With a scream, Nalia launched herself at the surprised soldiers. Four of them lay dead before they had a chance to react. Even then, though they were elite soldiers, the confrontation did not last long. Between Nalia and her sisters, who had deduced also that this was the location they were looking for, the passageway was clear in moments.
Nalia looked back toward the remaining sisters and saw her mother just entering the intersection. She nodded to her then nodded toward the passageway. Her mother’s tired smile lightened Nalia’s heart. Turning, she walked the twenty feet to the double doors. Here was where it would all end.
Chapter 20
One of the Sapsyra braced herself to batter the doors open, but Nalia’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. Reaching out, Nalia pushed gently on the doors and they swung inward silently. They were unlocked.
Expecting a trap, Nalia nevertheless walked in with her mother at her side, as if they were triumphant heroes returning home. What she saw made her slump her shoulders and sigh.
The Gray Man was sitting on a chair, a throne of sorts, on top of a dais. His bald, pale, maggot-like head poked up from his dark clothing like a worm from an apple. His eyes, as black as the night, were rimmed in red and seemed to glow. He sat calmly, elbows on the armrest of his chair and his fingers steepled in front of him. To either side of him were arrayed at least a hundred soldiers in clean, crisp uniforms.
She looked at the remaining sisters. They had maybe half their original number, probably a little less. But they were Sapsyra, the finest warriors in the world, and they were on a mission for the good of all Gythe. They would not be deterred.
Nalia looked toward her mother and saluted her, shrapezi crossed in front of her. Then she charged toward the Gray Man.
With her movement, chaos erupted. The close-quarters fighting precluded the use of bows on both sides, so the combatants were face-to-face, killing or being killed, required to watch all sides for an attack they were not expecting.
Nalia whirled, using her momentum to generate force in her strikes. She was so tired. They had been fighting and running for hours. Even her prodigious Sapsyra strength and endurance were being taxed. These soldiers were obviously the Gray Man’s finest, and they were fresh. She was having trouble fighting more than four at a time. Luckily, with the others crowded around her, she did not have to fight that many.
She dodged a knife thrust and twisted just enough to keep the horizontal slash of a sword from cutting her across the belly. Spinning with one of her swords vertical, she batted the knife away while extending the other sword out and slashing the eyes of the other sword-wielder, blinding him. Continuing her spin, she dropped close to the ground, used her foot to sweep the legs out from under a man coming at her with a club, and threw both swords out, taking both of the knife-user’s legs off at the knee. Finishing her spin, she jumped up to evade a flail’s strike to her legs and then landed lightly on the other side of the woman with the flail, stabbing both spikes into the woman’s back, punching holes in her lungs in between the ribs.
Pausing for a moment, Nalia looked around. There were few soldiers left and unless the Gray Man had been holding some in reserve, it appeared as if the sisters would be victorious. They were finally coming to the end of their ordeal. She looked over in time to see her mother take the head off one of the soldiers. She was surprised to see that Ylleria was bleeding from several different parts of her body. She was even more surprised to see, as she looked down, that she herself had several cuts, some of them deep.
As she was thinking that they were close to victory, the Gray Man entered the fray.
At first, she didn’t know what was happening. The lull had ended and she was busy fighting some of the remaining soldiers. As she did so, she caught movement from the corner of her eye, a dark shape moving in amongst the combatants. She did not think anything of it until she saw one of her sisters to her left drop to the ground, her face slack and lifeless.
She finished the two soldiers that were in front of her and took the opportunity to see what was happening. The Gray Man was moving through the sisters. When he waved his hand toward them, or touched them lightly, they would simply drop. The way they hit the ground, Nalia knew they were dead.
Her father had told her about masters who could use the rohw to burst an enemy’s heart in her chest. It was clear, that was what he was doing. He was killing her sisters by the handful.
Her rage built in her until she could not contain it. Stopping for the merest moment to savagely destroy one of the few remaining soldiers, she ran toward the Gray Man, meaning to end his life. As she did, she saw her mother do the same.
One of the few sisters left finished off the last of the soldiers standing, tearing out his throat with her double long knives. She turned just as the Gray Man reached her. She went to strike him and Nalia saw a flash of rohw energy light up in front of the sister and then she saw the Sapsyr drop to the ground.
She reached the Gray Man at the same time as her mother. They both went to strike and they both were stopped. Their weapons just stopped in mid-swing.
Nalia could not move. It was as if she was trapped in a block of ice. Every part of her body was locked solid, even her mouth and tongue. From her mother’s wide eyes, she could tell the same was true with her.
“Ah, the last two,” the Gray Man said, his voice rich and dripping with power. “Which to choose, which to choose?” He walked up and stood between the two, looking them up and down.
“Oh, how rude of me,” he continued. “I suppose I should let you speak so you can beg for your lives. Do your kind do such things?” He waved his hand and Nalia could feel the force holding her mouth closed loosen.
“You will die for what you have done,” she spat.
“Most probably. But not today. No, today, one of you will die, just as the rest of your sisters have died.”
