by Nathan Long
The streets of Kalnah were all hustle and bustle and a stink like an open sewer. Crowds of sky-sailors—they called them Kir-Dhans, which basically meant airmen—were everywhere: soldiers too, army and marines, in uniform versions of Sai and Lhan’s fighting harnesses, unit insignia and symbols of rank on their breastplates and shoulder guards. There were shipyards and sail makers and rope makers, and a huge, heavily guarded enclosure with walls so high I couldn’t see in. Something inside was roaring like a turbine.
I turned to Lhan and raised my voice. “What’s in there?”
Lhan shouted back. “That is the temple of flight, where the priests make the levitating air.”
“Priests, huh? Not engineers?”
“I know not the word.”
We passed through streets full of bars and food stalls and shops and houses and apartment buildings, some as high as eight stories tall, all using the hexagon floor plan, and painted like candy wrappers—reds, oranges, yellows, purples.
This was where the reality of Waar really started to sink in. I mean, I knew it was all real before. I’d been cut, bruised, gone hungry and eaten like a queen, but this is where I started to feel it.
Before it had all been like some fairy tale—a really violent fairy tale: all castles and princesses and four-armed ogres. Now I was around people who were just making a living. Women slapping clothes on the lip of a fountain in a courtyard laundry, guys carrying big loads around on their backs, boot makers, brick makers, butchers, millers, fruit-and-vegetable sellers, street kids, merchants with snooty wives, a dentist fixing a tooth using something that looked like a railroad spike. Beggars, acrobats, pickpockets, hookers, and guys who, with a change of clothes and a Harley between their legs, could have joined the Angels no questions asked.
I liked it. I got it. I understood these people. The guys were just guys. The chicks were just chicks. They wouldn’t die for some sucker’s idea of honor if you told them heaven was an eternal blowjob. They might die for love, or friendship or even their country, but they wouldn’t throw their lives away because it was more honorable to be dead.
Sorry. I guess Sai was pissing me off a little at that point. I bet he could have ditched his title, got the girl and lived down here on Sailcloth Street and nobody here would have given him a second glance. But with his upbringing that would probably have been harder for him than dying. Oh well, fuck it.
About ten blocks in, Sai snapped out of his funk and looked around. “Lhan, where do you take us?”
Lhan motioned ahead. “Kalnah was my home for two years while I served in the Navy. I roomed with relatives of my mother’s: the Dhan Dal-Var and his family.”
Sai cringed. “Please, Lhan. I would not stay where I would be recognized. Could we not instead find an inn?”
Lhan looked shocked. “You would ask an Aldhanshai to stay at an inn?”
“No, of course not. If I succeed, I will gladly accept your relative’s hospitality for Wen-Jhai and myself, but since I have no hope of succeeding, I would not suffer the pity of good-hearted people who know that I go to die.”
Lhan waved a hand, impatient. “Sai, enough. If you continue to speak like this you will defeat yourself long before Kedac-Zir ever has his chance.”
“I only speak the truth.”
Lhan turned his krae with a shrug. He was pretending not to care, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. “Then away to the Nightflower ward with us, where beds are cheap and discretion is an industry.”
Lhan led us into a neighborhood of dirty streets and shabby buildings. Slutty chicks laid their boobs out on windowsills like grocers showing off grapefruits. Shady guys talked in groups on the corners, watching us as we passed. I’d been in plenty of places like this, the Tenderloin, the Bowery, the Combat Zone. Every city on Earth has one. It looked like Waar was no different.
We stopped in a square surrounded by sketchy-looking inns and filthy food shops. Lhan dismounted. “Wait here. I shall inquire after a room.”
Sai looked around in horror. “How do you know of such places, Lhan?”
Lhan grinned. “I was a Kir-Dhan when I lived here, Sai. Not a priest.”
He crossed to the nearest inn. I wondered if he’d picked this area as some kind of revenge against Sai for being such a goober.
