Savage Bounty

by Matt Wallace

  Evie points a finger at him, drawing it like a dagger from her hip. “Your clichés do not pass for wisdom with me, by the way!”

  She turns, still mortified, and storms from the tavern without another word.

  Shared laughter, including Brio’s, follows her out into the street. Bam is already waiting for her there. Evie is so used to his presence shadowing her at this point that she scarcely feels the need to acknowledge him, though she does with a reassuring nod.

  Her bodyguard follows her back up the shabby little street. It is a hot afternoon, but the sun feels good on Evie’s face. Standing once again on the corner occupied by Kellan’s blacksmith shop, Evie turns her eyes toward the clear skies, enjoying the calm.

  When she returns her gaze to the Shade, Evie notices another slightly troublesome scene unfolding beyond the border of the slum.

  Half a dozen B’ors tribesmen are wielding weapons and tools of steel and iron. Such a sight would be rare enough, but these warriors are using those instruments to dismantle a section of the cobbled city street. They have already broken through the thick slab of stone, and are uprooting large chunks of the pocked masonry to expose the raw ground beneath.

  Two other warriors are gathered around Yacatek, armed with their traditional weapons of stone and bone, clearly the Storyteller’s honor guards. She surveys the progress of the diggers patiently and passively.

  Sighing in frustration, Evie soon marches over to the B’ors Storyteller, Bam tromping to catch up behind her.

  “I gave orders not to loot or pillage this city in any way.”

  Yacatek’s guards begin to step forward, raising Bam’s hackles, but she quickly waves them back with the slightest of gestures. “You did,” she affirms.

  “Does that not include bashing a large hole into the streets?”

  “That is for the great General to decide.”

  Evie detects the briefest of grins as Yacatek says those words, but she ignores it. “If you want to bury one of your story knives, there are less obstructed spots to do it.”

  “I am not burying a knife,” Yacatek calmly explains. “I am retrieving one.”

  Confused, Evie turns to watch the small crew of B’ors diggers burrowing deeper into the earth beneath the stone street.

  After several minutes, the hacking and hollowing of the dirt ceases. One of the warriors delves an arm into the hole they’ve created and roots about. When that arm finally reappears, he is holding a slender object caked in dense, dark earth.

  As the dirt is brushed away, Evie recognizes a stone knife, its blade still clearly etched with intricate markings.

  “Did you… bury that here?” she asks Yacatek.

  The warrior reverently carries the story knife over to Yacatek, who accepts it with an appreciative nod.

  “This dagger is older than us both,” she tells Evie as she continues to clean the soil away from its blade. “Do you think me so ancient?”

  “Then how did you know it was here?”

  “I am a storyteller,” Yacatek replies, as if that should be explanation enough.

  Evie wants to press her further, finding the whole proposition impossible, but she is also curious as to the origins of the story knife. “What does it say?”

  Yacatek traces the characters representing the B’ors story language with a fingertip. “It would mean nothing to you,” she says.

  Evie is offended. “How do you know that?”

  Yacatek looks up at her with stormy eyes. “Because you sit in a room with your people and you argue about who truly possesses this land. You talk of the desecration of your gods as if they created what we see around us now, when it was hands of men and women who shed the blood of those who kept this land long before those same men and women turned their thoughts to a god.”

  Evie’s expression sinks. “Your people lived here before Sirach’s, didn’t they?”

  Yacatek nods. “And before those Sirach’s people took these lands from.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You did not want to know,” Yacatek corrects her. “None of you do. I ask you, General, what will be our reward if this war is won? What will be left for my people after all of you have had your say about what belongs to you?”

  Evie doesn’t know how to answer that question, and Yacatek can see it written plainly on her face.

  The two women stare at each other until an agitated voice in the distance cuts through their shared silence. “General! General Evie!”

  She turns to see two rune-stained ex-Savages carrying a smaller figure between them. This third soldier is draped all in black like one of the night fighters under Sirach’s command. The trio approaches from the other side of the street that winds through the rest of the city to its main gates.

