But the people of Ahwan were not the only aspect of the city that took her by surprise and spun her head atop her shoulders. The buildings and the construction of the landmarks stole her attention away from the very attention-demanding task of trying to keep herself upright and moving at a semi-reasonable speed. Grey-stone brick and cobbled walls made up sections, while endless wood panels constructed others. Windows—some with glass panes, others closed only with shutters—adorned every side of the freestanding buildings, which rose several stories high each and remained unbound to cliffs or natural stone like those back in her village. Triangle-shaped roofs topped most of the structures, each dotted with rows of small tiles.
A tan and grey blur drew Oleja’s attention back down to the street. Tor—the coyote who had saved her life and who now served as her fiercely protective guard during her recovery—padded swiftly down the street, weaving between people as he hurried to catch up. Some of the others on the street gave Tor a surprised or curious look, but most kept their dull gazes focused ahead as they worked to shake whatever grasp the previous night’s rest still held them in.
Tor fell in step beside Oleja as she concentrated on the new rhythm of walking. Crutches, prosthetic, right leg. Crutches, prosthetic, right leg. She could feel the sweat beading on her brow, but she lacked the free hand to wipe it away. She might have asked Maloia to pause for a break, but pride kept a gag in her mouth.
As if hearing Oleja’s wishes, Maloia stopped outside a building, surveying the item-laden shelves within through a wide glass window. She glanced up at a wooden board hung above the door, its surface painted with odd designs.
“I’m going to get some things from in here,” said Maloia. “You can come in too if you’d like, or you can wait out here, but I don’t think the owners would like it much if we brought Tor in with us.”
Oleja looked down at Tor. He panted, his tongue hanging out one side of his mouth as he stared up at her with something akin to a grin. He spent most of his time in Oleja’s room with her; whatever customs prevented him from going inside this particular building remained unknown to her.
“I’ll wait out here,” said Oleja.
Maloia nodded, and then took another step towards the door. “Are you all right? You’re sweating quite a bit.”
“Fine,” said Oleja with a wave of her crutch. Maloia nodded again, smiled, and then disappeared through the door into the building.
Oleja glanced up and down the street. A short distance farther along, in the direction she and Maloia had been heading, a man stood atop a bench as he spoke to a group clustered around him. A similar bench waited just across the street from Oleja like pool of clear water in the midst of a harsh desert landscape.
Tor sat at her side, watching her. Oleja took a long, steadying breath, allowing a few street-goers to pass before she stepped out.
She didn’t even get halfway across before the shouting started.
A band of people rushed out of a side street and marched towards the group clustered around the man, shouting as they went, surging forward with fury plain on their faces. Some from the first group started to backpedal away while others stepped up to meet them, matching the temper of the newcomers. Oleja—in part due to her limited mobility, and in part due to her shock, stood frozen in the middle of the street. Bystanders fled; a few stepped in between the groups, attempting to act as peacekeepers.
They did a poor job of it.
The man leading the new group—a stout, balding man with a face redder with anger than the deepest sunset—brushed past the bystanders attempting to separate the two groups and launched himself at a man from the opposing crowd, pushing him hard and sending him staggering several steps back.
“You think you lot can come down these streets and spew your ‘no-king-but-Aukai’ filth? Huh?” he screamed in the face of the other man, his complexion getting somehow redder.
The surprise on the face of the man who had been pushed quickly dripped away as he squared his shoulders and straightened his posture, a full head taller, with his steely expression adding another several inches.
“So, you don’t respect Aukai?” said the second man. The first man sneered.
“I respect her as much as anyone, but I also respect the king.”
“And what good has your king done us? Or any king before him?”
Others rushed in from behind the second man—at first, Oleja thought, to separate the two men, but then she looked to their faces. A calm demeanor was about as common among them as trees in the desert. More people fell into ranks alongside the shouting men at the center, one side jeering at those on the other, the other side quick to return the favor. Only a few amidst the crowd looked to have any plans of quelling the anger.
“The king has done a lot more good than a dead hero,” spat the balding man.
In a flash, the other man had a dagger in his hand, drawn from a sheath at his hip.
“Traitor to the city and traitor to the hero’s blood!”
“Traitor to the king!”
The group who had been listening to the man speak struck first, but the newcomers were quick on the defense. The two groups collided with the sounds of steel on steel as both sides seemed to materialize an arsenal of weapons at once. Others rushed in from up and down the street, some knocking into Oleja as they sprinted past, weapons drawn, throwing themselves into the fray. Tor barked, but the sound vanished among the clamor.
As a woman ran by, her foot caught on Oleja’s crutch. She faltered, but righted herself, and continued in her charge towards the brawl. Oleja did not get so lucky.
She crashed to the ground on her side, the stone street promising bruises all up her arm and ribs. Yanked from where it clasped to her forearm, her right crutch skittered away across the cobblestones, then came to rest by the feet of the crowd. It lay like a bridge spanning multiple rivers of blood that ran through the cracks between the stones.
