Assassin Read online

  Pyotr sits straight up at the sound of crackling masers in the hallway, pulling the covers to his chin. The other two assassins are slinking toward the whimpering boy, but dash the last ten meters at the sound of combat. That reveals them, amidst sudden noises and a harsh barbeque smell. Another half company of bird guards is waiting outside his door. Hashâshīn fall wounded, stunned unconscious before the miserable pair can suicide. To their souls’ shame, they’re taken alive. They fail to complete their most holy mission. They’re undone, unmasked, excommunicate. Now they’ll be cut, burned, skinned, left unburied, their unholy bones picked over by desert ravens. Stripped naked, signature green robes taken from them, they’re dragged to the deepest subterranean torture chambers of SAC, located beneath the Avenue of Triumph in the heart of Novaya Uda. They’re subjected to the cruelest of all the torments the Curia knows, and to much older tortures and slower impalements favored by the Oetkert-Shaka houses.

  They die under the blades, but not before they’re revived and repaired over and over, so that their agonizing torture might stretch over many days and nights. The intensity of their suffering is amplified many times over by the heavy robusto they ingested before starting the kill mission. Yet, both men keep their Order’s infamous discipline, what the Brethren call the “Sacred Silence.” Not in lingering wails or howls of pain do they speak, nor while being shaken awake by stimulants and SAC doctors preparing their broken bodies for another hard session. Not with their final screams do they reveal who on the High Council on Terra Deus ordered the kill mission or why. It’s actually a small mercy to die this way, under SAC knives and clamps and hot probes. Brethren inflict far worse punishment on any Hashâshīn who fails to complete his holy mission. Better for the two dead men, not for the Broderbund. Millions will now suffer the vengeance of an outraged Queen and grief wracked wife and mother.

  They never espied what must follow the death of Karl Joseph when they fail to also kill his queen. They don’t envisage the utterly feral attack that’s coming on their privileges and rights, their lives and properties, portents and prophesies. They grossly underestimate Queen Mary, this woman they’ve just elevated to the ruling station as Dowager Regent for as long as Prince Pyotr remains of minority age. Dismissing her as a queen and as a woman, they think they know how she’ll weakly respond to the murder of her royal consort. Being who they are and what they are, none of the Brethren can see how ferociously she’ll reply as a mother to their botched attempt to also murder two of her children. The fools!

  ***

  Mary Oetkert screams in rage and pain, lying drenched in blood in her birthing bed. A dead child lies between her legs. The moment she learned a Hashâshīn’s silk cords had coiled around her husband’s lecherous neck, her own pinkish-gray umbilical strangled a tiny premature son, turning him blue inside her. He’s lying cold and stillborn where he dropped. Her naked husband, Pyotr’s father, has been carried into her chambers, fresh from his murder in a brothel in the inner city.

  Pyotr shakes in terror to see murder in his mother’s eyes as she holds up his dead brother’s little body, red and blue and white with coatings of blood and birth wax. He quails as he watches yellow bird guards cover his father’s naked corpse, brought to her chambers and laid at Mary’s feet. He cowers as she wails love and hate and vengeance in the same wild scream. He hides from her terrible visage then runs to his too cavernous room, diving under heavy silk covers.

  “I want them dead! I want them all dead!” Mary Oetkert bellows the order at the gathered commanders of the Royal Canaries and Kempeitai. She’s still lying in the blood and afterbirth of a premature fourth child she pushed into the worlds in spasms of grief and pain the moment they told her about Karl Joseph.

  “As you order, Dowager Regent.” It’s the first time anyone uses her new title, no more than an hour old, earned by a husband’s murder at Hashâshīn hands. “As usual, we shall inform the High Council that we’ll arrest any cowl in Novaya Uda who is connected to the assassination. We’ll round them all up by morning.”

  “No! Tell the High Council nothing. Round up all cowls, not just Hashâshīn. I want them all dead! Do you understand me! Kill them all, or answer to me! Start with the Broderbund ambassador. Bring him to me, now!”

