An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  “No,” she said with a sternness that didn’t at all match her red, teary eyes. “I need to suture your wound.”

  “Stay here and let them put me down like a sick pup? No, I don’t—”

  Lysa stabbed the makeshift pin through the loose flab of flesh on my stomach. The prick of pain shot a shiver up my spine and across my shoulders. Proper needles were far preferable.

  She glanced behind me, toward the door. Then to the pin again, looping the string back and forth with clinical detachment

  Another fist surged through the door, chunks of wood careening across the floor.

  Lysa looked behind me again. Then to the pin. She swallowed. “I think they’re collapsing the fortress.”

  “What?”

  Lysa’s hand hovered, the needle idle. “We should move. Now!”

  She helped me up, and I shrugged off the severed breastplate. We ran toward the far wall, Lysa holding my arm as if I was a decrepit old man who’d lost his cane. To be fair, I did look decrepit, what with blood dripping out of a half-sutured wound and a needle dangling from my stomach.

  We were about ten feet from the wall when the room began to shake. Curiosity nagged me, urged me to spin around and take a gander at what the conjurers were cooking up. But good sense and logic kept my feet moving.

  Five feet from the wall and sawdust, then wood chunks began falling from the ceiling.

  Another step, and joists trumpeted like the deep bellow of a horn, creaking and twisting and bending.

  Then, there was a crash. And the walls seemed to shiver, and floor was moving sideways and up and down.

  Curiosity won, in the end. I turned and watched with a gaped mouth as the front half of the ceiling caved in, a mess of wood joists and braces collapsing, then falling through to the hallway below as the floor fissured and split.

  A widening pit by the door swallowed the bunks, and the door itself had been crushed under lumps of whitewashed stone that had plummeted from above — presumably a stairway, or perhaps even the roof of the fortress.

  Only a skeleton of deformed framing remained from the hallway outside. The Custodians, the guards… gone.

  Several conjurers lay on the floor, some crushed beneath stone. Exhaustion had likely taken the majority — hopefully to a restful sleep and not to a sundered death.

  Amielle woefully hauled herself around. With slumped shoulders and a hanging head, she stumbled back to Lysa and me. And then she sat herself against the wall and puked.

  An unsettling silence lingered for the next few minutes as Lysa patched me up, completing the suture job by slicing the string from the needle and tying it a small knot.

  “We’ll need to get you wolf’s leaf as soon as possible,” she said.

  “And where, pray tell,” Amielle said, speaking for the first time in a while, “do you think you’ll get wolf’s leaf here? Fragment Three is a long ways away.”

  “We’re not going to Fragment Three,” I said, rising to my feet. I stretched my back, testing the stitching. Belly didn’t pop open and spill blood and juices everywhere, so that was good.

  Amielle looked up at me expectedly. “Then where?”

  I smiled. “To your new home with the rebellion. And I am going to a place you attempted to conquer. There’s a tear downstairs, yeah?”

  “A what?”

  “A gateway. A portal. You can’t see it. At least, I’ve never seen one, but you walk through it and poof! You’re somewhere far, far away.”

  Amielle dabbed a finger to her lips, wiping leftover vomit residue on her pants. “I see. So it’s called a tear? I wondered. I knew it led to a distant location, but they never told us where. Or how.”

  “It leads to Mizridahl,” I said. “Which is exactly where I’m going.”

  “What if it leads somewhere else?” Lysa said.

  I’d considered that possibility. And when posing the question to myself, I’d come up with the same answer that I offered Lysa: I simply smiled and told her to think of more pleasant things.

  Chapter 20

  Mumblings of deception and fraud passed between the conjurers, most of whom were huddled in apparent cliques across the room. They all wore white gowns down to their knees, skin cold and clammy.

  Amielle herself was skeptical of my claim.

  But I didn’t have time to assuage her wariness.

