“It’s over, isn’t it?” she asked, defeat sullying her voice.
I stood up, gazing at the shelf of rock where Cessilo had delivered us. “It’s not over. We just have to come up with a plan.” It was probably over. But I wasn’t about to admit that to anyone except myself. “Rav’s house seemed about as safe as it gets around these parts. We need to get back there.”
“How?” Lysa asked. “It took us six days by wagon.”
“Well, then, we need to find a wagon, don’t we?”
“I can get us a wagon,” Rovid said. “Can’t promise a horse or mule, though.”
“We’ll worry about that later,” I said. “Where’s the wagon?”
Rovid aimed the tip of his sword — my sword — into the distance. “The Prim. Sure there’s plenty left over from the culling.”
“Is that what you call it?” Lysa asked, recoil tightening her face.
Rovid shrugged, indifferent. “It’s what everybody calls it. Take us probably two days from here. Maybe three.”
“Two,” I said, unwilling to negotiate with time. It wasn’t a commodity we had to barter with. “We’ll sleep two hours a night. That may not sound like much, but your body will deal with it for a couple nights. Rovid, you can handle yourself with a sword?”
He gave me a thumbs-up.
“Good.”
“What about me?” Lysa demanded. She seemed offended that I’d given one of the two weapons we had to a reaper. Or perhaps that I hadn’t offered it to her first.
“Your job is to keep your eyes peeled for food. Berries, fruiting trees, that sort of thing. We’ll be pissin’ away all our energy walking this much. No food’ll leave us in bad shape by the time we reach the Prim. And I don’t imagine there’s much to be had there.”
Rovid swung his head from shoulder to shoulder, contemplating something. “What happens if, uh, you know… he comes for us?”
I shot him a shut-the-fuck-up glare. He knew damn well what would happen. “Let’s move.”
A few hours into our travels, Lysa spotted bushes of raspberries. Nesting birds were none too happy about our intrusion, but our growling bellies were thankful. Then later we discovered a walnut tree, green husks dangling from its boughs. Lysa had herself a giggle as Rovid and I climbed the tree, arms flailing while our swords rent the sky and occasionally a branch.
The next morning we split the husks and roasted the walnuts over a fire. We gorged ourselves on the nuts, ambled down to a nearby stream to wet our mouths, and then slept beside spitting sparks and under a hot-pink sun.
Rovid and I had only gotten an hour of rest, having spent an hour each on watch. Then it was up and onward again, following the blurry edge of a distant forest. The tree line ended eventually, and from there we followed the predicted arc of the sun, whose path would lead us to the Prim, according to Rovid.
Near sunset of the second day, we were the newest inhabitants of the city. We’d seen the square peaks of towers and other structures emerge into the blue sky for the past seven hours, so it was a relief finally being among them.
And rather unnerving. Cities never bothered me like they do some, like those who live off their own land. A city’s rugged nature was rather endearing, what with shady merchants hawking shady wares, battered and dilapidated alleyways where thieves stick you without second thought, the dog- and goose-shit-infested streets.
But the Prim wasn’t just a city. It was a city whose body had mutated. Its muscles had unraveled into hulking specimens of complex streets wide enough for ten wagons to roll on through abreast. Its legs vaulted high into the air, negotiating with clouds for space. Shadows claimed this place, searching for and snuffing out all remnants of light. And not just because the sun was setting; you had a distinct feeling that the sun wasn’t welcome here, that the pillars of stone and gloomy glass blotted out its light.
Also, it was empty. That was more perturbing than anything. Knowing that life once bustled here, and all that remained now were weeds choking the roads and the whistle of the wind.
“Look,” Lysa said. “It’s glowing.”
“Changes color depending on how the sun hits it,” Rovid explained. “And the moon.”
Lysa ogled with the excitement of a child watching her first parade, the dizzying spectacles overwhelming her senses. At least she seemed better now. I’d worried that killing Rav, or maiming him — whatever she’d done — would have incapacitated her. But the woman was a resilient one.