  Hearing the commotion, Lariat and Diggs hustle over from where they were previously milling in front of the tavern to join Evie and Bam.

  As the ex-Savages near, Evie sees that their charge has several long, deep gashes in their black garb. Dark, dried blood is visible beneath the tears.

  A new fear begins creeping up Evie’s throat.

  “What’s happened?” she calls to the Sicclunan scout.

  “We were moving around their camp,” they relate through broken, ragged breaths stitched with pain. “The Skrain ambushed us. Only I… only I escaped. Sirach ordered me to… return… to tell you.”

  “Mother,” she hears Lariat ominously breathe.

  “Did you see what became of the others?” Evie says, trying to keep her voice calm and even.

  “Killed,” the Sicclunan manages. “All except Sirach and… and Mother Manai.”

  “Did they get away?” Lariat demands.

  Evie waits, somehow already knowing the answer.

  “No,” the scout says. “They took them. The Skrain. They took them both. They have them.”

  FLOTSAM

  TARU AWAKENS TO THE EYES of a dragon seeming to peer directly into their soul.

  The retainer rolls away in terror, feeling damp and gritty soil beneath them. Taru stops and falls back against what a part of their brain not currently occupied by panic and confusion informs them is sand. They begin coughing and convulsing violently, the cringe-inducing taste of salt water filling their throat and mouth. Taru hacks up a half gallon of the stuff in short order, the process as terrible as any physical experience they’ve ever endured.

  When it’s over, they rest their elbows against the sand and force their head up, blinking against light that isn’t particularly bright, but feels very harsh.

  Taru is sprawled out on a beach. Waves of clear, blue water are lapping lazily at the shore just a few feet away. They can hear some type of bird squawking in the distance, its call totally foreign to Taru. It might be mid-morning, and the scene is more peaceful and serene than it has any right to be, given the last moment Taru can recall.

  They remember the Skrain galleon practically splitting in half. They remember breaking that insufferable Savage Legion tasker over their knee. They remember swimming for their very life in the middle of a furious storm. They don’t remember anything after that.

  The creature that was gazing at Taru raises its head, continuing to regard them with curious and gargantuan eyes. The reptilian face doesn’t belong to a dragon, but rather the largest turtle upon which Taru has ever laid eyes. It’s the size of a rowboat. Its shell is covered in two-foot spikes that look as though they were formed by a volcanic eruption.

  “What can you possibly be?” Taru croaks.

  “Never seen a spiker before, huh?”

  Taru’s head whips around, causing their neck and temples and everything connected to them intense pain.

  A few yards up the shore, a fisherman is reclining in a beach chair that looks fashioned from driftwood splinters, the long line of their tall, skinny pole cast far into the shallow tide.

  He’s not Crachian. He’s a Rok Islander. Taru has been among them before, immediately before the Aegins took the retainer.

>   So Taru has washed up on the shores of Rok Island then—the only independent nation to ever successfully resist Crachian invasion.

  “They ain’t fast, so over time their shells grew them stickers. Makes a thing think twice before setting on ’em, trying to make supper out of what’s inside that shell.”

  “There are… there are predators big enough to hunt these things on this island?”

  The fisherman smiles. “Size ain’t everything.”

  Taru falls silent, shaking their head to clear the dust and finding that to be another painful mistake.

  “Were you planning to help me at any point?” they ask, eyes shut tight to minimize the aching feeling in their skull.

  “Your people forbid us from mixing with ye, don’t they? I’m a law-abiding type.”

  “My people?”

  “The ants. Crachians.”

  “How do you know I’m from Crache? Everyone in the Capitol always tells me I don’t look like I’m from there.”

  “You’re marked, unless those things on your face are just what happens when you hit the bottle real hard.”

