by Joe Jackson
“That’s the fate that awaits you if you give these people reason,” Kari said, and then she gestured toward the other edge of town with her head. “Get to work, and don’t even entertain the thought of running.”
They set off to their tasks, and Kari turned to Seanada at her approach. “That was some impressive bit of swordplay,” the assassin complimented as she stepped next to Kari.
Kari refrained from shrugging. “Do the mallasti not have warriors among their number?” she asked quietly while no one was nearby. “He seemed surprised to find I could fight.”
“Mallasti warriors – warriors in general, really, outside of the kings’ standing armies and personal guard – are typically conscripted first to go and fight the war on Irrathmor,” Seanada answered. “Still, to find one here should not have been so much of a shock.”
“He must have known about his father’s prophecy,” Kari said, but the two women let the matter drop when the people of the town began to approach.
The people followed but stayed slightly behind an elestram with a regal bearing, despite the obvious traces of recent wounds in his fur. He stood tall and proud now, golden eyes taking in Kari and Seanada with a mix of pride and consternation. Kari could understand that: she had just taken a step toward leading these people to rebel openly against Sekassus. While that would undoubtedly give them hope, there was the possibility that Sekassus would have them all killed, or do so himself. This was what the Wraith wanted, though, and Kari was glad to see that whoever this man was, he was both eager to free his people yet mindful of their potential fates.
“Lady,” he said with a deferential bow of his head. “Who are you? Have you been sent by one of the king’s enemies to make war upon him?”
Kari paused, took a short breath, and thought her answer through. There was one minor grammatical change to make in her mind, then she spoke. “I am Mastriana Te’Dastra,” she said, and there was a brief wave of chatter amongst the townsfolk. Kari found that amusing, since they were mostly mallasti, and the hyena-folk typically got impatient when interrupted while speaking. “I serve no king. I serve the interests of our people. For too long have we suffered under the rule of Sekassus, when our sister clans in Tess’Vorg and Pataria live free under the more tempered hands of Kings Emanitar and Morduri.”
There was more muttered chatter, and Kari gave them a second. She could smell the excitement in the air, taste it on the back of her tongue. She paused before continuing, “The road to freedom is long and the price of it must be paid in blood. I will stand in the front line and take the worst your king has to offer. I will destroy his very princes, and should he attack in person, I will stand against him, even alone.”
“What you suggest is suicide!” one of the mallasti interjected.
“Perhaps. However, you know the prophecy: Sekassus–” she said, and she didn’t miss the widening of their eyes as she said his name again without his title. “–murders my kind because he is terrified that one of us will depose him. Do you think him brave enough to face me on the field of battle? I think not. He will cast every citizen of his realm at me before he comes to face me. We will turn them all against him, until he sits alone in his ebon pyramid.”
The townspeople were speechless, but after a moment, their eyes fell upon Seanada. “And who are you?” the mayor, or whatever his official title was, asked.
Seanada answered without missing a beat. “I am called Isharra, but my name is of little importance. I am one of the Ashen Fangs,” she said, pulling down the neck of her armor at least far enough to expose the tattooed fur over her breasts. “Our master has chosen to stand behind this vulkinastra, Mastriana, and aid in the coming war against King Sekassus. Just as she does not stand alone, neither will you stand alone against your despotic king.”
“And who are you, sir?” Kari returned politely once Seanada finished speaking.
“I am Mosza Oswerri,” the elestram answered with another short bow of his head. “I am the administrator of our town, and speak for our people. I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but you have declared war upon our very king, and made our town a target for retaliation. What are your plans from here? Please tell us you have more warriors than just the two of you?”
Kari swept her gaze back and forth across the townsfolk before her. “Am I not looking at a town full of people willing to fight for their freedom?” she asked, but something occurred to her quickly, and she moved to adjust her words. “Our primary allegiance is to the Overking, not to Sekassus. If you rise up, others will rise up with you, and I will marshal our strength, that we present enough of an opportunity that perhaps the Spotted Lion will invade.”
“Eh, you speak words of hope, but hope is but a candle, easily snuffed out. Killing one of the king’s sons is impressive, but little more than an invitation to be slaughtered. When Prince Amnastru finds you, he will make short work of you, and your rebellion will be over as quickly as it began. How long do you think you will hide from him?”
Kari turned to face the speaker, a grizzled, elder-looking mallasti with patches of gray across his muzzle and down his throat. “I have no plans to hide. I do not ask you to shelter me, or lie to the king’s sons. When Amnastru returns, tell him I was here, that this was my doing. Tell him my name. Tell him where it is I have gone to – Haestronn will be our next visit. He may hurt you – though not likely as badly as he already has – but he will be too busy trying to track me down and kill me to spend too much time retaliating against you. And this is what I want. I do not want you to fight my battles. You will have plenty of your own, and against your own people, no less.”
“Mosza, this is madness,” the elder mallasti said.
“No,” Seanada said, stepping forward. “Madness is standing idly by while your king strips you of your loved ones, your blessed daughters, and slaughters them to try to prevent some ancient prophecy coming to pass. The syrinthians perform sacrifices in his name, and he takes and murders your vulkinastra sisters. How long will you suffer this indignity?”
