The Assassin's Curse (11 page)

  "Be careful," Naji said. "Don't eat too fast."

  I thought about what happened with the water and slowed down.

  It didn't take me long to warm up, what with the fire and the food. When we'd finished I walked over to the camel, who had folded himself up all elegant in the sand. I scratched him behind the ears and rubbed his neck, and he blinked his big damp eyes at me, and for a moment I felt weirdly content, even if I was surrounded by nothing but sand and sky and scrubby little desert trees, even if I was traveling with an assassin who wouldn't tell me nothing.

  But the next day, during the absolute blazingest part of the late afternoon, I started tottering around on the sand, and I couldn't see straight. My head was pounding like I'd been in a fight. The sky kept dipping down into the sand and the sand kept swooping up into the sky, which was so hot it was white, and I couldn't even remember what clouds looked like.

  The next thing I knew Naji had his arms around me. I blinked and looked up at him, at his dark eyes and the part of the scar I could see above his mask.

  "You're going to ride the camel for the time being," he said.

  "What happened?"

  "Sun sickness."

  He scooped me up, one hand beneath my knees and the other under my shoulder, and I got real dizzy, though if it were from the heat or from him carrying me I don't know. His chest was sticky with sweat, even through the fabric of his robes – he wasn't wearing his armor – and I kept thinking about it later, the way his chest felt against my cheek.

  He set me on the camel and pressed one hand against my waist while I steadied myself. He took hold of the camel's rope and tugged on it and the camel pushed forward.

  "I'm sorry," he said, not looking at me. "I should have listened to your complaints about the heat."

  I squinted down at him, feeling a little smug and also a little touched that he'd bothered to apologize. He didn't say nothing more about it, though.

  The next morning Naji let me sleep longer, and he made me drink twice the usual amount of water before we set off.

  "Did it hurt you?" I asked. He was packing up the tent, folding it over on itself.

  "Did what hurt me?"

  "When I got the sun sickness."

  He finished folding up the tent and shoved it into the carrying sacks. Then he stroked the camel's side, not looking at me, just petting the camel like it was a cat.

  "Why does it matter?" he finally said.

  I frowned. "I want to know."

  I was sure he wasn't going to answer, but after a few seconds, he dropped his hand to his side. "It did, a little, but I caught you before you injured yourself, so it was nothing especially painful. And we had the camel, so…" He turned toward me. His face wasn't covered, and it was like looking at him naked. I wondered what it would be like to touch his scar. "That isn't something you need to worry about."

  "I don't worry about it," I said. "I was just curious." Although that wasn't entirely true.

  That morning's walk came much easier, because of the rest on the camel's back and the couple of extra hours of sleep I got in. Naji had me ride the camel in the evenings, and we carried on like that for the rest of the trip. He didn't seem to need the rest. I figured it was some trick from blood magic. He didn't offer an explanation, and I didn't ask for one.

  The days bled together out there, the way they do at sea, turning into one long day, one long night. Eventually the landscape starting changing. The desert trees disappeared and the sand turned coarser. Our path was littered with little round stones and tufts of bristly brown-green plants.

  "We're close," Naji said.

  "Close to what?" I was hoping he'd trip up and give me some kind of hint as to where we were headed.

  "The canyon."

  "And what's in the canyon?"

  "A river."

  I didn't even care that he was weaseling out of telling me anything important. "A river?" I said. "Water?"

  "Water generally comprises a river, yes."

  "Oh, thank Kaol and E'mko both!" I closed my eyes and all the dusty dryness fell away, and I imagined diving into clean hard river water, sloughing off all the grime and filth of travel, a proper bath and not a useless sandscrub–

  "We're not there yet."

  I opened my eyes. Naji was looking at me with little lines creasing the strip of his face, his own eyes bright and sparkling.

  "Are you laughing at me?"

  "Never."

  I lunged at him with an imaginary sword, and this time he really did laugh, all throaty and raspy, and I wondered what I could do to get him to laugh more.

