The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (26 page)

“
F
irst of all
,” Vayle said, as indignant as I’d ever seen her, “that’s not natural.”

“Suspend your disbelief as to what’s natural,” I said.

“I have tried. But that… no. I won’t. He appeared the moment you said his name.”

“It’s his thing,” I said.

Vayle craned her neck, peering down the steps. “He doesn’t look natural, either.”

“You’re being far too critical.”

“Maybe. But you cannot deny he speaks strangely.”

“What’s wrong with the way he speaks?”

“I can feel it in my skull. Have you ever seen his mouth move?”

With rising eyebrows, I was ready to disregard that question entirely. But when I thought about it… hmm. “Now that you mention it, no, I haven’t. It’s not something I look at, though.”

“There’s something off about him,” Vayle said.

“Well, he’s lending us ten thousand reaped. So, unless you have good proof he’ll murder us in the night or something, I’m enlisting his help.”

Vayle chewed her cheek thoughtfully. “I disagree with this strategy. Lysa’s approach is the better one.”

“Normally, I would be all ears. But—”

“It’s personal,” Vayle said. “I understand. But I cannot follow you. I must find Nilly and Serith.”

I leaned against the wall. “Dissent?” I said, smirking.

“I’m glad you’re not holding it against me. Even you know when you’re in the wrong, hmm?”

I pushed off the wall. “I’m not in the wrong, Vayle. Neither are you. You fight one front, I’ll fight the other. Maybe we’ll meet in the middle, what do you say?”

She grabbed the neck of my jerkin and yanked me in. “I say… see you on the other side, Shepherd.” She grinned, then threw her hand playfully into my face, pushing me away.

I walked down the steps, to the first floor. There Ripheneal was chatting up Lysa and Rovid.

Once their little discussion was over, I said, “I want the ten thousand reaped.”

“Wonderful,” Ripheneal said. “You’ll find them waiting at the cove.”

“The cove?”

“You want their help in your bid to unseat Occrum, yes?”

“Yeah, but… did I tell you that?”

Ripheneal looked at Lysa; the two of them tried to hide their growing smiles. “Consider sleeping before you depart,” he said. “A forgetful memory is a harbinger of far worse effects from sleep deprivation.”

I’d swear I hadn’t told him a thing about my plans. “There’s not a chance I can bring those ten thousand reaped here, have Lysa work her little magic and restore their souls, or thoughts, or personalities, or what have you, and then take them to Watchmen’s Bay and bypass this Serith and Nilly business, is there?”

“The moment they pass through a tear,” Ripheneal said, “their minds will again be obliterated.”

“Right. It can never be simple, can it?”

Vayle came down the steps, hands in her hair, tying her raven locks behind her head. “Lysa,” she said, “the phoenix, please.”

Lysa appeared confused. “I thought… oh. You two are—”

“Going on different paths,” Vayle said.

“I understand. I’ll meet you outside. If you spot a bird, keep your eyes on it, please.”

Rovid sat up in his chair. “Wait just a damn second. Who am I going with? ’Cause, if I have my choice…”

“You’re not a slave,” I told him. “You do have your choice.”

He jumped up. “Right. No offense, Astul, but” — he waved his hands around — “well, you understand.”

I grinned. “I understand. Be safe, Rovid.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “Yeah, you too. You too.”

“And I,” Ripheneal said, “have matters to attend. I wish you victory.”

“Now that’s a surprise,” I said. “I’d think you’d be personally vested in Occrum’s death.”

“Hence my offer. But as I said, I’ve matters to attend. Goodbye, and good luck.”

As he walked out of Big-Ass Building Number One, I hollered at him to wait. But he was already gone. “Damn. I forgot to look at his mouth. Did it move when he spoke?”

Lysa looked at me queerly. “That’s kind of a weird question. Although now that you bring it up, I’m not really sure.”

“Well, anyways…”

She twiddled her fingers. “Anyways…”

My hand gravitated to the back of my neck — the universal expression for
what the fuck do I say now?
A sigh, a sway of the head, and then, “Why’d you have to go and die, Lysa?”

She parted her silky blond hair. Brighter than the sun, those strands. Warmer, too. “You know,” she said, “it was the only way I could stop dreaming, and start living.”

“What are you, a riddle speaker now?”

“I could have never helped people on Mizridahl the way I wanted to. There’s too much conflict. All the terrible hatred for conjurers, for one. Contemptible lords and kings wanting to use my name to regain the South for themselves, like Braddock. Here, there is none of that.”

“That you know of,” I said.

She conceded the point with tilt of her head. “Yes, you’re right. But I really, truly believe this place is different. It’s… good, you know?”

