Dam hadn’t spoken to Hanhau since the collapse of the tower. Everything after that had proceeded in such a dazed routine, and Hanhau had been appointed to the city watch since so many of the warriors were unable to serve. After Dam and Attalos carried Aerander from the tower crater, Dam had spotted Hanhau across the smoke-blighted square. Hanhau’s face had glowed in recognition, but not more than a reassuring glance had passed between them.
Dam climbed the stairwell to the gravesite with an oil lamp to light his way. The funeral plot had been set up on a tall platform of rock apart from the main stages of the city. Across a dark pool of shadow, dotted tiers of gas lamps outlined the Honeycomb. It was like looking at a harbor village across a void of sea at night.
When he crowned the top of the shelf, the stench of smoking coals scraped at his sinuses. Flames flapped from tall totems staked around the grave mound. Dam had been to the gravesite for the first communal burial. Three more warriors had died since then. The mound of rubble was higher than Dam’s head and many times as wide. The yard was deserted.
The gathering for Teochin must have finished some time ago. That was troubling. Hanhau had moved on to who knew where. Then Dam heard voices coming from a shadowy pavilion on the far end of the yard. Dam headed over to search for Hanhau there.
It was some sort of rudimentary meeting house that the Old Ones must have built recently. It had flat slate roof buttressed by squared columns. The foundation was a slate slab as well, and it was broader than the roof, creating a narrow terrace around the perimeter.
As Dam neared the house, he could see the silhouettes of a dozen or so warriors seated at tables, muttering in a grieved tone. White light flashed from their faces. Dam stepped lightly into the house and looked around for Hanhau.
His arrival was quickly noticed. The warriors halted their discussion, looking at Dam warily. Dam recognized Ichika and Backlum, who was wearing a metal collar to hold his neck straight so it would heal. Miraculously, he was only sore from being thrown by the first blast at the tower. Hanhau stood up from a corner of one of the tables and stepped over, drawing Dam aside.
Hanhau smiled, but he was a bit shifty. “Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about Teochin. And I need to talk to you. Was that a bad idea?”
“No. Of course not. Come. We can talk over here.” Hanhau gestured to a corner of the house’s terrace, away from the interior and his warrior friends.
Hanhau’s careful behavior warranted some explanation. Dam was acquainted with many of Hanhau’s friends. He even thought of Backlum as his own friend. So why was Hanhau taking him away from them?
Had Hanhau’s interest in him died with the wrecking of the tower? Were lines drawn since Dam’s countrymen had stolen the Oomphalos? The gods had offered Dam few moments of happiness in matters of love. Normally, Dam would have heeded the signs of disaster and gone on his way, sparing himself the hurt of some delicately worded explanation. But he had promised his cousin he would find a way to bring back the Oomphalos, and Hanhau was the only person who could help Dam with that plan.
“Aerander wants me to put together a search party to find Calyiches.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Dam’s brow furrowed.
Hanhau glanced toward the house. He spoke in a low voice. “We’re going.”
“I’ll go with you. There’s others who will want to help. Attalos, Heron—”
“Dam.”
“What?”
“This isn’t a mission for you.”
“Why?”
“It will be a journey deep into the backcountry. That’s too dangerous for you.”
“It’s dangerous for anyone.”
Hanhau stared at Dam. “Calyiches’ crime was against our people. Rendering justice is our responsibility and our right.”
Dam understood to an extent. Many more warriors than Atlanteans had perished in the explosions, and Calyiches had demolished their sacred monument and taken their prized relic. But Calyiches had done it to punish Aerander and his countrymen as well. They needed the Oomphalos just as much as Hanhau’s people. It was the life source for the freed prisoners, and it might be the only thing to heal Aerander.
A troubling thought occurred to Dam as he glanced at the shadowed meeting house. “You were all going to run off to catch him without telling anybody? Does Ysalane know about this?”
Hanhau didn’t answer, although that was an answer in itself.
“That’s treason.”
