Conqueror's Blood (Gunmetal Gods Book 2)

by Zamil Akhtar

  All another lifetime, now. So far gone…but it was home, once.

  Zedra pointed a shaky finger at me. Then she grabbed her forehead, closed her eyes, and fainted forward into the arms of a gholam.

  He carried her out of the room on his shoulder and ran down the hall, probably to the healer. How stressed she must’ve been to faint like that in front of her enemy. “Wonderful,” I said to myself.

  Now only one gholam guarded me, though an uncountable number waited in the hallway. Were I the fearsome starwriter they believed me to be, perhaps I could erase them from existence. But I was just a tired, miserable woman who had lost everything. Too tired to even pray…so I closed my eyes and drifted…

  I dreamed of fluttering and flying. Of sipping a warm cloud. Of being a feather blowing in a sandstorm.

  Until someone slapped me awake; he wore a golden sword, glimmering chainmail, and calligraphy-covered plate. A gholam, obviously…but why did he have Eshe’s lovely face?

  He slapped me again, then pulled me up. “Let’s go! Now!”

  “Eshe? You came for me?”

  He unsheathed the sword — bloodrunes covered the blade. The gholam in the room stood like stone, perfectly still, eyes bulging and forward.

  “They’re tranced,” he said. “Come, follow me.”

  I pinched myself — this was no dream within a dream. But could we really escape the most fortified compound in the kingdom?

  Eshe peeked into the hallway. The stomp-stomp of boots on marble resounded, as if gholam marched through.

  He took out the tiny perfume bottle of my blood that he’d collected earlier. On tiptoes, he wrote a bloodrune atop the door’s threshold.

  “Help!” he shouted into the hallway. “Help!” The gholam ran toward us, vibrating the floor with their bootsteps.

  As they entered the room, they all swayed, obviously dizzy, then collapsed against the furniture, causing a plate of berries to spill.

  Astounding…

  “Close your eyes when you go through the door,” Eshe said.

  We stepped over their bodies and into the hallway — he’d tranced the guards outside our door, too. Eshe was so good; they should’ve feared him, not me.

  “What about Khizr Khaz?” I said as we hurried toward the exit.

  “I’ve no idea where he is.”

  “He stood up for me. He pointed a blade at Kyars. They may kill him for that!”

  He took my hand but could barely look at me, even though I was wearing my eyepatch. “I’d risk my life for you, Cyra, and far more. But I won’t lie — I wouldn’t risk it for that old sheikh.”

  He’d risk his life for me? Why? No time to ask or think. I didn’t want to leave without the sheikh, but I couldn’t force Eshe. Perhaps if we were free, we could help him later.

  We hurried through the archway toward the simurgh statue. Two guards drew their scimitars upon sighting us.

  “It’s them!” one shouted.

  As they charged us, blades forward, Eshe slashed his scimitar in their direction. Snow appeared to fly off his blade toward them; the snow hit both guards, and their skin turned blue, and icicles grew from their limbs and encased them whole. By Lat…

  Goosebumps erupted on my skin, and every hair stood. I didn’t want to go near anything freezing and hoped I’d never, ever be targeted by such magic. How distressing…that my blood could turn things to ice.

  Eshe grabbed my hand, and we ran by the simurgh statue toward the garden that led to the palace gate.

  We darted around the corner of a hedge. The red-haired woman I’d noticed earlier with Zedra was standing amid red tulips, a recurve bow on her back and a bottle in her hand. Soon as she eyed us, she grabbed the bow, nocked an arrow, and shouted, “Stop!”

  Eshe sliced in her direction; she dove and, by an inch, dodged the flying snow. It hit a palm tree; icicles erupted. A sound like steel clanging on steel pierced the air as the ice surged upward, so high that even the birds perched on the branches froze, their wings spread in failed take-off.

  Prone, the girl loosed an arrow. Eshe swiped at it, and the snow hit the arrowhead. Ice engulfed the arrow, forming a block around it, which remained stuck in the air, as if floating. Eshe was about to swing again when an arrow pierced the floating ice block, shattered it, and surged toward him.

