Is he nervous?
“…We never shake them.”
“Now,” he continued, “join us within the prefect's estate, and you’ll have all the food and rest you need. And I’ll ensure one of our physicians examines and cleans your injuries immediately. In fact, all Panpingese men and women are invited to share in the festivities while we will finish the work we’ve begun; bringing Yarrington to its knees.”
Without so much as another thought, Sora took a step forward, and Muskigo’s men parted, inviting her into the inner circle. They led her through the city, past the carnage of their wake. She’d missed it from the rooftops of the ghetto because Muskigo wasn’t lying, his people didn’t seem interested in that place. And her people probably barred their doors shut and closed the shutters like they did every time there was a ruckus in the better parts of town.
Glass soldiers littered the ground like trash. But not just them, civilians too. Merchants, chimney sweeps, anyone born west of the Great Ravine who got caught in a wave of Shesaitju warriors. A few of their ashen bodies stained the ground, but more of them stood. Hundreds, everywhere, being forced to stack the bodies of the dead on carts to wheel them off to Iam knows where. Sora couldn’t help but scan every single one for Whitney’s ridiculous Traders Guild outfit.
“So many dead,” she muttered. The air felt trapped in her lungs. She squeezed Aquira for comfort without meaning to, but the warm creature didn’t seem to mind. Suddenly, Troborough felt so small and far away, and all Muskigo’s talk of heroics, which actually had her questioning her dark desires, melted away.
“A forgettable foundation of blood for a brighter future,” Muskigo replied.
“Are the lives of these people so frivolous?”
“That is an unfair word. Their deaths will be with me forever. It is the weight I bear, so others don’t have to. But it is not only the lives of my enemies who mar these streets and will stain them further tomorrow.”
Muskigo stopped and knelt beside a Shesaitju warrior, writhing on the ground, a spear through his gut. He extended his palm and one of his men handed him their sword. He leaned in, cupped the dying warrior’s neck, and whispered something into his ear.
Sora knew what was coming. She fought her best intentions to stay quiet. With enough of a blood sacrifice, she knew she could heal him. It would drain her so much she’d probably pass out, but she could. However, it would show Muskigo that she was little more than a blood mage. Plus, why him and not another?
While indecision wracked her mind, Muskigo plunged the blade into the man’s heart. Sora had to look away as the life fled his eyes.
“You see?” Muskigo said as he wiped the blade on his skirt and returned it to his guard. “You may look away, for only I need wield the blade that brings their end.”
He rose, and they began walking again.
“You could have not brought them here in the first place,” Sora said.
“They’ve pledged their lives to this cause and were all too eager to fall for the glory of our Caleef.”
“It must be nice to be so devoted to one man.”
Muskigo stopped and in doing so, brought their whole company to a halt.
“Caleef Sidar Rakun is no mere man,” he said. “He, like all those who came before him, was birthed from the depths of the Boiling Waters and the churning sand. He is the embodiment of god.”
“Which god might that be?” she asked. She knew she might be pushing her luck but couldn’t help herself. As much as she hated him for what he’d done, as much as she wanted to give in to the power begging to leap from her body… so too did she hope to understand why her home had to be destroyed, and everyone she knew had to die. “I’ve heard of many so-called gods, but none of them have lived up to the hype.”
Muskigo’s dark eyes fell upon her. For a moment, she thought the man would lash out at her, bringing a swift end to her the way Kazimir had to her attackers. Instead, he laughed. “That does not surprise me, Sora of Yaolin City. You have not seen the likes of the God of Sand and Sea.”
“I thought your Caleef is your god?”
“He is, and he is so much more. He does not hide behind a name or scripture like Iam, but instead, walks amongst us.
They started moving again over Winde Port’s grand, central canal. She ignored the Glass Soldier lying face down on the frozen water but then, she saw worse. All down Merchants Row, the palisade wall surrounding the city was visible. The heads of soldiers dotted the stakes, overlooking where she and Whitney ate on their first day in the city. Her stomach did a spin.
