by Sam Sykes
“Well, don’t be shy,” it rasped again from a nearby tent, its voice broken by errant clicking noises. “Let’s not make it any more awkward, shall we?”
It wasn’t until the voice laughed—a hideous, chittering sound—that she recognized it. She swept to the tent, shoved back the flap, and saw her suspicions confirmed in a single glance.
The night had left precious little light to see by inside the tent, but there was no darkness thick enough to hide the peculiarity of the prisoner inside.
A tall, muscular figure knelt at the center of the tent. Flashes of moonlight through slits in the tent betrayed glimpses of pale flesh drawn tight with scars and painted with bruises and cuts. Two powerful arms were drawn over his head, stretched out and bound to two stakes flanking him. A pair of finer, more delicate hands emerging from just beneath those were bound before him. The creature looked to have been taken harshly: The reek of blood was all around him and his body trembled in agony.
Yet for all this, there was just enough moonlight for her to see the scars of his face twist as his mouth curled into a smile.
Or what Kataria assumed was a smile.
It was hard to tell with couthi, what with their giant fucking mandibles.
“Ah, so it’s you.” Man-Khoo Yun’s voice was dry, his laughter even more so, like the cracking of baked earth.
“You don’t sound surprised,” Kataria replied.
“I’m not,” the couthi said. “It would seem logical that they’d grant you the honor of finally killing me after so many days of torture. I am, after all, the one who exposed your conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy,” she repeated flatly.
“If one can call it that,” Man-Khoo Yun said. “Let the humans be buried beneath the knowledge that I warned them about you and your whole misbegotten race.”
“Yeah.” Kataria sneered. She held up her bloodied wrists. “You uncovered my plot to get myself tied to a tent stake and left half-starved for days. Fucking brilliant work there, insect.” She spit at the earth. “Whatever happened, I wasn’t a part of it.”
“Ah, yes.” Venom crept into Man-Khoo Yun’s voice. His ropes creaked as he tried to lean his battered body forward. “One tribe kills a man’s wife, and when he has a grievance, the other tribes tell him they are not responsible. Then when they kill his son, the first tribe tells him that they are not responsible. So a man has two bodies and, somehow, no one is responsible.” He grinned morbidly. “When Bir-Nal Than fell, we called it ‘the shictish miracle.’”
Her ears shivered at those words.
Bir-Nal Than. She had heard the name of the former couthi capital before, spoken frequently in the tribal fires. It was the great victory of the shictish tribes over the expanding couthi empire. One did not speak of Bir-Nal Than without speaking of the fires that had been lit in its burrows, the tribesmen who had sliced the faces of the defenders, the dead forest whose branches they had hung the couthi dead in. One did not speak of Bir-Nal Than without breathless admiration for the old war.
Man-Khoo Yun, though, spoke of it with a voice choked and black eyes glimmering.
“Countless dead,” the couthi said. “Countless murdered. While the armies were out hunting your warriors, you circled back and attacked the city. All our young, all our maidens, all cut to pieces and fed to your beasts. And then you simply scattered back into the forests, vermin fleeing a corpse picked clean.”
“That was…” Kataria swallowed hard. “My tribe was a part of that, but not my qithband. I wasn’t there, neither were my parents.”
“Tribes, qithbands, parents…,” Man-Khoo Yun all but roared. “For the couthi, family is something worth fighting for, worth dying for. For shicts, family is a collection of bodies you point to and say, ‘No, they’re responsible.’” He snapped forward in his bonds, the ropes snarling as they bit into his flesh. “My family is dead. My face was carved by their knives. What did I do to deserve that?”
When the bonds would not give, when the fire in his voice begat only a hacking cough, he fell back and hung from his ropes. But though his breath was ragged, his black eyes continued to burn with a fire too immense for the battered mess of his body.
“What did your humans do to deserve their fate?”
His words did not bite at her like a knife. He had not the strength to hurl them so far, so hard. Rather his words dribbled out of his mouth on rasping breath and pooled on the sandy floor in an ugly puddle of hatred and scorn and truth.
And she couldn’t deny it. Not a single ugly word.
She knew nothing of Bir-Nal Than but stories. The numberless couthi dead left behind were all the same: words lost in campfire stories.
Shicts, too, were the same, she supposed: stories, tales, legends of long-eared ghouls that haunted the night, told by worried human mothers to naughty human children.
When Man-Khoo Yun looked upon her, he didn’t see Kataria. That word had no meaning. When the khoshicts looked upon humans, words like Lenk, Asper, and Denaos had no meaning, either.
They saw only stone houses built on their lands. Only forges that churned out blades that killed their people. Only beasts that would one day hunt their children.
Maybe that was just the way of things, then.
There were no people, only stories. It was easier to kill a story than a person, to think only of the villainies recounted in the tales than to think of bodies hanging from dead trees and screams eaten in the cackle of flames.
Maybe.
And maybe she was about to make a huge mistake as she approached Man-Khoo Yun with the knife in her hand.
It was stupid, of course. Stupid to think that she could spare a world steeped in war another corpse, that the world would even notice a dry spot among all the blood staining it, that things might end without bloodshed for once.
