The Complete Season 1

by Michael Underwood

  The captain of the Blue Fang furrowed his brow, even as he plucked at the folds of his shirt, a silken delight with ruffled sleeves, more decorative than he preferred, but he’d hoped Cassia would be charmed by the flamboyance. Faced with Harjo’s scrutiny, Anton suddenly found himself with second thoughts.

  This, much like the unease that’d colonized his belly, was quickly attributed to a poor choice in gastronomic pleasures.

  “No.” Anton then added, “That was a strange thing to say. No one licks barnacles for pleasure. Not unless they’re cooked. Even then, it seems like a much better idea to eat them, although, why anyone would try to eat barnacles when they could have—”

  Harjo strode forward, a specter in indigo, his attire despairingly functional save for the flash of golden hoops at his ears. “What are you hiding, Anton?”

  He crossed his arms. “Why do you think I’m hiding anything?”

  “Because you, old friend, can’t keep a secret to save your—”

  “I can absolutely keep a secret!”

  “You can’t.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No, you—” Harjo exhaled loudly. “We’re not having this discussion. More important, I’m not letting you pretend you did not completely ruin that last deal we were—”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Keep him talking, thought a voice in Anton’s head, one quieter than all of the rest. It was his Penelope voice, he’d decided some time ago, measured and amused and lethal. Keep him talking, it repeated, as Anton two-stepped away from Harjo.

  “Because you won’t let me finish.” The other Herrok drew his sword, banged the flat of the blade against a fluting column. “Stand. Still.”

  Anton frowned again. “No.”

  “I know you’re hiding something. I know that look on your face. You’re a lot of things, Anton, but you’re a terrible liar.” Harjo growled, stalking forward.

  “But you’re the worse duelist.”

  Harjo froze, dismay and a kind of confused reproach warring for space on his countenance. He sighed again, shorter and sharper than before. “I— Don’t change the subject.”

  “But it’s true. You’re terrible. You’ve never won a match with me.” Possibly because Anton had made it a point to avoid unnecessary conflict. No reason to put his reputation at risk, after all. “And now you’re hoping I’ll forget all about it and focus on your silly, completely unfounded suspicion that I might be hiding something.”

  “For once in your life, be reasonable and stop playing the jester. I know you’re hiding something. Is it the girl, Anton? Do you know where she is?”

  She has a name, Anton almost snapped before he caught himself, hopping atop the black-iron balustrade that wrapped around the Vanian embassy. The fluttering in his abdomen cooled. Of course Harjo would be involved. He’d do anything for money. Even sell out the desperate.

  “Maybe. But even if I did, I’d never tell you.” Anton saluted Harjo and kicked from the rails, an elegant backflip that he transitioned into triple somersaults, knees held to his chest. As the sky yawned beneath him, hungry, Anton thought to himself, not for the first time, that he was very lucky to be Herroki.

  •••

  To say that the former warder of Kakute had left a mess would be to lie, Michiko decided grimly, even as she sorted through the detritus of his departure. His office was a travesty. Kensuke had never been what anyone would call immaculate, but this went beyond commonplace untidiness. Drawers sat upturned across the wooden floorboards, bleeding documents. Closets had been thrown open; safes were ransacked of their contents. Whatever Kensuke had been looking for, it had to have been important.

  And whatever he was running from, Michiko reflected as she shuffled a pile of manila folders into the crook of an arm, it had to have been big. Perhaps he’d been involved with the Vanian zealots, after all.

  She spread the folders along the desk she’d inherited, its edges framed with sky mantas, opening each in turn. Most held letters from Mertika officials, transcripts of conversations, and coded missives addressed to Kensuke from Lavinia’s staff. Nothing from Vania, however. Traitorous as it felt, Michiko knew that her heart would survive Mertika’s involvement—Mertika, after all, had a history with such things—but the idea of Vania being entangled in this mess had sickened Michiko. The thought of a world war was beyond her.

  She raked her eyes over her discoveries again, attention lingering over the letters. At least half had sections blacked out, or strips of paper carefully torn from the whole. But what could it all mean?

