As Iron Falls

by Bryce O'Connor

  Raz sighed, closing his eyes and thumping his head gently against the frame of the window several times, trying to think.

  The only thing it served to do was make the ache behind his temples throb, and no new stroke of brilliance erupted into being in his thoughts.

  Clink. Clink. Clink.

  Raz froze, eyes snapping open to stare at nothing as he listened. Behind him, the sound of Syrah, Akelo, and Cyper’s worried conversation faded, trailing away while he focused, listening to the approaching sound.

  Clink. Clink. Clink.

  Raz knew immediately what it was, the noise as distinct as the screech of a drawn blade. He could picture the group in his mind’s eye for more than a whole minute before he saw them, could visualize their beaten, heavy forms and their shuffling, tired gait. He said nothing, gazing emptily at the sky, blind to the heavy clouds that cloaked the Moon and Her Stars from view. Before long he could make out more than the shifting of the chains. He could hear the heavy, exhausted breathing, and the scratching sound of dragging feet over the slabbed road. The rumble of heavy carts came next, and the clopping hooves of the oxen that pulled them along over the stone. Raz smelled the group before they came in view, wrinkling his snout in repugnance before he could stop himself.

  When they made the corner in the road, shambling along like a dark mass through the night, Raz ducked away from the open window and flattened himself against the wall beside it, peering carefully out at an angle into the street.

  He hadn't seen the atherian being driven out into the fields that morning. He supposed it was possible he’d missed their passing, his attention diverted by more pressing matters, but he doubted it. More likely, he thought, the harvest-laden carts had to be unloaded somewhere out of the way, and so the slaves were forced to take a different path home in the evening. Whatever the case, he didn’t know how he felt now, in the moment, seeing the lizard-kind once again, and in such close proximity. They neared in a slow, lumbering mass, their bindings keeping them from taking even a full walking step. Occasionally one would trip, but they were always hauled up by their comrades around them with hisses of fear and quick glances toward the overseers at the back and sides of the group. The slave drivers paid them no attention, apparently content so long as everyone kept moving.

  Then, however, a female at the very back of the group stumbled and lost her balance, tripping over her own chains. With no one behind her to help and the atherian on either side too slow to catch her, she fell flat across the stone. Raz felt his hands go cold as he heard her breath catch, then come in rapid, fearful gasps as she scrambled to stand once more, desperate not to draw attention to herself.

  Too late.

  Raz saw the two men shout and fall back, saw the whips rise and fall. His vision shifted and blurred as he heard the female scream, collapsing to the ground again as the overseers yelled in anger, lashing her mercilessly. Three, four, five, six… The leather tails of the cruel instruments buzzed through the air, cracking with each landing. The atherian shrieked in pain and terror, her tail curling around her body, her arms over her face.

  Something warm fell on Raz’s shoulder.

  He started and blinked, realizing as he did that he was clenching the sill with one hand, gripping it so tight his steel claws were crushing the already-splintering wood. He looked around, breathing heavily, his heart slamming against his chest.

  Syrah wasn’t looking at him. She—like he’d been—was staring out the window, a look of tired, hard disgust printed across her face.

  “Bastards,” she spat quietly, her hand tense on his arm. “Lifegiver take them.”

  Akelo and Cyper had come to stand behind him as well. Raz hadn't heard the three of them end their conversation, but that was hardly surprising. As he turned his attention back to the scene outside, he felt his blood boil in his veins.

  The drivers had ended their torment of the female, and were in the process of hauling her to her feet. When she stood, Raz saw that even bent and shaking she was nearly as tall as the two men, though her thin, emaciated frame did little to make her otherwise threatening. She was dark of skin, like him, but had a single patch of yellowish scales that painted something like a large arrowhead beneath her chin, down her throat, and past her collarbones. She looked dazed, even from afar, her breaths short and shaking, the trauma of the beating taking its toll on her even after it was done.

  In that moment, Raz wanted nothing more in the world than to drop down to the street and deliver on the two men—now marching her along after the main group—every ounce of the combined pain and suffering they’d inflicted onto others in all their miserable lives.

  A voice in his head, though, reminded him that the woman would have to endure, for the benefit of all.

  “I’m getting tired of our ‘greater good,’ Syrah,” Raz grumbled miserably, turning away from the window and pushing himself between Akelo and Cyper, heading for the bed where Ahna and Syrah’s staff lay, intent on flopping down beside the weapons to sulk.

  “You’re not the only one,” the Priestess sighed, still looking down into the street below. “Talo would tell us to keep to the path, though.”

  Raz snorted derisively. “Don’t kid yourself. Talo would have been down there in the street, relieving those men of their teeth. He would have—”

  “Stop!”