“Eighteen warriors were killed that night. Twenty others were crippled. That murderer stole the most sacred artifact of our people.”
Dam answered fiercely. “You don’t have to tell me. I was there. And I’ve been in the infirmary every night since it happened.”
A group of warriors came out to the terrace. Too late, Dam realized he had raised his voice loud enough to be heard from quite a distance. They were an imposing, desperate-looking pack. Their faces were smudged from burying Teochin’s charred bones in the rock pile. Their chest armor was dented in places, and their unwashed hair was loose from their braids. Ichika stood at the head of the group. She stared at Hanhau bitterly.
“You told him.”
Hanhau looked at her helplessly.
“Don’t be mad at him,” Dam said. “He wouldn’t have bothered telling me unless I dragged it out of him.”
“That’s not true, Dam,” Hanhau said.
One of the men griped, “What is this? A lover’s spat?”
“He never should have come here,” another cried. “This is sacred ground.”
“He should go back with his kind.”
Hanhau stepped toward the group, speaking with both his mouth and his hands. The response that returned to him felt like it could ignite into a brawl. Dam had never felt threatened by the warriors before. As much to Dam’s surprise as anyone, that danger emboldened him. He pushed his way into the crossfire between Hanhau and the others.
“You say I don’t belong here? Guess what? You’re stuck with me. Because I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Dam’s outburst silenced the warriors. Their silence lifted his courage to greater heights.
“I don’t know how to fight,” Dam said. “I don’t know the backcountry. But I’ve got as much to lose as any of you if we don’t stop Calyiches. You go running off to claim vengeance, and what’ll you come back to? Mutiny? Terror? You want my people to feel even more helpless than we already feel? We want justice too. You can’t grab it all for yourselves.”
Some of the warriors came back at him with shouts and jeers. Dam raised his voice to answer them. Hanhau turned and stood between Dam and his companions.
“This isn’t your fight,” Hanhau said.
Dam searched Hanhau’s face. Raw emotion overwhelmed him. It had been pushed down too long so he could do his duty caring for crippled men, so they wouldn’t see he was afraid for them, so the broken world might mend itself if he pretended everything was fine and routine and going to get better. But it wasn’t getting better, and it never would unless he did something.
“What is my fight? Tell me. Because there’s anger burning through my veins, and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to make it stop.” His hands trembled at his sides. “My cousin was maimed that night, and all he wants is to make good on his promise to the freed prisoners. I swore to him that I would help. What am I supposed to do? You can’t leave me here with no purpose. You can’t do that to me.”
Ichika spoke out to the others. “We can’t be held up by surface dwellers following us through the backcountry. We’d be wasting all our time looking out for them.”
Words of agreement grumbled from the warriors. Dam fastened his gaze on Ichika. “Look at your city. We’re people from above and people from below, and we’re all hurting from the same catastrophe. You can’t split us off as a burden to be stowed away until we rot. We need to come together. That’s how we got the Oomphalos back in the
first place.”
The faces of the warriors dimmed. Hanhau looked upon Dam with understanding and a glint of pride. While the pack of warriors glanced around to gauge each other’s bearing on the matter, Backlum eked his way to a spot beside Dam.
“He risked his life pulling me away from the tower,” Backlum said. “I say we hear him out.”
*
They talked things over in the meeting house. With Hanhau and Backlum sitting beside him, Dam was able to get the others to ask for Ysalane’s commendation of their mission. If the warrior queen agreed, they would take a small squad of Dam’s countrymen along.
One of the warriors called Dam “Stone Badger,” and the rest of the group broke out in laughter. Hanhau explained that it was a kind of lizard, small but fierce, that chased men away from its chalky hollows in the high ground of the backcountry.
After a while, everyone’s shoulders were heavy, and yawns stretched from the warriors’ mouths. They said their good nights and went back to their homes to sleep. They would speak to Ysalane the next day.
That left just Dam and Hanhau back at the house. Hanhau wandered out to the terrace and sat down at the edge looking out to the burial mound, which was painted in flickering light and shadow by the yard’s flaming totems. Dam followed him out and sat down at a spot nearby.
