206 - How can I have changed so completely?

The time of an eye-blink passed, and a second, and a third, then a hand seized the dart-tube and another touched the side of his neck, making total darkness fall for him. Iyinisa, with one of those asa kraiya tricks. She expected to hear his “huff!” and a dart skitter off the wall; but later they would find it still in the tube, unshot. The kraumak fell and smashed, bringing total darkness for everyone else, except vague flickerings outside the door—and auras, of course, for me and Surya, if he was here. “Light! Get light! Get Tyaicha! Virani-e, Chevenga, wake up, wake up!” Iyinisa found my face with her hands and whipped the covers off me, the fourth assassin sprang away from the wall and ran, and I went banging back into my body.

Which I regretted in an instant, as it was sick as a dog. The torch-flames that came in blazing were an assault on my dark-accustomed eyes, the cold air an attack on my shivering skin; the probing hands on my aching muscles, as they checked every finger-width of me, were violations. As after the flogging, pain mattered again.

“Yes, they came to kill me,” I rasped, my own voice in my throat like sandpaper over a scrape. “No, they got nothing into me. Second Fire come. There’s a fourth one—he was outside, he ran. I’m fine. Except for a horrible case of change. Thank you all, I love you all, now will you put the covers back over me and tuck them in around tight so they don’t let in any drafts and let me go back to sleep, please?”

†

I woke in the afternoon. My dreams always seem utterly real to me, until the cold light of wakefulness reveals their implausibility. “I had the most bizarre one last night,” I said to Iyinisa when she peeked in on me. “It started plainly enough; it was here, and I was flat-on-my-back sick with this awful fever, every muscle aching, my throat scraping-raw, every little draft like a finger of ice…”

“You don’t feel that way n—aik!” She started, pulling one leg up a little. “Curses, I thought I got all the glass last night; well, it was night. You look and sound a lot better; mind if I open the shutter a tiny bit to find it?”

“Not at all… glass?”

“From that glow-globe they had. And dropped.” I felt nothing untoward, in throat or muscles or on skin, as if I’d never had a fever in my life. “Oh, we caught the fourth one—caught more like one catches a fish. He was trying to walk/swim off the island.”

The worlds of dream and waking smashed wholly into one another. I was still lying stunned when Azaila and Surya came in, and asked me to recount it all to them as I remembered it.

“Well,” said Azaila, when I was done. “There’s nothing more I need teach you. See? I told you you could do it. And that you shouldn’t sweat techniques.” I had done, I realized, exactly what he’d said.

“Nothing more I need teach you either,” Surya said, chuckling. “You hear now and then about someone really good holding off more than one adversary, unarmed against weapons, without breaking a sweat. But you usually expect him at least to get out of bed.”

I had to get up, just to feel real, as well as test myself. Usually the memory of sickness clings closer in the body, so soon after; it seemed in the distant past. My case of change is over? Then I was trembling all over, thinking I did that… I really did that, and had to lie back down. It had happened often enough in training, that Azaila or another master had told me something that baffled me, I’d wrestled desperately with it for days or months afterwards, thinking I’d never get it, and then suddenly got it. Or found I had it when I needed it without knowing when I’d got it. Why it should terrify me this time, I couldn’t understand, but it did. Through the covers under which I’d buried myself, he and Surya patted me, chuckling and saying, “You’ll get used to it.”

†

The maesa asa kraiya is the last place in the world, except Haiu Menshir, where there should be a prison, but there was one now, makeshift; the four assassins were trapped here by the too-thin ice, same as me. As soon as I’d eaten, I went to see the three I had met. After what I’d done to them, it would be wrong not to.

Odd, to see their faces for the first time, utterly unfamiliar and like looking in a mirror, at the same time. Meniaj was the only one who knew for sure who had been speaking to him. Skorsas looked as if he’d been hit with a board when I told him. “You mean I was right, it was your fikken ghost! Hear that, you two shen-heads, you should have listened to me!”

Naturally, all four were giving themselves up for dead—they’d be charged and no doubt convicted in Vae Arahi, then turned over to their home nations for appropriate punishments, as the friendship treaties were solid enough for that now. In Brahvniki (the fourth was Brahvnikian also) and Tor Ench it was hanging, in Arko beheading, if Skorsas was lucky. They all had a fair amount of equanimity about it; an assassin may not be a warrior, but his life is no less dangerous. Their escape plan, in truth, struck me as a touch implausible; to cross the ice such as it was on their bellies like snakes and with two long slender poles apiece to spread their weight. I understood though; they were all top-of-the-line, able to afford things such as kraumaks and wing-lessons, the sort of assassins who can pull off impossible things and so like trying.

