by Sam Sykes
She looked away. A great silence, like the held breath of a crowd before the executioner’s blade falls, grew between them.
“If you’re doing this for me, Lenk,” she said, “if you’re only doing this because you hope I’ll be back with you and everything will go back to the way it was.” She frowned again, and though it wasn’t soft, it hurt to look at. “I don’t … I can’t …”
She bit her lip, maybe to hold back whatever she was going to say, maybe to hold back something else. He felt a sudden pain in his chest, sharper and keener than all the new aches and old wounds that riddled his body. And he didn’t know what to say to that.
But he said it, anyway.
“I know.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“I said I know.” He sighed. “I don’t know what the fuck I was expecting.” He looked at the sword in his hand, naked and bare. “I guess I thought … maybe if I just kept fighting, it’d all work out, somehow.”
He set down the sack of supplies, pulled out the sword they had taken from Nezhi. He pulled it free from its scabbard—a dull and lifeless thing, virginal steel and no story to its craft—and tossed it away.
“I’ve been trying to remember the stories my grandfather told me,” he said. “I remember parts of them: the sad beginning, the monsters they slew, the happy endings where they got the girl and the treasure.” He sighed. “If there were any stories about heroes who don’t know what they’re doing, he didn’t tell them to me.”
He slid his sword into the blade’s scabbard. It was a snug fit, but a fit, nonetheless. And when he slung it over his shoulder, he could scarcely tell the difference.
“People like us,” he said. “I don’t think we get happy endings. I think you and I get through this still standing, we call it a win.”
“Lenk …” she said.
“After everything,” he sighed, “all the fighting and all the blood, all I have left is this.” He patted the sword’s hilt. “And you.” He shook his head. “If I can’t get rid of the sword, let me use it to protect you. So long as you come out of this alive, then you can walk away from this, from me, forever. I won’t mind, so long as you get to walk away.”
Softness didn’t look good on her. Softness was made for gentle ladies and women who had more to laugh about than dirty jokes. She was made for hard times: long hunts, arrows in the sky, and bodies on the earth. Softness, like the kind in her eyes as she looked at him, didn’t look good on her.
And it damn near killed him to see her look that way.
But she nodded, like he hoped she wouldn’t and like he knew she had to. And he nodded, like it didn’t kill him to do so.
And she pulled herself onto the horse, then pulled him on behind her. And with a quick kick, they took off at a gallop into the dunes.
TWENTY-SIX
PAPER GLORY
Smart money says they come in the most straightforward way.” Dransun tapped the map. “Right through the front door.”
He pointed out over the ridge, toward the long road that clove a clear, straight shot through the high hills. At the very edge of the Green Belt’s verdant fields and flooded paddies, the green earth gave way to a steep rise of hard-packed earth. Past that, the dust of the endless desert sprawled out forever.
Asper followed his gaze all the way out to the desert. The dunes crested high there, wearing glittering crowns from the hot afternoon sun: the strange mirages that made it look like liquid was forever on the horizon, just out of reach.
If she squinted, she could almost see the thousands of tulwar that would come pouring over the ridge before she knew it.
But then, that was just another mirage.
Or frazzled nerves.
Or the fact that she had barely slept in days.
“If that’s the case, then collapsing the other roads would seem a waste.” Haethen hummed, jotting something down on her scroll. “All wars end, eventually. When this one does, having more roads to bring in supplies will be key to keeping the city thriving.”
Asper spared a glance for her writings—the Karnerian made no effort to conceal her strategies. But with all the notes and diagrams scrawled with such madness that they seemed to make sense only to Haethen, Asper supposed she didn’t have to.
A drop of sweat fell into her eye, sending her mopping her brow for what seemed like the four hundredth time. Had Cier’Djaal always been this hot? Or had she simply not noticed before?
