by Evan Winter
Jabari breathed out as hard as he could. He didn’t want any grace from Tau, and it was a lie to say they’d fought together, as if they were equals in the act. He’d almost gotten himself killed several times over, and Tau had been forced to keep him alive each time.
“And we did it,” Tau said. “We stopped Odili from getting to the queen, and I put an end to Dejen Olujimi.”
Jabari didn’t see their battle. He’d been in the room with the queen at the time, losing another fight to an Indlovu. He did, however, see the battle’s aftermath. Dejen had been enraged when they’d dueled and Tau had blinded him, cut him to shreds, and stabbed him through the heart.
Tau had fought an Enraged Ingonyama alone and he’d butchered him. On its face, it was an impossible act, but then again, Tau had a secret. He had, Jabari thought, picturing his brother’s funeral burning, a few secrets.
“Odili fled and we gave chase. He was trapped, but by then the Xiddeen were at the gates.” Tau was speaking too fast. It was making it hard for Jabari to make sense of the words. “Zuri called a dragon to make the Xiddeen back down, and Odili had his men attack the creature, creating enough confusion to escape. Zuri, she … she couldn’t keep the dragon under control and it went mad. It killed people.”
Jabari wanted Tau to stop.
“It was going to kill my sword brothers.”
Jabari had heard enough.
“But you didn’t let it. It blew fire at good men and another good man shielded them, taking the brunt of the blast. You saved them.”
It felt like Jabari was gasping for air, just like the night when the fires had embraced him, boiling away even his tears.
“The dragon turned on Zuri then,” Tau said, his words coming out in a broken stutter. “It … it attacked her … it … she died that night, and Odili escaped, and the queen leashed the dragon. She leashed it, threatened the Xiddeen with it, and gave the warlord his son in exchange for their retreat. In exchange for a reprieve.”
Jabari didn’t know. He didn’t know Zuri was dead. He’d grown up with her, even fancied her a little when they were too young for him to know she was just a Lesser.
“Before long, the Xiddeen will be back to finish what they started, and our people are split,” Tau said. “The Royals have aligned themselves with Abasi Odili and the self-styled Queen Esi. Many of the other Nobles sided with them too.”
We’re all dead, then, thought Jabari.
“But it can’t end this way. There’s still so much to do…. ” Tau trailed off, and that’s when Jabari heard the footsteps coming closer to them. “Keep fighting, Jabari Onai. I could use the help of a good and selfless man.”
“Champion,” a woman’s voice said, “you’re needed.”
She stepped in and out of view. She was wearing a Gifted’s robes. Zuri, was Jabari’s first thought, but Tau had told him that Zuri was dead and it couldn’t be her.
The chair beside Jabari’s bed creaked and a shadow fell over him.
“Keep fighting,” Tau whispered. “We’ll get the man who hurt us both.”
“Champion, we must hurry,” the Gifted said.
“Abasi Odili won’t escape what he’s done,” Tau told him. “Keep fighting, and I swear that before it consumes us, we’ll burn our pain to ash in the fires of vengeance.”
UNDENIABLE
Where are we going?” Tau asked the Gifted who’d called him from Jabari’s infirmary bed.
She hurried him along and back to his rooms, telling him that the queen was preparing to attend a meeting with several Nobles and that Nyah wanted him there too. The answer was not comforting. It was late, and though Tau’s experience with midnight meetings was limited, he couldn’t imagine they were a good thing.
Once in his rooms, the Gifted woman urged him to don the dragon-scale swords and champion’s armor that the queen had given him. The black blades, mounted onto his father’s and grandfather’s sword hilts, felt natural at his sides, but the armor, black-and-red leather in the Ingonyama style, made him uncomfortable.
It wasn’t the armor’s fit or quality. The queen’s latest offering was a marvel that gave Tau greater freedom of movement and far more protection than his old gambeson. The form of the thing wasn’t what worried him; it was its function.
Wearing it named him the queen’s champion. It told all Omehi that he was one of the best of them, and Tau had no illusions about what the Nobles would think of that.
