The horse’s heartbeat is strong and steady—the only stable thing in this forsaken mess. Sakura clings to it as best she can.
The swords and spears of the guardsmen part the curtains. There: Burqila’s wild onslaught continues. Every slash brings with it a new war cry, a new burst of sparks, a new clang as metal meets metal. Relentless.
And yet …
Sakura almost doesn’t want to watch. Burqila’s blows are coming slower and slower. The back of her deel is dark with sweat—to say nothing of the blood seeping out from her shoulder wound. Rikuto has more and more time to prepare for the next slash, the next kick, the next bull rush. It hardly has to move the sword anymore.
To the people of Hokkaro, and of course to the Qorin, Burqila has always loomed large—but she has never been anything more than mortal. Even the Terror of the Steppes tires. And why shouldn’t she, after today? After all she’s been through?
“Did you think this would work?” says Rikuto. Its sword-shield rises and falls with its bellowing laughter. “You can’t keep relying on Dragon’s Fire to win your battles.”
The taunt works. Burqila lets out a guttural scream and swings—but it is a sloppy one, without any of her usual force to back it up. Rikuto pushes forward at the moment of impact. Two, three charging steps—the sword slams against Burqila.
And it is she who tumbles backwards, falling, falling—
Sakura screams.
All around her the shadows are chanting, chanting: “For the Eternal King! For the Eternal King!”
All around her the sounds of war, all around her the death and destruction she has feared all her life, all around her there are thousands of souls and hearts and bodies being forged and broken.
Burqila Alshara cannot die here.
Rikuto raises its sword. Burqila’s feet are in the air; she’s going to try to kick the sword from its hands as it comes down. Sakura’s seen Dorbentei do it as a trick.
But Dorbentei is younger, and Burqila’s twice wounded already—
Sakura should throw herself from the horse. She knows this. Deep in her heart she knows that the thing to do is to try to help, to save Burqila the way Burqila has saved her.
And yet she cannot move. Fear is a sculptor. From cold stone it’s carved her. The likeness is so fine that her soul has abandoned her body for the statue—she cannot move.
Rikuto remains unscathed.
A smile spreads and spreads across its lips. The sword’s impossible weight makes it quiver at the apex of the blow, and Sakura thinks to herself that the strike will not cut Burqila at all—it will crush her. Like a melon beneath a stone.
Move, Sakura thinks. Move, move, move.
But her self-preservation outweighs her honor. If she throws herself atop Burqila, the two of them will both die.
Down, the sword, down! Dropping like a boulder to the earth! Burqila kicks at its wrists but the sword keeps coming, as inevitable as death itself. Desperate, she tries to roll, but she’s too off balance, she’s wasted too much time on the kick—
Sakura cannot look.
She shuts her eyes and buries her face in the crook of her elbow, for she knows what is coming, knows what she will hear: the cracking of bone, the squelch of flesh that was once Burqila Alshara.
One breath, two breaths, she waits.
The sound does not come. Only the usual cacophony of war.
Her heart throws itself against the walls of her rib cage. Sakura can feel it even in the tips of her fingers. When she opens her eyes, she thinks that perhaps an arrow caught her in the temple and she is already dead.
For Burqila Alshara decided that if she could not roll away, she would push herself toward the demon. Her whole body is curled around its leg, well out of the way of the trench created by Rikuto’s misshapen sword.
And yet this is a short-lived victory. Burqila doesn’t have the energy to stand. She can’t have the energy to stand, not after all that. Her chest puffs like a croaking frog’s throat. Dirt and Hokkaran blood alike have dug into her wound. She’s lifting her legs as if she means to jump back to her feet, but she does not have the energy, does not have the strength—
Rikuto leaves the sword where it’s dug itself into the ground. It plucks Burqila up by the collar, as if she were a child and not a giant of a woman. Her feet dangle in the air. She’s trying to kick at it, but perhaps she really has become a child—the blows do not even make it to Rikuto’s torso before losing momentum.
