ATTENTION SUBSTACK NOVELISTS!

We want to help you promote yourselves at a big fucking convention in a few weeks…

Our sister , FIC’s co-founding Machiavellian altruist, the Godmother of questa cosa nostra, working with our dear friends and indie publishers of Drek Death n Doom and of Tiny Worlds, has booked a table at Readercon 35, July 9-12 in Boston, and wants to send out an open call for writers in our circle to send her promotional material to lay out real pretty and hopefully attract us all some new readers.

Boz and Curtis are going to be sponsoring specific books for a vendor through their shops (and you can ask them directly about that), but if you want to provide free promotional materials, you can reach out to Z and her assistants through this handy Google form:

TAKE ME TO READERCON!

Once we confirm who you are, etc., we’ll email you mailing instructions privately.

(And IF you want to donate to help us make this successful, we want to put Z up in the hotel at the convention for that weekend to stop her from having to drive her sick ass back and forth from Nashua four times to run our table. You can do that via Venmo to @ZaniDarp, and those of you who do, we will find a special TBD way to thank you for your kindness and consideration.)

Fiction is still culture. We look forward to hearing from all of you.

Love,

Tom, Zani, Fitz, Emil, Haly, Nick, Andrew, Dylan, Slater, Brent, Pablo, James, Judith, Vinny, Luke, and Bobbi.

THE SHIELDBREAKER, Book Two: Holiest of Cities available now!

PAPERBACK | E-BOOK

And again, let me remind you all that 150 sales gets you, my dear readers, a live performance of the silliest song I have ever ‘written.’

See you all soon. T

NINE MORE DAYS TIL THE RELEASE.

There are people who want to help, and there are people who ask how they can help, and then there are (a precious few) people who figure out for themselves how they can help, throw themselves into helping, become experts at helping, and start teaching other people how to help as well as they do.

That’s my wife. Once she cares, she cares harder than should be possible, and she goes all in to help. It is inspiring and exhausting and a bit intimidating to watch up close.

Her childhood experience of watching her family lose her great-grandfather to Alzheimer’s stuck with her for decades and pointed her towards becoming a speech pathologist specializing in working with adults recovering from strokes and traumatic brain injuries, battling cancer in the mouth or throat or brain, and, of course, living with dementia.

And her caring goes beyond the patient: her great professional passion is helping the caregivers struggling under the weight of their person’s diagnosis, the brain changes that come from it, the social stigma that goes along with the “tragedy narrative” and the inevitable isolation when other people can’t handle “seeing them like this.”

Rebecca does not accept the idea that people living with dementia and their caregivers are going through their journey alone. That doesn’t work for her. And it’s led to the thing I really want to tell you about today, and the favor I’d like to ask you, my dear internet friends:

Rebecca started a non-profit organization called A Sweeter Course a couple years ago to provide opportunities for people living with dementia and their caregivers to interact with their community.

Today, in honor of her birthday, I’d like to ask you to take a look at that site and donate if you feel inspired to donate.

In fact, DM me a receipt of any donation more than $10, and I’ll comp you on this publication for a year AND send you e-pubs of both Shieldbreaker novels (yes, the new one too!) as a thank you gift.

I appreciate you. I appreciate her more. You get it.

Talk soon. TS

(You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Why would you think that?)

I got assigned Robert Bruce and the late-Medieval wars for Scottish independence as a research topic, and between reading about the heinous shit the English did to William Wallace during his execution (Braveheart got maybe halfway there. MAYBE.) and the similarly heinous shit the English did to their own deposed King Edward II after he massively bungled a Scottish invasion and/or pissed his wife’s family off by giving his boyfriend too much public political influence (I think I’m remembering this correctly? It was legit thirty years ago and I don’t have the bandwidth to fact-check myself), I read a story about the man who would eventually win Scottish independence…watching a spider trying to climb a cave wall.

The story goes, Robert Bruce and his rebels have been beaten to shit by the English, and he and the twelve guys in his army who are still alive are in hiding in these caves, and he’s feeling rightfully down on himself, and suddenly he sees this spider trying to climb up a cave wall. It falls the first six times it tries, but on the seventh attempt it succeeds, and Robert gets inspired to fight on, and the rest is history.

Can you imagine reading that story as an eleven-year-old who loathes practically everything about yourself?

The sheer fucking hideous, obnoxious, Tony-Robbins-on-cassette corniness of it. My word.

Anyway, it stuck with me. It provided a perfect example of how not to write a believable dark-night-of-the-soul final scene.

Anyway, there’s a spider trying to climb a wall next to me right now as I write this, and he’s doing a pretty mediocre job, so let’s see if I learn any important lessons tonight.

(Holiest of Cities paperback and e-book for sale on Monday, June 8. Preorder it here, or wait three weeks and get it indie.)

It’s a big step forward, my friend. I’m proud of you.

I’m proud of you for a lot of things, frankly. You’re talking in complete sentences and singing the ABCs front to back without missing any letters and working crowds in elevators (your inflection on “Have good dayyyyyy!” is absolutely magical). You’re doing puzzles by yourself. Your music taste is fantastic. I’m half-convinced you have actually developed comedic timing already.

You’re pretty damn good at kicking a soccer ball. You climb fearlessly. You bounce back equally fearlessly when you fall down.

You’ve got a good face, and a good smile, and you smile at practically everyone, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that people tend to smile back at you.

You pronounce “Fuck” perfectly. Perfectly.

(I take exactly 50% of the credit for that, by the way. Thank your mother, too.)

You’re beginning to understand and remember when things are important. You’re good about holding hands when we’re out for walks. You’re way better at talking about your feelings than a lot of adult men I know.

Speaking of adults, a few things I intend to make sure you know before you become one of those:

- When you ask someone for something, there is no guarantee they give it to you. Learn to accept ‘no’ gracefully and not take it personally. That will be incredibly useful to you, basically forever, no matter what you’re asking for.

- Nurture genuine, mutually-supportive platonic friendships with people of every gender—including people of whatever gender you end up attracted to. This is especially important and relevant if you’re straight: anyone who tells you ‘straight guys can’t be friends with women’ doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, and I guaran-damn-tee you their lives are emptier as a result of that belief.

- Stay curious. Your mom and I will always answer any question you have, or point you in the direction of the correct answer if we don’t know it.

- Related, don’t trust anyone who thinks they know everything already, and don’t pretend to know things you don’t. (Trust me, I still need to work on this one myself.)

- Even if it turns out you love sports as much as I do, you don’t have to live and die with your team’s successes and failures. You can be a fan without being miserable. I will do my best to keep you on that path, even as we sing ‘Allez allez, Leverkusen allez’ on Saturday mornings and drive your mother crazy.

- Be generous wherever and whenever you can (without giving more than you are able to part with and still feel secure).

- Timing is usually a more important element of being funny than the content of the joke itself. (That being said, don’t punch down.)

- Being kind is more important than being nice, and being honest is kinder than being polite. (That doesn’t mean you have license to be rude all the time, but if you have to choose between honesty and politeness…be brave and be honest.)

- Be honest with yourself about your feelings. Get good at that now, and never stop practicing. That is the bravest thing you can do.

We’ll talk more about all this later. We have some time.

For now, just know that I will never love anything more than I love you, kid. As your great-grandfather (and namesake) told your grandfather, “When you were born, it was like the sun came out.”

Du hast mein ganzes verdammtes Herz.

Happy birthday.

Give me a phone and put a guitar in the room with me and I start playing the weirdest, silliest thing I have ever written in my life when I MEANT for this to just be about the fact that Holiest of Cities is coming out in paperback on Monday, June 8, and I have my first hard copy.

Oh yeah. That’ll do.

Thanks to , , and for the blurb love. Thanks to the rest of you for hanging out with me here.

Yabba Dabba Do,

TS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Dead and the Dying: Uskol says farewell to an old friend, and Regez creates a serious problem for himself.

—

Chapter 11: Kareva has pledged his loyalty to an outsider. Will the Hodrir go along with it?

—

Chapter 12: Ikune’s citizens throw a parade for its triumphant conquering hero. (Well, some of them do, anyway.)

—

Chapter 13: Kareva and Alakuz discover a betrayal. Ersev throws a party. Miruz sees trouble coming.

—

Chapter 14: In Ikune, the Hodrir get settled in and Alakuz and Turan make new friends. In the desert, Attala gets closer to discovering the fate of the Etela’s civilians.

—

Chapter 15: Several important conversations go very, very poorly.

—

Chapter 16: Kareva makes a lot of noise in his sleep. Miruz makes a big target. Alakuz makes a horrifying discovery. Nobody is having a good time.

—

Chapter 17: Miruz makes a dangerous play to try to make all his problems disappear at once.

—

Chapter 18: Miruz doubles down. Regez comes clean. The Hodrir wait for answers from their chieftain.

—

Chapter 19: The truth finally comes out. (And then, in Ikune, it goes right back in.)

—

Chapter 20: Kareva answers to everyone.

—

(ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and RELEASE DATE COMING SOON!)

(What? You expected me to recap the whole damn novel? Please. I’ve got half a mind not to even tell you where to buy the first one.)

The sun was going down.

Kareva stood silently on the same rock as before, watching the last remnants of his people placing more wood atop the large pile they’d build on the rocky beach.

When the sun disappeared completely, someone would strike flint to tinder and get the fire going properly, and when it was bright enough that everyone could see truth in the faces of the men they meant to interrogate, the last act of his doomed rule could finally begin.

He would answer every question they asked, as honestly as he could—unless Attala came up. If they asked what became of him, Kareva would admit to the murder, but he would swear he got rid of the body alone.

It probably wouldn’t save Alakuz from following him into death, but it might save him from a dishonorable one. It was a lie worth telling.

Something cold and wet landed gently on his face, and he looked up and saw snow for the first time and thought about home.

—

As everyone else milled around, waiting for the council to start in earnest, Uskol ul-Aravan stood silently off to the side, like always.

He heard the fire crackle, felt the flames begin to rise, felt the whispers around him get louder and more urgent. He nodded, turned on his heel, and started walking back towards the makeshift shelter he was almost done building for himself in the trees.

He looked back once to see if anyone had noticed him leaving, but no one had. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway; participation in the lawgiving council wasn’t mandatory. And he didn’t particularly care if his absence was noted.

—

“Are we ready to begin?” Georz asked Kareva, out of courtesy.

“Please.”

Georz turned towards the assembled men and took a deep breath.

“Faced with the choice of allowing us to keep our honor or our lives, Kareva-Oproz, son of Varyta-Kogon, thought he could outsmart the gods and help us keep both, and in his arrogance he led us down a middle path that left us with neither. His actions caused the gods to curse us. He himself has claimed responsibility for the deaths of our women and children, for the complete destruction of our tribe. And he bent his knee to a foreign ruler, even as that ruler conspired to make a fool of him—to the ruin of us all. Is that enough to make him a criminal? That is the question we have to answer tonight: Has he committed crimes against the tribe? Against our gods? And if he has, how must he atone?”

The crowd was not subtle with their initial thoughts, an assortment of calls for blood and fire and all manner of suffering for the man who’d brought them so low. This would be easy enough. Georz raised his hand for silence.

“Patience, gentlemen. The life of a great man’s son hangs in the balance. We will make sure we know everything we can, for Varyta’s sake, before we decide whether to pass judgment.”

—

Alakuz didn’t begrudge Georz for going for the kill, but to refer to Kareva as a “great man’s son,” as nothing but an inheritor, was an affront—a dismissal of Alakuz’s own work teaching the boy to fight. This was going to be ugly. And if he and Kareva did somehow make it out alive, Alakuz expected he’d have a few questions of his own to ask his rival.

“Kareva ul-Varyta, how did you learn about the slaughter of our women and children?”

“Miruz of Toskalne came to our barracks yesterday afternoon and told me and Alakuz that he had news that couldn’t wait. He informed us of the killings, told us that Regez of Led had been in charge of the—”

“Sorry, who?”

“Regez of Led, the—”

“—is that the northerner who is with us now?”

“Yes, the northerner, Regez of Led, the warlord’s first sword of many years, the man who was delivered to us last night.”

“And Miruz, if I remember correctly, is the man who brought the white cloth up the mountain.”

“Yes.”

“After Alakuz spared his life during the battle.”

Ah, yes. There it was. Kareva glanced over at where Alakuz was standing and they made the briefest of eye contact as the angry muttering began anew.

“Enough! That’s enough, gentlemen. Oproz?”

“Yes. Alakuz disarmed him and let him live to find another sword.”

“And instead he came up the hill with a white cloth to offer you false terms.”

“Yes.”

“And has been our main point of contact with the warlord ever since we entered his service.”

“Yes.”

“Did Miruz know our people were being hunted?”

Kareva turned left to where the northerner was standing, and the older man nodded firmly.

“He did.”

“According to our guest.”

“I have no reason to doubt the word of Regez of Led.”

The crowd burst into shocked, angry recriminations and Georz had to raise his voice ever higher to keep them in control. Finally he turned back towards Kareva, and Alakuz could see that he was just as offended as the men he’d been shouting down. “Dare I ask why not?”

“Because he readily admitted his role as soon as we asked him.” Kareva smirked. “In fact, I only had to hit him once.”

There was a smattering of laughter from a few of the younger men on the fringes.

“So he led the hunting party into the desert.”

“On the direct orders of the warlord, yes.”

“And the warlord delivered him to you?”

“Miruz made it clear we were supposed to kill him immediately, which felt strange to Alakuz, and he and I ordered Turan-Ohta and a party of archers to take him alive instead.”

“But why is he still alive, having admitted to what he’s done?”

The Oproz sighed. “I offered him his life if he would help us avenge our people’s deaths.”

—

Kareva watched the crowd explode with anger and wondered why it felt like the audience was larger than it was when they’d started.

—

As Limava stepped out from where most of his company was standing, a single hand grabbed him by the cloak and turned him around.

“Ask him if he’s sure.”

It was Zamal ul-Ganruz, still hunched over his crutch, head down.

“Zamal…”

“Ask him, please, Ohta. The night before we left the Kalaa I found out I had a son. I—” He gripped Limava’s cloak tighter and sniffed. “Just—” He trailed off and began to weep.

Limava smiled sadly. “Alright. Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

When he turned around again someone else had already started shouting up towards the Oproz.

—

“I would have fought with you to the fucking end after we jumped down onto those bastards and set them running! And now look at you! You bent your knee to a foreigner and we’re all paying the price for it! Shame on you, Kareva ul-Kogon! How can you hope to get to the gods now?”

Alakuz grimaced. If even the warriors who were next to Kareva at his finest moment weren’t siding with him, this would be over even quicker than he thought.

It was also a bit troubling that Kareva didn’t seem to even notice the man’s tirade. What a time for his head to be somewhere else.

Georz had seized control of the proceedings again. “After we accepted the warlord’s terms, you sent Attala-Ohta to try to find our refugees and tell them it was safe to come home, correct?”

Alakuz could see Kareva stiffen a bit as he wrestled with his—with their—unforgivable sin. “Yes.”

Georz turned back towards the crowd. “And no one knows where he is now, either. Everyone involved with this decision has come to grief.”

—

He has no idea.

Kareva clenched his jaw to bite back the sour taste in his mouth as someone new made his way to the front of the crowd. His cloak shifted and exposed his torn-open abdomen. His ribs and spine glowed gold in the firelight.

He smiled.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything. You wanted me to keep quiet that badly…

“Enough, Georz. What is the point of this?” he heard Alakuz say from miles away. He swallowed hard and turned left and the world came rushing back into focus.

“Are you acting as a lawgiver or simply trying to whip up a mob around you? I will save you some time: if causing our people pain is a crime, the Oproz most certainly deserves to die. Because of him we are alone in the middle of some strange forest who the fuck knows how far from our home, surrounded by enemies and without any family left to live for. The whole tribe is hurting. So obviously, you should kill him! Put him to the test and see if he reaches the gods. Whether he passes or fails, the outcome will be the same: you will feel better for about fifteen minutes, and then you’ll remember that we’re all still in the middle of these miserable, freezing cold woods, with enemies all around us, no family left in this world, and no way forward—”

He loves you like a son. What a fucking waste.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kareva saw another flicker of movement where Attala’s specter had been standing and willed himself not to flinch at the sight of his father, skeletal and wrapped in soiled bedclothes and grinning the same vicious grin his namesake usually wore.

—

Alakuz pointed at Kareva. “Kareva-Oproz owes us far more than his life is worth. He owes us vengeance. I don’t think he would have brought this outsider along with us unless he had an idea of how to get it. And I’m sure he knows that if he ever expects to reach the halls of the gods, he must deliver it or die trying.”

In the cacophony of voices that rose up after he’d finished speaking, one in particular seemed predestined to break through and find its way into Alakuz’s ear. “The Oproz puts too much trust in outsiders. Always has!”

Alakuz whipped his head around, looking for the man who’d said it as an act of reflex.

The speaker didn’t step forward.

Of course he didn’t.

Fucking coward.

Metan had told Alakuz once, a long time ago, that people were inherently worthless, no matter where they came from or who their parents were, until they proved otherwise. For Alakuz, hearing his mentor say that was simply a confirmation of what he’d always known to be true.

Those two boys he killed had certainly been worthless, or at least one of them would have been paying enough attention to get the better of an eleven year old boy with a grudge.

His mother, who bore him and then left him alone and unprotected in a land where no one trusted him or even looked like him? Hardly worth the tears he’d shed over her.

His father? Probably not worth much either. He certainly never proved otherwise.

And he had been worthless, too, until Metan had intervened.

With his help, Alakuz had become more than his anger. By the time he came of age, he was a feared killer. By the time his mentor stepped back and tapped him to protect Kareva after Varyta’s rebellion, he was a man of respect and reputation, a leader.

At least until things got difficult, apparently.

Now he was right back to where he started, a dark-skinned bastard outsider—and one who apparently tricked a credulous boy into letting him rule the tribe and got all their families murdered, just for good measure. Alakuz hadn’t heard a single voice try to shout the coward’s ugliness down.

Maybe this was exactly the fate they all deserved.

“Enough.”

The silence was as sudden as it was deafening. Every pair of eyes looked to see who the speaker was. Turan-Ohta, son of Toruk, stepped forward.

“You’re all fools,” he growled, his voice dripping with scorn.

Alakuz raised an eyebrow.

“When Kareva-Dazvazora made his agreement with the warlord—when he chose to kneel to save us and our families, as he said—all of the Ohtar accepted his decision. What does it matter that we didn’t bend our own knees? We could have killed him that day, held our line on Valtaa, and met death as the Way commanded. Maybe we should have. But instead we put our weapons down, and told you to do the same—and you all went along with it, too. We pledged our swords to a stranger. We chose to leave our homeland, to live in servitude. Every single one of us went along with it. We all denied Vei her privilege. We are all responsible for what happened next. We all have to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the gods. I defy any of you to tell me I’m wrong!”

The silence held against his challenge.

Turan turned to face his chieftain. “Kareva ul-Varyta, answer me truthfully: do you have a plan to take revenge against the warlord?”

Alakuz looked to his left. Whatever was wrong with Kareva was getting worse. He looked like he was somewhere else. His eyes seemed unfocused, almost as if he was staring at people Alakuz couldn’t see. It took a moment for him to register that Turan’s question was for him, then he swallowed hard and cleared his throat. Even his voice sounded distant.

“No. But I have the beginnings of one.”

Turan gestured towards Regez. “Involving this northerner?”

Kareva nodded stiffly. “He…he knows their political and military workings inside and out, and the warlord made a fool of him and left him for dead in our hands. He is excited to make himself useful to us.” He seemed to take an involuntary half-step backwards as he finished speaking, shying away entirely from any opportunity to take control of the situation.

Alakuz looked around, now fully distracted from his anger, wondering whether anyone else was seeing what he was seeing. If the rest of the men noticed that their chieftain was melting down in front of them, nothing Turan said would make a difference.

—

Kareva wasn’t paying attention to Turan.

