God's Last Breath

by Sam Sykes

  The three exchanged glances. It was evident, at least, by the shakiness of their portraits that they hadn’t expected her to see through them this quickly. Yet it was also evident by how quickly they composed themselves that they were ready to proceed. One by one, they turned to her. And when Man-Shii Kree spoke again, his voice was thick with hatred.

  “Revenge.”

  “What?” Asper asked.

  “You don’t know what we’re talking about? They almost went unnoticed, didn’t they? Between the tulwar and the demons, you forgot all about them. That’s their way.” Man-Shii Kree’s voice sank to an angry, bitter snarls. “Shicts. They are vile.”

  “It is clear to us that you will be powerful in the days to come, Prophet,” Man-Khoo Yun said. “With or without us, humans shall look to you for leadership, for guidance. We merely desire that an additional verse be added to the song of your legend.”

  “A verse of the treachery of the shicts,” Man-Leng Qij rasped. “A mere few lines telling the tale of their vicious ambush, their cowardly retreat, their vile methods. That the world may know, as the couthi have known, their cruelty and their hatred. And that the shicts may know the vengeance of the couthi.”

  “We are too few, too scattered to fight the tribes. But we can give you ships,” Man-Shii Kree said. “We can give you gold. We can give you a tale that will have the world of men rally every spear to you to fight the tulwar, to reclaim your city, to save every life you desire. All you need to give us is a promise.”

  “A promise of vengeance,” Man-Khoo Yun growled.

  “A promise of retribution,” Man-Leng Qij added.

  “A promise of war,” Man-Shii Kree said. “No contracts. No signed papers. The arrangement shall go deeper than that. Give us our war against the shicts, and we shall give you an army to do it.”

  Asper stared at her hands. She had been prepared for exorbitant prices; she had been prepared to be asked to do the unthinkable. But she hadn’t been prepared for this.

  It had been only a few weeks since fraud and treachery had made her a Prophet, and now she was asked to lead more men than she had even thought possible, and lead them into a war bigger than she had ever considered.

  This had all started as a means to fight Gariath, to defend Cier’Djaal, nothing more. And she hadn’t even done that. Gariath would have this city.

  And every other city …

  The thought came unbidden, from a dark part of her mind that spoke no lies.

  He won’t stop with Cier’Djaal. He won’t stop until everyone is dead. You know this. And so do the tulwar.

  But still …

  “To fight shicts,” she whispered to herself. “What would Kataria say if—”

  “Keep your pet, if you wish,” Man-Shii Kree said, making a flippant gesture. “We brook no grudge with her. We shall not bar her from the ships. Take her with you, wherever you want. But consider this …”

  “She is but one life,” Man-Khoo Yun said. “Against thousands. Against tens of thousands. If the shicts would attack Cier’Djaal, where will they strike next? Who will die if they are not stopped?”

  “The lives of more than Cier’Djaal hang in the balance,” Man-Leng Qij said. “What has been set in motion, you cannot stop, even if your gods were listening.”

  “You can only save who you can,” Man-Shii Kree said. “And you can save many.”

  They fell silent and waited for her answer.

  And Asper realized she did not have one. There was too much to consider, too many lives to save, too much war to wage. Her head couldn’t hold it all. Everything she even tried to consider, every possible negotiation, every rebuttal, all came up blank.

  And through that emptiness of thought, her answer emerged, in an unbidden whisper.

  “I can’t fail.”

  She had become a priestess to help people.

  She had joined Lenk and the others because she thought she could find more injured, more sick, more wounded to aid.

  She had taken up the mantle of the Prophet, indulged in this depraved charade, because she thought it was the only way to help people.

  Never once had she thought about fame or glory.

  Yet the idea of her legend was heavy on her head as she walked out of that building and into the dark streets of Cier’Djaal.

  This is the tale of Asper, the Prophet, Savior of Cier’Djaal.

  So heavy that it bore her head lower and lower with every step.

