by Tanya Huff
Four soldiers. Two older ones and a boy. The fourth, with a peg and an eye patch, reloading her bow a short distance away. Walking dead.
If she wanted to live, she could not give in to terror.
Vree marked their positions as she dove to the right, rolled, and came up with a throwing dagger in her hand. The crossbow had to be taken out. She was moving again before the dagger hit, the boy’s sword nearly parting her hair at the forehead. The walking dead were slow, but she realized, slashing a bloodless thigh from hip to knee, they had the advantage of not feeling pain.
* * * *
The horses would go to the water’s edge but no farther. Gyhard threw himself out of the saddle and into the river with Karlene close behind.
* * * *
*Watch out!* Bannon twisted her body away from the corporal’s thrust as the edge of the boy’s flailing shield caught her under the chin. She went down hard, spat out a mouthful of blood, and whipped her leg out of the way just before the corporal struck sparks off the rock she was lying on.
*This is not the sort of fight we’re good at, sister-mine.*
The shield blow continued to echo against the inside of her skull.
*Vree! Let’s get out of here!*
She half-stood. Staggered. A sword whistled past her face and she sliced at the fingers holding it, her blade gouging into the hilt. Three fingers fell, but the two remaining continued to hang on.
* * * *
“Start Singing!”
“Singing what?” Karlene demanded, stumbling on the uneven and unseen bottom. Arms whirling, momentum carried her forward another three paces, then she tripped over the weight of the water and fell.
Gyhard dragged her up onto her feet. “Sing their kigh free! Out of their bodies and away!” He released her with a shake for emphasis and continued his charge.
Gasping for breath, water pouring off of her, Karlene stopped moving and started thinking. She could Sing the kigh away, she’d done that once already, but how was she to get them out of their bodies? Don’t be an ass, Karlene, she told herself as Gyhard reached the bank, then leaped back into the river to avoid a sweeping length of steel. They don’t want to be in their bodies. Just remind them.
* * * *
Vree ducked through a circle of edged steel and found herself face-to-face with the archer—blind now, a dagger hilt protruding from the unpatched socket. She kicked at the peg. An unlucky grab as the soldier went down buried undead fingers in Vree’s hair. Training barely overcame terror as she tried to cut her way free.
* * * *
Neegan left his horse a little way downstream and slid into the river, eyes and nose only above the water. He could see his targets fighting four soldiers—the four from the station he’d wager, although he didn’t bother studying them too closely. They were not his concern as long as Vree and Bannon remained alive.
He would watch and wait and move only when his targets were either victorious or dead.
* * * *
Gyhard grabbed up a fallen branch about four feet long. This is not something I want to go into armed with only a dagger. Teeth clenched, he whipped it around and slammed it into the back of the corporal’s head. Her helm rang with the force of the blow. Her head jerked forward, then back. She should have gone down. Instead, she attacked.
“Shit!”
* * * *
Vree blocked a swing from the dead soldier’s other hand, the stock of the crossbow slapping into her palm. Shoving her dagger between her head and the fingers still clutching at her hair, she dragged the razor edge over her scalp and scrambled clear.
*What? This isn’t enough? You have to be bald, too?* Bannon kicked out and slammed her bare heel into the side of a knee. The joint popped and the boy-soldier tilted crazily to the right.
* * * *
Stepping toward shore, Karlene began to Sing a soldier’s song that a First Army captain had taught her back at the Imperial Palace. She kept it simple, for the moment working only at getting the attention of the dead, her voice reminding them of the life they’d been so cruelly cut out of.
The corporal turned first, her face expressionless, then one by one, the other three joined her. Even the blind woman seemed to stare.
* * * *
“Vree! Are you all right?”
Vree nodded, spat out another mouthful of blood, and grimaced. “It’s hard to remember they’re dead. We kept anticipating reactions they didn’t have.” Wrapping her hand around Gyhard’s wrist, she allowed him to help her to her feet. His skin seemed hotter than it should beneath her fingers. “I bit my tongue …” The Song made it hard to think. Brows drawn in, she turned to face the bard.