The canvas tent that topped their crude watchtower, hastily crafted from salvaged materials by carpenters with heavy debts, didn’t do much to shield them from the sun and wind. But it offered them the best possible view of the battlefield to come.
“I still say that was a good call by her,” Dransun grunted. He gestured over his shoulder. “The Green Belt’s nothing but open fields and Cier’Djaal wasn’t built to defend itself to begin with. We hold the tulwar here, or we don’t hold them at all.”
Haethen let out a low hum. “If the rumors are even half-true, then they outnumber us greatly. We can’t let them run wild.” She shook her head, sending her bushy black hair trembling. “The wizards reported back today, at any rate. It’s done.”
She pointed her quill as though it were a spear, aiming directly for the long road cleaving between the hills.
“Between the last phalanx under our command and what the Sainites have to bring, we’ll have enough men to hold the tulwar at the road.” She drew two arrows on the map scrawled across the table. “We’ll funnel their forces into the cliffs, fight them there.”
“I’d like it better if we could build more towers,” Dransun said. “Pepper them with arrows until they break down.”
“If you can find enough materials and craftsmen to build me some in as little time as we have, I will agree.” Haethen clicked her tongue. “After which, I will promptly find you medical attention for having pulled all of them out of your ass.” She sniffed haughtily. “Pound for pound, a tulwar is stronger and faster than the average man, but all of our research suggests that they fight in loose coalitions and war bands. They’ll falter beneath a true unit.”
“And what research do you base that on?” Dransun asked.
She regarded him evenly from behind her spectacles. “The research I have accumulated as chief strategist over six campaigns in service to the largest empire to have ever stretched across the land. Shall I continue?”
Dransun opened his mouth to retort but thought better of it, making a yielding gesture toward her.
“Thank you.” She tapped the map again. “The Sainites destroyed most of our veteran companies in the war. But we’ve got a few left to rally the remaining. I have faith that our phalanx can hold in these spaces, with the Sainites providing backup.”
“Worse comes to worst, you’ve got a few thousand angry Djaalics to fight,” Dransun offered.
“With all respect to your kinsmen, Captain, if it comes down to untrained civilians with sharp sticks, we’ll be considerably beyond ‘worse,’ no matter how angry they are. Our best hope lies with those trained to fight.”
Asper found her gaze drawn to those very people. The camp that had been set up at the base of the cliffs was small—frighteningly so, if she was honest.
On one side, she could see the black-clad form of Careus, stalking back and forth and barking orders. Responding to each command, she could see the last Karnerian phalanx—a tight square of shields, spears, and flesh—practicing combat maneuvers in iron harmony.
On the other, the remaining Sainites were hard at work fletching arrows for their crossbows, loading up fireflasks, tending to the few remaining winged scraws they had. Blacksbarrow stormed between the tents, snarling commands at them and being met with soldiers hurrying to see them completed.
They weren’t working together. But they weren’t at each other’s throats.
Progress, she supposed.
“The scraws will give us an advantage,” Haethen said. “But we’d be fools to think that the tulwa
r don’t know about them. We’ll use them tactically, striking where we think the enemy is weak. If we can use them to funnel more forces into the cliffs, so much the better.”
“Just send ’em in with their fireflasks and burn the whole shitload down.”
“Elegant strategy, Captain. It is a surprise you never saw military service.” Haethen rolled her eyes. “Fireflasks gutter out if dropped from too high. And we know that the Sainites took a beating from the tulwar at their city. They are our most precious resource. We must use them conservatively.”
Asper stared at the road—seemingly so wide, so massive—and tried to play it out in her head. She saw the phalanx. She saw the Sainites. She saw the fight.
And she saw the bodies.
Through all the strategies they had gone through, all the tactics they had proposed and discarded, it always ended the same way in her head. No matter how conservative or reckless they intended to be, it always ended with everyone dead and the tulwar rampaging through.
How could it not, she wondered? How could heaven look upon the fraud she had committed in its name and still take her side? How could she hope that people who had been at each other’s throats just days ago could form together to fight off a horde of that size?
