by Kate Elliott
“What do we do about her, Captain?” whispers one of the Wolves.
“Nothing.”
Driven as by a whip, mind fixed to his purpose, Kellas runs for the tower of rock. With the five Wolves spread out around him he easily scales the height, which rises no more than the height of three men. They fetch up behind a convenient stand of mountain-blue swaying in the wind. Its scent fills his lungs as he crawls forward on elbows and knees to see what awaits them.
The crown has a flat plateau no more than a spear’s toss in width and length, rimmed with twisted juniper, and on its east face a slab of higher rock creates several deep overhangs like shallow caves. Deep within one of the overhangs shines a metallic gleam. Has Atani led his men to a demon’s coil, the strange artifacts that in Kellas’s youth were known as Guardian altars?
He blinks and realizes the man he is looking for stands in plain view in the middle of the tiny plateau. The king’s riding clothes are scuffed and untidy but he is alive, with his remaining bodyguard on his right and a grizzled veteran Wolf on his left. A circle of sixteen Wolves surround a group of kneeling men with hands on their heads in the traditional pose of surrender. These are evidently the last sixteen survivors from the unmarked ambushers, although four wear no scale coat and have the callused hands of carters. By drawing the fight out of the confined space between wagons, the Wolves have won their victory.
But the king isn’t yet safe.
Six men wearing the gold tabards of Teriayne stand off to the south, guarding what seems to be a path up the back side of the knob of rock. Lord Seras waits beside them. He is a burly man of thirty-four. Seras and Vanas look quite a bit alike. Both have the broad cheekbones and stockier stature of the foreign-born Qin soldiers. Like most younger sons of the Qin soldiers who came to the Hundred with Anjihosh, Vanas went into the Wolves to prove himself.
Unlike his spear-and sword-wielding men, Lord Seras holds no weapon. One might think him at ease now the king is safe and the threat foiled, except he shifts from foot to foot as he watches the famously tranquil king rip into Chief Tobuk.
“Once they lay down their arms, as these have done, we do not execute them. The carters were not armed at all. They ran because they were afraid.”
“But Your Highness, they tried to kill you. They were in on the plot.”
“And they will stand trial for the offense. That is how the law works. Law is our shield. We do not govern by the sword. Furthermore we can only discover who hatched the plot if we have someone to question.” He turns his gaze from Chief Tobuk, braced at attention to better absorb the reprimand, to the kneeling men. “Now let me ask again. Who hired you? Who do you work for?”
The light changes as the sun touches the horizon. Silence sinks like the weight of anguish as the wind abruptly stills. None of the defeated men looks up. It’s as if they already know what Atani is, even though only ten people in the whole wide world have ever known who and what he truly is.
There are three kinds of demons in the Hundred.
There are ordinary demons, called demon-hearts in the old tales.
There are cloaked demons, once called Guardians, whose demon skin gives them terrible powers. Most people believe that ordinary demons and cloaked demons are the only kinds of demons. But Kellas knows better.
Atani and his hidden sister, the girl called Arasit, are also demons. Anjihosh sired both Atani and Arasit, it’s true, but their genesis as demons is far stranger. In dark days years ago, Mai found refuge beside a pool of liquid blue fire. The very bones and flesh of the two children she gave birth to are saturated with the substance of mysterious creatures called firelings, one of the Eight Children of the Four Mothers who gave birth to the Hundred according to the ancient tale.
Arasit is scarcely human at all. Kellas has seen her struck by lightning and laugh as if the jolt merely tickled her. Like the nine who wear cloaks she can rip open a human mind and look into it as easily as a cook cracks open a crab’s shell. But that isn’t all she can do.
Atani is almost as human as any other person. He cannot see into the thoughts of others, but he senses emotions and can use his gaze and voice to influence people’s actions. Like his sister he can blot out of a person’s mind the last tangled skein of their most recent memory so it is erased as if it never was. Unlike Arasit, who has few compunctions, this last is a particularly cruel gift he has only used three times.
