by Sam Sykes
Of course, that might just be him.
His snout was full of a thousand reeks—of death, of anger, of fear, of blood—and he couldn’t find the thoughts to concentrate on any of them. Ever since dawn, when a rider had come to Daaru, when Daaru had come to Mototaru, when Mototaru had come to him, he had been like this. Too agitated, too angry, too distracted to smell, to fight, even to lead.
“Rua Tong!”
The warriors charged again. Completely unfazed by their earlier failures as they came crashing over their fallen to strike the humans’ shields again. But it wasn’t bravery that fueled them. Bravery had a different smell than what roiled over him in a wave of stink. Their push was driven by desperation.
Of course, again, that might just be him.
“The clan that came with this information …” Gariath glanced to his right. “What was their name again?”
Daaru looked back at him. His usual reek of anger was overwhelmed by the stink of stale blood. His chest was swaddled in bandages from where a stray bolt had caught him on the last charge. But if the pain slowed him, it didn’t show on his face, still bright and vivid with angry color.
“Yanna Jai Janth,” Daaru said. “They come from the coast, far to the south.”
“What are they renowned for?”
“Fishing, mostly. Boat building. A little gaambol riding.”
“Are they stupid?” Gariath asked. “Can they count?”
Daaru’s face grew hard. “They can. And they did.” He pointed to the south. “More are coming. They will tell us the same thing.”
Gariath followed Daaru’s finger. Far away, he could see them, trickling in. The Yanna Jai Janth clan came loping toward the tulwar camp, mounted atop gaambols the color of sand, wielding heavy spears. As they had been coming since that morning when they first brought the news.
“Ships,” Daaru said. “Black ships with black sails. At least five of them, heading directly for the city. They will be here by the end of the day. We are out of time.”
The sound of a dying tulwar’s scream rose on the air, carried by the stink of warm blood on sand.
“And this isn’t working, daanaja.”
Gariath growled. He could see that from the first failed charge. But what else could be done? The cliff gap was too narrow to pour his army into. The humans’ shield wall would grind them up, one by one. He had hoped to break their morale with relentless attacks, but it had only earned him more corpses.
And more were coming. More clans continued to trickle in—some as vanguards for larger clans, some as few as tiny villages dotting the desert. More tulwar that had heard of him, of what he was promising. More tulwar that believed he could give them what they so desperately craved.
More tulwar that would be dead once those ships, and their reinforcements, arrived.
Daaru was right. They were out of time. And this wasn’t working.
And he was the only one who seemed to give a shit.
He turned, pushed past Daaru, and stalked to the far edge of the ridge. Far from the Nak Chamba clansmen who guarded their vantage, he found his adviser. Mototaru hadn’t budged since they had arrived, mopping sweat from his forehead with one hand as he scribbled patterns in the sand with a stick in the other.
“Well?” Gariath snarled.
“Well,” Mototaru muttered in reply. “Nice day, isn’t it?” He looked up at the sun. A hot breeze whipped his hair about his weathered face. “Warm for this time of year, though. The storms are heading back out to sea and the wind is carrying them. Should have a nice one soon.”
“You haven’t said a fucking word all morning,” Gariath said.
“To be fair, you didn’t ask me,” Mototaru said. “You just started sending warriors at their shields.” He glanced at the dragonman out the corner of his eye. “How’s that working out, by the way?”
“The humans have reinforcements,” Gariath growled. “More are coming. They’ll be here by the end of the day. Hundreds, at least. Thousands, maybe. And we can’t even break these few holding a road.” He fixed a hard look on the tulwar. “I don’t need sarcasm. I need a plan.”
Mototaru stared at the map he had drawn in the sand. In its crude scribblings, he saw something that Gariath couldn’t. And it made the tulwar’s lips pull themselves down into a heavy frown.
