“You fuck that up?”
“As much as it could be fucked up, yeah.”
“Tordin’s different from every place else,” Jasoi said, dismissing the other conversation as if she knew it to be as potentially fraught as Zezili did. Jasoi was a woman of simple pleasures, but she was not stupid. “Wild here, kind of like in Dhai. Lot of jungle, bands of thieves. They’ll skin you as soon as look at you. Most are refugees from the fighting. Civil war, all the time.”
“All the time?”
Jasoi shrugged. “Long as I can remember. The Empress’s cousin, Penelodyn, ruled here for a while before the Thief Queen unseated her. And after that it all started falling to pieces. Saradyn’s trying to bring everybody together again under a sword. Side with the guy with the biggest stick, you know?”
Zezili cleaned her weapon and sheathed it. She urged the bear forward and called up at Storm, “You going to put better scouts ahead? I don’t want any more surprise dogs!”
Storm glanced back. “I thought you’d be pleased at the chance to show your skills.”
“Fuck you, Storm.”
“I sent a boy up.”
“A boy? Is that a joke?”
“He’s fast. Good eyes.”
“That’s soft, Storm.”
“Just practical. The clearing’s ahead, another mile.”
Zezili slapped her bear, and the animal trundled on ahead of Jasoi and the half dozen legionnaires between her and Storm.
Storm rode at the head of the group, something Zezili would not have done herself. Any kid with a bow could loose a bolt in her throat. But Storm swayed on ahead with apparent ease. He had even loosened his collar and taken off his greaves.
“Think they’ll take us both out together?” Zezili said as she came up beside him.
“Who, bandits? Saradyn’s men? No, not a group this size.”
“I’ve learned caution.”
“I can see that in your face.” There was no sarcasm in his voice, but Zezili flinched.
“We should have a clear view of the crater from this clearing,” he said. “Should be an old temple to Rhea here, the Empress says. Our first landmark on the map. If this is it, we’re only a week or so away from the site she’s sending us to.”
As the trees thinned, Zezili saw a massive mound jutting out of the clearing ahead. She was a little surprised they hadn’t seen it before now, but the tree cover was thick. If the trees were two hundred feet tall, the mound was easily three hundred, a conical tower of soil covered in thorny vines and twisted saplings with yellowing leaves. When they broke into the clearing Zezili saw heaps of bones peeking up from the crawling vines. She stopped her bear at the edge of the clearing, and held up a hand for Storm to stop.
“You think there’s some beast out here?” Storm said.
“We’d have drawn its attention before now,” Zezili said, “unless that boy runner of yours was already eaten. You think he went up that?”
“Around, maybe,” Storm said. “He’s to scout, not explore.”
Storm put his fingers to his lips and whistled for the runner. Zezili waited with him while the bears and bodies behind her snuffled and shifted. Zezili was glad most of them couldn’t see the bones.
Storm whistled again. Zezili saw movement ahead of her, to her left, and gripped the hilt of her sword. Another flash of movement, then a bob of dark hair. Not some creature, but a boy with his hair shorn monstrously short. He wore dark colors, and was wiry as a bonsa sapling. She saw a bit of hard strength in his face that she didn’t like. He had the audacity to meet her gaze for a short moment before looking quickly away.
“Any monster out there?” Storm said. “Or worse? Another woman like Syre Zezili, perhaps?”
The boy shook his head. Young man, really. Twenty or so, if Zezili guessed right. “No sign of people ahead, for at least the next half mile. Biggest wildlife is a couple hundred pounds, some boar, long-necked herbivores–”
“Long-necked what?” Zezili said.
“Animals,” he said, “that eat grass.”
“Like range deer?”
“Bigger, and striped, not spotted. Sorry, I don’t know the name.”
Zezili pointed to the mound. “Scout up that next,” she said. “Should be our landmark.”
Storm frowned, scrunching up his scraggly beard. He had the decency to continue having his mane of hair done each morning while on the march, at least. “I can confirm it’s the same as what’s on the map,” Storm said.
“He’ll have a better view of what’s ahead,” Zezili said. “No more surprises.”
