Savage Legion

by Matt Wallace

  Daian’s words come slowly and on trembling breath. “You said… Ministry… was watching you…”

  “Don’t talk,” Taru orders him.

  Lexi’s hands hover over him, wanting to fix him without knowing how.

  “Te-Gen, please,” Taru bids her urgently, “I will attend to him. Give me leave to do that.”

  Lexi nods, removing her hands and rising to her feet. She swallows hard and wipes away the tears, stepping away from them to allow Taru to tend to Daian’s wound.

  Lexi looks over at Spud-Bar, teary eyes turning hard and resolute. “Are you willing to testify to what you know, all that you’ve seen, before the Arbitration Council? We can keep you safe.”

  “Begging Te-Gen’s pardon,” Spud-Bar says, glancing down at Daian, “but this doesn’t seem the safest of places. In truth if I’d known you’re being watched I wouldn’t have come here, promise or no. My life may be forfeit as it is.”

  “I’m sorry for that, but what’s done is done. Stay with us. Help us. There is change coming.”

  Spud-Bar can’t meet Lexi’s eyes. “That’s an easy thing to say from a tower, Te-Gen.”

  The expression on Lexi’s face hardens to match her eyes. “Very well. Then just tell me… what did Brio want me to have, and where can I find it?”

  WE BURIED OUR STORIES IN THE EARTH

  “I SAY WE CUT ’ER fuckin’ head off and give ’er body to that black foulness over the hill.”

  “Thank you for offering your wise counsel on the matter, Lariat,” Evie says. “We will take it under advisement.”

  Mother Manai laughs, and even Bam snorts a half chuckle through his cavernous nostrils.

  Lariat is not amused.

  Neither are the rest of the remaining Savages.

  Six of Sirach’s outriders survived the battle, although two of them are badly wounded. Evie’s side lost six Savages, including the former mine worker who told Evie his name didn’t matter. More than anything else at this moment she wishes now she’d insisted on hearing it. None of the B’ors warriors suffered so much as a scratch in the battle.

  Sirach and her remaining Special Selection soldiers sit upon the ground in a tight grouping. They’ve been disarmed, but Evie insisted they not be bound or restrained in any way; that was part of the bargain she struck with Sirach back in the outcropping of rocks before Brio and the Elder Company came back for Evie. They had no notion of what to think when they found their Savage sister and the Sicclunan agent sitting casually among the boulders, chatting over the maimed corpses of the two most feared blood coin hunters in Crache.

  Lariat spits on the ground in front of the Sicclunans. “Not sayin’ I know all that many numbers, but she’s killed more’n I can count of our kind.”

  “And how many times that number of her kind have we killed?” Evie asks. “It’s a war none of us here started or chose. She understands that.”

  “You claim a lot on ’er part,” Lariat says. “Were you back in those rocks longer’n we think somehow.”

  “She saved my life and I saved hers. We understand each other.”

  “All I understand of Sicclunans is cuttin’ ’em down before they do the same to me an’ mine.”

  Evie places a gentle hand against the leathery skin of his chest. When she speaks it’s as if to a child or a much older parent or grandparent.

  “You are a marvelous bear of a man who genuinely cares for his compatriots, and I admire you greatly. But you’re also an old grouch who solves all his problems by punching them. Where we are now requires thinking and compromise, and I submit to you, respectfully, this is not a place your leadership is best tested.”

  “She’s right, old man,” Mother Manai says. “She has a better head on those tiny shoulders of hers than any Savage I’ve ever met. Just listen to her.”

  Lariat blows air through his mustache in exasperation, looking helplessly between the two of them.

  “Fine!” he declares, and then, to Manai, “Old woman.”

  Evie pats him on the chest gratefully and turns away, bowing briefly to Manai, who returns the gesture with a smile.

  All the while, Brio has sat silently apart from the debate, his injured leg stretched out across the ground. It seems to be occupying most of his attention.

