Siege of Rage and Ruin

by Django Wexler

  A couple of tables up from us, a pair of young men have been discussing the day’s plan in loud voices. I’ve gathered that they have a pair of wagons, and that they were loaded with barrels of salt slitfish. Nobody who can afford not to eats slitfish, so they have to be hauling to the lower wards, and probably won’t mind carrying a few paying passengers.

  The two of them look at me as I sit down, and it takes me a moment to place their expressions. I’m used to contempt from the rich and fear from the poor, at least if they know my reputation, but this is neither. They’re staring, and I’m abruptly conscious of my mismatched clothes, my ragged hair, and most of all the blue cross-hatching that wanders across my face.

  This is going to take some getting used to.

  “Morning, sirs,” I say. It takes an effort to speak pure Imperial, instead of the polyglot mess we use on Soliton. “My friends and I were hoping for a ride to the city, down to the Sixteenth.” I open my hand to show the gleam of silver. “We can pay.”

  One of the pair, a gangly youth with a patchy beard, gives a derisive snort. The other, his older brother for a guess, looks at me with another strange expression.

  “I can give you a ride,” he says, slowly, “but I’m wondering what rock you’ve been hiding under, and if you know what you’ll be riding into.”

  I feel a prickle on the back of my neck. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning there ain’t no more Sixteenth,” he says. “My uncle had a little flat there, and a shop, but it’s all smoke and ashes now, and my uncle along with it. The Sixteenth is gone, friend.”

  I don’t remember jumping to my feet, but I must have. The next thing I know, everyone in the room is looking at me, and the two traders are frozen in place. I feel Meroe touch me gently on the shoulder.

  “Gentlemen,” she says, her Imperial fluent and correct. “Can we buy you a few drinks, and hear the whole story?”

  2

  TORI

  The headquarters of the Red Sash Rebellion—which is what they’re calling us now—is the old Ward Guard barracks in the southwest corner of the Eighth Ward. It was built to house a central reserve that could move via the military highway to prevent an uprising in any of the lower wards. Having failed in that purpose, it turned out be to be useful to us for similar reasons. Three stories high, backed against the ward walls on two sides, it’s built like a fortress. There’s a large square in front, formerly the site of a daily market, now used by Red Sashes for drills and practice. The shops and apartments around the edges have been taken over by Hasaka’s people for more living space, their owners fled or kicked out.

  A line of Red Sashes waits at the edge of the square, keeping back a small crowd of civilians. There’s not much to distinguish the two groups, except for the eponymous swathes of crimson fabric and the spears in the hands of the former. Both look dirty and threadbare, though the Red Sashes are perhaps a bit better fed.

  I cross the square from the small apartment building I’ve claimed for my own. I don’t wear a sash, but no one challenges me—even if they didn’t know me by sight, the trio of Blues behind me is identification enough. Two men and a woman in nondescript clothing, wearing the red sash of the revolution crossed with a blue one. That band of blue cloth and their eerie, silent movement marks them out, and the rebels in the square give us a wide berth. I can taste the tang of discomfort and fear in their minds, and the steady pulse of obedience from the Blues.

  Which is as it should be. It’s hard to believe I used to keep my Kindre senses shut down most of the time. It’s like going through life with your eyes closed tight, out of fear of the sun.

  The two soldiers at the front door bow as I enter, and I give them a brief nod. Inside, people bustle about, but armed Red Sashes and civilians alike pause whatever they’re doing and bow, too. I used to stop them, but I’ve given up trying. Let them bow, if it makes them feel like someone’s in charge.

  We use the map room on the second floor for our conferences. It’s cramped, nearly filled with a big table bearing a large-scale map of Kahnzoka and its wards. The others are already waiting when I arrive, and with a silent pulse of Kindre power I order the Blues to stay outside.