“Thought you didn’t believe in good and evil.”

“I didn’t believe in an afterlife at one point either. People… I guess I was wrong about them. They do change.” She paused. “But you won’t change your mind, will you?”

I raised a brow.

“About going after Occrum. It’s a bad idea, Astul. I really think it is. You should go with Vayle.”

I smiled and offered her a gentle tap of my knuckles on her chin. “Stay safe, will you? No mingling with reapers or getting yourself in trouble.”

She closed her eyes, then slowly opened them, resigned to the fact that her appeal to reason wouldn’t sway me. “Here. I wrote this for you. I never finished it, but… I don’t have anything else to give you. Maybe it’ll bring you luck.”

She placed a torn piece of paper in my hand. It said this.

“A poem?” I said.

“The start of one. I’m not very good at these things.”

I smiled, folded the paper up and stuffed it in my pocket. I turned to the door, then stopped and faced Lysa again. “By the way, I’m sorry.”

By the time she asked why, I was out of the building. And moments later my feet were in the stirrups, reins in my hands and wind in my face.

There are lot of bad feelings in life. But none worse than knowing you failed. It’s failure that callouses over the glint of your eyes, the passion in your heart. It’s failure that dismantles all the pride you’ve built up and the reputation you’ve acquired. And when you fail for that final time, and you’ve got nothing possibly left to give, that’s when you really know if you’ve got what it takes. You’re stripped to the core. Nothing to hold you back. No pride, no fear, no happiness, no sadness. As primitive and raw as you can be.

That’s a dangerous man there, and Occrum would know it.

T
housands
of white bones swamped the meadow in the color of snow, washing out all the yellows and blues and pinks of the pretty little wildflowers that grew underfoot.

Here they were, my lovely army of the dead. Intimidation! Fury! The unequal terror of animated cadavers.

Well, those were my expectations. Reality was rather different. Disappointing, you might say.

Instead of set jaws, black, whirling horror seething from empty eye sockets, and a disposition that would make even a knight’s stomach curdle in fear, an army of misfits greeted me.

Some heads were hanging crooked on broken necks, tilted sideways on shoulders of chipped bone. Festering green chunks of flesh dangled from joints and between fingers and in the webs of toes, which was expected, but the reaped’s tendency to put the chunks in their mouth and chew and swallow was rather… off-putting.

I walked over to them, taking a closer look. A couple heads bobbed as I approached, like parrots. Unlike parrots, the bastards said, “
Braaagggh!
”

And they puked up bile all over my boots.

“Thanks,” I said, smearing the slimy green fluids into the dirt. “Appreciate it.”

On the bright side, at least they weren’t trying to eviscerate me like the reaped in Lith. Which brought about an interesting question: why? Obviously when reapers mobilized the reaped in the living realm, they were able to bend their will somehow. I imagined through some sort of brainwashing. But how was it that Ripheneal had put them under my command when they’d never seen me until now? Maybe Vayle was on to something in her distrust of him. After all, a reaper with that kind of power? You’d think Occrum would feel challenged, threatened.

Oh well. He’d gifted me an army, and I sure as shit wasn’t one to decline presents.

“Do you speak?” I asked the reaped.

Some of them did. Some gurgled and burbled like toddlers. Others didn’t have mouths with which to make sounds; their jaws were either hanging off their faces or missing altogether.

“I know of a good woman who can make you whole again,” I said. “See to it that the man who is ultimately responsible for your fate dies tonight, and I’ll bring you to her.”

Not a peep. I wondered if they understood the monsters they had become, or if they were as unaware as a cow meandering through his lovely field that was owned by a butcher.

“Do you know the man I speak of?” I asked. “His name?”

A word slithered from a disconnected voice. “
Occcrummm
.”

Those able to speak repeated the name, and those who couldn’t nodded along.

For a moment, my mind began putting make-believe faces to the blanched skulls of my reaped army, wondering who they were, what their stories were before they’d been perverted into this. But I snapped out of it, unwilling to torture myself. Their past life did not matter now. They were my tools. My swords. The trick Occrum never saw coming.

“Come,” I told them, stepping into the cove. And they moved like a proper army, ranks shuffling ahead, shoulders bobbing all the way back as far as the eye could see, ten thousand deep, at least.

There is, it turns out, one minor pitfall to commanding an army so large. They take a fucking lifetime to cross through tears and into another realm. Bones were still clattering into the cove and pouring into the grass of Occrum’s island thirty minutes after I’d initially arrived.

A good question to ask at this point, and one that I indeed wondered about, was why hadn’t Occrum made an appearance? The moment my mind had entered the living realm again, my thoughts would have been scribbled into his little book. And I hadn’t made a good effort to hide them, so he would have known my intentions. A preemptive attack at that point seemed like a sound strategy for him.

