by Sam Sykes
And so Gariath growled, turned around, and began to stalk back toward the Souk.
He heard Dreadaeleon stumbling over bodies and ashes as the boy tried to keep up.
“So, what’d he do?” Dreadaeleon asked. “The gray dragonman?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You hate them for doing nothing?”
“Doesn’t work that way,” Gariath muttered. “You can only kill people for what they do. You can only hate them for who they are.”
“And…” Dreadaeleon glanced over his shoulder at the portcullis. “Who are they?”
Gariath snorted. Ashes fell from his snout to lie upon the empty faces of dead men.
“Family,” he said simply.
There was a brief pause after he took a breath. He touched his lower lip to his teeth and he stole a fleeting glance at her. That was how she knew he was about to ask a stupid question.
“How’s it look out there?” Lenk asked.
Kataria took her hat from her head and placed it on the tip of her bow. Ducking low, she raised her bow, the hat peeking over the top of the abandoned merchant stall they had taken cover behind.
An instant later, a crossbow bolt was quivering in the wall in front of her and a neat hole had been punched through her hat.
“Not good,” she replied.
In truth, “not good” was a bit of an understatement. But it would have taken too long for her to say “we’re pinned down by a sniper who might just be a better shot than me and surrounded by people stabbing the people who are shooting them and if we ever get out of this alive I want to know exactly what makes this asshole of a city worth abandoning me over.”
Her head hurt. She shut her eyes and drew in a breath.
One problem at a time.
She elbowed the wood of the stall; fire-kissed as it was, it crumbled away easily enough and gave her a small hole to glimpse out of. There, she saw her foe.
Far away and on the highest point in the Souk atop one of the few permanent two-story buildings, a woman, thin and tall like a stalk of corn, knelt upon one knee, balancing a weapon on her shoulder. To call it a crossbow would have been like calling a tiger a cat: technically accurate, but likely to end in blood and tears. It was a monstrosity of metal and wood, driven by a fiendish-looking crank and topped by what appeared to be a small tube on its grip.
Kataria squinted, observing quietly as the woman cranked back the weapon’s string, loaded a yard-long bolt, and scanned the battle below. The men in black had scaled the stalls and dragged their opponents down, and blades had been drawn to make the fight more intimate.
The sniper adjusted the tube atop her crossbow and Kataria saw just what it was for. The setting sun reflected a beam of light upon a tiny circle of glass: a tiny spyglass to guide her shots. One of the men in black, undoubtedly, realized this as well once he found a bolt lodged perfectly in his collarbone.
“Clever little monkey,” she muttered.
Envy, it was often said among shicts, was the mother of human invention, with them creating such contraptions as that monstrous crossbow to compensate for their natural inability with the bow. The pride from that thought was a small comfort compared to the hole that machination would put through Kataria if she stepped into its line of fire.
Still, Kataria thought as she nocked an arrow, it’s just a human.
“What’s out there?” Lenk whispered, leaning close.
The sniper had cranked another bolt and was searching for a new target.
“It’s Asper,” she said, never taking her eyes off the sniper. “She’s coming this way. Looks bad.”
“What?”
The moment Lenk leapt to his feet, she started counting.
One.
He put his head over the stall.
Two.
He looked around.
Three.
A pinprick of light flashed in the distance.
She seized his belt and pulled down sharply. He grunted as he fell to the floor and the bolt slammed into the wood where his head had just been. Kataria leapt up, drawing her bow back in a seamless motion and taking aim.
One.
She squinted.
Two.
She held her breath.
Three.
Her arrow sang, a long, lilting tune that carried it over the heads of the men in black and their hooded foes and ended in a short, bloody note.
A morbid grin creased her features as she heard the sniper scream. The arrow had only found a shoulder instead of a more satisfying target. But the woman slinked away from the edge of her perch before Kataria could draw another arrow.
One less problem.
“Did you just try to kill me?” Lenk demanded as he climbed to his feet.
Funny how there’s always one more.
“I used you as bait to make the sniper shoot,” Kataria replied.
“That’s the same thing.”
“No, I willingly put you in a situation in which I knowingly exposed you to something that would probably kill you. Not the same thing as trying to kill you,” she said, clicking her tongue. “But it’s close, I’ll give you that.”
“I take it by the passive-aggressive mincing of words that asking you to tell me what’s bothering you would be futile.”
“Just about,” she grunted.
“Look, if you’d just stop fuming—”
“I am not fuming, Lenk.” She whirled upon him, teeth bared, eyes ablaze. “I am seething. When something fumes, it stops when it dissipates. When something seethes, it doesn’t stop until it explodes.”
He touched his lower lip to his teeth. She cut him off with a sigh.
“When you said you wanted to leave swords and blood behind, I tried to understand,” she said. “When you said you wanted to stay in Cier’Djaal, I tried to understand. But only now, today, do I understand everything.”
“And what’s that?” he asked.
“These people… they looked at me like I was an animal. They treated me like I was a hide they could trade. I defended myself from being kidnapped and they called me a savage.” Her sneer was dark. “I can’t live here, Lenk.”
Somewhere in the distance, someone cried out. Lenk winced.