Nalia looked around and saw that it was true. There was no one else standing except the three of them. All of the soldiers, all of the Sapsyra, they were all down, dead or dying.
“But I still have my choice to make,” he continued calmly, walking around each of them, inspecting their wounds. “One of you will live and one will die.”
“Kill me, then,” her mother said.
“No, kill me. She is unimportant,” Nalia countered, feeling disrespectful even saying it as a ruse.
“Oh, how noble. I, on the other hand, have no need for such noble ideals. I am practical.”
He stepped up to Ylleria. “And since your wounds are more serious,” he said nonchalantly, “you are ill-suited for my task. Goodbye.”
He waved his hand at her and Nalia saw his eyes glow briefly. She had been trained to use the rohw by her father and could detect when it was used. In her rohw-sensitive sight, she saw a soft glow travel from his hand and concentrate in her mother’s belly, just below the navel. It flared briefly and then she…disappeared. She simply disintegrated, ceasing to be, leaving no trace that she had ever really been there.
“Mother!” Nalia screamed. “Noooooooo!”
She threw herself against the bonds that held her, straining her hardest to break free. She heard a wailing, screeching sound and realized after a moment that it was her. She wanted to die. She wanted to kill. She wanted to do anything that would cause this monster to feel pain. She glared at him, breathing hard from her exertions.
“Your mother?” he asked quietly. “I wouldn’t have seen that coming.” He turned and walked up to her, standing mere inches in front of her. She struggled to get to him.
“No matter. She’s gone now, and you remain.” He looked her up and down again. “Do you want to know why I have spared you? Do you want to know what your task will be?”
“I will do no task for you, monster, except that it involves me tearing out your heart and feeding it to you.”
“Uh, no,” he said calmly. “Here’s the situation. You are the last of the Sapsyra who invaded my home. There are no Zouyim left, as you no doubt are
aware. I don’t know exactly how many sisters you have left, but I’m guessing this was the bulk of your forces. So, here is my proposal.”
“I will accept no proposal from you, m—” his power stopped her mouth as she tried to speak.
“Yes, yes, monster. I heard you before. You, my dear, will be allowed to leave alive, you alone among all who came here. You will deliver a simple message to your remaining sisters. You will disperse and abandon your headquarters and you will henceforth not defy me in any way. If you do this, I will allow you to live and will not visit destruction upon Marybador as I visited it upon Kokitura Mountain. Defy me and I will not only destroy every Sapsyr left alive, but I will so completely destroy your compound that observers will wonder what had once been there. Am I clear?”
Nalia glared at him.
“I see I need to explain it in a way you can understand. You are honor-bound to deliver my message. To refrain from doing so would mean that you defy me, which means that I would go and destroy your precious Marybador with everyone in it. You personally would be responsible for the death of your order and your friends.”
He looked at her. “Ah, I see that you now understand. So, I will release you now. You can attempt to kill me, defying me, and cause not only your quick death but those of everyone else you love, or you can leave here alive, with your weapons, and deliver your message. I will be satisfied with either result.”
She felt herself released of the power holding her. She thought of her mother and wanted to strike out, but she also thought of the order and the compound. And of Regi. She could not cause their deaths. She did not want to admit it, but he was right. Honor required her to deliver his message, to try to save the few who remained.
“I will deliver your message,” she said through gritted teeth. “But so help me, by my mother, I will be there when you are finally paid back for all you have done.”
He waved her away. “Yes, yes, I understand. Be on your way. Oh, and do your best to convince your remaining sisters that it’s futile to attack me. It would only result in the complete elimination of your order from Gythe. I’m not sure that I will ever have a use for your order, but I would hate to cause it to go completely extinct.”
She took one last mournful look at where her mother had been last and then turned and made her way out of the keep, limping from a deep cut in her left leg. She would do what honor required, but he would pay for what he had done. By the rohw and the Sapsyra order itself, he would pay.
Chapter 21
Regi sat on a rock worn smooth by the countless sitting and scuffing of countless people over countless decades. One of her feet hung over the edge, swinging of its own accord, while the other was curled up underneath her. One arm grasped the bent-under leg while the other rested on top of it, elbow to knee. Her chin rested in her palm as she watched Rindu moving more slowly than anything she’d ever seen.
She had seen him practicing the kori rohw, the exercises meant to connect to the universal energy, before, but she had never seen him do it so slowly. She thought that maybe she could see the grass around him getting longer as he went through the glacial movements. Seriously, she couldn’t even really see him moving. She just knew he was because each time she looked up, he was in a slightly different position.
Tomorrow would be the fortieth day since Rindu had arrived at Marybador. She herself vacillated between bone-crushing stress from not being able to do anything about her sisters and their mission and body-wearying boredom because all she could do was wait until they got word. It was maddening.
She had pleaded with the Zouyim master, with the Rusha, with anyone who would listen, to go with her to search out the sisters who must be on their way back home by now. No one would listen. They all pointed out that in the four hundred or so miles from Marybador to the Gray Fortress, there were too many opportunities to miss the other group completely, passing within a few miles of them but never knowing, never seeing them. It was better to wait, they said. It was better to be patient.
