by Evan Winter
“Humor, Vizier?” Tau asked.
The queen, speaking before Nyah could retort, did not look pleased. “We thought we’d asked for the weapons to be put away. Were we not heard?”
Tau eyed the handmaidens. They were back to playing the part of docile servants, and though he wasn’t convinced there was no danger, he had to admit that what he’d seen, what he had thought he’d seen, was not real.
Grumbling, eyes still on the two women and making enough space to redraw, Tau slid his swords back into their scabbards. “I know handmaidens,” he said. “I grew up around them, my sister is one, and those two are not handmaidens.”
“They are the queen’s handmaidens, part of the Shadow Council and charged with her protection,” said Nyah.
“What does that mean? They’re Bodies, like the Royal Nobles have?” Tau tried not to sound petulant. “I thought the champion fulfilled that role.”
“Auset and Ramia are a less visible but needed layer of protection.”
“Needed layer of … from whom?” Tau asked.
Nyah wouldn’t say.
“Our Royal Nobles,” the queen offered in the vizier’s place.
“Apologies, my queen, you said these women have been with you since birth, and though the coup is much more recent than that, they move like they’ve trained for violence since they could walk. Why would that be, when the Royals have only just turned on you?”
He’d been flippant and the queen did not answer right away. She made him wait, like one would a naughty child, giving him time to stew and settle. When he did, she gestured in Fury’s direction. “We’d hoped to explain further on our ride.”
Still, Tau pushed. “And Kellan, my queen?”
“We’ll offer one story and you’ll have two answers,” she said.
That felt a lot like a riddle and Tau wasn’t fond of those, but he wanted to understand what had happened to Kellan. So, without giving the handmaidens his back, he moved to Fury’s side and tried to climb aboard.
“Did Auset and Ramia explain the situation in Palm?” Nyah asked the queen.
“They did. Odili has been parading my sister in front of the Royal Nobles, forcing her to publicly proclaim her right to the throne. He gave the Royals just enough of an excuse to back him while holding their heads high, and they took it.”
“Our plan is to fight,” Nyah reminded the queen.
“And yet, we’d still hoped there might be another way, but that’s gone now.”
They stopped talking and Tau felt like everyone was watching him struggle with the horse.
“Watch how Auset does it,” the queen said, after giving him another chance at clambering aboard the creature.
Face hot, Tau watched as the handmaiden flowed into her horse’s seat. As she did, he noticed her robes were actually loose-fitting pants with wide bottoms. Auset’s and Ramia’s clothing masqueraded as the standard, constraining handmaiden’s robes while actually allowing much more movement. Then Ramia was next in the saddle, making it look easy as spitting.
Sliding his jaw back and forth, Tau nodded to himself. He’d not be outdone by false handmaidens. He put his hands on Fury, to do as they had done, and the horse looked back at him, snorting. Tau jerked back, worried it might bite.
“Fury’s just curious,” the queen said. “Go on.”
Wary of the horse’s mouth and its large block-like teeth, Tau gave it another go, and to his own surprise, he swung up and into place on the first try. He was about to flash the handmaidens a look of victory, but Fury took a step, and he had to fall forward, wrapping his arms around the horse’s neck to avoid toppling off.
“Relax, sit up. She’ll sense your worry,” the queen said.
“I am worried,” he said.
Tsiora shook her head as if exasperated with him, but Tau could swear he saw the laugh behind her eyes. “Then, we’ll start slow,” she said, clucking her tongue so that her horse, a smaller, tree-brown version of Fury, moved off in that rolling gait the animals had.
Tau sat up, unsure if he should cluck his tongue too, when Fury began following the queen’s horse. They rode to the eastern wall and through its gates. Ihashe were guarding them and they saluted the queen, the vizier, and him.
“Is it safe to travel outside?” Tau asked, looking back to the walls and gates that closed behind them.
“We have you and our handmaidens,” the queen said. “Could we be safer?”
