Master Assassins

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Step down, Mek. Hold my arm.”

  It is a large pool. The ice crackles ominously as they run across it (like invalids, like clowns). Kandri is nauseous with pain, every blink is a nightstick, what if his balance goes, what if he faints? Maybe they will hesitate. Maybe the crackling of the ice will give them pause.

  “Kan,” Mektu whispers, “we’ve got to fool them. Like they fooled us, only better.”

  Somehow, Kandri knows his brother is right. “I can still see,” he says. “It’s getting worse, but I can fight them, I can try. If they don’t wait too long.”

  “They’ve waited for days,” says Mektu.

  Right again. The men are cowards. Smart fucking cowards. Kandri draws the machete from his belt. “I’ll pretend I’m stone blind, then. I’ll look in the wrong direction. That’s what they’re waiting for, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—” Mektu bites his thumb. “It’s not sly enough. Not for a weasel like Atau.”

  “What would be sly enough?”

  “I don’t know. Something twisted. Think like me, brother, think like me.”

  Kandri wants to hit him. Why don’t you fucking think like you?

  Suddenly, Atau shouts at the bald man: “Go, kill the other two, before we lose the smith under the ice. Bring back his weapons and his head. I should be finished here, but if not, we’ll use that bow of his. Get along.”

  “But that crazy bitch is coming this way!” cries the bald man.

  “What do we care?” says Atau. “Just stay good and quiet when she passes. She used to throw those knives blindfolded, you know. It was part of her act.”

  Talupéké’s roars grow louder. Kandri looks back and sees her barely twenty feet from them—staggering, striking at ghosts. I could kill you, she’d warned them. He tugs at Mektu’s arm.

  “Girl!” shouts Mektu suddenly. “Over here!”

  “Shut up!” Kandri clubs him, hissing. “Oh, Mek, why do you do it, you stupid ass, every fucking time—”

  Too late: Talupéké whirls and lumbers in their direction, thin ice breaking around her knees. Atau stands perfectly still. When she reaches the brothers’ pool, she climbs up onto the ice and crouches low.

  Kandri holds his breath. Talupéké flicks the mud from her knives.

  “Girl?” says Mektu.

  Talupéké charges, slashing at the air. Kandri shoves his brother from her path with all his strength and dives in the opposite direction. She lunges between them, screaming murder, and the knife in her left hand passes inches from Kandri’s neck. Out of the blur of limbs and fire he snatches one glimpse of her face: madness, terror, an eye like a wounded horse. She doesn’t see him. She rages on across the ice.

  A few pools scared the Tirmassil so badly they wouldn’t go near them. . .. Did one of those release a madness already latent in the girl, or inflict something new? Kandri watches her, a blur swiftly vanishing, a young girl seen through tears. Soldier gone. Killer, freak, fucked-up child: gone. Misery and rage clot in his chest, his throat. He staggers to his feet and draws his machete.

  “Is that the blade that killed Ojulan?”

  Atau’s voice is casual. He is on the ice and starting to circle the brothers, his masked head like an insect’s, his scimitar in hand. Kandri struggles to see him, a phantom among searing clouds. Not sly enough, Mektu had said. Right a third time. You can’t act stone blind unless you let Atau move behind you. And I’ll be Gods-damned if I’ll let him behind me.

  He pivots. Mektu crouches by his knee, staring in the wrong direction. We have to fool him. How, how? What trick do you spring on a master of tricks?

  Kandri pivots again. Mektu clings to his leg. “Brother, kill me,” he says. “Bring your hand down. Here, here’s my neck.”

  The weeping has started; Mektu has snapped. In a burst of fury, Kandri kicks him away. Mektu falls hard, face smashing against the ice. When Atau makes a dart at him, Kandri swings his blade in a wild arc.

  “Your brother has the right idea,” says Atau. “It’s better this way, honestly. When the Prophet collects you—think about it, now—you don’t want to be anything but dead. The Rasanga could work you over for a year or more. They talked around our fire, you know. Small slashes, tiny tools like cheese graters, unimaginable pain. Then tourniquets, amputation when necessary. But worse than any of that—at least to judge by their own fear—would be simply to give you to the White Child. Can you tell me about this Child? What the hell is it? What makes a Rasanga’s blood run cold?”

