The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (12 page)

Rav heralded his return with a loud clap of his hands, which was wholly inappropriate considering Lysa and I still both suffered from searing headaches.

“It’s time for you two to depart. Hurry, now, Cessilo is an impatient woman.”

“Cessilo?” Lysa said.

“Cessilo?” I said.

We looked at one another and would have probably shared a smile under different circumstances. But concern marked both our faces.

“She’s your escort. She will be taking you to my brother.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

Rav looked at his arrangement of boxes and coiled wire. “I have unfinished business to take care of. I’ll meet you there.”

“If you don’t? What then?”

“Then it is likely I am dead. Please ensure my brother joins me.”

I let out a caustic laugh, threw my hands in the air and let them fall onto the table.

“We don’t have a plan,” Lysa said. “How do we kill him?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” I said. “He’s only been around five hundred years. We’ll just figure a way to stab him or something. After we find a fucking exit from Amortis.”

“Enough,” Rav said. “Gather your belongings. Now.”

I spat out a few four-letter words and stomped up the steps, punching the banister at the top. I didn’t mind doing the impossible so long as I had a plan. We didn’t have a plan. Not even a poorly put-together scheme that resembled a plan. We had nothing. Absolute-fuck-nothing.

I stripped out of the loose-fitting clothes Rav had provided me and back into my leather armor. Put my belt on, tapped my blades like a priest saying a final goodnight prayer to his gods, and then went on my way to meet this Cessilo character.

Rav stopped me in the kitchen. He had his arms crossed, as if in disappointment. “Your temper will eventually be your end.”

I chewed on that suggestion for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “I should have snapped my fingers, clicked my tongue and said, ‘By golly, don’t you worry, Lysa. We’ll figure this out!’ You haven’t given us a glimpse into what your plan is, and now you’re telling us that you’ll meet up with us. But don’t fret! Is that right?”

“The plan is to end my brother’s reign.”

One, two, three…
After getting to ten, I sighed and rested my clasped hands on top of my head. “That’s not a plan. That’s an end. The plan is how you get to the end. You’re sending me out into a world I’ve never been to. A place where dead people roam, apparently. All I’ve got is a pair of swords and a nineteen-year-old girl who’s never swung one in her life.”

“Cessilo is a dandy escort. You’ll arrive safely so long as you listen to her.”

“This isn’t adding up for you, is it? What happens when I get there? To your brother’s home. Castle. Palace. Tower of doom.”

“It’s an island.”

“When we get dumped off at this island, what do I do? Snap my fingers and voilà! We’re back in the world of oppressive heat and drying oceans? Do I sing a song, perhaps, and the fabric of the realm peels back, revealing the living world again? Or do I skip through a hidden door?”

Rav opened his mouth, but I was on a roll and didn’t give him the opportunity to speak.

“Let’s say I pop out like a newborn, right onto a sandy beach. Should I traipse right up to your brother, introduce myself and then tell him that while he’s been kicking around here for five hundred years, some things have come up and it’s time to go away? Then I’ll stab him in the belly and watch him bleed out. Does that sound about right?”

Rav bit down on his thumb, as if I’d finally —
finally
— gotten him to see the problem at hand.

What I’d actually done was triggered him. His arms reached out at the speed of wind, hands smashing into my leather jerkin.

I felt myself being lifted into the air, feet kicking below me. Then my back crashed into the unforgiving counter ledge. Tin cans and carafes and mugs scattered in different directions as my arms flung up uncontrollably.

Rav was in my face, hands shaking me like a dog ripping gristle from bone. “What do you have in there, motherfucker!” he cried, stabbing his finger into my forehead. “Right between your eyes. What’s there?”

I tried to speak, but my clenched jaw wouldn’t allow it. I’d had angry drunks get up close and personal with me before, their stale breath burning my eyes as they demanded an apology for their spilled drink. But never in my life had I seen furor like this.

What I witnessed here was teeth jumping out of Rav’s mouth like tiny daggers. What I witnessed here was sparks crisscrossing between his eyes like lightning dashing through stormy clouds. What I witnessed here was a voice that seemed unfathomably loud, as if it were probing the soft sponge inside my skull.

He turned and walked a line to Lysa, who stood near the mouth of the kitchen in surprise.

“I have given up more than you will hopefully ever understand for this moment to blossom. I am providing you with an unprecedented passage through space and time. My brother is like any other man. He laughs. He cries. He bleeds.” Rav paused and massaged the bristles on his chin. “He can be taken by surprise. In fact, I believe that is the only way he can be taken.”

I understood it now. I didn’t like it, but I understood.

