Child of the Daystar (The Wings of War Book 1)

by Bryce O'Connor

  “Luck my ass,” Reyn snorted, crouching down. Aside from the dirt and leaves that clung to its body from the fall, the deer looked practically untouched. There was no sign of injury, no wound or blood. To the human eye it was as though the animal had keeled over on its own and died.

  Which was pretty much the case, Syrah thought, sticking her staff in the soft ground before unwinding the leather straps she’d had wrapped around her waist and kneeling down.

  Laor’s gifts were many and great, but the small talent he granted his faithful in the arts of magic were possibly the most potent of all. In their varying years of training the Priests and Priestesses learned to control and manipulate the powers, changing them to suit their needs. Most of their studies were devoted to healing, something Syrah had unfortunately never had a true talent for. On the other hand, these other—less docile—aspects of magic certainly had their uses…

  And what Syrah had always had a talent for was fighting.

  Maybe it was the fact that she’d practically been raised by a former gladiator. Maybe it was the remnant memories of a thatched mud-brick house, the floor covered in blood and dust and bodies. Regardless, what Syrah lacked in ability for the mending hand she made up twice over with her skills in the field. Even before she’d been granted her staff she’d often been a member of choice for the rare expeditions the Laorin took down the mountains during the freezes. Eret, bless his soul, always knew that she could take care of herself, even within the boundaries of the faith. The cardinal rule of the Laorin still held her firm and—while Syrah had left more than one man bloody and unconscious in her life—she’d never gotten near the edge of killing. It was an experience, even if it had been allowed, she was sure she’d never want to explore.

  Taking a life is like falling off a waterfall, Talo once told her on a rare occasion they’d discussed his former life. There’s a moment of exhilaration, a minute where you feel invincible as the red dyes your hands… And then you hit the water below and it rushes over you, flooding into your lungs until you can’t breathe.

  No. That wasn’t something Syrah ever wanted to experience.

  But it wasn’t merely the horror of the actual act that stopped her. Murder was an unforgivable sin, and the punishments for a Laorin knowingly taking a life were severe and brutal, even by the kindest standards. Priests, Priestesses, and even acolytes who partook in the knowledgeable death of a person were cast out of the faith, carted to Ystred, the closest of the North’s mountain towns, and given enough money for food and shelter for a single night. Then they were left to find their own way in a harsh world many of them had little experience dealing with.

  But not before they were Broken.

  Even in the summer warmth Syrah shivered, giving the leather straps she’d tied around the deer’s feet one final tug. Laorin who were Broken were separated from Laor’s gift, had the magic ripped out of them in a ceremony that left them scarred and marked forever as a traitor to the faith. She’d only seen it happen once, to a young Priestess who hadn’t been more than three or four years her senior, but Syrah had prayed every day for the next two months that she would never witness such a thing again.

  The screaming had been the sort to craft nightmares not quickly forgotten.

  “Wait’ll Carro and Jerrom get a load of this one! They’ll piss themselves, the old tarts!”

  Syrah blinked and looked up at Reyn, who was smiling mischievously, already wrapping one of the leather strap’s loose ends around his wrist. Getting to her feet, Syrah smirked, doing the same.

  “You don’t think it’s a little early to be gloating?” she asked, pulling her staff from the earth and grunting as they started making their way back through the Woods toward the mountain stairway. “I think you said something like that two days ago, and those two came back with a net-full of fish the size of your body…”

  “Yeah, but that day we only caught a couple of hares and a pheasant.” He smiled again, pushing aside a pine branch. “This time we’ve got enough meat to last a whole table the night!”

  Syrah rolled her eyes and laughed, watching Reyn smile and tug the deer around a rock with arms toned from years of instruction under Master Brern.

