Warmaidens

by Kelly Coon

  “Yeah, well.” Iltani grinned malevolently. “Now they can do it for Alani in the Netherworld.”

  “You could have just put them to sleep.” I stared hard at the warriors.

  “Too much of a risk, A-zu,” Humusi said.

  Sickened, I dug into my satchel and found the nerium, then dabbed a little on each of their tongues so they wouldn’t suffer as they met the Boatman. I knelt there as they stilled, then tore my eyes away as I stood, bile rising in my throat. It wasn’t right. But I was on this path and could not get off it. I’d chosen to align myself with bloodshed.

  The warriors nodded to Dagan. His face grim, he took a torch from the wall as Humusi held up three fingers. Then she dropped to two. Then one. And when the final finger dropped into a fist, Dagan flung open the door and Taram and Humusi charged in, weapons drawn, bellowing like beasts. A woman screamed, and Dagan slipped inside with the torch and one of his daggers.

  “Get up get up get up get up!” Humusi commanded.

  “Leave me alone!” the woman cried. “Guardsmen!”

  It was Gudanna! But where was Uruku?

  There was scuffling, water splashing, shocked grunts, and a massive sploosh as something fell into the bath. But eventually, Gudanna was dragged, sopping wet, out of the bathing room, her belly bulging in the bolt of linen haphazardly draped around her. Scars wrapped up from her abdomen, around her throat and chin, from the fire that had killed her family so long ago. Her ankles were swollen and face puffy from being with child.

  “Where is Uruku?” Dagan asked Gudanna as he exited the room dripping wet, discarding the snuffed torch to the side as he walked around to face her. His voice was low. Menacing. Darker than I’d ever heard it.

  Humusi and Taram pulled Gudanna tight on either side and wrestled her up closer to Dagan. I fought the urge to shrink away from the air of violence heavy in the humid chamber.

  “He’s not here.” Gudanna’s lip curled up, twisting at one corner from the scars. Her hair was plastered to the sides of her face, framing bright, intelligent eyes flashing with indignation. “He did not want to come today. Said he felt the presence of Alani, and now we know why.”

  Dagan stepped forward and pressed his emerald dagger to her throat. She tried to tug away, but the warriors held her firmly.

  “It is no matter,” Dagan said. “Tell us where he is! NOW!”

  She sneered. “I knew you’d come back to save your mother, Farmer. You’re too senseless and weak to do otherwise.”

  Dagan stood taller, his lip curling with unmitigated rage. “Tell us where he is, woman, or I’ll cut out your heart.”

  At that, Gudanna’s face twisted with interest up at him. “Liar,” she challenged.

  Dagan gritted his teeth and sliced down her bare arm in a jagged cut. She gasped as blood began seeping from the wound and rolling down her arm.

  “For the sake of Selu, Dagan!” I yelled, but he was not listening to me.

  “Where. Is. Your. Evil. Husband!” He held the dagger directly in front of her right eye, shaking with rage, and for a moment, Gudanna looked afraid. Truly afraid.

  “He’s in the Palace. In our chambers.”

  “Then take us to him.” Dagan clenched his jaw.

  “Yes! Good idea,” I told him, my heart nearly bursting with nerves. “She can escort us into the Palace and tell the guardsmen to stand down or—”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me? Ha!” She sneered. “You need me alive to get to my husband.”

  “But we don’t need that brat in your womb,” Iltani said, her eyes lit with malice. “Kammani is a healer and she can cut that kid right out of you if you don’t do what we say.”

  Gudanna’s face went white. She looked at me. “You wouldn’t let that happen. I know it. That isn’t in you.”

  Iltani continued. “You have no idea the level of death and destruction in this girl’s heart. Yes, she would! So you will lead us safely into the Palace and tell the guardsmen to stand down. Now choose! Your husband or your child!”

  “What a terrible choice to have to make,” a voice echoed from the narrow hallway.

  We turned around to see Uruku emerge, weakened with poison even more, it seemed, his face yellowish, wan, eyes sunk in his head. He was flanked by two burly guardsmen holding spears. But before anyone could react, those spears shot through the breezeway and landed squarely in the bellies of both Taram and Humusi, below their breastplates. The warriors fell to their knees, blood oozing from around their wounds, and Gudanna fled to her husband.