S
he looked
like she’d been plucked from a swampy mire. Where the fog never dissipates, the trees are thick and cauldrons bubble inside ramshackle houses. Where stews await the fresh meat of children.

Her name was Cessilo. White threads of thin hair dangled like wisps to midway down her back. Her nose was fat and square, framed with a deep red boil.

She sat in the seat, holding onto reins attached to two horses. Lysa and I sat in the wagon bed.

“Got me three rules,” she said, her voice decrepit. “See this here?” She clenched her hand into a tight fist. “I put this up in the air here, like so, and you shut your mouth. That’s the first rule. Second rule is that if you’ve got somethin’ to say, you whisper it. I won’t have any shoutin’ or rambunctious nonsense in my wagon. Too dangerous out there for that sort of thing.”

“What’s the third rule?” Lysa asked.

“I’m gettin’ to it!” Cessilo snapped, her prune lips strung tight. “Third rule is you don’t leave this wagon. Not for any reason. Don’t care if there’s fire underfoot. You don’t leave the wagon. If you leave the wagon, that’s it. I’m not pickin’ you back up.”

I wasn’t much for rules, but those didn’t sound so bad, especially the last one. After all, taking a stroll outside the wagon sounded about as enticing as wolfing down that bitter tree-bark-tasting shit in Rav’s carafe.

We were in the land of the dead now. Well, we’d
been
in the land of the dead for the past week, but that fact had seemed less alarming when were in the perceived safety of Rav’s house. Now we were outside. Exposed.

I expected a world of gray gloom, with desolation our only company. But as the wagon rolled forward, life burst forth from this departed universe. Blankets of two-foot-tall grass stalks carpeted the landscape, mingling with heaps of shrubs on which pockets of blackberries and raspberries grew, their red-and-black colors interspersed like checkered fruit.

Cessilo took us into a forest of towering broad leaves, choked at the trunks with spindly weeds. Birds cooed and cawed as we approached, then they trembled the boughs as they flew away in fear.

We passed a small gathering along one of the cleared paths: a couple women who seemed to be hawking some sort of goods. Jewelry, perhaps.

They didn’t look very dead. To that point, neither did Cessilo. In fact, over the next few days of our travels, we came across settlements and skirted around towns in which the inhabitants looked peculiarly similar to those on Mizridahl. Flesh, bones, that sort of thing.

There was one small, but quite noticeable difference: Their demeanor. The smiles on their faces. The seeming lack of fear that all the poor and underprivileged in Mizridahl carried with them like soggy winter coats on a summer day.

Happiness existed in short bursts on Mizridahl, unless your name was prefaced by Lord or Lady or whatever title your culture granted you. Here, it was as if the people had finally made it into the afterworld they prayed and hoped for.

“What about eating?” I asked Cessilo as the days in the back of the wagon grew long and boring. “Eating doesn’t seem like something dead people do.”

“We ain’t dead people,” she crowed.

“I see. Then what do you call yourselves?”

“People.”

“Fair enough. Point still stands.”

“Like fuckin’,” she said. “Don’t need to do it, but it brings lots of good feelings.”

This Amortis place didn’t sound so bad. I could see myself enjoying it here. I wondered, though… did
everyone
come here when they died? There have existed a lot of folks throughout the history of time. If this realm was really just an overlay of the living realm, the dead should have been stacked elbow to elbow.

I could’ve asked Cessilo for clarification on that. But there are some answers which you take comfort in pondering for a little while.

“How long have you been here?” Lysa asked.

“Don’t know,” Cessilo said. “Don’t much care, neither. Long time. Why d’ya need to know?”

Lysa shrugged. “Just wondering, that’s all. Sorry.”

Cessilo pinched her wool sweater at the shoulders. “Some three hundred years now.” Her voice lost its accusatory tone.

A week or so into our journey, I hungered for Rav’s mighty breakfasts. Cessilo stopped regularly enough at inns and hovels along the way, but the innkeeps usually had nothing on hand except enormous cauldrons full of stews and broths. Stew for breakfast, stew for dinner. It gets old. Quickly.

“’Bout three days now,” Cessilo said one morning. There was something different in her voice, a small, almost imperceptible jitter. A little sigh at the end of her words.

Maybe fatigue. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Mostly laid her head back in the early mornings, when she’d laid the horses down to rest. Never once saw her eyes close. Never saw her dream. She was forever peering into the horizon, sweeping it like a general looking for the encroaching army.

Later in the day, when rain pattered the hide canopy overhead, I stretched out in the bed of the wagon and intended on taking a nap. Lysa was stuck in her book,
The Sepulchering of Self
. She’d been obsessing over the same pages for several days now, bemoaning the lack of clarity in each paragraph.

