by Evan Winter
“Get on the horse.”
Tau glanced at Jabari for help, but the Petty Noble gave no sign that he’d been listening at all. “I’ll see you,” Tau said to him, reaching up and clasping wrists with Nyah so she could help him clamber onto her horse.
“You smell like a rotting onion,” she said, flicking the reins and setting them moving at a canter.
Tau wanted to say something about that, but after taking a sniff, he found his nose had taken Nyah’s side. “Vizier, you can’t really mean to take me to the queen like this.”
“Hyah!” Nyah said, urging her horse to go faster and leading them to the center of camp, where Tsiora’s massive tent had been put up. “Having you vanish shook her. I want her to know that you’re still here.”
Tau had no idea why a morning of absence justified anyone being out of sorts, but they’d arrived and he became more concerned about his smell and appearance than the moods of royalty. When Nyah slowed her horse to a stop, he climbed down, doing his best not to put any more weight than was necessary on his bad leg, while, beside him, Nyah hopped off, looking spry for all her cycles.
They walked past the Queen’s Guard and he saw that Auset and Ramia were outside the tent, looking demure and handmaidenly, as they ate delicately from bowls of stew.
“Auset, Ramia,” Tau said.
“Champion,” they replied at the same time, though Auset raised an eyebrow at his appearance.
“Inside,” Nyah said, and he followed her into the tent.
The queen, pacing with her back to the tent’s entrance, turned as soon as she heard them. She did look worried.
“Did you find him …? Ah, Champion”—the queen blinked when she saw him—“Solarin.”
Tau bowed, and awkward as he felt, he was determined to behave as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about attending an audience with the queen of the Omehi without a shirt.
“Queen Tsiora, please accept my apologies. I did not mean to absent myself these past spans. I … Jabari and I …”
“No, don’t apologize. You’ve both been through so much. It’s understandable that you’d need some time to …” She trailed off, considering his appearance again. “But … you’re well?”
“Ah …”
“Excuse us, you don’t need to answer that. Grief is personal, individual. We’d heard that time and again but only understood it after our mother and father went to the Goddess.”
Nyah bowed and moved to the tent’s flaps. “My queen, if you’ll excuse me, you know how some seasons affect me, and it seems I must clear my nose.”
Tau caught a trace of amusement in Tsiora’s eyes, and it felt good to see it displace some small part of the worry and grief that they all held.
“Will fresh air help, Vizier?” the queen asked.
“I’ll try, but I fear finding air fresh enough to do the trick,” Nyah said as she left.
“My queen, please excuse my appearance,” Tau said, his neck and scalp growing hot from embarrassment. “I was called from my tent late last night and didn’t have time to make myself ready for an audience with you. If I could get to my … ah … I realize I don’t know where my tent is.”
“It’s set up, with all your belongings, a few strides behind this one.”
As she spoke, Tau noticed that Tsiora was doing a thing he saw most often when fighting someone. She was trying to keep her eyes on his face when she really wanted to look somewhere else. It was what poor swordsmen did when they wanted to strike for your chest but needed to make it seem as if they’d be aiming for your head. She was looking him in the eyes, but her gaze kept slipping lower. She probably couldn’t believe how filthy he was.
“Thank you, my queen.”
“Pardon?” she asked, her eyes shooting back up.
“For taking care of my tent and belongings.”
“Yes, of course, that.”
“May I, then?”
“May you?”
“Get dressed.”
“Dressed? Yes, of course, why shouldn’t we want that?” She paused, searching for her words. “We mean that we want you to get dressed, if that is what you want.”
Feeling like he’d rolled in horse dung, then smeared it on for good measure, Tau couldn’t wait to leave. He bowed and was about to go, until he saw the demon.
The queen noticed the change in him and her face fell. “We’ve been inappropriate, and at a most horrible time,” she said. “It’s our turn to ask for forgiveness.”
“No,” Tau said. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
“Oh … that’s a kind lie.”
