The Fires of Vengeance

by Evan Winter

  The following evening, as Tau and his fighters gathered at the far edge of their ever-growing camp of Indlovu, Ihashe, and Ihagu, Priestess Hafsa came running over.

  “You have to stop him,” she said.

  “Who?” Tau asked.

  She didn’t speak. She pointed.

  In the distance and the dark, a burned and bandaged Jabari shuffled toward them.

  “Jabari?” Tau asked the man shambling over, as if it could be anyone else in the bloodstained bandages.

  “Goddess wept,” said Thandi.

  “Make him go back to the palanquin,” said the priestess. “He won’t listen to me and threatens anyone who tries to stop him.”

  Tau’s shock had been so great that he hadn’t noticed the naked bronze Jabari had in his right hand. “Priestess, he can barely stand. You’re telling me no one could stop him?”

  Hafsa spoke quietly. “No one will go near him.”

  Tau looked at her and then to his friend. “Jabari,” he called. “Are you demon-haunted? What are you doing?”

  The Petty Noble lurched over. He had on loose-fitting pants, Ihashe grays that had been cut away just above the knees, but wore no shirt. It wasn’t needed. His torso and arms were covered in bandages, and on his shoulders he had a hooded cloak. The hood was up, hiding much of his face in shadows, and though it hurt Tau to admit it, he was thankful for that mercy.

  Jabari’s face was bandaged, but the walk over had caused several of the coverings to move and slip, and the things Tau saw underneath …

  Tau crossed the remaining distance between them. “What are you doing?”

  Jabari lilted to and fro as he tried to stand steady. “Isihogo,” he said, the word hard to understand coming from his ruined throat. He moved past Tau, and gurgling in pain, he bent over, putting his hands on the ground so he was on all fours. That done, he slid one foot forward and lowered himself onto his ass, a sudden cry escaping him as he did.

  It looked everything other than easy, but he’d done it. Jabari was sitting in the circle with the rest of Tau’s fighters.

  “Tell him to go back where he belongs,” Hafsa said.

  Feeling his eyes grow wet, Tau went to join his sisters and brothers. “Leave us, Priestess,” he said. “My brother is where he belongs.”

  The first time in the mists, on the night Jabari walked to their circle, Tau’s fighters held the demons at bay long enough for him to see Thandi’s shroud thin. To do it, the seven of them fought like they were Goddess blessed, and chasing the thought away as quick as it came, Tau wondered if something extra did guide their swords that night.

  He didn’t believe it, not really. But seeing Yaw and Themba fight with the desperation of the damned and Auset and Ramia moving through mist and demons like dancers following practiced steps made him proud enough to credit even the divine. He watched them with as much awe as he held for Uduak, the group’s heart and hammer, who, roaring his fury, smashed through any demon foolish enough to come within his reach.

  And, last to fall, as had become tradition, was Jabari Onai. In Uhmlaba, his birth marked him a Petty Noble, the blood moving through his veins too weak to be enraged, but in the underworld he fought as hard as any Ingonyama, and the Petty Noble was the most dangerous of the fighters Tau trained.

  That first fight of the night, Jabari died on the barbs of a demon that towered over him. It had run him through and Jabari’s mouth filled with blood as he cut at the creature with swing after swing of his sword. The beast ignored his weakening attacks, snarling and baring yellowed tusks at him. Jabari, his body dying, dropped the sword he was holding, and, hands free, he rammed his thumbs knuckle-deep into the thing’s eyes.

  Throwing its head back, the demon roared in pain, and Jabari began to laugh. It was a hacking cough of a thing, and he barked it in the face of the demon that had killed him.

  “I’ll be back. I’ll keep coming back,” he swore to the blinded beast, speaking around the blood that poured from his mouth before he died.

  Tau had disabled two of the three demons facing him by then and had enough time to see that the towering tusked thing was coming for him. He looked back at Thandi, seeing her shroud shimmer and fail, noting the surprise on her face when she realized how long they’d held the circle. Then, before her golden glow could call more attention to itself, she left the underworld.

