Master Assassins

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Master Assassins Page 31

by Robert V. S. Redick


  The old woman laughs. “And you, girl, are still the most foulmouthed. Gods below! Boys, if you’ve killed two Sons of Heaven, all Urrath’s in your debt. Let them come and tear this house apart: you’ll still be welcome. But they will tear it apart, that’s the trouble, and when they do, you’ll be found. You must leave soon or die soon. If you have nowhere to go, run off into the bush and say your prayers. Maybe Ang listens closer to the prayers of a hero.”

  “She doesn’t,” says Mektu. “I’ve tried.”

  Kandri left his orchard job at dusk and ran all the way to the clinic. It was simple: he must see Ariqina or die. But when he arrived, the duty nurse told him that she had left early that night and was not expected until midmorning on the following day.

  He ran to Sed Hemon and tugged the rope at the Nawhals’ front door, but no one answered the frantic bell. He ran to the side of the house and tossed pebbles at Ari’s window, then called out her name. She did not appear.

  He searched the darkening village. Was she avoiding him? Was she going to break with him altogether? Or had she gone through with the cleansing ceremony after all, and begun her three days’ isolation from men?

  Abject, he stumbled home. He was quite late for dinner, but no one scolded him; wordlessly, Dyakra Hinjuman filled his bowl with parsnip soup.

  Kandri sat, sweaty and rank, feeling the weight of their eyes. You know, every one of you. You’re laughing at me.

  Eventually, talk resumed. His baby brother Perch had named the six new kittens in the barn. The Old Man discussed weevils. Mektu’s friend Betali had sent a letter from Eternity Camp. “He’s learned to fire a crossbow,” said Mektu proudly.

  “A crossbow!” Dyakra Hinjuman made a blessing sign. “Ang’s mercy, that boy’s not safe around a spoon.” She looked at her eldest daughter, Nyreti. “And what kept you out until dark?”

  Nyreti had spent hours with Father Marz, she said, copying Orthodox Revelation edicts for distribution across the Valley. She described the edicts in detail, reciting several from memory, which made Kandri long for the weevil talk to resume. Then he realized that she was looking directly at him.

  “I saw your friend,” she said, with eyes full of scorn. “The doctor.”

  Kandri’s hand froze halfway to his mouth. “Ariqina?” he said, trying and failing to sound casual. “Where was that?”

  “At the temple. She came rushing through the gate just as the Father and I were stepping out to visit the town council. He went back in after her. I was surprised, because he’s got a busy night ahead.”

  “How’s that?” said Lantor Hinjuman, gnawing a parsnip.

  “I don’t know, Papa,” said Nyreti. “Some sort of ceremony, maybe, but it’s all a big secret. He even had some younger priests up from Ashfield to help him cover the windows in the sacristy.”

  Kandri moved his spoon from bowl to mouth, bowl to mouth, like one of his father’s mechanical toys. So it was happening after all. Confession, abasement, dabs of holy oil. And maybe a little grope for the kindly Father? There was more than one kind of bribe, wasn’t there?

  You should prevent it, coward. You’re her man. If you don’t protect her, who will?

  His premonition came again: something awful was brewing, something Ari should not have to face alone. But if she was going through with the cleansing, it meant that she wished to marry him after all. How could he dare to interfere?

  He looked up and saw Mektu watching him across the table. Kandri’s hand shook; soup splattered his thighs.

  After the meal, he stepped out into the street. The air in the house was stifling, but it felt little better out there.

  Go to her.

  Don’t go. Trust her, do as she asked.

  Go to her!

  Keep away, don’t push, you could lose her forever.

  He was pacing, swearing, looking down at his feet. He walked right into his father’s chest.

  “It’s that bad, is it?” said the Old Man.

  “Yes,” said Kandri, “but I don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “If you tell me, I’ll try to help you.”

  “Oh, horseshit.”

  He was almost as shocked by his words as the Old Man himself, but he pressed on. “Help me, Papa? Tell the truth. You’d just sneer. You’d explain what I should have done, what you would have done. But I know all about your approach. I lived it, up there on the mountain.”

