An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Justin DePaoli

  “End the creator,” Ripheneal wheezed, “and his creations end you.”

  The god of life threw himself forward, the hilt of the blade sliding up against his ribs.

  He died then. He died, and I snapped. Went rabid. Absolutely, utterly and entirely mad. I thought I’d gone mad before, once or twice, but no. I’d gone unbalanced, perhaps, because this was something else.

  Something I had never before felt.

  It was, in a word, hunger. The kind of hunger you’ll do anything — anything — to sate. The kind that opens up a man’s raw, primal core… that piece of you that’s not so different than the jackal who would snatch tiny ducklings from their mother and rive them into satisfying morsels of pondborne meat.

  I’d always prided myself on being the shepherd, never the sheep. But as the blood poured from Ripheneal, I became merely a member of the pack.

  The stampede came from all sides, converging on a man who had transcended into godhood. He very much looked like a man again, the fear percolating in his eyes as the creations he thought to eradicate came at him with the savagery of animals, with the instincts of cold-blooded killers. We weren’t killers, though, were we? No.

  We were simply avenging the man who made us. That was what it felt like — that in the core my being, I bore an unimaginable heaviness that only the death of your finest lover, of your greatest friend, could unleash.

  He turned to his Wardens. Their hulkish frames of brawn parted then, and Arken slipped behind his faithful protectors. The gap sealed as the Wardens fell back into position like a congealing aspic after being fingered.

  “Kick their skulls right down into their assholes!” yelled a man.

  “Yeah!” cried another.

  The cries spread into a chant as the Wardens inched forward as one immovable bulwark. From the other side, a charge. Klosh’s forces that had captured Vereumene stormed toward Arken, forcing half the Wardens to split and intercept the would-be god killers.

  Still had seven of the gigantic bastards a handful of paces in front of me and advancing closer. With the combined might of the North and West, they’d fall, but neither quickly nor without inflicting a whole helluva lot of casualties first.

  I had no interest in being among those casualties.

  I couldn’t be among those casualties. Not because I very much wanted to continue living with my limbs intact, but rather for one simple fact: I hadn’t come all this way to see a god survive.

  “Vayle!” I shouted above the cacophony of war cries. “The phoenix!”

  “I see him,” she said, blade in hand. “Take the horse, chase him. I’ll see you on the other side, Astul. Go!”

  A toast of ebon and off I went, giving the encroaching Wardens a wide berth. One of them flashed his starry eyes at me, but what could one bearded, grungy-looking man with a fresh, meaty gash crescendoing from shoulder to nipple possibly do?

  Arken’s little servant — or in this case, mammoth servant — let me slip past without more than a flinch of his knee… he’d thought about it, for a moment. But shadows overcame him. His flail went up, rising with the others. And the seven Wardens decimated the first push of Northernmen.

  Now in the clear, I sheathed my blade. Far easier to haul ass without carrying something.

  I ran hard, beating the hell out of my lungs. Tasted the chill of a fall air on my tongue, felt it electrify the wetness of juices and blood seeping out bit by bit from my poorly sutured wound.

  Arken’s gemmed cloak fluttered in the air, thirty feet above me. Tendrils of fire from the phoenix’s tail curled up as it flew headlong into the wind, obscuring amethysts and sapphires and bloodstone.

  The god of Amortis had fled. He’d fly back to the tear, throw himself into it, then find safety in the violet haze of Fragment Zero.

  Maybe he would indeed find safety there, along with freedom forevermore. Good chance of it happening. I knew that even as I climbed atop his warhorse, settled into the saddle, secured my boots into the stirrups. Even if this steed bounded across crushed rock faster than Pormillia, I’d be two days behind. Arken would find himself in another realm while I was still galloping through this one.

  If I’d had some good sense left, probably I’d have stuck around. Helped chop some knees off a couple Wardens, bury those fuckers till they touched the water line. Then I’d have worked my smooth-talking self into a deal with Patrick or Jesson or Grannen, with a promise here and a promise there, and if I was lucky, I’d have an army with which to escort to the tear. We’d lay siege to Fragment Zero. Better to attack a god in numbers, yeah?

