The Seared Lands

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “If you must bring war to your enemy in his own fortress,” the great poet and general Zhao Quan wrote, “do so in a time or place of upheaval, when you are not expected. The key to victory against great odds is to use a surprise attack.”

  “Seize the dream,” he whispered to himself, and hardened his heart. The disarray of the imperial soldiers was no sham. His own troops stood but a few paces behind, white-faced with shock but already armed and armored for war.

  “Gather your troops,” he shouted, though there was little need; no general would be so foolish as to waste such an opportunity as this. “To arms! To arms! To war!”

  Jian held up his war fan. It flashed blue and white, and his force went to point like the Huntress’s hounds scenting blood. Then he brought it down sharply, pointing straight at the imperial troops and the emperor beyond.

  “To the palace!” he cried, and was lifted up, carried along on the tides of war, a child’s toy in a maelstrom.

  They poured into the once-immaculate streets of the Forbidden City as a muddy river pours into the sea, and were met by rank upon rank of the emperor’s soldiers—daeborn princes who had survived the great wheel, every one, ready beneath the banner of the white bull.

  Arrows hissed down upon Jian’s forces like a rain of vipers, and pikes lowered as they were met with a high, thick wall of shields and iron that would seem to the untrained eye as impenetrable as the scaled hide of a dragon. But Jian’s eyes and heart were not untrained. He had trained with, then led, his father’s armies during his long years in the Twilight Lands. Every moment of that time had been spent in preparation for this moment.

  Lifting his fan, he turned it to the south three times— and sent the raptors forward. Each of the chinmong, those creatures with which the mountain tribes lived and hunted, was half the height of a tall man and nearly twice as long. Lithe and quick, they did not slow at the sight of the shield wall and bristling lances. Obeying their handlers’ whistles they rushed at the imperial troops with great leaping bounds, quicker than the human eye could track, then set upon any exposed flesh they could reach with tooth and claw.

  Men who were used to facing human enemies—or at least half-human enemies—were not trained for the alien ferocity of such a maneuver. Precious minutes passed before the shield wall began to show gaps as men fell, screaming, and the raptors tore into them. The tortoise-shell formation—so effective against arrows and light infantry—was no defense.

  Human soldiers rushed in and the battle unfolded in the streets of Khanbul as a flower opening to the first light of spring, no less beautiful for being expected.

  “The outcome of a battle,” Allyr had told his son, “is decided in the first ten heartbeats of the fight. One side will have an advantage over the other, be it the high ground, strength in numbers, quality of force, or the element of surprise. An effective general will exploit this advantage without hesitation and smash the enemy before they have time to work out an effective counter-strategy.

  “This does not mean,” Jian’s father had warned, “that a general should presume the outcome of any battle, no matter how predictable it may seem. For every trick you have up your sleeve, assume that your enemy has ten, and you will never be disappointed.”

  Directing the course of a battle was much like captaining a massive sea vessel through the heart of a storm. It was necessary to separate the heart from the mind. Necessary also to control as best one could the larger course of events without losing sight of the many smaller incidents playing themselves out within the larger drama. A slip, a misstep, a moment of inattention on the part of the field general might spell disaster for them all.

  Jian felt suspended in time as he called the chinmong back, ordered the archers to hold, and the ghella handlers to loose their heavily armored, long-trunked beasts among the hapless defenders. He could not afford to listen to or care about the screams of his own men as the emperor’s arrows found their targets, nor those of the imperial swordsmen as they were trampled and gored. Nor could he rejoice as a massive force of crudely armed human peasantry came to join the rebel army.

  Giella and her country bards had long worked to shape his years-long campaign against the emperor’s troops, transforming it into a hero’s story, framing him as a champion to the common people. Quickly the emperor’s troops lost ground. Fear bloomed in their hearts. It appeared in the whites of their eyes and sang in the pitch of their screams. Defeat showed in the way they stood, the uncertain fashion with which they held sword and spear and bow, in the way they clung to their tiny, meaningless lives rather than throwing themselves wholly into the fight.

  The battle, Jian knew, was already won.

