He closed his mouth with a snap.
Isara? Pretty, sweet Isara, interested in him?
’Ware the hunt, human male. Ruh’ayya dropped her mouth open and huffed a cat’s laugh. This young queen has your scent.
The memory of the warrior’s treatment of Hannei hit him like cold water on a new fire. Ismai firmed his mouth and looked away from her.
“On this day, in this moment, we betray one of our own.”
“Do not waste your pity on that one, Ja’Sajani.” Isara pushed closer. Too close, so that Ehuani pinned her ears and snapped at the chestnut flirt. “She is Kha’Akari and none of ours.” Her tone softened. “It is good, however, that you have a soft heart. A soft heart and a hard body. These are fine qualities in a man.” With a grin and a wink of her huge dark eyes, Isara was gone.
Mastersmith Hadid rode up on his right, laughing softly. “I am surprised that you are surprised, young Ja’Sajani.”
“But—” Hadid held up a hand and extended his fingers, one by one.
“You wear the touar. You ride a fine mare. You have been chosen by the vash’ai, just as so many abandon the people.” His face darkened at this, for his own Orujho had been gone for a moon now. “You are the last of the line of Zula Din, and of late I have heard the warriors comparing you favorably to your elder brother. It would not surprise me if young Isara soon approaches our First Mother for breeding-rights, if she has not already. Nor might she be the first.”
“They might as well braid stud beads into my hair.” Ismai’s face grew hot, even as his brows drew down in a scowl.
“That is exactly what they are after, my boy, or did you think a warden’s duties were limited to taking census and settling border disputes?” His smile faded. “The duty of a Ja’Sajani is to his people, young Ismai. You are young, and strong, and not entirely ugly. Your brother was not much older than you are, now, when he first gave the gift of life to a young Mother.” He grinned. “Not such an onerous duty, when you think about it.”
“I do not like the idea of women discussing me as if I were some… stallion. I will choose for myself.”
Hadid laughed so hard at this that he bent over in the saddle, slapping at his thighs.
“I wish you the best of luck with that! If you figure out how to manage such a thing…” He straightened, wiping tears from his cheeks. “…please let the rest of us know. Truly, you would be a hero among men.” Still chuckling, he trotted off on his dun mare.
Isara rode not far ahead, and Ismai was sure she had overheard the whole conversation. She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled, the smile of a vash’ai queen eyeing a fat young tarbok. He sank even lower into his saddle.
I do not understand females.
You are not meant to understand females, Ruh’ayya chided. You are meant to obey us.
An image of Char’s face, swathed in rags and veils, swam unbidden into Ismai’s mind. He suddenly longed to be with his friend, to sit by a fire in the shadow of Eid Kalmut, sharing roast hare and companionable silence.
I will ask her advice, he thought, and he straightened in his saddle. She was the one friend he could count on for unbiased advice. She always knows just what to say.
Kithren, Ruh’ayya warned, as she always did when he thought of Char, you should be more wary of that one. She is not what you—
“First Warrior!” one of the Ja’Akari, farther ahead, shouted. “Riders. ’Ware, riders, and they… they are…” Her voice rose into a thin, high shriek of purest terror.
“Arachnist!” another bellowed.
All around Ismai, the warriors exploded into action. Swords and bows were drawn, horses screamed as they caught the enemy’s scent, and the few vash’ai who still rode with their human kithren leapt into action. A moving, living ring formed around the Ja’Sajani in their midst. Isara rode past, face a mask of fury as she screamed a war cry. One hand held her bow and her stallion’s reins, high on his neck, giving him his head as she yanked the laces of her vest.
“Show me yours, filthy bastards!” she screamed. “Show me yours!”
Ismai stood tall in the stirrups, craning his neck to look up ahead, trying to see…
…and then he saw, and wished he had not.
At first glance his eyes told him that a man sat on a horse, ahead on a low hill, raising his arms as if he would welcome them in a friendly embrace. A handful of other men stood in a loose ring around him—an escort of sorts, perhaps. When Ismai’s mind finally heard what his eyes were screaming, however, his head jerked back as if he had been struck.
