As Iron Falls (The Wings of War Book 4)

by Bryce O'Connor

  Indeed, though they were faint, he could just make out the angular shapes against the wash of the early morning, like shadow puppets atop a blue-grey backdrop. The outlines were clearer now, though. For nearly a half-hour he’d thought he’d been seeing some detail in the distance, but the heat of the midsummer day rippled over the flatness of the grasslands in undulating rivulets, distorting everything at any distance. Now, though, he’d called a halt, allowing Akelo to echo the command to the men as Raz had heeled Gale forward another dozen yards up the road.

  At the very edge of his vision, indistinct silhouettes of what looked like a mountain made of turrets and struts and thin, jutting buildings clawed at the sky itself.

  On his right, Syrah sighed, the veil that covered her face fluttering lightly with the exhalation. “I don’t know whether to be relieved or terrified,” she admitted, glancing behind them. “I can’t even imagine what they’ll think.

  At that, Raz too turned around, taking in his meager forces.

  In the last twelve days, they’d crossed paths with no less than seven more of Karesh Syl’s patrols. The men had kept their promises, leaving the majority of the fighting to him, and as a result their numbers had swollen as five more slaves chose to join their cause, falling in with Esser and Aleem so that Raz’s army was now twenty strong if he counted Syrah and himself. In addition, they’d collected an additional six horses—having lost another when the animal bolted before anyone could snatch its bridle—as well as a plethora of armor, weapons, and gold and silver looted from the bodies of the Tash’s slain soldiers. As the number of mounts grew, their party had started moving faster, taking turns riding and walking. Indeed, if the former slaves were to be believed, Raz hadn't expected to see the city for another two days, maybe three.

  They seemed to have made better time than any could have estimated, because now Karesh Syl loomed like a disease on the open flatness of the savannah.

  “Find Akelo,” Raz told Syrah, still not looking around at her. With every moment the heat shifted, revealing more and less of the hundred knives that were the bastions and towers of the city. “The other kuja as well.”

  He saw Syrah nod in the corner of his vision, then pull her mare around and canter back to the main group. A minute or so later, she returned with the Percian, Akelo and Odene on horseback, Zehir and Kalin on foot accompanied by a newcomer, a youth named Rufari. Like all the other slaves they’d managed to free from the patrols, Rufari was slimmer than the former oarsmen of the Moalas. Whereas most of the now-seven recruits they’d gained had been couriers, footmen, and servants, however, the boy claimed to have been a laborer along the palace walls. His strong frame fit well in the soldier’s uniform he sported—better indeed than the broad shoulders of Akelo and the rest—and he had a stern, calm face that lent itself well to the overall persona of a man-at-arms of the Tash’s army.

  Well… usually Rufari was stern and calm. As seemed common among the newcomers, whenever he was summoned before Raz for any reason the man appeared to have trouble maintaining his composure, staring openly with nothing short of awe.

  It was flattering, in a way, but also exasperating.

  “What’s going on?” Akelo asked as the five dark-skinned men came to group around Gale, all of them—except the young Rufari—peering off in the eastward distance, following Raz’s eyes.

  Raz gave Syrah a quick, grateful look. She hadn't said anything in front of the rest of the men.

  “The city is closer than we thought,” Raz answered, keeping his voice low to indicate that the others should do the same. “Three, maybe four hours' hard riding, if I had to guess.”

  There was a collective hiss of surprised disbelief from the kuja. Even Rufari now turned to look out over the horizon.

  “You’re sure?” Akelo asked, and the question was a testament to the weight of this news. Raz didn’t think the man had even once before questioned his word.

  “I am,” he said with a nod. “It’s time. Syrah and I will bring the caravan as close to the walls as we think prudent. You five will ride on ahead, as we discussed.”

  Akelo nodded, his dark face a little paler than usual. In truth, there wasn’t too much to worry about, in the short term. Their plan was simple enough, and one of the other freed men—a Southerner named Nudar, whose family had been dragged from their home in Karavyl some years prior—had been in charge of cleaning the chamber pots in several of the city barracks. He’d been able to pass on a few key bits of knowledge from his time among the Tash’s soldiers, explaining the basic etiquette of the army, as well as how to identify most of the ranks according to the bronze markers pinned to the left side of a soldier’s bleached leather cuirass. Akelo and the other four had even replaced all their preferred weapons with several of the standard-issue blades they’d pilfered. The bow the old Percian preferred was now kept with the rest of their weapons stocks, retrieved only when the kuja prowled the savannah every morning for the game that had kept them all fed over the last three weeks.

  Now—and after several days of instruction from Raz and Cyper on the appropriate way to heft a shield—the five men were more than passable as a basic scouting unit.

  “You lot,” Akelo was saying, turning in his saddle to speak to Zehir, Kalin, and Rufari, still on foot around them. “Find horses, and grab what supplies we’ll need.”

  The three men nodded at once, jogging back to the cart and the rest of the caravan. After they’d gone, Raz turned to Akelo.

  “We’ll make camp off the main road, in whatever cover we can find,” he said. “Don’t draw more attention to yourself than you need to. Be back before dark, if you can.”

