She rolled her head to peer at Waray. The drug had taken full effect. “Enjoy it,” she said. “For the both of us.”
• • • • •
Ashtadukht had dispatched the Hephthalite king and his mounted warriors through a valley north of Nishabhur. She’d ordered a detachment of Eshm sisters to follow, speciously for support, but actually to prevent the nomads from breaking off or having second thoughts. That unit would move swifter than her main force, circling around the mountain against which Nishabhur hunkered, and in doing so cutting off anyone fleeing her host as it neared.
Generally, a siege on Nishabhur would have been no walk in the park. As the first line of defense against invaders from the east, its walls were built to withstand a prolonged siege until reinforcements could sweep in and rout the attackers. Ashtadukht wouldn’t have felt comfortable besieging it even with the well-oiled engines of Hrom at her command. Owing to that, she’d devised another plan entirely.
By the time her host reached Nishabhur, its gates had been barricaded, its ramparts outfitted with grim-faced sentinels, and the surrounding plain evacuated. An army could only lay low for so long before something gave it away. In this case, it’d been the thunder drummed up by tens of thousands of feet or other appendages on the move.
Ashtadukht ordered her litter carried to the front of the formation. The garrison would not be sending out a negotiator; there were no terms to be discussed when divs were present. They were not disposed to negotiation, especially in war. Most any man of the Truth shared this sentiment; the garrison would fall before entertaining surrender.
She did not order the assembling of siege. The ranks did not advance. Ashtadukht waited. On her uncomfortable throne, beneath the canopy of her litter, she kneaded her cuff and watched from the gloom of a moonless night. Her gaze drifted along the ramparts where, illuminated by the glow of torches, she could make out the many silhouettes of the garrison. A star-reckoner would be among them, taking stock of her host and wondering why she hadn’t fanned out and prepared for a prolonged siege. He’d be one of four star-reckoners, Nishabhur being so integral to a defense against divs. Four. The thought thrilled her; adrenaline emboldened her. The others would be posted on the walls of their respective quadrants as a precautionary measure.
A wan smile tugged listlessly at the corners of her lips. They’d trained her in their eldritch arts and protocol, if poorly, and that had would be their undoing.
Ashtadukht had never forgotten the div who’d set her on this path. The one who’d thought he was clever, making a pact with a child who didn’t know better, presumably at the behest of Ahriman. Once she’d been elevated to a position with clout, she’d kept an eye on his affairs. The King of Kings, being in all things a champion of Truth, had held firm to his promise. In doing so, he’d sent the div and its phylactery to Nishabhur to serve as a consultant in the event of this very scenario. Ashtadukht had been in contact with him prior to setting out. She’d made promises she never intended to keep: promises honeyed by power and parades and wealth. He’d open those gates, and she’d give him his just desserts all right.
Then she’d kill the star-reckoners. Ashtadukht had made that much clear with her host. The star-reckoners were hers, and any div who trespassed upon that claim would meet with terrible, lasting retribution.
The gates opened.
Ashtadukht leaned forward, clutching her cuff.
“Tear them apart!” she screamed so loudly it rattled in her throat, and the command needn’t be relayed. Those nearest—the Eshm sisters in their sanguine trappings—charged, issuing sharp hisses as war cries. The rest of her host followed suit.
All eyes were trained on the din of the advancing line, and even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have noticed the company that skulked along the wall and slipped in undetected well before the order to attack.
Waray and her shit-stirrers were tasked with securing the star-reckoners and sabotaging any defenses they encountered along the way.
She rounded the gate, and her axe split the brow of something resembling a boar but altogether wrong. The pomegranate-red closed in, brought a dangerous glint to her grin, but she pressed on, letting gravity and her gait tear the bit of her axe from its skull. With a gesture over her shoulder Waray signalled for her company to break into two, not bothering to check whether it’d been heeded. She trotted over the bodies of slain guards, which the now-departed div must’ve dealt with prior to opening the gate, and up a flight of stairs.
