by L. D. Lewis
“This is just my face, Mr. Moreno,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he chuckled and joined her on the wall. “Looks like the face of someone wondering about the life choices they made to be staring at the ass-end of a rhino.”
“See that a lot here?”
“Mm-hmm.” Mr. Moreno chuckled and tossed her an apple of her own. He wasn’t all that old, really. Had her by about ten, fifteen years but melanin had kept his wrinkles fine and the labor had kept him firm. And he always seemed to be happy.
Good for him.
“Too long away from my bed.” Daynja told him. It wasn’t completely a lie.
“Well, maybe they’ll let you sleep in it awhile this time. There can’t be too many more baddies to send you out after.” Mr. Moreno shrugged.
“You’d think that, right?” Daynja bit into her apple and reveled in its sweetness. Perhaps hunger had something to do with her ennui.
Deus was escorted from his stall. The attendants adorned him in plates of studded black metal marked with red clay circles. His horn and the tips of his ears were sheathed in mottled gold. He was twice Daynja’s height and met her eyes with his own bored gaze. He huffed from his giant nostrils, making clouds of a layer of dust on stone path.
“I know,” Daynja told him. She patted his face and held the apple in her mouth to hoist herself up the chain-link ladder to his saddle. Behind them, the other seven slightly smaller rhinos were being brought out from their dressing stalls in a line, their attendants standing back with bowed heads.
She blew a two-note whistle for her Shadows and called “mount up!”
The Shadows appeared quickly from wherever they’d each been loitering during the wait. They aligned their animals in two columns behind One, who centered himself on her.
“Go on, Deus,” she muttered, and the beast led the lot of them tromping onward toward the city.
Before the arrival of Os Vazios, Citadela was just another Boorhian nation-state that made for a spectacular sight. For miles the city sprawled across a valley south of the distant mountain line that split the continent between its lands of hot, lush greenery and cool, arid, nothingness.
After Os Vazios, the city sheltered refugees behind its walls and gates, and became the center for all of Boorhia’s counter-offensive measures. An ocean of clay tile rooftops marked civilian territory. A cluster of tall, black buildings in the city’s northern interior marked the military compound. The ministry that had once governed Citadela was now overseen by emperors, and the blood-orange glass dome dominating the city’s center was no longer the capitol building, but a palace.
A few hundred yards out, Daynja chucked her apple stem into the tree line. A crooked-looking jacaranda marked the place just outside the visual range of anyone who cared to look outside the city’s gate. She had used it for as long as she’d been doing this, to know when to pull the mask from her hip and wear it. Boorhia loved its legends, and the impenetrable General Édo was a favorite. She thought it rude to ruin the illusion with her mortal face.
She sighed, looking into the back of the mask for the thousandth time before placing it over her face. At once, the legendary black armor crept over her body, beginning with her eyes, and coating everything from hair follicle to toenail.
The General didn’t have a personal god, nor did she know which of the existing ones were even canon anymore. But the start of the city was marked by alabaster obelisks with shallow cubbies carved in their faces for the placing of miniature wood or stone idols so regional gods and saints knew where to find and bless their faithful while they were visiting. Beyond them, two chimeric stone goddesses a hundred meters tall, stood armed on either side of the city’s gate. There was no shortage of divine feminine architecture in Citadela.
The black gate opened as General Édo and the Shadows approached. Cheering crowds already lined the avenue. She didn’t know how they knew to assemble because she was always on the other side of the gate when they did. The city still smelled of dew and morning coffee and prayer-burnt herbs. Petals and whole blossoms in every color were flung into the road before the rhinos. Their riders remained stoic, forward-looking, as if they were marble busts of themselves and not wholly revered flesh. Small children showed off paper and tree bark masks of their own and waved frantically to get the General’s attention to flaunt them. By ten years of age, most of them would be small soldiers beginning their training on the other side of the inner gate.