  “Aye,” Akelo said through a tight jaw, his eyes once again on the lightening horizon. “In, out, and report. None of us want to be in the shadow of that place longer than we must, believe me.”

  Behind him, as though to accentuate this point, Odene muttered a prayer to the Sun above.

  They left not long after, riding west at a hard gallop in the order Nudar had advised them on: Akelo at the head, the other four in two pairs on his heels. Raz and Syrah saw them off, watching the dust of their departure linger and settle, and after a minute or two the five men were nothing more than an indistinct group of steel helms and white leather even to him.

  At that point, he turned back to the caravan.

  “I suppose we should tell them?” he asked the Priestess under his breath, studying the set faces of his remaining men, all either watching him expectantly or gazing after Akelo and his group.

  At his side, shifting in her saddle as Nymara dipped her head to snort at a tuft of dry grass in the road, he thought he made out Syrah smiling sadly.

  “On the road,” she said. “Give them a little while longer believing their troubles are still a few days away.”

  The men, in the end, took the news with such stoic understanding, Raz couldn’t help but be proud of his little army. He made his announcement as Syrah suggested, while marching at a leisurely pace ever eastward, and even the recruits—though one or two of them blanched and stumbled when he said they could make the city as early as that evening—swallowed whatever fear they must have all been suffering, taking the new reality in stride.

  Raz left them alone after that, ceding immediate command to Cyper, and rode ahead of the group with Syrah in order to give them all the chance to speak among themselves, reassuring each other and bolstering one another’s courage out of earshot. For a time he and the Priestess trotted along in relative quiet, taking in the wondrous golden-flatness of the savannah, watching birds take off in waves from the grasses and listening to the occasional breeze play its music over the plains. Raz couldn’t help but be saddened by the deceptive peacefulness of this place. Again he was reminded of the Arocklen Woods, of the solemn wonder of the Northern forests. He remembered feeling similarly conflicted when traversing the Woods with Talo and Carro, torn between the magnificence of the scenery and nature around him and the ever-present fact that someth
ing dark and hateful lingered within its depths. Then, it had been Gûlraht Baoill and his army, the constant knowledge that at some point Raz would have to confront the wild tribes of the Northern mountain men. Here, it was the weight of Karesh Syl, like the city itself were pressing him down as he approached.

  After a while, Raz had to allow himself, too, a reprieve from the tension. Eventually he managed to press aside his concerns, if only for a time, even managing half a smile as he gazed off over the savannah, watching gazelles bound in dipping patterns in the distance, as well as a pod of lions lazing about in the shadows of a massive baobab. He was able to clear his mind, to separate himself from the trouble he could feel so rapidly approaching. For a time, he knew peace, enjoying the ride and world.

  Then Syrah gasped.

  Raz—who had been staring off to the south for several minutes, trusting Gale to keep to the road—whipped around in his saddle, his hand jerking up to the head of the sagaris on his hip as adrenaline spidered through him like light through shattered glass. His first instinct was to expect an attack, maybe yet another patrol, but as his eyes snapped over the savannah to the north he saw nothing more than shivering grasses and what looked like tilled growing fields approaching as they trotted forward. He took in this farmland in a flash, initially noting nothing of importance other than the fact that he should have known a city-state would need some means of supplying itself with food.

  He was about to ask Syrah what she’d seen, about to demand that she explain the rigidness with which she sat in her saddle, when he made out the workers.

  The fields themselves were impressive in their size. There were dozens, each cleared of grass to reveal rich, earthy soil from which all manner of colorful vegetation grew, most of which he didn’t recognize. They were separated by hedges of uncut land, marking boundaries between the plots, and around each section two or three men were standing in the shade of rickety tool sheds and covered carts, or pacing about the edges of the fields. Percian all, they wore uniform light, sleeveless shirts, most heads shaved clean so the sweat that lingered across their scalps shone beneath the Sun. Each man carried a whip and cudgel with him, either on their belts or held firmly in hand, and many were shouting harsh orders at the top of their lungs over the hundreds of forms toiling amid the harvests. Dozens of figures were bent or kneeling in each field, tending to the plants in the cruel light of the full day, heads bowed against the heat.

  “Raz!” Syrah’s voice was distant to him as he stared at the workers. “Raz, come on. Come on!”

  He knew, in some secluded part of his mind, that she was right. The slave drivers hadn't noticed them yet, it seemed. They had to go back, had to rejoin the main group they’d left nearly a quarter-mile up the road. They could lose themselves among the men, he knew, or stow away in the cage again.

  And yet, despite this knowledge, Raz couldn’t move.

  He had been expecting it, of course. He had been working diligently to brace himself, to prepare his mind and soul for the moment he knew would come eventually. With each day they grew nearer to Karesh Syl, though, and with each step the reality of the event had loomed ever closer, like death creeping up on an aging man.

  And now, staring off across the fields, Raz felt as though the reaper had finally caught up to him.

  The atherian worked in complete silence, the only sounds from their efforts coming from the human overseers all around them. They were bound—each and every one—around the ankles, looped manacles linked by a short iron chain that made it visibly hard for any of them to do more than shuffle about the rows. They wore thin, threadbare clothes that hardly even covered them decently, and the cloth of those rags was so dirty and disheveled they could as well have periodically been lying down and rolling around in the dirt.

