The Devil You Know

by Erin Evans

  The Vayemniri might not lean upon a god the way other races would. But Dumuzi knew enough ancestor stories to be certain they knew the value in acknowledging an ally, in repaying a debt. If he could convince them it wasn’t a trick or a trap …

  Behind Farideh, he watched as the first of the elders returned for their conclave.

  “I have to go,” Dumuzi said.

  He hurried back toward the Vanquisher’s audience chamber, past the weapons of Vanquishers of old. The conclave had not yet begun and only a few of the elders were there—including Verthisathurgiesh Anala, whose brow ridges lifted as he appeared.

  “Dumuzi,” she said, greeting him warmly. “I’m glad to see you’ve returned.”

  “Matriarch,” he said formally, bowing with more solemnity than strictly necessary. “I would speak with you. About your offer of space for a shrine. I will need it, as it happens.”

  Anala’s amber eyes narrowed, the only hint that she was annoyed at Dumuzi. “Oh? Did I offer that?”

  “You did. Shall I find you after the conclave?”

  Anala pulled her gauzy crimson wrap close around her shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ve been called to approve Verthisathurgiesh’s contributions to the defense of Djerad Kethendi.”

  “They haven’t already left?”

  “No,” Anala said slowly, and Dumuzi saw the rebuke implicit in his words. “As I said. I must review them and send them off.”

  As they spoke, more of the elders entered, Kepeshkmolik Narghon among them. Uadjit was nowhere to be seen. Nor, Dumuzi noted, was Kallan with Yrjixtilex Vardhira.

  “Are you voting on the Vanquisher today?” he asked.

  “That is the intent,” Anala said, her tone annoyed as Fenkenkabradon Ishkhanak entered, leading Arjhani. Dumuzi’s father, slight, compact, and handsome in his best armor, scanned the room, his gaze carefully gliding past Anala and Dumuzi. A stab of anger went through Dumuzi—Arjhani had not so much as asked after him in the time since Dumuzi had killed the demon on the pyramid’s peak—but he smothered it. He shouldn’t expect anything different from Arjhani.

  The Shestandeliath patriarch had arrived with Narhanna, their matching silver chains swinging as they surveyed the conclave. Dumuzi counted piercings—jade plugs, mother-of-pearl moons, jasper axe heads, bone studs, silver skewers, copper owls, dark steel antlers, pale jade rings, and more. Enough.

  You have to do it, he told himself. There’s no time to waste.

  “I wish to address the conclave!” he shouted above the murmurs. The elders fell silent, gazes cast askance—who was this hatchling to broach protocol as if he’d been raised in a cave? Dumuzi clenched his jaw, fighting his nerves, fighting the urge to apologize, to take it back.

  I am with you, Enlil reminded him. But Narghon was already pushing his way through the crowd and Dumuzi’s heart had climbed right up his throat.

  “Stop,” Narghon hissed. “This is not the time, not the place, and you are not free to speak.”

  A lifetime’s lessons of following his elders nearly broke Dumuzi’s resolve. He focused instead on that growing sense of sureness, that strength. “I have a matter for the conclave, Patriarch. I speak for the god, not Kepeshkmolik.”

  “Let the boy speak,” Anala said, in tones all too eager, to tweak Narghon’s snout. There it is, Dumuzi thought, the clearest confirmation he would get of Anala’s true intentions when it came to Dumuzi and Enlil. You can still use it, he thought.

  You cannot build a city on a foundation of deceit.

  “Speak your piece,” Anala said, her eyes never leaving Narghon’s. “We have much to attend to.”

  Dumuzi took a deep breath—this first, the shrine, and the rest later. “We are Vayemniri,” he said to the assembled elders. “We don’t let our debts linger. We earn the balance—we are not slaves nor are we slave masters. And so I wish to collect what is owed Enlil, Father of Storms.”

  “You cannot claim a debt for an unasked-for service,” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. “In my day, we called that extortion.”

  “I claim we owe him our gratitude,” Dumuzi said, embarrassed at how his voice shook. “Or have my elders taught me poorly?” His heart sped further at the strange and suspicious looks this garnered.

  “My, Narghon,” the Ophinshtalajiir said. “Your hatchling has a very bold tongue.”