Metan, with his arm hanging limp by his side, seemed to shake his head reproachfully as he stepped forward out of the crowd. Next to him stood Taravi, body and face scarred and broken from her fall. On his left stood the warrior he’d executed in the desert for attacking Uzani and the three Kaljur he’d strung up at the foot of the mountain, throats cut, still holding their arms high above their heads where he had ordered them tied.

And Sivridi.

She glided toward him out ahead the rest of them, her head tilted coquettishly, gaping wounds visible on her left arm and through her chest, her eyes replaced by pools of dark red. She swooped in as if to kiss him; when she opened her mouth, it was full of serpents’ teeth.

He stepped back slightly, doing everything he could to avoid visibly flinching, and she was gone again. They all were. But not for long, surely.

If only the men would stop talking and kill him already.

—

Turan wasn’t paying attention to Kareva, either. He had already turned back to address the rest of the men.

While Alakuz was speaking, he had taken one look at Kareva’s reaction and decided how best to punish him.

His decision to protect his family’s honor had made them all suffer. And his decision to use their faith against them to get them to follow him down this path, to bend them to his will, was even more unforgivable than whatever he and Alakuz must have done to poor Attala to keep him quiet.

Bringing that up would surely get Kareva killed. Just like he wanted.

Turan would make absolutely fucking sure he lived—just like the rest of them would have to live, hungry and cold and ashamed, trying and failing to think of a way to avenge their people.

Turan’s decision to invoke the gods in his argument was an extra twist of the knife. So was calling Kareva ‘Shieldbreaker.’ He couldn’t help himself. He was too angry.

“Do any of the rest of you have any better ideas? Do you have a plan to take revenge? To defeat an entire horde with just the few hundred men around this fire? Because I imagine that letting ourselves die stupidly will only confirm Vei’s bad opinion of us.”

—

Georz ul-Zimion hung his head in frustration as the soldiers around him muttered to themselves in uncertainty. As much as he hated to admit it, Harila’s little brother was right. If there was to be any chance of vengeance, they almost certainly needed Kareva—and, more to the point, his new pet outsider—to bring it about.

He put an arm around Mikal ul-Zalan’s shoulder and whispered, “We have to call it off.”

He felt his friend tense under his arm and try to pull away. “We’ll never get to join the gods. You and I will never see our sons again. He needs to bleed for what he’s done.”

Georz grabbed him tighter to keep him still. “You’re right. But we don’t have the consensus we need among the men, and if we insist on calling a vote anyway, we’ll have to go on record calling for the Oproz to die. And afterwards, his word will still be law, and that will be the end of both of us. It’s not worth it. I’m calling it off. We’ll try again.”

Mikal glared at his best friend and spat into the snow in front of them. Then he broke free from Georz’s grasp and stormed away.

Georz let him go. There was no point in trying to keep him here for this part; he would only cause trouble. He cleared his throat, pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders, and raised his voice. “We are all loyal men of the Hodrir, are we not?”

Murmurs of assent followed.

“Tonight’s revelations have been painful. And I think we can all agree on this: the Oproz failed to protect our people. But I do not think we will be able to come to a consensus on whether his failure was criminal—and as we all know, by the laws we all swore to when we came of age, unless we are all in agreement—”

The murmurs got louder. Then someone shouted, “He betrayed us!” and two or three others shouted “shame!” or other variations, and just as many shouted “Long live the Shieldbreaker!” or “Death to the northerners!” Georz held up his fist for silence.

“I hear—I HEAR—” he shouted, as the commotion gradually died down, “that there are many among you with strong opinions. I respect all of them, but I feel that now, more than ever, we cannot afford to harden our hearts against each other over such a disagreement. So, unless anyone here insists on holding a vote and formally expressing their opinion on the matter,” and there he paused again, letting the unspoken part sink in, “I shall decline to accuse Kareva ul-Varyta or Alakuz ul-Nev of any crimes against our people or against the gods.”

He paused and looked out over the crowd, offering everyone the chance to object. No one said anything.

“Very well, then.” He turned to the chieftain. “Kareva-Oproz, your word is law. What are your orders?”

This was the first good look he’d gotten at the boy’s face all night. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost. He must know how close he came to meeting the gods’ judgment tonight.

“In order to avenge our people…first we must survive.” Kareva nodded more to himself than anyone around him. “Everyone see to your shelter.” And he walked away without even waiting for the men to salute him.

Alakuz turned to look in the direction that Kareva had gone, then looked back in Georz’s direction with an expression on his face that Georz could not read. Finally he stood to address the men himself. “You heard the Oproz. Look after yourselves. It’s going to get colder.”

—

For what felt like the first time since the lawgiver had started talking, Regez exhaled.

Nothing like a trial to make a man appreciate the virtues of a good, old-fashioned death in battle. Even a painful, lingering one. Regez would take that in a heartbeat over what the boy had just had to go through.

And given how quickly he’d gone off by himself, Regez was certain Kareva would agree.

—

Alakuz willed himself not to turn around again and draw more attention to Kareva’s abrupt departure.

He knew the look he had just seen on the boy’s face. He had seen it last night, too. If Kareva was, indeed, going off into the woods right now to end it all—if he was choosing to abandon his people, the men who’d just decided that, even at this crushingly low point in their lives, he was still their best hope—there would be no coming back from it. The different factions would turn on each other as soon as they found his body, and whoever made it out of these woods alive wouldn’t last long themselves.

And maybe that was just the way it was.

Alakuz didn’t know what he could do to fix it. He’d simply have to sit here and hope the warrior he trained was still in there somewhere, and that he would get hold of himself.

—

Uskol ul-Aravan walked backwards, counting off a further ten paces from the line he’d drawn in the snow. That first line marked fifty paces from the makeshift target he’d set up. He’d already hit dead-center a dozen times tonight from that line. It was time to challenge himself a bit.

He turned, looked at his target, illuminated by torchlight, and nocked an arrow on his bowstring.

Whatever the outcome of tonight’s big meeting, whoever the tribe had decided would lead the last of the Hodrir into their final battle, it made very little difference to him. Kol was the only future they had left. He would be ready.

He released and heard a soft thud a moment later as the arrow struck the hay bale standing beneath the torch.

—

Kareva wouldn’t let them see him break.

Whatever was about to happen to him now could not happen in front of the rest of the tribe. For their sake as much as his.

He stumbled through the pitch black woods, scraping his hands on the half-frozen bark he used to re-balance himself every time he reached a tree, unable to waste the time it would take to fall down and get back up, unwilling to slow down even to improve his footing in the snow.

A root caught his left big toe perfectly and pitched him facefirst into the cold wet white, then the familiar low chuckle sounded from behind him. He scrambled to his feet and looked up just in time to run right into the open arms of Sivridi screams the name of the goddess pirouetting twin blades outstretched to carve a path surrounded now alone exactly as it should be two more enemy throats open in front of her splashing her face warm red the first blade enters her shoulder she gasps turns cuts through the one she thinks stabbed her never can be completely sure two more blades find her she looks down at the one bursting through her chest blood welling forth tightens her grip on her swords and forward into the snow again, right hand out, left hand over his midsection, coughing up nothing, pushing himself up again because now there was nothing to do but fucking run for it, run until the freezing cold air burned his insides, run until he could run no more and collapsed against a large rock, chest heaving, every exhaled breath a white mist, and then he noticed the little feet next to his and recognized the young girl from the night he killed the envoy as she shrieked again and grabbed the sleeve of his robe sitting in the sand crying nose running why are they hurting everyone she turns to where her mama is looking for something what are you looking for mama she cries mama pulls out a knife she comes over to hug her close mama is crying too don’t let go says mama then suddenly her back hurts her tummy hurts everything looks like nighttime he was on his knees in front of the boulder, rocking back and forth with both hands wrapped around himself, tears freezing on his cheeks, and he reached out for the boulder, used it to haul himself up to his feet, and when he turned around Georz’ sons were in front of him, heads shorn, covered in blood from head to toe, and they reached out to him at the same time and Katuz caught hold of him first no matter what happens protect the Oproz a spear blade appears out of the glare of the sun Tarav got there a split-second later gods there are so fucking many of them northern brute across the shield wall readying to stab him his arm is tired his shield moves a split second too late deflects the thrust up into his throat he can’t breathe he is sinking it’s so loud and it smells like shit now bent double at the waist, hands over his ears, fists clenched, pounding the sides of his head trying desperately to clear it, and then thought better of the idea, because if he was doing this all to himself then he was truly too mad to exist, but if these specters were real, then sooner or later he would face the one death he could not handle seeing again, and when he thought about it like that, it might be best for him to not exist whichever way it turned out—

Fuck that. Not an option. He could not abandon the men he’d led here. He couldn’t abandon Alakuz.

He took another breath and noticed, for the first time, how cold it was now that the snow had stopped. He needed to make a fire. Were any of these branches dry enough to be useful?

He snapped a few low-hanging twigs off of a smaller tree that hadn’t been pelted as hard by the weather, and in a few moments had enough wood to at least get started, and he turned around to look for more and Attala was in front of him, stumbling forward, reaching out to grab his robes hard for him to see through all this rain but it’s obvious what’s about to happen there isn’t any other option the hand clamps down over his mouth he doesn’t struggle here comes the first thrust through his back just go with it as the boy yanks his head back to open his throat it’s over now at least Kareva leaned forward and let out a guttural howl through clenched teeth and a few sticks snapped in his hands and scratched the bottom of his nose, drawing blood in the bitter cold, the warmth mingling with his frozen tears and spittle and snot and whatever the fuck else was all over his face at this point, and he bit down on his lip to try to force himself to focus, and it came to him that right here was actually a decent spot to build the fire if he could keep his wits about him long enough to actually fucking do it.

He laid his knife down on a rock near the firewood, dug barehanded through the snow to make a pit in the dirt, and hastily arranged a few sticks and twigs into the triangle shape he’d practiced nightly since he turned nine years old.

Since his brother had taught him how.

Kareva rummaged through his pack, shivering as he searched for the piece of flint lying somewhere at the bottom. His fingers closed on a tiny bottle he didn’t recognize right away. What the fuck? He pulled it out to look closely at it and realized he was holding the last remnants of the Sisters’ oil he’d used on Valtaa to bless his warriors’ pyres.

Maybe it would be good luck. Now where was the fucking flint?

There it was.

He gripped the flint tight in numbing fingers and pulled it out into the moonlight. Then he opened the bottle of oil and poured the few remaining drops over his paltry construction and struck the flint against the rock near the firewood, once, twice, three times, grunting his annoyance with each failure, and somewhere in between the fourth and fifth attempt a spark caught, and the fire whooshed to life in an instant.

Over damp wood. The oil had done more than its fair share.

That must have been how the Sisters got his father’s funeral pyre to light.

He rubbed his hands together and stared into the flames, taking in their warmth, trying to draw some strength from the truth in them: there were no gods looking out for the Hodrir. There was only the world, and the world was moving on without them.

Which meant that his course of action was simple, really. Tomorrow morning he would take Regez and anyone who wanted to go with them back to the city, where they would figure out a way to sneak into the palace and kill the warlord or die trying.

It was, after all, their one realistic opportunity for any kind of vengeance; the fantasy he’d entertained of…what, exactly? What had he thought they might be able to do? He really was fucking mad, wasn’t he?

So, there it was. Kareva and his followers would take their simplest, best shot and take as many of the warlord’s men as they could with them to whatever came next—which, if he was lucky, would be nothing—and everyone else could live what life was left to them as they pleased, and that would be that.

And maybe it would have ended this way no matter who was leading the tribe.

When he looked up again, his brother was staring at him from across the open flame. The sword wound in his abdomen gaped like a second smile and wept red.

On instinct, Kareva grabbed the knife from the rock in front of him. It glowed orange in front of his face and even the metal near the handle was hot to the touch, so hot he nearly dropped it as he backed away from the flames and the specters closed in.

He screamed, no longer worried about suffering in silence, and swung his knife wildly at them as Taravi lunged forward and hit him full in the chest she is falling over the edge of the cliff oh gods so far down he turned and Harila ul-Toruk appeared in front of him already bleeding from six wounds looks up to find the biggest bastard he’s ever seen standing ready to finish the job fuck it let’s go the giant is fast enormous sword is up bursting through his chest he leaned forward to steady himself and a screaming woman fell to her knees in front of him, begging for help, and reached to grab his legs in supplication on her back in the sand a laughing brute with stinking breath and blood all over his face and clothes reaches down to unbuckle his belt as she screams he pulled back and found himself face to face with Metan dourly shaking his head one of the bastards got me I need your help he says looking up at the overmatched son of his oldest friend he wrenched himself away straight into the path of poor little Makava who never even got to swing his sword until it was too late oh FUCK fuck it hurts he screams his left hand trying to force his guts back into his belly his right hand desperately trying to keep contact with his sword hilt as feet stamp all around him when he spun back around, the rest of them were hanging back and Varyta was standing alone in front of them all, grin stretching across his lifeless face, and Kareva knew what was about to happen and made to lift the knife up towards his own throat and Varyta snarled and lunged at him.

Kareva took a stumbling step back and his heel hit something and he tripped and fell backwards with his arms flailing.

He saw glowing orange flash in front of him then felt the skin below his left eye blistering around the glowing metal and he yanked the blade down and away from himself, ripping his cheek open all the way down to the jawline, and then there was darkness.

—

He came to on his back in the snow, head throbbing, and felt the wound open again as he grimaced. He reached up gingerly to touch it, then pulled back and saw the blood glowing warm and red and sticky on the exploring fingers.

The embers of the fire were still burning faintly in front of him. He must not have been out too long. Good thing, too. It was still terribly cold, and his clothes were pretty wet from the snow now, and imagine if he had frozen to death out here with no one around—

He sat bolt upright, instantly back on guard.

Where were they?

He sat still for what felt like an eternity, barely daring to breathe, waiting for his torment to begin again.

But it stayed quiet, and at a certain moment the quiet began to feel normal, and he began to believe that the specters were actually gone.

It was a miracle.

It was an accident, a small voice in the back of his mind protested, but joy and relief quickly shouted that voice down and banished it.

Vei had shown herself. She’d accepted his blood as a sacrifice and banished his tormentors.

She loved him.

He burst into tears, lying back, arms spread out wide, reveling in the peaceful breeze and the crackling of the dying fire and the throbbing pain cleansing all misdeeds.

Then he sat up again and took a deep breath, nodding as he let it out.

“All praise to you, Patroness,” he whispered into the beautiful silence. “Thank you for setting me free. With all my heart, I am yours.” He looked down and ran a hand over the blood in the snow. His other hand found the handle of his knife, and his fingers curled closed around it, and as his other hand lightly touched the wound on his face, he smiled the barest of smiles.

“Consider this a down payment.”

For those of you who have made it this far? Thank you, from the bottom of my (obviously cold, black, twisted) heart. I can’t express how much I appreciate (the opportunity to psychologically torture) you. TCS

Back to Table of Contents

Shall we find out? Yes, let’s. (And as always, if you want to buy Book One, it’s available exclusively here in paperback and here as an e-book.)

“You’re absolutely certain?” It was at least the tenth time Ersev had asked one of his subordinates this question since daybreak.

Ulav shook his head. “Mightiness, I know better than to say absolutely certain. As many men as we’ve recruited to your Guard, maybe I forgot one or two of their names and faces? Sure. But five that I don’t recognize, and they’re all found dead together in this…” he grimaced, unwilling or unable to search for words to describe his distaste for the place. “It would surprise me.”

Ersev curtly nodded his understanding. “Alright. So they’re not mine.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit.” He turned to walk back outside, where the rest of his escort was waiting for them on horseback.

“Shit!” he hissed one more time as he reached the door.

Shit was an understatement. Several hundred horses—almost half of their surplus after the setback in the desert—had disappeared from the northern stables before they were set ablaze. There was a massive amount of grain missing, too, and at least a dozen wagons lost, either stolen or consumed by the fire.

It was a circus. It was worse than a circus. No one (at least no one who was still alive, anyway) had seen anything that might lead to who had done it, either—which was likely going to turn out to be a blessing, because as hideous a morning as he was having, he could only imagine how ugly it would get if his vassal chieftains figured out what had happened.

Ersev knew already. It wasn’t a particularly complex puzzle to solve.

It had taken him no time at all to figure it out once he got to the Hodrir villa, where he’d gone looking for a report on their activity during the overnight disturbances, and discovered their villa cleared out so thoroughly that no one would suspect the place had been lived in recently but for the latrine pit.

Their defection had been planned. Which meant they knew.

“Of all the times for Regez to not be here…” he muttered to himself.

“Sorry, Mightiness?”

“Talking to myself, Ulav.”

“No, I mean, sorry, Mightiness, but…you don’t have him?”

He looked up at his subordinate. “What?”

“The patrol at the palace reported seeing someone taken out of Regez’s house under guard last night with a hood over his head. I wasn’t going to ask you about it until you brought it up, figured it was a sore enough subject without me sticking my fucking nose in, but—“

“I never gave that order,” Ersev said quietly. He looked back to where the five strangers lay dead in his colors and ran his tongue over the inside of his teeth to combat the rising sour taste in his mouth. “We’re going back.”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“When we get there, tell the big one I want to see him.”

—

Alakuz wrapped his cloak tighter around himself and cursed again under his breath as the tribe finally slowed their horses to a steady walk.

The temperature was considerably cooler out in the open plains, the wind whipping in every direction. Winter was almost here—maybe it was here, now—and the Hodrir were heading north.

With Kalaa Ukruv’r exposed, he and Kareva had agreed with Regez’s assertion that there was only one place they could be reasonably assured of not being found right away: the enormous fucking forest looming in front of them.

“Is it haunted, do you think?” he heard someone ask from behind him.

Alakuz turned his head slightly to see who it was and couldn’t tell, and whoever it was stayed quiet afterwards.

—

Miruz did his level best to breathe evenly as he walked past Ulav into the Khogon’s chambers. “Good morning, Mightiness.”

The warlord was sitting on his usual divan. “Sit down. You look like hell.”

“Yes, Mightiness.” Miruz sat.

“Busy night for you last night, huh? You and all those guards you pulled out of bed and raced across the bridge…”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“The fire, right?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The fire was what you were investigating?”

Miruz shook his head. “The fire hadn’t started yet, Mightiness. When I came to call for help, the trouble was near the market, not the stables.”

“And you failed to track the troublemakers’ movements into the northern district until after they set the fire?”

Miruz grimaced. “Yes, Mightiness.”

“But you found five dead men in my colors.”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

Ersev stood and walked over to his desk towards the jug of wine. He looked back at Miruz and raised a questioning eyebrow. Miruz shrugged and nodded. Ersev smirked and reached for a second cup, then walked back to the low table where he’d left Miruz and handed him one.

“Thank you.” Miruz lifted his cup towards the warlord in salute.

Ersev smiled thinly and returned the gesture before throwing his cup of wine back in one. “Sure. So. The bodies.”

Miruz stopped his cup halfway to his lips. “The bodies.”

“Down an alley in an abandoned building?”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“How did you find them?”

Miruz shook his head in consternation and took a sip. “Bit of luck, I guess. Not sure if it was good or bad, but—”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Sorry?”

Ersev shook his head, never taking his eyes off Miruz. “Silta’s too big for you to be that lucky. Did someone tell you where those bodies would be? You have informants over there, I imagine.”

“Of course, Mightiness.”

“You and Kareva Hodrir’s man…Alakuz? Is that his name?”

“That’s right.”

“You two get on pretty well, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“Even after he nearly killed you up on that mountain.”

Miruz chuckled. “Yeah. Bygones. Hell of a fighter, that one.”

“That’s right.” Ersev stood up again to pour himself more wine. “I guess it wasn’t him who told you where to find the bodies, though.”

“No, Mightiness.”

“No.” He refilled his cup and sat down again without offering Miruz another. “I am a bit confused about why you didn’t go to them for help first, instead of running all the way back over the fucking bridge.”

Miruz stopped short of draining his cup and swallowed hard. “Mightiness?”

“I mean, your friends live right there. It’s their fucking district, in fact, that caught fire last night. Why didn’t you go raise them up in the middle of the night to help you deal with it?”

