The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (30 page)

T
he architect
of fear is hope. Without hope, without the possibility of a better tomorrow, what is there to fear? The best outcome and the worst are one and the same — either way, you’ve got no fucking chance. So you go out with one last spectacular showing, that one last prodigious burst of light that flares as bright as a meteor streaking across a dark sky before the night smothers it.

Six days ago, I had no fear. Regret for having to leave this world, sure. But not fear. And then Tylik comes, reveals a little secret and pumps me full of hope once again. A hope that intensified when the sellswords who served as spies informed me four days ago that no one had crossed the Widowed Path. That meant Edmund Tath’s bannermen weren’t arriving in Edenvaile, at least not on time.

Hope cut through me like an ebon blade on the thirtieth day of the march. It was probably a day fitting of the brumal North. In all likelihood, the clouds were low and thick and chunky with the color of sour milk and smoke. Probably wasn’t any sun, because this place didn’t fuckin’ deserve it. Snow was probably falling — tears from the poor bastard gods who had to watch over this pathetic land.

Or maybe the sun did come out. Maybe it burned abnormally hot, melting the flakes as they fluttered down and stuck to the brims of helmets. Maybe you could smell the sweetness of grass thawing beneath the ice as the last days of winter retreated.

Maybe, possibly, probably — I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like. Hope had cut me open, and just as decay settles inside a fresh wound, fear weaseled its way in. Couldn’t tell you what the weather was like because I had the shakes. Had the grumbles in my stomach and the booming percussions of thumps and thuds in my heart. Had the crushing doubts, the what-ifs, the don’t-you-dare-fuck-ups racing through my mind.

Couldn’t tell you what the weather was like because who has the fucking time to look toward the sky when an enormous wall of stone and crenellations, of legs and arms, of bows and arrows, of thin eyes and tight lips, of people who just want you bloody fucking dead — who has the time to look toward the sky when you’re staring at that?

I stood at the forefront with Vayle and Dercy and a few other officers, far out of range of the archers. I had nothing to say, no advice to give, no real reason to show my face up there. It was all about selfish curiosity, a twisted thirst for what war was all about.

See, assassinations are one-and-done. You kill a single man, maybe a couple more here and there, but it’s small stuff. War, though? It’s big. Massive. Incomprehensible and imperceptible. Fifteen thousand infantry stood behind me. Swords at their sides, pikes pointed toward the heavens. Their stoic faces looked chiseled from stone. The absence of terror in their eyes wouldn’t last. In even the best scenario, half of them would be trying to stuff their guts back inside their bellies and choking on blood as arrows punctured their lungs. Over seven thousand men dead. More than likely it would be ten thousand, twelve thousand, possibly every last one of them.

The mind can’t possibly reconcile the scale of obliteration that war delivers. At least mine couldn’t.

A voice as chilling as the frost that thickened the air sailed across the field. It came from the balcony that had hosted Sybil and Chachant’s grand wedding.

“Lay down your weapons,” Vileoux Verdan said, “and I will allow these men to march peacefully back to their homes. My grievance is with you, Dercy, not the innocent souls you bring to my walls.”

Dercy responded, but I didn’t listen to his words. It was all a formality, and I was more interested in identifying those who joined Vileoux on the balcony. Unsurprisingly, Chachant and Sybil stood by his side. Farther on down the line were a few men and women I’d never seen before — conjurers, undoubtedly. But the tall, slender gal who centered this little gathering… oh, I’d seen her before.

Her voice had once echoed inside my skull. Her dungeon had nearly broken me. Her arena murdered my friends. They called her the queen of the conjurers. I’d never killed a queen before. It was time to change that.

I turned the reins of my horse over in my hands, guiding her back through the horde of shields and leather and mail and swords and pikes and axes that gathered in square clusters of forty deep and forty wide. The glint of silver stretching across the field probably looked like stalks of freshly planted white sage to a hawk.

Although the hawk would question what a couple of wooden beams mounted upon wheels were doing in a field of foliage. That, of course, was the weapon of the day — the big-ass battering ram Vayle had procured. The ram itself sat idle above the wheels, suspended by chains. A canvas canopy enclosed it, stitched with cold, wet hides that would have a good chuckle at any fire-laced arrows the North would hurl from their wall.