High, it lifts her, so that the whole army may see her huffing. With the palm of its massive hand, it tears off her war mask. The face beneath is not much different—Burqila Alshara scowls. She spits at it. The spit lands in its eye, and for an instant it winces.
“I expected better from you,” it says.
“No,” says one of the guards near Sakura. “It isn’t— That’s Burqila Alshara—”
Its hand on her head. Barsalai Shefali once tore a man’s head clean from his body just outside the Bronze Palace. Sakura has been to the spot. Even Baozhai, ever the mistress of her own home, has not found a way to get rid of the stain. A splotch of darkness on the cobblestones—that is all that remains of him.
It is this memory that shatters Sakura’s stone cage. She cannot fight it; she has no hope of winning.
But she might be able to distract it.
Sakura stands in the saddle. The horse keeps going forward and Sakura knows, she knows, that she will have only one shot at this before she topples backwards like a fool. With all the strength remaining to her, she hurls the knife straight at it.
The blade lands straight in its chest, wobbling like an arrow shot into a tree. Black blood seeps from the wound. Rikuto turns toward her. When its eyes lock on hers, her throat clenches shut.
“You?”
The disbelief, the fury! The hairs at the back of her neck stand on end. Run. She wants to run, wants to get far away—but this is the life she’s chosen. The death she’s chosen.
It is only looking at Burqila that calms her: the warlord’s scowl has broken into a shit-eating grin.
Rikuto drops Burqila. One step, two steps—its footfalls echo the way the cannons do when they land. Sakura stumbles backwards trying to get away from it. If she were a Qorin—if she were Dorbentei or Burqila or Barsalai—she could have managed it on the liver mare.
But she is a northerner through and through, and so she falls from the horse with little ceremony. One of the guardsmen manages to catch her and set her upright, but she is too panicked to thank him, too panicked to do anything but run, run—
“You would interrupt a duel?”
A scream. She makes the mistake of looking behind her only to see Rikuto picking up a guardsman with one hand. A single squeeze of its hand and the man’s head bursts like rotten fruit.
“I thought you knew better.”
So many people dying because of her, so many people—
The guardsmen surround her, telling her not to worry, that they will get her to safety. But she knows that is a lie. There is no such thing as safety beyond the Wall of Flowers.
They are all going to die.
A shrill whistle behind her. The horse’s hooves, moving. At least Burqila could get away. At least there is—
Shouting, screaming, cracking bones and squelching flesh. Bodies falling useless to the ground behind her. It is so close that she can see the shadow of its nose overlaying on her own.
And so when it grabs hold of her, that is no surprise.
She’s crying. Sakura always thought that if something like this happened, she’d be brave enough to say something cutting, brave enough to make some snide remark, but words fail her as the demon’s eyes bore into her. She is crying so much that her skin is more salt than flesh; she is whimpering.
Minami Sakura is going to die like a coward, thinking of her mother and her home and the people she will never again get to see—
A hand atop her head—
The whistle of an arrow, the thunk as it digs
into its shoulder. Sakura can see Burqila half-standing behind it, her bow in hand, and a nervous smile breaks out across her face.
The same trick won’t work twice.
But she’s grateful. She’s grateful.
Sweet Sister, she doesn’t want this to hurt.
She sucks in a breath as it starts to squeeze. The pain of it! As if she were trapped in a vise rapidly tightening. Her eyes feel as though they are bulging from their sockets; her skull threatens to give—
Four notes on a flute. She wonders briefly if everyone hears them before they’re taken. Why four? Isn’t five the appropriate—?
It occurs to her that it’s stopped. Though she’s in agony, though she still feels as if she will burst at any moment, it has stopped squeezing.
She opens her eyes. There’s a distant look on its face; it’s focused on something back in the direction of the pit. More plumes of steam shoot from its ears. It grunts like an animal before flinging her to the ground. Her head cracks against the earth.
But before the darkness takes her, she swears she sees it disappear into the wind.
O-SHIZUKA
NINE
BOOM.
What is that?
BOOM.
