The Outworlder

by Natalie J. Holden

  Karlan sighed, then sat on the sill next to him, and this time Taneem wasn’t able to hide his flinch.

  “War can get messy sometimes,” said the young lord with elation, “but you know this is no different than what befell our parents in Nes Peridion. We’re doing what they did to us; repaying our debt, restoring the natural order—”

  “We’re not in Nes Peridion,” cut in Taneem, unable to listen to this crap anymore. “These were not the people who killed our parents.”

  And even if they were, Taneem couldn’t find it in himself to justify the slaughter. He left Nes Peridion cycles ago, trying to build a new life away from violence, bloodshed, and class warfare. The only reason he agreed to follow Karlan was because Kiraes came and fed him some crap about claiming their legacy. He never said a word about murder and… whatever the fuck was happening outside.

  Karlan watched him intently, and Taneem clenched his fists. He realized he was shaking.

  “If there was any chance of keeping Nes Peridion from the hands of the tyrants, we would be there; you know it.”

  Excuses, Taneem thought. The sorcerer mumbled something about flickering merges, but the truth was, the people of Nes Peridion were tough—and wary—while those in Maurir spent their entire lives in peace and safety. They never expected the attack.

  But he didn’t say anything. He just swallowed the bitter taste that had been filling his mouth for days, and nodded. “Of course.”

  “Besides, old Haneaith is dead. We can only get to his idiot son. And we will.”

  His tone left no doubt that he regretted the fact. Taneem thought that if Haneaith were still alive, he would grab Karlan by the scruff of his neck and tan his backside before kicking him back to Tarviss. This whole moronic project would die before Dahls even got involved.

  A shame his son didn’t take after him.

  “It will be over soon, my friend,” continued Karlan, and Taneem felt something inside him break.

  “Yes, as soon as his Dahlsian friends breach the gate and kill us all,” he snapped. He realized what happened, and for a moment his heart stopped, seized by panic. He glanced at Karlan, but the lord seemed too shocked to say anything. With nothing to lose, Taneem decided to press on: “You said it was going to be different. You said they were going to run as soon as they smelled blood.” He pointed toward the Dahlsi camp, less than a league from the walls of the mansion. “Well, it doesn’t seem to me like they’re running.”

  Karlan composed himself and followed his gesture with a disinterested gaze. His lips flickered in disgust.

  “They will. If not now, then after the first battle.”

  A hysterical laughter escaped Taneem’s lips. “First battle? Last time you said there wasn’t going to be a battle! Make up your mind, Karlan!”

  “Enough!” The lord sprung to his feet so suddenly, Taneem reeled in shock. “Even if we’ll have to fight—so what?! Are you afraid of them, Taneem? A bunch of fags and junkies? They may seem imposing, but I assure you half of them will flee before dusk, and out of those who remain, half will be too high to pose any danger. We’ll crush them, all of them if we have to, and restore the rightful rule in Maurir. After that, in Nes Peridion. Then we’ll cut our way to Tarviss and nothing will stop us!”

  He looked manic, with cheeks flushed and teeth bared. But as soon as it flared, his wrath settled. His eyes rested on Taneem, and the young courtier felt smaller than ever before.

  “You’ll see,” added Karlan after a while. “You may doubt me now, but in time you will witness the true glory of Tarviss and regret your lack of faith.”

  Taneem was clenching his fists so hard, it hurt. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

  “I hope you’re right,” he croaked.

  He wished he could believe it.

  Chapter 7

  I didn’t follow Myar Mal’s suggestion. Instead, I headed straight to my tent. It was a sterile cocoon of silk and protective spells, small and cold, almost suffocating at times. Saral Tal once told me it reminded him of home, but I couldn’t fathom why. I tried to adorn it with various trinkets to make it seem less empty. Sadly, my attempts at keeping a plant had been unsuccessful; the magical compression killed everything unfortunate enough to be inside the tent when it folded. A shame, it would be a great help, especially while exploring worlds with no native life.

