We would all be at peace.
I looked over at the cart and wondered what Borzai’s price should be. The gold coins? The other left over pieces of fine materials for the armor I’d packed away?
As I mulled it over, the muffled thump of a churning drifted to the top of the hill. Horses. I ran around the cart. Three men in city guard cloaks rode their way up the hill. The horses’ legs glinted harshly in the setting sunlight, clad in metal and heavy leathers to protect against the low-lying bramble.
Like a startled rabbit, I took a few steps left, then right, trying to think which direction I could bolt in. But then I looked back at my parents’ graves. I stood frozen by the cart as the men thundered into the small grave space, their faces dark as they reigned their horses in and leaped to the ground around me.
I recognized Lukat, the sympathetic guard captain from earlier. He had a hand on his sword’s hilt as he walked toward me. “I’m here to take you back to Khaim,” he said sadly.
“The gold coin . . . ,” I said. “I did leave it for you. Like I promised.”
Lukat shook his head. “Even a gold coin isn’t enough to stay my hand when it comes to a lord’s murdered son. They gave us horses to track you. There are more out on the roads. Malabaz himself paid the stables.”
My eyes burned slightly, but I had cried too much over the last few days for anything to trickle out. I merely nodded. I felt somewhat relieved to realize it was all ending. “I will come. Just, please give me time to fill my parents’ graves.”
But Lukat looked down at the ground and shook his head. He pointed at the graves. “Fetch the bodies,” he ordered the two younger guards.
They moved forward and I shouted, “No!”
“I’m sorry,” Lukat said. “Malabaz ordered that your entire family be returned to him. Regardless of your conditions.”
I grabbed the helmet and my hammer from the cart and moved between my parents’ graves. “You will not desecrate the grave of my mother and father.” Not after all I had done.
“You desecrated the boy,” Lukat said. “He will never find peace. The lord demands his retribution.”
“He should have lived a life better suited for the scales.”
Lukat shrugged. “True. But we are still here to take your family.”
“You will not have my parents,” I said firmly.
Lukat looked pained. “I have no choice here. These are the duke’s orders.”
“Piss on the duke!” I shouted, startling them all. But I was furious, desperate, and deep inside myself I begged for Lukat to see the obvious path my words beat toward. “We’re outside Khaim now. You can make any choices you want. Let us choose life.”
I was thinking back to the priest’s words.
“Bind her,” Lukat ordered, his voice catching. “Then we’ll deal with the graves.”
I looked at him, angry to see the sorrow in his eyes. “You’ll have to fight me first.” I pulled the helmet on, buckling it in place with a single hand while stepping back even farther.
“You’re a girl, not a guard,” Lukat said. The two guards on either side of the graves pulled their swords and looked back at Lukat, wondering what to do next.
“I am a girl wearing armor,” I said. I shrugged my cloak off to fall by my shod feet. “Your swords will struggle to pierce it too. I’m a damned good craftsperson. I’m my father’s daughter. My family’s armor is well known for its reputation against a blade.”
Lukat’s lips curled with frustration. “Then we will bash you senseless in your armor.”
“You, maybe.” I looked at the other two guards. “But these two boys you have with you? They’ve barely held these swords for a full year. I have been swinging my own hammer since before I could walk. Look at their arms, Lukat: they have no rope on them.” They were skinny little things, unaccustomed to hard work. Hell, they didn’t even have calluses on their fingers.
I raised my hammer. Lukat shook his head. “Get her,” he ordered, waving them forward.
I did not wait for the nearest one to move at me. I ran for him. He raised a hand, thinking to block me, somewhat shocked at my presumption. I swung the hammer hard and it clanged against steel as he struggled to bring the sword up, suddenly realizing his hand would do nothing against armor and a hammer.
He punched at me, howling as his knuckles bounced off armor. I smacked him with a fist against the side of his head. It was as sure a hit as any: my arm tingled from the impact.
Dazed, he stumbled back and grabbed at his ear, looking shocked to find blood flowing down to soak the collar of his tunic. Then he sat down and coughed, unable to keep to his feet.
“Go, now,” I begged them all.
But the second guard came at me, grabbing me in a great hug as he tackled me from the side. We struck the soft dirt. Air huffed from between my lips.
I rolled away from him and crouched on my hands and knees. As I drew in a long breath the guard reared up, his sword held in two hands for strength, and struck my helmet with the butt of his sword.
My head snapped and I shut my eyes as the glass behind the slits in the helmet shattered. Shards dug at my neck as I stumbled to my feet. But the helmet had taken his strike and remained intact.
