The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (16 page)

I sat before the chessboard and took in the strategy. “You know, if chess reflected the battlefield, you couldn’t so much as take a queen before you’d have a ten-thousand-strong army converging on you in—”

In retribution
, I thought. Didn’t say it, though. Not aloud.

I jumped up, ignoring the whats and where-are-you-goings from Lysa and Rovid. With the gleam of the glass panes as my torchlight — now as green as an unripe banana — I scoured the pile of rubble in the corner. Nothing there that I needed, so I pressed onward, through a long hallway that wrapped around into a small room with a balcony. A few chairs remained upright in here, but most had been twisted and crushed into scraps. Judging from the inlet hearths along the ways, this had been an eatery at one time. Probably not somewhere I’d find an excess of oil trays and pens. A cursory riffling through the debris proved that assumption correct.

So, off again. Into other rooms and hallways. Up a floor. And up another. Finally, at the tip-top of the Big-Ass Building Number One, I came across what looked like a study. Bookcase had remained intact, surprisingly, and so too did a desk. Popping open a few drawers revealed nothing much of interest, except a key. Only reason that was interesting was because the door across the way refused me entry.

Now, all I’d come here for was some goddamn writing utensils. I had a few complex plans brewing in my mind, and I needed to see them visually before committing to them. But… curiosity clawed at me like a bad sexual urge. All the doors I’d tried so far had been unlocked. What was so special about this one?

Well, it couldn’t hurt to take a look. So I waltzed on over to the door, stabbed the key into the hole and gave her a push.

Mint green light filtered inside the cold room.

It took approximately a half second for my sheathed sword to become an unsheathed sword. Took approximately another half second for me to step backward in preparation to haul ass out of there.

But either I hadn’t been seen, or they didn’t have eyes. Or, quite possibly, they were dead. Didn’t look dead, though. And things couldn’t well die here, anyway. At least that I knew of.

“Rovid!” I hollered. My voice had enough oomph to travel down twenty flights of stairs, curve around a few buildings and probably scare the shit right out of a sleeping crow a couple miles away.

I heard the stampede of panicked feet come rumbling through the building.

“Astul!” Lysa screamed.

They found me standing before the doorway. Lysa was wheezing, and Rovid was hunched over, sword drawn.

“What the fuck is this?” I said, pointing.

Ebon clunked against a stone floor as Rovid dropped his weapon and mindlessly walked inside, as if a nefarious voice had called to him. He poked his finger in the jelly — which seemed like a preservative of some sort — that pooled inside what looked like several caskets on squat stilts. Caskets without a top.

“This,” he said, brushing his hand over the purest and pristine flesh I’d ever seen, “is our ticket out of here.”

“
T
o clarify
,” I said, hand going numb from holding my sword so tight, “they’re not alive?”

“Only vessels,” Rovid said. He blew a puff of air through his nostrils, like a scholar upon making a new discovery. “I’ve never seen them like this. Fresh, I mean. We could trade these for a wagon and mule and a horse. As long as we can get to a village within a couple days. Else they’ll rot, outside the preserves.”

“Any villages left around here that you fuckers haven’t culled?” I asked.

“Plenty. There’s one north of here, a day and a half away. But we can’t carry them that far. They’re heavy.”

Lysa scooped her finger through the goo. She made a face. “It’s cold. And it smells like… something not very nice. Hmm, what about a wheelbarrow?”

“You must protect them from the elements,” Rovid said. “Or they’ll rot.”

I sheathed my blade. “We don’t have the luxury of choosing. Wheelbarrow sounds like a dandy idea. We’ll have to make one from spare wood lying around. Get some sleep. We’ll get to it in the morning.”

I turned to leave, but Rovid put himself between me and the doorway. “They’ll know we’re not one of them. If we show up with rotted corpses, nothing to trade, no goodwill… they’ll attack us. And kill us.”