  The woman who came to the city to help people and sat by, helpless, as war between four different armies ravaged the streets and she couldn’t count the dead.

  She felt nauseous as she walked. The air was too thick.

  The woman who deceived three nations into thinking she was the voice of the gods and led them into a war that became a bloodbath.

  She had to stop and lean against a wall. She rubbed her face, suddenly feeling feverish.

  The woman who swore a dozen oaths, made a hundred promises, asked a thousand prayers, and sold them all. This is the tale of Asper, the Prophet, the woman who fucking ruined everything.

  She snorted, spit onto the ground.

  If they can set all that to music, then we’re set.

  She heard boots on the stones behind her, moving silently and carefully. An assassin from the Khovura or Jackal holdouts come to kill her, maybe. Or an advance scout from the tulwar. Or simply a disgruntled citizen, knife in hand and murder in his eyes, who had watched his city collapse since she had come.

  Any one of those would be nice, really.

  But no killing blow, nice and neat, came. And after a long moment of nothing happening, she turned and faced her new company. And, almost instantly, wished it had been a knife she were looking at instead.

  What had Aturach looked like when she first met him, she wondered? Tired, frazzled, overworked, certainly. But he had still been handsome, vibrant, burning with energy that could not be doused. The man standing before her now was haggard and gaunt, looking as though he had gone a hundred days without food and a hundred years without sleep.

  “You’re alive,” she observed.

  You don’t look it, though, she chose not to add.

  Aturach merely nodded, saying nothing else. The silence drew out like a knife between them. And when she spoke, Asper could feel its edge.

  “I couldn’t stop it, Aturach.” She stared at her feet. “Any of it. All that we tried to do, all the people we tried to save, and I just …” She shook her head. “They’re all dead. I couldn’t—”

  “Not everyone is dead.”

  He spoke softly. His voice was hoarse. But it was enough to make her look up. His smile was short and weary.

  “And more would have been dead without you,” he said. “This city has been bleeding for years, Asper. You tried to stanch the wound, but it was always going to die.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “He does.”

  Hard boots on hard stones. Dransun came walking forward, a bundle tucked under his arm. He was dirty, weary; dried blood ran down the side of his face and stained his beard.

  “You never saw it,” he said. “But we did. We’ve lived here all our lives. We saw the fashas drink us dry. We saw the Jackals tear people apart. We saw the saccarii swear revenge, over and over. But you’re just a shkainai. You thought you could fix it.”

  “I did.” Asper shook her head. “I was wrong.”

  “You weren’t,” Aturach said. “Maybe you couldn’t fix everything, but you’ve given us something.”

  He looked to Dransun. The old guard took the bundle in his hand and unfurled it, holding it up. Tattered and torn, stained with earth and blood, the banner sailed. The sigils of Karneria and Saine were barely visible, the sigil of Talanas all but worn away.

  Asper furrowed her brow. “How did you get that?”

  “We went back for it.”

  From the shadows, they emerged. Beaten and limping, dirty and caked in sweat, bruised and bleeding and ragged and bare
ly upright. But they were alive. And they were here.

  Haethen came, her spectacles cracked and her robes torn. Blacksbarrow came, her sword broken and her hat gone and a new cut on her face. Their troops followed: the remnants of the Karnerians and Sainites, their armor torn and shields shattered. They all came back to her.

  “Specifically,” Haethen said, gesturing to one of the Karnerians, “he did.”

  The young man looked around as eyes suddenly turned to him. He saluted, pressing a bandaged fist to a blood-soaked tunic. He made a brief bow toward her.

  “Marcher Dachon, Prophet.”

  “Why?” Asper asked. “Why did you go back for it?”

  To her, it had been a lie, just one more on top of all the other frauds she had committed. It had just been a pretty piece of cloth. And now, it was just a ragged scrap caked in filth.

  “Pathon …” Dachon hesitated before continuing. “My brother died for that banner, madam. Many of my brothers did.”

