An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  His eyes narrowed. “An all-lady company?”

  “From what I hear, they’re fierce. Be careful, will you?” I winked at him and playfully shoved my elbow into his shoulder.

  Rovid put his hands on his hips. Was he unconvinced, or begrudgingly accepting of the idea? If it was the former, I had one last weapon in my arsenal with which to push him over the edge.

  “Rovid, do this for me and I promise to help you find your wife and child. Whether I’m alive after all this, or I die and find myself pissing around in Amortis. I will help reunite you.”

  He responded with a plaintive snort. “Vayle told you I was fixin’ to track them down, did she?”

  “She didn’t go that far. What stopped you?”

  “Lysa. Saw Arken come around a few too many times. Had a bad feeling, you know? If I’d left her and something terrible had happened… I refused to suffer through that guilt again.”

  To think at one point I’d legitimately thought to stick a blade through Rovid’s throat. The reaper might’ve had a temper that would have bested Braddock Glannondil in his prime and a stubbornness that rivaled my own, but beneath that bedrock of flaws was a soul that shined brighter than most.

  After advising him to keep himself alive and in good health for at least a little while longer, I slung a burlap sack containing the duplicate book over my shoulders and went off to the stables. The keeper there offered me my pick of boars.

  “Glissy here’s a young’un,” the keeper said, “but she’s got a mean nose and endless energy.”

  “She behave like a young’un?”

  The keeper tossed his head back and forth. “Er, ya, you could say that.”

  I passed Glissy right on up and opted for an older barrow named Edik. He grunted soothingly as I secured a couple riding satchels to him, then displayed his good manners as he calmly followed me while I gently led him by the reins.

  There was one last piece of business to finish in this city. That piece was a girl, and I knew precisely where I’d find her.

  My boar and I followed a pathway of smooth black glass through the heart of the city and up the small incline of a hill that led to Scholl’s only entrance and only exit.

  There, beside the Warden who dutifully posted himself against a wooden stake in the palisade, sat Lysa.

  “Here to see me off?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I seem to remember telling you the exact opposite.”

  When I’d dropped the rather surprising news that I’d be making a jaunt to Fragment Zero, Lysa had insisted she’d join me. I’d told her no. Ellie had told her no. Vayle told her no. Rovid would have told her no had the black dust he’d smoked not reduced him to a comatose state.

  “That’s never stopped me before,” she said, rising to her feet.

  “It will this time.”

  A scowl marked her lips. “When are you going to learn that I’m my own person, and I can handle anything that comes my way?”

  “You’re not coming. Trust me, Lysa, you won’t find a way around it. I’ll be back in a month or so. If I’m not, keep yourself safe, and find a way to pry victory from Arken’s hands, yeah?”

  I gently patted her cheek. She snapped her head back in response, the scowl on her lips slithering up her cheeks and into her nose and eyes.

  I mounted Edik, nodded at the Warden, and left the city of Scholl for what I hoped wouldn’t be the last time.

  I’m not a man who often looks back at what he leaves behind. It’s a rather fruitless endeavor, that — nothing good comes of it. But on this occasion, I indulged in a little visual reminiscence. Not to remind myself of what I was fighting for, but to ensure that Ellie had done what I’d asked.

  The sad look of betrayal that seized Lysa’s face — that painful, mouth-gaping, big-eyed look you give when you come to find the person you trusted most is the one who has duped you like an imp — told me Ellie had indeed come through.

  The Warden pushed Lysa back into the city as I rode for Fragment Zero.

  Chapter 14

  The mind generally doesn’t appreciate when things that are not real — that cannot be real — begin popping up like flotsams of red crabs when it’s time for the little critters to land ashore and make babies. There are plenty of tricks your mind has to deploy when such occurrences happen.

  Sometimes it fuses together reality with the brief glimpses of fantasy, so that the monster standing over your bedside is swept away by the shadows. Sometimes it closes your eyes so that when you open them, the illusions — and they have to be illusions, don’t they? — skitter and scatter.