  It was good to be home. It was good to see her friends again, and to be free of the responsibilities she’d had working in Metcaf and Harond. The past few years had been hellish, a constant war to forge relations between the mountain clans of the Vietalis—the ranges that capped the west and northwest corner of the North—and every nearby town. She’d been homesick for a majority of it, disliking the feeling of being hundreds of leagues from where she felt safe, and so far hadn’t regretted a moment of returning.

  But what she had been regretting of late were the strong hands of the young night-watch captain she’d been seeing for the better part of the last half year.

  Her fair features, despite her pale skin and pink eyes, had always been good at supplying certain comforts…

  “It’s always the same with you men,” she huffed playfully, pushing a lock of her white hair out of her face and tucking it behind an ear. “Size always has to come into play, doesn’t it?”

  Reyn tripped over a protruding root, almost tumbling to the ground.

  “I-I—Wha—? I mean—Who said—?” he stuttered, fumbling over his words.

  Syrah smiled, winked, and said no more as they kept moving through the trees, deer in tow. Reyn, for his part, was open mouthed and silent the rest of the walk, lost for words.

  The only sound he managed to make for a while, in fact, was a hopeless groan once they arrived back at the stairway.

  Carro and Jerrom were waiting for them, smiling knowingly and lounging in the grass beside the bodies of an antlered buck and a boar whose shoulder would have reached a short man’s hip.

  XII

  “I never saw him fight, a fact I will always regret. I heard say he could enter a ring bare-handed and give the crowd a show, plucking the sword from another man’s grasp before running him through with it. Even when he didn’t kill he was the one the people always thronged to. Above all else, I wish I’d been there just to understand how he could do it, how he could fight and kill so many and yet claim to hate it so much…”

  —Xerus Junt, Doctore of the Stullens Arena, c. 865 v.S.

  The documents hadn’t yielded a fraction of what Raz hoped they might. Barely any of the šef seemed to keep records with anything more than numbers and a few coded words to spare, and those foolish enough to mark down such things as times or places had scrambled to change their plans before Raz could do any real damage. He’d been pleased to hear he’d caused a minor financial crisis for Sass and a few others but, infuriatingly, the biggest coup he’d been able to pull off in the month since was freeing all the Caged prisoners from their confinements two weeks back.

  And now the sentries along the market square had been tripled, so even that opportunity was gone.

  Raz sat on the dirt floor of the cellar of an abandoned butcher’s shop a few blocks west of the east slums. He’d been there for almost a week now, and knew he would have to move again soon. Sharpening his gladius in the sparse light of a few candles, though, he had other things on his mind.

  He was losing momentum. Twice now Raz had approached old contacts only to discover they were shocked to see him, informing him the rumor was he’d been killed. He hadn’t flung himself into this crusade to give people hope for a better future, but it still somehow irked him that so many thought him dead when in truth the Mahsadën had simply tightened their defenses tenfold. Plans he’d started forming weeks ago were now that much more difficult to pull off. Chances were missed, opportunities snatched away. The whispers said Ergoin Sass was behind it all, urging the other šef to treat Raz as a direct threat after the mess he’d caused.

  Thank you for that, cousin, Raz thought bitterly, holding the sword up and examining his reflection in the steel. T
he amber eyes looked back at him, full of judgment.

  Putting the gladius aside, he reached to grasp Ahna’s shaft and pulled her across the ground into his lap. The bleached wood of the dviassegai was marred and chipped, evidence of the years of abuse he’d put her through. The leather wrappings Jerr had strung around the shaft were worn and frayed from use. There were nicks and scratches that gave her twin blades a scarred appearance, crisscrossing over the steel and chipping tiny fragments from her honed edges.

  Raz reached up and ran a finger over his snout, feeling the three dents of the scars he’d had there for as long as he could remember.

  “Figures you’d end up looking like me in the end, huh, sis?” he chuckled, putting Ahna aside again and climbing to his feet. Crossing the cellar, he moved to lean over an old table set up against the far wall, the only other furniture being the sleeping mat he’d rolled out directly in front of the room’s door. A pair of candles lit the table’s surface, illuminating the array of objects littered across it.

