by Sam Sykes
“Asper, wait!”
“Send the reserves in with me. We just need to hold until he comes,” she called out over her shoulder as she charged down the ramp, headed for the pass.
“He won’t even see you!” Haethen called after her.
“If heaven can see me, so can he!” she called back, and then was gone.
“It was luck, mostly. Just an old man who happened to be right.” Mototaru tapped his pipe against his palm, emptying the ashes onto the sand. “But storms are like birds. They come from the sea, roam around the mainland for a little, and then go back.”
He packed new tobacco in his pipe, lit it, and took a few deep puffs.
“Now is the time of year they return to the sea, but any fool who watches the sky long enough could tell you that. And asking gaambols to throw around a lot of sand and make a tremendous mess is like asking rain to be wet.”
A smile curled around the stem of his pipe, knowing and ancient.
“But how did I know the wind would be strong enough to carry that much sand? Well, there is the idea that Humn’s Tul never diminishes. It is rumored that we remember all our past lives and it is this culmination of lifetimes of wisdom that grants us the authority to lead. I used to think it was all oxshit, of course, but I remembered this storm … I remembered this wind, somehow. And somehow, it felt like not so much oxshit and you’re not even fucking listening to me anymore, are you?”
Gariath was listening, but only barely. Had he been paying a little more attention, he would have found the energy to resent Mototaru’s accusation. But as it was, his eyes were locked on the ensuing chaos below.
The humans still stood; their formation had been shattered, their leader had been killed, but there were still more than enough to challenge their foes. The Mak Lak Kai, for their part, continued to fight, even as their gaambols had been slain and their bodies weathered the violence. They would fight to their last breath—and then keep fighting—but Gariath didn’t need that.
He just needed them to hold on for a little longer.
The drums continued to thunder, their song filling the sky. The tulwar answered, rushing forward in a great tide. Rua Tong, Chee Chree, Tho Thu Bhu, Yengu Thuun; clans were forgotten, divisions ignored as they swept across the sand in a teeming wave of flesh and steel.
It had been their defeats, Gariath realized. The withering losses they had suffered in the morning had left them hungry for vengeance. And now their need for victory overwhelmed their apprehension about the Mak Lak Kai. They would not allow the malaa to show them up, even if it meant fighting alongside them.
Bloodlines divide. Bloodshed unites, it was once said.
Or maybe he had just made that up.
Someone ought to write that down. It was good.
He didn’t care about that, either. His thoughts were for the impending battle. The tulwar would break their last formation, sweep into the Green Belt and right to the city gates. They would have their vengeance. The city would be razed. The world would be free of one more disease.
All it would take was a little more—
A war horn cut through the air, a thin and tinny note barely audible against the bellow of drums. But he caught it all the same.
Just as he caught sight of the humans rushing toward the pass.
Not as many as the tulwar, nor as well armed. Some steel there, but mostly sticks and spears and a few cruder implements. It wasn’t warriors they were sending out; rather, the tall human would give him one final insult before he crushed her by sending out farmers and weaklings to die for nothing.
He would have been enraged by that.
Had he not seen something else to be enraged by.
There. At the head of their mad rush. A flash of pale among the dark-skinned humans. A dented and ugly shield. And a big, bold blue piece of cloth, fluttering in the wind like it would do a damn thing.
He could smell her reek from here.
“She’s here,” he growled.
“Who?” Mototaru asked.
“I need a gaambol.” Gariath did not answer as he stormed down the hill. “And a rider. Get me one.”
“What?” Mototaru creaked to his feet. “Why? Our warriors will carve them apart in no time. There is no need to risk yourself.”
“They couldn’t kill me if there were a hundred times more than there are now,” he snarled in reply. “There is no risk.”
That was half-true.
He knew he could kill her. He knew she could not hurt him. Not in all the time they had traveled together could she ever have hoped to even scratch him. And he knew, too, that she and her rabble could not hope to stand against the tulwar. They would cut her down as surely as he would.
But then, she would have been killed by someone else.
Then, she would die with the smile on her lips as she went to her imaginary god with the belief that he had been too scared to fight her. She would die never knowing why she had to die, why it had to be him to kill her.
She would die never realizing what a moron she and Lenk and all of them had been to abandon him.
“I have watched you hurl yourself at monsters that nearly ate you alive!” Mototaru cried, hurrying after him. “You cannot be trusted to not kill yourself!”
“This battle is won, no matter if I survive.”
“It’s not the battle we have to think of, fool!” Mototaru roared down the hill as he approached the tulwar left behind to guard him. “We are not here simply to kill! This is not simply revenge! It’s a murderer that only thinks of the kill! A warrior thinks about what happens afterward!”
That, too, was a good saying. Someone should write that down, too.
Someone else, of course.
He had a prophet to kill.
Pathon wasn’t sure what he had been expecting.
