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

by Bryce O'Connor

  —bedtime fable, c. 860 v.S.

  “HOW COULD YOU LET HIM GO? HOW? OVER TWO HUNDRED STRONG, AND ALL WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT IS TWENTY-FIVE DEAD AND ENDLESS QUESTIONS FROM THE MID-DISTRICTS!”

  “Gaorys, you weren’t there! My men say i’Syul took a bolt full in the back! He’s likely crawled up in some hole in the slums, bleeding to death. We’ve only to wait and—”

  “OH, YOU THINK SO, DO YOU?” Vyrr Gaorys spluttered. His paranoia was clearly getting the better of him. He was purple in the face from screaming. “AND HOW MUCH ARE YOU WILLING TO BET ON THAT, HMM? YOUR LIFE? MINE? BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE ARE RISKING! WE ARE—!”

  “Enough! The both of you!”

  Ergoin Sass’s words cut through the argument like a whip, and Gaorys spluttered to a silence mid-sentence. Across the wide circular table, Ulan Orture caught the retort he’d been about to bellow back.

  From his spot against the wall, Adrion watched the proceedings with feigned boredom, leaning against the arm of his chair with two fingers pressed to his temple. The meeting had been called in haste, but all came as summoned. The eight šef had taken their places around the oak table in the center of the vast window-lit room, their other lieutenants seated along the wall to Adrion’s right.

  More than a few of whom were taking in the argument with open mouths.

  “Orture, Gaorys is correct,” Sass sighed finally, looking to the Captain-Commander of the Miropan guard. “I have it on good authority that the lizard was injured, but most likely not so grievously as to mark an end to this madness. He’ll hide away, but it’s only a matter of a week or two before he—”

  “He won’t.”

  Every head in the room turned toward Adrion. Sass shot him a seething look, but Adrion ignored him. It was high time he start making his own voice heard, even if some šef didn’t agree.

  “Who are you to interrupt us?” Alysya Orture, Ulan’s twin sister, demanded sharply. “If he’d wanted your opinion, Ergoin would have—”

  “Quiet, Alysya.”

  The room deadened instantly. Imaneal Evony was watching Adrion with deceptive casualness. The gold and silver rings on his fingers glinted in the light of the morning Sun, and Adrion felt some of his confidence slip away staring into those cruel eyes.

  “Speak,” Evony ordered coolly, and no other voice rose to oppose the command.

  “H-he won’t.” Adrion tripped over the words, coughed, and continued more strongly. “He won’t hide. Raz doesn’t have the patience to, and he likely sees this time as our most vulnerable. And is he wrong? We’ve put all our eggs in one basket and, now that the basket has slipped through our hands, where do we stand? Stalemated again.”

  “i’Syul is injured, though.” Evony tilted his head. “Of that we are all agreed.”

  “Short of running him through-and-through, I can’t imagine a wound in the world that would slow my cousin down.”

  Evony nodded slowly, pausing before speaking again.

  “And you think… what? That we should expect retaliation today? Tomorrow? When?”

  Adrion had just opened his mouth to express his worst fear when there was an abrupt knock on the room’s carved double doors.

  “What is it?” Sass snarled. He was clearly not happy with the way the conversation was going. “You were told not to disturb us!”

  “Urg-urgent message!” a wavering voice called through the wood. “Beggin’ yer attention promptly, sirs and madams!”

  Sass frowned, looking to Evony, who nodded. Adrion, on the other hand, had heard something else in the messenger’s tone. He’d just started crying out a warning when Sass gestured to one of the sentries posted on either side of the door.

  “Wait!”

  But the sarydâ had already reached down and pulled up the handle.

  There was an explosion of wood and dust, and the man was catapulted across the room into the table as the left door was kicked in so violently it ripped free of its top hinge. The second sentry barely had time to loosen his sword from its scabbard when something silver flashed, opening him up from hip to hip. He was on his knees, screaming his last few breaths away, when Raz i’Syul Arro stepped into the room.

  In his free hand, held by their hair, swung a half-dozen heads of the sarydâ assigned to guard the stairway outside.