Tau wasn’t listening. He was too worried about what it meant that he couldn’t blink it away. No matter what he did, the demon crouched in the corner behind Tsiora would not vanish.
“Last night,” he said, “I … Queen Tsiora, I fear I’m not in my right mind.”
She lowered her eyes. “We did this,” she said. “We know what the Goddess wants from us, but we’re rushing it, asking for too much too soon. It doesn’t have to happen the same way as it did for Taifa and Tsiory. They’ve been our example, but they don’t need to be our template.”
Tau was worrying over what Hafsa had told him about his likely end. “I think it’s the dragon blood,” he told the queen.
Tsiora gave him a look. “The dragon … wait, what?”
“Hafsa warned me. I didn’t believe her, but it’s happening faster and faster. I think I’m losing my mind.”
The demon, a two-legged thing with its knees on backward, stood to its full height, its oversized jaws dripping ichor.
“Oh, Goddess … you’re talking about the poison and your wound?” the queen asked. “That’s what’s worrying you?”
“It’s getting worse, and after everything that’s happened … I’m not well.”
She stepped toward him and the demon came forward too. “We’ll get through it,” she said. “We’ll do it together.”
“I don’t think I can. I see things,” he said, “horrible things.”
The queen stopped and tilted her head. “What things?”
Tau couldn’t make himself say it, didn’t want to say it. “I see demons, stalking me and those I care for in this world. I see demons, everywhere.”
The monster behind the queen opened its mouth, revealing row upon row of pointed teeth.
“Demons?” she said. “When?”
“Now.”
“Here? In this tent?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Tau pointed behind her and Tsiora turned.
“Champion,” she said.
“Yes?”
“We see it too.”
LEASHED
The demon lunged for Tsiora, and Tau, flying through the air with only one sword drawn, grabbed her with his free hand and threw her back and down, causing the creature to miss her and hit him. It was heavier than him by far, and it bowled him over, knocking them both to the ground, where it slashed at him with claws and teeth, catching him in the side with the three razor-sharp talons on its right hand.
Tau was on his back when it ripped at him. He felt his skin tear, and not wanting to give the demon the chance to do more damage, he scrambled away from its clawed hands on his heels and elbows. Undeterred, the thing renewed its attempts, stretching its neck to snap its jaws near his throat. He pushed down at it, but with its back feet dug into the packed earth beneath them, it had more leverage.
He couldn’t hold it back, and it climbed his prone body, drawing closer to his face. To stop it from killing him, Tau pushed his hand and the hilt of his weak-side sword into its neck, barely keeping its gnashing teeth at bay.
It was all defensive, and Tau couldn’t use his other weapon. It was still sheathed, and the arm he’d use to draw it was pinned between their bodies in such a way that freeing it would mean slicing himself open. To make space, he drove a knee into the creature’s side and pushed back, wriggling his body out from beneath it as the demon writhed on to
p of him, snarling and snapping at his hands, face, and body.
It should have had him. It would have had him, but Tau was shirtless, grimy, and in the heat, sweating already. He was slippery as a river eel, and wriggling loose, he kicked the beast back as he stood, bringing both blades to bear.
Something felt wrong, though, and he looked to his side. The demon’s talons had ripped into the skin beneath his left ribs. The cuts weren’t deep. Nothing vital had been pierced, but he was bleeding himself an ocean.
“Ramia, Auset!” Tsiora shouted, calling to her handmaidens but also drawing the demon’s attention.
“I’m here, you bastard!” Tau shouted at it. “Look at me!”
It brought its giant head back to Tau, yellow eyes focusing right before it pounced.
His leg protesting and his side feeling as if it were on fire, Tau threw himself out of the demon’s path, swinging both blades with all his might, blasting them into the back of the monster’s head. The blades dug deep, opening up jagged gashes in the back of the thing’s skull and spraying green corruption into the air around them.