Her head … her head … who’s hurt her head? That sound—is it someone trampling on her? A boot coming down, over and over? She can’t think. Where is she? Can’t remember, can’t think.
BOOM.
That sound again! No one tramples her, but the sound is enough to make her wish they did. If someone were trampling her, at least she’d have some idea of where she—
“Barsatoq! Barsatoq, if you don’t wake the fuck up—”
Barsatoq? Her Qorin name. The Qorin! In a rush of horror and agony, it comes back to her: she’s at the bottom of a pit filled with dead Qorin. Shefali? No, that wasn’t Shefali’s voice—
She jolts up, one hand on her forehead and the other closed around her mother’s sword. Darkness surrounds her—she banishes it as she ignites the sword. Light blares painfully into existence.
She wishes it hadn’t.
Minami Shizuka sits at the very foot of the mound of bodies. From here, it seems impossibly tall, impossibly cruel: hundreds of horses and a thousand bodies all mashed together, some not yet dead. Plaintive cries rise from the mass, which writhes here and there. Everywhere her eyes land, there’s another wriggling limb. Any relief she feels at seeing survivors is soon trampled by the knowledge that she will not be able to save them. There simply isn’t time.
“Save me,” wails a woman, “please, Sky, it hurts.”
“Just kill me. My horse is dead, just kill me and finish it.”
Her throat swells. It isn’t her head that hurts anymore.
“Barsatoq, look at me.”
Someone’s at her side. She can’t tear her eyes away from the mound, can’t tear her mind away from what it represents. How many of these people did she meet? All of them swearing to come on this mission, all of them wanting only to rescue the Lost Qorin …
And now they are going to die beyond the Wall.
Her fault.
This is her fault.
She should have known. She shouldn’t have let Shefali run on ahead. They should have … It was the first of Qurukai, they should have stayed put until the day was through. To march forward knowing it was the fated day was a fool’s decision.
“Barsatoq.”
She doesn’t deserve that name—without her wife, she is lost. Her companion’s tugging her by the shoulders, but she cannot summon the will to move, cannot force herself to look away. To look away would be to hide from the horrors of this thing she’s done, these lives that she has ruined with her childlike dreams of godslaying.
“Barsatoq!”
A palm atop her helmet physically turns her head. Dorbentei Otgar is kneeling next to her. At least, she thinks it’s Otgar. Her face is swollen on one side—it’s impossible to see her right eye for all the swelling. When Shizuka looks her up and down, she realizes that Otgar is bracing herself with one of her arms—her right leg is bent at an unnatural angle beneath her.
Shizuka wants to close her eyes, but she cannot. She forces herself to look at Otgar’s leg. She forces herself to think of what it might mean if Otgar cannot walk after this.
“I said at me,” says Dorbentei. She lifts Shizuka’s chin. “Fucking northerners can’t listen to instruction. Look at me, listen to me.”
She does. A swollen face, near beyond recognizing—but her unharmed eye is the same as it has always been. The fall might have broken Dorbentei’s leg, but it did not break her.
“You have to get up,” she says. “I won’t call it a miracle that you didn’t really get hurt, since you’re … what you are. But if we’re going to get out of this alive, we need you.”
We need you.
But they do not need her—they need the Empress. They need the god. The guilt-ridden girl is hardly going to be helpful here.
Shizuka presses her eyes closed. Up ahead, another distant explosion. The cannons? But if the cannons are firing, then that means …
“Shefali?” Shizuka says. Her wife’s name is the only thing she can trust herself to say, and even that comes out in a rasp.
“Farther down the tunnel,” says Dorbentei. Shizuka hears it now—she’s slurring her words a little. No wonder, with the falls they’ve both taken. “The spider woman carried her off after…”
The rest remains unsaid, and perhaps for the better. When Shizuka is brave enough to let her eyes wander, she sees puddles of blood and gore on the ground.
“We can get her back,” says Dorbentei. “Needlenose isn’t going to go down without a fight—not while she knows you’re all right—but she can’t do all the work herself. She needs you.”
