by Evan Winter
She was kneeling next to the Greater Noble, cradling his head and whispering to him.
“He’ll be well. Just give him time and space,” Tau told her.
She turned to him, her eyes wild and face tear streaked, and that’s when Tau saw the blood.
“I told you, you bastard,” she said. “I told you!”
Tau ran over to them and saw that there was blood seeping from gashes in Kellan’s neck. The worst of it was the arterial red spurting between Thandi’s fingers. Kellan was awake, his eyes wide, and Thandi was telling him to be still. She hadn’t been cradling his head. She was squeezing her hands and fingers against his neck to slow down the bleeding.
“No …,” Tau said, “he can’t be hurt. The demons, they can’t—”
Her face was screwed up so tight she didn’t look like herself. “Get help!”
The fear and fury in her voice jolted Tau from his confusion. “Help!” he shouted, running for the infirmary. “We need the priestess! Help!”
WOUNDS
Champion?”
Consciousness came rushing back. “Kellan! Kellan?” Tau said, waking up disoriented.
“He’s fine.” It was Priestess Hafsa Ekene. She was standing over him and he was sitting, leaned up against the wall outside the infirmary.
He’d come here with Gifted Thandi and the Indlovu who had carried Kellan. Thandi was gone and he must have fallen asleep when they were waiting to hear Kellan’s fate.
“How long?” he asked.
“Seven, maybe eight spans.”
He rubbed a forearm across his eyes. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep.”
“I didn’t,” the priestess said. “I tried to wake you spans ago.”
Tau’s leg was throbbing and he shifted to ease the pain, touching above the wound with his right hand.
“I can take a look at the thigh, if it please you?”
“No,” Tau said, waving her off and rising. “I need to see Kellan.” It wasn’t just his leg; he was stiff all over. He’d fallen asleep in his leather armor.
As he stood, a blanket fell off him. He looked down at it, surprised to think that someone had been able to get close enough to place it over him without his knowing.
The priestess bent over and picked it up. “You were exhausted.”
“Long days.”
“And nights, I suspect.”
He nodded. “And nights.”
“The vizier is coming. It’s why I’m waking you now, but there’s time to see your friend. Follow me.” She walked to the infirmary doors, opened them, and led him inside.
Tau walked past the bed that held Jabari. It had curtains on all sides and he couldn’t see in. He needed to visit him. It had been … Tau couldn’t track the time. The last few days were a jumble. He also passed Hadith, who was sleeping. Uduak was doing the same, albeit in the chair beside the new general’s bed.
“Uduak,” Tau said.
The big man stirred, opening one eye and then the other.
“How are the others?” Tau asked.
Uduak turned to Hadith, saw him resting, and looked back to Tau. “Shaken.”
“And you?”
“Shaken.”
“It gets …” Tau let the words die on his tongue. He didn’t want to lie. Instead, he nodded to the big man and moved on.
Kellan lay asleep in one of the last beds in the infirmary, and his neck had been swaddled in bandages that showed through with bloody streaks.
Gifted Thandi was with him, sitting on the edge of his bed, and the look she gave him, with her red-rimmed eyes, was not one Tau could call pleasant.
“I gave him something for the pain,” Hafsa said. “It’ll also help him rest.”
“He shouldn’t have needed it,” Tau said, shaking his head. “He should be fine. He knew not to take the underworld’s power.”
Hafsa made the dragon’s span with her fingers, to ward off evil.
“Do you know why this happened?” Tau asked, turning to Gifted Thandi.
The way she was looking at him, Tau half expected her to leap across the bed at him, but look was all she did. She’d behaved the same way when they’d brought Kellan to the infirmary; she wouldn’t say a word to him.
Footsteps. It was the vizier. She was alone and walking toward them.
“Vizier Nyah,” Tau said in greeting.
“Do all who deal with you end up in places like this, Champion?” she asked.
“It makes no sense,” Tau said. “He shouldn’t be hurt.”
“Did you wait for Gifted Thandi as you were meant to? Did she say it was fine for Kellan to be one of your madmen?”
“Gifted Thandi has no say in who fights with me.”
Nyah closed her eyes and kept them closed. “The queen wishes to see you.”
“Kellan is the most disciplined man I know,” Tau said. “He wouldn’t have taken the underworld’s powers into himself, and without them, the demons have no way to carry the harm they do in Isihogo to Uhmlaba.” He pointed toward Kellan’s neck. “Those wounds match the demon’s claws that—”
“That’s quite enough, Champion,” Nyah said, tilting her head in Hafsa’s direction. “Priestess Ekene is very busy and does not need to listen to us speak of fever dreams.”
Tau glanced at Hafsa. Her eyes were round and they bounced between him and the vizier.
“The queen is waiting,” Nyah said.
Tau lowered his head to rub at his face as worry and weariness set back in. “I don’t know how this happened.”
“Then let Kellan rest and come with me to the queen so she can explain it,” said Nyah.
HANDMAIDENS
Tau pressed Nyah for answers, wanting her to tell him whatever it was that she knew, but she rebuffed him, saying over and over again that the queen would make things clear.
