The Fires of Vengeance

by Evan Winter

  “What is it?” asked Auset.

  Tau stared at the spot where he’d seen it, the face. There was nothing, and his visions were becoming stranger. The face he’d seen had not been demonic. It had looked human.

  “It’s nothing, just the grass moving in the wind,” he said. “Kellan, Uduak, Themba, take a bag each. If this is some kind of ration cache, we should deprive the Xiddeen of it.”

  “Done,” Kellan said, keeping one of the bags and passing the other two to Uduak and Themba.

  The task complete, the Greater Noble began to make his way forward once again, and doing his best to shake away the feeling that he was being watched, Tau returned to his earlier worries.

  Yesterday, during the march, Hadith had been dictating notes to a Proven scribe. The notes held orders for the inkokeli in Citadel City. Tau knew that and none of the particulars. However, the vizier had been near them and the particulars impressed her.

  “You remind me of Kana,” she’d said.

  “You know him well?” Hadith had asked.

  “He was here to marry our queen. Do you think I let him have even one unwatched moment?”

  “No, I don’t imagine you did.”

  “Your minds work similarly,” she’d said.

  Kellan lifted a hand, calling them to a silent halt. He was peering into the dark, eyes squinted as if the issue was too much light rather than too little.

  “Tau?” he whispered. “See anything?”

  He kept whispering, and it was an unnecessary caution. This close to the Roar, the ocean’s booms and crashes were enough to drown out anything less than a shout.

  Tau scanned the beach, letting his gaze alight on longship after longship. They were built with unpainted Xiddan wood, reinforced heavily by hemp rope and what looked like leather hides, but that couldn’t be right.

  The Xiddeen would need to have access to the equivalent of hundreds of horses to have that much leather, and other than the few war lizards he’d seen them riding in the Fist, he’d heard no stories of them having animals. It occurred to him then that the ships might not be covered in animal hide. It could be human flesh instead.

  The thought made his palms itch, and he had to forcibly cast it aside. He’d met Kana and fought others from the tribes. The Xiddeen were not like the Omehi, but they were also not like the stories he’d been told since he was a child. Given everything he’d been taught, it was easy to think they’d eat human flesh or skin one another for leather. It was easy to believe and extremely unlikely.

  “Their oars are stowed and the sails have been lowered and wrapped around each ship’s main mast,” Tau told the others. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Hiding in the ships?” Uduak asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “A trap, then,” Kellan said.

  Tau considered the possibility. “The trap is only worthwhile if Kana left enough fighters to successfully spring it.”

  “Well, that’s exciting,” Themba said.

  Auset sucked her teeth. “He won’t have left so many. Every raider he leaves with the boats is a raider he doesn’t have for his attack on Kerem.”

  Tau was running short on patience. He wanted to pull his swords free and fight. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “And, yet, we can’t have our army charge into a trap,” Kellan said.

  Uduak elbowed Kellan in the shoulder. “Decoy.”

  “What?”

  “Ride to the ships,” Uduak told him, making the shape of a horse running with one hand. “Make them show themselves, then ride away.”

  “That could work,” Kellan said, “but we’d have to go back to get a horse and—”

  Tau stood up and walked out of the grasses, onto the sands of the beach.

  “Champion? What’s he doing?” Kellan asked the others.

  “Here we go again,” said Themba.

  “Tau!” hissed Kellan.

  Tau felt sick to his stomach. He’d known something was wrong and should have trusted himself. “Kana and Hadith … they think alike,” he said over his shoulder, striding farther down the beach.

  “I hate when he gets like this. What do we do?” Themba asked.

  “Follow,” said Uduak, and Tau heard the big man’s steps behind him.

  “They think alike,” Tau said again, praying he was wrong.

  “What does that mean?” Kellan had caught up. His sword was out and his head swiveled left and right, no doubt hoping to spot any movement among the ships while they still had the time and distance to run.