  There were the fiscal records, flattened and scattered now, piled around an old brass inkwell and feather quill. Beside them a bone-handled knife doubled as the paperweight for a few sheets of blank parchment and a series of useless correspondences he’d intercepted. The remainders of his last meal, the stripped bone of some raw lamb he’d stolen, sat below one of the candles.

  Uninterested in all of these, Raz pushed the scattered papers aside, searching. It took a minute, but eventually he managed to find the bundle of rolled-up scrolls, pulling them free of the mess. Unlooping the twine that held them closed, he spread the thin parchments out across the table.

  He’d stolen the maps from Adrion’s office half a week ago without his cousin realizing, layouts to a building Raz suspected to be the center of operations for a good many of the Mahsadën’s bigger dealings. It had been a desperate move, especially after Sass tasked a half dozen of his hardest enforcers to look over his accountant’s house, but Raz hadn’t known what else to do. Adrion was his only link to the heart of the Mahsadën. Raz knew of other hideouts and estates where a few of the šef themselves lived, but they were too well guarded to be worth risking his neck for the life of one or two of eight ringleaders. He had to figure out a way to get them all in the same room, or at least closer together.

  Looking down at the maps laid out before him, Raz’s mind whirred.

  Maybe this would be his chance. He would have checked it out more thoroughly, but lack of proof and the recently bolstered measures of the entire organization had pushed him to decide it wasn’t worth the risk. Now, though, risks were all that were left. Sass had been right, in a way: all the things Raz had done, with some exception, were small fish, little more than annoying pokes in the back of the Mahsadën’s leg. He could pull off pranks like that for the rest of his life and accomplish nothing at all.

  No. He had to make a bigger move. He had to cut at the šef’s hold on the city somehow, had to deliver a blow that would actually damage them.

  To do that, though, he had to gamble…

  Raz picked up the knife and used it to trace the lines in the upper-left quadrant of the first map, lifting the corner up so that the candlelight could shine through the paper. He’d only suspected the building because he’d heard rumors of deals and meetings taking place there, but the fact that Adrion had had these plans must have meant something, right? The man was one of the group’s top bookkeepers. They probably trusted him with safekeeping the records they didn’t deem important enough to lock away.

  Which meant that, even if this building wasn’t as significant to the Mahsadën as Raz hoped, maybe it held some clue as to what he should do next.

  At worst he would just burn the whole place to the ground.

  Making up his mind, Raz let the corner drop to the table, his eyes flying over the papers, trying to memorize every detail. Those things he was sure he would need he copied down. Finishing with one section, he moved on to the next.

  After two hours of poring over the parchments, he had everything he needed, and Raz moved back to his mat on the floor. Lifting the edge, he pulled out a thin wooden box from under it. It had been risky, but he’d snuck back to his old rooms in the White Sands and salvaged what he could from the wreckage of his belongings. Most of his possessions had been destroyed or taken by the Mahsadën agents who’d tossed the place, looking for a clue as to where he might be hiding. Some things, though, had been missed or ignored, the box being one of very few items he’d found worth salvaging.

  Flipping the catch, he opened it, reaching in to pull out the thin wools of his mottled night gear.

  ________________________

  Raz couldn’t help but feel sad, swinging himself over the edge of Adrion’s balcony. The Grandmother was still there, staring off into the night, layers of thick fur blankets wrapped tightly around her, and a cap pulled over her head. She didn’t even notice him crouching beside her, pausing despite his better judgment.

  Then he bowed his head respectfully before looking to the wall above.

  It was several hours past midnight, the only time he knew his cousin would be asleep. Raz barely had any time to get back to his hole in the ground before day broke, and the last thing he wanted was to be caught in the streets again with only the gladius to defend himself. He wished he’d had more time to plan. He hated rush jobs, and this couldn’t really be considered anything but. He needed to get the maps back into Adrion’s office before anyone noticed they were gone—if they hadn’t already—so he’d be free to see what was actually going on without risk of being found out. If the Mahsadën realized one of their operations was compromised in any way, they would pull out within hours, leaving nothing behind.

