The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (29 page)

“Grimm… Grimm…” I searched my mind for the name. “Ah, the sheep fucker? No, no, that was someone else. Grimm…”

“You, me and Big Gruff assassinated his wife and her three secret lovers.”

I snapped my fingers in recognition. “Oh, that was a good one. Funny bastard, that one. Had a good sense of humor to him. Well, after we brought him the head of his wife and the cocks of her lovers.”

“I wrote him a letter recently, requesting any help he could spare. Unsurprisingly, he could promise no soldiers.”

“He could if he really wanted to,” I said. “But his liege — who is it, Lord… I can’t remember his name — probably wouldn’t appreciate it.”

Vayle opened a fresh skin of wine and threw it back for a good three seconds. She smacked her lips and sighed refreshingly. “Probably not. But he
does
have something else waiting for us in his village. A battering ram.”

“What the fuck is a little village vassal doing with a battering ram?”

Vayle laughed and drank more. “Claims he has had it for twenty years. During a weeklong bender, he drew up plans to invade his liege’s stronghold. He bought the ram and ladders, then sobered up. It’s been sitting in his armory ever since.”

“Dercy didn’t think to bring a battering ram or other siege equipment? Seems like a necessity when you’re laying siege.”

“Six hundred miles is a long way to carry siege equipment. It would not make it.”

I snatched the skin of wine from her table and gulped some. “Before you inform me of your grand plan that involves this ram, allow me to divulge my plan. It’s much simpler. There will be mercenaries inside Edenvaile. When I give the word, they will butcher as many archers as they can.”

“Excellent,” Vayle said. “That means I don’t need to waste as many footmen as fodder.” She removed the wet quill from its well and began drawing circles and lines and arrows.

“Every foot soldier will be here, all fifteen thousand of them. One-third of the cavalry will remain behind, here, and an equal amount of archers will idle on the sides, here. In the middle of the infantry is the ram.” She drew three long lines toward Edenvaile. “The infantry will march toward the gate, shields over their heads, protecting themselves and the ram carriers, who will be marching with them. When the cavalry and footmen pour from Edenvaile, we deploy our cavalry to the wings, meeting them. The ram will hammer at the gate and—”

“Vayle,” I said.

“And hopefully with your sellswords cutting down the archers from above and all the panic on the field—”

“Vayle…”

She frantically tapped her finger on the map. “The ram will level the gate. From there, we—”

“Vayle…”

Barely taking a breath, she continued. “We swarm the castle, flood it with everybody we have, push back, dismember and kill every northernman we come across, create chaos, force the reinforcements to retreat, and then we gather on the walls, fortify the rear gate and we hold the castle. We take it. We become the defenders. Maybe we can kill or capture Vileoux, Sybil, Chachant, Mydia, someone. We can turn the tide. We can—”

I slammed my hands on the table. “Vayle! For fuck’s sake, breathe.”

My commander’s uncharacteristic excitement abated as she regathered herself and took a drink. “I’ve been at this for three weeks now. It’s testing my sanity.”

“All I hear is the northernmen this, the northernmen that. What about the conjurers, Vayle? You can outwit and outsmart and outduel the northernmen, I trust that. I don’t know if it will be enough to compensate for the two-to-one disadvantage we have in available men, but I’ll share your positivity and say it can. But none of this accounts for the sway the conjurers will bring to this war. You haven’t seen the will of a conjurer buckle the earth and make it quake, but I have. You haven’t seen a conjurer compel the wind to come alive and thrash about like a wicked sea, but I have. You haven’t heard their voice rape your mind, silence your thoughts and instill their desires inside your soul. But I have. How do you account for that? How do you defeat something like that?”

Vayle folded her hands on the table. “In the past, there were only a few who could control the elements.”

“All it takes is a few.”

She played a grating melody with her gnashing teeth, and then pushed herself away from the table. “I know that,” she said, the optimism from her voice falling away like cheese from a grater.

“It’s not as if we can’t give courage and hope a try,” I said, feeling somewhat shameful that I’d once again driven my commander into those awful pits of dismay. Not a good place to be in, and it feels even worse when someone leads you there. She was a very intelligent woman who undoubtedly knew her plan had no regard for the conjurers. She likely didn’t need me to throw in that bit of information.