Oleja propped herself up on her hands and began to push herself out of the street, her attention fixed on the crowd as if nailed there. The outermost people blocked the worst of the horrors that she knew transpired deep within the mass of furious people, but still her mind reeled for an explanation for it all. She had experienced the outbreaks of anger and the ever-present instability firsthand, but even that had never come close to rivalling the rage of the mob before her. Talk of the city—both outside its borders and within—painted it to be a place of safety, a place of stability. But at the moment, she felt anything but safe.
And that, of course, was not helped when the crowd began to move towards her.
At first, only a few people on the fringes of the fight backed up, closing the distance between themselves and Oleja. But with them they drew their opponents, and then others too, until the whole mass rushed down the street.
Tor placed himself in front of her and growled, but he alone made no match for a hundred angry people with blades, and who didn’t look where they headed anyhow. Oleja’s first thought was to stand and fight her way through them—a thought only silenced when she realized not only could she not stand without likely falling back to the ground soon after, seeing that her second crutch remained several feet away, but also that she had no weapons with her. Moving about unarmed worried her, but Maloia had reassured her that there was no need for her knife in the city, and so it remained back in her room along with her tinkering bag, which she was equally unhappy to part from—not that the latter would lend her many boons at the moment.
Finding her instincts futile, Oleja tried to crawl away again, this time with greater haste. But she did not get far before a forest of legs enveloped her.
The first person managed to dance around her, but the second did not get so lucky. A heavy boot collided with Oleja’s side, and then the owner came to join her on the ground with a crash. He climbed back up in an instant—or nearly up, as he had not quite regained his footing before a blade found itself between his ribs and he hit the ground again, this time permanently.<
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Tor barked again and gnashed his teeth at oncoming legs. Again, he went unheard, and finding his calls ineffective, he employed a new strategy: teeth. He sunk his fangs into someone’s calf, the razor points slicing through the fabric of their pants and sinking into flesh. The man attached to the leg may have shouted, but amidst everything else, Oleja could never have hoped to pick out one cry in particular. Some effect seemed to come of Tor’s efforts, however, as the crowd started to part a bit.
Another boot, sliding on the blood-slick cobblestones, crashed into Oleja, this time catching on her prosthetic. A second boot—presumably belonging to the same body—landed squarely atop the limb. A resounding crack joined the rest of the noise. A woman fell over her, narrowly missing an uncomfortable landing for the both of them as she fell just past Oleja. Oleja shifted her left leg and looked down. A long crack split the side of her prosthetic, and the ankle joint dangled freely at an odd angle.
The crowd thinned and Oleja managed to dodge a few blows, but she still sustained a knee to the face that left her dazed. Her head spun as she sat stunned for a moment.
“Oleja!”
Oleja blinked stars from her vision and looked around. Maloia dropped the bags she carried as she rushed to Oleja’s side. A protest tried to force its way through Oleja’s lips—a warning of the dangers—but then the fuzziness in her mind cleared and she realized the fighting now surged on behind her, the people no longer swarming around her as they had moments prior. Maloia knelt at Oleja’s side.
Blood ran through the streets, filling the cracks between stones like molten metal flowing through a mold. Bodies lay still—dozens of them, all around, some with blades still stuck in their flesh. Oleja looked herself over. None of the blood on her seemed to be her own, aside from that which ran from her nose and lip. Tor looked fine as well, though now that she could see him clearly, she noticed a slight limp in his step. Ultimately, if ‘trampled under a stampede’ was the alternative, they looked to be doing all right.
“What… happened?” asked Oleja as Maloia moved to get her lost crutch, now a splinter’s width away from two halves.
Maloia shook her head. “I’m sorry you had to witness such things, I thought we would be safe here, in this district, but clearly I was mistaken. I will explain, but not here—let’s get you back to your room.”
“I’m fine,” said Oleja, trying to stand. Her prosthetic creaked and bent under the idea of bearing weight, and without her other crutch she struggled to make it up to a standing position besides—a reminder that she was not, in fact, fine.
Maloia crouched down and extended an arm. With a sigh, Oleja wrapped her own around the woman’s neck. With some additional nudging from Tor, she heaved herself up.
Together, slowly, they made their way down the street, leaving the carnage behind.
Chapter Two
As soon as she got back to her room, Oleja flopped down onto her bed, much to Maloia’s distress.
“Oleja! The sheets!” she groaned, pressing her eyes shut. “You’re still covered in blood.”
Oleja looked at the sheets, then back up to Maloia. “You’re a doctor. And a woman.”
“Yes, but—”
“Am I the first to get blood on these sheets?”
“No, but—”
Oleja shrugged. “I’ll wash them.” And then, in an attempt to make it better, added, “It’s not even my blood.”
“That’s worse! It’s not clean.”
Clean. The people of Ahwan had a funny view of what made something “clean.” Just after her arrival, while still regaining her strength, Oleja had been eating a bowl of soup, and in her weakened state she spilled a spoonful down the front of her shirt. Maloia insisted she undress immediately and exchange the garment for a “clean” one. But what made soup so unclean?
Blood, at least, she understood to some degree—but there wasn’t all that much of it on the sheets.