But she had the feeling that there’d be enough violence in the days to come that she could afford to skip it this once.
And so she reached up with her blade. And so she sawed at the ropes securing his larger arms to the tent poles. And so she stepped away as he collapsed, weary, to the sand.
“You can try to kill me if you want,” she said, regarding him coolly even as he glowered murderously at her. “But if you want my advice?” She pointed the blade at his broken body. “You got it worse than I did. You could attack me, maybe even kill me.” She sniffed, flipped the blade in her hand. “If you really wanted it. But by the time it’s over, you’ll be in no shape to escape. So you can fight or you can run.”
She stepped back farther, until she was out in the cool of the desert night. She spread her hands out wide.
“Up to you.”
For a long time he stared at her, his eyes inky voids that drank what insignificant light there was inside the tent. When he finally did move, it was shakily. He rose to his towering height and stalked out of the tent. Towering over her, mandibles glistening in the moonlight, he still looked as if he would have a good chance of strangling her with those giant arms before she could stab him to death. But it’d be a wager. And neither of them had that kind of ferocity left to gamble.
Maybe that was why he turned from her and why he stalked away. And maybe it was foolish to think that he might go back to his people, that he might have the one story that existed in the world about a shict and a couthi who did not kill each other one fateful night.
Maybe.
Or maybe he’d just make a useful distraction as her pursuers had to choose between chasing him and chasing her.
No fucking point in waiting to find out, she thought.
And she turned and began hurrying down the dune.
Should go back.
Too many thoughts.
Should go back and get a yiji. You can’t make it on foot.
Too much air.
No time. Can’t go back and risk getting captured again. Have to keep moving.
Free from the confines of the camp, her head clear of the fury of their Howling, Kataria found her thoughts com
ing swiftly.
Too swiftly.
They tumbled about in her skull, clashing off each other with resonating bangs that sent her temples throbbing. She felt suffocated by the open space around her as she put the camp behind her. Now that she was free of the immediacy of escaping her prison, the enormity of her task did not so much lie before her as bear down on her like a wolf whose jaws were tightening on her neck with every step she took.
It had all seemed so simple when—
No, not simple, she corrected herself, necessary. It had been necessity that had given her the will to escape. She had to stop it—Shekune’s war, the inevitable human retaliation, the doom of all shicts—and she had to do it quickly.
Only now, beneath a pitiless moon on an unforgivingly clear night, did she stop and stare and realize that her plans were as empty as the desert that sprawled out before her.
No landmarks. No trails. Nothing but dunes upon dunes to guide her. How could she find her way back to Cier’Djaal through this? How could she hope to beat Shekune and her army, who had lived in this desert for generations, there? How could she get to Sai-Thuwan in time?
And who was to say he would listen? That Shekune would listen? She had heard the Howling of the khoshicts; their hunger for war had rung so loudly in her ears that it had knocked the wind from her lungs.
They might ignore her. They might go ahead with their plan. And the humans might not stop with the khoshicts but go on to eradicate the Twelve Tribes entirely.
And what if she was captured again and forced to witness it? What if Lenk was out there and they found him? What if Kwar realized her dagger was missing? What if…
What if I can’t do it?
It was that thought that spoke the clearest, loudest, and it would not stop repeating itself in her head. She felt the thundering of her heart in her throat, the taste of something sour on the back of her tongue, the scent of salt in her nose.
She asked herself this, again and again. And when she could no more, she asked the desert.
“What then?”
And the desert offered no answer.
Not so much as a breeze to stir a single grain of sand in response to her. She opened her ears and heard nothing. No sounds of the Howling. No lonely cry of wind. She could hear nothing.
Nothing, at least, but the creak of a bowstring being drawn.
She whirled about, flipping the dagger in her hand and drawing it back, ready to throw. She tensed, expecting to find a stalking hunter behind her or a yiji-mounted rider bearing down on her.
What she did not expect to find was a child.
No, not a child, she recognized. A man. But not by much.
It took her a moment to recognize him as Yarra, the youth who had been charged with watching her. All the arrogance and scorn he had shown her when she was bound had vanished, chased away by eyes wide with fear and lips that struggled to force a command out.
“D-don’t move!” he cried out.
The command might have carried more weight if the bow he held weren’t shaking. The shaft of the arrow rattled against the bow, his stance was weak and ungainly, his fingers—bandaged from when Kwar had broken them—awkwardly gripped the arrow’s shaft.
Kataria had seen this before—trembling hands, darting eyes, heavy breathing—in every young shict.
He had faced only targets of wood and straw, she knew. He had never put arrows in something that bled. She would bet he’d never turned his bow on anything that walked, let alone another shict.
Gone was the boastful warrior who had gloated over his captive. Left behind was just a scared, trembling boy.
“You… you have to come back to camp with me,” Yarra said, licking his lips. “Or I’ll shoot.”
“No, you won’t,” she said, the firmness of her voice strangling the quaver of his.
“I will!” he insisted. “They told me to… to shoot you if you tried to escape.”