  ________________________

  Raz examined the room almost leisurely. Diamond-paned windows cut through the stone of the west wall, casting the floor with bright patches of morning light. Six men and two women leapt to their feet around a circular table in the center of the wide chamber, all turned to look at him with a surprising level of calm. Beyond them, another eleven looked on, clearly much less reserved. Amongst this group, his crutch leaning beside him, was Adrion.

  Raz ignored his cousin’s glare, tossing Ahna over his shoulder and looking back. The man he’d held at blade point was standing in the doorway, shaking in his boots.

  “Why are you still here?” Raz asked him, lacing the question with implication.

  The sarydâ ran so fast he tripped and almost fell headfirst down the stairs.

  Raz chuckled dourly. Dropping the heads to the floor with staggered thumps, he stepped closer to the eight šef. A few flinched when he moved, betraying the fear hidden behind nearly every face, masterfully masked. Even Vyrr Gaorys held his composure, though his hands started to shake when Raz’s eyes passed over him.

  “Raz i’Syul.”

  Raz blinked. One of the šef stepped out of the group and walked around the table toward him. He was a tall man, swathed in gold-trimmed lavender robes that swirled with the slightest motion. He looked to be the oldest of them, his head completely bald and chin framed by a pointed goatee. His sharp eyes, though, spoke of wit volumes beyond his age.

  A man Raz had never met personally, but knew well by reputation.

  “Imaneal Evony,” he stated plainly. Evony smiled, coming to a stop a dozen feet away, just outside of Ahna’s reach.

  Clever old man.

  “I see you know me,” the šef remarked, gesturing to the other members of the group. “So I assume you know the rest of us, and our confidants.” He motioned to the eleven seated against the back wall. Raz’s gaze fell back on Adrion for a moment.

  “Some better than others,” he replied, not taking his eyes off his cousin until the man looked away.

  “Excellent!” Evony exclaimed with another smile. “Then there is no need for introduction! Now, tell me… what can we do for you?”

  Raz stared at him, and the stillness of the room could almost be tasted on the tongue.

  “What do you expect me to say to that?” he asked after a moment. “I’d figured my reasons for being here weren’t terribly complex.”

  “But they are,” Evony replied, frowning in false confusion. “We”—he motioned again to the other šef—“are your employers. We have the assets to supply you with whatever it is you need. Work? I’m familiar with your rules, and I can assure you we have plenty of problems you would be interested in handling for us. Money? Not an issue. I’m sure Ergoin and the others haven’t been paying you half of what you are—”

  “I don’t want your money!” Raz spat, the crest along his neck flaring up. This time a number of the šef cringed. Only Evony and Ergoin Sass, who stood near the far end of the table, didn’t budge.

  “You’re sure?” Evony asked him with a knowing smile. “I don’t think you understand. I can offer you rates that are deserving of your skills. And I can offer you other things. Here, Emyl!” One of the men seated at the back leapt up at once. “Draw up documents ceding the Vorshceyer estate to Master i’Syul. They won’t be needing it after—”

  “I said NO!”

  The room stilled at Raz’s roar. Evony frowned, the flare of his ego winning over his desire to turn Raz in his favor.

  “This is your last ch
ance, Monster,” the man snarled, glaring with a daring intensity Raz had never seen in a human. “We’ve given you a place in this society before, and I’m willing to offer it to you again so long as you do as I say when I say it. You’re an animal, and if it weren’t for your limited talents I would have had you put down long ago.”

  Raz’s body chilled at the words, and he felt the taunts tear holes in his self-control. His eyes never leaving Evony’s, he took a step forward.

  “Slaver,” he hissed as he moved, staring down the man, who amazingly stood his ground. “Murderer. Thief. Rapist. All of these and more can be applied to every one of you, Evony. Yourself especially, if I’ve heard right. You kill for personal gain. You take away freedoms so that your own might be improved. You maim and scar and lock people away in places that never see the Sun. You say you know my rules? Then answer me this. This game is at its end. I’ve done things for you that I will never forgive myself for. So, knowing that, tell me why would I ever go back to—?”

  The whisper of footsteps.