  But here’s the thing: good sense had abandoned me. I was driven by one need, one lustful desire. I’d stumble trying to seize it. I’d fall trying to obtain it. I would die for it.

  So I set out on an armored horse, leaning hard into the saddle. Aimed toward a horizon stippled with the amber flecks of fire.

  Two days, I’d figured. I cut it down to one. I pushed Arken’s warhorse harder than I’d ever pushed a steed before. Took that bastard seventy miles across a rolling landscape of crushed rock. Seventy miles, about twenty-two hours if my counting had been accurate. He was frothing at the chest by the end of it, even after I’d stripped him of his gemmed armor.

  Sand was in my throat, and my empty gut was gnawing. I didn’t have enough spit to polish my fucking fingernail. But I did have passion, and it burned. It burned so, so bright as I kicked out of the stirrups and climbed off my horse.

  Against the slope of a hill lay a body whose face had been chewed off by the dullness of fingernails. And a little ways beyond, where the realm of Amortis spat me out, stood a bird who groomed itself, tossing old plumage onto the ground. The feathers blackened into hardened slabs of coal.

  “Well,” I announced with a voice that sounded scarred over. “Does your own realm not fancy your return?”

  Arken turned then, a book in his hand. The book, rather. He looked… disturbed.

  He put on a face of confidence, turning up his mouth into a smile as he closed the book and stuffed it under his armpit.

  “A good trick,” he said. “All of it, in fact. Quite respectful. You had the gems pulled over my eyes.”

  “Wool,” I corrected him. “That’s how we say it in this realm, and since it looks like you’ll be staying here for the rest of your very short life expectancy, try to assimilate, will you?”

  I matched him step for step, even though a span of forty feet separated us.

  “Quick thinking, Shepherd, involving the Mother of Conjurers. I expected… how should I say this… bumps in the road when it came to her. But” — he tapped a finger on his chin, as if this was all a minor inconvenience for him — “to seal a tear? No, I would have never guessed she had the knowledge.”

  Lysa, I thought. It made sense now, her silly talk involving the what-ifs and maybes of the tears vanishing after this was all over. Ellie must have figured out a way to seal them, and Lysa had known. She’d known I’d never see her again. Not until I left the living realm forever.

  “She does have a mind in her,” Arken said, almost inwardly, as if in deep rumination. “And a godly body, wouldn’t you agree? Mother of the Conjurers… I call her the Mother of Beauty. And let me tell you, Shepherd, she could fuck you till you nothing more came out and you were begging for reprieve. I can still hear her moans as I grabbed her—”

  “Even gods have fantasies, do they?”

  His head jerked back, as if surprised. “She didn’t… oh, of course she wouldn’t tell you. The truth was always an inconvenience to her. Surely a man like you must question how, if I cannot create life, the wonders of Wardens exist. Surely you must have asked yourself how a goddess of war can come to be, and how the god of fragments was born.

  “Allow me to sate your curiosity. Creation is not always necessary when you have the power of manipulation at your fingertips. Ellie is responsible for it all. She deformed the minds that went on to become my Wardens. She shaped the consciousness, the instincts,
the genius that was my goddess of war. We were to share the power of creation once we conquered this realm.”

  I thought to brand him a liar, but was what the point of telling me tales? The existence of Wardens, of Lyria and Klatch, of Custodians… they couldn’t have been born from the ether. Someone — something — must have sculpted them not anew but from a framework of existence. And who more capable than the Mother of Conjurers?

  “Let me guess,” I said, pointing the tip of my blade at him. “Soon as she delivered you an army of demented fuckers with starry eyes and gemmed flesh, you tried to rid yourself of the shared responsibilities of creation, yeah?”

  Arken clicked his tongue like a disapproving parent. One of his amethyst gauntlets curled into a fist, then unfurled. “Such steadfast confidence that I am a snake, hmm? No, it’s Ellie who’s the snake. She thought to unseat me. To use her manipulations against me. But loose lips ended those grand delusions.”