“Lovely sounding,” I said. “Find me a goddamn wagon with a pristine canvas, then. Otherwise, we’re building a wheelbarrow and hoping for no rain.

I tried to leave again, and this time a thin finger stabbed me in the chest. “You don’t get to make all the decisions.”

“Oh, I bloody well do.”

“On whose authority?”

I pushed my face closer, the tip of my nose wrinkling his. “My
own
.”

I heard his teeth grinding. “I know Amortis better than you. You’re fucking blind here without me.”

“All well and good, but I know how to survive better than you. I know how to avoid messy predicaments better than you.” I looked deep into those inky eyes of his, making my point understood. “And if you fancy yourself a democracy, take note the vote is two-to-one in favor of the wheelbarrow. They teach you how to count in reaper school?”

He huffed himself up real big. “You might have spared my life, but you don’t own me.”

The knuckles around the hilt of his sword were white. “It’s time to return that,” I said, glancing at the blade.

Silence thickened in the air like a rising loaf of bread. In fact, you could have cut it like a loaf of bread. Perhaps that was why the edge of my own blade sheared its leather casing, glimpsing freedom.

“Stop it!” Lysa cried, shoving herself between Rovid and me. “You’re acting like imbeciles because you’re tired. We can decide in the morning if we will use a wagon or wheelbarrow. Just stop arguing.”

I snapped my fingers. “The sword.”

“Astul,” Lysa said, her head falling to the side, as if I was being wholly unreasonable.

I snapped my fingers again, unwilling to budge on this issue.

Rovid dropped the blade. “Take your fucking sword,” he said, walking out of the room.

I bent down and picked it up. “I don’t trust him,” I whispered to Lysa.

She sighed. “You picked a bad time to decide that.”

I waited till I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then said, “Never have. But he’s useful. When he stops being useful, however…”

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. I won’t stand by while—”

“What?” I said innocently. “Once he stops being useful, I’ll cut him loose. Interpret that however you will. Now, I’d very much like to find a bloody pen.”

A pen I didn’t find. Unable to keep my eyes from falling shut, I made myself a pillow from a ball of faded cloth. Of course, when I
wanted
to sleep, I couldn’t.

Thinking about the day ahead kept me up. Rovid had given us the lowdown on the corpses in that jelly shit, before he had his hissy fit. It went like this.

Once you die, you more or less keep your same body. How? No idea. That wasn’t in the lesson. Maybe the universe makes a copy, who knows. Anyway, that means kids come to Amortis with little bodies, old hags come in with shriveled-up bodies, and so forth. If you plan on spending eternity here, sticking to one body seems like a huge drag. And if you end up taking a knife to the throat during your stay here, or your head gets whacked off, you’re rather fucked without an extra body lying around. So corpse making is a thing. Basically you gather some leather, a few herbs, a bunch of milk and, as Rovid explained, ‘other shit.’ And you go to work stitching one together, fitting it with necessary organs retrieved and molded from animals.

Then you get this goo, which sounded positively like witchcraft, submerge your new creation in it for a few years, and voila! Out comes a fresh corpse, like a pie from the oven. And, far as I could tell, the dead simply jump right out of their old body and into the new. Or something like that. Apparently they sell for a handsome price, but the Prim offered them for free if you met ‘special requirements.’ The corpses were called Preen.

Preen rot easily, though — without being tethered to the dead — hence the pissy confrontation with Rovid. Hopefully they wouldn’t rot on us. That wasn’t the only worry that kept me awake, though. I had a plan brewing. A big fucking plan. A plan born from kings on a chessboard and, if luck would have it, one put into action against the kings of Mizridahl.

The image of Occrum sped through my mind like bouncing sheep.
I’ll surprise you yet, you bastard.

A
wheelbarrow it was
, because intact wagons didn’t exist in the Prim. Lysa, Rovid and I salvaged the parts from abandoned carts and engineered a marvel of a wheelbarrow. It didn’t roll straight, it had uneven handlebars, and its bed consisted of partially rotted wood. But it didn’t collapse as we piled about six bodies into it, so that was good.