Dam was too tired to feel the full force of his indignity from the way Hanhau had first treated him, but the unsettled feeling stirred in his gut. What if he hadn’t sought out Hanhau? Would Hanhau have left the city without even telling him?
“I’m sorry,” Hanhau said.
Dam picked at his sandal, waiting for more to come.
“I told you I didn’t care about what the others thought about the two of us, but I let that bother me tonight.”
Dam studied him sidelong. Hanhau’s face was tense and embattled.
“I’m ashamed,” Hanhau said.
Dam let that pass in silence for a while.
“Good,” Dam said. “Then I guess you’re lucky that I forgive you.” He reached out his hand, and Hanhau took it. Hanhau’s palm was rough and calloused from working at the burial site. He squeezed Dam’s hand, and Dam squeezed back. That simple touch said more than words could. Their disagreement was forgiven and forgotten. In fact, as they interlaced and pressed their hands together, it roused familiar cravings in Dam from the previous times they had been alone.
There were ways to mend a fight that were much better than talking about it.
Dam slid his hand up Hanhau’s arm.
Hanhau cleared his throat. “When we go on this mission, it will be as comrades.”
That seemed far in the future and hardly troubling. Now was the time for just the two of them to be together. Dam edged up close, gliding one hand over the smooth skin of Hanhau’s shoulder and the scars of victory that bloomed there. His other hand closed over the scales of Hanhau’s belly. He reached his mouth to Hanhau’s for a kiss.
Hanhau turned his head away. He told Dam gently, “We can’t.”
Dam remembered the shedding of Hanhau’s armor. He would need it to protect himself on their mission into the backcountry. Hanhau ran his fingers through Dam’s coarse and messy hair.
“When we come home with the Oomphalos,” he said.
Dam bowed his head. His body steamed like doused coals. Waiting until then was going to be awfully hard.
Chapter Three
They came together as a party of sixteen for the expedition to capture Calyiches and return the Oomphalos. Ysalane had granted this privilege to eleven warriors, including Hanhau, Ichika, and eight other volunteers, along with five boys from Atlantis.
Dam had been appointed with the job of raising that faction. He chose Attalos, Callios, and Heron since they had taken part in the prisoner’s rebellion and knew a bit about traveling the underground backcountry. A fifth boy, Radamanthes, had presented himself as an unquestionable asset to their cause. Rad was from the martial clan, House Autochthonus. Next to Calyiches and Lys, he had been a formidable athlete in the Panegyris. He was eighteen years old and had trained with his father’s infantry, which was renowned for their maneuvers across all kinds of terrain—desert, grassland, and jungle—patrolling the wilds of Tamana. Rad had kept up a routine of exercises in the bathing yard, and between that and his rations of fish, his brawny body had tightened like metal cord. If their mission came down to hand-to-hand combat with Calyiches and his band of traitors, Rad was the one to bet on.
Their party had Ysalane’s full sanction with the proviso that they attempt to bring back the traitors alive so they could be brought to trial in front of the people. Word spread quickly, and “Ysalane’s sixteen” were hailed as heroes before they had even stepped out of the city gates. The smithies worked quickly to equip them with freshly minted crossbows and lightweight blades. The scullery workers packed up smoked and salted meats for their journey.
Around the Honeycomb, it seemed like every boy who had a lick of martial experience came down to Dam’s middle-house to offer advice. They had all been genuine and encouraging, but Dam understood their lessons were born from an undercurrent of doubt. Dam was a novice priest. He had no training in soldiery like many of the highborn boys. Neither did Attalos, a pawnbroker’s son, nor Callios, whose father had run a tannery, nor Heron, who had grown up in a shantytown of orichalcum miners. Yet they had been entrusted to capture the most heinous criminals their generation had ever known, other than the High Priest Zazamoukh himself.
