Lady of the Sands

by Fuad Baloch

“Of course, they are!”

  Ruma exhaled, forced her heartbeat to calm down. “You lack both numbers and morale.” Bubraza opened her mouth, but Ruma continued talking over her, holding up both hands. “More than likely, the Vanico army ahead already knows your position. If they haven’t come to crush you yet, they are waiting for you to come to them. And when you do”—Ruma clapped with such force that every head turned towards her—“the men they have secreted away will attack you from behind, crush you in the middle.”

  The Uniter, one of the most important figures in history, the one Ruma knew had to come out victorious, trembled with rage. “How dare you—”

  “You are I are very similar. Always twisted around by what’s right and demands of our own feelings. Now is not the time for wounded pride, though. Do not rush in headlong without thinking through what lies ahead.”

  Bubraza continued glaring at her, but Ruma could tell some of the sting had dissipated. Losing a battle—especially the way she just had—tended to do that to a proud person.

  “I…” Bubraza shook her head. “What else can be done?”

  Ruma stepped forwards, certain now where she saw the greater evil. “The priority is to stop the artillery—the catapults. The machines are bulky to move, hard to defend. Give me thirty of your men and I will destroy them.” And I might also have a way to slow them down with my vials. “Keep a token presence in the orchard but push the bulk of your forces out. When unable to assail the city walls, the Vanico army will turn around and come after you. And when they do—”

  “We outflank them and enter the city walls to join the governor’s forces,” completed Bubraza, nodding her head thoughtfully. “A brilliant plan.”

  Ruma nodded, impressed the woman had caught on easily. Neither of them mentioned the fate of those few they’d be leaving behind as bait. Breathing men who would turn into martyrs.

  “When do you plan to strike?”

  Ruma watched her shadow, which was already twice her height. “Midnight.”

  “Very well. I shall come seek you an hour before.” Ruma jerked her head up. “Just because I agree with your plan doesn’t mean I trust you enough to lead my men.” Bubraza chuckled, but Ruma knew better.

  The woman’s pride had been wounded by the manner in which they had been caught napping. This time, Bubraza would lead the counterattack, salvage what little she could of her shredded pride.

  Bubraza raised her hand and Ruma stopped. So did the thirty soldiers behind them. Still crouching, Gareeb coughed softly into his hands. Bubraza, her features outlined by soft starlight, scowled at the young man, then waited for long breaths.

  Ruma nodded. The woman might not have had any formal guerrilla training, but she did have a natural feel for tactics. Patting her side as if to confirm she still had the sword safely strapped to her waist along with the vial, Ruma strained ahead.

  As she had hoped, the artillery camp was poorly guarded. Two dozen or so guards loitered beside open fires, their guttural drawls unintelligible from this distance. Spent for the day, the catapults, the massive machines that had taken the Andussian peninsula by surprise, lay a hundred yards behind them.

  “Only fifty or so yards between the catapults and their tents,” whispered Ruma, gesturing at Bubraza.

  “We won’t have a lot of time,” replied Bubraza.

  “No, we won’t. We need to be in and out in…” Ruma ran a mental check. “Five minutes.”

  “Five minutes,” repeated Bubraza. They hadn’t yet learned to divide time in the way Ruma’s Doonya did, but the unfamiliarity with the term didn’t seem to dampen her understanding.

  Ruma bit her tongue, her heart racing. Her thoughts travelled to the night she and Hanoos, the Misguided, had boarded the Zrivisi ship to secure her passage off Doonya. Not that different of a night from this, even if separated by an eternity. The night had been clear, the desert winds cool against the skin, her adrenaline rushing through her just as much now as then.

  That mission hadn’t turned out well, though.

  Ruma shook her head. The past—or the future, depending on how she thought of her life—was done for the moment.

  Trepidation rose within her. She was not seeing something important, some force hurtling her towards an ending others knew more of than her. A stone hurled across the sky, tumbling too fast to see the landscape underneath.

  Bubraza raised her hand, then turned around to face the eager faces Ruma imagined looking up at her.