  “We need to move, now,” I said. “There’s an army of thousands waiting outside this fortress. I don’t think they’ll come up to investigate; they’re too sheepish. They rely on their commanders. But trust me when I tell you Wardens will be here soon, and if you don’t know what those malevolent bastards are, well—”

  “I know Wardens,” Amielle said, eyes creased.

  Of course she did. That was probably how she’d ended up here, hunted down and captured by the flail-wielding beasts.

  I sheathed my blade and handed the other back to Lysa. “Then you’ll be eager to leave.”

  Lysa excused herself, said she was going to see if there was a way to learn what the army gathering in and outside the fortress was up to. She promised she wouldn’t do anything stupid, like leap down below and sleuth around.

  “Before we leave,” I said to Amielle, “tell me. What do they have you do down there, in that room with the tear?”

  She leaned against the wall, head back. “Prevailing thought said the only way for the dead to return to the living realm was through a process of sundering and then binding their soul to a corpse from the living realm. However, this results in the ruining of their minds. They call them reaped when that happens. They can be controlled, indoctrined, but they are not reliable. They cannot think for themselves. The conjurers here… we have discovered a solution to this problem. Or rather, I discovered the solution.” She grimaced.

  “You’re going to tell me what that solution is,” I said, “but before you do, back it up a step. Far as I know, once you’re sundered, you’ve the freedom to choose a new body, provided one is available. Hence the Preen. So how was a reaped forced into a corpse from the living realm?”

  “Being sundered, Astul… it is not pleasant. I hear its agony, unless your are sundered but for only a moment, as you might be when transferring your soul into a Preen. It’s worse than any torture you’ve ever inflicted and endured. One would do anything to escape… even become a reaped.”

  Not many things make my stomach turn, but that tidbit of information certainly did. Suddenly, I very much wanted Lysa back in Fragment Nine. She shouldn’t have come here with me. I shouldn’t have allowed it.

  Amielle shook her head. “I don’t know why I worked so much harder than the others here. I guess…” Her voice trailed off, and she stared with empty eyes into the wreckage. “I guess I was foolish. Thought maybe we could be let free if I did what He wanted.”

  “Arken, you mean?”

  Amielle nodded. “Do you know how many I sundered with my experiments in attempt to find a solution? Hundreds. Thousands. The constant deliveries of Preen ensured they all returned, but there’s something different about a person when they’ve been sundered, even if you escape the horror quickly. You’re emptier. A piece of you is taken when you’re sundered, I believe.”

  Amielle Scorticia with a showing of decency, of regret for her decisions. Now that was something I’d never counted on seeing. Of course, in the end, it was never her fault. She was only Occrum’s puppet, unable to resist the pulling of her strings.

  “What is the solution?”

  “We shut them down,” Amielle said.

  “Shut them down?”

  “Hey,” Lysa called from across the room. “I hear voices down there. I can’t really make anything out, though.”

  “If you incapacitate the mind,” Amielle began, “essentially rendering it inactive, passage from Amortis to the living realm is possible without the person in question becoming reaped. They retain everything that makes them an individual, thoughts and all. I believe it’s a trick played on the universe… or wh
atever strange force has created the rules by which we live. Corpses can pass between realms unimpeded, so—”

  “Incapacitate the mind and you make it appear the body is without an owner, that it’s a corpse.”

  “Yes. But interestingly, the reaped are not corpses, yet they can pass through. I believe it’s because they are in a vessel from the living realm — another ruse, so to speak. The universe, or powers that be, is tricked into beliving that the reaped are actually alive, from the living realm… because their bodies are.”

  It’s not good to clench your jaw; you tend to break teeth doing that, over time. But I couldn’t help it. My worst fear — well, one of ’em — had come true. Arken was preparing to deploy the might of his army to the living realm, in their corporeal form.

  But just as the bad always accompanies the good, the opposite is also true. I could use this to my advantage.

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked Amielle. “Incapacitating the mind?”

  “Some do not come back, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking. How many? What percentage?”

