Ash and Ambition

by Ari Marmell

  Ash&

  Ambition

  Book One of Nor Fang, Nor Fire

  Ari Marmell

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 Ari Marmell

  Cover Art by Claudio Plozas

  http://www.claudiopozas.com/

  All rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to: xerography, photocopying and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  Too many names to list, and too many names that can’t afford to be listed. This is for everyone who’s been forced by society to hide who they are. You are magnificent and powerful, every one.

  Southern Galandras

  Chapter One

  Everything ached.

  Even the parts he wasn’t yet accustomed to having.

  The world swayed and juddered to a song of ear-rending shrieks and moans. The sun, though modestly veiled behind a translucent and wind-kissed overcast, was blinding through the shadows of the bars. On those winds wafted the sour stench of sweat and offal. Directly overhead, the sky was wooden, the patterns in the grain suggesting—

  Wooden? Bars?

  “Smim?” His voice was ragged and parched.

  The one that replied was no less a croak, though something about its nasally, savage timbre suggested it wouldn’t have sounded pleasant even under more comfortable circumstances. “I’m here, Master.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The wagon, Master. Remember?”

  The wagon? The cage!

  Oh, but he remembered now. Furious, he sat upright, and nearly collapsed all over again as the world, already swaying, began to spin. The creaking of the wheels, jolting over every imperfection, separated themselves from the pounding deep in his skull—just as the warmth of midday now paled against the feverish heat from within.

  And above all that, the agony, the infection, the intrusion, in his chest.

  Clinging with desperate intensity to a lucidity that threatened to dissipate with every breath, the injured man forced himself to look around.

  He was, indeed, within a heavy cage on wheels, lying beside a flattened board intended as a bench. There were others, many others, crowded in with him, but first and foremost, there was Smim.

  The goblin leaned over him, concern evident in the rheumy eyes that peered from a rounded, swamp-skinned face half-hidden by strands of coal-black but moss-textured hair. Whether that concern contained an iota of true affection or merely represented Smim’s fear of being left to fend for himself, he neither knew nor cared.

  “Your nose is crooked.”

  Smim’s grin, revealing jagged gray teeth, was feeble. “As it ever has been, Master.”

  “No.” The protuberant, almost root vegetable-like snout was definitely even less centered than usual.

  “I may have had something of a misunderstanding with several of our fellow internees,” the creature admitted.

  At that, squinting through the pain, the wounded man examined the others. All human, save Smim, or so at least they appeared. Many glared sullenly his way, though whether in general resentment over their situation or particular animosity due to the goblin’s presence, he couldn’t say. Most were men, a few women. None of obvious nationality; hair color varied, and skin tones ranged from nearly snow-pale to the brown-black of lush soil, and every hue between—though even the darkest of them showed a certain greyed pallor from hunger and fear.

  Elgarrad, he thought, drawing the two primary human ethnicities of Galadras from deep memory, and Cennuen. Mostly a mix of both.

  Which thought, in turn, caused him to raise a hand and examine his own skin, his own flesh, alien as it was. A rich, chestnut hue: abnormally dark if his blood were substantially Elgarrad, about average if Cennuen. He wondered, idly, if that implied any cultural connotations with which he might need concern himself in the future.

  Then again, given his current circumstances, he wondered if he’d have any sort of future in which it mattered.

  No! None of that! I’ve survived too much already to—

  A particularly sharp bounce of the wagon, followed by an equally stabbing jolt of torment through his skull, obliterated the rest of his internal rant. He clutched his forehead, groaning.

  “People travel in these contraptions regularly?” he demanded.

  “Most of them keep to the roads, Master,” Smim pointed out helpfully. “I would imagine that makes their journeys somewhat less arduous.”

  Indeed, the view between the bars showed no trace of a roadway, or any sign of civilization at all. Open fields of poor grasslands and the sporadic copses stretched far to the east, first rolling gently before rising to veritable waves of hills at the edges of vision. Between the wagon and those hills, invisible due to the land’s contours but just audible above the protests of vehicle and passengers, ran—he scoffed inwardly at the name—the Dragon’s Tail, tributary of the Dragon River.

  He focused as best he could on the rushing waters, trying to block out the more immediate noises and the constant agony. Eventually he fell back into a feverish half-doze, in which he dreamed, or perhaps hallucinated, of a sword the size of a mountain, one that cruelly sliced bits of him off and added weaker, incongruous parts back in their place, all while he whimpered in fear or prayed for succor to gods he scarcely recognized.

  When he awoke once more, when those whimpers and prayers penetrated deeply enough for him to recognize them as genuine sounds rather than products of his near-delirium, the wagon had halted. Beyond the bars, unshaven men of a particularly rough mien, clad in leathers and armed with cudgels, passed bowls of a pasty gruel to prisoners’ grasping hands.

  He didn’t recognize his captors. He did recognize their cudgels.

  He remembered staggering from the foothills and out onto the plains, every step a fresh hell, his heart the center of a web of agony so intense as to make madness a welcome respite. Step by step, each an impossible act of will, leaning heavily on Smim’s wiry frame lest the next stumble be the last. They made for a border that might as well be worlds away—the untamed region known by most as the Outermark was broad indeed—beyond which lay at best a feeble hope.