In an alleyway, I spotted an abandoned cart.
The three of us looked it over and all came to the conclusion that it’d need work. Two wheels were splintered, and the frame had suffered what looked like rot from wet leaves and sticks and other forest litter allowed to settle on it for who knew how long. Canopy looked like it’d gotten into a fight with a few stray lightning bolts.
“We’ll see if we can’t find another,” I said. “Salvage what we can from the one worse for wear, and repair the other.”
“We could get lost very easily,” Lysa pointed out. “We should leave behind a trail so we don’t forget where it’s at.”
Good point. Place was like a misbegotten maze. “Stay here,” I said.
I went back to the building that had grabbed Lysa’s attention earlier. Its panes of glass reflected back a warm rosy tint. I counted each intersection as I walked back to Rovid and Lysa.
“Fifteen,” I said. “Fifteen intersections from that colorful bastard to here. Since that thing looks like it’s fisting the heavens, we’ll use it as our marker. It’s rather impossible to lose. We’ll separate and regroup there in an hour. If you find anything, make note of where it is.”
Rovid cleared his throat. “Uh…”
“Yes?”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Place is as empty as a corpse’s asshole, yeah?”
Rovid scratched his neck uneasily. “Well… absolutes, you know, are—”
Knuckles went white against the hilt of my sword as I scanned the fortified sky of towers. “Reapers?”
“Doubtful. Not sure if anything is here, to be honest, but it’s possible. Squatters is what we called them. Those who watched their loved ones taken, but somehow avoided the culling themselves. Rather than search for safety, they stay behind. A kind of mourning, maybe.”
“Are they dangerous?” Lysa asked.
The care Rovid took before replying should’ve been the only answer she needed. “Er, possibly,” he said.
“Spiteful, probably,” I said. Then with a roll of my eyes, “Can’t imagine why. All right, we stick together. We’ll move slower, but at least one of us won’t be chopped up into tiny bits by vengeful ghosts.”
“Not really ghost—”
“Don’t care what they’re called. Move it.”
Like a group of foreign visitors, we slunk through the bowels of the Prim. Dusk had settled in, and soon after the night itself. The silence in the city was so pure. You could hear yourself swallow, the slosh of spit going right down your throat. The crack of bone or muscle or whatever cracks in your neck popped sharply as I checked each intersection thoroughly for a silhouette of a body. Or weapon.
None appeared. Or, for a more chilling thought, none could be seen. Leave it to your mind to open up that door.
The night proved to be a difficult setting in which to find wagons. We located three, all of which had careened off into roadside buildings, where the darkness wasn’t so heavy. But they weren’t much help. Two were rotted through entirely, and three wheels were missing from the third. The canopy was also in tatters, and the seat was nowhere to be found.
So we dragged our defeated selves back to Big-Ass Building Number One, which was what I affectionately termed the colorful thing.
Lysa suggested we take a look inside, use the shelter to rest. Rovid and I were against this insanity, for obvious reasons. But then it began to rain. Hard. A very hard, quite cold sort of rain that soon became mixed with what felt like stone fucking pellets. S
o in the end, Lysa won out, which seemed to happen more often than I liked to admit.
Rubble and shattered glass littered the innards of the building. There were also numerous boots, as if the owners had been plucked right out of them, moldy linens, soggy parchments, and a distinct fungus-like smell in the air that made breathing a chore. Fortunately, the colorful glass windows illuminated the inside in a salmon-pink aura, so we weren’t going in blind.
Rovid and Lysa went to work cleaning up so we could set up camp without impaling ourselves on shards of glass. I, along with my trusty sword, wandered up to the next floor. And the next and so on, ensuring we didn’t have any secretive guests who might want to join us — or murder us — in the middle of the night.
Place seemed mostly clear, so I made my way back down the twisting flights of stairs, to the bottom floor. The initial thought was to camp out on the second floor. That way, we’d have a bit of time to gather ourselves in case a horde of dead people came busting through the doors. But being far away from an exit could have proved disastrous. We couldn’t stay here long, with what limited food and water we had.