  There are four of us left, the commanders of the rebellion, since Hotara died in the battle for the Sixteenth Ward. One way or another, we’re all tied to Grandma Tadeka, whose death was the spark that started everything. Hasaka watched the door at Grandma’s hospital and mage-blood sanctuary, and was the unofficial head of her security. He’s a tall, powerfully built man, long arms wrapped in dark tattoos, and his time in the Ward Guard makes him an invaluable resource. Unfortunately, the rigors of rebellion have brought out the worst in his gloomy nature, and a dour, sullen expression now seems permanently etched onto his features. Still, what discipline and training the Red Sashes have, they mostly owe to his efforts, and he commands our fighting soldiers.

  His boyfriend, Jakibsa, sits beside him, a stack of paper sorting itself in midair in front of him with a faint glow of Tartak blue. A pen hovers by his ear, revolving slowly. Jakibsa is cheerier than his lover, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. Long hair brushed forward over one side of his face can’t entirely hide the red-and-white burn scars that disfigure him, and his gloved hands are nearly useless, forcing him to rely on his Tartak Well. At Grandma’s, Jakibsa managed a wing of the hospital, tracking meals and medicine and linens—now he’s our quartermaster, overseeing the rebellion’s food, weapons, and supplies.

  Giniva, on the other side of the table, is engrossed in a study of the map, unconsciously coiling and uncoiling the end of her thick braid around her fingers. She’s a mage-blood, who’d joined the sanctuary just before everything exploded. She has every right to hate me—her sister had tried to join along with her, but I’d seen a plan to betray us in her mind and told Grandma to send her away. In spite of that, Giniva has never shown any resentment, attacking any work we put before her with quiet, understated efficiency. She’s shown a particular flair for gathering and organizing information, so she’s our head of intelligence, if you can dignify the haphazard collection of watchposts and patrols with the name.

  And then, of course, there’s me. Gelmei Tori, a few months past my fourteenth birthday, raised in a Third Ward mansion since I was eight years old, carefully insulated by hired servants from everything that was wrong with the world. A spoiled little girl who until a few months ago had never earned a day’s wage, never kissed a boy, never made her own supper.

  Isoka had wanted me that way, free from pain and need, protected from the bloodstains she gladly took on herself. All I wanted was to make her happy. Now she’s gone, probably never coming back, probably dead, and it’s for the best. I’m not who she wanted me to be, who I was supposed to be. I stabbed a boy in the throat and felt his hot blood gush across my hands. I crushed a woman’s mind like a butterfly in my palm, and watched as she died at my command. I pulled a terrified family out of hiding and used them like hunting dogs to bring down my prey. I burned the Sixteenth Ward to ash and bone.

  Monster, the voice in my head says. Monster, monster, monster.

  The Red Sashes are what I have left. The three in this room, and everyone fighting for us out in the city, are what’s left of Grandma’s sanctuary and the people who joined us in the streets. I will do what I can for them. And, maybe, for the chance to get my hands around Kuon Naga’s throat, and squeeze until his eyeballs pop like grapes.

  As Grandma Tadeka once told me, sometimes you have to do what you can with what you have.

  * * *

  The others are all staring at me, waiting. I realize I’ve drifted off again, lost in my own thoughts. It’s happening more than it used to. Maybe Kindre is driving me mad. Not that it matters. None of us are likely to live long enough to worry about our long-term mental health.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “Thinking. Give me the news.”

  Hasaka and Jakibsa look at one another, and I can hear tinny anxiety in their minds. Giniva just
sits up, expectant, calm as ever.

  “Well,” Hasaka says. “Not much news on my front. Some hints that more militia troops are moving into position off the Fourth District, but they haven’t tried anything beyond the usual skirmishing.”

  “‘The usual skirmishing”’ means arrows fired back and forth, people dying in pain and blood. Just not very many of them. Not enough to really matter, and anyway probably more of them dying than us, which has to be a good thing, right?

  Kahnzoka is a city of walls. The main defenses face outward, protecting the capital against any outside force. Inside, the wards are divided from one another by an interlocking set of barriers, manned by the Ward Guard. This is supposed to stop rebellions like ours, but the city’s architects hadn’t expected a secret gang of mage-bloods, nor the assistance of the criminal underworld and their smugglers’ paths. We’d taken the city, down to the waterfront and up to the Second and Third Wards, and manned those same walls against the government’s counterattack.