“What does the queen have to do with this?” he asked, struggling to keep pace with her. His leg burned and the night spent sleeping on the floor outside the infirmary hadn’t helped.
“I told her Kellan Okar was injured and I explained how. She asked me to bring you to her.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” he said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
To take his mind off his frustration, Tau tried to figure out where they were going. They’d left the keep and were walking through the city’s east side. It surprised Tau to find that, once he was away from the urban center, the buildings and homes got smaller, ragged, and the faces he saw staring back at him from behind crooked windows were the faces of Lessers.
“This is where those who serve the city live,” he said.
“Yes, here and in the city’s south,” the vizier told him, glancing down at his injured leg. “We’re almost there.”
The adobe on the buildings around them was unpainted, paper-thin, and where it had worn away, poorly patched. The thoroughfare was in equally bad shape. Its cobblestones were loose and uneven and it intersected with many tiny paths littered with refuse or night soil.
It seemed that the Lessers who lived in the east side spent morning to night caring for the rest of the city, only to come home to a place where no one did the same for them.
“The conditions here are—” Tau began, when he heard shouting and running feet.
The sounds were coming from the intersecting path immediately ahead, and Tau watched as the first of several figures came into view. He thought them demons when they appeared, their smaller size and strange movements not matching his expectations, but it was children, four of them, playing.
They ran into the main path and were heading for the tiny one running perpendicular to it when they spotted him and Nyah. The lead child, clothes in tatters and face showing more dirt than skin, skidded to a stop. The two behind him crashed into his back and all three came close to tumbling to the ground. The last child had enough space to come to a standstill without incident, and soon Tau had four pairs of eyes locked on him.
“That a Lesser?” said the sm
allest of them, her voice thin as a river reed.
“Hush!” said the lead child, dropping his gaze to the ground.
“I am,” Tau said to the children.
The lead child and the two closest to him kept their heads down. The smallest one was not so deferential. She examined Tau.
“Why you dressed like them, then?” she asked.
Tau wasn’t sure he had a good answer for that. “I’m the queen’s champion.”
“Liar,” the girl said.
“Goddess’s bare ass, Nali!” the lead child hissed, making Nyah wince.
“I’m not lying,” Tau said.
“But you’re a Low Common, like me,” the girl said.
“I’m a Hi—” Tau began before giving up. “Yes … like you.”
“And you’re champion?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t know you could be both.”
“Not sure I did either,” Tau said.
“Champion is supposed to be the strongest.”
“That’s part of it.”
“Big part,” the girl said, looking him up and down.
Tau shrugged.
“Shouldn’t you get back to your parents, child?” Nyah asked.
The girl’s gaze bounced over to the vizier. “Ma’s dead and Da’s been fighting in the Curse since before I could talk. He’ll be back soon.”
“Shut it, Nali,” the lead boy said.
“Come make me,” she said, and Tau took a closer look at her.
She had to be eight or nine cycles, and if her father had gone to the front lines before she could talk, his mandatory service should have ended long ago.
“You have those black swords,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Never seen someone with two before.”
The lead boy gaped at her. “Nali, you can’t just ask people why they have two swords.”
“I can and I just did,” she said, glaring at the boy. Returning her attention to Tau, she pointed at Nyah. “I’m going to be like her,” she said.
“Her?” Tau asked.
Nyah shot him a look.
“Yes,” the little one said. “I practice every day.”
The girl had lost him. “What do you mean?”
“The black robes talk to the Goddess and She makes them strong,” the girl said, speaking like she worried that he might be simple. “I practice by talking to Her too, all day and all night. When I’m older, I’ll be Gifted.”
“Uh … practicing is good,” Tau said.
The vizier couldn’t seem to meet the child’s eyes. Tau knew why. Near three thousand Omehi women were born for every one who was Gifted. The girl could talk to the Goddess all day and every day and it wouldn’t change how badly the odds were stacked against her.
“I wish you well, little one,” Tau said. “I hope you grow to be very strong.”
“I’m already strong,” she said, chin out. “I’m still alive and most Nobles would be dead if they were me.”
Tau blinked slowly, both acknowledging her words and wanting better for her than what was. She reminded him of his half sister. Well, she reminded him of Jelani on Jelani’s good days.
“Nali, is it?” Tau asked, reaching for his belt pouch. “Come here. I have something for you.”
Her eyes thinned and she took a step back. “Something like what?”
The distrust and fear, coming so quickly after her boldness, cut at him. A Low Common girl in a city full of Nobles, he could imagine her life.
“Here it is,” he said, pulling his purse free from the pouch. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Her mouth fell open. “Anything in it?”
Tau nodded, and quick as a rumor spreading, she was next to him, hand out. He let the purse fall into her grime-lined palm and it landed with a clink, pushing her hand lower with its weight. She gaped. The purse contained the coin left over from his last pay as an initiate. It’d be spare change to a Noble, but more than what most Lessers saw in a moon cycle.
“Goodbye, Nali. Grow ever stronger and be powerful,” he said.
“Bye, Champion Lesser. Goddess keep you close.”
