The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Read online

  “I don’t think he’s dangerous,” Lysa said. “Maybe a little peculiar.”

  “A little?”

  Lysa and I caught up with Rav at the bottom of the tower. The sun set him ablaze in an amber glow as he stepped outside. He looked like a thieving wanderer looking for clothes and food as he rummaged through the carriage, what with his tattered linens.

  “It’ll be a bit cramped,” he noted, “but it’s good for you. Gives you more respect for how big the world is when you step out.” He glanced back and tapped a finger to his skull. “Positive thinking there. Keeps you young and wiry.” He flashed me a smile full of old teeth that time had whittled down.

  “I’ve heard a handsome supply of wine keeps one young and wiry too,” I said. “Got any of that stuff by chance?”

  “Mead, wine, ale, even stumpkorf. Got it all back at the wonderland of Rav.”

  “Stumpkorf?”

  “First ingredient is tree stumps,” Rav explained, much to my disgust. “Second ingredient is korf, which rather fell out of usage, oh… well, several years ago. Now you might call it stumpcoral. See, you get the shavings from the stump, mix them with some fresh coral from the sea, make magic with fermentation, toss in a few other widdly-diddly things, and you’ve got yourself a spicy miracle drink. Strong, that one.”

  I leaned in to Lysa and whispered, “Don’t drink that.”

  “All righty,” Rav said, knuckling the wooden frame of the carriage. “Think we’re… ready…to…”

  He was standing on the tips of his toes now, arms held close to his lanky body like an inquisitive cat on its hind legs. He regarded the horizon curiously, scanning the entirety of Lith’s curved walls.

  In the distance, thunder.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered, hand moving shakily across his mouth. Apparent fear tenderized his voice into mindless muttering. But I was close enough to him to hear every word. “I thought too loudly… he heard me. He knows I’m here.”

  Rav spun around and thrust a bony finger at the tower. “Go! Up to the top, now.”

  Ebon gnashed its teeth along a leather scabbard as I withdrew my blade. “No way out up there. We’ll fight through whatever’s coming.”

  A louring scowl darkened Rav’s face. His body seemed to inflate like a rabid animal in the throes of a hunt. He radiated anger… malice, unlike anyone I’d ever met.

  “Go, now,” he growled.

  There were not many people in the world who intimidated me. In fact, I couldn’t recall a single one, unless I traveled back to a place I didn’t like to go — my childhood. Standing before this minacious creature who called himself Rav — who’d had such a blithe spirit only moments ago — hearkened back to a time in which I had cowered before the punching fists of my father. A time when the bottoms of my teeth would clash against the tops. When I just wanted to run away.

  That was how I felt now… a little boy again, held in the clutches of fear.

  Lysa tugged at my arm. “Come on!” she urged.

  At my feet, the grass wavered as the palpitations of a stampede boomed ever closer. I saw them. They were on horseback, most of them. An acrimonious gray cloud of death rolling in from the fields, charging through the gate.

  “Astul!” Lysa begged.

  I turned and ran into the glass manor.

  Lunging and lurching, I skipped every other step, pausing only for a moment at the third floor to take a gander at Rav. His face was nestled into the fur of his mule’s neck. Then he drew back and patted its butt, and the wagon raced away from the approaching ball of death, the seat empty. That was a good sign, at least. But the paranoid devil on my shoulder kept telling me this was a trap, that Rav would abandon us.

  “Astul,” Lysa yelled, “come on.”

  We made it to the top and inside the halo of stained glass. A pair of feet echoed throughout the tower, interrupted by a ragged voice that said, “Motherfuckers.”

  Breathless, Rav fell into the room. Molly the duck spilled out of his hands onto the floor, quacking enthusiastically. Behind Rav lay a fine layer of black powder that trailed to the steps and presumably beyond.

  He crouched near the doorway and produced a chunk of flint and a small knife. “Break a window,” he ordered. “And hurry it up.” His head flung around and his eyes were big. He looked like a madman hyped up on a cask of wine.