* * * *
Still in the water, Karlene changed the Song. There were notes played on a horn every night at the First Army garrison. The captain had explained their meaning as a sort of a combination pat on the back and dismissal. Good soldiers, your duty for the day is done. Rest knowing that because of you, the Empire is safe. Karlene had never asked if the same notes were played in every garrison, but given the efforts made to keep the seven armies unified, she was willing to bet they were.
She Sang the notes over and over, making them both a call to the soldiers’ kigh and stressing the dismissal.
Good soldiers, your duty for the day is done …
* * * *
Slowly, Vree turned toward the river, pulled around by the Song.
“Vree!” Gyhard grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “Vree, she’s not Singing to you!”
She knew she should make him pay for touching her, but it didn’t seem to matter. Her duty for the day was done…
* * * *
Hidden in a tangle of willow roots that extended out into the water, Neegan heard the Song and shook it off. His duty would not be done until his targets were dead.
* * * *
“Vree! Listen to me! You aren’t in the army any more!” Gyhard grabbed her face, pulled it close, stared into her eyes. “Don’t you remember! I dragged you away and made it impossible for you to return!”
Vree blinked at him. “I’m a good soldier …”
“No! You were, but you aren’t any more.”
“I want … I want to rest.”
*… rest.*
Gyhard pressed his forehead against hers. “You can’t,” he told her hoarsely. “I won’t let you.”
Suddenly, the soldiers collapsed, puppets with cut strings. Karlene threw herself into the Song and joyfully Sang away the kigh that whirled about her.
Gyhard felt Vree sag in his grip and at almost the same instant, stiffen. He could feel her breath, warm against his mouth. If he lowered his head just a fraction…
He let his hands fall just as hers rose to break his wrists. She frowned, and for the first time, he wasn’t sure if it was Bannon or Vree he saw.
“Why didn’t you …” Her voice trailed off.
He shook his head and stepped back, unable to answer. All he knew was that he had to get away from her, far enough away to be able to think clearly. I should have killed her when I had the chance…
“Vree! Are you all right?” Karlene splashed up out of the water and squelched across to the assassin’s side. “I saw you get hit!
“It’s nothing,” Vree muttered, watching Gyhard drift toward the river’s edge.
Bannon yanked her head around. *No!*
*Bannon, I …*
*You what? You have no defense, Vree. Don’t even try.*
* * * *
Neegan watched and waited and, when the moment was ripe, attacked. A heartbeat later, he knelt between Bannon’s shoulders, dragging back his head with a handful of hair and pressing the point of a blade into the arc of his throat.
Now, he would get some answers.
Heart slamming up against his ribs, Gyhard froze. The grip in his hair hurt more than the dagger although he could feel a warm trickle of blood run down from the point. If this assassin killed him, thinking he killed Bannon, the circle would have turned
to death at last. He couldn’t jump bodies without eye contact—all he could see was the riverbank. All thought fled, leaving behind only the terrified question, Why aren’t I already dead?
Crouched, dagger in her hand, Vree stared, wide-eyed at the commander. Assassins who deserted died. It’s over.
*I’m not going to die, Vree.* She could feel him straining against her control. *I’m not going to die!*
“Vree …”
“This has nothing to do with you, Karlene.”
Neegan turned his head, just enough to meet Vree’s gaze. “I need some answers,” he husked. “Or Bannon dies.”
“No!”
Thrust into the back of her own mind, Vree clawed at Bannon’s frenzy. *Bannon! He’s giving us a choice!*
“I am not going to die!”
Vree’s sudden, irrational charge took Neegan by surprise. In spite of her speed, he could still have opened Bannon’s throat before she reached him, but he hesitated. He knew it was Vree charging toward him, shrieking defiance, but it was Bannon he saw.
*Bannon, no!*
He/she/they dove, hitting the commander under his left arm, using his/her/themselves as a battering ram to throw the older man off Bannon’s body. The knife point drew a crimson line toward Gyhard/Bannon’s ear.