  Raz sensed more than saw the motion, leaping to the side in time to evade the curved dagger that would have buried itself into his lower spine. Even so, he couldn’t avoid the blow completely, and he snarled when the thin blade caught the membrane of his left wing, slicing a foot-long vertical gash clean through it. Reflexively he twisted, swinging Ahna around like an ax.

  Her head caught Sass, who’d taken advantage of Raz’s distraction to slip behind him, in the side just below his stomach, ripping him open from end to end.

  Raz’s body shook from the pain radiating from his wing and the aching crossbow wound. He watched his old handler stumble back, gaining his balance just in time to gape at his own insides slipping through the slash in his gut. Sass dropped the knife and fell to his knees, desperately grabbing at his entrails, scrambling to hold them in place. When he realized it was no use, he looked up at the other šef, his own shock reflected back in each of their faces for a long moment.

  Then he collapsed to the ground, eyes open and one side of his face smacking down into the blood pooling around him.

  “NO!” someone screamed, and all hell broke loose.

  Raz let go, giving in completely to the animal. He turned on the room, his vision slipping into the red-black spectrum of his own bloodlust. Falum Tyle, the head of the Mahsadën’s ragroot trade, fell first, braving a bodily lunge at Raz, sword drawn and yelling a warcry before leaping from the table he’d run across.

  Ahna speared him out of the air, flinging him through the windows with a crash.

  Raz was the Moon’s reaper, dancing to death’s drum, flashing across the room in all different directions. He leapt and twisted, slashed and thrust. Ahna moved through his hands like water, feeling light as air as he twirled her over his head, behind his back, and around his shoulders. She cut through everything she touched like a scythe taken to harvest, and immediately the room was filled with screams. Those few who tried to break for the door found their way somehow barred by Raz, his tail sweeping feet from under bodies and breaking necks. His wings whipped out to join the melee of steel and flesh, shattering bones and throwing people into the table and walls. The šef were struck down one by one, some putting up a fight with daggers and swords, others pleading for their lives. Ahna fell on them like judgment. Krane úl’Syen, master of the local thieves guilds. Vyrr Gaorys, the money handler. Dimonia Gríc, the woman responsible for coordinating and running the black market sex trades. Alysya Orture, a dark-skinned Percian who handled all inter city trade, and her brother, Ulan.

  There were others between them, the confidants that had accompanied the group. Raz made no exception, hacking Ahna left and right, up and down, leaving some wounded, some dead, and some hovering in between. Bodies fell, the stone floor of the room growing slick and sticky with blood. One after another they piled up. Throats were cut, bodies mangled, limbs severed, flesh slashed. Raz spun like a whirlwind of vengeance, a gale of steel, teeth, and claws.

  After three minutes, it ended.

  Raz came to a stop over the last moving figure in the room. Every other body was still, but Imaneal Evony looked up at Raz from his place on the ground. He scrambled back, sliding over the wet floor. One of his eyes was sealed closed by the blood seeping from a cut across his forehead, and his right leg was twisted at an odd angle, broken at the hip where Raz’s tail had thrown him across the room.

  “I can give you anything!” he screamed. Raz followed him unhurriedly. Ahna at his side, he stepped over the forms scattered across the floor. “ANYTHING! JUST NAME IT!”

  Evony’s back found the corner of the wall, and he started to shake.

  “You can’t do this,” he breathed, staring up at Raz. “You can’t do this! They’ll kill you! You think you’ve won by doing this? YOU’RE WRONG! WE ARE EVERYWHERE! THE OTHERS WILL FIND YOU! THEY’LL FIND YOU AND THEY’LL—!”

  Shtunk.

  The bottom tip of Ahna’s shaft speared his heart, splitting through him, and Evony jerked once. His bald head lolled toward his chest, his forehead resting on the leather of the dviassegai’s lowest handle.

  For a long time Raz stood over the dead man, watching him, unsure of exactly what he was looking for. He was in control of himself now, he was sure of it. So why did he still have the savage urge to tear Evony apart with his bare hands, along with every other corpse in the room?