  All right. Fine. Break a window, sure. What could possibly go wrong with shattering a pane of glass when you’re only, oh… fifty feet above solid ground? To be fair, experiencing flight right before death didn’t seem like a bad way to go. At least in comparison to corpses sticking you with sharp swords. I’d a feeling the latter was something that might haunt me forever in the afterworld, if such a thing existed.

  An unintelligible chant droned from within the belly of the tower.

  I hauled ass over to the edge of the room and inspected the glass with my hand. “Right,” I said, baffled as to how I’d break a window with nothing but a couple ebon blades and my fists. Ebon might be sharp, but glass generally doesn’t care if you cut it up.

  Lysa yanked the other blade from my scabbard.

  “Whoa, whoa!” I said, jumping out of the way as she turned the sword around so that its serrated tip pointed at me and its hilt at the glass.

  She struck the pommel against the pane, then looked at me proudly.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Keep screaming, motherfuckers!” Rav hollered insanely.

  They did keep screaming, their cries insulating the tower in a chilling gnarl that reminded me of the way my assassination targets used to burble as they’d scream with blood filling their throats.

  Lysa and I took turns punching the knobs of our swords into the glass, and each time the glass would answer back with a loud clunk. What was this stuff made of, bone?

  Oh, I thought, remembering Amielle describing the process by which it was produced. That’s right. It is made with bone.

  As it turns out, ground-up bone — while resilient — isn’t quite as tough as the unblemished kind. A crack finally appeared in the glass, spreading like tendrils across the pane. A final solid hit and it shattered into an explosive burst of shards that fell fifty feet to the ground below.

  “What now?” I asked Rav. “Jump and flap our arms?”

  “Come on, come on, come on!” he said, striking his knife to the flint.

  A hand stripped down to the white of bone flashed into view from the short corridor leading to the steps. A mangled frame of rot barreled forth. The reaped held a sword vertically, the blade halving the thing’s skull.

  A flick of the reaped’s wrist and the sharp cusp charged toward Rav.

  More corpses rounded the corner now, a flock of cadavers with the black of madness anchoring their eyes.

  I put an arm across Lysa’s chest and stepped in front of her, as if I were a protective father. Why’d I do that? She could fend for herself. I wasn’t her guardian.

  The reaped heading the charge had its mouth gaped like a hungry bird. It would be on Rav in seconds. Its sword would slice right through the old man’s body and poke out the other side, ripping through vital organs and spine.

  We’d be alone, Lysa and I. Forced to fight until they’d overtake us, or to jump to our death.

  “Vah-ha-ha-ha!” Rav cried dementedly.

  The tiniest of sparks, that’s all it was. A little flicker of meager light, till it touched the black powder. Then, like a dry sponge splashing into water, it grew. Quite unlike a sponge, however, the spark became a roaring spine of flame that hissed down the trail of black powder. The reaped in front of the pack had no chance. The others at least had time to turn and consider running, even if they couldn’t get one foot in front of the other before the fire consumed them.

  Rav jumped up and grabbed Molly. “Hotter than you can imagine,” he said, hurrying over to Lysa and me, “but quick-burning. It’ll be out before you know it, and there’s more down there. Whole bucketfuls of the bastards. So we’re catchi
ng a flight out of here.”

  Before I had the opportunity to ask the inevitable question of how we’d be doing that, Rav stood by a newly created hole that had come courtesy of Lysa and myself.

  And he chucked Molly the duck off the tower.

  Then Molly the duck shifted into a Molly-what-the-fuck-is-that beast with vast wings. Her cute yellow bill became a baleful beak from which spikes grew. Her tail was thick enough to break your leg in one swipe, and her talons came in trios of knives that looked as though they’d been sharpened on the sheer face of mountains. She resembled a prehistoric monster.

  A prehistoric monster that Lysa and I suddenly found ourselves on. Lysa wrapped her arms around my stomach as the whale of a bird — there’s a good name for it… whale-bird — flapped its enormous wings and surged high over the city of Lith.