Rovid didn’t speak, opting to grunt and point us in the direction of the village he’d referred to earlier. When it was his turn to push the wheelbarrow, he’d cast a few curses and called the wagon a few choice names as its wheel sunk into the mud, but otherwise said nothing to Lysa or me.

He finally broke his silence that night, while the three of us sat around a warm fire.

“What is your plan?” he asked, jaws mashing the leg meat of a rabbit we’d found hobbling about earlier. “To run away? That won’t help you.”

“Told you our plan already. It’s to make Occrum take a long, long nap. A permanent one.”

He spat out a piece of bone into the fire. “So you don’t have a plan. You have a wish.”

“Oh, I’ve got a plan. But I can’t reveal its secrets. No hard feelings. And it’s not just you. I can’t tell Lysa, either. Or my good friend Vayle, if I ever find her. Only I can know its twists and turns.” I peeled away a thin strip of meat from what looked like a rib. “And even that might not be enough.”

Rovid licked his fingers clean. “You don’t have shit.”

“I’ve never known him to lie,” Lysa said. “But… why can’t you tell anyone?”

After inspecting the rib for more meat and finding nothing, I lay back on the crisp grass and looked at the stars. “The trick to outwitting Occrum is to surprise him. That’s a fairly difficult trick to pull off when he can read your thoughts.”

“He can’t read them here,” Lysa said.

“No,” I agreed, “but we can’t stay here, either.”

“Where are we going, then?”

“To Mizridahl. I can tell you that much. But nothing more. See, the way in which you outwit someone who knows what you’re thinking is not to think about it. You never give him a glimpse as to what lies ahead, because then you’re finished. You move and think one step at a time. Is that possible? Maybe. Maybe not. Better chance of it succeeding if only one of us knows each notch in the rope, though.”

Lysa begrudgingly accepted this. Rovid laughed. Probably a laugh he thought would be insulting, but I regarded it as ignorance. Rovid had it deep in his head that Occrum was this all-mighty creation whose will could not be challenged. In the end, it was Rav who was correct. He was just a man. A man who’d built himself up big and mighty, sure. But I’d seen big things fall before. I loved the thud they made when their knees finally buckled. Loved seeing the bewilderment dash across their eyes. Loved the slow realization that they’d been had.

After our short rest, we continued on till morning, when we slept for two hours. We spent much of the afternoon dodging rainclouds and learning how great a pain in the ass a wheelbarrow is in soft mud.

Then, we arrived. More or less. The village Rovid mentioned — Crokdaw Village — lay ahead, its paths and buildings arranged in a circular fashion. Bells had been sounding in the distance for the past thirty minutes, apparently alerting the inhabitants to our coming. Also alerting the well-armed militia, who looked about as pleased to see us as a cow staring down a butcher’s knife.

“Reapers,” one of the men said, poking his face forward in front of his bow. A triangle was painted on his forehead, centered with a vigilant red eye.

“I am,” Rovid said. “They are not.”

Red Eye traced Lysa and me from head to toe with the tip of his nocked arrow. Clearly we weren’t the sort of reapers he usually encountered, and this seemed to startle him.

“If not reapers, then what?”

“People,” I chimed in. “That want to leave this realm.”

A bead of sweat wet my eyebrow. Must’ve been twenty bows, which meant twenty arrows, which meant… well, by simple calculation, a very dead Astul if even one of those hit its target.

“Why’s he with you?” Red Eye asked. Then he lifted his chin at the wheelbarrow. “Flesh?”

“Not just flesh,” Rovid said. “Preen. Fresh. Pristine.”

Red Eye signaled for us to push the wheelbarrow to him, but Rovid shut that down quickly.

“Not until we come to an agreement. We need a wagon. With a mule, horse, anything that can pull it.”