Sai looked up over the crumbling adobe skyline at Kedac-Zir’s castle, which you could see from just about any point in the city. He swallowed, nervous. He was looking more gray than purple. Now, after dragging us all the way here with his, “I must, ’tis the only honorable course,” he was staring his destiny in the face and not liking it much.
“You alright there, Sai?”
He shook his head. “No, Mistress. I fear I am not.” He didn’t look at me. He couldn’t take his eyes off the castle.
Lhan came back. “We have a room, and I have discovered that we arrive not a moment too soon. Out host informs me of gossip that Kedac leaves with Wen-Jhai for Ormolu tomorrow at dawn. You have only tonight to challenge him.”
Sai paled. He turned suddenly to Lhan. “What... what if she’s content, Lhan? Kedac is Kir-Dhanan of all Ora, the commander of a thousand air-ships. What would she want with a mere Dhanan’s son? I don’t want to ruin her happiness.” He was practically begging Lhan to agree with him.
Lhan fiddled with his krae’s harness, embarrassed. “A charitable thought, Dhan Sai. Perhaps you should ask her.”
Sai caught the sarcasm and flushed a deep maroon, but even Lhan’s disgust couldn’t cure him of his cold feet. He played it off like Lhan had meant it. “Yes, yes! I must do exactly that. I must reach Wen-Jhai somehow and ask her the way of her heart. We must find a way into the keep.”
Lhan jerked his mount toward the tavern. “Come. The stables are this way.”
Sai was practically melting from shame, but he didn’t call Lhan back. I felt as uncomfortable as a kid when mom and dad are fighting.
***
Things were a little strained in our room. It wasn’t exactly a big room in the first place: a ten-by-ten box with two beds and a table, and with all the tension and hostility Sai and Lhan were throwing off, it felt like a matchbox. At least it beat the roost, which is where most people stayed. That was a big open room with cots all over like in a flop house, and a stink like the bunkroom of a biker’s clubhouse after a week-long beer bash.
Sai kept trying to catch Lhan’s eye, but Lhan just polished his sword and wouldn’t look up.
Sai wailed. “But, Lhan, how horrible if I win Wen-Jhai only to find she preferred Kedac all along.”
“Do you know her as little as that?”
“But I must be sure, must I not?”
Lhan’s sword flexed he was rubbing it so hard. “Unless you go through the main gate with an honorable challenge, you go alone.”
Sai sagged like he’d been punched in the chest. “If that is what you must do, I understand. I know how this appears. But... but could you not at least help me to prepare? You have been in Kedac’s keep before. Is there some way to gain entrance without detection?”
Lhan’s voice hardened like concrete. “Unless you go through the main gate with an honorable challenge, you go alone. I will wait here in case you repent of this folly.”
Sai looked at Lhan for a long second, then sniffed. He stood, jaw out. “Come mistress Jae-En. If Dhan Lhan-Lar chooses to forget the many times in his youth that his steadfast companion Sai-Far followed him into folly, we do not need him. We are not helpless. We will reconnoiter the castle ourselves, despite the dangers.”
He was obviously hoping to shame Lhan into coming along, but Lhan wasn’t rising to the bait. He just glared at the sword in his lap as Sai walked out the door.
I rolled my eyes. What a pair of boneheads. They were like passive aggressive newlyweds having their first tiff. Disgusting.
I went after Sai. Not that I felt much like going. I didn’t feel much better about this trip than Lhan did, but my future was sort of tied up with Sai’s, so I felt obliged.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VIOLATED!
It was sundown when Sai and me left the seedy inn and headed across the city to case the approaches to the castle. We got plenty of good looks at it along the way. The red sunset lit the place up like a picture postcard, a postcard that said “wish you were somewhere else.”
What I had thought were long, low walls that morning when the the sun had been behind the castle turned out to be hundreds of dark brown tents that seemed to surround the castle on three sides. The side facing us butted against the sheer cliff. The place was wrapped up tighter than Fort Knox.
Sai sagged. “We shall never penetrate all that.”
