The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (20 page)

S
o long as authority exists
, you’ll always have people on the other side. Some call themselves freedom fighters, rebels, anti-insert-authority-name-here, or whatever other fancy moniker they prefer. In the case of those who oppose Glannondil rule, I called them my friends.

I’d been to five hovels in an attempt to recruit a few friends. This was my sixth and, finally, I’d found a promising one. Wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall, some battered shack twenty miles from Erior. It lay on the low roads, beneath the high paths above that had been smoothed over by the marching Glannondil army over the years. You didn’t have to worry much about the crimson wolf prowling around here, at least not without due warning.

An assembly of drunks made a toast, one mug rising to meet another in a furious showing that wimpled the starved candlelight. They downed their ale with the harmony of rhythmic dancers.

I nursed my ale, taking stock of the scene. A few men gathered at a rustic table, red twine tied around the swords on their hips. In the East, those who wished murder and mayhem upon authority made it known. They weren’t so subtle as those in other provinces.

I ordered them all drinks, twice. And we talked. All the way into morning we talked. Wasn’t long after a warm dawn punched through the windows and beneath the door crack that I’d finally parted with a very large purse I’d been carrying since the Hole.

Now all I needed was for Rovid to hold up his end of the bargain.

S
ome five miles
over that way lay Erior. All you had to do was pick yourself up out of this lush forest and walk along the stepped face of a hill till you got to an enormous ramp that went up, up, up.

People called this place here, with its hulking trees and snakelike vines, the Swamplands. Not much of a swamp anymore. Dried out long ago, but names die hard.

Rovid had met me here in the morning. He’d brought with him all that I’d asked for and even more. What a sedulous little reaper he was.

One cart, two mules — horses complain far too much when it comes to big hills — and the long-awaited supplies from Amortis. To be exact, the long-awaited supplies from Rav’s house. I’d asked for four buckets of black powder. Rovid had brought me fifteen. Do you know how much mayhem fifteen buckets of black powder could produce? Neither did I, but I pegged it at about a fuckton. He’d also brought me about forty apples, one bow, and three arrows, all of which would come in handy.

Rovid went off into the green haze of the Swamplands in search of something to eat, while I rolled up my sleeves and spread my tools out before me. I’d bought a hammer, a hacksaw, a few tins of nails, rope, some extra planks of wood and a book. All from various merchants and messenger camps between Ouldish Village and here.

The book was titled
Hackin’ And Hammerin’: The Complete Guide To Carpentry
.

I’d read it front to back five times on the way here, discovering the excitement of angles, measurement by fingers, and the tricks to fixing something up so that it won’t crumble into pieces moments later. Carpentry hadn’t ever been my forte. I rather enjoyed the hacking-things-into-pieces part, but dressing everything back up was kind of a drag.

I flattened myself on the ground, then squirmed beneath the wagon. First order of business was to cut a hole the diameter of one of my buckets in the center of the wagon bed.

After swallowing perhaps a cupful of sawdust and blinking another half cupful into my eyes — there was much screaming and swearing — step one was complete. I lifted the bucket up to the hole, and voilà! Fit like a glove.

The other steps proceeded painfully. I took a nail right through the edge of my finger. Then I cracked my head on the wooden underside of the cart. Hammered my thumb twice, finger once. Measured wrong and cut even worse.

But several hours later, with Rovid’s eventual help, I stood back and looked on with dried blood stuck to my forehead and plum-sized fingers. The mobilization part of Project Fire, Part Two had been completed.

“Test her out,” I told Rovid.

The reaper got the mules into position and climbed into the seat. He took the heavily modified wagon for a short stroll through the Swamplands, with the dispenser in the open position. A thin cloud of black soot trailed him, falling softly into the litter of leaves.

“It’s a thing of beauty,” I hollered, smiling and wincing at the same time. Go figure: an inanimate object had taken its greatest physical toll on me thus far. Unless you counted the Glannondil soldier who’d cut so deeply into my bicep it looked like my skin had split apart and was forming wings. Lucky shot, that one. The wound was looking better now, at least. Wolf’s leaf had done its job admirably.

Rovid closed the dispenser and steered the cart back to its original position. He climbed out.