  It wasn’t the command that cut Raz short, ringing up from the street below. He’d heard soldiers shouting orders all day, snapping directions at the citizens of the city and pulling anyone they saw fit out of the crowd to question. Raz wouldn’t have thought twice about it, in fact, were it not for the sound of Syrah’s choked surprise and Akelo’s hissed exclamation.

  “Raz!”

  He was back up in a flash, Cyper dodging smoothly out of the way as he surged back to the window, utterly forgetting to stay behind the cover of the wall. Following Syrah’s eye, Raz made out the slave drivers and their trembling charge some dozen yards down the road, in the direction the rest of the slaves had been going.

  Now, though, they had stopped, the two men still holding up the female atherian by each arm as they looked back up the road.

  Almost directly below the room Raz, Syrah, Akelo, and Cyper were spectating from, a five-man patrol of soldiers had appeared out of one of the side-streets across the way. They moved in their typical formation toward the three figures, the leader at the head of the unit holding up a hand in indication of the halt. There was nothing unduly unusual about the group, the standard swords and shields of the army strapped to their hips and arms respectively, their spiked half-helms shining in the uneven light of the underfed oil-lamps that had been lit a half-hour before.

  Despite this, however, Raz got a bad feeling watching the soldiers pass below.

  “Problem, officer?” one of the overseers asked in confusion when the patrol came to a halt before him, his fellow, and the still-shaking atherian.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” the soldier at the head of the patrol responded. Even from the first floor of the Red Shield, Raz could tell he was eyeing the female. “The lizard giving you trouble, was she?”

  The slave drivers glanced at each other. Whatever was going on, Raz could tell it made them uneasy.

  “…Nothing we couldn’t handle,” the other man said, lifting his whip as though to make a point. “It’s been taken care of.”

  “Has it?” the officer asked mockingly, his voice falsely-impressed. “My, you will have to teach us that trick. A lashing always keeps the difficult ones in check, does it?”

  Again, the overseers shared a look.

  “Not… always,” the first answered hesitantly. “Not at first, anyway. They learn eventually.”

  The soldier nodded sanctimoniously. “Of course, of course.” Then he turned his attention back to the atherian. “Leave her here.”

  There was a splutter of outrage.

  “Leave her?” one of the drivers demanded, like he couldn’t believe his ears. “What do you… We
can’t just leave her!”

  “Oh?” the head of the patrol asked, still in his mocking tone. “I do believe you can, as that’s the order I’ve just given you.”

  “They’ll dock our pay,” the other man grumbled indignantly. “If we lose one on our watch, the cost comes out of our pockets.”

  “Then you can tell your supervisors that the army commandeered your slave,” the soldier said evenly. “A city laborer, isn’t she?” He waited for one of the drivers to nod reluctantly. “Excellent. Then she is the property of the Tash, to be dealt with at his pleasure.”

  Raz heard the two overseers grumble at that, but he could tell they realized they were going to lose the argument.

  “And if they want to know what you needed her for?” one asked, his voice resigned and heavy with annoyance. “What then?”

  The soldier shrugged, motioning to the four others behind him. “Tell them there is more than one use for a slave that causes trouble for her masters.”

  After several more seconds' hesitation, it seemed the men understood they weren’t being given a choice. Raz watched them disengage themselves from the female slowly, then step away to leave her shivering before the patrol. With some last rebellious grumbles, the overseers turned and walked away, one of them even glancing back when they were a dozen yards down the road.

  Was that pity Raz saw in the Percian’s eyes?

  Then the men were gone, leaving the atherian to stand, head bowed and clearly terrified, alone with the soldiers.

  “Look at me, scaly.”

  The leader’s voice was a strange combination of stern and excited, and he took a step forward as he said the words, coming to stand directly in front of the female. At once she did as commanded, lifting her eyes to meet his, revealing the bright markings along her throat again. It was hard to tell, but Raz didn’t think she could have been more than sixteen or seventeen summers old, judging by the bluish-orange webbing of her ears.

  “Tell me what happened,” the officer continued, sounding almost kindly, except for something cruel behind his words. “Why were you causing trouble for your masters?”

  “I-I tripped, sir.”

  The female’s voice jolted into Raz, rippling in a chill down his back and arms. She spoke the Common Tongue as easily as the soldiers did, like she’d been born to it. It was bizarre and amazing and terrifying to hear it, to come to terms with the fact that for the first time he was perceiving his language from an atherian that wasn’t him. It was strange, too, hearing her speak, like experiencing an echo of his own voice, though softer and higher.

  “You tripped?” the soldier said, sounding saddened by the news. At his side, his hand rose into a two-fingered gesture. “You chose to be difficult because you tripped?”

  In a flash, the slave was surrounded. At their commander’s signal, the other four had moved at once to encircle her, cutting her off from every direction.

  Raz felt the anger start to build again.

  “I-I didn’t mean to be difficult, sir!” the female squeaked in fear, her head flicking this way and that to take in the men who flanked her from every side. “I wasn’t trying to—!”

