by EM Kaplan
“You know, we don’t—I mean they don’t call themselves trogs. There was this other term, or idea, for what we were. It’s more like…” Bookman smooth the brush and debris away from a spot on the forest floor. While the ground was dark and muddy, hard to see in the poor light, Ott was at just the right angle to watch Bookman draw his finger through the soil. One stick figure. Another. A group of five. Then a circle drawn around them.
Ott could feel his eyes bugging out of his head.
A cadre. A military unit. Bloody foot soldiers was what they were.
Chapter 26
South in the red desert, Zunee smacked at the man’s hand around her midsection, batting away his grimy paw. His other hand—broken nails encrusted with red dirt—clamped on her forearm with a punishing grip. Given half a chance, she would strike him in his vitals. “Release us at once,” she demanded.
Lantus Chok, filthy pig. Though he was the weakest and the least of her dead father’s enemies, he was still an irritant that she’d like to kick in the genitals. Maybe if she struck hard enough, he’d have fewer filthy offspring to carry on his scourge of a line. Speaking of which…she balled up her free fist, hunched over, and punched between her legs. Direct contact to the most tender part of his worthless self. Lantus went down like a stone, clutching his groin. She could feel a satisfied grin creeping across her face. Though she might look a bedraggled, half-starved, transient mess, she was going to allow herself this moment of beatific and unadulterated joy.
She sought out Deni, who was under the butt of the Chok clan’s second, Lantus’s right-hand man. Her best friend laughed, but then his captor punched him in the back of the head. Deni’s eyes rolled back as he blacked out. Zunee flung herself on the man’s back, tackling him off Deni and rolling in the soft dirt along the river bank. They grappled and twisted, breathing hard and hollering, each trying to get the upper hand. For all her skinny limbs and negligible bodyweight, she was a skilled wrestler and got the upper hand. An arm leveraged behind the man’s arm, her hand gripping the back of his filthy, stinking neck, Zunee had him within a minute or two of surrendering—either his pride or his own consciousness. She would render him helpless either way. Preferably unconscious.
“Stop,” Lantus demanded, having pulled himself upright, though he still clutched himself between the legs. Pain leeched into his shout, “Desist with your struggling at once. Or I will kill every one of your sisters. I will slaughter them, scrape the flesh from their bones, and feed them to my family.”
Zunee froze, narrowing her eyes. She was prepared to call his bluff. When her father was alive, Lantus had been known for his bluster and lack of follow-up—weak willed and pathetic, an opportunist at best. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all he did, his greasy jowls flapping. More of a sycophant and one to kowtow, he’d never outright challenged her father, so she’d never feared him much before. But now his arms men dragged out her sisters, one by one, knives at their soft throats. Her heart sank. She’d been a fool to think she could transport this precious cargo to safety, to keep them intact and alive in her father’s place. A complete and utter idiot. She examined each of her sisters’ faces, marking them from Lena down to Yanna to see if any of them had been injured.
Each of her sisters’ faces, stair-steps down the line in different shades of brown, some dark while others were light, stared back at her. From Lena’s perpetual scowl, a thunderous cloud darkening her brow, down to Yanna’s uncharacteristically serious expression, Zunee examined each one, committing their uniform silence to her memory. She met eyes with each, trying to reassure them without words that she would not fail them. With every fiber of her being, as she gazed into eyes, dark, gray, and hazel, that she would not let them down.
“You would not harm them.” She said it with a healthy dose of scorn, none of which she felt. In richer times, Lantus would keep them as servants or wives. Adding to a family was more important when mouths could be fed with ease. Strength in the desert meant large numbers. But now while food was lacking…
Lena looked pale and furious, captive in the steel clutch of a slender man who looked like a younger, leaner version of Lantus. Zunee pitied him, if that was who he’d claimed for his future bride. Lena would slaughter him in his sleep and wear his entrails for a scarf. Her sister’s fists were screwed up into tight balls, the pale pink of her palms squinting like clenched eyes.
