Sure enough, a figure was peering out over the wall top at them from the ramparts above the wide arch that was the town’s southern gate. Raz’s sharp ears made out the piercing whine of a warning whistle, and two more heads appeared by the first. They were still too far away to make out what the guards were saying, but soon one of the men nodded, and all three dropped out of sight. At once the iron portcullis, the great grate that blocked off the archway on its outer end, started to lift with the clanking of well-oiled machinery.
“Arrun…” Lueski whispered in fright as five men ducked under the rising gate onto the dirt road, identical longswords belted at their waists, and all attired in matching maroon and brown uniforms. The girl’s brother shushed her, though.
Wisely.
“Halt!” one guard—an officer of some kind, judging by the single gold stripe over his left shoulder—called out. “Traveler, you are to state your name and business before proceeding! Also, be advised that you are in the company of two runaways wanted by the town of Azbar’s court of law. If you’ve come to collect on the reward, we will—”
“I’ve come to make a deal!”
They were close enough now, barely a dozen yards apart, that Raz could see the mixture of surprise and curiosity pass over the faces of the five men as they heard his harsh voice.
“A deal?” the officer demanded. “What kind of deal?”
“I would have Azbar clear the names of my companions,” Raz listed, putting a hand out to stop Arrun and Lueski as he continued to move forward, “as well as credit them the remainder of their debt. I want documents drawn up that guarantee their safety and freedom, as well as secure passage out of town at any time they so choose.”
There was a roll of laughter from the five guards. Silently Raz thanked the Sun for choosing to shine so brightly at least one last time on that day. None of the men could see his face yet under the hood, even as he kept walking forward.
“And in return you offer what?” the officer asked through a mocking chuckle. “A chunk of the moon and a barrel of bear piss? The cold’s getting to your head, stranger! You don’t really think the council will—?”
Barely six or seven paces from the group, Raz reached up with his free hand and pulled off his hood.
As one, all five of the guards took a step back, a couple inhaling sharply, eyes wide as they saw his face.
“What in the Lifegiver’s name…?” one of the men on the end hissed, shocked.
Raz had partially hoped that luck would favor him again, and that out of the five one might recognize him and caution his companions against a reckless move. Maybe he’d even have been able to manage a fair bargain without resorting to methods he’d rather have avoided if it could be helped…
Not surprisingly, though, like lightning, luck never struck the same place twice.
“Atherian? This far north?” the officer demanded, perplexed. “You’re a fair bit mad to come such a ways from your heat, lizard-man. And you speak? I didn’t know animals could talk.”
“Insults are not recommended, Officer,” Raz said simply, narrowing his eyes and extending his neck crest slowly, like the building warning of a rattlesnake. “As for your question: I offer myself to the Arena in place of my two companions.”
“Wha—?” a shocked voice erupted from behind him. “No. Raz, you can’t—!”
“Be quiet, Lueski!” Raz snapped over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off the group in front of him. Lueski shut up. Raz could hear her start to cry again, and he almost sighed in exasperation.
He’d been mulling it over the last two days, contemplating the options as the three of them had been making their way towards Azbar. He had no money to bargain for their life with, all of it having gone towards his escape from Miropa, and even had he kept some significant sum, he wasn’t sure what gold crowns were worth to Northerners. His armor and weapons could fetch a fair price, but Raz would lose his head before he let himself part with any of them.
In the end, all he had left to bargain with was himself.
Not to mention there might just be a way to work such a play to his favor, too…
“You?” the officer asked, bravely ignoring Raz’s bodily warnings and stepping forward, placing a hand on the crossguard of his blade. “You’re big, atherian. But big doesn’t necessarily mean you’re worth shit in the pit. Nay, we’ll take the boy and his sister, and you should be glad we don’t just drag you along and throw you to the gladiators for sport.”
“Take another step,” Raz snapped, pointing a clawed finger at a guard who had moved towards Arrun and Lueski at his commander’s words, “and I’ll tear your eyes from your head and let you wander blind off the edge of the canyon.”
The man, apparently a great deal more intelligent than his officer, backed off at once.
“Threatening an enforcer of the law is punishable by a fine of up to a hundred gold, lizard,” the officer said gleefully, starting to draw his sword. “Men, take him and—!”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence.
Raz—a blur of muscle, scales, and steel—caught the handle of the man’s sword with his free hand and set a foot firmly on the guard’s chest. Shoving him away, Raz watched the man stumble back, falling and landing hard on his rear.
The sword, though, stayed in Raz’s hand.
“GET HIM!” someone yelled, and the other four came at him in a rush.
Predictable to a fault, Raz snorted inwardly.
They were well trained, though, and even as they dashed forward they moved to separate, giving one another the room needed to strike without the risk of lopping each other’s arms off. It was a smart move, one that would have forced any other opponent to fight all four of them simultaneously from different sides.
