Kingmaker

by Eric Zawadzki

CHAPTER 37

  “You Ahjea are used to thinking of Turuna as a vast desert with mountains at the edges, but that is not true along the Riphil, and the southern coast has forests and orchards.” Tirud nodded to himself, sounding like Lujo. “As Ahjea children shape steel and sand, so Kanjea children command branch, leaf and fruit. Most of the fruit is nothing special to a Kanjea, but some have magical powers.” He held out his hand as if plucking something from a tree.

  “One of these is lej. If you eat a piece of that bitter fruit, you see yourself as you would if you were looking back on yourself a cycle from now. It isn’t seeing the future, but it distances you from the present enough to put the current crisis into perspective. When you look back at the things that were important to you a cycle ago, you’ll find that most of them don’t matter to you anymore.”

  He frowned, his face green in the setting light of Zheldesa, large against the horizon. Galdera’s pale sliver and a thousand stars soon would be the night’s only light.

  “Lej is dangerous to those who try to gain too much perspective by eating a lot of it. Many merely lose hope, but some fall into a sleep from which they never awaken. Turun children are the most vulnerable, though, and the adults try to keep the children from eating it. Some Kanjea keep it a secret from the children, while others warn them not to eat it. You see, a single bite of lej robs a child of magic forever. However, he’s immediately aware of how foolish his actions were.”

  Tirud fell into a long silence. The green moon set.

  Adults have a different kind of magic, and it works the opposite way as yours. The more you understand it, the less it works on you. The more you think about magic, the less you think about anything else.

  He’d been hinting at Blay’s deception, at the time. Butu suspected this was another of the tall sordenu’s subtle warnings, but he couldn’t find any connection between the story of lej and their present situation.

  Why hide his meaning at all? We’re all in the same squad.

  “Is this your story, or are you trying to tell us to obey Blay’s orders?” Butu demanded, not really in the mood for parables.

  Tirud smiled mysteriously.

  “Either you want to answer my questions or you don’t,” Butu said. What’s the point in getting me to ask questions if you’re not going to answer them?

  Tirud stood up, brushing the sand off his pants. “Some questions are more important than their answers, and many questions have no answers.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Tirud winked at him before strolling back toward the tent. “Now you sound like a child who might reach his fourth cycle.”

  Butu muttered several choice words at Tirud’s back. He supposed it was possible Tirud had told his own story. There was a certain comfort to that. It was much easier to imagine an unfortunate childhood misunderstanding had caused Tirud’s lack of magic, and not a stroke of bad luck that could yet strike Butu.

  I will keep my magic, Butu vowed silently, and suited action to thoughts, grabbing a handful of sand and crafting marbles. About half his attempts were acceptable. He considered racing out into the night, dancing over dunes as lightly as the wind, but the memory of Nolen pressed down on him. He felt suddenly afraid of the darkness, afraid of stepping on a snake, afraid of falling down a dune in an avalanche of choking sand.

  One of us is dead, he thought, and we didn’t do anything. We just found out several clans have gathered at Urgaruna. Our corporal wants us to leave without finding out if they have Pisor.

  “He was talking about Blay,” Jani said suddenly from her place near the fire. Butu jumped. She hadn’t even made herself invisible, and he had forgotten she was still there.

  Butu frowned. “But Blay still has his magic.”

  Jani sighed. “It’s not directly about Blay, of course.” She looked annoyed, exhausted, and sad all at the same time. She collapsed into the sand near him. “Blay thought he was a born leader when we left Gordney, remember?”

  “Yeah. Karp tried to warn me about him, but I didn’t listen.” The words were bitter. “His lack of judgment nearly killed the entire squad in the sandstorm. It did kill Nolen!”

  “You said he did everything he could to save Nolen,” she said gently. “No one died because of him.”

  Butu took a deep breath. She’s right, he thought. I can’t blame Nolen’s death on Blay. But I can blame the lies on him.

  “Fine,” he snapped. “His decisions didn’t kill Nolen. I’m tired, Jani, of being told one thing when we’re doing something else. For all we know, we’re actually going to Urgaruna in the morning. That’s our corp for you. He calls us men and treats us like children!”

  “He’s scared, Butu. He’s under a lot of pressure from Pater and Zhek. He’s never done anything like this before, and it obviously isn’t going well.”

  “It would have gone a whole lot better if he’d listened to Tirud sooner and told us the truth.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what Tirud was talking about just now. People make mistakes because they don’t know they’re mistakes, at the time.” She picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle through her fingers.