  So they do, realizing that it’s now the cowls or themselves who will die. She orders the ambassador pushed out her high window to his death, as she watches. She strains to reach the sill and look down, to see his broken melon head on the flagstones. Then she slides onto the cold jade floor half fainting, deep red stains between her legs, a tiny dead child cradled in her arms. They understand Mary in that moment. Know that they are dealing with a different order of ruler than her weak, dissolute husband. That this is an Oetkert woman who has far more of the Shaka line in her than her dead husband ever showed. Know that the Imperium will now run red with monk’s blood.

  ***

  Pyotr still has nightmares about that night. The hard night his father and his brother die and Royal Canaries come into his room with humming masers out and blades drawn, looking to kill his favorite teacher, Brother Luther. The old man runs to Pyotr’s bedchambers when he hears terrible screams in the hallway and recognizes them as voices of Brethren in palace service to the Imperial Family.

  “Save me, Prince Pyotr! Save me!”

  Luther knows nothing of the assassination plot framed by his superiors on faraway worlds, or so he protests to the grim bird guards who seize him by the beard then bind his arms to his sides. In Pyotr’s visions, Queen Mary arrives next, filling the doorway in his dreams and memories with fine vanilla scent and rustles of silk. He remembers her forever as she looked that terrible night, framed in his doorway in fear and fury, soaked in his dead brother’s birth blood.

  His mother never came to see him by day, or ever visited his room or played with him or spoke to him tenderly like a mother speaks to her child. He was always and only summoned to see her in Royal Court. Most often, after servants dressed him in stiff green trousers and a soft silk shirt and cap, and cleaned his ears and rubbed his dirty face too hard. Then he was brought to her, attended her along with so many others at Court. Just another ornament below her elevated royal feet.

  She looks pale and weak as she enters his chambers, but acts more strongly than he has ever seen. She’s dressed in an aloof monarch’s royal green, a fresh widow’s mourning black, and a mother’s rubied rage. She doesn’t reach out her arms. She doesn’t coo soft comforts to him. She makes no effort to comfort him when he runs over and tries to hug her, wanting to bury his face in her bosom. She recoils from his embrace. She pushes him away. “You are too weak! Act like your father’s son, especially on this night!” He stands limply beside her, skinny arms at his side. Terrified, bewildered and ashamed.

  “Guards, get on with it.”

  “Please, Mother! Please no!”

  He tries to look away as they start to kill the old man, but she forces him to watch. He never forgets and he never forgives her for it. Although later, when he is the monarch, he understands.

  “Hold him!”

  “No! Please tell them to stop!”

  “You will learn what it means to be Tennō. Watch!”

  A guard holds Pyotr’s small head steady as his mother prises open his eyes with her fingers. Her hands are greasy red with afterbirth. He squirms to see Canaries cut Brother Luther’s throat, then he’s slicked with his dying teacher’s spurting blood. It splashes over him as the monk falls gurgling onto cold green slate, his throat open ear-to-ear from a quick snick! of a diamond blade. When the deed is done, but not before, she lets him go, tearless and dry eyed, yet sobbing uncontrollably. She whirls away from weeping Pyotr in a bustle of silk, leaving a trembling 10 year-old with a dead monk on the floor of his ruined bedroom, blood soaking into austere robes where a frail old body lies pale and still.

  Pyotr hides in a closet all night, squatting in a puddle of his own piss and fear, too scared to come out while more sounds of dying monks ech
o in the hallways as they’re hunted down and butchered. For three days he hears a ghoul wind of cries and screams float in his open bedroom window, too high up for him to reach and close. Thousands of green robed men are being gutted and left to rot, or strung up from pillars and posts all around the city. An era is ending in the Imperium.

  ***

  How could the Brethren know? How could they predict a mother’s rage? Their own cloned mother-wives are kept in lifelong submission. They have no daughters to warn them, for they kill all unwanted female children at birth. They have no idea what any woman would do to men who try to kill her children, let alone this dragon queen they have just awakened into rage and vengeance. They have no conception of what she’ll do to them, of how she’ll hound them. Only stale misogyny that leaks from their old manuscripts and doctrines, inbred in all male barracks where they were raised. They can’t know what she’ll do. They have no inkling that she’ll now wreck them beyond repair.