After extensive urging from Maloia, Oleja stripped off her clothes—the new ones she had received since arriving in Ahwan, a plain white shirt with several buttons at the neck and black pants—then cleaned herself off with a damp cloth. Maloia took the time to strip the soiled sheets from Oleja’s bed and replace them with a clean set, fetching fresh clothes for Oleja as well.
Oleja sat back on the bed, now dressed according to Maloia’s standards. Gingerly, she loosened the straps binding her prosthetic to her thigh. Once they fell to the sides, she grabbed the body of the thing—broken, cracked, rattling in ways it shouldn’t—and wiggled it back and forth until it slid free. She laid it on the bed beside her. Next came the socks—two of them, layered one on top of the other. Sweat and blood and dirt stained them, and she tossed them into the heap with her old sheets and clothes.
Cool air kissed her freshly exposed skin. A fresh aching, prickling sensation flowed through her knee and what remained of her left leg below it. After the day’s toils, it was left swollen, and she massaged it gently with her fingertips.
“Are you feeling all right, dear? Do you need anything for the pain?” asked Maloia.
Oleja shook her head. “No, I’m fine right now.” Maloia nodded and gathered up the mountain of soiled linens, which she carried away out the door. Oleja flexed her knee a few times and then continued massaging it. After a couple minutes of nursing the aching muscles, she shifted her focus away; there was too much to do.
A folding tray stood at the end of the bed, one of countless things brought into the room by Oleja’s request. From the neat, nearly-empty room it had been upon her arrival—holding only the bed, a small nightstand, and a wide, flat pillow that Tor slept on—to now, she had turned the room into a proper workshop. The tray served as her primary workspace, small as it was, and her tinkering materials scattered every other surface in the room—namely the floor. While she’d had many components with her in her bag when she arrived, her recent projects required much more. Scraps of lumber lined the wall to the left of her bed, opposite the door. Metal odds and ends lay sorted by likeness in piles across the floor. Many often found a home on her bed—the largest bed she had ever seen, big enough for two to sleep comfortably side-by-side, or three if they agreed to a certain degree of intimacy. This extra space left plenty of room for tinkering materials, though while changing the sheets Maloia had moved them all carefully to the floor.
Maloia did not understand what it was, exactly, that Oleja did, and the mess in the room provided a subject for frequent debate between the two—especially whenever Maloia stepped on something, and the sharper the object, the sharper the scolding—but after Oleja completed her first functional prosthetic, Maloia’s skepticism of the work petered out.
Oleja hefted her prosthetic onto the surface of the small table. The crack in the body would prove difficult to mend, as the wood itself had sustained the damage, but she could reinforce it with strips of metal for the time being. Cutting wood anew meant spending days sawing, sanding, shaping, and honing—and those were days she’d have to spend without being able to walk at all. No, the temporary fixes would have to do for now.
The ankle joint promised an easier fix—at least relatively. The contraption itself was the most complicated piece of the prosthetic, but at least it was something she could repair without crafting a replacement from scratch.
Maloia returned a few minutes later and took a seat on the bed beside Oleja. Oleja continued her work selecting the pieces she needed to repair her prosthetic and broken crutch.
“So, about the events down in the street…” started Maloia after clearing her throat.
“Yes—not quite what I expected of the city,” said Oleja, keeping her hands and eyes busy with her work. “Though I must admit I’m unfamiliar with cities in general, and such events were not entirely uncommon in my own village, though my people rarely took it to such extremes.”
Maloia tugged at a thread hanging from the side of her loose white pants and tucked a stray curl behind her ear before speaking again. “Things in Ah
wan have not been great for several years now—the problems go farther back into our history than my lifetime, but they’ve worsened as of late. It started to get bad when I was still a girl—a little over twenty years ago, perhaps? Unrest runs deep within the people of the city, especially among Aukai’s Clan. That group is always picking fights, just like today.”
“Well, I cannot say that I haven’t seen many others act in such a manner,” said Oleja. “But why here? The people of this city are safe—they are free to come and go as they please, and they have full bellies—what is there to fight about?”
“That’s not a simple question to answer,” said Maloia with something like a chuckle. “They fight about politics. Laws, governing—who should, and when, and how. They fight about who should be permitted into the city, and how we should treat those outside our borders—humans and earthborn alike. Everyone has different opinions, and it seems every few years there is a coup that takes one king out of power and replaces them with a new one—one who has no firmer solutions than the last.”
Oleja nodded as she listened, her hands operating on their own. Most of Maloia’s words meant nothing to her. But she understood the word “king.” The king was the leader of the city—that much she knew.
“But why do their fights turn to physical blows?” asked Oleja. “Such disagreements don’t need to turn to violence, surely. It all seems like such a great overreaction.”
Maloia sighed. “Yes, perhaps. I don’t know how things worked where you are from, but such sentiments are not uncommon in any of the towns and cities in the area—though Ahwan is worse than most. It’s just how things are. Some say it didn’t used to be that way, back in the Old World, but after the dark times that followed, everyone turned to more savage and selfish ways in their desperation for survival. Those instincts still underlie our cultures today. At least, that’s what many will claim.”
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