“Guards!” shrieks Mektu. “What has happened to the daylight? Where are my sons? There is a weight upon me, get it off.”
His lips curl. He looks at his arms with astonishment, with disgust. He claws at his shoulders. He screams.
“Get it off! Get it off me!”
He falls writhing on the stone. His nails tear at his collar. Spittle flies from his mouth.
“All a lie,” says Bear Claw, but her voice is hollow. She cannot tear her eyes from the man before her. Mektu’s nails are bloody, and his lips. He has bitten his tongue.
“It will kill her, kill the Prophet!” cries the archer with the tethered arrow. He turns a wild, almost mutinous glance on his commander. And Kandri, his mind clear as glass, closes one eye and shoots the archer through the throat.
He has sealed his own death, of course. The second archer whirls and fires at him and cannot possibly miss. His last thoughts are wordless flashes, lightning of the mind. The sweetness of moments, naked with Ariqina, with Eshett, the joining spasm and the snuggling afterwards, joys of home, greyback geese over Blind Stream, wolf pups on Candle Mountain, the Old Man’s grin, Dyakra’s singing voice, Ari’s eyes on you believing in you loving what she alone could see, your spark, that sacrament, the Well of Fire calling you to drink—
The arrow misses.
The archer’s hands grope for the sky. Fifty feet back from the cliff, an old woman with silver hair rises from a throwing stance. Beside her stand three soldiers, among them Talupéké. And the archer: he has been skewered by a spear.
“Kandri, Gods!” bellows Chindilan.
Then the blades and the madness. Bear Claw flies at Kandri and nearly kills him before he can drop the bow and draw his machete. It is his uncle who saves him, by hurling his axe. The Rasanga flexes backward, an impossible contortion; the axe just grazes her chin. Kandri has the machete now, but he is not remotely her equal. Blindingly fast, she drives him back toward the cliff—parrying, flailing, one step ahead of death. No hope (the blades crash, his arm is wrenched), no balance (she could take three of him), he can’t breathe, can’t sustain this, he will not see the final blow.
Bear Claw screams. A knife juts from her shoulder, buried to the hilt. Without reaching for it, she shifts the mattoglin to her left hand. But now Kandri has recovered. He jumps away from the cliff and strikes, a killing overhead slash. He sees her eye, the calculation, the astonishing response. Once again, she twists aside just in time.
But she has forgotten the knife. The machete strikes the hilt, gouging open the wound. Kandri whirls away from her counterattack and then whirls again, she is still driving him, still the better fighter, with one arm limp and gushing like a spring. He parries. He leaps and feints, never letting her close on him, never landing a blow.
Don’t stumble. Don’t give her one fucking inch.
“You will die, Abomination. You and your brother. On Rasanga steel.”
Is she even human? Where can she be hiding so much blood?
“The White Child will find you. The Dagger of Remorse will bleed you dry. The Prophet’s justice is as certain as the sun.”
In the warrior’s eyes Kandri no longer sees hatred. Only wonder, and a curious need to be heard.
“All Urrath will be her kingdom. Her feet walk Heaven’s Path.”
When she falls, he hears her teeth crack on the terrace. And recognizes the knife.
“The last Rasanga?”
Talupéké turns to look at him, draws a finger across her throat. “She didn’t fight half as well as her mistress, but she was still a beast: it took all of us to bring her down. Kandri, I saw your brother. What the fuck was he—”
“Not yet, Tal,” he begs.
The girl is shaking and twitchy; freckles of blood are drying on her cheeks. “Tell me this, at least,” she says, “How did these bastards know you were here?”
Kandri shuts his eyes, but there is no way to erase what he has seen. Stilts, their friend, her uncle. Calling Mansari to the cliff’s edge. Pointing down into the mist.
“I couldn’t say,” he tells her. It is not altogether a lie.
Chindilan draws near. Talupéké gives him a long, steady look. She hides her right hand, but Kandri has seen it already: his uncle’s bright steel ring.
