Race the Sands

by Sarah Beth Durst

  “And what do you need me to do?” Raia asked.

  “Conquer your fear.” Tamra approached the cage. The kehok was eyeing her as if he were far more interested in mauling her than allowing her to chain him. “And call him to you.”

  “Do what?”

  Most kehoks would be happy to be presented with a willing target—he’d forget about the danger of the net in his eagerness to reach Raia.

  “Call to him,” Tamra repeated.

  “I can’t do that and not be afraid!”

  Tamra rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say banish your fear. I said conquer it. You are right to fear the kehoks. They will always be stronger, faster, and far more deadly than you, and given the opportunity, they will kill you. Only idiots stop being afraid of what can kill them. Dead idiots. You shouldn’t stop being afraid. But you shouldn’t let your fear control you. Choose to be brave. Stand there. Don’t run. And call to him.”

  Without waiting for a response, Tamra turned to the kehok. “Go to Raia. Go to the girl.” She kept repeating the command—silently now, concentrating on it as if it were all she wanted in the world—as she unhooked the lock on the cage. Kicking the door open, she sprang back, ready to dive into the river if need be.

  But the kehok didn’t move.

  Catlike, he lay down inside his cage.

  A minute passed.

  Then another.

  “Call him,” Tamra told Raia.

  “Come to me,” Raia said weakly.

  River protect us . . .

  “Like you mean it.”

  Raia clenched her fists, planted her feet wide, and commanded, “Come!”

  Go to her, Tamra pushed.

  He shifted his weight onto his hind legs, like a cat in the bushes about to hunt. She tensed, ready to leap toward the pulley. Go, Tamra thought. She ignored the niggling worry: it shouldn’t be this hard to command him. Her order alone should have been enough to compel the beast. She’d controlled plenty of resistant kehoks before and never had trouble. Or at least rarely had trouble.

  Something’s wrong, a voice inside Tamra whispered.

  Firmly, she pushed the doubt away. It had no place when dealing with kehoks.

  “Come! Now!” Raia called.

  The black lion launched himself forward with a furious roar. Tamra lunged for the pulley, smacked the release, and braced herself as the iron net plummeted down.

  It landed with a smack on the kehok, the surprise of the sudden weight dropping him to the ground and pinning him to the dock. Perfect, Tamra thought. She hurried to him as the kehok pushed up onto his feet.

  Grabbing one of the dangling chains, Tamra pulled, and the net tightened. It squeezed over his face and around his legs. The kehok net was a special design: it worked both to muzzle a kehok’s jaws and hamper his movements. It wasn’t heavy enough to stop them, but it was enough to slow them.

  “Tell him to follow,” Tamra said to Raia.

  “Follow,” Raia said in a quavering voice.

  He chewed on the chains, trying to gnaw through the iron, but while he was focusing on freeing himself, he wasn’t resisting their commands. He shuffled after them toward the stables.

  It was slow, and Tamra was very aware that the net wasn’t a perfect solution. Many a trainer and rider had died while a kehok was in chains, thinking they were safe. With a monster this strong, if his need to attack them overrode his need to be free of the net, they’d be in danger. And so they proceeded slowly, calmly, and alertly until they reached the stables.

  Inside, the other kehoks screamed, sensing their approach.

  That caught the attention of the black lion. He quit chewing on the chains. A low growl started in the back of his throat. Oh, sweet Lady. She’d hoped they could get him all the way in before he noticed. It usually worked.

  Tamra quickly grabbed a hook from the wall of the stable. As the lion began to retreat, she latched the hook onto a loop of chain. “Grab one!” she called to Raia.

  Raia obeyed, taking a second hook and sticking the end into the net.

  Both of them leaned back, pulling the kehok toward the stable.

  But the kehok was stronger. Still retreating, it dragged them away from the stables, their heels plowing through the dirt. By the River, this isn’t working! Her back and leg muscles were sending lightning bolts of pain through her body as she pulled. Soon, they’d give out.

