by Doug Beyer
That just left an opening for the third champion, whose blade slashed directly at Rafiq’s eyes. Instinctively Rafiq ducked, and the attack just missed. The audience gasped.
Was this Jhessian crazy? Helmets hadn’t been worn in combat for hundreds of years; everybody knew that an attack with a blade to the head was strictly illegal. Rafiq recovered and stood, looking sternly at the judge. The judge did nothing, signifying no breach. Impossible.
The three Jhessians circled around him, looking much more lithe in their heavy armor than Rafiq had made them out to be. Their swords struck toward him like needles, more accurate than they should have been and far more damaging, cutting actual scars in his armor. He deflected all he could, relying on years of ritual combat as Bant’s foremost Champion of Sigils, but the illegal moves were overwhelming him. The judge was motionless, leaving Rafiq to his own devices.
Then Rafiq felt it. The blow came from behind him, where his armor didn’t cover, and had cut into his skin, a razor-thin line through his actual tissue. It was far from fatal, but that didn’t matter. He turned in shock, and the Jhessians spread out and broke off their attacks. There before him stood the champion who had struck him, a tiny spot of red liquid glimmering on the point of his sword.
Rafiq watched his blood trace its way down the champion’s blade, transfixed. He had never seen blood on a blade before.
JUND
Sarkhan saw the surge of hot air blast out from Rakka’s hands, catching the warriors full in the back and accelerating their flight, turning each of them into flailing comets. The spell was messy—it didn’t create a choreographed air attack, but an explosion of human bodies sailing across the cavern. Would it save them from gravity, only to kill them with velocity?
No time to criticize. As Sarkhan prepared another spell, he saw Kresh grasp his sword with both hands and raise it over his head in midair, preparing for impact as he fell toward the beast. The dragon reared up to meet him. Kresh sliced downward at its face and struck home, his sword burying itself in the top of the dragon’s snout, before falling past the beast and leaving his sword behind. He slammed into its wing pinion, knocking the breath from his lungs, and tumbled to the cavern floor, gasping.
Around him, the other warriors fell against the dragon in impact after violent impact to form rough piles around the creature’s feet. Some of them got back up immediately and gathered their weapons and wits; many did not.
Rakka’s spell was a mistake. The attack had been a disaster.
The dragon unleashed a torrent of fire on the warriors around it, and simultaneously flapped its wings, sending up a massive whoosh of air. Most of the clan were sent reeling. The burning bodies of several warriors, already dead, slid and flipped across the rough cavern floor.
Sarkhan and Rakka dived to the ground to survive the heat blast. Pebbles and debris rained down on them, and Sarkhan felt the heat roast his back and the hair on his head. He scrambled to his feet and yelled at the shaman.
“Damn the elementals, Rakka! Just bring the ceiling down!”
It had stopped being an assault on a majestic foe. It had become a massacre, and a matter of survival.
“No,” she answered. “Keep it busy. Just a little longer.” She was gathering her spell materials back together, assembling the sangrite chips into an approximate circle.
“You have to collapse this place now, Rakka! There’s no hope of beating that thing!”
No response. She must have gone mad. Sarkhan turned to the dragon. If he were some other person, he would have escaped up the volcanic vent they had used to get in. But instead he threw out the edges of his cloak, ran at the hellkite, and leaped off the ledge himself.
As he fell, he drew on every bit of power left in him, and became a dragon made of fire.
NAYA
Tenoch hated the night patrol. If he slept, he got a whipping. If he managed to stay awake all night, he got to listen to the shrieking of jungle insects and the snoring of his pridemates—pests, both of them. So instead he spent the night in a dreary state halfway between sleep and wakefulness—not enough to feel any kind of satisfying rest, but enough to get grudging agreement that he had done his duty.
There was rarely movement in the den at night, especially after the Festival, which is why his half-sleep was disturbed by the footsteps of the figure, quiet as they were. Only Tenoch’s eyelids stirred, and only enough to get a look at what was going on.