  A gamble again, but he didn’t have many other options.

  Following the same path he had on his last “visit,” Raz crouched and leapt. Catching the windowsill of Adrion’s office with one hand, his feet found the top ledge of the balcony doors below him. Hoisting himself up high enough to grab the top of the window frame, he tucked into the narrow foot of space between the glass and the ledge of the sill. When he found his balance, Raz dug claws into the wood of the window and pulled, feeling it move just a little before catching.

  Adrion had locked it this time, it seemed.

  Drawing a thin knife from his hip, the blade too fragile to be of any use in a fight, Raz slid it carefully into the lower portion of the crack between the window and its wooden frame, moving it upwards slowly. When edge hit latch, he wiggled it, getting the tool snug before tugging upwards smoothly. There was a muffled clunk, and the window swung inward the slightest bit.

  Moments later Raz dropped into the office, no louder than a ghost as he landed on all fours on the carpeted floor.

  Cautiously he studied the room, peering into every dark corner. It was a spacious chamber, an excellent example of the fine tastes Adrion had developed since he’d found his apparent calling in the Mahsadën’s ranks. Tapestries and brightly colored paintings covered the walls, offsetting a large mirror with golden engravings depicting the Sun and Moon in each corner. Raz grit his teeth when he saw it.

  “If only They would take you, cousin,” he grumbled under his breath, standing up. “It would probably make my life a little easier, at least.”

  He could smell no one else, and his vision was good enough in the dark to notice any motion that spelled a trap. The guards Sass had left must have been downstairs. He was safe for the moment, and Raz hurried to the wide desk set up against the back corner of the room. Tugging the middle drawer open, he dug through the papers and letters carefully until he neared the bottom.

  Then, pulling out the maps he’d stowed in his shirt, Raz tucked them exactly where he’d found them, closing the drawer silently.

  He was out the window in a minute, using the thin blade to push the latch back down, locking it behind him. Dropping silently to the balcony below, he kn
elt in front of the Grandmother.

  “He’s turned traitor,” he spoke quietly. “A betrayer to our family and our ways. I hope you hear this, because I would ask you to pray to keep him out of my way. No one else is going to.”

  And then Raz leapt over the balustrade, dropping to the street below.

  If he’d taken a moment to look back up, perhaps just in the vain hope that the Grandmother’s eyes had followed his departure, Raz might have noticed the slim figure watching him. Swathed in black, she crouched down, peering over the edge of Adrion’s roof, balanced masterfully on its apex.

  XIII

  “While the rule of the Mahsadën covered only a relatively brief period in the grand scope of history as a whole, it is a well-remembered one. Even now, a century and a half after the fall of the shadow government, unhealed scars mar the faces of most of our cities. Amongst the worst to suffer during those years, the fringe town of Karth never fully recovered, becoming a den for thieves, bandits, and the sarydâ that still travel the desert routes. It is for this reason that, in the 23rd year b.S., the Age of Change, Karth was renamed Tatrê Suav, or Haven of the Traitor.”

  —exc. “As Death Rose from the Ashes,” by Kohly Grofh

  “Our scrolls were back, like you said they’d be,” Adrion spoke up from his seat in Sass’ office, turned in the chair to watch the man pace.

  “Then everything is going smoothly.”

  “You’re assuming a lot. How do you know he’ll take the bait?”

  “The Monster hasn’t been able to make a move in weeks.” Sass stopped by the window, pulling the crimson curtains aside with a finger to peer out. “It’s a stalemate, and you told me yourself he won’t be able to sit around and do nothing.”

  “Even before everything happened, he was like that,” Adrion agreed, nodding thoughtfully. “Picked that up from our uncle. But are you sure he’s going to go for it?”