  Then a light rose up from the Palace of Flowers and moved toward them like the dawn of a dying day. Bright it was, lovely, and terrible. Jian had seen the likes of it before, many times.

  “Luminists!” he bellowed. “Ware luminists!” and across the field of battle a cry went up from all sides.

  “Luminists!”

  The emperor’s light-sorcerers spared none when they came with their killing light, and they cared not. Yet Jian’s forces were prepared for this, having faced the threat before. Most of them wore helms with silken gauze affixed over or under the eye-slits. Those who were helmless made haste to tie strips of spidersilk over their eyes and the eyes of their beasts. Others, who were less prepared—mostly the common folk—drew clothing up over their heads in a frantic effort to spare their sight, or ran for cover.

  The light came striding down the emperor’s path, fanning out like a plague of fire, naked women and men soulbound to the emperor, sworn to the heartless flame. Too brilliant to look upon, too terrible to imagine. All those pieces of them which had been woman or man, Dae or human, had been stripped away—they were scooped hollow as an old skull and filled instead with a killing flame that revealed and destroyed all truth.

  The sorcerers spread out, raising their arms and chanting with voices like the crackling of wildfire, the strike of lightning from a clear sky. Screams rose from those who were nearest to them—imperial troops and rebels alike—as the clothing beneath armor began to smolder and smoke, flesh began to char, and hair to singe.

  Jian raised his fan, flicked it this way and that. His archers had overtaken the ramparts inside the shining walls, and their arrows arced overhead, a shroud of death which caught fire midflight and fell like smoking rain. Raptors, maddened by the searing light, turned shrieking upon friend, foe, even their own handlers. The heavy armored ghella also broke free and ran trumpeting, bellowing in agony and fear, leaving trails of broken soldiers in their wake.

  Those hapless fighters too slow or unprepared to withstand the terrible faces of the emperor’s wrath screamed in burbling agony as their bodies turned to ash, their voices to smoke, their dreams to naught and they dropped dead at the feet of their fellows, no more now than heaps of cooked flesh. Jian’s stomach growled and then turned at the smell of roasted meat.

  But he was long used to this, as he was to disregarding the softer corners of his own heart. There would be time to mourn the dead later, if later ever came. Now there was only war, and an enemy to kill. He closed his heart, and his eyes, raised his own arms in mocking mimicry of the luminists’ stance, and called upon his own magic—deep magic, dark and cool, magic sung deep into his bones by the voices of his ancestors. It was knowledge and fear of this magic which had led Daeshen Tiachu to purge the Daechen of those whose blood sang with the song of the sea. It had led Xienpei, Jian’s trainer, in her ambition to spare his life.

  Come, he called to the sea, to the river, to the rain. Hear me. See me. Feel my need and come to me, for I am your son. He opened his heart, his soul, bared the very essence of his nature to the water that slept deep and dreamed of dragons. The water heard, it woke—and answered his call.

  The air thickened as if preceding a rain, dimming the baleful eye of Akari and depriving the luminists of some of that power. The sound of his own heart thundered in his
ears even as scores of his enemies reeled and fainted, the water in their blood and bones answering his call, as well. The ground trembled and stirred, softening under the feet of the sorcerers so that they became mired in mud.

  Furious, the luminist at their center—a woman whose face Jian vaguely remembered—turned her deadly gaze upon him and began to chant. Feeling the air around him begin to heat, Jian matched her chant with one of his own, a thing he had learned from his father.

  “Auri auri thunrenothel beno beno falrevoi!

  Sharra sharra Danuroshev vel a rassa soloroi!

  Vel a rassa soloroi!

  Soloroi! Soloroi!

  Danu rassa soloroi!”

  So he sang to the heart of the sea, that which exists in the soul of all things that live or have ever lived. The water in the emperor’s moat broke loose with a roar so loud it seemed as if Sajani must surely be roused from her sleep. The waves rose high, higher, till they cast a shadow upon the wall. A black mass rose up within the face of the water—the zhilla, poor captive that it was, writhing silhouetted against the sun’s dimmed rays, singing a watery song as its tentacles burst forth. Several of the emperor’s pikemen were snatched up like sweetmeats and carried, screaming and flailing, to a watery grave.