“Gotta give you credit,” he said, “I’ve seen plans worse than this before.”

“Coming from you,” I said, rummaging through a cache of wine skins that I’d filled with water, “that’s like a kiss on the cheek.”

Rovid seemed different since he’d returned from Amortis. Eerily so. I wouldn’t say he was hopping around like Kane’s cheerful guardsmen, but he wasn’t so bloody miserable anymore.

“I set up some traps,” he said, motioning toward the belly of the Swamplands, where the green tint abated and the black eye of the always-caliginous forest horizon swept in. “Figured we could do with some hearty dinner tonight. Maybe even breakfast tomorrow.”

I offered him my thanks, uncorked my skin, and satisfied my thirst with piss-warm water. Tomorrow we’d strike. Set fire to Erior. Create chaos. People would burn. Some would die, some would writhe in agony but still survive… at least until all their skin sloughed off. A number of innocents would be among the casualties, I knew that. Hard choices are never without consequences. And I wouldn’t be the man who made Occrum quiver ever so slightly if I didn’t make those choices.

Sometimes, though, a guy’s gotta ask for help.

“Let me toss a question at you,” I said to Rovid. We sat with our backs against the stepped hillside, sweat pouring down both our faces. The sweat seemed to vanish like a droplet of water into the sea as it bled into Rovid’s black eyes. “Let’s say you’re in a war, and you’re outnumbered. Someone tells you they’ve got ten thousand reaped that they can deliver to your front lines at any time. Do you take them up on the offer?”

Rovid thought about it. “What’s the price?”

“Free.”

“That’s a good price. There’s no catch?”

“There is a catch,” I said. “Those ten thousand reaped… they’re not reaped yet. They’re still alive — or dead, however you term it — in Amortis.”

Rovid drew back, withdrawing his head in like a turtle. “Then, no. Absolutely not.” He cupped his mouth for a while, as if deep in thought. “Someone came to you with an offer, didn’t they? Reapers?”

“A rebellious one, yes.”

“That’s not surprising,” Rovid said. “He wants out, just like I want out. Like every reaper eventually wants out. No one in their right mind wants to ruin a man, woman or child for eternity. And that’s what we do, right? We ruin them forever. Look, I know you assassin types have your own atrocities to deal with. I mean, shit — everyone does. Life’s tough. It’s fuckin’… it’s rough out there. I get that. But none of it compares to what reapers are put through.

“And I’m not meaning to vaunt my own hardships here, you know? I’m just warning you. You take up that offer, it’s not like you’re killing ten thousand people. You’re torturing ten thousand people, and their families. For eternity. You get that? Forever. How do you even wrap your mind around that? Can’t even quantify it, can you?”

I exchanged the skin of water for a skin of wine, took a nice gulp. “Why haven’t the reapers rebelled before?”

“What makes you think some haven’t? Occrum, he shuts them down.” Rovid snapped his fingers. “That quickly. Murders them. Then, for those unlucky enough to pass on into our version of Amortis — the one we know of — he yanks them right back out, turns ’em into reaped. Murders them again. Then they’re mindless husks, forever and for always.”

I wiped the sweat off my brow, swished around some wine and thought unpleasant things.

“I was wrong about you,” Rovid said.

I lifted my eyes from the bottom of my wine skin.

“Thought you the same as Occrum. You didn’t care about anything except the final outcome. You would’ve skinned your own mother’s back if it had meant accomplishing your goals. That’s what I thought. Then I saw how you acted with Lysa. You care for her.”

“Not like that,” I said.

“No, like a father cares for his daughter. And your Rots, they’re your brothers and sisters. That’s why you’re here, right now, to save them. You’re not freeing them so they can play a big part in your plan. How could they play any part? You can probably see their bones. Not one of ’em can likely hold down so much as a handful of minced meat.” He raised his skin to me and said, “You have a family, and you care about them. And I… I respect that.”

Had I disguised my intentions that thinly? Oh well. No sense in keeping up the farce now. The wine had begun seeping into my veins like a warm broth after a cold day in the fields. It put me at ease, and I laid my head back against gritty rock and relaxed my inhibitions.

