by Various
“I’ve been counting corpses,” the Half-Jaw said. “You fought off at least two companies of Jiralhanae as well as their ship—”
“A light cruiser,” the Scion interjected. “It bombed the port and bastion compounds, then it dropped its infantry. . . .” She lowered her voice so her brother wouldn’t hear. “The Jiralhanae swarmed the streets, killing any Sangheili who stood their ground. We sallied out from the keep to save those we could. When the Jiralhanae drew close, we held the gates. But soon there were no more stragglers, and my father ordered me inside—up to the walls to direct the guards’ fire. Then the kaidon charged, my two brothers at his side, straight for the Jiralhanae’s leader.” The Scion took a deep breath, then swallowed anger and frustration. “We had their leader in our sights, but he moved too quickly—faster than anything I’ve ever seen. And then . . . he was gone.”
The Blademaster had marched up to join the Half-Jaw during the Scion’s tale and now said: “I’ve never heard of a Jiralhanae chieftain who could move like that. How large was his hammer?”
The Scion spat her words like bitter fruit. “Their leader was San’Shyuum.”
The Half-Jaw and Blademaster shared a surprised glance, and then listened, rapt, as Tul ‘Juran described what she had seen.
A San’Shyuum without a throne. A warrior in black armor who had evaded her keep’s finest marksman and disappeared into the smoke of the burning settlement. An enemy that could have reignited its cruiser’s plasma cannons and vaporized the keep but instead had pulled its ship from orbit and disappeared almost as quickly as it came.
“A Prelate,” growled the Half-Jaw.
“It can’t be,” the Blademaster said. “They all died at High Charity.”
“Evidently not.”
The du’nak bellowed with relief as the street finally crested and the keep appeared through the driving snow: a fortress with soaring walls of rough-hewn granite built between two mountain spurs—the farthest fingers of a line of jagged, snowcapped peaks. The keep’s iron gates were open, and small groups of Sangheili settlers and keep guards were gathered outside the walls, near the smoldering remains of a large funeral pyre. With all these eyes upon them, the Half-Jaw and his warriors unloaded the corpses from the sledge. Everyone waited in silence for the bodies to catch fire on the warm heap of ash and bone. The oily smoke rose, twisting in the wind, and the pyre consumed the last of its sorry fuel.
“Where are you going?” the Half-Jaw asked the siblings as they turned their tired du’nak back onto the road.
“To find my father and my brothers,” the young kaidon said. “To bring them to the fire.”
“If you haven’t found them by now, you never will,” the Half-Jaw said, as kindly as he could. “At least, not here.”
“What do you mean?” asked Tul ‘Juran.
“If a Prelate came here just to kill, this keep would be a pit in the ground.”
This observation pricked the pride of the keep guards in the crowd, who grumbled among themselves. But the Scion’s eyes grew wide with a hope she hadn’t dared to consider. “If this . . . Prelate spared the keep. If he let us live . . .”
“. . . He might have taken prisoners,” the Half-Jaw said.
The Blademaster locked his arms across his chest. “And why, by the balls on every blasted Prophet’s chin, would he have done that?”
Which was a very good question. But the Half-Jaw had no answer.
Tul ‘Juran tossed back her cloak, baring her armored chest, and spoke loud enough for all to hear. “I invoke my right, as Scion of this keep, to free my kaidon from his imprisonment and take revenge upon his captors!” She stepped to the Half-Jaw and bowed her head. “For this, I humbly beg passage on your ship and enlistment in your crew.”
The Half-Jaw heard nothing humble in the Scion’s voice, however. Her words were steel determination, and the right she had invoked was ages old and just as rigid. . . .
The entire recorded history of Sanghelios could accurately be described as one long war for control of its thousands of familial keeps. Even after the Sangheili built interstellar spaceships and found other foes, kaidons still fought bitterly, and in these skirmishes, one kaidon sometimes captured another—a terrible fate, not just for a kaidon, but for all Sangheili warriors who believed that being stripped of armor and denied a noble death in battle was the ultimate humiliation. A kaidon’s captor never intended to release his prisoner. Instead, the vanquished would languish in their cells, a mockery to themselves and all their kin—unless one of their bloodline invoked the “right of release” and was then bold and clever enough to see it through.