How could she beat Gariath when no man, monster, or demon had so much as slowed him down in all the time she had known him?
“This all hinges, of course,” Haethen muttered, “on the idea that the tulwar will have nowhere else to go.” She quirked a brow at Dransun. “I hate to harp on the subject, but all our lives rest on the idea that there are no other ways into the Green Belt.”
“None,” Dransun said. “The Green Belt’s farmers have tended this land for generations. There’s not a path in that they don’t know about.” He spit on the floor. “With the other two roads blocked, the only way left is Harmony Road.”
Haethen paused in her scribbling, eyeing him for a moment. “What did you call it?”
“Harmony Road,” he said. “Kind of nice, isn’t it?”
“I’ve been calling it ‘the Godsway’ in my correspondence,” she said. “Our maps have it labeled as such.”
“No, that’s the old name.”
“Well, what was wrong with it? I thought it sounded impressive.”
“Yeah, so did every other ruler with a road and a religion. There’s, like, forty different Godsways out there.” Dransun jerked a thumb toward the road. “The fashas renamed it Harmony Road a generation ago to encourage more foreign traders to come visit. Sort of a ‘come be one with everyone in the spirit of trade’ thing, you know?” He shrugged. “It just stuck.”
She stared at him flatly for a moment. When she returned her quill to her scroll, it was with a decidedly irate thrust and a less-than-thrilled curl of her lips.
“Fine,” Haethen said. “I’ll just be Haethen Calderus, chief strategist who oversaw the Battle of Harmony fucking Road. That’ll look amazing in my record.”
“Listen,” Dransun said. “Before you go getting upset about that, you might consider the fact that you don’t have an end in sight.”
“Pardon?”
“Hold off the tulwar for as long as you want, they’ll keep coming. And then what? We’ve got no reinforcements coming. No way to repel them for good. If you ask me, our only way out is—”
“The dragonman.”
It was the first time Asper had spoken since rolling out of bed after two hours of sleep and demanding a cup of coffee. And she spoke it without tearing her eyes from the road.
“All we need to do is kill him,” she said. “And the rest of them will collapse.”
“That’s a gamble,” Dransun said. “No one knows if that will actually—”
“I do,” she said.
She could feel their stares boring into the back of her neck. But she heard no words to go with them.
They had questions for her, she knew—Haethen, especially—about her relation to Gariath, about how she knew so much about him. But after a time, they had stopped asking.
It wasn’t that she was intentionally being cagey—she wanted the dragonman dead as much as anyone, if it would save lives. But she was never really sure what to tell them. Because she was still never really sure what Gariath was to her. Or maybe she just wasn’t sure how it had all come to this, how she had set out with five other people to become an adventurer and had ended up as a fraud of a prophet facing down a monster that had once been her friend.
In the end, she supposed it wasn’t important. Most of their questions weren’t, really.
“How are you going to kill him, then?”
Except that one.
“I was there, Asp—” Dransun caught himself. “Prophet. I saw what that monster did to you. You barely laid a finger on him, even without him standing behind a wall of tulwar. How are you going to do it now?”
She stared at the road. She pictured those thousand tulwar streaming down it like a black tide with rivulets of steel. She pictured him at its head, tall and proud and his claws wet with her blood. She pictured all the carcasses in his wake.
She closed her eyes.
“Heaven is watching,” she said.
Not a great answer, she knew. But fuck, it seemed to solve pretty much everything else these days.
“Right,” Dransun grunted. “I’m going to go check the supplies.” He spared a nod for Haethen. “Madam.” He spared a stiff bow and stiffer look for Asper. “Prophet.”
He trudged down the ladder, his footsteps lingering in her ears longer than they should. A warm breeze blew past. Papers fluttered behind her. Haethen muttered something as she shuffled them back to order and continued scribbling notes in them.