  When I was dismissed, the sun gate was halfway to closing. With Maurir’s twenty-something-hour long days, I still had some time before nightfall. But there was not much to do. The bleak landscape discouraged any thought of wandering, and my mind was too troubled for reading. So I lay on my cot, chewing on dried meat, thinking about everything that had happened that day. Going through every conversation, turning around every sentence I’d uttered, smoothing them, finishing them, wondering if there was anything else I could have said to have changed how things turned out.

  It was late into the night when I finally managed to fall asleep.

  I was awakened by a tingling of magic. For a moment, I lay with my eyes wide open, trying to figure out what was happening.

  A doorspell.

  I sprang from my cot, twisted my fingers in a cleaning spell, then quickly put on my suit, and grabbed my weapons. When I pulled away the flap, I faced Saral Tal, with no trace of his usual smile.

  “Myar Mal wants to see you,” he said simply, and the coldness of his tone woke me up.

  I glanced up: the sun was barely a thread across the sky. But even in the half-light, it was clear no one else was up yet.

  “What happened?” I asked, but Saral Tal only shook his head.

  “You should ask him yourself.”

  That smothered all the questions I had. Without a word, I followed him to the outskirts of the camp where a peculiar construction stood—half a sphere of white plastic. From what I saw yesterday, we used it to store our kites.

  Many people, usually outworlders, believed the kites were the pinnacle of Dahlsian technomagic. In truth, they were flying garbage. Gravity put a limit on the weight that could be lifted, and it topped at about one Dahlsi. There was no way to equip the kites with any kind of useful machinery: motors, steer, weaponry—forget it. They could only glide using natural streams of ae, the magical energy. Still, we kept them for aerial reconnaissance, and passing messages.

  The kites were gone.

  The chains we used to keep them down lay crumpled on the ground, while Myar Mal and other vessár-ai paced around, arguing and cursing. It didn’t take much to figure out the kites had not been deployed.

  A quick glance up revealed black triangles, barely visible against the dark blue sky. Luckily, the skydome in Maurir was pretty solid, otherwise they would have floated Out and disintegrated.

  But whatever comfort I drew from this quickly died when I saw the expression on Myar Mal’s face. His lips were pressed tight and brows furrowed, casting shadows over his dark, angry eyes.

  A figure I hadn’t noticed earlier sprang from the ground: a kas’sham. Almost humanlike but strangely proportioned, with a longer torso and shorter limbs and a large, expressionless face. Their uniform was puffed out by fur and cut around the joints, allowing greater range of movement. They strode toward me with the soft, dance-like steps of a natural-born predator. Their pink nose fluttered when they leaned forward and started sniffing.

  “Ith not him,” the kas’sham announced.

  “Are you sure?” asked Myar Mal. His arms were crossed, and his face pursed in discontent.

  The kas’sham regarded him with disdain—although that seemed like their default look—and drawled, “If you don’t trutht my ekthpertithe, why do you even athk?”

  Confused, I turned to the kar-vessár, “What’s happened?”

  He clenched his jaw, but didn’t answer. For a moment, no one spoke, and even I could feel the tension rising in the air.

  “Someone released our kites at night,” said Laik Var from somewhere on the side.

  This much I had deduced, but before
I spoke, it struck me.

  They thought it was me.

  At first, I felt nothing—just a vast, all-encompassing emptiness. I was a statue with no feelings or thoughts. All around me, there were real people, watching me, expecting… something.

  But what could I give them?

  “Aldait Han?” Laik Var’s voice broke through my stupor.

  “I was ready to die for you,” I stammered.

  “We wouldn’t have let you die,” protested the kar-vessár, and his tone commanded me to listen.

  “But you didn’t bother telling me,” I snapped, the betrayal still raw in my memory. “And I did it anyway, and now you—”

  “Who else could do it?” Myar Mal cut me off, looking me in the eye for the first time, and I felt like he had poured oil on my smoldering rage.

  Yeah, I know! I wanted to scream. You’re a perfectly normal, well-spoken man, while I struggle to form a simple sentence. Trust me, I know that better than anyone, dipshit; you don’t have to rub it in.

