by Sam Sykes
Of how much he had given to them.
Of how much more he had left to give.
“You should go, Gariath,” Daaru whispered. “I… Shaab Sahaar will have much to tend to in the coming days.”
Gariath grunted in acknowledgment. “Revenge.”
“No.” He shook his head. “We have homes to rebuild, funerals to arrange…” He looked down to the dead girl in his arms. “Dead to bury.”
“Why?”
Daaru looked up for the first time since Gariath had arrived. And for the first time, his eyes betrayed something other than dull glassiness. Outrage, shock, hurt: All were apparent as he looked upon Gariath standing over him, arms folded across his chest, impassive as a mountain.
“What did you say?” Daaru all but snarled.
“Why bother?” The dragonman forced coldness into his voice. “Why not just trust in the Tul to give her back?”
Daaru rose to his feet. His body trembled. Color crept into his face, painted it fresh with rage as he glared up at the dragonman.
“Do not speak to me of Tul, outsider. Do not speak to me of anything you do not know. That is not how the Tul works.”
Gariath met his rage with coldness, his eyes black and flat as he stared back at Daaru and spoke bluntly.
“Then why are you going to wait for the same thing to happen to your son?”
The rage that painted Daaru’s face suddenly snapped then, draining away in an instant and leaving only a cold, naked terror. But what replaced it, what filled his face with reds, yellows, and blues so vivid it was as if they might simply bleed out through his skin, was something strong, something resilient, something unbreakable.
The rage that filled someone’s heart where once a loved one had lived. The rage that came from knowing one had nothing left to lose. The rage that flooded Daaru’s face, poured into his throat, and came out on a roar that carried across all of Shaab Sahaar.
“RISE UP!”
It shattered the silence of the dead city. People looked up as though they had seen the dead walk. But they approached all the same, for they looked upon the only one of them who yet lived.
“RISE UP!” he roared again. “SHAAB SAHAAR, RISE UP!” He swept his gaze around the crowd, let them drink in the colors of his face. “Against the humans, for our dead, for the Tul! RISE UP!”
“Rise up?” one of them muttered. “What do you mean, Daaru?”
“They attacked us for no reason,” Daaru snarled back. “They killed us simply because they felt like it. We have lived with the dream that we could live apart from them, away from them, but we were wrong.” He held up his slain daughter. “We were wrong.”
“We have all lost loved ones,” an elder chimed in.
“And we have so many more to lose,” Daaru roared back. “Who will we wait to take them? Should I wait for the humans to come back and take my son? For the shicts to take my wife? How long must I pretend this world is fair?” He held his daughter high above his head. “RISE UP!”
“But the Humn—”
“They did nothing while Shaab Sahaar burned!” he howled. “They did nothing while my daughter died! They did nothing while even the dragonman, an outsider, fought for us!”
Gariath suddenly felt all their eyes upon him, more keenly than he’d felt any blade or talon. He shifted uncomfortably, as though if they looked long enough, they might know. Everything.
“I was not born Humn,” Daaru said. “I was not made to lead. I was born saan, like so many of you, like my daughter. All my lives have led me to this moment.
“Humans and tulwar cannot live together. Our fathers knew this. We ignored them, content to wait for their rebirth. But what world will they return to? I will go to the human city. I will go to Jalaang, to Cier’Djaal, and beyond. And I will burn every house to the ground before I let them do this again! I will bury my daughter in the ashes of their homes and paint their cities scarlet! I have fire. I have blades. And I have no more words.”
He stared out over the crowd, the colors of his face pulsing with his fury.
First silence. A nervous exchange of glances. And then a flash of color.
The answer came in a single glint of steel, stark against the night sky, as a curved blade was held aloft in a hairy hand and a voice roared out in reply.
“Rise up!”
A bow joined it, held up and proud above the crowd, with a voice to accompany it.
“Rise up!”
A spear.
“Rise up!”
A dagger.