  “Any fighters left with the ships would die, and knowing the ships were here, we had to come for them, to destroy them,” Tau said. “It’s what a good tactician would do and that’s why it was Hadith’s plan. Don’t you see? We had to come for the ships.”

  “And?” Themba asked, jogging to catch up.

  “And Kana knew it was what we’d do. He isn’t going to sacrifice any fighters here,” Tau said. “He’s going to use every bit of strength he has to blaze and burn his way through Kerem. He’s abandoned his ships because it was always his plan to fight his way back to Xiddeen territory through our mountains.”

  Tau was by the nearest longboat and kept his swords sheathed. He needed his hands because the side of the ship was too high for him to see over it, and though it could mean a spear through the eye or a hatchet in his skull, he jumped up, grabbing onto the boat’s railing, pulling himself up and over.

  Jumping into the belly of the longship, he spun round, the sick feeling in his stomach rising into his throat and mouth. “Empty …,” he said.

  “What?” Kellan asked from outside the boat.

  “It’s empty!”

  “Check the others,” Kellan ordered.

  “They’ll be empty,” Tau said, not caring if they heard. “Kana took everyone. He’s going to kill his way out of the peninsula.”

  BODIES

  Fury’s strides ate the ground beneath her as she coursed up the mountain’s incline toward the plateau on which Keep Onai was built. Tau was bent over her neck, his eyes streaming tears caused by the wind rushing past him. He’d left the army behind. He couldn’t stop Kana alone, but he couldn’t wait either.

  “Hyah, Fury! Hyah!”

  She gave him more speed, enough to make it feel like they had taken flight, and they were on the last stretch of path before the keep would be in sight. He heard the clamor behind him and paid it no mind. Tsiora had sent Nyah chasing after him, and the vizier, a better rider than Tau, would have caught him already, if he weren’t riding so recklessly.

  “Hyah, Fury!”

  The mountain air was filthy with thick haze that vibrated in the heat, and Tau didn’t want to think what that might mean. He took the final bend in the path at speed, Fury’s hooves kicking up dust behind them in a shower of sand and stone.

  He had to be in time. He had to be. The keep came into view and the truth came with it.

  Keep Onai was a smoldering ruin that smoked like a wet fire, and that wasn’t nearly the worst of it. The women, men, and children of the keep had been placed on either side of the path leading to it. They were lying on their backs, each of them speared through the gut and held to the ground like a collection of beetles. Their hands had been tied to their neighbors’, so they formed a chain, and every fourth or fifth person in the chain had had their arms cut off at the elbows. It was a broken chain of the dead. The reward for a queen’s broken promises.

  Before he could stop himself, Tau skimmed the faces. He saw Mistress Chione—the head handmaiden who’d often supervised Zuri’s work—with blood spattered about her face. It looked like she’d taken a while to die, coughing up her last few breaths. Steps beyond her was Ekon. He’d become Aren’s second-in-command, and then, after Aren was murdered, Umbusi Onai had probably made him the fief’s inkokeli. If so, he hadn’t held the position for long. Ekon was dead, and flies swarmed over his sun-bloated body, their maggots overflowing from his open mouth.

  “No, no, no
, nononono …”

  Tau almost didn’t recognize Ochieng. They’d beaten the keep guard’s face so badly it didn’t seem like any of the bones in it had held.

  Tau threw his head back and yelled then. It startled Fury, she threatened to bolt, and he had to pull himself together enough to hold her steady.

  “You’re fine, girl,” he said. “You’re fine…. ”

  He heard the staccato drumming of Nyah’s horse coming round the bend and drawing near. He heard the sudden dig of dirt and the animal’s pained cry when the vizier jerked her horse to a halt.

  “Goddess wept,” he heard her say. “Come … come away, Tau.”

  Tau shook his head and urged Fury on.

  “Tau …”

  As much as it hurt, he studied the faces of the murdered. As much as it hurt, he looked left, then right, moving slowly down the path, looking for his family.

  “Tau, don’t go there,” Nyah shouted to him. “It’s what he wants. Don’t look at it.”