He swung at me, the sword high over his head for another brutal strike. I walked into it, my head bowed and hammer still in my hand. He struck the helmet again. I struck his side. As the sword bounced off my helmet and shoulders, he crumpled, his ribs broken. Blood stained his garments, soaking the dirty gray material quickly, as I hadn’t used the blunt side of the hammer. The tip had shattered his ribs and pierced deep between them.
When I yanked the hammer away, flesh and fabric tore free.
“Leave me be,” I begged again.
“Akash!” Lukat shouted. He ran at both of us, sword out. Any hesitation he had about fighting me had fled, there was nothing but rage in his movement. I’d hurt his fellow guardsmen.
Behind him one of the horses whinnied, panicked by the shouting. It yanked at the tether Lukat had staked to the ground, but as it tried to turn and move, it tripped in the leathers. It stumbled out into one of the many patches of bramble surrounding the hill.
I wasn’t going to be able to scare these men away, I realized as the horse thrashed and screamed in the bramble. Lukat rushed me as the other guard wobbled to his feet, holding an unsteady sword in the air with one hand, his head with another.
“Malabaz orders this.” On his knees, the guard I’d hit stabbed at my feet with the sword as he wheezed the words.
I turned back to him as he raised the point of his sword, trying to aim for one of the joints between my thigh plates and my hip. There was nothing but determination in his eyes. They would kill me if they had to. Then drag all three of our bodies back to the duke. I let the sword hit and work in. But it stopped as it hit the plates underneath.
“Please stop,” I begged yet again. Lukat loomed close. The both of them would overpower me at any second.
I screamed and slammed the hammer between Akash’s eyes as Lukat struck me, knocking me free of both his guard and the hammer. He hit the helmet with his sword twice, knocking my head about in it. Glass shards dug hard into my collarbone, and blood wet my shoulders.
Lukat pinned me to the ground, using his weight to hold me in place as he pulled out a thin dagger. “I’ve fought men in armor before,” he hissed.
He was levering the tip of the dagger in between the joints under my arm. Metal creaked and scraped as the edge of the dagger pierced the chain slightly.
Lukat pushed harder, his face red from the effort. The bite of metal stung as it broke my skin. Blood trickled down my armpit as I struggled to get free of him.
I hit him with my other hand. One metal gauntleted punch after another in his side as he kept trying to drive the dagger in farther. Each time I rocked in the dirt slightly. I could glimpse the graves of my parents each time.
Then I was able to roll him. We tumbled right into my father’s
grave, the dip in the ground being just enough to separate our bodies as we fell into the shallow pit.
Lukat howled as I drove my plated knee into his groin.
I scrabbled out onto the dirt, a split second ahead of him. I was half standing, sprinting away, as he struck me again.
But I was hoping for it. I grabbed him and kept stumbling, letting him beat at me as I held us both together and ran us away from the dirt.
He didn’t understand why I didn’t fight the dagger stabbing up under my arm again, or his punches. I was only worried about moving us both along in a spinning, spinning dance that he did not lead.
And then his eyes focused not on me, but on the world whirling past. He oriented himself, tried to break free of me. I only crumpled with him in my arms. We struck the ground in our embrace and Lukat flailed, trying to get back to his booted feet.
It was too late.
I rolled with him on bramble. I crushed strands and thready needles under my armor as I fell on my back. They stuck to Lukat as he flailed around with me. He shrieked when he pulled free of me, horror in his eyes. He yanked at bramble needles stuck to his skin and swept desperately at his cheeks and fingers.
Then his eyes rolled up and he stumbled forward.
He swayed, then fell forward into the mat of bramble I’d thrown us both into. Near the still body of the horse that had also fallen to the bramble’s touch.
I stood up unsteadily, terrified that bramble had poked through my broken helmet. Only a single needle hung limp on the edge of a slit that had once been glassed over. An inch from my eye.
Ever so carefully I undid the straps to the helmet and pulled it off, leaning forward so that any bramble attached to it would fall away from me.
When I strode out of the bramble, helmet in my hands, the last guard dropped to his knees. “Mercy,” he said, and threw up. “I won’t tell anyone anything. . . .”
“But you will, when the Majister spells it out of you,” I said. I wrapped my guantleted hands around his throat and squeezed until he could see me no more. “Mercy? There is no mercy in Khaim.”
I dug more graves.
One for Lukat. Another for each of his fellow guards. I did that in armor as the sun set orange over the plains in the distance. I put coin, which I could barely spare, in each of their hands for Borzai. We all made choices. They had chosen to follow lords and Khaim, even into death. But there had been some kindness, far enough back, that maybe Borzai held them in fine regard. I would not harm their afterlives, not even after what today had brought.
This would be done right. Because I wanted things to change from here.