  She tilted her head, annoyed. “It’s not a math problem. I don’t know. Some. A few out of a hundred. What are you asking for? You claim to be alive. You came to Amortis in one piece. Shouldn’t you be able to leave all the same?”

  “I’m not asking for me.” My eyes wandered back to Lysa.

  From the corner of my vision, I saw Amielle lift her head sagely. “I see. I cannot promise anything, but the odds are in her favor, if you wish for her to pass into the living realm.”

  “You’re all passing into the living realm. I’m getting you out of here.”

  Amielle chewed her cheek, but said nothing.

  Lysa laid herself on the floor, half her body dangling over the edge of the collapsed room. She got up, worry wrinkling her forehead. “They’re getting louder.”

  Probably just soldiers. Wardens wouldn’t be here quite yet. Still, if I was wrong about the lads and lasses in Arken’s army — if they weren’t cowards and submissive yes-men — then we’d be in trouble. More were bound to show if we didn’t move soon.

  I clicked my tongue, thoughts tugging me this way and that. “Give me the lowdown on this black magic business. How long’s it take to shut down the mind? How many can you shut down at one time? And, lastly — I promise — are you going to end up like Sybil over there if you were to do it, zonked the fuck out?”

  Amielle picked at the gown straps, straightening them across her shoulders. “It can take upward of five minutes, depending on the number of minds required to be shut down. The Brimary has us tend to forty at a time, split between eight conjurers. And—”

  “Wait,” I said. “The Brimary? What the fuck’s the Brimary?”

  “It’s an order within Arken’s army. Officers, from what I can tell. The ones you saw below. To answer your last question, no. Unless you intend on having me incapacitate minds without reprieve.”

  Huh. Unless I intended? The Amielle I remembered wouldn’t have ever let those prideless words inside her mouth, much less let them leave it. Another’s intentions did not concern Amielle, only her own.

  Maybe it served only as a figure of speech. Or maybe she’d been beaten down to the point that she could not recall having the capacity to act for herself. Damn scary thought there. If such subservience could pin down a stubborn woman who’d lusted for control and power like Amielle, was anyone safe from Arken’s subjection?

  That was what had impelled me from the beginning, though, wasn’t it? The ultimate fear not of death, but of the loss of freedom — an indefinite indenture where I’d lose all sense of who I was, who I’d become. Preserving Mizridahl, saving the ones I loved, those were byproducts of something much more personal and selfish. In the end, I was out for myself. Needed to save me. But the reasons for saving the world don’t much matter, so long as you do it. Right?

  I just hoped this insane plan of mine would work.

  Both Amielle and Lysa were convinced it was indeed insane, but they didn’t know the half of it — only a very small part. Hell, Amielle didn’t even know why I’d come to free her and the conjurers, and she remained skeptical when I insisted she’d hear all the juicy bits soon as we left this bloody fortress.

  But she proved to be a sedulous little conjurer, agreeing to my plan. Really, what choice did she have?

  She, with the help of a prune-skinned man, gathered conjurers in groups of forty. There were a total of one hundred and ninety-four conjurers in the makeshift dormitory, sixteen of which had been either sundered or rendered unconscious during the collapse. Eight conjurers had been separated from the larger groups, forming their own. Amielle included.

  The unconscious conjurers were picked up and carried by teams of two to the busted ledge of rock that fell away to the hallway below. The debris had piled into the form of a large mound, high enough that we could jump onto it, then make our way down the sloping side and into the part of the hallway that had been spared from destruction.

  I stepped over shattered gems and pulverized armor — remnants of Custodians and the Brimary.

  Some of the candelabra suspended from the ceiling had had their chains ripped from the joists. The chandeliers hung sideways, solidified wax crusted on the floor.

  The door to the holding chamber was closed, but as Lysa had claimed to hear, voices did indeed bleed through the wooden frame. Meek voices, full of wonder and curiosity. I put an ear to the door and listened.

  “He’ll be real angry ’n’ such if we run,” said a man.