“The plan,” he sighed, “is there is no plan. We came here driven by anger and fear, like we did in the first Uprising. Those carried us all the way to Cier’Djaal, but there were no armies in our path then. They weren’t ready for us then.” He shook his head, rubbed his face. “Anger and fear can’t carry an army. I knew it then, like I know it now, but I still … I thought this time, with you … but we can’t … we can’t …”
He stared at his drawings in the sand, mouth hanging open, eyes empty. To Gariath, it seemed like nothing more than crosses and circles and arrows drawn in the dirt. But Mototaru saw something vast and hopeless in them, a long story with a hundred endings, all of them unhappy. He stared at them so hard he looked as though he would fall into them, simply fall face-forward into the dirt and simply stop moving, stop speaking, stop everything.
There would come a day, Gariath knew, when he would welcome that kind of silence from the old tulwar.
“No.”
But today, he needed a strategist.
His foot came down on Mototaru’s drawings. All the strategies and stories and unhappy endings vanished in a cloud of dust.
“There’s a way,” he said. “We have always had it.”
Mototaru opened his mouth to ask, but then the realization dawned on his face. He looked over his shoulder, toward a camp far from the others.
“The other clans will never charge with them,” he said. “They are too afraid.”
“Fear carried us this far. It can go a little further.”
Mototaru shook his head but paused. The wind kicked up, a sudden gust that sent the dust of his former strategies flying across the sky. He watched the grains disappear into the wind, humming.
“Two hours,” he said.
“What?”
“Two hours. Make your charge then.” Mototaru clambered to his feet. “I will go to Daaru, have him pull our warriors back.”
“Back where?”
“Back to the dunes. Back to the sand. I will need them all, every warrior, every archer, every gaambol. I will need them to kick up as much earth as they can.”
“For what?”
“You need a plan.” Mototaru shuffled off. “I’ve got one. Just make sure you’ve got what you need.”
Gariath asked nothing more. He had asked for a plan, true, and he had gotten a lot of insane mutterings instead. But, with someone like Mototaru, perhaps they were the same thing.
He made his way down the dune, pausing to roar at warriors lingering in their camps, commanding them to head to the front and heed Mototaru. He counted them as they rushed away—twenty here, fifty or so there—there would be a thousand, maybe, left to fight after all their losses today.
A thousand and however many he could pull from the dingy pit of a camp that loomed before him.
The Mak Lak Kai clan didn’t bother with tents or firepits. They slept on the backs of their gaambols beneath the stars. They ate their meat raw and tossed the bones aside. And the stink of both their beds and their meals hit him like a reeking fist, almost bringing him to his knees as he stormed through their camp.
But he forced himself through, ignoring their calls to him, ignoring the shrieking of their gaambols, as he made his way to the center.
And the scarred warrior sitting there.
“Ah, daanaja.” Chakaa waved idly, lounging against the flank of her snoring gaambol, as he approached. “Is the fight going well? I’d check, but the other clans won’t let us near the front. I sometimes hear screams on the wind.” She smiled an ugly yellow smile. “Sounds like we’re all having fun out there.”
“Get up,” Gariath snarled. “Ready your clan.”
“F
or what?” Chakaa asked. “Is it lunch?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Chakaa is never stupid, my friend. But she knows what happens when malaa try to fight with other good tulwar.” Her smile faded. She regarded Gariath coldly. “You asked us to come, we came. You ask us to fight, we’ll fight. But it’s not us that’ll tell you that you ask too much. The other clans—”
“The other clans will learn,” Gariath snarled, “that I don’t ask.”
Chakaa blinked. Slowly, the grin returned to her face as she pulled herself to her feet. She took up her massive beaten-metal sword and hiked it over one shoulder.
“I always knew there was a reason I liked you, daanaja.”
Quiet, it was written once, was the soldier’s worst foe. Warfare had its own harmony—the rattle of steel, the parting of flesh, the splash of life. It was easy to follow from one note to the next. Silence, however, invited nothing but the cacophony of thought: messy, gibbering things that shouted to be heard over one another. In carnage, there was peace. In quiet, there was madness.
Pathon hadn’t believed it at the time. Pathon couldn’t even remember the manual he had read that in.
