Assassin's Apprentice

I knew.

All the threads that run back and forth between folk, that twine from mother to child, from man to woman, all the kinships they extend to family and neighbor, to pets and stock, even to the fish of the sea and bird of the sky—all, all were gone.

All my life, without knowing it, I had depended on those threads of feelings to let me know when other live things were about. Dogs, horses, even chickens had them, as well as humans. And so I would look up at the door before Burrich entered it, or know there was one more newborn puppy in the stall, nearly buried under the straw. So I would wake when Chade opened the staircase. Because I could feel people. And that sense was the one that always alerted me first, that let me know to use my eyes and ears and nose as well, to see what they were about.

But these folk gave off no feelings at all.

Imagine water with no weight or wetness. That is how those folk were to me. Stripped of what made them not only human, but alive. To me, it was as if I watched stones rise up from the earth and quarrel and mutter at one another. A little girl found a pot of jam and stuck her fist in it and pulled out a handful to lick. A grown man turned from the scorched pile of fabric he had been rummaging through and crossed to her. He seized the pot and shoved the child aside, heedless of her angry shouts.

No one moved to interfere.

I leaned forward and seized Chade’s reins as he moved to dismount. I shouted wordlessly at Sooty, and tired as she was, the fear in my voice energized her. She leaped forward, and my jerk on the reins brought Chade’s bay with us. Chade was nearly unseated, but he clung to the saddle, and I took us out of the dead town as fast as we could go. I heard shouts behind us, colder than the howling of wolves, cold as storm wind down a chimney, but we were mounted and I was terrified. I didn’t pull in or let Chade have his own reins back until the houses were well behind us. The road bent, and beside a small copse of trees, I pulled in at last. I don’t think I even heard Chade’s angry demands for an explanation until then.

He didn’t get a very coherent one. I leaned forward on Sooty’s neck and hugged her. I could feel her weariness, and the trembling of my own body. Dimly I felt that she shared my uneasiness. I thought of the empty folk back in Forge and nudged Sooty with my knees. She stepped out wearily and Chade kept pace, demanding to know what was wrong. My mouth was dry and my voice shook. I didn’t look at him as I panted out my fear and a garbled explanation of what I had felt.

When I was silent, our horses continued to pace down the packed earth road. At length I got up my courage and looked at Chade. He was regarding me as if I had sprouted antlers. Once aware of this new sense, I couldn’t ignore it. I sensed his skepticism. But I also felt Chade distance himself from me, just a little pulling back, a little shielding of self from someone who had suddenly become a bit of a stranger. It hurt all the more because he had not pulled back that way from the folk in Forge. And they were a hundred times stranger than I was.

“They were like marionettes,” I told Chade. “Like wooden things come to life and acting out some evil play. And if they had seen us, they would not have hesitated to kill us for our horses or our cloaks, or a piece of bread. They . . .” I searched for words. “They aren’t even animals anymore. There’s nothing coming out of them. Nothing. They’re like little separate things. Like a row of books, or rocks or—”

“Boy,” Chade said, between gentleness and annoyance, “you’ve got to get yourself in hand. It’s been a long night of travel for us, and you’re tired. Too long without sleep, and the mind starts to play tricks, with waking dreams and—”

“No.” I was desperate to convince him. “It’s not that. It’s not going without sleep.”

“We’ll go back there,” he said reasonably. The morning breeze swirled his dark cloak around him, in a way so ordinary that I felt my heart would break. How could there be folk like those in that village, and a simple morning breeze in the same world? And Chade, speaking in so calm and ordinary a voice? “Those folk are just ordinary folk, boy, but they’ve gone through a very bad time, and so they’re acting oddly. I knew a girl who saw her father killed by a bear. She was like that, just staring and grunting, hardly even moving to care for herself, for more than a month. Those folk will recover when they go back to their ordinary lives.”

“Someone’s ahead!” I warned him. I had heard nothing, seen nothing, felt only that tug at the cobweb of sense I’d discovered. But as we looked ahead down the road we saw that we were approaching the tail end of a ragtag procession of people. Some led laden beasts, others pushed or dragged carts of bedraggled possessions. They looked over their shoulders at us on our horses as if we were demons risen from the earth to pursue them.