On the ground, Deni groaned and rubbed his forehead on the muddy ground, a smear of it marking his brow. She imagined the cool dirt had to feel good on his head. Just stay down, she wanted to tell him. Don’t do anything stupid.
A difficult situation, Zunee thought, her jaw tight with frustration. What would her father have done had Lantus trapped him? Never mind that her father would not have allowed himself to get into this position in the first place. She waved off that notion as a forgone possibility. She was here now, and there was nothing she could do about it…other than to get herself out of it. Like a cabra who had wedged herself in a tight passageway, she had no other course of action but to continue forward.
“What do you want from us?” she demanded, looking down at him. She was counting on the disgusting rodent to make an offer for their freedom. She could counter it, of course, or in the worst case, use trickery against his feeble mind. She was certain she could out-think him. A bleating, thin-legged cabra could outsmart him, for pity’s sake. She wasn’t certain how he’d survived this long in life without being sucked back into the womb of the Great Mother desert. Given half a chance, Zunee would be glad to assist him on his return trip home.
Lantus stood, still off-balance from the evident pain between his legs. Smoothing his dirt-smudged yellow robe, he laughed—a sound which made Zunee further suspicious. So, he thought he had the best of her? Well, he was wrong. Dead wrong. And as soon as she freed her sisters, he would pay.
“What makes you think you can barter with me? While your sisters have knives at their throats. You’re as arrogant as your father was. Unluckily for you, he’s dead now, isn’t he? Too bad. I don’t want anything from you. You belong to me now. Everything that was once yours is now mine. You are mine. From your dirty feet to your sharp chin, and all the dusty, dry bits in between.” The sneer on his face as he insulted her fertility made the murderous rage boil inside her belly. He could rant at her all he wanted, but as soon as he threatened the lives of her sisters, he had put a definitive number on the days left of his life.
She suppressed a growl of annoyance. It was obvious he wasn’t going to let them go without a fight. Didn’t he know he was a dead man? Time to weigh her options. She eyed the dagger strapped to the belt around his waist. How far would she get if she slit his throat? How many members of her family would his men kill in retaliation? Despite the excessive number of her sisters, despite his certainty, she had none to spare.
Deni was still woozy, not yet recovered from the blow to the back of his head. The rapid rise and fall of his dusty shoulders assured her that he still lived, though he was suffering. She’d been knocked into blackness once, tumbling down some rocky hills, and even the stubbornness of her thick skull had not prevented the subsequent head ache and vomiting upon awakening. No, she didn’t envy him now. Furthermore, she could not count on his help—she would have to rescue him, she thought with something akin to amusement, her foolhardy self-confidence rearing its indomitable head, even at a time such as this.
Uncrossing her long, thin arms and letting them fall to her sides, she approached Lantus, step by cautious step. She held out her hands in an appeasing gesture. Surely, a malnourished, insignificant female such as herself could present no threat?…The closer to him she could get, the better.
“What do you intend to do with us?” she asked him, softening her voice, making it quaver. Never in a thousand revolutions of the sun would she consider using her female wiles to seduce him, to change his mind. Under difference circumstances, Lena and Deni would laugh at the very idea that she knew how to do such a thing. The thought of
it made her stomach turn. However, she wasn’t above fooling him into thinking she’d given up and was surrendering. Weakness, she could do.
“It depends upon your behavior,” he said, dusting himself off. There had been a time when his belly was round, and the fat had padded his face. Now the loose flesh hung from either side of his jaw like pockets of an empty purse. His gray hair clung to his head in a tight cap, curled and matted from general uncleanliness. The crust of a past meal lined the corners of his mouth. Did none of these Chok pigs bathe?