This was the moment Miruz had been expecting, had planned for. He set his cup down, hardly touched. “I…it felt to me like the Guards would be needed, Mightiness. I told Ulav—”

Ersev didn’t let him finish. “Yeah. Especially since the bodies were wearing my colors.”

“I mean, I didn’t know that yet, but I imagine it would have been much, much worse if someone else had found them, right?”

“True enough, I suppose.” Ersev lifted his cup to his lips and Miruz took a breath and reached for his own cup again too. “Except they weren’t my men.”

Miruz froze mid-reach. “You’re sure?”

“I saw them personally. I never so much as spoke a word to any of those five men in my life.”

“Shit.”

“How did you know where to find the bodies, Miruz? Ulav’s men were under the impression you walked them straight into that dead end without so much as pretending to look around first.”

“That’s—”

“And where are the Hodrir now?”

“Are—are they not accounted for?”

“No, Miruz.” The warlord shook his head slowly. “They are not. And I think you knew that already.”

“I—”

Ersev lifted a hand and Miruz shut up. The warlord stood and walked around the table, into Miruz’s personal space. “I have one last question for you, and I suggest, for your own sake, that you answer at least this one truthfully. Where is Regez?”

—

Turan had not said a word to anyone since the column had walked out of the city through the wide-open Eastern Gate.

He had to admit, the northerner had been right about quite a few things last night. The ease with which they were able to casually draw the guards out of the stable, misdirect every single detachment that could have posed a threat, and make it look, to any civilian witnesses, like they were just some tribe going out on a routine (if long) journey? It was impressive. He was clearly clever enough to be useful, if Kareva and Alakuz were able to make use of him.

He just had no idea how the tribe could possibly allow that to happen, once they found out who he was and what he’d done. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get right with that himself.

How could anyone pay back a blood debt that heavy? Was there enough money, or a great enough service—or a painful enough execution, for that matter—to even begin to make things right?

And was this northerner the only one who deserved it?

The Oproz was almost certainly going to be challenged when the news came out. Mikal and Georz had only backed down on Valtaa because of him and Attala and Limava all backing the peace deal, and now Attala was nowhere to be found and who knew how Limava was going to react to news this horrible, either…

And last night, in the heat of his shock and anger, Turan had flat-out asked how Alakuz could still support Kareva.

Which, in the cold light of morning, forced him to a question: did he still support Kareva?

There was going to be trouble, that was for sure. The formal challenge was the best-case scenario: there could be an assassination attempt, or a standoff between those loyal to Kareva and those who wanted him gone, maybe even a mass desertion or a battle or just a full-blown fucking riot, if things broke the wrong way, and if that happened there might not be a tribe left to decide who should lead them. But until the tribe stumbled into that final, irrevocable step, they were still Hodrir, and Kareva-Oproz’s word was still law.

Until it wasn’t.

—

“...so you gave them Regez.”

“He was there and in charge of that patrol. I didn’t like doing it, but it was the safest play and the easiest to corroborate.”

“You should have come to me first.”

“Respectfully, Mightiness, what would you have done differently? Touch off a pitched battle on the bridge plaza? Stormed their barracks? Do you remember how many of us died the last time they had a strong defensive position? We had to give them someone—and I didn’t want to involve you unless I had to. I felt like I had to move fast in case Regez found out that they were looking into it and went to them first.”

“So, you told them what, exactly?”

“That you were furious that it had happened, and you were giving them Regez as compensation for their blood debt, and that as long as they took care of it quickly and quietly, there’d be no repercussions.”

Ersev’s eyes narrowed. “You handed him over to those…you saw what they did to Stasin! That man saved your life. What the hell were you—” And he stopped himself. “And to make things worse, they didn’t simply kill him there and then.”

“No.”

“Did you see any sign of a struggle in their barracks?”

“No. There was a bloodstain on one of the floors, but it looked too old to be related to any—”

“So Regez, as far as we know, is alive.”

“Yes.”

“So you handed over my oldest friend—your own mentor—to be killed, and made it look like I gave the order, and you didn’t at least stick around to make sure he was dead?” Miruz opened his mouth to try to defend himself but found no words. The warlord went on. “Which means we have to assume they know I ordered their people slaughtered before I made any deal with the boy.”

As Miruz nodded silently, he noticed Ulav in the corner covering his mouth, unable to stop himself from shaking with silent, horrified laughter.

Ersev must have heard it. He turned back to his bodyguard. “Something funny?” His voice was dangerously quiet.

Ulav knew he was in trouble, too, and Miruz could see him trying his level best not to let it out, but finally he couldn’t control it any longer. He burst out in an undignified cackle. “This—this is the—I’m so sorry, Mightiness. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.” He doubled over to catch his breath. “If any of this comes out, we all look like fools.” He looked up at Miruz. “I don’t even think you can kill this jackass without causing yourself more trouble than it’s worth.” Then he burst out laughing again.

The warlord’s hands curled into fists. Miruz considered warning Ulav but thought better of it. He was in enough trouble.

Ersev swung once, delivering a crushing right hook to Ulav’s face that he never saw coming. He crumpled to the floor, holding his jaw and moaning in pain. After a second, he recovered himself. “Sorry, Mightiness.”

The warlord wasn’t listening. He had already turned around and was walking back towards Miruz, scowling thoughtfully. His wheels were turning. “You’re still not telling me the truth.”

Miruz froze. How the fuck did he know? “Mightiness?”

“Regez must have figured out how much extra time you had been spending over here, beyond whatever messages you were supposed to take between us, and you assumed he would come after you somehow, maybe formally accuse you of those murders he pulled you out from under, and you did this monstrously stupid thing to preempt him?”

“I—“ Something held Miruz back from telling the warlord that Regez had already tried to kill him. What difference would that make right now? “It did not go as planned, Mightiness.”

“No kidding. But, incredibly, and quite fortunately for you, Ulav is right: my need for this catastrophe to be kept quiet is greater, by the slightest of margins, than my desire to hear you beg for death.” Ersev sighed, exasperated. “You will take three hundred of my Guards, plus however many of Oreik’s men are sober enough to ride immediately. I will also get all the tribes to give you some extra men for the manhunt—without telling them exactly who your quarry is, of course. You will leave the city tonight. You will find the Hodrir, wherever they have gone, and you will kill them all before you come back here.”

“And Regez?”

Ersev looked down. “If you find Regez alive among them, then he’s working with them. And whoever is to blame for that, that means he and I are done. Complete this task successfully and quietly, causing no more damage or embarrassment to me, and when you return you will still have your mentor’s former place.”

Miruz was floored. “Y-yes, Mightiness. Thank you, Mightiness.”

Ulav snorted with laughter again from the floor behind them. “Perfect.”

Ersev rolled his eyes, then took a step closer to Miruz. “Here’s what I don’t understand. Between your survival on that mountain, and this” (Ersev turned his head towards the convulsing Ulav again for an instant before he continued) “apparently hilarious series of poorly-planned betrayals, you should already have two death sentences on your head. Why didn’t you run?”

“Mightiness?”

“When you found your men dead in that tavern—or afterwards, when you found out that the Hodrir had gone,” Ersev shook his head again. “Why aren’t you fifty miles from here already? I would be, if I were in your position.”

“Wouldn’t running away have confirmed your bad opinion of me? I figured it would be better to take my chances explaining myself.”

Ersev’s eyes narrowed. “You were really that sure I’d be willing to let you?”

“I’ve always taken you for a reasonable man, Mightiness—”

“Spare me. Why didn’t you run?”

Miruz looked over the warlord’s shoulder at Ulav for a moment, then into the warlord’s eyes. “To run away would be to admit that I was afraid.”

Ersev nodded. “Even worse, running away would have meant that everyone would know you were afraid.”

Miruz swallowed and nodded. “Yes, Mightiness.”

Ersev took another step into Miruz’s personal space. He lowered his voice so that only Miruz could hear. “Shall I tell you what will happen if you fail to bring me the heads of Kareva and all the rest of the Hodrir? If you fail me again, ever, in any way? If you make me think, ever again, for even one moment, that I can’t trust you?” Miruz felt a shiver run down his back: even fifteen or twenty years his senior and a head shorter, Ersev still scared him. “I will kill you, of course. You can be sure of that. But before I do, I will kill your reputation. To hell with politics, to hell with saving face. I will drag you up all those flights of stairs to the top of that stupid, pointless tower in front of the Hall of Elders. Then I will tie you by your ankles, and I will shove you off of that balcony and let you dangle there, crying and screaming and shitting yourself in front of the entire horde until they pity you.” He smiled and took one last step closer. “And if, somehow, that fails to do the trick, I will find some other way to break you. Do we understand each other?”

Miruz’s throat had gone completely dry. “Yes, Mightiness,” he rasped.

“Good. Get the fuck out of my sight.”

—

A few hours’ ride into the forest the column turned further north after one of Alakuz’s outriders came back with the news that he’d found a clearing with a lake large enough to have not yet frozen over and enough space to accommodate the entire tribe and all their horses and supplies—and deep enough into the woods to be a solid hideaway for at least a little while.

And yes, the rock beach they found themselves on when they broke through the trees was pretty. Idyllic, frankly. A lovely, peaceful plot of wilderness that was everything Kalaa Ukruv’r was not and never would be.

Alakuz had never felt further from home. He was almost certainly not the only one. If nothing else, finding themselves a place of such natural beauty hadn’t been enough to lift the men’s spirits, that was for sure. Getting an order to dress for battle and disappear in the dead of night did have its effects on the mind, especially for the older warriors who remembered the last time they were roused out of their beds without warning in the dark.

“So, when is the Oproz going to do us the honor of telling us what we’re doing here?” snapped Mikal ul-Zalan from a few paces to his right.

“We need to set up a camp. Then we will all talk.”

“Is the plan to stay a while, then?” Georz ul-Zimion had ridden up next to them as well, clearly expecting the discussion to start immediately. “Someone needs to offer up some explanation for how the fuck we ended up here, why we had to sneak out of the city in full gear, why we burned the stables on our way out—”

“What the stranger is doing here with us,” Limava chimed in.

“And why he’s done whatever’s been done without any counsel from anyone other than you. And maybe the young one,” finished Mikal. “And when we get an answer, we’ll start setting up camp.”

“So this is a challenge, then?” Alakuz’s hand went to the handle of his sword.

“Fucking right it is,” snarled Mikal.

“Mikal…” Georz grumbled.

“No! No, let’s see how long he lasts against all three of us. We’re not green boys stumbling around a dark hall in a panic—”

“Enough.”

Kareva had dismounted already. He took his sword off and tossed it on the ground in front of him. “Unless you plan to do what those green boys planned to do, put your swords on the ground in front of you right now. And then you’ll get your answers.”

After a moment, Limava nodded and unbuckled his sword from his belt. “Oproz.” He let it fall in front of his horse and dismounted.

Kareva looked up at Georz and Mikal. “Gentlemen?”

Two more leather scabbards hit the pebbles. Mikal looked suspiciously at Alakuz. “Him too.”

Alakuz smirked. “Like I would need a fucking weapon.” He unbuckled his sword and let it fall at his side.

Georz cocked his head towards his chieftain. “Alright then. You have our attention.”

Kareva sighed. “Gather everyone. I only want to have to say this once.”

—

“Last night, our rule was challenged by cowards and thieves. And we had no fucking answers for them!”

Ersev stood in front of the heavy wooden front door to his palace, rather than in front of the gaudy, useless throne in the main hall. He was flanked by several of the biggest, meanest-looking men of the Warlord’s Guard and snarling down at the chieftains of the Pohyor tribes sworn to him (none of his foreign auxiliaries were at this meeting, of course).

He wore his sword crossed behind his back and held a heavy spear in one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold a plain wrought-iron helm that he would place over his crown when he felt the moment was right.

The message to his vassals was clear: the ruler of Ikune was not addressing them today. Their warlord was.

“Bandits and outlaws, with aid from local rebellious elements and religious extremists within our city, made us look like fools in the most conspicuous possible way. They murdered our men, they stole our horses, then they burned our fucking stable to make sure everyone here knew it had happened—and then they disappeared into the night while we were holding our dicks, staring at the fire.”

—

Berez of Led looked around as the warlord continued to harangue him and his fellow chieftains.

This wasn’t going the way Ersev wanted it to. The collective outrage he was clearly trying to fire was nowhere to be found.

Neither was Berez’s uncle.

Was the Khogon really stubborn enough to keep his most experienced advisor shunted to the side, even in the face of a real threat to his control over his city and his horde?

Unless something else was going on.

“...each supply me with forty extra riders to supplement—”

A groan of frustration escaped someone in the crowd next to Berez.

Ersev froze.

So did everyone else.

The warlord took two steps down from his door towards the throng of men in front of him, men he’d wrangled down here under his command with promises of riches beyond anything they’d seen up north—and kept under his command by sheer force of will. How long would that last?

“I don’t care who it was,” Ersev said, quietly. “I understand that you’re frustrated. I’m frustrated, too. We have won ourselves a fairly large collection of prizes this past year or two. And as a result, we have something to lose now. This challenge affects all of us. We will meet it together. Pick your men, and have them report to the palace by sundown.”

—

“Gentlemen, we are at war again.”

Kareva stood on a large-ish rock in front of the last few hundred survivors of the tribe of Hodrir. Everyone had tied their horses to trees and put their packs down in deathly silence: watching their captains shout at each other and almost come to violence must have made the seriousness of the situation clear enough.

Three hundred eighty-six warriors and one stranger from the north would hear his confession.

And, of course, one other, hidden in the crowd but inescapable, his usual smile stretching into a bleeding red grin at the prospect of Kareva’s self-destruction.

“Last night, we discovered—we were informed that the refugee caravan we sent to Makan Alabar…”

A collective groan of horror and disbelief rose from the crowd and drowned him out. They must have already known. Some part of all of them must have already known.

Like you did? Varyta’s grin grew wider.

Kareva gritted his teeth and pressed on.

“...that all our women and children were killed by Pohyor riders in the dunes of the Turma.”

“No!” shouted a few different men at once.

“Murdering bastards!” shouted someone on Kareva’s right.

A great many of them simply started sobbing or wailing.

A few fell to their knees. A few of those threw up.

“What the fuck did you do?” screamed one man, long, bleeding hanks of freshly torn out hair gripped tightly in his fists.

Kareva had to shout now to make himself heard over the keening. “The warlord gave the order before we met him on Valtaa.”

There was silence again. It was not a calm silence. “After we beat his warriors back the third time, he negotiated peace with me under false pretenses. I knelt to a liar. I have shamed us all. I have cost us everything.”

Not to mention, you actually knew several days earlier than you’re admitting, and you murdered one of your Ohtar to keep it quiet.

Kareva clenched his fists. “Now I say, tell me what is to be done with me, and I will abide by whatever decision the tribe makes.”

No one said anything for a moment, then Georz ul-Zimion stepped out in front of the group. He, too, looked like he was about to be sick.

“Forgive me, Oproz, but if what we just heard is true, I believe we will require a lawgiver tonight.”

Kareva nodded. “So be it, Ohta. You’re the longest-serving commander here. As of right now, your word is law.”

“Very well, Oproz. You and Alakuz-Ohta and your, uh, guest? The three of you will stay right where you are, please.” Georz raised his voice. “Get a fire going over there. We will reconvene when the sun goes down. Everyone who wishes will have a chance to speak their mind and ask the questions they need to ask, and then we will decide together whether the Oproz or anyone helping him has committed any crimes against us or the gods, and how they shall atone.”

—

Turan had turned away the moment Kareva said “discovered.”

Maybe everyone else was still distracted by the news itself and not thinking clearly, but Turan didn’t have to work too hard to connect this news to the Oproz’s screaming nightmares these past several days.

He’d already known about the women and children. Turan couldn’t explain how he knew, but he knew.

A man didn’t scream like that in his sleep unless he was well and truly mad, mad with rage, or grief, or guilt—

Attala.

He shook his head to clear the hideous thought from his mind. There was no way.

There was also no other sensible explanation.

He shook his head again, slower. This wouldn’t fucking stand. Kareva would have to pay.

—

“That’s it for him. For both of them.” Mikal whispered in Georz’s ear as Georz walked past him.

“Yes,” sighed Georz. “That’ll do it. The men won’t follow him anymore after that. I will focus on his arrogance, his belief that he could disobey the Goddess and not come to grief, and the facts will do the rest.”

“And afterwards…”

“Not that there’s much of a tribe left to lead, but yes, I will be Oproz and you will be my Ra’an Ohtar.”

“And we’ll figure out some way to at least help the rest of the tribe die honorably.”

Georz nodded. “The boy and Alakuz as well.”

Mikal spat. “I could care less about that, frankly.”

“Knock it off. They will absolutely be offered the chance to reach the gods. We are doing this the right way.”

—

“You all, I’m sure, remember what we talked about when my horde first came to this city. You all remember the arrangement I offered you: keep the peace between your people and your political factions, keep your priests from riling up their true believers against each other or against my men, and keep your wealth and influence.”

Ersev stopped and looked around the room. The wealthiest men in Ikune looked back at him: merchants, bankers, and assorted old-money landholders.

It struck him as odd how difficult it was to tell the easterners from the westerners in this room. In the streets it was easier.

“Somebody broke that arrangement last night. Fifteen of my men are dead. A few hundred horses are missing from one of my stables. It wasn’t random, either. Someone made a plan.”

Ersev paused again and half a dozen voices rose simultaneously from all over the room, shouting over one another, all protesting their own innocence and denouncing some scoundrel from the other faction, probably one they had a personal grievance with.

At the beginning of the occupation, a decision had been made—one that Regez had strongly urged him to make, in fact—not to simply kill these men and their families and distribute their fortunes among his warriors. Regez had insisted it would keep the city quiet, which would be vital while they subdued the rest of the region. And it had been, to be fair, but now he was stuck dealing with what amounted to an unofficial local government who were not his people.

Each interview had gone almost exactly the same way: the rich man would present a substantial-looking gift, thank Ersev for rescuing the city from “the old regime” (whatever that was; the city had been as good as undefended when the Pohyor arrived), and add some platitude about how fortunate it was that the new ruler of the city was a “reasonable man” and how he was at Ersev’s service.

It didn’t matter whether the supplicant had ties to the Runir or the Imandrir. Their disgust with the “old regime” never failed to enter the conversation. That was the part of the farce Ersev enjoyed the most. No matter who the new ruler was, he must be thanked for saving them from the bastard who came before. Sure, they had obeyed him, but they’d never loved him.

Each of these men must have made this speech a half-dozen times in the last decade of the Eternal War alone, probably because it kept working. Each feckless Emperor in turn would surely lap up the praise and revel in the tales of the wickedness of his defeated foe, and then he would confirm the toady in question in his rank and property. And so the story went, to the point that Ersev was half-convinced that if his horse were to throw him off tomorrow and the fall were to break his neck, the next day these same men would be lining up to offer the horse substantial-looking gifts and thank their new four-legged overlord for rescuing them from the villainous “old regime.”

I was just following orders for the sake of the city, you see. Another sugar cube, Mightiness?

Which begged the question: were they really more useful to him alive?

It was usually hard to tell, but this gambit, at least, was working perfectly. Both sides were too deeply immersed in their distrust for the other to ever imagine an alternative explanation. It was also giving him his first good look at their true alignments. As similar as they looked and dressed, as similarly as they talked, even, they still stood close to their kinsmen, and apart from their enemies.

History would always win out. It had to.

Just like he had to keep his enjoyment of the spectacle to himself.

“That’s enough.”

The clamor on both sides ceased quickly.

“I’m not interested in your theories about who, exactly, murdered my soldiers and stole my horses, or why. I don’t need to know, frankly. I just want it handled, and then we can go back to business as usual.”

The assorted grandees looked at each other with a mixture of confusion and relief.

“I’m not going to have my guards crash around the city looking for answers. You will investigate within your own enclaves. Whoever finds the person responsible, whoever it is who turns out to have a delusional nephew who thinks he’s a freedom fighter...take care of it yourself. Quietly, but decisively. Make sure their supporters get the message.”

