by Sam Sykes
The sound of the wind splitting reached his ear-frills. Another screech tore free of the scraw’s mouth, likely aided by the seven-foot length of wood that suddenly protruded from the creature’s shoulder.
Gariath stole only a momentary glance, just enough to see them. But a moment was enough.
Upon the towers not yet burned, the gaambols clung to the eaves as their riders drew back tremendous spears and hurled them through the air. Scraws fell, struck dead by the blows, and spiraled limply to the earth.
They had done it. Those cowards, those weaklings, they had somehow made the plan work. Good for them.
He’d have to remember to tell them that, if he lived.
The scraw’s iron grip tightened around him. He couldn’t hold its beak back any longer. He risked releasing it, smashing his fist against its head with the hope of distracting it long enough to reach out and seize the spear embedded in its shoulder. With a roar he twisted and jerked it free in a gout of warm red.
The scraw’s head snapped forward, beak gaping. It stopped with a sudden jerk, a spatter of crimson, as Gariath drove the spear forward and into its collar. Its jagged head bit deeper than any arrow or claw could hope to, plunging into its flesh and past its bones.
If its scream was any indication, the pain must have been unbearable.
He could hardly blame it for dropping him.
He clung to the spear, but it merely tore out of the beast’s breast with a spray of gore. He fell, one red drop among many, to the earth. He had no idea how low they had been flying when he was dropped—it certainly felt as if it had been very high when he struck the earth and felt his breath explode from him.
And yet he lived.
His wind returned to him in slow, ragged, struggling breaths, but it returned. His wounds ached, burned, and stung from sand and smoke, but no more. His muscles seared, felt as though they had been torn and chopped with a fine blade, but they still carried him back to his feet, after a time.
He looked to the skies, now dark with nightfall. From the fires below, he could just barely see the remaining scraws as they wheeled about and veered back toward the direction of their convoy, chased by spears and arrows.
Only when he was sure they were retreating did he look to the city.
He was not sure how he had expected this to end. Perhaps it had been too much to think there might be cheering for the victory. He did not fault the tulwar warriors for not even loosing roars of fury. But he had not expected such silence from them, such glass-eyed, vacant-faced quiescence turned to a sky they would never trust again.
What buildings had fallen now lay in rubble or smoldered in massive pyres for the dead who had been inside. What buildings stood now groaned precipitously and swayed uneasily as gaambols climbed down. The city was bright with firelight, and the smoke that rose from it was black enough to choke even the night.
They had won. Yet to anyone who might have been watching, Shaab Sahaar was already dead.
TWENTY-SIX
THE WOLVES GATHER
The first time I ever left my home was the night after my mother died.”
These were the first words Kwar had spoken that night.
When Kataria had left Lenk sleeping alongside a fire long since smoldered to whispers, she had gone to the edge of the camp. There, among the dunes and under a pale moon, Kwar had found her.
“I hated my father, the way he wanted to make peace with the humans after what they had done to her. I hated Thua, and how he always cried and begged me to stay. I had nothing left, so in the middle of the night, I sneaked out of my tent and climbed the walls of Shicttown and left into the desert.”
They had sat on the edge of a dune together, staring out over the rolling scrubgrass.
“I stayed out there two nights before I ran out of food. My mother had already taught me how to hunt. But I didn’t. It wasn’t hunger that brought me back to Shicttown that time. Or the next. Or the hundred other times I ran away and came back.”
Kwar had looked at Kataria. In the darkness her eyes had looked like nocturnal beasts, alive and hungry.
“I couldn’t stand the silence. If I wasn’t hunting, I would hear my mother’s voice and I couldn’t…” Kwar had looked away then. “But when I came back to Shicttown, it was just as bad. Everyone went carrying on, hunting and trading and raising yijis, like Mother hadn’t died, like she hadn’t even existed. But I couldn’t hear her voice, so I stayed. I thought I’d die there.”