It wasn’t much. A hooded figure approached the bonfire at the center of the den. “Probably just someone from the den who can’t sleep,” Tenoch muttered. The fact that the person wore a cloak was a little strange, as it was a warm night, but people could do what they wanted, Tenoch figured. The figure bent over and tossed something into the fire, paused to look into the fire for a moment, and then walked into the darkness.
Excellent, thought Tenoch’s groggy mind. He already had a happening to report to Jazal in the morning, proof that he had witnessed something. He nestled his head on his arm and let sleep take him.
The night was a blanket of insect whirrs, the sleepy murmurs of his pridemates, and the occasional bellow of a faraway gargantuan. The bonfire hissed and crackled, lulling Tenoch to sleep. A loud pop startled him, but he dismissed it as a wet stone in the fire that had cracked. He set his head down again, only to hear a series of muffled bursts from inside the coals. Annoyed, Tenoch stuck his head up again, to see what was happening.
Noxious purple smoke streamed out of the fire.
“What the hell?” he muttered. If the canopy caught fire, he was going to catch the whipping of a lifetime.
Annoyed, he lurched to his feet to go investigate.
“Terrible, terrible things,” he involuntarily whispered to himself when he saw the bonfire.
Creatures made of darkness had begun to form out of the billowing smoke. They dropped out of the fumes in distorted humanoid shapes, landing on their feet in hunched positions. They looked around and sniffed the air with a hissing sound.
Then a single, enormous creature of shadow emerged from the bonfire, easily twice the size of a nacatl. Its claws were dagger-sharp and its eyes empty like a skull. It peered around the den and saw Tenoch, who froze.
It took him a dozen short breaths to pull enough air into his lungs. He tried to yelp, but it only came out as a whimper. Then he began screaming in earnest.
JUND
Rakka watched Sarkhan sail over the cavern ledge, his body igniting and expanding until he almost filled the cavern with his brilliance. The Sarkhan-creature slammed into the dragon, and the two engaged one another, snapping and striking with their jaws and claws. The man has a gift, that’s for sure, she thought. She could finally complete her mission.
She assembled the circle of shamanic ingredients quickly and set up a small, crystal obelisk in the center. With only a morsel of effort she bound an elemental of magma into the crystal, containing its enormous essence inside the tiny symbol. She should be offended, she thought, that the others believed she could have been so incompetent, so slow to summon her elementals for the assault. But they had served their purpose. The hellkite wouldn’t bother her, and she could serve her purpose to her master—a dragon far more ancient and dangerous than even Malactoth.
Her crystal obelisk glowed and shuddered with power as the elemental spirit inside it raged, struggling to break out. The ritual set up sympathetic tremors in the cavern around them, causing stalactites to fall and the walls to begin crumbling.
“I’ll collapse this place just like you asked, Sarkhan,” Rakka said to herself, her hands trembling with the force of her magic. “But not for the reason you thought.”
As the cavern shook, the largest column supporting the ceiling cracked. The outermost layers of rock fell away from it like a broken eggshell, revealing a gleaming red obelisk of pure sangrite beneath. The crystal replica in front of Rakka broke with a bang and fell into two smoking pieces.
Shards of rock began falling from the ceiling. Rakka wipe
d her brow and took one last look at the battle down below. Sarkhan’s fiery form held Malactoth in a death-grip, and pieces of stone began to fall on both of them. Without another thought, Rakka slipped out.
BANT
Rafiq knew he should probably throw down his sword, yielding the match. Continuing to fight was tantamount to admitting the legality of the Jhessians’ assault, which was tantamount to sanctioning chaos. But the Jhessians were closing in around him, and the judge had done nothing. Rafiq’s body tensed, tingling and electric, as he realized that he had been set up, and that neither his ceremonial armor nor the law of Bant would protect him. He was used to winning for a cause; he would have to win to live.
“You’re here to kill me, then,” said Rafiq to the Jhessians.
Rafiq’s words echoed throughout the arena, and the murmur of the crowd followed them. The Jhessians didn’t respond, but one of them gestured to the others, a signal Rafiq didn’t understand.