  “Go!” she hissed. The men fanned out, rushed past her.

  Bubraza rose to a half-crouch. Ruma grabbed her by the arm. “Stay here!”

  The shorter woman yanked her arm free. “Never lay a finger on me again.”

  Ruma gritted her teeth. “Suit yourself.”

  As Bubraza rushed towards the nearest group of soldiers at the cook pot ahead, her hands already throwing fighting knives, cries broke out all around them.

  The attack had begun. Ruma grimaced. A covert mission where one entered like a ghost seldom ended as predicted. Shrugging the thoughts away, she sprinted towards a Vanico soldier grappling with a Traditionalist warrior.

  “You—”

  Ruma skewered him, then, without pausing, pulled out her sword and ducked under the swing of another soldier. As she brought her own sword up, the soldier who had attacked her was already collapsing. Gareeb emerged from behind him, grinned foolishly at her.

  “Keep moving!” Ruma hissed.

  More shouts came from her right. And worryingly, a few calls from the tents beyond.

  “What’s going on?” rang a shrill voice, the words clear, articulate. Not accented with the harsh vowels she’d have expected.

  “Hurry!” hissed Ruma, her darting eyes looking for Bubraza, who had seemingly been swallowed up by the night.

  Steel rang against steel. More shouts rose.

  Ruma licked her lips, dabbed at the sweat gathering on her brow. Too many shouts, even when one accounted for the relative inexperience of her companions.

  “Walk the lonely path, infidel!” shouted someone to her right. A voice she recognised as belonging to a young man with a slight limp.

  “Meet Alf, you heretic!” came a shout from the front. Ruma shook her head, troubled by the words. Something was wrong. All plans had a chance of going wrong, of presenting some variable one had miscalculated. But her intuition cried out as it recognised one she hadn’t anticipated at all.

  Her eyes found Bubraza. Three men had formed a circle around her. They jabbed, thrust, swinging their swords at the short woman in their midst. Growling, Bubraza moved like agitated mercury, somehow slipping the attacks at the very last instant. Ruma blinked, rushed to rescue her. “We need to turn back!”

  “Nonsense!” shouted back Bubraza, her words clipped but not drowned by the snarling men.

  Ruma heard the snarl a second before something rammed into her stomach. A kick! With a poof, Ruma collapsed on the ground, pain shooting up her body, all wind gone from her lungs.

  The shouting became a racket.

  Lying down on the ground, for the moment unable to move her physical body, Ruma finally realised what was wrong. For all its strength, this army could have broken through the city’s defences a long time ago. Yet it hadn’t. As if waiting for the Traditionalists to walk into a trap. Not the only thing that was wrong. The voices. Not the guttural drawls she’d expected, but clean, perfectly clipped Anduras accents.

  Currents ran underneath currents. She could see one of them now.

  Dimly, she registered a dark figure jump ahead of her and grunt as his sword blocked the soldier. Gareeb!

  Coughing, Ruma got up to her feet, shook her head. She looked around for her sword, couldn’t spy it.

  “Turn back!” she croaked.

  “Alf curse you!” shouted Gareeb, followed by the sickening sound of a knife perforating a ripe melon.

  Ruma spat to the side, straggled over to Gareeb, her eyes looking for Bubraza.

  Gareeb huffed
. “The catapults are over there—”

  Ruma broke into a sprint. The three men had become five. Bubraza still stood in the centre, still fighting as strong as she had, but the movements were slowing down.

  “Bubraza!” shouted Ruma.

  The shorter woman turned her head, her attention diverted for a fraction of a second. Plenty of time when it came to matters like these.

  “No!” screamed Ruma.

  As if realising the mistake she had made, Bubraza ducked almost instinctively and pushed her sword out in front. Steel rang out against steel. She didn’t dodge the second attack. A stream of black liquid spilled from her thigh as a sword slashed across it.

  Bubraza screamed, sword still somehow clutched in her hand.

  Gareeb rushed towards their commander, Ruma half a step behind.

  The Uniter dodged two more attacks, then screamed in agony as more blood streamed from a gash in her stomach.

