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

  I leaned against the creaky back of the chair. “And you think those hands exist? Look, what are we dealing with here? A book like this one?” I held up Lysa’s and my published thoughts.

  “More complex,” Rav said. “It has cataloged every thought that has ever been born into this world.”

  “How?” Lysa asked. “Who created it?”

  “Ah,” Rav said, bringing his hands together. “The one question I cannot answer.” He picked his fork up and wagged the pointy tips at Lysa. “I can instruct you on how to obtain gelatin from the belly of a cow and work it into a capsule which you can fill with medical miracles. I can rattle off a recipe to reset the elasticity of your memory so the sixty-year-old you will recall the past as easily and quickly as the nineteen-year-old you. I can show you architecture that can withstand the gale winds of hurricanes.”

  “Why—”

  Rav cut Lysa off at the first word. “I believe the sky can turn purple and the sun can hibernate. I believe fruit can prosper in the North and grow larger and faster while we’re at it. I believe onions and shallots and carrots and potatoes can grow at six times the current rate and feed the world over. I believe in evil and good, and know that both have existed since time began, in more frightful capacities than you two will ever know. I believe the oceans can be drained, and I believe they can cover the tallest mountains in suds and sand. I believe mice are the future of the eradication of diseases, and that minding your own business will save your life more often than a sword.

  “I believe all of this, because I’ve seen the words. Some of it has existed before, and the rest can exist in the future. Know what I don’t believe, dear? That I’ll ever find the answer to your question. The book exists because the creator of this world wanted a laugh. Because he’s a flake, a kook and a neurotic nut. Because he believed too much in his creations, put too much faith in his ambitions and was short on cynicism. The book exists because he’s a man of tests, and we’re all playing his game. The book exists because life is exceedingly improbable and so too is a book that records the dawn and the dusk of its birth, and all you can do is shrug and laugh that everything here defies chance and logic, and that your very life is a miscalculation on part of the universe. Pick your reason, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “There must have been countless inventions lost to time,” Lysa said, wonder in her voice. “Medicinal herbs extinct. I bet there were animals and plants that I couldn’t imagine.”

  Rav sighed. “All of that and more, my dear.”

  There was a long, drawn-out silence, which seemed the most respectable outcome to what was perhaps the longest speech ever. I broke the silence, both because I liked hearing myself talk and because I desperately wanted an answer.

  “What does matter to you?” I asked.

  Rav looked up from his plate for the first time in a long while. “That life persists.”

  “And that’s at odds with your brother?”

  “The book slowly devoured my brother. He saw himself as a god. The God. He was the protector of existence. If he discovered the book, then so too could someone else. Someone of a more deviant mind. Paranoid that the natural advance of culture, science and exploration would bring such a mind to him, he systematically erased most of life and all of its learnings like a fire cleanses the forest, leaving behind small pockets of sperm and egg so it would all arise again, perhaps differently.”

  Lysa looked disgusted. “You let him do this?”

  “Let him? I was powerless to stop him. Moreover, life persisted. He did not intend to make it extinct.”

  “And this time?” I said. “It’s different. Yeah?”

  Rav smacked his lips. “The making of the conjurers was his last hope. He’s given up.”

  Whatever that meant. How could the conjurers hearken hope? Much as I’d like to hear the logic in that, there were more pressing questions that needed answers.

  “Let’s see,” I said, scribbling down imaginary numbers on the table. “Five hundred years. That’s how long you’ve been around. Have you by chance come up with any solutions to apocalyptic scenarios in that time? Because if not, then, hey, it’s been nice knowing both of you. You, Lysa, more so than Rav, because you at least had the courtesy not to inform me of my impending death two days into meeting you.”

  “We kill my brother,” Rav said.

  “Great. Kill a god.”

  “He’s a man.”

  “Fine, a man-made god. Nonetheless, he has access to every thought that zips from one end of our skulls to the other. Got a counter for that? Or do we go on a suicidal escapade, skipping across the fucking desert to reach wherever the piss he calls home, all the while hoping he isn’t having a little look in that book of his?”