“Rise up!”
A single fist, bloodied and trembling.
“Rise up!”
Countless weapons were added, countless voices were joined. From the darkness they marched into the streets of Shaab Sahaar. From the rubble they joined, convening in the city center. From the ruins of their former lives, they were reborn, faces alive with color, voices roaring with fury, screaming with a singular, unbreakable rage.
“RISE UP! RISE UP! RISE UP!”
And from far away, Gariath watched them as they marched.
To war.
Exactly as he’d hoped.
And so it was that he skulked into a nearby alley, his head suddenly swimming. No more blood to clog his nostrils, no more smoke to blind him, nothing to distract from what he had done.
Him. He’d done this. All of it.
What would his humans have said, had they seen this? Would they have cursed him? Or merely applauded how very much like them he had become?
How like them, he wondered, have I become?
He looked up, saw the remains of a wooden building, still burning brightly, still spewing smoke into the sky.
He wondered, then, if he could walk into that pyre. He wondered, then, if he could let the flames sear his skin from his sinew, his sinew from his bones, paint his bones black. He wondered, then, if he could burn the human influence out of him.
But then, he wondered, what would be left?
TWENTY-EIGHT
TOMBS OF IVORY AND SILK
There were no gentle ways to win a fortune.
There were tragic ways: from the death of a loved one who had valued gold as much as he valued his inheritors. There were clever ways: at the tips of silver tongues and at the edges of coy smiles.
But the vast majority of wealth was earned the honest way: upon blades wet with red and beneath the marching boots of armies.
Karneria’s treasuries burst and withered as territories were conquered and lost. Saine’s fortunes rose and fell with each spring that came and heralded a new war. Muraska’s wealth lived or died by which of its neighbors it could keep from intruding upon its territory.
There was only so much gold in the world, after all, and that made it worth fighting over. Coin was the blood of cities. As blood was synonymous with wealth, so was wealth synonymous with war. Every city understood this, and Cier’Djaal was no exception.
It just preferred to be more civilized about it.
As insects fed upon blood, so too did thieves come in search of gold. The fashas had long ago given up trying to keep them out and had instead made a proposition: Only the gangs that proved the least disruptive would be allowed to operate within the city.
The fashas had thought this an elegant solution. The Jackals had agreed. And their tentative peace and less tentative fortunes had been won with lots and lots of bloodshed. The Houndmistress had threatened this pact, but the Jackals had found a way to deal with that. And even through the wars with the Khovura, the Jackals had never intruded upon the territory of the fashas.
But Denaos planned to be long gone before anyone could blame him for doing so.
Tonight his concerns were for more immediate things: the thud of guardsmen’s boots, the lights cast by streetlamps, the shadows cast by towering manors. He slipped into the latter as soon as he hit the ground, slinking away from the wall he had just climbed over.
The shadows here were not as deep as he’d have liked on a moonlit night such
as tonight. The closer a manor was to the commoners in the Souk and surrounding neighborhoods, the less desirable it was. Houses built near Silktown’s walls tended to be owned by lesser fashas or greater merchants who could afford only tiny palaces.
The liability of his chosen entry point became clear as soon as he peered around the corner.
It was true that the house guards of Silktown were considered to be mostly a joke, even by the house guards. To their fasha employers, they were just another excuse to flaunt their wealth: handsome men and pretty women they could garb in flashy, useless armor and arm with ridiculous weaponry in the hope of showing off just how much they had spent in the name of a pretense.
Denaos had expected to see a few out, maybe even more than a few. He hadn’t expected… this.
Guards wearing the colors of many different fashas marched up and down the well-lit avenues flanked by perfectly manicured lawns. They stood in front of the grand doors and beneath the stained glass windows. They scanned the streets from atop sweeping rooftops and kept a vigilant gaze upon the clean streets.
They were well armed and well armored. Some of them were even ugly enough to look as if they might actually know a thing or two about fighting.