The young man’s throat bobbed. He glanced at Storm.
“Don’t look at him,” Zezili said. “We’re both leading this charge. Get your skinny ass up the mount.”
“Go on, child,” Storm said.
The young man crept to the edge of the clearing and trod slowly across the tangles of yellowed bones.
Zezili leaned forward. She realized she wanted to tear the tunic from him, and watch him navigate the gauntlet naked. A perverse pleasure, she knew. But her pleasures were fewer and fewer these days. What she could not control, she wanted to punish. It was an instinct that served her well in Dorinah. Outside of it, she realized, it meant punishing everything, everyone – the world; the sky.
Zezili admitted she was surprised when he got to the base of the mound unscathed. He kicked at the loose soil and began to pull himself up, gripping vines and dying saplings for leverage. After a few feet, one of the saplings he grabbed tore away. He yanked it from the soil, and as it tumbled free Zezili saw the roots of the sapling were tangled around something that looked distinctly like a hunk of flesh of some kind. Animal or human, she didn’t know. She rubbed her eyes. It had been a long ride.
The boy climbed higher. Below him, the sapling and whatever it had rooted itself to tumbled into the wash of bones and vegetation below. Zezili saw the detritus tremble. She squinted. It continued to waver; a sea of bone. She saw ripples move out across the pile.
“Storm…” she said, pointing.
“I see it,” Storm said. “Come down, boy!”
“Don’t!” Zezili said. “He’s making progress.”
Storm slid off his bear with a grunt. He strode to the edge of the bone sea. “Come back!” he yelled. “Don’t go further!”
“There are stairs further up!” the young man called. “I can see steps built into the tower here.”
“Come down!”
The young man swung further up the mound. Gripped what Zezili supposed he meant by “steps.” From this distance, there were indeed some kind of patterned protrusions on the outside of the mound, but to Zezili they looked like teeth.
Zezili didn’t get off her bear, but she edged it forward to get a better look. The boy was at least thirty feet up, climbing with some regularity. Zezili saw bits of stone and loose soil tumble down the edge of the mound as he ascended. His fingers dug into the irregular grooves.
Then the soil began to fall faster, and the falling stones grew larger. Zezili recoiled. The entire mound trembled.
“Get off there!” Storm yelled.
Zezili drew her bear back.
A massive moaning broke across the clearing, as if the world had cracked open.
The young man yelled, and held on. Great, fleshy tendrils erupted from the mound, a thousand snaking arms of tuberous tentacles. The boy screamed and let go. He slid four feet toward the bone yard before the tentacles caught him.
The fleshy tentacle shook him like a doll, so violently Zezili thought he would come apart. Zezili heard the cracking of his spine.
“Retreat!” Storm yelled at the women behind them. “About face and forward!”
They were all too eager to obey. Zezili heard the jingle of tack, the babble of muttered prayers.
Storm lunged back onto his bear, sliding his substantial girth into the saddle. He brought his mount around. He galloped ahead to catch up with the tail end of their force.
Zezili ga
zed back a moment longer at the seething mound. The tentacles began to retract back into the soil. They took the boy’s broken body with them. Zezili watched as the tentacled thing folded it into the maw of the giant semi-sentient flesh-eating plant. The horror gripped her then. She gagged. Yelled at her bear.
She followed the retreating tail of their force. Storm forged on ahead to take the lead, but Zezili remained at the rear, looking constantly over her shoulder for some massive tentacle to come curling up from the undergrowth.
They had no tracker for the Tordin woodland. Jasoi had left the place as a girl. What did she know? Foolish, to bring women to a place as wild and contaminated as Dhai. No infrastructure. No order. No law.
An hour before dusk, Storm had them burn out a clearing and pitch camp. The Empress’s Seekers were well gone, run out or destroyed by the Empress herself, so they worked with foreign tirajistas and parajistas from the island country of Sebastyn, a rocky shore much fought over by Dorinah and Saiduan. They enjoyed a negotiated peace now, one that had the Sebastyn collective agree to hand over a dozen jistas as a sign of goodwill and friendship.
