The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (14 page)

“That sounds real enjoyable,” I said.

“It’s better than what will happen if you go through with your plan. You won’t kill him. You can’t. And when you fail, he’ll turn you into me. Maybe even something worse than me.” Rovid swallowed. “You don’t want that.”

I rolled a moldy raspberry between my fingers and thoughtfully flicked it out of the wagon. “Are you going to help us or not? The extra weight is slowing us down, so I’d like to cull whatever we don’t need.”

It seemed the prospect of death and whatever torture that entailed was a far more abhorrent thought than revisiting the man who ruined his life. “I’ll help you,” Rovid said. “I don’t know how, but I’ll try.”

Nobody knows how
, I thought.
That’s the fun part. And the scary one.

Fatigued by running through scenarios and sketching out plans in my mind as the day wore on, I decided to play a little game with Lysa. I termed it the mystery game. The rules were simple. One person is the spotter. The other is the spy. The spotter reveals a vague clue as to what he spots in the distance, and the spy has three chances to guess correctly. If the spy guesses wrong all three times, then it’s three chugs of wine. Big chugs too, none of that sissy stuff.

Or at least that was the idea. After Lysa reminded me how poorly our last drinking endeavor had gone, we opted to simply keep score.

The game wasn’t very fun for most of the evening. Since Cessilo deliberately avoided bustling hotbeds of life — or death, whatever — only the empty plains of sandy grass stretched out before us. Not much of an effort to guess what the spotter sees when the only hints to offer are “something grainy” and “something green.”

That all changed the next morning. The sand had thickened now, choking out everything except the most resilient weeds. Weeds and an impossibly large and impossibly vast… what was it? A city? Maybe for the gods, because I’d never seen a city like this.

There were roads on top of roads on top of roads, with inlets of more roads. All made from impeccably smooth stone. Hugging the roads were celestial-sized structures. Looming towers larger than the walls of Erior, some thin as a pick, others fatter than a castle. Rows of wall-to-wall buildings squished together, squat in shape like those belonging to a lord’s manner.

“They’re so big,” Lysa said, her head inclining slowly, as if trailing a plume of smoke as it filtered into the heavens.

“And empty,” I noted. Utterly big and utterly empty. A fine film of beige dust clung to the streets, swathed the buildings. It was as if the land had come to take back its property.

“Relics,” Cessilo commented. “All it is now.”

“What happened?” Lysa asked.

Cessilo angled her thumb back behind her shoulder. “Him’s what happened,” she said, her words obviously intended for Rovid. “Used to be called the Prim, place where you’d come and get your bearings after leavin’ behind the living world. Meet your ancestors, if they made it, get to know the whats and whys. Capitol of Amortis, some called it. All gone now.” There was a wistfulness in her voice.

It seemed to take most of the day before the Prim vanished into the obscurity of the horizon behind us. Then night fell and morning came. Around noon, the wagon came to an abrupt stop atop a ledge of rock.

“Here we are,” Cessilo said.

“Here?” I asked. “There’s nothing here.”

Well, that wasn’t quite true. Down below, there was, inexplicably, a meadow of what looked like hemlocks, conical pink flowers that could have been hyacinths, red asters and a host of other budding flowers and even trees. It was a jarring transition from the dry, sandy terrain on which we stood. Almost looked like it wasn’t even real, like it’d been painted on canvas.

Oh, and there was something else too. It lay amid a patch of rock and trees. Threads of lime-colored moss dressed it in camouflage. It looked like the mouth to a shallow cave. At least to the naive eye. But to someone who’d seen it in over thirty paintings, it wasn’t a cave.

It was a cove.

T
he troop of Lysa
, Rovid and myself stood before the cove. Rovid’s ankle seemed better, although he still walked with a slight limp.

Cessilo had high-tailed it the fuck out of there like fungal spores had taken to the air and were coming for her. We managed to take what supplies we could before she left.

“Eww,” Lysa said, her finger recoiling from the moss. “It’s mushy.”