Maybe he had hoped that faith would shield him, hold him strong against the tulwar when they attacked. Or perhaps he had thought that the courageous knowledge that the world rested on his shoulders would give him the strength to prevail. Maybe some small part of him, some wide-eyed boy whose grandfather’s tales of valor had inspired him to enlist, had expected the skies to open up and Daeon to step down and save Careus and rout the hated pagan.
He had been expecting a miracle. Or at least an advantage.
Yet the sky hung over him, empty and blue and silent. The speaker’s corpse lay next to him, cold and unmoving like any of the others strewn across the battlefield. His arm was broken, his body was numb, and he could not find the strength to rise up. The sounds of the tulwar, their bellowing cries, were soft and distant in his head.
The battle was over.
The sky was empty.
Heaven had not been watching.
In the end, it had just been another war. The same bloody and awful mess as all the others he had fought. The stories his grandfather had told him had just been that.
Stories.
Mothers never wept proud tears over swelling breast to hear that their son had died in the dirt far away. The right and the just never swept over the land and won a bloodless rout against cowardly villains. The sky did not open up. Gods did not come down. Prayers were not heard.
People fought.
People died.
This was all it was. Deep down, he had always known that. But some part of him had hoped it wasn’t.
A shadow loomed over him. Bright red eyes fixed on him. The tulwar canted his head at him, curious, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. He leaned down, and, satisfied that Pathon was still alive, nodded sagely to himself as he raised his sword and aimed to remedy that.
Pathon drew in a breath. He looked at the patch of orange sky behind the tulwar’s shoulder. He watched heaven and waited.
And so, he barely saw it when something came barreling out of the corner of his eye and struck the tulwar, knocking him to the earth.
He craned his neck and saw a dirty man in ill-fitting armor tackling the tulwar to the ground—a Djaalic. The
man wrestled with the creature for a minute, stabbing awkwardly with what looked like a crude knife. He held the tulwar down until three more Djaalics came rushing up, jamming their spears into the tulwar and pinning him to the earth.
The reserves. The Djaalic reserves were here.
They were supposed to stand behind and help with the retreat, should it be necessary, or to catch any tulwar that came through. They shouldn’t be here, in the real battle. They were farmers, merchants; they’d be killed. They should be running. They should be going back to their families. He opened his mouth to yell at them to flee.
“Are you all right?”
Those weren’t his words. That wasn’t his voice.
Another shadow fell over him. Dirty armor, clinking mail. An arm wielding a dented shield. A face smudged with grime, brown hair that hung in thick, unwashed strands around hazel eyes, deep with concern. A glimmering pendant of Talanas dangling from her neck as she leaned over him.
“P-Prophet,” he gasped out.
“Easy.” She took him gently by the shoulder, easing up him to his rear end, careful not to touch his shoulder. “Your arm is broken. You need to fall back.”
It was her.
It had been so long since he had seen her up close. From afar, she looked regal, like someone who really could command heaven. But here, down in the dirt, she was filthy and sweaty and grimy, like the rest of them. Her voice was full of concern, not authority. And her eyes weren’t ablaze with divine purpose.
“Did you hear me?” she asked. “You need to go back. Get treated, Pathon.”
She wasn’t from heaven.
She was just a woman. A normal woman.
And she was here, in the dirt, fighting. She had stopped to pick him up, just another soldier. She was just a woman and she was here, standing against so many, fighting with them.
Not like a story.
Something more than that.
He clambered to his feet. She nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Try to get to the city, if you can. We’ll have to—”
He reached down and picked up his sword with his good hand. She shook her head.
“No! No!” she cried out, rising up and reaching for the blade. “Don’t fight! Your arm is broken! You need to—”
“I need to do my duty,” he answered.
“You’ve done it,” she said. “You’ve done more than enough. Please, get back and—”
He took up his blade and stormed to the front lines. It was probably disrespectful to disobey a Prophet. And, truly, maybe she was still a Prophet. But before that, she was just another person. A person who would fight to protect this city. A person who would fight to defend these people. She could have taken her lofty title and grand vision, demanded riches and power and fled. But she had become a Prophet just to lead them, just to bring them to this fight.
The only fight, of the many he had waged, that really felt like it mattered.
Not for duty. Not for conquest. Not for gods. Just for people.
Perhaps it was simply the agony numbing his mind that made him think these things. Perhaps that dumbshit kid who had listened to too many stories was in control now. Or perhaps his brain was leaking out of his skull from a head wound.
It didn’t matter.
As he rushed to the front lines, his sword held high, a wave of gnashing fangs and flashing steel and painted faces rampaging toward him, he was prepared to fight.
Just as she was.
“Fucking moron,” Asper growled as she waded forward.
A blade shot out at her, screeching across her shield as she brought it up. She shoved out with it and pushed her aggressor back. When the sword went flying high, she lashed her own blade out in a thrust. When she lowered her shield, the tulwar’s face was wide with confused fear as he slid off her sword and crumpled to the ground in an unmoving heap.
“Fucking stupid moron.”