“Your swords are illegally enchanted, no doubt more skilled at finding my skin than you are,” Rafiq continued. “You fight without technique or honor. Yet I will not show you the same disrespect. In the name of Asha and for the good of this court, I shall defeat you entirely within the bounds of proper—”
He stopped short. The Jhessians had begun doing something strange. They were unbuckling the clasps on their breastplates.
“Stop!” Rafiq said. “What are you … “
In a moment, the Jhessians were unarmored to the waist, only a simple tunic covering their chests. They took up their swords again, and Rafiq was surrounded by three sharp, glittering points—with unarmored fighters behind them.
A single strong blow with Rafiq’s heavy, unsharpened arena sword would break the Jhessians’ bones and probably kill them. All his fighting prowess conformed to the rules of ritual combat, and all his principles conformed to honor. He couldn’t lay down his sword—but how could he, the most honor-decorated knight in Bant, attack three nearly defenseless youths before hundreds of people?
NAYA
Screams tore through Ajani’s dreams. As he awoke, the screams didn’t fade away along with the veil of sleep—they just gained in volume and immediacy. With his heart pounding and his body tense, he staggered from his bed and looked out of the entrance to his lair.
Roars and shrieks rebounded throughout the caves of the den, and the inconstant light of the bonfire threw bizarre, thrashing shadows in all directions. His nostrils flared. There was blood in the air—nacatl blood—and beneath that, he smelled something foreign, like ash and rotting flesh. In the dark, his hand closed over the handle of his axe, and he stepped out.
He could see them. Unnatural creatures were swarming around the bonfire, attacking his fellow nacatl. Members of his pride swept past him, climbing to higher ground to escape them. One of the creatures ran toward Ajani in pursuit, the fingerbones of the creature’s claws splayed out like the branches of a dead tree, an unholy light radiating from the empty pits of its eyes. Ajani stepped before it, lodging himself between the fiend and his pridemates, and swung his axe, chopping down through its body. The axe’s bindings held as he hacked solidly into the creature once, twice, rending the thing in two with a clatter of ribs.
Ajani sprang down into the fray, landing full on the back of another of the creatures. Its flesh broke, sloughing off like wet cloth under Ajani’s claws. One after the other Ajani felled them, his axe and claws driven by protective instincts, his senses sharpened by the cries of his pride-mates. After what felt like only a dozen heartbeats, few of the fiends remained, their shredded remains littering the grounds around the bonfire.
Then Ajani heard the words he had hoped he wouldn’t.
“The kha!” shouted a voice. It was Tenoch, who had been in charge of the watch that night. “Jazal is in trouble!”
Ajani looked back up the slopes of the hill. The remaining death-creatures had fought their way all the way up the zigzagging trails to the lair at the top—his brother’s cave. He bounded up ledge after ledge, slowing only to cut through every one of the creatures he encountered.
When he reached the entrance to Jazal’s lair, Zaliki stood there. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but her posture was defiant, blocking Ajani from entering.
“Move aside,” Ajani said.
“Don’t go in there, Ajani,” said Zaliki. “I mean it.”
“Move out of my way, or I will move you.”
She put a hand on his chest. “Ajani, listen to me.”
But of course, that was the last thing she could say to make him listen. He knew her purpose was kindness, but he tore through her arms and ran into the lair.
His foot touched something sticky on the cave floor. Unidentified cruor stuck to the fur on his foot. Behind him, he thought Zaliki said something, but he didn’t hear her words over the blood thumping in his ears.
Ajani’s pupils dilated, taking in the dim details of the lair. The first thing he saw was the wooden handle of the axe, positioned vertically over the bed. He followed its line down to where he saw his brother Jazal lying on his back. The handle belonged to Jazal’s axe, the one that matched Ajani’s own; the blade was obscured, sunk somewhere deep within Jazal’s chest.