The indulgent little procession ambled toward the inner gate to the military district at the far end of the avenue, where black-clad soldiers stood in solid lines and a team of advisors and lesser generals waited to welcome them back.
The inner gate —two obscenely tall and ornate iron doors— closed behind them, and the cheers dwindled to breezy sounds well over their heads. Deus groaned audibly as General Édo dismounted, equally relieved it was over and already dreading the next time it had to happen. The Shadows followed her lead and moved swiftly into a standing formation with the other soldiers. Pages saluted quickly and guided the rhinos away without much ceremony at all and Daynja heard and disregarded the congratulations from members of the military’s old guard who didn’t particularly like her but who were here because her life was still exceedingly more interesting than their own.
She’d been serious about missing her bed and turned to dismiss her Shadows.
“General Édo,” called a familiar voice.
Édo’s childhood mentor, the stout Mr. Remy, approached quickly. He was short with a feisty stride and always seemed ripe with a complaint.
Daynja took advantage of her mask’s hiding the curses she muttered before she removed it and tucked it under her arm. The armor disappeared with it. The Shadows saluted.
“Good morning, Mr. Remy,” she said, barely tempering her irritation. It wasn’t that she didn’t like or respect the man, but he was another ridiculous obstacle in a morning that was going on too long.
“Welcome back.” He replied with a tight, compulsory smile. “I trust everything went as expected.”
“Yes,” she said flatly.
“Good. Emperor Negus has a request to make of you.”
Daynja’s skin prickled. She’d grown up with the Emperor and trained under his mother’s permission. Somehow he’d interpreted her debt to the Empress as a debt to himself despite his overwhelming unworthiness.
“Of course he does. No rest for the wicked...” Daynja scoffed.
“And, General, he’d like to discuss it with you tonight in the War Room. The other generals are in agreement with you that Bastiat’s been picked clean and it’s time to re-evaluate where they are using your talents.”
“‘Bastiat’s been picked clean?’ The world has been picked clean, Mr. Remy. I should know. I’m the one doing the damn picking!”
Mr. Remy, stoic in the face of decades of Daynja’s stubbornness, held up his hand to stop the frothing she’d begun to do. She growled herself to silence.
“Tonight. The War Room.” He said calmly. “Get rest and remember yourself by then.”
Daynja glared after him as he walked away. She knew he felt comfortable leaving her seething in silence because he knew she would come, despite her protest. Everyone did the bidding of the Empire.
The way they are using my talents. She sneered at the thought. In the beginning at least, it’d been she using them. But she was thirty-six years removed from the beginning. Somewhere, things had changed.
The military men loitering in the forecourt around her —men who estimated themselves her peers and superiors— flinched and looked away as her eyes scanned over them.
“You heard him.” She said, turning back to the Shadows. “Tonight. Keep to your regular duties until then.”
The Shadows dismissed themselves quickly for the most part, save for a lingering stare from One. Daynja couldn’t make out his expression —confusion, doubt, a daring bitterness, perhaps— but it piqued her curiosity and so she called him back.
“One.”
He stopped in his stride and moved smoothly back to stony attention. One had been with her longest. He’d grown from a spindly child into a towering young man, broad-nosed, dark-skinned, and handsome. Nothing about him was delicate but his eyelashes and his temper.
“Something on your mind just now?” She asked. At times his deep, interested eyes sparkled with something like the ambition forbidden to the Empire’s soldiers. Now they regarded their General carefully.
“No Xir. I am as tired as you are.”
Lies were also forbidden the Empire’s soldiers. But she’d chosen most of her Shadows for their forbidden qualities.
“Speak freely, One. And don’t waste my time.”
“The Emissary is an important man. The way you speak to him is unbecoming.” He said sharply. There was a coolness about him, as if he knew he was right and the General was wrong no matter what she said next. A century of Boorhian custom backed him.
Daynja nodded and kept her amusement to herself. “I see,” she said. “It’s good that you revere him. But Mr. Remy and I have known each other a long time and our relationship is complicated.”