  But my jaw was frozen, and my thoughts jumbled. I barely heard the next thing he said.

  “Give me one person in the entire camp who would have a reason to sabotage our efforts and aid Tarvissi rebels?”

  “Why the fuck would I aid them? They were ready to kill me!”

  “People do many things out of a misplaced sense of duty,” remarked Innam Ar, but I didn’t even look at him—my gaze locked with Myar Mal’s in a battle I had no hope of winning but couldn’t give up. The kar-vessár’s jaw was tight, and his eyes shone with iron resolution. In any other circumstance, the sheer strength of that stare would have paralyzed me. But the one thing capable of breaking through my anxiety was anger.

  And I was angry. Angry at the situation, at Dahlsi, Tarvissi; at Myar Mal and his bloody confidence.

  “You know what I’d do if I really wanted to sabotage your efforts?” I reached to my pouch and scrabbled until my fingers closed on what I was after. I raised it for all to see.

  The Dahlsi around me paled; someone even took a step back. A slight tingling suggested that more than one protective spell was cast. Only Myar Mal stood immovable, never turning his eyes from me, cold and calculating as ever, and I hated him so much, it hurt. So, I opened my hand and let a red carai nut fall to the ground, where it got stuck in the damp ash, like a drop of blood.

  “Put that in our water supply and take out half of Mespana in one go.”

  No one said a word. They were all watching, and my anger started cracking, letting in the first pangs of anxiety. I wasn’t going to wait for it to take over. I made a stiff nod, never for a moment turning my eyes from Myar Mal. “With all due respect, Vessár-ai, I’m leaving.”

  “You can’t do that!” protested one of the vessár-ai; I didn’t see—or care—who.

  “You wanted to send me away yesterday.” The bitterness crept into my voice. Bile rose in my throat, and I worried that if I were to stay here much longer, I would throw up. “Should’ve just kicked me out with all the others. Though I guess that your need for me was more important at the time.”

  Again, no one answered, so I turned and started walking, a jumble of thoughts and emotions boiling in my mind. I tried to push them all away and formulate a plan. I had to take my personal stuff and then, I don’t know, find Tayrel Kan and ask him to open a merge with Espa Solia. Or with whatever. The one we—no, not we, not anymore; Mespana—used to move our—their!—forces, was obviously closed.

  Laik Var caught up with me. I didn’t stop—if anything, I only started taking longer steps, relishing in the way he trotted to keep up. It was childish, and I regretted it later, but at that moment, I didn’t care.

  “Aldait Han, wait,” he pleaded, and following the cycles of conditioning, I obeyed.

  “What for?” I growled. They should all be fucking happy to be rid of me, anyway.

  “We didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I can’t see what else you could mean, Laik Var,” I shot back. He didn’t deserve it; he was the only one who stood up for me from the beginning, and who bothered trying to stop me now. Still, he was also the only one here for me to lash out at.

  “They’re going to check everyone in the camp. And outside, if needed. You were just first in line.”

  “Because I’m Tarvissi.”

  A particularly loud huff of air escaped his lips—an attempt to sigh or combat the shortness of breath, I wasn’t sure.

  “Where are you gonna go anyway? To Tarviss? You think they’ll be happy to see you?”

  I stopped and turned to him angrily. “It didn’t bother you when you sent my family there!”

  He raised his hands in a placating gesture. “And for their sake, I ask you to stay.”

  That finally gave me pause. I crossed my arms and glared, waiting for him to go on.

  “Look, we made a mistake,” he started. “Deporting all Tarvissi was clearly an overreaction. We didn’t know what to do! Didn’t know who to trust. So, we decided to distrust everybody.”

  “A lot of innocent people had to pay for your overreaction.”

  “I know, Aldait Han. I’m sorry. But if the choice is between our people and others—”

  I didn’t let him finish. “The thing is, many of those people considered themselves Dahlsi up until the point you kicked them out.”

  “We were driven by fear, not malice. Look around you.” He grabbed my arm pleadingly. “We’re not an army. We have never waged a war. Fuck, we have never fought more than a dozen people at a time!”