“Talupéké,” says the smith, “what in Ang’s name are you doing here? How did you know?”
“I didn’t,” she says. “It was the general; he had a hunch. Ever since the Megrev, we’ve known that the traitor in our ranks served the Prophet—and then you appear, the worst enemies the Prophet’s ever seen. The traitor wouldn’t dare let you escape. So the general kept five or six pairs of eyes on you at every minute. That’s why you were put in the high chambers, you know: because every room has a spy-hole.” She glances from Kandri to Eshett and back again. “Every room,” she repeats.
Chindilan’s eyebrows climb.
“No one tried anything in the cavern,” says Talupéké. “So that left the path through these hills. But hours after you left he woke up shouting orders. He’d guessed the real situation: that the Prophet had been tipped off much earlier, and had forces waiting for you on the path. That’s why we’re here.”
“I wish he’d sent more fighters from the start,” says Kandri.
“What if one of them had turned out to be the traitor?” says Talupéké. “You’d have been too easy to kill, in the darkness on that trail. A knife in the ribcage, a wire around the throat. No, the general only dared to send his best, the ones he’d trust with his own life. Where are they, anyway? Where are Mansari and Stilts?”
The men look at each other. Kandri doesn’t intend to say a word. Fuck the truth. It can wait. But the scalding doubt in his own mind: what is he to do with that? He had given Stilts more than his trust. He had started to love the man. What could have turned the general’s closest aide into a creature of the Prophet?
And is that truly what he was? That madness, that unblinking zeal he had seen in the eyes of so many fanatics: was there even a glimmer of it in Stilts?
Kandri clears his throat. This girl knows them; she can read their looks and silences. In another heartbeat she will grasp it all.
“We lost them,” Kandri hears himself say. “I’m sorry. We lost them in the dark.”
“So you climbed up here and got cornered. That was bright.” She wipes the sweat from her chin. “Well, fuck, we go on without them. General’s orders. My unit will bring you to the caravan and travel on with you from there.”
“You will? All the way?” Chindilan face is a door flung open to the sun.
“All the way to Kasralys,” says Talupéké. “I’m to see that letter delivered to the doctor’s hand. If we find the others, Stilts will join us. Mansari will go back.”
Kandri glances sidelong at his uncle. “Back to the Cavern, you mean?”
Talupéké shakes her head. “The Cavern’s lost,” she says. “The Prophet’s men attacked an hour after you left. They must have marched all night, from the battlefields up north. They were ragged, but there was no end to them. And they knew just where to find us. Someone led them to the Cavern’s mouth.”
She bends over and spits. “One day,” she says, “I’m going to cut the head off that son of a whore.”
“Did the general escape?” asks Chindilan.
Talupéké straightens, glaring at him. “He will,” she says. “This isn’t the way he’s meant to die.”
Her voice is sharp, defensive. She looks at each of them in turn.
“He sat there, watching me pack for the desert,” she says. “I’ve never seen him look so old. I’ve never seen him look old at all. When I finished, he called me over. ‘All my life, I’ve prayed for things to change,’ he said. ‘For this damned war to shift in our favor, for power to flow into our hands. I want children like you to have something you can nourish. Something more than what I’ve given you, these armfuls of smoke. Tonight, Ang forgive me, I failed to notice that the change I prayed for was beginning. A
nd why? Because I am not the chosen instrument. Because I will be an afterthought, when the stories are told. Go quickly. Find them before the Prophet does. They may be all the legacy we have.’ Then he kissed me, and pointed at the door. And I’ll never see him again.”
“You don’t know that,” says Kandri.
Talupéké is trembling. “I wanted to talk. I wanted to give him some fucking promise, but I just stood there, the God was interfering, the God wouldn’t let me speak.”
Chindilan puts his hands on her shoulders. She flinches, baring her teeth.
“Tebassa knows,” says the smith. “Why else would he trust you with those words?”