  The travel was easier, now that I knew our destination included a river. I didn't even need to hop on the camel that evening. Naji didn't push it, neither, which I appreciated. As we walked, I started telling him jokes, trying to get him to laugh again. Which he didn't do.

  The next day started same as all the others, except I launched into my joke-telling straight away. I was building up to my best one, about a whore and a court magician, and I knew it'd get a laugh out of Naji for sure.

  I never got to tell it, though, because the sky began to change.

  Naji spotted it first, but he didn't say nothing about it, just stopped the camel and pulled his armor out of the pack. I went on walking a little ways before I noticed – I was trying to work out the best way to tell my joke – but then I realized I didn't hear the whisper-soft footsteps, and I turned around and saw Naji suiting up like he was about to go into battle.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Nothing you need to concern yourself with."

  "Bullshit!" I stalked up to him, spraying sand and stones, building up a bank of all the best cusses I'd heard in my lifetime, when I saw it. This weird cloud on the horizon, snaky and dark, like ink dropped into water.

  "What's that?" I stopped a few feet away from Naji, staring past him, out at the desert. The thing crawled across the sky, long thin strands like a ghoul's fingers. "Don't you dare tell me I don't need to concern myself with it!"

  "It's a sandstorm."

  "No, it ain't."

  "And how would you know?" His eyes gazed at me from the top of his mask. "Do you see a lot of sandstorms out on the ocean?"

  "I ain't never seen a sandstorm, but you wouldn't be suiting up if it were."

  His eyes dropped away from me.

  "Give me your sword."

  He slapped the camel's thigh to get it moving again.

  "Absolutely not."

  Naji walked beside the camel, and I followed behind Naji.

  "Then give me that knife of yours. I want to be able to fight, it comes to that."

  "You have a knife." He paused. "You stabbed me in the thigh with it, if I recall correctly."

  "That knife ain't worth a damn. I want yours."

  He sighed. "You realize things are easier for me if you don't fight. If you don't…" He tilted his head, like he was searching for the right words. "If you don't put yourself in danger. Besides, it might not be anything troublesome. A fellow Jadorr'a passing through."

  "The hell is that?"

  "An assassin, Ananna." The word kind of soured when he spoke it. "Someone from the Order. Someone like me."

  "Oh yeah?" I shot back, though I did feel kind of bad about not knowing what a Jadorr'a was. "You usually leave a trail big enough to see from Qilar when you're passing through?"

  He didn't say nothing. I patted the dress sash I had tied around my waist, where my knife was tucked away, to reassure myself.

  Naji was walking quicker than he had earlier – not running exactly, but fast enough it was making me pant. The camel trotted alongside him. I kept glancing over my shoulder to look at the cloud, which was filling up the sky faster than I could track.

  "We gotta stop," I said.

  "Ananna–"

  "What? We do."

  He looked over at me, all eyes and mask. I hated that mask.

  "Look," I said. "Something nasty's obviously about to catch up to us, and you damn near running like that's not gonna help. All it means is we'll be worn out when we've got to fight."

  Naji blinked but didn't say nothing.

  "We should rest," I said. "Rest up and face them head on. They probably won't even expect it, if you usually run from a fight like this."

  "I prefer to stay on the offensive," Naji said.

  "Yeah, and that's why you're an assassin, ain't it, a bloody murderer-for-hire. Cause ain't no one ever gonna expect you and so you can fight like a coward or not fight at all."

  He flinched when I said coward. Not a whole lot. Just a little squint of the eye. But I still saw it.

  Then he did something I didn't expect. He told the camel to stay put, and he reached into his cloak and pulled out his knife. The blade glinted in the sun, throwing off sparks of light.

  "If I give this to you, will it make you feel better?"

  "A little. I still want to rest, though."

  He shook his head. "You can't fight them. Not without magic."

  "You got plenty of that."