We talked for a good while, Rovid and I. He told some interesting stories, let loose with a few good jokes, and even managed to humanize himself.

He had been almost forty when they came in the night, overturned his hamlet. They’d kept the men, slaughtered the women and children. His boy and beautiful wife whose chocolate hair gleamed like a moonlit lake didn’t make it out. That was ninety years ago.

Occrum required more reapers for a special project. And he isn’t the kind of guy to put up fliers requesting volunteers. Go figure.

There were about two hundred men with him, Rovid said. Only forty passed the trials. Each received a handful of pills from Occrum himself, who told them they held the secrets of history in their hands, that their lives would persist forever so long as they were loyal.

Then came the modifications. Some men were fools, told Occrum what they wanted most was to see their families again. The thing about these modifications is they’re intended to make reapers more efficient in servitude. And so these poor fucks saw the faces of their children and the orgasmic screams of their wives every passing second that they didn’t work for their master.

They were conditioned to enjoy harvesting reaped.

Rovid said he was born the son of a cobbler. Takes a certain amount of wit and a good sense of desires, he said, to sell shoes when people can’t afford food. Both those qualities were passed down to him, he claimed, and he foresaw the intention behind Occrum’s question,
What do you desire most?

Figured if he could see in the dark, he could get away from there that night. Instead, he cried and hissed and wished death upon himself as he felt the forceps of Occrum’s fingers pluck out his eyes. Felt the air rush into his empty sockets, pooling like a trapped current behind the bones of his cheeks.

In the end, he didn’t escape, obviously. But he did get new eyes.

I switched from wine to water as the moon relieved the sun of its duties. Tomorrow would be a hard day, and hard days are even less enjoyable when you’re retching and pleading with the gods to either make your head stop pounding or just make the motherfucker explode already.

Nighttime in the Swamplands was not something I endeavored to experience, but as the insects chirped and bats careened through the air, I prepared myself for the inevitable. And the inevitable, as it is wont to do, approached.

A fist-sized piece of bark slapped me in the face. To an outsider, it probably would have seemed like bad luck. But luck doesn’t peruse this forest. The most annoying animals that have ever existed do.

They’ve two tiny legs and four creepy arms that look like spindles. Their blood-red eyes sit low above their malformed concave snout which I assume is the cause of their heinous snorting. They live high in the trees, hollowing out their homes in the trunks. They sleep during the day, but at night, the little misbegotten creatures swing from branch to branch, gnash their teeth, which I guess is their fucked-up mating call, and pepper passersby with nuts, bark, twigs, bones of small birds, and whatever else they can find.

And they’re goddamned chickenshits. I’ve climbed halfway up a towering oak once, and they ran with their tails between their legs and their spindly arms flying in the wind like threads of string.

They’re called Orphills. And I hate them. They exist only in a small pocket in eastern Mizridahl. Apparently the world hated them just as much and drove them to extinction everywhere else.

Throughout the night, they chittered, bombarding Rovid and me with weapons from their bags of forest abominations. We slept maybe two hours, and most of that came when dawn chased the little fucks back into their homes.

I splashed water on my face in the morning. Or at least I thought it was water. Turned out to be wine. Turns out wine stings your eyes about as badly as placing sliced onions beneath your lids and claiming you’re the onion monster. For the record, I was a stupid child with an equally stupid imagination.

I took my ebon dagger in hand, fisted a clomp of beard and chopped it off. Then another fistful, and another slice. Once I’d shaved most of the hair from my face, I had Rovid stand square to me and provide me with instructions.

“Up,” he said. “Right. No, no, my right. There. Ah… no. You missed a patch there.”

The blood on my blade reminded me why I never shaved. Well, that and because I looked like a baby-faced boy, and that’s no good as an assassin. But I couldn’t well waltz into Erior looking like myself. Most wouldn’t recognize me without my beard and with a hat I’d bought from a merchant.

“You think this will work?” Rovid asked. “If the powder doesn’t catch, or the guards stop you…”

I went to twirl the hairs beneath my chin, forgetting they weren’t there. “In the wise words of my father, come whatever may.” The man might have been a bloody asshole, but he had some good sayings.