Yes, we could, Tau thought, back in the city.
“We’re sorry about what happened to Kellan,” the queen said, eschewing titles to speak of Okar in closer terms. “We assumed you’d choose only Lessers to train.”
It was what a Noble would have done, Tau realized. They’d have picked people from their own caste and no other, and the queen was used to their way of thinking.
“Neither of you had any way to know what would happen to him, because that knowledge is a matter of history told only to Royal Nobles.” The queen glanced at the handmaidens and Nyah. “Well, Royal Nobles and members of the Shadow Council.”
“How can old stories hurt Kellan in Isihogo?” Tau asked.
“Because the stories are about his blood. Because Kellan Okar is not Omehi, as you are.”
Tau squinted at her. “Not Omehi?”
“Not always.”
“Apologies, Your Majesty,” Tau said, “I’m not good at riddles.”
The smile she offered him was a somber one. “It means that Lessers and Nobles were not always a single race of man.”
Tau looked to Nyah and the handmaidens, trying to see if this was some game or trick. All three women were stone-faced.
“We’re telling you the truth,” the queen said. “Long before we sailed to these lands, there were Nobles and there were Omehi and these were two separate peoples. It is why the Nobles are bigger and stronger than you and everyone like you. It is their gift.”
The land sloped down and Fury took a jolting step, shooting pain up Tau’s thigh. He hardly noticed. “Their gift?”
“Men of the Noble race are all born Gifted, and that gift is a permanent connection to Isihogo. From the day they’re born until they die, a fraction of their soul exists in the underworld, drawing a small but steady stream of power from it. The fraction glows dimly, unlike the souls of those wholly in the underworld, and the Nobles draw too little power from Isihogo to attract its demons. But what they do draw is enough, over a lifetime, to make them grow bigger and stronger than the women or men of any other race.”
Tau’s mouth was open. He could feel it was, but he didn’t seem able to close it.
“Kellan Okar cannot fight the demons in Isihogo as you do,” the queen said.
“Kellan always has Isihogo’s power in him?” Tau asked. “When he fought the demons he was corporeal?”
“Somewhat, yes.”
“Goddess … I sent him to his death.”
“He did not die and you did not know.”
“Two races of man? Is this why the castes aren’t permitted to mix?”
“Some do,” the queen said, dropping her eyes. “Almost all Gifted are Lessers, and they couple with Greater or Royal Nobles.”
The thought hit Tau like a hammer. “Our Gifted … their gifts come from our race, the Lessers.”
“Edification, enervation, and entreating are the gifts of the Omehi people,” the queen said, “and long ago, we learned there was more that we could do. We learned we could enhance and multiply the natural gifts of the Nobles.”
“Enraging,” Tau said.
She nodded. “Enraging.”
“How did we come to be … one people?”
Now the queen’s smile held sorrow. “That is a hard story, and it was difficult enough, convincing Nyah to let us tell you as much as we have.”
Tau swiveled to face the vizier. “I’ve heard half the tale. Give me the rest.”
For once, Nyah seemed to treat Tau as an equal. “What you’ve been told is dangerous,” she said. “Already
a rift has opened in our queendom and stories like the ones you ask for are enough to turn that rift into a permanent sundering. You had to know this much because you had to know that a man who can be enraged cannot fight Isihogo’s demons with impunity. The blood precludes it.”
“Why tell me anything, then?” Tau said, better understanding the reason for a horse ride outside the city and away from everyone else.
“Because it’s unlikely that we can retake Palm City without the benefit of your … project,” Nyah said. “Because you need to understand why you can’t use men like Kellan.”
Tau thought the problem through, working out how to explain his position without telling Nyah and the handmaidens that the greater value of training men in Isihogo was not to enhance the powers of the Gifted, but to create men who were killers without peer.
“What I’m trying to do isn’t easy,” he said. “I need men I can trust, and there aren’t many left.”
Nyah sniffed. “You’re short of Lessers? There’s you, that big one, the light-skinned boy who’s always sunburnt, the drummer, and Themba.”
