The Fires of Vengeance

by Evan Winter

  She was in a pitiful state, but Tau refused to feel pity. She’d killed people he loved and then dared to call him. Her end was her own doing.

  “On the night you murdered Jayyed Ayim, you saw me,” he said, taking a step toward her. “You recognized what I am and you ran.”

  She moved back, her knees buckling with every step.

  “You should never have stopped running,” he said, following her, the pain in his wounded leg masked by the anger in his heart.

  She cursed him, spitting foul-sounding words as she struck out with thrusts too sluggish to land, and he knocked her attacks aside, casually, derisively. He hated her and he hated that she wouldn’t give up.

  She should have been born Chosen, he thought, though then they wouldn’t have let her fight, and the spearwoman was born to fight.

  She shouted again and charged with neither the strength nor the speed to have any hope of hurting him. He knew what she wanted. She wanted him to kill her as she ran at him. She was trying to have some small measure of control over her end, but she’d slain Jayyed and Chinedu, and Tau had no mercy in him to give.

  His sword made the air sing before it smashed into her lead hand, splitting the limb in half and sending her spear flying away. Her cry then, as she fell, with her hand, wrist, and arm in flaps, was a cry not of pain, but of despair and loss. It was a cry to match the things Tau felt before sleep saved him every night. It was the cry he held inside himself whenever he thought of everyone he’d lost.

  She was on the ground in front of him, her mangled arm cradled to her belly, and he stood over her, watching her struggle to reach into the pouch on her hip with the hand that remained whole. But there was no weapon left in the world that could help. The thing to come was inevitable.

  “His name was Jayyed Ayim,” Tau told her, “and you will never say it again.”

  He plunged his strong-side sword through her chest, pinning her to the red clay. She gasped, panting, the end near, and fumbled at her pouch, pulling something free from it.

  It was a ragged square of folded papyrus. She tried to open it but couldn’t do it fast enough one-handed. She died trying.

  Tau brushed at his mouth with the back of his hand. He’d done it. He’d killed Jayyed’s and Chinedu’s murderer. He’d avenged them, and as he stood there over her body, waiting for the satisfaction to come and the weight in him to lessen, his mind kept filling with the memory of the light going out of her eyes.

  But he didn’t want to think about that, and shaking his head to knock loose the moment of her death, Tau focused on the papyrus she had in her hand instead. It could be important. It could be a map of Xiddeen territory or perhaps military orders, but the pain in his leg had returned and he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to stand up if he knelt to retrieve it.

  He told himself he’d come back for the papyrus when the rest was done, and he turned away from the spearwoman’s body, trying to recapture his anger. It had kept the agony in his leg at bay, but Tau’s fury had died with the spearwoman, and his leg ached.

  The pain, radiating out from the wound and extending all the way into his core, felt like it was traveling to his heart, and for a moment, he worried that the priestess was right and that he didn’t have much time left. But she’d also said that there wasn’t enough poison in his body to kill him, just enough to make him kill himself.

  Grimacing, Tau braced himself against the pain and limped onward. “That’s not how I go,” he said as he went to take the warlord’s life.

  SCARS

  The remaining Xiddeen were fighting behind Tau, and they no longer outnumbered the Chosen, which meant there would soon be no Xiddeen left. In front of Tau, separated from the rest of the fighting, the warlord was standing at the edge of the cove, his feet in the surf.

  In the time it had taken for Tau to kill the spearwoman, Kana’s ship had made it past the breakwater, but Warlord Achak was not watching it. He had his back to the ocean and was facing toward Tau. Kana would not get to his father before Tau did, and clearly, Achak knew that too.

  Eyes on Tau, the warlord handed his spear to his shaman and pulled two short-handled hatchets from his belt. The twin weapons of bronze and bone had oversized heads stretching two handspans from toe to heel, and their blades were curved as if to match the shape of the half-moon cove in which they both stood.

  Achak’s shaman, the one who had enraged the spearwoman, took the warlord’s spear and leaned against it. The emaciated man looked drained but willing to fight, and placing a hand on the warlord’s shoulder, he held his head high.