Lysa and Rovid had cleared the place with surprising efficiency. And it seemed they’d found something to occupy their free time.
“Chessboard,” Rovid said blithely.
“Have you ever played chess?” I asked Lysa. She was already down four pawns, two rooks and a bishop.
“This is a stupid game,” she declared.
“Surprised you found anything intact in here,” I said. The scraps of glass and other litter lay piled in a heap in the corner.
“Fully intact, ’neath a table,” Rovid said. “Pawns and such were tucked away in pull-out compartments.” He paused, regarding Lysa’s move. “Bad choice there.” With a swipe of his hand, he kidnapped her queen.
“Did you at least show her how to play?”
He grinned. “Showing her now.”
How were these two still awake, much less playing a game? They should have been blissfully unaware of anything around them, snoring and fidgeting as dreams stole away their realities. On second thought, I knew precisely why they were awake. Probably for the same reason I wouldn’t be getting sleep for at least the next few hours. Too wired. The Prim had us all on edge, and we hadn’t a worthwhile plan for getting out of this Amortis mess yet.
I sat before the chessboard and took in the strategy. “You know, if chess reflected the battlefield, you couldn’t so much as take a queen before you’d have a ten-thousand-strong army converging on you in—”
In retribution, I thought. Didn’t say it, though. Not aloud.
I jumped up, ignoring the whats and where-are-you-goings from Lysa and Rovid. With the gleam of the glass panes as my torchlight — now as green as an unripe banana — I scoured the pile of rubble in the corner. Nothing there that I needed, so I pressed onward, through a long hallway that wrapped around into a small room with a balcony. A few chairs remained upright in here, but most had been twisted and crushed into scraps. Judging from the inlet hearths along the ways, this had been an eatery at one time. Probably not somewhere I’d find an excess of oil trays and pens. A cursory riffling through the debris proved that assumption correct.
So, off again. Into other rooms and hallways. Up a floor. And up another. Finally, at the tip-top of the Big-Ass Building Number One, I came across what looked like a study. Bookcase had remained intact, surprisingly, and so too did a desk. Popping open a few drawers revealed nothing much of interest, except a key. Only reason that was interesting was because the door across the way refused me entry.
Now, all I’d come here for was some goddamn writing utensils. I had a few complex plans brewing in my mind, and I needed to see them visually before committing to them. But… curiosity clawed at me like a bad sexual urge. All the doors I’d tried so far had been unlocked. What was so special about this one?
Well, it couldn’t hurt to take a look. So I waltzed on over to the door, stabbed the key into the hole and gave her a push.
Mint green light filtered inside the cold room.
It took approximately a half second for my sheathed sword to become an unsheathed sword. Took approximately another half second for me to step backward in preparation to haul ass out of there.
But either I hadn’t been seen, or they didn’t have eyes. Or, quite possibly, they were dead. Didn’t look dead, though. And things couldn’t well die here, anyway. At least that I knew of.
“Rovid!” I hollered. My voice had enough oomph to travel down twenty flights of stairs, curve around a few buildings and probably scare the shit right out of a sleeping crow a couple miles away.
I heard the stampede of panicked feet come rumbling through the building.
“Astul!” Lysa screamed.
They found me standing before the doorway. Lysa was wheezing, and Rovid was hunched over, sword drawn.
“What the fuck is this?” I said, pointing.
Ebon clunked against a stone floor as Rovid dropped his weapon and mindlessly walked inside, as if a nefarious voice had called to him. He poked his finger in the jelly — which seemed like a preservative of some sort — that pooled inside what looked like several caskets on squat stilts. Caskets without a top.
“This,” he said, brushing his hand over the purest and pristine flesh I’d ever seen, “is our ticket out of here.”
Chapter Sixteen
“To clarify,” I said, hand going numb from holding my sword so tight, “they’re not alive?”