“We can talk about this later, can’t we?”
“We can’t,” she said sternly. “We can’t talk about it now, either. There’s nothing to say. Deny whatever you want, say whatever you want, but I can see it in you… you want to be here. You want to put down your sword and count coins and pretend you’re normal.
“I’ve walked into fire with you, Lenk. I’ll do so again,” she said, drawing her bow. “I’ll walk with you out of here. But once we’re out, I’m going to keep on walking until I can’t hear you anymore.”
There was a brief pause after he took a breath. His jaw hung open for a moment as his eyes struggled to speak and his mouth struggled to hear.
That was how she knew something inside him had broken.
He shut his mouth, as though the shards of that something might tumble out at any moment. He looked over his shoulder and she saw him find his resolve, as he did, in the usual places.
The bloodshed. The ashes. The violence.
“There’s a gap ahead.” He spoke firmly, curtly. “We run toward it. We run through it. We get to the Souk gates. Anyone else who survived will have headed for…”
A brief crack in his voice. A fragment in his mouth. Blood on his tongue.
“For there,” he finished.
A part of her, not small, not hidden, wanted to say something. Something that would make him find a voice, that would make her put a hand on his shoulder, that would make everything she had just said meaningless and tell him that was all going to be okay.
But it was another part of her, something small and jagged like an old arrowhead lodged in a femur that just hurt too much, that bade her keep her mouth shut and stand by what she said.
His sword was in his hand. The feathers of an arrow ran between her fin
gers. They crouched beside the edge of the stall. They exchanged a brief look, their eyes searching each other’s. His, searching for any doubt, any reason to believe she was lying just then. Hers, searching for any understanding, a compromise that would let her know he was ready to leave this city and its disease behind and come with her.
And in each other’s eyes, they saw only one thing.
“Ready?” he asked.
She nodded.
And without another glance, they ran into hell.
Any semblance to a civilized war, with drawn-up sides, battle fronts, and casualties, had been dispensed with in favor of the much more satisfying ease of an all-out slaughter. Men in black dragged hooded foes to the ground to be hacked to thick, screaming chunks under curved blades. Hooded thugs kicked their dark-clad adversaries into burning stalls, firing bolts into them as they emerged, howling, from the inferno as walking holocausts.
“Khoth-Kapira!” they were shrieking. “Saccaam ashal thuru! Khoth-Kapira!”
“Quit screaming and burn, you heathen sons of bitches,” one of their foes shouted back.
Every thought was saved for the eyes that looked up from carved corpses to her. Every instinct was reserved for the thicket of blades and bolts overhead and all around. And everything in her was in her legs as she ran, trying not to hear the murderous screams hurled her way.
Harder to ignore were the bolts that flew from the stall rooftops. But these were wailing, warbling shrieks. The rhythm of her bow’s song was something smoother, lyrical, in perfect time.
One.
She felt the feathers in her hair rustle as a bolt wailed past her ear.
Two.
She felt arrow in hand, string between fingers as her eyes picked up the crossbowman on the roof.
Three.
She felt that brief rush of wind as her bow sang and sent a steel-tipped note into the crossbowman’s throat.
He tumbled off the roof, his scream caught between his throat and the arrow lodged in it, to plummet into a burning stack of silks. A dramatic death, she thought. That was a shot she might have liked to take in with greater leisure, had she not so many more to make.
Arrows hummed, answering every crossbow bolt with a shot that sent bodies tumbling to the flames and stones below. All the while, she kept the wind at her back, the arrows at her fingers, and Lenk at her side as they rushed through the carnage.
At the end of the stalls, the walls of flames, the packs of blades and bolts, she could see a large, sloping arch leading out of the Souk. It was barricaded with crates, barrels, and carts in some hasty effort by more levelheaded citizens to keep the battle from following them out.
Difficult, but not a problem, she thought.
“KHOTH-KAPIRA!”
The man in black charging toward her, sword in hand, scream in throat, though? That was a problem.
The rage in the man’s voice spread through him like fever. His legs pumped with steady fury, heedless of the crossbow bolt lodged in his thigh. His sword was a curtain of steel around his head. His eyes were wide and wild and full of the hate that came spilling out of his mouth with every shriek.
He was fast. Incredibly fast. By the time she had an arrow in her hand, he was already upon her. By the time it was strung, the blade was above her head. By the time she thought to cry out, it was coming down.
She felt the blade’s kiss, but only just a kiss. It caught her against the arm, an errant and haphazard blow from arms that were suddenly flailing. A blade lashed out from beside her and caught the man in black at the hamstring, cutting momentum and sinew alike.
The man in black went flying, the wound in his leg painting a crimson arc as he planted facedown upon the stones. The sword clattered from his grip, the blood wept from his leg. Yet he still tried to rise with the vigor of a man hale and unbloodied.
“Khoth-Kapira,” he muttered. “Shaalacc, Khoth-Kapira. Shaalacc.”
He staggered to his knees and reached for the blade. He fell upon the stones just as the hard heel of a boot smashed between his shoulder blades.
Lenk stood above him, flipped the sword in his hands, and aimed the sword down. And for a moment, he was someone else.
