The Perfect Assassin

by K A Doore

  This time, Amastan put his hand on Yufit’s arm. “You heard Menna, jaan don’t act like that, not normally. What should you have done?”

  “More,” said Yufit, the single word heavy with recrimination.

  “You still saved me,” said Amastan. “And we’re both alive. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Yeah,” said Yufit, but his voice was hollow, his gaze distant, his mind still stuck in the alley. “Yeah, it could’ve been worse.”

  Amastan turned his glass, the words burning a realization through him. His thigh throbbed, a reminder of several nights before. It had gone horribly wrong, but it could have been worse. He could have messed up the contract. He could be dead. Menna could be hurt. Instead, the killer might still be at large, but so were they. There was still hope.

  Yufit looked into his glass, and when he spoke, his voice was thin. “You know, when I didn’t see you for a few days, I worried about you.” Then he laughed. “I don’t know why. I’ve never worried about someone before.” His fingers tapped his glass and he finally looked up. “Do you think what happened to Megar will happen again?”

  “I don’t know.” Amastan’s fingers curled around the beads at his throat. “I hope not. But unless we quiet the jaani soon…”

  “I don’t see why this is happening,” said Yufit. “Jaan don’t act like this. They don’t burn people up from the inside. Guul don’t either. They just hunt for corpses. This isn’t normal. It must be because Yanniq was a bad person. It must be.” He reached for the jar of date wine, but hesitated, stopped. He drew his hand back. “Megar didn’t kill Yanniq.”

  Amastan glanced at him, but Yufit was spinning his glass again and the shadow of his tagel hid most of his expression.

  “How do you know?”

  Yufit turned his glass one way, then the other on the table. “Yanniq might’ve had a lot of enemies, but Megar wasn’t one of them. Besides, he’s not—wasn’t”—Yufit winced—“smart enough. He was a man of passion, as you might’ve noticed.”

  “Yeah.” Amastan chewed his lip. As much as he’d wanted Megar to be the killer—or one of the killers—Yufit was right. Amastan had nothing that pointed to Megar being the killer aside from a handful of suppositions that didn’t quite add up. And the figure on the rooftop couldn’t have been Megar.

  When Yufit spoke again, his words were careful, measured. “Even though I was only there a month, I still learned a lot about Yanniq’s past. Does a man’s jaani reflect how he lived his life? That could explain why this jaani is so violent.”

  Amastan’s breath caught in his throat and a slivered edge of hope returned. He was afraid to say anything, though, lest he accidentally discourage Yufit from sharing what he knew. So he only nodded.

  “I said before that Yanniq pardoned murderers, but that was only some of the truth,” said Yufit. “You study history, right? What do you know about the Serpent of Ghadid?”

  Amastan snapped in a breath, too quick. He picked up the half-empty jar of date wine to hide his surprise and give himself a moment to think. What would he know, if he wasn’t family? “The Serpent is a story told to frighten children.”

  Yufit leaned across the table, his gaze intent on Amastan. “The Serpent’s more than a story. She terrorized this city for years.”

  “She?” Amastan splashed amber wine into his glass and downed the wine without tasting it. Yufit’s unease was infectious.

  A smirk twitched at the corner of Yufit’s eyes and was gone. “Yes, she. She was real. She was caught, eventually. And there were more like her, an entire group of trained killers. They called themselves assassins, but they were glorified murderers. The drum chiefs looked the other way and let them kill without any consequences.”

  “You’re saying the drum chiefs have a secret army of assassins?” asked Amastan, trying desperately to sound amused. “Wouldn’t somebody have noticed?”

  “Not an army,” corrected Yufit. “There aren’t that many of them. But yeah—the drum chiefs let them get away with murder. At least, until the Serpent killed one of their own. The drum chiefs should’ve rounded them all up and had them executed for the safety of Ghadid. Instead, Yanniq convinced the Circle to pardon the Serpent. The blood of her victims—and the victims of all those assassins—is on his hands. A man like that is the worst kind of evil.”

  Amastan’s breath caught in his throat. “Which drum chief did the Serpent kill?”