  Instead of removing Mary, they have elevated her to full power as Dowager Regent. A woman rules the Imperium. A woman rules them. It’s anathema, and they did it. They’re astonished at wanton rage that unleashes SAC death squads and even sleeker killers, secret police hunters of the Kempeitai. Aghast as the full power and fury of the throne and state hurtles at them. They die lost in wrongful divinations that don’t foretell her orders. They die en masse in the Red Purge.

  Mary’s widow and mother grief is inconsolable, her rage insatiable, a terrible red slaughter immeasurable. An hour after they lay her murdered husband in the ruling family’s Jade Tomb, she gives the genocide order. The kill command spreads over the whole Imperium, like a boulder dropped in a catchment in an immense abattoir, making red ripples that reach across stars for the other shore.

  “Banish their vile Order from the Jade Court, from this city and from Kestino. Reduce all their monasteries to rubble, break their commanderies, slaughter the initiates, kill all their dāsa slaves, empty their clone vats and incubators.”

  “Yes, majesty. It has already begun.”

  “All, do you hear? All! Ruin their estates, demolish their fortresses, obliterate their seed from the Imperium. Drive them out! I want them all dead! Dead!”

  She kills Brethren and confiscates commanderies across a hundred Imperium worlds. Before her volcanic rage subsides to a pāhoehoe lava flow and cools to a hardened crust of black hate nine months later, tens of millions of cowled men and far more dāsa are dead. Mary understands that to carry vengeance all the way, to burn out and gut the core Broderbund worlds of Fates and Terra Deus, to finish the Devastation of the Ordensstaadt she ordered could mean civil unrest on a scale she fears to test. Still, she needs reminding, even if giving caution to a monarch who’s in bile poses great risk to the adviser who dares.

  “It’s not just the last of the cowls you must consider, majesty. Other parties oppose you in this extreme action against the Broderbund.”

  “Explain, Lord Simon, Who would dare try to block me on this righteous policy?”

  “Billions of Grünen look to the cowls as caretakers of the Black Faith. They’re restless and angry at the bloodbath.”

  “Do they not know what these awful cloaked men did?”

  “They understand your grief. They did not want your husband, Tennō Karl Joseph killed, or your son to be stillborn. They regret losing the little prince.”

  “How kind of them!”

  “Yet they also know our history, that your family has accepted that Brethren have a right to do this thing, to select rulers by holy assassination. By overreacting, by killing all cowls, you risk losing the Mandate of the Stars.”

  “Let the peoples seethe, as my justice advances until the last cowl dies!”

  “With respect, Regent. You have exacted enough justice. You have moved beyond justice. You have altered our history irrevocably. No monk will ever again decide who lives to rule the Imperium. You have ruined them.”

  “They still cling to Fates and Terra Deus. They still have clone vats there, vast underground tanks in layer upon layer. They still make clone slave mothers, and dāsa to serve in their hidden regiments. They still harbor Hashâshīn. If this injury is to be done to them, it should be so severe that their vengeance need never again be feared by any Oetkert or Shaka.”

  “Yet, you know that you cannot do this last thing. You cannot devastate the Ordensstaadt. Kaigun will not do it. It won’t pour that stain on its reputation, for centuries to come. Too many officers are at least casual adherents of the ancient Black Faith. They aren’t Rikugun, where the new Purity idea rises.”

  “Do you say they’ll mutiny against me?”

  “No majesty,” responds her chief adviser, “but nor will they do this harsh thing you order, bombard the last of the Broderbund worlds, render them immune to all life. Think of it not as mutiny but a military strike: they will down arms and tools.”

  “What do you mean by that fine distinction?”

  “They won’t act against you, but nor will they act for you in this.”

  “You are a brave and honest man, Lord Simon, to speak so plainly when you know this matter is close to my heart, and is a monarch’s and a mother’s will.” “I do my duty to your family, that mine has served for generations.”