The silence was far too deep and not nearly merciful enough to spare her the sound of her own thoughts.
And so she spoke to drown them out.
“Six campaigns,” Asper said. “Really?”
“Indeed,” Haethen replied, her voice climbing with a bit of pride. “The speaker and I have proudly served the Empire across many southern continental campaigns, including the Bagwai Forays and the withdrawals from Nivoirian-held territories in—”
“How did they end?”
Haethen paused. “With the completion of the objective, of course.”
“No, not that. It’s …” Asper sighed. “When you say you completed the campaigns, what happened, then? Were the lands you left peaceful?”
A longer, deeper pause. “Not by the common definition, no. Greenshicts continue to launch raids from the Bagwai jungles. We resumed hostilities with the Nivoirians last summer.”
“It never ends, does it?” Asper muttered. “Even if we win here, we’ll just have bought a few days. Maybe months. We’ll have to fight them again, won’t we?”
The silence was punctuated every two breaths by a thoughtful tapping of Haethen’s quill to her parchment. After ten of these, she quietly rolled her scroll up and approached to stand beside Asper on the watchtower.
“Approximately one century ago,” she said softly, “the disgraced Karnerian philosopher Dadalin Manetheres posited that mankind’s doom was inevitable as they saw conflict as points on a line. Your neighbor takes your cow, you kill your neighbor, take back your cow, the injustice is corrected and the conflict is over.
“Manetheres, however, claimed that conflict was a wheel that made a full revolution once every generation. You take your cow back, your neighbor’s son avenges his cruelly murdered father by killing you, your family retaliates against him, and so on. Conflict, he theorized, was simply a series of responses that does not end without someone agreeing to not respond.”
“There’s a lot of sense in that,” Asper said. “Why was he disgraced?”
“This theory was famously delivered on the steps of the Imperial War College. When he had finished, Speaker Shondean the Second, Most Revered of His Line, calmly walked out of the crowd, approached Manetheres, and hacked off his head. He then asked the headless corpse to respond to his conflict. As
headless corpses tend to not do that, Shondean suggested that the theory had some holes in it.”
Asper sighed. “Outstanding.”
“Regardless, the theory is still taught to Imperial war scholars today,” Haethen said. “However, the lesson tends to be that whoever chooses to end the conflict does so one of two ways: either by being dead or by leaving no one alive to say other—”
Haethen’s voice trailed off as her eyes narrowed to slits. Asper glanced at her, curious.
“What is it?”
Haethen didn’t respond, rushing to the table and seizing a spyglass. She held it up to her eye, peering out far in the distance. Her face twisted into a grimace that softened with a weary sigh.
“Right on schedule,” she muttered as she handed the spyglass to Asper.
With a queer look for her companion, Asper plucked up the glass and peered through it. It took a moment to see, but she found it soon enough.
At the farthest dune, two columns of black smoke rose to stain the blue sky. And at the base of it, she could see the scouts she had sent out into the field mount their horses and go galloping away.
The signal fires had been lit.
Gariath’s army was on the move.
Two fires.
They would arrive by dawn.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE TASTE OF PROGRESS
A rat scurried through a pile of refuse, not ten feet away.
There wasn’t anything special about it. Maybe it was fatter than the average rat—there was, after all, a lot to feast on in Cier’Djaal’s alleys these days. But it had four legs, a long pink tail, a mess of black fur, and a lot of twitching whiskers as it nosed its way through discarded meat and old scraps of paper.
And when Dreadaeleon raised his hand, made a simple gesture, and the rodent was magically pulled into his grasp, it made the panicked squeaking sound of any other rat.
And when he closed his eyes, squeezed his fingers a little tighter around it, and felt a sudden burst of heat …
The squeaking sound was lost in the hiss of steam. The scent of something acrid filled his nose. And he felt his grasp growing tighter as the rodent’s body grew smaller, withered, warped.