  He was. He was looking, and hidden in the shadows of the keep’s entrance were bodies piled up as if to serve as kindling for a bonfire, and in the middle of it all, a man had been lashed to an upright pole. His head was tied back and angled so it seemed he was admiring the thing he held in his upraised hand. He was naked and his belly had been opened up, spilling his entrails onto the bodies of those below him. He was dead, and that meant the Xiddeen had tied him such that his hand and the thing he held aloft would remain in place.

  Tau dismounted, leaving Fury, and pulling his swords free of their scabbards, he stepped closer, peering into the shadows before wishing with every iota of his being that he hadn’t.

  “Makena?” he asked. “Makena!” he called as he ran his limping way toward his mother’s husband, shouting the man’s name as if the dead could hear.

  He made it to the archway and into the shadows. He made it far enough to see what it was Makena held in his raised hand, and the bones went out of Tau. He collapsed to the earth on his hands and knees, his sword sheaths stabbing into the path’s loose gravel.

  He was panting and staring at the dirt below him. He was panting and getting no air at all. He lifted his head, unwilling to believe what his eyes had shown him, but nothing had changed and Tau’s sharp eyes had never misled him.

  Hanging from her hair, which had been tangled and knotted around Makena’s dead hand, was Jelani’s severed head.

  Tau screamed and beat his fists against the ground. He tried to stand to take Jelani down from there, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He tore his eyes away from the horror of it, and that’s when he saw the umbusi and her husband. They were strewn among the other bodies in the heap of the dead, their throats slit, eyes plucked out, and hands cut away.

  Someone touched his shoulder, and finding the strength to stand, Tau snatched up his swords and spun.

  “Tau.” It was Nyah. She had her hands up and out, empty. “Tau, please.”

  He didn’t lower his swords. “My sister. My stepfather. Nyah, my sister.”

  Nyah looked up and past him to the monstrosity behind him.

  She tried to draw closer. “I’m sorry, Tau.”

  “My sister,” he said, his voice breaking. “It’s Jelani.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His swords were still up, but she walked between them and she put her hands on his face, holding his eyes with hers. “I’m sorry. This is an evil. I’m so sorry, Tau.”

  He was going to fall, when he heard a voice behind him call out.

  “Tau?”

  The voice was weak, shaky, and hard to hear. It didn’t matter. Tau knew the way his mother said his name.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WRATH

  Tau was holding his mother in his arms when the rest of the army arrived. She was in horrible pain, but she told him what had happened. Kana and his tribespeople had killed person after person in the keep until the living broke and told him the names and likenesses of anyone related to Tau.

  Kana killed Jelani and eviscerated Makena in front of Tau’s mother. He made her watch it all and then he put out her eyes with fire-heated bronze, so that her daughter’s murder and her husband’s butchery would be the last things she ever saw. Blinded and bound to the bottom of the pole on which they strung up Makena, Tau’s mother had listened to her husband dying for a day and night.

  Tau held his mother, but he could hear Nyah explaining to the others what had been done.

  He was still there, holding her, when Jabari came. Maybe he should have gone to his friend. He didn’t, even when Jabari saw for himself what had been done to his own mother and father. Tau heard his friend’s uncontrollable cries, but he was in too much pain to share in more.

  “Can I see her?”

  Tau looked up. It was the Sah priestess from the medicinal order, Hafsa.

  “I should clean her wounds,” Hafsa told him. “They could fester.”

  Tau nodded and made to move away. His mother clung to him. “Mother,” he said. “This is Hafsa. She’s a priestess from the medicinal order and has healed many of my sword brothers. She needs to look at you, to make sure you get better.”

  If she heard him, it made no difference. She held to him, and after a few more fruitless words, Tau had to pry his mother free so Hafsa could care for her.

  “They’re setting up camp higher on the mountain just beyond … this,” Hafsa said. “We’ll be in the infirmary tent, yes?”

  “Yes,” Tau managed.