The demon went down with the attack. Tau did too, but he rolled back to his feet, slipping a little on one of the tent’s many embroidered carpets. Centering himself, he saw that the demon was up and ready as well.
The tent flaps opened behind him, the push of new air and added sunlight telling him the handmaidens had arrived before his eyes confirmed the fact. The two women, dirks to hand, saw the demon, and though they faced a nightmare made real, they did not falter. They ran into the tent in opposite directions, making a triangle with Tau as its head and Tsiora, most protected, behind him.
“What is this?” asked Ramia.
“You see it?” Tau said, beginning to feel faint from the loss of blood.
Ramia nodded, her eyes round as shields, and Auset gave Tau a look sour enough to curdle a mother’s milk.
“Can it die?” she asked as the demon snapped its teeth in her direction first, and then in Ramia’s, before leaping for Tau.
With Tsiora behind him, he couldn’t get out of the way and leave her in reach of it. So he blocked the demon’s swiping claw with one sword, stabbed it through with the other, and tried not to let its snapping jaws reach his face, but the demon was too big. It could still reach him, and it opened its mouth wide as it dove for the finish.
Shouting in horror, Tau left his sword in the creature and tried to twist away from its bite, when it froze, mouth open, saliva dripping.
“Goddess! Cek!” he swore, backing away from it and holding the sword he had remaining in front of him.
“Kill it. Kill it quickly,” Tsiora said through gritted teeth.
She had her hands up and aimed at the creature, and though its eyes moved in its head, it did not, or could not, move. She’d entreated it, wrapping it up in the bonds of will that were the Omehi’s greatest gift and the most direct expression of the Goddess’s power. The queen of the Omehi had the demon in her grasp.
“Kill it!” she said again, and Tau obliged.
Taking up his weak-side sword in both hands, Champion Solarin swung as hard as he was able, connecting and cleaving through the demon’s neck in a single stroke that took its head from its shoulders, decapitating it and denying it access to whatever foul power allowed it to be in Uhmlaba.
The monster’s body and head crumbled in on themselves, losing color and form until they were nothing but ash, and even that vanished without trace, gone from the world as surely as it should never have come into it.
“Auset, Ramia, do you see others?” Tau’s vision was closing in and he meant to bend forward to pick up his strong-side sword. It was on the ground, having fallen there when the demon was vanquished. He almost fell over in the attempt and abandoned the blade for the moment. “Do you see others?”
“No, no,” said Ramia. “Should I be seeing others? Do you see others?”
“There’s nothing else here, Champion,” Auset said.
Tau nodded and looked to the queen. “You entreated it?”
“We did.”
“Thank you for saving me,” he said, his vision going all the way black as he dropped to the floor.
AUTHORITY
She was holding his hand when he opened his eyes. Squeezing it hard enough to hurt. His head was spinning and he was groggy, but not so much so that he couldn’t place himself.
He was in the infirmary tent and could have recognized the bleached color of its woven roof anywhere. More than that, he knew and was made anxious by the smell of its grassy herbs and infected flesh almost as much as the constant susurrus of women and men in various states of misery.
They hadn’t been in a battle recently, but moving people always meant accidents, arguments ending in violence, and the regular comings and goings of common and not so common illnesses. In any event, the infirmary tent was never empty.
The squeeze came again, hard enough to grind the bones in his hand against one another. He turned his head to her.
“You need to get up,” his mother said.
“Mother …”
“The queen marches to join with her army from Citadel City. She’s taking the war to Odili and Palm City, and if you don’t get up you’ll be left behind.”
“How long was I—”
“He’s awake!” his mother called to someone he couldn’t see. “He just woke.”
He heard someone approaching, and then Hafsa’s head popped into view.
“That’s surprising,” she said. “Unless he was disturbed, the draught I gave him should have seen him resting for at least another few spans.”
“He was born this way,” Imani said. “Always stronger and more resilient than he appears. He should have been a Noble.”