The Sebastyns were mostly short and dark, with a couple of exceptions. Zezili had yet to learn their names. It felt like an inordinate amount of work. She had spent much of her time drinking and sleeping. It worried her that the Empress had placed her trust in whatever needed to happen to wake her sleeping weapon into the hands of these foreigners.
Storm’s pages put together Storm and Zezili’s tents. Zezili yelled at one of the jistas to come over and burn out a tendril that looked like it was moving again, then sat down and started untangling her armor. After the tents were up and darkness descended, Storm invited Zezili over to his fire. Zezili saw Storm’s second there, and Jasoi, and even the youngest page, a girl Zezili had taken to calling “runt” because she had some kind of mangled walk.
Zezili was already a little drunk, but she shuffled over. Drinking alone got old, and in the right light, Storm’s second looked a little boyish.
“What did you think of that… thing today?” Jasoi asked. Her eyes were bright, and her cup was nearly empty.
“I think we need some help,” Zezili said, “or we’re all going to get eaten out here.”
“It tells us we’re on the right track,” Storm said, “and we have the jistas.”
“Jistas traveling at the center of the group,” Zezili said. “They aren’t going to be much help if something surprises us again.”
Storm grunted. “That surprise could have been avoided.”
“That so?” Zezili said. “You’d rather I took you and Jasoi up there, so it was our bodies getting eaten by worms?”
“Just a waste, is all,” Storm said. “We didn’t need to scout that view.”
Zezili leaned forward. “Every one of us is here to be ground to death for one purpose. To wake up whatever the Empress has huddled up here. That’s it. And we’ll fall for it, every one of us. There’s no waste in that. That’s precisely why we’re here. If we took a load of apples with us, and ate them, would you say they were a waste for being eaten? No. That’s their purpose. There’s no waste. Same with you or me.”
“You always were a cold bird, Zezili,” Storm said.
“You should have romanced proper,” Jasoi said. “A nice warm woman.”
Zezili glared at her. Jasoi hiccupped, and covered her mouth.
“I have a husband,” Zezili said.
“Husbands are sufficient for children,” Storm’s second, a lean woman named Haloria, said warmly; a little smugly, “but love is only for equals. Love is something only a woman can bring you.” She said it like she was reciting from The Book of Rhea.
“You making me an offer?”
Haloria guffawed. “I know some good girls who could warm that soul.”
“It’s not my soul needs warming,” Zezili said. “It’s up to the task.” She didn’t like the way the conversation was going. She stood. “Long day tomorrow.”
“Yes, Syre,” Storm said.
Zezili narrowed her eyes. Was the mocking worth a scene? She wasn’t certain. She was tired. She stepped to her tent and kicked out her fire. Inside, she pulled on a heavier coat and kicked into her bedroll. For a time, she sat awake listening to the noise of the camp; laughter and murmured prayers, the singsong voices of recited stories, the dark whispers of the day’s fears. The Empress had put her in charge of all of it, all of these lives, again, though she had watched half her women burned to death by some mad omajista, and declared her own life forfeit. The Empress liked to move them all around, just to see how far she could push them.
And she can push me far, Zezili thought, all the way to Tordin. She closed her eyes and saw, again, the runner’s body broken, his meaty suit of humanity yanked into the boiling mound. She imagined the Empress was that alien, unknowable thing, devouring all she touched, scattering bones at her feet.
We are not wasted, she had told Storm, and that was true, perhaps. They were no more wasted than those bones. It was their fate, to become bones fed to the ravenous beast that was their Empress.
Or to feed the Empress her own bones, in the end.
Whatever way it went, Zezili didn’t much like it.
15
Saradyn of Lind, King of Tordin, woke from a dream of ghosts. The ghosts had trailed after him from his dreams and stood over him, pale in the way of Dorinahs, bloodless – all ghosts looked like Dorinahs, in the dark. He gazed through their misty forms to the dogs lying deep in their slumber at the mouth of his tent.
“Saradyn,” the ghosts murmured.
Saradyn turned his back to the ghosts, and slept.
He woke at dawn and pulled on his boots and coat, scratched at his bearded face, and rinsed his mouth. The ghosts were gone.