  He went on with his metaphors and described how Ellie’s spool of deceptions unwound itself right to his feet, but it went in one ear and out the other for the most part. My mind was preoccupied with a so-called truth the Mother of Conjurers had told me. The one involving her redemption story, where she wanted to make a difference — a good, honest difference — in the realm of the dead. The redemption, according to her, had begun with the rebellion, but that wasn’t quite true, was it? It had begun with her arrival in Amortis, when she’d apparently hatched a beguilement for the ages.

  I couldn’t blame her for leaving that part of the story out. Bearing responsibility for the terrors that threaten to seize your world… that’s not something you’d like to admit. But this new information did give rise to an interesting, or perhaps unsettling, question. What were Ellie’s intentions? Far as I could tell, only two possibilities existed: end Arken and his lust for creation — and along with him, a dreadful future for both Amortis and the living realm — or… she wanted precisely what he desired, all for herself.

  Maybe it was naivety and ignorance, but I convinced myself it was the former.

  Arken rubbed his hands together, the gems embedded in his gauntlets screeching. “You may think of me as a tyrant, but I am an honorable one. I will reign over this realm, Shepherd, and when that comes to pass, I will be in great need of a bevy of gods to ensure my vision for creation is maintained. The Council will elevate you, just as they did me. They will elevate anyone I demand. Including your Commander Vayle. Including… a precocious conjurer whose name escapes me. Is it… hmm. I believe it starts with an L.”

  “I’m not interested in becoming a god,” I said. With a flick of my wrist, ebon scribbled against a leather scabbard. I aimed the black summit at Arken. “I’m interested in killing them.”

  My boots raked across mashed rock as I set a determined course toward the god of the dead. A serpent’s grin on his face preceded the drawing of his sword, and he advanced on me.

  This would be a battle of wills. A fight where the supernatural and the occult held no dominion. No tricks up my sleeve for this one.

  This would be a clash from which Arken probably thought he’d emerge victorious. After all, what was I to him? A mangy assassin whose only weapon was an ebon blade and whose only defense the panache of a swordsman.

  Another step toward one another, and the gap between us shrunk to fifteen feet. Another step, then three more. Ten feet now.

  I hefted the abyssal blade upwards, its black sheen and icy blue swirls halving my face. The god of Amortis would soon learn I was much more than he could conceive.

  I was a misbegotten boy who’d grown into a man drunk on power, whom the hardships and losses and terrors that bred in his mind had eventually molded into the personification of intimidation. I was a miscreant who’d ended the conjurers, who had saved a world from extinction.

  Arken believed he could kill me. I saw that belief glisten his eyes. And I realized then that even gods make grave misjudgments.

  It came with a swoop. Air was rived as a sword made from gems arced downward.

  A quick step into the swing saw ebon clash with a spark of amethysts. The impact jolted Arken’s blade backward, and the god shuffled in a circle around me, tip of his sword following mine.

  “You’ve been alive for how long?” he asked, wide eyes cautiously stalking mine. “Thirty, forty years?”

  I struck with a faux stab at his belly, pushing him back. “Thirty-four, to be exact. I got a little while before forty.”

  He grinned, tongue flailing between his lips. “In eight thousand years, you’ll be my age. Now, what makes you believe you can possibly outduel me?”

  “Experience has diminishing returns after a while,” I said. “And I find it hard to imagine you’ve honed your skills while sitting in your plush city of gems for so long.”

  Whoosh went the air, brief gusts scurrying away as emeralds and bloodstone flashed brilliantly. I met his downward strike before the serrated sword could sever the joint of my knee, but as I did, he socked me in the jaw with a fist of gems.

  I stumbled back, clutching my face. There were scrapes and blood. Maybe even a missing tooth. That kinda stuff doesn’t kill you. A salient blade edge shearing your neck from your shoulders, though? That’ll end you quick.

  I threw myself awkwardly backward as a luminous band of gems cut horizontally at chin height. The near miss announced itself with a gentle breeze against my flesh. Unable to keep my balance, I tumbled back, spinning as I crashed shoulder first onto the rocks.