  “Kill me,” says Mektu again.

  “But there’s no need for your brother to kill you,” says Atau. “I’ll do you both if you can just get him to cooperate. Lie down on your stomachs. Or if you want to pray first, go ahead. I don’t mind.”

  Kandri lunges again. What is he attempting? To kill Atau, to deceive him? Deceive him how? I can’t do this, Mektu should be doing this, think like Mektu, pretend you’re—

  A kind of lightning grips his mind. He straightens, finds his balance. Then he leaps a third time—and Atau jumps back.

  Kandri snarls at him: “I can see you, pig.”

  “Of course you can,” says Atau. “You led your brother by the arm, didn’t you? I know you’re not quite blind. It’s coming, though. Probably sooner than you think.”

  “Come and get me.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  “You’re a shit-scared little eunuch,” says Kandri. “If my dog fucked your mother, I’d say a prayer for the dog. Where did she have you, in a sewer, on a heap of rotting—”

  Atau flings grit in his face.

  “It’s no good,” says the Tirmassil. “I won’t blunder to my death because you’ve angered me. Try again.”

  Stabbing pain: the salt-grit gnaws at Kandri’s eyes. The streaks of light are expanding, crowding out what he sees. He moves through a halting, blinkered battle-dance, memory and practice guiding his feet. But Atau is maddeningly patient; he knows very well what to look for, it seems. Kandri has a momentary glimpse of his face: black mask, insolent grin.

  “I like you, Chiloto,” he tells Kandri. “You’re about to make me rich.”

  The machete’s grip is slippery. Kandri dries his palm on his shirt. One card left to play.

  He swings—but makes sure that his blow falls short of Atau. He makes himself stumble, lets the machete bite into the earth.

  “That’s more like it,” says Atau, delighted. “You’re half-blind and worsening fast, but at least you’re thinking. What to do? Feign total blindness and lure me in? No, no, that can’t be done safely; I might not fall for it. Feign normal vision and scare me off? But you know I won’t go far. So you make a bold choice: you pretend to be pretending you can still see well enough. And then you fake a slip-up, a tell. The very tell you think I’m looking for. You hope I’ll rush in to finish you off and give you a last clean shot at me. Not bad, not bad at all. But let me say it again, boy: I can wait.”

  And for the next quarter hour, he does. Kandri leaps and stabs and never comes close to landing a blow. His eyes stream, his head is throbbing. His vision contracts to a few scattered points. He anchors himself on his useless brother, who has curled into a ball. Sobbing, crushed. Facing what Kandri cannot.

  Beaten. Skinned and gutted. Outfoxed.

  He makes a desperate lunge. Hacking at any hint of movement. Atau throws more grit at him. And the world goes black.

  It is as if a piece of the sun has dropped and burst before his eyes. Brilliance and fire, then purest night. No grays, no shadows. He is blind.

  A terrible silence has fallen. Atau gives him nothing, not a footfall, not a breath.

  Kandri swings his blade in a circle. Two times around, three. The pain at the pit of his eyeballs, the burn. He thinks, Blindness too is a sort of drowning—and with that, his balance deserts him, and he falls.

  Atau kicks the machete from his hand.

  “Roll over, boy. Cross your arms beneath your chest. I’ll make this clean; you won’t feel anything. And t
he pain in your eyes, and the pain in your heart: all that will cease.”

  Kandri flails toward the voice. His fingers brush boot leather, close on nothing. Atau’s second kick is to his face. He falls and his mouth gushes blood. The third kick is to his groin.

  “Or if you’re difficult,” says Atau, rattled, “I’ll just bleed you out. You fucking Chiloto dog! I make it easy for you, and what do I get? You ought to be kissing my boot, not—”

  His voice is cut off with a sound like a slurp. Kandri flinches; blood sprays his face. He starts to rise and Atau crashes against him, lifeless, slashed open at the neck. A pair of hands seizes the body and shoves it aside.

  “He should have waited a bit longer.”

  “Mektu. Oh, Gods, Mektu.”

  “You’re a terrible actor, brother. Fortunately, I’m not.”