But as the quiet dragged on into its third hour, he was beginning to buy it.
After a morning of near-constant attacks, the tulwar had finally fallen back. Their dead littered the road and their blood painted the shields of his fellow Marchers. He would have called them defeated, but …
There was something about the retreat. It had come too suddenly, with too much disorder. They had fallen back in a mass herd, fleeing over the dunes and disappearing. Like something had happened. Like they knew something he didn’t. They were smarter than they seemed, these monkeys. They fought like savages, but they were too clever, too cunning to be so easily written off. They were planning something. They were …
A thick droplet of sweat fell into his eye. He shook his head and, with it, shook those depraved thoughts out of his ears.
It was the wind, he told himself.
The heat in this desert was always oppressive, but over the past few days, the wind had kicked up, buffeting him with hot air. Today, it was blasting in great, burning gusts that flew over his shield and right into his visor, making his helmet feel like an oven strapped to his head.
Too much wind.
Too much heat.
Too much quiet.
Not enough fighting.
He glanced over his shoulder. The speaker stood beside the phalanx, his eyes locked on the distant horizon. Sweat dripped down his face, falling in rivers from beneath his helmet. His black armor must have felt like a furnace, but he did not so much as shift uncomfortably.
He would not move until the enemy was destroyed or the heavens parted so that Daeon might welcome him into the eternal army.
Pathon set his jaw and nodded to himself.
Neither would he.
But just as he had resolved himself, the speaker stirred. He raised the visor of his helmet. Beneath, his eyes were wide as they stared out over the dunes.
Pathon turned and saw it, along with the rest of the phalanx.
A great wave was roiling toward them. A massive cloud of sand and grit, billowing forward like the sails of a mighty ship. It swept forward with such speed that Pathon didn’t even have time to appreciate how huge it was until the wind carried it over him and the rest of the phalanx.
If the air had been merely oppressive before, it was an army all its own now. The wind moaned like a war horn. The air became thick and stifling, carrying in sand that plastered itself to their sweaty brows and got into their mouths. The phalanx raised their shields and huddled closer together, but to no effect.
“A whim of nature,” the speaker bellowed. “Or pagan trickery. The Empire flinches from neither. Stand together, sons of Daeon.”
And so they set their heels, kept their shields raised, and waited.
Pathon was grateful for an end to the silence, at least. The howling of the wind was in his helmet, quieting his thoughts. The sound of grit pelting against his shield was not so unlike the sound of arrows. He could handle this. In the din, he found a kind of peace.
And in that peace, he found another sound.
Soft, muffled shudders, like distant thunder. It carried through the howling of the wind to grow louder, until he could hear it as one continuous rumbling sound.
He squinted. Over the rim of his shield, he could see something in the sheets of sand. Hazy shapes, like bad dreams. They grew into shadows, stark black against the wall of sand. In another hot breath, he could see them take shape. He opened his mouth to cry out a warning, but it went unheard.
In one more breath, they had arrived.
“MAK LAK KAI!”
First as ghosts, voices on the wind. Then as nightmares, black as sin and stained with streaks of chalky white that painted their faces like bleached bones. Then as steel, crude and jagged weapons that grinned with sawteeth and dented edges.
He didn’t realize they were tulwar until they crashed into him.
“Stand fast, brothers! Stand—”
The speaker’s words were lost in the shrieking of gaambols, cackled war cries torn from fanged mouths, and the groan of wood and steel as the tulwar collided with their lines.
The gaambols plowed through the front shields, howling as spears stuck them. But they did not stop, driven by the kicks of their riders, the black tulwar who swung their massive blades wildly, carving through shield and armor and bone.
Pathon saw his brothers falling in glimpses: seized by gaambols and dragged screaming to disappear into the grit or collapsing without a sound beneath the hacking of great weapons. He heard the hum of crossbow bolts behind him, the Sainites barking orders and firing blindly into the cloud of grit. There was the sound of spears piercing hides, of gaambols screeching, of bolts punching through necks and chests. But of the tulwar themselves, there was no sound of pain. Only their laughter, long and loud and depraved.