  “And mine,” Blacksbarrow grunted. “And my sisters. And my cousins. And my birds.”

  “Then you should go back to them,” Asper said. “While you still can.”

  “We were going to,” Haethen replied. “We were scattered and lost. But we were asked to return here.”

  And she didn’t have to ask to know.

  There, at the back of the crowd, bloodier and more beaten than anyone, they stared at her. Kataria smiled at her, waved wearily. Lenk looked like doing even that much might make him faint. He merely nodded at her.

  “Too many have died for us to give up,” Haethen said. “I shall not return to the Empire without doing everything I can.”

  “We swore to follow you,” Blacksbarrow added. “No man or woman of Saine is an oathbreaker.”

  “For all this to mean something …” Dransun gestured to the broken, the weary, the bloodied remnants of her army. “This has to mean something.”

  And he held the banner, ruined and ragged. It hung limp in a sky without wind, the last flayed remains of her cause.

  And yet someone had gone back for it. Back into a field crawling with demons and the dead, they had gone to find it. And they, her army, a perfect match for its shabbiness, had rallied to it, still.

  Whatever oaths she had broken, they had not.

  Whatever promises she made, they had kept.

  And whatever prayers she had offered …

  They would expect her to answer.

  “There’s no saving the city,” Asper said. “There are too many tulwar and too few of us. But there are ships. We can get people out of here.”

  They listened, nodding attentively, as she told them her plan. They ran off to enact it, to find the survivors, to bring them back. Still alive, still fighting, they went about their work.

  And Cier’Djaal held its last, dying breath.

  FIFTY

  FROM ON HIGH

  It was not as easy as it used to be.

  There was a time—not so long ago, in fact—when Gariath could remember scaling trees with ease and nearly sprinting up sheer rock walls. His claws made grip where there was none and his muscle took him the rest of the way.

  Now? Now, he could barely climb up a simple, shoddy wall without stopping to breathe heavily every few moments.

  He supposed that stood to reason. His arm—dislocated in the fall he had taken—was set in a splint and wrapped with bandages. His severest wounds had barely been dressed and the lighter ones hadn’t even been looked at. He had almost died last night. He had no business climbing anything, let alone something like this.

  But he had to climb.

  He had to see.

  Hand over hand, foot over foot, claw by claw, and breath by breath, he hauled himself up the wall of the Souk. The day was gone by the time he made it to the top. And in the light of the setting sun, the Silken Spire’s namesake fluttered gossamer, the last twitch of a butterfly’s wings before it died.

  On the edge of the Spire, Gariath stared out over Cier’Djaal.

  The city stood empty now. Its homes were silent and its shops were darkened. Its squares were populated only by rubble, and the sole living things were the occasional abandoned livestock, wandering blissfully empty streets. Row after row, the buildings stretched like gravestones, monuments in the world’s largest tomb for all its silent ghosts.

  Just as it had been when they had arrived.

  There had been no battle when his army had finally arrived. Asper had not met him at the head of a ragged band of spirited misfits, ready for a heroic last stand. Lenk had not stood there, ready to go down fighting. Not so much as a stone had been thrown in defiance when the tulwar had finally entered.

  He knew that would happen. The tulwar’s march had been slow, his army still ragged and worn from the atrocities at the pass, and many had been reluctant to heed the call to return to the demon-plagued city. But Chakaa had carried his message, Daaru had delivered it, and Mototaru had seen it through.

  And on a pale morning, the tulwar conquered the skeleton of the greatest human city on the face of the world.

  He watched his warriors wend their way through the streets in small knots, scouring the city for survivors or salvage. They were thousands, their numbers augmented by late reinforcements to the battle. But from up here, they seemed tiny and thin, simple stains of ink moving across a long, empty parchment.

  Some of them would find a few handfuls of humans—maybe a few dozen, maybe a few hundred. Most of them had disappeared on the black ships. More had fled into the surrounding deserts. The tulwar were in no shape to pursue them. But the humans were in no condition to fight.