  Mektu can still see. He has guessed the danger earliest, pinched his eyes shut the soonest, blinking only occasionally for the benefit of Atau. Now he is wearing the dead man’s goggles. He says his vision is bad and blurry but getting no worse. He cannot see the bald Tirmassil or the other travelers. He can barely see the shore.

  He mops the blood from Kandri’s face, then winds a thick bandage around his head. “You could have told me what you were up to,” says Kandri.

  “Wrong,” says Mektu. “It was you who made Atau believe in my blindness. You never suspected, so neither did he.”

  Kandri himself remains perfectly sightless. And strangely resigned. It feels almost good to be helpless, to be led along the jagged rims, across strong ice. But a new danger confronts them already: the wind has finally turned, and the heat is building. They shout for the others but hear no reply. “We need shade,” says Kandri. “I’m sweating already. We can’t make it to the hills.”

  “There is no shade anywhere,” says Mektu.

  “Then we’ll have to get ashore and pitch the sunshield.” He stops dead. “Oh, Gods, Mek. The sunshield.”

  “What about it?”

  “The damned thing’s in Uncle’s pack.”

  Mektu begins to swear, quietly and steadily, as though urinating. He drags Kandri north—“Something different about the ice there—” and then curses again; it is only blue mud splashed on the rim.

  “Maybe Miss Trouble waded through this one. Maybe it’s the one that drove her mad. I don’t know. I can’t fucking tell where we are.” He sighs. “At least we haven’t fallen into one of these damned things. Just don’t wipe your hands on your pants. There’s green mud splashed up to your—”

  He freezes, gripping Kandri’s wrist. “A body,” he says.

  “What! Where?”

  “It’s the bald man, Atau’s sidekick, and—oh.”

  “Be careful!” says Kandri. “The bastard might be faking death.”

  “Not likely.”

  Mektu’s voice is odd. He leads Kandri closer, painting the scene in words. The Tirmassil is chest-deep in a small cobalt pool, arms stretched forward, hands clawing at the ice. Evidently, he had walked about six steps before it shattered, then tried and failed to pull himself free.

  “The pool’s not mud. It’s a clear blue with lots of bubbles. It’s very pretty, actually.”

  “Why are you so sure he’s dead?” says Kandri.

  “Because he’s a gooey skeleton from the ribs down, and the bones are going too. That liquid’s eating him, melting him away.”

  “Devil’s Ass!”

  “Steady, brother. Don’t fall.”

  Which is worse: to see the corpse plainly, as Mektu does; or to imagine it, half-dissolved, a man turning to slime? “Let’s get out of here,” Kandri says.

  “Hold on,” says Mektu. “Something else on the ice . . . huh! Isn’t that . . . curious. I suppose it’s what he was after.”

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “Big bloody knife.”

  “A dagger, you mean?”

  Mektu releases him, crouches down. “No, not a dagger. It’s a mattoglin. A beautiful mattoglin. All jewels and gold.”

  Minutes later, Kandri is holding Lord Ojulan’s priceless weapon, which his brother has knocked to the edge of the pool with a few well-aimed chunks of ice. Kandri feels the big stone set in the pommel, the gold tracery on the blade, the small sharp rubies, the flame-like teeth near the tip. He is dumbfounded. It is unquestionably the same mattoglin they tossed away with the body of the Thirdborn. But who has retrieved it—Chindilan? Eshett?—and why have they carried it all this way, only to abandon it here?

  “Bait,” says Mektu. “Someone determined that the ice was weak and tossed it out there.”

  “And the Tirmassil couldn’t resist,” says Kandri. “That’s my guess, too. But did it help them escape? And how far could they possibly get—blind, in this heat? For that matter, how far are we going to get? We’re in trouble, Mektu. We’re sweating our lives away.”

  “Careful,” says Mektu. “Here’s the shore.”

  It is a great relief to stand on solid ground at last. They drop their packs, sip from a faska, then shout for the others again. At first Kandri thinks he hears a distant answering voice, but a moment later there is nothing but the low scrape of the wind.

  He tells his brother to make a quick search along the shore, leaving him with their belongings. Mektu agrees; they both know how much faster he’ll be without a blind man on his arm. “Ten minutes north, ten south,” he says. “If I don’t find them, maybe I’ll at least find some kind of shelter. In any case I won’t let you out of my sight.”

