Chapter 14
Two black pebbles streaked with moonlight hung from the ceiling. They inched closer.
Still disoriented from the abrupt transition from midday brightness to the midnight-blue shades of twilight, I was still a bit fuzzy. Maybe I was seeing things.
I tested that theory by poking a finger at the slinking pebbles.
As it turned out, the pebbles were eyes. And the eyes belonged to a bat. How did I know this? Because it screeched at me, flapped its wings and charged its blind fucking face into my head.
I slapped it. It clawed me. I told it to fuck off. It told me to do the same — at least, it sounded like a fuck-off kind of shriek. Then it dislodged itself from my head and flew away.
“I fucking hate bats,” I said aloud. A brush of my finger along my cheek revealed a bit of blood. Good — it’d make me look like some kind of insane executioner who imbibed the fluids his sword leeched from its victims.
I stepped to the edge of the cove and peered out.
Beneath a sky that featured a crescent moon and brooks of pinkish-blue twilight stretched a triangular island. Just as Rovid had described. And there in the middle stood the fortress: a squat, ugly structure made of old stone that was crumbling at the foundation.
I expected to see all of this, but two things were missing. One: Rovid; and two: Lysa.
Scanning the edge of the island revealed a dense curtain of fog that curled over itself. Too thick to see the water that presumably lay beyond. A more optimistic man than I might have happily thought Lysa was in the water, splashing about as Rovid told Occrum of his prisoner. But experience had robbed me of optimism. Something had gone wrong with Lysa’s plan.
I cursed myself for giving in so easily to such a weak idea. There must’ve been a better way to draw Occrum away from his book. But dwelling on that wouldn’t change anything. And neither would playing a game of search and rescue.
Lysa was a lost cause. How could I possibly free her? Rav had told us his brother was only a man. Maybe so, but he had a book of eternal knowledge that doubled as a narrative of all living thoughts. You give me a suit of invincible armor and a sword that can shoot fireballs and I’m no longer a man, am I? I’m a fucking god. That was exactly what I faced. A god.
Best course of action was to turn back. Retreat into Amortis, give myself time to think. Lysa would die, yes. Or be turned into a reaper. But that would happen whether I fled like a coward or charged headlong into the fortress like a fool. The difference is that I’d suffer the same fate if I opted for the latter.
So the decision was made, then. Right?
Right. Time to turn around. Walk right back to where I’d come from. Skip into Amortis. Chat up some ghosts, see if they had any good schemes for taking down a god.
Just had to twist myself around here, in this cove, point my back toward the island, feet toward the darkness, where that invisible tear lay. And walk, one foot in front of the other.
Well, I thought, staring at the fog, I suppose if my body doesn’t want to turn, I can simply walk backward.
I didn’t move. Maybe I wasn’t breathing either. If I had been, my heart probably wouldn’t have thumped in my ears so loudly.
The windowless amalgamation of stone taunted me. Who the hell builds some archaic thing like that when you have the autobiography of architecture itself to draw from?
I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. It seemed to call to me, like voices inside the mind of a madman, beckoning him with persistence.
The ground beneath my feet no longer felt of cold rock. Rather muddy, actually. I wasn’t in the cove any longer, a fact that seemed at odds with my intent to leave this place. The wind was wicked here, howling as it backhanded my cheeks.
The taste of copper filtered onto my tongue, swirled in little puddles at my gums. My teeth had carved a nice gouge into my bottom lip. Oops.
Finally, I turned and looked at the cove. I imagined Lysa coming out, only to fall into hands of Occrum. The sheer terror she must have experienced…
All the air went out of me, deflating my shoulders and chest. Fuck.
A sharp whistle cut through the air. I looked at my ebon blade and swung again. And again, it whistled. I couldn’t well leave her with him, could I?
Into the brisk evening air I went, not as a man, but as a hunter. With an ego bigger than this entire island — fuck, bigger than this entire world — I walked with a swagger, slicing my blade through the air, pretending I was taking off a head or two. Confidence — it’s the best dish you can serve up to Death.