The smile she gave Kataria then was a lying smile, small and scared.
“But then I met you.”
Kataria had pulled her knees to her chest. “You act like that’s a solution.”
“When I’m around you, I feel… I…” Kwar looked at her hands. “Like I always wanted to feel. We could go, you and I.” She made a gesture out over the desert. “Just go. Leave everything.”
“What about Thua?”
“I will leave him.”
“We’d starve.”
“I can hunt.”
“We’d die of thirst.”
“There are oases.”
“We’d be eaten by yijis.”
“They don’t like the taste of shicts.”
“Khoshicts. What about pale shicts?”
“Who would like the taste of a pale shict?” Kwar had nudged Kataria with her shoulder. “You taste like undercooked food.”
“Well, why do you even need me if you’ve got all the fucking answers?” Kataria had laughed a lying laugh. She had stared at the ground. “It’s not that simple.”
“‘Not that simple,’” Kwar had snarled. “My father said the same thing. It’s something people say when they’re too afraid to act. What’s not simple about it? I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me?”
“I do.”
“Do you want to be with him?”
Kataria had closed her eyes. “I do.”
“How? How?” Kwar had leapt to her feet. “He’s human. Kou’ru. Don’t you know what they did to us? What they still do to us?”
“He’s not like the others.”
“He is.”
“I know he’s different.”
“You’ve spent too much time around them. You’ve started thinking like them. You need to—”
“Do not tell me what I need.” She had risen to meet Kwar with a snarl. “He is different. Different enough to spend two years of my life with. I can’t just walk away. I can’t just go in the night. I can’t kill him like that.”
“But you can do that to me?” Kwar had stepped forward, tears in her eyes. “I love you.”
“I know.” Kataria had pressed her brow against Kwar’s. “I know, I know. I can’t… I need to…” She had shaken her head. “I can’t go.” The words had hurt to speak. But they had sounded right. She had let go. She had turned away. “Not yet—”
And Kwar’s fist had cracked against her temple.
And the night had gone completely dark.
Shicts had received few gifts from their maker.
The Dread Goddess Riffid had created strong children and saw no need to coddle them. But the most important gift was the bow and the hands to use it. Shictish hands were fine, made for following tracks and drawing arrows.
Humans claimed to have gods, but it was clear just from looking at their brutish hands that they were simply monkeys who had learned how to grab swords. All their power was in their hairy palms, and their fat fingers struggled with the finer manipulations of more precise weaponry.
Human fingers were clumsy, inept, groping.
Shictish fingers were thin, dexterous, elegant.
And yet, Kataria thought, they all felt the same when they were forced upon her.
“I had heard that touching a human causes hair to sprout out of everywhere.” She felt a grip tighten, viselike, around her jaw. “My grandfather always said that’s why you never saw shicts with beards.” The grip forced her face this way and that, inspecting her. “I don’t see any hair coming out of you, though.
Is it different for the pale shicts?”
Kataria kept her eyes shut, to hide the impotent anger flashing in her scowl. She bit back her anger, her shame, her helplessness, buried it in an empty mind beneath a layer of darkness. And for a moment she could pretend like the last two days hadn’t happened.
But soon enough the Howling reminded her that it had.
His Howling, specifically.
In the darkness of her mind she could hear him: the grinding of sharp teeth twisted in a grin, the excited gibbering whine of a yiji closing in for the kill, the sound of a tongue slurping the marrow from a cracked bone.
And through his Howling, she knew his name.
“Do not act as though you cannot hear me, kou’loho.”
Yarra.
Her eyes snapped open an instant before he struck her. The blow across her face sent her reeling, but only for a moment. The fire that burned through her veins and bade her lunge at him in response, too, was short-lived.
The rawhide securing her hands behind her back gnawed at already bloody wrists, sapped the fury from her in a twist of sudden agony. Breathless, she slumped against the tent pole she had been secured to, scowling up into the sneer that looked down upon her.