The man on the horse was no man at all, but a nightmare riding a nightmare steed. He had too many arms—arms that twitched and flapped like dying things as they reached toward the Zeeranim, and his horse’s head flopped from side to side as if its neck had been broken in several places. The pale man-things that swayed about those fell hooves, insectoid eyes glittering, chitinous pale not-skin seeming to glow red in the dying light, could only be—
“Reavers,” Hadid whispered hoarsely. The mastersmith pressed his dun close to Ehuani, and Ismai’s silver mare was so upset she did not even protest. “Akari help us, those are reavers.”
The arachnist waved his dead and twitching arms, and Ismai’s stomach clenched as the reavers, insect-like tools of the arachnids, sprang toward them. Ismai drew his sword, kissed the blade, and raised it high, letting it reflect the last light of Akari upon his upturned face. He threw his head back and yelled, a war cry that trailed off into a fit of laughter.
What is so funny? Ruh’ayya asked. She half-stood, half-crouched, hackles stiff and tail lashing from side to side. We are about to die, you and I.
Exactly, he replied, laughing again. We are about to die.
He kicked his mare, and they sprang forward to meet their doom. To dream of battle and glory was one thing. To watch blood shed under the sun was quite another.
The Ja’Akari hit the reavers in wedge formation, rolling over them like a sandstorm. Blades flashing, eyes flashing, ululating war cries, they danced a dance, and played a game upon the sands, a game with rules as ancient and venerated as the Zeera herself.
The reavers did not dance, and they did not play by the rules. Two of them crouched, skittered sideways, and leapt upon a single rider. It was Hudada on her lovely bay mare, a woman nearly as old as Ismai’s mother and with a smile and wink ready for any boy who might sneak down to the kitchens in search of an extra meal. She went down horse and all, shrieking beneath the weight of her attackers, their flashing limbs and wide black mouths. A gout of blood and gore rose into the air like a dark blessing.
Isara screamed and charged, shamsi raised to the sun, terrible and glorious. Sareta, snarling like a vash’ai, knocked a reaver from the back of another warrior’s horse and crushed it beneath her mare’s hooves.
Reyhanna was pulled from her horse. She rolled, leapt to her feet, and charged her attacker bare-chested, bare-handed, fierce as the midday sun. The reaver sprang toward her—
Mastersmith Hadid rode past Ismai, blacksmith’s hammer held high, smith’s robes thrown back from his face.
These scenes flashed before Ismai’s eyes. Then he crashed headlong into battle, and the world about him exploded into chaos. Smashed between two Ja’Akari, his Ehuani jostled so that she staggered and nearly went down, he hauled hard on the reins and then dropped them altogether, of necessity trusting his mare to keep them both safe as a reaver clawed its way over a riderless horse and leapt upon him. A smell of sulfur and burnt cloves engulfed Ismai, stinging his eyes and making him cough. He beat the thing in its face with the pommel of his sword and his off hand.
It hissed and chittered, striking at him with arms hard as staves and serrated like knives down the sides so that they cut him. Its mouth opened wide, wide. He struck it between its burnt-black eyes, screaming—
Ruh’ayya leapt through the dust and gore, mouth gaping in a gorgeous snarl, claws extended. Her tusks sank into the reaver’s back. The thing squeale
d, let go of Ismai, and they fell away, lost to him.
He swung at the face of another reaver, missed, and nearly lost his sword. The shamsi’s grip was slick with ichor and blood. Grip lightly, he reminded himself. Move slowly and with grace. To move too quickly is to lose the way. Keep your gaze broad and strong. He took a deep breath, but let it out again in a long, shuddering moan when the confusion before him parted and he saw, too clearly, the nightmare that was an arachnist.
Istaz never taught us about this, his mind gibbered. He never.
The many-armed figure sat on his freakish mount and watched the battle with an air of detached amusement. He wore black robes, Ismai saw, tattered and worn as corpse rags. They fluttered about him like cobwebs in a foul wind. As the Ja’Akari overcame his reavers one by one, smashing and hacking the foul things and turning their attention toward their fell master, half his face twitched upward in a terrible grin.
The spider-priest raised his upper arms high, over his head, and the dead arms twitched and flapped excitedly as the sand all about them began to roll and boil. Ehuani screamed as the ground beneath her hooves burst open and wave upon wave of spiders vomited forth.