I stripped the armor off and buried it carefully for my mother and father to hold.
That was a price for a lord, a fit price, and one my parents could proudly present to the afterlife.
For what would I do with it? Bring more blood to my hands?
I wanted to make things. To hammer them out with my hands. Tap designs out with my fingers. I wanted well-worn tools by my side. I’d spent a life working by my mother’s and father’s sides to learn these things. My hands knew them by instinct. I was not a killer, I swore it. I had been backed into a corner. Turned into an animal by the true animals of Khaim: the velvet ones.
I was glad to see dirt cover that damned armor.
When all were buried, I built a spell I’d learned as a mere child, long before the blue hung over all Khaim and the nobles died at the hands of the Majister. Paper and oils, and the scratch of symbols I barely understood. In the old days, before bramble choked the land, we’d used this spell to light the forge fire quickly. I lit the paper with a fire strike and threw it on the ground.
I took the two remaining horses with me. I’d reloaded the cart’s contents onto one of them, and I rode the other. They picked their way down the hill happily. With a horse, now only the Majister himself could fly overhead to catch me. And I doubted he would bother to hunt me down.
There were bandits out on the roads, I’d been told. But I wore the boiled leather from the armor’s underlayer. I had my strength, my mind, and my hammer looped in a belt by my side.
Behind me the top of the hill glowed, flashed, and sparked. A funeral pyre of magic flame burned which made bramble quiver. Vines of threaded stalks crept closer to the disturbed dirt I’d thrown the spell on, lacing themselves over the graves as I reached the road and turned to put Khaim to my back.
When I found a village with need for a blacksmith, I would stop. Or maybe I would head all the way to Paika, where I knew they had need of blacksmiths to forge axe heads. And they might ask me where I came from. I would not say I came from the city of blue. I would tell them I came from the city of blood, and I would tell them to stay far from it.
AFTERWORD
The creation of a place like Khaim requires a great deal of support that often isn’t seen by readers but is vital to us as authors. Firstly, we’d like to thank our families for their patience and support as we spent many hours on Skype brainstorming, chatting, and (let’s be honest) drinking, as we created this world and the people who inhabit it. We’d also especially like to thank Steve Feldberg at Audible.com for his support of our first experimental forays into Khaim; Bill Schafer of Subterreanean Press for bringing early parts of it to print; and Joe Monti, our editor at Saga, for championing this deepened and much-expanded work that you now hold in your hands. Special shout-outs also to our agents, Russ Galen and Barry Goldblatt, for their unceasing support of our imaginative explorations. With luck, we hope to have many more opportunities to revisit Khaim and its many tangled stories.
—PB and TB
About the Author
Photo copyright © JT Thomas Photography
PAOLO BACIGALUPI was nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. His short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories was a 2009 Locus Award winner for Best Collection and was also named a 2008 Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.
His novel for adults, The Windup Girl, was named by Time as one of the ten top best novels of 2009. It also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. His previous novel for adults is the New York Times bestseller The Water Knife, a near-future thriller about climate change and drought in the southwestern United States.
His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, was a Michael L. Printz Award winner and a National Book Award finalist, and its sequel, The Drowned Cities, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Book of 2012, a 2012 VOYA Perfect Ten book, and a 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Visit his website at windupstories.com.
Photo copyright © Marlon James
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL is a New York Times bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.
His novels and more than fifty stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
He currently lives with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs in Bluffton, Ohio. He can be found online at tobiasbuckell.com.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SIMONANDSCHUSTER.COM
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Paolo-Bacigalupi
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Tobias-S-Buckell
ALSO BY PAOLO BACIGALUPI
* * *
Pump Six and Other Stories
The Windup Girl
The Water Knife
YOUNG ADULT
Ship Breaker
Drowned Cities
Tool of War
Zombie Baseball Beatdown
The Doubt Factory
ALSO BY TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
* * *
XENOWEALTH SERIES
Crystal Rain
Ragamuffin
Sly Mong
oose
The Apocalypse Ocean
Xenowealth: A Collection
Halo: The Cole Protocol
Halo Encyclopedia (editor)
Halo: Envoy
Arctic Rising
Hurricane Fever
COLLECTIONS
Tides from the New Worlds
Mitigated Futures
Diverse Energies (editor)
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“The Alchemist” text copyright © 2010 by Paolo Bacigalupi
“The Children of Khaim” text copyright © 2018 by Paolo Bacigalupi
“The Executioness” text copyright © 2010 by Tobias S. Buckell
“The Blacksmith’s Daughter” text copyright © 2018 by Tobias S. Buckell
Jacket illustration copyright © 2018 by Krzysztof Domaradzki
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