  His father was despicably composed.

  “I couldn’t bring your mother down here, Kandri. Things were complicated. I wish I could make you understand.”

  Kandri laughed in his face.

  “You had two women at the same time, and you got them both with child. You left us up there so no one would know. It’s not complicated, Papa; it’s cruel.”

  “You don’t have the whole story.”

  “I don’t want another story. Do you know how cold it was in winter? Do you know what we ate? People died up there, Papa. She died. And all of a sudden, you want to help?”

  His father shrugged. “Open up to someone else, then. Keeping all that steam inside can’t feel good.”

  He started to turn away. Kandri grabbed his arm and held tight.

  “This matters to me, Papa. More than anything ever has.”

  “I can tell,” said his father.

  “And that’s why I won’t talk to you. When have you ever trusted me with what matters to you? I used to ask, remember? And you’d tell me to get lost.”

  Lantor Hinjuman closed his eyes. He raised his hand, felt for Kandri’s own where it gripped his arm. Their fingers interlaced. For the first time in his life, Kandri knew he’d struck the target. The war in the Old Man’s heart was as plain to see as the stubble on his chin. Would he speak? Would he give the trust he was asking for?

  His father opened his eyes, and the answer was written there: No, not yet. He was almost in tears—they both were—but somehow, he conjured his old, wolfish smile.

  “I’d be a true prick, wouldn’t I,” he said, “not to respect a man for keeping secrets?”

  “Yes,” said Kandri, “you would.”

  That night Kandri slept in the courtyard with the dogs. He could not face another grilling by Mektu, he told himself. But there was another reason. From the yard he could slip away without alerting his brother.

  It was easy to imagine: clawing over the temple wall, blundering into the sanctuary, smacking old Marz away from Ariqina, leading her out by the hand. But lead her where, save into disgrace and the loss of her clinic, her dream?

  He lay there with a dog for a pillow, watching the stars wheel overhead.

  He must have slept, for in the dead of the night, he thought he woke to the squeak of the front gate, and footsteps fading on the cobbles. But in fact his sleep was only half-broken, and though he struggled, he was soon once more in its embrace.

  Just before dawn he snapped fully awake. Mektu was seated beside him, eyes open, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap. His stillness unnerving. Kandri felt certain he had been there a long time, staring fixedly at nothing, at the ghosts only he could see.

  The next morning a rumor began to creep through the villages: Dr. Ariqina Nawhal had disappeared.

  The Hinjuman boys were the first to raise the alarm, but the town was slow to heed them. Most patients found their way to the clinic, but Ariqina had never been known to turn away a summons to the bedside of one too ill to travel, even if that meant tramping for hours along the black and rutted roads. Like as not, she was in Stone Gate or Ashfield, or some farther village, and would find her way home before sunset.

  There was reason to doubt such a notion: Ariqina had a day shift at the clinic and had neglected to call for a replacement. She might have forgotten, but it would have been the first time in her short career.

  Of course, she had been seen the night before in the company of Father Marz. It was commonly supposed that she had gone to him to discuss some crisis of the spirit; young women often did. Marz himself repor
ted that she had left the temple at half past ten of the evening. Not a soul had seen her since.

  Ariqina’s office was locked. The duty nurse thought little of it until one of the patients remarked that he had heard soft voices—one of them Dr. Nawhal’s—coming from the office well after midnight. The voices had sounded friendly, even playful: a strange occurrence, but not an alarming one. The nurse pondered this information another quarter hour before locating the spare key.

  The office was in disarray. An empty Cotton Whiskey bottle stood on Ariqina’s desk. Beside it was a letter announcing her resignation as Founding Director, followed by several pages of precise case histories for her patients, recommendation for their care and detailed accounts of the clinic’s finances (they would find, in days ahead, that every last gham tallied: whatever Dr. Nawhal had been up to, theft had played no part).

  Her writing was very neat. But the page itself was blotched with water—or whiskey—and below her name, she had added a hasty scrawl:

  Her den-mates drive her from the cave that was her own:

  Let them beware; she may return a panther, fully grown.