Pebbles fall on Shizuka’s head. Whatever is going on aboveground is …
She swallows. If she saves Shefali, maybe she can save everyone else. The two of them, together. Gods. What use is being a god if you cannot even save your people?
“Can I lean on you?” Shizuka rasps. She’s so slurred, she can hardly understand herself.
Dorbentei seems to get her point. She reaches for Shizuka’s hands and sets them on her own shoulders. “C’mon,” she says. “Up you go.”
Standing may have been a mistake—the room around her spins and spins, and she must put all her weight on Dorbentei’s shoulders if she is to remain on her feet. Nausea twists her stomach into knots. She raises her war mask just in time to keep from getting any vomit on it.
“Let it out,” says Dorbentei. “Won’t have time for that once we get going.”
It doesn’t bring her any relief to vomit. She hasn’t had much to eat, truth be told, with all the other things she’s had to worry about. As children she and Shefali took all their meals together. These days …
Shizuka wipes her mouth clean. Her head’s starting to steady. Her healing at work? She hopes it is; she cannot imagine fighting in such a state. Even if her mind isn’t involved in the process at all, her body’s too shot for any kind of swordplay.
But Shefali fights like this all the time.
Her wife … Her wife is too good for her.
Shizuka clears her throat. She blinks once, twice, as her vision settles. Webs surround them—coating the walls and crisscrossing the ceilings. Intricate designs trap the eye as readily as the webs trap their prey. There is an awful lot of the latter: cocoons dot the walls every few horselengths, each one a trapped Qorin waiting to die. Shizuka’s stomach threatens to empty again. For once, she wishes she hadn’t been right.
“Throw an arm around me if you need to,” says Dorbentei.
“Your leg,” Shizuka says. It comes out a mutter.
“I’ll be fine,” says Dorbentei. “Had worse wrestling. Don’t worry about me when there’s so much at stake.”
Before Shizuka can protest, Dorbentei takes her arm and slings it around her shoulders.
“C’mon,” she says again. Desperation le
aves her sounding rough.
One step. Dorbentei has to lean on her, but Shizuka needs Dorbentei for support. What an awful pair they make! Wobbling this way and that, the world spinning, the cries of the dying and the distant din of war the only music granted to them.
The farther into the tunnel they go, the narrower it becomes. Shizuka wonders how the Spider managed to fit through this at all. Sideways, perhaps? For there is not enough room even for her and Dorbentei to stand side by side—they must turn, both of them. The walls are like the pages of an old book, and they the unfortunate pressed flowers. Neither of them can tell how high up the ceilings go—there is only dark, only web above them.
Shizuka leads. It is the least she can do, she thinks—to brave this impossibly narrow passage herself. At least there’s plenty for Otgar to lean on.
Except—if they simply walk through, the webs will trap them.
Fire, she thinks, and her mother’s sword answers her: when she touches the blade to the webs, flames soon consume them. The two women stand heaving what breaths they can amid all the smoke.
“They’re going to know we’re coming,” Dorbentei says.
“Shefali always knew,” says Shizuka. She can’t imagine Shefali has kept quiet about that either. Her wife is a romantic at heart—bragging about her impending rescue is absolutely something Shefali would do.
“Barsatoq.”
“Yes?” Shizuka says. The fires are still burning, but she takes her first steps into the passage all the same. Fire has never frightened her.
“I don’t understand what she likes about you,” says Otgar.
Shizuka frowns. As she slides into the dark, the flames lick at her cheek. She imagines the fiery woman from Shefali’s story—would they have gotten along, the two of them?
“You don’t have to,” says Shizuka. Is it the dark playing tricks on her, or does she sound louder? Warmer. As if she’s become a forge.
“I just wanted you to know,” says Dorbentei. She sucks in a breath and follows, the flames now dormant in Shizuka’s wake. Is she breathing heavily? Ah, but this sort of confinement cannot be healthy for a Qorin who craves the wide-open sky. Her lower lip’s trembling. “In case one of us dies. It’s not honest, to let someone think you like them.”
The Warrior Moon Page 36