Regi hated waiting. She hated being patient.
These were her sisters. Nalia was even more her sister than the others, and Ylleria, she was as close to a mother as Regi had had for a very long time. Looking over at Rindu again—had he even moved at all while she thought?—she frowned. They were right, she knew. It didn’t make it any easier to take, though.
Just earlier that morning, while eating a light breakfast with the master, she had complained again about waiting.
“How long will we wait until we send out someone to look for them, someone to look for news?”
“To the calm heart, time is a gently flowing river,” he had replied to her. What did that even mean? She ground her teeth and continued watching the frustrating man.
She had to hand it to him, though. He was like an immovable rock. What must he be feeling underneath all that calm and collected exterior? He had lost his entire extended family, his brothers and sisters of the Zouyim order, all but just a handful. His wife and daughter had gone to attack someone who was probably the most powerful man in the world. They had been gone for over a month. Still, he showed nothing. He meditated, did his calligraphy, practiced his kori rohw, and continued on.
The worst part was that even though everyone else in the compound—the few Sapsyra left, the families who lived there, even the Rusha—were on edge and snapped at each other with the slightest provocation, he did not. She herself had snapped at him—she still felt embarrassed about that—but he simply endured it like a deeply buried rock in the middle of a river. He treated her with understanding and kindness, discussing with her whatever she wanted to talk about and answering her questions, no matter how silly.
She couldn’t help but to allow a small smile to creep onto her face. He was amazing. Nalia had always gone on and on about how he was the perfect example of one of the Zouyim, how the Sapsyra could learn much from him, but she never paid attention. All children said that of their fathers, right? Well, she could see it now. If it wasn’t for his calming influence, she believed that some of the residents of the compound would have actually come to blows. She thought she would have been one of them.
She sighed and the smile slipped from her face. She went back to watching Rindu.
She started as his head snapped up suddenly. That wasn’t part of his exercises. He looked at her, his hazel eyes bright. Nodding slightly, he took off running toward the gate. Not knowing what else to do, Regi jumped up and followed him. As she went, she heard a cry from the Sapsyr on guard at the gate.
There was someone approaching.
Rindu didn’t wait for the guard to descend the stairs to open the gate. He opened it himself and rushed out, robes flowing behind him.
By the time Regi caught up with him, he had Nalia in his arms, carrying her back toward the gate. She was filthy, her clothes not much more than shredded rags, but she seemed whole, though injured. Her head drooped tiredly as her father carried her into the compound and toward their house.
“I am the only one left,” Nalia was muttering as Rindu placed her on her bed and began to look over her wounds, “the only one. He killed them all.” Regi had never heard her sound so manic, so…emotional.
“We made it through to the Gray Man, to the room in which he sat. We had lost half our number by then, but still, were we not Sapsyra? Were we each not the equal of any warrior on Gythe, any five warriors each, any ten?”
Rindu reached up and gently pulled the mask off Nalia’s face. She blinked as if the sunlight coming through the window was too bright for her. Her blue/green eyes surveyed the room, then latched onto Regi’s own eyes. Regi involuntarily took a step back from what she saw there.
She had only seen Nalia’s face maybe two or three times in all the time she was growing up with her, but it wasn’t a shock how ugly she was. What scared her was the way her eyes darted, the way they narrowed to focus, the way they were filled with anger and pain and hatred, as if it would bubble out through her pupils. She found her
self crying for the second time in little over a month. Crying, not at her own loss of sister and mother, but at Nalia’s. She didn’t know if the other woman would ever be the same.
Rindu turned his daughter’s head back and forth to inspect all sides of it. Seeing no injuries, he released her head and looked deeply into her eyes. He made some soothing noises and whispered something Regi couldn’t hear. Then he locked his eyes on hers and put a palm gently to her forehead. She thought she could see a ripple in the air, almost like you would see above a fire, and Nalia closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Rindu had Regi go and fetch the Rusha and then prepare a meal for when Nalia woke. After completing her tasks, she sat with him, waiting for her sister to regain consciousness. Only an hour later, Nalia suddenly shook awake, eyes snapping open and darting, muscles tensing.
Rindu took her hand and spoke consolingly to her. “Are you well, Iba, my heart?”
“Father,” she said, swallowing hard. Her voice was scratchy and rough, as if she hadn’t used it for some time. Regi handed her a cup of water and smiled at her. She hoped it was more convincing than it felt.
“Thank you,” Nalia croaked, taking the cup and drinking deeply.
She set it down and looked to her father, then to Regi, then to the Rusha, who had come not fifteen minutes earlier to wait for Nalia to wake. “I wish to tell you what has become of my sisters, and of my—” she choked out a little sob, then breathed deeply to calm herself, “my mother.”
“Iba,” Rindu said to her, “you may wait to tell the tale. Eat, drink, and rest. There is time to tell it later.”
“No.” She sat up straight in the bed and took another breath. “I would tell it now. I have been twenty-seven days on the road to return and I would not wait one minute longer to share what happened with you. Please, father…” she implored.
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