  Taru crawls forward, peering into a shallow puddle of water nestled in a hole in the sand. The runes brought on by the bloodcoin they forced down the retainer’s gullet are starting to propagate. There’s one on their cheek, another in the center of their forehead, and yet another branding their right temple.

  The rest returns to their mind then. The reason they were being shipped across the nation, Brio and the rebellion, and Lexi, left alone in the Capitol, surrounded by enemies. And now Taru is free, able to return to her. But how? Trying to reach the Capitol as a marked, escaped Savage would surely be impossible.

  Rok Island, the only independent nation to ever successfully resist Crachian invasion.

  Taru looks to the little fisherman, eyes flashing desperately. “I escaped the hold of a ship that capsized in a storm,” they explain, urgently. “It was carrying Savage Legionnaires west to fight the rebellion there.”

  “You don’t say,” the fisherman comments idly, as if he’s only half listening.

  “Did you hear?” Taru demands. “I said there is a rebellion in the east. A rebellion against Crache, made of its own people, its own armies.”

  “Aye? That must be a sight.”

  Taru sighs, pressing their forehead into the cool, damp sand. It feels good, refreshing, even replenishing. It aids in them forming a new thought, and with it a new tack.

  “Do you know a ship called the Black Turtle?” the retainer asks, raising their face from the beach. “It is a Rok vessel.”

  Finally, Taru seems to capture the fisherman’s attention. “Might could be,” he answers, measuredly.

  “Its captain… Captain Staz… she knows me. She knew me before—” Taru waves a callused, pruned hand over their facial runes. “Before I became this.”

  “Oh, aye?”

  “Is Captain Staz back on Rok?” Taru says, more than a little exasperated.

  The fisherman leans back in his little rickety beach chair. Again, he smiles. “Might could be.”

  SO HIGH

  THE TINY CUTS ARE MULTIPLYING like rabbits in heat. After three hours, they cover her small hands and thin arms, thin red slivers like gory notches calculating some macabre achievement by her limbs. Dyeawan can only guess at the amount of blood she’s left in drops along her way up the stony face of the supposedly dormant volcano.

  She began her ascent after sunrise, as instructed. She had ample time beforehand to consider her path, as well as the sharp rocks that would greet her every inch of the way. While there was clearly no real trail to speak of leading up the face, it became like looking down at a maze from a bird’s eye view. Her mind began to solve it in that way, finding the negative space zigzagging between the crags, and identifying the best holds for her hands to ferry her along.

  She prepared by stripping the padding that covers the platform of her tender and tearing it into wide strips. Dyeawan wrapped the padding around her legs, knowing she would be forced to drag them up those rocks. She considered fashioning some kind of litter, but in the end decided she didn’t want to be burdened by the extra weight. She needed to be as light and mobile as possible if she hoped to accomplish this task, let alone beat Nia to the top.

  She also tore strips of cloth away from the excess material of her tunic and used them to wrap her hands as thickly as possible while still allowing them to grip tightly. Her final act of preparation was to yank cords out of her tender’s construction and use them to lash her legs together so neither would wander dangerously as she ascended.

  It was not lost on Dyeawan that this was the second time she’s had to disassemble her tender to meet one of the Planning Cadre’s ominous challenges.

  She can’t help wondering if those internal challenges will ever cease.

  She can’t help wondering if she will ever be enough for them, even as their supposed leader.

  Abandoning her tender and feeling the ground beneath her body, Dyeawan’s mind is immediately transported back to the alleys and streets of the Bottoms. She never thought she’d long for her tin sheet and stolen pig grease again. She also longed for the steely strength that once permeated her arms, honed by those years of dragging her body along the floor of the Bottoms on that greased tin sheet.

  It wasn’t as difficult as she initially supposed, at least at the outset. The incline was less steep than Dyeawan ascertained from the mountain’s base. Her arms proved stronger and more able than she imagined they would when put to such a daunting task. She moves her body along with relative ease and rapidity, finding barren spaces through which to pull her legs, and, failing those spaces, flat rocks over which to drag them. She covered what must have been fifty yards without even realizing it, and with only her breath and the pace of her heartbeat quickening.

