by Sam Sykes
She stared at the weapon in her lap. She picked it up, sheathed it, set it aside.
“And ran him through the heart with it.”
Such calmness she spoke with. How many times had she repeated this, Lenk wondered, before she could say it without crying?
“Then I went to my parents’ room and killed them, too,” she said, methodically and mechanically. “I left out my door and went to my neighbors’ house. An elderly couple. I killed them. Then the next house and so on until I had killed thirteen people the first time I ever picked up a sword. I remember that number and little else.”
He should have been unnerved by this tale, by the calm way she told it. But the only thing that unsettled him was how calm he felt listening to her. Something about the way she spoke, without boasting or fear, sounded right. Not good, but right. And he needed to hear more.
“Do you still kill?” he asked.
She nodded.
“When you do, how do you feel?”
“Like I did that night.” He knew what she was going to say, yet it still made him shudder to hear her say it. “Complete.”
“Yeah.” He looked away. “Yeah.”
“Master Sekhlen calls it the Awakening. We enter the nightmare with our swords bared. Those who survive it wake up with changes. Our hair is the color of an old man’s, our eyes are cold, and we…
“We have a need,” she said. “We need violence. It fuels us, makes us strong.” She glanced to him. “You had a wound in your side, didn’t you? When we first met?”
“How did you—”
“You winced when you stretched,” she said. “Does it bother you now?”
He shook his head. Shuro nodded, reaching up to the collar of her shirt and tugging it down. A wound, caked with dried blood, painted a path just shy of her throat.
“Grazed by a bokka knife back on the river,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. I bet you’ve taken a dozen such hits: wounds that should have been fatal, injuries that should have left lingering effects. Yet you’re still alive, hale and healthy because of what you are. What we are.”
“And…” He hesitated, but it was too late. He couldn’t stop the question. “What are we?”
“A blade ever honed. A storm ever brewing. A slave to no god, no king, no man. A wind ever moving.” She shook her head. “They don’t have a name for us, as a people, even as individuals. But we gather together, sometimes, under the only name we have left.” She picked up her sword once more. “The Order of the Restless Blades.”
At his blank stare, she smiled. “Dramatic, isn’t it?”
“I mean, not the most dramatic I’ve ever heard, but…,” he began.
“It was our own choosing, the name we gave ourselves, for in the days when we were made, we weren’t allowed to carry any of our own.” As though it were the most casual thing in the world, she set aside her weapon and asked, “Have you slain demons?”
He reeled at the question; it wasn’t something one was asked except by those who already knew the answer.
“I have.”
“How many?”
“I lost count.”
Shuro raised her eyebrows in appreciation. “And you killed that many without ever asking why you were able to do it?”
“Of course I asked.” Feeling quite restless, Lenk rose to his feet, stalked away. “I asked every night, to any god I thought would listen. Why I could kill the demons, why it only got easier to do so…” He let his gaze fall down to the earthen floor. “Why I felt so complete after doing so.”
“The question haunted you.”
“Doesn’t it haunt you?” He whirled on her. “All the deaths. Not just demons, but men, women, anything that gets in your way. Don’t you ever feel like you’re going to choke on the blood? Don’t you ever feel… wrong for feeling so right about killing?”
“I do not,” she said flatly. “No more than a sword feels wrong for serving its purpose. For that is why we were made.”
“Made.” The word didn’t have the iron coldness in his mouth that it did in hers.
“As our foes were made,” she said. “And no one fights demons as long as you have without knowing what crucible made them.”
He looked long into the fire. “They weren’t always demons…”
They had once been called Aeons. Servants of gods and men alike, they carried word between the two. Shepherding the mortal creations, speaking on behalf of divine masters, Aeons were outsiders in their own world, denied the euphoria of heaven and the base desires of earth alike.
No one said what had made them lose that position, whether it was anger at their half-formed nature, temptation by the power they were forever denied, or merely resentment of their mortal charges.
Lenk had never asked Mocca.
“But they were made into them, all the same,” Shuro said. “And the war between them and mortalkind began. The mortals found themselves outclassed by demons at every turn until they found a new weapon.”
“Us,” Lenk muttered.
“They say we were made by a dead god,” she continued. “A divine being whose essence was distributed among so many mortals to give them the power to do so. Others say we were created by an ancient curse wrought by the first wizards, back when it was wild and primal, before the Venarium and its laws were established.”
The latter seemed more likely to Lenk. Curse seemed as appropriate as anything to describe it.
“But, personally…” Shuro paused, the words coming with great difficulty. “I think it was the Awakening that made us this way. Demons are shaped by pain and fear, so are we, too, and this is how we fight them. When we have nothing left—no homes, no gods, no… no family—we are creatures like they are. We can kill them, just as we killed those close to us.”
The question had been brewing at the back of his mind since she had spoken, since he had met her, since he had walked out of the ashes of Steadbrook. And until now, there had always been more important things to think about: battles to survive, enemies to kill, trials to overcome.
But now he could not think of anything else. And so he asked it, wrenched it free from his lips and threw it cold and flat on the ground.