  A sigh unspooled as Michiko gathered the pieces she’d earmarked as most relevant, feeling the whole time like a thief in her own house. There were people she could consult, surely. Yochno. Ojo. Kris. Takeshi. Resources abounded. But in the time it took to breathe again, Michiko strangled the idea in its crib.

  No. Not them.

  Here and there, her eyes snagged on their names, glaring between the lines of gibberish. Maybe these were intelligence reports. Perhaps not. No reason her friends could not be complicit in Mertika’s schemes. After all, Kakute had its heroes too. Michiko swallowed against the implications, suddenly cold. Until she had more ammunition, it was likely best to keep her revelations to herself.

  Absently, she ran a thumb along the soft corner of a vellum sheet. The alphabet of ciphers used was old, older even than the span of Michiko’s careful education, something straight from Kakute’s past, the one that Mertika had pared and pruned, snipped of contentious branches and stitched up like a mouth that wouldn’t cease auguring truths.

  An epiphany flexed. When all else failed, there was always family.

  Michiko collected her ritual paraphernalia from her bag. But not all of it. She needed to be quick, and a full conference with her ancestors would invariably become mired in petty politics. Michiko lit her candles, a triage of joss sticks in grip. No time to consecrate the area either or procure offerings. Ordinarily, she’d be aghast. But, Michiko thought as she folded cross-legged atop the floor, it’d likely be the Golden Lord who came howling into view first. And any opportunity to annoy him was one she gleefully welcomed.

  The air stirred with their murmurings, and Michiko breathed deeply as the ghosts of her past woke to her summons.

  Chapter 5

  Ojo

  Ojo shaded his eyes as he clambered onto the landing platform, the sun a featureless white, the air sticky and warm on his skin. Through the slats of his fingers, he could see no clouds, nothing to obstruct that lacquered blue, save for one thing:

  The dreadnought.

  Its silhouette was broader than most Quloi warships, broken in places where the cannons protruded, tumorous bulges riddling the hull. It was uglier than anything he’d ever seen, Ojo thought, dropping his hand as his eyes adjusted to the glare of the noonday. Clumsy, callously built, intended for artillery function and nothing else, a thing of deaths, a relic scraped from its grave and put back in the firmament.

  He was ashamed. The realization, blooming hot along the back of his neck and rancid in his mouth, left Ojo dumbfounded. The site of the warship shamed him. It stood antithetical to everything he’d built, everything that Quloo had advocated, had fought for in the recent past. But idealism was always the first casualty of conflict.

  “Warder Kante,” Yochno’s voice came from the east, stilted with anger. “I was hoping you could explain the meaning of this.”

  “Old friend,” Ojo said, then hesitated. The truth lay trapped between his teeth, viscous, indignant at the lie that pressed against the roof of his mouth. I wish it hadn’t come to this. I wish this wasn’t necessary. I wish I could tell you everything. Sentences died midway to articulation, duty murdering them in the birth canal. “It isn’t what you think.”

  Yochno cocked his head, his regard glacial, his mouth thinned to a line in the sand. “Really? Tell me what I should think, then, Warder Kante. Tell me what”—he slashed at the air with the side of his palm—“this is if not a sho
w of power.”

  “A precaution,” Ojo lied, smoothing his expression.

  “A precaution,” Yochno repeated, his voice fraying into a bark of angry laughter. “That is what you’re going with then, Ojo. I thought you’d have respected me enough to at least come up with a better lie. But I see.”

  Ojo breathed deeply. “We’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t we?”

  “This isn’t the occasion to reminisce.”

  “Since I first took up office. When we met—your predecessor was alive, was he not? What was his name?” Ojo glanced at Yochno, the latter’s arms folded beneath the drape of his peony-trimmed sleeves.

  “What is your point, Warder?” A new inflection in Yochno’s voice, a brittle formality that curved through Ojo’s gut like a fishhook.

