“Yes,” I said, hoping I wasn’t wrong. “The Glannondil name has grown too bold, and Dercy knows if it’s not stopped soon… well, sovereignty will be inked in the history books, remembered only as nostalgia.”
“We’ll sink the ships,” Kane said, understanding the direction of my strategy. “Surprise them, feed them to the Mother.”
“Feed them to the Mother,” I said, smiling. “Half of the Glannondil army, gone. Just like that. The other half will put up a fight, but you’ll be on near-even terms with the help of Dercy. And I assume you’ve favors to call in from men of the sea.”
“Boatfuls,” he said, swiping his chalice. “But tell me. What purpose do you have for invoking a war?”
“When you take everything from a man, you leave him with nothing to lose. Braddock has gone too far this time. I want to see his name suffer. I want to see it written in the annals, his downfall described word for word.”
The ragged emotion in my voice and the pain in my eyes must’ve been convincing enough, because Kane got up and came back with a knife. He sliced his palm and shoved the blade across the table. I did the same, and we shook hands.
I wondered what Kane would think if he knew the true reason behind my need for war — a thought that I quickly dismissed, because it led me too close to laying out my grand strategy to outwit Occrum.
Kane offered me a room in the keep, on the lower levels. The hallway leading there was dark, with a spattering of orange from occasional braziers. It smelled heavily of pine, as if it had been recently constructed. The room itself was small, mostly barren, save a bed of straw and a few linens. Not exactly standard fare as far as castle chambers go, but it beat the hell out of sleeping in mountain passes, where creepy fuckers paint your eyes in coal dust.
The road to Vereumene had made a tired boy out of me. And I slept easily and heavily.
Until the tip of a nail screeched through my door in the middle of the night.
Luckily, I’d retrieved my equipment from the guards prior to dozing off. And since my blade slept beside me like a lover every night, I had the sword in my hand as a second nail pierced the wood, then the pounding that drove it clean through ceased.
I heard footsteps. Quick-moving footsteps that fled.
I was standing now, shaky with excitement. After waiting a few moments, making sure the footsteps didn’t return, I inspected the protruding iron nails. Were they holding something up on the outside, perhaps?
I could open the door, but… what if it was a ruse? Oldest trick in the book there. You knock on the door, stand aside, wait for the unsuspecting bastard inside to open it and step out. Then, you shank him. Or, as children, you place goose and dog shit on doorsteps and shriek with laughter as old hags step in it and curse.
I considered my options. The door had no locking mechanism, and there wasn’t much in the room to put in front of it. Without assurance that whoever was outside couldn’t get in, I wouldn’t sleep.
Might as well take my chances.
I flung back the door and pointed the black tip of my blade at the shadowy mouth of the hallway.
A noise. Right beside my ear. A sort of rustling. Then it quieted.
A piece of parchment paper was nailed to the door. It said this.
Ouldish Village. Hands in red clay. Meet you there.
I stumbled back inside and fell onto the bed. I’d spent the first twelve years of my life in Ouldish Village. When I was six and my brother not yet old enough to speak, my father had rebuilt the outside wall out of red clay. My mother had pressed our hands against the wet clay, told us it meant we’d always have a home.
I hadn’t been home in a very long time.
Chapter Twenty
This was a trap.
At least, it appeared that way on the surface. It seemed obvious that Occrum was setting me up. But the longer I brooded, the more I wondered. Would he make such a straightforward attempt to lure me? Seemed like a waste of time, and not even something that would cross his mind. But who else would know about the hands in the red clay? I’d kept no friends when I left that village. I hadn’t even told Vayle much about my days there.
My brother would remember, but… well, I suppose that’s what gave birth to my curiosity. And once I get a sniff of curiosity, I’m like a bloody cat. I can’t let it go, till I find the end of the thread. Bad personality trait, there — if you want to stay alive.
Ouldish Village lay in a pocket of hills, not far from Vereumene. Only about two days on horseback. I could get to Erior from there before Rovid would return.
