The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (10 page)

“He has a library?”

“The house is much bigger than it appears. Did you know,” she said, tapping the spine of
Healing: The Secrets to Extending Life
, “that Savant Fiona Marlee discovered that arteries leading to the heart clog with gunk as we age?”

“How’d she do that? Start cutting people open?”

“Well, pretty much, yes. She dissected over three hundred corpses, if you believe the stories. But that’s not the interesting part. It says here that she discovered a cure for this — because all that gunk stops the blood flow, which kills you — but then the cure was lost. How could something so important become lost?”

I carefully poured a small dollop of honey mead onto my tongue.
Not bad
, I thought. “You said if I believe the stories. Are these stories passed down from long ago?”

Lysa thumbed through the book like she had every chapter memorized. “She lived somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand years ago.”

“Religion dominated cultures back then. Could be a few zealots thought Miss Marlee was trying to play the part of gods. Sacked all her work.”

“Close,” Rav said, his voice echoing throughout the house. “You’re thinking along the right lines, anyhow.” He appeared in the dining room. “I would like to show both of you a magic trick. Come.”

Maybe it was because I’d finally filled my stomach with good food, but a magic trick sounded quite pleasant to me. I was at ease with the world for a moment, which seemed strange since the world was crumbling around me.

Until I realized Rav was leading us outside.

“No, no, no,” I protested. “I’m not leaving only to come back through that cursed doorway again.”

“It’s a one-time experience,” Rav said. “I promise.”

“You also promised it would result in a slight twinge. There was nothing slight nor twinge-y about the shit I went through.”

“I’ll go with you,” Lysa said cheerfully.

Rav gave me an admonishing smile. “Come, then.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered, trailing behind Lysa.

An engulfing heat sucked every emotion except apathy out of me as I walked into the great outdoors. Great in the sense of terrible. Nothing good comes out of feeling your eyes burn and your lips pucker up like prunes.

The hot sand seared the soles of my feet, till I found some shade beneath an outcropping of roof.

“You didn’t give me your approval,” Rav said, “but I felt our current needs triumphed over such petty morals.”

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, which was, from the little I’d known about him, par for the course. He seemed to enjoy making you wriggle a little by making a vague, abstract announcement and then forcing you to ask for clarification. It was bloody annoying.

“Approval for what?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Linking your mind with this book.”

I refused to ask, ‘What?’ I’d stubbornly stand here all day before I’d ask ‘What?’ Because he knew — he bloody
knew
what he said sounded absurd.

My silence, along with Lysa’s, finally broke him. He handed me the book and said, “Look for yourself.”

I did look. Well, perhaps
look
isn’t the appropriate word.
Look
implies a method in which your mind creates a rough sketch of what lies before your eyes. The more accurate term here would be
read
. Because that’s what I did. I read the pages as they filled with what appeared to be dried ink.

After a short while, I caught on, and I predicted each word that would follow. How? Because I had just thought them.

“Turn to the middle there,” Rav said.

I did, and the text at the very top read, “Lysa Rabthorn.” This was what followed.

I handed the book to Lysa and considered what just happened. I thought back to my first assassination. What was I, sixteen? Some old coot wanted his wife’s secret lover dead for a measly couple gold.

It was warm that night. Spring was on the cusp of turning into summer. I’d left Pormillia on the outskirts of the village. Dressed in the darkness of the night — out of the naive paranoid fear that another color would make the villagers scream the assassin had come — I climbed up the shelf of rock behind the hamlet.

Mouth was dry, hands were shaking. Mind was numb. The muscles in my legs seized nervously as I saw him. He was drunk, and I waited for him to take a piss off the bluff. Then I cut his throat, and my body convulsed with the effluence of fear and excitement.

I always thought I’d never feel more alive than on that night. Always would be chasing that high, never once again capturing it. But then came the conjurers. And the realization that an occult world existed out there. Each subsequent discovery — Pristia, the existence of Lith, phoenixes, Amielle’s infliction — they always struck me right in the core of my being. Rendered me speechless, dazzled me with the impossible.

This was no different. I’d have thought after seeing the dead come back to life that nothing would dazzle me again. But I was wrong. This book, this magic trick, was bloody dazzling.

“This is fascinating,” Lysa said, a childlike smile spreading across her face. “How did you do it?”

“Simple linking of thoughts to an external manifestation,” Rav said. “But I haven’t shown you this to be a boastful braggart. This is to explain what we’re up against. My brother has a book like this, except much larger, and it does not require the bearer of thoughts to be nearby.” He peered into the horizon which was streaked with the haze of heat. “Come inside.”

“Let me see that for a moment,” I asked Lysa. She regretfully gave the book back to me, and we followed Rav into his house.

That was the exact moment the book ceased to transcribe my thoughts onto the pages. Curious, I stepped back, exiting through the doorway, and watched as words filtered onto the cream paper once more. Soon as I walked back inside, they stopped, midthought.

That brought up a rather nagging and uncomfortable question: what
was
this place? Seemed to me it wasn’t only a house. Seemed to me it was something more. Something rather disconnected from the fabric of reality.

The old man brought a cake in from the kitchen and set it on the table. A sticky red glaze melted down the sides of the frosted dessert topped with chunks of fresh strawberries.

The desert seemed like a strange place for strawberries to sprout up, but I didn’t question it. Rav wouldn’t give me a straight answer anyway.

“Five hundred,” Rav said, spooning a heap of frosting into his mouth.

“You know damn well I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“You asked how old I am. That’s the answer.”

Lysa helped herself to a large triangular piece of cake, setting it on her plate with great care. “As in five hundred…?”

“Years,” Rav answered nonchalantly, as if five hundred years of existence didn’t register a blip on the scale of fucking weirdness. “You can live forever if you know the secrets.”

“Well, fuck me,” I said, “cough it up, then. Come on, don’t be stingy. I wouldn’t mind seeing how the next fifty thousand years shape up.”

“Mostly everyone will be dead.”

Lysa forked a piece of cake toward her mouth, then stopped. “Because of your brother?”

Rav’s silverware clanged against his pewter bowl as it fell from his fingers. He stared at the table like a man revisiting memories that were long ago lost but nevertheless cut as deep as the day they were made.

“We were a hair past thirty years of age,” he said. “He came home after two years at sea, told me he’d made the discovery of a lifetime. I could see tears welling in his eyes as he described it to me. Why, it had a spine of pure gold, paper that smacked of saffron, ink from the finest well of oil man could dredge up. A book, of course, but it was more than that. It was an eyepiece to the past, and a hope for the future. At least, that was its potential, in the right hands.”

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?”