He had a face like a hatchet, all his features coming together in the center in long, hard angles. A hawkish nose and pointed chin split with the twist of his grin, his canines big even for a shict’s. His body was too skinny to be a proper warrior’s, the muscle beneath his dark khoshict skin flimsy and underdeveloped, unworthy of the bow that he wore strung across his back.
Yarra.
Kataria had learned his name the moment she had laid eyes on him, his Howling intruding into her skull on the grin he wore when she was brought before the Kho Khun.
Yarra.
She’d heard his name when she had been marched to the modest tent at the edge of the camp, pressed against the pole and her hands tied. She heard his name with every grin he flashed, every blow he struck, every moment he was within earshot.
Yarra.
She held on to that name, held it in her teeth as she glared up at him. She gnawed on it, chewed it into pulp until the blood of his name filled her mouth. And, with her ears rigid and quivering and her eyes narrowed to thin slits, she reached out with her own Howling, into his skull, and spit his name at him.
He reeled as if struck; for surely he had been, to feel a presence so hostile in his skull, let alone one from a kou’loho. And with nothing else to strike with, he raised his hand high above his head and aimed for her jaw. She met him with a snarl, challenging him to bring it down, promising much worse when she got free.
“Yarra.”
His hand was stilled by a voice from the tent’s entrance. And though it filled Yarra with fear, it filled Kataria with something else. As she looked to the slender shadow filling the entrance, she’d never thought she could hate someone more fiercely than she hated the man before her.
But then, there were so many things about Kwar she hadn’t expected.
The khoshict woman pointedly ignored Kataria’s scowl as she entered, her attentions focused on Yarra, who gave begrudging attention in return.
“The council is about to convene,” she said. “They say they want you on lookout duty tonight.”
“Lookout duty?” Yarra cast a sneer at Kataria before looking back to Kwar. He spit his next words. “What of the kou’loho?”
Silence for a moment. “They didn’t say.”
“Fine,” Yarra grunted. “If that’s what they want.”
He offered her a nod of acceptance before moving past her to leave. He had barely taken a step outside the tent when Kwar suddenly spoke up.
“Yarra.”
He paused, glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“You left-handed or right?”
“Right. Why do you—”
The rest of his question was lost in the crack of bone as Kwar smashed her fist against the bridge of his nose. He spun, fell to the ground on his stomach. Kwar slammed one foot between his shoulder blades and seized his right wrist. Swiftly she grabbed his first and second fingers.
“Learn to use your left for a while.”
And without a hint of emotion on her face, she bent them back.
And the swift snapping sound paled in comparison to the scream that followed.
“BITCH! YOU BITCH!” Yarra shrieked, cradling his fingers as she released his hand. “I’ll tell the Kho Khun! I’ll tell them what you did!”
“I don’t give a shit what you say, worm.” She reached down and seized him by his hair, pulling him up by the scalp to face her. “But I’ll do worse if you don’t listen to me.” She leaned so close as to spit in his face with each word. “You never touch her again. Not to strike her. Not to tie her. Not even to help her drink. If I ever see you look at her wrong, I’ll gouge out your left eye and make you watch me eat it with your right. Do you hear me?” she roared, shaking his head. “Do you hear me?”
Yarra could but nod weakly and scamper away as she released him. She chased him out with a growl before turning her attentions to her captive.
She met Kataria’s eyes for only a moment. Her ears curled themselves over, closing them to anything she might say. Kataria’s ears went rigid, attempting to reach out with the Howling, to send something—a snarl, a whimper, anything—to Kwar.
No answers. No pity. Not so much as an awkward look of apology. Kwar had given her nothing but silence since she had been kidnapped. Kataria was not sure why she expected more tonight.
Nor was she sure why she received more.
“He’ll heal,” Kwar muttered.
“Too bad,” Kataria snarled in reply, canines bared.
Kwar turned her eyes away as she stalked behind the tent pole and tended to Kataria’s wrists.