  Achak reached over, took the shaman’s hand in his, and squeezed it.

  It was a moment of warmth between men who, in all likelihood, had shared a long history. It was, Tau thought, an assurance that, whatever came, they’d face it together.

  They were wrong.

  They’d come to his peninsula with their warriors and stolen the lives of those Tau loved. Like the spearwoman, they’d done things that had called him to them, he’d answered their call, and they would die, each man alone.

  “You can wave to your son,” Tau told Achak. “I’ll let you say goodbye.”

  The warlord, with his half-burned face, gave Tau half a smile.

  “Why,” Achak asked in broken Empiric, “when I’ll see Kana … after?”

  Advancing, Tau shook his head. The fury was coming back. “After me, there is nothing.”

  The warlord laughed, flourished his hatchets, and charged. Without limping, feeling no pain, Tau raised his swords and kept walking, until his mind broke.

  When the warlord was four strides from striking distance, he became two, then four, then six men. Tau was too close to get away completely, and when the six men raised their twelve hatchets to cut him down, he dashed to his left, out of reach of three of the six warlords, doing his best to block the attacks from the other six hatchets.

  He couldn’t stop them all, no one could, but turning his weak-side blade parallel to the ground and raising it like a shield, he barred the deadly arc of four hatchets. The power of them hitting his sword almost disarmed him, but Tau held on. He tried to do the same with his other sword but couldn’t intercept the incoming attacks from that warlord, and a hatchet took him in the chest as the other one went through his neck … completely through his neck.

  The hatchets in that warlord’s hands moved in, through, and out of Tau, without him feeling a thing. Both ax-heads had “struck” killing blows, yet Tau was still alive.

  There was little time to consider the miracle. The two warlords, the ones holding the hatchets he’d blocked, were attacking again. So were the ones he’d avoided, the ones on Tau’s right.

  With his mind overloaded, Tau gave his instincts the lead, turned his back on the warlord whose hatchets had gone through his body, and, using both swords, went to war with the closest two men. Those two Achaks, like the rest, moved in tandem, as if attached at the legs, hips, and arms by invisible cords.

  That they were replicating each other’s movements made it easier to block and counter them, but as Tau’s sword went to meet the first of the hatchets, doubt plagued him. He did not understand what was happening, and if the warlord and hatchets at his back could become substantial, Tau was dead.

  It being too late to adjust for that possibility, Tau did his best to avoid dying at the efforts of the two warlords directly in front of him. He sent up his swords to block, and dragon scale met bronze with full force.

  Grunting under the power of the clash, Tau disengaged. He tried to make space, moving to keep all six opponents in front of him, but failed to track all six men and rammed right into and through one of them, as if the man was not there at all.

  “Gifts,” Tau spat, thinking he had some understanding of the things he faced. “Your shaman conjures soulless men with no substance to fight for you.” Tau gambled, picking one of the two warlords he had crossed real blades with. “But I could feel the collision in my right when I blocked your real hatchet.�
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  The warlord to whom he was pointing, the real Achak, tilted his head in acknowledgment and stepped back. The false men vanished when he did so, and Achak offered Tau another of his half smiles as the illusions re-formed in a single line.

  The real Achak stepped among them, through them really, making it impossible for Tau to be certain that he still knew which of the six men was the real one. Then the newly formed sextet separated and brandished their hatchets, each copy wearing a perfect mirror image of Achak’s broken sneer.

  Tau tried to keep his confusion from his face, hoping Achak wouldn’t attack if he thought Tau knew which of the copies was the real one. It made no difference. The six warlords attacked, and Tau, praying it would work—and work in time—flung his spirit to Isihogo.

  The mists of the underworld enveloped him, and Tau was in the prison Ananthi had made for Ukufa. Using his eyes in Isihogo, Tau saw the warlord charging him as if he moved through mud, and as Tau had gambled, there was only one Achak.

  The illusions had no souls. They were the effect of energy taken from Isihogo and pushed into Uhmlaba. They could not appear in the spirit world.