For Raz, though, it just meant his targets were farther apart.
Throwing himself forward, Ahna still resting on his shoulder, Raz rolled under the horizontal slice of the left middle man, landing on one knee directly in front of the surprised end guard.
Shlok-shlok-shtunk!
In less than a second the flat of Raz’s stolen sword landed on the outside of both the man’s knees, the pommel catching him in the abdomen as he fell. Already turning, Raz leapt to his feet, catching and redirecting the overhead swing of the guard whose strike he’d avoided first. Whipping his blade in rapid circles, dragging his opponent’s with it, Raz flicked the steel suddenly. The guard lost control of his weapon, and was still gaping at the blade as it flew through the air towards the gate when two controlled kicks to his stomach and shoulder sent him tumbling to the ground, winded.
The last two, thinking they were catching on, came at him significantly closer together, and Raz finally lifted Ahna from his shoulder. Dropping the borrowed sword, he lunged forward to catch them unprepared, whipping the dviassegai’s head in a T-shaped slash, striking both of the men’s extended swords with such force that one blade snapped into two pieces, and the other flew out of its owner’s hands still ringing. Without bothering to slow down, Raz twisted Ahna so that he held her horizontally in front of him and shoved her haft hard directly into the hips of the two men. As they instinctively curled over the handle, the breath rushing out of their lungs in identical gasps, Raz roared and strained.
Before they knew what was happening, both men were suspended in the air, hooked by their own weight over the weapon’s haft as Raz lifted them straight off the ground and held them over his head. His blood-red wings, kept relatively disguised until that moment, flared out to their full extent on either side of him. The guards’ faces blanched at the sight of the winged atherian holding them both up in the air without so much as blinking under the effort.
“Take your friends and leave,” Raz snarled in their terrified faces. “Then send out someone who isn’t a complete waste of my time.”
Twisting Ahna to the side, he let the two men fall in a tangled pile on top of each other. At once they scrambled to their feet and bolted for the open gate, completely ignoring
their companions, of which only the officer had gotten to his feet. With one last shocked look at Raz’s winged form, the man fled as well, disappearing into the safety of the archway.
“If I see or hear more than one person tonight, I’ll kill them all!” Raz called after him. “No guards! You hear?”
There was no reply, unless you count the groans and wheezings of the two men still left laid out in the grass, but Raz didn’t care. He’d been theatrical this time, but it had been necessary to make his point.
And he was sure it had been made.
Tucking his wings back under his fur mantle, Raz dropped Ahna once more onto his shoulder and turned around, making his way back to the two figures still huddled together a short ways down the road.
“Lifegiver’s saggy balls… I’ve never seen anything like that!” Arrun shouted, eyes as wide as fists as Raz approached, just like his sister’s. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”
Raz cuffed him lightly, picking up his sack as he walked past, smirking.
“Watch your mouth around your sister, Arrun,” he said semi-jokingly. “And half of that was self-taught, the other half by a man the Moon claimed years ago. Now come on. We’re heading back to the tree line until they send someone out.”
“He must have been some teacher…” Arrun breathed, pulling Lueski along as he ran after Raz.
That he was, Raz agreed privately, feeling the familiar white wood of Ahna’s haft under his palm.
It was almost midnight by the time Azbar’s representative finally made their appearance. Raz had left Arrun and Lueski a short ways into the woods, far enough so that the flames of their fire couldn’t be seen from the town’s walls, but close enough to make out any sign of trouble. His own camp he’d made up right at the edge of the forest, the light of his fire a distinct beacon of orange and yellow beneath the trees as he heated the last strips of cooked venison from his pack. Arrun had shown him how to bait the deer in close using certain kinds of plants, and they’d managed to spear a small doe with a crude wooden javelin Raz had whittled to a point with his knife.
Meat had never tasted so good.
Azbar was not quick in its response, a fact that surprised Raz considering the elaborate show he’d put on at the town’s gates. He worried more than once that the leaders behind the wall were trying to band together a hunting party for his small group, but in the quiet of the night he was fairly confident he would be able to hear the warning cranks of any of the gates if they opened. Therefore, since not once until well past dusk did he make out anything but the crackle of the fire, he relaxed and watched the flames dance, his wrists on his knees as he waited.
Finally, several hours after a bright half-Moon started her arch through the clear night sky—attended by Her Stars much further south in the sky that Raz was accustomed to—he heard the portcullis lift in the distance and the hoofbeats of a single horse approaching. A minute or so later the rider came to a halt, pulling the horse to a stop just outside the light of the flames as the mount whinnied.
“I’ll admit,” Raz called out from his seated place by the fire, not bothering to look up, “I expected to hear from someone sooner.”