  "No." He stood close, bending down so our eyes were nearly level. "Any magic I do, it comes from me, do you understand? It takes a little piece of me with it. I can't simply cast any spell I want, any time I want – I have to give my body time to recover."

  I set my mouth into a hard little line so he couldn't see what I was thinking. I felt stupid for not realizing that sooner, what the magic did to him.

  "I cast a block over us before we left, but it was weak after the work I did creating your protection charm. You are wearing it, right?"

  I lifted the mask away from my neck, showing him. I was sure he knew I never took it off, but I wasn't gonna say it out loud.

  "The black streaks are from the block. It's a warning, not an invitation to engage in battle. The canyon's close, we should be able to get there qui–"

  The wind changed.

  The whole time we'd stood there arguing the air had been hot and still and dry. Stifling. But then a breeze picked up and rustled the hem of my dress, and it was cold as ice. It sent a chill down my spine like a ghost had reached out and grabbed hold of me.

  "Oh no," said Naji, like it was every curse in the whole world.

  I was stuck in place, the breeze turning into a wind turning into a gale. All the sweat evaporated off my skin. My scarf unwrapped itself from my head and skittered across the sand, a thin twist of white disappearing into the encroaching darkness.

  Naji started chanting in his language, his eyes glowing. I stumbled forward, my legs stinging like they'd been stuck with a million little pins. At least I could move again. Naji shoved his knife at me and then grabbed me by the arm as soon as I'd taken it. He pulled me up to him.

  "Please don't fight unless you have to," he said, right close to my ear.

  The camel made this horrible noise, a shriek-snort of fear, and galloped off, away from the darkness, all our food and water disappearing into the line of sunlight. I cried out for him to stay, but Naji put his hand on my arm.

  "Let it," he said. "I might be able to call him after… after it's done."

  "I thought you said it was impossible to win."

  "It is," Naji said. "I didn't want to… to frighten you."

  I was already frightened, but I wasn't going to tell him. Still, I pressed myself up against him as the darkness moved closer to us. Something was stirring up the sand. Figures appeared on the horizon. I kept imagining them all to look like Naji, a whole army of Najis, but they didn't.

  They looked like ships crossed with enormous insects. And as they lurched across the sand, they let out this creaking noise, metallic and resounding. It made my ears ring. It shuddered deep down into my bones.

  "What are they?" I shrieked, close to panic.

  "I have no idea," Naji said.

  "What!" I twisted myself to look up at him. His eyes were still glowing. "I thought you said–"

  "A Jadorr'a is among them," he said. "But the Order does not deal in metallurgy."

  Metallurgy. The word kind of lodged in my brain, like I should know what it meant but I couldn't quite grasp it.

  The creatures shuddered to a stop. The sand settled. Thick black smoke belched out into the sky, mingling with the inky swirls of darkness from Naji's block. Their skins shone in the few beams of sunlight that made it through, like the side of a knife, like–

  Like metal.

  "They're machines," I said numbly.

  Naji dug his fingers into my arm. "Killing a snake isn't going to save you this time."

  Under any other circumstance that would've pissed me off, but I was so busy trying to overcome my panic that I didn't care.

  The creatures stood there for a long time, creaking and heaving and letting off smoke. Naji murmured to himself, casting magic.

  "Why aren't they doing nothing?" I whispered.

  He chanted a little louder. The machines stared us down.

  Then, like that, he stopped.

  I didn't like not hearing his voice. As long as he was chanting, I felt like nothing could hurt us.

  "Can you use a sword?" he said.

  "Of course I can use a sword."

  He slid his sword out of its scabbard and jabbed the hilt at me. His sword was even more mean-looking than his knife, thick-bladed and curving a little at the end.

  "When they attack you, fight," he said.

  "Planning on it."

  "Try, please, not to get yourself hurt. Don't do anything foolish." Then he took a deep, bracing breath and walked off.

  Just like that. He left my side and walked straight into the smoke, disappearing into the haze. I tried to call out to him, to remind him that he didn't have his knife neither, but the smoke got in my lungs and made me cough.