“Who killed my family?”
And she looked at him, sadly. And she smiled, sweetly.
“Is it not obvious?” she sighed, as though this were a question a child would ask, instead of a man about to shake himself to pieces.
He said nothing. And so she closed her eyes. And she spoke, softly.
“You did.”
There were a thousand answers he wanted to offer in return to that. There were dozens of accusations that ran through his head. There were a hundred threats he wanted to make, demanding that she recant. There were a few soft, wordless feelings that he simply wanted to cry out.
But, after a breath, all he could think of was four words.
Why didn’t that hurt?
Perhaps he had long numbed himself to the tragedy of his family’s violent passing. It had been so long since he’d convinced himself bandits or shicts had burned his village down and slaughtered everyone.
Or perhaps he had always known he’d had a hand in it.
He should have wept. He should have screamed. He should have whispered a prayer.
And it terrified him that he did not.
“Whatever made us,” Shuro continued, snapping him from his reverie, “it made us well. We led the charges against the demons, cut them down where they stood, drove back their hordes and spawn and cast them back into hell. And when it was over?
“The lucky of us were cast out. The rest were hunted down and slain. Maybe they thought we had outlived our usefulness, that demons would never return. Or perhaps they viewed us as unnatural, abominations, given how we were made.”
“And what do you think?” he asked.
“I think… we are good at what we do. Demons are not kind creatures. They feed on suffering, on despair and on pain. They slaughter the innocent and laud the guil
ty. They devour, they taint, they destroy, they kill. And they cannot be killed but for memory.”
Her voice grew cold, hard.
“They remember us.”
And as cold and hard as it was, it was the realization that came with it that struck him like a mace to the skull. Suddenly her presence here made a startling amount of sense.
“Mocca,” he whispered. No, that was not the name she knew. “Khoth-Kapira.” His eyes widened. “You’re here to kill Khoth-Kapira.”
She frowned, as though she had been hoping to spare him this knowledge. He echoed the sentiment, for he certainly wished he hadn’t deduced it.
“The Order exists because it must exist,” she said. “We kill demons because no one else can. What mortals know or don’t know about us matters little. We must kill the demons because that is what we were made to do.”
“You’re talking like you’re not one of them,” Lenk said. “Mortals.”
“We aren’t. Not exactly like them, anyway.” She studied him carefully. “You’ve been in the city. You’ve seen the signs: his cultists, his name, the strife that follows. Sekhlen, master of the Order, saw them himself ages ago. He watched carefully, hoping he was wrong, but he was not.” She rose to her feet. “Khoth-Kapira is returning.
“When he reigned over the mortals from his seat in Rhuul Khaas, he pronounced all gods dead and instated himself as the lord and savior of his people.” She turned her eyes up and to the east. “Among all the Aeons, he was the most envious of the gods’ creations, and he sought to remake a world in his image. But where creation came naturally to heaven, he struggled. He strained to create a perfect race, a world where every breath was owed to him.
“The lives he spent making this were… well, even our records strained to convey the number. The Order has watched for the return of many demons, but he has been one of our top priorities. For there was never a doubt to Master Sekhlen that Khoth-Kapira would try to pick up where he left off.”
“And they sent you to stop him? One woman? Why not an army? Why not the whole Order?”
“We train specifically to avoid that,” she said. “An army would be easily detected. Easily foiled. Khoth-Kapira sees more than you know.”
More than one of us knows, certainly.
He opted not to say this. Perhaps it would have been wise to let her know of his conversations with the demon. But when he opened his mouth to, he found his mind drifting back to the city he had seen, of shicts and humans walking together, of the promise that Khoth-Kapira had made.
And maybe he was not ready to dash that dream.
“Why you?” he asked instead.
“Because killing is what we are made to do,” she said flatly, “and I was made by the very best.”
“Still, how can you be sure—”
“We’ve seen it.” She gestured to the woods around them. “Even now the forest teems with his followers. They come from the cities, the deserts, the mountains: a slow-moving tide sliding inexorably east. They are called to him: the widows, the orphans, the broken. He calls to them, beckons them to his side.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Lenk asked. “Is it so bad that someone out there is looking out for those who have no one to look out for them?”
She cast an impaling glare at Lenk. “Would you trust an asp if it said it only wanted a kiss? Demons are not kind lovers, Lenk. They do not give freely. They do not ‘look out’ for anyone. There is always a price.”
This he knew. From the many demons he had cut down, in Cier’Djaal and the wilds beyond, he knew there was always a price.
Or so he’d thought he knew.
That had been before Mocca, before thoughts of redemption.
Who set the price? The gods? Mortals? Could it not be that a demon could pay it, just as mortals could, with penance? Could it not be that anyone, born or made or cursed, could put their pain and fear behind them?
He stared at his hands. They looked normal to him. Soft flesh, however callused, wrapped around sticky sinew caked upon mortal bone. Like anyone else’s. They might have been used to build a barn, drive a plow through a field, hammer a pair of horseshoes on an anvil. They might have rocked a wailing infant in the dead of night, raised the bridal veil on a young woman’s face, held her hand years later when she breathed her last and begged him to go on.