I agreed with him, but I wasn’t going to say it. I knew if I pushed him he’d get all stubborn and try it just because I said it couldn’t be done. If I wanted him to give up, I’d have to play along and let him figure out for himself how impossible it was. “Maybe there’s another way. Come on, lets go see what the front door looks like first.”
***
The front door looked like the gates of hell. The road up to the castle was a shallow zigzag carved into the face of the cliff just to the south of town. The only access to the road was through the navy base at the bottom of the cliff. Not exactly promising.
We peeked at the gates from behind the hull of a boat—a plain old float-on-the-water boat—turned upside down in a shipyard by the river Kal. The navy base was on the far side of the river, across a stone bridge. The walls of the base were thirty feet high, ten feet thick, and crawling with archers.
A squad of marines stood outside the gate checking a line of carriages and pedestrians waiting to get through. The line was an odd mix. There were fancy coaches with uniformed drivers that got waved through right away, but there were also lots of people in funny costumes. As we watched, a bunch of short, muscly guys in matching tights were being let in. They looked like the Oran National Gymnastics Team. Right behind them was a gaggle of cooch dancers in g-string loincloths and pasties.
I didn’t pay them much mind. I was too busy trying to see around them through the gate. As the gymnastic team went in I got a look. It was grim. Right inside, four burly marines were patrolling with vicious, six-legged monsters that looked a cross between a bear and a panther: low and slinky, with powerful muscles and glossy, purple black fur.
“What are those?”
Sai shuddered. “Ki-tens. From the jungles of the south.”
I snapped my head around. “Kittens? Are you shitting me? If those are kittens I’d hate to see your cats.”
Sai pursed his lips. He wasn’t in the mood. “You say it incorrectly. Ki-tens. The most ferocious animals on Waar.”
“Go figure.”
I looked above the walls to the cliff. The approach didn’t get any easier once you got to the zig-zag road. There were stone guard towers, chock full of bowmen, set every fifty feet along it, with a gate house at every switchback.
I could hear Sai swallow. “It does look formidable, does it not?”
I nodded. “And I ain’t got a clue how we get through that once we get up there.”
“Could we perhaps—climb the cliff and go over the wall?”
I broke out in a sweat. I probably could, damn it. “Uh, well, I might be able to get up the cliff, but look at the wall. It’s as smooth as glass.”
Sai’s face dropped. “Yes, I see that.”
Now was my chance. If I pulled this off I could get him to forget the whole thing right here.
I sighed, playing it big. “I’m sorry, Sai. I’m all outta ideas. Since we’re here, maybe you should just go announce yourself and face Kedac the way you meant to from the beginning.”
Of course I didn’t expect Sai to agree with that. What I hoped was that mentioning Kedac would push him over the edge and send him scurrying back to the inn with his tail between his legs. And I think it might have too, except that just then we got handed our ticket in on a silver platter.
Sai was just saying “Yes yes, perhaps ’tis for the best to abandon...” When he trailed off. He was looking along the riverbank. I followed his gaze.
A string of brightly colored wagons was parked in front of a dockside tavern, and as we watched, a crowd of bizarros in wacky hats and masks straggled out of the joint, yawning and stretching. A balding old guy as thin and wrinkly as a stick of jerky followed them out, shouting. “Hurry now, you lazy lamlots. We’ve near to slept though our entrance.”
A midget in what looked like a yellow mini-skirt and tarantula dreadlocks bitched back at him. “’Tis your own fault, you miser. If you hadn’t booked us in Rivi last night and Saen-Lat this morning with a thirty iln march between we’d be fresh as new paint.”
Sai looked from the freaks to the gate, then slowly turned and gave me the once over like he was seeing me for the first time. He got a wild look in his eyes and licked his lips. Oh hell, I thought. Here it comes.
“Mistress Jae-En, I think for once your... er, unique nature may be an advantage. It appears that Kedac holds an entertainment this evening, no doubt for the amusement of Wen-Jhai. And these mad-cap fellows...”