I clicked my tongue. What to do, what to do. “This is the exact cove I saw in Rav’s paintings. Had to be a hint. I don’t know why he wouldn’t just tell me, though.” I looked at Rovid. “You’ve never seen this?”

“Never.”

“Where do you come and leave from, then?”

“Various locations,” he said. “Never here. Actually” — he leaned in to inspect the spongy texture of the rock — “this does look a little familiar. Can you untie me?”

“Not happening.”

“How am I supposed to help you with my hands bound behind me?”

“He doesn’t have a weapon,” Lysa said. “You won’t run, will you?”

Rovid stood straight. “You’ve my word.”

His word was about as valuable to me as virgin wine is to an alcoholic. Still, he had a point.

“Fine,” I said. “You keep your hands out of your pockets at all times. And stay in front of us. If you run…”

“I know, I know.”

I pointed the tip of my sword to the meadow. “Turn around.”

A swift swing of the blade — close and violent enough to send an uncomfortable breeze up his arms — cut the rope.

Rovid tested his newly freed hands, curling his wrists and massaging his fingers. He edged his palm down the rugged face of the cove. “You feel this? It’s porous.”

“So?”

“You ever seen porous rock before? I haven’t, except on the island.” He faced me. “It’s where Occrum lives.”

“You’ve been there?”

He thumbed his eye. “It’s where these were put in.”

“Well, I think we’ve found our gateway back to the living world.”

“Tear,” Rovid said. “Not a gateway. A tear. As in, you’re tearing a hole in the fabric of life. In time. In space. A tear,” he reiterated with emphasis. “Not a gateway.”

I blinked. “A man of your definitions, are you?”

“How are they made?” Lysa asked.

“Something about fragments,” Rovid said, “and particles and manipulating their vectors and… I don’t know. Only the reapers who break know how to do it.”

“Break?” Lysa asked.

Rovid snapped his fingers. “Or snap, whatever you want to call it. Occrum… he poisons every reaper with — look, I don’t know what it is. It’s from the concoction he makes us drink when we’re first brought to him, that’s when I think it happens. It’s a poison that lies dormant, till activated. Then a mere reaper becomes something greater. Occrum calls ‘em wraiths, but I prefer the demented. They’re the ones who open tears.”

Hmm. That information might prove helpful in the future
, I thought. “Er, not to suggest you should, but can you activate it yourself? This poison?”

“Why would I want to? Those wraiths, I’ve seen ‘em. They’re not right in the head anymore. They’re, I don’t know. Disturbed. Something terrible has to happen to a reaper for him to break. Something that touches his core. Only the reaper himself knows how to inflict that sort of pain. And Occrum. He breaks reapers as he sees fit, depending on his need for new tears to bring reaped through.”

“All right,” I said, deciding to move on from what appeared to be a sore talking point for Rovid, “so, soon as we step into this cove, then what? We’re there, on his little island? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Rovid said.

Lysa lifted a finger. “There’s a problem.”

“Only one?” I said.

“Soon as we step through, the book will capture our thoughts. He’ll know we’re there.”

“And then there goes the surprise.”

Rovid groaned. “That fucking book. All he does is read the thing. He’s paranoid, says
he’s
always coming for it. Who’s he? Not got a clue.” He shrugged and added, “Maybe he means you.”

“I’m not coming for his book,” I said. “Not to steal its secrets, anyhow. Listen, does Occrum trust you?”

“I don’t think he trusts anyone.”

“Can you pry him away from that bloody book for a few minutes?”

“How would I do that?”

Lysa clapped her hands cheerfully. “With my help! Okay, so pretend… hmm, wait a minute.” She scoured the meadow for a moment, then returned with a thick stem. “What does the island look like? Describe it to me.”

“It’s triangular,” Rovid said. “Cove sits right near the narrow tip. Then smack dab in the middle there’s a… I don’t know what you’d call it. Maybe a fortress? That’s where he stays, in that damn thing all day long, every day, far as I can tell. Only been there a few times, mostly when he wants to discuss plans with the reapers.”

