The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (14 page)

A sense of pride struck me like an unlikely bolt of lightning on a cold winter night. Chauvinism was not an emotion that often moved me. Ever since I was a boy, I’d held civil zealotry in little regard. If a lord from the North wanted to take over our little village, I thought, then I would simply run away into the woods. I didn’t care for “my people.” I cared for myself. But this… this was different. The conjurers, they didn’t belong in my world. They didn’t belong in any world. For them to march in and eradicate all I’d known… no. No, that wasn’t going to happen.

I stood tall and wagged my torch at her. “People will remember you in much the same way they remember a bee buzzing around their flowers. Here one day, gone the next, leaving nothing of significance behind. I’ll make certain of it.”

A shrill laugh bolted from Amielle’s throat. “I can churn the wind that will extinguish your light.”

Intense concentration wrinkled across her forehead. A foreboding howl bounded from the cliffs and from the forest, from the north and from the south. It surrounded me like the eye of a tornado. The air whipped about tumultuously, pulling at the rags on my body, yanking the hair from my eyes.

The flames in my hand sizzled.

They hissed.

They died.

Blackness entrapped me.

“And you think,” Amielle said, her face invisible, “that you can stop me? I can conjure the earth to rumble and eviscerate the rock on which you stand.”

As the raging wind quieted, an uncomfortable sensation trembled in my feet. No matter a man’s profession — assassin, jester, stable boy, ring polisher — feeling the ground shift beneath your toes is a sign you will not be having a very good day.

Beneath the earth, something roared without pause. The hard shell of the jagged rock I stood on began to give way to the powerful storm beneath the surface. Cracks crawled across the top, deepening into massive gorges.

I dropped my unlit torch and held my arms out, balancing myself as my body began to sway uneasily. Stuck in the impermeable blackness like a rat in a blanketed cage, I felt the world around me begin to buckle. The ground thundered now, and the outcropping of earth and rock that served as my gracious host was ground up into morsels by whatever hell was rising from below.

Air rushed past my face, which is another way of saying I was bucked into the air and approaching the unforgiving ground quickly.

Holding my hands out, I braced myself for impact. Luckily my face was the third body part to thud into the densely packed mud and not the first. Still, the bridge of my nose twisted into an unhealthy curve, and my jaw felt like I’d gotten kicked by a horse.

“And you think,” Amielle said, gasping, “that you can stop me?” She sounded like she was standing over me. “I can rive the sky and show you—”

I threw a hand in the air, my face still buried in the mud. “I get it. You can do a lot of wacky shit.”

The haunting warmth of her body surrounded me. She knelt beside my head and conjured a tiny speck of flame that idled above her fingertips, illuminating her eyes, which were whiter than snow. “I will break you, Astul. You will not leave my world with your mind intact.”

I hauled my face off the ground and offered her my best crooked grin. “People have been trying to break me my entire life. Good luck. You’d best pray that you’re successful. Otherwise, I’ve got a blade with your name on it. I will kill you.”

She vomited — a symptom of the exhaustion that comes with the use of a conjurer's perverted powers — then licked her lips. “A conjurer never dies.”

“I know a few who impaled themselves on my sword that would disagree with you.”

A wretched smile formed on her lips stained with yellow bile. “A conjurer never dies,” she said again. She stood up and walked away, one hand cupping her stomach, the other pressing firmly against her temple.

A heaviness sunk into my mind. And I fell asleep.

M
y mother used
to tell me that having a routine would save me from becoming a vagrant one day. Waking up once again in a cold, dark room with unforgiving stone slabs beneath me, I wanted to shout, “Well, lookie here, Mother. I finally found a routine: being knocked unconscious and then coming to in a place rats keep their distance from.” Really fantastic thing these routines were.