Bannon, Vree; it became irrelevant whose wrist he held, whose rib he drove his knee into—Neegan had lived this long by adapting to the unexpected. He jabbed three fingers hard under the curve of a muscle, twisted, and nearly got a hand free. An elbow slammed down and pinned his palm to the ground.
“You’ve been trying to kill me all my life, old man,” Bannon hissed through Vree’s lips. “But I’ve always been too good for you.” Impervious to pain, impervious to anything but survival, he smashed Vree’s forehead against the bloodstained rag tied over Neegan’s brow.
The commander grunted, and his grip spasmed around Vree/Bannon’s blade hand.
“An assassin who deserts dies,” Bannon snarled, shifting Vree’s weight to keep Neegan pinned. “And an assassin who stays dies. And this assassin …” He laid the blade against the vein pulsing in Neegan’s throat. “… dies now.”
“VIREYDA! STOP HIM!”
Vree grabbed onto her name and used it to cut through the maelstrom of anger, fear, and triumph that was Bannon.
*No!*
Trembling, gulping in the air, she stopped the knife with the point just below the skin. “Why?” she whispered, her voice no louder than Neegan’s would have been. “Why should I stop him, Karlene?”
She almost couldn’t hear the bard’s answer over the sound of Bannon’s shrill challenges. “Look at him, Vree. He’s your father.”
My what? But the words never made it past the clenched barricade of her teeth. They didn’t have to. The commander’s face told her everything she needed to know.
Eyes clouded with pain, Neegan stared up at her.
For the first time, she noticed how like Bannon’s his eyes were. Recognized the angle of his cheek. Remembered how he’d always been there, forcing them through harder and more deadly training, tangling their responses until the lines between them blurred and they struck as one blade.
Neegan read the thought off her face. “Assassins,” he told her, as he had a hundred times before, “have no family but the army.”
“I had Bannon.”
He closed his eyes. “No. Bannon had you.”
*Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!*
Once, during training, Vree had slipped from a roof. The impact with the ground had knocked the breath out of her and numbed her entire body except for a sharp, focused pain in her chest where she’d cracked a rib. She felt like that now: numb, with a sharp, focused pain in her chest. There should have been a thousand things to say, but she couldn’t think of any of them.
She rocked her weight back off her knees and stood. Stepping over the commander, over her father, as though he wasn’t there, she walked slowly along the river’s edge, brow furrowed. Why did the world suddenly seem to end just beyond her fingertips?
“Vree.”
Even before the arrow had destroyed his voice, Neegan had never needed to shout. Vree stood where she was, acknowledging his call, but not turning.
“I have never missed a target.”
“VREE!”
The desperation in Gyhard’s warning snapped the world back into focus. Whipping around, she found Neegan exactly where he had to be in order to drive a dagger through her spine. She dropped to one knee, pushed the point of her blade through a black sunburst, and up under his ribs. A twist of her wrist moved the double edge from left to right and sliced through his heart.
He was dead when he hit the ground.
“He wanted you to kill him,” Karlene said softly. “It was the only way he could stop trying to kill you.”
“What? And that was a good thing?” Vree sucked in a deep breath and forced it out through her teeth. “I am so slaughtering tired of being everyone’s slaughtering answer.”
Gyhard moved toward her, looking very much as if he had no choice in the matter. “Your head’s bleeding.”
Vree touched her forehead and stared at the blood on her fingertips. “It’s not mine.”
“Are you all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She was hanging onto a window ledge with fingers and toes. Shadows filled the cobblestone courtyard below, but they were the least of her worries—the fall would kill her. “Why did you warn us? Your life would be so much easier if we were dead.”
“If you were dead, my life wouldn’t be worth living.”
Vree’d never noticed before how much Bannon—Gyhard looked like Commander Neegan. “Slaughter you, too,” she snarled and knelt to wash the blood from her face and hands.
When Gyhard stepped toward her, Karlene grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “You’re a complication she doesn’t need right now.” Her voice held a tone that suggested he not argue. “She’s falling apart.”