“Like our relationship with you?” said One.
A breeze passed between them. Daynja watched as he dampened the twinkle of his eyes, the way he always did when he was caught being human.
“Not unlike it, no.” She considered for a moment whether probing was worth the responses she might receive. “You are dismissed,” she decided instead.
One turned on his heel and excused himself up a stone staircase and out of the square toward the barracks. The other Shadows had gone swift as whispers toward whatever would occupy them into the evening.
Daynja made her own way out of the shadow of towering administrative buildings and classrooms toward the sun-drenched parade grounds that divided the fortress. Drum beats resounded in her chest with an ancient rhythm when she reached the top of the stairs. The grounds were littered with small soldiers in neat rows and columns running disciplinary drills and marching formations to the sound of the drums. Flag drills raised and lowered in precision even to the rhythm of the echoes. The scent of sweat, the sounds of clashing metal and adolescent war cries rising from the training pits to the east drifted on the wind.
She made her way across the drill pads to the towering residential compound reserved for the heads of Boorhia’s government. The building’s base was formed of monumental stone columns shaped as women in varying poses and regal expressions. Their empty eyes saw both nothing and everything. They may have been goddesses once, now reduced to propping up the homes of mortal men.
She was beginning to see herself in them.
She’d lived in the same small apartment on the thirteenth floor of the center tower since clinching her first success with A Vibora. It was sparsely furnished with fine things commissioned from all over Boorhia. A coffee table cut from a great, felled tree somewhere in the eastern forests. Chairs with illustrated histories carved into their legs, sofas stuffed with black wool and upholstered in tough hides of northern beasts. Here and there, golden accents and trinkets from trips she’d accumulated and held onto less for nostalgia, and more for lack of something better to do with them.
The open shutters over the balcony let in sunlight to highlight the dust she disturbed by plopping herself onto the sofa.
Her boots came off with some effort and she thought vaguely about a bath but lay on her back and closed her eyes instead.
∴
“405.” General Édo muttered into her cachaça glass. She leaned against her balcony window overlooking the nighttime lights of the capitol.
“What's that?” Djinni asked, stretched out on the couch behind her.
“My count,” she sighed. “I added it up. Between myself and the seven Shadows I command, four hundred and five deaths have been served at the pleasure of the Boorhian Empire.”
“You're very good at your job,” Djinni offered.
Oh absolutely, the General smirked and pensively tapped a fingernail against her glass. “Just... seems high.”
“You seem troubled,” they remarked.
“Eh,” the General waved with a noncommittal groan.
Djinni shot upright with a gasp and an impish grin.
“Daynja Édo, are you feeling guilty?” they scoffed, incredulous.
The General cut her eyes at the demon as they popped up to get a better look at her face there in the dark.
“The subtly knitted brow, the sheen of vague sadness dulling those eyes. The Imperial Warlord of Boorhia has four hundred and five regrets! How positively human of you,” they chuckled, delighted apparently by this development.
“That will do, Djinni.”
“And here I thought you were all mask! Well I, for one, am proud of you. But I imagine the War Council won't be pleased. What do you intend to do then? Retire?”
No.
No, once you reached a certain level in the Boorhian Army, you died on the field or not at all. And who said it was guilt she felt anyway?
A clock tower sounded nine across the city.
“You should go,” she said, finishing off her glass. “I have an appointment.”
“I was thinking I'd stick around. You can tell me how it goes.”
“I'm thinking you won't.”
“Oh come now,” Djinni’s voice dipped into its sinister tenor. The residence warmed by degrees and things as light as the bourbon bottle began to levitate by inches. “Who loves you more than I do?”
The General allowed her glass to float out of her hand. She watched the uniformed men cross the drill pad below to the War Room. No one, in fact, loved her as much as Djinni did.
“Out. Now,” she ordered, eyeing her reflection and running her fingers through the short, silver coils of her hair.