These liberations were the stuff of legends. But the most famous, and the one the Half-Jaw knew best, was the ballad of Kel ‘Darsam, First Light of Sanghelios.
Kel ‘Darsam was a warrior renowned for his bravery and cunning. In the earliest eras of Sangheili history, before the first Forerunner relics were discovered and these new gods conquered the old, Kel was a beloved member of the Sangheili pantheon—a demigod born to a mortal mother and a divine father who was none other than Urs himself, lord of all other Sangheili gods and namesake of the largest and most sacred of Sanghelios’s three suns.
In the days when Urs ruled Sangheili spiritual life, the seas that covered much of their home world were still vast and mysterious and filled with monstrous, semimythical creatures. Kel ‘Darsam was famous for slaying many of these: the Sand Dwellers of Il’ik; the many-mouthed Watcher of the Lonely Harbor; the nine serpents of Dur’at’dur, whose endless thrashing was thought to cause those islands’ deadly currents. Indeed, Kel was so keen on ridding the seas of their terrors that he had little interest in becoming kaidon, a position he gladly left to his uncle and mentor, Orok ‘Darsam.
During one of many wars to defend his keep, Orok was captured by a powerful sea lord and rival kaidon, Nesh ‘Radoon, and Kel dutifully invoked the right of release. Without a navy of his own, Kel was forced to sail alone, under cover of night and through a line of squalls, to the sheer walls of his rival’s keep. After scaling the walls and slaying the keep’s best swordsmen, Kel and Orok raced to make their escape. But as Kel perched on the wall, preparing to dive to safety, a spear struck him in the back. Mortally wounded, Kel tumbled to the waves far below.
Oddly, the Half-Jaw knew, there were two versions of the ballad: one in which Nesh ‘Radoon threw the spear that killed Kel ‘Darsam, and another in which the spear was instead thrown by his uncle, Orok. In the latter version, the entire capture was a ruse—a trap designed by Orok, who was deeply fearful that Kel would someday tire of slaughtering monsters and decide to claim the title of kaidon for his own.
But both versions of the legend had the same ending.
As Kel ‘Darsam fell, dying, toward the waves, he was touched by the first rays of Urs as the god-star rose over the edge of the sea. In this moment, Kel was transformed into pure light; an eternal reflection of his divine father’s pride and grief.
After the founding of the Covenant, many of the old myths faded away. But the Sangheili continued to sing the ballad of Kel ‘Darsam to their sons and daughters, just as they taught them that the Sangheili word kel means “light (that dances on the waves).”
“Ridiculous!” the Blademaster said, glowering at the Scion. “I’ve never heard of a female invoking the right of release. And I know for certain that no female has ever been—or ever will be—a warrior on a ship!”
The Scion glared right back at the Blademaster. “That is not your decision.”
She was right, the Half-Jaw knew. As shipmaster, it was his decision. And, looking at the Scion’s determined eyes, he was surprised to realize he had already made it.
“You can’t be serious!” the Blademaster sputtered after the Half-Jaw had approved the Scion’s enlistment and pulled his second-in-command aside for a private conference. “This is unprecedented—a breach of the most fundamental rules of recruitment! And more than that, it’s an affront to honor and tradition!
”
As Vul ‘Soran continued his impassioned protest, the second Phantom landed and deployed its troops: two squads of silver-armored Sangheili rangers—and one Unggoy. This stout, bandy-legged creature was also clad in ranger silver, but unlike his Sangheili comrades, he wore a cylindrical tank across his shoulders and a breathing mask on his face. The Unggoy was unusually tall for his species, and the spiny top of his crustaceous head nearly reached the shoulders of the Sangheili. Typically, Unggoy were the subservient, lesser members of a Covenant military unit. But when this Grunt gave a curt hand signal, the Sangheili rangers formed ranks and stood at attention. For he was the rangers’ leader, and they obeyed him without question.
“I’m sorry you feel otherwise, but she is coming with us,” the Half-Jaw said to the Blademaster. “That’s my final decision.” Then, directing Vul’s gaze to the Unggoy ranger, Rtas noted in a softer tone, “Besides, if you can get used to that, you can get used to anything.”