  The passage rang a bell, but no one could quite place it until Nyreti Hinjuman revealed that it was part of the War Choral, her brother Mektu’s favorite book (“He can’t find time for scripture, but he can recite that profane verse in his sleep, the Gods save my family, they live like beasts I tell you, not one of them walks in the light”). Mektu confirmed that he knew the passage, and also that he had lent his copy of the Choral to Ariqina not long before. But when asked why she might have closed her letter with the words, he grew wary and said no more.

  With the discovery of the letter and the empty bottle, the brothers’ fear caught like wildfire, and the Upper Sataapre mobilized. Every farmhand left his labor; every shop closed. Patients had to be restrained from walking out of the clinic, and a few could not be. A solid thousand volunteers descended on Blind Stream, where the constables did their best to organize them into search teams. Uncle Chindilan rode for Wolf Kill to seek the army’s help.

  The mystery grew more troubling the longer one considered it. Ariqina was not given to drink. Her aunt and elder cousins were all the family she had. More to the point, she was universally loved. The clinic had changed lives, and brought fame and better fortunes to Blind Stream. So had Ariqina’s famished pursuit of her medical degree. Few Valley youth had ever achieved such a level of scholarship. None who did so had remained, serving the needy in the place of their birth. Why would she abandon them, and where could she possibly go?

  Despite the letter, most people doubted that she had gone very far. No horses were missing. No stagecoach was scheduled to pass through the Upper Sataapre by night. She was lost, that was it: she had gone for a walk before bedtime and gotten lost. Anyone could, in the deep clefts and wooded hillsides surrounding Blind Stream.

  The town had some deadly hazards, too. There was an eroded cliff walk, and a stone quarry with several open pits. There was a boulder field where snakes were common, though most who were bitten managed to drag themselves into town. And of course, there was the spot that gave Blind Stream its name: a sinkhole in a distant meadow, though its shape was less hole than winding incision. Narrow enough for a man to step across, it was so overhung with grass that one could be within a yard and not know that it was there—save for the gurgling of the stream twenty feet below.

  These morbid possibilities were all swiftly eliminated. The search parties walked in long dragnets under the fierce afternoon sun. Ariqina’s name echoed through the hills.

  Kandri and Mektu were madly suspicious of each other. Whenever their paths crossed, a mutual interrogation began. Had Kandri truly not seen her after the wedding? And why had Mektu suddenly appeared at Kandri’s side in the courtyard? Was it he who had opened the gate a few hours earlier, his footsteps Kandri had heard walking away?

  Kandri clung to the hope that Ari was somewhere nearby. She was in turmoil. They had made love with an abandon that had frightened her, and though he spilled his seed upon her thigh or stomach, there was the always the risk of an accident, wasn’t there? Little accidents were all over the Valley. Some of them lived in the orphanage down the road.

  She had been spied on, denounced to Father Marz. She had been forced to consider the insult of his cleansing ceremony. And Kandri, who had not even summoned the courage to say I love you, had suddenly begged for her hand. It was all too much. Ari had felt smothered, and so she had indulged in a dream of escape, penned a letter to make it real. She wouldn’t get too far, though. Good sense would return to her soon, if it hadn’t already. Go back, it would whisper. Your people need you. Kandri needs you. And you love him; you said it to his face.

  But other thoughts, like furtive assassins, slipped through his defenses as the day wore on. If she had fled—if she was leaving him for some other life—Kandri knew she would make for Kasralys. That was her true dream, after the clinic: she longed for no other place. That foreign doctor was to blame: she had come spewing passions, conjuring visions of a better Urrath, painting the sky with rainbows. Ariqina had never been the same.

  A beautiful secret, Kandri. Her work could change the world.

  But nearly three years had passed since Dr. Tsireem’s visit. Why now? What would make Ariqina drop everything and flee? Certainly not the bribe money, nor the prospect of a few humiliating hours with Father Marz.

  Unless it was . . . more than humiliation.

  Kandri, searching north of the village in a dense wood, stopped in his tracks. “Ang’s cunt,” he said.