  Evie kneels in front of him, gently prying apart the dressings she applied that are now both seeped through and filthy from their cross-country hike. Brio hisses in pain as she does. What Evie sees beneath the bandages looks less like flesh of any condition and more like a swamp.

  “This leg is going to have to come off,” she informs him quietly, her expression as grim as it has ever been.

  Brio tries to smile, but even that effort seems to cause him pain. “I didn’t know you’d become a surgeon in the last hour. That’s impressive.”

  “Brio,” she whispers, almost pleading. “Your leg will poison you if it stays on much longer. It’s already started. You’re running a fever. That’s why you’re sweating so much. And you can barely stay awake.”

  “What’s to be done out here?” he asks, looking at her with eyes that have abandoned hope.

  Evie glances to where the B’ors have chosen to rest and await the decision of their Crachian counterparts concerning the Sicclunan, having offered no counsel in either direction.

  “I’m working on it, all right? I promise. I just need you to hold on a while longer. Please. Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” he says.

  “Then try.”

  Yacatek sits against the hill with her legs folded beneath her. She’s unsheathed her stone neck knife and is using a small, jagged sliver of rock to carve upon the blade. Two of the B’ors warriors stand like sentries at the foot of the hill below her, weapons in hand and eyes surveying both the cold camp and the surrounding wasteland.

  Evie leaves Brio and walks between them.

  “May I sit with you?” she asks Yacatek.

  “I do not own the ground,” Yacatek answers without looking up from her etching. “That is a belief held by your people, not mine.”

  Evie chooses not to respond to that. Instead she trudges painfully up the hill and lowers herself beside the B’ors woman, groaning as she does. It feels as though every part of her body is angry at every other part.

  “What’s the meaning of the marks on that blade?” Evie asks.

  “History.”

  “Of your people?”

  “Of my band, before I was taken, and now the history of this new band we have formed.”

  A new thought strikes Evie.

  “Is this why the others follow you?” She motions to the two B’ors sentries. “Because you record their history?”

  Yacatek nods. “I am a Storyteller. There is no more sacred calling among my people. It is given to Storytellers to keep the words and names and deeds of our bands. We preserve them in stone because it will outlast us all.”

  “What do you do when there’s no more room left on the dagger?”

  “Begin another.”

  “And what happens to that one?”

  “I bury it.”

  “Where?”

  “In the earth. It does not matter where. There will be those who come later, who will uncover it. Everything in the earth is revealed in time. People feed off the earth so ravenously it cannot be helped. There will always be those who come later, and they will uncover our stories, and that is how we will remain. Our time of living is short now. Only a small band of Storytellers still mark the stone. Your people will finish what they began.”

  “You’re not gone yet.”

  “No. That is why I sit here carving this knife.”

  “Why a knife?”

  Yacatek shrugs. “Knives are useful things. People will keep a knife.”

  Evie would laugh if the implications behind what she’s watching weren’t so dire and horrific.

  “We are, all of us here, dying in the same way. You know that? It doesn’t matter whether we’re Crachian or Sicclunan or B’
ors, not to those hunting us.”

  “That is true,” Yacatek concedes.

  “So… we can die or we can fight.”

  “Fighting and dying walk hand in hand.”

  “True enough. So you’ll keep fighting?”

  “My band are warriors,” the Storyteller says simply.

  “Would more of you fight with us? Do you know where the other bands are?”

  For the first time, Yacatek looks up from her recording to regard Evie.

  Evie expects to find suspicion in the Storyteller’s eyes, but the aspect there is more akin to surprise.

  “You say ‘with us’ and not ‘for us.’ ”

  Evie nods. “You’re not mine to command. But we have common enemies, common goals. Your warriors are the best fighters I’ve ever seen. Savages have proved to be a powerful weapon when they’re aimed correctly. The Sicclunans have taught themselves to be brutal stealth assassins. The death knell for all of us is numbers. The Skrain and their forces overwhelm us. If we formed… a new band, all of us together, and fought together… they wouldn’t be ready.”