“It’s a question I have no answers to,” she said, her back still turned. “How
do
you account for an enemy you’ve seen in only small skirmishes, whose tactics are not written in books, whose weaknesses are as invisible to you as the land they hail from?” She hung her head.

“This isn’t a war we can win. I understand. But it feels wasteful, Astul. It feels wasteful to ignore the good life I still have and not prepare for the battle ahead like I would if victory was kneeling inside those walls, waiting for me. It feels wasteful not to mount an assault that will eliminate as many of those who make us hurt as possible, if only in the name of justice.

“I know that justice means little to you. But it is the only pursuit that has fully governed my life, and if I must die pursuing it, then… it must be a good death, yes?”

Her words were faint and shallow, dripping out of her mouth like water from a thawing cube of ice. I sidestepped the table and snuck up behind her, taking her softly by the shoulders.

“Most agree that I’m not a good man much of the time. But you are a great woman, Vayle. The world will surely miss you more than it misses me. If we both must bid this place goodbye in the coming days, I could take no greater pleasure in death than standing beside you as the Reaper comes swinging his scythe. You are my friend, Vayle. My partner in this dark world. It’s not love that binds us, and I’m glad. Because love is wild and unpredictable, here one moment and gone the next, so rarely sustained for eternity. No, it’s respect that brought us together. Unbreakable respect, like rock forged in deep, abandoned caves where the pressure and heat of long-forgotten molten lava had molded mountains and walls, invulnerable and immortal.”

Vayle turned in my arms, her head lolling to the side. She straightened herself and withdrew her ebon blade, just as I withdrew mine. We threw them on the table.

The blue of her eyes swirled around like turbulent winds. She tucked her fingers beneath my belt and wound me in.

“We have eight days on this world,” she said, unclasping my buckle. “Let us extract what pleasure we can.” She winked uncharacteristically and added, “Not for love nor for respect. Not for anything but the savage and the primal… the finer things in life. Like we used to, before this world spun out of control.”

Some call it making love, but I preferred the time-worn term of fucking. It sounds rawer, animalistic, the perfect word for the obscene manner in which we stripped each other of clothes, the filthy way we ran our hands up each other’s body, mine over the humps of her pale breasts and hers down the length of my bulging cock, the unscrupulous sounds of kissing and sucking, of moaning and crying, of flesh slapping flesh, of gasps and thrusts.

Vayle and I did not make love. We fucked. And it was good, great, even, as it always was. While her loins ached after, my heart cried out in pain. I did not wish to leave this world quite yet. It was a good world, all things considered. Lots of wine still to taste, lots of assassinations to be carried out, lots of gold to stuff in my vault. Hells, maybe even another friend still to make — much like the friendship Tylik and I had struck.

Where was he now? If his gods existed and they were finally tired of playing cruel jokes, maybe they’d swept him far away from the conjurers. Far away to a sandy shore, where the sun always shined and the sea was always blue and the fish were plentiful. A shore where you didn’t need feet to get around, only knees and hands. He could crawl about until old age finally took him, feasting on crabs and fish until his belly could fit no more.

I fell asleep on that note, my arm over Vayle’s shoulder, cradling her breasts.

A heavy pulse of chaotic noise awakened me sometime later. I’d been asleep for precisely the amount of time it takes you to question whether you have slept for two hours or twenty-two.

Vayle sprung up like a suicidal woman upon a pyre who just ascertained the meaning to life, which was: your woes may never go away, and you may well slip farther into the void, but
fuck
fire burns.

“What’s going on out there?” she asked, stabbing a pair of fingers into her sleepy eyes.

I yawned. “A party, perhaps?”

She spun around the room like a cyclone late for its appointment to level a small village, snatching up her clothes and attempting to put them all on at the same time. “I’m in charge here while Dercy’s sleeping. If we’re being attacked…”

Oh, right
, I thought,
we’re in the middle of a war camp.

That sudden realization shook the swampy grogginess from my mind. I jumped up and got dressed alongside Vayle.

Two men burst through the tent, clad in full plate armor, immediately turning their attention elsewhere as Vayle was still naked from the waist up.