There had to be fifty within his field of vision alone. And while that was intimidating, it was nothing compared to what strode through their ranks.
The dragonmen, towering high and broad, waded among the house guards’ mockeries of military formations. Weapons draped lazily over their shoulders, the horns on their snouts thrust high, they glanced around Silktown with a sort of disdain, knowing that these tiny humans would only impede them if there was a call to action.
Which, on most nights, would be unthinkable: Only a fool came to Silktown. The dragonmen were there largely for prestige and to discourage rabble from entering the district.
But tonight someone was worried enough to have gone through the farce of deploying every guard they had. Someone was worried enough to have at least two dragonmen patrolling the same street, and he could see the hulking shapes of at least three more in the distance. And considering the cost of all this, someone was likely to be several someones.
What could have caused this sudden show of defense? Denaos wondered. He had heard about the massacre at the Silktown gates, where Mejina had commanded the slaughter of dissenting crowds. Did they fear revolt? Revenge? From whom? The commoners weren’t enough to challenge them and the Jackals weren’t likely to retaliate on behalf of a few dead poor people.
Much more likely they were afraid of Karnerians or Sainites ending the farce of respecting their authority and finally moving into Silktown. But then, the fashas and the foreigners both knew that all the house guards and the dragonmen in the world wouldn’t save Silktown from the armies.
Denaos drew in a breath. Fifty or five hundred, it changed nothing. He had come here for one last-ditch effort: Expose the fasha supporting the Khovura and find out what he or she knew. Doubtless that would lead to the lair of the Khovura themselves, and the Jackals could finally turn the tide and take the fight to these deranged cultists. Then they could go about ousting the foreign armies, and Cier’Djaal would slowly mend itself once more.
Funny, he thought. All sounds so simple when you put it like that. As though fixing a city could be done in one night’s time. He shook his head. Shut up. You promised Anielle. One more try. One last night. Then you’re out. You’re not such a swine as to back out from a promise, are you?
Denaos—and probably Anielle—knew he was, in fact, such a swine. But liars as consummate as he had no trouble lying to themselves.
He let his eyes drift across the avenues and plazas, replete with their fountains and statues, toward a prominent house on a small hill.
Even in charred ruins, the house of Ghoukha, burned to a crisp when the Khovura attacked it, loomed large enough to cast shadows over the rest of Silktown. Denaos’s eyes were fixed upon a house living in one such shadow.
Big enough to suggest a fasha of at least healthy influence, the manor of Fasha Mejina burned with bright light from within, as though it were struggling desperately to extricate itself from Ghoukha’s legacy.
Fitting, Denaos thought. Mejina had been around as long as Ghoukha, but the lackluster silk output of his spiders had earned him a fraction of Ghoukha’s success. Rumor had it that he had spent thousands—perhaps even the remains of his fortune—to prove himself the leader Silktown needed in Ghoukha’s absence, hiring mercenaries and dragonmen to lock down Silktown and keep the rabble out.
Mejina was desperate to be respected, hungry to be powerful, and willing to throw a lot of money away in pursuit of those goals.
Three factors that made a man look for friends in dark places. Three factors that put Mejina at the top of Denaos’s list of suspects.
The sound of hushed murmurs caught his ear as a pair of guards began talking but ten feet away from his hiding spot. He crept back, slinking deeper into the shadows. He pulled a black cloth mask up and over his face, inhaled deeply the scent of washed silks and clean grass that had been scrubbed into the material, just as into the vest he wore over his shirt.
He had expected dragonmen and their keen sense of smell—scent-treated fabrics were used frequently by the Jackals to throw them off. And while he hadn’t expected this many house guards, they were still only house guards.
True to form, the house guards barely looked up from admiring their weapons or polishing smudges from their breastplates as he slipped around the alleys near the houses, darting silently through the narrow shafts of light cast by the streetlamps. The ones atop the roofs kept their eyes fixed over Silktown’s walls, looking for any sign of an angry mob. No one really bothered to look much at the shadows as Denaos slipped through the back alleys and navigated his way toward Mejina’s house.