  “He has our gratitude,” Narghon said, ignoring old Kaijia. “No one has said otherwise.”

  Dumuzi fought the urge to tap his tongue to the roof of his mouth, to taste for the scent of danger. “No one has said otherwise, but no one has said their thanks. That’s what I request. That’s all he wants.”

  “Right now,” someone snorted.

  “It isn’t so much,” the Daardendrien patriarch said, scratching the row of bone studs in his jaw. “I assume we can’t—”

  “We can’t at all!” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. “Why are you entertaining this nonsense?”

  Anala studied Dumuzi with a puzzled expression. “What is it—”

  But then a young woman with Kanjentellequor’s silver skewers in her jaw and a Lance Defender’s badge on her shoulder came barreling into the audience chamber. All eyes went to her as she searched the room.

  “Who is in charge?” she gasped, almost a plea—Let them have made the Vanquisher vote, let someone be in control of this.

  “Still the conclave,” Narghon snapped. “What’s happened?”

  For a moment, her eyes searched the room again, as if hoping beyond hope there would be someone in charge. “Djerad Kethendi’s forward regiment has been destroyed,” the young woman said, still panting. “The King of Dust turned magic on them, terrible demons ripped their bats from the sky. They say it happened so fast. Those that aren’t dead are captured, except the five who escaped.”

  “How many captured?” Kaijia demanded.

  “We don’t know,” the Lance Defender said. “But Djerad Kethendi can’t support another attack like that. The conclave there wants orders.”

  “Armies from the clans will reach there soon,” Anala said. “There will be reinforcements.”

  “Djerad Kethendi’s forward regiment was a thousand strong,” Narghon said. “Clearly this King of Dust is skilled in magic, and his demons are worse than the first one he turned on us. The forces we’ve spared may hardly wind him.”

  “Such a thing to say about our warriors,” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. But a grim silence surrounded her—if Djerad Kethendi had lost so many, then it would not matter how loudly they praised their warriors’ skills.

  “We need to establish a Vanquisher,” Vardhira said.

  “We need to act,” Narghon said. “What would a Vanquisher do? Pull away more of our attention while we get him or her settled in? We need to set a strategy—”

  “Which is why a Vanquisher—”

  “Enlil,” Dumuzi said, trying to be heard above the shouting. “You cannot have a strategy that ignores—” But no one would hear him.

  Anala took him by the arm and marched him swiftly from the room. “Dumuzi, noachi,” she said, “come back later. Let us settle this, and we’ll discuss your god and his concerns after.”

  “But—” The doors shut in his face, the guards barring the way. “I need to get in there,” he told the Adjudicators.

  The man on the left gave him a sympathetic look. “It will be all right,” he said. “Go find your agemates.”

  Dumuzi snapped his teeth, feeling a frustrated cloud of electricity building between his teeth. So close—he’d been sure that would get through to them.

  The god pressed upon him, and he felt as if the black-scaled dragonborn walked beside him, wordless and sorry and crackling with the same frustration, and yet knowing that this was exactly what was bound to happen. It made Dumuzi’s head ache.

  Another reason I need more followers, Enlil said. You cannot be everything.

  Being something was almost too much for Dumuzi. He’d rushed in with broken words and clum
sy gestures and nothing like a plan. There wasn’t time to figure out how to be perfect at this and there wasn’t time to be less than perfect.

  The doors to the conclave opened only wide enough for Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani to slip through. Dumuzi looked up, surprised at his father’s appearance, but then Arjhani caught him by the arm, steered him down the hallway.

  “I love you,” Arjhani hissed. “You know that, and I’m sorry you’re angry, but have you given the slightest thought to how much you’re upsetting me? To how badly you’re damaging my chances?”

  Dumuzi shook him off. “Your chances?”

  “I could be Vanquisher,” Arjhani said, sounding furious. “I could be, but then my son is shouting all manner of nonsense out of order in the conclave he hasn’t been invited to—”

  “I’m trying to save this city!” Dumuzi burst out.

  “You’re trying to make that god at home,” Arjhani said. “You shouldn’t trust people just because they pay attention to you. Have you not learned the lessons of Esham-Ana?”

  Dumuzi felt as if he might faint or explode, and he could only wait and see which. “That’s not what that story’s about,” he managed.