  My mind, however, was all out of tricks. Had it a few remaining to pull out of its sleeve, assuming minds wear clothes, it would’ve done something as the edge of Fragment Five bled into the border of Fragment Eight.

  An almost imperceptible curtain of gray fizz fluttered before me, blinking out of sight as quickly as it arrived. My boar trudged onward, and the curtain returned, this time appearing as the embodiment of chaos. Its jagged outline jutted up and out, down and away, stabbing into the cloudy sky and plunging deep into pockets of volcanic ash.

  Trees approached from all angles, smashing into one another and splintering into woody fragments that evaporated midair.

  A mountain, over there, folded over itself. It began rolling toward me, a boulder of snow and ice and iron, thundering across a misfit land of soot and green grass and rain — no, snow now. The snow turned to sleet and then to nothingness as the mountain veered off course and tumbled off a cliff.

  Edik paid these bizarre happenings no mind. He happily went about his business transporting me across the fragments, as if mountains chasing you down and trees warring with one another were common sights here in Amortis.

  A few minutes later, the weird and the strange stopped greeting me and no longer followed me. A look back revealed flat fields of grass, tall as your knee, bending to one side and the other as the wind changed direction. There was no indication that a pitted land of magma geysers and falling ash and rivers of black glass lay beyond.

  Ellie had told me I might experience a slight, in her words, “stutter” upon transitioning between fragments. Clearly people here understated things.

  Which worried me. Because she also said the inhabitants close to the border were nomadic freemen who held a “slight” contempt for outsiders. And outsiders didn’t mean the once-in-a-lifetime visitor from the living realm. Outsiders meant anyone who didn’t belong to their tribe. Oh, and there were roughly thirty goddamn tribes in Fragment Five.

  To avoid getting myself shot with an arrow, or stabbed in the gut with a crude spear and hoisted up over a fire while men and women chanted names of their gods, Ellie advised traveling by night and sleeping — in a concealed spot — by day.

  Unless you’re a mole or a snake or other creature who can burrow beneath the dirt, there aren’t a whole helluva lot of places to conceal yourself in a grassy meadow.

  Sometime between morning and midafternoon — rather difficult to tell the time when clouds hide the sun — I came across a small crop of trees. Edik kindly brought me to one with a thick branch about six feet up.

  “Well,” I told the boar, “the last time I climbed a tree, I fell out and broke three fingers.” I paused. “Actually, that was two times ago. I found a village boy digging up corpses for a freaky-faced reaper the last time.”

  The boar grunted, as if shrugging and saying, “Yup, that’s life.”

  I walked around for a bit, taking in my surroundings. There were probably about sixty trees here, boughs full of leaves on each. Short of a cave, this was probably the best cover I’d find.

  “All right,” I told Edik. I snapped my fingers and said, “Come.”

  The boar lazily pushed himself forward.

  “Lie,” I said, holding my hand flat.

  He followed orders to a tee — as the stable master in Scholl said he would — although he let out a deep sigh
as if this was all a great annoyance. He tucked his little hooves under him and lay his head against the trunk, sniffing the bark. Soon, he was licking the bark. And then chewing it.

  Not one for eating bark, and not for a lack of trying, I dipped into my reserves of salted boar strips, tactfully keeping them out of Edik’s sight. Didn’t want to upset my only companion on this journey.

  After quashing the hunger pains in my stomach, I eyed my ascent up the tree. Looked fairly straightforward, and so I jumped and grabbed onto the thick branch six feet up. A few pull-ups and swings of my legs later, after wrestling with uncooperative twigs intent on poking my eye out, I sat comfortably in a bark seat from which three branches flowed out.

  I slept there for hours, waking beneath a sky of purple clouds.

  Edik hoofed it deeper into Fragment Five. Soon the grasslands were chopped off at the knees, the endless bands of green blades nothing more than beige and bronze stubble in a soil that’d been whisked into a thick soup of mud. Far away, in a direction I could not identify, a shelf of rock blackened the horizon.

  The Mirror Mountains, as Ellie called them. Or at least I hoped they were the Mirror Mountains; if not, then I wasn’t going the right way.