  As Raz continued to watch, he noted once again the distinct aura that hovered about the figures, that almost palpable sense of a unanimously broken spirit. He remembered the hollow eyes of men and women he’d seen cruelly penned up in the Cages of Miropa. He recalled the utter lack of hope lingering in the faces of Akelo and the others when he’d first descended into the hull of the Moalas. Again he witnessed it now, could practically taste the despaired wretchedness of the beings before him. They seemed less person, somehow, even to him. They had been worn away, stripped of the life and spirit that Syrah would have said made one “human.” The atherian before him had been fractured, hammered and beaten down into something almost less than living.

  They seemed little more than things, machines that just happened to be breathing, utterly without hope and desire, because hope and desire had only ever led to pain and disappointment.

  It wasn’t the first time Raz had been close to lizard-kind, of course. He remembered little and less of the details of his life before the Arros had taken him in, but he did remember the occasions when his family had stowed him away inside their wagons during the summer seasons by the Garin, hiding him when the atherian came down from the Crags to the east to trade with the nomadic families. He’d never been allowed—not even as he’d grown older—to interact with them, which had taken him some time to understand and appreciate. He’d been an Arro, a man of the clan, son of Agais and Grea. He did not belong to the atherian, not anymore, and he’d eventually understood that he didn’t want to belong to them, that to show himself might well have resulted in attempts to take him away from his kin.

  Still, Raz hadn't been able to control his curiosity completely, and more than once he’d snuck out of the wagon ring to study the strange people that were of his blood, observing them from a safe distance and always, always, downwind.

  Now, witnessing the hundreds of lizard-kind spread out across the fields in the distance, Raz was reminded of that time.

  Unlike him, the scales of many of the figures were not a congruent shade of greenish-black. They were mostly of that same color, true, but many of them had markings or patterned patches of different hues, like wolves or dogs of the same breed might have. There were ripples of white, red, and even luminescent blue down the back of necks and the front of throats. There were mirrored slashes of purple and green across chests and shoulders, or shapes of yellow and orange that layered down arms and legs like sheets of armor had been painted onto their skin. Not a single form bore wings, obviously, but the males had crests that twitched and fluttered behind their heads, and all had tails adorned with yet more patterns, like thick snakes marked with geometrics and swaths of different colors. They were a beautiful people, Raz thought, remembering abruptly that he had made the same realization on the occasions he’d had the opportunity to observe them around the Garin.

  A beautiful people, now chained and fettered and driven at the end of a whip like common livestock.

  Raz felt himself reaching for Ahna, still lashed at Gale’s side. He felt, for the first time since the Moalas, the animal stir within him, felt it raise its head in tentative anticipation. As the steel claws of his gauntlet closed about the haft of the dviassegai, he sensed himself being pulled away, submerged into calm, cool depths as something more terrible rose up in his place.

  Had it not been for Syrah, he would have ruined everything then and there.

  Her touch, as always, brought him ripping back. Her hand, though tense and shaking in what might have been any combination of sadness or anger or fear, was a comforting warmth against his scales. She had reached out—probably as soon as she’d seen him going for Ahna—lightly gripping the muscled breadth of his upper arm.

  “No, Raz,” she said in a shallow whisper, and her fingers dug lightly into him. “Not here. It isn’t the time or the place.”

  Raz clenched his jaw, feeling his fangs grind in loathing frustration. She was right, of course—Syrah was usually right, after all—but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “I left you, once,” he said bitterly, his hand still around the bleached white wood of Ahna’s shaft. “I had the chance to save you, and I didn’t. Look how that turned out.”

  “Y
es,” Syrah hissed with a nod, indicating herself with her other hand. “Look. Look how it turned out. I’m free. I’m whole.”

  “Mostly whole,” Raz growled, feeling his anger flux as his gaze flicked to her face. Through the veil he could barely make out the outline of the frayed black wraps bound over her right eye. “Mostly whole.”

  To his surprise, Syrah managed a hard laugh. “Maybe, yes. But all this—” she motioned to her hidden, ruined features “—was done long before you or anyone else could have helped me. Look at them, Raz.” She pointed west and north, toward the fields, though her own face didn’t turn from his. “They are slaves of Karesh Syl. You aren’t leaving them. You aren’t abandoning them. The remaining days they spend toiling for the Tash will be hard, yes, but they will be worth it. Allow them to make the sacrifice. Allow them to give you a chance to save them all, not just those right in front of you.”

  Save them all, Raz thought, realizing she was echoing his own words back at him.

  He watched the atherian continue their work. A few of the slavers had noticed the pair of them now, he could tell, turning to look up at the road curiously. No one raised any alarm, though, so he thought the distance and the Sun at their back must have been enough to distort their forms, alone and ahorse on the road. Still, despite the situation becoming more pressing by the moment, Raz couldn’t look away, couldn’t quite bring himself to break the spell of seeing his own kind for the first time in the better part of a decade. He couldn’t pull himself out from under the weight of the moment, nor the desperate fury that still lingered within him.