“Champion …,” the Gifted said with a shiver as she looked him up and down. “Champion Solarin.” She raised her chin. “I’m Gifted Thandi, but … I was a High Common before,” she said with pride, though Tau couldn’t be sure if it was due to her current station or some strange valuing of the one from which she’d escaped.
He still had trouble reconciling the idea of Gifted as ever having been Lessers. The woman in front of him looked strong, well-fed, and the robes she wore were pristine. The very essence of her seemed something other than Lesser, given the grace and confidence with which she moved, her smooth, unweathered skin, and the ease with which she let her beauty show.
Lessers didn’t do that. They buried the fullness of what they were inside themselves because drawing attention to yourself around Nobles was a quick way to be reminded of where you actually stood.
“They’ll think I have no right to wear it,” he said, his thoughts spilling out before better sense could hold them back.
“They’ll be wrong.”
“How can you say that?”
“I say it because if there was any way to deny you, they’d have done it,” she said. “The only way to get as far as you have, considering what they think of us, is to become undeniable.” She waved him on. “Follow me.”
Moving fast, they walked the halls, passing a few guards, who all saluted Tau, their military instincts overriding any reservations they might have about the man wearing the armor of an Ingonyama. Thandi led him to an unfamiliar and empty part of the Guardian Keep, where the walls were unadorned by tapestry or painting and the floors were bare, echoing the tip-tap of their footfalls. Leading him to the end of the undressed corridor, she stopped in front of a locked door that was little taller than Tau and reinforced by a bronze frame.
“I’m sorry for your friend, the Petty Noble who was burned,” she said, revealing the key hidden in the bauble on her necklace and opening the door. “I heard he saved many lives.”
“He did,” Tau said.
Beyond the door were narrow stairs leading down to darkness, and Gifted Thandi led them on.
“A moment, Lady Gifted,” Tau said, trying to keep the fear from his voice as he eyed the way ahead. “The stairs … you want me to go into the tunnels beneath the Keep?”
The robed woman looked over her shoulder at him. “Come, Champion,” she said. “The vizier is waiting.”
Tau took a step back. “I think I need to know more about what we’re doing and why, or she may be waiting awhile.”
Thandi tilted her head and blinked at him. She wasn’t like the other Gifted he’d met. Most of them were ascetic in appearance and stern, but Thandi’s face was round, and she had large eyes and a mouth that slipped easily into a smile. She looked young, honest, hopeful.
“The tunnels are the best way to move through the keep unseen,” she said.
“Why do we need to move unseen? Are we in danger?”
She slipped into that easy smile, but it didn’t extend beyond her lips. “Yes.”
He was fine for the first two turns in the torchlit tunnels, but after that, with the exit far behind them, Tau’s limbs began to shake and his mouth went dry. He hid his discomfort from the Gifted, unwilling to appear weak, but the nausea made him misstep and he fell against the nearest wall.
“Champion?”
“I’m well,” he said over a tongue thick as porridge. “I don’t … I don’t like small places.”
“Can I help?” she asked.
He waved her off and squinted his eyes. “I’ll be fine,”
he said, imagining himself in the open air of Kerem’s mountains. “I can do this …,” he muttered, pushing off the wall as a peal of thunder cracked loud enough to send bits of raw adobe raining down from the tunnel’s makeshift ceiling.
Tau dropped to the ground and scurried to the wall, jamming his back against it while his heart leapt in his chest like a stick-poked frog.
“It’s just the storm,” the Gifted said, kneeling beside him and offering him a hand. “The tunnels are rough cut, but they won’t collapse. I promise.”
Tau stared at her but didn’t see Gifted Thandi. He was remembering the last time someone had tried to comfort him in these tunnels. He was remembering Zuri and noting that the storm had raged since the night he’d lost her. He’d never seen one last so long and wondered if even the heavens mourned with him.
“Let me help,” the Gifted said.
Like Zuri’s, her eyes were brown, but that was the only feature they shared.
“I don’t need it,” he said, and though Thandi looked like she doubted that, she didn’t get the chance to respond.