  Twirling his black blades one way and turning on his heel in the opposite direction, Tau watched and listened as the creations of corruption and evil closed in on him from all sides. There were too many and he wouldn’t last long, but his fighters had achieved more than their goal, and selecting the tusked one as his first target, Tau intended to celebrate before he suffered.

  After that, Jabari walked to the circle for each night’s training. He was stiff, moving like a man held up by wires of too-thick bronze and prone to crying out in pain without apparent cause, but he could stand, sit, and walk, which was more than Tau could have imagined after first seeing the damage the dragon’s fire had done to his friend.

  Hafsa, the priestess, told Tau that Jabari refused to let himself be carried in the palanquin and that she was worried he was pushing himself too hard. She worried his body was dying. She’d seen it before, she said. It often began with the body no longer able to perceive the pain it was in. That was, she argued, the only way that someone in his condition could be doing what he did.

  Tau knew it wasn’t the only way, but Hafsa had never seen Jabari in Isihogo. If she had, she might understand that, though the mind is chained to the body, it is not the body.

  She couldn’t understand a person doing as Jabari did, unless their pain was muted, but Jabari’s pain was still there. He thrived not because his pain was gone, but because he had found a way to use it against the forces that were trying to break him.

  Tau wondered if that was part of what it took to survive the underworld. He wondered if those who could stand Isihogo’s privations were the same ones who had something to claim on the other side of the suffering it heaped upon them. He was still wondering it when he walked into the queen’s tent to sit by her fire and learn how Queen Taifa Omehia and her Shadow Council had changed the course of life for every living Omehi woman and man.

  OSONTON

  It was another cold night, the third in a row, and after the difficult day, Tau was glad the queen had the fire in her tent burning high. It crackled and hissed pleasantly, but also sounded too much like the noises the inkokeli from the fief they’d visited that afternoon had made when trying to breathe through the nose that Tau had broken for him.

  The fief’s umbusi had resisted the queen’s request for her Ihagu, and when Tau stepped up to take command of the scale, the umbusi’s inkokeli, a Petty Noble, stepped up to Tau. They argued a little, and then Tau became impatient and pushed past the man. Taking it as an insult, the Petty Noble went for his blade, and Tau went for his, whipping his sword pommel into the Noble’s nose and exploding it across his face. No one said much after that, and the umbusi’s Ihagu joined the rest of the queen’s growing army.

  In the tent that night, Tsiora asked Tau to sit next to her so she wouldn’t have to shout over the noise of the fire. He wasn’t used to being so close to her but didn’t mind because he never liked sitting with his back to an entrance. Still, it was strange to be so near her. It made him notice things he wouldn’t have otherwise.

  Her eyelashes, for instance, were surprisingly long, and the lines in her palms matched the skin there, making them almost invisible. She also breathed with her chest more than her stomach and that made the small dip in her neck, the one sitting between her shoulder bones, rise and fall like a softer kind of heartbeat.

  “Is it the necklace?” she asked, startling him.

  “My queen?”

  “You’re looking at my necklace.”

  He was surprised to see that she was indeed wearing one. It was gold and ended in a wooden circle that had a woman’s face carved into it, though she didn’t look li
ke anyone he’d ever seen in person. The face was too angular and its features were sharper than would have been typical on an Omehi.

  “Yes, the necklace,” Tau said. “The Goddess’s face.”

  “A sign of our faith,” Tsiora said.

  “I’m used to seeing them on the Sah.”

  “A lot of Gifted wear them too.”

  “Yours … looks different,” he said. “The wood, is it Osonton?”

  “It is.”

  Tau looked up at his queen. “I’ve rarely seen anything so beautiful.”

  She took a breath when he said it, making the dip at the base of her neck dive, and then, as if she didn’t know she was doing it, she reached up to touch the necklace. “Our mother gave it to us and her mother to her, and on and on.”

  Tau smiled. “I sometimes forget.”

  “What do you forget?”

  “That you’re descended from the same people in the stories you’re telling me, that Queen Taifa’s and Champion Tsiory’s blood flows in your veins.”

  “We sometimes wish we could forget,” she said.

