We Cry for Blood

by Devin Madson

  I wished I could hear Gideon breathing.

  The rocks and dirt clattered upon the floor as I started digging again. My fingers were almost numb from the work, their tips cut and bruised. One might have been bleeding, but apart from a sense of damp warmth it was impossible to be sure. It didn’t matter. I needed to dig. Every time I considered stopping to rest, I thought of the tiny stone space, of the half-empty water skin, of the prospect of dying here in the dark. Of Gideon. I could give up on my life, but never on his. We had eaten rice patties together because he had wanted to take care of me and I had wanted to take care of him, not because we cared for ourselves. The realisation left me breathless and I shied away from considering it further, the space beyond that thought intense and frightening. Better to dig and not think than risk thoughts I could not draw back from.

  A distant clatter echoed near my hand. Followed by a whisper. I shook my head and kept plunging my fingers into the rockfall and dragging free stones and dirt. Gideon moved in his sleep as, far away, someone shouted. I blinked, wondering if I had fallen asleep. Perhaps I was just dreaming about digging because digging was all I had now.

  I kept working, accompanied by the clatter and scrape of distant sounds. I understood none of it until someone said, “It can’t be much farther; this is the way to the next cave.”

  Jass. That was Jass’s voice. Jass and replies in Kisian. Jass and the sound of digging and shifting rocks. The realisation crept upon me, tingling my skin from my toes to my scalp. Jass was close by. He was coming.

  “Hey!” I shouted to the stones. “Hey! Jass! Jass!”

  “Rah?” Movement and excited gabble followed. “Rah, are you all right?”

  “Fine, just trapped,” I called back, tearing rocks away now. They had to be close. We were going to get out of this. We were going to live.

  “We’re coming, just hold on a little longer.”

  Afraid I was hallucinating, I kept digging, listening to the scrape of shovels and willing them not to vanish like the echoes of a cruel ghost. They got closer and closer, clawing at the walls.

  Light pierced the stones, pouring through the first small hole. Voices followed. More light as rocks and dirt were pulled away, and I flinched back, the brightness an assault on my eyes.

  “Rah.” A hand touched my arm. Voices milled. Footsteps. They had come. It was real. We were going to get out of here. Tears rolled down my cheeks in relief I couldn’t voice.

  Then Gideon cried out.

  The footsteps stormed around me. Lanterns flashed, but I forced my aching eyes open. A pair of Kisian soldiers had hauled Gideon to his feet, his eyes bleary and disoriented from sleep. “Emperor Gideon e’Torin,” one said. I didn’t know the rest of the words, but they were harsh and clipped in anger. I hunted Jass in the milling bodies as the men dragged Gideon toward the hole I’d dug in the rockfall. Toward what moments ago I’d thought of as freedom.

  “Rah.” Panic and confusion filled his voice as he was carried past. “Rah!”

  The scuffle of footsteps faded as they moved into the next cave, leaving me blinking rapidly in the light. Alone.

  27. DISHIVA

  I opened my eyes. Opened them again. Tried to blink the darkness away and remembered what had happened, slowly, like rising from warm water into cold air that nipped at my skin and made my bones ache.

  Every part of me hurt.

  I parted my lips and managed a breathy groan. There was weight on my face. A tightness around my head. My hand found fabric.

  “You’ve lost an eye,” said a familiar voice, calm and motherly yet far from the one I wanted to hear. Whisperer Ezma cleared her throat. “And the cut across your nose is deep, but has been stitched. The other eye is scarred but should heal.”

  “Great.” The word rasped and I cleared my throat. “Sichi? Nuru?”

  “Fine.”

  “Leo?”

  “Gone.”

  I could still feel the floor cracking beneath me. Falling away. His shocked cry dropping into dust. “Dead?”

  “We found no body, and a number of Levanti are missing. No doubt these things are connected.”

  “Missing?”

  “We don’t know what happened. Everything was rather chaotic.”

