by Sam Sykes
He cleared his throat. “Ah. Well, thanks for that.”
Kataria tore the arrow from the most recent corpse. “I do it all for the gratitude.” She grunted, slipping it back into her quiver. “Where’s Asper?”
“I was busy. You didn’t see her?”
“No.” Kataria looked over his head. “But I do now.”
Sure enough, Lenk thought as he followed her gaze, there the priestess was. Though she was easy enough to miss in the mayhem as she valiantly tried to fight her way through a roaring tide of screaming civilians, fleeing this way and that in a mad panic.
Ghoukha’s tent was fast disappearing, the many shirtless men hoisting it up by its platform and waddling off with it as the remainder of his guards closed in around him, protectively. They vanished, swallowed up by the tide of humanity.
Asper was left, struggling and fighting and screaming to be let through.
And, like a snake from the river, another black-clad burst from the torrent of people, blade aloft and scream on his lips.
“ASATHU DESH—”
Whatever he was about to say next trailed into wordless agony. And that, too, was drowned out by the sound of fire roaring as the man was suddenly enveloped in flames. He fell back to earth, a brimstone mortal, flailing wildly. The crowd parted with instinctual fear, giving him a wide berth as he shrieked and tried vainly to bat out the flames before he collapsed in an unmoving pyre.
Callous laughter drew their eyes upward, to the top of a nearby stall. A man, short and fat, stood wrapped in black leathers with a sand-colored scarf smothering his entire head. A pair of wooden goggles peered out from below, the only thing to escape the smothering wrap besides a gruesome, excited cackle.
He reached for the bandoliers lining his chest and pulled free a small, gourd-shaped flask. He snapped his fingers, two flint rings sending sparks to catch upon the linen rag poking out of the flask’s lid. It caught ablaze in an instant and, with an athlete’s aim and a madman’s abandon, was hurled into the streets below.
A wall of fire rose up where it fell, crackling as it coiled up into a spiral of crimson, sending civilians screaming away. Asper disappeared from sight—swallowed by flame or by crowd, Lenk had no idea.
“We’ve got to go back for her,” he shouted to be heard as he scanned the crowd for a break that wasn’t there.
“What about Gariath?” Kataria cried back.
A cacophonous roar brought his attention back to the brawl at the other end of the square. Gariath clung to Kharga like a parasite, clawing at his scales, biting at his throat, while the gray hulk tried to pry him off to no avail. Neither dragonman seemed particularly bothered by the carnage going on around them.
“He can take care of himself,” Lenk muttered. He winced as Gariath let out a mad howl. “Probably. For now, we need to—”
“Get down!” Kataria cried, hurling herself against him.
Something shrieked overhead, biting the air where his skull had just been. A crossbow bolt struck the cobblestones and clattered off.
Lenk looked up and suddenly, they were everywhere. Men and women alike, clad in black leathers with sand-colored hoods, stood on every roof of every stall. Crossbows in hand and firing, fireflasks flying from their fingertips, they aimed for the men in black but seemed to take no particular care for who got hit.
“Bleed, scum,” one of them cried. “BLEED!”
“Cier’Djaal belongs to the Jackals!”
“Die for your God, cultist shits! Tell ’im it was the Jackals who sent ya!”
So many death threats, so many fires, so many people; Lenk couldn’t tell what was happening, who was attacking whom, who was dying and who was killing. Kataria seemed to have a better idea, though. She hauled him to his feet.
“We get to cover,” she grunted. “Now.”
“What about Asper and—”
“We can’t find her if we’re dead,” she shrieked, shoving him forward. “Now, MOVE!”
Above the roar of fire and the shriek of people, she could still hear her pursuer. Closing in on her.
He was saying things: horrible things, Asper imagined, but she couldn’t be sure. All his words were smothered by the scarf wrapped around his head. He was looking at her—with malice, she thought, but she didn’t know. Every time she looked around, only the two wide, unblinking glass circles of his goggles stared back.
All she knew was that he was chasing her. And enjoying it far, far too much.