And so off I went, an insatiable thirst for the curious. I crossed Alder’s Bridge the morning of the second day. My brother and I used to play in the creek that ran beneath the bridge. We’d catch crayfish and feed them to the gulls who flew overhead. The creek had run dry now, dusted with parched dirt and rock.
Vast fields of golden corn had stood as nature’s ornate wall into the village, but it seemed now the soil had taken back its land. Purple heathers sprawled across the fields where golden stocks had been. It looked wild here. Untouched.
A sign welcoming you into Ouldish Village lay twisted on its post, the letters now fragments of paint and chipped wood. The air felt cool, like this place existed in its own bubble, away from the oppressive heat that smoldered the earth outside.
Warped wagons that languished on their sides cluttered up the weed-choked paths that snaked between dilapidated buildings with caved-in roofs and crumbling walls.
Ouldish Village had been abandoned.
No, not abandoned. As I pressed farther on, the truth of its ruinous state became clear.
It had died.
The white of bones lay buried in weeds and ferns, alongside skulls with empty sockets, the flesh probably devoured by rats and mice.
Had war come here? No, not this close to Vereumene, not without Serith or Kane knowing. Maybe the people here had starved. Or a clan had come down from the mountains and pillaged and raped.
I clambered off my horse and stood before a house of red clay. Pitted scars marked its walls, and the door had rotted away from its hinges. But it remained mostly intact. Even the little handprints were still there.
I withdrew my sword. “Hello?” I called out. “Is there anyone in there?”
The downtrodden guts of my old home crackled with sickness. A hand pushed aside the door. The underside screeched as it gashed the floor.
“Astul,” a man’s voice said. “Shepherd of the Black Rot. Brother of Anton.” The voice seemed here and there and everywhere, as if it surrounded me like the very air I breathed.
A very small figure filled the doorway. He wasn’t quite a dwarf, but neither could you call him a grown man. A tweener, maybe. He looked old. Very old, like his skin had endured centuries of windburn, the bluster of two hundred winters. It was leathery and scarred. Slit eyes the color of a cataclysmic red sky glowed from within his deep-seated sockets.
I greeted him with a show of ebon. “Who are you?”
“You can put that away,” he said.
“That would be silly, and I’m not a silly man.”
He wore a silver belt around his loose-fitting white trousers. But no dangling sheaths. No weapons. At least not the visible variety.
“I suppose that’s fair,” he said, “given the circumstances.”
“Circumstances? You mean the whole nailing a note to my door and urging me to meet you in a village I do not like to visit?”
He walked toward me, and I backed away. “An associate of mine delivered you the note. The coal on your eyes, if you are curious, that was your brother’s idea. A joke of sorts.”
“You’ve talked to Anton? How?”
“I’m a reaper. And from what I know of you, that name means at least something.”
“Nothing good, I promise. If you’re trying to persuade me to drop my guard, you’re doing a poor job.”
The stocky man opened his arms and proclaimed, “I’m on your side. Me and my cohorts, w
ho total close to a hundred. My name is Ripheneal. I am the first reaper ever to exist, and I have been by Occrum’s side ever since. I’ve wished him dead since the beginning, and now, my patience has afforded me this opportunity.”
A grackle smoothed out its midnight-blue wings and trotted through the weeds, paying me close attention. It probably hadn’t seen a soul around these parts in a long time.
“You must be a gambler,” I said, “to tell me this outside Amortis. Or maybe you’re an imp.”
Ripheneal walked toward me again. This time I didn’t back away, but I tracked him with the summit of my sword. He trusted me enough to turn his back, to gaze into the fields of purple heather.
“You give Occrum too much credit,” he said. “What will he do when he reads of my betrayal in his book? Spring into action on a phoenix, hunt me down? No. He’s a big man. Big men, big things… they don’t concern themselves with small matters. Do you think the mountain worries when a few years of drought starve it of its snow? No. It’s focused on the long game, the erosions that will flatten it in a thousand years.”
He went silent for a while, as if absorbing the calamity of this old, broken village. Then he said, “I understand you have a plan.”