  I groaned, trying to make sense of her words. “Where am I?”

  Fabric rustled as she moved. Closer. I wished I could shift back, but even a twitch of muscle ached. “You’re in a house in Kogahaera, along with the other injured Levanti who are still with us. As I understand it, a rock hit the tower beneath you, taking out a corner of stonework and ripping a hole in the floor. You fell through it.”

  I remembered falling, but not landing, not hitting anything hard on the way down. My body remembered though, every inch of me bruised.

  “The wreckage was searched, but no Leo Villius. His followers are saying he has been renewed by God.”

  I patted the bandages, relieved to see a shift in the darkness above my left eye. I didn’t want to touch the other.

  “Dishiva.” Ezma’s tone was urgent. Low. Ill-ease broke through my lassitude. “This has happened for a reason.”

  “For a reason—?” I bit off the sudden flare of anger so hard my teeth clacked.

  “Yes,” the horse whisperer said, her caressing voice too close. “Because you are special, Dishiva. Because you are here for a purpose. We are all a part of God’s purpose, but you… I have been waiting ten years for you.”

  I could see nothing, yet the room spun around me, such an odd sense of displacement that I doubted I could reach out and touch anything solid. If not for the pain, I would have been sure I was dreaming.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, the thud of my heart uncomfortably loud within my darkness. There were little sounds of movement and murmuring around me to prove we weren’t alone, but the way she shuffled closer made me feel all the more isolated.

  “You are the one they call Veld, Dishiva, not Dom Leo Villius, whatever he might claim to the contrary. You.”

  They were ridiculous words. “That,” I said, trying to maintain an even voice, “makes no sense. I am not even a believer. I was only given this position because he wanted to punish me. And besides, Veld dies and lives again, and I’ve seen him do it. I’ve seen him die twice and come back.” My words became a desperate hiss. “I have no such pact with a god.”

  “You don’t need one. The original translation doesn’t specify death in its true, bodily sense, but in the way a heart breaks and one dies inside. Suffers. Hurts.”

  Almost I tore the bandage from my face, sure I could rip away the darkness and everything would be back to normal. But there was just nothingness and her voice, pressing in on me like a suffocating weight.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I don’t believe you, it’s ridiculous. If he’s not Veld, why does he keep coming back?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out, but the information is vague and unhelpful. Yet I know he is not the one I’ve been waiting for. You are.”

  “I am not even Chiltaen.”

  “Nor is the faith. There are many passages proving Veld is Levanti. ‘Wide-open plains.’ ‘On thunder of hooves.’ ‘Painted dedication to God upon their skin.’ None of those could possibly refer to a Chiltaen cleric now, could they? And yet they are in the original book. Not the Chiltaen one of course. They changed and adapted what they didn’t like. They were even so set on Veld being a man they mistranslated the leader with two voices. Nyan means male leader, but the faith does not allow for men to couple, which meant Veld was a woman, all well and good where the faith originated but unthinkable here where women are not highly valued.”

  They were all words I knew, but none of them fit into my mind, half sticking only for the rest to tumble out.

  “A Levanti,” was all I managed to say.

  “A Levanti,” she repeated. “A woman. One ‘chosen to protect, whose single vision will build an empire.’ You are already Defe
nder of the One True God. Chosen to protect. Your body and soul sacred in the eyes of God. So, you see why I say this happened for a reason.”

  “No.”

  She shifted on the mat beside me, pressing ever closer with her voice and her scent. “Yes, Dishiva. Your fate is hundreds of years written and cannot be denied now. You are the one who will build a holy empire from ashes.”

  “No.”

  A gulf of silence sucked at my thoughts, and I had the urge to scream until she went away, scream at the world for having brought me to this place. I pulled at the bandage, linen unravelling. It stuck to some skin and drying poultice, but I ripped it free, blinking at the sudden ingress of light through the crusted lids of my left eye. She appeared, a blur owning vague disapproval. It sharpened as I blinked and forced myself to focus, unable to shift the thin film of rain behind which she sat.

