by Evan Winter
Snatching up the dagger, Tau found his pants, buckled on his sword belt, and retrieved his swords. He wasn’t wearing a shirt when he left the tent. He didn’t think one would make a difference to what was coming.
Jabari was waiting a few strides away, and seeing Tau, he walked off. The Petty Noble moved stiffly, but Tau still had to rush to keep up with the taller man’s shambling gait. He considered calling out to ask Jabari where they were going, but that would only confirm his guess. He knew where he was being taken.
When they got to Keep Onai, Jabari walked beneath the archway that had once held the keep’s gates and into the keep itself. Tau went with him, the two men moving in silence until they reached their destination and were standing in the burned-down remains of what had once been Lekan’s room.
“Why are we here?” Tau asked.
Jabari laughed. It was a painful, short-lived sound, and as he made it, he dropped a hand to his sword hilt. Tau matched the movement and the burned Petty Noble sneered before adjusting his sword so he could sit on the floor next to a bronze shield.
The shield couldn’t have been there when the room burned. Its surface was clean of ashes and it hadn’t been touched by smoke or fire.
Jabari closed his eyes and slowed his breathing.
“Isihogo?” Tau asked.
No answer.
“Isihogo.” Tau nodded, more to himself than to anyone else, and he sat several strides away, facing Jabari.
He closed his own eyes but didn’t need to slow his breathing or otherwise reframe his mind. One moment he was in Uhmlaba, and the next he was with Jabari in the underworld.
Jabari, his face whole and unmarred, was staring into the mists. “After I was burned, when you would visit me in the hospital, you spoke about so many things,” he said, voice full and strong. “You spoke about the people you loved, the ones you’d lost, and all the things you’d done. You didn’t think I could hear you, but I heard it all, Tau.”
Tau closed his eyes for a breath.
“You killed my brother.” Jabari said, pulling his dragon-scale sword free from its scabbard. “You killed him and I brought you here to accuse you of the crime with my own voice.” He bent down to Isihogo’s ground, retrieving the shield there. “You are here to be judged.”
“Judged? And what sentence can you pass in this place?”
“I can’t match you in Uhmlaba. My injuries prevent it.” The Petty Noble licked his lips. “So, I was going to kill you in your sleep, slitting your throat and letting you die in your bed.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Jabari’s nostrils flared. “Because I’m no inyoka. I won’t slither into your room to take you quietly from dreams to death,” he said. “I’m a man, and you, Common of Kerem, are not a better one than me.”
“When did I say I was better?” Tau asked.
“When?” Jabari said, his tone dripping with scorn. “When you chose to show up Kagiso at the Indlovu testing. When you raised a sword to Kellan’s back after he let your father live. When you attacked my brother on the path home, and when you murdered him in his rooms that same night!”
Tau stared Jabari down, unwilling to accept shame for the things he’d done. “In my place, would you have done differently? Would you let Kagiso maim you? Would you scrape and beg at the feet of the men who killed your father? Tell me, Jabari Onai, what makes me undeserving of the same humanity you claim for yourself?”
“Humanity? I saw what you did to Lekan.” He was getting louder. “The back of his head looked like a hammer had been taken to it!” Jabari shouted. “You’re a monster!”
“Did you know that Nkiru’s family didn’t make it to Dakur? Did you know that my father found their broken bodies at the bottom of a cliff in Kerem’s mountains? Nkiru’s wife was still holding the baby.”
Jabari’s sword dipped. He hadn’t known.
“If I’m a monster, what was Lekan?” Tau asked.
“He was my brother!” Jabari said, cutting through the mists at his side with his sword. “And I’ve risked my soul for this moment.”
“Enough,” Tau said, trying to bring sense back to his sword brother. “There’s no justice to be had in the underworld. Nothing you do here is permanent.”
Jabari’s smile was cold. “You’re almost right,” he said, stepping forward. “Dying in Isihogo isn’t permanent, but it is disorienting, and even you need time to recover.” He took another step. “I’ll kill you here for what you did to my brother, and while you’re coming back to yourself in Uhmlaba, I’ll take your life there too.”