  “I think I’ve learned my ancestor stories. Well enough to know better than to fall for such tricks.”

  “Tricks?’ Dumuzi demanded. “But … You’re … Fenkenkabradon only nominated you so they could keep hold of the Lance Defenders.”

  Arjhani’s expression contorted in rage. “How dare you.”

  “It’s the truth!” Dumuzi cried. “Ask anyone. You’re their puppet in this. How could you not know?”

  Arjhani slapped him across the face. “Shut your mouth. If I’m a puppet, then what are you?”

  Dumuzi stood for a long moment as his father’s footsteps faded away, hands balled into fists, trying to ignore the surge of the god all around him. He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want power. How was he different anyway? Arjhani wasn’t wrong.

  He isn’t right, Enlil said, but what else would he say? Dumuzi rubbed the scales of his cheek. You can’t ape Enlil’s old ways, he told himself. You can’t just try to please the elders. You need another way and you need to find it yourself.

  Dumuzi climbed up to the Lance Defender barracks, winding his way through busy corridors followed by nearly empty ones. No one was teaching classes to cadets. Everyone was preparing for war. Remembering his dream, he made his way through the bat stables and up onto the launching platform at the pyramid’s peak.

  A jolt of sick panic hit him as he stood where not six days before Dumuzi had dealt the maurezhi a killing blow with the Black Axe of the Moon’s Champion. He’d climbed the pyramid itself, trying to chase down the killer of his friends, the killer of the girl he’d been smitten with, believing he had doomed himself, and suspecting he might die. Lightning snapped in his teeth.

  You survived, the god’s voice reminded him, in tones that smoothed Dumuzi’s nerves and quieted the lightning breath. There’s no danger here. I am with you.

  Three dozen young dragonborn arrayed themselves along the wall, looking down at the forces rallying on the plain below. Beyond, the Kuhri Ternhesh snaked toward Djerad Kethendi. Dumuzi peered at the horizon as he approached his father’s unsupervised polearms class, but the land rose up between him and wherever the King of Dust’s army waited.

  “Look at that,” someone said. “They’ve added another regiment of glaive bearers.”

  “That’s the Ninth Blue Cohort. My cousin’s there.”

  “Must be expecting a lot of ground forces.”

  “Any day now they’ll have to add cadets to the ranks,” someone replied. “That’s what my uncle says.”

  Which of the students looked back at Dumuzi first, he couldn’t have said. But one moment their eyes were all on the plains below, and the next they were on Dumuzi. One, his cousin Saitha, a reddish-scaled Kepeshkmolik girl, stepped out of the crowd.

  “What’s at your back?” she asked with a nod.

  Dumuzi shrugged. “Still have my shadow. What do you think?” he added, nodding toward the edge and the armies below.

  Saitha hesitated. “It’s bad, isn’t it? I heard they let you into the elders’ conclave. Do you know how bad?”

  Three dozen pairs of eyes watched Dumuzi. It would be proper, he thought, to demur. To let the elders handle this. Sometimes there was value in the bare truth and sometimes it was wiser to say what needed to be said and no more. Six days ago, Dumuzi might have told them he wasn’t really sure, that they should all go home and stop gossiping. This was too serious.

  “The Kethendan forces have been slaughtered,” Dumuzi told them. “At least fourteen homesteads are just gone, and it sounds like there’s a good chance the Blue Fire will come again.”

  “But you can stop it,” asked a tall boy near Saitha, an Ophinshtalajiir with jade rings in his jaw. “You stopped it, that’s what they’re saying. You did a spell.”

  “That is not what they’re saying,” retorted a Shestandeliath girl—Ereshkin, Zaroshni’s cousin, Dumuzi thought, a pang of grief going through him with the recognition. A pang of grief that kept him silent as she added, “They’re saying you channeled a god, right in front of everyone, and made it do that.”

  Murmurs raced through the crowd before Dumuzi found his voice. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “They’re saying you killed the maurezhi too,” the Ophinshtalajiir boy said.

  “No,” Ereshkin said, the silver chains that ran from her nostril to her ear shaking with her head. “I heard it was Master Arjhani.”

  The Ophinshtalajiir boy frowned. “I guess that’s more likely.”

