman started; the box of matches spilled in the dust. He spoke without lifting his eyes.

  “If you don’t like the arrangement, go and find yourself another family, another roof over your head.”

  Kandri stalked away, too furious to speak. I will, you know. Even sooner than you think.

  But that night, after the younger children were asleep, Lantor Hinjuman approached his eldest sons again.

  “Meet me in the barn in five minutes,” he said. “Bring warm clothes, and some drinking water. It’s going to be a long night.”

  The Hinjumans’ barn was a tall, narrow structure, built for cattle long since sold. The Old Man lit an oil lamp and handed it to Kandri. He produced a ring of keys and unlocked a storeroom from which he dragged the expandable ladder. They climbed to the second floor and pulled the ladder up behind them. Kandri had occasionally been sent to this second floor, to retrieve a tool or to hang bunches of longstaple tobacco to dry. But on those few occasions he had never noticed the small trapdoor in the ceiling, also padlocked, to which they ascended next. It could only lead to the hayloft, which Mektu had assured him was long abandoned.

  His father unlocked the trap door and climbed through. Mektu followed. Kandri handed the lamp up to his brother and pulled himself into the loft. And with a single glance, he knew his father had made an irrevocable choice.

  The hayloft was a secret workshop. There were long work benches, saws, planers, boilers, pedal-driven grinders and sharpening wheels, an anvil, a kiln. There were also smaller work sta
tions, with tiny precision tools dangling in neatly ordered rows on the walls. But every surface was blanketed in dust.

  “Six years,” said Lantor Hinjuman. “That’s the answer to the question you were about to ask me. Six years, except for winding now and then.”

  “Winding?” said Mektu.

  Lantor Hinjuman checked the windows: all tightly shuttered. Then he led them to a table near the center of the room and hung the lamp from a hook above. Something lay on the table beneath a dust cloth; it was about the size of a raccoon. Kandri and Mektu started, glanced at each other for confirmation: yes, a noise—an almost imperceptible whirring and ticking noise—was issuing from beneath the cloth.

  Their father cleaned the table meticulously, then drew the cloth aside. Before them stood the most extraordinary device Kandri had ever seen. It was a clock, nothing more—but what a clock. Four faces in pearl looked out from beneath a crystal dome. Below the faces lay an intricate wilderness of machinery, components of bronze and steel and silver, some thinner than the veins in a leaf. And it was alive! Covered with weeks, perhaps months of dust, its wheels and gears and cogs were nonetheless spinning, and second hands swept round the clock faces, silent and serene.

  “You . . . built this?” Kandri said, barely breathing.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Lantor. “This clock was made for the Imperial Governor of Važenland, four centuries ago. I won it at cards.”

  He produced another key and wound the clock reverently. It was an astronomical clock, he explained, and told not just the hour but the precise day of the year, the phases of the moon, the positions of the three Sentinel Stars, and even the approach of the great second moon, the Pilgrim. “See there, that pinprick.” He pointed at a small red dot upon a clock face. “As the Pilgrim nears, it dilates open, wide and wider. And when the moon is so close that its pull could damage something as delicate as this clock, it shuts itself down protectively—just long enough for the Pilgrim to pass. Once every twenty-one years.” He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t build such a marvel. I’m a tinker, not a magician.”

  But the next eight hours were magic all the same. For as they watched, Lantor Hinjuman dismantled the clock—ratchet and pinion, escape wheel and flywheel, gears light as flower petals, springs smaller than the legs of bees—and reassembled it, explaining every step to the boys, even letting them help. They screwed the dome back into place with daylight leaking through the slats on the barn’s east side. Kandri was half blind but suffused with a joy beyond words. His father looked at them and grinned.

  “You followed some of that, didn’t you? Some part of it made sense?”

  They assured him it had.

  “We’ll get your hands dirty next time. I’ll teach you metals, show you what your Uncle Chindilan can do.”

  The brothers nodded, reeling with exhaustion, smiling like drunks. Lantor Hinjuman opened his mouth as though he might just start talking metals immediately. Then he checked himself, and his grin became a frown.

  “You ever speak a word about this—so much as hint—and I’ll strangle you. What you learn here, you hide away, against a time when the world’s very different. Until then, you’re not to let on that you can build anything more clever than a folding chair. I’m deadly serious, boys. And don’t expect your mother to save you again. She might even help me. Let’s lock up.”

  So it began: a secret education, dreamlike, unmentionable. They met once every three or four weeks, that autumn when the boys were sixteen. They discussed nothing but what was before them: engineering, properties of metal and water and stone and steam, leverage, momentum, the specific weights of various oils and extracts, the marriage of copper and iron in a furnace, the laborious tempering of steel.

  Never in his life would Kandri see his father so happy, so intensely himself. And after the fifth such lesson, exhausted and glowing as ever, they stumbled from the barn at sunrise to find an elderly priest watching them through the courtyard gate.

  Lantor Hinjuman froze. The priest’s eyes narrowed to slits. Both men opened their mouths as if to speak, but neither did so. Later that morning Kandri would learn from his brother that the priest was Father Marz, the All-Shepherd, a great servant of the Prophet. And in later years, he would realize that their secret education had ended then and there. But at the moment he knew only that his father was afraid.