The Half-Jaw and his troops stayed long enough to help the Rahnelo settlers drag the Jiralhanae corpses from their streets, pile them into the large craters on the road to the spaceport, and then bury them with rubble. This solution came at the suggestion of the Scion’s brother. The settlers would not dignify the Jiralhanae with a funeral pyre, but were content, in the years to come, to let their du’nak trample their attackers’ graves as they hauled their loads to and from the port. It was a wise first decision for the young kaidon, the Half-Jaw thought, and although he was undoubtedly bereft, the Scion’s brother stood strong as his sibling departed the keep, taking only her armor and her lance and leaving a promise to return.
By then the storm had passed, and when the two Phantoms rocketed skyward, Shadow of Intent was bright above them, its long, hooked prow glinting in Rahnelo’s reflected light. From the bottom, the mighty assault carrier looked like two iridescent blue teardrops, one larger than the other, joined at their tapered tails. The ship was a little more than five kilometers long and nearly two kilometers wide in the thickest part of its aft section, which housed the reactors for its maneuvering engines and slipspace drive. Heavily armored and bristling with plasma cannons, Shadow of Intent looked invulnerable. But only from afar.
On approach to the primary hangar, the Half-Jaw could see all the damage the venerable carrier had endured: dull spots in its shimmering metal skin where human missiles’ thermonuclear detonations had burned through the carrier’s energy shields and seared its hull; blackened gaps in rows of point-defense laser batteries where their former enemy’s Longsword fighters had gotten lucky shots; hastily patched penetrations from MAC rounds, the hypersonic, magnetically accelerated slugs that were the humans’ most powerful naval weapons.
On top of all this damage were scars from Shadow of Intent’s attempt to blockade High Charity. There the carrier had traded plasma torpedoes with San’Shyuum vessels desperate to flee the Flood, and a particularly close call had left a bubbled streak on the starboard side of the carrier’s prow.
Shadow of Intent looked as tired as the Half-Jaw felt. And a few months ago, when the Arbiter, Thel ‘Vadam, had offered him the mission to take the carrier far away from Sanghelios, Rtas had gladly accepted.
When the Covenant shattered, not all Sangheili had abandoned the idea of Forerunner divinity. After the fall of High Charity and the cessation of hostilities against the humans, tensions had flared between those Sangheili who still revered the Forerunners and the Arbiter’s faction, which did not.
The Arbiter and the Half-Jaw had been rivals for a time, after the failure to keep the humans from destroying Halo was laid at the Arbiter’s feet. But during the Schism, when the Prophets removed the Sangheili from command positions in the Covenant military and replaced them with the Jiralhanae, the two had forged a tight bond in the sudden fight against their common foes. The Arbiter was now the widely accepted leader of the Sangheili, but as the threat of Sangheili civil war increased, the Arbiter had asked Rtas ‘Vadum to pilot Shadow of Intent away from Sanghelios. The assault carrier was presently the last operational ship of its type in the Sangheili fleet—a hugely powerful vessel that the Arbiter wanted out of reach of other shipmasters whose loyalties weren’t as certain.
So the Half-Jaw had gathered his crew and charted a course for the sparsely populated frontier of the former Covenant Empire. It was here, not far from Rahnelo, that the Half-Jaw had hoped he and his warriors could finally rest and recuperate. The Half-Jaw sighed. It was good while it lasted. . . .
Shadow of Intent’s hangar had room for scores of Phantom dropships and Seraph fighters. But now the Half-Jaw’s two Phantoms had the cavernous space all to themselves. Most of the missing craft were casualties of war. The others Rtas had abandoned; he simply didn’t have the crew to man them. Indeed, there were fewer than two hundred Sangheili on Shadow of Intent, a small fraction of the carrier’s capacity, just enough to keep the ship’s most important systems running. But enough to win a fight against a Prelate?
The Blademaster had given his own answer to this question during their flight back to the carrier: Shadow of Intent would have the upper hand against a single cruiser, even with its reduced crew; this Prelate was clearly dangerous, but hitting an essentially defenseless colony wasn’t the same as naval combat; they had the advantage in both weapon strength and tonnage. It was a reasoned response. But the Half-Jaw wanted a second opinion, and so after the Phantoms landed, he sought out the Unggoy.