  We’d done as well as we had because the Ward Guard are better at beating up dissidents and taking bribes than actually fighting, and the provincial militias they’d called on for reinforcements are little better. The Navy is another matter, which is why we had to abandon the waterfront and pull back behind the north wall of the Sixteenth Ward, but so far we’ve held the rest. But the real soldiers of the Empire, the Invincible Legions, are out there somewhere, and everyone knows they have to be coming. It’s just a matter of time.

  “They’re not gathering there for the fun of it,” Jakibsa says. “They must be planning something.”

  “Or else it’s a bluff,” Giniva says quietly. “Or a feint, and the real attack is elsewhere.”

  “Exactly.” Hasaka rests his fingertips against his forehead. “We can’t know. And we have to guess right, because if they break through…”

  He didn’t have to finish. If they break through, we won’t be able to stop them. We don’t have the numbers for a street fight, not now that the Ward Guard’s been reinforced. We have to hold at the walls, or not at all.

  “Assign extra patrols to the Fourth’s walls,” I tell them. “If they’re going to try something, it’s not going to be a straight-ahead attack. They must have an edge. A hidden gate, or a weak spot.”

  “Or a traitor,” Giniva muses.

  “Or a traitor.” I resolve to walk the wall myself, as soon as I get the chance. Betrayal is hard to hide from a Kindre adept.

  “If this goes on much longer, there are going to be a lot more traitors,” Jakibsa says. A sheet of paper shuffles itself free of the mess in front of him. “We finished our sweep last night. Everything edible is now in the depots.”

  “And?” Hasaka says, though I can feel the answer in his gloomy mind.

  “Four weeks,” Jakibsa says. “That’s on short rations for Red Sashes and half for the civilians.”

  “Four weeks is long enough,” Hasaka says. “The Legions will crush us before we starve.”

  “There’s already a black market for food,” Giniva says. “And it’ll get worse as people get hungrier.”

  “Rotting hoarders,” Jakibsa says. “Selling out their neighbors for a handful of gold they won’t have the chance to spend.”

  “We should have started rationing sooner,” Giniva says. “If we’d gathered food before the fire…”

  They don’t look at me, but I feel the surge of guilt anyway. I was the one who burned the Sixteenth Ward. I should have seen this coming. We hadn’t worried about food as long as we had access to the sea—Kahnzoka Bay produced fish in plenty. After the Sixteenth burned, the Navy had taken control of the ruined docks, and we’d been forced to rely on stocks left in the city.

  “There’s more under the temples,” Jakibsa says. “A lot more. But the Returners have them all locked tight.”

  “I still say we should go in there and break some heads,” Hasaka says. “If they’re not going to fight, they can at least share their bread.”

  Another stab of guilt. A monster is a monster. What does a little more blood matter? But there are some lines I won’t cross. Not yet, anyway, my inner voice taunts. Not until you can convince yourself you don’t have a choice.

  “I’ll talk to Kosura again,” I tell Hasaka. “Today.”

  He grunts and concedes the point, though his mind radiates skepticism. I turn to Giniva. “You’re working on finding the hoarders?”

  “As best I can,” she says. “It’s not easy.”

  “I know.” I blow out a breath. “How many cases for me today?”

  “Two.”

  “Let’s get that over with,” I decide. Better to have my plate clear before I go to butt heads with the cultists. “Anything else?”

  Jakibsa and Hasaka shake their heads. Giniva gets up, and I follow her out, the three Blues falling into step behind me. We descend through the chaos of headquarters in a bubble of quiet, activity stilling as we turn a corner and resuming behind us. How much of that is me and how much is Giniva, I don’t know. Dealing with traitors is part of her job, and that tends to make people cautious.

  There’s an extensive prison under the barracks, now mostly empty. A few guards hang around the near end, where two small holding cells are occupied by a man and a young woman. The man is middle-aged, with a patchy beard and ragged clothes, a rotten-egg stink of panic rising off him. He looks up at me as I stop in front of his cage, baring his teeth in a snarl.