  I smashed into him, causing us to tumble behind the hedge, as the arrow kissed my hair and flew into the distance. Thankfully, that floating ice block shattering had given me enough time to react, but I was too close to death.

  As soon as I rolled off Eshe, an arrow arced over the hedge and pierced his chainmail. By Lat…how? By what magic had she arced an arrow like that? Blood gushed as Eshe grabbed his erupting belly wound and wailed. She’d meant that arrow for me!

  Running steps sounded from the palace entrance. Gholam were coming. I pushed on his wound to stop the blood, but it seeped through.

  “I gave it my all,” Eshe said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll be fine.” I already tasted tears. “You’ll be fine.”

  The gholam’ bootsteps quickened. In seconds, they’d surround us. I’d go back into captivity, but Eshe…Eshe they’d surely kill. How could I have let this happen?

  “You saw my eye,” I said. “You know what I am…you know I’m the very thing you despise…so why did you risk your life for me?”

  He brushed my cheek. “Because…I think I’m just foolish enough to love you.”

  I grabbed his hand, squeezed, and prayed. Prayed for Eshe to live, prayed that he’d be saved, like he’d saved me.

  The red-haired woman stepped forward, arrow aimed at Eshe’s head. The gholam breathed on my back. I pulled off my eyepatch. Daytime stars covered my sight, burning in blue and red and green and gold. They hymned in unison, low-pitched and somber, like an Ethosian choir.

  “Help me,” I said to them.

  A star on my left vibrated; I touched it, and it hymned a solo, then I drew lines to so many vibrating stars above and below and to my left and my right until the pattern resembled the…the sigil of the Seluqal House of Alanya?

  “Kill the man,” a gholam said. “Return the girl to her room, tie her up this time.”

  I collapsed on Eshe, shielding him with my body.

  Everything rumbled as if an earthquake struck. The Karmazi girl looked toward the palace entrance, gasped, and dove into a thorny hedge. Each gholam turned, then dashed aside. Something huge was…running through the garden…toward us. Shaking the world and shattering stone with every step.

  Red eyes on a giant wolf head! I could scarcely believe as a falcon-winged simurgh launched into the air, dove, and grabbed Eshe and me with lion claws larger than a carriage.

  The thunder of its spreading black wings popped my ears. It tossed Eshe and me onto its back as it soared, each flap bringing a storm. We clung to its feathers, though it didn’t seem necessary, as a force adhered us to it. It climbed the sky, higher, higher, bursting through clouds and approaching the stars. Qandbajar shrank, its buildings and walls and domes like toys I could step on and crush. Dizziness swam through my throat and chest, and cold poured through my veins. Oh Lat, anything but cold.

  I let go of the feathers and took Eshe into my arms. To ease the bleeding, I cupped my hand around the wooden arrow jutting from his belly. His body warmed me, and so long as there was warmth, there was life. When we landed — if we landed — he’d have to write a bloodrune to save himself.

  “Did we…die?” he said, breaths tense and heavy. “This our carriage to Barzakh?” I had to strain to hear him over the scathing air. We hadn’t died, yet, but everything in my mind and body screamed that we were about to. I pressed my lips on his — kissed him — the first time I’d ever kissed a man. I tasted blood on his tongue — oh Lat.

  The simurgh broke through what must’ve been a higher heaven: only a cloud ocean below and the sun and moon and a starry sky above. For a second, it stilled, and we were as gods.

  Before I could even smil
e, it dove beneath the cloud ocean toward shimmering orange land. My stomach churned; I’d have retched if I had anything in me. I’d dreamed of falling before, but this was worse — panic engulfed my senses, and I could no longer think or feel anything but terror, which surged through me in rippling waves as we descended through clouds that left me wet and shivering. Gazelle in the distance were ants, but as the desert-scape surged toward us, they grew. Then the simurgh fluttered its wings against the air, jolting my heart into my throat and slowing its descent. It glided sideways; whatever force was adhering us to it released, and we fell — screaming — onto a dune.

  Eshe was still screaming. The fall had twisted the arrow inside him, and blood flowed and bubbled. I shuffled off my back and onto my knees, crawled toward him through the sand pile, and pressed my hand on his belly. “You’ll be fine!”