  “My point is that I value our friendship, that I value Twaa-Fei. When have I ever been anything but an advocate of the nonaggression policies here? I have fought for what Twaa-Fei believes in. I have stood my ground against Lavinia and everyone who would upturn the laws that had been set down. You, of all people, should know. So believe me when I say that I have no intention of seeing this fragile peace destroyed. The dreadnought is a precaution—”

  “Clear it out of the airspace.”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “But you are Quloo’s warder, Ojo.” Yochno started forward, a palm bent and raised, as though he cupped the world in his grasp. Today he seemed older than he’d ever been, the sun mapping the webwork of wrinkles bordering his eyes, his skin there pebbled with liver spots and moles. Under its veneer of powder, his flesh was almost translucent, crawling with veins of blue and emerald. “Surely, you can do something?”

  “I am a messenger,” Ojo replied. “I am the voice of my people. Nothing can be done without consensus. Whatever power you think I might have, none of it is mine. I act for Quloo.”

  “Then let us speak to Quloo.”

  •••

  It would solve nothing. Ojo knew it was pointless from the moment Yochno proposed the idea. Nothing would change the mind of the council, least of all an audience with a foreigner. He longed to dissect the Quloi class system for Yochno, explain the ways in which capitalism had molded their cultural sensibilities, what that meant, how their society was weighted toward those possessing of a fortune, and how people like Yochno, compassionate and selfless, were regarded as lesser. Inept, naive children who’d waste their brief lives in servitude.

  Yochno wouldn’t stand a chance. Quloo was a mercantile nation. It made sense that Ojo’s island would revere the savvy and the pragmatic, those who’d barter sentimentality for the willingness to do what was right.

  And what was right would always be what was best for Quloo.

  The High Sky party conferred between themselves, the four representatives garbed plainly, an insult that Yochno did not decipher. In silence, Ojo continued his vigil, occasionally correcting the eddies of the viewing pool with a slant of his blade, refreshing the runes where required. If nothing else, at least he could provide Yochno with clarity.

  Guildmaster Nenge murmured a word in a dialect that Ojo had almost forgotten—fool—and allowed her mouth to climb into a smile. The space between Yochno’s brows pinched.

  “Master Seneschal.” That was not Yochno’s title. Not that Nenge cared in the slightest. “We appreciate your concerns and we will discuss the ramifications.”

  “I’d appreciate if it was possible to expedite the procedure. Is there any way that you could communicate my concern to someone of senior rank? This is an urgent matter. If we do not attend to it now, the situation may devolve into an international emergency.”

  “Yes.” The guildmaster traced her tongue over plum-dyed lips, teeth white against the bruise-dark color. Her cohorts kept their silence. “Absolutely.”

  To his credit, Yochno saw through the charade, mouth and forehead tightening further, his distaste for the council as evident as their disdain for him. “But will you?”

  Here, Izebry, rounder now than when Ojo had first encountered him in their youth but no less imposing, expelled a booming, brassy laugh. “I see that you’re not entirely uneducated in politics.”

  Ojo winced. “Guildmaster, I’d advise that you maintain civility. Yochno—”

  “You bring us a servant to discuss matters of state,” Nenge interrupted. “I believe we’ve offered more civility than is decent.”

  Beside Ojo, Yochno sucked in a harsh breath, his frame growing rigid. The conversation had slipped its gloves. No more niceties would be traded. The guildmasters smiled at Yochno’s discomfort, satisfied as cats.

  “Apologize, Guildmaster Nen—”

  “Or what?” Her eyes dilated, her expression eager. “What will you do, Warder Kante?”

  Briefly, Ojo contemplated an argument, the words unsheathed in a hiss. But what was the point? He’d known from the moment that Yochno had proposed the idea. There was nothing either of them could do. Not like this. If he spoke against the council, he might be discharged, neutered of any ability to alter circumstances. If he kept his silence, if he held still as Yochno quaked in their polite laughter, Ojo might yet steer the destiny of his country.

  Sohe said nothing. Ojo only breathed, only schooled his face for impartiality, only held his place, eyes downcast, grip white-knuckled around his sword, as Yochno executed a bow, elegant even in his degradation.