  He was right. Dahls always occupied the precious spot between two powerful worlds, Tarviss and Tayan, being too small to be worth conquering and at the same time too rich for any of their neighbors to allow the other to have them. The situation changed when advancement in magic and technology allowed the Dahlsi to open a merge to the new cluster—thousands of uninhabited worlds ripe for the taking.

  But Dahls had yet to establish its own military force that others would have to reckon with. Mespana was created ten cycles ago—if it were a man, it would be just reaching adulthood—and it had less than two thousand people trained to work in duos or trios, in dozens at most. Even with the most advanced magic and technology at our disposal, both Tarviss and Tayan could crush us with sheer numbers.

  Not to mention the complete lack of military experience on our side. Fuck, we weren’t even real soldiers! Our primary job was documenting new worlds. We were only called when things got violent because, well, there was no one else.

  Still, we were not an army.

  “Tarviss cannot wage war against you without facing retribution from Tayan,” I protested, inciting a bitter laugh from my commander.

  “Unless Tarviss and Tayan band together and rip us to pieces. There are plenty of worlds for them to share,” he answered mirthlessly.

  “In that case, a few hundred Tarvissi living in colonies won’t make any difference.”

  He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “We both know it. And perhaps other people know it too, but they’re afraid. Can you blame them?”

  No. For me, war was a thing from old legends. I fought almost every day, but it was all skirmishes, man against man. But the clash of two armies? Hundreds, thousands, of people standing against each other? That was something else. Something I read about but never imagined I would take part in. And it terrified me.

  So no, I couldn’t blame the Dahlsi for fearing it, too, and doing anything in their power to avoid it.

  I shook my head, resignation welling in my chest. “What do I have to do with it?”

  “You are here. I convinced some people you can be trusted. As a member of Mespana, as my subordinate. As a Dahlsi. If you can uphold this trust, maybe in time… people will see that Tarvissi doesn’t have to mean a traitor. Maybe that will make them more amenable to letting your family and other Tarvissi back to Dahls.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes, Laik Var.”

  “None of this will happen if you leave now.”

 
“What can I do?”

  “Stay. I know it’s going to be hard, and I know it’s not fair. But nothing worth fighting for ever is.”

  Chapter 8

  So I stayed. In Mespana, I mean. I actually left the camp to wander the hills alone; I didn’t feel like witnessing Myar Mal’s attempts to find the culprit.

  Mostly, I thought about Laik Var’s words.

  Dahlsian society differed from the Tarvissian. It was egalitarian, so all citizens, including those of foreign descent, held equal power; but since it was spread among so many, how much could be carried by one person?

  Or not strictly power, but influence? I knew myself; I wasn’t charismatic. Even at the best of times, surrounded by people I was familiar—and comfortable—with, I was not cut out to be a leader. But now Laik Var wanted me to be more—an example. The walking representation of a perfect Dahlsi-Tarvissi. Could I be that?

  Could anyone be that?

  Our people were different, no doubt. But at the same time, I thought we had more in common than we wanted to admit. Our ancestors all came from old Karir, right after it was destroyed by dark elves ten thousand cycles ago. We both had the same straight, black hair and bright, upturned eyes. The same wide faces with pronounced features. Even our languages were similar—as long as one ignored the pronunciation—with identical grammatical structures and comparable words. But while we grew tall and tanned under the sun, Dahlsi became pale and frail in their sheltered city. Still, we were much closer to each other than any of us were to the pale, ethereal Tayani or yellow-eyed Xzsim.

  So, what made it so hard to live together?

  Arbitrary bullshit, I concluded.

  “You’re right.”

  I jerked in surprise and turned to see Tayrel Kan. I was so lost in my contemplation that I hadn’t even noticed him before.

  “Were you reading my thoughts?” I asked. He gave me his shrug-wave.

  “I wouldn’t if you weren’t screaming them around.”

  I started wondering if he was always doing it. It was considered rude, but he didn’t seem like a person who’d care. I felt sorry for everything I’d thought about him when we first met.