“Look at me,” says the king in the voice no one dares disobey because it is a demon’s voice, subtle and staggering and calm. “Do not lie for I will know if you are lying.”
Lord Seras extends a hand to one of his soldiers to take the man’s spear.
Kellas jumps up, whistling the alert that all Wolves know.
“Vanas, stay here as rear guard,” he says.
He crashes out from the branches as Atani’s Wolves spin around, weapons raised to confront this new threat. When they recognize their captain and five fellow Wolves, they relax infinitesimally. But Kellas sprints forward, seeing Seras’s hand close around the shaft of a spear.
He cries, “Beware Lord Seras—”
“Captain Kellas is the traitor! The demons have their claws into him!” shouts Seras.
Their hesitation is all Seras needs. He flings the weapon toward the knot of men as if at Kellas. Suddenly everyone is shouting at once as Atani goes down beneath one of his bodyguards.
Seras’s voice rings out. “The Wolves are in Kellas’s power. Strike to save the king!”
At that instant Kellas must choose to go to the king or go after Seras.
His thoughts race, and the scene around him slows until he can mark every piece of it: the bodyguard with the spear in his back he has taken to save his king; Atani squirming to get out from under; the Wolves hesitating as their captain and brother Wolves race toward them like attackers; Vanas holding the rear guard as ordered; the gold tabards bolting forward with swords drawn; the surrendered men leaping up as they see their chance to escape.
He dodges left, headed toward Seras as Seras hefts another spear. A stumbling man blocks his path. Whatever he is, he is no Wolf, and he is in the way. Kellas cuts him down because he has to get to Seras before the spear is cast.
“Isar!” A woman darts up beside him, swinging a staff. Its blow catches him off guard and he staggers sideways. She flings herself down beside the fallen man, grabbing a knife from the man’s boot. As Kellas rights himself, she slashes at him.
He catches the knife’s edge on his blade, then cuts inside. Too late his eye registers the sling with the baby tucked inside. He pulls the blow.
In a desperate frenzy of defense she leaps in, jabbing at him with a blow that thumps up under the flap of his armored coat. He counterpunches with the hilt of his sword. The cross-hilt slams into her face, puncturing her eye. Liquid spatters. Her scream and the spasm with which she jerks away, her hand shoving off his chest, rock him. As he twists to gain balance, his blade comes down on the baby’s head. Flesh parts beneath the edge.
But he is already moving, jumping over the woman as she collapses.
“Traitor!” The word sparks amid the clamor, and Kellas can’t even tell who shouted it.
Atani rolls the wounded bodyguard off as the Wolves scatter to catch the fleeing ambushers.
“My lord! Stay down! Lord Seras is the traitor!” Kellas glances around but he has lost track of Seras. His vision blurs. A terrible pain blossoms in his side as he realizes the woman’s knife penetrated his flesh.
Atani does not stay down. He stands, the cursed fool, and whistles in the way Kellas taught him years ago, the sound so shrill and penetrating it chokes the clamor and confusion. “Stand down! Everyone! Stand down!”
His voice has magic.
Soldiers pause, obedient to his will.
The baby is wailing. The king strides to where the woman has fallen on top of the man she ran to. One side of her face has become a ruin. The cotton pulled tight across her breasts has soaked through but not with blood:
Her milk has let down. Its warm smell blends with the iron of blood and the stink of urine and voided bowels.
Her fall has dislodged the sling, spilling the baby onto the dirt. The infant’s cheek lies opened to the bone, skin peeled up. Blood paints its eyes and hair, and it is screaming.
Atani kneels beside the young woman. Her taloos has unwound enough to reveal an unexpectedly fine silk undervest, garb only a very rich woman can afford. Seeing this, the king slices off strips of silk and binds the baby’s face, then tucks the little body against his chest. Its squalls cease the moment he looks into its dark eyes.
“This woman is Ri Amarah,” says the king. “How is she come to leave her people and fall in with this group?”
Too late Kellas sees Seras pushing forward through a screen of his own men, the king’s back to him.