“And how long did you have to study to develop that amazing insight into human nature?” Gyhard growled, jerking his arm free. But he remained where he was. As little as he wanted to admit it, the bard had a point if for no other reason than the face he wore was too like the older face pressed into the dirt of the riverbank—a face that in death showed as much emotion as it had in life. “I’m going for the horses. You might start thinking about burying this lot.”
“Burying?” Karlene swept a dismayed gaze over the five bodies. “But that’ll take so long. We need to rescue the prince!”
Gyhard, wading across the ford, ignored her, but Vree stood and slowly turned. Mud stained the knees of her trousers, water dribbled down from her hair, and her lashes had clumped together into wet, triangular spikes. “We can’t leave them for the crows,” she said. “They were good soldiers, like you sang.” Her cheeks flushed and her eyes shone with an almost feverish heat. “They were all good soldiers.”
“Vree, we haven’t got shovels or anything to dig with, and this whole area is rock and clay.”
“We’ll have to do the rites,” Vree continued as though she hadn’t heard.
Unable to step over, Karlene went around Neegan’s body, almost frantic with the need to make the younger woman understand. “Vree, these people are dead, truly dead. Prince Otavas is alive, and we have a chance to save him, today. You can’t want him to spend more time with …” Her gesture covered the four soldiers from the station. “… this sort of thing. They’re dead! He’s alive!” She reached out to grab the assassin’s arm, but some instinct of self-preservation stopped her hand before it closed on flesh. “Vree, listen to me.”
“I hear you.”
“A soldier expects to die in the service of the Emperor, and these soldiers are at rest. I guarantee it.” She used as much Voice as she thought was safe. The last thing she wanted to do was overwhelm Vree’s conscious control and release Bannon.
“What about him?”
“Him, too. His kigh is …” Gone would n
ot, perhaps, be the best word. “… not here. I’d know if it was.”
Vree sighed and nodded, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders. “Then Jiir allowed this as a battlefield death. Good. The army was … was …” She bit down hard on her lip. When she released it, her chin jerked up as though daring the bard to comment. “Why did you tell us that he was … who he was?”
Karlene spread her hands; half in apology, half in helpless discomfort. “I didn’t want you to kill your father.”
“I guess you should’ve checked with him first.”
“I think he wanted you to know.”
“I don’t think he gave a shi …” Vree’s face twisted, her fingers curled into claws, and her toes dug into the wet ground. “You want to know what’s funny?” she said a moment later as though Bannon had not spoken. “He was always the closest thing to a father we had.” She stepped over Neegan’s body without looking down, put her foot on the shoulder of the one-legged soldier, and pulled her throwing dagger from the eye socket.
* * * *
He felt the Song in blood and bone and in the memory of ancient pain.
“There’re out there now, looking for me. They’ll find me.”
They were the demons of his youth. He knew them now. He should have known they would come for his heart. Long ago, they had taken everything else, flayed his spirit, and left him for dead.
But he had survived.
In many ways, he was stronger than he had been then. His gaze gently touched each of his four remaining companions where they rested in the shade. This time, he was not alone.
“I have run from them for too long,” he murmured to the dark head on his lap. “We will make a stand and defeat them, you and I, once and for all.”
* * * *
Otavas stirred, his dreams touched by a dark hand. He would have wakened had he been able.
* * * *
“We can’t just charge in like three of the seven armies to the rescue,” Gyhard said, his eyes locked on Vree’s profile. “We need a plan, and we haven’t much longer to devise one.”
Vree touched the crossbow tied on behind her saddle. “We kill the old man. Karlene Sings away the dead. The prince goes home.”
“I don’t think Kars is going to be that easy to kill.” The look she shot him lifted the hair on the back of his neck. Obviously, the pair of assassins sharing Vree’s body thought differently. If they were thinking at all. Because he could do nothing to ease her pain, even if she admitted feeling it, he continued his explanation. “Suppose Kars has told the dead to kill the prince if he dies. If Karlene starts to Sing before he’s dead, he’ll stop her—remember he’s had years of practice Singing a fifth quarter she’s only just discovered. And it’s going to take her a while to find the right Song. These people have been dead longer and they’re all different—one Song isn’t going to cover them.”