  “Nonsense,” a woman said. “How will he ever know, till he comes here himself? You don’t see no rainbow shootin’ up to the sky warnin’ Devous, do you?”

  “She got a point,” said another man.

  “I don’t know… I don’t know. Seems risky. Dissidents, they… you know how it is. Sundered eternally.”

  Seemed my assumptions about the soldiers were correct. They were probably slaves just like those who worked in the iron mountains of Fragment One or the forests of Fragment Three — they donned their armor and carried their swords because they had to, not because belief or hope stimulated them.

  Slave armies make for good numbers, but they have no loyalty. If you get to them, prod them, plant a seed inside their minds… they’ll turn. They’ll fight against you instead of your enemy.

  Ah, hell. I already had too much on my plate.

  I threw open the door, startling those behind it.

  The warm smog of a thousand bodies hit me like the sticky air after a summer storm.

  Faces hidden behind iron stared at me. At us.

  “Your Custodians,” I said, “are dead. Men of the Brimary are dead. Sundered. I suggest you leave this place now, before the same happens to you.”

  There were whispers and murmurs, questions abounded. There was a shuffling of feet, a widening of eyes. But there were no hands moving to hilts, no emptying of sheaths.

  “Are you… a god?” a baby-faced soldier asked. Looked like he hadn’t seen a day over sixteen, but he could’ve well been over three hundred years of age, given how long some seemed to stay in the same body in Amortis.

  “No,” I said. “But I know how to kill one.”

  These men and women probably didn’t believe that, but they couldn’t be certain. And they weren’t the sort to test the truth.

  I pushed my way through, the crowd parting.

  With Lysa at my side and the conjurers filing in behind, I walked the platform, hand gliding down the smooth amethyst banister. Stopping before the iron door fashioned with steel belts and rivets — the door to the room the Custodians had carried the unconscious conjurers from — I turned. Faced the frightened lads and lasses whose lives had as little meaning as those mining in the gem fields.

  “Run,” I told them. “Run far, far away. If you split up, form small companies, then some of you will make it. Some of you won’t. Better than sitting here, waiting for Arken to s
under you.”

  “We… we could kill you,” said a woman, voice frail as her birdlike arms. “He would reward us.”

  I chuckled. “I just ended the lives of eight Custodians and a handful of the Brimary.” I extended a hand out, gesturing to the conjurers. “I’ve freed the very people Arken depends on to win the war he’s sending you to fight. And you can kill me? Then go ahead, try.”

  No one moved. No one tried.

  “You should leave,” I said. “You don’t want to be here when the storm comes. And trust me, it’s blowing in faster than your hearts are thumping right now. So go. Get out of here!”

  There was movement in the back, near the entrance of the holding chamber. Feet began shuffling, shifting, turning. Soon, a migration had commenced and a sea of iron clanged away.

  The holding chamber emptied out, leaving only myself, Lysa and the conjurers.

  A few seconds later, the hinges of the iron door whined as I shoved it open and went inside a room whose appearance I dreaded.

  I’d envisioned steel chains anchored into walls, attached to iron clasps which would bind the ankles and wrists of conjurers so they couldn’t escape. I’d imagined a torture setup of sorts, where soldiers would be stuffed into cages in case their minds were obliterated and they themselves turned into rabid, untamed beasts. And while my expectations weren’t spot-on, they weren’t far off, either.

  The room was circular, one continuous wall of translucent amethysts curving around the edge, violet light bleeding from within and leaking out as a hazy, dim mist that filled the room. Iron tracks were likewise arranged in a circular formation, leading to the center of the room, like the spokes of a wheel. At the beginning of the tracks, resting against the walls, were large iron carts, dented and rusted, and beside each cart a lever.

  A quick inspection of one of the carts didn’t reveal anything interesting. Looked old, smelled of rust, had a deep-seated bed.

  “That’s where they put the soldiers,” Amielle said.

  “They load them up like animals,” another conjurer put in.

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. I’m trying to get it, but I don’t get it.”