“You have to consider, though: what if King Emanitar does not aid us?”
Seanada met the elder’s gaze with unflinching intensity. “Then I would rather die free than live four eras as a slave who would not stand up while her sisters were slaughtered. You may live on your knees. I will die on my feet.”
Kari snorted, drawing everyone’s attention. “I have no plans to die at all,” she said. She made certain the confidence shone through in her mannerisms, not just her words. “You have to make a decision. No one can make you free; it is something you need to be willing to fight for. I aim to kill the princes that have come to harm you, but if you refuse to help me, that is as far as I will get. You must be willing to take the next step yourselves.”
“If war comes, we will stand with you,” a younger mallasti male said.
“Madness,” the elder insisted. “Utter madness.”
“Well, this is a decision that does not need to be made this minute,” Mosza said, holding up a hand to signal for calm amongst all the chatter. “Come, we will feed you and give you a place to wash before you set off on your path. When war comes, we will make the decision then. We will make the preparations now, though.”
“I do apologize for the damage to the windows,” Kari said as the town administrator led her and Seanada to the inn. “Sometimes my zeal gets the better of me.”
“It is of little consequence,” he answered, waving off her concern. “A few windows are a small price to pay to have the prince’s hand lifted from us, and for our dead to be properly taken care of.”
“You realize hanging the prince’s corpse is going to be taken as a declaration of war regardless of what you may ultimately decide?” Seanada said.
Mosza didn’t answer right away. He brought them inside, and asked the innkeeper to prepare a bath for Kari, and hot meals for both women. Kari could hear the giggling of children in the back room, but had seen no youths at all thus far. She glanced around at the inn’
s interior, so much like those back home, but slightly different on account of the masterful sculpting and carpentry of the elestram people. It was odd that it could feel alien and yet so familiar at the same time, but Kari basked in the sensation.
“The decision was already made, though I left it as much to the individual as I could. If Javri and others who want no part of war wish to avoid it, they may move elsewhere, or else hide and hope that it passes them by. What he and others fail to realize is that the king’s vengeance will not be limited to those who fight him; anyone who does not fight for him will meet a similar fate. This is a most dangerous game we are about, but if the Ashen Fangs have sided with you, then I will trust that you may be capable of doing what you promise.”
Kari nodded, and took a moment to compose her thoughts. “I cannot speak for King Emanitar, but I know he is mindful of the clans here in the south of Sorelizar. I think once the region is unstable and some of Seksassus’ princes lie dead in the streets, he will finally do what he has wanted to for ages.”
The conversation ended abruptly as a small gang of mallasti children, no older than six or seven years by Kari’s estimation, erupted from the back room. She could see that they had the reddish-brown fur here and there, but they were coated in flour, which made the innkeeper put his hands to his hips and cast a narrow-eyed stare at the unruly youths. They rushed up and stood before Kari, giggling, and she found it was quite contagious.
“We want to be vulkinastras too!” they shouted.
Seanada, Mosza, and the innkeeper, Raussi, all looked concerned by the children’s little “slip-up,” but Kari found it heartwarming that they still had some semblance of innocence. Even the blood that stained her armor and the fur of her left side hardly seemed to concern them; they saw Kari – Mastriana – as something powerful, blessed, and that they wanted to be like. Even here on this alien world, dealing with people she had considered her enemies for most of her two lives, it all clicked in Kari’s mind. This was what she fought for, the people she fought to defend. She didn’t defend humans or rir or elves; she defended people, and though she couldn’t properly call the beshathans her people, they were yet a people worth fighting for.
Kari rubbed a few of the children playfully on the forehead, and Raussi barked for them to go and get cleaned up. They filed from the room with the innkeeper in their wake, and Kari could only imagine the mess he was going to find in the kitchen. A prolonged, groaning growl from the back room confirmed that, and Mosza gestured for Kari and Seanada to go and get washed up in the bath commons.
Seanada helped Kari wash up, but didn’t partake of a bath herself. It took a bit to get all the blood out of the fur until it showed white again, but thankfully, the armor was much easier to clean. When they were finished, they sat down to delicious-smelling bowls of stew. Kari reached across the table before they began to eat, and Seanada laid her hand in Kari’s. The assassin remained silent while Kari gave a prayer of thanksgiving, but a smile cracked her face when Kari included Be’shatha in it.
*****
By the following morning, all of the dead had been removed from the crucifixes and either cremated or prepared for burial. Twenty-six in total had been slain by the princes, though Kari wasn’t sure who had killed more. Her instincts were to assume Amnastru had killed all of them, but that didn’t make whoever she’d killed yesterday innocent by any stretch. Saovonn was a decent-sized town, but not so large that twenty-six killings would go unfelt. The fact that the other prince had been content to leave the bodies desecrated said all Kari needed to know of him.
There was a difference in the air this morning, Kari could feel it. Despite Javri’s claims that rebelling was utter madness, hope had settled in among these people. While repairing the shattered windows and other minor disturbances from Kari’s arcane outburst, they were making subtle reinforcements to their homes. Glyphs were being painted on the traditional mallasti homes, and the elestram, too, were marking their homes and places of business. Kari couldn’t read beshathan yet – those lessons were still to come – but she recognized some of the glyphs from her time in Rulaj.