  “You speak beyond the few warriors here and now.”

  “Far beyond,” Evie confirms. “I’m speaking of whatever’s left of the Sicclunan armies, every band of B’ors we can find, and turning every damn Savage they’ve conscripted against them if we can.”

  Yacatek’s eyes bore into her intensely. “Who are you to bridge these worlds and make such a fight?”

  Evie looks down at her hands. She remembers the first morning she awoke to find runes staining their flesh. Twice as many runes cover her fingers and palms now, and she can feel them upon her face and the rest of her body. She finds she has trouble recalling what her flesh looked like before she swallowed the blood coin.

  Evie stares back at the Storyteller without wavering. “My name is Savage. That’s what they’ve made me, and I plan to use it.”

  She can’t be certain what’s occurring inside Yacatek’s head in the silence that follows, but Evie has given it her best.

  Finally, the B’ors woman nods her chin, just once, and returns to her carving.

  “It will be a good fight” is all she says in the end.

  Evie accepts that gratefully, standing with even more agony than it caused when she sat. She carefully trots back down the hill, pausing after a few steps.

  “Am I mentioned on that blade?” she asks.

  Yacatek again nods her chin a single time.

  “What does it say?”

  “That you too often say what is there to be seen, but that you are a warrior to be contended with.”

  Evie nods. “I can live with that.”

  She walks between Yacatek’s sentries and leaves the B’ors to their hillside retreat for the moment, returning to the other Savages and their Sicclunan wards/prisoners.

  “What’s it be, Sparrow?” Mother Manai asks her.

  “It comes to this. Whether we can reach the Tenth City or not, we can’t go back. We can’t return to the Legion, not now. We’re runaways, plainly and simply. And even if we find a way to remove these coins and the runes fade from our flesh, we can’t go back. There’s no place for any of us in any of the cities. There will always be Aegins and Skrain and blood coin hunters. There’s no life outside the cities, either. The land between isn’t fairing much better than this stripped earth around us.”

  “Where do we go, then, if not back to the Legion?” Lariat demands. “Is yer new Sicclunan friend offerin’ us sanctuary with ’er people?”

  “There is no sanctuary,” Evie assures them all. “I promised Brio I’d return him home, and I promised you could return to your families. But that can’t happen with Crache as it is.”

  “What are you saying, love?” Mother Manai asks. “What do you want us to do?”

  “I want to do what we were all going to die doing, no matter which side of the line we find ourselves on, no matter how much we lied to ourselves. I want to fight. I want us to stop being a Skrain weapon and become the worst enemy they’ve ever faced. I want to make Crache a place we can return to and live.”

  “I don’t mind cuttin’ down Skrain,” Lariat says. “You’re askin’ us ta kill Savages? For Sicclunans?”

  Evie shakes her head. “No. I want to turn the Savages against them. ALL the Savages.”

  She expects another spar with Lariat and is already readying her counterargument when he delivers the last response Evie expects.

  He bursts out laughing.

  “Now that’s a notion!” he bellows gleefully. “Why didn’t ye say so in the first place?”

  Lariat claps a hand on Evie’s shoulder and shakes her hard enough to send lances of pain through every aching muscle in her body. However, the rest of the Savages have taken their lead from the elder statesman of their ranks and they join in on the sudden merriment, all of them ready to follow along wherever Evie’s plan of action leads.

  In the wake of the laughter, Sirach delicately stands and brushes the ground from the crimson-dyed leather of her trousers and tunic.

  “So pleased we’ve worked this all out,” she announces.

  Lariat quiets, and the other Savages fall silent with him.

  “Look ’ere, girlie,” he says, fisting a katar and pointing the tip of its triangle blade at Sirach. “This doesn’t mean I like you.”

  “And I find you to be just a hair above a pig rolling in muck,” Sirach says. “It’s the perfect place for us to start.”

  With that, Lariat begins laughing anew, deeply and genuinely.