She heard the sound of glass shattering at her heels, of flames blossoming as his fireflasks sprouted red flowers behind her. They consumed the stalls, the fleeing people, and the black-clad men with indiscriminate glee. And that same glee was reflected in his voice as he pursued her, racing on short legs atop the stall roofs.
“Hfy wrmrn!” he called out, words smothered in his scarf. “Crtch!”
“What does that even mean?” Asper shouted back without breaking stride.
She wasn’t sure why she asked. Every question only had the one answer. Another fireflask shattered behind her, another wall of flame roared to life. And the man on the roofs cackled wildly as the world burned behind him.
There was no telling where Lenk and Kataria were. No telling whether Dreadaeleon and Gariath were safe. No idea where Denaos had gone. And there was nothing she could do for the people fleeing around her, cut down by blade or impaled by crossbow bolt. She would help them, she vowed, as soon as she could. But for any of that to happen, she had to survive.
A prospect that grew increasingly paler as the flames continued to shepherd her through the rows of stalls. She would tire, eventually. She would trip, eventually.
“Nk mse, wrmrn,” her pursuer cackled. “Thf tfmf.”
He snapped his fingers. His iron rings set the fireflask ablaze. She looked over her shoulder, saw him draw back his arm to throw.
She never saw the knife being thrown until it was lodged in his shoulder. He screamed into his scarf, dropped the flask. It exploded at his feet, bathing him in his own fire and sending him into a shrieking, flailing inferno. Just one more among many.
She slowed down as the fires relented, straining to catch her breath through the smoke.
The crowd had thinned out the farther into the Souk she had gone, most of the civilians either having fled or lying on the streets around her in puddles of their own blood.
There was a time when she would have stopped to mourn them. A time when she would have wept over the senseless loss of life, prayed over the bodies, sought out the living relatives.
Those were days born from her youth in temples and monasteries, when protocol and faith were synonymous. Those were days for youthful optimism, passion, and anguish in plenty. Time and suffering had tempered her.
She came to a halt beside a dead body, a young woman facedown on the stones, tucked neatly in a small square of the Souk flanked by stalls as though someone had left her there as a gift. Asper wondered then, as she sometimes did, just what she had lost when those flames were extinguished. She wondered how much more useful faith was as a weapon than as a source of warmth and light.
And, as she often did, she felt a tingle in her left arm.
Something within her that she had no name for felt her doubt and fed upon it. It hissed inside her left hand, flowed through her body like fiery blood to grow hot in her veins. She resisted the urge to claw at it, to whisper at it to stop, to beg Talanas to silence it.
She knew not what it was; she hadn’t known when she entered the monastery, hoping that service to the Healer would cure it. So many years later, she still knew nothing of it, save that faith could not remove it.
And only suffering could calm it.
She closed her eyes. She forced her breath to slow. She bit back the agony welling up inside her arm. Temperance, she reminded herself. Iron. Stillness. Pain was fleeting.
“Deshaa…”
Eyes snapped open. She saw the black-clad man approaching, knife clenched in his hand, blood on the blade. His
eyes were wild above his veil. They caught sight of the pendant hanging from her neck, the Phoenix of Talanas, and went even wider.
“Oppressor…” he hissed. “Slave driver. Betrayer.”
“We can talk this out,” she said, doubting it.
“Death to oppressors!”
He swept up to her, quick as shadows in candlelight. She was slow, without weapon or warning. Before she knew it, his hand was about her throat, his knife was above his head, and his scream was wild on his lips.
And before she knew anything else, the blade was coming down.
She caught him at the wrist, but barely, the knife’s edge a finger’s length away from her eye. Her windpipe closed beneath his grip. Her life stalled under his fingers. She fought the urge to panic, to scream and waste precious breath.
Easy, she cautioned herself. He’s not a man. He’s a body, organs and bones and sinew. You’re a healer. You know how bodies work. She found her free hand going to the one around her throat. He’s not a man. He’s a thumb.