With the blood in his ears booming, Tau tried to ignore the way his hands kept twitching closer to his blades. “I don’t want to fight.”
Jabari scoffed. “We both know that’s not true,” he said, raising his sword. “So, face me like you have some scrap of the humanity you covet, or die with your swords still in their scabbards. I’m sending you to the Goddess either way.”
Jabari wasn’t going to give him a choice, and along with that realization came a familiar longing. It was time for violence.
“Jabari, before we begin, I want you to know two things.” Tau said as he unsheathed his black blades. “First, I didn’t go that night to kill Lekan, but I won’t lie to you, he was always going to die at my hands.” He twirled his wrists, loosening them and making lazy circles with his swords. “Second, I want you to remember that you asked for this.”
Jabari lunged, sending his sword cutting horizontally through the mists, and Tau leapt back, causing Jabari’s swing to cleave air in place of flesh. When he touched ground, Tau pushed forward, thrusting for Jabari’s chest with his weak-side sword and chasing the Petty Noble’s blade with the one in his left.
Tau’s chasing blade caught up to Jabari’s sword and blocked its path, preventing the Petty Noble from bringing his weapon back to bear, but Jabari didn’t need it to stop Tau’s thrust. He repositioned his shield and Tau’s sword point slammed into it instead of his heart.
With their swords still entangled, Jabari tipped his shield over the top of Tau’s sword, driving the blade down. It pulled Tau off-balance and Jabari shot his leg forward to deliver a front kick to Tau’s chest. Tau saw it coming, and instead of resisting Jabari’s move with the shield, he let it yank him clear of the strike.
Missing his target, Jabari stumbled forward past Tau and Tau spun in a half circle to smash his elbow into the small of Jabari’s back. Arching in pain, Jabari staggered a few more steps, and when he turned, Tau was on him, swords whirling.
Jabari caught the first strike on his shield, blocked the second with his sword, ducked beneath the third, and, still ducking, he took the full impact of the flat of Tau’s sword to the bridge of his nose. The Petty Noble pitched over and crashed to the ground, but rolling away and up, he threw his shield at Tau.
Tau bashed the flying shield from the air with one of his swords. “You should have done it in my sleep,” he said, hearing demons howling in the mists.
Jabari tottered to his feet, blood pouring from his broken nose. “He was my brother!” he said, charging Tau.
Tau parried Jabari’s swing with one sword, smashed him in the throat with hilt of the other, and kicked his legs out from under him, dropping him into Isihogo’s muck.
Wiping blood from his face and limping, Jabari got back to his feet.
“They’re coming,” Tau said, waving a sword at the mists.
“I don’t give a shit.”
“My father might be alive today if not for Lekan,” Tau said. “Nkiru, Anya, the rest of their family, I know they would be.”
“He was my brother,” Jabari said.
“He was cruel, callous, and selfish. Good people died because of him.”
“Behind you, Tau.”
Tau spun and crossed his swords, catching the demon’s overhand strike. It was twice his size, it had four rear legs, but it stood tall and fought with its two much longer forearms. Its head and face looked like they were made from ruptur
ed flesh stuck to rocky skin, and Tau drove a sword between the gaps in its stonelike exterior and into the soft stuff within.
The demon reared back, screeching, and Tau shot a look over his shoulder, expecting Jabari to stab him from behind, but the Petty Noble had his own demons to fight.
“Back to back!” Tau shouted, and Jabari nodded, grabbing his fallen shield on the way.
The rock demon, somewhat recovered, made an inhuman sound and attacked, forcing Tau to give it his full attention. He wasn’t sure how Jabari was doing against the demons he faced, but if any in the Ayim could handle themselves in the underworld, the Petty Noble could, and they held the creatures off, until three more burst through the mists.
GRIT
Jabari died first, but Tau didn’t last long on his own, and back in Uhmlaba, before Jabari had wholly come back to himself, Tau stood to go.
“We’re done here!”
“No.” The way it sounded, it had to tear Jabari’s throat to shreds every time he spoke.