  Rav neatly folded his hands, like a delicate napkin. “We stay here.”

  “Oh? Sit tight, is that your grand plan? Invite your brother over for supper while Lysa and I hide under the table, swords in hand, ready to stab him in his sensitive bits.” I rolled my eyes. “For kicking around here for some five hundred years, you haven’t learned much in the way of strategy.”

  “This place,” Rav said, stretching his arms like a man gesturing in the world. “Not this house.”

  “What is this place?” Lysa asked.

  “A destination as inevitable as the passing of time. Everyone comes here, in the end.”

  Lysa and I shared identical expressions, I was fairly certain. Our nostrils were flared, eyes bulging from their sockets. The color of our skin resembled chalk. She managed to blurt out the question before me, however.

  “Are we dead?” Her mouth was agape, and her words hung in the air.

  Rav seemed to scrutinize us with the glee of a man who gets his rocks off to unbridled tension. His beady black pupils swiveled from me to her, her to me.

  Finally, he pulled in a deep breath between his narrow lips and held his head up high, dropping it as he said with great emphasis… “No.”

  Well, that was a relief. I supposed.

  “Everyone else here, though? That’s another matter. Except myself. And Molly. And Tick and Tack.”

  I flipped through the pages of the book Rav had given us, reading the last of my thoughts that had ceased to transfer to the paper as I stepped inside the house.

  It might’ve been uncharacteristic, but I couldn’t help it. My finger jabbed the pages enthusiastically, and a big dumb smile stretched across my face. “You brilliant old bastard,” I said. “That book your brother has, it only records the thoughts of the living, doesn’t it?”

  There was a twitch of his wrinkly face; an appreciative acknowledgment.

  Lysa shot up from the table like she had a bulging cramp in her calf. “No, no,” she said, finger twirling madly, “it’s simpler than that. We’re still living, right? So that doesn’t make sense. It must record only the thoughts of the realm it’s in. Life and death — they’re two separate realms, yes?”

  “Picture it as an overlay,” Rav said.

  “Yes, that’s what I imagined. And nothing that goes in naturally can come out. Otherwise, no one would stay dead. Everyone would want to come back.”

  Rav barely confirmed her suspicions before Lysa continued with her breakneck pace.

  “So—”

  “Hold on to your britches, girl,” I said, interrupting. “I don’t mean to blow a hole in your cheerful theories here, but we had corpses — live, animated corpses — at our heels. Now, I’m not suggesting they’re inhabited with dead people — or living, whatever term you prefer — but—”

  “It would be an accurate suggestion,” Rav said. “Reapers. My brother employs them to go in and come out with what you saw as the reaped.”

  “What’s with digging up the bodies on Mizridahl, then?” I asked.

  “Bodies are vessels,” Rav explained. “When the inhabitants of this world are brought into the living realm, their spirit is ripped away from their vessel in this realm. Without a tether in the living world, they float about,
unseen, useless. A similar phenomenon happens if they are separated from their body in this realm. Without an empty corpse to claim, they are sundered and cannot exist physically. But souls are not intended to leave this realm once they pass into it. The reapers… what they do is nothing short of torture. Once they take you from this realm, you become a husk. Broken and shattered, mindless. As you’ve seen.”

  That brought up a lot of questions, and being a man who enjoys answers, I just had to inquire. “What do you people have here, stockyards of corpses? Let’s suppose I keel over tomorrow. What happens? I float about in this bloody world till my eye catches a body not in use?”

  “You retain a copy of your body when you pass on,” Rav said.

  “That’s not important,” Lysa insisted.

  I side-eyed her. “It’s pretty fucking important.”

  “What’s more important,” she said, “is that we can stop this extinction event and the very source of the problem.”