  The warlord, though moving at a crawl, was just to his right, and locking Achak’s position in his mind, Tau fled Isihogo for the real world. His soul still somewhere between realms, Tau willed his arms to move, throwing up his swords to block two of the twelve hatchets chopping at him.

  Ten hatchets slammed into thin air like they’d hit a wall, the illusory blades matching the height and angle at which Tau’s swords had caught and collided with the real Achak’s actual weapons. The block rocked Tau onto his heels. The warlord was powerfully built and he’d put everything into the twin strikes.

  Tau pulled his swords and Achak’s hatchets down and to the right, setting up a counter, but the warlord disengaged, slipping back and into position with the five copies.

  He seemed to be able to draw them into himself and push them a slight distance away at will. It meant Tau couldn’t keep track of the real man among the phantoms.

  Tau heard the shaman say something in the Xiddeen language, and as if spurred to action, the warlord came on hard. Tau spun away from all six men, cast his soul to the underworld, caught sight of the real Achak, and was about to leave when he noticed the shaman in the distance. The shaman’s shroud was a pale thing that, as Tau watched, vanished, revealing the eye-watering golden brightness of his unmasked soul.

  Tau tore away from the underworld, blocked the real warlord’s attack, and struck back. He whipped his weak-side sword at the warlord’s left hand, and though he missed the man’s wrist, he hit the hatchet’s handle, sending it flying from his grasp.

  The right-handed hatchet in each of the copies’ hands did the same, flying away for six or seven strides before vanishing in midair.

  Tau ran his gaze across the hands of the six men he faced. “He told you to finish me quickly, didn’t he?” he asked, trying to distract Achak as he considered the discovery he’d just made, wondering all the while if he dared to trust it.

  Ignoring Tau’s jibe, the warlord let his copies vanish, hefted the hatchet in his left hand, and stepped back. Immediately, the five illusions began to re-form around him, and as they did, the warlord passed through them until Tau couldn’t be certain he still had his eyes on the real man.

  That done, Tau’s opponents spread out, their six hatchets ready. Only, this time, Tau knew something important. By knocking one of the hatchets out of Achak’s hands and seeing the illusions vanish and re-form, he’d learned that the replicas were not perfect. They truly were reflections.

  “Your shaman’s shroud has failed,” Tau said. “And your spearwoman had courage enough to accept her end without killing her Gifted. She refused to trade his life for a few extra breaths. Tell me, Warlord, are you as brave?”

  The warlord and his copies moved farther apart, encircling Tau as they spoke as one, their six voices overlapping. “In a few breaths, you won’t exist,” they said.

  Once Tau was encircled, the warlords attacked, every one of them bellowing the same war cry. Tau was in Isihogo as they came, and looking straight ahead, he saw nothing. It meant the real Achak was one of the men behind him, but he didn’t know which of the three was the real one and didn’t have the time to turn, check, return to Uhmlaba, and block the real hatchet.

  No choice remaining, Tau abandoned the underworld, spun round, and saw three warlords and three hatchets coming for him. The warlord to his right, the unburned side of his face closer to Tau and twisted in hate, swung the hatchet he had in his left hand in a blow that would kill Tau outright. The warlord directly in front of him was exactly the same, and that was why Tau turned to his left and stopped the hatchet that that Achak held in his right hand.

  Catching the hatchet’s bronze head a fingerspan from his temple, Tau stabbed out with his other sword and took the warlord through the heart with his strong-side blade.

  The illusions vanished, Tau jammed the blade deeper, and Achak’s mouth dropped into a half O. His burned side, the side on his right, was too stiff to loosen, even as death spread through him.

  “The illusions are reflections,” Tau told the dying man. “They have your burns on the wrong side.” Achak’s eyes went dim. “And earlier, I knocked free the hatchet in your left hand.”

  The hatchet that the real Achak held in his right fell from his unresponsive fingers into the surf, where the churning waters dragged it into the ocean. Watching the weapon go, Tau tore his blade clear of the warlord’s corpse, letting the man’s body fall near the water’s edge.

  “Achak!”