Ismai had seen russet ridgebacks before, of course. The ground-dwelling spiders were as much a part of the Zeera as wind or sand, their eggs considered a delicacy among the prides. But he had never seen them like this. A mad, hissing mass of grasping legs and snapping mandibles swarmed over man and woman, horse and vash’ai.
Ehuani squealed and then screamed, a sound that pierced Ismai’s ears and his heart. His good, true mare, lost to terror, threw herself into the air. Ismai pushed himself away from the saddle as the mare went up, and he was nearly crushed as she fell back and over, legs flailing, to land full upon her back. She thrashed to her feet, screamed again, and took off at a full gallop, bucking and kicking at anything in her path.
’Ware, Kithren! Ruh’ayya screamed in his mind. ’Ware!—
Her voice cut off.
Ismai pivoted, crouching and raising his sword defensively, and in the end was betrayed by shamsi and sun and sand. His heel slipped so that he staggered back a step, the precious golden blade twisted just so and reflected the hot gaze of the Sun Dragon full into his eyes, blinding him. The moment passed, but in that instant a reaver had closed the distance between them. Hands as strong and hard as tree roots gripped Ismai’s shoulders so tightly his arms went numb and he dropped his sword into the sand.
The thing’s small black eyes, shiny as obsidian, twisted in their burned sockets and it opened its mouth grotesquely wide, wormlike tongue writhing as if it would lick his fear from the air between them. The thing leaned in to bite his face off. Ismai stared into the eyes of death…
…and laughed.
He laughed even as he twisted, Snake in the Blackthorn coming as easily to him as if he had worn the blue his entire life. He laughed as ichor sprayed across his face, stinging skin and eyes, he laughed even as beneath his heel he crushed a spider bigger than his head. Three smaller spiders raced up his legs, too fast for him to shake off, and a giant red-spiked arachnid the size of a small tarbok waved its forelegs as it advanced, mandibles tucking and chewing in anticipation of the taste of his flesh.
“Show me yours!” he screamed at the fell thing, as if he had become a warrior after all. He laughed as its cluster of beady little eyes twitched in confusion. Ismai threw back his head—
His laughter was cut off as a strong arm wrapped around his throat from behind, lifting him up and out of the battle. Golden scales blinded his eyes, golden wings enfolded him in a silken caress as Akari Sun Dragon swept down from the heavens to take him home.
* * *
“Burn the bodies. No, the spiders only. The gha’alim must be burned with dragonfire, pile them here, and the shakkat,” she spat, indicating the body of the arachnist, now lying some distance from what remained of his head. “Dismembered and burned. Also with dragonfire.”
“Dragonfire?” Ismai flung another dead russet onto the growing mound of corpses. The reavers, as Ishtaset had ordered, were being dragged and put in a separate pile. Nobody had, as yet, volunteered to collect the remains of the spider-priest.
Their own dead had been carefully wrapped and laid together. They would, Ishtaset had declared, be making the long ride home.
“Dragonfire,” she agreed. The warrior regarded Ismai with some amusement. “You will see.”
When she turned her head like that, and the sun caught in her bleached mane, Ishtaset was the fiercest and, Ismai thought, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. In her gilded wyvern’s-scale armor and glittering robes—which had made him think he had been stolen away by Akari—she seemed hardly less magnificent than the Sun Dragon himself.
Sareta walked up to the golden warrior, frowning, though she tried to hide it. She had been frowning, Ismai thought, since these warriors of legend had ridden out of the sun and saved them all. “Mah’zula” they named themselves, after those first warriors who had ridden with Zula Din.
“I hardly think such measures are necessary,” Sareta said, straightening. She was half a hand shorter than Ishtaset, and too obviously found that irritating, as well. “We need to get our wounded back to Aish Kalumm, that our healers may see to their needs.”
“Ah, yes, Aish Kalumm, the City of Mothers.” Ishtaset folded strong arms across her chest. “Houses of stone in which you… Ja’Akari… crouch like feeble old men, hiding from the very mother who gave birth to you. No wonder the vash’ai have all but deserted you.” At this, the warrior’s own sleek cat, nearly as big as Khurra’an, padded to stand beside her. “It also is no wonder you allow your men to ride so far from the prides, so that they may protect you.”