My mare trotted past it, past the remaining infantry and beyond the archers who stacked behind, arrows already nocked, fingers nervously prodding the twine.

A small distance behind the archers, Dercy’s remaining officers gathered, along with Tylik and his nephew. It was also where my Rots made their stay. We’d sit tight until we were needed.

My mare reared around and faced the Rots, who were seated on their horses. There were twenty-one of us in all. Vayle had managed to round up the few who’d combed through the Golden Coast in search of a usurper, but there was no time to bring back the ones who had gone to Hoarvous. I wondered what they were doing there now. Perhaps they were responsible for the lack of Edmund Tath’s bannermen, against all odds.

“Fuck me,” Slick said. “Thought I’d gotten away from this shit years ago.”

Slick wasn’t a particularly stealthy assassin. He’d gotten captured more than eighteen times since joining the Black Rot, but that’s precisely how he got his name. He managed to slip out of any confine, slick as oil and crafty as a fox.

“You never leave war,” Rimeria said. “It follows you around like a hound fly.”

“’Least you can kill a hound fly,” Slick retorted.

I smacked him lightly on the cheek. “Cheer up, Slick. You’re not a feeder for indispensable knights like you were for your uncle’s militia. You’re the indispensable one now.”

“Yeah,” Rimeria said, “who else could we bet on getting roped up and thrown into a stockade every time he has a job to do?”

The Rots chuckled and had some more fun at Slick’s expense, but the jokes soon ended as Dercy returned.

Dercy’s steed huffed a steamy wisp of rotten horse breath into the air and lowered its face of menacing plate. A warhorse in every sense of the word.

Its rider didn’t look too bad himself. The short and squat King of Watchmen’s Bay was dressed in a suit of plate that glistened from his boots to his gorget. No helmet, though — somehow that made him all the more intimidating. After all, it’s not often you see a little man in plate armor with a balding head, sitting atop a horse fit for a mountain of a man. It’s disconcerting.

Dercy side-eyed Tylik. “Let us hope you are not being misled, hmm?”

“Been around for a long time,” Tylik said. “Got me a good eye for insincerity, promise you that.”

“I would never question it,” Dercy said. “I have a healthy distrust of all things northern, that’s all. When you’re raised in a place like this”—he looked around, judging the gray sky and the bitter air with contempt—“it does things to a man. Have to fight for your food when you’re little, or you’ll starve. Only the most cunning make it out alive.”

The snow crackled under the heavy hooves of Vayle’s horse, who appeared from the thicket of archers.

“Ram’s ready,” she said.

The steel plates protecting Dercy’s fingers clinked as he fastened a tighter grip around his steed’s reins. He drew in a deep breath, held it, and then let it pass slowly through his flared nostrils.

He regarded the officers and the Rots with a quick nod. “Men… women… today we bear a great responsibility. Take a look now at the vastness of life before you and behind you. There are twenty thousand beating hearts standing on this field today. There are soldiers, savants, tailors, tanners, blacksmiths, servants, prisoners, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers. Twenty thousand who have entrusted you with the safety and fortitude of their world. You cannot consider a single one of their lives, or indeed twenty thousand of them, more valuable than the survival of this good world we’ve come to know, but you will not dare let one of them go to waste. Today you lead so that tomorrow you can rebuild.”

Dercy unsheathed an ebon blade — a gift from yours truly. He jerked the reins of his warhorse, and it trotted to the outer edge of the infantry. He held the silver eye of his blade high in the air, clicked his heels and galloped down the ranks.

“Go!” he screamed. “Now! Tear down their walls! Go!”

A chill skittered up my spine as the swarm pressed forward. The wind was drowned out by thousands of pieces of clanging armor, fifteen thousand boots rumbling through the ossified sea of snow and ice, crunching and splintering the frozen earth.

A carnal cry of bravery and honor billowed up like chimney smoke from the marching footmen.

I watched the Edenvaile parapet in equal parts anticipation and dread. “Come on, you bastards,” I whispered to myself.