  It was the shaman, or what was left of him. The thin man, clutching the dead warlord’s spear in both hands, rocked back and forth on his legs, which threatened to give out at any moment. The shaman couldn’t see that his tribesman was no more. Blood, tinted blue-red by the night, seeped from eyes that could no longer see, and with each shout of the warlord’s name, the shaman spat blood out onto the beach’s sand.

  “Achak!”

  Tau walked over as the old man’s knees gave out, dropping the shaman to the ground with a thud.

  “Achak!” he called as Tau came to stand over him.

  “Dead,” Tau said, but the shaman couldn’t hear him over his own screaming, and Tau didn’t need to send his spirit anywhere to know that more demons had come to finish what one or two had started.

  “Demon-death?”

  Tau turned his head at Themba’s voice. His sword brother had a hand to his side, squeezing a shallow cut there.

  “Are you well?”

  “Well enough,” Themba said, gazing out at the water. “He actually came close to making it, the crazy bastard.”

  “Kana?” Tau looked toward the ship.

  It had made it farther in than Tau would have thought possible and was less than a hundred strides offshore, but the longboat was paying the price for it. The ship was getting thrashed by the waves and at threat of sinking. Yet, Kana, flanked by two other Xiddeen warriors, stood at its prow with his body held stiff as an Indlovu flag. His hands were wrapped round the boat’s railing hard enough to crush it, and his eyes were fixed on Tau.

  “Guess he wants to die too,” Themba said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “They’re not stopping. He has to have told the ones piloting the ship to make landfall. Maybe he thinks his father is still alive?” Themba shrugged. “It’s good for us. If they make it in, we can kill them too. ”

  Tau scanned the beach. There were no more Xiddeen alive onshore, and Kana’s ship had too few fighters to challenge the Omehi who had reclaimed the beach. Themba was right: If Kana’s ship did make it onshore, everyone on it would die.

  “Just go, Goddess damn you,” Tau whispered, willing it to be so. “Just go,” but Kana and his ship battled forward.

  Cursing, Tau strode over to Achak’s body, bent down over it, his leg protesting the action, and filling his hand with Achak’s hair, he wrenched the dead man�
��s head up. Fighting back bile, Tau pulled free the guardian dagger that had belonged to his umqondisi and placed it against Achak’s neck.

  “Eh … what’re you about?” Themba asked him.

  Tau locked eyes on the ship and the man standing at its front. The longboat was close enough that he knew Kana could see him as clearly as he could see the hate on Kana’s face.

  “Your father’s dead and you’ll be too, if you come here,” Tau said. He didn’t shout it. There was no point. The words would have been lost to the Roar, but he didn’t need Kana to hear the words. Their meaning could be sent another way.

  Tau began to saw, sliding the guardian dagger back and forth over the meat, muscle, and tendons in Achak’s neck with ease. The work was bloody, but the dragon scale made it quick, and the only part that took any time at all was breaking through the small bones in the back of the warlord’s neck.

  “Cek, Tau …,” Themba muttered when the head came free.

  Tau stood, his leg burning, and as he held the warlord’s head aloft, showing it to the ship, showing it to the son, he began to believe that all the pain that wracked his body was deserved. Then, to finish it, Tau drew his arm back and flung the head out and into the waves.

  “Leave,” he whispered, not to Kana, because Kana would be incapable of doing it, but to the fighters who followed him. “There’s nothing but death for you here,” he said to those fighters, desperate for them to see that truth.

  On the ship, Kana began to climb the railing. The warriors at his sides grabbed him. They held him back, perhaps thinking that he meant to retrieve his father’s severed head from the roiling waters. Kana strained against them, the muscles on his arms bulging, but he couldn’t get free and they wouldn’t let him leap to his death, but Tau knew it wasn’t Kana’s intent to die in the Roar or to swim for his father’s head.

  Tau could see the hate in Kana’s face and he knew that the whole of his being vibrated with it. It was fueling him, overloading him, and in that moment, it was not grief or suicide that compelled him. Kana didn’t want to die in the waters. He meant to swim to shore so that he could kill Tau with his bare hands.