  “By killing his brother,” I said. “I think we already clarified that.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “You’re not thinking about the big picture. I mean, yes, we have to do that. But his death won’t really change anything, will it? His book, the knowledge it holds… goodness, someone will always desire it. And the cycle will begin again.” She pranced around the room and continued on. “But if we take it and hide it in this realm — the realm of the dead —”

  “It’s called Amortis,” Rav said.

  “Okay. Amortis. If we—”

  “Why not just burn the fucking thing? Or throw it in the ocean? Destroying things is far easier than hiding them.”

  “It can’t be destroyed,” Rav said. “Gods know I’ve tried.”

  “So,” Lysa said, annoyed, “if we hide it here, it can’t be used to harm ever again. The only ones who will have knowledge of its existence will be us and the reapers. We can hunt the reapers down one by one, so they won’t be a problem. And you and me, Astul… we’ll live out our days until old age takes us. That leaves Rav as the only person who has knowledge of how to enter and exit Amortis, who could retrieve the book.”

  Rav straightened himself. “Take care of my brother, and I will gladly end my time in the living realm.”

  Lysa shrugged. “There. Then the cycle ends.” She looked proud of herself, content even.

  I was not content. At all. Thanks to a nagging question I had a feeling wouldn’t be greeted with the kind of answer I hoped for.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked.

  “Two months,” Rav answered. “Give or take a week. That’s how long it will be before the Bay of Selaph dries and the land bridge connecting Mizridahl to its sister continent is revealed. Afterward, the reaped will converge on all living things. And your people, they will not put up a fight. Because their crops will wilt, their earth will bake, and their rivers will dry. They will welcome death, no matter how it arrives.”

  The pride inflating Lysa’s chest whizzed right out of her like the bravery of a rebel upon seeing the guillotine.

  Now, she understood.

  No one had managed to end this fucker in five hundred years, and we were supposed to do so in under two months? Lovely.

  Chapter Ten

  We had six days. Not until the whole upsetting world-goes-poof thing, but until Rav, Lysa and I departed for the great beyond. Otherwise known as Operation Kill Rav’s Brother.

  While waiting for the day to arrive, I kept mostly to myself. Lysa was buried in history books and deriving as much as she could from The Sepulchering of Self, so she didn’t provide much company. Rav disappeared for hours, and I couldn’t exactly go looking for him. He had given us specific instructions to stay in the house and not, under any circumstance, to leave.

  Normally, telling me to not do something naturally makes me want to do it. But given that the apparent world of the dead lurked nearby, I wasn’t very eager to go venturing away from safety.

  So I fattened myself up on cakes, spent hours in the library and looked at the various paintings hanging from every wall in Rav’s house. They all shared a common theme of the coast, and on each canvas there was a small cove. Sometimes the cove would subtly fade into the background of a furious ocean or a sandy beach. In other paintings, it would stand at the forefront, and from its shadows peered tiny slits resembling eyes.

  Some pieces were charming, with a careful touch of a brush dipped in colorful oils that were layered on in smooth fashion. Others were disturbingly abstract, with thick, jagged edges and a mishmash of angular designs, but just clear enough that even a novice eye could see a cove somewhere within.

  I asked Rav about the significance of the cove. He smiled, shrugged and told me we’re all creatures of habit, and that we all cling to something.

  On the fourth night of our stay, I dreamed the cove trapped me inside. And I looked out to see the ocean, but instead I glimpsed the entirety of Mizridahl, the fringes of its shores encompassed with a short swivel of my head. The world burned, burned, burned.

  I decided the next morning I’d stop gawking at the paintings. I had enough nightmares on my own, thank you very much.

  It made me wonder, though. What was happening to Mizridahl? I’d been away for a couple weeks now. Had Braddock Glannondil died from his flaming encounter? The world could get messy if he had. Or did his fat protect him from mortal burns?

  Had Vayle freed more slave children? Of course she had. Strongest woman I’d ever known, right there. Nothing would stop her.