  The air bleated as those wings beat the ever-loving fuck out of it. In a matter of seconds, Lith was behind us, and the shore was to our left. And beyond, I wanted to imagine a vast, sandy beach where crabs patrolled and birds flew. There was a vast, sandy beach. And maybe even some crabs and birds, too. But something else crawled across the beach. Marched, really. Not crawled. Definitely a march.

  They marched in orderly rows, probably fifty wide, as deep as the haze that filtered out the edge of the world.

  “First legion,” Rav hollered back. “About twenty more to come.”

  Later I’d probably want clarification as to what that meant. But not now. I wanted to shut my mind off and gaze without thought into the mountains that crescendoed into the horizon, golden light pouring over their peaks.

  We flew a short ways before the beast aimed its beak toward the ground. It landed beside a familiar wagon.

  As if he was dismounting a regular old horse, Rav climbed down from the winged animal and inspected his wagon.

  “Hmm. Nicely done, Tick and Tack.” He petted the heads of his mule and donkey, then faced Lysa and me. “Mind buggerin’ off my dear Molly so she may go back to being a duck?”

  “Oh,” Lysa said. “Sorry.” She jumped down. “Um, what is she now?”

  “A weavler. Used to command the skies above Evastra long ago. Mostly fossils beneath the dirt now.”

  “Evastra?” Lysa said. “Where’s that?”

  Rav put his hands on his hips and looked at his feet, then back up at Lysa. “You’re standing on Evastra right now. Mizridahl’s sister continent, some call it.”

  “I’d heard this place didn’t have a name,” I said.

  “It’s been forgotten by most, but that doesn’t mean it never had one.”

  “Never mind that,” I said, jumping off the weavler and putting my feet back on solid ground. “You’re telling me you whipped a duck into some extinct beast? Just like that, with the snap of your fingers?”

  “I don’t snap,” Rav said. “Be advised Molly does not particularly enjoy this activity. She understands it’s necessary at times, but that does little to lessen her annoyance. She will be a chatterbox the entire way home, and she may bite. Do not pet her. Especially under the chin.” He drifted toward me on the tips of his toes and in a dreadful voice said, “Never under the chin.”

  What happened next I could not recall. It’s not that the sun blinded my eyes, or a reaped wandered up and clubbed me across the head. It’s just that, well, time rather skipped a beat. Molly had been a weavler one moment, and the next she was waddling about as a duck again, and I never saw the in-between phase. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen the in-between phase when she had become a weavler, either.

  “Off we go now. Load yourselves in. Mind the knickknacks, please. Valuables and such.”

  “I don’t like wagons,” I told Lysa as I positioned myself across from her in the wooden bed. “Bad experiences.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t fly any longer,” she said. “Did you see how lovely the forests looked from above?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Oh. You really missed out.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t drop that,” I said, noting the book she still held.

  “I’d sooner drop myself.” She opened the cover and thumbed through a few pages. “I think I’ll read this now, if you don’t mind.”

  “By all means,” I said, scooting up to the front, behind Rav. “I’ll just talk to Rav here, who says he’s not a conjurer. Liar.”

  “Not a liar,” he said, jerking the reins. The cart bumbled forth over uneven terrain.

  “You conjured a weav-what-the-fuck-ever out of a duck. Counts for a conjurer in my book.”

  “By that order, a soldier is an assassin because he kills.”

  “Well, no. Not quite. See—”

  “Ah,” Rav said, reeking of condescension, “he only has the skill of killing as an assassin does, yes?”

  I saw where this was going, but I was helpless to turn the tide in my favor. So I sat there quietly.

  “What do you know about the conjurers?” he asked. “Their history?”

  “Not enough,” I admitted. “Only that they came here some fifty years ago.”

  He chuckled. “Appeared right out of thin air, did they?”

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t around fifty years ago.”

  “Consider smoke,” Rav said. “It doesn’t appear from the ether. It’s infused into the world by flame. Something is responsible for the flame, and so something is responsible for the smoke. The conjurers weren’t born from oblivion. They were created, and they were your last hope.”

  “Hope is what you call the end of my world, is it?”