  I heard the huff of his breath as a black smog clouded my vision. Heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of his boots. He was drawing closer. Running toward my fallen soon-to-be corpse.

  The fall had spun me around. Couldn’t see fuck all, but I knew — I knew — he was on top of me. Right there. Right now. If I didn’t move, the Reaper man would be coming for me.

  I anchored one foot into the loose rock and pushed off hard as I could, lurching forward and somersaulting. Got to my feet at the very moment a gemmed blade spewed volcanic gravel in all directions. Had I delayed by a mere second, the spewing would’ve contained bits of bone and flesh.

  I spun around, ebon blade in hand, heart beating hard in my chest.

  Arken smiled. “You’re outmatched, Shepherd.”

  He came at me again, so fast it seemed his armor fragmented into a mishmash of blurry jewels.

  A punch of his blade at my waist, and a deflection. Knuckles pummeling toward my nose, and a jerk of my head. Another slash, another deflection. An upward swing of his blade, and a screech of ebon and amethysts.

  He seemed tireless, able to continue his assault for eternity. I, on the other hand, was sucking in air and puffing it out like a panting hound. Had cramps in both sides. My lungs burned.

  “This,” Arken said, “ends now.”

  He spoke meticulously, his mouth gaping to pronounce each word. Almost looked like you could fit a fist inside there. A fist or… I patted my pocket. My palm pressed against a cylindrical bulge. Holy hot damn, I thought.

  Maybe Arken was right. In a battle of blades, he’d win, every time. But death by ebon wasn’t the only way for him to be purged from this realm and from all of existence.

  I had a plan. And I put that plan into action by fleeing up the hillside, crawling up sliding sheets of volcanic gravel till I got to a flattened plateau. Arken pursued me effortlessly, staking his sword in the ground to propel himself upward.

  Upon reaching the plateau, he unleashed a flurry of attacks. I shrugged off the first five, then “slipped” and found myself staring up at him, bits of rock gnawing at my back.

  Arken straddled me. He lowered himself, putting a knee into my gut. Then he wrapped his gemmed glove midway up his sword, creating a makeshift dagger.

  I threw my left hand up to strike him in the face. He predictably swatted it away, and as he did — while his focus was elsewhere — I slid my right hand down, down, down. Searching for a pocket.

  Searching for the pocket.
r />   There.

  At my fingertips, a vial of glass. And not just any glass. This was the type of glass that you won’t ever find in the shop of your average glassblower. It’s the sort that you only acquire if you’re willing to hand over a pretty payment. The kind guaranteed not to shatter if you were to fall on it with all your weight. It needed to be durable, because guys like me — we carry it with us wherever we go, just in case. Better to part with this world on your terms than those of a tyrant.

  Cork plugged the poison inside. I gouged the cork with my nail, loosening it just enough so the liquefied camadan seeds inside would spill out with enough jarring force to the vial.

  “Little Shepherd,” Arken said, “goodb—”

  The word to be was goodbye. To pronounce it requires you to open your mouth nice and wide. And as the god of Amortis did just that, I slipped the vial out of my pocket, catapulted my hand upward and jammed the vial into his mouth.

  He reeled back, flailing. The excitement of an assassination jolted me forward. I slammed my palm beneath his chin and clamped down on the top of his skull with my other hand, forcing his mouth closed.

  He floundered, iron eyes as inflexible as ingots. An attempted jab of his sword was met with failure: I drove him back, pinning him to the ground. He lost his grip on the blade in the process as the back of his head crunched into the loose bits of crushed rock.

  The god of the dead made noises. Meager little noises muffled by a sealed mouth. He kicked and punched. His fingers crawled along the ground, searching for his sword. But the wetness of his eyes signaled despair, and with despair comes panic.

  With panic comes desperation. And desperation courts the irrational. Arken disregarded his weapon, opting to try and pry my hands from beneath his chin and on top of his skull.

  His face burned the color of hot embers as he dug his nails into my wrists.

  He swung his head from one shoulder to the other; the poison puddling in his mouth would begin to melt the flesh of his cheeks now.