  The priestess nodded and guided his mother away, speaking to her as they went.

  Tau picked up his swords from where he’d dropped them, and he sheathed them, sand and all. It felt like he was watching his life from a distance. He could sense the sun on his scalp, hear the voices of those around him, and see the efforts being made to clear the slaughter, but none of it felt like it was happening to him. He was removed and yet the pain of what he’d lost, whom he’d lost, sat in his stomach like a stone.

  “Tau?”

  It was another voice Tau would always recognize. It was the brilliant Grand General Hadith Buhari.

  “There are no words, but you have my deepest sorrows for—”

  Tau snatched Hadith by the throat.

  “Oi!” shouted the nearest soldier, drawing the attention of others.

  “He knew you’d make us go to the ships first,” Tau hissed. “He knew it. It’s why he beached them near enough to Kigambe to be found, and by doing it we gave him enough time to do this.” Tau waved his free hand at the desecration that surrounded them.

  “We’ll get him. I promise you we’ll get—” It was all Hadith managed before Tau shoved him away.

  “Fail me again and it’ll be your last time, Grand General,” Tau said, turning away and heading up the mountain.

  Kellan, in Tau’s way, bowed his head and stepped aside. The other soldiers, who had been working to clear the dead, dropped their eyes, none daring to look him in the face.

  “Champion.” It was Hadith.

  Tau stopped, listening.

  “We’ve received our reply from the Southern Fortress. Thandi just gave it to me. They know the queen is with us, but they’re not sending soldiers.”

  Tau turned, and in spite of the distance between them, Hadith stepped back.

  “Does the queen know?” Tau asked, ignoring the demon at the edge of his vision.

  “She does. I’ve never seen her so angry,” Hadith said. “She wanted you to know because a choice must be made.”

  Tau blinked away the monster and fought to cool his blood. “What choice?”

  Hadith tried to start his sentence a few times before settling on what to say. “Kana will do this again if we don’t stop him.”

  “Can we stop him if the soldiers from the Southern Fortress aren’t there to cut him off?”

  “I don’t know, but if we’re to have any chance of doing it at all, we have to leave now.”

  “Now?” Tau asked, sliding his jaw from side to side. “And
the dead? Who will burn them before the sun rots their bodies? Who will watch them burn and wish them well on their way to the Goddess?”

  Hadith lowered his eyes.

  “This is the choice you need me to make?” Tau asked, choking up. “A choice between woe and wrath?”

  “Yes, Champion.”

  “And do you know what I’ll choose, Grand General Buhari, when given such a choice?”

  “Wrath, Champion,” Hadith said quietly. “You’ll choose wrath.”

  QUARRY

  It wasn’t hard to follow the warlord’s son, because he wanted them to chase him. He wanted them to see the things he was doing.

  Kana left a massacre in his wake, littering his path with the victims of his atrocities, and it was like marching through the aftereffects of a plague.

  Sichiwende, the hamlet to the east of what had been Keep Onai, was torn to pieces. Not a single hut was left standing, and the hamlet’s tiny fields had been trampled, its people dismembered and scattered across the ground like seeds.

  The mood as they marched was grim. Kana’s viciousness was expected to grow more and more vile, and without help from the Southern Fortress, they might catch up to Kana, but how could they hold him? He’d simply retreat, never committing to an engagement, until he could slip into the Curse, free from their grasp forever.

  “We split the army, sending half down the mountain to run the flatlands,” Kellan suggested as they marched. “Then those men can climb back to us near the Curse to cut him off.”

  The only ones on horses were the queen and Nyah. Tau walked beside Fury, letting her rest after the strain of galloping to Keep Onai, and he needed to work off some of the anger that kept threatening to explode out of him. It didn’t help his mood that the sun was setting, because the mountains were too dangerous for night travel and that meant they’d lose ground in their hunt for Kana.

  They couldn’t expect the warlord’s son to slow down. If he wanted to get any of his raiders out of the peninsula alive, he’d need to spend some lives in exchange for speed.