“Khutlani,” one of the golden warriors hissed.
Sareta’s face was hard as rock. She opened her mouth to speak, but Ishtaset walked past her without so much as a glance.
“Ah, Anarra! Je halan shukri, thank you for responding so quickly.”
“Je halan el’aish,” a woman responded. She wore brilliant hooded robes of green and blue, red and black, and pushed the hood back, revealing her face. “It is an honor and a duty to serve.”
Ismai stared. The woman’s face was heavily tattooed in reptilian patterns, also of blue and green and gold. Bright plumes had been fastened into her braids so that she looked more than half lionsnake. In place of a warrior’s vest she wore a harness fashioned of straps of lionsnake skin, from which depended a myriad of snakes’ teeth, plumes, and small glass bottles of blue and green.
“Aulani!” one of the Mah’zula yelled in a voice high with tension. “They are stirring!” Ismai did not like the sound of that, at all. He turned slowly toward the voice, even as he heard Mastersmith Hadid gasp.
“One of the reavers is alive!”
Ishtaset rolled her eyes. She and the lionsnake woman strolled casually to the place where they had thrown the dead reavers. Ismai could see that the body of the arachnist had indeed been dismembered and thrown onto the pile.
For the first time since he could remember, Ismai did not feel hungry at all.
“The reaver is not dead,” the snake woman said to nobody in particular. She stopped at the heap of corpses, where serrated arms were waving feebly, fingers twitching like the legs of a squashed spider.
Kithren, Ruh’ayya warned, limping over to join him. She had been sorely wounded by the reaver, and stitched up again by the Mah’zula—who, as she pointed out in her silent, catlike way, were stepping warily back from the corpses and especially the snake woman. Ismai stepped back, as well.
“Neither issss it alive,” the snake woman continued. “It is a reaver.” As if that explained everything. Unfastening a long green bottle from one of the straps, she held it up to the sunlight. Dark, iridescent liquid swirled within, and Ismai caught a faint scent of musk.
Lionsnake venom, he thought, surprised. What…
One of the Mah’zula lit a torch and handed it to the snake woman. Ismai bac
ked away even further, so quickly he almost tripped over his own feet. Lionsnake venom and fire did not mix. Or rather, they mixed entirely too well.
“What!” First Warrior snapped, striding toward Ishtaset and the snake woman. “What are you—”
“Sssssssssssss!” the snake woman hissed. “You will ssssee.” She brought the bottle of venom to her lips as if it were a skin of usca. Cheeks puffed gently, the pink tip of her tongue sticking slightly out. She held the torch up in front of her mouth.
Pursed her lips…
…and blew.
A gout of flame, bilious green streaked with red and gold, shot from the woman’s mouth as if she were dragonkin. It engulfed the near side of the corpse pile, and every nightmare Ismai had ever had came to life at once.
Not dead, he thought. Ruh’ayya pressed into his legs, half-hissing, half-snarling, and they backed away from the seething, screaming conflagration, backpedaling at a near run. Neither were they alone. Not dead, not dead.
Neither were they alive.
Flaming reavers rose and leapt and dragged themselves from the tangled pile, shrieking and chittering like mad things even as their chitinous skin crisped and crumbled in the vermilion flames. One of them ran hissing at the snake woman, who took another swig of venom and spat flames into the thing’s face till it was nothing but a pile of stinking ash. The arachnist’s severed arms flapped and flopped like live fish thrown into a hot pan, and a smell unlike anything Ismai could have imagined rose in a thick, black cloud, burning his eyes and lungs, staining the sky.
Before his eyes, the arachnist and his reavers were reduced to a stinking, twitching, oily mass of slime. The snake woman finally ran out of fire and leaned forward, hands on her knees, panting hoarsely. Ishtaset patted her on the back, murmuring soothing words as the woman regained her breath.
“Yeh Atu,” Mastersmith Hadid breathed at Ismai’s shoulder. “Yeh Atu.” Ishtaset straightened and turned to face them. Her eyes met those of Sareta in a steady, challenging gaze. The First Warrior was the first to look away.
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