Last thing I remembered as my eyes closed was her sneaking a look at me, as if to double-check whether I’d gone to sleep yet. Next recollection was a violent thwacking.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Cessilo cried. Her hand was smacking my leg.

Half-dazed from the dead of sleep, I rubbed my eyes. That was when I realized the thwacks weren’t from Cessilo’s hand on my shin. They were from Lysa’s legs slamming into the sidewalls of the wagon.

She was seizing.

“
Shit
,” I spat, rolling onto my knees. My hands were panicky, hovering over Lysa as my mind felt like it’d iced over. Probably because I’m not a bloody savant.

Cessilo brought the horses to a stop and jumped into the bed. Rather spry for an old lady. “Cut me a cloth.”

“What?”

She yanked at my pants. “Cloth! Something to put in her mouth. She’ll bite ’er tongue off.”

Cutting a chunk of leather out of pants designed to thwart that precise intention wasn’t going to happen. But I did have a linen undershirt under my jerkin. So I hurriedly stripped out of both, because accidentally stabbing myself in the belly wasn’t my idea of fun.

Cessilo balled up the piece of cloth and stuffed it in Lysa’s mouth.

Lysa thrashed about like a beached shark, shoulder driving into the wagon frame, shaking the whole thing. Her crazed, uncontrollable kicks splintered the wood, bloodied her toes. Her eyes had rolled back, the whites exposed.

The horses whinnied.

“Gimme your boots,” Cessilo said, cradling Lysa as best she could in an attempt to cushion her body from its savage attempts to brutalize itself.

I untied my boots and gave them to Cessilo, who positioned them behind Lysa’s head as a sort of pillow.

“Shh, shh,” Cessilo said, now lying on top of Lysa to pacify her. “You’re okay, dearie. You’re okay. Shh.”

Lysa grunted like an animal, then smashed her feet against wood again.

Then, as quickly as I could snap my fingers, she opened her eyes. And spat out the balled-up cloth.

She had a wild, frightened look in her eyes.

“Easy now,” Cessilo said. “You’ve come back. You’re all right.” She put a wrinkly hand on the sill of the wagon and leered out. “Best get back to it.”

She clambered back into the seat, and the wheels began rolling again, over dry pine needles.

I gingerly touched Lysa’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

She swallowed and nodded.

“She’ll be fine,” Cessilo called back. “Get some good water in her. No wine.”

Rav had given us a bounty of supplies, including amphorae of water. I opened one and gently placed the spout to Lysa’s lips. She drank until the water spilled out onto her chin and down her chest.

I blotted the puddling stuff with the hem of my undershirt. Lysa smiled at that.

“Thank you,” she said.

I followed her somber eyes down to a book that had lodged itself between her thigh and the edge of the wagon. I picked it up. The words inscribed on the front cover,
The Sepulchering of Self
, seemed to gleam like snow in the sun.

“There’s danger in this, isn’t there?” I said.

Lysa didn’t acknowledge my worries. Didn’t shake her head, didn’t bite her lip. She simply blinked.

“Fess up,” I said.

“It’s… possible to lose yourself in your own mind. To… you know. Never come back.”

The concept sounded like gibberish to me, but I believed it. Nothing good comes without the risk of something bad. “Possible? Or likely?”

“Somewhere in between,” she admitted. “They warned us never to go inside our own minds, the instructors. They said it can become an addiction. An instant addiction.”

“How so?”

Lysa tried sitting up, but struggled. So I lent her my hand and pulled her up.

“I thought I could bury something small. A worry that I had recently. But when I was inside there — my mind — I… I wanted to fix everything. It distracted me. When I go inside another’s mind, I monitor the afflicted.”

“The person, you mean?”

“Yes, the person. They always termed them the afflicted in lectures. We’re supposed to monitor them for certain maladies. The mind doesn’t like being taken. It rebels in many ways, but there are lots of methods a conjurer has to mitigate such events. So long as you monitor. When you’re inside your own mind… oh goodness, the pleasure — it’s like nothing I’d ever experienced. I lost all sense of control.”

“Well,” I said, inspecting the book, “you’re done with this.”

“No!” She grasped my wrist. “Give it back!”

“Lysa… Lysa! Stop.” I yanked my arm away from her, book in hand. “Look at what just happened to you.”

She fell silent, and she seemed to be ignoring me.

“You’re not—” I paused as she lifted a finger and pointed. Then I turned.

Cessilo’s fist was in the air. Trembling.