  She’d told me to ride toward them, till I came upon a fat lake. Lake’ll take you right into Giddish Village, she’d said. And there I’d meet with a man who was part of the rebellion. All I had to do was tell him Ellie sent me and he’d resupply me with food and other necessities for the rest of the ride to Fragment Zero.

  I wasn’t anticipating this particular meet-and-greet. Rebellions are loosely organized groups, and you get all sorts of people who want to join. The downtrodden, the risk takers, the two-faced who’ll sell your ass out to a higher-paying bidder. If you can’t keep eyes on your supposed loyalists, then how do you know if they’re still loyal?

  My options were limited, though. By day seven, my satchels were light enough that a mischievous squirrel could’ve taken off with both of them in his tiny hands as I slept. By the time I came upon what I suspected — or rather, hoped — was Giddish Village, I had a finger’s length of salted boar remaining, and a couple pieces of stale bread.

  I hadn’t seen a soul this entire time, which was not as comforting as one might expect. Although Ellie had told me Fragments Five, Six and Seven — the behavioral test fragments — were considerably less populated than the others, I’d still expected a whiff of life. Or as it were, death. And my nostrils didn’t smell a thing till I came upon a hilltop village of thatched roofs and a rotting palisade.

  It was daytime, which meant two things. One, it was bloody hot — Fragment Five felt like a goddamn furnace intent on squeezing the last bits of sweat out of my pores till I keeled over. Secondly, I stuck out like a phoenix coming in for a landing in the middle of the night. Why? Because I was wearing clothes.

  In a community of nudists.

  Ellie had not bothered to tell me that the lads of Giddish Village let themselves swing free and the ladies walked about with bare breasts and, depending on the woman, a fair bit of hair between their legs.

  Here I was with a pair of ebon blades dangling from my belt, a black cloak draping my backside, and wearing old leather armor that’d been soiled by mud, rain and blood.

  I smiled at my audience uneasily as Edik climbed a small ramp of dirt into the village. The inhabitants of Giddish Village stared at me with the friendliness of a thunderstorm.

  Even a company of goats stopped chewing on grass to have a look at what the wilds had brought in. Or perhaps they were perplexed as to why their handlers had stopped milking them.

  Anyway, I stopped off at a mud shack with a white painted “4” on the door. I knocked, hopeful Ellie’s informants hadn’t skipped off into another village.

  The door swung open, and a broad-chested man greeted me with narrow eyes.

  I cleared my throat. “Ellie told me—”

  A hand darted out, grabbed me by the collar of my jerkin and yanked me inside. The door slammed shut.

  A bearded man sat on a stool, eying me up and down.

  “What’re you?” the man who opened the door said. “A backwards fuck with nothin’ in your head there? Told Ellie I’d contact her, not the other way around.”

  “Right,” I said. “What’s with, uh… you know, letting the boys hang freely? It’s hot here, I get that, but—”

  “Look at tha’ butt’ry face,” said the man on the stool. “Where you from?”

  “Yeah,” the other man said, “got a glow to you. Why?”

  “Living realm,” I answered. “I guess our skin’s in better condition than the dead. Go figure, huh?”

  Barstool man scratched at his beard. “Livin’ realm? What the hells is Ellie got cookin’ up?”

  “He’s fuckin’ with us,” said his partner. He shoved a meaningful finger into my chest. “Where’d you hear the name Ellie at? One of Lord Sterm’s boys?” He leaned over a table and fetched a hatchet. “Go on, Gentry, tell ’im how I sniff his kind right out.”

  I crossed my arms. “Put your ax down. Ellie told me to follow the river and I’d run right into this village. She failed to tell me I should’ve stripped beforehand, and she most definitely didn’t mention I’d be dealing with two hotheaded ogres. She’s in the city of Scholl, has the god of fragments imprisoned, and she’s managed to wrangle in a Warden to serve at her side, if any of that means something to you.” Fair enough that the god of fragments was no longer imprisoned, but no reason to let something so tiny and annoying as the truth get me in trouble here.