In the moment when the blood-slick sword caught the light of a hundred pyres, in the moment when the screams were made silent, when two blue eyes were wide and wild with a desperate need to protect her.
Lenk became sound and color and steel.
And there he was, the man who put her above all else, the man who killed for her and no one else.
That man existed only until his grip tensed and he plunged the blade into the back of the man’s neck, before he was lost in a spatter of blood.
He looked at her with the blue eyes of a desperate man, wholly human.
“You all right?”
She looked at her arm; a gash marked her flesh, but the pain was the steady ache of a nonlethal wound. She nodded, shouldering her bow as she looked toward the barricade.
There was no sign of Asper or the others. Yet. But they could wait. First, she and Lenk would have to clear the barricade. First, they would need somewhere to run to.
The archway loomed closer as they took off at a run again. The hail of bolts had thinned to a few stray shrieks. The screams of the dying and the roar of flames dimmed to a distant cackle. She could hear the thunder of her own breath as she rushed toward the gate.
And a single man stepped out of the wreckage to stand in her way.
She recognized him as human only because of how unimpressive he was. Short, slender, and with a sand-colored hood drawn low to smother his face in shadows, he stood heedless of the carnage surrounding him. The red bud of a cigarillo burned in his mouth as he lazily took Kataria in: her swift stride, the bow in her hands, the arrow pointed right at him.
She drew back the arrow. She aimed for the only part of his face she could see. She saw the long white scar of his teeth as his lips curled into a smile.
And then, suddenly, she saw the rest of them.
They were everywhere, hooded men above her, around her, behind her. She skidded to a halt as they rose upon the rooftops, crossbows trained upon her and Lenk. She backed away as they crept out of the ashes and shadows, cruel, short blades in their hands. She felt herself press against Lenk’s back; she felt him short and strong and bristling against her as the hooded men encircled them.
And her ears twitched as the man with the cigarillo said in a low, raspy voice:
“You must be new here.”
ELEVEN
THE DISCIPLE
They weren’t attacking.
Their crossbows were trained on him, fingers trembling on triggers. Their swords were drawn, each one wet with red life. Their eyes burned beneath drawn hoods, drunk with violence and looking for more.
But they weren’t attacking.
And the man with a shadow for a face, who took a long draw on his cigarillo, wasn’t saying a word.
Not for lack of encouragement. The hoods, with all their blades and bolts, glanced eagerly at him, looking for the slightest curled lip, the lowest muttered word, anything they could interpret as permission to start the butchery.
And still, the shadowed man said nothing as he dropped the cigarillo to the ground and crushed it beneath a polished boot. Not until he took another one from his pocket, lit it with a match, and inhaled deeply.
“They have a point, you know.” His voice came out on a gray cloud.
“Who?” Lenk asked.
“The Khovura,” the shadowed man replied. “They are a heathen breed, bereft of virtue or faith, but they know one or two truths. When they seek out foreigners in the crowd, for example, one finds oneself hard-pressed to fault their priorities.”
He took a deep draw of his cigarillo and looked skyward to the Silken Spire hanging over the Souk. It wafted against the smoke-stained breeze with a serenity that belonged somewhere else, over a happier city with wives baking pies and children playing in streets not choked with corpses. Th
e spiders were impassive to the suffering below as they ambled lazily over their rainbow-colored web.
“It’s the silk,” the hooded man said. “No other city makes it. And so the foreigners and their armies come to ours and buy it, steal it, fight for it, as we have bought it, stolen it, fought for it. They become entangled in our affairs. They live lives in Cier’Djaal, but they are not Djaalics, and so everything becomes vastly complicated.
“Case in point,” he said, gesturing to Lenk’s bloodied sword. “This is our footwar. You should have stayed out of it.”
“I can agree with that,” Lenk replied. “I tried telling them. But people kept trying to kill us. So I told them again.” He hefted his blade, a drop of blood painting a thin red line as it wept down the steel. “They listened the second time.”
The hooded man’s laugh was bleak.
“You’re funny.” He glanced at Kataria. “And you’re dangerous.” He smiled broadly at the scowl she shot him. “I love these traits in a man.” He held up his hands to Kataria in apology. “Or a woman. I encourage them in my own Jackals.” His voice grew darker on a cloud of smoke. “But disrespect is something I cannot tolerate.
“You come to our city. You shoot our people. You leave them dying in our streets.” He bobbed his head, thoughtful. “You kill the Khovura, too, and I applaud you for this. But I cannot abide someone killing my soldiers, my people, in my city and not suffering for it. It sets a poor precedent for anyone who may be watching.”
“So, does the suffering come from us getting shot,” Kataria asked, eyeing the crossbowmen, “or from listening to you go on?”
“People call us thieves. They assume we have no law.” He shook his head. “Every man has a code. Every Jackal has a law. And mine tells me that it is an honorable thing to inform someone why they must die when I say they must die.”
He raised his hand.
A dozen crossbows were raised in response. A dozen short blades twitched in anticipation.
He drew a long, smoky breath.
Lenk raised his sword. Kataria drew back her bow. Neither had any hope of either of those actions doing a damn thing. Neither had any intention of dying without the other at their back.