  What of those who had strayed from the Black Rot after the war? I had reason to be angry with them, for not coming to me and telling me they were done with the life. Instead, they drifted, pretending they’d return. But I understood. They’d come this close to losing everything they had. They needed something more out of life now. Hopefully they found it. After all, there’s nothing more demoralizing than searching the depths of your soul and coming up empty.

  Also of question was the lack of rain and the relentless heat sweeping across Mizridahl. I had an inkling that Rav’s brother was responsible, a suspicion Rav confirmed. If ending all of life was his brother’s plan, why not bake everyone alive? Why even go to the trouble yanking the dead out of their realm? The answer to that, it turned out, was simple: affecting the elements is conjurer business, something his brother had learned from the book. But it ain’t easy to do, and you can’t keep it up for long. Rav said he’d die of exhaustion before the populace of the living realm died of thirst and hunger and heat. He’d still kill plenty, but plenty wasn’t his objective: absolute obliteration was.

  Day five, midday. I found Lysa in the library. She had somehow procured a small leather bag. She had a knife in her hand, and she jabbed the pointy end into the leather and began turning the handle in a circle.

  “Uh,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. Her tongue poked out of her mouth, and her forehead wrinkled as she applied more pressure to the handle of the knife.

  After a few minutes, she had carved two tiny holes into the top corners of the bag. Then she produced some string from her pocket, threaded it through the newly made eyelids and tied a couple knots.

  “Snazzy, huh?” she said, now wearing the bag on her back.

  “Yeah, real snazzy. What’s it for?”

  She shouldered off the pack and stuffed a few books inside. “Rav said I can take these.”

  I cocked my head to get a better view of the titles. “The Hidden Power of Triangles,” I said aloud. “You have horrible taste in books.”

  “At least I have taste.”

  “I was an avid reader in my younger days. What do you say after packing up your tomes of knowledge that we drain Rav’s amphora of mead?”

  “I’ve never really drunk anything,” Lysa said sheepishly. “Other than tea and water, I mean.”

  “You ought to give it a try. A little sip here, a gulp there, and all your worries fade away.”

  She seemed to consi
der this. I could’ve mentioned how the booze loosens you up, puts a smile on your face, and turns a shy mumbler into a compelling storyteller, but none of that would have interested Lysa. Losing her worries, though? An intriguing premise there.

  “Okay,” she said. “Sure. Why not?”

  Twenty minutes later, Lysa and I were sitting across from one another at the table in the dining room, mugs filled to the rim with amber-colored mead.

  She inspected it cautiously, then took a sip. Her eyes reacted with pleasure, almost pushing her brows into her blond bangs. “It’s like… like honey, but with—”

  “With a kick?” I suggested.

  “Exactly. It’s actually really good.”

  It was good, much better and sweeter than most of the mead Mizridahl had to offer. Some of the shit there smelled like it’d been rolling around in a barrel full of dead rats for half a century.

  I raised my mug. “How about a toast?”

  “A toast,” she said, chewing down on the prospect of such a thing. “To…” She crinkled her face. “Oh, I don’t know! I’m not good at this.”

  I laughed. “Two friends we are…who have come near and far… ah, fuck it. Clank ’em together and let’s drink, huh?”

  Lysa giggled and tipped her mug into mine, and we drank. And we talked. She emptied her second mug, and at this point her cheeks were rosy red. Her freckles seemed to blossom with every sip, dotting her pale face in a meadow of warm, soothing flecks.

  What a lovely girl. And not that kind of lovely either — the thought never crossed my mind. Not even once. Perhaps this was how fathers felt about looking into the face of their grown daughters — a sense of affection that… well, I couldn’t hope to describe it. It was all new to me.

  “Okay,” she said, peering into her third mugful. “Question time.”

  I leaned back into the chair. “Hit me with whatever you got.”

  She nibbled on the top of her fingernail, then flung the tip at me, wagging it in front of my face. “I had you pegged for being a selfish, narcissistic butt… hole.” I stifled a laugh. “But you’re out here, like what? Saving the world? Why? Why, why, why? It doesn’t make any sense. What’s in it for you?”