Dam had his reasons for selecting his crew. It had to do with instinct rather than experience. He needed boys who would come together as a company under his advisement, and more importantly, under the command of the foreign warriors. The boys from the middle-houses were used to being told their place. They hadn’t been part of their country’s venerated noble class, of which Dam sensed the Old Ones were even more suspicious due to Calyiches’ treachery. As for Rad, who Dam only knew in passing, he counted on the boy’s stolid dedication to a soldier’s lifestyle as a favorable disposition to taking orders.
When everything had been settled with Ysalane, Dam had gone to see Aerander. The infirmary’s charges had dwindled to about a dozen. Sacnite had sent home any man who could hold down soup and water and cough without hacking up blood. That helped lessen the spread of rot through the air, and it gave those with the most serious conditions more attention from the medic’s team of healers. Hephad had been relieved of his duties. He wasn’t needed anymore, for which he was grateful. The “kittens” needed boarding and training now that they were half the weight of men and scaling the highest stages of the city. A yard with a high stone wall was set up outside the Honeycomb where Hephad could handle them and temper their wild natures.
Just two boys were left at the infirmary. Dardy had been carried home by his brothers. Lys was in fine condition to leave. The swelling in his hand had lessened, and a healthy pink had returned to his fingers. But Lys would not give up his pallet at Aerander’s side. Aerander still could not withstand sitting up for more than a short while before plunging back to a dizzy lethargy. His head was still swaddled in cloths. He remained blind.
While his cousin lay on his back and Lys sat up at full attention, Dardy told them about the expedition.
Aerander smiled weakly. His voice was as thin as paper. “You did it. I knew you would. You’re House Atlas. Our ancestors charted the seas and fought Amazons and Minotaurs.”
“Don’t let the Old Ones claim all the glory,” Lys said. He tucked into a boxer’s stance to demonstrate for Dam, making play jabs with his good hand. “If you’re face-to-face with Calyiches, an uppercut to his nose will stun his senses. Then box his neck to break the bone and artery.”
Dam had heard the advice before, but he nodded solemnly to Lys. No one would look after his cousin better. Lys would fight off the demons of death to keep Aerander alive.
Aerander groped for Dam’s hand. “I have something for you. Lys?” The bigger boy crept over and knelt behind Aerand
er. Delicately, Lys grasped the amulet around Aerander’s neck and lifted it over his bandaged head.
“If you’re ever in danger, talk to Calaeno,” Aerander said. “She’s promised to help you.”
Lys held out the amulet for Dam. Dam stared at the ugly thing. Its ancient chain link was dull and rusted. Three pale bones twined together formed its trident decoration.
It could bridge a mental connection to Atlas’ daughter, a Pleiade who had been banished to the night sky. Dam had begun to believe in prayers again, but that possibility left him frozen. The goddess had been obscured from history due to a scandal that Dam only understood in bits and pieces. Her father had raised her as a boy because he had no male heirs, and Calaeno had abdicated her duty, running off with a suitor to the underworld. Later, she had been imprisoned in the heavens by a powerful spell that could only be broken when she was spotted in the night sky and her beholder revealed the mystery of her disappearance. When Aerander had done that on the night of the flood, Calaeno had shone a heavenly light on the portal at the Citadel so people could evacuate during the flood.
“You’ll need it more than me,” Aerander said.
Lys looked to Dam encouragingly.
“How do you…talk to her?” Dam said.
“You just do. It helps if you try thinking about nothing, and just listen to the space inside your head. Say her name. She’ll answer you.”
Taking the necklace from Aerander didn’t seem right. Strange as it was, the amulet was his cousin’s only regalia. He somehow looked weaker, a common invalid, without the ancient heirloom around his neck. But Dam couldn’t just sit there with Lys pushing the amulet on him. Dam took it in his hand.
The necklace felt light and delicate, but not special or magical, however something special and magical should feel. Dam pulled the necklace over his head. Nothing happened. That was fine with Dam.
“We’ll bring back the Oomphalos,” Dam told his cousin. “And you’ll see again.”
*
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