Lysa began drawing the description of the island in the sand. “Are there any walls?”

“No.”

“Okay. Here’s my idea. Rovid and I go into the cove together. You stay back.”

“Uh.”

“Just wait,” she insisted. “I’m going to be Rovid’s prisoner. He found me here in this realm, saw that I wasn’t dead, and knew that Occrum would want to have a look at me. But I’ll break free before we get to that fortress, and I’ll start running. Swimming! I’ll start swimming for my freedom. That’s when Rovid alerts Occrum, who will storm out of his fortress and capture me.”

Lysa took a much-needed breath, then continued, “That’s when you come through. And you sneak inside the fortress, find the book, and you wait for him to come back. Sword in hand.” She stood back proudly. “How’s
that
for a surprise?”

“Yeah, great,” I said. “Just how the hell am I supposed to know when to waltz on through?”

“Oh. Well, you could wait here for an indeterminate amount of time. Five minutes or so. That’ll give Rovid and me time to pull off our trick.”

“Problem,” Rovid said. “I’ve never actually seen the water.”

“But you said it’s an island,” Lysa noted.

“It is. Just… lots of fog around it. Water probably lies beyond. I don’t make it a point to stop and gawk at the features when I’m there. You also have a second problem. Occrum’s likely reading your thoughts as you speak. Before you speak, actually. He’ll be prepared.”

Huh. I would’ve expected Occrum’s corpse-reviving militia to know the limits of his special book. When I clarified that our thoughts couldn’t be recorded from this realm, he looked startled.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Trust me,” I said.

“And me,” Lysa put in.

Rovid put his hands on his hips, abysmal eyes swiveling from me to Lysa. “Who
are
you people?”

“A guy and a gal,” I answered. “That’s all. Tell you what, reaper man — if we survive this little encounter, I’ll tell you all about myself. No question left unanswered. But for now, let’s get on with it.” I faced Lysa. “Pull your pant leg up.”

“What?”

“Pull it up.”

We both pulled a pant leg up at the same time. I unclasped the sheath from around my shin and tightened it around hers. Her leg was too thin. The sheath slid right down to her ankle, so I took the blade out and told her to tuck it in the waist of her pants.

“Try not to get yourself killed, yeah?” I said. “This should help.”

A big smile scrunched up her freckled nose. She slammed herself into me, face in my chest, arms wrapped around my back. “No matter what happens, thank you.”

Standing there awkwardly for a moment, unhinged by this rather abnormal affection, I patted her back. “For what?”

She pulled away from me and sucked in a huge breath. “For the experience.”

I stood with my thumbs tucked inside my belt as Rovid took her by the arm like a guard escorting his prisoner to the dungeon. Together, they walked into the cove. Together, they vanished.

I thought for a moment of returning Lysa’s thanks, even though she was no longer there. But this wasn’t the time for sentimental bullshit. I had about five minutes to prepare myself for the assassination of a lifetime. Of all lifetimes.

And how do you prepare for something like that? You don’t, I discovered. Short of chugging two skins of wine — which you absolutely should not do unless you want to be known as the botcher of the assassination of all lifetimes — nothing could numb me. Nothing could dull my emotions. I was excited and afraid. Nervous and aroused. Charged like a spark from a blacksmith’s hammer falling upon ebon.

Oh, there’s nothing like the feeling of being alive. Now to keep hold of it. Speaking of which, it’d been about five minutes, hadn’t it?

T
wo black pebbles
streaked with moonlight hung from the ceiling. They inched closer.

Still disoriented from the abrupt transition from midday brightness to the midnight-blue shades of twilight, I was still a bit fuzzy. Maybe I was seeing things.

I tested that theory by poking a finger at the slinking pebbles.

As it turned out, the pebbles were eyes. And the eyes belonged to a bat. How did I know this? Because it screeched at me, flapped its wings and charged its blind fucking face into my head.

I slapped it. It clawed me. I told it to fuck off. It told me to do the same — at least, it sounded like a fuck-off kind of shriek. Then it dislodged itself from my head and flew away.