  Tau worried he’d said something wrong. “If you’d like to rest tonight instead of doing this, I could go …”

  “No, we’d like you to stay, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t,” Tau admitted. “I’ve been thinking about where we stopped and I want to go further.”

  Her eyes seemed to twinkle, but it had to be the firelight reflecting in them. “Do you?” she asked.

  “I do,” he said. “I know the Omehi left Osonte. I know we built ships and sailed the Roar, but what exactly did the Shadow Council push through with their voting? What did they vote for?”

  Tsiora turned wistful. “Sometimes I wish I had happier stories to share, but this one will have to do,” she said. “With the votes from the Shadow Council, Taifa Omehia was declared a Dragon Queen. They voted to hand her absolute power.”

  Tau chewed his lip. Voting to make Taifa a Dragon Queen hadn’t been one of his guesses. “Why not simply win the vote to escape Osonte? Wouldn’t that have been enough?” he asked.

  “She didn’t want to just flee. She wanted the power to change Omehi and Noble culture. She wanted to make her people strong enough to return to Osonte and stop the Cull. So, she became a Dragon Queen and that gave her the power to do what she wanted, but on Xidda, she lost something she needed.”

  Tau knew what was coming next. Any daughter or son of the Omehi knew what came next.

  “On Xidda’s white shores, Taifa watched her love, Champion Tsiory, fall. Yes, our beginnings here were soaked in blood, but perhaps there could have been an understanding with the Xiddeen, if only they hadn’t killed him.”

  “Taifa turned to vengeance,” Tau said.

  “Taifa turned to slaughter,” Tsiora said, touching her necklace. “She burned the beach and every Xiddeen on it to blackened glass, and in the season following our landfall, she called the dragons so often we lost every second Gifted we had.

  “Queen Taifa Omehia found us a new world but couldn’t escape the old one, and we fought the Xiddeen as hard as we’d fought the Cull. In those early days, when the skies rained fire, the people of this land died in the thousands, and desperate to stop the carnage, the Xiddeen sent messengers with gifts, overtures, and foreign words of peace. The Dragon Queen returned their messengers to them one limb at a time.

  “But our brutality wasn’t enough. We couldn’t win, not without more Gifted, and as our losses to the Xiddeen increased, tragedy struck.

  “The next Hoard was a season in which one in four starved and the Nobles began to whisper that Queen Taifa was leading the Omehi to another defeat. So, using the ire of starving people, they risked an attempt to depose her.

  “They named her bloodthirsty, unfit to rule, and to appease those they’d taken to calling Lessers, they put Taifa’s young daughter on the throne in her place.”

  “History shapes itself a circle,” Tau said. “They wanted control of the queendom, and as was done to Taifa, they made a figurehead of her child.”

  “They thought this time it would be different,” Tsiora said. “They thought Taifa’s daughter was giftless. You see, the Nobles still needed to present an Omehi queen to their people. We were the dragon callers, the first Enragers, and the idea of us was what held our two peoples together.

  “However, they’d never wanted and no longer needed their queen to have the power to bend the wills of men or bring down black death from above, and so they sought to weed the Goddess’s power from the Omehia family line.”

  “But … you’re gifted,” Tau said.

  “Yes, us, and all the queens before us. The Shadow Council protected the daughters of Queen Taifa’s line across the generations, lying for us, training us, and preparing us. They’ve done it for every gifted princess.”

  Tau leaned back, taking in the secret’s scope. “Did the child’s mother … did Queen Taifa know that her daughter was gifted?”

  “She planned the deception. The Goddess told Taifa that she’d be betrayed.”

  “The Goddess told her?” Tau said, thinking Shadow Council spies the more likely source of information about an impending betrayal.

  “She did.”

  “And knowing the betrayal was coming, Queen Taifa let it happen?”

  “It was necessary. She knew that. Her actions led to today, and in the tomorrows to come, they’ll lead us home.”

  Tau wasn’t about to give much weight to promised tomorrows. “What happened to Taifa?” he asked.