  Gareeb thrashed into the soldiers, shattering their circle. Still winded, Ruma feinted to the left, sank her sword to the hilt into the soldier in front of her.

  The other soldiers had turned their attention to the newcomers. Shouts from the tents were getting closer. They had run out of time, their mission a spectacular failure.

  Ruma stuttered for a second, her hand dripping to pat her side.

  Her eyes fell on the catapults. Two of them had caught fire. But they had counted at least a dozen from the orchard. Bubraza howled beside her. Ruma began to turn when her eyes caught the cook pots.

  Again, she patted her side, felt the poison vials she had grabbed from the Kapuris’ provisions—strong enough to kill the snakes that roamed the countryside.

  Time wasn’t on her side.

  Exhaling, Ruma rushed towards the unguarded cook pot with the overpowering scent of onions, a staple of all armies moving across Ghal. She threw the bottle into the pot, then rushed over to Bubraza.

  The Uniter was moaning, one arm draped across Gareeb.

  “We’re… We’re…” Gareeb trailed away.

  “Turn around!” growled Ruma. She stepped up beside the young commander, placing her other arm across her shoulder. Bubraza winced. Ruma looked down. Bubraza’s tunic was slick, a pool of liquid gathering at her feet.

  Ruma squeezed her eyes for a second. Then she screamed in frustration.

  “Ruma!” said Gareeb. “What do we do?”

  “Run, you fool!”

  Thirty-Nine

  The Eyes

  “What in Alf’s name happened?” demanded Gareeb, panting.

  Ruma sucked her teeth. How long had they been dragging Bubraza now? Half an hour? Longer? She craned her neck back. The palm trees had helped them melt away from any that might have pursued them, but she also couldn’t see them.

  “Hang on,” said Ruma, pulling up Bubraza’s chin with her other hand.

  The woman’s lips moved. Ruma leaned in. The words were too quiet. A jumble of syllables and consonants broken by winces.

  “We need to stop, see how badly she’s hit,” said Ruma.

  “We can’t stop!” Gareeb turned his head around. “We’re still half a mile from our forces.”

  “Can’t let her bleed to death!”

  “But—”

  Ruma waved her arm in annoyance, then pointed at a tall tree to their right. “The trunk is thick enough to hide us. Head over there!”

  Gareeb muttered something under his breath but took her lead. Half-dragging, half-carrying Bubraza, they approached the tree. Bubraza whimpered, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. Ruma bent over, her hands gently prying apart the fabric of her tunic. She exhaled. The slash to her thigh was largely superficial. Tissue damage. Nothing a minor visit to sickbay wouldn’t have fixed in a matter of minutes.

  The wound in the stomach was something different entirely.

  “Is she going to be alright?” asked Gareeb, his face averted to the side as if out of modesty.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you bandage her or something?”

  Ruma inhaled, felt tears pool in her eyes. The woman underneath her winced again, her eyes shut, the skin burning hot, her entrails visible under the tunic.

  “Well?” demanded Gareeb. He pushed her to the side, bent over himself, his eyes travelling to the terrible wound in Bubraza’s stomach. “Oh!”

  Ruma suppressed the urge to scream. Little good that would do except draw attention from the bastards pursuing them.

  “What do we do now?” asked Gareeb, his voice low, strained.

  Ruma shook her head. What the frack did she know? How had the mission gone so wrong, almost as if they’d been anticipated? What would she do if she lost the one person she thought had the best chance of healing the relationship between the two factions?

  What in seven hells was she not seeing?

  Bubraza grimaced. Then she screamed, her body beginning to convulse. Cursing, Ruma bent over, placed a hand over her mouth, the other trying to keep her body calm.

  “Oh, Alf! Oh, Alf!” muttered Gareeb. Ruma heard him stand up, take out his sword, his back towards them now.

  The screams fell away even as the body continued to convulse for another half a minute.

  Ruma chewed on her lower lip so hard she could feel blood break out. They needed an auto-doctor, a fully trained medic on site. Of course, this was the wrong bloody world. Still, they needed to get away, get to the barber-surgeons, see if they could patch up this woman.