Near the aft wall of the hangar was a line of floor-mounted methane-recharge stations. These clusters of tanks and hoses were designed to service dozens of Unggoy, but Stolt was alone. In fact, he was the only Unggoy—and the only non-Sangheili—in the Half-Jaw’s crew.
But if Stolt was lonely for his own kind, he never showed it. The Unggoy seemed as relaxed as always, his back resting against the recharge station, his hard-shelled arms hanging loosely at his sides. Like the rest of his body, Stolt’s thick forearms were dotted with stubby spines, evidence of his species’ crustacean ancestry. The ranger leader’s small, dark eyes betrayed no emotion as he listened to Rtas explain their new mission. And when his shipmaster was done speaking, the Unggoy simply scratched the seal of his mask with a barnacled finger and stared appraisingly at the Scion.
The female Sangheili had disembarked from her Phantom and was standing in a line with the other male Sangheili warriors, her red armor standing out against their silver. Holding her lance at her side, Tul ‘Juran pointedly ignored their curious glances and muttered assessments and was the first to comply when the Blademaster shouted for them all to shut their jaws and come to attention.
The Half-Jaw knew that Stolt had faced similar scrutiny when he had joined Shadow of Intent’s complement of rangers during the human war. Rangers were an elite force, trained in the demanding art of zero-g combat. The humans had called them “ship killers,” and for good reason: many human vessels had perished when Covenant rangers breached their hulls and tore them apart from the inside out. Unggoy rangers weren’t unheard of, but they were rare. And at first, most Sangheili on Shadow of Intent had regarded this Unggoy as a Grunt who would never be their equal.
They were wrong.
Stolt had survived encounters with human soldiers that saw many of his comrades fall. When he wasn’t battling the enemy, he outfought any Sangheili who sparred against him, enduring their melee strikes until they tired, and then pummeling them into submission with his chitinous fists and feet. After a chance encounter with one of the humans’ fearsome Spartans, in which the Unggoy wounded the enhanced human so grievously that it was forced to withdraw, even the Blademaster approved Stolt’s promotion to ranger leader.
“So, then,” the Half-Jaw said after the Unggoy’s tank was full and he had pulled away from the station with a wet pop and hiss, “do you believe we can kill a Prelate?”
Stolt kept his beady eyes on the Scion as he savored a long breath from his tank. “I think,” he said, his gravelly voice rumbling through his mask, “we’ll n
eed all the help we can get.”
In the Prelate’s dreams, his return to High Charity was always the same.
The holy city’s simulated star had dimmed, giving the dome’s floating towers a warm, sunset glow. Barges draped with colored streamers and fragrant flowers filled the air, except for the space around the bone-white Forerunner Dreadnought at the center of the dome. Here there were fireworks; explosions of celebratory glyphs that formed phrases such as A CHILD FOR THE AGES! or BLESSED WITH TWINS! or SHE HAS HER MOTHER’S NOSE (THANK THE GODS!). Some of these were fiery proclamations about individual San’Shyuum’s reproductive potency that, despite their artful innuendo, sorely tested the Committee of Concordance’s laws on public decency.
But on this night, all was permitted. San’Shyuum children were rare, and when the birthing season reached its peak, all of High Charity rejoiced. Even the dour Sangheili joined in the festivities. Above the Dreadnought and below the star, Sangheili Banshee fighter craft flew aerobatics in tight formation. Watching from the barges or temporary grandstands cantilevered out from their towers, tipsy San’Shyuum revelers would roar their approval and pound their fists against their anti-grav thrones whenever the pilots demonstrated particular daring.
This picture of High Charity at its finest—bright and bawdy and hopeful—spread out above the Prelate as he exited the stalk and flew up into the dome.
Viewed from the outside, High Charity looked like a mushroom that, hidden in the deep black night of interstellar space, had grown to shocking size. The cap that formed the city’s dome was hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The stalk was longer than the dome was wide and bristled with dry docks and manufacturies that served fleets of capital ships and countless smaller vessels. Novice shipmasters were often daunted by the arcane procedures and quasi-religious communication protocols that governed flight operations in and around the holy city. But Tem’Bhetek had logged plenty of approaches, and after many months away from home, he was quick to dock his cruiser in its bay and disembark the moment the gantries latched.