Red Eye jerked his bow up, putting a target on Rovid’s throat. “Reaper. I don’t trust reapers. Taken people I’ve loved.”

Rovid faced us and said, “I’m their prisoner.”

Red Eye looked at me for clarification, which I was all too happy to give. “Oh, yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’ll chop his lanky fuckin’ head off if he makes one wrong move.” Then, for emphasis, I dragged my thumb across my neck.

This made Red Eye smile, which made the others smile.

“Stay,” Red Eye said. “We must vote.”

He slung his bow around his shoulder and sprinted off toward the village. The rest of the militia stayed behind, ensuring we couldn’t take a step without steel arrows making a mess of our organs.

A bell rang, and children scurried through the circular village, filtering between an outpouring of taller, older figures. The kids stayed outside while the adults went into a large building. A few minutes later, Red Eye emerged and returned to us.

“Yes,” was all he said.

The barelegged and bare-chested men under Red Eye’s apparent command put away their bows. Apparently an agreement had been reached. We needed more people like Red Eye in the world, I thought. Short on words, but he got things done. I liked him.

We followed him into the village, where he pushed the wheelbarrow past clamoring children and adults alike. A woman with braided black hair inspected the Preen with a probing finger, then gave an approving nod. She snapped her fingers and ordered the children to take them inside.

She approached us, hands cupped in front her, emotionally subdued. She smelled strongly of jasmine and sandalwood, or perhaps that was the scent emanating from the whole village. Her breasts hung freely, legs bare. Must’ve shivered something bad during wintertime. Did winter exist here?

“Where did you find them?” she asked.

I waited on Rovid to answer, then realized she wasn’t addressing him. In fact, she walked right past him. Which made sense. As a reaper, he was beneath her. Hell, beneath the dirt she walked on.

“The Prim,” I answered. “Stumbled upon a room full of them.”

“May I ask where exactly in the Prim?”

“Er, big colorful building.”

She smiled as I tried to convey the details of a world she knew far better than I.

“Top floor,” Lysa said. “It was locked. But it’s not anymore.”

The woman took Lysa’s hands in hers, then softly let them slip beyond her fingertips. “Thank you.” She traded glances between Lysa and I, brow furrowed. “You don’t belong here, do you? How did you—”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “One that I can’t even explain very well. It’s just that — well, we’re here, and we’re trying not to be.”

“Where are you going?”

I swatted a fly out of my ear. “Ultimately a land called Mizridahl, if you’ve heard of it. But anywhere other than here is the first step. No offense. Lovely place you’ve got, but we don’t much belong. Yet.”

She tapped her chin thoughtfully. Then, she turned and hollered out a name. Sounded like Taryl.

A man jogged over, straw necklace wiggling around his neck. Big guy, all shoulders and chest.

“Our guests who brought us the Preen,” the woman said.

“An honor,” Taryl said, steepling his hands and offering a slight bow of his head.

“They require passage to Mizridahl.”

Taryl crossed the tree stumps he had for arms and bounced slightly on his knees. “Mizridahl? Anywhere in particular?”

“I’m not greedy,” I said.

He grinned and shot a thumb behind his shoulder. “I can get you there in half a day. Need rest, or…?”

“We’re rather invigorated,” I said. “Especially with this news. You can put us on Mizridahl in half a day?”

“Before night falls. Meet me by the stables. I’ll get us a wagon and some horses.”

I elbowed Lysa. “Well, fuck me, huh?”

“Luck’s changing,” she said, winking.

“I wouldn’t go that far. But at least we got a break.”

Before we went off to the stables, the woman before us wanted a last word.

“Thank you both from the very bottom of my soul,” she said. Her eyes set on Rovid. “For taking this monster away, and for bringing happiness into our lives. Over one hundred years, some here have been forced to persist in the same flesh as when they arrived. Children. The elderly. This will change everything. If you ever make passage into this realm again, you are always welcome in our village.”

“Thank you,” Lysa said, in the kind of heartfelt way only she could convey. “What is your name?”