“Secure star-reckoners,” she muttered to herself. “Securestar-reckoners. Naphtha defenses. Naphtha defenses.”
Waray had never been very good at following orders; they waded against her personality and clashed with her bloodline. Time spent with her mental illnesses worsened that aversion considerably, made following them nearly impossible and moderately painful. Orders gave her goosebumps; orders made her unreasonably incensed.
But Ashtadukht had given these, and she’d made it clear how vital they were. For the sake of her friend, Waray whispered the request to herself—calling it a request from a chum in an attempt to mollify the way it made her skin crawl—and did her utmost to give her objective substance where every breath threatened to quell substance. So she kept it simple. “Secure star-reckoners. Naphtha defenses.”
Her head itched. She scaled the steps three at a time, mumbling her reminder as she did, the butt of her axe deceptively at ease on her shoulder. Behind her, a band of similarly vicious, troublemaking divs all fumed with their own breed of barely subjugated bloodlust.
She crested a landing, and the moment she did, a pack of soldiers came hustling down from the ramparts. They weren’t expecting resistance so soon. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were, but it sure didn’t help their odds. Waray bounded ahead of her company, skimming over the distance between her and the soldiers as if she were an expertly tossed skipping stone.
To say her axe rested on her shoulder would have been misleading, wrong, and if you were on the receiving end, deleterious. She’d long ago learned from mace bearers to prime it so, like a viper poised to strike. So when the first soldier intercepted her skip with a brandished sword, he did so utterly unprepared. Waray didn’t bother addressing his underhand swing. She stepped in, shrugged her shoulder, and, both hands firmly around the haft, lashed out explosively. Her axe hewed his clavicle and ribs before lodging in his lung and heart. The soldier crumpled, taking her axe with him. She planted a foot on his sternum, bared her fangs at an oncoming soldier, and tugged. With a crack, she freed her axe right as the man neared, his blade drawn back for a stab, and the force of its release brought the spike on the butt of her axe straight through his jaw.
Waray shoved him forward, tumbled in the same direction beneath a blade that whirred where her head had been mere seconds earlier, and came up by the haft of her axe, which now jutted skyward. She reached for it and looked out past its handle. Another soldier bore down on her. Farther back, one had an arrow nocked and drawn. She hissed and prepared to throw herself aside only for the archer to be bowled over by a careening div with plating like a rhino. Her band had joined the fray.
She wrenched her axe from its cairn, pomegranate-red throbbing like war drums in her ears, and muttered, “Securestar-reckoners. Naphtha defenses.” Waray furrowed her brow. She hadn’t really given the defenses much thought. Just that she’d want to set them aflame. A wall met the qualifications of a defense if she’d ever seen one. Trouble was, she was standing on it.
The approaching soldier drew his arm back, rotating it in strange circles. She squinted. There was far too much space between them for a melee strike, and her infrared receptors were having a hard time figuring out what he was holding. If she’d cared to inspect his shoulder tufts and epaulettes, and had the knowledge to distinguish one from another, she would have identified this man as the fortress commander. Odds are she wouldn’t have exercised caution, but she would have nevertheless known that caution was called for. She hissed, raised her
axe, and—it was a lasso!
She came to this realization as he threw it, first by its undulations—like some beaked sea snake tossed by its tail—then by its more mundane qualities. And she did so too late. It’d snagged her by the neck. Waray tried to hack at it with her axe; however, she was pulled off her feet before she could get a swing off.
Her nose smashed into the stone with a crunch. She let out a miserable groan that would have gone on if it weren’t truncated by the lasso tightening around her throat. The fortress commander was forcefully yanking on his end. At this rate, he’d strangle her or break her neck, if he didn’t waltz over and run her through.
Between her crushed nose, lack of oxygen, and the yanking—which was really the worst of it—she would have succumbed there if it weren’t for the pomegranate-red. It kept her fighting.
“Naph—” she spat, and the half-word brought to mind the sack she’d been outfitted with.