She found him, in his chubby digit atop her windpipe. She grabbed it and twisted, hard. He snarled, grip loosening, blade quivering. Distracted, she could feel his knife-hand slipping.
It’s not a knife, she reminded herself. It’s a wrist.
And she pulled it away, twisting the wrist as she did so. A snarl became a squeal as his joints groaned. She could see each one in her mind, each tendon she pulled, as she had seen in every corpse she had dissected before. She twisted until the blade dropped, then shoved him away as she kicked the weapon aside.
He hardly seemed to notice his weapon gone. He threw himself back at her, tackling her by the shoulders. His voice was alive in a howl as they tumbled to the ground.
“Deshaa! Death to the oppressor Gods! Deshaa! DEATH!” he screamed.
He rained blows upon her with such fury and fervor that she could not keep up. She couldn’t find joints to twist or wrists to grab. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t control her thoughts as they raced through her head or the thundering beat of her heart or the pain rising in her arm.
Oh, no.
Her left hand snaked out, the curse taking control, desperate to soothe itself. A surge of anger and fear and doubt and hate carried it from the stones to the man’s throat. Her fingers tightened about his neck. A searing panic controlled them now.
“No, no, no…” she whispered.
The man didn’t stop. He might not have even felt it.
But she did. She felt the fire in her veins, the fear in her heart. The curse had gorged itself on her doubt and now hungered for something meatier. Her arm tightened in agony. Beneath her sleeve, her skin burned bright red, painting the bones of her arm in pure black.
Something inside her whispered. It was a voice and not a voice. It was a stream of consciousness without language or breath. And it was not hers.
Don’t like you can’t help you want you gone go away.
A silent voice. And yet she couldn’t hear anything else. She wondered if the man in her grasp heard it.
And, as the man’s throat withered to a gray, thin stem in her grasp, she wondered if he even felt it.
He hung limp, tumbled lifelessly off of her as she shoved him off and lay there. He looked almost comical, his veiled head wobbling on a neck suddenly six sizes too small for it. She would have laughed, had she not been torn between crying and vomiting.
This wasn’t fair. She had taken so many pains to hide it from everyone: her companions, her clergy, her God. She had been so careful with it. Yet every time faith wavered, the suffering began and like a hungry hound, the curse returned.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen anymore,” she whispered. She grabbed her left arm, hissed at it. “You were silent all through the trip here. Why now? Why again?”
“Deshaa…”
“What, again?” she screamed.
Indeed, again. And four times over.
She turned and saw a quartet of black-clad men slipping from the shadows, blades in hands, eyes alight. Yet perhaps they had seen what she had done, for they approached cautiously. She got to her feet, backed away, found the wall of a merchant’s stall behind her. They raised their weapons; they hissed beneath their veils.
“Death to—”
“Cier’Djaal for the Jackals!”
Eyes went up. A trio of people in dark leathers and sand-colored hoods stood upon a roof. She caught only a glimpse of movement as they drew back their arms and hurled fireflasks to the square below. A collective scream went up from them as they shattered upon the ground.
Nothing more came of it. No fire. Not so much as a spark. Nothing but a wet, sticky sensation on her hands and face. Something red dripped down her brow.
Blood? She hadn’t felt any pain. And it was far too thick, too chunky for that. She took a dab upon her fingertip and, curious, tasted it. Blood; but not hers. This was thick, greasy, almost like gravy.
“Animal blood?” she asked no one in particular.
And something in particular answered her with a low, guttural growl.
Blood-soaked, Asper and the black-clad men whirled upon one mouth of the square to see more hooded men wheeling forward cages. Behind their bars, canine creatures with arched backs, fur clinging to half-starved bodies, bared teeth.
“Oh,” she whispered.
No answer this time but the groan of metal as the cages rose. The canines came streaking out, howls on their teeth, hunger in their eyes, and the scent of blood in their nostrils.
And Asper was running.
She could hear the excited cackle of the beasts, the ripping of flesh, the screaming of the black-clad men as the hounds tore into them. She didn’t bother to look. Because she could also hear the tap of claws on cobblestones, the panic in her breath, the growl of a bristly beast as it closed in on her.