  “Just hurry,” says Kandri. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Ha! That’s a safe bet!”

  Kandri looks at him—or rather, turns his head as if looking. His brother’s laughter ceases. “I’ll be quick,” he says, and is gone.

  Twenty minutes later, he returns and swigs from the faska. “Nothing,” he says, “absolutely nothing.” And without another word, he runs south.

  Kandri sits under his headscarf, brooding. They must find shelter; the water won’t suffice. And yet they cannot abandon Eshett and Chindilan. And Talupéké—was there any chance of finding her alive? Would she just try to kill them, if they did?

  Poor fucked-up soldier girl. Nerves shattered and dreams full of death. Callous Gods, or sleeping. Beaten bitch of a world.

  He knows why such savage thoughts are flooding him. Blindness, in a word. He is scared to death. What if it’s doesn’t wear off in an hour, in a day? What if it lasts forever?

  “You’re dying of thirst, Kandri Hinjuman. Forever is the last thing you should be worrying about.”

  Kandri leaps up, hand on his machete. “Who’s there?” he shouts.

  Utter silence. He draws the machete, recalling how quiet Atau managed to be when it suited him. No one attacks, however, and the minutes drag on. Was the voice in his head?

  He laughs at himself: of course it was in his head. Where else?

  But he knows the voices his thoughts come clothed in—his father’s, his second mother’s, Ariqina’s, his own—and that voice is not among them. It is a stranger’s voice. One he has never heard before.

  Mektu is gone much longer this time. When at last he returns, he is gasping and stinking of sulfur-mud. “What happened?” asks Kandri. “Did you see them? Did you find anything?”

  Mektu collapses beside him, presses an object into his hands. It is a small, mud-caked shoe. “Eshett’s,” he says, spitting out the word.

  He is struggling not to cry. He says that the shoe lay on the ice in the middle of a turquoise pool. No footprints: the blowing grit erased them all too quickly. But at one end of the pool, the ice was shattered. Mektu had leaped in, searching. He’d found nothing at all.

  “That doesn’t mean she’s drowned,” says Kandri. “You waded out of there, didn’t you?”

  His brother says nothing. Kandri gropes for his shoulder. “I know how to get us out of the sun,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

  He sketches the plan; Mektu si
ts like a stump. But for all his misery, he does not wish to die, and a moment later, they are both on their feet. They walk the shore until Mektu spies one of the harmless, light-green pools. As Kandri waits, he sets to smashing the crystal surface. Then, working together, they drag two enormous ice-sheets ashore, trim them roughly into squares and plaster them with mud. Finally, with much swearing and staggering, they prop the squares against each other, forming a tall triangle. “Good and dark on the inside,” says Mektu. “Scoop out the floor, Kan. I’ll build a windbreak so we’re not drowned in grit.”

  Soon they are both in the shelter, lying side by side. Then the loss falls on Kandri like an avalanche: Uncle Chindilan, who guarded them in secret. Eshett, Talupéké. Clumsily, he recites a prayer for their safekeeping—but why, Gods? I don’t love you, I don’t trust you; you’ll do exactly as you like—and Mektu crosses and uncrosses his wrists in the gesture of Holy Release. Kandri makes the gesture too: the shackles of hell torn asunder by the Eagle of Selulahi. One of the Great Tales of Urrath. Then Mektu begins to describe Eshett’s ineptness at fellatio, and Kandri tells him to shut the fuck up.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Mektu. “I didn’t complain. I never made her feel bad. I thought you might be interested, that’s all.”

  “You fucker. She’s probably dead.”

  Mektu falls silent. Kandri’s hands are in fists. Just wait, count the seconds. Eight, nine, ten—

  “I’m not actually concerned with what she did to my dick,” says Mektu. “It’s the broader picture that’s interesting. Some girls just can’t. Doesn’t matter how you ask for it. You could draw a diagram, you could send them to dick-sucking school. But others get it right the first time. Ariqina, for instance.”

  Kandri grabs his own wrist: he is that close to striking his brother in the face. “You can be such an evil bastard,” he says.

  “I have every right to talk about her, Kandri. We were in love. We were engaged to be married.”

  “Goat shit. You weren’t.”

  “It’s true. You don’t know everything. We’d be married already if she hadn’t disappeared.”