  Dumuzi ran a thumb over the head of the black axe. “That was me. And … I didn’t make the god—make Enlil—do that. He just did.”

  Saitha gave him a deeply skeptical look. “Why?”

  “Because he wants to help,” Dumuzi said. “Because … He was here before we were, and he left his people in the wrong hands. He’s … I think he wants to atone for that, but I think, too, he just sees we need help. We need him.”

  “Do we?” Saitha asked.

  “We did,” Dumuzi pointed out. “Or do you think I’m the sort of person who can run up the pyramid and plant this axe in a demon’s chest and then make a wall of lightning to protect the city?”

  “So … can he do that again?” the Ophinshtalajiir boy asked.

  “Not yet.” Dumuzi considered the young Vayemniri before him. They were all in the year before their Lance Defender service—hatchlings by the elders’ measure, not yet experienced enough to be thrown into the field or allowed their own decisions. Dumuzi’s peers, or close to it. “I need help with that.”

  Saitha tilted her head. “What kind of help?”

  “Well … your help, I suspect.” Mehen’s suggestions, the words of Enlil, Farideh’s notions all boiled together in his thoughts. It could work. If he’d stood in the group of cadets instead of in front of them, he would have at least listened.

  “I stand with an offer of engagement,” Dumuzi said, as formally as if he were one of their elders suggesting a qallim agreement. “Enlil will aid us if we acknowledge him. In exchange, though, we agree not to put anyone in shackles—not the Untherans, not ourselves, not the god. Anyone who gives him worship belongs to him like a clan-mate, and so belongs to the city. You will strive to be true, to be kind, to follow the laws and traditions we have set out. When he has helped us, we will acknowledge it and thank him, just as we would a comrade.” A sea of skeptical faces considered him, whispering to each other. Dumuzi took a deep breath. “For two years. The same as a term with the Lance Defenders. After two years, we will reconsider and renegotiate as needed.”

  Mortal words for immortal things, Dumuzi thought as the murmurs built and built.

  Not always the wrong choice, the god’s voice murmured in his thoughts. You say it how they need to hear it.

  “Are we … allowed to take an offer like that?” said a boy near Saitha, white-sca
led and stocky and wearing Clethtinthtiallor’s piercings across his cheeks. “By the laws, we’re not adults yet.”

  “But you are your own people,” Dumuzi pointed out. “You belong to the city and the city belongs to you. This doesn’t reflect on your clan. You can be everything you’re asked to be, and still make this agreement—think of it like a sellsword contract.”

  “People don’t get exiled for sellsword contracts,” Ereshkin pointed out.

  Saitha uncrossed her arms and came to stand beside Dumuzi. “I can do anything for two years,” she said with not a little bravado. “How do I agree?”

  Dumuzi faltered. “It’s … I might need help with that. The way he did things before, it won’t work for us. But.” He cupped his hand to his mouth and exhaled sharply. “That. And think your thanks for the lightning wall. We’ll see if that’s enough.”

  Saitha glanced back at her friends, as if she couldn’t quite believe this. “You have to mean it,” Dumuzi warned. “Don’t bother if you don’t mean it.”

  The look of skepticism didn’t quite fade from Saitha’s expression. But she closed her eyes and cupped her hand to her mouth, silent a moment before the soft exhale of her breath.

  Again the crackle of electricity raced up the small scales at the back of Dumuzi’s neck, a hint of Enlil’s growing power. Again he felt light-headed and his heart started pounding. The presence of the god swelled in his thoughts—more solid, more pleased, more real.

  But this time, Saitha and a few others clapped a hand to the backs of their necks, startled by the sensation. Saitha’s gold eyes widened and Dumuzi grinned, almost giddy. It was a start—finally a start..

  • • •

  PREXIJANDILIN HESKAN, SON of Ghesh, of the line of Namarra, did not kneel before the King of Dust until the demons made him. With his commanders dead, he rose to the leadership of Djerad Kethendi’s forward guard, a dubious promotion—there were only ninety-two of them left and all of them prisoners of this hairless, sneering maunthreki.

  As his knees hit the cold, dusty ground, hands tied behind his back, Heskan met the King of Dust’s imperious gaze and knew he was the next to die.