  “Fairly said, and know that your loyal service is not unnoticed or unvalued. It won’t go unrewarded, if you’re proven right in this grave matter.”

  “My reward will be as your majesty dispenses.”

  “Reward will come to you like the tide, if you point me to another way to the same end I desire: obliteration of Broderbund influence in Imperium affairs, ensuring the future of my family and the dynasty.”

  “There is one, but only if you first stop the ‘Red Purge,’ as your peoples call these killings. It’s unbalancing the Imperium and will impede your reign as Dowager Regent. It must end, majesty. You must hide your hatred and call a halt. Restore the balance, if it’s not already too late.”

  “You’re a clever man, to use mine own words against my purpose, to say restore the perpetual balance to counter my fondest wishes for the deaths of all these monks. It’s what I think of when my eyes open each morn until they close again at night’s falling.”

  “I speak your wisdom, majesty. I remind you of your own words, as you say. Of the many times you pleaded with your husband, the departed Tennō, to pull back his support of SAC. And about the need to maintain an internal balance.”

  “Yes, I said it. Many times. He didn’t always hear me or act as I advised.”

  “Yet, you were right to advise him then, as I advise you now.”

  “Perhaps I am too hasty in this matter?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do you say it is so?”

  “Wisely is slowly, as the folklore says. They stumble who run too fast.”

  “Then we shall proceed without haste, brave and honest counsellor. But also without rest.”

  “You do not disappoint, majesty. You will return your house to reason and balance. You fit well in the role of Dowager. It is my great honor to…”

  “I said you are an honest man, so stop this callow flattery! It has no effect on me, except to irritate. Show me that you’re also a wise man, who sees a different way ahead. What is it you propose?”

  “Banishment of all Brethren, forever.”

  “Permanent exile?”

  “Banish them to the drear Ordensstaadt. But don’t make the last worlds they hold into lifeless slag and ashes. Leave them Fates and Terra Deus.”

  “Agreed. I’ll preserve the core of their holdings but send all monks there.”

  “I am most glad to hear it, majesty.”

  “On one condition.”

  “Majesty?”

  “In retribution for a dead husband and stillborn child, my warships will raze Rudkhan Castle in the Alborz Mountains from whence sally unholy Hashâshīn, to cull the Oetkert and Shaka lines. They must hold back all planetary defenses. They must not interfere with destruction
of the fortress. Then I expect the High Command itself to kill any remaining Hashâshīn who survive the attack.”

  “I’ll bring you their answer, within a day.”

  “Leave them in no doubt what refusal means.”

  “They will agree, for this is reasonable.”

  “No doubt, you understand?”

  “It can and will be done, majesty.”

  ***

  High cheeked like all the Imperial Family, with angular nobility and native scorn on her face, Mary doesn’t lament one drop of cowled blood she spilled. But she’s no fool. She believes in balance above all. So she stops the genocide before the last monk is dead. A settlement is made. Time to act as Dowager. Time to reign in the killers. Time to restore balance and order. Time to swallow hate, and make a deal.

  Survivors submit to Mary, who abolishes the Order’s legal rights everywhere except Fates and Terra Deus. Cowls lose their HQ on Lake Isis in Novaya Uda, from where they controlled the Jade Court for fifteen centuries. It’s dismantled, reduced down to the last stone. Rudkhan Castle also ceases to exist, its high canyon walls evaporated by a cruiser firing down from high orbit. With those famed structures gone, all the Broderbund’s power at the Jade Court ends.

  When the killing stops there are a mere ten million Brethren left. All are exiled, blockaded and banished from power outside the original Ordensstaadt. There, on its remaining worlds, the Order tends to its wounded and the last 180 million dāsa. The Broderbund is a shadow of its former self, reduced to where it started, divining ancient scrolls and starcharts and praying in the dark. Only now it broods over tens of millions of butchered confreres and asks “why?” of God. Brethren have lost tens of thousands of fortified commanderies, tens of millions of Sword Brothers, and whole worlds they lorded for over a millennia. They’ve lost vast hordes of dāsa. They’re staggered, disheartened as only true believers can be who think their god deserted them and betrayed their loyalty.