  Nenge made a low, lazy noise. Placated by Ojo’s silence, perhaps, she returned her attention to Yochno, smile cloying. “To answer your question properly: yes. Yes, we could. But as we are currently the highest authority—”

  “What happened to the Truth of Steel?”

  The guildmaster cocked a strange look at Yochno, even as Izebry and gaunt Edokwe, his hair a rooster’s comb of black braids, leaned together to whisper banalities between themselves, anecdotes about local restaurants, trading tips. Only Amewezie, youngest of the four, maintained the pantomime of interest, her eyes darting guiltily between her companions.

  “They failed their country. As is the case with weak, useless things that contribute nothing to their societies, they were removed and replaced with something better. Now, as I was saying before, we absolutely can forward your request of the highest authorities.” Her smile was pure malice. “I’ll let you know if they show any interest in dignifying it.”

  Abruptly, the viewing pool went dark, the surface so still that it might as well have been a lamina of the night sky, chiseled from the heavens and installed into a circle of marble. Ojo sheathed his sword and stood in silence with his old friend, until Yochno broke the quiet in a whisper.

  “How has it come to this, Ojo? How did this all happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Ojo replied, gazing at his reflection. He could not recognize his own face in the pool. “But if it was your country at risk, I imagine you would do the same.”

  Yochno said nothing for a long, long time. When he spoke again, it was with the lilt of a stranger, his voice pared of familiarity. Still warm because Yochno was incapable of being anything but courteous, decorum inlaid into his very bones. But Ojo understood the truth of it. Whatever friendship had existed between them was gone now, payment for Ojo’s silence.

  He did not turn around as the doors clicked shut behind him, only stared into the pool, silent even though a sigil in the waters flickered to life.

  Chapter 6

  Kris

  Kris had heard a thousand stories about Lavinia, and they did not believe a single one. That afternoon, however, they found themself revising their skepticism. Perhaps some of the myths could be true. Because how else could Lavinia stand alone like that in the shadow of the looming dreadnought?

  “In the name of the empress and the Mertikan empire, I order you to depart from Twaa-Fei airspace!” she bellowed for the fifth time, a blot of polished armor against that herculean mass. Yet there was no fear in her expression, no hesitation in her stance, nothing that a ordinary human might exude in a similar
situation.

  Not even defiance, Kris realized, even as they searched the landing area. Lavinia carried herself with the air of someone who was not just assured of their place in the world, but certain that they were the axis of the sun’s rotation. In another individual, such bravado might have been arrogance, but arrogance intimated the possibility of doubt. And if Lavinia had ever experienced doubt in her life, Kris, they decided, would bread, batter, fry, and eat their boots.

  “Do you hear me?” Impatient, Lavinia struck the ground with her sword three times, each impact conjuring a bloom of sparks, every one larger than the last. It wasn’t until Lavinia’s volume became amplified threefold that it occurred to Kris that she’d been performing bladecraft, her movements so minute that they’d missed them entirely.

  “You will move,” she snarled, her voice thunderous, “or you will be moved.”

  “Kris? What happened to you?”

  The Rumikan warder dropped their gaze at the sound of a familiar voice, their hand fluttering up to close over their bruised cheek. There was Adechike, looking as though someone had carved the hope from his breast, his eyes bright with a yearning to do something, anything at all, so long as he could right this wrong that had entered the world.

  How many times did he practice to get that expression right? Kris searched Adechike’s countenance, looking for signs, Alyx’s warning ringing in their ears. Be careful of kindness, Kris. Be wary of smiles.

  They’d been careless before. It wouldn’t happen again.

  “Ojo and I had a disagreement.”

  “Those bruises. He— Ojo did this?” Adechike’s voice softened, its timing of theatrical precision. He ran his palm across his fleecy hair, sweat already beading his dark skin, his eyes still clutching that consternation, that put-on compassion, and Kris found themself marveling over how quickly love could pivot to loathing. “D-did you duel? Even if so, this is ghastly. There’s no reason for Ojo to have been so brutal. He’s not Lavinia—”