But his island lay as silent as the eternal curtain of fog around it. The fog finally made sense: likely some conjuration to conceal himself from the rest of the world.

With no end in sight to the reaped still coming through the tear, I pulled one reaped in particular from the crowd. He was the first one to say Occrum’s name. Seemed stronger than the rest, more cognizant of the situation. Less likely to chew on his own rotting flesh.

“I want you to scout that fortress. Tell me what Occrum is doing. What he has at his disposal. His defenses. His weapons. Everything. Do
not
get caught. Understand?”

The reaped made a fist, struck his chest, and jogged up to the fortress. When the door refused to budge, he launched his frame of bone at it, striking it madly with a blur of pointed knees and elbows. The wood cracked and splintered and crunched under the blows. After punching a wide hole through it, he climbed through. Efficient
and
effective, that one. I would call him Bones.

A few minutes later, he climbed back through. No worse for wear, so that was good. But I knew my enemy well, and so I defended against any foul play with an ebon sword in guard position. If Lysa had managed to rearrange a reaped’s thoughts, then Occrum could do the same, turning my new friend against me.

Bones — a bland, but fitting name — began to rattle off his findings.

I blinked. “What do you mean he isn’t there? He has to be there.”

“
Only… one man
,” he said, voice uncoordinated and detached. “
Searched entire fortress
.”

None of this made sense. “What’s he look like, the prisoner?”

“
Old with a gray beard. Bloody
.”

No… no, it couldn’t be. Rav couldn’t possibly be alive. This was a ploy to get me inside the fortress. Occrum was here somewhere, hiding.

I counted out fifty or so reaped. “In that fortress, now. Turn the place upside down. Report what you find. Go!” I ordered another handful to patrol the perimeter of the island, starting on the left side, and another patrol to begin on the right side.

They all returned to tell me the same thing: Occrum wasn’t there.

Not there. The guy who was, by his own admission, more stationary than a fucking rock had up and left? I had to see this for myself.

With a menagerie of corpses filing in behind and beside me, I entered Occrum’s fortress. I walked his stone floors. I put my hand against his stone walls. I spat on his torches that seemed to breathe an eternal fire. Half-expecting the bastard to leak through the walls like an apparition, my vigilant eyes scanned everything.

To the room with the golden book. That’s where I went. Maybe Occrum had cloaked the room, masking it from Bones and company.

The blueprint of this place may not have been imprinted in my mind, but you don’t forget where you were held prisoner. Up a set of steps, and another. Down a hallway, past an opening on the left and two on the right. Then stop, because you’ve arrived.

The long reach of ebon arrived inside first. I stepped in behind, my faithful cadavers at my rear.

Clouded eyes squinted at me through long strings of oily gray hair.

“You,” I said, waving my sword at him, “are supposed to be dead.”

His dry, cracked lips parted. His mouth held that position for a while before he finally said, “It’s too bad… isn’t it?”

“Where’s your brother?”

Rav rolled his head onto his bare shoulder stained with blood. He peered up at the army of reaped behind me, then swallowed. His eyes oscillated. Looked as though they were swimming into a vortex, about to be sucked into oblivion.

Wrought iron shackled his ankles together. A chain leading from the clasps looped around the stubby legs of a steel chair, then connected to an iron ring fastened to the wall. Some more chains were wound around his waist, chest, and arms.

“Where is he?” I asked again.

“Gone,” he croaked.

“And the book?”

“Gone.”

I looked at the wall where the book used to stand, its pages shimmering with gold from the ceiling to the floor. It sure seemed like one hell of a feat to move something like that.

Rav gasped. “Wa…ter. Water, please.”

I crouched before the old man, put my hand on his knee. “You tell me where your brother’s gone off to, and I’ll see about getting you some refreshments.”

He tried to swallow, but as if he’d taken a gulp of dry sand, he retched, tongue flailing out his mouth. “Please,” he begged, his voice hoarse.

“Where do you propose I find this water?”

“
Puddle
,” Bones said.

“What?”

“
Waterrrr. High.
” He pointed a finger toward the ceiling.

“Wa—” Rav fought to get the word out. “Water… reclamation.”

“Fine,” I said. “Get our friend here some water.”

Bones departed for the apparent water reclamation project Occrum had going on here.

“How’s your spine?” I asked, patting the back of the chair. Rav winced. “It’s a shame Lysa hadn’t finished you off, you fucking traitor. She’s dead now, because you and your brother wanted to play God.” I stood up, finding my hand tightening into a fist and an unrelenting rage gripping me. “You fucking cunt!” I screamed, bashing my knuckles into his wrinkly face so hard I felt his goddamn bones crunch.