To be fair, the dungeon did lack the acrid smell of piss this time around. And the stone wasn’t quite as cold. In fact, it felt quite strange: gritty and uneven, as if tiny specks of sand dotted its surface. And was that a breeze? Something resembling wind certainly rippled through my hair. Speaking of hair, hard bubbles of blood were dried to mine. Upon a bit of inspection with my fingers, perhaps it was mud.

Hmm. My hands were free. Strange. Amielle’s preference since I’d gotten here was to toss a chain around every movable body part and clasp it into place with ridiculously large iron locks.

Wiggling my ankles uncovered another interesting twist: they weren’t bound either.

A fat drop of water — gods, I hoped it was water — splashed onto the bridge of my nose.

It did not fall from the ceiling, because there was no ceiling. If I was a gambling man — and I certainly was — I would have bet Rivon’s roosters it was the sky that towered above me. Pinpricks of glittering light stretched across the black canvas, the moon full and fat and bright. That’s not to say it provided me with a whole lot of light, though, thanks to a gargantuan wall blotting out most of its pearly sheen.

That wall seemed familiar. Hauntingly familiar. It looked like an imposing curtain of stone rising high into the air, cylindrical spikes overlooking tiers of seating. If you were a suicidal bird who fancied putting a pike through your body, this would be the place.

Hauling myself off the ground, I stretched my stiff arms and walked carefully into the shadows. That’s when it hit me.

The smell. Damn near knocked me right back to the floor. I reeled around and covered my nose, but it was no use. I knew this feeling. It greeted me when I awoke from drinking a smidgen more than the perfect amount of wine — the perfect amount of wine being whatever amount doesn’t make you dry-heave and want to kill yourself when you open your eyes in the morning.

I hurled nothing but a few globs of spit into the air and, unfortunately, onto my toes. Better than chunks of food, which was impossible given I hadn’t eaten in two fucking days.

Wiping the slobber from my lips, I turned back around, this time prepared to face whatever rank scent of death wafted through this place.

And make no mistake. It was the scent of death. Worse than that. It smelled like a beast had been gutted, strung out in the hot sun and left to rot while a murder of crows had shat upon its corpse. It choked the breath from my lungs. But I pressed on with a demented curiosity.

My feet sunk into a cool bed of sand. As if I’d ventured out from a concealed room, more of my surroundings revealed themselves in the form of two more walls that curled around to form a half circle, meeting with the first wall.

As I stepped forward and spun around, the circle suddenly completed itself. That was the moment my heart tried to plunge through my stomach.

Rows upon rows of empty stone blocks serving as seats were staggered upon one another. I’d seen this place before, from afar. I had no interest in ever seeing it again. I wished I was back in the dungeon, chained to a pillar.

A gentle voice droned from behind me. “Rested up, I hope?”

I turned slowly and instinctively reached for my sword. Instead, I found my hip without a sheathed blade attached to it — one of an assassin’s worst feelings.

A fiery gold hue streaked across the sand. A thin man walked along the outer edge, a torch in his hand. He stopped before ornate wooden posts that were spaced every ten feet or so. He touched the fire to them, and
whoosh.
They became alive with flame.

With each one he lit, a ghastly glow of orange brightened the arena, revealing more of its features. Revealing the source of the acrid stench that sunk into my lungs like an unwelcome parasite.

Scattered around the blood-stained pillars that reached into the heavens were the empty husks of men and women I’d recruited, trained and fought with. Assassins with whom I shared grandiose stories over skins of wine and barrels of ale.
Friends
who had, against all odds, managed to thread themselves into my heart. Friends who didn’t deserve this fate. Friends whose death I was responsible for.

Most of them lay facedown, and that was good. But some… they gazed into my soul with their lifeless eyes. I shook my head, desperate to erase their smiling faces that turned to horror and terror as the spikes from the arena surged into the soles of their feet and through their calves, tearing through their ribs and arms and necks and heads and…

“Is this how your queen thinks she can break me?” I asked of the man who finished lighting the torches. “You may as well save yourself the trouble and drag yourself back to her quarters fit for a princess and deliver her this message: I cannot be broken. I
will not
be broken.”