  “Pig rolling in muck!” he echoes her, giving rise to a new wave of guffaws from the Savages.

  Evie watches them figuring one another out, hoping it’s enough. She looks from the strange scene to where Brio is leaning over his necrotic leg, summoning all his strength just to stay conscious.

  “The easy part’s over, then,” she whispers quietly to herself.

  PART THREE REVELATIONS OF THE THROAT

  FORMLESS, SHAPELESS, IT CAN FLOW OR IT CAN CRASH

  “WATER.”

  Dyeawan lets that single word hang heavy in the air above them all, as if it might become a banner flown between two charging warhorses.

  The planners are convened in another room she’s never seen before. Dyeawan is beginning to understand that in many ways, the façade of the Planning Cadre is only that, and there’s far more beneath the surface she’s yet to see or know. The chamber is a microcosm of the keep itself. There are twelve planners including Edger, six men and six women, all of them clad in the same simple gray tunic as him and wearing the same pendant of concentric circles. They’re seated within a table that’s actually a thin stone slab winding inward several times to a central point. The planners sit along its path like children hiding poorly inside a hedge maze.

  Edger sits at the winding stone snake’s center point, an array of masks arranged facedown on the surface in front of him.

  They are the only ones in the chamber save for Oisin, forever draped in his black cape. The Protectorate Ministry agent is lurking against the wall in the back of the room, surveying them with his usual obvious contempt.

  Dyeawan’s spoken only one word, but she can clearly see it has affected all of them deeply. No one responds at first, but the subtle expressions and glances that pass between several of the planners speak volumes.

  Edger is the first of them to address her directly. “Pardon me, Slider, but might I ask you to elaborate?”

  “That’s how the Spectrum was built,” she says. “Or… formed… would be the right word. Water.”

  Now several of the planners actually turn to whisper to one another heatedly. Some of them seem excited to Dyeawan, while others seem suspicious, even hostile.

  It is, as always, impossible to read Edger, though as in the bay when she emerged from the test in the drowned room, Dyeawan can’t help but picture him smiling.

  “How did water form the Spectrum?” he asks.

  Her slight shoulders shrug. “
The same way water shapes all stone, I imagine.”

  Dyeawan takes out the flattened rock from the stone bank upon which the God Rung sits. She gently wings it across the nearest curve of their snakelike table. It skips several inches before rattling to a halt like a flipped coin.

  “Time,” she says.

  This statement elicits murmurs among the planners, to which Edger raises his arms, signaling for their silence.

  “If you’re asking me how the builders created such specific forms, I don’t know,” Dyeawan explains. “I don’t think you do, either. If you did, you would be using the process to create more palaces and keeps in the Spectrum’s likeness. I think you know how they did it, but you also do not know how they did it.”

  Edger takes up a jovial, smiling mask and holds it over his expressionless face. He turns his head to regard each fellow planner with the painted expression.

  “I believe, comrades, this demonstrates with finality that my faith in our little Slider here was not misplaced,” he says.

  “She’s magnificent,” one of the other planners says.

  She’s a young woman who can’t be much older than Riko. She also has more purple in her eyes than anyone Dyeawan has ever met.

  “She is… undeniably adequate,” another among them says, begrudgingly, and Dyeawan is not at all surprised to see it’s a much older man.

  In fact, their opinion of her, read on their faces, seems to be divided strictly by age. The younger planners are all smiling at her, while their elders either appear dubious or scowl outright at her.

  No one else speaks. The majority opinions on Dyeawan seem to have been expressed.

  “What happens now?” she asks them. “Do you vote?”

  “I don’t believe that’s necessary, no,” Edger says, raising his arm and motioning behind her.

  Dyeawan turns her head and peers over her shoulder. She did not notice Quan standing there before, waiting attentively just inside the chamber doors. He strides forward, smiling and cradling a length of cloth in his long arms.

  It’s a gray tunic, like the rest of them wear. Dyeawan can see the concentric circle pendant already pinned to the garment.