The dogs rose with him, two perpetually adolescent runts he called Dayns and Sloe. Their heads just reached his shoulder. He had tended their birth himself, and raised them from pups when their mother saw fit to eat them. They were a useful size – large enough to be intimidating, but small enough to sleep inside his tent.
He stepped outside onto frozen ground. The air was chill. The dogs followed. His men emerged bleary eyed from the thin folds of their own tents, and huddled around cook fires. These men had been with him from the beginning, and later, brought their sons into his service. They camped now at the base of the Tongue Mountains, toothy protrusions raking the sky along Saradyn’s peripheral vision. Dawn tore the sky like the remnants of a red dress. The woods of old pine were rimmed in frost, but the day promised to warm as the suns rose. Para’s milky blue light already touched the treetops. Laine’s sons had not blessed him with the magic to control the wind, raise the dead, or bend living things to his will. What the satellites bestowed on him was darker, a curse more than a gift – from Laine himself to remind him of his sins – and the sins of others. He could see ghosts.
As the dogs took in the measure of the camp, Saradyn took in the day’s news and gossip. There was talk among his runners that Natanial Thorne had crossed back over the Mundin Mountains and into northern Tordin the day before. What he had been doing in Aaldia, Saradyn could only guess. Saradyn had sent a runner up that way to confirm. Rumors were already coming out of Dorinah about cats and assassins and the rising of Laine’s Eye, but Saradyn had no time for rumor until Natanial confirmed it. There were troublemakers in Saradyn’s own tenuous kingdom in the one Tordinian province that had sided with his enemy in the old days. Fools, all. Educated by witches and girls.
Tanays, Saradyn’s second, gestured to him from a nearby fire. He and his ghost. The ghost was always at Tanays’ shoulder; a small, hunched figure with big, dark eyes. She did not speak. Only watched. It was a fitting place for her to end her days. Saradyn had known that ghost in life. Tanays’ daughter.
Saradyn squatted next to Tanays. He shifted purposefully into the ghost, so their images merged. Her form flickered, faded, and reappeared at Tanays’ opposite elbow. Saradyn had learned long ago he
could not banish the ghosts Laine forced him to see, only antagonize them. Best they had ghosts, though. The ones who did not… they were the truly dangerous ones.
“We received more information last night,” Tanays said. “The rabble out of Old Galind is a group of the Thief Queen’s lot.”
“Thought I’d killed them all,” Saradyn said. His circle was one of the last to hold to the Thief Queen’s old moniker – Quilliam of the Mountain Fortress; Quill of Galind; Quill the Thief Queen. He supposed he was one of the few old enough to remember she had a real name once before she tried to take his power and he killed her for it.
Tanays leaned over the fire pan and pushed a sizzling slab of boar bacon with a charred stick. Above his peppered-gray beard, lines etched the corners of his eyes. He kept his brow perpetually furrowed. He was always squinting.
“I’m assuming this group of rebels wants autonomy,” Saradyn said.
“They want to call themselves Rohandar,” Tanays said, “after some dead city.”
“Just what Tordin needs,” Saradyn said. “Another country.”
“That’s their thought.”
“Let’s sweep the village of dissidents, then,” Saradyn said.
“I haven’t told you everything,” Tanays said.
“Sweep it clean. I don’t want it butchered completely.” He liked Tanays, but Tanays had always been too hesitant, too willing to sit on his heels and let events run their course. Saradyn had not gotten this far by sitting back from the fray. Tordin had been in disarray since the murder of the Empress of Dorinah’s sister, Penelodyn, twenty years before when she was burned out by the Thief Queen. Saradyn had taken full advantage of the chaos. Now the whole region was nearly his, from the northern mountains to the southern sea. Nearly.
Saradyn gazed out at the camp and saw a cluster of figures at the edge of the trees, insubstantial, like fog. He whistled to Dayns and Sloe. The dogs loped toward him.
“See,” he said, and pointed to the tree line. The dogs galloped through the camp. They smashed through the line of hazy figures. The dogs did not howl, and did not bark.
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