  “Brother! The Gods forgive you!” cried Nyreti, the nearest searcher on his left.

  Kandri turned and started walking along the line, limbs shaking with rage. Mektu was nine or ten positions downhill. He started running. He called out for Mektu and eventually heard his brother’s reply.

  They met in a clearing; Mektu’s face glistened with sweat. “I heard the gate close last night,” said Kandri without preamble. “I know you went out. Just tell me what happened. You saw her, didn’t you?”

  His brother hesitated, then turned away with a shake of his head. “Stop fucking around,” he said. “Get back on the line. You’ll throw us all off.”

  “What did you do to her, you shit?”

  Mektu whirled. For several seconds, he could do nothing but gape. “You think . . . you honestly believe I could—”

  “I believe you lied about something.”

  They were circling each other. “So what if I saw her?” said Mektu. “You sick fuck. I’d rather be stabbed dead than hurt Ariqina.”

  “Where was she?”

  “At the clinic. I didn’t say anything because it was private. Kandri, how could you imagine such a thing?” Mektu gives him an imploring look. “You know me better than anyone. Don’t you?”

  That, of course, was precisely the question. Kandri wondered if he would ever truly have an answer. But no, damn it to hell: he did not, could not believe that Mektu had done Ari violence.

  But if it wasn’t you . . .

  Kandri turned back toward the village. He heard Mektu calling behind him. The soft forest floor, a quicksand of leaves. He broke into a run.

  More than humiliation. More than just an old man’s lascivious lurches, a palsied hand grazing a breast.

  There were soldiers on the road to Blind Stream: Chindilan’s call had been answered. Kandri ran straight by them, ignoring their shouts as he had ignored his brother’s, passing the turnoff to his own house, the primary school, the empty market, racing along the path beside the aqueduct, into Sed Hemon. At the bamboo grove, he turned right and climbed to the temple.

  He had some younger priests up from Ashfield, helping him . . .

  The gates stood open. There were old women on the temple steps, laying out offerings of fruit and flowers to the Gods. Kandri bounded up the steps three at a time.

  The cries of the women reached the sanctuary, where those too frail or too important to join t
he search had gathered to pray. Father Marz, a wiry, hollow-cheeked old man in voluptuous black linen, moved among them.

  He saw Kandri coming. Judged his face and intentions. He dropped the silver prayer bowl and bolted for his life.

  “Don’t run,” bellowed Kandri. “I need some fucking moral correction.”

  “Help, help!” the old priest shouted. “Hinjuman’s boy has gone mad!”

  In the rear of the transept, an iron gate let onto the stairs to the choir loft. Marz was fumbling with the lock as Kandri closed on him. At the last possible moment, he wrenched the gate open, squeezed through and slammed it behind him. There was an inner bolt, but as he tried to drive it home, Kandri grabbed his hand and pulled his forearm through the bars. Marz squealed and clawed at him. Kandri twisted his arm.

  “You old horny bastard! What did you do to her?”

  “Stop! Stop! Anus of a swine!”

  They were still at it when the constables appeared. Kandri surrendered, but they beat him anyway, with truncheons and canes. He looked past them. The pain a dull and distant thing. Somewhere in this building, Ariqina had chosen to break with the Valley, to prune the branch back to the trunk, to abandon him.

  He was dragged to Blind Stream’s tiny jail, between the alderman’s office and the dog pound. One bench, one bucket. The floor white with bird shit. The other two cells were occupied by a simpleton prone to pleasuring himself in schoolyards and a shaggy mute convicted years before of murdering his father with a spade.

  Midnight.

  Mektu retires to the bedchamber in the farmhouse, still complaining about the medicine, and Talupéké leads the others back to Oppuk’s Mill. The road is deserted; Kandri breathes a little easier. They hurry downhill, barely speaking, until they reach the spur path into the ravine. It is darker within; only a little moonlight glimmers on the trickling stream.

  “Be silent, now,” says Talupéké, “and don’t hold it against them if you’re roughed up a bit.”

  “Roughed up?” says Chindilan. “What the hell do you mean? Are they going to beat us?”

 

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