“Five hundred years,” I yelled, “and your fortress looks like a pile of shit shat out by the asshole of the earth.”
I booted open the wooden doors of his precious keep. Torchlight flickered at me, as if angry that I’d disrupted it. I spat on the flames and waltzed up a wide set of stairs.
“Where’s the hospitality?” I said. My voice returned to me in the form of an echo. “No servants? And stairs, are you kidding me? You should have clouds floating me up to your chambers. Gotta be something about hovering clouds in that fancy book of yours.”
I rapped my blade against the wrought-iron railing. “I’m comin’ for ya, big man. You think you’re on good terms with Death, but let me share a secret with you: we’ve been working together for years.”
Atop the landing now, I had to make a decision. Go right or left, or up another series of stairs? I couldn’t so much as click my tongue before the decision had been made for me.
“The place isn’t mine,” boomed a weathered voice. “It had been erected before I arrived.”
I glanced up to see a figure glancing down, from the top step. A deep crimson robe dressed him. Not the sort of robe scholars and intellectuals fancy, but rather a simple one that might keep you warm in the winter months. He was thin, with a lean face and shaggy silver hair. Not at all what I’d expected. Truthfully, I hadn’t known what to expect, but not this. Something more… frightening, perhaps.
“You must be Occrum.”
“Please,” he said, “disarm yourself.”
“You got fuck-all chance of that happening.”
He pulled the belt of his robe taut and started down the steps, slowly. “Disarm yourself or I will do it for you. Appreciate this offer.”
I coughed an ill-at-ease laugh. “With your bare hands? I don’t think so.”
A storm rumbled throughout the fortress with each step he took, as if the soles of his feet were made of iron. He seemed larger now, a towering, mystical aura. Fear has a way of creeping into your perceptions, enlivening the listless, erecting towers from rubble. Try as you might to convince yourself it’s not real, that it’s just a cheap trick your terrified mind conjures up, it doesn’t go away.
Fight or flee. That was what the shakes were all about. The dry throat, the grinding teeth, the pimpled arms. The thump-thump-thump of my heart. Fight or flee. I sure as shit wasn’t ever one to flee.
As if the air vaulted me forward, I lurched up the steps. Then, as if the air vaulted me backward, I lurched down the steps.
He was fast. Unimaginably quick. A blur hung in the air with the thrust of his hand into my chest.
Lying on my back, coughing up digestive fluids and perhaps blood, I heard a screech of steel swivel its way across the stone floor. No, not steel. Ebon. Then the heavy scabbard on my hip was jerked about.
“Ebon,” Occrum said, holding my second blade close to his flecked gold eyes. “The ingenuity of man has never ceased to surprise me. Do you know how it came about, this precious metal?”
I touched my chest experimentally, half-expecting to find a crater the size of a fist. Instead, I felt a bruise the size of a fist. I coughed, then grimaced, then decided I’d try my best not to cough anymore. Or move. Or breathe. Unfortunately, I had to breathe. And it hurt. Every goddamned breath hurt.
Occrum ripped a finger across the serrated edge of the blade, slicing a deep gash from the tip down to his palm. He grinned madly. “When bones foss
ilize, over thousands of years, they blacken. And harden. Almost resembles rock.”
“I don’t give a—”
“You should. You think I’m evil for reuniting the dead with life, but you use their bones as weapons of murder. Tit for tat. Get up. Or I’ll carry you myself. Will you at least appreciate this offer?”
I rolled over onto my knees, head bowed to the floor like I was in prayer. I wasn’t. It’s just that a stone floor has a tendency to mute your voice when you whisper foul things into it.
Occrum led me up the stairs, my ebon blade still in his possession. The other sword lay behind me somewhere; I figured recouping it probably wasn’t in the plans.