  “Drum Chief Saman,” said Yufit, his voice tight. “Yanniq’s worst crime was letting Saman’s murderer walk free.”

  22

  The horrors of the night before seemed so far away among bright daylight and dusty scrolls. The sun might have banished the image of Megar’s eyes bursting with flame from Amastan’s mind, but it did nothing for the pulsing dread and the time hissing past his ears, forever lost. Four dead and what did he have? Nothing.

  Nothing—but now everything.

  Yufit had given him the slip of string that tied everything together. Or so Amastan hoped. Yufit had also walked him home, or at least as close to home as Amastan had dared. It’d been nice. Quiet. A reprieve. For a few minutes, Amastan could ignore the imminent deadlines and pretend he was normal. But now that reprieve had ended.

  Amastan went to the wall of scrolls first, each a tiny piece of Ghadid’s history. When he couldn’t find what he was looking for there, he scanned through every scroll Barag had given him for the family’s history. But that record stopped abruptly over twenty years ago.

  He set the last one down and took a small sip of water from his skin. The water softened his mouth but did little to alleviate his thirst. He was running dangerously low and he only had one baat left. The air was as sticky as porridge today, and he thought he’d caught sight of a cloud on the horizon. But one cloud was no guarantee season would end today or tomorrow or the day after. He would just have to lie low and endure his thirst.

  But he didn’t have time to lie low.

  Barag peered at Amastan over the top of his thin glasses. “What’re you looking for? Anything I can help with?”

  Amastan tapped the box of scrolls. “Where’s the rest of the family’s history?”

  Barag paused, his eyes inscrutable. “Are you done already?”

  “No,” admitted Amastan. “But it would be easier to put all these pieces together if I knew the whole history.”

  Another pause. Amastan held his breath, hoping Barag wouldn’t press the question. He didn’t want to explain about last night, didn’t want to tell Barag that a servant of Yanniq’s had accused his wife of terrible things. Tamella had certainly done terrible things, would readily admit to them, but Amastan didn’t want Barag’s version of events. He wanted to read it himself.

  “I’m still working on that part,” said Barag. “But I’ve got the original records for the drum chiefs’ Circles during that time and the accounts over here. Why don’t you wait until I’ve finished before you add it to your project? It’ll only be a few more months.”

  “It’ll help now,” said Amastan. “Trust me.”

  Barag shrugged, then dug around beneath his table. He finally came out with a small box of tightly wound scrolls. Amastan swallowed his immediate disappointment: it didn’t look like much. But it would have to do.

  He pushed aside the other scrolls on his table and set the box in the middle. Then he picked out a scroll, the biggest he could find. Unrolling it revealed a list of an entire year’s imports and exports, item after item squeezed onto the vellum in thin, precise script. Unless he wanted to know exactly how many slabs of salt the caravans had brought in that year, it wasn’t going to do him any good. He set it aside.

  Three more scrolls led him nowhere. But the fourth—

  The fourth had brief accounts of the year’s Circles. He scanned them quickly—there were twelve in all. The accounts contained all of the drum chiefs’ decisions during their monthly Circles. Disputes between merchants, friends, families. Each neighborhood’s annual allocation of baats. A change t
o the way grains would be taxed.

  And there—between a blessing of marriage and a grievance from a gear worker—was a discussion about the Empress’s tax collectors and what to do with them. Drum Chief Saman had argued against kicking them out empty-handed. The Circle had decided otherwise.

  That had been the last Circle of that year. Amastan picked through the other scrolls until he found the account for the next year’s Circles. The first mentioned that several merchants had come before the Circle to express their worry about angering the Mehewret Empire. The same merchants returned several Circles in a row before the drum chiefs officially decreed that Ghadid was not a part of the Empire and therefore owed no taxes.

  The merchants disappeared from the record. For a few months, the Circles returned to normal. And then, all at once, the names changed. Two new drum chiefs were part of the discussion. Amastan had to scan them twice before realizing Saman’s was one of the two that had disappeared. The other had been Liddas. This was the longest Circle account yet. And for good reason: the drum chiefs had debated the fate of the family.