  “A little help here!” Tamra called. It grated on her to call for help when she normally could control any kehok, but the alternative was worse, and she had an untrained rider who could be hurt. She only hoped—

  Two trainers came running. Of course they were watching, Tamra thought. I should’ve guessed I’d have an audience for this. But she couldn’t complain, given that they did come to help, even though they’d waited for her to humiliate herself before coming to her aid. Truthfully, though, it shouldn’t have been necessary. She must be too distracted with her own worries about Shalla and the future to focus properly.

  She renewed her attention on the kehok.

  Grabbing additional hooks, the two other trainers also latched onto the net. The four of them, inch by inch, dragged the kehok toward the stable.

  While they pulled, Tamra pressed her thoughts against his. Come. Obey.

  She felt his will weaken as they slowly overpowered him.

  Keeping the pressure on his mind, they dragged him into an open stall. Tamra clamped the chains to the wall, shackling him. He lay beneath the net, snarling at them, as they slammed the door shut. One of the other trainers locked it.

  That should not have been so difficult, Tamra thought again, as the whisper of doubt wormed back into her mind. Focus, Tamra. You’re better than this. She’d once controlled five kehoks at the same time! Just one shouldn’t have even been a challenge. Bending over now, however, she worked to catch her breath. She ached everywhere and knew she’d pushed her body too far. She’d never had so much trouble bringing a kehok into a stable, especially one in chains.

  Maybe this was a mistake.

  “That is not a racer,” one of the other trainers, Osir, proclaimed. He’d been a trainer for a decade longer than Tamra and thought he was at least two decades wiser. He always spoke as if pearls of wisdom were dripping from his bulbous lips. He’d disapproved of Tamra and her methods from the moment they’d met. Tamra wished she could have picked a day when he wasn’t working to bring in her new prize.

  “He will be,” Tamra said.

  “No chance. You can tell. He’s got the kind of will you can’t bend. At best, you break him. But right, you don’t like to break your monsters. You’ve got a ‘better way.’” He waved his fingers in the air, as if he thought her “way” was no better than a sleight-of-hand magic trick.

  “It works for me,” Tamra said through gritted teeth.

  “Until it doesn’t. Mark my words: you don’t have a racer here. You have a killer.”

  The second trainer, a woman named Zora, nodded firmly. When Tamra had first arrived at the training ground, Zora had offered to share use of her kehoks. She withdrew her offer after realizing Tamra was that trainer and hadn’t spoken to her since. Despite running to her aid just now, neither Osir nor Zora qualified as supportive colleagues, which was fine.

  I don’t need friends, Tamra thought. I need to win.

  “My new student, Raia,” Tamra said, introducing her. “This is Trainer Osir and Trainer Zora. They also have use of this training facility. You won’t have much interaction with them, though, because they have their own students.” She wanted to add, “Also, they have the souls of roaches,” but she refrained. After all, they had just helped her.

  Raia bowed her head. “Honored to meet you.”

  Zora snorted.

  Osir slapped a hand down on Raia’s shoulder. “Your new trainer won’t break kehoks. But she won’t hesitate to break you. Watch yourself.”

  Tamra expected Raia to murmur a polite response. It was what a well-educated rich student would have done.
It was also what a poor just-off-the-streets student would have done. But instead, Raia met his eyes and said softly but firmly, “It’s why I chose her. I don’t break easily.”

  Tamra didn’t even try to hide her smile.

  Chapter 6

  Per Trainer Verlas’s orders, Raia spent the night in the stable, which was not at all what she’d been hoping for, after a string of terrified nights spent hidden in sheds, alleys, and abandoned houses. She’d wanted a nice cot in a quiet corner inside a house.

  The stable was definitely not that.

  She was supposed to work on conquering her fear. Not banishing it. Just dealing with it as a constant that didn’t have any power over her. Easier said than done, Raia thought. But at least she had a roof over her head and didn’t need to worry about being run off by the stable’s owner or a city guard, which was an improvement.