“Atani, beware!” He can place himself in the way. He can take the spear in his own heart.
He leaps forward, but instead he is so weak that he stumbles.
Atani staggers as if punched from behind. His eyebrows draw down in puzzlement. Still grasping the infant, the king pitches forward into Kellas’s arms, the baby caught between them.
A spear sticks out of the king’s back, its shaft tilted crazily like a grotesque ornament.
Another spear passes over Kellas’s bent back and buries itself in Seras’s chest. Vanas races into view and cuts his brother’s throat as the man lies twitching on the ground.
“Curse you to the hells!” Vanas shrieks, choked with rage. “Curse you to all the hells, Seras!”
The fallen man has risen to his knees, sobbing: “Nadit! Stay with me, my darling!”
The Black Wolves stare in shock. An eagle and reeve appear in the heavens, circling down. The whole world eddies around this one point.
Blood trickles from Atani’s nose. His gaze tracks to the overhang. A light shudders in the dimness, tracing a knotted pattern that sears into Kellas’s throbbing vision. Through its hazy, intangible contours he can see only one thing: The generous, joyful boy who laughed as his little sister beat him at a child’s game is dying in his arms.
“Arasit is coming,” Atani whispers. “Don’t let them kill her, Captain.”
A faintly wry smile creases Kellas’s lips. “As if they could kill one like her. Can the coil not heal you as it does the others, Atani? Let me carry you there.”
He tries to rise but his legs give out from under him, and he finally realizes how deep is the wound in his side.
“Too late,” whispers Atani. “I am weighted with too much flesh to be healed as they are. Captain, I rely on you … on you to remain loyal…”
The light leaves his eyes. Flesh transforms to mere meat.
The baby begins screaming again.
There is no healing when the spirit departs the body. There is only emptiness.
The demon’s coil flares so brightly that the entire scene is lit as by a thousand lamps. Deadly Arasit shines as she appears on the coil. She is the only demon who can walk through one coil across vast distances onto another, because her substance is more fireling than flesh. Her brilliance reflects off a scuffed bronze mirror tied by a leather cord to the belt of the dead Ri Amarah woman, mirrors reflecting mirrors until the world is nothing but glare.
Then darkness falls with a hammer, and he collapses beside the inconsolable baby and the corpse of the man he swore on his life and honor to protect.
“He still died, even though you were there, and everyone saw that you knew the demon, even though the creature escaped,” Dannarah was saying.
Kellas climbed out of the hole of memory and recalled that he was seated in the marshal’s cote, trying to convince Dannarah to take a message to Salya.
Oblivious to his silence, she had started piling the cut paper into an unsteady pillar as if to build a new memory out of sundered truths. “Let me tell you a thing I’ve never mentioned before, Captain. On his deathbed, my father told me that of all the people still living, the only one I could trust to be honest with me was you. All of his original Qin bodyguard were dead by then, of course. I couldn’t help but notice that he did not say Atani.”
Now he regretted letting emotion rule his words. He should have said nothing about ever having had any suspicions of her being involved in Atani’s death.
She folded her hands beside the pile of torn paper and burned him with her glare. “Tell me how and why my supposed plot to murder my beloved brother would have unfolded.”
“You separated me from Atani and told me to kill Jehosh. Had they both died, you would have been left to act as regent for the younger boys.”
To his surprise she nodded. “A reasonable plan. But as I know you know, I had nothing to do with Atani’s death. It hurt me more than anyone, in my heart and also in my life and ambition.”
She struck flint and spark to light a lamp. One by one she fed scraps to the flame, letting the paper flare in her fingers and afterward dusting the ash to the table. The scrape of saws and adzes and the knocking of hammers gave the only sign of nearby life except for a pair of gold-feathered sun-wings chirping under the eaves.
“Then why did you ask me to go with the army and kill Jehosh?”