  Amastan’s head spun and he realized he was holding his breath. He let it out as he read, taking his time over each word.

  The account briefly acknowledged that there’d been traitors among the drum chiefs and that they’d been removed. Then it turned to the matter of Tamella Basbowen: she’d killed one of those drum chiefs. The debate had been over whether to execute or exile Tamella, and whether to disband or dishonor the family. Whoever had written this account had glossed over the details, leaving behind a dry summary about the final decision—eight for, four against: Tamella would be allowed to not only live, but stay. The family would not be disbanded, but their work was over. Contracts would be banned indefinitely.

  The eight who’d voted to pardon Tamella included Yanniq. The four against: Drum Chief Azul, Drum Chief Eken, Drum Chief Hennu, and Drum Chief Yugten. Amastan didn’t recognize Azul’s name, but he knew the rest. Yugten and Eken were the drum chiefs of the northernmost neighborhoods and Hennu was his own drum chief. Azul and Hennu’s names were the two new ones, replacing the names of the traitors.

  “You’ve been reading a long time,” said Barag, startling Amastan. “Do you have any questions?”

  Amastan looked up from the scroll and met Barag’s eyes. If anyone would know …

  “Why did Tamella kill Drum Chief Saman?”

  Barag stared at Amastan until Amastan began to wonder if he’d heard. Then he set down his pen and folded his hands on the desk. “Now why would you want to know that?”

  “Please, sa,” said Amastan. “It’s the only lead I have left. Something ties Tamella and Yanniq together, and I think Saman might be it.”

  Barag sighed. “I thought you were working. Fine. I’ve already told you some of what happened. Tamella stopped a civil war that would’ve torn this city apart and handed its shattered shell over to the Mehewret Empire. A few of the conspirators were drum chiefs. One of them was Saman.” Barag chuckled darkly. “She was the one who originally took out a contract on me, when I started to put together what was happening. You see, history has a way of repeating itself and I’d noticed a particular pattern in their correspondence which turned out to be a code. She didn’t much like poets, either. So that was two strikes against me.”

  Barag shuffled the papers on his desk, but he didn’t seem to have any order to his movements. “Saman was their leader. She gathered people sympathetic to the Empire and helped build the conspiracy from the sands up. In fact, it was her idea to cultivate a conflict that would split the drum chiefs and the people. The ensuing chaos would’ve made it easier for the Empress’s conquering force to march right in. She believed that the Empire’s control was inevitable and working with them was the only way to avoid being enslaved—as the Empire was rumored to do to any who dared not submit. She sincerely thought she was saving Ghadid from something worse.” Barag shook his head, as if Saman had been an ignorant child instead of a drum chief.

  “When it all came crashing down, Tamella confronted Saman. It ended badly—Saman died. Tamella said it was self-defense, but that didn’t matter. She was an assassin who’d acted outside of a contract.”

  “But she saved the city,” said Amastan. “Saman was a traitor. Wouldn’t Saman have been executed anyway?”

  Barag shook his head. “That wasn’t Tamella’s decision to make. You should remember, the family operates on the thinnest line of legality. It isn’t up to you to decide who lives and who dies. To put it crudely, the family was the knife that Ghadid used to excise its tumors before they grew too big—too public, if you will. But a knife should never think for itself. The drum chiefs’ greatest fear was that their knife would turn on them. And that’s exactly what had happened.

  “Tamella broke the rules. The drum chiefs called her before the Circle to answer for herself. She’d saved them—that was never in doubt—but at the same time she’d proven how dangerous the family still was. Some of the drum chiefs argued that the risk of it happening again—of another assassin deciding fate for themselves—was too great. They wanted the family gone completely. Most of them would’ve been satisfied with some degree of dissolution, like forbidding the training of new assassins or even exile, but one drum chief wanted the family executed. Every trained member of the family. Especially Tamella.