Tau could see Hafsa eyeing his mother.
“Well,” the priestess began, “it’s good he’s up, but he needs to rest and recover.”
“My side, how bad?” Tau asked, his tongue feeling as lifeless and withered as a salted slug.
“You were fortunate,” Hafsa said. “It was just flesh I had to stitch. There was a lot of stitching, though, and you’ve got twine running from your hip to your ribs on your left side.” She seemed to consider him a while. “Who cut you with such ragged blades? The handmaidens asked me to purify the wound before stitching you, as if I wouldn’t have anyway.” The priestess licked her lips. “Champion, I do not mean to tell you your business, but you cannot continue to train so roughly. It makes no—”
“That’s enough, Priestess,” Tau’s mother said.
Hafsa’s chin almost tucked its way into the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, but in my hospital tent, I will speak as I see fit.”
“You’re speaking to the mother of the queen’s champion and you will mind yourself.” Imani was sitting and she was blind, but she also had a way of making herself seem tall enough to be a Greater Noble.
Still, it shouldn’t have worked. Tau’s mother was a High Common, and Hafsa, though born a Lesser, had to be at least a third- if not fourth-term Sah priestess.
But Tau could appreciate that the handholds this far up the mountainside were untested. He was the queen’s champion, and champions were always Ingonyama, or in rare cases, Royals. That meant that the mother of a champion had always been a Greater or Royal Noble as well, and he knew Hafsa was working her way through the societal puzzle Imani had posed.
“Enough wasting our time,” his mother said. “Prepare him to leave.”
Hafsa didn’t look like she knew what to do with her hands. “I was told to let him recover. I was going to stay behind with him to let him rest when the army left.”
“Who told you so?” Imani asked.
Here, Hafsa appeared to be on more solid ground. “Ingonyama Okar, and it is likely he received his orders from Grand General Buhari or …” She paused for effect. “The queen.”
Imani waved the last away. “You were told this by Ingonyama Okar, and I’m here telling you that we’re leaving.”
> “I don’t see how you can—”
“‘Champion mother’ will serve.”
Hafsa’s lips pursed, but she acquiesced. “Champion mother, I cannot allow—”
“Tell her, Tau,” Imani said, squeezing his hand again. “Tell her we’re joining the army and marching with them to Palm.”
Hafsa turned to him, helpless.
“We’ll do as my mother says,” Tau told her, no longer sure if he said it because it was what he wanted to do anyway or because he’d never been able to say no to his mother.
Hafsa wilted. “Yes, Champion. I’ll come with you, of course. Just give me time to set the affairs here in order before—”
“That’ll take too long,” Imani said. “Help me stand him up.”
“You can’t be … Champion mother, your son is in no shape to go traipsing … Listen, his wounds aren’t a danger, but the blood loss, he’ll be weak for a while and it would not do to have him tear the stitches before his body can heal.”
“Come, now, Priestess. With others we are coy, but you, of all people, must understand that his strength does not come from that body.”
Hafsa stuttered at the start. “I assure you, I do not know what you mean.”
“Mother—”
“He’s a match for Greaters and Royals,” Imani said. “You’ve heard the stories?”
“Mother—”
“How long have you been a priestess? How many Lessers and Nobles have you examined, stitched back together, watched heal? How many Lessers should be able to defeat a Noble?”
The conversation was taking place over Tau, and the two women were so intent on each other, it was as if he were not there.
“You are one of the leaders of the medicinal order, neh?” Imani asked. “No normal Lesser can match Nobles. You know this.”
“I’m not sure what you wish me to say, Champion mother.”
“I’m after no less and no more than the obvious truth,” Imani said, leaving the actual words that made up her truth unspoken.
“Mother, enough,” Tau said. “Priestess Ekene, when in the day is it?”
“You fell unconscious from blood loss only yesterday afternoon,” Hafsa said, emphasizing how recently he’d been injured. “It’s now morning and most in camp will just have broken their fast.”