“I can’t undo the night Lekan died,” Tau said, working to rein in his own anger, “and I’m not sure I’d want to.”
He turned to leave, and Jabari, still sitting, smacked the ground, disturbing the ashes there. “You’re no champion,” he coughed out, shaking his head in rebuke. “You’re just a Lesser!”
Tau rounded on him. “Jabari Onai of the Nobles, what will you and yours have left, when it’s no longer possible to pretend that you’re better than people like me?”
“You didn’t win!” Jabari said, coughing up blood and smacking the ground beside him. “I didn’t ask for the Goddess’s mercy!”
“You will,” Tau said, joining him on the ground.
Jabari slammed his eyes shut, struggling to slow his breathing enough to switch realms. Tau closed his eyes and opened them in Isihogo.
When Jabari arrived, they fought. Tau beat him into the dirt, and when he wouldn’t surrender, Tau drove his sword through Jabari’s heart.
It was the first time he’d killed another human in Isihogo, and it worked just as Jabari had assumed. The Petty Noble died, his soul’s glow went out, and he vanished.
Tau returned to Uhmlaba and waited for Jabari to recover. When he did, they returned to the underworld, and Tau killed him again.
They went back a fourth time, crossing swords as soon as they saw each other.
“They’re here,” Jabari said, hunching over his side where Tau had just cut him in their rapid exchange.
He barely had time to finish the sentence before a small horde of demons burst through the mists, and, howling as it jumped, the closest one launched itself through the air at Jabari. Tau blasted his swords into the monster’s torso, knocking it off course, and Jabari followed up with a heavy cut that sliced the creature almost in two. The demon was down, but the others were on them, and the two Ayim, their black blades already slick with demon blood, went to work.
When they were killed, Tau and Jabari went back to the underworld and found the demons waiting for them. The creatures came in twos, prolonging the fight until Tau’s and Jabari’s mutilated human bodies could contain their souls no longer.
It was torment, that time, but after it was over, they went back anyway. Perhaps they hoped the demons wouldn’t come and they could finish the fight they had with each other. But both men knew Isihogo better than that, and the demons gave them no quarter. Still, they kept returning to Isihogo, fighting and dying as many times as it took for them to remember that they must stand together against an implacable enemy. They went back as many times as it took to remember that, though they shared no blood, Tau Solarin and Jabari Onai had been and would always be brothers.
“There’s no Goddess,” Jabari said during their tenth or twentieth or maybe fortieth fight, his eyes wild and haunted. “How could there be, when this exists as well?”
The demons answered him, doing it with teeth and claws, and when they were killed and flung back to Uhmlaba, Tau realized that the sky had begun to lighten. They’d been fighting for so long, the sun was returning to the earth.
Jabari, not yet back to himself, staggered to his feet, and, eyes rolling in his head, he fell to his knees. Moaning from a mixture of the misery Isihogo had visited on him and the too-real pain of his burned body, Jabari crawled to the nearest wall and used it to work his way to a stand.
He remained like that for a time, then, finding enough courage or perhaps strength, he tried to leave the room, his walk a slow and lurching thing. But before he could disappear around the corner, his body gave in, and like a clutch of overripe fruit falling from a tree, he collapsed.
Fighting away his own fogginess, Tau looked to see if the Petty Noble was still breathing. Jabari’s chest rose and fell fitfully, and, satisfied that he’d be fine, Tau leaned over to lie on his side amid the ashes. He was exhausted, the pain in his leg was back, and in the same way it worked with the demon’s bodies, he felt as if his soul was stitching itself back to an imperfect wholeness.
“Lekan,” Jabari said, his flayed voice startling Tau, “was an nceku.”
Tau let his hanging head flop over so he could see his friend from the corner of his eye. Jabari was lying there in the same uncomfortable position in which he’d fallen, watching Tau.
“What?” Tau managed to say.
Jabari took a while to answer. “I loved Aren like he was my father,” he said, the string of words sending him into a coughing fit that ended when he spat a glob of red phlegm onto the ash-filled floor. “But I had to fight you, Tau. Lekan was my blood.”