Tau narrowed his eyes. “Themba? Why do you know his name?”
“How could I not? He never stops talking nonsense,” Nyah said.
Tau shrugged, ceding the point. “Your count puts us at five. It’s not enough to form a protective circle around the Entreaters. I need more men, at least one more.”
“Then pick one, anyone.”
Tau let his gaze slip to the queen’s face. Her features were placid, smooth as a mountain lake. It was a false calmness, similar to the false meekness of her handmaidens. The queen, Tau thought, had not told Nyah exactly what he was doing in Isihogo. So, he trod carefully.
“It’s not as simple as choosing anyone,” he said, thinking about how he sought to create and unleash men as deadly as permanently enraged Ingonyama on the world. “It takes time to develop the courage to stand when the demons come. It takes time to learn how to fight them.” Tau gave his words a moment. He wanted Nyah to focus on the nightmare of having to stand and fight monsters and not on what one would have to become in order to do so. “To hold the demons back long enough for our Entreaters to gain an advantage, our fighters must be experienced at facing them. The only way to gain that experience is by taking men to the underworld night after night, where they’ll fight and die to an enemy they cannot defeat, over and over again.”
On some level, Nyah had to have understood this part of the plan, but he could tell that hearing him lay it out so plainly was unpleasant.
“I see,” she said.
“I need men who can withstand the underworld’s trials and I need enough of them to hold the circle,” Tau told her. He needed men who could withstand the transformation into demigods without being driven mad.
“And there’s no one else you can use?” Nyah asked.
“I have lost many of my closest sword brothers, but our family is not all gone.” Tau turned to the queen. “Will you make time to teach me more of riding, my queen?”
“We will. Why do you ask?” she said.
“I’d like to ride back to the keep. I think I have a sixth man.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DUMA SIBUSISO
Duma couldn’t be sure if he was lucky or damned. Night had fallen not long ago and he was sitting cross-legged in the dirt behind the building where they housed the horses. It seemed strange that the animals had a better roof over their heads than anything he’d had growing up, but a lot happened around Nobles that was strange, and Duma wasn’t one to waste thoughts on foolishness he couldn’t control.
Instead, he wondered if Tau … Champion Solarin had become some kind of Noble. He certainly looked like he had, sitting across from Duma in that red-and-black leather armor.
Scale Jayyed, Duma thought, had changed Tau. Well, it’d changed all of them, but him the most, and Duma knew himself well enough to admit that the man Tau had become was a frightening one.
Solarin had always had a way of looking at a man like he’d just as quick slit his throat as offer a word, but Duma had known that type back home, and there was usually something you could do to stop them from actually cutting your neck. The thing that made the new champion most frightening was that, as best as Duma could tell, there was precious little to be done if Tau got it in his head that someone had spent more than enough time living already. So, Duma wasn’t sure if he was lucky or damned, but Tau Solarin had come to him that night to ask him to be the sixth man in his new unit, and Duma took pride in that.
He looked round at everyone, seeing Uduak, Yaw, Themba, Azima, that pretty Lady Gifted, and of course, Tau. Unlike Duma, they’d all done this before, and yet he could still see the anxiousness in their faces.
Given what Tau had told him to expect, it made sense, and Duma couldn’t say he was looking forward to what they were set to do either. It also made his mouth dry, thinking that he was expected to do something Kellan Okar hadn’t been able to handle. But the way Duma saw it, if Tau and his sword brothers needed him, he’d do his part.
“Remember what you’ve been taught,” Tau said. “Take no power from the underworld.”
Duma needed to piss. He’d gone just a quarter span ago and had no idea how an empty bladder could feel so full.
“Close your eyes and breathe,” Tau said. “Let your muscles go loose, limp …”
It was hard to relax, and he thought the tension in him might keep him anchored where he sat, but Duma’s head began to spin and he could tell that some better part of him was being taken from the world.