“Apologies for the delay, Master Arro,” a woman’s calm voice responded, and there was the thump of boots on earth as she dismounted. “As is with any important decision in a community as large as ours, it required some deliberation.”
The speaker stepped into the light then, pulling off her leather rider’s gloves as she did. Tall for a woman, she was of moderate build with a fit, muscular figure obvious even beneath the layers of cloth and fur she wore to fend off the returning cold. Her hair was black as the night around her, like Lueski’s, but streaked with stripes of gray and white, and Raz realized the woman was not so young as to be expected to calmly meet a stranger who had just bested five of Azbar’s trained guard without so much as a drop of drawn blood. Her skin was creased around her eyes, and she held herself with a bearing that spoke of a hard life well handled, hawklike green eyes taking in Raz’s reptilian face without missing a beat.
“Join me,” he said, motioning to the other side of the fire. The woman nodded her thanks, accepting the offer. As she sat, Raz noticed something else: a scar, barely missing her right eye as it curved out and around it, angling inward again to stop at her upper lip. It left her with an ugly, tugged half smile that marred what otherwise might have been an attractive face.
It was the kind of scar only a blade could make…
“So you’ve figured out my name,” Raz said, ignoring his budding curiosity about his strange visitor.
“We have,” the woman replied with another nod, holding her hands to the fire to warm them, eyes on the flames. “A group of our bounty hunters returned yesterday absent their leader. One tried to feed us some rambling story of how they’d somehow managed to run into a Southern legend in the middle of the Northern forests.”
“You should thank the man. He can consider himself the only reason he and the others didn’t suffer the same ending as Boar, or whatever his name was.”
“Chairman Tern doesn’t reward returning without promised captives,” the woman said simply. “The only reason the remaining hunters weren’t thrown into the pit was because they had valuable information regarding you.”
“I hope your Chairman took the time to gather more than what they could tell you,” Raz said with a humorless chuckle. “Otherwise, you don’t really have much to go on.”
“You’re a former hired sword for the Southern underworld,” the woman said at once, her eyes flicking up suddenly to his face. “You broke off your partnership, though we aren’t aware why, and went on a spree that left well over a hundred dead and innumerable wounded. You’re running, and there are a dozen different rewards offered from any given city for shipping your head back to the South in a basket.”
She’s testing me, Raz realized, staring the woman down coolly. What manner of messenger is this…?
“I would be interested in finding out how, exactly, you know all this,” Raz responded nonchalantly, allowing his scaled tail to curl closer to the warmth of the fire, “but otherwise, yes. You are correct. What else do you know?”
“The rest is all boring history,” she responded with a convincing shrug, but her eyes never left his. “Something about a lizard-kind infant found in the desert and raised by men. Then of a family butchered in their sleep, their homes burned to the ground with the living still inside. In all honesty it sounds like a bad bedtime story, though, doesn’t it?”
The cold night air seemed to swallow Raz whole as he stared across the rippling dance of the flames, meeting the woman’s gaze. He wasn’t surprised by what she knew, honestly. It wasn’t hard to piece together that messages, probably sent by bird, had likely beaten him north, warranting his arrest or execution. From there it was likely the bounty hunter Shrith who had filled in the details. Raz’s history was common knowledge to most anyone who’d spent any amount of time in the fringe cities of the Cienbal.
Still, it was some small shock to have his past find him so quickly here, in this new world…
“You’ve no words for me?”
Raz blinked, then cursed silently. The woman was still watching him, her face immobile, but he could tell that she was getting something from the pause in their conversation. She was clever, this one. Dangerously clever. He could only hope she’d deduced that the silence meant Raz was capable of deep thought as much as the next man.
Regardless, he didn’t have the patience for games at the moment.
“What use would words be when you already seem to have all there is to know?” Raz asked after a moment. “You seem happy enough figuring it all out on your own, after all. Tell me, were you ordered to come piece together the puzzle that is Raz i’Syul Arro, or is this just an annoying pastime of yours?”
It was the woman’s turn to blink, and Raz smiled inwardly.
“Oh, was I not supposed to know?” he asked with false concern. �
��Do most men not see it, or is it that you’re out of practice? Because if you know so much about me, you’d realize I’ve spent enough time in shady places to perceive pretty quick when people are trying to figure me out for their own devices.”
There was another silence, this time not on Raz’s account.
“They don’t see it,” the woman responded finally, straightening up, her eyes no longer boring into him. “But I suppose it’s to be expected with your reputation. I apologize again. As Doctore, it’s my responsibility to assure that—”
“As what?” Raz cut in.
“Of course,” the woman said in realization. “You wouldn’t know…”
After a second’s hesitation, she stood up. Crossing her right fist over her heart, she gave a small bow towards Raz, speaking as she did.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 41