  Dagan and Iltani both charged Uruku, daggers drawn.

  “Secure them!” Uruku bellowed, and one of his guardsmen—a big, hulking man—was on Dagan in a flash, tying his hands with rope. Dagan thrashed, knocked the guardsman in the mouth, then received a headbutt in exchange. He growled and tried to rip his hands free. The other guardsman punched Iltani in the jaw and she screamed in rage, her blade clattering down the dark corridor. He snatched my dagger from my hand before I could conceal it.

  “Run away!” Dagan yelled to me, eyes wild as he thrashed against his restraints, but I immediately fumbled over to Humusi, tripping on my own feet, slipping in her blood. I pressed my right hand against her abdomen, trying to staunch the flow. She twisted and lurched, moaning in pain, and fell backward at an awkward angle with a groan, eyes in torment, gory hands weakly tugging at the weapon.

  “A-zu!” she gurgled as blood bubbled up into her mouth.

  “No!” I screamed, but a guardsman hoisted me up and away from her. Iltani attacked again, clawing at his face, but he knocked her to the floor once more with an elbow to the side of her head.

  The guardsmen pulled me and Dagan to stand in front of Uruku while the Koru warriors groaned in the background.

  A sob in my throat, I stared hard at Gudanna.

  She looked up at her husband. “Ahh, love, but you know I’d never choose anyone over you, even this child.”

  With something like softness in his eyes, Uruku looked down at Gudanna and planted a kiss on her forehead, his face pale with pain. “Well, you don’t have to make that decision now.”

  “Please.” I desperately tried to claw out of the guardsmen’s hold. “We only want Shiptu and we’ll be gone forever. Please.”

  Gudanna smiled. “I understand wanting something you can’t have. My children, burning alive in the hut while I was on the other side of the city, still cry for me in my dreams. Your abum failed them, and they still scream my name when I close my eyes. But I can’t have them back any more than you can have what you want.”

  She stepped forward, her eyes glittering. She smiled at me once, ran a finger down the smoothness of my cheek, authority in the tilt of her chin, her belly protruding out and hanging low in such a way that I knew, as any good healer did, her time to deliver was drawing nigh.

  “They must be questioned about Arwia, my lord. And if they give her to us, maybe we will free them.” She looked over her shoulder at him, and he tilted his head, studying us as if we were bugs.

  “Or perhaps”—he winced with the pain his words were costing him—“if they do not give her to us, we will cut off their heads.”

  They dragged us out of the bathhouse and around the splayed feet of the guardsmen still lying like corpses. But as we wended around their prone bodies, a muffled note of surprise broke from Iltani’s mouth. Because there were only three men lying there.

  Gala was no longer propped against the doorjamb.

  He was missing, and apparently not as lovesick as Iltani believed.

  LESS THAN ONE year ago, I stood on this same carpeting in the extravagant throne room, marveling at the softness beneath my toes. The gurgling water in the fountains. The beautiful tapestries and murals adorning the walls.

  The torches hanging on either side of the thrones looked different this evening than they use
d to. They were off-kilter in their sconces, splashing ragged, twisted shadows across the sandstone walls. Illuminating the bloodstains on the rugs from past punishments.

  People had gone with the Boatman in this room.

  Evil lived in this place.

  Gudanna sat on Arwia’s old throne in a soft blue tunic, her swollen ankles encircled with copper bells. A heavy lapis lazuli headdress with gold rosettes sat atop her hair, and her dark eyes had been outlined with kohl. Her belly sat on her lap, and faint rings of sweat darkened her tunic under her armpits. I watched her for any signs of distress that her baby was trying to descend from its wicked mother’s womb, but outside of a faint grimace that could mean everything or nothing at all, she was still.

  Uruku sat on the central throne—the one reserved for the lugal—his hair slicked away from his sickly face, the bronze headdress hammered with the lion and blooms of Lugal Marus. He hadn’t even bothered to change the emblem, perhaps recognizing on some lower level of his baser self that he was usurping a city-state that did not rightfully belong to him.