  “If this is Barzakh, why does it still hurt?” he screamed. “Isn’t death supposed to be peaceful?”

  “You’re not dead! Listen, you need to write yourself a bloodrune. Stop your bleeding!”

  “So you’re telling me simurghs are real?” He laughed hysterically. “My blood is the wrong flavor. I need yours, and the bottle fell out while we were flying.”

  What to cut with? I bit down on my lip — as hard as I could — until I tasted blood. Then I took Eshe’s hand and squeezed my lip so the blood tinged his fingers.

  I ripped his shirt open where the arrow had pierced.

  “Pull it out first,” he said.

  I squeezed my hands around the arrow and pulled. Eshe cried. Blood gushed from the weeping hole.

  With my blood, he wrote the same rune he’d written on my neck, then mumbled the incantation. It glowed. I gaped as the weeping blood dried and a scar erupted to cover the hole.

  “Did you — really kiss me — while I was bleeding out — on the back of a flying simurgh?” He heaved between words. “You have — the worst timing.”

  I kissed him again — only on the lips — since there was still blood in his mouth. That left a bloodstain from my bleeding lips on his. “I thought I was going to die, and I didn’t want to die without kissing a man. It wasn’t what I expected, though.” It wasn’t any different from kissing a girl.

  “A creature that every Philosopher agrees never existed — and those bastards can’t even agree that east is east — just took us for a ride, and that’s what was on your mind?”

  “Death was on my mind. Do you recall what you said when it was on yours?”

  He grinned, flush. “Well, you know, I really thought I was going to die.” He let out an ecstatic sigh. “Life — I’ll never take you for granted again!”

  It seemed his veins were surging with the same lightning as mine. After what we’d been through, it was entirely appropriate.

  “You said you loved me, and you used the word love, as in rising romantic love, not one of the ten other words you could’ve used.”

  He rolled over, as if trying to powder himself in sand. “Don’t rub it in. Oh Lat, I need some date wine. Think you can use your starwriting to summon a flask? Or how about a bath of the stuff? I want to soak in it. Fanaa into it.”

  He already seemed drunk. Or somewhat delirious, at the least.

  Gallops sounded in the distance: riders dotted the horizon from the direction of the city. Oh Lat. If they were gholam, we couldn’t outrun them. But considering a simurgh came to life just to drop us here, I had a strong feeling they were Jotrids.

  “Are you…at all upset?” I asked.

  “Truth be told, I felt betrayed at first. But I know why you hid it. You thought yourself evil, like Aschere. But when you took my hand, I saw the Morning Star. It’s the same star that I invoke when bloodwriting. It’s not the Blood Star, Cyra, and that means you’re not like Aschere.”

  What a relief to hear. And yet, I’d gained this power from the Palace of Bones, where I’d floated for thousands of years. I’d watched as stars danced around each other and merged in a cataclysm. “Does that mean I’m…good?”

  Eshe winced as he tried to sit up. “Oh Lat, when I move, it screams.” He lay back in the sand. “That doesn’t make you good…it makes you not Aschere.”

  “Well, I already knew that.” Did I, though?

  As the riders neared, I breathed in relief: they wore leather vests over fur-lined blue caftans and hard caps with argus feathers, Jotrid outfits. They surrounded our dune, kicking up sand.

  “Cyra.” The thin-limbed man was Tekish, face gritted and soot-stained. “Thought it would be you.”

  “He’s hurt,” I said, pointing to Eshe. “Please help us.”

  Several riders dismounted and climbed our dune. They handed us both fuzzy waterskins. I drank deep, relieved to be among allies again, though it was still strange to think of the Jotrids as such.

  Tekish’s wife, blood flecks on her vest, came to my side and asked, “Was that…really…what I think it was?” Her short hair, though odd, suited her, and she had such defined cheekbones and chiseled arms. My mother had a similar build, in her prime as a huntress, and lamented that I remained soft, uncoordinated with the bow, and more interested in playing with rabbits than hunting them.

  “It was, indeed, a simurgh.” Of course. I’d passed by that statue a thousand times. The same simurgh emblazoned the fronts of coins and mail plates and all manner of banners and carpets hanging in the palace and elsewhere in Qandbajar. “Sorry, I forgot your name.”