  Hatchet man looked crestfallen, as if deeply troubled he wouldn’t be able to sunder my soul with… was the blade made of copper? Or was it that badly rusted?

  The wooden handle of the ax clunked onto the table as it was tossed from his hand.

  “So she did send you,” he said. “Apologies. Had a few run-ins with Sterm’s men recently, masquerading around as the rebellion, tryin’ to get us to admit to—” He paused, searching for the words. “To things,” he finally said, clearly distrusting still. “Anyways, call me Corvin. What’re you here for?”

  I rapped a finger against a clay amphora sitting on table. “Wine?”

  “Tea,” Gentry said. “Cold and old.”

  With a disgusted sigh I wheeled around, taking in the place. Looked like an insufferably small shack from the outside, but its innards opened up into wide, airy rooms featuring dusty tables, stools, an unlit hearth with a pile of ash inside, and various tools and knickknacks lying about. Plates were strewn among the counter, and clothes were piled high against corners of walls. Looked like a nice place for cockroaches to call home.

  “I need supplies,” I said. “Enough to get me to Fragment Zero.”

  “What’s Ellie got in her head to start sendin’ more scouts to that abominable place?” Corvin asked.

  “The supplies,” I said, uninterested in being laughed at for telling them my true intentions of going there and freeing conjurers.

  “All right, if Ellie says so, I’ll trust ’er. What do you need?”

  I threw my satchels on the table. “Enough to fill both of these. I’m out of everything.”

  Gentry kicked his feet against the legs of his stool. “Need more’n ’at to get to Fragment Zero. Be smack dab outta morale halfway there I’d imagine.”

  “He’d be dead,” Corvin said. “Livin’ realm and all that.”

  “Ah, ah. Yup. True. Dead as Sterm’s men’ll be they come lookin’ for us again.”

  “Should only be another seven or eight days, yeah?” I asked.

  “Sure enough,” Gentry said. “But berries and cabbage don’t go to fillin’ your belly all that much, do they now?”

  “Tell me,” I said, taking a peek into the other rooms, hopeful to find a store, “you have more than fruit and rabbit food.”

  Corvin pushed past me. “’Fraid not.”

  I followed him into a square cutout in the wall, his bare, plump ass leading the way. A gentle
breeze blew across my arms, from an opened window covered with mesh. The room was cool and mostly dark, but the slivers of sunlight that squeezed through the mesh exposed several shelfs on which bushels of carrots, heads of cabbage, breathable sacks of berries, beans, peas, onions, parsnips and other vegetables and fruits were stored.

  “’Ey, Gentry,” Corvin hollered, spinning around so fast his balls slapped into his thighs, “where’s the damn satchels?”

  “Should be in ’ere.” A pause. “Wait. I moved ’em the other day. Was cleanin’ out the bottom there and…” His voice trailed off. Moments later, he came up behind me and tossed a few empty satchels into the room. “Should be enough, I’d think. Five oughta keep—”

  Gentry was moved to silence with a deep percussive voice that you could feel in the soles of your feet. Couldn’t hear one word that was said, but you had the unmistakable feeling it wasn’t sweet talk.

  “The hells is going on out there?” Corvin asked, whipping his head around.

  “Don’t know. I’ll go see.”

  “Sterm’s men?” I said, venturing a guess. It seemed that Sterm — whoever he was — made it a point to be a needle in the side of Corvin and Gentry.

  “Could be,” Corvin said. “You know ’im?”

  “Don’t know much about these lands.”

  “Well, you came to the right side. Other half of Fragment Five would’ve had ya in shackles up to your waist, maybe even yer throat.”

  He hefted a sack of raspberries from the shelf, then opened a small cloth bag.

  “Why the difference between the two?”

  He shrugged as he took a handful of berries and dumped them into the bag. “Who knows? Some say it’s ’cause Arken’s seein’ how people best respond. How he can get the most out of ’em. By lettin’ ’em have free will, or whippin’ ’em into shape. Here,” he said, holding up a bagful of berries.

  “Corvin,” Gentry said, his voice as shaky as a pair of wet feet on ice. “We got problems.”