  “That was not wise,” she said.

  “What do you want?”

  “What is meant to be.”

  “And what do you get out of that?”

  Even blurry, the look she gave me was condescending, and I felt like dirt beneath her feet. “You will understand one day, Dishiva. Your time is coming.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “It has been written.”

  “So what? I could write your death now and it wouldn’t change anything, it’s just words on a page.”

  “The words of a prophet.”

  All the thoughts crowding my head had grown sharp edges, jostling about and cutting each other and me with the anger that had shaped them. Prophet. The term sounded so wrong on her tongue. We used it for forecasting spring rains and the routes different herds used to cross the plains, not for the futures of individuals. Or gods. Or empires.

  Ezma reached for my hand. Her grip was strong, and I was too stunned to pull away. “It is for the best you know the truth now. You can accept your fate. Make peace with it. Be grateful.”

  “Grateful.”

  “It is an honour to be a chosen. To be the one with single vision is the greatest honour of all.”

  Grateful, for pain and loss. For having my once steady sense of self stripped away piece by piece. For being the chosen instrument of a God I didn’t want to serve.

  Bile washed around the sharp-edged thoughts in my mouth, consuming them into angry words. I wanted to spit them all at her, but they owned vulnerable parts of my soul. What right did she have to my pain?

  “Dishiva—”

  “No,” I said again. “I don’t care what you think is going to happen, or what some long-dead man who drank too much wrote down. I am the only one who makes decisions about my life, and while there are many things I can imagine myself doing, building an empire is not one of them. Take your holy writings and scrunch them up for tinder. Your god will get nothing from me and neither will you.”

  “You are being narrow-minded and stubborn to your own detriment, Dishiva,” she snapped. “To all our detriment. You sided with Gideon because he promised to build something you wanted, but now that you have the chance to build it you refuse to even listen?”

  “Get out.” My whole body felt hot with a rage and disappointment and hurt as I thought of everything Rah had told me about her, about what had been happening back home. “Get away from me or I will scream until someone throws you out.”

  Ezma let my arm go. “We will talk again soon,” she said, stiffly calm. “For now, you should rest. Remember, whatever our pain, whatever our suffering, everything happens for a reason. Trust in that.”

  When she was gone, I wanted her to return so I could vent more of the fury dammed inside me. Propped upon hard cushions, I stared straight ahead, trying to make sense of the sounds and the shapes and the blur of shifting light while I worked my stiff fingers until I could close them to an aching fist.

  “Everything happens for a reason.” The insidious words ate at my mind, rubbing ragged against the Levanti belief that prophecy was only a guess, a likely outcome, that no matter how much one knew about rainfall patterns and the contour of the hills, the plains had an element that was ever-unknowable. As did life.

  “Everything happens for a reason.”

  I was still opening and closing my fists when hurried footsteps approached and a familiar outline appeared. One far more welcome than Ezma’s. Relief spilled through me, burbling through my lips on a sob.

  “Dishiva! Shit, what happened? Are you—? Do you need—?” Jass looked around at the second person who’d followed.

  “You’ve made a mess of my bandage, I see,” they said. “Let me—”

  “I want to be able to see.”

  The unknown newcomer shuffled. “Your eye—”

  “I know it’s gone. I mean I want to be able to see without this one being covered. Go away. No, come back. Tor. Tor e’Torin. Is he around anywhere?”

  I didn’t need clear vision to know the two men looked at one another. “He should be,” Jass said at last. “He arrived with the empress’s army. Why?”

  “The book. I need… I need to ask him something important. Can you fetch him? He’ll come if you tell him I’m here. I know he will.”

  A little snort of annoyance followed a murmured discussion, and the second man departed, leaving Jass standing beside me. With a pained grunt of effort, he lowered himself onto my mat, my first breath of him a mix of dirt and sweat.

  “I saw the tower come down,” I said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  Easier to speak about that pain than the one curdling in my chest.