Vayle said something, but I ignored her. The wall was more important. The archers had their elbows cocked, ready to unleash pure hell on the unlucky soldiers at the very front.

A couple stray arrows whizzed down from the Edenvaile wall, the mark of nervous men — their intended targets were still too far away. Wouldn’t be long, though. Wouldn’t be long before the barbed tips would needle their way into flesh, or if our men were lucky, deflect harmlessly off their armor.

A bit of chaos would be good right about now. Some unexpected fun along the battlements, a few surprises gift-wrapped in steel. That was my contribution to the first part of the siege: to deliver agents of chaos.

But where were they? Where were my little agents?

Right
there.

A speck trailed up to the parapet, and then another. And another, and another. It was a blur now, a pod of stars streaking across the sky, flashing pinpoints of black light as they raced onward.

Some of the archers turned alertly. Others toppled over the crenellations, somersaulting slowly with the wind beneath them, till their bodies fell below the horizon of soldiers that marched upon their walls. I knew when they struck the unforgiving sheets of ice because the taunts and cheers and hollers from the footmen flared up like a fire being fed fresh needles.

I smiled. Chaos had been born. My sellswords cut through the clumps of archers effortlessly. The bowmen may have had swords at their hips, but they were caught off guard and too closely packed together. By the time they realized the threat was on them, they were dropping over the wall like sick baby birds from a nest. And they couldn’t well shoot at their attackers without sending iron tips through the backs and necks of their fellow archers.

But good things never last. Reinforcements were sent in, and the mercenaries were mercilessly beaten down. I’d told them our footmen would storm the wall with ladders they could use to slide down in case of danger, but that was a lie. A lie I knew would cost them their lives and one that I would tell again. This was war. There are no promises of safety in war.

There is no mercy in war. The footmen knew that well enough when they came upon the gate. They stepped over the corpses of their friends. They found the man they walked shoulder to shoulder with writhing in pain as an arrow gouged the gap between his shoulder and breastplate.

This was war. There is no humanity in war. If it existed, I wouldn’t have heard the high-pitched wails of agony as cauldrons of boiling water poured over the wall, sizzling the cold air in a bath of steam and splashing on the men below.

Flesh was melted on this day. Scalps were scalded and skin fused together, topped with blisters like cherries on a pie.

This was war. There is no time to brood. You make decisions quickly and live with them. Vayle understood that. There was no hesitation in her voice when she called the cavalry to action.

They swooped in from behind us, the soles of my feet rattling as two thousand horses stampeded out in a U shape, quick to greet the mix of cavalry and infantry who bounded out from behind Edenvaile. They all wore the jagged
C
of the conjurers, the devious eye embroidered within the letter. Five hundred of ours wielded ebon blades, giving them the distinct advantage.

My mouth felt like cotton. Had it been open this entire time? Maybe. My eyes were dry too. Probably would have helped to blink. Didn’t have time, though. A crack of thunder stole my attention.

The double-leaf gate of Edenvaile trembled.

Another bellow of thunder.

And the gate trembled once more. Amielle and the other conjurers on the balcony crossed their arms, as if they were waiting impatiently.

I took my horse closer to the action. The action was nothing but terror: clashing steel and spurts of blood. Screams that could curdle milk fresh from a cow’s teat.

I imagined myself at the forefront, fighting off the cavalry and rushing guardsmen. What would I do? What they all did, probably: kill and move.

Swords clang, shields splinter, and you move.

Blood spatters your face, tinges your tongue with the taste of burning iron.

And you move.

You see the eyes of your friends roll back, the whites flash at you like a lake of pale milk under the moon. Sometimes you don’t see eyes at all, only empty sockets with red spongy cords dangling, misplaced, strewn.

And you move.

You move because it’s the only thing you can do. Till you come upon the enemy. Then you kill.

Man looks like you, walks like you, talks like you, probably has a family like you. Problem is, he’s holding a pike and dressed in different clothes. You don’t think about his wife, or his children. Or his problems or the fact he’s out there to pocket a bit of gold to afford some salted fish for his next dinner. If you don’t parry his blow, sidestep him and shove your blade deep into his belly, twisting the steel up around his ribs, ripping and tearing at his flesh… he’ll do it to you.