  Her annoyed resting face, too, reminded me of my mother. “Elnur. Come on, now. We should get back to camp.”

  A relief to hear we still had a camp. I sat at the back of her saddle. Eshe could hardly stand, so Tekish strapped him to his back.

  “What happened in the city?” I asked Elnur as we rode by a bulging acacia tree, which looked like a giant cauliflower in a bed of saffron rice. Lat, I was hungry.

  “I’d filled seven sacks with brocade after ransacking some rich cunt’s house. Then Pashang ordered us to stop. Said you convinced him. So…thank you.”

  “Thank me?”

  “Thank you…because had we not stopped looting and drinking and rutting, formed up, and returned to discipline, we would’ve been on our backs when the gholam attacked, and that would’ve been it.” She sniggered. “My husband was dragging double his weight in gold when a gholam bomb exploded the stable holding his mare. He barely crawled out.”

  I scratched my head. Seemed I’d done some good. “You’re welcome, I suppose.”

  “I say we leave. There’s no reason for us to fight so many gholam. This isn’t our home.”

  No, it was mine. And I needed them to stay. “You don’t think there’s a reward that could be worth it?”

  “What reward is worth our deaths?”

  True enough.

  The Jotrids still held the southern and eastern walls, as well as the adjacent city quarters. I met Pashang alone in his yurt, which was just outside the wall. When I entered, he was shirtless and…meditating, his back straight, legs crossed, and eyes shut.

  I stomped my foot. “How could you do that to us? How could you leave the palace undefended?”

  He groaned. “I left it well defended, but Mansur’s guard lost their will to fight. Want to know why?” He gestured to a bloody sack on the floor.

  I gasped, recalling the heads my brother had once emptied at my feet, all from a bloody sack just like it. “I saw them parading the head around. The rest of him is in there?”

  Pashang nodded. “His body is covered in burns, fingers cut, bones broken in all the wrong places. He didn’t go peacefully into the next world. Regardless, his children deserve to plant his shrine with what’s left of him.” He snickered. “Cyra, this might be a lost cause.”

  I overcame the fact that we were sharing this yurt with a headless body and said, “Pashang, have you forgotten our promise? I burned my only bridge. My marriage is ended. This is my home, and I’m going to fight for it.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” He stood and paced between t
he stand where his mirror armor hung and a — sadly — empty meat pot. “The gholam…we can’t defeat them. Their matchlocks fire four times faster than ours. Their gold-plated armor laughs at our arrows, the way the sun laughs at the birds flying by. While we held the palace, we had a defensible position. But now—”

  “But now?” I shook my head, utterly disappointed. “So it’s true — all you’re good for is terrorizing the downtrodden. Those who can’t slap back. But come against a proper host, and you’re as terrified as those you once cut down. Why don’t you just piss yourself already?”

  He laughed. I didn’t want him laughing. I wanted him in tears!

  “Tell me, then. How do we win this battle?”

  I never claimed to be a strategist. A general. A vizier. What the hell did I know about winning battles?

  “I prayed…and a being that only existed in children’s stories came to life and saved me. Don’t you see, Pashang? With our prayers, how can we lose?”

  Now his eyes went empty. “I saw three visions, years ago, and since then, nothing. Only when I met you did I feel that connection again. The connection…with something up there.” He pointed at the hole in the yurt’s center, through which shone the dark sky.

  “Zedra said it was the darkness that we prayed to…are we heathens, Pashang? The bedrock of our faith is to worship only Lat, and yet we…”

  Pashang lit a fire in the stove. The waft of burning wood and coal filled the yurt. “We are on a different path, but it’s our own path. We aren’t forcing anyone else on it, the way everyone else does.”

  I nodded, though I didn’t know what to believe. The only god that had ever helped me was not the one my parents raised me to worship. Eshe had said we invoked the same star, but what was the difference between invoking and praying? I’d have to ask him, sometime, because what I was doing felt so…sinful.

  Pashang, it seemed, had gone in deep. Was worshipping whatever spoke to us, turning his back on the straight path to Lat entirely. “Pashang, how can we lose?”