“Only vessels,” Rovid said. He blew a puff of air through his nostrils, like a scholar upon making a new discovery. “I’ve never seen them like this. Fresh, I mean. We could trade these for a wagon and mule and a horse. As long as we can get to a village within a couple days. Else they’ll rot, outside the preserves.”
“Any villages left around here that you fuckers haven’t culled?” I asked.
“Plenty. There’s one north of here, a day and a half away. But we can’t carry them that far. They’re heavy.”
Lysa scooped her finger through the goo. She made a face. “It’s cold. And it smells like… something not very nice. Hmm, what about a wheelbarrow?”
“You must protect them from the elements,” Rovid said. “Or they’ll rot.”
I sheathed my blade. “We don’t have the luxury of choosing. Wheelbarrow sounds like a dandy idea. We’ll have to make one from spare wood lying around. Get some sleep. We’ll get to it in the morning.”
I turned to leave, but Rovid put himself between me and the doorway. “They’ll know we’re not one of them. If we show up with rotted corpses, nothing to trade, no goodwill… they’ll attack us. And kill us.”
“Lovely sounding,” I said. “Find me a goddamn wagon with a pristine canvas, then. Otherwise, we’re building a wheelbarrow and hoping for no rain.
I tried to leave again, and this time a thin finger stabbed me in the chest. “You don’t get to make all the decisions.”
“Oh, I bloody well do.”
“On whose authority?”
I pushed my face closer, the tip of my nose wrinkling his. “My own.”
I heard his teeth grinding. “I know Amortis better than you. You’re fucking blind here without me.”
“All well and good, but I know how to survive better than you. I know how to avoid messy predicaments better than you.” I looked deep into those inky eyes of his, making my point understood. “And if you fancy yourself a democracy, take note the vote is two-to-one in favor of the wheelbarrow. They teach you how to count in reaper school?”
He huffed himself up real big. “You might have spared my life, but you don’t own me.”
The knuckles around the hilt of his sword were white. “It’s time to return that,” I said, glancing at the blade.
Silence thickened in the air like a rising loaf of bread. In fact, you could have cut it like a loaf of bread. Perhaps that was why the edge of my own blade sheared its leather casing, glimpsing freedom.
“Sto
p it!” Lysa cried, shoving herself between Rovid and me. “You’re acting like imbeciles because you’re tired. We can decide in the morning if we will use a wagon or wheelbarrow. Just stop arguing.”
I snapped my fingers. “The sword.”
“Astul,” Lysa said, her head falling to the side, as if I was being wholly unreasonable.
I snapped my fingers again, unwilling to budge on this issue.
Rovid dropped the blade. “Take your fucking sword,” he said, walking out of the room.
I bent down and picked it up. “I don’t trust him,” I whispered to Lysa.
She sighed. “You picked a bad time to decide that.”
I waited till I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then said, “Never have. But he’s useful. When he stops being useful, however…”
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. I won’t stand by while—”
“What?” I said innocently. “Once he stops being useful, I’ll cut him loose. Interpret that however you will. Now, I’d very much like to find a bloody pen.”
A pen I didn’t find. Unable to keep my eyes from falling shut, I made myself a pillow from a ball of faded cloth. Of course, when I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t.
Thinking about the day ahead kept me up. Rovid had given us the lowdown on the corpses in that jelly shit, before he had his hissy fit. It went like this.
Once you die, you more or less keep your same body. How? No idea. That wasn’t in the lesson. Maybe the universe makes a copy, who knows. Anyway, that means kids come to Amortis with little bodies, old hags come in with shriveled-up bodies, and so forth. If you plan on spending eternity here, sticking to one body seems like a huge drag. And if you end up taking a knife to the throat during your stay here, or your head gets whacked off, you’re rather fucked without an extra body lying around. So corpse making is a thing. Basically you gather some leather, a few herbs, a bunch of milk and, as Rovid explained, ‘other shit.’ And you go to work stitching one together, fitting it with necessary organs retrieved and molded from animals.
The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Page 17