Nyah, looking like she hadn’t slept in days, walked around the far corner of the tunnel.
“Gifted Thandi, you’re late,” the older woman said, spotting them both, and then, behaving as if it was perfectly normal to find Tau on his ass in the Guardian Keep’s tunnels, she greeted him. “Evening, Champion.”
“Vizier.” Tau said, locking his eyes on her face so he didn’t have to see the floor sliding back and forth.
“You look awful,” she said.
“There’s the sun chiding the cook fire for the hut’s swelter,” he said.
Gifted Thandi chuckled, Nyah turned to her, and Thandi pretended she’d been clearing her throat.
“Does this happen every time?” Nyah asked, swinging back to him. “Are you always unmanned by enclosed spaces?”
“It’s uncomfortable but could be worse,” he shot back. “I could be the youngling.”
It was hot in the tunnels, but the temperature seemed to drop with the look Nyah gave him.
“Do you know why the youngling’s presence and purpose are revealed to so few, Champion?” she asked.
“Because it’s wrong,” he said, working his way back to his feet.
“It’s because the powerless, having no understanding or experience with how much real power can save or destroy, think too simply. They see things as either right or wrong, but the world and the purposes of those in it are distorted, misjudged when reduced to so basic a binary.”
Tau shook his head, and testing his balance, he took a step toward Nyah. “Wrong is wrong,” he said, needing to know what was around the corner behind her and seeing that, only a few strides away, the tunnel ended at a closed door. “It’s in there, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Turn around,” Nyah said, pointing back the way he’d just come. “We’re going that way.”
He wasn’t ready to leave. “They’re intelligent, neh? It’s why they can hold on to the Gifted when they’re entreated. They’re intelligent and you trapped one of them underground and behind locked doors for almost as long as we’ve lived on this land.”
The vizier held his gaze with hers. “You think too simply, and you’re wrong on the last count.” She crossed her arms and stepped aside. “The doors to unwanted truths are rarely locked, since so few wish to face what’s behind them.”
Nyah didn’t think he’d go in. She thought him unwilling to witness the cost of their survival, but Tau had seen the cost and suffered it. He’d been there, helpless, forced to watch Zuri spend her life to save others, and he’d be damned if he couldn’t at least stand in the presence of the thing that had killed her. So without even a last look in the vizier’s direction, he stepped up and pushed open the unlocked door.
TOOLS
The dragon’s prison was hot as Hoard and cavernous. It stank like an inyoka’s failed eggs and was lit by guttering torches losing a battle against the dark. The space, taken in its entirety, looked like the Goddess had inverted and dropped a rough-hewn bowl of hardened clay onto a cobbled path, and Tau stood on cracked, crumbling stones, smoothed by the passage of countless feet.
A few steps farther into the room, spread out around the cavern at equal distances, were six Gifted. They held themselves stiff as boards, hoods up, eyes closed, heads down, and most of them swayed with the unsteadiness of exhaustion. They were in Isihogo. Tau could tell. It was also the only explanation that could account for the restless slumber in which the beast before him was held.
With no more than forty strides separating them, it was the closest Tau had come to a dragon, and though it was far from grown, he was awed by the creature’s size. The youngling was massive, and its scales, blacker than tar and harder than hammered bronze, blended into one another in a darkness so complete he couldn’t hold on to their shape or depth in his mind.
In the prison, no one spoke, but it was not silent. The chamber rumbled and hissed with every breath the creature took, and with his back to the tunnels and the wide-open cavern in front of him, Tau’s stomach had begun to settle, but trying to make sense of the dragon turned it anew. He couldn’t focus on any part of it without the scales twisting the light and pulling his eyes this way and that.
“Goddess …,” he said.
And behind him, Gifted Thandi whispered to Nyah. “There’s been an edification from Palm. It’s about the handmaidens.”
“Are they well?” the vizier asked.
Ignoring them, Tau walked farther into the prison, trying to understand the thing before him.
“They rode past Palm’s walls last night,” Thandi told Nyah. “An alarm was raised over the missing horses, but the handmaidens were not pursued.”