I was fucked. Probably more fucked than I’d ever been fucked before, and I’d been fucked plenty. I’d been a prisoner, an unwilling participant in the enslavement of my own mind, a spectator to my brother’s death and the murder of my Rots, my father’s assassin, and my mother’s failed savior. And now, I would become a reaper.
Sure, there was the chance that Occrum would simply kill me. But that seemed too kind.
Occrum took me to a room. Numerous candles set in pronged holders clawed away the darkness. Lysa and Rovid sat in chairs, hands bound by rope. Those were minor details, however — little glimpses that complemented the dominant attraction. And the attraction in this room… it didn’t get more dominant than this. It didn’t get bigger than this.
A golden glow enveloped it like a sublime shell. It emanated warmth from its open pages, but not comfort. I couldn’t recall what I’d imagined the book to resemble, but most probably not something like this.
It stood on the floor like a harp, its vast collection of history rising from the floor to the ceiling, from one wall to the other.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Occrum said, standing in front of it, arms crossed proudly. “It was smaller when I first found it.”
Parchment lay scattered on the floor in stacks amid overturned ink trays and broken quills. It stunk in there. A bad, moldy odor from someone who hadn’t bathed in perhaps forever.
Occrum extended a hand toward Lysa. “I’ve already showed your friend here a lesson in the malevolence of this book. It’s only proper that you learn as well.”
Malevolence? Strange way to term a book that gives you absolute power. I bit my tongue, though. Seemed the best strategy at the moment.
Occrum probed the book. Its pages ruffled like the plumage of a bird. “Astul, thirty-one, assassin, introspective,” he said.
Several edges of the deeply bound pages shimmered. Had to squint to see them, though — it was like watching one star out of a million wink at you.
He knuckled the pages, as if he was knocking at a door, and the luminous sea of paper — or whatever the words were written on — sloshed to the back, revealing the chosen text.
“Hmm,” Occrum said. “Prior three months. There we are. Let us have a glimpse into the mind of the man they call the Shepherd.”
He busily scanned the words on each enormous page, the back of his skull touching his shoulders as he read from top to bottom.
Lysa kicked me with her toe as we waited. I looked up at her. She tried to smile, but her lips wouldn’t let her. Her face was as pale as milk.
“Vayle,” Occrum said suddenly. “She seems to be important to you.” He was still facing the book as he spoke. “Vayle, Black Rot, Mizridahl, today.”
As if the book was sentient, the pages once again sloshed, this time the other way, almost to the very last page.
“Her most recent thought,” Occrum said, “occurred two hours ago. She must be sleeping. She thought this: Gods, let me die tonight. Don’t make me suffer anymore.”
Her voice, as meek and brittle as the final croak of a wrinkly grandmother, wriggled in my mind, repeating those words over and over. “She’s in trouble. What happened to her?”
“It appears,” Occrum said, head inclining, “she’s a prisoner.”
“Where?”
He flipped to set of unrelated pages. “Another time, perhaps.” He turned, a tiny but noticeable smirk on lips. “Now do you understand its malevolence? This book, it holds the knowledge of the world within, since its creation. Do you understand how that could drive a man mad? Like it’s done to you, right now. One glimpse into the mind of your friend, and already you’ve gone red in the face.
“I’ve witnessed atrocities you cannot even begin to comprehend. Injustices that have raped the young and innocent and rived the old and fragile. Insane kings who have fucked little boys and so-called devout queens who have boiled the nipples right off their daughters to spare them from sin. I’ve witnessed genocides on scales that would obliterate your perception of numbers. And still here I stand, unscathed. Do you know what kind of man that makes me?”
“Unscathed?” I said. “Is that why you’re conducting a mass extinction?”
He licked his lips and pointed urgently at the book. “I’ve had the power to play god. To make the people worship me! It’s all right there, the power to do whatever I wish to this world. And I’ve never, not once, used it for evil purposes. Do you know what kind of man that makes me?”
“Genocide is evil,” Lysa said. “It doesn’t matter how you try to justify it.”
“Is it?” Occrum asked rhetorically. “I’m sparing these people.”