Ersev’s order was met with the shuffling, uncomfortable silence he had predicted: it couldn’t be that hard for any of the men in this room to imagine finding out the killer was in their own camp. He took a few steps forward, beckoning everyone closer, and let his voice become quieter as he twisted the knife.

“If there’s a next time, everyone in this room is going to answer for it. And you will find that unpleasant.”

—

Regez stood between the two men he’d followed out into the forest, watching them wait peacefully for their fellow tribesmen to call for their deaths.

To his left, the young chieftain stood silently, eyes closed, reveling in the chill in the air like he’d never experienced winter before. The tall, dark sword warrior who was clearly his mentor and chief advisor was on Regez’s other side, looking away from the two of them, scowling and flexing his bandaged hand. The two of them hadn’t spoken a word to each other since Kareva had made his announcement and that other captain had called for a formal law-giving council.

This was not what Regez had signed up for. Not even slightly. The boy had offered him his life and a chance at revenge, and he had jumped at it, and somehow in that moment it had not occurred to him to wonder how the rest of the tribe would react to the news that their families were all dead and their killer was among them and—get this—on their side now.

It had been hasty. Panicky, even. Maybe he was more afraid of dying than he’d been willing to admit before. Waiting for it like this was definitely making it worse.

“Alakuz.”

Regez looked left. The boy’s eyes were still closed.

“Oproz.” His protector hadn’t moved and was now staring at the growing fire in the center of the clearing.

“If this thing starts to go how it looks like it’s going to go—”

Now Alakuz was glaring at his young chieftain. “Don’t.”

“You don’t have to go down with me. Take their side. Tell them everything was my idea, and you were just following orders. Tell them…” The boy lowered his voice. “Tell them about the other thing. Tell them I forced you to go along with it. That should be enough to make Georz and Mikal spare you.” Kareva shook his head. “I did this. Not you. You can tell them. You have my blessing.”

Alakuz hesitated for a moment, took a deep breath. “I was given an order six years ago to protect you with my very life. I took an oath on it. I intend to keep my word.”

“He’s dead, Alakuz.”

“All the more reason not to dishonor him.”

“You’re a fool.”

“So be it.”

The two stood silent for a moment, then Kareva hesitantly reached out and patted the taller man on the shoulder. Alakuz nodded a barely perceptible response.

Regez looked back and forth between his erstwhile captors. “So, not to interrupt whatever you two are on about, but they are going to kill you, right? That’s what’s about to happen?”

The boy’s mouth twitched slightly, showing a shocking lack of concern. “Yeah. I imagine they’re going to bleed me dry.”

Regez turned his head sharply. “What?”

“They’re going to give me the chance to redeem myself by allowing them—ordering them, technically—to sacrifice me to our goddess. I stand on an altar, hands tied to the side posts, and the men take turns cutting or stabbing me, one at a time, until I die. The goal is to keep me awake and in pain for as long as they can, so my heart keeps beating fast and pumping as much blood out of my wounds as possible for the sacrifice. And as long as I don’t cry out in pain, it’s considered a fair atonement for my crimes, the sacrifice is deemed acceptable, and I get to join the gods when it’s all over.” Kareva smirked. “And, of course, our people get their protection.”

Regez remembered the panel behind the stone chair in the desert fortress and shuddered. “That’ll happen to both of you?”

Alakuz shrugged. “Depends on if they’re feeling generous. They might just gut me and leave me to twitch my last without a weapon.”

“I won’t allow that.”

“You think you’ll get a say in the matter?”

“I’ll make sure. I’ll make a deal with Georz if—”

“Sorry, let me stop you again,” interrupted Regez, trying his level best to keep his voice even. “So if they’re going to kill you both, they’re planning to kill me too, right?”

It was Alakuz’s turn to smirk. “Yes. Certainly.”

Regez shook his head. “Then why the hell did you bother bringing me along? Why didn’t you just kill me back in the city?”

The boy finally turned to face him. “Because you’re our best hope for any real vengeance. Our only hope, really. I had to take the chance.”

“But you think they’re going to kill us?”

Kareva held his gaze, his voice steady. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure.”

Alakuz’s head drooped, exasperated and resigned.

Regez chuckled mirthlessly. “Great. This is perfect.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure they let me kill you first. And I’ll do it quickly, like I promised.”

Regez looked back and forth between Kareva and Alakuz, and beyond them into the gathering crowd of these strange men whose entire world he had played a part in destroying, and shrugged his acceptance.

“Alright. I suppose that’s not nothing.”

—

At some point as he was waiting for all his new men to make their way to the palace, Miruz had an unwelcome thought, triggered by something the warlord had said during their last meeting.

Regez had real, career-killing dirt he could have used to ruin him, or even get him executed. Why would he have needed to try to have him murdered?

Could someone else have sent those men after him?

Miruz allowed himself a moment of self-doubt, perhaps even a hint of guilt, at the prospect of having burnt his mentor for no reason, and then he put those feelings out of his mind as luxuries he could no longer afford.

IN THE FINAL CHAPTER (available Sunday, March 15): Kareva answers to everyone.

READ BACK: The Dead and the Dying | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 |

And thanks again to our friends at Television Sky for letting us use their space to stream this thing. You can join the party here: Television Sky Discord!

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Friend of mine has a poster on his home office wall that says ‘There Is Only The Work’ but that’s a bit tricky to reconcile at 3:37am as I measure, ever so carefully, the exactly one inch I’m supposed to hold this thermometer from the forehead of the adorable wriggling almost-certainly-feverish chaos demon I’m holding in my other arm, who coughed itself awake three minutes ago (maybe? maybe ten and I didn’t hear the first several minutes? what is time anyway) and has been sick for between five and eight (million bajillion) days now and looks enough like me that it makes me do absolutely ridiculous things like decide on my own to carry it into bed with me and my lovely wife, knowing full well that it means our night of sleep is effectively over, and now it is 7:15am (at least IT slept for a few hours, we think) and it’s time for me to get up with it to make it breakfast and decide what it’s going to wear today (oh look a Metallica onesie sitting on the rocking chair, didn’t get worn yesterday but I don’t remember how it got there oh wait never mind definitely was worn, looks fine though, on it goes) and into the middle of all this pops a conversation between two characters that needs to take place in Book Five of The Shieldbreaker Saga, coming to your inboxes some time in 2033, and I’m muttering it to myself under my breath to try to preserve it, and of course there’s a few instances of the word “fuck” thrown in there, which means the chaos demon has a new Word of the Day, and my important conversation is quickly lost to the hypothetical ages (or will pop up again at another hilariously inconvenient time), and by the way, you guys, did you know that the wheels on the bus—get this—they go round and round ALL THROUGH THE TOWN and my tiny lookalike revels in reminding me of this very important fact (or drafting Miss Rachel to do it for him over YouTube) while I microwave some blueberries and oatmeal and mash it up with a bit of peanut butter and hope it cools fast enough not to have to stuff it in the freezer between the forgotten heels of several loaves of the bread he likes (fifty-fifty shot, depending on how much patience I have for wheels and busses today) and either way there will be “purples” soon and as soon as I sit down the idea for that conversation is back in my head but of course now I am covered in peanut butter and loath to reach for my phone, it’s fucked enough as it is, even if Ben Franklin’s ghost hasn’t gotten to it yet, and the chaos demon is singing with his mouth full of berries and oatmeal and peanut butter and I lean in and sing along because there’s The Work and then there’s THE WORK, know what I mean, and I’m not worried because I know I’ll figure out how to make that conversation play out the way I need it to. I always do.

I’ll get to it when he’s napping. After I watch that last episode of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

If you want to see what happens when I’m not distracted…

(Know what? No. I’m not going to bothe—oh, fine. Here’s links to buy Book One in paperback and as an e-book. Just in case.)

Alakuz was sure he’d never seen the man under the hood before.

The older man certainly had recognized them, though. Or, at least, knew who they were and what he was doing here.

He looked up at Turan. “How many?”

“Five. Not him, though.”

“You sure?”

Turan raised an eyebrow that Alakuz took to mean, He’s kind of hard to miss, isn’t he? “Yes, I’m sure.”

“And no one saw you arrive or leave.” Turan simply shook his head. “Good. Go set a guard on the door to the tavern.”

“What’s going—”

“Now, please, Ohta. No one comes in.”

Turan sighed, exasperated, and nodded. “Yes, Ohta.”

Alakuz nodded back, then grabbed the heavy sack of coin off of the table in front of him and tossed it over their guest’s head into Turan’s hands. “For your friend.”

“Yes, Ohta.”

—

Kareva, for his part, had instantly recognized the older man who was waiting to see Ersev a few nights earlier.

The night you murdered a loyal captain for threatening to expose your colossal failure, you mean.

He looked down and gritted his teeth, trying to focus on what Alakuz and Turan were saying to each other—

How many holes did you put in Attala, anyway? If this is the man who did for all of our people in the desert, I imagine that’s good for, what, twice or three times as many? You’d better get to it, too, before anyone else figures out who he is…

He heard the door close and looked back up. The older man seemed to be looking at him funny. For the smallest sliver of an instant, Kareva wondered if the man also saw his brother.

Wouldn’t that be something? The specter chuckled. He doesn’t need to see me. He sees your face. He can tell you’re cursed. He can tell you’re completely out of your fucking mind.

“Either of you want to tell me what I’m doing here?” said the older man, trying his very best to stay defiant in the face of whatever he imagined was coming to him.

He has no idea what he’s in for.

Kareva, if only to shut the specter up, stepped forward without any warning and threw his left fist at the jaw of his prisoner with all his might.

The older man toppled over in the chair he was tied to. Kareva was on top of him in an instant.

Yes. Do it. Fucking do it already. Kill this piece of shit.

Kareva felt his right hand sliding towards the knife in his belt, and willed it to stop. He grabbed the back of the chair from behind the man with both of his hands and hauled him back up into a sitting position. Then he crouched down next to him, never taking his eyes off of him.

“We have some questions for you,” he said softly.

—

What Miruz was having the most difficult time with was the indignity of it all—to be double-crossed was one thing, but Kareva and Alakuz must have expected him to be at the tavern to make the delivery, too, when they set their ambush.

Maybe that would have been for the best. It was going to be bad, now. And he was too fucking large not to be conspicuous. Anyone who was anywhere near that goddamned alley would be able to recognize the big fucking oaf who went sprinting down the main street towards the market in the torchlight.

What the fuck were you thinking? Stupid, stupid bastard.

He needed—something. What the fuck was he supposed to do now?

It was this desperate lack of direction that was pulling him towards the Hodrir barracks. If he could at least make sure the rest of the men were in one place before he alerted the warlord to this horrific fuckup, maybe he’d be able to figure out a way out for himself—

He stopped short. The huge front door was wide open.

Fuck.

He leaned forward and poked his head around the door, then walked cautiously through the entrance, still jumpy from his first brush with death today, knees half-bent in case an archer appeared out of nowhere.

But none did.

The villa was deserted. Of course it was.

For a moment, he felt no ground beneath his feet, and his stomach dropped towards his balls just like it had with every move he made that night on the mountainside, and he fervently wished he had been on hand at the tavern to take two quick arrows to the chest and a blade to the throat.

But he was alive. He might as well try to keep himself that way.

If he was going to have any prayer of catching Kareva and Alakuz and their men and pinning them down, he’d need reinforcements.

And thinking two steps behind his quarry wasn’t going to help him, either.

Stupid bastard.

He ran back towards the road, towards the fucking bridge. He’d have to haul ass back to the Guards’ barracks and get himself some help.

And on his way over there he would have to figure out a good reason to be asking.

—

Turan had been trying to hand Olan his gift for a few minutes now.

“It’s important.”

“It’s important that I take your money? Since when?”

“No, you stubborn old goat, it’s important that you know how much I appreciate your help, and that I consider you a friend.”

“And you are my friend as well, Turan son of Toruk. So don’t insult me by trying to pay me for a favor I would do freely.”

Turan groaned in frustration. “Listen to me. I was ordered to give this to you by—”

Olan smirked. “Well then, why didn’t you say so? I thought you were paying me personally. Your bosses’ money, I’ll take, no problem.”

Turan felt his exasperation crest and then disappear as the old man’s smirk turned into a full chuckle. He patted his friend on the shoulder, firmly. “I’m very lucky to have met you, Olan.”

“You’re a good boy, Turan.” Olan patted him back, and then he frowned. “So. There’s going to be trouble.”

Turan nodded sadly. “I think so, yeah.”

—

Deeper within the cul-de-sac behind the tavern, Uskol ul-Aravan sat among his tribesmen, each of them on a burlap sack that held all their respective possessions, supplies, tent poles, a few days of food…everything they’d had in the barracks.

Uskol was worried.

He’d been worried for a few days now.

He had never fully bought into the idea quietly making the rounds through the barracks rumor mill that the Oproz’s screaming nightmares were simply some kind of byproduct of all the killing back on Valtaa. Something about the sounds coming out of those rooms struck him as darkly familiar. There was something more there than just fear or anger or grief.

There was shame in them. Guilt, even.

And this evening Uskol had stood in the shadows in an abandoned building with Turan-Ohta and several others, fired an arrow into the chest of a stranger wearing the warlord’s personal colors, and then cut that man’s throat.

On Kareva’s orders.

And now the tribe was pretty clearly deserting the horde.

He wasn’t going to be the first one to say out loud what it meant, but he knew. It didn’t take a gigantic intuitive leap to put the pieces together.

He looked to his left, to where Antaz ul-Inaz was sitting a few paces away, chin on his fist, chewing on the inside of his lower lip as he stared at the wall of one of the dilapidated buildings that were concealing them. Antaz had been there with Turan too. He noticed Uskol looking over at him and raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment. Uskol nodded a subtle response.

Antaz kept his eyes trained on Uskol, searching his face, clearly trying to find a way to ask if Uskol was thinking what he was thinking. Uskol didn’t look away. He simply nodded again, slower.

Antaz looked down.

Uskol did, too.

There wasn’t any other possible explanation for what they’d just done. How else could the northerners have crossed the Oproz severely enough to warrant this response, without any advanced warning and in the dead of night?

Uskol felt his heart begin to race. He looked around him at the several dozen men in his field of vision, all still in various states of wakefulness as they waited for one of the tavernkeeper’s girls to bring them tea, blissfully ignorant of the end that was upon them. Good for them. He wouldn’t begrudge them a few more hours of something resembling a normal life before they all looked and felt like him for the rest of however long they had left.

—

“The man who delivered you to us told us you were in the desert not too long ago.”

The boy was pacing back and forth in front of Regez, face blank, pale grey eyes seeming to drift in and out of focus.

Miruz was right: there was something unnerving about him.

Regez held still, doing his best to avoid thinking about the drops of blood lazily making their way out of his lip. “The whole horde was in the desert not too long ago. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“The whole horde was south and east of the mountain pass, trying and failing to kill my warriors at Valtaa. You were somewhere else.” The young man stopped in front of him and leaned in close. “You were west of our fortress, you and several hundred others, murdering my tribe’s women and children.”

Regez grimaced as he swallowed some of the adrenaline coursing through him, and the boy saw it.

“And you were in command,” added the taller, darker-skinned one, standing in the far corner of the room.

Regez sized the two of them up quickly, mind racing, looking for an angle, anything that might save him, and came up empty. He was a dead man. The best he could do for himself was end it quickly.

He nodded. “Yes.”

The boy took a step back and glanced at his enforcer, who had not reacted and did not turn now. He remained still, eyes resting on Regez.

Regez noticed the bandage on the taller man’s hand, saw that the flesh around one eye seemed to be darker than the other. The boy was cut, too, and had bruises on his lip and above his eye. And they hadn’t said one word to each other yet. They hadn’t so much looked at each other since that other one had taken Regez’s hood off.

They must have just had it out.

He idly wondered what would have happened if he’d simply punched Ersev in the face the day the horde got back to this miserable city, instead of waiting weeks to talk to him.

“Who rode with you?”

The boy was addressing him again.

“The so-called ‘Prince’s Guards.’” Regez felt the cut on his lip as he scowled. “The miserable pieces of shit that hang around the warlord’s son.”

“And they robbed the bodies when the job was done,” the other man stated, more than asked.

“Yes. They took everything of value they could carry with them. And they’ve been tossing it around at every brothel west of the river since they got home. I’d say I was surprised it took you this long to figure out that something happened, except I know we crossed the bridge a while back. Who gave me up?”

“We are asking the questions,” responded the boy chieftain in a whisper of barely-controlled fury, his hand straying back towards his knife. Regez flashed back to the rocky pass, to Stasin’s corpse, and was absolutely certain the boy had done the envoy entirely by himself.

He was totally mad. As mad as his barbarous gods.

The boy straightened up in front of him, struggling manfully to stay composed. He took a breath and went on. “The man who gave you to us said you were acting on your own initiative.”

“Then he’s a liar.”

“He said the warlord was furious at what you’d done and was giving you to us as an apology.”

Regez felt all his fear drain out of him, replaced by a cold rage. “Fuck the both of them, then. Ersev gave me the command personally. Now kill me and be done with it.”

The taller man shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

—

Zamal looked up and saw Toruk ul-Mikal looking over in his direction. He acknowledged him with a raised eyebrow and a quick nod. Interesting night, eh?

Around them, the mood seemed confused. No one was talking at a regular volume—not that anyone had given any sort of instructions to keep quiet, but it seemed clear enough that an order to clear out of the barracks in the dead of night and march into an alley in the middle of nowhere came with the assumption that attracting attention was a bad idea.

Even their Ohta looked serious. And Limava never looked serious; he would flirt his way through a shield wall.

It was worrisome.

Zamal looked towards the open end of the cul-de-sac, at the frontmost building where Turan-Ohta was keeping watch with a few of his men.

Whoever that man was that Turan and his boys had brought in, he was inside with the Oproz and Alakuz. There was no sound coming from inside the building, either, but Zamal noticed himself waiting to hear a scream at any moment.

The men at the door of the tavern looked like they were having that exact same experience.

—

Turan couldn’t make himself be patient any longer. To hell with orders. Someone had better explain what was happening.

He turned to the men next to him. “Stay here. If a patrol comes through here, kill them and get rid of the bodies. Unless you see that there are too many to kill—then you just drink your tea and act casual. Say you’re Gvelir. Understood?”

His men nodded, nervous and uncomprehending but not about to start asking questions right now.

“Good. I’ll be right back.”

—

“...and before my scout saw the scorpion, he saw the body you strung up there to try to distract us.” Regez had decided rather quickly, if only so he didn’t have to waste time repeating himself, to spare no detail. He didn’t know what good it would do them at this point, but there didn’t seem to be any point to dragging the conversation out.

“Guess it didn’t work,” muttered the darker-skinned one, mostly to himself.

“The warlord didn’t give a shit about Stasin. It wouldn’t have changed our plan at all, except his son is a fool. You know how the saying goes: beware the son of the great man.”

“Uh huh,” muttered the younger one absently.

“Little shit immediately starts talking about how no one can get away with such disrespect, and asks his father for the command, and Ersev fucking gives it to him.” Regez spat, spraying a few drops of blood on the floor with his spittle. “I protested, a little too long and too forcefully, and Ersev gave me the dirty job as punishment.”

“Is that your little way of telling us you didn’t want to kill our people, that you were forced to do it?”

The younger one was looking at him strangely again. Regez shook his head. “Honestly, I could have cared less what happened to them. Whoever strung up the fat man on that rock was sending us a message from you. Ersev said he wanted to send one back, so that no one else in the region would question our might ever again. But it shouldn’t have been my job to deal with them.”

“But it was, and there you were. How far away from the city were they when you caught up to them? A few miles?”

The other one turned his head at that. He looked confused.

“Did the watchmen on the walls send anyone out to try to stop you? Of course not. It wasn’t their affair anyway, was it? So they just stood there and watched.” The boy didn’t seem to be talking to Regez anymore. His pale eyes looked unfocused again. The darker man was staring at him, his confusion clearly turning into outright worry. “They just fucking watched you and your animals slaughter my—”

“Listen. I’m not sure what you’re talking about. There wasn’t any city in sight.”