BANT
The Jhessians’ ceremonial plates lay strewn across the dirt of the arena, abandoned as if they were meaningless hunks of scrap metal. The three youths slashed at Rafiq with magically-augmented precision, landing scratch after scratch on Rafiq’s armor and shield. Rafiq retreated step by step, parrying and defending, resisting the urge to strike back. But he was losing. One blow found a chink near his shoulder and sliced through the leather strap, causing his steel pauldron to hang uselessly to one side. Another nicked a flesh wound in Rafiq’s forehead that began to ooze blood down his cheek.
The crowd was in an uproar, but Rafiq didn’t hear them. He had made his choice.
“Asha forgive me,” he muttered.
Rafiq lunged into one of them, driving his sword high, toward the shoulder blades. As he expected, that Jhessian’s sword came up to meet his own in a parry, and another attacked Rafiq’s exposed flank. Rafiq brought his sword down in a flash, catching the attacker’s blade with the full weight of his own, cleaving the weapon in two. The point went flying away, and the broken sword’s wielder backed off in fear.
Rafiq pressed the attack. He traded attacks with the two remaining warriors as if he were two men, letting his steel move fluidly between them. He learned the reaction time of the youths and their enchantments, and when he had the rhythm of them, he leaped between the two and spun, presenting a flash of his exposed back to each of them. As they both lunged, Rafiq pivoted sideways, and the youths sank their swords into one another.
They fell to the ground, gravely wounded but healable. The remaining Jhessian dropped the hilt of his broken sword, and fell to his knees.
The judge finally spoke. “Victory goes to the defendant.”
The crowd leaped to their feet, cheering.
Rafiq felt no victory. He had only one thing on his mind—someone had set him up to fail, to dishonor himself, and to break the law. Why in Asha’s name do that? he thought. He turned to face Aarsil the Blessed in the crowd. She had an inscrutable smile on her face.
“You did well,” said Aarsil the Blessed, after the match. Her bemused smile was the reverse of Rafiq’s scowl.
“I did what I never thought I’d do,” said Rafiq. “They didn’t deserve such treatment. I shamed the arena and my caste.”
“You did what you had to do,” said Aarsil. “That was the important thing. And they’ll survive. I’ve had my best healers tend to them.”
“You used your influence here,” said Mubin, his eyes narrow. “You used your caste privilege to influence the judge.”
“Mubin, please!” said Rafiq. “Remember your place!”
“No, he’s right,” said Aarsil. “And my associates from the Order of the Skyward Eye supplied the enchanted swords. I’m sorry we deceived you, and put t
he mercenaries at risk. But I need a special kind of champion—one who has the right skill and character to perform a grave duty in the times to come. I had to test you. And you passed.”
Rafiq bowed sharply, and cast a look at Mubin, who bowed grudgingly. “We are at your service, of course, Blessed,” said Rafiq.
“Good. Then you leave for Giltspire Castle immediately.”
“Giltspire? What is our mission there?”
“To discover who destroyed it.”
“Giltspire … destroyed?” Rafiq said. “It doesn’t make sense, Mubin. I don’t understand it. How could the angels have allowed such a thing?”
Mubin rubbed his chin pensively. “What I want to know is who would want it done?”
A long line of mourners marked the road to Giltspire—all heading to the city, none away from it. Individual travelers, couples, and entire families had picked up a minimum of belongings and were making a grim pilgrimage to the site of the disaster. As Rafiq and Mubin passed them on their leotau steeds, the pilgrims’ faces didn’t look pleading, or even sorrowful. They looked resigned, as if they had already accepted their fate. Rafiq noted that many of them had copies of Asha’s Prophecy with them, the prayer spread across Bant in recent years by the solemn Order of the Skyward Eye.
“Asha’s Prophecy predicted this,” said one old man at a pilgrim’s camp one night. “The Prophecy warns that once grace falls, doom will come to the world, and the ultimate test will begin.”
“What does that mean?” Rafiq asked him.
“It means you of Sigiled caste must unite to save us,” said the old man. “Without you, we won’t be able to stop them from pouring out of hell and destroying us. As the Prophecy says, unless you scour the underworld of evil itself, Bant will fall.”