Waray struggled against the lasso to reach back and rummage through her sack’s contents. She fished out a pot padded with wool, and gave it a bloody grin. Another yank. She rolled over, cocked her arm, and heaved the pot with all her might.
She didn’t hear the pot break over the roar of battle, but the fortress commander erupted in flames nevertheless. Waray scrambled to put her boots beneath her, cackling triumphantly as she did, and removed the lasso from her neck, disgustedly throwing it to the ground as if it were the fortress commander’s entrails.
“Whofights with a šo-looped rope,” she said with a disapproving scowl. Waray canted her head and took stock of her surroundings. Blood dribbled from her nose to her chin, over the ring on her neck to be soaked up by her collar. Most of the scanty resistance her company met had been dealt with. She snatched up her axe and headed for the stairs. On the trot over, she lined her remaining pots on one arm like a wench serving ale to a full tavern.
Waray drew up short of the steps, concentrating on her pernicious load. She broadened her stance and extended one arm to the side, the other hooked around the pots of naphtha. Her torso wound calmly one way, then unwound at full steam the other. Her leg swept out wide, and she went through a full revolution before loosing the pots as if she were throwing a discus.
“Securestar-reckoners,” she mouthed, and about-faced just as her projectiles swathed the landing in flames. She then scaled the stairs summarily, which emptied her on the ramparts.
From there, she could make out the terrible oncoming storm of Ashtadukht’s host as it funnelled into the gate. Unlike a human army, the divs were not reduced to entering shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, the rank and file clambered over one another such that they poured into the fortress in gushes and spurts. Ashtadukht had consolidated her heavy units and a small detachment of infantry at the rear of the host, where they huddled around her litter.
Waray’s focus transitioned from the chaos below to sharpen on her more immediate surroundings. Archers fired indiscriminately into the swarm; soldiers emptied pitch or threw boulders over the crenellations; an officer barked orders. Within that line, one man stood out: the only man not taking a noticeably active part in the defense. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he wore no armour, only a thick robe.
He spun on her. His lips moved, and strangely, the words they gave shape to came with clarity above the clamour. “The Sun and the Moon set upon Mercury in the Sturgeon.”
• • • • •
Ashtadukht drew a lot.
“Mercury is immolated by the Sun. Mars and Jupiter shear the Ram below the horizon, while Venus gives chase to the Bull nearby. Saturn bears down upon the Lion. The lot has been drawn.”
The tetrahedron tumbled especially energetically, its roll made erratic by the furrows in her well-worn mind. When it finally came to rest in the rut of one of those scars, it did so favourably. The trouble, Ashtadukht had found, in reckoning with Saturn lay in it being a wild card. Of all the planets, it was the most likely to go haywire—disposed to it, even—heedless to the propitious outcome of a lot.
The sacrifice of the Lion coated her, hot and fresh like ten thousand sheep and ten thousand cattle all slain at once, their lifeblood drained into and directed through an ancient system of waterways and qanats with her at the middle to receive it all.
Ashtadukht exhaled, and it quavered coming out. Sacrifice had always been the most humbling of the elemental temperaments. Such puissance. And in a single breath no less. The constellations were mighty indeed. She took firm purchase on her cuff. As quickly as it’d coated her, the sacrifice sloughed away, not leaving so much as a drop behind. She might have likened it to a fanciful dive into the gelid Mazandaran Sea during deep winter, only to suddenly be torn from the dream. The former might have also galvanized memories of her childhood. Frozen to her cuff, only her grip remained.
She leaned forward in her throne. Sacrifice. What it entailed she couldn’t begin to imagine; it didn’t often answer, and less so with Saturn at the helm. Her innate curiosity took hold.
Ashtadukht wouldn’t have relied on planet-reckoning at all, but the defenders were fierce and well-trained. Further, she knew a fortress could be held with half the attacking force, or less. What’s worse, Nishabhur was divided into quadrants, each functioning as its own fortress. She’d need two to establish a foothold.