  “Of course, that drum chief was outnumbered, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Yanniq was the one who argued for Tamella’s life the loudest, and rightly so—without her, the Circle wouldn’t even have been able to meet. The other drum chiefs came around, but Tamella was barred from ever acting again, let alone taking a contract. Honestly, even the drum chiefs realized this was an empty gesture—too many people knew Tamella and the myth of the Serpent of Ghadid was already spreading. It was no longer safe for her. But they had to make it official, and in a way that stung worse than anything else they’d dealt her.”

  “But they didn’t exile or execute her,” pointed out Amastan.

  “True,” said Barag, spreading his hands. “But they might as well have. Being an assassin was her life and she lost everything. All because she tried to do the right thing in the wrong way.”

  Barag paused to catch his breath. He smiled at Amastan, but the smile lacked warmth. “All that to say: yes. Tamella killed Drum Chief Saman. It’s a bit of a sore subject.” He picked his glasses back up, signifying that the conversation was over. “Now, don’t you have some scrolls to transcribe? Everybody needs to work for their water.”

  “It’s the end of season,” said Amastan. “There isn’t any water.”

  “But there will be.” Barag turned back to his work. “The storms always come.”

  Amastan nodded, but he wasn’t thinking about the storms. He stared at the scroll in front of him, seeing the fight play out between the drum chiefs as if he’d been there. Yanniq was one of the eight that had voted to pardon Tamella. Azul, Eken, Hennu, and Yugten—against. They’d all wanted Tamella gone, the family disbanded. One of them had even wanted to have Tamella executed.

  But which one? He needed to know more about Drum Chief Saman.

  Amastan put his pen down and glanced at Barag, but the older historian was already engrossed in his work. He didn’t even look over when Amastan stood and headed for the shelves. He tapped the stacks as he passed them, marking each year and counting back twelve. Then he scanned the labels until he found what he was looking for: a record of the year’s deaths.

  He picked through the scrolls until he found the appropriate one, then, keeping his back to Barag, unrolled it. Names filled the vellum, each marked by dates and a few sentences about the deceased. He found Saman’s with ease; like Yanniq’s, hers had more than a few sentences.

  Saman Uzbamen ma Anaz, Drum Chief of Seraf Neighborhood

  Took up the drum from Anaz Inesolen, may his jaani rest with G-d in peace, in the year 352. Ruled with fairness and faith for 12 years. Maintained the peace and prosperity of the
Seraf Neighborhood. Negotiated …

  Amastan started skimming. It was in the same formulaic style as the one that had been written about Yanniq. Saman had done her job and she’d done it well—up until she’d betrayed Ghadid. But Amastan found no mention of that particular history in this account. Instead, he came across a peculiar section, which made little sense out of context.

  Died from severe blood loss.

  Amastan could only imagine. But the next line was what caught his interest.

  Survived by three sons and Hennu ma Saman, who has been named drum chief on behalf of the eldest son, until he comes of age.

  Hennu. The one and same who was still drum chief of their neighborhood over a decade later. If Drum Chief Hennu was the deceased Saman’s wife, then she had reason enough to dislike Yanniq and Tamella both, as well as every other assassin.

  Amastan carefully rolled the scroll back up and returned it to the shelf. His thoughts buzzed with the new information, fitting it into its place. Everything was beginning to make a terrible sense. Hennu had a very good reason to hate Yanniq and want him dead. She’d argued for Tamella’s execution. She’d wanted the whole family disbanded. And she’d gotten none of it. Instead, she’d been forced to watch her wife’s killer continue walking Ghadid, free and alive. It must’ve felt like a slap to the face.

  The only problem was: why now? Why wait so long?

  The other thing that didn’t make sense was how. That couldn’t have been Hennu on the rooftop. For one, she was shorter. For another, unless she was a very good actor, there was no way she could be that strong or fast. Which meant he hadn’t found the killer, not yet.

  But Amastan had found who’d hired him.

  Now he needed proof.

  * * *

  Sunset was nearing when Amastan knocked on the wall beside Kaseem’s doorway. He waited with his hands behind his back. It wasn’t until his neck began to itch with sweat that he realized several minutes had passed. He was about to knock again when the curtain swished to one side and two glittering eyes peered back at him.