“He loves his tribe. He fears for its safety.” The khoshict’s voice was soft as she began to untie Kataria. “He has never seen a kou’loho before.”
Kataria winced at that word.
It rang painfully in her ears, now as it had when she had been brought before the Kho Khun last night. Now as it had when they had heard Kwar’s testimony as to why she had brought another shict as a prisoner. Now as it had when they had branded her with that word.
Kou’loho. One who had been touched by humans. The word was interchangeable with slave, criminal, unclean, for the shicts saw no difference.
Kataria had been helpless to deny the accusation. And though she knew the word, she had never thought to call herself it. Not until her own people had.
“The tribes are gathering tonight,” Kwar said.
Kataria felt her wrists pull apart suddenly, sticky with blood, as the rawhide bonds snapped free. Tortured skin and aching muscles suddenly screamed out.
“The Seventh is here. The Ninth has been streaming in all day,” the khoshict continued as Kataria stepped away from the pole and rubbed her wrists. “The camp stretches out for miles and the edges are patrolled by our hunters. If you try to run…”
Kataria turned. Kwar met her with a pursed mouth and eyes straining to remain hard. If she had a threat brewing behind them, she could not muster the will to speak it.
So, too, were Kwar’s hands kept deliberately clear of the knife she wore scabbarded at her hip. When Kataria’s eyes lingered upon its hilt, she tried to slide it on her belt to her back.
“You untied me just to tell me that?” Kataria asked with a sneer.
“The Kho Khun have called a gathering. Every shict has been called to attend.” Kwar’s eyes softened as they saw her bloodied wrists. She reached down to take Kataria’s hand. “And I untied you because you’ve been here for a day and a night. What happened to—”
“Don’t.” Kataria drew her hand away suddenly. She was surprised to feel no heat in her voice, no anger. Rather the words drew out like the cold blade of a knife. “Don’t you ever touch me.”
Kwar’s face flashed, wounded. “I was trying to help you. Yarra, he—”
“You’re the same as him,” Kataria spit. “Worse than him. He didn’t betray me.”
“I saved you.” Anger slowly brewed upon Kwar’s sharp features. “You couldn’t see it, you spent too much time with the human. He was infecting you, making you see things. Some time spent among your own people will make you see that.”
“My people?” Kataria held up her bloody wrists. “Anyone who I would call my people wouldn’t do this to me.” She gestured to her weary face. “Or this. Or call me a… a…”
“Kou’loho,” Kwar snarled. “Do you deny it?”
Kataria remained silent. Kwar grimaced.
“I… didn’t want that,” she said. “I just wanted you to see.”
“I see,” Kataria muttered. “I see everything.”
Now it was Kwar’s turn to fall silent. She said nothing, did not look at Kataria as she moved to the tent’s flap and held it open. Kataria regarded her for a moment before stalking out into the night wind.
They traveled down the dune, toward the distant sea of campfires and shadowed tents in the valley below. Kwar was never far from her, the sound of feet crunching on the sand the only sound exchanged between them. They spoke not a word.
And in their Howling, there was nothing but silence.
Why?
This was the word she had yearned to speak.
There were others she’d had in mind, too, when she had awoken from Kwar’s blow. Most of them had been formless snarls of fury. More had been curses. Some had been threats.
But over the hours they had traveled, she had whittled them down to just one word.
Why?
And over the hours, as night became dawn, she had sought to ask it. As she had bobbed and swayed on the slavering yiji beneath her, she had all but screamed it. As she’d struggled against the rope securing her hands behind her back and gnawed on the gag around her mouth, she had been able to come up with but muffled noise.
And Kwar had said nothing.
The khoshict had not even looked back as they rode through the desert. The yijis had romped with a brisk pace, yowling as they took them away from the Lyre. But Kwar had ridden with a head bowed and eyes downcast, leading Kataria’s mount by a rope.