The children followed Kari around the town, something Seanada found amusing, though the mallasti youths didn’t coat themselves in flour this time. Kari took stock of the town and its structures; it wasn’t very defensible, certainly not if someone came wielding fire with the sole intention of burning it to the ground. Still, it was populated by no small number of mallasti, and she surmised that their arcane power would be enough to counter any such attacks, if their hearts were in it. And when it came to defending their town, how could they not be?
No, Saovonn would certainly not do for a good battlefront. If she wanted a place to set her feet and call for Sekassus to attack, it would need to be a city. She wondered if any of the cities in Sorelizar had walls; a canny tyrant wouldn’t allow such a thing, all the better to make sure he could smash his own people if necessary. Still, that left him open to attack from outside, and Kari realized he would have a difficult time rebuffing Emanitar if the Spotted Lion invaded. The same might hold true in reverse, but under the Overking’s laws, Emanitar could legally invade the realm of his higher-ranked neighbor; Sekassus couldn’t do the same until attacked.
And Sekassus tried to murder Emanitar some time ago, Kari thought. She was certain the mallasti king would invade Sorelizar if given a golden opportunity. All Kari had to do – not that it was exactly straightforward or easy – was to kill those princes assigned to quelling the rioting in the south. From there, the mallasti people and their elestram neighbors would likely accept King Emanitar with open arms. But even if they didn’t, that was as far as Kari’s involvement in this plot went. From there, it was up to Emanitar, Morduri, and the Wraith.
She thought briefly of home and her children, and let forth a sigh. She had only been gone for a few weeks, but it felt like an eternity already. She was missing so much of her son’s life in particular, and all those little moments of her daughter’s infancy. It was a tough decision to make, but as she’d suggested to Kris Jir’tana, the war was going to come one way or another. She was better off taking steps to make sure it happened here, rather than trying to spend time with her children only to end up having to hide them when war came to their home.
Kari looked around at the edge of the town, and could still see the crucified dead in her mind’s eye. This was a fight worth starting, and one she knew she very well might get called back here to finish. But if they could secure some hold here, some beachhead, as the military might call it, she could bring her family with her. Surely if they managed to involve someone as powerful as King Koursturaux, Kari would have someplace safe for her family to stay nearby and yet out of immediate danger. How the Crimson Huntress would react to all this ruckus Kari was causing, the demonhunter couldn’t figure out just yet.
“So we go to Haestronn next?” Seanada asked.
Kari nodded. “I know you want to get home and defend your family, but I think killing Prince Amnastru is something we need to work up to. If we kill him first, it may draw Sekassus right to us, and he won’t spare anyone he comes across. We need to weaken their position first, then kill Amnastru, then hope that King Emanitar follows through.”
“It would certainly be a relief for my family to live under his rule,” the assassin said.
“That’s my goal,” Kari said, turning to her friend. “I know I’m supposed to be here to kill Prince Amnastru and then leave. That’s my debt to King Morduri. But it’s not what I’m here for. As some of the people back in DarkWind would say, we have bigger fish to fry.”
Seanada smirked at the saying, which came out a bit different in beshathan. The children paid little mind to the women’s conversation, and a twinkle entered the assassin’s eye before she responded, “Yes, I can see why the Wraith finds you so attractive.”
“How do you mean?” Kari returned, more to stall than for an actual answer. Now she wondered about his minor pass at her in bed that first nigh
t in Ewuaswi. Had he fallen in love with her to some degree after living in her home for half a year or more? She thought once more of being told that she attracted all the right people to her side, and wondered if for some, it went even deeper than that.
Seanada waved off the question for a moment while she shooed away the children. They laughed but ultimately departed to go play ball. The golden eyes of the assassin came up to meet Kari’s gaze squarely. “I know there is a man under that guise he wears, much as he would like to believe it is some secret. And it is no mystery that he feels attracted to you. I feel it myself at times. You are a powerful warrior, a natural leader, and yet you have a tender side to you as well. You are a mother and a complete woman. At times, I find myself wishing I was half the woman you are.”
“Seanada…,” Kari half-whispered.
The disguised assassin waved off Kari’s response. “I am not in love with you, so please do not let my words make you anxious. I am in love, so to speak, with what you are.”
“No, I understand that,” Kari returned. “I just…Seanada, you’re more than half the woman I am. I wish you’d realize that. I know you’re afraid of the demon within you, but you have no reason to be envious of me. You just need to learn to trust yourself.”
They held each other’s stares for a minute, but then Seanada smiled. “Perhaps. But this is conversation for another time, hmm? Let us go kill another prince.”
“What other princes do you think we’ll face? Do you know the name of the one I killed yesterday?”
“I do not know many of them by sight,” she answered with a shake of the head. “I can tell you, however, that there seem to be two classes, so to speak, of prince: those more humanoid like Amnastru, and those of the sylinthian variety, like the one you bested yesterday. The older and more powerful ones tend to be more like Amnastru. The younger, weaker ones tend to be more like Prince Vassiras.”