“Commander Vayle,” one of them said. “A fiery bird swooped down from the mountains. It made landfall approximately half a mile outside of the infantry. There were two men on it. One of them claims he is here to see the Black Rot, and if luck would have it, its shepherd.”

Vayle and I traded glances.

“What are their names?” Vayle asked.

“My Lord Commander, that information was not relayed to us. The patrols did, however, inform us that one of the men upon the bird is missing his toes.”

T
he impact
of disbelief can be felt in several places: in your racing heart that you may, depending on the improbability of what has just transpired, paradoxically feel in both your stomach and throat, but strangely not your chest. In your mouth, which will often delude you into believing your lips, tongue and the inside of your cheeks have turned into a sandy desert which no water will ever moisten again. You can feel disbelief in your eyes, which tend to bulge and stretch in ways eyes are advised not to bulge and stretch. You can feel it in muscles that seize and tremor and your shaky fingers that make it quite difficult to properly hold a sword.

But you feel it most prominently in your mind. Upon seeing or hearing or smelling or feeling or tasting something so utterly unlikely, the large spongy thing inside your skull has but two choices: end all of its processes, which I believe accounts for fifty percent of all sudden deaths, or accept the fact that life is a very funny bastard sometimes.

I coughed out a dry laugh so massive, it forced one half of my heart back down my throat and punched the other half back out of my stomach, framing it as a whole piece in my chest once again.

“You’re a fucking crippled magician!” I cried, running forward and embracing Tylik. Mister No Toes was riding like a child on his nephew’s back. I relieved Karem from his plight and carried Tylik over to a chair, sitting him down.

He seemed so much more broken in the light. One eye was nearly sealed shut, with bright pink pustules clinging to the lid. Profound black ovals, like severe bruises that could never quite heal, dotted his forehead and cheeks and arms and legs. He was balding in some areas, with stringy hair in others and a misplaced lush mane zigzagging across his temple. The rot of his missing toes looked much improved, however. Gone was the wretched green slime and inky leakage.

“I’ve heard some good fucking stories over the past few weeks,” I said, “but I think yours is going to top all of them. How the piss did you get here, Tylik?”

Tylik coughed up a wet ball of mucous, which he quickly swallowed. “It’s a story all right, and a good one! Me and Karem here, we heard the horses come tramplin’ after us in the woods that night we broke free. Took ’em a good long while, though, didn’t it, Karem?”

Karem reclined as much as a stiff wooden chair allowed a man to recline and put a skin of wine to his lips. He sighed, tilted his head up and said, “Mm hmm.”

“Luckily for us,” Tylik said, “we weren’t bouncin’ up and down on some horses. Might be quick, y’know, riding on saddles, but anyone with half a brain in ’em can track those big paws in the mud. So anyways, we hide out behind some trees, inchin’ our way through the forest when the sound of racing hooves quieted, and then darting behind more trees when they returned. My poor nephew damn near broke his back carrying me. Tryin’ to shorten this story up now, but lots of things transpired. Biggest one of ’em all, I’d say, happened when we reached a little village tucked away inside a bosom of a mountain. How long it take us to reach, Karem?”

A soft snore burbled through the tent.

“Karem?”

No answer.

“Karem!” Tylik hollered.

Karem jerked sideways and spilled a pool of wine in his lap. “Bah!” he spat. “What? I’m tired, Uncle.”

“How long did it take us to reach Dorral?”

“Four days.”

“Four days!” Tylik said exuberantly, holding four of his skeletal fingers up. “And that was with the help of a friendly merchant who wagoned us on up there most of the way. So we get there and — now, this is the village my family ran away to, see? Don’t want to confuse you. So we get there and I reunite with my little children, who are now big children, and I see my wife again, and it’s the greatest moment of this broken man’s life. But I can’t rest. I know that. My wife says it was some god who gave me another chance, but… but I know it was you, Astul. You and Karem. I couldn’t sit on my hands now. I was given the opportunity to do somethin’, and I was gonna do it.”