  And it wasn’t as if she had to sleep in a stall. There was an office off the stable that boasted a cot and a washbasin. It even had a cabinet stocked with sausage rolls for her dinner and fruit for her breakfast.

  The only flaw was all the monsters on the other side of the wall.

  How did I get myself into this?

  She was supposed to be on track to becoming an augur, her future assured. The fact that it wasn’t a future she wanted was less important than the fact that it would provide her with wealth, security, and comfort—or so her family had repeated ad nauseum. Maybe in a past life, she’d earned her place with the augurs, but she didn’t remember that existence, and she wasn’t that person anymore. Her parents had never understood that.

  What would they do if they could see me now?

  She knew the answer to that. Haul me back in chains as if I’m a kehok. Toss me in a house that might as well be a locked stable and tell me to breed.

  It was better here, even with the horrors that slept only a few feet away. Even if she had no idea how she was ever going to control the one that was supposed to be hers, much less ride him. I’ll learn, she promised herself.

  Lying on the cot, Raia slept fitfully—every time a kehok screamed, she woke convinced her family had found her. She fell back asleep grateful it was just a monster, only waking permanently when dawn poked its way through the dusty windows.

  She washed as best she could with the shallow basin of water and dressed in the student rider clothes that Trainer Verlas had left for her: a durable tunic and rough leggings that scraped at her skin. The tunic was scarlet red. To hide the bloodstains?

  Don’t think like that, she told herself.

  She’d chosen this life—the first time she’d chosen her own path—and she wasn’t going to panic just because the outfit was ominously colored. She could do this.

  That burst of confidence got her out of the office and into the stable . . . and then it abandoned her.

  Raia felt as if she were being smothered in screams—horrible, bone-cutting screams that ricocheted through her veins and filled her skull. Inside their stalls, the kehoks raged, smashing against their walls, tugging at their shackles, and squealing as if they were being skewered. For a long moment, she stood just inside the door, her ears too flooded with sound to move as the kehoks bashed against their stall walls and strained against their chains.

  All of them except the black lion.

  He stood in the center of his stall, the net of heavy chains draped around him, shackled to the wall. He was motionless, but his eyes followed her as she crossed toward his stall door. She stopped several feet shy of it.

  “Why aren’t you screaming? Not that I want you to. You can stay as silent as you want.” She didn’t think he could hear her over the others, even if he could have understood her. Yet he was looking at her as if he followed every word.

  “What did you do to be reborn like this?” Raia asked. “You’re lionlike, so you must have hunted the innocent in your past life. Were you a murderer? An assassin? Did you seek people out to be cruel to them? Did you hunt with words or knives? Your body is metal, so you must have been cold. Unfeeling. A hard man. Did people hate you? Did you hate them? Both?”

  She knew she was babbling, but the words wouldn’t seem to stop. “Did you know you would come back like this? Did you ever try to change? You know that’s what augurs are for—to help you make the right choices and help you lead an honorable life. They could have prevented this from happening to you, if you’d let them, which you obviously didn’t. Why not? I mean, I know why my parents don’t ask augurs to help them.” A waste of gold, they called it. She’d never seen them enter a temple except to pay her fees and check on her progress, and she wasn’t permitted to read them herself—it was one of the rules of augur training, no unsolicited readings—even if she’d been skilled enough to see their auras clearly. “I think they’re afraid of what the augurs will tell them. I think they know deep inside that they are not any of the things they’re supposed to be, and they’re scared it will be too hard to fix themselves. Is that what you did? Avoid the augurs because you thought it would be too hard? Or did you simply not care whether you were a good person or not?”

  As she talked to the black lion, the other kehoks’ screams began to blur into the background. They still made her bones itch and her skin feel raw, but she wasn’t as aware of them anymore. She was instead hyperaware of the metallic lion’s golden eyes.

  Kehoks had beautiful eyes.