“You’re a foolish old man,” says Talupéké, in tears.
Kandri turns away from them. He walks back across the terrace, past the splayed bodies of the Rasanga, to the northern edge from which Stilts and Mansari fell. It is still very windy. He has to argue with his feet before they bear him to the edge.
The morning mist has fallen by a hundred feet. He stares down into the drifting whiteness, probing for some glimpse of the land below.
Who were you, Stilts?
Pale ghosts at the foot the precipice: boulders or treetops. He cannot tell.
What made you betray us? And what in Jekka’s hell made you fall?
A sea of cotton, churning. Then suddenly, a moment’s clarity: yes, those are cedar trees below. And something caught in their branches. Something rippling, voluminous, like the sail of a ship.
The wind gusts; Kandri lurches back from the cliff. When he creeps forward again, the mists have closed.
Thoughtful, he crosses the terrace again, this time to the western edge, which none of them have yet approached. The sun is warm against his back.
He knows he is too far to see the Coastal Range. But surely he will see Mab Makkutin and the rim of the Stolen Sea. And if he can glimpse the Yskralem, then he can imagine its farther shore, and the villages of the Mileya on the road to Eternity Camp. From there, home is in reach, as Mektu tried to tell him. A day’s ride on a fast horse.
But when he reaches the cliff, he knows that something is wrong. The Lutaral plain is still in shadow, but the colors are wrong. A gray-black stain, punctuated by countless, tiny points of light, engulfs the land between the hills and Mab Makkutin. For a few seconds, Kandri thinks with horror that he is looking at the ashes of a single, cataclysmic fire. But no, that’s not it. Like the mist, the stain is churning. The points of light move to and fro.
Lamps. Torches.
Men.
It is the Seventh Legion. Not a detachment, not a brigade. Everyone. There is no other force of such size in western Urrath. They press to the very edge of the Yskralem; they surround Mab Makkutin; they break against the feet of the Arig Hills. The Prophet has abandoned the northeast front, marched them here through the night, driven them like animals.
She has lost her favorite son . . .
He turns and looks at the survivors. Eshett is kneeling beside his brother; she has lifted his hand to her cheek. Mektu is lying flat on his back. Eyes open, drinking in the dawn.
. . . and her wrath is beyond description.
Well, then, why describe it? Why mention it at all?
He walks back across the terrace. Eshett rises and meets him a few paces from Mektu.
“That woman,” she says, glancing at the silver-haired warrior with the spear. “The one Spider argued with at Oppuk’s Mill. Do you know who she is?”
“Talupéké’s grandmother?”
Eshett nods. “Kereqa. Stilts’ older sister. The founder of the circus, the one who put a roof over Tebassa’s head when the plague took his family. She’s twelve years older than the general.”
“Jeshar,” says Kandri. “Some people only rest in the grave.”
“If then,” says Eshett.
Kandri looks at her sharply, waiting for her to explain the remark. He feels an odd chill. Somewhere deep in his mind, a girl’s plaintive voice is calling his father’s name.
Eshett extends her hand, offering him something wrapped in a scarf. He puts his hand on the object but does not take it from her. It is the mattoglin, Ojulan’s priceless blade.
“You need this more than I do,” she says.
Kandri shakes his head. “We’re rich enough,” he says. “Keep it. Find a good buyer, someday when it’s safe.”
“Someday.” She turns to the east. “Your uncle spotted the caravan, with your scope. It’s not too far ahead. The old woman thinks we can catch it by midday.”
“And three days later you’ll be gone.”
Eshett reaches for him, then checks herself, touching him only with her eyes. Kandri meets her gaze, and for some reason they both smile.
He crosses to Mektu and bends down.
“Anything broken?”
Mektu shakes his head.
“Still got a tongue in that mouth?”
Mektu nods.
“That’s too bad.”
The remark earns him a ghastly grin. Kandri holds out his hand, and after a few blinks, Mektu takes it and rises, stretching.