But they hadn’t done that.
They had found the hilt of a sword, soft throats in the night, the warmth of blood and the splinter of bone. And now all he could see on them was the scars. Scars that looked as though they had always been there.
What had Kataria seen, he wondered, when she looked at his hands? What had she felt when he laid them upon her bare shoulders, when they coaxed breeches off her hips, when they brushed against her lips, wary of the fangs hidden behind?
He wondered whose hands were upon her now.
Through the sweltering heat of the jungle, he felt a chill upon his skin. He looked down and saw slender fingers encircling his bicep. Shuro’s skin was cold, cold as the stare she affixed upon him.
“I was found by Master Sekhlen when I was very young,” she said. “In that time I have rarely spoken to anyone who wasn’t exactly like me.” She forced what was either a very awkward smile or a very localized seizure onto her face. “I… sometimes forget that not everyone takes the knowledge of what we are so easily. I’m sorry. For… for telling you you killed your family.” She cleared her throat. “And all that.”
“It’s…” He shook his head. “It’s fine.”
“It is?”
“Well, no. It’s not. But it’s not your fault.” He smiled at her, tried to make it seem less hollow than it felt. “Can’t spend much time thinking on what isn’t there, can you?”
She stared at him, through him. “Like your shict?”
His smile faded. He pulled away from her. “She wasn’t mine.”
“Oh.” She winced. “I… sorry about that, too. I guess.”
“Not your fault, either. She and I just… we… I don’t know.”
“I do.” Her voice cut him, it was so sharp. “It wasn’t just her, you know. It won’t end with her.”
“What?”
“She’d never understand you. She’d never even know you,” Shuro said, earnestness in her voice. “Has she never looked upon you with mistrust? With fear?”
He stared at her, felt something rise in his gullet. “She has.”
“And others? Other people?”
“Them, too.”
She nodded. “So they do. So they would. All of them. They were made differently than we were, destined for different lives.”
He opened his mouth to deny that. When no denial came, he tried to say something, anything beyond acknowledging how much he believed her.
“But you don’t have to be alone,” she said. And her eyes did not soften so much as glisten, moonlight off the ice of a frozen lake. “You can come back with me. You can come back to the Order.”
“Back to killing,” he muttered.
“It’s what we do,” Shuro said, sighing. “But not always. There are times when you don’t think of violence, right? There are times when you don’t have to carry a sword.” Her hand found his, colder now than it had been. “Right?”
He had very much thought so. Once. Now he was not so sure.
“I have seen you fight,” she said. “Together we can go to Rhuul Khaas. We can stop Khoth-Kapira. And when it’s over, we can go back together. You can be among people who won’t fear you, won’t hate you for how you were made. You can come with me.”
Shuro’s voice was no less hard, even when she spoke so enthusiastically. Yet there was a comfort in that iron certainty, an assurance in how simple she made it all sound. As though she merely needed to say it and it would be so.
So much so that he found himself looking down at her hand, wondering if perhaps it was not so cold as he thought. So much so that he found himself whispering back to her.
“I can go with you,�
� he said.
Lenk neglected to say how far he would go. Or even to what end he would go. And he certainly did not tell her that he had been accompanied this far by her quarry.
A decent man would have told her. At the very least, he would have turned her away.
But at that moment, something upon her face that resembled a smile—a real smile, bereft of sorrow or pain or anything beyond the simple enthusiasm of someone looking for a promise of tomorrow—made its way onto his face, too.
He found he could not look away from that enthusiasm, that certainty, that joy.
Not even to see the man in white standing at the other side of the fire, his form as hazy and fleeting as a nightmare. But if Lenk had looked up, he would have seen that Mocca stared at him with eyes black.
And his hands curled into fists at his sides.
TWENTY-FIVE
A MOON PAINTED BLACK
They were called scraws. And they had turned a conquest into a war.
From what Gariath had gathered—from human sources and from sources that couldn’t afford to be ignorant of human problems—it had begun with the Empire of Karneria. The dark-skinned, fine-boned humans had armed themselves with spear and shield, golem and siege weapon, and a holy mandate to use them all in their conquest to make the world ready for their god, the Conqueror.
With weapons superior and legions innumerable, they had almost done it. Their march north had consumed many nations with names Gariath couldn’t be bothered to remember—how important could they be if they had been conquered? From their red-mountained homes, across the plains and forests of the world, the Karnerians were stopped only when they attempted to cross a river called Pike’s Ford into the recently unified realm of Saine.
There they had met the pale-skinned, burly Sainites.
And the Sainites had introduced them to the scraws.
They had emerged from their mountain aeries in such numbers as to darken the skies: winged beasts that came shrieking out of the clouds, each one bearing blue-coated soldiers armed with fireflasks and crossbows. They had swept over the legions, who could only stare up agog, and their superior mobility had turned the invincible Karnerian infantry into soft, slow-moving sacks of flesh to be filled with arrows and skewered on lances and incinerated by flame.