His teeth scraped my knuckles, bloodying them up. They’d be a lot worse than bloodied by the time I was finished with him.

I grabbed the snake by his greasy hair and threw his head back against the wall. “You’ll tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll make these the worst moments of your five hundred years of living.” I drew a circle around his eye with the tip of my sword. “And I’ll start by dissecting you.”

A squeak. That was all that came out of that worthless bastard’s mouth. Bones returned with a bucket of water. I told Rav to open wide, then poured it on his face, forcing him to lap it up like a dog.

“There,” I said. “You got some water. You’ll get some more if you cooperate. Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

I clicked my tongue. “Mm. I should inform you that if you choose not to cooperate, you’ll receive ebon instead of water. So, let’s try again. Where is your brother?”

“I swear!” Rav said. “I don’t know! He left here days ago. Days ago!”

Now there was the Rav I knew. Full of piss and sunshine. “He sits in his fortress for, what, five-hundred-some years? And all of a sudden, he takes off? Just like that?”

His leg quivered, and the other seized momentarily. “Promise me something,” he said. “Only one promise. I must have it, and I’ll tell you everything. Everything!”

“Fine. Let’s hear it.”

He put his face forward, blew his grizzly hair out of his eyes. I had a feeling he’d have steepled his hands and bent the knee if he was able. “Send me to the beyond. End this life of mine, I beg.”

“Huh. That’s a strange request, given I’ve heard naughty things in Amortis await those who have been naughty boys in the realm of the living.”

“You have no idea what my brother has done to me. The horrors I hear and see and feel and—”

“I don’t care what he’s done. It’s not enough as far as I’m concerned. You chart me a course to your brother, and I’ll gladly stab you right through your fucking skull.”

“Occrum is a thief, and the owner he stole from wants his book back.”

The cold enclosure of stone chilled me from the inside out as I heard those words.

I circled the dimly lit room, kicking dust along the floor. Fourth or so time of going around and around, I stopped and looked at the reaped. Then at Rav. Then at the reaped. Connections were made. Very unsettling connections.

“Did you know,” Rav said, “that gods walk this world?” I hadn’t known that. But I did have a rather bad feeling I’d met one. “More water, please.” After having the bucket emptied on his face, Rav belched. “I feel much better.”

“Don’t let your newfound satiety stop your talking. Keep the secrets coming.”

“A promise is a promise,” he said. “So long as you keep yours. The owner of the book has sniffed my brother out. It appears Occrum left a trail leading directly here when he last visited the world below.”

The world below? What kind of term was that? “You mean Mizridahl? And Lith?”

“Yes, among other locations.”

“What business did he have there?”

“The molding of the conjurers. He saw to their work himself. Risky business, and he knew it, but Ripheneal hadn’t been close to his heels in generations. He thought he could slip by.”

Sadly — or perhaps terrifyingly — my assumption that I’d met a god had proven to be correct. Vayle was right, after all. Conjurers, phoenixes, madmen with magical hear-all, see-all books, and now a fucking god. This had to be the end. I’d finally found the bottom of the well.

“I told him to that leave that blasted book here,” Rav said. “Told him I’d watch after it. But the thing drove him mad. Didn’t trust a soul alone with it. And he brought it along with him, down there, and this thing — this book — it oozes power, see? Oozes a scent which its owner can sense. Oh, and he sensed it. Took him a while, but he chopped at the weeds and the vines and all the thick undergrowth, and there he had himself a trail to follow.

“I foresaw it all. And I planned my escape, because I’d be implicated too if Ripheneal found me here with my brother. I had another place to go, to take the book — a place where Ripheneal wouldn’t find it. I’d influence the whole of creation just as my brother had done, only I’d do it better.”

I almost made mention of how Lysa had thrown a kink into those plans — one might even say into the
spine
of those plans — but thought better of it. Needed to keep him talking, and insults could have hindered that.

“Occrum said his intention to eradicate life was to keep his little book safe and sound,” I began, “out of the hands of tyrants. Let’s pretend that’s true and not some narcissistic nonsense. If a god had trouble finding this place, what hope could a bunch of wayward kings and peasants have?”

“Unless they learn to fly, none whatsoever. It was never about that, truthfully. Those are the lies he tells to keep his reapers in line and working for the good cause, and the lies I handed off to you. Extinction served only one purpose: to remove Ripheneal from this world. Then, my brother would have free rein to go wherever he wished. And likewise do whatever he wished. Perhaps he did not know how to create new life, but he could have learned. He could have… become a god.”