  “Here she is,” he says. “Rotting Queen of the Ashes. Hunting for your harem, is it? I heard you like it good and hard up the—”

  One of the guards slams the bars with the butt of a spear, and the man subsides, his eyes wild. I look at Giniva.

  “Attempted rape,” she says. “A couple of Red Sashes saw him pull a woman into an alley. He pulled a knife on them.”

  “Acting like you have any right to tell us what to do,” the man says. “Queen of the Rotting Ashes. You’re going to be so much cold meat when the Legion gets here, and you know it.”

  Probably.But you won’t be around to see it. Once I would have felt guilty about thoughts like that, but not anymore. “Hang him,” I tell Giniva. “With a notice of what he did.”

  She nods, both of us as calm as though we hadn’t just condemned a man to death. He howls in incoherent protest as we leave his cage, until the guards get tired of it and start beating him with the butts of their spears.

  The girl in the other cell is calm, the fear I can sense in her mind not visible on her face. She sits cross-legged, dark hair cut short. I guess that she’s seventeen or eighteen, with the hard, underfed look of a street kid from the lower wards.

  She looks like Isoka. Not really. Her face is wrong, more broad and square than my sister’s, but there’s a hint of Isoka in her ropy muscles, the set of her jaw. I glance at Giniva.

  “Desertion,” Giniva says. “She was a guard on the wall of the Fifteenth, and the others on her shift caught her climbing down a rope ladder.”

  “Do you deny it?” I ask the girl.

  She shakes her head tightly. “Why would I? It’s the only sane thing to do.” Her eyes bore into me. “We’re all going to die here.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  She snorts, and says nothing.

  “It’s Krea,” Giniva supplies.

  Krea. She really doesn’t look much like Isoka. “I’ll take her.”

  A sudden flare of fear from Krea. She looks at the floor of the cell to cover it. Giniva nods.

  “I’ll have her sent over,” she says.

  “Let me know how it goes with the hoarders,” I tell her. “We’re going to need to make a few examples once we catch up with them.”

  “Of course.”

  I give her a nod, and head back upstairs. Once again, the crowd parts in front of me.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m watching myself, as though an actor were playing me on a stage and I’m just in the audience. Passing judgment, ordering patrols, making examples.

&nb
sp; How did I get here? I can answer the question, step by step, but it doesn’t feel real. How did quiet little Tori, who only wanted to drink plum juice and eat dumplings with her sister, turn into this?

  You were always this, the voice—my voice—tells me. A monster. You just don’t have to pretend anymore.

  I want to go back to my room, wrap myself in my blanket, and sleep for a hundred years. Or forever.

  Instead, I turn my steps toward the Temple of the Blessed’s Mercy, and try to figure out how to talk to a fanatic.

  * * *

  The Temple is also in the Eighth Ward, on the east side. It’s the largest in the city, big enough that it distorts the neighborhood around it by virtue of its ecclesiastical gravity. There are dozens of cheap hostels catering to pilgrims, and plenty of winesinks and gambling houses for the less than completely pious. In better times, the Temple’s weekly procession always brought a crowd eager to watch the masked and costumed dancers carrying colorful floats, while supplicators droned prayers and vendors sold fried dough and roast potatoes.

  Everything is quiet now, of course. The inns are shuttered, the winesinks silent. Even most of the apartments are empty. The Eighth Ward borders the Third, not more than a mile from the Temple. Many civilians figure that any Imperial offensive will come downhill from the palace, and this will be the first target. Hasaka’s opinion is that this is unlikely, since the walls are stronger here, but that isn’t enough to stop people from seeking safety farther south.

  The Temple of the Blessed’s Mercy, on the other hand, is bustling. It’s set back from the streets, its grounds surrounded by a high, spiked fence. The central building, with its distinctive double-curved roof like a broken-down horse, is supposed to be over three hundred years old, but it’s surrounded by more modern constructions spread out through a carefully tended garden patch. Now it seems like every inch of that garden has been covered by tents, and the smoke from dozens of cookfires rises to mix with the steady stream from the temple’s chimneys.