  Then shouting, shapes rising from behind this boulder, that knoll, swinging those massive, knotty clubs… Sharp pain, in arm and leg and skull, and that pain was welcome for its distraction from a torment far greater, a relieved smile around a mouthful of blood…

  The memory faded, the here-and-now returned. The wagon was already moving once more, the prisoners greedily clutching their pathetic fare, eyeing their neighbors like sworn enemies. Smim, a cracked and battered bowl in each hand, knelt beside him, one arm extended. “Here, Master. You should—”

  “You won’t be needing that.” The fellow who spoke was a hairy, unwashed tree-trunk of a man. Clad in tattered rags like the rest of the wagon’s occupants—including Smim and his master—he nonetheless stood out. Not merely his size marked him as different, but the healthier flush to his tanned skin, a lesser cracking of his lips. This one wasn’t near so hungry as the others, and it took no contemplation at all to understand why.

  A quick whisper. “The one you ‘disagreed’ with earlier?”

  Smim nodded, flinching. Then, to the larger prisoner, “My mas—my friend is sick. He requires food and—” The goblin yelped, only partially able to dodge the kick aimed his way.

  “If he’s si
ck, there’s no cause to waste good food on him. And as for you, you damn garbage-eater—”

  The ache in his head, in his limbs, seemed to fade; even his wounded chest subsided just a bit. “The goblin is with me.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  Fury blazed, burning away what remained of the pain. “Have you any idea who you’d defy, you stupid man?! I am—”

  “Master!” Smim hissed, alarmed.

  Damn it! He wanted to scream his frustration, but the goblin was right.

  It took him an instant to remember, though. “Anvarri,” he said, somewhat anticlimactically. My name, for now. I can’t afford to let myself forget. “Nycolos Anvarri.”

  The other prisoner appeared not merely unimpressed, but irritated, even disgusted. “Never bloody heard of you,” he grunted, reaching again for the goblin. The other miserable souls, who had paused their meals to watch the altercation, looked equally ignorant.

  All save one or two. These, if Nycolos read their expressions accurately, indeed recognized the name—they just didn’t believe it.

  Interesting, and worth further study. Later.

  For now, even as Smim fell back to the floor of the wagon, trying to avoid his tormentor, Nycolos grabbed the larger man’s arm in an impossible grip. He allowed the other a moment to stare, locking his eyes with Nycolos’s own, jaw gaping in the beginning of a shocked, suffering gasp…

  And then he twisted, snapping bone midway between elbow and wrist.

  The agonized scream, accompanied by a chorus of softer, startled sounds from around the cage, was the first noise Nycolos had heard since he’d awakened in this damned rolling prison that didn’t cause him pain.

  Still, he was weak, injured, distracted, far from his best. He failed to notice one of the other prisoners rise, fists raised, moving to help the first.

  He failed to notice, but Smim did not.

  Another horrid shriek joined the first as the second man also collapsed, clutching the back of his mangled, crippled ankle. Smim rose from a crawl behind him, teeth and lips smeared with blood where he’d bitten clear through tendon and flesh.

  “Would anyone else,” Nycolos demanded, rising to his full height, head brushing the wooden ceiling above, “take what is mine?” The sobbing bully still dangled from his fist, arm flexing horribly in his grip.

  Nobody so much as met his gaze.

  It was not only a small victory, but a short-lived one. The wagon halted, and the cruel men with their cudgels seemed uninterested in Nycolos and Smim’s protestations of self-defense. Even as his many pains returned twice-over, however, as he felt consciousness slipping away again beneath the pounding of the heavy clubs, Nycolos was satisfied that he had made an important point.

  Not only to the other prisoners, but to himself.

  For all that has changed, I am still me. And I will fight to keep—and to reclaim—what is mine!

  ___

  When he awakened again, the aches were worse than before, but his mind was clearer. When he ground a hoarse “Where are we?” through ragged throat, it wasn’t that he had once again forgotten the wagon. He meant, and Smim properly interpreted, his question in a much broader sense.

  The goblin pressed his face to the bars, peering out into the long shadows and pooled murk of twilight. For the nonce, Smim’s night vision was far better than Nycolos’s own. He could remedy that, but the requisite change in his eyes would almost assuredly be noticed.

  “We’ve been traveling west,” Smim announced after a pause. “I can see the ridges winding southward, far ahead. I’m afraid, Master, that we must be nearing the mountains.”

  Nycolos choked softly on a self-mocking laugh. The Outermark Mountains—or simply “home,” as he’d called them—was where they’d started this hellish, fruitless trek!

  That they approached the mighty range far north of where they’d begun was hardly consolation. It still meant that the bulk of their efforts had been neatly undone.

  Before Nycolos could come up with profanity sufficient for the situation, the wagon slowed, accompanied by a brief symphony of human grunts, equine snorts, and wooden creaking.