  “Well it’s not like Tirud didn’t spend the entire march here practically shouting at Blay to just tell us what was actually going on, you know. Ku or not, Tirud has some idea what he’s doing.”

  Jani didn’t look his way, watching the sand fall from her fingers, instead. “The adults warned Tirud not to eat lej, too, and you see how well he listened.”

  “A second-cycler doesn’t get put in charge of making life-and-death decisions for a squad of sordenu, Jani,” he countered.

  Jani fell into a fidgety silence for several minutes. Butu stared into the shanjin.

  “I think I know what Blay is going through,” Jani said abruptly.

  Butu turned to look at her, but she had turned invisible. She flickered back into view after only a moment. She looked embarrassed.

  “Butu, we need to talk.” Her voice cracked a little like Retus’, though Butu knew it wasn’t because her voice was changing.

  His heart pounded in his chest as he considered all the possible meanings that one sentence could have. He nodded mutely.

  “I joined the sordenu when I did partially because I wanted to be in your squad.”

  Partially?

  “Yeah. I know,” Butu said softly, taking her hand. “The night I left you in Jasper, well, I kind of know how Tirud must have felt after eating lej. My world ended.”

  “Mine too,” she said. She slid her hand out of his grip. “But not for the reason you probably think it did.”

  He glanced at the withdrawn hand. “Jusep was sending you to Mnemon. I was joining the sordenu. You didn’t know if you’d ever see me again.”

  “I was being selfish, Butu,” she said, sounding miserable. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you like this!”

  “Hurt me?” He leaned back and looked at her searchingly.

  “I wasn’t chasing you. I just wanted to be in your squad because you were familiar. After everything else I lost, I just wanted one thing from my old life that I could trust.”

  Magic senses or not, if a Clanless raid approached right now, Butu wouldn’t have noticed it. “Oh,” he managed after the initial shock had passed.

  “Oh?” she repeated, looking even more miserable.

  “Well, um, I’m glad we’re talking about this, actually.” Butu rolled one of the marbles between his fingers nervously. He was almost certain he didn’t look glad. “When I found out you’d joined the sordenu, I thought it was all my fault for refusing to run away with you. I thought you were going to die during that first march.”

  “So did I,” she murmured with a faint smile.

  Encouraged, he plunged forward. “But I meant what I said, too. During the march, I mean. I’m glad you’re in my squad. I was kind of glad for the rule, though.”

  Jani looked puzzled. “Which rule? Not the one about magic, of course.”r />
  Butu hesitated. Maybe she’s chasing me but doesn’t want to admit it. Maybe she isn’t but won’t believe me if I tell her I’m happy about it. His stomach knotted again as he blurted, “No romance within the same platoon.”

  Jani laughed, and all her tension melted. “I should have known.”

  He managed a small smile of his own. “We both should have. We snuck plenty of kisses behind the backs of your family. No reason why some sordenu rule would have stopped us, right?”

  “As if they didn’t know exactly what was going on,” Jani reminded him. “I think Jusep decided it was better to just let us think our doomed little romance was a secret. It kept us from running off together before our mirjuvas.”

  Butu digested this. “You know, you never told me about your mirjuva.”

  She shrugged but looked embarrassed. “You remember when Jusep took Zhek and me to negotiate that trade deal last year? It happened during that. I tripped and fell while Zhek and I were playing hide-and-seek with some of the Kadrak kids. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t want to tell you about it. By the time I stopped being embarrassed about falling down, I was embarrassed for not telling you as soon as I got back, so I just kept it a secret.”

  Butu nodded, remembering the awkward mirjuva conversation in Gordney. “I can understand that.”

  Jani relaxed again. “Still friends?” she asked in a cheerful tone.

  He nodded vigorously, and they hugged warmly. Butu felt a small, irrational pang at losing her again, but it was weaker now than it had been in Jasper.

  “I should get to bed,” Jani said with a yawn as she stood up. “I’ve been marching all day.”

  A wild thought came to Butu. “Jani, wait.”

  She turned, watching him in the firelight. “Yes?”

  “We should go get Pisor,” he said in a deadly serious tone.

  She stared back, her face a set of O’s. She didn’t object, though.