The dull flames from the man’s torch illuminated his oval face. His sunken eyes sagged into unsightly bags. The skin on his chubby face looked as if it was slowly succumbing to the invisible force that yanked everything downward.

“Queen Amielle tasks you with cleaning the aftermath of the arena spectacle.” He nodded at a wheelbarrow. “You may wheel the bodies to the front of the arena, where you will stack them in preparation for burning.”

“Tell her she’s got a better chance at convincing a fish to drown itself.”

The man folded his hands together. “The queen has made it clear that you cannot leave here until you complete this task. You do not want to stay here. The stench is not something you grow accustomed to. I have tried.”

The man placed his torch in a bronze lion-carved brazier affixed to the wall. He slipped into the shadows and returned with a cloth and small bucket. He knelt before a pillar, dipped the cloth into the bucket and began washing off the dried blood.

“You’re not a conjurer, are you?” I asked.

He rubbed the cloth in a slow circle, over and over again. “I am the arena custodian.”

I laughed at the absurdity. “What’s the catch here?”

Without interrupting his studious cleaning, he said, “Pardon?”

“Your queen can’t possibly expect me to stay put like a good little boy because a custodian tells me to.”

“Ah,” he said, dipping the cloth back into the bucket. “You want to leave. You may try, but the queen has posted guards outside the parameter. Standard response when I am given prisoners to help clean up after a rather… dramatic day here at the arena. Although she does not usually assign specific tasks as she has with you.”

“These are my friends,” I said. “My friends! Dead because of her.”

The man sniffed and waddled on his knees to another dollop of blood. “I am sorry to hear that. But it would seem to me that you would find it considerably easier to burn their bodies rather than stare at them and smell their remains.”

Taking stock of my situation put me in regretful agreement. I might have been the most stubborn man alive, but I wasn’t getting out of here anytime soon. And I was probably playing right into Amielle’s plan. If I remained here long enough, the madness would overtake me. And she’d win.

I took the wheelbarrow and placed it in the middle of the fallen Rots, and then I pulled my shirt up over my nose. One by one, I turned over the men and women who weren’t yet lying facedown. When I finished, water clouded my eyes and an overwhelming sadness squeezed my heart.

I was never on friendly terms with sadness. That terrible tightness in my chest and the sandiness of my throat reminded me of being a wee little boy and watching my father pound his fist into my mother’s face. I
hated
sadness.

Anger — yeah, that was what I indulged in. Anger drove me like air drives a fire. Anger put my feet on the ground in the morning and slashed my blade across the throats of my targets. Anger threw back the wine into my belly and coursed the adrenaline through my veins. Anger is what created the Black Rot. Anger for my father. Anger for the rigid world that expected me to put on a happy face and do as some bloody lord demanded.

Anger impelled me through the most difficult times in my life. With my fists clenched and knuckles white, I decided there in the arena anger would impel me once more.

With the fury known only to those who suffer through gross injustice, I heaved the bodies of the Black Rot into the wheelbarrow. Only two fit inside at a time. I dumped the first load off and came back for another. Dumped them off on top of the first two and came back for another, refusing to pause. Refusing to feel sad. Refusing to feel anything except hatred and anger toward the conjurers.

I thought of nothing but how to reap my justice. And somewhere in those obsessive thoughts — perhaps after dumping eight or ten Rots in the pile — I heard a voice unlike any I’d ever heard before.

It hissed and clawed at the fabric of my mind.
Kill yourself
, it said. A whisper, then a shout.
KILL YOURSELF, ASTUL. It’s the only way. If you kill yourself, she can’t use you.

I ignored the thought and pressed on.

It returned with a vengeance. I cupped the sides of my head and rocked back and forth as the voice felt like a hot knife threading into my skull.

This was a waste
, it said.
Why did you even do this? WHY DID YOU EVEN DO THIS?