“Speak your mind, Sora of Yaolin City,” Muskigo said. Apparently, she hadn’t been as proficient at concealing her disgust as she’d hoped.
“It’s just…”
“Yes?”
“These people… what did they do to deserve this? The towns you burned. Those were lives, families, people like you and me.”
They stopped again, and Muskigo placed his hands upon Sora’s shoulders. She winced.
“This is war, mystic. You should know as well as any the consequences of battle. Are you too young to remember the Third Panping War?”
She wondered the same of him. His beard was dark and thick, and his skin was smooth—signs of youth—but his eyes held great depths within. Having lived in Troborough most of her life, she didn’t have tremendous experience with Shesaitju. Did they age slower? She wasn’t sure if Afhem Muskigo was twice her age or less… or more.
“My parents fled after the war, but I was so young I remember very little of it,” she said, allowing herself to look up at the heads.
Crumbs of truth.
She didn’t remember a thing of her true parents, but she had a single memory of her ancestral lands. Chaos and screaming… It was why she never cared to go back until her memories of Troborough were forced to be the same.
Muskigo finally decided to wrap his arm all the way around her. Aquira grumbled in disapproval, glare fixed upon the afhem’s hand as if daring him to try hurting her. Sora again flinched at his touch, but she didn’t fight it as he guided her away and continued their walk toward the palace.
“My father died at the hands of that wretched killer, Liam. To his people, Liam was the great conqueror—uniting Pantego under the banner of his God. In peace.” The word left Muskigo’s mouth as if it were poison. “But what about us? Did we ask to worship Iam?”
“I suppose not,” Sora admitted.
“And now they’ve imprisoned our Caleef. Would the Glass not have done worse to get their own king back? What would their crazed queen do?”
Sora remembered the bodies hanging from the Yarrington walls in the Queen’s mad quest to save her son. It was her first, and she hoped only impression of the Glass Castle.
Before she had a chance to respond, they stopped in front of a beautiful two-story estate. Marble columns supported a balcony that jutted from the upper story. Vast, green, gardens were visible in the courtyard through the lower floors arcade—lush despite the bitter cold.
“Welcome,” he said, spreading his arms. “My new home belongs to you. It belongs to all who have long suffered under a Glass boot.”
The inside of the palace was as grand and luxurious as the exterior. In the center of the lofty greeting hall was a great hearth set in stone. Shesaitju soldiers sat around the blaze, drinking and laughing as if it were any other day. As if there weren’t dead bodies littering the streets of a foreign city just outside the door.
Muskigo snapped and a handmaiden, dressed in clothing more appropriate for a desert than the land north of the beaches, approached them. He whispered something in her ear, and she bowed. Her face was covered by a shawl, but the skin around her eyes was creased with age.
“Now, I have business to attend to preparing our defenses,” Muskigo said. “Shavi will take care of anything you need. We shall speak soon, Sora of Yaolin City.”
He fell in with a group of gold-armored guards and left the estate. Sora was too overwhelmed by the maje
sty of the place to muster more than a faint curtsy to bid him farewell.
“Come, dear,” the old handmaiden named Shavi said, leading Sora deeper into the place.
Sora followed along. She wasn’t excited about the prospect of temporarily sharing the home of an enemy, but she knew it was her best chance at finding Whitney—her best chance because it was the only option that seemed to promise her life. With all the soldiers around, and the daylight filtering in through the great arches of the courtyard, Kazimir wouldn’t be able to touch her.
She glanced down at Aquira, who looked up at her. Sora was no expert on wyverns or their facial twitches. Her frills undulated, and her mouth was crooked, with one sharp fang hanging out over her lip. She didn’t appear overly nervous, and Sora couldn’t blame her.
“Can’t be worse than being drained by an upyr,” she whispered to the wyvern. Then they entered.