“Silma.”

“Silma,” Lysa parroted. “We’ll end the reapers for you, Silma. I promise.”

That comment turned Silma’s head sideways and put a teary smile on her face. She cupped Lysa’s cheek, whispered something to her, and then let us be on our way.

Once we were out of earshot, I told Lysa, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I didn’t.”

“Confident, are you?”

She brushed up against my arm, smirking. “Just taking after you.”

I laughed. “Don’t do that.”

Taryl had readied the wagon, reined in two horses, and told us we were ready to go.

So I shoved Rovid forward, playing up the whole prisoner thing at his expense. “Get up in there, you filth!”

“Bind his hands!” a villager recommended, rushing to my side with rope.

I could’ve turned aside the suggestion, said I clearly had things under control. But this sounded like fun… and retribution for the piss fit he had thrown about our chosen method of transporting the Preen. Which had turned out completely fine.

Once the three of us were safely inside the bed of the wagon, Taryl uttered some commands to his horses, and off we went. Trundling into a forest.

After picking a well-traveled trail that’d beaten weeds and creepers far back to the edges of tree trunks, Taryl turned around in the seat and faced us.

“Been scouting for reapers recently,” he said. “Been an uptick in the area. So I’m sitting in a tree, cracking walnuts, and all of a sudden, one appears. Out of nowhere. Figured I found myself a new tear. And I did. Right to Mizridahl.”

“You went through it?” I asked. “I thought the dea— I mean, people like you, they couldn’t go through.”

He snapped his head around and jerked on the reins hard. “Quit eating that, Rilly! Sorry, can’t have her eating the whole forest, and she would if you let her. Anyways, naw. Reaper told me.”

“Doesn’t seem like a reaper would willingly give that information up,” I said.

“Nothing said about willingly. I threatened him with choppin’ off his head. They speak real fast if you say stuff like that.”

Lysa curled up into a ball and laid her head against me as the forest jolted us about with its unwieldy terrain. “Did you free him, or take him prisoner?”

“Neither,” Taryl said. “Chopped his head off.”

I could feel Lysa’s head pulling back against my jerkin. “But you said—”

“He’s no good alive. They do terrible things. Sure you know that, since you’ve got one of your own.”

“But—”

I tapped Lysa on the leg and whispered, “Drop it.”

Taryl wasn’t questioning why we needed passage to Mizridahl, nor why we were escorting a reaper there, so I wasn’t about to have us question him.

Lysa glanced up and shot me a frown. She was a stubborn one, but knew when she was in the wrong.

The forest canopy consumed most of the sky, letting only the occasional droplets of blues dribble in. Those blues were getting darker now, smeared with the color of coal dust. Wouldn’t be much longer before we’d have night smothering us. But Taryl made good on his promise, and soon proclaimed we were there.

“It’s somewhere in the middle there,” he said, a finger drawing circles around the bridge of a fallen tree.

Lysa and I clambered out. Rovid rather fell out. I yanked him to his feet, brushed the leaves off his face.

“You should know,” Rovid said, keeping his voice muted as we walked toward the presumed placement of the tear, “that they do not put these things in places where just anyone could stumble into them.”

I helped him over a few fat, coiled vines. “They’ll be guarded? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“Maybe. Probably not. They don’t stand fucking guard. Do you know how suspicious that would be in a place like Mizridahl, still full of life?”

“Then what are you telling me for?”

“They take secluded, abandoned camps. Coves six hundred miles from civilization. Places where no soul would think to look, understand? We go through this and we might find ourselves without any hope of reaching so much as a village.”

I shoved him forward. “We’ll worry about that when we cross over.”

As it turned out, we didn’t need to worry about that. The transition was sudden and startling, as it had always been. One moment I’m walking in a forest, and the next I was in a cave.

A very familiar cave that wasn’t a cave at all. Rather a hole. My Hole. And bodies lay strewn before me.