“MAK LAK KAI!”
A howl from a beast, rushing through the torn ranks of the phalanx, right for him.
Black as night, its eyes wide and red and its mouth a gaping ring of teeth, the gaambol came rushing toward him. It ignored the spears lashing out at it. Its rider didn’t so much as flinch as a crossbow bolt took him in the shoulder. Their eyes, their fangs, their steel were locked on Pathon.
He raised his shield, planted his feet, set his spear into the earth.
And whispered into the wind.
“Heaven is watching.”
Steel crunched. Beasts screamed. Earth groaned under his feet as he felt himself sliding backward. The gaambol charged into him with no heed for itself, taking his spear all the way to its collarbone. He felt the hot blast of its breath as it howled, continuing to charge even as his spear burst out the back of its neck.
His shield shuddered as the tulwar rider swung his massive blade in a chop. It cleaved through the rim of his shield, tearing through steel and wood and lodging itself there. He lowered his head, gritted his teeth, and ignored the burning pain as he was driven into the earth by the creature’s charge.
But its rage lasted only as long as its howl. It continued only for a few more feet as its shriek of fury became a whimpering gurgle. The beast’s momentum turned from charge to stumble as it collapsed into a heap on the earth, taking Pathon’s spear with it. The rider went flying from his mount’s shoulders, tumbling into the earth.
He twisted away to avoid being buried by the creature, letting it take his weapon. He tossed aside his shield, rent useless by the massive blade lodged in it. He found his sword at his hip, tore it free, and whirled to face the beast.
And the tulwar was there to meet him.
Tall, lanky, his fur the color of pitch and painted with grotesque white chalk, the rider seemed unaware of the carnage unraveling around him as his fellow beasts tore into the fray. His red-rimmed eyes were for Pathon alone. As was his smile, toothy and grotesquely yellow.
And the crude ax that had appeared in his hand.
“MAK LAK KAI!”
He hurled the war cry at Pathon as he leapt forward, clambering over the carcass of his mount to leap at the Karnerian. Pathon ducked away from the savage blow that followed, the ax whistling over his head. He darted away as the tulwar chopped down, cackling as he did.
The blows came fast, each one parting the air with such fury that Pathon had no doubt that even one would be the end of him. But it was simple pagan brutality: the inborn violence granted to all savages. No technique. No foresight. The tulwar’s swings grew slower with each strike and Pathon found them easier to turn away.
Fury was a flame: bright and finite and flickering out quickly.
Discipline, though, was as eternal as the Empire.
And by the fifth swing, Pathon saw his opening.
The tulwar’s blow went wide, leaving him exposed. Pathon struck, lunging forward and planting his sword into the tulwar’s belly. The savage snarled—not screamed—and staggered backward, rasping for breath. Pathon fell back, wary of what fury the tulwar might expel in his death throes.
But no fury ever came. The tulwar paused, looked down at the hilt jutting out of his guts, as though puzzled how it got there. Then he looked up at Pathon, his smile wider than ever. He offered a single wink of a red eye and chuckled in a guttural voice.
“You’re adorable.”
He howled as he rushed forward, not a drop of blood on his lips or from his wound. Pathon could but stare, wide-eyed, at the tulwar, eyes locked on the useless weapon lodged in his stomach, completely oblivious to the ax coming down upon his head.
“Death to pagans!”
Silver flashed, burning bright through the cloud of grit. A great blade scythed through the tulwar’s arm, cleaving down into his shoulder and past his rib cage. The tulwar let out a scream, collapsing to the earth in two twitching, writhing pieces. He stared up at Pathon, mouth twisted in a snarl and eyes wide with fury.
And then there was the sound of crunching bone and a black iron boot where had once been a head.
“Marcher!”
Pathon looked up. The speaker stood over him, black as night against the sand. Sweat poured down his face, the signs of battle clear in his eyes. Yet there was not a drop of blood on his armor, on his sword, on his skin.