“From what?” she asked.
“From someone unlike me. Someone who wishes to rule this world rather than understand it. I have tried for hundreds of years to allow life to prosper. I’ve allowed nature to go about its business. Nature failed me. They expanded toward me. I’ve washed out almost all of life, erased histories and knowledge. A fresh start failed me. The new populations grew and expanded toward me. I’ve rearranged the landscape through manipulation of its core workings, tied all lands together as one, concealed myself behind a pole of ice. Deception failed me. The ships still came, expansions still continued.
“So,” he said, unfurling his hands, “what am I to do? It is as if the mind is born with an innate draw to this book. Who discovered it before me, I’m not sure. But they were no longer here when I arrived. I will not surrender my duties as such. I will not let a madman take my position. This book is a curse, and the only remedy is expulsion.”
Lysa fidgeted in her chair, as if she was cracking her knuckles behind her back. “Take it to Amortis. We’ll help you.”
“What good would come of that?”
“The dead cannot exit. Your brother told us that. No one could ever bring it back if you take it there.”
“And hide it,” I added.
With a wagging finger, he tongued his cheek and said, “You’re clever. Have me conceal the most powerful weapon in creation so that you can steal it out from under me. No, I don’t believe that will work.”
This was useless, but I found myself arguing the point nonetheless. “Five hundred years and you’ve never asked yourself the question? You never said, ‘Gee, Occrum, what would happen if I tied some rope to this book and hauled it out of this realm, where it can’t be used to harm the living?’”
“It would find its way back,” he asserted. “It was meant to be here.”
Lysa, Rovid and I remained silent. How can you possibly reason with narcissism? Narcissism will latch onto any string of rationalization and logic — no matter how thin or how brittle — to prove that fault lies elsewhere. And there are always strings. The spool is ever unwinding.
Occrum steepled his fingers. “You will come to understand and appreciate the solution. Mostly all my reapers do. Although” — he glared at Rovid — “there are some exceptions.”
He crouched before Rovid, stirring up a chalk-white cloud of fear in the reaper’s face.
“You don’t want to be an exception.” He was still addressing Lysa and me, but his face was growing ever closer to Rovid’s.
Occrum whispered something, but I missed it. Lysa had nudged me, then tilted her head toward the open door. I looked, then gave her a silent what? shrug.
“One of the first steps to becoming a reaper,” Occrum said, “is modification. Now, I would ask what pleases you the most, but people tend to lie, so I’ll discern this information from the book. Meanwhile, you will take comfort in…”
His voice trailed off. Well, he continued talking, but it was all background noise to me. This was because of Lysa Rabthorn. She might have lost her freedom here on this island, but she had not lost her wit. With stretching fingers, she’d snagged the spherical pommel of the dagger I’d given her from the waist of her pants.
Then she sawed the rope from her hands, and a delightful grin spread like fire across my lips. Lysa, however, was flat. Tenacious determination set her jaw. She dropped the sliced rope to the floor silently, eyes never leaving the hallway.
I understood now. She was planning an exit.
I gave her a knowing nod, then turned to hint which way we’d need to go to escape this place.
But a problem had arisen. It was about a six-foot problem. And it smiled. Or rather, he smiled. He smiled, because he had finally achieved his end goal after five hundred years.
Rav was about to take his brother by surprise.
Sword hoisted up to his shoulder, he drifted into the room like a trail of smoke. Silent and unassuming.
He cocked his elbow, ready to swing.
Then he cried out in pain and the floor ran red.
Lysa stood behind me. Hand trembling. Fingers coiled around the hilt of the dagger that she’d buried into his spine.
Oh, Lysa. What had she done?
Chapter 15
Chaos. I was fucking swimming in chaos, up to my goddamned eyeballs.
Lysa stumbled back into me. I held her with one hand, dove for my blade with the other. I had it before Occrum could react, or knew how to react. He was holding his gasping brother, troubled by a plot he hadn’t seen coming.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 50