  Dagan stood on my right, his nose bloodied, eyes bruised, back lashed in stripes. He’d been beaten in the dungeons, where we’d been hung against the wall for many hours to try to get me to talk. They’d end the torture if I told them where Arwia was. They’d end his suffering. Dagan’s eyes had found mine again and again, and through each strangled cry that came out of his mouth, he’d told me to hold firm. Not to speak. He could bear it. I’d cried in agony for him, but it was less pain than knowing that Dagan, whom I loved with all that I had in me, who wanted my hand more than anything in this world, was hurting.

  Iltani was about to be whipped for trying to poison Gala, but he had begged his senior guardsmen not to lay a hand on her, citing “an illness of the mind.” But since he’d taken the afront personally, he’d agreed to let them shave her head.

  Through the door of our dungeon, he’d told us he would have been willing to help if we’d let him in on our plans. He’d suspected something was off with Iltani since she was so nice to him, and he’d faked drinking the brew and run away in case she was planning to kill him. He knew she was unhappy. And then, when Iltani had said she’d wanted a hug, he’d come into the cell and embraced her, and she’d practically torn off his ear with her teeth.

  Now she stood next to me, her shoulders thrown back in defiance, head shaved, looking like a cat that had been bested in a street fight.

  “Where is she?” Gudanna’s voice echoed from the throne.

  “Who?” Iltani said belligerently, and was immediately knocked to the floor by a swift backhand from one of the guards. Where were the pitiful child guards? It seemed as though Uruku kept the strongest around him, and left the smaller, younger guardsmen to battle outside threats, his own people be damned.

  “I’ll ask one more time. Where is she?”

  “We do not know,” Dagan wheezed, holding his likely cracked ribs. “The last we heard, as we…repeatedly said…,” he panted, “she’d been taken to wife and died in childbirth.”

  In one swift motion, Uruku stood to his feet. “LIES!” he yelled, wincing in pain. Angrily, he gestured toward the corridor, holding a knuckle to his temple. “Bring them out!”

  Bring who out?

  A rattling of chains and a scuffling noise, followed by a low moan, echoed from the corridor. Three bedraggled figures were tugged from the depths, their torsos and heads stuffed in linen sacks. A man and two women, judging from their bodies. Guardsmen standing nearby yanked the sacks from their heads, uncovering Shiptu, whose bones jutted from the tunic as if she’d been starved, and two people I was not expecting to see:

  Nasu and Assata.

  * * *

  “Ummum!” Dagan strained against the ropes they’d tied around his body.

  Shiptu gave Dagan a brave stare despite her thinness. Despite the fact that two of her teeth had been knocked out. “I am here, my child. Where are your brothers?” Her chin bunched with unshed tears, but she recovered. “Are they well? Have they been harmed?”

  Dagan’s voice went hoarse. “They are all well, Ummum. Well and whole.”

  Could she hear the falseness as I could?

  Rish was not whole, and poor Shep was gone to the Netherworld.

  My stomach dropped when she closed her eyes and said a prayer of thanks to Selu, clasping her tied hands in front of her mouth. She was wearing a filthy tunic and her feet were bare. Her hair was matted, but aside from the missing teeth, she didn’t look as though she’d been beaten.

  But it was not the same for Nasu and Assata. And why are they even here?

  Nasu didn’t look good. He had been whipped bloody, matching Dagan stripe for stripe. His lashes wrapped around his shoulders in jagged red welts, even extending up across his jaw. But he wore defiance like a crown, jaw set, eyes hard, feet resolute.

  Assata, on the other hand, looked strange. Almost as if she were severely injured, but…off. She limped and moaned, holding her hip, but if she were really injured on that side, she’d be limping the other way.

  As I studied her, she caught my eye. And when she did, one eye closed in a wink so brief, I wouldn’t have caught it if I weren’t paying attention.

  She is faking her injury.

  But why?

  Gudanna gestured to Nasu. “This one and the tavern wench were attempting a coup with several young women dressed as warriors, similar to the ones we found with you. The women killed some of our best guardsmen, but though a few of them escaped, the rest were dispatched to the Netherworld.”