“I fucking hate bats,” I said aloud. A brush of my finger along my cheek revealed a bit of blood. Good — it’d make me look like some kind of insane executioner who imbibed the fluids his sword leeched from its victims.

I stepped to the edge of the cove and peered out.

Beneath a sky that featured a crescent moon and brooks of pinkish-blue twilight stretched a triangular island. Just as Rovid had described. And there in the middle stood the fortress: a squat, ugly structure made of old stone that was crumbling at the foundation.

I expected to see all of this, but two things were missing. One: Rovid; and two: Lysa.

Scanning the edge of the island revealed a dense curtain of fog that curled over itself. Too thick to see the water that presumably lay beyond. A more optimistic man than I might have happily thought Lysa was in the water, splashing about as Rovid told Occrum of his prisoner. But experience had robbed me of optimism. Something had gone wrong with Lysa’s plan.

I cursed myself for giving in so easily to such a weak idea. There must’ve been a better way to draw Occrum away from his book. But dwelling on that wouldn’t change anything. And neither would playing a game of search and rescue.

Lysa was a lost cause. How could I possibly free her? Rav had told us his brother was only a man. Maybe so, but he had a book of eternal knowledge that doubled as a narrative of all living thoughts. You give me a suit of invincible armor and a sword that can shoot fireballs and I’m no longer a man, am I? I’m a fucking god. That was exactly what I faced. A god.

Best course of action was to turn back. Retreat into Amortis, give myself time to think. Lysa would die, yes. Or be turned into a reaper. But that would happen whether I fled like a coward or charged headlong into the fortress like a fool. The difference is that I’d suffer the same fate if I opted for the latter.

So the decision was made, then. Right?

Right. Time to turn around. Walk right back to where I’d come from. Skip into Amortis. Chat up some ghosts, see if they had any good schemes for taking down a god.

Just had to twist myself around here, in this cove, point my back toward the island, feet toward the darkness, where that invisible tear lay. And walk, one foot in front of the other.

Well
, I thought, staring at the fog,
I suppose if my body doesn’t want to turn, I can simply walk backward.

I didn’t move. Maybe I wasn’t breathing either. If I had been, my heart probably wouldn’t have thumped in my ears so loudly.

The windowless amalgamation of stone taunted me. Who the hell builds some archaic thing like that when you have the autobiography of architecture itself to draw from?

I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. It seemed to call to me, like voices inside the mind of a madman, beckoning him with persistence.

The ground beneath my feet no longer felt of cold rock. Rather muddy, actually. I wasn’t in the cove any longer, a fact that seemed at odds with my intent to leave this place. The wind was wicked here, howling as it backhanded my cheeks.

The taste of copper filtered onto my tongue, swirled in little puddles at my gums. My teeth had carved a nice gouge into my bottom lip. Oops.

Finally, I turned and looked at the cove. I imagined Lysa coming out, only to fall into hands of Occrum. The sheer terror she must have experienced…

All the air went out of me, deflating my shoulders and chest.
Fuck.

A sharp whistle cut through the air. I looked at my ebon blade and swung again. And again, it whistled. I couldn’t well leave her with him, could I?

Into the brisk evening air I went, not as a man, but as a hunter. With an ego bigger than this entire island — fuck, bigger than this entire world — I walked with a swagger, slicing my blade through the air, pretending I was taking off a head or two. Confidence — it’s the best dish you can serve up to Death.

“Five hundred years,” I yelled, “and your fortress looks like a pile of shit shat out by the asshole of the earth.”

I booted open the wooden doors of
his
precious keep. Torchlight flickered at me, as if angry that I’d disrupted it. I spat on the flames and waltzed up a wide set of stairs.

“Where’s the hospitality?” I said. My voice returned to me in the form of an echo. “No servants? And stairs, are you kidding me? You should have clouds floating me up to your chambers. Gotta be something about hovering clouds in that fancy book of yours.”

I rapped my blade against the wrought-iron railing. “I’m comin’ for ya, big man. You think you’re on good terms with Death, but let me share a secret with you: we’ve been working together for
years
.”