  “They made an example of her,” Tsiora said. “They made the price of ruling without Noble sanction as costly and as plain as they could.”

  As she was saying it, Tau realized he didn’t want to know. He was speaking with Taifa’s descendent, and it was too easy to picture Tsiora in her forebear’s place, but he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to imagine what the Royal Nobles and Abasi Odili would do to his queen, if they lost the battle for Palm City.

  “They eviscerated her,” Tsiora said, unintentional in her lack of mercy. “It’s where the tradition for the execution comes from.”

  “I see.”

  “Tau,” she said, using his first name, “we are part of an unbroken line of Gifted that stretches back to the very first Omehi queen. Our kind was birthed on Osonte, and now it is time for us to go home.”

  “Go home? Why? Why now?” he asked. “Why does any of this need to happen now?”

  “Because of my sister,” Tsiora said.

  THRONE

  In the last fief they had to visit before returning to Citadel City, the umbusi made a terrible mistake. With the gates to her keep closed and bolted, the umbusi of fief Luapula stood on top of her keep’s walls with helmeted and armed Ihagu lined up on either side of her, refusing the queen entry.

  Nyah, riding up to the gates with Tau, addressed the umbusi from horseback. “In Queen Tsiora’s name, I demand that you open these—”

  “The queen, Queen Esi,” the umbusi shouted down at them, “sits on her throne in Palm and makes no demands of me.”

  The umbusi’s words made the central vein on Nyah’s forehead stand out like a worm about to break ground.

  “What did you say?” the vizier asked through gritted teeth.

  “You heard me, you black-robed inyoka,” the umbusi said. “The queen is in Palm City and I recognize no pretenders. Leave my fief.”

  It was a bad start. No denying that, and all things considered, Tau was surprised they hadn’t encountered such recalcitrance before. Indeed, the more he thought about it, the more he wished they hadn’t sent almost all the Ihashe and Ihagu they’d commandeered from the other fiefs to Citadel City.

  He understood why they’d done it. They needed to give the men into Hadith’s care as soon as possible so he could put them into scales and claws, assign inkokeli to each, outfit them, organize them, and otherwise prepare them for the upcoming assault. It made sense, but as he stood in front of a keep’s c
losed gates and high walls, the sense of it didn’t help much.

  “What now?” Tau whispered to Nyah.

  She didn’t answer him, opting to call out to the umbusi instead. “This is your last warning. Open the gates while you still can.”

  “Fellate a scorpion’s sting, you wingless kudliwe!” the umbusi shouted.

  Tau tucked that one away for safekeeping. He’d trained among initiates, full-bloods, and Proven for an entire cycle and had never heard its like before.

  Nyah, less amused, yanked on her horse’s head straps, turning it back the way they’d come. Then, looking over her shoulder to the umbusi’s Ihagu, she said, “Let none of you say she was not warned!” before riding off.

  Tau considered saying something, anything, to try to convince the umbusi to listen to reason.

  “Look,” the umbusi said, raising the pitch of her voice to sound as if she spoke to a child, “the false queen dresses her Drudge in the armor of champions.”

  Tau shrugged and turned Fury back toward camp. Some people, he thought, can’t be convinced by words alone.

  It didn’t take them long to come up with a plan to remove the rebellious umbusi from power. They based it on how they intended to attack and take Palm City. Kellan, leading the fighting men of their camp and with Gifted Thandi at his side, marched to the front gates of the keep. The queen remained near the rear with Nyah, protected and safe, though her champion and handmaidens were not with her.

  Tau, the handmaidens, Uduak, Yaw, Themba, and even Jabari, who, without words, had made it clear he would not be left behind, had circled the keep and were standing in the shadows of its rear walls. Up above, on the keep’s ramparts, were eight or nine distracted Ihagu. They were trying to find out what was happening out front and kept calling to their sword brothers farther down the wall for news.

  The attack on fief Luapula was going to be a test, and if the six others with Tau didn’t necessarily think of it like that, he did. He wanted to see how the time spent in Isihogo had changed them, if it had at all. And breaking into a well-guarded fief to capture an umbusi seemed as good a test as any.