“They got out,” Nyah said. “Praise the Goddess, the news will ease the queen’s mind.”
From muzzle to tail, the youngling was many times Tau’s length. It was big enough to smash him beneath a single one of its claws, and being closer, he could see that it was missing scales along its body. The skin beneath the scaleless patches was gray, puckered, and angry, like the surface of a badly healed wound.
He looked back at them. “You’ve held that thing here for lifetimes, in an existence between dreaming and death. You’ve used it to control its kin and harvested weapons from it by ripping pieces of its body away.”
“We’ve kept our people safe, Champion,” Nyah said, letting her gaze fall to the guardian swords at his sides, “and none among us are innocent when all among us benefit from what is done here.”
Unwilling to face her, Tau turned back to the prisoner. The heat, he realized, was coming from it. He went closer.
The dragon’s eyes were closed and its mouth was shut, though he could see a few of its fangs peeking beyond the meat of its lips. Its teeth were coal black and scythe-like, tools for tearing flesh.
“Do you think this helps, being here?” Nyah asked.
He ignored her, letting the heat assault him, punishing himself for his inadequacies, and Nyah walked up to stand beside him. She stood tall and proud, even though her breathing was rapid and she had to squint against the invisible blaze radiating from the youngling. “Our queen needs us.”
Tau said nothing, his eyes on the dragon and its stirrings.
“While you’ve sequestered yourself these past few days, the remaining Greater Noblewomen in the city took it upon themselves to form a ruling council.” Nyah’s mouth twisted. “They think to ‘advise’ the queen.”
“There’s already a ruling council in Palm City,” Tau said.
“The insects in Palm rule over none but the treacherous, and how can they be a ruling council when they bow to Odili?”
The sounds of the three syllables making up Odili’s name felt like the tap of fingers wrapping round Tau’s throat. They made it hard to swallow and harder to speak.
“Are all monarchies so brittle?” he asked. “Why can Odili claim that the queen’s sister is our true ruler and get Palm City bowing
to Queen Esi instead of Queen Tsiora?”
“It’s a mistake to think this break the result of a single blow,” Nyah said, shifting back half a step and wiping a hand across the sweat on her forehead. “In the moment, as the knife scrapes your spine, it may seem that way, but the ones who’d kill you from behind are not hot-blooded. They’d never trust your death to just one strike.”
“So, there were other attempts to overthrow Tsiora?” Tau asked. “Well, you’re the queen’s vizier. Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you see this coming?”
“It’s always coming,” she said. “The knife was no surprise, only its timing.”
She wiped her forehead again and took another step away from the heat.
She tilted her head toward the dragon. “What you said earlier—you were right. We’ve enslaved this creature and kept it from its family.”
Tau had his left hand on the pommel of his strong-side sword and his grip tightened. “Why say that? Did you let me come in here to taunt me with the things you’ve done?”
“Could I have stopped you?” she asked. “And why shouldn’t you see how far we’re all capable of going to keep those we love safe?”
He turned to face her. The skin on her lips was cracking from the heat.
“I love our queen, Champion Solarin, and this supposed ruling council meets without her,” she said. “Can you understand what that means? Can you appreciate the position in which we find ourselves?” She turned away from him, the dragon, and its heat. “Come, now, we’re needed.”
Nyah wanted him to fight for the queen, and maybe Queen Tsiora was a better choice to lead the Omehi than the Royal Nobles or the Xiddeen, but Tau hadn’t sworn the champion’s oath because he thought it important to fight for Tsiora’s throne. She’d been sitting on it when his father was murdered, and having her there hadn’t helped Aren at all.
The queen’s cause wasn’t his. Tau was fighting to get to Abasi Odili so he could rip him apart, turn him inside out, piece by bloody piece, because that was what it would take for the Nobles to see and hear a man like him. To be understood, he’d speak the one language the powerful share with the powerless, the language of pain, fear, and loss. The powerful had to be shown that people can only be pushed so close to the flame before they catch fire and burn everything down.