  Wham.

  The blow fell so fast, even Raz didn’t see it coming. The officer’s hand came up in a fist, catching the poor slave across her serpentine jaw. She staggered with a cry and would have fallen, except that the two soldiers at her back grabbed her under the arms and shoved her forward again. The man punched a second time, this time catching her squarely in the gut as she stumbled toward him.

  Raz heard the breath erupt from her lungs.

  “No…” Syrah whispered in terrified realization beside him, watching the slave fall to all fours at the officer’s feet.

  It was the man, though, that Raz heard more clearly.

  “The Tash,” the soldier said, half-squatting, like he wanted to ensure the atherian could hear him from her hands and knees on the road, “has no use for troublemakers among his servants.”

  Then he stood straight, and sunk his boot into the atherian’s side.

  “No!” Syrah said again, louder now and turning on the room. “Raz, they’re going to kill her! Please! They’re going to—!”

  Raz, though, was already gone. By the time the others knew what had happened, Ahna was in his hands, and the Dragon was out the window, dropping thirty feet to the road below on spread wings, little more than a black-and-red shadow in the night wind.

  CHAPTER 45

  “You can’t truly understand it until you witness it for yourself… It’s as though Laor, in some fit of madness, took all that is terrifying in the world and molded it together to form a single man. There is no stopping him, once he begins his dance. I have a hard time imagining that death itself would be brave enough to meet his challenge, should he ever decide to give it…”

  —Alyssa Rhen, on seeing The Monster fight

  Karan knew she was going to die.

  It was a strange sensation to experience, curled up there on the cold stone of the empty street as the Tash’s soldiers pressed in around her, their leather boots and fists pummeling her body from every angle. Despite all the hardships of her life, despite all the misery and fear the existence of a slave entailed, Karan had never truly feared she might be killed. Her kind were an expensive commodity. Her masters even sent for physicians and surgeons when one of their charges fell ill or injured, because paying the fees for exams and medicines was far cheaper than replacing a lost head. For this reason, Karan had never been afraid of death, even though there had been plenty of times when she’d wished for it.

  Now, suddenly, she was acquainted with that terror.

  It was the presence that had led her to this torment, she realized. It was that damned sensation that something more lingered nearby, that something she needed to know was within reach of her. It had passed over her mind as she and her field-mates had been returning home after a long day of labor. Once more the warmth had broken through the dim misery that was her life for a brief moment, bearing with it the feeling.

  It had distracted her so much, Karan’s feet got caught in her own chains, and the tumble that followed had very likely cost her her life.

  The soldiers ringed her on all sides, beating her thin form bloody. She didn’t know why, exactly, they seemed so intent on seeing her dead, especially so brutally, but even as the blows rained down on her Karan couldn’t help but think that it was never a slave’s place to question. She didn’t even fight it, honestly, didn’t do more than yelp and moan when fists caught her in the neck and head or boots took her in the back or sides. All she did was pray, reaching up to the Moon and Stars above and asking that one of the men might draw their blade and end it, that someone would make quick work of her misery. She fought to listen, waiting desperately for the sound of metal on leather that meant a sword was being pulled from its sheath.

  What she heard instead almost made her jump out of her bruised skin.

  “RRAAAAAAAAAAWR!”

  The roar seemed to shake even the heavy stone slabs of the road beneath her. It shattered the night, drowning out the huffs and grunts and laughs of the five men as they pummeled her. It ripped across her ears, so deafeningly loud it left her skull ringing—or maybe that was just from her head being slammed into the ground a few too many times?—and even through dimming consciousness Karan realized blearily that the blows had stopped. Her mind struggled to catch up to her senses, fought to link what she had heard with what seemed to be a sudden hesitancy in the soldiers.

  Then, though, there was the sound of shearing flesh, a howl of agony from one of the men, and something wet and hot splattered Karan’s arms and cheek. Even before she pulled her hands away from where she’d been trying to shield her face, she tasted the iron on the air. She blinked uncertainly, staring at the crimson sheen of the blood dripping from between her fingers. She didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Her heart hammering in the cage of her bony chest, she looked shakily about, wondering what had happ
ened to the men.

  That was when she saw him.

  At first, between the scrambling legs of the shouting soldiers, Karan couldn’t make out much. A darkness, solid and shifting, shining like silver and steel. It moved with incredible speed, a massive flicker in the waning light of the lamps overhead. Like an avalanche of power it surged into the four men left standing, fearless and roaring in fury, clawed feet scraping against the stone as it whirled and danced among the soldiers.

  Clawed feet? Karan thought in confusion.

  Then, though, the legs before her shifted, and she saw the wings.

  They extended like omens of a bloody battle, whipping out to slam men aside or buffeting them about their heads and helmets as they screamed in fear. A deep, sunset red, they were beacons in the night, shifting and undulating to glow in the light cast from above.