  She’d heard that before, but she’d never been close enough to see for herself. It wasn’t just that their eyes were golden, but the gold seemed to shift as if it were molten metal. The longer she stared, the more she thought the gold was really a mix of colors: reds and yellows and oranges, constantly swirling around black pupils. “It must mean something that your eyes are so beautiful. You must have some good in you.”

  She hadn’t learned much about kehoks in her training, only that they were the worst fate for the worst of souls. The bulk of augur training focused on ordinary souls. Kehoks were a cautionary tale. “I think if my ‘fiancé’ were to be reborn as a kehok, he wouldn’t have your eyes. There’s nothing good about him.”

  It was funny, but the longer she talked to the black lion, the easier it was to stay in the stable. She could almost forget she was surrounded by monsters. At least until the other students began to come inside, and the kehoks burst into rage-filled roars again.

  Quickly, Raia ducked into an empty stall.

  Peeking out, Raia saw three students: two girls and a boy, all about Raia’s age. One of the girls had a shaved head, the boy had a scar on his left arm that looked like a crescent moon, and the other girl towered over Raia by at least two feet. All three of them wore sleeveless tunics that showed off their arm muscles. Looking at them, Raia was aware of how few muscles she had, anywhere. She was also aware that they had blocked the stable’s only exit, and that she was effectively cornered inside a stall.

  One of the girls whispered something to the boy, and he laughed.

  Raia shrank deeper into the stall and wondered if they’d noticed her yet.

  “Hey, new girl,” the tall girl called between the kehok screams. “Come on out.”

  Heart thudding, Raia inched forward. She wondered if they planned to hurt her and if she could stop them. Trainer Verlas will stop them, she thought. But how would Trainer Verlas know she needed her? Any call for help would be drowned out by the cries of the kehoks. And any screams would be lost beneath theirs.

  “Whoa, relax!” the girl with the shaved head said. “You look more scared of us than of the kehoks. Promise we don’t bite. At least not as hard as they do.”

  “It’s because I’m tall,” the tall girl said knowingly. “You think because I’m tall I have the overwhelming urge to drop heavy objects on smaller people.”

  “You don’t?” the boy asked. “I always assumed you did.”

  “Of course I do,” the tall girl said, “but I resist those urges because I’m civilized. Unlike you. You are literally standing in monster crap.”

  The boy lo
oked down. He’d stepped in a mound of manure. “Shit.”

  “Yes,” the tall girl agreed.

  Watching them, Raia didn’t think they seemed threatening. Maybe she didn’t need to be afraid of them. Still, experience had taught her caution.

  “I’m Silar,” the tall girl said. “This is Algana, and he’s Jalimo.”

  Jalimo pointed to his feet. “And these were new boots.”

  The shaved-head girl, Algana, clicked her tongue. “You should know better than to wear new boots to a stable. What were you going to do when Trainer Osir asked you to muck out stalls?”

  “I was going to bribe you into doing it for me,” Jalimo said, then turned to Raia. “So what’s your name, who’s your trainer, and are you a paying student?”

  Before Raia could answer, Algana jumped in. “She has to be a paying student. Look at her.” To Raia, she said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with paying—the trainers need to eat. You just don’t look like someone who . . . Well, you don’t look . . . Silar, help me out here.”

  “Oh, no, you stuck your foot in your mouth all by yourself.” Silar was grinning. But it wasn’t an unfriendly grin. Raia allowed herself to relax minutely.

  “My name’s Raia, and I’m not a paying student,” Raia said.

  “Yes!” Jalimo said, punching the air. “Another one of us! We’re all training to be champions. The paying students . . . they’re just paying to play being brave. Fierce rivalry between us and them.”

  Silar rolled her eyes. “No, there isn’t.”

  “We at least look down on them,” Jalimo said in a wounded voice.

  “And they look down on us,” Algana said.

  “It’s a mutual condescension thing,” Jalimo agreed. “But the trainers won’t allow an actual rivalry. They said it will distract us from our training. And besides, the kehoks bruise us up plenty. We don’t need to fight among ourselves.”

  “So you aren’t going to beat me?” Raia burst out, before she thought about her words.