No chance of fighting it. No chance of outrunning it. She felt its breath on her heels. She felt its cackle in her spine. She closed her eyes; she prayed quietly; she thought of nothing else.
Certainly not of the hands reaching out from a nearby alley to seize her.
Brawny hands took her by the shoulders and hauled her in, slamming her against a wall of a stall. She screamed, of course, but more for the beast that came bounding in after her. One of the hands errantly flicked a handful of powder into the hound’s eyes. The beast let out a shriek of alarm, pawing wildly at its snout as it collapsed to the ground. Unable to get out whatever was in its nose, it turned and scampered away, wailing in pain.
It was only when it was gone that she had time to appreciate who had just seized her and quite how peeved she was to see him.
Denaos turned and looked at her, blinking dumbly. “What?”
“Do not do that again,” she snarled, shoving his hands off of her. “What the hell were those?”
“Hounds.”
“Hounds? Hounds? Why the fuck do they call themselves the Jackals, then?” She wiped blood from her face with her sleeve. “And where the hell were you when we were at the fountain?”
“Avoiding tangling with a fasha. What was I supposed to do?”
“I… stab him, maybe? That’s what you usually do.”
“What I usually do is survive,” Denaos replied.
“At whose expense?” she all but roared. “Who could you have helped by not skulking and hiding in the shadows? Who could still be alive if you were there so I wouldn’t have had to—”
She didn’t need to see his face grow concerned. She could feel the tears on her face. They burned upon cheeks that were already alight with heat. Her hand trembled at her side; she clenched it to force it to stop. But it was too late.
“You… used it, didn’t you?” he whispered. “You killed someone with your arm.”
“I had no choice,” she replied, knowing it was a lie.
And Denaos knew. And Denaos said nothing.
Because, she knew, Denaos faulted no one for lying.
“Are you all right now?” he
asked.
“Yeah…” She sighed, knowing that, too, to be a lie. “You?”
“Obviously not. I’m in the middle of a war.”
“Between who?” she asked. “Who are they? Why are they killing everyone?”
“Because thugs like us don’t fight fair,” Denaos replied. “We don’t have battlefields and we don’t have armies. Not traditional ones, anyway. We fight wherever we want and hope that the society we use as a battlefield hates them more than they hate us. That’s how the Jackals do it, anyway.” He glanced warily out the alley’s mouth. “As for the others…”
“No one knows.”
Someone spoke from the shadows. They turned and saw no one there in the darkness, nothing but the glow of eyes lit by the bud of a smoking cigarillo. The man stared at neither of them, his gaze off at some spot in the darkness and fixed upon a shadow within a shadow.
He stood perfectly still, the only movement the plume of smoke escaping from mumbling lips.
“The Khovura speak no language we understand. Their tongues are meaningless, their Gods are unheard of. We share only a few words—blade, blood, fire—and we share them liberally.”
“Yerk?” the word sounded uncertain coming from Denaos’s mouth.
The man’s head swiveled. A long, slow smile, perfectly white against the gloom, lit up the darkness.
“Hello, Ramaniel. You do not look well.”
Asper shot a glance to Denaos that went pointedly ignored. She had never heard this name before. But she owed it to him to ask as little as he had asked her.
“Better than you,” Denaos replied. “And considering I’m in the middle of a footwar, that’s saying something.” He offered a grin bordering on cruel. “Though, speaking fairly, you didn’t look that great when I left, either.”
“Ah, you wound me.” The cigarillo tumbled from his lips with a sigh, fading into the shadows. “Let us not grieve your delicate company overtly. Suffice to say, much has changed.”
“So I see. I saw Sandal’s handiwork earlier. I thought the Debt Squad stayed out of footwars.”
“Magnificent, wasn’t he?” Yerk replied. “The things that man does with fire transcend poetry to become faith.” There was a brief movement in the shadows as he began to roll another cigarillo. “My last report suggests, though, that lady flame turned on him.”