  None of that lasted.

  After that initial gain, those barren spaces narrowed, the flat rocks grew more jagged, and the incline sharpened dangerously. By the top of the morning, the few cuts Dyeawan had suffered previously became legion. Her arms felt as though they were broiling from within. Her mouth had not been so dry since her longest days on the street without food or water. Her pace was slowed by more than half, and Dyeawan felt herself losing speed with every handhold for which she reached, though she continued to press forward.

  That wasn’t the most worrisome development, however.

  The tremors she’d experienced during her meeting with Tinker began in earnest less than an hour into her ascent. The first shook the mountain just hard enough to loose small pebbles that were little more than granite dust. They rained over her harmlessly. The next time the mountain shivered, however, Dyeawan had to cling to her current purchase and bury her face between the crags to shield her head from the fist-size stones that rolled down in the tremor’s wake.

  When Dyeawan started out, the smoke trailing from the peak was dark and shot through with slate-gray. Now, as the sun rises high with the afternoon, smoke is billowing from the top of the peak in thick, deathly curtains as dense as the night itself. It is as if the sky is calling the illusory black columns to its breast.

  Now, half the volcano’s face behind her, Dyeawan’s biceps, forearms, and chest are burning, her elbow joints feel like the rusted hinges of a door caught in a gale, and the rock beneath her is seized in a state of constant, violent rumbling that seems to intensify with every passing moment.

  Dyeawan’s volcano research was thorough. She knows about lava, and about eruptions. She imagines a great molten churning occurring behind these rocks. She imagines the lava bubbling chaotically and threatening to boil over like soup left too long in a stove pot.

  Finally, she imagines the mountain’s blood washing over her, melting her flesh and turning whatever is left to blackened ash. Considering her current plight, that might very well be a blessing.

  Gripping the rocks with her bloody fingers, sweat glazing every inch of her slight body, Dyeawan inexplicably fin
ds herself recalling a conversation she had with Edger. It was shortly after she passed her seemingly lethal test to prove herself worthy of becoming a planner. She’d asked him why it was necessary for her to fear for her life during the exam. She wanted to know why she couldn’t simply have been presented with complex problems and proved her ability to solve them.

  The problems we solve, Edger had explained, are very often and quite literally life and death for veritable multitudes. You must be able to see them as such to gain their full weight and measure.

  Dyeawan accepted that explanation then, but what’s before her now, what she has been tasked to do here, just seems punitive and absurd.

  How does a race up a mountain I’m terrified is going to explode teach me anything? she wonders bitterly.

  How does it prove who should lead those who solve life-and-death problems for Crache?

  She thinks about her last conversation with Riko before Nia challenged her to this farce. They spoke of what Dyeawan wanted to accomplish sitting at the head of the planners.

  Dyeawan recalls saying some impassioned things that she thought worthy at the time, yet now, clinging to the hot rocks of a quaking volcano, she can’t remember the substance of any of those words.

  Nor can she remember why she should so badly want to sit at the top of the Planning Cadre.

  The entire mountain convulses like a dying man. Dyeawan is shaken loose from her purchase and goes sliding back down the tenuous path she’s following, contorting painfully to avoid the most jagged features and still slicing her body open at several points before managing to grab another hold deep enough to stop her sudden descent.

  Dyeawan concentrates all that she is on that single point of her grip. She wipes the soot from her eyes, only succeeding in replacing it with blood and sweat. It takes several moments of blinking before she can see well enough to locate another hold for her free hand. Reaching for it, she rights herself against the face of the mountain and clings there.

  The heat is almost unbearable. The rocks begin to sear through the now filthy wraps around her hands, painfully stinging the last unmarred patches of her flesh. Dyeawan isn’t sure she can hang on, much less ascend any farther. Let Nia have it then, if she hasn’t already reached the top and returned safely to the base.