  “I thought so too.” He grimaced, but I couldn’t make out the way his brow usually crinkled, and the hurt I harboured soured all the more. “And I did lose Rah and Gideon for a while. We had to dig them out. They were… very lucky, really. The way the rocks fell left them with a hollow, and they had food and water, but… well, I was worried. Whatever I might think about Gideon, no Levanti deserves that end.”

  He told me how the cave had collapsed, how he had dug himself a way out and run to the Kisian camp for help. I listened and sipped metallic water from the edge of a thin bowl, mind full of the questions I had for Tor.

  The young Torin soon arrived, his all too vague outline approaching to join us.

  “Captain Dishiva,” he said as he saluted. “I’m sorry I could not get more information to you sooner. About the book, I mean. Everything got quite… complicated there for a while.”

  “I don’t think it’s likely to get any less complicated for some time,” I returned. “But I didn’t ask you to come to berate you. I have… some questions. But first, did you find out more? About Veld and how he… died?”

  “I did.” He knelt beside my mat, leaving Jass to hover. “You already knew about the cave—that was the last one I had when you…” He trailed off rather than specify the circumstances under which I had visited the deserter camp. “Well, the one after that took me some time to figure out, but it best translates as ‘stabbed in the back by an empress.’”

  I closed my good eye and, tipping my head back against the wall, laughed. It was all I could do, all it made sense to do, when it was already far too late. When we had, once again, helped him, having set out to hinder.

  “You’ve already done that,” Tor said, and it wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway, my stomach hurting from the laughter. My eyes stung as tears tried to fall.

  No wonder that Leo had been so happy. He was playing with me. I had to think of it like that, not let myself fall into Ezma’s belief that everything happened for a reason, that I was merely living out the words of a prophet, had to hold to the Levanti understanding there was no such thing as prophecy, only a likely outcome of events. An outcome I could change.

  “Tell me about Veld,” I said. “About the holy empire. What is it? How does he build it?”

  Tor shifted his weight, fabric rustling at my side. “It’s complicated, and honestly none of it makes a lot of sense. I may just be translating it poorly, but the book seems to… disagree with itself quite often.
Often enough that I think it can’t just be my translation at fault.”

  “What does it say?”

  “That Veld is disbelieved and maligned, even by his own people. Yet is also revered. That he is both a warrior and a peacemaker. That his empire is both the salvation of his people and their destruction. There is a whole section I only skimmed through about where he was born and how he earned his name, but most of it isn’t that detailed.”

  He shifted his weight. It sounded like it had nothing to do with me, but Ezma had spoken of a different translation, of a version of the book that wasn’t Chiltaen. She had spoken with such belief, but if there was one thing I had learned, it was that belief was all too easily fashioned out of desperation.

  “I have been waiting ten years for you,” she had said.

  Desperation for purpose. For a belief that fit her view of the world. For a Levanti holy leader. A woman. It was only a wonder she hadn’t twisted the details to fit herself.

  “Why do you ask about it, Captain?” Tor said.

  “Just… something someone said to me. Thank you, Tor, you’ve set my mind at ease. I’m sorry to have taken up your time.”

  “Whisperer Ezma, I assume, but no need to thank me, Captain, I’m glad to have been of use. Sorry I didn’t get the information about Veld’s next death to you in time to… stop it.”

  I turned my head, centring his blurred outline. “What comes next? After being stabbed in the back by an empress?”

  “He gets betrayed, and then sacrificed by himself,” he said. “Though I’m not sure how getting betrayed kills him. It also says that the foundation of Veld’s holy empire is built on the death of a false high priest. I’m not really sure what that means either. Whisperer Ezma has a different copy of the book though, so if you have other questions it may be best to ask her.”

  “It is not a conversation I wish to have with her, so thank you, Tor. You’ve done a huge service to your people by translating that thing, and you ought to be proud, whatever anyone else might say.”

  He was silent a moment, before nodding. “Thank you, Captain.”