  “The end times are near, so declare I, a prophet of Lord of the Worlds. Water and Fire. Earth and the Sun. The two moons and the black nothingness. Life and Death. When one comes, so does the second. And the second shall rival the first. Together. Apart. Fire and Water.”

  Ruma shuddered, recalling the prophecy. She wasn’t one to put much stock in prophecies, but it didn’t matter when half the world did. If this woman, acclaimed by most as the prophesied one, was to pass away, that wouldn’t bode well for what happened in the future. In her world.

  Right?

  She had to do something.

  Ruma rose, washed down the guilt at leaving the dying woman without her company.

  Was there really nothing she could do? She’d never really been a medic, but was there nothing around she could—

  Thoughts melted away as she realised she did have a card up her sleeve.

  “First…” she called out.

  The Pithrean didn’t respond.

  “You’re here,” she said. “Dying, just like this woman! I know that. Talk to me or I swear I am going to do everything in my power to deny you everything you desire!”

  Silence.

  Distantly, she heard the rustle of boots. Gareeb scouting ahead. The soft moans of Bubraza.

  “First—”

  “What do you seek?”

  Ruma swallowed. “This woman… She must live. Help me save her life and… I will help you.”

  “I cannot save her.”

  “Of course not!” she howled. “You wanted her dead, didn’t you?”

  The pressure on her temples mounted, but the Pithrean kept quiet.

  Ruma squeezed her eyes shut, her fingers curling into fists. They could try carrying the woman over, hoping the men they had left behind would have a medic who could—

  Realisation bloomed within her More pieces of the puzzle falling in together. There was a good reason she’d felt their mission had been anticipated, that the Vanico army had been biding its time, almost waiting for them to come in the night-time.

  Because she had fracking projected her plans in advance to the one woman she needed to have hidden her plans from.

  Is that what the Pithrean had been trying all along? Have her help Yasmeen defeat Bubraza?

  “You played me!” she accused.

  The Pithrean didn’t say anything. Ruma hissed. There was something else as well: a shift in the balance of power she could feel but not really see.

  “You wanted this. From the very first moment, you did
n’t really want me to kill Yasmeen. You wanted this woman to die. This Uniter who would heal the warring factions and ensure the faith survived in its form as it had in my time. Because she would have gone on to become the Lady, right?”

  How had she missed it all?

  Ruma gritted her teeth, then kicked the trunk with all her might. Her toes hurt like seven hells, but in her rage, she barely registered the pain. She had been played like a fiddle. All this time, the First had been manipulating her, charting her path for her, and like a damned fool who thought herself otherwise, she’d been dancing to his tune.

  “What do you want?”

  The First didn’t respond. Why was that? Surely, the fracker must be ecstatic about having achieved all he’d wanted and should have been gloating. Yet somehow she could feel his despair within her.

  Something still hadn’t gone according to his plan.

  At the sound of soft footfalls across the sand, Ruma looked over, not even bothering to reach for a weapon.

  “No one is chasing us,” reported Gareeb. His eye fell on the still figure beneath her. “Yet.”

  “We could…” Ruma cleared her throat. “We should take her to the main host awaiting the order to rush into Salodia.”

  “Aye.”

  Ruma nodded, bending to raise Bubraza. Another thought flashed through her mind. She stilled, then straightened her back, dread pooling in the pit of her stomach.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Gareeb.

  “We… We can’t go to the main host.”

  “Why not?”

  Bubraza squirmed. Ruma bent, pulled the woman’s hand in hers. Bubraza moaned, one swollen eye miraculously settling on her face. “You…”

  “Take it easy,” said Ruma. “You’re going to be alright.”

  “Y-you… a-are a good l-liar.”

  Ruma smiled sadly. “Thank you.”

  “I…”

  “Go on.”

  Bubraza’s lips quivered. Ruma leaned in closer, willing the shorter woman to take some of her own strength, even if for only a breath. Bubraza’s breath grew ragged. Ruma pulled up the woman to help her breathe.

  Bubraza didn’t say anything.