XVII
THE KNIGHT
“By Iam,” Torsten said. It was all he could manage as Winde Port appeared on the horizon. It didn’t take long leading his army along Muskigo’s tracks for him to realize he’d underestimated his enemy. A mass of refugees swarmed the hill. Traders and civilians, guards and dockworkers—anyone who could escape the port city before the wrath of the Black Sands fell upon it. Some were bloodied, many crying, others being carried with Shesaitju arrows protruding from their backs or limbs.
Torsten reached down from his perch atop his horse and grabbed a fleeing city guard by the shoulder. The man looked petrified, hands shaking and sweat pouring from his brow. “Soldier, what happened?”
“The Black Sands… th-they… they…” the man stuttered.
“Spit it out,” Wardric grunted.
“They came from the f-fog… thousands of them.” He finally seemed to remember the world around him and grabbed Torsten’s leg. “My brother. He’s still in there. You have to save them.”
“We will,” Torsten said.
“Only Nesilia can save them now,” Redstar remarked.
Torsten glared back at the scourge of his life, then spurred his horse ahead of his army to get a better view. Every thud of his mount’s hooves made the refugees shudder. He hadn’t seen such frightened people since the Third Panping War, after their great mystics were vanquished and the people were left to clean up their dead.
He rode his horse up a promontory and stared down at the city. Words failed him at the sight. The late King Liam had once called Winde Port ‘the key to Pantego,’ the fulcrum upon which the East and West swung. It wasn’t heavily fortified, even with the defensive measures taken after Torsten returned to Yarrington with news of Muskigo’s betrayal more than a month ago. Wooden palisade walls now wrapped the city where it met land, though they remained unfinished at the city’s north.
It wasn’t anything insurmountable, and that was half the reason Torsten never expected Muskigo to center his invasion of the Glass heartland on it. But he had forgotten the Shesaitju of his youth—the ruthless, godless warlords whom it took every ounce of Liam’s brilliance to defeat.
Glass Soldiers were hung by their necks over the palisade walls in the very same manner Oleander had used, some still squirming and alive. The heads of more soldiers crowned many of the pointed stakes comprising the wall itself, and piled in front of it were the decapitated bodies, fortifying defenses with a layer of flesh. Muskigo’s savagery made Oleander’s killing spurt seem like child’s play. Blood rushed to Torsten’s head. It was almost as if the afhem mocked her.
And yet, of all of it, that wasn’t the worst. From his vantage, Torsten could see a fenced area protruding from the wall, surrounded by spiked barriers. Thousands of Glass civilians were packed inside a camp that appeared as though it had been ransacked. Innocent people tied together by chain and rope like cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse. Gray-skinned Shesaitju warriors stood guard like shepherds over sheep.
Or worse, like butchers.
Not warriors, Torsten realized. They wore little more than tattered rags, and every one of them wielded weapons stolen from the Glass Soldiers. The young King had issued an edict to detain any Shesaitju civilian west of the Walled Lake, and in an instant, Torsten knew that these were those people, spurred to revolt by Muskigo’s invasion and making it even easier for them to gain ground.
The King’s edict, meant for protection, had collected all those potential enemies in one place. With that, and Torsten falling for the deception of Marimount as the primary target, they’d handed over Winde Port on a silver platter.
“I tried to tell you not everything was as it seemed,” Redstar said from behind him. Just the sound of his voice had Torsten clenching his jaw. “Nesilia is many things, but a liar she is not.”
“I’m getting tired of hearing about her,” Torsten growled, not bothering to look back.
“And I suppose your men will quickly grow tired of a commander who lost a battle without even being present. Where was the all-seeing Eye of Iam when Winde Port needed him?”
“Distracted by snakes in our ranks.”
Redstar laughed. “Blame me all you want, but it was your scouts who missed this.” He rode up beside Torsten and pointed to the coast of Trader's Bay, south of the city. A light mist loomed over it as it always had in this region. And within that veil of white, tremendous shadows loomed. “That is their fleet, dragged up the coast in the cover of night and fog by their beasts.”