  “Apparently we’re to be examined before ‘delivery,’” Smim informed him in response to a curious glance. “Or so I believe I overheard. I cannot be certain I heard properly, of course. The others seem disinclined to allow me near them.”

  After what had happened earlier—and Nycolos couldn’t help but notice that the two men he and the goblin had mauled were nowhere to be seen—that was hardly surprising.

  “Master…” the goblin continued, his ugly voice dropping. Had Nycolos possessed only a human’s hearing, he’d never have caught the word at all.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re too strong, Master. You need to fix that.”

  Nycolos repressed the urge to hiss. “I will do no such thing! I’m feeble enough as it is!”

  “I understand, but…” Smim scooted closer, fingers twitching anxiously as the vehicle came to a full stop and their captors approached. “You should not have been able to do what you did earlier, to that lout’s arm. It was noticed.”

  “I’ll be more careful.”

  “Master, you know I would never show you disrespect, but—”

  “Out with it!”

  Smim sighed. “You lack your usual patience. Perhaps it is your injuries, or our present circumstances. Perhaps your blood simply burns hotter now than you are accustomed to. And you’ve rarely before had need to restrain yourself when your anger burnt brightest. You’re not used to it. Master, you can’t simply ‘be careful.’ Not at this time.”

  “Smim…”

  “I’m sorry. But you know I’m right. And you will be noticed. You cannot afford that; we cannot.”

  Nycolos felt his shoulders slump, an odd feeling in and of itself. Everything inside him screamed defiance, railed against the notion of making himself weaker still, of giving anything to these… these animals who dared cage him! He had little left to him, but that short list included his pride.

  But Smim was right. Nycolos had precious little experience with these feelings, with enemies he could not overpower or at least meet on equal terms. The goblin did.

  “You can always regain your might,” Smim reminded him, doubtless sensing his hesitation, “should you require it.”

  Another sigh, a nod, and Nycolos closed his eyes in brief concentration. Beneath his skin, muscle and bone rippled, shifting, softening. In instants, he possessed a strength impressive, perhaps even remarkable for a man of his height and build, but no longer unnatural.

  After that, there was nothing for it but to rise, the ragged tatters of his shirt and trousers tugging loose from his flesh where the congealing blood of his injuries tried to paste them, and present himself, like freshly slaughtered game, for inspection.

  The sting to his pride burned hotter than any fire.

  The men came, hauling open the door of the cage. They poked, they prodded. They checked teeth, as though purchasing a herd of old nags. They stripped rags away, studying physique. They squeezed muscles. They pushed. Occasionally they slapped.

  Nycolos nearly bruised the bone of his jaw, so tightly did he clench, biting back an angry protest or worse.

  “This?” A heavily mustached man with old cheese on his breath, jabbed a finger at the red and angry wound in Nycolos’s chest, exposed when his shredded tunic was tugged aside. “You’d best not let this cost us.” He conveniently ignored the other injuries, the ones he and his fellows had themselves inflicted. And just as well, really; had he scrubbed away the caked blood and the dust, he might have been startled at just how swiftly those wounds, unlike the one beneath Nycolos’s heart, were healing.

  “Perhaps you ought have considered that,” the seething captive spat, “when you crept up behind me and clubbed me over the head, you cowardly—!”

  The slap, made dismissively with an open hand rather than fist or cudgel, startled several birds from a nearby branch, where they
had warily studied the wagon and the gathered people. A furious heat washed through Nycolos, from his cheek outward; a tide of rage, not pain.

  He heard screaming, and couldn’t be certain at first whence it came. He felt leathers and fabrics bunched in his grip, flesh flattening against bone beneath his other fist. His vision cleared, the crimson veil boiling away, to reveal his captor’s bruised face and bloodied nose hanging inches from his own.

  “Master! No! Stop!”

  It wasn’t Smim’s beseeching cry that brought him up short, however, but the overheard muttering of the other captives.

  “Idiot.”

  “Fool.”

  “Madman.”

  “Get himself killed.”

  The goblin had said it, mere minutes ago. His temper was no longer as it had been. His judgment, his patience…

  Who am I allowing myself to become?

  And, of perhaps more immediate import, How quickly will this new “me” get me killed?

  Nycolos released his tormentor-turned-victim and stepped back, hands raised, well before the man’s compatriots reached him. He expected, at best, another severe beating. With luck, he might survive it.

  But while many of his captors clearly intended precisely that, cudgels and even a few small blades raised, one man reined them in with a gesture and a sharp bark. His bald head bore signs of peeling, having seen far too much of the midday sun. The ends of his dark mustache dangled low to vanish into the equally dark fur mantle he wore over a battered breastplate of old steel. It was, to Nycolos’s memory, the only armor he’d yet seen among his jailers that wasn’t of leather and hide.

  “You’re fast,” the bald one said in a voice more befitting a boy than a man of his size and age. “Not many can get the drop on Inju way you just did.”

  “He startled me.” Nycolos wanted to vomit, to throttle himself before he let the words escape, but he would not allow his pride to be the end of him. Not today, not this way. “It won’t happen again.”

  “We should kill you,” the other continued. “Attacking one of us. And you already cost us two perfectly good slaves.”