The earth let out a peevish groan. The ramparts that ringed the compromised and adjacent quadrants reared up as if they were playing at being a lion. Towers became paws, swatting at some unseen assailant. Merlons were shed in a rockslide of a mane. To tie the performance together, it issued a baked brick roar like the King of All Bulwarks.
Saturn glinted in the west, and from its lofty house that glint streaked across the sky, silvery and ill-omened. Its trajectory shot through the Cub and the Bear constellations, then into the Dragon, where it took a more terrestrial heading. The fey asteroid slowed to a drift there, between the stars that delineated the tail of the Dragon, to loiter at the top of its arc. And just when it seemed it’d draw to a stop, it rocketed toward the Earth.
The ramparts-lion reared pre-emptively—it must’ve known deep within its newborn consciousness what was coming—and a second later the glint pierced its back, revealed as a huge ceremonial dagger. The ramparts roared a death knell like a landslide, and fell apart so completely the mortar that bound it must have all at once failed.
Ashtadukht sat back, positively pleased with herself. She’d taken a risk, and it’d payed off so magnificently that even Waray would surely be impressed by the display. She thought this without knowing what’d transpired atop the bulwark. She’d saved the half-viper’s life, perhaps: whatever the star-reckoner had meant to unleash never came to fruition. An errant brick to the face had seen to that. And Waray had, in fact, been impressed. Standing astride the spine of a towering ramparts-lion had earned her appreciation; however, once it’d fallen to pieces, the plummet had led to some brief revisions in the area of appreciation.
Rather than opening up only the adjacent quadrant, Ashtadukht’s planet-reckoning had stripped up and dismantled the outer wall of three. Now, the city was scattered with debris and marked by a dagger whose hilt sliced through a passing cloud like the tip of a mountain.
“Might’ve gone overboard,” Ashtadukht mused. She’d planned on using Nishabhur as a rallying point and supply depot—much like Murv—but it’d take some doing before it could serve as a proper fortress again. She’d have to leave some divs behind to work on fashioning a new wall, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to cut into her ranks. Ashtadukht wasn’t blind to the worth of contingencies—and the cost of having none—but she didn’t want to entertain the idea of retreating. This campaign was all or nothing. There would be no turning tail to the relative safety of Down Below to retaliate later. If Iran could manage to rout her host, it was over. She had the initiative; it’d be foolish to squander it.
Ashtadukht reached for an apricot, frowned and decided against it, then figured she deserved a treat for plans well executed. Sh
e could revel in being well laid as much as the next half-whore—conjure up the imagery anyway—but a plan well executed? That’s what victories were made of.
The remaining quadrant would resist, but its fate was sealed. And if, by chance, the garrison’s redoubled defense proved too tenacious, she’d send in her heavy units. Not the forty-armed div, though; his part didn’t come until later. She’d point him in a direction and he’d rampage. And not stop. She bit into an apricot, and looked on as her host converged on the resistance.
• • • • •
Ashtadukht strode into Nishabhur like she owned the place. All things considered, she did. She’d foregone her litter both despite and because of the intransigent ache in her bones. She’d rather not go through the trial of scaling it and risk looking weak, especially not in her moment of triumph.
So, chin high, stride supremely confident, she passed through the bleating, baying ruckus of her host to the four men Waray had rounded up for her. The half-viper limped forward as she approached, and Ashtadukht gave her an inquiring look and gestured toward her leg.
“Did they give you some trouble?”
Waray canted her head, her broken nose screwed up in a grimace. “Oneminute I was riding a šo-bucking wall. Next it was all shambles andšo-muchwind.” She scratched the still-fresh wound on her head. “Heroics, I think.”
“Maybe,” Ashtadukht replied, pointedly giving the half-viper’s typical nebulous reply. She indicated the four star-reckoners, who were bound and hooded and wore the regalia of their office. “You did well in capturing them. Commendably. And alive, too. I was right in trusting you with such an important task.”
“Maybe,” Waray said, canting in the other direction and shifting her weight to better favour her injured leg.
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 31