The boy looked up at Regez again. Whatever had been clouding his eyes before seemed to have vanished. He shook his head as if to clear it and began to walk back and forth between the ends of the little room the three of them were in. Regez went on. “When we caught up to your people, they were camped in low ground between two enormous sand dunes in the middle of the desert, with no shelter and no way to avoid being surrounded. We cut every last one of the warriors down, and then did the women and children.” Regez sighed. “Your men did you proud, though. They killed more of us than we expected them to, that’s for damn sure…”

The younger one was still pacing the room. It wasn’t entirely clear to Regez whether he was even paying attention until he asked again, “And the Khogon gave the order?”

“My answer hasn’t changed since the last time you asked me that question.”

The sharp retort seemed to snap the boy back from wherever he had gone this time. “Quick wit, for a man whose life is in my hands.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway. But yes, the Khogon gave the order. Was it Miruz who gave me to you?”

The younger one looked back at the darker one, who shrugged. “Suppose it was. What is that to you?”

“I taught him everything he knows.” Regez spat on the floor, furious.

The darker one moved in closer. “You’re the big man’s mentor.”

“Huh. The ‘big man.’ That’s all he was when I found him, just big. And stupid, and about to be hanged for killing a few of our warriors in a bar fight. I saved his fucking life. I taught him everything he knows—taught him how to use his head. I taught him how to really use a sword, instead of just swinging it around like a fool. I taught him how to strategize, how to lead men, how to fucking read and write. And now he has my place at the warlord’s right hand. I hope he rots from the inside.” Regez spat a second time. There was still blood in his mouth. “I was supposed to be leading the attack against your men on that mountain. Ersev’s idiot son should have been leading the hunting party after your women and children, like he usually does, and he and the lazy, incompetent fucks who follow him would almost certainly have gotten bored and given up looking for that scorpion after about twenty fucking minutes, and your people would have gotten away—and I would have made sure your warriors all died on that mountain, just like you intended. Instead, Oreik made a mess of everything and got a bunch of our men killed—including my cousin and a few hundred of our kin, by the way—and I had to watch his thugs murder your people.” He looked up at the boy. “If it’s anything to you, I ordered them to make it quick. Most of them obeyed, too.”

The boy hadn’t taken his eyes off Regez since he asked about Miruz. He came closer and sat down across from him at the table. After a moment he said, softly, “I believe you.”

Regez was finding it more difficult to keep his composure. “Alright. We all know you have to kill me. I’d ask you to not draw it out, for my sake and for yours. You would be wise to be gone from here before Miruz or Ersev finds us.”

The boy stared at Regez for a moment. “Are you afraid?”

Regez tensed at the question. “Go to hell.”

“I know you’re not afraid of dying, but I wonder if you’re afraid of looking like a fool. I wonder if you’re afraid of dying with your honor and your reputation dragged through the dirt.” Regez didn’t answer, but his jaw tightened. The boy kept talking. “That’s the way I feel, at least. Obviously we’re all dead if they find us, after the trick we played on Miruz to get you here. I just hate to think I’m going to die having been made a fool of.”

Regez looked down. “That has crossed my mind.”

“I wonder if you’re not more angry than you are afraid.”

Regez looked back up. “I’m definitely more angry than afraid.”

“So if I gave you a choice?”

“What choice?”

The boy leaned in. The look on his face was different now, thoughtful, calculating. “If you want me to kill you right now, if you tell me you can be of no more use to me and that you’d rather die a loyal subordinate to the man who just handed you over, say the word, and I’ll give you a quick, decent warrior’s death. But one way or the other, I don’t intend for you to be the only one who pays for this. So if you wanted a chance to restore your pride before your death, to get some measure of justice…especially given how much you know about the horde’s inner workings...”

Regez snorted. “How would you ever be able to trust me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said the younger man. “All I can say is, it would surprise me to find out that you’ve lied about anything yet. You didn’t try to bargain with us or deny you were there, or pretend your role was smaller than it was. I think you knew you were dead and decided to die an honest man.” He stood up. “And obviously, if I’m wrong…” He shrugged his shoulders and grimaced. “But we don’t need to go into that. I’m inclined to trust you. So, if I gave you the choice?”

—

When Alakuz opened the door, Turan was standing just outside it, shaking with rage. “He’s going to let him live?”

Alakuz put an arm around him and walked them back into the hallway, trying to keep his voice quiet. “Listen to me. We need to clear out of Ikune tonight. Go back out to the alley—”

“Is it true?”

“Pick three men and have them start walking casually towards the northern stables to see how many guards—”

“Alakuz!”

“We don’t have time for this right now, Ohta.”

“He’s going to let that bastard live! All of our people are dead, and he’s letting him LIVE? HOW CAN YOU FOLL—”

Alakuz grabbed Turan by both shoulders and slammed him against the wall. He put one forearm lightly across the younger man’s throat, pressing just enough to let him know what would happen if he struggled. “Listen to me. The whole tribe will hear what has happened, from the Oproz’s own lips, and we will decide as a tribe what to do about it. But if anyone hears a word of it before we are clear of this city and anyone who might pursue us, I will know who told them, and I will personally see to it that you don’t reach the halls of the gods.” He paused for a second and took a deep breath. “Miruz wasn’t in the tavern, right? We have to assume he knows something’s wrong by now and he’s rounding up the rest of the warlord’s men to come find us. If we don’t get out of Ikune right now, we will all be dead by morning. And then no one will get any justice. I swear to you, everything will come out once we’re a safe distance from here. And then, if the men decide Kareva-Oproz has to die, he will not hide from it.”

He lifted his forearm from across Turan’s throat. Turan stood still, staring hatefully at him. “They all died for nothing.”

Alakuz held his gaze. “If you don’t get hold of yourself, so will the rest of us.” He took a step away from Turan. “Are you ready to do your job, Ohta?”

—

Miruz was the last person Ulav expected to see pounding on his door in the middle of the night.

“Well, you look fucking terrible. Been on one?”

“Ran here. We have a problem.”

Ulav raised his eyebrows. “A problem?”

“Across the river.” Miruz did, indeed, look terrible, like he was about to be sick. Or already had been. “Saw a few of our men about to be set on in an alley by a mob of…whoever the fuck is angry with us over there.” He gestured vaguely towards where Ulav imagined he assumed the Old City was relative to where he was standing.

“Our men?”

“They were wearing our cloaks.”

Shit. “How many against them?”

“Enough that they’re in trouble. I’d have gone for local backup but I didn’t trust the barbarians to handle it. I figured this needed to be our own people. And I didn’t want to sound an alarm and risk getting the whole city riled up unless—”

“Alright. Fine. That makes sense, I guess. What do you need?”

“How many men can you wake up right now?”

—

Turan walked a pace or two behind the northerner, fingers tickling the hilt of his knife, staring at the man’s shoulders and registering every breath he took, each one another insult to the memory of Turan’s men, his brother.

His brother’s children.

Everyone he’d ever known.

His fingers tightened around the knife handle and he willed them to relax for the moment. There would be call for that soon enough.

The same ten men he’d already led on one killing errand tonight were walking several paces behind him in silence with the bows and quivers their puppeteers had gifted them slung over their shoulders. They were out in the open, walking in pairs behind this bastard who’d apparently helped the Oproz come up with this whole plan.

Out in the fucking open!

This was madness. If anyone was looking for them—

Well, they were dead men anyway.

If they did get caught, Turan would at least make sure to spill this bastard’s guts into the street before they could—

“Act casual, would you please?” came a whisper from in front of him. “I can hear you grinding your fucking teeth from up here.” The northerner looked back at him. “Now, listen. The men guarding that stable don’t know you. You’re going to have to let me approach alone.”

“Not a fucking chance,” Turan snorted.

The man stopped walking. “Alright. You don’t trust me. You don’t have to. The horses in there are your only chance of getting far enough away by sun up, and I’m hoping these guards don’t know I’m supposed to be arrested or dead already. That’s the best I can do for you. You want to ruin your best chance to get your men out of here, that’s on your head.”

Turan willed his knife-hand to relax again.

—

Four or five hundred men on foot, all half-drunk or half-asleep, certainly wouldn’t be enough to take on the Hodrir. Not by themselves, at least. Miruz knew that.

But maybe those bodies in Ersev’s colors would be enough to get someone who wasn’t him to call for the bells to toll out an emergency.

Those bells would wake everybody up. The Aelar and the wall patrols would be on high alert and shut down the exits, and certainly a few more tribes’ worth of warriors would be over the river—awake, fully armed, and on horseback—soon after that.

And it would wake up that other tribe of barbarians, too—and their chief would gladly help him get rid of Kareva. Nobody could have missed the looks that boy shot his way.

So he’d have to lead these sleepy bastards back to the Ruby, have them ‘discover’ the bodies, and hope he wasn’t too late.

Not the cleanest plan. But not bad, in the heat of the moment. Maybe he’d make it out of this in one piece, if a few things broke the right way.

—

“Hey! Who’s on duty here?” shouted Regez as they reached the stables. He heard the shuffling as the angry young men who’d captured him earlier this evening fanned out behind him in the darkness.

“Who’s asking?” came a shouted reply from behind the stable gate.

“Regez of Led, here on the orders of your Khogon to inspect the facility.”

He heard a murmured “Oh, shit” and some stumbling and then the gate swung open. One man hurried out to greet him. “Evening, Lord,” the guard said. “Sorry. Wasn’t expecting anyone.”

“Clearly,” Regez snarled. “There’s just one of you here?”

“No, no of course not,” stammered the young man. He nearly fell over himself backpedaling towards the gate before he caught himself and turned around. “Boys!” he shouted. “Out front and at attention, right fucking now!”

Regez kept his breathing even as half a dozen more young men hurried out from behind the gate and joined their squad leader. Two more stragglers came last, one struggling to fasten his billowing cloak as he ran to catch up with his fellows.

The leader looked to his left to check his count, then turned and saluted Regez smartly. “That’s all of us, Lord.”

Regez smiled thinly. “Very well.” He stepped forward, keeping his right arm tucked behind his back to conceal the knife in his hand until the very last moment.

—

Turan heard a gasp and saw the man in front of the northerner collapse, seeming to pull the northerner down on top of him. It was, he admitted, a clever way to get oneself out of the line of fire.

The other eight Pohyor guards were down with arrows in them before any of them had a chance to even react.

The northerner stood and wiped his hands on the cape of the man he’d killed, looked back in Turan’s general direction, and walked past the line of bodies and into the stables without a word. He left the borrowed knife sticking out of the man he’d killed.

Turan patted Uskol ul-Aravan on the shoulder. “Alright. Go get everyone.” The rest of the tribe weren’t far behind; they were simply waiting for confirmation that the path to the stables was clear before they moved out into the open.

“Yes, Ohta.”

—

Even in the half-dark of the torchlight, Uron-Ravat would have sworn that he’d be able to see (or hear, for that matter) signs of a mob if there was one.

It’s not like a proper mob would have dispersed on their own, and there was no sign of any other Pohyor detachments on the street—not at the bridge plaza, not in the next hundreds of yards on the main road, not even as they got closer to the old stone buildings that surrounded the market square in this part of town.

No blood, nothing scattered or broken, nothing.

And Miruz seemed to be a bit too sure of where he was going. Did he just turn into a fucking alley? Even for someone who bragged about knowing every tavern and wine-sink in both halves of the city, this seemed a little bit too precise…

“Fuck!” he heard someone shout as he dismounted and made to walk into the alley after the big man. “Who is that?”

“They’re wearing the Khogon’s colors,” came another voice from the quickly forming crowd at the front door of a deserted-looking building a few yards ahead of him.

“Damn it.” Uron finally located Miruz as the big man turned and pounded a fist on the doorframe. “We’re too late.”

Uron watched him look around then nod as if to himself. It was a clever performance, he had to admit. Miruz probably had the rest of his audience fooled.

“Alright. One of you, go back to the plaza, get them to ring the fucking bells. If they’re out here killing Warlord’s Guards, then—” and then he wheeled around, mouth still half-open, and looked up.

Uron turned his head too, back the way they came, towards the sound of the bells in the Bridge Plaza already ringing.

A faint whiff of smoke hit his nostrils a moment later.

—

From his vantage point atop the Eastern Gate, the Khogon of the Aelar could instantly tell where the flames were coming from.

“Dear God.” Aravun turned to Pavul, the man who’d come to get him when he first saw the fire. “Go wake up the rest of the tribe. Get everyone mounted up and over there now.”

“Yes, Khogon!”

“Take the main road through the Eastern Market square and then turn right at the plaza. It’s faster.”

“Forgive me, Khogon. Those alleys will be a nightmare in the dark, with the horses? We should just follow the wall around.”

“Is that the fastest route?”

“It’s the one we know best, Khogon.”

“Find. But time is of the essence. And bring every bucket you can find.”

“Yes, Khogon. And have everyone armed, I assume?”

“Someone’s either just stolen a whole lot of horses or set them on fire, Pavul. Yes, fucking armed!”

—

Winded as he was, Miruz was still a few paces ahead of the rest of his detachment when they reached the blaze.

The gate was swinging open on its stone foundation, and all the wood and straw inside the enormous courtyard was burning merrily. In front of the gate lay nine bodies—one sporting a knife left wedged in his throat, and the other eight with arrows sticking out of their corpses.

“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED!?” came a shout from a few yards away. Miruz turned to see Ovrud-Ravat, another Guards lieutenant, swaying where he stood with his hands on top of his head, unable to process the grievous loss his men just took.

Miruz grabbed him and shook him. “Where are you posted?”

“What?” Ovrud looked dazed.

“Where are you posted?”

“The, uh…the Gap. We’ve been on the Gap for a few days.”

Miruz’s guts dropped into his boots again. “You left the Gap open?”

“We saw the fire, and…God above, man, that’s our fucking horses—”

Miruz let him go, and he stumbled and fell on his hands and knees and retched a few times. Miruz couldn’t tell whether anything was coming out. After a moment Ovrud started to cry.

Miruz turned away and lifted his hands to his own head, breathing heavily, worn out from all the sprinting and puking and improvising and panicking, and he began to wonder how easy it would be for him to get to the Gap before anyone noticed he was gone—

“What do we do, Lord?”

A few of the Guards were standing behind him. He closed his eyes gently for a moment, took a deep breath, and turned around.

“Have everyone canvas the neighborhood for buckets, then we get to the river and grab enough water to put the fucking fire out.”

“Yes, Lord.”

Behind him he heard the hooves of the first wave of responders entering the square—the Aelar coming from the East Gate, if he had to guess. The Hodrir would have an abundant choice of unguarded paths out of Silta.

They were likely hiding in the abandoned neighborhoods east of here. It reminded him of what he would have done in his thieving days back in Toskalne: set fire to the place he’d robbed to draw everyone past him and his little crew, hide until the coast was clear, and then walk away.

It should’ve been harder to pull off with a few hundred men and horses involved. But there was so much uninhabited space out there—not to mention all the gaps along those walls, because obviously the priests needed any extra stone they could find to build their fancy new temple to compete with all the others in this, the holiest of all the southern cities.

Holiest, indeed. It was fucking full of holes.

And, of course, no one was even looking for the Hodrir but him.

In any case, them disappearing into the ether was probably ever so slightly better for his survival chances at this point, the difference between vanishingly small and nonexistent.

—

It was quiet out here. Too fucking quiet.

Mikal ul-Zalan hadn’t spent much time outside after sunset these past six years. Sure, there were the nights where he had command of the watch, and the occasional social obligation foisted on him by someone too close or important to turn down, but for the most part, he avoided it.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been avoiding it. Maybe he should have listened to that part of himself that screamed in his ear to be ready for the next time.

There was always a next time.

And he wasn’t ready for whatever this was. Not tonight.

He had no idea what they were doing out here, no idea where the fuck young Turan had led them, no idea why it was happening—except for that something must have gone horribly fucking wrong for the boy chieftain to order them to desert the city and his new masters without any warning. After all, the last time everything had shifted this suddenly—

He shuddered. The only thing he could hear out here besides the bells were his men’s footsteps and the horses’ partially muffled hooves. It was practically pitch black (only one torch per ten men, were the marching orders), and now they had stopped for some reason, and if they were walking into an ambush, they’d never see the enemy coming.

He turned around abruptly. The men at the rear weren’t organized. They weren’t paying enough attention.

It’d be just like last time.

He heard something rustle, and when he looked in that direction he could swear he saw someone disappear behind one of the empty huts they’d just passed.

Fuck, not again—

“Shield wall, rear ranks!” he whispered as harshly as he could. No one paid him any heed.

There was another rustling sound on the other side of his field of vision, another enemy just missed. They were fucking toying with him. He’d show them.

He let go of his horse’s reins and walked purposefully towards the very end of the line, drew his sword, lifted his shield, and braced himself.

Come get me, you fucking murderous cunts, sneaking fucking cowards, you think you can—

Suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder and he jumped and whirled around and into a crouch, ready to lunge.

“Mikal.”

He stopped dead.

It was Georz.

“You alright?”

“Yeah. Just thought I heard something,” he muttered. “Can’t be too careful.”

Georz nodded slowly. “Alright.”

Mikal shoved his sword back into its scabbard. “I’m fine, Georz.”

“Okay.”

“I just wanted to make sure—” he stopped himself.

Georz nodded again and patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah.”

—

At the front of the line, Alakuz waited with Kareva, the two of them flanking their guest to ward off anyone getting too curious.

Turan had found the main road a few minutes earlier and gone to make sure the coast was clear. Regez had been confident it would be—no Pohyor would be disciplined enough to hold position on foot if their horses were threatened.

Turan reappeared and beckoned them forward. Alakuz rode forward alone to meet him.

“We’re alright?”

“Yes, Ohta.”

“You’re sure there’s no one out there?” Alakuz asked.

Turan nodded. “They didn’t even bother closing the gate.”

“Good.” Alakuz lowered his voice. “Earlier on, did our guest…”

“Yeah. He gave a good account of himself. Didn’t hesitate.”

“Alright. And I meant what I said earlier. It will all come out when we’re well clear of this place.”

Turan spat. “Good then. Let’s go.”

IN THE NEXT CHAPTER (available Sunday, March 8): The truth finally comes out. And then, at least in Ikune, it goes back in.

READ BACK: The Dead and the Dying | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17

We’re back! Join us this Thursday night to watch (the first half of) another glorious hours-long shitshow of a table read—this one featuring the voices (and faces) of author , (if he can get his camera to work this time), , , and .

Link to Part 1 Live (Thursday 2/26, 8:30pm EST)

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Tom, Fitz, Haly, Emily, Slater, and the whole team here at Fiction is Culture, Unincorporated.

(If you feel like you are MISSING VITAL CONTEXT vis à vis THE FIRST BOOK and you SOMEHOW STILL HAVEN’T READ IT and are instead CONTINUING to read this book? …I guess that’s cool. Good on you. Thanks for your attention. But I would be remiss not to remind you that you can get Book One right here in paperback or as a Barnes & Noble e-book.)

“…and, well, uh…yeah. That’s that. I hope you believe me when I tell you, the Khogon is absolutely furious—fucking beside himself, really, that one of his people would’ve done this without a direct order from him.”

Miruz looked back and forth between Kareva and Alakuz, waiting for either of them to say something. The poor bastards looked absolutely stunned.

After a few moments, Miruz pressed on. “He’s particularly angry because he knows that’s a massive breach of trust with you, Kareva.” he said, nodding in the younger barbarian’s direction. “He values you highly. I’ve been told to make it very clear that he deeply, deeply regrets what happened. He would tell you himself, but he can’t be seen visiting a tribal chieftain to beg forgiveness for fucking anything, let alone handing over one of his officers to that chieftain’s mercy. Politics. You understand.”

The boy gave the slightest of nods in response. He seemed barely aware that the conversation was even taking place. Miruz turned back to Alakuz, who was at least staring directly at him.