“Yeah yeah, I get it. I’ll fit right in with the freak show. Thanks.”
Sai blushed. “My apologies, mistress. I meant no offence, but, er, you must admit...”
“Give it up before you swallow your whole leg, Sai. I already said I was in. But are these guys are just going to let us join up with them? I’d be a mite suspicious about some joker who wanted to use me to sneak into a castle.”
Sai shook his head. “I was not suggesting we approach them, but merely...” He finger walked his two hands, one tip-toeing up behind the other. “...become part of their train.”
“You think the guards are just gonna figure we’re part of the circus?”
Sai looked uncomfortable. “Once again, Mistress Jae-En, I draw your attention reluctantly to your appearance. You will forgive me, but I doubt they will give us a second look.”
Damnit, he wasn’t wrong. There had to be some excuse. “But, uh, what about you? And our clothes? And our swords? We’re not dressed like freaks, and they’re not gonna let us in armed to the teeth.”
Sai frowned. “You are correct. These are indeed obstacles. Well, hmmm, we shall hide our weapons here, and...”
“Hide our...! Are you nuts? This is crazy enough as it is. Without our weapons it’s suicide.”
Sai raised a finger like he was making a point in debating club. “You forget, Mistress, that I have no intention of fighting. I merely wish to speak to my beloved and retire.”
“And if somebody spots us you’ll be retired permanently! Things go wrong, Sai. Happens everyday.”
Sai swallowed. “Well then, we will just have to take extra care. Now come, place your sword here with mine under this skiff, and as to our clothes... You will do as you are, while I...”
I stared at him as he started to unbuckle the straps that held his sleeve in place. The little bonehead was insane. Scared out of his wits to face one guy, but totally oblivious to the dangers of walking into hostile territory unarmed. He was like one of those idiots you read about in the news who go splat on the sidewalk climbing out a tenth floor bedroom window because they didn’t want to face some jealous husband. Sometimes what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with what’s actually dangerous.
Of course, the real crazy one was me. At this point I should have let him go join the freaks and gone back for a couple of drinks with Lhan, but I’m a different kind of idiot—the kind that doesn’t go back on her word, even when the other guy changes all the rules halfway through the game.
Sai pulled off his sleeve so that he was naked to the waist—and nearly naked below it, as usual. He took out his dagger and cu
t two holes in the shoulder end of the sleeve, then pulled it down over his head like a stick-up punk putting a pair of panty-hose on his head. He tugged the holes down until they were over his eyes. The rest of the bright yellow sleeve flopped over his back like a windsock. He looked like a gay Klansman with erectile problems. He did a little dance and looked up at me. “Well? Will I pass as a clown?”
“Oh, you’ll do more than pass.”
Sai looked relieved. It went right over his head. “Then we have some hope of success.”
I groaned. “Sai, we’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“Snowball? I know not...” He stopped. We heard the creak and jingle of the circus wagons as they passed our hiding place. Sai made some Oran holy sign with his fingers and stepped forward. “Come, mistress. ’Tis now or never.”
“How about never?”
He ignored me and stepped in behind the last wagon. I sighed and followed him. I felt naked without my sword.
***
Amazingly, it went just like he said it would—at least the getting-through-the-gate part did. It helped that as we were waiting in line, a gang of cross-dressing tumblers pulled up behind us and we got lost in the shuffle. The guards just waved us through all together.
But getting in so easy didn’t make me feel any better. Walking up the cliffside switchbacks and seeing all the marines and ki-tens and crossbows and iron gates, all I could think about was how the hell we were going to get back out when everything went south. Notice I said when, not if. With Sai involved I couldn’t see how we’d manage to pull this off without a hitch.
The picture didn’t get any brighter when we walked into the castle itself. Security was tighter than a flounder’s sphincter. The main entrance into the castle courtyard had a double set of drop-down iron gates with big spikes on the bottom. There were guards every five feet and crossbow guys all along the tops of the walls.
Sai was checking them out too. He swallowed. “Perhaps... perhaps...”