He half expected he could walk right through them without their noticing and was half tempted to try, if only to satisfy his curiosity, but resisted the urge. Paranoia had virtues Denaos didn’t wish to disabuse the fashas of. And so long as their guards had all their eyes on the streets, they wouldn’t be looking for people in their houses.
He continued to slide in and out of the shadows, behind backs, beneath gazes, at the corners of wary eyes. Silktown’s avenues were long and sprawling, built to accommodate the vast manors that had been erected here when the city got rich, and maneuvering his way toward Mejina’s house at the other end of the city had its challenges. But as he probed deeper into the district, he found the patrols thinning out—likely the fashas had them closest to the front to make a greater show of force—and soon he saw his opportunity in an empty street.
Just across the way, smaller merchant houses cropped up, and just beyond their comforting shadowed alleys, Mejina’s manse loomed. Denaos paused, drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and—
“Do you think it’s true?”
Damn it.
“What?”
The voices of house guards came with the rattle of armor and the stomp of boots. He could hear them coming up the street, toward the alley he crouched in. He steadied his breathing, slunk into the shadows, waited for them to pass.
“The mob at the gates,” the first guard, a woman, said. “I hear they wounded one of the lizards.”
“Yeah?” A second guard, male, chuckled in reply. “I’d have liked to see that. Those smug reptiles are always looking down on us. How’d they do it?”
“Don’t you get it?” the woman asked, annoyed. “One of the dragonmen, the only thing keeping the war from Silktown, got injured. That’s never happened before. And once the shkainai hear about it, they’ll—”
“They won’t,” the man said. “The foreigners want this city’s wealth. They aren’t going to go messing with the money.”
“That’s what you think. You heard they saw a wizard here in Silktown? Wandering around, muttering to himself, smelling like ashes?”
A wizard? Denaos leaned forward, listening intently.
�
��Hell. I knew those Venarium fucks were up to no good. Anyone try to stop him?”
“Yeah. I’m sure there’s a line of people ready to fight a guy that can shoot fire out his asshole,” the woman guard scoffed. “Point is, if you’ve got wizards running around, what else will come here? Foreigners? Khovura? The Jackals? I hear they’re getting desperate. And if the dragonmen aren’t invincible, then we are most righteously fucked. I got this job because I thought Silktown was safe.”
“You got this job because you look good in that uniform,” the man said. They were drawing closer to Denaos’s hiding place. “But if you want to know if it’s true, you could always ask.”
They halted, just outside the alley. Denaos didn’t have to wait long to find out why. He could feel the reason in the soles of his boots as the cobblestones shuddered with tremendous footsteps. And soon a hulking shadow fell across the alley.
“Hey, lizard,” the male guard called up. “Is it true one of you got fucked up in the mob?”
“Huh?” the dragonman boomed back, glancing down as though he hadn’t noticed these two tiny humans until they spoke.
“We heard one of you got injured,” the female guard said, sounding nervous. “Is it true? I thought you couldn’t be harmed.”
“As far as you’re concerned, we can’t,” the dragonman replied languidly.
“Oxshit,” the man said. “One or two of you went down in the Uprising, my uncle said. You’re big and covered in scales, but under that you’re as weak as the rest of us.”
“Maybe,” the dragonman said. He squatted down on his haunches to draw closer to them. The female backed away nervously, the male sneered in reply. “No one ever said Drokha don’t die. But it’s a rare occasion, one that’s dependent on a very specific circumstance.”
“And what circumstance is—”
The male guard’s voice was cut off by the sudden crunch of metal as the dragonman’s hand swung out, smashing into the guard’s side and sending him flying. He smashed against a lamppost, a crack of bone was heard over the squeal of useless armor bending, and then he tumbled down to lie still on the street.