  My eyes welled as Gudanna prattled on, oblivious to the pain she was continuously bestowing upon us. “The tale this traitor guardsman spins about Nin Arwia is different than yours. He claims no knowledge of her current whereabouts, indicating she is alive. You’ve stated she died in childbirth. Who tells the truth?”

  “The nin is likely dead!” Nasu’s voice was strained. “I didn’t know!”

  Uruku frowned. He pivoted on one heel, taking in Dagan’s sagging, bloodied body with his shrewd eyes.

  “I believe you to be more sensible than this blubbering twit behind me, Farmer. And if not you, your healer.” He waved in Iltani’s general direction. “Or whoever she is.”

  Gudanna hoisted herself from her throne, her center of gravity off due to the growing baby. Holding her belly with one hand, she descended the stairs and walked toward us. Uruku weakly walked over to assist her. They stopped a few handsbreadths away.

  “We know she is alive and wants to take over the city.” Gudanna pointed her finger at my chest. “Healer’s Daughter, if you have any good sense about you, tell us where she is or we will add Shiptu’s head to our collection on the wall.”

  “I don’t know.” I met her eyes with the lie, hoping she’d buy what I was selling. “I swear it.”

  Uruku waved her away with a thin arm. “No, no, no, we won’t add her head to the wall. It doesn’t do any good. We need the nin, which requires more finesse. Nobody cares about death by decapitation. It needs to be more personal.” Uruku’s eyes, too close together, focused narrowly on me. “Besides, what would be the sport in a quick dispatch? We will have a Trial of Ordeal and let the gods decide which one of them is telling the truth.”

  He tipped his head after he said it, as if he were simply suggesting the obvious. We’re tired, so we should sleep. We’re dirty, so we should bathe. As if he weren’t about to punch the wind from my lungs. Knock the legs out from underneath us all.

  “A Trial of Ordeal?” Dagan strained against his ropes, his face twisting in pain. “That’s for criminals who’ve said”—he gasped—“they didn’t commit the crime of which they’re accused. We haven’t been accused of a crime!”

  Gudanna held her belly and grimaced. “Yes, you have. You’re accused of lying to a ruler about the whereabouts of that brat Arwia. But if you te
ll the truth, that the nin really is dead, you won’t die in the trial. Selu will save you.” She looked up into Uruku’s sickly face. “So which should we choose? The drowning?”

  I closed my eyes. The drowning trial meant that we would be tossed into the river Garadun with our arms and legs bound. If we were able to keep ourselves afloat for a day, we’d prove our innocence and be rescued. But if we drowned, it proved our guilt. Nobody was ever proven innocent in that trial.

  “No.” Gudanna’s hand absently rubbed her abdomen as she argued with herself, and a line appeared between her brows. The beginning of labor? “I think not. I should think two strong young men like the farmer and the guardsman over there should have a better trial than that. One that utilizes their strength.”

  Uruku’s sunken face brightened. “Indeed, wife. You’re correct, as always. We should have them battle in the Pit.”

  “Battle what? Lions? Tigers?” Gudanna rubbed her belly, looking around the cavernous throne room as if drawing inspiration from the nature scenes painted on the ceiling and walls.

  From the corner, Nasu barked a note of surprise as Assata stumbled against him. He made a move as if to try to catch her with his tied hands, but she crumpled in a heap. She raised her head, appearing to be woozy, and scrabbled against the wall as if trying to get up.

  Shiptu stared down at her in despair.

  Uruku and Gudanna contemplated the situation; then Uruku pointed to one of the guardsmen near Assata. “Take her out back and finish her. She’s been as useful as she can be.”

  My heart sank as they dragged her away, kicking and biting, and I gritted my teeth at my inability to save her or us or anyone else. I was completely useless.

  Uruku stuck his hands on his lean hips, going back to the question at hand as if sending someone to their ancestors wasn’t anything more than a nuisance.

  “No, not tigers or lions, my sarratum. I think it best that they battle each other, don’t you? The guardsman and the farmer, fighting to demonstrate who is honest and who is not? These two here”—he pointed to Iltani and me—“can watch with us. Perhaps when they see that one of their own has been slaughtered by another friend’s hands, they’ll cooperate.”