Atop the landing now, I had to make a decision. Go right or left, or up another series of stairs? I couldn’t so much as click my tongue before the decision had been made for me.

“The place isn’t mine,” boomed a weathered voice. “It had been erected before I arrived.”

I glanced up to see a figure glancing down, from the top step. A deep crimson robe dressed him. Not the sort of robe scholars and intellectuals fancy, but rather a simple one that might keep you warm in the winter months. He was thin, with a lean face and shaggy silver hair. Not at all what I’d expected. Truthfully, I hadn’t known what to expect, but not this. Something more… frightening, perhaps.

“You must be Occrum.”

“Please,” he said, “disarm yourself.”

“You got fuck-all chance of that happening.”

He pulled the belt of his robe taut and started down the steps, slowly. “Disarm yourself or I will do it for you. Appreciate this offer.”

I coughed an ill-at-ease laugh. “With your bare hands? I don’t think so.”

A storm rumbled throughout the fortress with each step he took, as if the soles of his feet were made of iron. He seemed larger now, a towering, mystical aura. Fear has a way of creeping into your perceptions, enlivening the listless, erecting towers from rubble. Try as you might to convince yourself it’s not real, that it’s just a cheap trick your terrified mind conjures up, it doesn’t go away.

Fight or flee. That was what the shakes were all about. The dry throat, the grinding teeth, the pimpled arms. The
thump-thump-thump
of my heart. Fight or flee. I sure as shit wasn’t ever one to flee.

As if the air vaulted me forward, I lurched up the steps. Then, as if the air vaulted me backward, I lurched down the steps.

He was fast. Unimaginably quick. A blur hung in the air with the thrust of his hand into my chest.

Lying on my back, coughing up digestive fluids and perhaps blood, I heard a screech of steel swivel its way across the stone floor. No, not steel. Ebon. Then the heavy scabbard on my hip was jerked about.

“Ebon,” Occrum said, holding my second blade close to his flecked gold eyes. “The ingenuity of man has never ceased to surprise me. Do you know how it came about, this precious metal?”

I touched my chest experimentally, half-expecting to find a crater the size of a fist. Instead, I felt a bruise the size of a fist. I coughed, then grimaced, then decided I’d try my best not to cough anymore. Or move. Or breathe. Unfortunately, I had to breathe. And it hurt. Every goddamned breath hurt.

Occrum ripped a finger across the serrated edge of the blade, slicing a deep gash from the tip down to his palm. He grinned madly. “When bones fossilize, over thousands of years, they blacken. And harden. Almost resembles rock.”

“I don’t give a—”

“You should. You think I’m evil for reuniting the dead with life, but you use their bones as weapons of murder. Tit for tat. Get up. Or I’ll carry you myself. Will you at least appreciate this offer?”

I rolled over onto my knees, head bowed to the floor like I was in prayer. I wasn’t. It’s just that a stone floor has a tendency to mute your voice when you whisper foul things into it.

Occrum led me up the stairs, my ebon blade still in his possession. The other sword lay behind me somewhere; I figured recouping it probably wasn’t in the plans.

I was fucked. Probably more fucked than I’d ever been fucked before, and I’d been fucked plenty. I’d been a prisoner, an unwilling participant in the enslavement of my own mind, a spectator to my brother’s death and the murder of my Rots, my father’s assassin, and my mother’s failed savior. And now, I would become a reaper.

Sure, there
was
the chance that Occrum would simply kill me. But that seemed too kind.

Occrum took me to a room. Numerous candles set in pronged holders clawed away the darkness. Lysa and Rovid sat in chairs, hands bound by rope. Those were minor details, however — little glimpses that complemented the dominant attraction. And the attraction in this room… it didn’t get more dominant than this. It didn’t get bigger than this.

A golden glow enveloped it like a sublime shell. It emanated warmth from its open pages, but not comfort. I couldn’t recall what I’d imagined the book to resemble, but most probably not something like this.