All desert women grew up knowing what to expect from life. Zunee had never questioned the options laid before her. Among her people, women could be wives or warriors, or both—they were always highly valued, both treasure and power. Women were life-bringers. As long as they remained free, no one could confine them to any one occupation, and after generations of such freedom, no one would have been able to limit them. Upon capture, however, they could expect to serve as slaves or wives, who added to a clan’s status. What they made of their lives under their new tents was untold. Zunee would never live peaceably under any tent other than her own. She’d known that fact from her first waking moments at her father’s knee, listening to his stories.
“And what if I agree to submit to you, to present you with my sisters as your new wives and daughters?”
He smiled, the gaps of his missing teeth cementing her disgust on the matter of his hygiene, or lack of it. “What makes you think we would have you that way?”
Zunee’s temper snapped. She heard a shout of protest from Deni—to his dying day, he’d be trying and failing to dilute her bravado, to keep her grand plans under control. But she had already jumped into motion. Wrenching the dagger from Lantus’s belt, she gripped his elbow, spinning him, twisting the arm up and out of its natural position. The joint gave with a pop. He shrieked, dropping on his knees. She stooped behind him and pressed her dagger against the the skin of his dirty neck, hard enough that a trickle of blood flowed on his filthy yellow robe.
“Release my sisters,” she told the men who held the girls captive. “Let them go or I will slaughter your father.” She dug the dagger into his neck just a little deeper, eliciting a higher scream from him. No more waiting. She would take his life now.
Yet, no one moved.
“I said, release—”
An arm wrapped around Zunee’s neck and pulled her away from Lantus, choking her until she had to stand on the tips of her toes just to breathe. Another hand chopped the dagger from her weakening grip, and the blade fell in the dirt. Clawing at the hard arm around her throat, her vision swam. As she fought against the blackness that threatened to overcome her, Brakah Ashonti’s face swam into her vision.
Ashonti. Another enemy, a fiercer warlord.
Now this was a man to fear. Cold, calculating, ruthless. Her father never spoke of him but with sober caution. Ashonti glanced at Lantus who sat on the ground, holding the sleeve of his robe up to his bleeding neck. That the two warlords had come together during this famine and had overpowered Zunee and her sisters was dire indeed. Ashonti’s flat, black gaze ran over Zunee’s face.
Dry and emotionless, his voice rasped in her ear, “I knew he would fail. He wanted to capture you. I gave him an opportunity, which he wasted. Let it never be said that I was not generous, but now you are mine.”
Chapter 27
Mel’s fingers tingled from clutching the hard, wooden seat of the velocycle as it bumped over the foothills on their return trip toward the river. Her teeth clacked together on a particularly hard landing. Jaine sped across the bare, brush-dotted land, heedless of their personal safety. Other than the small triangle of her chin, brown leather encased the girl’s entire body, from her high, buckle-ornamented boots to the cap covering her curly head.
Mel would have thought Jaine would be concentrating on her task, eager to deposit Mel at the river and to drive home to Tooran to determine how badly the city and the library had been damaged—that would have been Mel’s motivation for driving at a speed designed to cause death by rattling of their bones. Instead, an almost ghoulish glee broadened the smile on Jaine’s face. Through the wood of the velocycle, Mel could detect the even, accelerated rate of a heartbeat that was unmistakably…elated. The girl was thriving off the chaos of the moment, embracing the speed with the heart of a throwaway child who’d grown up in the noisy streets of a bustling city.
Mel herself was unsettled enough for the both of them, although for other reasons. The smell of smoke clung to the inside of her nose, but even more disturbing, the sensation of the flames lingered inside her mind. Only with effort did she blink, coming back to herself. As soon as she was able to shake off the malaise, she wrenched the medallion from her neck. Eying it with fear, she pinched it between two ginger fingers by its chain as they bumped along the sloping dirt landscape. What kind of Mask wore such an object? Had it controlled him? Had he controlled the fire creature?… Elemental, Mel realized, naming the creature for what it was. Of course it was. A beast made of fire, with arms and frightening grasp, thoughts seeming to be all its own. It was Ignisius. After having touched the inside of it, having felt what it felt, she knew without a doubt that a fire elemental roamed Tooran City.