She looked up, the weathering of her many years evident on her face. The wind and rain and sky had kept her strong. “Because I didn’t trust Jehosh not to ruin what my brilliant father accomplished. King Anjihosh the Glorious took a chaotic, strife-ridden land and made it peaceful, orderly, and prosperous. Atani was a good steward of that peace. Jehosh was too eager to go to war. It’s true he has acquitted himself well in the field, but at home he puts his own desires and whims before the needs of the Hundred. I can’t help but see what has become of the palace during Jehosh’s reign and believe that I was right to ask you to kill him. The court has splintered into at least four factions because Jehosh is lazy and thus weak.”
“Four? Jehosh, Chorannah, Dia.”
“A person is a fool who doesn’t see that Lord Vanas is looking out for his own interests. Are you a fool, Captain?”
“I try not to be.”
“The Hundred became strong because my father made it strong. It is the duty of his heirs to rule with strength and wisdom. Jehosh is not a strong ruler and I am not convinced he ever can be. I certainly can’t trust either queen. We are entering a dangerous time for King Anjihosh’s legacy. You know it as well as I do.”
“I do know it,” he agreed. “Which is why I ask you to see this message taken to Salya.”
She held out a hand. “Very well.”
He handed her the folded and sealed paper.
She tapped the paper against her arm, then set her gaze on him in a way that made him understand he could not look away. “Where did Atani’s household go, after he died?”
“Your question takes me by surprise. Have you had no contact with them since his death?”
“I saw Queen Yevah briefly in the palace after Atani’s death when everyone was arguing over the funeral rites and how to punish the conspirators and Lord Seras’s helpless sons. After that fiasco of castrating innocent boys I was too angry to stay. Then I was too busy with the administration of the reeve halls. Then Jehosh returned from his first war and threw me out as chief marshal. I busied myself as marshal of Horn Hall, and I knew I was not welcome at the palace … So, I haven’t seen her for twenty years. Yet I feel I would have heard if Yevah had died. Surely Jehosh would mourn his mother’s passing.”
He hoped and prayed that the years they had been separated made him opaque to her. “Why do you care after all this time, if you have not sought contact with her before this?”
“It has come to my attention that there may have been things about his life that Atani never told me. I’m just trying to thread some broken chains together. Where did they go?”
“Queen Yevah has an estate outside Toskala.”
“I have ascertained that she does not live there, Captain. Where else might she have gone?”
“Queen Zayrah
on her deathbed willed her estate on the Beacon Coast to Atani. I always suspected she did it to give Lady Eiko some place to stay, for as you know Lady Eiko cared for Atani’s mother as kindly as if she were the queen’s own kinswoman and not just Atani’s lover.”
“Aui! Is that meant to put me in my place, Captain? That I did not care properly for my mother?”
“Nothing of the kind, Lady Dannarah,” he retorted more sharply than he meant to. “It happened that way. That is all.”
“That is never all. Anyway, I have ascertained they aren’t there, either. Have you anything else to tell me?”
He had seen her angry many times but something deeper coiled in her words now, and he dreaded it. “I do not know what else you wish to know.”
“Was my brother a demon?”
The words tumbled through his mind like avalanching rocks ripping a gouge into a mountainside. His throat closed over any reply, because this was the most dangerous ground of all.
She held the folded paper he had given her over the flame until the edges began to brown, then withdrew it before it caught on fire. “When I was in Salya at your clan’s house I saw a cloaked demon, who called herself Marit. I saw your granddaughter Fohiono nod her head at this demon as if the creature was familiar and ordinary to her rather than a threat. Does Plum Blossom Clan consort with demons, Captain?”
“What do you mean, Lady Dannarah?” He kept his voice placid, but he felt as if his ears were in flames because he could see no way this conversation was not about to go wrong in a hundred different directions.
“The demon tried to seduce me with her lies and lures into believing that no demons ever wanted Atani dead. But my father taught me that demons hate the king. Demons want to keep the Hundred weak and fractured instead of strong and unified. Killing Atani brought a weak ruler like Jehosh to the throne, and now indeed the court is fracturing.”