  The priest touched the gate. He pursed his lips at their father as though communicating a warning, or a threat. But then, with a twitch of his crooked shoulders, he turned and limped up the road.

  Kandri and Mektu never saw the inside of the hayloft again. They never had other tutors, or read a book from the forbidden cabinets in the study. Today, nine years later in the Yskralem, Kandri tosses pebbles at his brother until the snoring stops. We’re still farm dogs, Mek. The Old Man traveled Urrath; why wouldn’t he share it with us? What was he afraid we’d find out?

  Night falls, a stone into a well. They rise and set off walking with scarcely a word, shuffling down the gentle slope. The darkness is deep, but they can still make out the islands before them, black silhouettes against the stars. The closest two are mere steep-sided hills. The third is far larger and stranger. The summit—the old island’s surface—is rather flat, but the land beneath it is hourglass-shaped, narrower at the middle than it is above or below. It is an uncanny sight, as if the upper third of the island were weightless, balanced on its narrow midsection.

  The air cools in no time, although the scree is still warm underfoot. Descending, they pass a broken helmet, a snapped oar, the perfect skeleton of an eight-foot fish. Ragged wind. Utter silence. The cliff looms behind them like a suspended wave.

  “We really are on the floor of the sea,” Kandri says aloud. No one answers, and he wishes he had not spoken. He is not sure why.

  Deeper, lower. A rowboat, one oar and two boots inside, salt crystals coating the whole of it like frost. A bed of fossil oysters. A camel’s skeleton, long legs, white cage of ribs.

  It is almost cold by the time they reach the first island. It looms black and sullen before them, a round hill that outlived the sea. They grope and stumble around its base, littered with smooth stones and ancient driftwood. Mektu gazes up at the island.

  “I smell bird shit.”

  “You’re a crackpot,” says Chindilan.

  “He’s right, I smell it too,” says Eshett. “Something’s nesting up there. Eagles or vultures. It would be a safe place to raise chicks.”

  Kandri can almost feel his brother’s smirk.

  They are rounding the second island when the moon peeks above the horizon. Soon a tattered silver ribbon gleams before them over the wastes of salt. Our feet walk Heaven’s Path, thinks Kandri, mirthless.

  The third, hourglass-shaped island is even taller than it looked from afar. Standing close to its concave sides, countless tons of rock and earth above his head, he cannot help but imagine it collapsing, burying them, although of course it has stood that way for eons. He leans his head back, gazing at the distant summit. Who lived there, before the rivers were diverted, the sea left to perish in the sun?

  He collides with Mektu, who has stopped in his tracks.

  A hundred yards ahead is a large cluster of men, passing swiftly among the boulders at the island’s foot. By the moonlight he cannot see them well. They bear no lamps or torches, but Kandri thinks he sees the glint of steel.

  It is almost funny, the way the four of them dive for cover, squeezing behind a barely adequate rock. “Gods of death, they got here before us!” says Mektu.

  “It can’t be a Wolfpack,” says Kandri.

  “Can’t it?” says Chindilan. “Garatajik said that the Prophet was certain you had outside help. Maybe in her mind that meant horses, saddled and waiting to take you east. She could have sent a force into the Yskralem at full gallop, from the legions in the south.”

  “If she thinks we’re assassins,” says Mektu.

  And Eshett says, “Thinks?”

  Kand
ri, with infinite care, leans out from the rock. Nothing has changed: the men have not stopped moving, or sped up, or started in any new direction. He leans back with a sigh.

  “Whoever they are, they haven’t seen us,” he says. “Ang’s tears, let’s keep it that way. But we also need to count heads.”

  More careful glances. Kandri cannot be sure that he has seen more than ten figures; Mektu puts the number at twenty or twenty-five. But even with the telescope, it proves impossible to say: the men pass in and out of view too often. Already they are vanishing, deeper among the rocks and ridges surround the great island. Within minutes, the last of them is gone.

  But not far gone, Kandri knows. The open seabed between the islands is a paltry distance, something that could be crossed in one determined charge. “We should fall back,” he says. “As a matter of fact, we should find ourselves a hole and dig in. We can’t take another step until those bastards leave.”

  “What if they dig in?” says Mektu.

  “Then we’re food for jackals,” says Chindilan. “If they dig in, it means they think we’re somewhere close. We’d have to try to flee along the rim, north or south, until we find a staircase or ladder. And hope to hell it’s not guarded.”

  “Or stay right here,” says Kandri, “until more of them come up behind us, and they start turning over every Gods-damned rock.” He shakes his head. “We can’t wait for that to happen, and we can’t just run. We need to move at the right moment.”

  “If it comes,” says Eshett.

  They retrace their steps, until the lower slopes of the island close around them. After half an hour of searching, they find a deep cleft in the hillside, out of sight from both east and west. It is no ideal shelter: by noon tomorrow, it will offer no shade. But noon is a long way off.

  Kandri takes the first watch. As the others roll themselves into blankets and cloaks, he climbs with great care to a ledge some twenty feet up the hill. There he crouches, hidden by a shoulder of rock, peeping out at the moonwashed island across the flats.