  Only broken windows and empty bedrooms and abandoned toys were left to oppose him.

  Was this it, then?

  His thoughts were soft and fading in the morning light.

  Was this what you saw, Mototaru? A bunch of houses and streets scared you away from conquering Cier’Djaal? Was it different back then?

  He narrowed his eyes and swept them over the city.

  What did you see?

  He tried to picture it as it once was, brimming with humans ready to fight. He tried to picture it with Drokha mercenaries lining the streets. He tried to picture it with ballistae and catapults and great beasts of war. Anything that would have made Mototaru come down and abandon the Uprising as he had done.

  But all he could see was houses.

  Houses and shops.

  Houses and smithies.

  Houses and docks and empty taverns and lonely streets and old walls and … and …

  And then he saw it.

  Just like that. As if he only needed to see it from here, so high up.

  He saw it.

  And he suddenly felt very tired. He fell to his rear, letting his legs dangle out over the edge of the Spire. He leaned forward, breathless, and stared at it for a very long time.

  A long time passed. The sky grew to a weary red. Night grew on the horizon. And he had not moved by the time he heard a grunt of exertion as someone else came clawing up the side of the wall.

  “It was easier when I was younger.” Mototaru hauled his considerable weight up over the ledge. He lay there, breathing heavily. “But I thought that having taken the city, I would find the strength to … to …”

  He waved a hand, snorting. Slowly, he rolled to his side and got to his feet. Sweating profusely, he hobbled to the edge of the Spire. Gariath did not look away from the city.

  “The Rua Tong have swept the city. The Mak Lak Kai have scoured the Green Belt. There is no enemy to fight and no reinforcements behind us.” Mototaru, despite his labored breathing, pulled his pipe out and began to pack it. “Despite all its worth, Cier’Djaal was without friends at its moment of need. Poetic, no?

  “We cannot count on that to last, though. Too many humans escaped. Word of what happened here will spread. Others will come seeking us. We must make preparations to defend ourselves.” Mototaru lit his pipe, noting the one-sidedness of the conversation. “Are you li
stening to me? I said—”

  He paused. He observed Gariath staring out over the city.

  “Tell me, Rhega,” Mototaru spoke softly through the smoke of his pipe. “What do you see?”

  “Houses.” Gariath’s voice was numb. “I see houses. And shops. And streets. And smithies. I see homes. I see a city. And it’s huge.”

  Before, it had only been fragments. Knots of people, clusters of houses, walls in his way and smells he was eager to put behind him. It had been only a series of annoyances. And perhaps that was what led him to look at it as something he could destroy.

  As he looked at it now, he saw the house built with the lumber from that warehouse at the edge of the city. And he saw the street built from stone carried to those docks by a ship. He saw a shop made with glass from a glassblower. He saw mansions carved from marble brought from far away. He saw silks spun and sent out. He saw it not as fragments of a dying thing, but as one immense, living, breathing thing. Connected, from every home to every street.

  And it was terrifying.

  “Is this what you saw?” He looked to Mototaru. “This huge thing?”

  Mototaru considered the question. “I saw years. Years that had been spent building while my people fought and scavenged. And I wondered, in all those years, how many other cities had been built? How many more humans were there? How big was their empire?”

  He stared grimly over the city through a veil of pipe smoke.

  “And I knew we could not fight them. We could kill them. We could kill thousands of them. And we would go on fighting and killing until all of us died out. And when we were gone, there would be nothing but dust.”

  He swept a hand over Cier’Djaal.

  “And they would still be here.”

  In silence and smoke, they sat, staring out over the foe that neither of them, with all their armies and fury, had been able to kill. Gariath watched the tulwar pick their way through the streets below. He had thought them alternately brave and stupid. But never before now had he looked at them and realized how very small they were. How very few.

  How very insignificant.

  “The reinforcements that came,” Gariath said. “Daaru didn’t tell me where they came from.”