She leapt over his body, raised her shield, and rushed forward. She slammed the bulk of it into a tulwar engaged in a deadlock with a Sainite. Her momentum carried her forward, into another tulwar, shoving them both to the earth on top of one another. A Karnerian soldier leapt forward and thrust his spear down through the first until it skewered the second.
“Why the fuck—”
She caught a swinging blade with her shield.
“—won’t anyone—”
She shoved the tulwar back.
“—listen to me?”
She smashed her shield against the tulwar’s jaw and sent it reeling. Her sword followed, hacking down on his neck and sending him to the ground to bleed out on the earth.
She looked up.
There were more.
There were so many more.
In a great flood, they choked the entrance to the pass. Rushing forward in a massive herd, fighting to get over each other, each one of their faces alive and bloody with color, the tulwar howled to reach the fight.
The remnants of the Karnerians and Sainites were doing most of the work still, shooting or stabbing or slashing the tulwar that the Djaalic reserves were managing to keep occupied. Even that moron, Pathon, who refused to head back, seemed like he was holding his own with one sword and a broken arm.
But it was a mess. A mess of people dying. Of people fighting. Of fights breaking out in little, angry pockets of blood and filth.
It was supposed to go easier than this. It had all seemed like it would work.
She looked over her shoulder. Her banner stood, thrust in the earth, whipping in the wind. Bright and blue and beautiful against the gore and dirt splattered across the road in equal measure.
It was supposed to be a line. She was going to plant it, they were going to assume defensive positions, they were going to hold it there until the banner did what it had to do.
But it had all gone to shit.
The Karnerians and Sainites were roaming around, weary and empty looks on their faces, butchers instead of warriors. The tulwar were slavering animals, almost beating each other to get to beating the humans. The Djaalics were flailing and trying and dying with every breath.
And the plan hadn’t worked.
He hadn’t come.
This had all been for nothing.
These people would die. The tulwar would run rampant, destroy the city, slaughter every last person in it. And that stupid fucking lizard wouldn’t even have shown his face this entire time.
It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She wasn’t supposed to fail.
“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” She gritted her teeth. She swallowed down the urge to weep, the urge to scream, the urge to fall to her knees and just let it be over. “Fucking gods-damned fucking—”
“HOLY SHIT!”
That last part hadn’t been her.
It had come from a Sainite, far away toward the front of the melee. And in another moment, he was no longer quite so far away. He was screaming, flying through the air, his blue coattails flapping as he sailed screaming away.
And that was when she heard the roar.
Louder than any scream, any horn, any drum. Enough to make the tulwar seem quiet and the Djaalics turn and run. She had heard it a thousand times. Before the screams started, before the bodies fell, before the killing started.
It had made her cringe when she had first heard it, so long ago.
Like it did now.
Something came, rampaging through the melee toward her. The tulwar parted in a great wave to let it through. Brave soldiers rushed to stop it. Smart soldiers ran away when the brave ones fell, broken and screaming. Great spatters of life burst across the orange sky. Bones snapped. Shields shattered. Spears fell.
Two Karnerians ran forward, locked their shields together, readied themselves for what was coming. Something struck them, reached through their shields, seized them by their throats. Like skin flayed by a lash, they went flying through the air, limp and useless.
And
like blood from the wound, Gariath burst onto the black earth.
Huge. Horned. Red as life.
Too many bodies.
Pressing in around him. Fighting. Screaming. Bleeding. Dying. Filling his ear-frills with their noise and yelling and terror. Filling his snout with their anger and their hatred and their fear.
Too many bodies.
Victorious or losing. Human or tulwar. Living or dead. Gariath couldn’t tell the difference anymore. They were everywhere around him. Pushing into him. Getting in his way. Falling under his feet.
That was fine.
He didn’t need to hear. Or smell. Or even see.
He needed to be on the other side of this melee.
His legs needed to be strong to get there, kicking corpses aside and stomping on those who grabbed for him as he waded through the brawl. His arms needed to be long to make a path, swinging wide and knocking the screaming and the dying out of his way. He made his way through. Ankle-deep in carcasses and a wreath of screams settling on him, he made his way through.
But he needed to be faster.
Someone leapt out at him. Human? Dark-skinned? Pale? It didn’t matter. It was no longer a human. Just a sword in his face and a sack of meat in his way. He reached out, seized the wrist that held the blade, grabbed the throat from which the war cry came. He squeezed. He pulled.
There was a thick squishing sound. Two pieces fell to the earth.
Someone stood before him. No. Something. Something cowering behind a shield, thrusting a spear at him like it meant anything. He twisted away from the weapon, seized it, tore it from the thing’s grip. He pulled down the shield with one hand, smashed the spear against its helmet with the other. It splintered into two. He thrust forward, jamming the splintered haft into the thing’s visor, and shoved it aside before it had even stopped twitching.
More fled from him. Tulwar clearing a path for him. Humans running from him. It didn’t matter.
There was the whistle of air. Something struck him in the shoulder. He looked down, saw the crossbow bolt lodged in his skin.
He looked up. Three things stood in front of him. Two raised their swords. The third was reloading its weapon.