“Form the circle! They’re coming!” Tau shouted, though his voice wasn’t louder than a whisper.
Duma opened his eyes and looked around, seeing the sunlight glow of his fellows, bright and clean and so very different from anything else in the gloom pressing against him like a weight. He held his sword up and sent out a prayer as he peered into mist that was briar thick. His hands were shaking, and when the first monster burst through the fog, running for him, Duma’s empty bladder opened right up and found itself some piss anyhow.
The demon, racing into range, leapt for him, and Duma screamed. He also slashed at it, catching it somewhere between its ugly head and gruesome body with the edge of his blade. The power in its jump and the angle of his swing took them tumbling into the muck that coated the ground, and then he was rolling and fighting, pulling his dagger from his belt.
He jabbed the small blade into the nearest part of the demon he could reach, and black blood belched out of it, the smell making him retch. They scuffled a little more, and the thing got its back legs onto one of his thighs and pushed off, ripping skin, muscles, and bone to bits.
Duma screamed again, pain and fear and the need to stay alive mixing themselves into an inseparable muddle of shit. He scooted back, scrambling to his feet, his torn leg ready to give out from under him, and the thing came at him again.
Duma knew he was dead, but he lifted his sword regardless. If he was going to the Goddess, he’d go with his killer’s blood on his blade.
He didn’t get the chance to do any dying. Before the demon could get to him, Tau was there, cutting at the creature faster than Duma’s eyes could follow, until the thing was down and done, bleeding its life into the muck.
Tau grabbed Duma and pushed him back to the circle. Duma went, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the thing Tau had cut down, because the cuts Tau had put in it were mending themselves.
“Keep holding!” Tau yelled.
Duma had lost his dagger, his sword felt too heavy to hold, and on his wreck of a leg, he was moving slow as new-made mud. So when the next monster came through the mists, fear had him clamped in its grip, but Tau Solarin had chosen him for this, his brothers needed him for this, and Duma would not let them down.
The demon attacked and Duma gave no ground. He fought it, shouted at it, and when they went to the ground and his sword slipped from his fingers, he pounded at it with his fists. It butchered him anyway.
> “Duma, take your time. You’re safe. You’ll be well.” It was Tau’s voice. His normal voice, not the wind-dampened shout he had to use in that evil place.
Duma opened his eyes. He was on the ground. He was crying and couldn’t stop. He had wet himself.
“Try to get your breathing under control first,” Tau was saying to him and the others. “It makes the rest easier. Focus on your breathing.”
Tau was pushing a small bowl at him. “Duma, here, drink.”
It was water and Duma took it. It was good going down, though he choked a bit, since his breathing and crying made it hard to manage a clean swallow.
“It’s not possible.” That, he realized, was the Lady Gifted speaking to Tau.
Duma lifted his head and saw her. She was collected and calm and it shamed him to be out there on the ground in front of a woman like that with his pants soaked through.
“It’s possible,” Tau said to her. “It’ll just take time.”
“Champion Solarin, they fall immediately. We’re asking too much of them, and for what? They’re unable to offer anything beyond what my shroud gives me.”
“I’m telling you, they need more time at it. Give them that and they’ll be able hold the demons at bay.”
“I worry that we’re torturing these men in pursuit of a destination they can’t reach. Every day, more fiefs and hamlets turn away from the queen in favor of Odili. If we wait for your men to master the underworld, they’ll be the only ones left in our queen’s army.”
“We have enough time.”
“Champion, the queen intends to march for Palm before the season ends. Look around you—your fighters need longer than that.”
“You’re thinking of it wrong,” Tau said. “We’re back in Uhmlaba at almost the same instant we left. Gifted Thandi, we have all the time in the world.”
The Lady Gifted looked frustrated. “We have the time we need in the underworld, but look at how much is wasted here while they recover,” she said. “How many battles do you think they can manage in a night? One, maybe two? It’s not enough. We should tell Nyah and the queen that we need to find another way.”