“Have a peek into Occrum’s book, did you?”
“Spies,” Ripheneal said. “All around. In your Hole, scattered amongst the brush of your plateau.”
“And what did your spies tell you?”
“Of your intentions to incite war.” He faced me. “I can help you. Ten thousand reaped at your disposal.”
I considered this. Ten thousand’s a big number. Probably would beat what Kane could offer up with whatever bannermen he’d mobilize, and it wouldn’t be far from what Dercy would lend.
“I should mention,” Ripheneal said, “these souls are not yet reaped. But it’s a small matter to change that.”
Of course. There’s always a goddamned catch. “Not yet reaped? As in they’re still in Amortis, whole and healthy?”
He faced me, thick arms crossed. “That is correct.”
I stared past him, watching the grackle twist its head and poke its beak forward at a cloud of insects swarming by. Then the bird rather faded into obscurity, along with the ocean of purple heathers it swam in. The entirety of Ouldish Village slipped away as I tossed Ripheneal’s proposal around in my mind.
“Tell me,” I said, “how would this make me different than the reapers who do Occrum’s bidding? We’d one be one and the same, ripping minds right out of their skulls, riving conscious thought, erasing memories.”
Ripheneal lifted his brows curiously. “I was not aware the Shepherd of the Black Rot concerned himself with being a righteous man.”
I stabbed the tip of my blade into the mound of clay on which we stood, and cut a line across it. “I straddle the line,” I said. “I’ve learned if you go too far one way or the other, you either never accomplish anything, or you do, but at the expense of this.” I tapped my temple.
The sour red of his eyes seemed to set ablaze his entire face. Had he blinked since I’d met him?
“In war,” he said, “there are casualties no matter which path you pursue. You face an army of forty thousand reaped, and those forty thousand will bring extinction to millions. Do you believe the sacrifice of ten thousand is an unreasonable price to obviate such a disaster?”
I thought about my answer for a while, then finally said, “Your eyes, pal. They’re freakin’ me out. Can you, I don’t know, close ’em or something?”
He lifted his chin. “If, after you fight with your thoughts, you come to the decision, then say my name. Say it anywhere, anytime. And I will come. Goodbye.”
“Wait. What about my brother?”
“What about him?”
“Where is he in Amortis?”
Ripheneal blinked, at long last. “Safe,” he said simply.
And then he left. Not in the manner a normal man leaves, by turning his back, moving his feet and walking the fuck away. No, this strange bastard just left. Up and vanished. Gone, without a trace of evidence that he was here at all.
The grackle looked at me and cocked its head.
What the hell had I just encountered? He surely didn’t give off the impression of a reaper. Seemed like something more. But he was on my side, so I had that going for me.
His offer wasn’t particularly pleasing, though. But I couldn’t think about that now. I had a king to burn.
Chapter Twenty-One
So long as authority exists, you’ll always have people on the other side. Some call themselves freedom fighters, rebels, anti-insert-authority-name-here, or whatever other fancy moniker they prefer. In the case of those who oppose Glannondil rule, I called them my friends.
I’d been to five hovels in an attempt to recruit a few friends. This was my sixth and, finally, I’d found a promising one. Wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall, some battered shack twenty miles from Erior. It lay on the low roads, beneath the high paths above that had been smoothed over by the marching Glannondil army over the years. You didn’t have to worry much about the crimson wolf prowling around here, at least not without due warning.
An assembly of drunks made a toast, one mug rising to meet another in a furious showing that wimpled the starved candlelight. They downed their ale with the harmony of rhythmic dancers.
I nursed my ale, taking stock of the scene. A few men gathered at a rustic table, red twine tied around the swords on their hips. In the East, those who wished murder and mayhem upon authority made it known. They weren’t so subtle as those in other provinces.
I ordered them all drinks, twice. And we talked. All the way into morning we talked. Wasn’t long after a warm dawn punched through the windows and beneath the door crack that I’d finally parted with a very large purse I’d been carrying since the Hole.
Now all I needed was for Rovid to hold up his end of the bargain.