“What now, then?” Tau asked. “You wait until I’m sleeping?”
Jabari shook his head. “No, never like that. But when I’m stronger than you, there’ll be another fight.” He coughed hard enough that his whole body spasmed, and when it passed, he sighed and let his head fall to the ground, still eyeing Tau.
Tau thought it over and nodded. Lekan’s death was a wound between them that would never close all the way, but perhaps they could live with the scar. It seemed that Jabari was offering to try to do as much.
“You have my word,” Tau said. “The next time you think you’re stronger than me, there’ll be another fight.”
Jabari grunted his agreement. “Until then, sword brother,” he said, closing his eyes and giving himself over to unconsciousness.
Tau counted Jabari’s breaths. Doing it calmed him. Then, losing count, he watched the sun rise over the ruins of what had once been Keep Onai, and when the light became blinding, he blinked.
“Uh … Champion?”
Tau squinted, seeing the Ihagu soldier standing over him with the sun high overhead behind the man. Tau had been asleep.
“We … ah … Grand General Buhari sent me to find you. We’ve broken camp,” the Ihagu said, swallowing nervously around his unusually large throat stone, the bulge in his neck bouncing up and down like a ball.
Tau sat up and the sudden movement sent shocks of pain reverberating up and down his leg. “Yes. Thank you, Ihagu,” he said, rubbing around the wound in his leg.
The soldier glanced at Jabari’s unconscious form, no doubt marking the bloody spit in which he lay. “Is … ah … is he well? I should call a Sah for him, neh?”
“He’s well. I’ll take care of it.”
“As you say, Champion.”
“Where’s the army now?”
“Heading for Palm City and just a little ways down the mountain. They’re not far ahead.”
Tau nodded by way of dismissal, but the man didn’t leave.
“Champion?”
“Yes, Ihagu?”
The soldier stood straighter. “What you’ve done for us Lessers, I … well, we’re ready to fight against the Royals and what they want. We’re people, same as them, and they’ll see that when we beat them.” The man seemed emboldened by his own words. “We have the queen, the Gifted, and the army. Nkosi, we have you, and that’s all we need to crush them.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
INTRUDE
R
Tau and Jabari caught up to the army during the halt for the midday meal, and as they walked through the tail of the army, Jabari, hood up, brooded. It hadn’t occurred to Tau before, but he could see why the Petty Noble hid as he did. Everyone they passed stared.
At first, Tau thought they might be looking at him, their champion, who was also a Lesser, who also wasn’t wearing a shirt. It didn’t take long to realize he was wrong. They were looking at Jabari, trying to see under the lip of his hood to gawk at the man so burned the whole of his flesh seemed to writhe with the searing imprints of a dragon’s fire.
Feeling protective of his friend, Tau called to a few soldiers a little too brazen in their gawping.
“Have you nothing better to do, Ihagu?” Tau asked them, and, caught out, they bowed and apologized, looking mortified.
But Jabari put a hand on Tau’s wrist and shook his head.
“Why shouldn’t I say it?” Tau asked. “They’ve no right to stare or treat you that way. You, who saved lives by sacrificing yourself.”
Jabari shook his head again and lowered his head, pulling the front of his hood farther down over his burned face.
“Fine, I’ll do as you wish, but they shouldn’t stare,” Tau said. “Come, we’ll get something to eat and find the others.”
They didn’t get the chance. Nyah rode up on her horse, and bringing the animal close enough to make them step back, she started in on Tau.
“How dare you! Where were you?” she asked. “When we came looking for you this morning, you were gone. Your swords were gone…. ” Nyah seemed to notice Jabari for the first time. “You cannot do that, not after the betrayals the queen has already faced. She carries too much as it is, without worrying over the loyalty of those in whom she places her trust.”
It troubled Tau, how easily Nyah made him the one in the wrong. “Is she well?”
“I won’t have her worrying any longer over where you are. Get on the horse—we’re going to see her.”
“I don’t have a shirt,” Tau said.