Beyond telling the three that it had been me who had done what I had, I found myself stuck for words and awkward in the ones I had. I was ashamed, I realized, to know so much about them. No wonder Surya never looked at auras without consent. I did manage to say the important thing: if they agreed to do what I had done, finish going asa kraiya, I would entreat the court and their home states to grant them amnesty entire.

The fourth man, who I had not touched and so had no concept of asa kraiya, just spat in my direction. The three I had were at a loss for an immediate answer. They were all in shock, which I knew all too well. “You have until the ice is passable to think it over,” I said. I told them they need just ask whoever was guarding them if they wanted to speak to me, and I’d come.

Who had sent them, Vyadim said he’d have told me freely enough, since he’d be truth-drugged anyway, if he knew. It was the usual thing, a person in a hood and mask with a sack of money for the upfront half-payment, not in the Knotted Worm but another place just like it. We’d get everything we could out of Vyadim and set Ikal on it.

Much of the rest of my time on the island I spent in the company of the three, speaking of asa kraiya, the blades within, and all manner of other things; with each of them I shared the harmony of knowing each other’s innermost secrets. We even swapped assassination stories; it was oddly satisfying, all things considered, to be commended for how I’d offed Inkrajen and Edremmas Forin by true experts.

It was Meniaj, not surprisingly, who sent for me the most. “At least your foreknowledge is honourable, being true,” I said to him, first thing. I wept for him, and took him in my arms in compassion, for being bound to the fate I had escaped. I was the only person outside of family who ever had, he told me, so tightly he’d kept his secret.

We shared our stories, of hurrying, of secrecy, of itching to action, of forbidding ourselves, however unsuccessfully, to mix foreknowledge with love. He had never married, indulging only in short flings; “the line will go on through my brother,” he said, “if King Kranaj is merciful and does not scrape us and run us in for everything else we’ve done.” At the very least the family would have to change callings, go into accountancy for real. “I can’t believe I am capable of saying this, but that now seems like a good thing,” he said. “How can I have changed so completely, in one night?”

It helped him that this didn’t surprise me, just as it had helped me that nothing I’d said had surprised Surya. I told him the story of my first session, entire. “Let me ask you this,” I said. “Before that night, if I had told you, ‘Don’t worry, everything is going as it should,’ would you have understood?”

He spat out a bitter laugh. “You are joking, right, Sievenka?”

“How about now?”

His eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I do understand,” he said, when he could. “When I learned you’d thought you were doomed too and laughed at you, when I took the contract because I hated you for escaping it, when I aimed the kill-dart at you and then couldn’t shoot, everything was going as it should. That all had to happen, for me to get to this. You promised me, and here we are.”

Skorsas was the angriest, at first, perhaps because, being an Arkan, he anticipated Hayel. He did not send for me for a while. But when he did, he said, “I was planning to tear your head off with words, Shefen-kas… but now I see you, I can’t. Anger was my ruin and my corruption, wasn’t it? Even understandable anger… I never saw that before. I always told myself I killed Itasas for my father; I see now I did it to satisfy myself, and so it was choice, not obligation. There is comfort in the freedom, and there is comfort knowing I will never backstab another soldier, and there is comfort in knowing my execution will be a just one, all three—somehow—I don’t see how it can make sense, but it does. I will die a better man, and perhaps the Gods will take that into account, after all, when They judge me. I owe that entirely to you.”

In the end, two of three chose to do the ceremony. Meniaj did not want me to argue for mercy, as it would be a quicker death than the one he faced from his illness, which would eventually stop his heart or his kidneys or both; I was the only person he’d ever told that he was already weaker and his eyes were going, so all he was giving up was two or three years of increasing helplessness and pain.

Skorsas knew he’d be scraped in Arko and so was sure he’d be condemned several times over at the behest of several Aitzas families, whatever I argued; he asked only that I entreat Minis to spare him torture, which, since I am always against it, I would have done whatever he chose. But he decided to do the ceremony anyway, “for the good of my soul,” he said. Without telling him, I also asked that in all the documents and the record he be named Skorsas Noren solas.

Vyadim had a wife and children, and felt that enough highly-placed Brahvnikians had been clients to counter those who’d been victims that he might have a chance of freedom as well as the mercy I’d ask, at home. But, he said, he’d do the ceremony regardless. “What is happening to me is like tumbling down a mountain,” he said. “I cannot stop it.” I understood so well. He had a face as hard as a crag of rock, but he need only think about my touching the blade in his heart, and his ice-chip eyes would be full of tears.

We did their ceremonies five days after they’d tried to kill me. Azaila pulled each man’s blade out, while I held him. For all I was still an asa kraiya greenhand with a mentor myself, on their asking, I became theirs.

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