It felt like an eternity before the agony in my head retreated. When I opened my eyes, a blazing sun blinded me. I brushed a hand through my hair, raining sweat down upon my arms. I picked myself up from where I had apparently collapsed into the sand and had a look around.

The deceased Rots were all piled up now, although I had no recollection of doing the deed.

A jolly whistle carried throughout the arena, followed by a gruff voice unfit for singing.

Two mules dragged a cart into the arena. A goblin of a man directed them to the stacked bodies. He clambered down from his driver’s seat and tugged on the reins, guiding the mules closer. An enormous wooden wagon was attached to the back of the cart.

The man poked a long fingernail into the mass of limbs. Seemingly satisfied, he nodded and went around the other side. He hauled off and threw his shoulder into the bodies, toppling them over. Some fell into the cart, their elbows and arms and ankles and knees cracking off the edge as they toppled inside. Others slid right off and collapsed into the sand, kicking a thin film of dust into the air.

“Get the fuck off them,” I cried.

The man jumped in surprise. “Whoa! Hey. Who are you?”

“What are you doing with them? They’re supposed to be burned.”

The goblin scraped a long yellow fingernail across his doughy jaw. “Er. Don’t think so. I wouldn’t be here if they were ta be burned. What’s wrong with ’em that the poor bastards need set on fire, anyhow? Bugs? Bit o’ disease?”

Pinching my eyes shut, I drew in a deep breath. Clearly this was all an illusion. It was make-believe, all part of Amielle’s grand plan to break me.

“You’re not even real, are you?” I suggested. “You’re just a vision in my head.”

One of the man’s unruly eyebrows inclined. He bent down slowly, keeping his focus on me as if I was an unhinged and unpredictable specimen.

“All right,” he said. “
All
right. Just calm down, huh? Nice and easy here. My name is Yurkie, and I collect the bodies from the arena once a week. Now, if there’s lots of maimin’ going on and they pile up quicker than that, I sometimes make an appearance twice a week, but no more.” He grabbed the wrist of one of my Rots and then his ankle. With a grunt, he picked the dead assassin up and threw him into the cart like he was a maimed deer.

“Ain’t doing nothing to you,” he said. “You have my promise.”

“Those are my Rots!” I shouted.

I ran toward him, unsure of what I was going to do, but it was going to be something, dammit. Something mean. Something violent. Something born in anger.

But like a boomerang thrown through the air, the voice that had crawled through and pricked my mind once again returned.

ASTUL, SHE DIDN’T TAKE ALL OF THE ROTS. You can save them. You can save the ones that are left. YOU CAN SAVE THEM!

The ground beneath me had vanished. It must’ve. A chasm swallowed the arena, digesting the sand into a black mist that clung to my eyes as I tumbled down, down, down into the dark, ominous abyss.

Think of it
, the voice said. Its tone had changed from aggressively hopeless to sweet and charming not unlike the melody of a songbird.
Conjurers need assassins too. When they take Mizridahl, pockets of rebels will fight them. The Black Rot would be the hand of the conjurers.

I said a word. I swore I said it. I opened my mouth and I pushed my lips out and I screamed it. I cried it. But it didn’t come out.

No!
That was the word, the rejection for the heresy the voice in my mind proposed. But all I could do was think it.

A cold, bitter wind rushed past me as I plummeted into the darkness, my body somersaulting into what seemed like a bottomless crater where it became colder and colder the farther down I went.

It would be no different than now
, the voice said.
Simply a different head wearing the crown. You don’t truly care about Mizridahl’s fate. Do you? You’re not a hero, are you? You’re a hired sword. Nothing more.

The thoughts the voice induced bred in my mind like mosquitoes in a dank river. Slowly and methodically they spread, blanketing and suffocating everything that I believed. That I valued.

Or perhaps this was part of the game. A trick to make me think these thoughts weren’t my own when they truly were.