* * *
Some five miles over that way lay Erior. All you had to do was pick yourself up out of this lush forest and walk along the stepped face of a hill till you got to an enormous ramp that went up, up, up.
People called this place here, with its hulking trees and snakelike vines, the Swamplands. Not much of a swamp anymore. Dried out long ago, but names die hard.
Rovid had met me here in the morning. He’d brought with him all that I’d asked for and even more. What a sedulous little reaper he was.
One cart, two mules — horses complain far too much when it comes to big hills — and the long-awaited supplies from Amortis. To be exact, the long-awaited supplies from Rav’s house. I’d asked for four buckets of black powder. Rovid had brought me fifteen. Do you know how much mayhem fifteen buckets of black powder could produce? Neither did I, but I pegged it at about a fuckton. He’d also brought me about forty apples, one bow, and three arrows, all of which would come in handy.
Rovid went off into the green haze of the Swamplands in search of something to eat, while I rolled up my sleeves and spread my tools out before me. I’d bought a hammer, a hacksaw, a few tins of nails, rope, some extra planks of wood and a book. All from various merchants and messenger camps between Ouldish Village and here.
The book was titled Hackin’ And Hammerin’: The Complete Guide To Carpentry.
I’d read it front to back five times on the way here, discovering the excitement of angles, measurement by fingers, and the tricks to fixing something up so that it won’t crumble into pieces moments later. Carpentry hadn’t ever been my forte. I rather enjoyed the hacking-things-into-pieces part, but dressing everything back up was kind of a drag.
I flattened myself on the ground, then squirmed beneath the wagon. First order of business was to cut a hole the diameter of one of my buckets in the center of the wagon bed.
After swallowing perhaps a cupful of sawdust and blinking another half cupful into my eyes — there was much screaming and swearing — step one was complete. I lifted the bucket up to the hole, and voilà! Fit like
a glove.
The other steps proceeded painfully. I took a nail right through the edge of my finger. Then I cracked my head on the wooden underside of the cart. Hammered my thumb twice, finger once. Measured wrong and cut even worse.
But several hours later, with Rovid’s eventual help, I stood back and looked on with dried blood stuck to my forehead and plum-sized fingers. The mobilization part of Project Fire, Part Two had been completed.
“Test her out,” I told Rovid.
The reaper got the mules into position and climbed into the seat. He took the heavily modified wagon for a short stroll through the Swamplands, with the dispenser in the open position. A thin cloud of black soot trailed him, falling softly into the litter of leaves.
“It’s a thing of beauty,” I hollered, smiling and wincing at the same time. Go figure: an inanimate object had taken its greatest physical toll on me thus far. Unless you counted the Glannondil soldier who’d cut so deeply into my bicep it looked like my skin had split apart and was forming wings. Lucky shot, that one. The wound was looking better now, at least. Wolf’s leaf had done its job admirably.
Rovid closed the dispenser and steered the cart back to its original position. He climbed out.
“Gotta give you credit,” he said, “I’ve seen plans worse than this before.”
“Coming from you,” I said, rummaging through a cache of wine skins that I’d filled with water, “that’s like a kiss on the cheek.”
Rovid seemed different since he’d returned from Amortis. Eerily so. I wouldn’t say he was hopping around like Kane’s cheerful guardsmen, but he wasn’t so bloody miserable anymore.
“I set up some traps,” he said, motioning toward the belly of the Swamplands, where the green tint abated and the black eye of the always-caliginous forest horizon swept in. “Figured we could do with some hearty dinner tonight. Maybe even breakfast tomorrow.”
I offered him my thanks, uncorked my skin, and satisfied my thirst with piss-warm water. Tomorrow we’d strike. Set fire to Erior. Create chaos. People would burn. Some would die, some would writhe in agony but still survive… at least until all their skin sloughed off. A number of innocents would be among the casualties, I knew that. Hard choices are never without consequences. And I wouldn’t be the man who made Occrum quiver ever so slightly if I didn’t make those choices.
The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Page 21