He was right. One by one they were being turned by zhulong and heaved into the water, completely blocking off the bay. That was how nobody noticed their fleet sailing in from the south because they hadn’t sailed at all. They’d exhausted their beasts hauling their ships, siege weapons and supplies up the oft-rocky, and always foggy coast.
“Whispers. Rebellion. Spiders,” Redstar said. Torsten turned back and saw him, calm as could be despite the horrors arrayed before them. “It is what lurks in the darkness that we fear more than anything, isn’t it?”
“This is what you hoped for all along; to watch us fail, all because King Liam took your sister and gave her a life worth living in a place worth living in. Do you know why he and Uriah left you behind?”
“Because I committed the awful sin of seeking power that is freely available for those willing to grasp it.”
“Because you were a wretched boy, more interested in playing blood magic than caring for your sister. It was your fault. She needed you in a strange new world, and you couldn’t shut your mouth, keep your weapon down, and help her.”
“Playing?” Redstar sniggered. “Tell me, Torsten Unger… King Liam died of a long, terrible sickness. I wore the skin of Uriah Davies, his Wearer of White after the Goddess Bliss drained the blood from his body. Does that sound like a game to you?”
“Are you admitting to regicide?”
“Heavens no. But my goddess is just.” He patted his horse’s neck like their conversation was nothing more than talk amongst friends. “You were there that fateful day when your ‘great’ king stole a girl from her home and made her a wicked woman, hanging her own from the parapets. I wonder what will happen to you next?”
Redstar sidled his horse close and laid his hand on Torsten’s shoulder. His other hand pointed with the flat edge of a dagger toward the bodies piled and staked before the walls of Winde Port. “How poetic would it be for you to join them?”
Torsten hoisted his claymore off his back scabbard and held it at Redstar’s neck. “I could kill you right now for your words.”
“I’d be careful if I were you, Sir Unger,” Redstar said calmly. “My people are fiercely loyal.”
“Are you two ever going to stop bickering?”
Torsten and Redstar whipped around to see Wardric. Behind him, the front ranks of the army stared intently. The Drav Cra warriors squeezed the handles of spiked clubs and spears. The eyes of the Glassmen darted nervously from side to side.
Redstar lowered his blade first. “Not bickering,” he said. “Merely discussing strategy.”
“Well, tell your savages to back off,” Wardric demanded.
“Of course.” He bowed his head. “The true enemy is behind those walls, after all.” He shot Torsten a smirk, then led his horse back toward his forces.
Torsten could feel the tension in the air like a thick paste, and he realized the mistake he’d made. Driving a wedge further between their combined forces after allowing himself to be fooled was the last thing he needed. He wasn’t ignorant to the whispers as they marched through the bodies of Citravan’s slaughtered legion from Winde Port. Redstar’s people, saying how Nesilia predicted this, his own, fearing that Iam had abandoned them.
“Wardric,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Set up camp on this hillside,” Torsten said. “I will ride into the city.”
“For what?” Wardric asked, clearly perturbed by the idea.
“I plan to speak with the rebel.”
“You’ve already heard all he had to say at Marimount. Look at the wall. This man has no honor. If he gets the chance, he will string you up with the rest of them.”
“Then the Shield will be left in your capable hands.”
“Sir, it is the King’s decision who serves as his Wearer of White.” He shot a sidelong glare Redstar’s way. “If you are lost, there is no saying who would replace you.”
Torsten brought his horse right before Wardric’s and leaned in close. “Barely a man outside the King’s Shield has fought in a war. Even fewer of them against the Shesaitju, and already, we have lost a battle.”
“That was barely a battle, it was a sacrifice.”
“We lost to one hundred ghosts in the fog. What do you think is running through their minds, seeing that city overrun? It’s exactly what Muskigo wants.”
“How do you know?” Wardric asked.
“Because it’s what Liam would have done—sewn fear until our army sees them as more than men. It started when they burned down villages during the sacred cycle of mourning. Lights in the trees. Fire. We only lost a handful of soldiers yet half of those remaining shiver in fear.”
The Redstar Rising Trilogy Page 54