“Anyway. I’ve been authorized to hand him over to you, under the one condition that it’s not made into a spectacle. He has to disappear. And beyond that—shit, whatever else the man can do to properly compensate you for this fucking catastrophe? Consider it handled. Better billet than this, for starters. Pay increase, within some reasonable limits. We can help you find new women for your boys, too, replace what’s been lost.” He leaned forward a little more, trying to impress the seriousness of the offer on his audience. “This doesn’t have to be the end of you.”

The silence held for a moment longer, then Alakuz cleared his throat, clearly trying to keep some vestige of composure in the face of an overwhelming moment. Miruz felt a twinge of pity for the two of them.

“What’s his name?” Alakuz finally asked.

“Regez. Regez of Led.”

Alakuz scratched his chin. “I’m not even entirely sure I’d recognize him to speak to. Who is he close with? Any particular tribal leaders? Any higher-ups among the Guards? The warlord’s son?”

Miruz snorted. “Oreik? God, no. They hate each other’s guts…” He was about to leave it at that, but something about Alakuz’s facial expression made him decide to hedge. “But some of Oreik’s men do raid with him, from time to time. I suppose the prospect of easy plunder tends to make people forget their differences.”

Alakuz nodded subtly. “Certain types of people, at least…”

He was buying it.

Miruz nodded back firmly, keeping his face as grim and serious as he could. “Exactly.”

“So you’ll bring him to us.”

Miruz had practically forgotten Kareva was there. He hadn’t moved or spoken since Miruz started talking. The boy’s words were flat, quiet, without any hint of…anything, really.

“Yes. Not here, though. Some place where it won’t come back on any of us.”

“Alright.” The boy looked down again. He looked dazed.

“There’s a tavern between here and the River Plaza that we can use.” Alakuz tapped his forefinger against his jaw, absently and arrhythmically, as he spoke. “It’s in an alley, off the main road to the Eastern Market. The former owners abandoned it a few days ago. No one will raise an alarm. The whole street is deserted. And we will take care to keep your friend quiet while we do what needs to be done.”

Miruz felt his stomach sink. “It needs to be done quickly.”

Alakuz raised an eyebrow. “Is that another condition?”

Miruz raised both hands to try to placate him. “Consider it a request. From both of us. Since we’re coming to you in good faith. Quickly and quietly, if you please.”

“And he disappears.”

“No trace.”

Alakuz looked over at his chieftain, who seemed to give no indication either way, then turned back to Miruz and nodded. “Tonight at the third bell.”

“Alright. What’s the place called?”

“The Split Ruby. I can send someone back with you to show you, if you want.”

“No need. I’ll find it.” He turned to go. When he got to the door he turned back. “Open or closed?”

—

“Closed.” Kareva’s voice was barely above a whisper.

As the big man swung the door shut behind him, Alakuz turned his head towards his protégé just in time to see him pull his knife out of his belt and swing the point up towards his throat.

Before he even knew he was doing it, Alakuz was gripping the knife by its blade. He could feel it cutting into his palm as he tried to pull it away from Kareva, who had not stopped trying to pull it back towards his throat.

He pulled harder, ignoring the pain, and suddenly the two of them were face to face and Alakuz swung his free hand across and slapped Kareva as hard as he could without a windup. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he whispered. “Are you really this weak? You’d rather die by your own hand than face your failure and your shame? I have looked after you since your father crawled into the cave he lived in for the last six years of his life. I raised you! How could you have turned out no better than him? Just another fucking coward—“

Alakuz saw Kareva’s eyes go blank a split-second before his left hand, balled into a fist, crashed into Alakuz’s jaw. Stars exploded in front of his eyes and his grip loosened on the knife involuntarily, even as his own free hand curled into a fist and shot upwards towards Kareva’s face. He made solid contact, and suddenly the knife was airborne and Alakuz was kicking his left leg viciously at Kareva’s ankle to take advantage of his temporary imbalance.

Kareva toppled backwards with the impact, twisting to try to fall on his hands instead of his back, and suddenly his own left leg shot out and hit Alakuz square in the chest. Alakuz felt all the air leave his body as he fell backwards and saw Kareva scrambling towards him on all fours as he hit the floor.

Kareva clambered up until he was straddling Alakuz’s chest and hit him again, throwing all his weight behind the punch. Alakuz’s head snapped to the side from the impact, and he felt blood on his cheek, and saw Kareva rearing back to hit him again. He kicked up with his right knee to hit Kareva in the ribs, breaking his momentum, and grabbed him by the shoulders and tossed him to the floor.

They grappled for position for a few moments, trading blows whenever a hand came free, and then Kareva hit him in the ribs again, and Alakuz wheezed painfully and his grip slackened. Kareva smashed him twice in the face with his forearm, and reached forward beyond his head, and before Alakuz could wonder what the hell Kareva was doing, he saw the flash of metal in Kareva’s hand again and then the knife was pressed against his throat.

And then he felt it stop.

Alakuz went very still. He looked up at Kareva again, into his eyes, and saw that they were no longer blank. Whatever demon lived inside the boy had clearly taken control for a moment there—but Kareva was back now.

He was still furious, but he was himself, and if he was going to kill Alakuz, he was going to have to decide to do it on his own.

Alakuz raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, challenging the boy to make up his mind. The pressure on his throat slowly lifted, and a second later he heard the knife clatter to the floor.

“You’re not the one I have to kill.” Kareva’s gaze shifted down to the side. “You should clean that.”

Alakuz looked to his right and saw blood pooling below his right hand. He lifted his arm up for a closer look as Kareva rolled off of him.

“I’m fine.”

Kareva’s back was turned. He wasn’t listening. “There’s an iron in the fire.”

Alakuz shrugged and rolled over to push himself to his feet. He gingerly grabbed the iron rod with his left hand and shoved it into the coals at the bottom of the hearth. He flexed his bleeding right hand again. The cut was long, but not too deep. He could move his fingers, make a fist. Kareva’s first punch had loosened his grip on the blade just enough to save him from being crippled. Of course. I’m not getting out of serving him that fucking easily.

They stayed silent for a while, Alakuz holding the now-glowing fire iron, Kareva pacing.

Then Alakuz heard the pacing stop.

“You probably shouldn’t call my father a coward again.”

He gritted his teeth, readying himself for the fire.

“We both know what he was. What he did to you.”

“Even so.”

“Alright.”

Alakuz pressed the orange part of the rod into his palm, heard it hiss, and willed himself to stay quiet as it burned him. He pulled his hand away after several seconds and exhaled hard. “Miruz was lying.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. But what he told us wasn’t the whole story.” He reached for a scrap of cloth to tie around his hand.

—

“I can’t do that, Lord. I’ll lose my job—I’ll be whipped! Or worse!”

Miruz smiled disarmingly. “Come on, Hadani. You know I won’t let any of that happen to you. I just need five of them. Just for a few hours.”

“Five! They don’t have their own?”

“These men are new. We’re still waiting on the fucking cloth merchants to get their heads out of their asses. I’ll have them back to you before you even miss them.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Absolutely. On my life.” He pulled the bag of coins out from behind his back and jingled them gently. “Come on, love. Help me out?”

The old woman scowled and reached towards the bag, and he grinned and held it back. “All yours, as soon as I have my extra cloaks.”

He watched her amble towards the back door, out to the yard of the laundry house to where the Warlords Guards’ cloaks hung to dry before being redistributed to the men. Regez had made it an order of policy that all of Ersev’s men always look impeccable on patrol in his capital city, and while it sometimes felt like an expensive inconvenience, Miruz had to admit that consistently having a newly cleaned cloak every few days did something for the men’s morale.

And it made his plan slightly more workable tonight, too.

The crone came back with the cloaks under her arm, eyes glued to the sack of gold and silver in his hand. “Well?” she snapped, hungrily?

He handed the bag over with a smile. “Thank you. You’re the best.” The old woman thrust the cloaks into his hands and turned around to open her prize without so much as a second look at the man she’d just helped steal from their lord and master.

Miruz’s hands were vice-tight around her throat before she could react. He snapped her neck, then lifted her a few inches off the ground to keep her twitching legs from accidentally stomping the hard wooden floor and drawing attention from anyone who might be nearby. He kept her dangling there until he knew she was dead, grimacing and holding her farther away from him as her bowels voided in her last moments.

He stooped down to pluck the bag of coins out of her lifeless hands. Sorry, love. Nothing personal. He considered hiding her body somewhere but decided against it; there were enough other things to deal with tonight and people her age dropped dead often enough that, with no blood at the scene, maybe no one would even suspect foul play.

He picked the cloaks up from the floor where he’d gently placed them, brushed the dust off of the bottom one, rolled them up, and put them under his arm as he strolled casually out the door.

The man he was expecting was already waiting for him in the appointed alley a few buildings over. From the look of it, this was the closest any of them would ever come to being in the Warlord’s Guard. “Alright. Here’s five of them. Wear these when you take him. And put a hood over his head, like the Guards do. No one except us knows who the prisoner is. He needs to be over the river at the Split Ruby by the third bell. Now, you’ve been to every whorehouse on both sides of the river so I’m sure I don’t have to tell you where it is, right?”

His accomplice’s chuckle was a bit too effortful for Miruz’s liking. He cocked his head at him. “Something wrong, Emran?”

“No, Lord.”

“Good. Inside the Ruby there will be two men waiting to murder the prisoner. Who they are is not important to you. Let them do it, then you and your men kill them, too. Make it look like the three of them quarrelled over something. And for the love of all that is holy, get no fucking blood on these cloaks. They will be found tomorrow, innocently misplaced by some idiot servant, and no one will be any the wiser. Understood?”

Emran swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes, Lord.”

“Good. Meet me at the other place, the one right next to the Plaza—”

“The Red River.”

“Yeah. Meet me there when it’s done. Just you.”

“Yes, Lord. And, uh—”

“Yes, Emran, you and I are even when you’re done. I haven’t forgotten.”

“Alright, Lord.”

Miruz turned away without another word and strode off in the opposite direction.

Given that they’d already have their swords out as part of their “guard duty,” he had to imagine Emran and four other men would be enough to quickly get the better of Alakuz and Kareva in their current state, especially when they weren’t expecting an attack.

And Emran would be easy enough to get rid of when he was done with his part of the job.

This would work.

It had fucking better work. It was the only thing he could think of to do that would get himself completely out of harm’s way and out from under any suspicion. There might be some more collateral damage afterwards, sure. The Hodrir, probably, would have to be dealt with.

But that was tomorrow’s problem.

—

Emran-Ravat didn’t like this at all.

He’d been dreading a moment like this ever since Miruz appeared at the tavern he was drinking at a few weeks ago, pissed over the result of the tribal council that had chosen someone else to replace Bhorda as chieftain.

“Hello, my friend! Glad to see you still in one piece.”

Emran didn’t even ask how Miruz knew where to find him: he didn’t have to. Everyone knew where the Hakkar drank.

“Miruz of fucking Toskalne! The man who braved the cliffside. What a pleasure. Let me buy you a few drinks? Rosi!” he’d shouted to the girl who’d been serving him. “This man saved my life. His drinks are on me, as long as he’s here. Fucking whenever he’s here.”

“You know what they say: Every close friendship starts with a few drinks.” Miruz smiled, and Emran knew he would never be done repaying his debt.

It had been a long few weeks since then. And expensive. But then Miruz had showed up earlier this evening and told him to sober up, that he needed a big favor. That there was an important task to accomplish.

“Whatever you need,” he’d said before he could think of anything but getting out from under.

And as Miruz told him what he had to do—what the warlord needed him to do, actually, which struck him dumb enough to allow him to listen closely—he regretted it immediately.

“This doesn’t…sound like it’s coming from the Khogon,” he said, because he couldn’t think of any better way to ask Miruz if he was out of his fucking mind.

The big man leaned in closer and patted him on the shoulder. “This one can’t come from the man himself. It’s too sensitive a thing. He has a political problem that he really doesn’t want to be seen solving on his own.”

That made sense, actually. Emran shook his head. “Fucking politics.”

“Don’t get me started.”

“So who are we…you know…?”

Miruz grimaced and whispered the name, and Emran felt his stomach sink through the floor.

“No.” He shook his head. “No, he can’t be.”

Miruz leaned in a little closer. “Can’t be what?”

Emran felt Miruz’s grip on his shoulder tighten. It was too late to back out. “I mean...the Khogon can’t be involved in this one. I take your point.”

Miruz relaxed his grip instantly. “Good.” He patted Emran on the back. “And this squares us, obviously. You’ll never see me again if you don’t want to.”

“And the Khogon?”

“He won’t know who you are. You’re safest that way.”

Emran spat. “Fucking politics.”

Miruz nodded emphatically. “Fucking politics.”

And so, here he was, with four men he trusted, standing outside the house of Regez of fucking Led, dressed like Warlord’s Guards sent to arrest him.

Fucking politics. If he made it through this night in one piece, he’d drink to the good health of Ridda of the Hakkar every day for the rest of his life.

—

Regez didn’t recognize the five men at the door, but he knew the color of their cloaks well enough, and he was already drunk enough and feeling sorry enough for himself that he didn’t question it.

It made sense that Ersev wouldn’t send men he knew on this errand. Too many Guards owed him favors.

He steadied himself on the railing of his front stairway and walked down the three steps slowly, to avoid embarrassing himself ahead of time on his way to whatever the fuck humiliating end was in store for him at the hands of his oldest friend.

Fucking Ersev. There was no need for this bullshit. Having these children tie his hands was bad enough, but when they put the hood over his head, Regez’s anger overtook him for a second, and he tried to break free and walk himself.

He stumbled and one of his escorts caught him and pinned his arms to his sides, and the party silently made its way…out of the compound?

Fuck.

He began running scenarios, as best he could through the fuzz of the wine and the fear he felt creeping down his back. Maybe it was a mock execution? They’d done a few of those over the past few years, scared a few wayward loudmouthed malcontents back onto the straight and narrow. It certainly worked. A man would bargain with himself, with God, with whatever old gods he really believed in, and might very well make the most of a second chance to be a good, loyal soldier. Maybe Ersev just wanted Regez to fear him?

That didn’t seem likely. They’d known each other too long, and they both knew (even if Ersev was too fucking stubborn to say so) that Regez was right. He’d never do something this drastic just to force Regez to grovel to that shitstain he sired.

And so in that case, it seemed he was going to have him killed instead. Fine. But why the fuck would Ersev feel the need to drag him this far outside the palace compound to do it?

He shivered. The wind had picked up—and was that water?

They were at the bridge.

They were going into Silta.

He shivered again, and this time he knew the wind had nothing to do with it.

—

“Is this it?” one of the men behind Emran asked, trying to keep his voice down.

Emran looked up at the faded painting above the tavern’s door: in the torchlight, he could just about make out the form of the naked woman with her ass and legs stretching perpendicularly over the top of the doorframe.

The titular precious pink ‘gem’ was not visible in the painting. Emran had a fleeting memory that maybe it used to be. Too many fucking priests in this city. Even in this part of town…

Not that there was anybody around right now.

He looked back towards his men. “Yeah. This is it.” From somewhere behind him, he heard a clanging sound. Third bell. It was time. The two men Regez had told him to look out for must already be inside.

He pushed the door slightly open and poked his head inside. The front room was empty, but a torch was lit. That was something. “Delivery?” he called.

“In the back,” called a voice in an unfamiliar accent.

He pulled his head back outside and nodded to his men. “Let’s go.”

Emran gave the condemned man in the hood a conciliatory pat on the shoulder as the boys led him through the door: Lord Regez had not made any attempt to escape, had not struggled or refused to keep walking. Shit, he hadn’t made a sound since they left the palace compound. I hope I can be that strong when it’s my fucking time.

He walked in last and closed the door, then heard a grunt from in front of him and another to his left before two arrows hit him in the chest and knocked him backwards.

In the dimness of the single torchlight, he saw the rest of his men fall to the ground too, and then he felt a knife draw across his throat and back through it.

Miruz is going to have a hard time explaining all the blood, he thought to himself, then felt a moment’s annoyance that even in death he couldn’t escape the bastard.

—

Regez heard the zip of arrows and the grunts and stumbles of his escorts falling wounded to the floor, and he threw himself onto the floor with them to try to avoid being shot.

Then he heard the attackers approach their victims and, shortly thereafter, the gurgle of throat-cut men around him, and when it registered that they hadn’t approached him yet he cursed himself silently. They knew who he was. They wanted him alive.

—

Turan and his ten archers had been waiting in the tavern, standing in the shadows along the walls, since the second bell rang.

Kareva and Alakuz had called him into the Oproz’s chamber earlier in the evening, just before sundown. The room was in shambles, which wasn’t particularly surprising to Turan given all the noises he and the boys had been hearing the past few days. But the chieftain and his mentor were a wreck as well: bruised faces, split lips, a bloody bandage around Alakuz’s right hand—and the two of them hadn’t so much as looked at each other the whole time Turan was in the room.

And now this man, whoever he was.

“There will be a man with a hood over his head. We need to talk to him. He’s the only one who leaves the tavern alive.” Those were the only details in Alakuz’s instructions. Kareva hadn’t uttered a single fucking word.

The ambush was easy enough to set up, even without more detail. There was enough space that lighting the one torch at the far end of the room gave his men all the cover they needed. And he didn’t give a shit who the five dead men were, really, except for that they were wearing the Khogon’s cloaks, which meant trouble.

He continued to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach as he walked to the center of the room where the hooded man lay huddled, covered in the blood of his escort but unharmed.

He nudged the man in the ribs with his foot.

“Get up.”

—

The Red River’s wine was fucking terrible. Even for a tavern east of the river, where you could never really hope for anything beyond passable, this was absolutely awful.

Miruz kept drinking anyway, trying to quiet the part of himself that still had half a fucking conscience. It was louder than he wanted it to be, now that he was just about out of danger.

It kept bringing him back to that night a few years ago, a hundred miles or so north of here, to a different shitty tavern with similarly disgusting wine, to some asshole in a similar dark green cloak talking shit and some of the local boys he used to run with taking offense, to waking up in a cellar with a splitting headache and manacles on his ankles and wrists and the quiet man sitting in the corner during the interrogation, the one who chuckled quietly to himself when Miruz bragged about killing three or four of the northern soldiers himself. The one who was waiting for him at the front door instead of the executioners the next morning.

How would you like to live long enough to make something of yourself? he’d asked, a smirk playing on his lips.

Miruz poured himself another cup and threw it back in one quaff. This was a terrible way to repay that man’s kindness.

He hoped it was over by now.

He’d tried, at the end, to at least convince Alakuz to make it quick. That was something. He hoped he’d convinced him to just kill his prisoner and get it over with—shit, for that matter, he just hoped he had convinced Alakuz that Regez was acting on his own initiative.

It was always kind of hard to tell what the man was thinking.

There was something about the way he had looked at Miruz when he was asking about who Regez associated with that didn’t sit quite right…

He could hear the big bell tolling again from the tower in the western plaza, across the river. Was that fourth already? What could be taking that fool Emran so long?

The bell rang a fifth time.

Fuck.

Miruz was instantly out the door and walking down the main road as casually as he could.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This was bad either way. If he was wrong, he’d have to find a way to kill all five of his accomplices to keep his secret.

And if he was right—

He broke into a run before he could think to stop himself, and once he started it no longer mattered if anyone saw him. He skidded to a halt at the graffito of the ruby painted on one of the stones in the wall, turned into the alleyway and slammed into the closed door to the abandoned tavern—something heavy was blocking it from opening all the way.

He got low and pushed the door further open—and found himself staring at the hem of a cloak peeking out from under the door.

It was green.

And then it wasn’t anymore, as the combination of the terrible wine and the ill-advised sprint and the realization of how completely fucked he was produced the evening’s only predictable result.

—

Regez no longer had any idea what direction he was walking in.

That wasn’t the worst of it, obviously. The worst of it was that he’d let himself believe, for a split second, that he might be getting rescued. He’d even thrown himself to the ground to avoid getting shot.

Fucking embarrassing.

He had heard somebody say something once about how the mind does funny things to a person who knows they’re about to die. Everyone had their own definition of funny, he guessed.