  The luminists redoubled their efforts, all of them staring now at Jian, pointing as if to single him out for scorn. Their leader blazed so white-hot in her wrath that scores of men writhed weeping upon the ground, clawing at their eyes. A voice rang out from the center of this inferno.

  “Three words thrice shall stay the prince,

  Three names twice shall slay him.

  Three drops once shall bind his heart

  Lest that heart betray him.”

  “Dammah!” the high luminist cried, as if calling for blood to be spilled. “Dammah, dammah!”

  Jian’s breath caught in his throat, and his song faltered. Three words—the weakness bound to his bones at his inseeing, chains woven around his soul by the emperor himself. He had thought only the oracle knew these words, and his yendaeshi Xienpei, dead these many years.

  “Tummohai!” another luminist cried, as if in longing for the ocean. “Tummohai, Tummohai!”

  “Issuqan,” a third cried, as if naming Jian a sea-thing child beneath the eye of Akari. “Issuqan, Issuqan!”

  No, Jian cried deep in his heart. They cannot know these things. No… no no no… But surely, surely they did not know the names. Names of those he had killed, or of those who had died for him—it was not possible that the luminists would know those names.

  “Perri!” one of the luminists cried. “Naruteo!” another cried.

  “Tsun-ju Tiungpei!” their leader howled, and Jian’s heart faltered, the song cracking between his teeth like a pearl.

  “Perri!” the luminists cried in unison. “Naruteo! Tsunju Tiun—”

  “No!” Jian screamed, outraged that such small mouths would ever dare to speak his mother’s name. The darkness in his heart rose up like a wish, like a dark tide, like a curse upon all the land beyond wrath or reason. Water in the air, in the land, in the bodies around him rose up in a mist, licking at the feet and legs and bodies of those who would dare defy the son of a Sea King.

  The zhilla raised her sweet voice and danced as the mist thickened into a cold black fog, swirling and rising, rising like a black veil drawn over the face of the sun.

  The veil parted, and the armies of the Sea King poured forth, star-eyed and monstrous. With the spilling of Tiungpei’s blood, the stilling of her heart, the treaties between the Sindanese emperor and daekind had been broken, and the horde was let loose upon the land. At the front of this nightmare army rode the Sea King Allyr, at the back rode the Huntress with her mad-eyed hounds, and between them the imperial army was crushed like pearls beneath the booted feet of soldiers. The emperor’s luminists were devoured as candle flames in the wind, for between the Huntress and the sea rode Death, and Hunger, and Wrath— but never Mercy. On this day of days, it seemed, Mercy had stayed home to tend her gardens, and she was not to be found anywhere in the Forbidden City.

  Not on this day, this day of blood and water.

  And Sea Kings.

  FORTY - SEVEN

  Sulema was surprised to learn that she had a love of the sea.

  In two moons’ time an army had been raised. It was a patched-cloak army of Zeeranim and Quarabalese, citizens and slaves of Min Yaarif, pirates and mercenaries and the walking dead. Her brother’s ships carried them up the Dibris and into the tourmaline waters of the vast inland sea Nar Bedayyan.

  They sailed up the eastern coast, past the roiling tributary of the Kalish river and parallel to the Great Salt Road. Tarbok bounded along the white cliffs to one side, dolphins leapt from the deeps on the other. On three occasions great shadows lingered beneath their boats, forms so monstrously large Sulema’s mind could not imagine what might have cast them, but each time those Baidun Daiel who had chosen to join them chanted and sang, and the guardians of the deep let them pass.

  After one such incident Sulema stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her sword-sister at the prow of her brother’s greatest ship, which he shared with her and Yaela, with Ismai-who-was-not, and Mattu Halfmask, to whom she still refused to speak. Her brother and a handful of his crew had stripped down to loincloths and dove into the waters where the serpents—greater predators of the sea—lay in wait.

  Rather than eating the sailors, the serpents crested the surface and bore them upon their backs like water-steeds. The women and men of Leviathus’s group whooped with delight, standing upon—and often falling from—the broad scaled backs of the sea-beasts, who seemed to enjoy this odd sport every bit as much as their tiny companions.