“But you didn’t,” she replied. “You could have shot me from thirty paces. But you came close enough for me to use this.” She gestured with her chin to the blade she held drawn back. “You don’t want to kill me, Yarra.” She let her voice slip lower, into a softer tone. “You don’t want to kill another shict.”
Shame flashed across his callow face for a moment, quickly swallowed by his fear, but it was clear enough for her to take a bold step closer. He retreated a step in response and held his bow up higher.
“Stay back!” he said.
“I don’t want to, either, Yarra,” she said, ignoring the command. “I don’t want to see any shicts die. That’s why I’ve got to go to Cier’Djaal. Shekune will kill us all with her war. The humans will retaliate and leave not a single shict alive.”
“Shekune said…” Yarra swallowed hard. “She’s going to bring us revenge. She’s going to show them that we’re to be taken seriously!”
“Who’s going to die for it, Yarra?” she asked. “How many humans are you going to have to kill for that to happen? How many shicts are they going to kill in return?”
“I… I don’t know. Look, just come back and—”
“You do know,” she snapped. “You know as well as I do and every fucking shict in that camp knows that there’s no way to win this without so many fucking dead that it won’t even matter who won.” She bit back her anger. “I can’t let that happen, Yarra. Not without trying to stop it.”
His lips quivered, trying to form a reply. The fear in his eyes spread to all parts of him, choking his voice in his throat and making his tongue swell. His hands continued to shake. His arms would be getting tired, Kataria knew; bows were meant to be drawn and fired quickly, by instinct, not held for so long.
He would tire soon. The fear in him would sap his strength. Then she could get close enough to knock him out and escape.
“Yarra, listen to me,” she said, “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt any shict. Put down the bow.”
“I… I can’t. Shekune, she trusted me with this. She said—”
“She said what, Yarra? That shicts should kill shicts?”
“No, she said—”
“I don’t fucking care what she said.” She bared her teeth in a snarl, tensed. “She’s wrong and she’s going to get us all fucking killed if we don’t stop her.”
She took another step forward.
“Yarra, just—”
“NO!”
Instinct.
That’s all it was. Instinct.
Instinct from a hundred battles fought that made her dart to the side as the bowstring snapped. Instinct he didn’t have from a hundred battles he’d never see that made his arrow go wide. Instinct she had fought for, worked for, bled for that made her arm snap forward and send the dagger flying toward him as he awkwardly twisted.
It was just rotten luck that made it find his ribs.
She cursed—at him for firing, at herself for throwing. He cried out—a name she did not recognize. But neither of them spoke loud enough to drown out the sound of the blade finding its mark. And as she heard the meaty smack of steel biting past muscle, she knew that the throw had been pitilessly perfect.
He went rigid, arm tucking into his side in response to the pain. He collapsed, his cry came out thick and burbling. She ran to his side, found the blade lodged to the hilt in his flank. It had found its way between his ribs, punctured a lung.
“Yarra!” she cried out, falling to her knees beside him. “Yarra, I…” She gritted her teeth, balled her hands into fists, and snarled, “You asshole. You stupid piece of shit, didn’t you fucking hear me? Didn’t I say to put the bow down? Didn’t I?”
His response was a bubbling red froth that poured from his lips as something inside him ruptured and spilled out of his mouth. His response was a futile clutching at her arm with a hand gone rigid with desperation. His response was the fear in his eyes fast fading, giving way to an empty lightlessness.
“Yarra,” she said. “Yarra, listen to me. I’m… I can…”
It would not change anything.
It would not make the light stay in his eyes. It would not make his hand not go limp. It would not make his last words be anything but a few choked, gurgling sounds.
And when he went still, and lay staring up endlessly at a night as dark as his eyes, she said nothing.
What would it change?
This question hung over her head. She looked over the desert.
And the desert offered no answer.
It was getting colder.
The night gnawed at her bare flesh as she trekked across the dunes. The wind traveled west, as did she, and bit at her back. It was almost unfair, she thought, that something so sweltering by day should be freezing at night. She would do well, she knew, to find shelter and wait out the night on the leeward side of a dune, much like the one she was trudging down.
But she did not.
She forced herself to feel the cold, its bitter chill and gnawing wind. She forced herself to feel the soreness of her wounds and the ache in her feet. She forced herself to feel the weight of Yarra’s bow and quiver upon her back, as keenly as if she were carrying his corpse.
For this weapon was his corpse. All that was left of Yarra, everything he’d meant to the tribe, was on her back now. He had died because of her. Many more would if she did not keep moving.
She could not afford to forget that.
Not that there was much chance that she would.
She could still hear him, the last sounds he had ever made. And though they had been gurgling, choking sounds that had escaped his lips in runny froth, she knew the word he had spoken.
Why?
If she had just held her dagger for just a moment, if she had just run, if he had just believed her…
But he hadn’t. He trusted Shekune more, as all of them did. And now he was dead.
The quest to save countless shict lives had begun with one dead by her own hand.
And the rest? she asked herself in the spaces between her footsteps. When the rest of them trust Shekune? What are you going to do to them? Are you going to kill them as—