They had been walking for another two hours now: he could hear the fifth bell ringing off in the distance—from farther away than the fourth had sounded, for sure—but after a couple dozen assorted lefts and rights it was anyone’s guess where the hell they were.

Which made it all the more certain that his captors were going to kill him.

Fine. So the fuck be it.

But couldn’t they have gotten it over with before they dragged him wherever the fuck they were dragging him?

The column came to a halt. In front of him, someone knocked on a door once, twice, then twice more in quick succession. The door squeaked open and Regez was on the move again. His feet found a wooden floor. He breathed in deep and smelled bland stew and weak tea, and then another door was squeaking open ahead of him and he was shoved to his knees.

The hood came off, and Regez saw the looks on the faces of the two strangers standing over him and immediately understood why he was still alive. A single snort of laughter escaped him, forcing him to accept that, if he looked past how hideously painful the last night of his life was likely to be, maybe this whole thing was the tiniest little bit funny.

IN THE NEXT CHAPTER (available Sunday, March 1): Miruz doubles down. Regez tells the truth. The Hodrir wait for answers from their chieftain.

READ BACK: The Dead and the Dying | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

(If you still haven’t read The Shieldbreaker, Book One: The Last of the Etela, it is available here in paperback and here as an e-book.)

Oreik lurched into blurry, hung over wakefulness.

Where the hell was he? He squinted against the sunlight streaming through the curtained window. He saw silk and smelled perfume and his hands reached out and found skin that was too smooth to be his. Someone giggled.

Alright. So that mystery was solved, at least. The boys had left him to sleep this one off in the brothel. It might be time to cut back on his drinking a bit. He needed to get his head right if he ever wanted to get back into his father’s good graces; it might be time to let a few other things go, too, a few grudges—

His eyes snapped open.

“Kasad!” he croaked, too quietly for anyone outside the room to hear.

The someone who’d giggled turned over. “Morning!”

“Where are my—”

“They’re in the other rooms, love. I promise you, my friends took good, good care of them.”

“Oh. Okay.” Something about how friendly this girl was acting towards him made him deeply uneasy about the amount he must have spent. “Good. I need to—”

“Oh, no! So soon? Amani and I were looking forward to having more fun with you before you left.”

From behind him, another girl moaned her sleepy agreement.

“I need to talk to Kasad.”

The friendly girl pouted. “Oh, all right. I’ll have someone go get him.”

“Good.” Hopefully it wasn’t too late. “When’s the next market day?”

“It’s today, love.”

He looked at her steadily for a second, and then everything started swirling in front of him as last night’s wine started to rise.

“Bucket.”

“Huh?”

“Bucket. Bucket!”

—

In the five days since he unceremoniously dumped the body of an Ohta of the Hodrir into the river that split this miserable city in two, condemning that man never to reach the gods or see his family again in the process, Alakuz had yet to speak a word.

He’d grunted acknowledgments to the Ohtar when they came to him with daily reports and nodded curtly at a few salutes from the men during the few brief intervals when he was not in his quarters, and that was it.

He had not seen Kareva.

That was for the best.

He was willing to bet no one else had, either, except probably the local girl who brought his meals, and given the nature of the sounds coming from behind the chieftain’s door the past few nights, that was also for the best. It would not do for the men to see him the way he was that night: a snivelling child riddled with guilt and shame, shivering from the river water Alakuz had doused him with to get the blood of that good, loyal, doomed man off of his face…

Gods. His head hurt; he was clenching his teeth hard enough to crack them. He slapped himself in the face twice, lightly, just to relax his jaw and help him focus.

From the moment he had stumbled on the scene, there was never any question of what he would do about it. He’d sworn an oath, after all. Whether he liked it or not, he was going to protect Kareva.

And that was why he was avoiding Kareva right now: he didn’t trust himself not to kill the boy, and not just out of anger.

Alakuz had tried very fucking hard for a very long time not to think about the demon within his protégé. He had wilfully ignored his suspicions about the Oproz for years—mostly, when it came right down to it, out of affection. Kareva was a good boy: he was a quick and willing student, and he never showed anyone any disrespect or acted entitled to rule simply because he was his father’s son. Oaths and loyalties aside, Alakuz liked him. He was proud of him. He was a warrior, a man of honor, in no small measure because Alakuz had turned him into one.

But it was long past time for Alakuz to come to terms with the fact that ever since his brother’s death, Kareva had been more than just ‘a little strange.’ Something terrifying lurked behind those pale grey eyes—something even Alakuz was more than just wary of. It was why he’d taken it upon himself to teach the boy how to rein himself in when he was angry. Developing that bit of discipline had worked wonders for Alakuz without making him any less formidable.

It had seemed to be working for Kareva, too.

But when he slaughtered that northerner outside the gates, the thing must have escaped his control. Why else would Kareva have kept stabbing the fat man for so long after he was already dead?

And that was how it must have gone for Attala as well, with the several gashes in his throat and the gruesome, gaping chasm that had once been his torso…

Alakuz swallowed hard, forcing down his disgust and fury, forcing himself to make his mind still and think.

It still didn’t make sense.

The envoy made sense. He had given more than enough provocation. And that man from Dazvar-Muz that Kareva gutted in the desert? Sure. Fine. Alakuz would have had him beaten or whipped instead, but he definitely had something coming to him. It wasn’t completely out of nowhere.

But Attala? He’d been steadfastly in the Oproz’s camp—the fact that they were able to make peace after Valtaa was almost entirely due to the fact that Attala sided with Kareva and helped back Mikal down.

What would have made Kareva kill him?

There was only one reason he could think of. In truth, he was just looking for any way to rule it out. He’d been desperate to think of any other possible explanation since the moment he saw Attala’s body.

But there wasn’t one, was there?

And at that moment, the ring Rivi was wearing on their first night together popped back into his mind.

—

“Ohta, a word?”

“What?” Turan hadn’t slept well.

“A few of us…”

“Out with it.”

“Well, Ohta, I mean, we’re actually all out here, if you’d...”

Turan groped blindly for the cloak he’d thrown over the chair nearest the door. There was a chill in the air now that he hadn’t been ready for when the tribe went north. Maybe that was what was bothering everyone so much these past few days.

He walked out into the courtyard, straight into a throng of his men from Nev—and several dozen men from a few assorted other companies. Were they even separate companies anymore? Half of them didn’t have a commander. They ought to try to clarify that. Maybe when Attala got back…

“What is it, gentlemen?”

Lukaz ul-Zalan, who wasn’t of Nev but seemed to have assumed some sort of informal leadership role, spoke up. “Ohta, we’re all wondering…um…what’s going on with the Oproz?”

Antaz ul-Inaz piped up next. “We’ve been hearing the screaming from out here.”

“We’re a little worried, is all,” interjected Uskol ul-Aravan.

Lukaz raised his eyebrows and tilted his head towards Uskol. “That’s how bad it is, Ohta. The chief’s got this one out of his stupor. Next thing, who knows? He might actually wake the fucking dead!”

“Enough,” came a growl from behind Turan. Georz ul-Zimion had emerged from the officers’ hall.

Lukaz shut up in a hurry and snapped into a hasty salute. The rest of the assembled men followed his lead.

“I will say this one time: there is to be absolutely no discussion of the Oproz’s mood. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Ohta!”

“Good. Dismissed.”

The men dispersed, slowly, half-heartedly. Turan turned back to where the older captain was standing. Georz’s disciplinarian snarl slowly receded. “Morning, Ohta.”

“Morning, Ohta,” replied Turan. “Georz…It’s not good, is it?”

Georz took a step forward and put a paternal arm around Turan. He lowered his voice. “I’m not surprised he’s having bad dreams. Valtaa was a bad one. We’re all struggling with it. But it’s not to be talked about—least of all with the men.” He lowered his voice even further. “Eventually, we’re going to have to fight another battle. We all know it. And talking about it often makes a man question whether he can go through it again.” He patted Turan hard on the shoulder. “Training needs to be a bastard today. Tire them out, stop them thinking too hard. You up to it, or would you like me to—”

Turan chuckled darkly. “No, no. I’ve got it. And thanks.” He looked down. “I didn’t know how I should handle that. Lucky you were there.”

“Don’t mention it.”

There was an ear-splitting crash in the building behind them, followed by a howl that barely sounded human.

Georz turned slowly to Turan.

“Get Alakuz.”

Turan nodded. “Yeah.”

The front door of the officers’ building opened and Alakuz emerged with murder in his eyes. He made no eye contact with either of them as he made a beeline for the front gate.

Georz’s eyes widened as he tilted his head towards the departing Ra’an Ohtar. Well? Get him!

Turan jogged after Alakuz as he made his way out of the barracks. He caught up feet from the exit and stepped in front of him.

“Ohta.”

“Not now.”

“Where are you going?”

“Private business.”

“What kind of pri—”

“Private business. Let me pass.”

“The Oproz seems to be in a bad way, Ohta. Is now really the time to—”

“To what, Ohta?” Alakuz’s eyes glinted dangerously.

Turan backed down. “Nothing. None of my business, of course.”

“Good. You and Georz have command until I get back.”

“Yes, Ohta.”

Alakuz leaned back through the villa’s heavy door. “Unless he comes out and gives an order, of course.”

“Of course, Ohta.”

Turan shook his head as the heavy wooden door slammed behind Alakuz. What the fuck was with everybody today?

—

“So, you’re out.”

“Yes.” Regez was sitting in Berez’s house again. He would have been there sooner, but he’d spent the last few days drunk and surly in his apartments—not his initial plan of action, but one that became inevitable once the warlord’s servants came to collect his intelligence papers, at the warlord’s request, to help ‘the next First Sword’ get acclimated. He’d known instantly the men came from Miruz, who was playing a dangerous game using the warlord’s name already.

He should have left the greedy upstart piece of shit to rot in Toskalne. And he should have had a son of his own, passed on his wisdom to someone fucking worthy of it.

“How do we fix it?” his nephew asked, snapping him somewhat back into focus.

“We don’t,” said Regez. “Bastard questioned my loyalty.”

“You have to fix it, Uncle. Apologize. Tell him you’re sure Oreik was doing his best.”

“Grovel to him.”

“Yes.”

Regez let out a belch, grimacing as some of last night’s wine followed the air out of his stomach and lapped lazily at the bottom of his throat. He swallowed hard and then let the scowl return to his face. “I’d rather let him fucking kill me.”

“I don’t know what else you expect me to tell you to do.”

Regez looked hard into Berez’s face. He looked a lot like Oruz did, when they were young. “So you would like me to simply take this insulting demotion in stride, keep my head down, and hope for the best?”

“Yes. Absolutely. And not just because I’d rather you not get yourself killed. We’ve got our hold on the tribe to consider. The Led came down here on your say-so, and after all the men we lost in the desert, I don’t know how I’ll be able to stay in charge if we fall further out of favor.”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right, Uncle. You and my father taught me well.” The boy reached out and patted Regez on the shoulder. “He’s your oldest friend. He’ll be ready to talk to you if you don’t keep poking at this.”

“I suppose.”

Berez leaned in, intently. “And do you really expect Oreik to live long enough to succeed him? A man that stupid?”

Regez chuckled ruefully. If he was really honest with himself, maybe having some distance between himself and the horde’s decision-makers wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to him right now. Let someone else try to deal with planning for the succession.

“Alright.”

“That being said…what are you going to do about Miruz?”

Regez scratched his chin with his left hand and smiled thinly. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

—

The thing that never ceased to surprise Miruz was how excruciatingly boring it was to be a great man’s advisor.

His life at Regez’s right hand had been, outside of campaign season, pretty dull. It hadn’t occurred to him that Regez’s job might involve even more tedium than his.

He’d spent the last five days in long, slow-moving meetings with the warlord’s seemingly endless list of new political clients, rich men and religious leaders from the East and the West (not to mention their own, the most prominent Brothers of the G’Va, who, without fail, would show up unannounced mere minutes after any meeting with a foreign priest, exhorting the warlord to give their ideological enemies no comfort but the final one), representatives from every local trade group, and all of the warlord’s other key collaborators among the conquered population.

The gist of every meeting was that the supplicant, under the pretext of helping the warlord raise money to fund the horde’s winter in Ikune, would attempt to pass off as much of his tax bill onto someone else who, from his vantage, could more easily afford to part with it.

There was, for instance, Onekos Gavaral the wool merchant, who had come to visit the palace three times today: the first to suggest a different potential donor of woolcloth for winter cloaks (some easterner who had, it turned out, fled the city some time ago), then to suggest another alternative (a rival and neighbor who’d actually put Gavaral’s name back into contention less than an hour earlier), and then finally to announce that he had done some calculations and, happily for everyone involved, the horde would actually only need about two-thirds of the cloth the warlord was demanding.

Miruz had, at that point, his best moment of the day—perhaps his only good moment—reminding poor Gavaral that the cloaks for the warriors guarding the fully-exposed wall gaps would need to be significantly thicker. Gavaral had blushed and stammered an apology for his oversight and promised the full delivery by the full moon, and Ersev had smirked and nodded his approval at Miruz.

It seemed he did indeed have it in him to do this job.

Then Gavaral had asked the two of them to pass along his fondest wishes to Regez. The warlord’s smirk had curdled, and a few awkward seconds passed, and eventually Miruz forced himself to smile and promise Gavaral he would do just that. Ersev kept his eyes trained on him the whole time. Miruz had no fucking idea what he was thinking.

Right after Gavaral left the room, the warlord called a halt for the day and Miruz all but leapt for the door.

Only Ersev’s voice had stopped him: “Bright and early tomorrow.”

“Absolutely, Mightiness.”

He turned onto his usual path around the market square on his way back to the Guards’ barracks where he was still living until his new post became official.

The side streets were deserted, he noticed; not even one merchant or customer passed him on their way out of the square. Everything must have closed up a little early today. Maybe they had a slower crowd than usual—though he hoped not. That wouldn’t be a particularly cheerful omen for the winter.

Or maybe those meetings really had taken all fucking day and it was just later in the afternoon than he imagined. It was close enough to dusk that that was a possibility. He put it out of his mind. There were more immediate worries on the horizon.

He was still trying to think of what could have been going through the warlord’s mind at that moment, in the room with that pathetic excuse for a schemer, when he was interrupted by an arrow whistling past his head.

He froze as it came to a shuddering halt in the wooden doorframe of the building just in front of him.

The fletching pointed upwards from its final resting place, rustling lightly in the cool evening air. Mocking him.

Pointing upwards.

He whipped his head around towards the buildings across the road just in time to see a man on one of the rooftops pulling his bowstring back for another try.

He fell flat. The arrow hit the pavement near him and bounced off harmlessly to the side, and he pushed himself up quickly as he could and took off at a run towards a side street he knew would keep him out of sight for long enough to escape this cowardly bastard.

He chuckled crazily as he abruptly turned the corner out of the shooter’s sightline, stumbled slightly on a barrel someone had left out against the wall, and was back at full speed in no time at all and racing down the side street towards safety when a third arrow hit him in the meat of his upper arm.

He slipped and went down in a heap, breaking most of the arrow off on the street as he fell. He looked at his arm: this arrow (what was left of it, anyway) was sticking out pretty straight.

There was another assassin on the street.

His instincts told him to get up and run again, but he willed himself to lie still. The man would be on his way over to finish the job. Miruz needed him to be complacent.

He moaned. He was in a bit of pain, he supposed; he could at least feel the arrow now, through the adrenaline. But he really needed to sell this. He smiled to himself as he heard cautious footsteps, then moaned again.

The footsteps got closer. Miruz rolled halfway over in mock agony. “Oh, God!”

He heard a chuckle and a knife being drawn, and when the assassin had gotten close enough for Miruz to hear him muttering something about “not so fucking tough,” he rolled all the way over into a crouch in one fluid motion and launched himself at the overconfident fool’s midsection.

It was over before it began.

The knife clattered to the ground, and Miruz was on top of his enemy, holding him by the throat with one hand and by the balls with the other. He relaxed both hands ever so slightly so the other man could breathe. “Obviously, we don’t have much time, so we will have to do this quickly. Who sent you?”

The assailant squirmed but said nothing.

Miruz grinned wolfishly, then gritted his teeth and squeezed his intact left hand into a fist.

The assassin’s eyes registered surprise, then agony—and then there was a soft, wet popping sound, and a soundless shriek followed.

Miruz relaxed his now-irrelevant grip and lifted his left hand to cover his victim’s mouth in case he found his voice. He leaned in slightly closer.

“I will ask you exactly one more time. Who sent you?”

He pulled his hand away.

The assassin made as if to say something and then fell into a dead faint.

Miruz growled in frustration, snapped the man’s neck in one swift motion, and stood up. He looked around to see if anyone else was following him, and hurried back towards the center of town and the safety of the Guards’ barracks, leaving the dead man where he lay.

—

Rivi was on all fours on her bed, smirking back over her shoulder and wiggling her ass in the direction of one of her regulars, a cloth merchant named Sivran who was notoriously straitlaced and immaculate in his daily life—and whom she delighted in reducing to a quivering mess of frustration and desire before she let him touch her—when the door burst open.

Alakuz strode in with a look on his face that Rivi had seen a few times in her life, and her first instinct, rather than to cover herself, was to reach for the bejewelled knife on the table at the foot of her bed.

“What is the meaning of this?” Sivran sputtered.

“Get out,” Alakuz said quietly, not even looking at him.

Rivi was sure she was dead.

“Come any closer and I swear, I’ll—” and she stopped talking as she realized she didn’t know how she could stop him if he wanted to kill her. She pointed the little dagger at him, holding it away from her with both arms out straight, trying to create distance between them. It was the only thing she could think to do.

Alakuz, for his part, stood stock still as, behind him, the terrified and humiliated Sivran gathered his robes and hurried out of the room. Even when the door closed, he didn’t move, eyes focused on her face. She wasn’t entirely sure he’d noticed she even had a weapon.

“I need to talk to you.”

Rivi’s mouth dropped open. “You need to talk to me? You burst in here—”

He cut her off. “The ring I saw you wearing the first night we met.”

“What about it?”

“Where did you get it?”

“A friend.”

“I need a name.” He took a step closer, and she scooted backwards on her mattress to the wall and raised the dagger slightly higher. He snorted. “You’re joking, right? If I was here for that you’d be dead already. I need a name.”

“I don’t have one.”

He snarled and then looked down for a second and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “That garnet belonged to my people.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. I need a name.”

“I don’t have one.”

He took another step towards the bed and his hand was on her arm before she could raise the dagger back up. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? That ring was with my tribe’s women and children. It was part of the toll they were supposed to pay for safe passage in—” he shook his head. “If it’s here, and not down south, then the man who gave it to you...I want to talk to him.”

He smiled, ever so slightly.

Rivi shivered. “I don’t remember his name. Please.”

He looked into her face, probing for any sign of dishonesty, and thankfully didn’t invent one that wasn’t there. “Alright.” He let her arm go and stepped away. “Do you remember when you got it? Do you remember who was here that night?”

“It was a long night. The parade was that day, when the army came back to the city. The warlord’s son and his friends were here, celebrating their victory, I guess? I didn’t get a lot of details, but—”

“The warlord’s son.”

“Yes.”

“And his retainers.”

“There must have been a hundred of them here. They bought the entire house out for the night. Vemma was terrified they would run him out of business.”

“The warlord’s son and his retainers, and one of them had that ring and gave it to you as payment.”

“Yes. That’s what I just told you!”

“Alright.”

He turned to go. Rivi stood, grabbed the nearest heavy thing she could find and, before she could stop herself, hurled it in his direction.

It bounced off his shoulder and shattered against the wall. He spun back around, the terrifying, murderous little smile back on his face, and she burst into tears.

He froze.

“I’m sorry.” He took another step closer and said it again, quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She looked up. The monster was gone.

For now.

She sniffed, and set her jaw. “Don’t ever come back here.”

He didn’t move for a moment, then nodded. “Alright. That’s probably for the best.”

The knife fell from her nerveless fingers as he left the room, closing the door far more quietly than he’d opened it, and she cried until there weren’t any tears left in her.