  “I wonder if they could learn to play aklashi,” Sulema said aloud. It looked like great fun, and she wanted to join in, but she was no more allowed to ride one of the serpents than Leviathus would have been allowed to touch an asil. The kings of the deep had an accord with the pirates, but any other human would become a tasty morsel.

  Besides which, Sulema had never really learned to swim. If she were not eaten, it was likely that she would drown, and then this entire venture would have been for naught. Too much had been invested in this budding war for her to get herself killed doing something foolish.

  “It is not worth the risk.”

  At the sound of Ismai’s voice, Hannei stiffened and strode away without looking at either of them. Sulema watched her go, heart heavy, wishing she might mend the chasm that lay between her two old friends.

  But some wounds, she knew, ran too deep to ever truly mend. She turned to face Ismai.

  “You used to be a lot more fun,” she complained. “What happened to you?”

  “What happened to me,” Ismai said. He stepped closer— when had he grown so tall?—stared down at her with his ruined face, his burned and blinded eyes which somehow saw her, and frowned. “The same as happened to you, Sulema an Wyvernus ne Atu. The same as happened to turn Hannei into Kishah. The world turned, and the world burned. We burn with it.”

  “No,” she said. “That is not you speaking, not our Ismai.” Sulema stepped closer. Ismai shifted almost imperceptibly to a fighting stance, as his undead followers shifted behind him, muttering. Most of the Lich King’s soldiers were on another ship or belowdecks, utterly still as only corpses could be.

  Ismai had been Sulema’s friend, had tried to hide a crush on her since childhood in fact, so she ignored her misgivings and took another step toward him.

  “What happened to you, Ismai?”

  Ismai—really Ismai, this time—closed his opaline eyes, and a shudder ran through his lean frame.

  “Ishtaset, rajjha of the Mah’zula, happened,” he answered at last. “They came upon us in the night and burned Aish Kalumm to the ground. They killed mothers. They killed children. They killed—they killed little Sammai.” His ruined face contorted with grief. Sulema had heard parts of this story already, but not from Ismai himself.

  Ais
h Kalumm, gone? The city, the trees, all of it, gone? She had not wanted to believe any of it. Those few vash’ai who had not left their kithren, she had heard, had turned as vicious and unpredictable as their wild brothers and sisters. She wanted to scream, or to throw up, but instead she laid a hand on Ismai’s arm, soothing him as she might a half-wild colt.

  “Ishtaset and her riders claimed the right of rule over all the Zeera,” Ismai went on, opening those eyes again. He looked out across the river but did not pull away from her touch. “She claimed rights over me. Because of my blood.” He touched his chest, frowning. “Mastersmith Hadid, he—he—he sacrificed himself, so that I could get away, but not before her snake-priestess of Thoth did this.” He brought his hand up to his face, stroking the shining, twisted scars.

  “I am sorry, Ismai. I wish I had been there.”

  “You were busy being held in your brother’s dungeons, I guess.” A hint of the old Ismai leaked through the cracks in his mask, and he smiled. A little smile, a start. “It all worked out in the end. Char saved me—she is Naara now, my daughter. The Lich King’s daughter, anyway. And Ishtaset is dead.”

  “Dead-dead or walking dead?” Sulema could not help glancing at her friend’s dead-but-walking soldiers. “I am sorry,” she added lamely to the beautiful Quarabalese corpse that shadowed Ismai’s every step. “I do not mean to give offense.”

  “None taken,” the woman answered solemnly. This one, as far as Sulema had seen, never smiled. “Ishtaset is dead-dead. I ate her myself.”

  “Oh. Ah, thank you?”

  The woman nodded acknowledgment and turned away. It was, Sulema thought, the strangest conversation she had ever had.

  “Ishtaset wanted to return to the old ways,” Ismai told her. “I returned the old ways to her, but not as she might have hoped.” There was a dark, sweet satisfaction in the words, as if he spoke around a mouthful of mad honey.

  “I used to dream of meeting my father,” Sulema said slowly, “and to be free of my mother’s influence. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Sometimes it is the darkest wishes of our heart which come true.”