  He cleared his throat. “Not you specifically, you selfish ass of a mule. Your people. Your kin. Though if you ask me, it was all an idealistic dream by my idealistic brother. And that’s the last I’ll say about it until we arrive in the safety of my home.”

  “Because your brother’s a thought-reader?” I asked. “That’s what you said back there in Lith, he heard your thoughts.”

  “Precisely. And he hears your thoughts as well, and Lysa’s. Which is why I’m very sorry to do this, but I’ve no choice.”

  Chapter Nine

  On very rare occasions, the space of time between closing your eyes and opening them is filled with nothing but a peaceful sheet of blackness, a nothingness so perfect that neither the idealism of dreams nor the agony of nightmares invade.

  That was my experience, coming to after conking out. Only thing I could remember was riding in the back of a wagon and hearing the whisper of a subtle threat.

  “Up you are now,” rasped an old voice. He stabbed the toe of his boot into my ribs, at which I complained with a childlike groan. “Lots of work to do still.”

  My hands swam through an abrasive sea of what felt like finely ground beads. They were hot and dry to the touch.

  I got to my knees, yawned and patted my hips. Swords were still in place, so that was good. Arm ached, but that’s going to happen when metal pierces you right down to the bone.

  After blinking away the grogginess, I became painfully aware that my lips were cracked, perhaps bloodied, and entirely devoid of moisture.

  Something shuddered against a wooden frame, then Rav spoke. “Here you are,” he said, handing me a mugful of what appeared to be chilled water. I gulped the stuff down, rose to my feet and took a long look at my surroundings.

  Everything was the same in all directions, although if I gave a real good squint, the crest of a mountain range faded into view. Or perhaps the endless desert played tricks on my eyes. Besides a few cacti and some weathered rock, sand seemed to pour in from the horizon, rendering a baked expanse dry as dust.

  Lysa stood beside me, drinking from her mug.

  “I hope you’ll note,” Rav said, “your weapons remain in your possession. A gesture of goodwill.”

  He stood with his birdlike arms crossed over his concave chest, framing what looked like a house behind him.

  “Nothing like a gesture of goodwill, then knocking us unconscious, right, Lysa?” I said.

  �
��Put to sleep,” Rav said. “That’s the phrase you’re looking for. Did you enjoy your rest? Your skin looks healthier. Eyes are more awake, less dark around the edges there.”

  “I’m starving,” Lysa said.

  “Plenty of food inside, but there’s a small conundrum to solve first. Before I welcome you into my home, I must know something very important. Do you have any regrets?”

  That’s the kind of shit that makes me not trust someone. Not once in all of mankind’s existence has someone asked, “Do you have any regrets?” and not followed that question up with an expression of ill intent. It’s just a nicer way of asking for the condemned’s last words.

  “Yes,” Lysa said. “Lots.”

  “Less than a hundred,” I said, “more than ninety.”

  Rav folded his hands. “Understood. Be advised you may experience a, er… slight twinge o’ sorts when you walk in.”

  “Why?” Lysa asked.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ve rearranged his thoughts,” she said with a turn of her head toward me, a reference to a time I did not care to remember; one in which I played the part of Amielle’s slave thing. “Complicated is part of what I do. Or what I’ve done.”

  “And part of who you are,” I jabbed, smiling.

  She turned up her nose at me.

  “You don’t have the basics,” Rav said dismissively.

  “Try me,” Lysa said.

  The old man drew in a patient, or perhaps impatient, breath. “As you walk inside that door, you will experience a change in vectors relative to your current existential position, resulting in an uncomfortable needling inside what a woman long ago termed your cerebellum. The cause cannot be explained without the inclusion of horrible ten-syllable words, various diagrams and approximately three weeks of time in which you will read from a large tome and sleep for two hours a night. Now, you are giving me more trouble than Molly after waking from a short nap, so please, go inside. Slowly.”

  “This sounds rather poor for my health,” I said. I’d walked through plenty of doors, and indeed into plenty of doors too, when the wine was strong. Other than punching the frame with my nose, none of those entrances or exits caused me pain. Well, unless you count the one evening when a fat man reared back with a mug and introduced my forehead to splintered wood.