Kandri steps back and lifts his hands above his head. He gives three loud claps, and the others fall silent. Facing Mektu, he bows as low as he can.
“Congratulations, brother, on the performance of a lifetime.”
There is laughter. Immoderate laughter. Even Kandri is laughing, his back turned firmly to the Seventh Legion, clear morning light in his eyes. What’s wrong with us, are we crazy? he thinks. Death all around us, and we can’t stop with the jokes.
“It was a performance, wasn’t it?” asks Chindilan.
Silence again. Kandri glances at the edge of the cliff, thinking of Stilts’ cry.
Mektu turns to face the smith. “Uncle,” he says, “will you step over here?”
Chindilan frowns. He sidles a little closer. Mektu points at his own ear.
“Have a look, will you? Anybody in there who doesn’t belong?”
The smith cuffs the back of his head. Then he guffaws and embraces Mektu and kisses both his bloody cheeks. The whole party is roaring. “My nephew is a genius!” shouts Chindilan, one arm tight around his shoulders.
Kandri hugs him next. Weak from mirth and violence, the brothers hold each other, swaying like dancers. Or like boxers in a clinch.
“You haven’t answered the question,” says Kandri.
Mektu’s look says he’s aware of that.
“Come on,” says Eshett, “we have a caravan to catch.”
The Fire Sacraments continues in Book Two, Sidewinders.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Getting a novel written is a solitary business, but the burden of that solitude is shared. A part of the writer is, by necessity, out of reach. When I return to earth, I catch glimpses of what this means for family and friends, and can only tell them, at every opportunity, that I’m grateful for their caring and their faith.
The making of Master Assassins has been an epic in itself, replete with storms, curses, death marches, alliances broken and renewed. There were no villains but many heroes. If not for the latter, this book (and its author) might still be out on the desert highways, shambling towards a hallucinatory coast.
Pat Rothfuss, singular paladin, read the book in a moment of darkness and happened to like it, and his support since then has made all the difference. Earlier, when the book was still a tangle of thorns and impulses, readers gave me priceless feedback: these included my parents, Jan and John Redick; as well as James Heflin, Mira Bartók, Adam Shannon, Stephen Klink, Judi Kolenda, Bruce Hemmer, Ed Zavada, Mark Roessler, Jedediah Berry, Emily Houk, Jon Redick, and Christy Crutchfield.
I’m grateful beyond words for the talents and energies of my editor, Cory Allyn; my agent, Matt Bialer; and artists Lauren Saint-Onge and Thomas Rey. My thanks as well to Gillian Redfearn and Tricia Narwani, for their kindness and wisdom. John Jarrold, Simon Spanton, and the late David Hartwell also contributed to the emergence of this book, and have my sincere thanks.<
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I wrote much of Master Assassins in a house in Bogor, Indonesia: terimah kasih banyak to Ibu Amah, who fed me; Pak Hasim who built the table where I worked and the lattices that kept out the screeching night toads; and my compañera, Kiran Asher, who took me there, and who has walked beside me through twenty-five years of love and joy. Gracias, mi sol.
Robert V.S. Redick grew up in Iowa and Virginia; his father worked in nuclear non-proliferation and his mother as an electron microscopist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed epic fantasy series The Chathrand Voyage Quartet, which begins with The Red Wolf Conspiracy and concludes with The Night of the Swarm. The books have been published in five languages and nominated for several major awards; Locus magazine calls the Quartet “one of the most distinctive and appealing epic fantasies of the last decade.” Robert holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and an MA in Tropical Conservation and Development from the University of Florida.
Robert’s twin passions have always been storytelling and internationalism; previous employers include the antipoverty group Oxfam, Hampshire College, and the Center for International Forestry Research. He has lived and worked in Indonesia, Argentina, Colombia, and the United Kingdom, and traveled extensively in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Raised in Iowa and Virginia, he now lives in Western Massachusetts.
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