It stood on the floor like a harp, its vast collection of history rising from the floor to the ceiling, from one wall to the other.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Occrum said, standing in front of it, arms crossed proudly. “It was smaller when I first found it.”

Parchment lay scattered on the floor in stacks amid overturned ink trays and broken quills. It stunk in there. A bad, moldy odor from someone who hadn’t bathed in perhaps forever.

Occrum extended a hand toward Lysa. “I’ve already showed your friend here a lesson in the malevolence of this book. It’s only proper that you learn as well.”

Malevolence? Strange way to term a book that gives you absolute power. I bit my tongue, though. Seemed the best strategy at the moment.

Occrum probed the book. Its pages ruffled like the plumage of a bird. “Astul, thirty-one, assassin, introspective,” he said.

Several edges of the deeply bound pages shimmered. Had to squint to see them, though — it was like watching one star out of a million wink at you.

He knuckled the pages, as if he was knocking at a door, and the luminous sea of paper — or whatever the words were written on — sloshed to the back, revealing the chosen text.

“Hmm,” Occrum said. “Prior three months. There we are. Let us have a glimpse into the mind of the man they call the Shepherd.”

He busily scanned the words on each enormous page, the back of his skull touching his shoulders as he read from top to bottom.

Lysa kicked me with her toe as we waited. I looked up at her. She tried to smile, but her lips wouldn’t let her. Her face was as pale as milk.

“Vayle,” Occrum said suddenly. “She seems to be important to you.” He was still facing the book as he spoke. “Vayle, Black Rot, Mizridahl, today.”

As if the book was sentient, the pages once again sloshed, this time the other way, almost to the very last page.

“Her most recent thought,” Occrum said, “occurred two hours ago. She must be sleeping. She thought this:
Gods, let me die tonight. Don’t make me suffer anymore.
”

Her voice, as meek and brittle as the final croak of a wrinkly grandmother, wriggled in my mind, repeating those words over and over. “She’s in trouble. What happened to her?”

“It appears,” Occrum said, head inclining, “she’s a prisoner.”

“Where?”

He flipped to set of unrelated pages. “Another time, perhaps.” He turned, a tiny but noticeable smirk on lips. “Now do you understand its malevolence? This book, it holds the knowledge of the world within, since its creation. Do you understand how that could drive a man mad? Like it’s done to you, right now. One glimpse into the mind of your friend, and already you’ve gone red in the face.

“I’ve witnessed atrocities you cannot even begin to comprehend. Injustices that have raped the young and innocent and rived the old and fragile. Insane kings who have fucked little boys and so-called devout queens who have boiled the nipples right off their daughters to spare them from sin. I’ve witnessed genocides on scales that would obliterate your perception of numbers. And still here I stand, unscathed. Do you know what kind of man that makes me?”

“Unscathed?” I said. “Is that why you’re conducting a mass extinction?”

He licked his lips and pointed urgently at the book. “I’ve had the power to play god. To make the people worship me! It’s all right there, the power to do whatever I wish to this world. And I’ve never, not once, used it for evil purposes. Do you know what kind of man that makes me?”

“Genocide is evil,” Lysa said. “It doesn’t matter how you try to justify it.”

“Is it?” Occrum asked rhetorically. “I’m sparing these people.”

“From what?” she asked.

“From someone unlike me. Someone who wishes to rule this world rather than understand it. I have tried for hundreds of years to allow life to prosper. I’ve allowed nature to go about its business. Nature failed me. They expanded toward me. I’ve washed out almost all of life, erased histories and knowledge. A fresh start failed me. The new populations grew and expanded toward me. I’ve rearranged the landscape through manipulation of its core workings, tied all lands together as one, concealed myself behind a pole of ice. Deception failed me. The ships still came, expansions still continued.

“So,” he said, unfurling his hands, “what am I to do? It is as if the mind is born with an innate draw to this book. Who discovered it before me, I’m not sure. But they were no longer here when I arrived. I will not surrender my duties as such. I will not let a madman take my position. This book is a curse, and the only remedy is expulsion.”