The massive, goofy smile on my face seemed stuck there perpetually as Tylik talked. It was a strange feeling, being happily sucked back into a past in which I should have held absolutely no nostalgia for — a past where I slept against a pillar, where iron clasps gnawed at the flesh of my ankles and wrists, where a friendly voice helped me through the dark days and the sightless nights. Of course, it was also a past that had hope, however minuscule and however fleeting.

“Allow me a guess,” I said. “You made good on your promise to do something with that opportunity by procuring a phoenix?”

Tylik erupted into a coughing fit. The sickly pustules on his eyelids bobbed up and down like stitching needles as his body convulsed. He regathered himself and cleared his throat.

“If only it was that easy. See, word had gotten around that the conjurers had taken a wee little village a small ways up north. According to some good merchants, it was pretty bare, not a lot of protection. Still, put us in lots of danger. We could have been next. So I convinced all the strong men and women to put on their boots and grab hold of the sharpest things they could. We were goin’ to war. Bless the hearts of the kids, they wanted to help too. Put some slingshots in their hands, wrapped ’em in good quilted armor, and we marched north.”

“A farmers’ march, hmm?” Vayle said.

“Oh, we were more than farmers,” Tylik said, his nose scrunched up and his one good eye lowered. “Butchers, dyers, tanners, saddlers, blacksmiths, armorers, grandpas, grandmas, fathers, mothers, fierce protectors, angry freemen. We were much more than farmers.”

The jovial tone always present in his words was strangled by an undercurrent of hatred and loathing.

“And we showed them conjurer bastards what good old-fashioned justice is all about. Not one of ’em was left standing.” His eye began to twitch, and his lips tightened. “Not one ’em had a head left on their shoulders!”

“And the phoenix?” I asked.

“Two of ’em were there,” Tylik said, the tenseness in his shoulders and face slipping away. “Used those big fiery birds to take everyone way, way far away, to the sand. See, we hadn’t heard squat about conjurers bringin’ villagers from the beaches around the East, so that’s where we went. Then Karem and I, well, we knew we couldn’t just well stay there. What if the conjurers won this war you were talkin’ about? They’d be everywhere! Like the clouds in the sky! So we took a phoenix, hoped I remembered correctly that you said Mizridahl lay to the south, and we steered her that way.”

Vayle stood. She had a curious look about her. “How did you defeat the conjurers?”

Tylik waited for her to continue on, but when it became apparent that was her only question, he said, “Well, we swung sharp things across their throats.”

My commander contemplated this for a moment. “Did the ground not move under your feet? Did things not fall from the sky? I know for a fact some of them can bend the elements to their will.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Tylik said. “A few of them can, seen it myself more than I’d care to admit. But most of those under the conjurer banner, they’re just like your soldiers outside here. They swing swords and sing songs while they march. Now the actual conjurers themselves, they pick at your mind and do terrible things to it. Or great things, as they would have you believe. The ones who can move the earth and all that wickedness, no… there aren’t many. Stuff like that can kill you, did you know that? Seen it once before. Young man tried to make the earth swallow a rabbit, and his head
exploded
! Swear it did!

“By the gods, I bet you even the queen Amielle would only be able to open up the sky once or twice — and only for a short while — before her mind would be so tired, she couldn’t tell you the difference between a donkey and a cow. ’Course, with the sudden lack of donkeys and cows in the past thirty years, not a lot of people could. ’Least on my world.”

“It won’t take much to turn the war clearly in their favor,” Vayle said. “We’re already severely outnumbered.”

Tylik appeared confused. “But I am not done sharing my story. I recalled Astul telling me while we both suffered in that awful dungeon that a man by the name of Patrick Verdan was the key to winning this war. He was somewhere in the North, but as Karem and I discovered, the North is a very big place. But people here are very accommodating and will answer most questions you have, as long as they don’t see the fiery bird you arrived on. Stuffed to the brim with directions, we flew toward and eventually landed in a place so cold and snowy, I could not breathe. And I talked to this very elusive Patrick Verdan.”

“When?” I asked.

“Oh, has to be about four weeks ago now, I’d say. ’Course, I talked to him just yesterday too.”

“What’s he doing away from his kingdom?” I asked.

Tylik cleared his throat. “He’s preparing for a very large war.”