The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2)

by Justin DePaoli

  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 fossilize, 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 c
roak 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.

  Her eyes remained fixed there, in the empty hallway.

  “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 Fifteen

  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.

  I cut the rope binding Rovid’s hands.

  He understood, but Lysa didn’t. She was still shaking, still muttering to herself. What she had done, why she had done it… I didn’t know. But I wasn’t leaving this place without her.

  “Go, go!” I said, twirling her around to face the doorway. I shoved her forward, and she tripped over her feet. Apparently punching a stone floor with your face clears your head, because she picked herself up and ran with Rovid.

  I was at her heels, glancing back occasionally to make sure Occrum wasn’t chasing us.

  He wasn’t. Yet.

  Down a flight of stairs. And another, stopping only to grab one of my swords that Occrum had knocked from my hand earlier; it was still sitting on the floor. Out the gaping door and into the brisk night air now filling with our wheezing gasps.

  “The cove,” Rovid said.

  It was a good idea. The only plausible one, really.

  I chanced one final glance back at the fortress. The doors were now closed.

  Into the cove I ran with the others, until before us lay not blackness but the colorful arrangement of flowers.

  “That was exhilarating,” Rovid said, clutching his chest. “And frightening.”

  “We’re not safe,” I said. “We need to find a way to… somewhere. Somewhere out of here. All Occrum has to do is step through that cove and—Lysa, what the fuck!”

  Her body was tight and rigid. Eyes open, but not blinking. Mouth ajar, but not breathing. Or at least breathing in such a manner that you would’ve had to put a hand to her chest to feel her lungs rise and fall.

  I knocked on her head with my finger. “Hello? Lysa Rabthorn? Please come out.”

  Apparently that wasn’t the key that turned the door and released her consciousness, because she rem
ained inanimate.

  “Realize,” I said, “that you—” I stopped myself midsentence. That sounded far too much like something Occrum would say. Let’s try that again. “Do you understand that you possibly, well… I don’t want to say ruined the world, but ruined our chances of saving it probably isn’t a hyperbole.”

  That got her talking. At least in one- and two-word sentences. “The book. I saw.” She punched her knuckles into her forehead and collapsed onto her knees. Shattered, she began weeping. “His blood… oh my goodness. The sound he made when—”

  I gave a sword to Rovid and pointed to the cove, then went to the ground and consoled Lysa. “Why’d you do it? What did you see in the book?”

  The soil seemed to drink her tears eagerly. Nature was rather inconsiderate at times, if you asked me. And so was I. I wanted to get on with it, move past this emotional business. But I’d learned over the past year that sometimes the mind needs to pause and wring out its sponge full of nightmares and painful memories before it stores new ones.

  And so I let Lysa cry, despite the three of us being in a precarious position. We wouldn’t have gotten far enough to consider ourselves safe even if we had begun charting a course right then.

  The tears eventually dried, and the sniffling was less mucous and snot, and the hiccups ceased. And Lysa talked.

  “When he left,” she said, “I guess to retrieve you, I got up. I wanted to know where Rav was, if maybe he’d been in the living realm recently. So I went through the book just like Occrum did.” She stopped to clear her eyes and catch her post-crying spasmed breath. “He was there, very recently. I didn’t get to read many of his thoughts before I heard Occrum coming back, but… Astul—” She sniffed and looked up at me with red, swollen eyes. “He wanted the book for its power. We were only his pawns. He wanted to get rid of us.”

  Truthfully, this wasn’t as surprising to me as it should have been. When you put your trust in no one, you always consider the treacherous outcomes. Most of the time, I planned around them so I wouldn’t fall victim to them. But I was in a rather tight spot this time. Didn’t have much of a choice.