“Suit yourself.” They huffed like a disappointed child. The room cooled and the floating objects dropped with clatters and thuds. “Be seeing you.”
She felt them gone like air through an open window.
The General peered up into the stern faces of the stone goddesses as she headed out.
The sky was its deepest possible blue, clear and flecked with constellations named for Boorhia’s greatest, feared minds. She’d picked out a cluster of stars for herself to the west, away from the bulk of legends and the last to be conquered when the sun rose daily. She’d be damned if she hadn’t earned them.
The dome of the War Room’s rotunda stood out against the darkness like the hot, white arc of a third moon. The men before it met one another with laughter and claps on the back like old poker buddies and not armchair mass murderers. Though admittedly, some of them were both. She was the only active warrior ever present at these things.
She proceeded across the expanse as the head of the speared formation of her seven black-clad assassins.
The formation stopped just inside the great hall. “Wait here,” she said, and the Shadows fell swiftly into a neat, statuesque row beside the doorway.
A static filled the atmosphere tonight. It piqued Édo’s senses as she nodded at the passing officers and ministers who made up the Emperor’s War Council. They eyed her, some with lascivious smiles. They enjoyed her exploits as much as any drunk enjoyed drinking, but she knew what they thought of her.
Mr. Remy approached quickly from the tall doors at the far end of the hallway, his clicking footfalls staccato in their rhythm on the marble floor.
“General Édo. Shadows.” Mr. Remy called. The Shadows bowed in his direction as he came upon them.
“Good evening, Mr. Remy.” The General replied.
He took stock of the Shadows, sizing them up with keen eyes. “His Eminence is about ready to begin.”
“Of course he is. Let's get on with it.”
“Bring your lieutenant,” suggested Mr. Remy. How unorthodox. The General hesitated with a raised eyebrow and watched him for signs that he might explain why. “General, we haven't got all day.”
“Join us, One,” the General shrugged. One stepped forward and followed them into the chamber.
The War Council took seats at a senselessly large round table. Spectating officers and ministers stood against walls around them. The First Shadow took his place standing at the General’s back.
“General Édo, and her First Shadow. How pleased we are you've been able to join us.” Emperor Negus smiled politely on his gilded throne at the far end.
“Pleased as always to be here, Your Eminence,” Daynja said flatly.
Negus’s Chief Minister stood and called the meeting to order. His beard and the hair on his head were so soft, coiffed, and white, he almost looked friendly.
Dossiers were dispatched around the table. Daynja flipped through it to see a young woman photographed on a beach with a few dozen discontents. The buzzing began in her ears again. Something wrong was coming.
The Minister began, “We have received word that a Queen-Saint has ascended to the throne in Eros despite Emperor Negus’s merciful suggestions that that not happen. With her comes the growth of certain anti-Empire rhetoric and a faction we’d like to be rid of.”
“So, a show of force operation. Squash the rebels, remind them of their place. This is a militia job. The Shadows are overqualified.” Daynja offered.
“Not quite, General,” Emperor Negus interjected. “You and the Shadow Army will eliminate the Queen-Saint and her faction.”
Here, the General laughed. The sound was said to shake souls free of the bones they clung to. Surrounded as she was by soulless men, however, there was nothing here to shake.
“You're joking,” she scoffed at the Minister. “She’s a child! And Eros is a pious island nation. They’re pacifists because the Queen-Saint’s main job is to beg favors from old, dead gods for their defense. There is absolutely no threat here.”
The Minister glared and the Emperor’s jaw clenched the way it did when the serenity General Édo’s brutishness granted him was inconvenienced. The men on the edges of the room seethed, the shifts of their loosening bodies in their pristine uniforms audible in the silence of the rotunda.
“Am I to understand you’re confused about these orders?” The Emperor spoke low in the hallowed oval, meaning to threaten her with his tone. She knew him too well to take him seriously.