Tau smiled, and clutching her new purse, Nali ran off, the other children following close behind.
“They’ll take it from her,” Nyah said.
Tau watched until the children disappeared down the side path. “I don’t think they can, Vizier,” he said. “Which way now?”
She watched him like he was a map she might be holding upside down. “We’re almost there. The queen will be at the city’s eastern gates.”
“The gates? Why?”
“In cities even the walls have ears,” Nyah said.
Tau sighed. The gates couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred strides distant, but he knew how much his leg would hurt, carrying him that far.
“Lead on, Vizier,” he said, letting her move past him.
Within fifty strides Tau was sweating, more from the pain than from the heat. His leg and hip throbbed, both feeling three sizes too big, and he let his head hang down as they went, not wanting to see how much farther they had to go and finding it easier to keep his eyes on the swishing, dust-coated hem of Nyah’s Gifted robes.
It was the horses and their noises that let him know they’d arrived, and raising his head, he noticed the queen first. He couldn’t help it. She was mounted, sitting astride her horse beside four more of the animals, one of them Fury, and the queen was wearing a dress the color of fresh boiled maize.
Tau shook the thought away. The color that boiled maize brought to mind was the right one, but the queen’s riding dress was more than that. Her dress looked like the cloth’s dyer had stolen rays of sunlight just so they could be worked into the fabric, and seeing the queen in that fabric, it was hard to think of her as anything other than beautiful, which was the problem.
It was always easy to find Nobles beautiful. They were properly fed, they dressed in marvels, and they could move through the world with confidence, heads held high, treating the world as if it were fair and decent, because for them it was. Nobles had the better of everything and they wrapped themselves in that betterment, appearing to everyone else as beautiful, right, and good, just like sunlight.
The queen offered him a smile. Tau greeted her but couldn’t find it in himself to smile back. Her smile weakened. He didn’t let that get to him. He pictured how beautiful Zuri would have looked in that same dress and his heart had no room to worry over the feelings of a Royal Noble.
Having greeted his monarch, Tau gave his attention to the oddities standing next to the horses. Dressed in light, long-sleeved robes of pure white, belted at the waist, were two young women. Their hair was cut in matching styles, shaved on the sides with the middle wrapped around itself in twists that locked their tight curls into knots that ran down their backs.
The women were slim and hard, Tau’s height, and they both had skin as dark as midnight. They had to be sisters, not born together, though. One looked a cycle or two older than the other.
Outwardly, they didn’t look to have the same interest in him that he had in them. The sisters made it seem as if he was less interesting than a rock in a quarry, but he could feel their eyes on him whenever they thought he wasn’t looking.
“Our handmaidens,” the queen said. “Auset and Ramia.” The women inclined their heads in turn, the movements slow but precise as a full-blood’s salute. “They arrived not long ago from Palm City. They escaped to return to us as soon as they could.”
“Should we begin?” Nyah asked the queen.
“We should,” the queen said. “Champion, we know you have questions and we hope we have answers. We also promised to teach you how to ride, and those lessons may as well start now.”
Tau glanced at Fury, wanting little less than to ride a horse after the painful walk he’d endured. “As you wish, my queen,” he said, tamping down his unease with the handmaidens and limping the last few steps to the horse … his horse.
>
The handmaidens headed for their horses too, but the way they did it, moving with perfect balance, chilled the blood in his veins. They moved like fighters, like assassins, and they were closing the distance to the queen.
Tau turned to them to watch them more carefully, and the slightly taller one, Auset, the queen had named her, stared at him with red demon eyes.
“Stop there!” Tau said, pulling his swords free and dashing forward to put himself between Tsiora and the two women, who reacted as if expecting him to do just that.
Their expressions of disinterest vanished, replaced by snarls that showed their mouths to be filled with pointed teeth, and they assumed fighting stances, each of them holding two dragon-scale dirks snatched from the wrist bracers they had hidden beneath their sleeves.
The dragon scale surprised him. Demons didn’t use weapons. He hoped the surprise didn’t show.
“Run or die,” he told them.
BLOODLINES
Enough!” Nyah said, the force in her voice pulling Tau’s eyes away from the handmaidens. “No one is dying here.”
“Damn you, Vizier, you don’t understand. They’re—” Tau returned his attention to the two, who had spread out to make themselves harder to fight. The pointed teeth had vanished, and the taller one, Auset, no longer had red eyes. Tau blinked, trying to clear his vision.
“All three of you, put away your weapons,” the queen said.
Hearing their queen, the handmaidens whisked away their dirks, vanishing them up their sleeves as if they’d never been. As they did it, Tau considered killing them both.
“Auset and Ramia have been with us since birth,” the queen said. “We trust them as we do Nyah, as we do you. We trust them with our lives.”
It was shaming to hear her speak of him in that way, when Tau didn’t think he’d have much to do with queens or queendoms after he was finished with Odili. “But they’re …” He couldn’t say demons. They weren’t that. “They’re fighters, warriors,” he said, his swords aimed at the two women.
“Thank you for that,” Nyah said. “We’d never have known if not for you.”