  He resisted. Placing a foot on the man’s shoulder, he pulled Ahna free, letting Evony slide sideways down the wall. The man slumped to the ground, sending short ripples through the thick, pooling blood.

  Turning away, Raz listened to the snuffling of the survivors, taking in the moans and keening wails of shock and pain. His eyes moved over the forms of the living and dead alike, and he finally found the one he was looking for shivering near the east wall of the room, curled up on his side by the headless body of Alysya Orture. Moving to stand over the figure, Raz put a foot on his shoulder and shoved him over.

  Adrion rolled onto his back, glaring up at Raz and cradling what looked like a broken arm. There was a large gash across his chest, ending just below his collarbone, and red wetness dribbled from a stab in the thigh of his bad leg.

  And yet, despite all of it, he still managed a sneer.

  “You going to kill me, too, cousin?”

  Raz didn’t respond at first, looking the man over. He pulled Ahna off his shoulder and gripped her in both hands.

  “You don’t deserve any better,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, and you’re going to be the judge of that?” Adrion demanded sarcastically, pushing himself up onto his good elbow. “You? Really? Look at yourself sometime, Raz. You turned into you a long time before I turned into me. If anything, you taught me how to sail this ship.”

  “I’m not you,” Raz snapped. “And if you say that I am again, Mychal, I swear by the Sun I’ll cleave you open right here and now.”

  “DON’T CALL ME THAT!” his cousin screamed, striking out at Raz and falling over. “DON’T CALL ME THAT! BASTARD!”

  “Fine, Adrion,” Raz smirked, watching the man struggle to sit up again, his right arm hanging uselessly from his shoulder. “I’ll call you whatever you want. I’d rather it, actually. You don’t deserve the name your parents gave you.”

  “MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!”

  The room seemed to go quiet, the silence of the dead around them drowning out the cries of the living. Adrion started to laugh.

  “Dead!” he chortled, and Raz was shocked to see tears cut through the blood that stained his face. “All dead. Because of you, Raz. My parents, my sister, now my friends. You. Killed. Everyone.”

  “I didn’t kill the Arros,” Raz hissed.

  “You as good as,” Adrion chuckled, looking up. “Where were you, Raz? When they came, when those men spilled out of the city like wolves, where were you? You weren’t there. You were out playing on the rooftop
s. And they were there for you.”

  Abruptly, he stopped laughing. In an instant Adrion’s face shifted from maddened amusement to loathing.

  “They were there for you!” he screamed, throwing himself at Raz. “FOR YOU! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING LIZARD! I’LL TEAR YOU APART AND BURN YOUR FUCKING—!”

  Raz backhanded the man, sending him sprawling. For a full minute Raz stood over his cousin, heart pounding, feeling Adrion’s words rock through his body and tear at old wounds.

  Then he calmed himself, resting Ahna’s tip on the ground. Using her to help him kneel by Adrion, he found him unconscious but breathing. From a knee Raz stared down at his damaged face, trying to see the boy he remembered from years ago.

  He couldn’t. Mychal was dead and gone.

  “It was my fault,” Raz said quietly. “You’re not wrong. But at least I fought to make things better, Adrion. You didn’t.”

  Raz got to his feet gingerly and eased Ahna over both shoulders.

  “Take care of our Grandmother, cousin.”

  XVIII

  “We’re through. You can come out now.”

  At the driver’s words, Raz pushed up on the wooden planks he was lying under, lifting the door to the smuggler’s hatch he’d been curled in for the last three hours. Sitting up and groaning at the throbbing of his healing wing and side, he looked out the back of the open cart.

  The last twinkling lights of Miropa, the Gem of the South, were fading quickly in the distant night.

  Pushing himself to his feet, Raz grasped the cloth covering to steady himself. It had been years since he’d last traveled by cart, and the rumbling, bumpy sensation beneath his feet as he replaced the hatch’s cover felt both pleasant and sadly nostalgic. The wagon itself was a lot like his family’s had been, in fact, packed with goods and items to trade, pushed to the sides to offer better balance. Somewhere in the mess, Ahna was stowed away, along with his other weapons. His armor was there, too, finally removed with the help of hands greased by a couple of his last gold crowns.