The medallion was the enchanted object, which the right person could use to control it.
Clearly, Mel was not that person because she’d been overtaken by the fire’s lust to consume the city. Very little of herself had remained—only enough to realized that the thing controlled her, not the reverse.
But who was the keeper of the medallion? The Mask who had died in Tooran? If so, all notion of controlling the fire elemental and wielding its power was lost. Mel refused to believe that the man had left the settlement and exiled himself, because he was the keeper. More likely, the elemental was out of his control. Or perhaps the Mask had been a seer.
The blood rushed up into Mel’s face, then drained out. She slowed it as soon as she realized she was in danger of fainting—she’d never experienced the sensation before in her life. Rubbing a grimy hand across a likewise muddy forehead, she realized she had not thought about her own father in some time. Really thought about him.
Her father, Ley’Albaer, had called himself a seer—a prophetic teller of the future. Many people had believed his words and his vision, her mother included. Because of him, the three of them—no, the four of them, including her blood father, Jenks—had traveled to the frozen north in the first place. Because of him, they had arranged to negotiate with the trogs. And because of them, he had died, and her mother had died with him. Arrogant intellect. How could he have erred in such a grievous fashion?
No, Mel didn’t believe in seers. Not in their words. Not in their existence. Those who called themselves seers truly were the stuff of scary tales. One had taken her mother away.
Mel blinked her eyes and forced herself to look forward. She couldn’t obsess over the past—at least not clinging to the back of the velocycle—no more than she could worry about Ott and the others. She simply had to trust that they were well, that they would reunite as planned. Soon.
Spying a dark shape to the south of them, almost hidden among the scrubby bushes and slope of the hills, she shouted, “Stop!” Over the roar of the wind and the chugging of the cycle’s pistons, Jaine didn’t hear her, so Mel slapped the girl’s leather-clad arm. “Stop,” she said again and pointed toward the form in the distance. “There’s something over there.”
Jaine lifted the earflap of her leather helmet. “What? We can’t stop now. We’re almost to the river. What’s the matter?”
“I saw someone over there.” Mel pointed, again to the south. “I think it’s the man I am looking for. His name is Charl. I followed him here when our boat was destroyed, but I lost him.”
Jaine squinted, then veered to the south, making Mel slide across the wooden seat. Their trail of greenish steam followed them, marking their change in direction. The velocycle stopped with a skid in the loose dirt next to a brownish h
eap on the ground. Charl.
“How on earth did you see him?” Jaine said. Her eyes flicked toward Mel and then she amended, “Never mind. Forgot who I was talking to. Just like the Academie, aren’t you? They all have eyes on the backs of their heads and ears that never let me sneak anything past them.” Jaine pulled her helmet off her head, making her dark curls stick up in sweaty spikes. “He looks in bad shape. Do you think he’s dead?”
On the ground next to the cycle, Charl lay curled into himself like a wounded animal, unconscious but still breathing. Dirt and grime covered his face. He looked as if he’d been there all night, huddled in the same position. Mel had been scanning the land for him, almost certain they would find him somewhere on the well-traveled road between Tooran and the travel depot. She had feared in what condition they’d find him. Possibilities had crowded her mind, fueled by a fearful imagination. Mauled by animals. Out of his mind. Or come to some other mortal harm.
Stepping down from the cycle, she squatted near him and put her hand on his, which was warm and dry to the touch. At least he lived. If he were still in a feral state, he might be dangerous, so she proceeded with caution. While she thought she’d be able to outrun him, she didn’t want to take any risks with Jaine nearby. No visible wounds, though he could have hit his head or fainted for other reasons. She listened to the beat of his heart and found nothing out of the ordinary. From all outward signs, he appeared to be a normal man lost in a deep sleep.
When he didn’t stir, she shook his thick shoulder and called his name. Still no response.
“I think we’re going to have to lift him into it,” Mel said. She stared at his inert form and back at the cycle, assessing the weight, the height, and the distance.