  “The corp won’t take us to the rock,” Butu explained quickly, recreating Lujo’s map in the sand. “He thinks there’s too few of us, but I think there’s too many. If just you and I went in — you to be invisible and me to see — we could snatch it from them before they knew.” He paused. “Look, Jani, if we go back, they’ll find a way to marry you to an el’. We’ll all be branded as deserters whatever Blay says. And if he says we won’t, I still don’t believe him.”

  She was shaking her head.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he asked sheepishly.

  “No,” she said slowly. “We have to bring Lujo.”

  “What?” But Butu could already see how useful he would be.

  Phedam can heal himself, and Retus has his armor. Tirud and Blay have no magic. Lujo, though, can transform rock and metals. He could hide Pisor once we get it.

  “He could create a tunnel for us where there wasn’t one,” Jani said, as if echoing Butu’s thoughts.

  “So we’re going to do it?” he said, excitedly.

  She nodded. He stood up, dusting himself off.

  He went to wake Lujo while she snagged supplies for them. Their exhausted friend was easily persuaded that they could protect him, and that they’d die without him. It was another prank to their perennial tale-teller, and an exciting one at that.

  They left the camp as Galdera set, the stars spinning overhead their only light. Jani’s mouth was a bitter line, and Lujo’s yawn swallowed the night. They’d travel all night, Butu explained, and when they were inside the outer line of patrols, they’d rest. Lujo didn’t complain for four hours, and Jani never once opened her mouth as they backtracked toward the rock.

  Finally, as they marched partway up the side of a tall dune, on the idea that patrols would look at ridges and valleys and not in between, Butu felt nothing around them for at least half a mile. He poked his head over the top. Torches on Urgaruna had been visible the past two hours, and now, as a thin blue line promised the start of the day, the rock loomed before them, less than a mile away. He thought about Pisor as he watched the three distinct camps in front of it, soldiers moving like ants from this far away. A squad of cavalry thundered out on patrol, their hooves just reaching his sensitive ears.

  “I’ll take first watch,” he said. “You two sleep. Two hours, then I’ll wake Lujo. Then two more for Jani, all right?”

  “Can we stay here that long?” Jani asked. “The Zhekara patrols came out this far.”

  “Farther,” Butu corrected. “They’re behind us already, about a mile back. And if we’re not fine, we’ll have plenty of warning. Besides, when Lujo’s on watch he can build us a shelter and no one will notice us.”

  Lujo was already asleep, half-buried in sand. Jani did the same, staring around her wildly.

  “Do you think they followed us?”

  “No,” Butu lied. Someone had seen us leave, I’m sure of it. Blay would be waking right now. It’s easy to track across this. Would Blay follow us, or go home? He was certain Blay would command them to go home. Will Tirud argue? He couldn’t decide.

  Well, he’s done nothing but ask us to question Blay’s authority.

  The thought startled Butu. Did Tirud lead me to make this choice? Is he as much of a liar as Blay?

  He crawled back up to stare at Urgaruna as the sun broke the horizon.

  It was a mountain, no doubt about it. This close, it rose into a shadowy knife of black rock stabbing the sky. Steep slopes met narrow ledges to riddle the structure with places to hide and false entrances to the tomb beneath — the legendary city of Urgaruna, lost for a thousand years.

  He ducked his head as he felt a cavalry patrol come by, headed to the rock. The ten horses trotted through the valley below him, and he chanced to look at them again.

  Zhekara, he thought. Of course they’d come back to camp somehow. He cursed himself for thinking they’d be safe here.

  But the squad went by without even looking up, intent on getting home, and he coughed out a sigh of relief, leaning back and drinking from his waterskin. He took a deep breath and concentrated on keeping watch. Time passed quickly, and he woke Lujo from a sound sleep.

  Lujo held up well on little sleep, Butu had noticed as his tentmate, and after two hours here, he was alert.

  “We saw it,” he had said, when Butu had asked him to come. “The rock, the armies.” He had hung his head in his hands. “A lot of people are going to die for this sword. Maybe if we take it, no one will fight, because there’ll be nothing to fight over.”

  It was a second-cycler’s comment, Butu knew, but he didn’t dissuade his friend.

  We’re all here for different reasons, he thought as Lujo’s tent went up to hide them. He’s here for a noble ideal, while I’m here because of Nolen. He fell asleep thinking about Paka, though. I wonder if I’ll see my shumi again before I die.

  Jani woke him with the sun high in the sky and a faint rumbling, far in the distance. Lujo was already at the rise, and he and Jani joined him.

  “Shanubu,” he breathed.