—

Miruz gritted his teeth as the short, squat barber-surgeon pulled the small, red-hot blade out of the wound in his arm and wrapped it in linen.

“Change the bandage every day,” the little man said as he stood up to go.

“Wait.”

Miruz stood up too. He loomed over his guest, reaching into his pockets for a few extra gold coins. “Not a word about this visit to anyone, if you please,” he said with barely concealed menace as he dropped them into the barber-surgeon’s palm one at a time.

“That wouldn’t come from me. What you boys do in your off hours isn’t any of my business.”

“Some drunk moron was playing with his bow on the street and missed.”

“I didn’t ask,” spat the barber surgeon.

Miruz sighed. “Alright. Thank you. Travel safe.” He let the rest of the coins—a goodly sum, and well worth the silence it was buying—fall into the surgeon’s hand, and he turned back to the jug of wine on his desk.

His mind was racing, trying to put too many pieces together at once.

The shooter on the rooftop got away. That was inevitable; he was never going to be able to catch him. But that meant that whoever ordered him killed must know by now that it didn’t go as planned.

Whoever. Right. He shook his head ruefully. Who else could it be? Who else was close enough to him to know his routine and powerful enough to get an entire marketplace cleared on his say-so? And who else had a good enough reason?

And of course, having taken that step, there was no way Regez would stop now.

Miruz sighed. He would have been more than happy to leave well enough alone if Regez had simply accepted the new order of things, and someday, if the opportunity permitted, he might have even tried to mend fences.

That was a naive thought. Childish, really. Regez was a ruthless killer in his own right, after all, and proud, too.

This could only end one way.

And that being said, simply waylaying Regez and ending him would not be an option. However angry the warlord was at his old friend, whoever killed Regez would soon wish he was dead, too.

He grimaced. His arm was throbbing, and he clenched his fists against the pain, and felt the absence of his missing fingers more keenly than usual as he squeezed—and then he chuckled, and the chuckle grew into a fit of incredulous, panicked laughter at the sheer madness of the solution that had just presented itself.

—

Makan Alabar was tantalizingly close.

Kareva was walking among the crowd of refugees. He could see the walls beginning to materialize out of the desert sand, and not a moment too soon.

He hadn’t seen them yet, but he knew they were coming.

He could hear the thunder of hooves. He could hear the people around him begin to panic as they heard it too and realized what it meant.

He turned towards the city and sprinted towards the city walls, screaming “Follow me! We’re almost there!” He ran for what seemed like forever, but the walls grew no bigger in his sight, and the hooves sounded louder and louder, and behind him he heard the wailing begin.

He reached for his weapons and realized that they were nowhere to be found, just as he saw the first horsemen materialize out of the sand at the rear of the column—

Then he was back at Kalaa Ukruv’r, sitting at the foot of his father’s bed, staring at the corpse the priestesses had just finished preparing to be burned. It was wrapped from head to toe in clean white linen, just as it should be.

Except for a spot of blood near the corpse’s mouth.

That wasn’t right. Kareva stood to go get someone to have it fixed, but as he took a step away, the body’s right arm shot up and took hold of his arm and wrenched him back down to sit on the bed.

Kareva, unable to resist, felt his gaze pulled towards the corpse’s face. The blood around the mouth was spreading because the mouth was stretching.

The body was grinning at him through the cloth.

It wasn’t his father.

Kareva felt himself pulled closer, ever closer, and heard the low chuckle, and knew he would not be able to stop himself from screaming—

He was back on top of Valtaa, alone.

He looked to his left, to his right, and it was only when he turned around and felt his boot squelch into something wet that he realized where everyone else had gone.

He standing on top of a pile of bodies. He knew it even before he looked down and saw them.

He felt, more than saw, the sun beginning to go down. It was getting cold, and the sky was beginning to go dark, and there were no funeral pyres in sight. None of these warriors would ever get to see the gods if they were still here when night fell.

Not that you have to be worried about that, right? A different voice was in his ear now. A woman’s voice.

He looked directly below him and saw Sivridi, the last Daughter of Vei, eyes opened wide in death, skull partially caved in by a random combatant’s boot, teeth shattered within the gruesome smile frozen across her bloodied lips.

You were right. I got exactly what I wanted.

Kareva broke into a sprint back towards the cave at the back of the mountain where all the supplies were, looking for wood, for oil, for anything that would make a fire. Behind him the sky continued to darken and the wind began to pick up, and he begged Povod to relent for just long enough for him to get a fire going.

He groped wildly for flint and tinder and felt a rush of exultant hope as they found his hands. Then he turned and sprinted back towards the exit of the cave—

And saw only one body.

The envoy’s corpse stood directly in front of the rock formation that led to the path to Kalaa Ukruv’r. His flesh and insides were gone, taken completely off the skeleton by carrion birds, yet it was unmistakeably him, and he stood upright without any support.

Slowly, his left arm began to move upward from his side, and his left hand curled into a fist, save one finger.

It stayed out, just like the arm, angled away from the rest of the skeleton but still angled downward.

It was pointing at the scorpion carving.

The envoy’s head turned to face Kareva. Was it possible for a skeleton to smile? In Kareva’s limited previous experience with skeletons, they weren’t supposed to be able to point, either—or taunt someone, for that matter.

He drew his sword, walked up to the envoy, lifted the blade up behind him and brought it down in a vicious overhead arc straight into the grinning skull.

He saw the blade shatter, and a hunk of sharp metal flying towards his eyes, and he didn’t even have time to flinch before—

He found himself standing alone on top of an enormous, unfamiliar wall, staring out into the sand.

He was in Makan Alabar.

He’d made it. Maybe they had all made it this time.

He heard a bell toll from somewhere to his right, and when he turned he saw a detachment of spear-warriors focused on a dust cloud forming out in the near distance.

He squinted into the rising sun and saw hundreds of people on foot, hurrying towards the wall he was positioned on. The dust cloud was coming from behind them.

He strained to make out any faces, any small detail that might tell him it wasn’t his people, that maybe they were safely within the walls and this was some other caravan of refugees about to be ridden down. He begged for it to be anyone else.

Then the horses appeared out of the sand, and the screaming began.

Kareva raced towards the soldiers stationed on the wall.

“You have to help them,” he gasped when he made it to where the first guard was standing.

The man cocked his head as if he hadn’t understood.

“Please, help me! Those are my people down there. We have to drive away those horsemen.”

The man smiled pleasantly, then shook his head and shrugged. Sorry, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.

A stiff breeze picked up and sprayed the watchers on the wall with a mist of blood flecked with grains of sand. Below them, the screaming got louder, filled the air completely. Kareva found himself unable to hear his own voice as he begged for his people’s lives.

“You have to help me! You have to help me stop them! WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!”

He shoved the guard in front of him out of frustration, willing to try anything to shake the man out of his apathy. The guard stumbled, and then his smile disappeared, and suddenly all the guards’ spears were pointing at him.

Instinct forced Kareva’s hand.

He drew his dagger, and felt half a dozen spear blades slam into his torso at once, and he gasped as he dropped his weapon—

And a little knife clattered onto a wooden table.

“Come on, sweet boy, you’ve got to learn to hold that the right way!” chided a muffled but reassuring voice from his right side.

He turned his head and was surprised when he had to look up as well. Looming over him was a blurry feminine figure. The only clearly visible feature was its long, dark, shining hair, but it emanated warmth and love.

He smiled, and the blurry figure laughed lightly and touched his shoulder. “Come on, pick it back up!”

He reached out gingerly and reacted with shock to his tiny, childlike hand in front of his face. He looked left and took in the sight of the Kogon in his prime, tall and severe-looking, but when his father looked back at him there was subdued joy in his eyes. Next to him sat a boy who was not quite of age yet who smirked at his halting efforts.

“How do you expect to fight if you can’t even cut your own meat, yereka?”

“Let him be, Varyta. He will learn,” admonished the muffled voice next to him.

The Kogon leaned forward. “The one thing you must always do is hold onto your knife, my son. You must not let it fall.”

“Will the gods be angry with me?” Kareva heard himself ask. His voice was a child’s voice.

“Not tonight. But you must not drop it again, for they won’t always be so forgiving.” He smiled at Kareva, his eyes twinkling with a little bit of mischief at the idea of the gods concerning themselves with the knife-skills of a little boy. “Don’t hold it so tightly. Allow your fingers and wrist to adjust themselves as they need to.”

Kareva lifted the knife back up and made a point to hold it more loosely in his grip. It felt like he’d been holding it all his life.

His father leaned back, satisfied. “Better. Now, use it.”

The door burst open. Metan strode into the dining room, with Alakuz walking quietly in his wake.

“Matavuz, we have a problem.”

The warmth emanating from next to Kareva was suddenly gone. He looked to his right to see what had happened to her. The figure was still there, but even blurrier than she was before and seemingly shrunken in stature, as if she were hiding herself from the men at the table.

Varyta-Kogon looked at his first sword. “What is it?”

“The women and children are gone. None of our men can find them anywhere.”

The High King leaned back in his seat. “I see.”

Everyone was silent. Metan and Alakuz looked at each other quickly, then both turned their gaze back to the head of the table.

“Well, I don’t know why you’re telling me,” said Varyta-Kogon. “This is his problem.” He gestured in Kareva’s direction.

Metan and Alakuz stared at the Kogon for a moment, then burst out laughing. Varyta-Kogon smirked and turned his eyes back down to his meal.

Varyta the Younger made eye contact with Kareva across the table. He no longer looked eleven. When he smiled, there was blood on his lips—

And then the dining room was gone, replaced by sand.

Kareva felt the hot sun bearing down on him and grimaced. He looked around and saw he was back among the caravan. The young priestess who had sacrificed Rakili was kneeling with another woman in front of a little girl. The mother was sobbing, rocking back and forth. The little girl was not moving.

Kareva came over to kneel with them, across from the body, and when she noticed his presence the young priestess looked up at him and smiled sadly. “Fifth one today. The young ones aren’t used to travelling like this.”

Kareva held out a hand to the sobbing woman. “I’m so sorry.”

The woman shrank back from him, then abruptly turned herself completely around and was sick in the sand.

The priestess looked down at the little girl again, then back up at Kareva. “How many more days?”

Kareva was keenly, painfully aware that he had no idea where they were. He did his best to put on a brave face. “It can’t be long now.”

The caravan trudged on in the blistering daylight. Kareva found himself waiting for the sun to move and give them any confirmation that they were moving in the right direction, since the city was nowhere in sight.

The sun never changed position, and on they walked.

Kareva busied himself wandering from group to group, offering support wherever he could, and got used to seeing the fear and the frustration and the thirst in one pair of eyes after another as they met his.

He found himself next to the young priestess again, kneeling over another body. It was the mother this time. No words passed between them. Kareva could tell the priestess knew better now than to ask him, of all people, how close they were to safety.

Now he was at the front of the column again, with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. He felt cracks in the skin around his mouth and nothing but sand at the back of his throat.

They weren’t going to make it.

He looked behind him and saw what was left of the caravan: barely a dozen people, tottering along the path he’d just walked. No more wagons, no more water. Just sand all around them, and the sun above them.

One of the last survivors toppled over, and Kareva ran back to help.

It was the priestess. The reproach shone in her sightless gaze as she stared through him towards her death.

It can’t be long now.

Kareva sank to his knees and clasped his hands together in prayer to the gods or whatever was out there. Please, save them. Let there be some water somewhere. I will do anything, give anything, for enough water—

It was raining, and he was alone on a stone street by a river, both hands clasped around the handle of a knife.

Oh, fuck.

He looked down into the shredded chest cavity of Attala ul-Marak and saw that the point of his knife was still buried deep in his victim’s spine. He wrenched his hands back and forth, pulled up with as much strength as he could muster through his horror.

The knife stayed where it was.

Kareva hung his head and groaned. Then he heard the soft splash of footsteps in the rain behind him. He turned, knowing who it was, praying for it to be anyone else.

Alakuz stood stock still, transfixed at the sight in front of him.

Kareva said nothing.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

Then Alakuz shook his head ever so slightly, as if a veil had been lifted and he was seeing clearly for the first time in his entire life.

“I never asked for this.”

He turned and walked back the way he had come.

Kareva stared at his receding form and whispered, “Please. Please come back. I’m sorry. I can’t d—”

His muttered pleas were interrupted, rather abruptly, by two wet, slimy hands clamping down unthinkably hard around his throat.

Attala was awake, but not alive, certainly, and probably not even himself: his eyes were black all the way through and his face stayed slack even as the muscles in his arms twitched with the effort of avenging himself. The gash in his throat that had actually killed him was still open, but no blood was coming out anymore. He clearly had none left to spill.

Kareva couldn’t think of anything to do but keep trying to pull his knife out of Attala’s spine. He tried again and again to work the blade loose as everything darkened in front of him.

What are you going to do with a knife, anyway? You can’t kill a dead man. And you can’t hide from—

Kareva gasped as he caught his breath. It was still pitch black, but the horrible dead hands were gone from his neck, and that was something, anyhow.

The darkness was suddenly broken by the light from a flaming arrow streaking overhead. Another arrow followed in quick succession.

He was on top of the mountain again, in the place where he kept watch overnight between the two main Pohyor assaults. There were no torches, though, and no one else was with him. The stars seemed to be gone as well: the arrows were the only source of light he could account for. He stood and walked to the edge of the summit to look down at the enemy camp, and saw nothing but black sand.

When he turned back around, she was there.

Another arrow appeared in the sky as if fired from nowhere; it flew over his position, casting its dim light, then disappeared into the void again. Sivridi stood before him, tall and angular and so very alive. Instead of her usual jerkin and trousers, she wore a black robe Kareva recognized as his. It was tied closed around her waist; she wore nothing beneath it. Her hair was unbound and cascaded down almost to her waist. Her eyes glowed dark blue in the arrow light as she walked slowly towards him.

He shivered, but not with fear.

When she was two steps from him, she stopped.

“You saved us,” she whispered. She lunged across the last distance between them and kissed him.

He kissed her back.

She threw her arms around his neck, and her body melted into his, her breasts pressing up against his chest as he put one hand behind her head and one on the small of her back. He let that hand slide down towards her hip and then down further to the firm, muscular ass below it, further still to the back of her thigh. She broke the kiss for an instant and looked into his eyes, grinning as she felt him swelling up against her, and then pulled him closer to her, kissed him harder, and then they were intertwined on the ground and she was pushing him down, pinning his back to the rock, and she was untying her robe as she climbed on top of him, a look on her face of something more violent and animalistic than joy—

The horse he was riding was at full gallop, and the city was visible in the distance. Finally.

All he could hear was the thundering of hooves. They would make Makan Alabar today. Filled to bursting with exhilaration, he let out a scream.

All the riders behind him let out the same scream.

And then they were over the dunes, and he saw a dust cloud kicked up in front of him and above him and heard new screams, different screams, and he knew what was about to happen even before he saw who was screaming.

No.

He reached behind his back for his sword and freed it, swinging it in vicious, gleeful circles over his head as he continued to keen.

You can’t.

He saw the first group of stragglers break away from the rest of the column and scurry off to the side, trying to climb back up over the dunes and away from the hunters. He grinned and rode them down himself, chopping downward with his sword once, twice, a third time, feeling the blood spray across his face, hearing bones crunch as his horse trampled someone underfoot.

He screamed his victory to the sky—

He was still screaming when he heard the pounding at the door.

He looked around, wildly. The room looked like a battleground. The chairs had all been knocked over, as had everything that was on the table when he went to bed. How long had he been asleep? The fire was still going; he could have lit himself on fire. Maybe that would have woken him up sooner.

The pounding started again. “Oproz?”

Alakuz.

A new flood of shame overwhelmed him as he scrambled to pick up anything he could on his way to the door.

“One minute, damn it! I’m coming.”

—

Alakuz was just about at the point of pounding on the door again when it opened and Kareva appeared behind it, bleary-eyed and slightly hunched over. He motioned Alakuz in, avoiding eye contact the entire way back into the room.

Alakuz sat down in one of the chairs next to the table. He didn’t wait for Kareva to take the other. “We have a problem.”

“I know.”

“Why did you kill him?”

Kareva looked awful. “I didn’t kill him.”

Alakuz rolled his eyes. “Don’t try that with me. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“No, no, that’s not what I—there wasn’t any honor in it, is what…” he looked up into Alakuz’s face. “I murdered him. I snuck up behind him as he was walking away from me and cut his throat. He wasn’t even armed, I don’t think.”

“And all the stab wounds afterwards?”

Kareva shuddered. “I honestly don’t even remember it clearly. I lost control. Next thing I knew I was carrying him towards the bridge, and that was where you found us.”

Alakuz sighed and looked down, willing himself to stay calm. “Why?”

“I had to keep him quiet.”

“Makan Alabar?”

“They weren’t there.” A tear ran down Kareva’s cheek. “They didn’t make it.”

Alakuz had thought he was prepared to hear it, but now he felt his guts sink into his feet as his worst fears were confirmed. He took two steps towards Kareva, fists clenched, then stopped, whirled to his left, grabbed at the nearest object to him—the chair he had just vacated—and made to pick it up and throw it. Then his strength seemed to all ebb away, and all he could do was sink back down into it. His head fell into his hands, and he dug into his scalp with his fingernails, shuddering with the effort it took to keep himself from screaming. Then he slumped a bit. His elbows hit his thighs, and he lifted his head so that his chin was in his hands, rather than his forehead, and he looked up at Kareva, who still hadn’t moved from where he was hunched over in the corner.

“And he was going to tell the rest of the men.”

Kareva nodded. “And that was going to be it for us.”

“Probably.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.” He looked so young. “I’m sorry.”

“We have a bigger problem.”

Kareva looked alarmed. “I know I need to find a way to tell the men the truth. And I can’t be at odds with you right now while I have this over my head. You never saw me that night. I won’t let—”

“Kareva.”

“What?”

“We have a bigger problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I know how they died.”

Kareva stared at him, uncomprehending, and stood up unsteadily, mouth starting to open, clearly about to ask him how the hell he could know such a thing. And then Alakuz heard the door swing open behind him.

Kareva shook his head and waved an arm in dismissal. “Sorry, Miruz, right now really isn’t a good time.”

Alakuz turned to see the big man in the doorframe, his face showing none of his usual brutish good humor.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but this can’t wait.”

IN THE NEXT CHAPTER (available Sunday February 22): Miruz makes his big move.

Read back: The Dead and the Dying |
Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 |
Chapter 14 | Chapter 15

Oh…and the lie that the peace between Kareva and the warlord was based on? ALSO very close to being brought to light. So, um…yikes?

(Need to catch up? The Shieldbreaker, Book One: The Last of the Etela is available here on paperback and here as an e-book.)

“What the fuck is taking him so long?” Ersev was pacing back and forth in his chambers while Miruz stood at attention near the cushioned benches they usually sat at when the warlord summoned him. “When I told you to tell him he could take his time, I never imagined he’d keep me waiting for over a month before he presented himself.”

“Mightiness—”

“And now there’s this nonsense being whispered about him demanding a blood price.” Ersev stopped pacing and turned to stare at Miruz. “Do you know anything about that?”

“I…some while ago, don’t remember how long, a few of the rank-and-file Guards were talking about it at a tavern I was having a drink at. One of them asked me about it directly, do you believe that?”

Ersev’s eyes narrowed. “What was his name?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, Mightiness.”

Ersev took half a step towards him. “No?”

Miruz took a deep breath. What would Regez do in a moment like this? He made his exhale into something of a sigh. “Mightiness, you don’t really want to personally involve yourself in something this stupid, do you? Some common soldiers gossiping about your best friend of God knows how long?”

Ersev held his gaze for a second, then shook his head ever so slightly, as if to clear it. “No. I suppose not.”

“The moment you start asking questions—”

“I know. I heard you.”

“Alright, good.” Miruz gestured to the benches with a raised eyebrow, asking permission, and Ersev nodded and sat down first. Miruz sat heavily with another sigh. “Not that I don’t understand, you know. I was furious. Went right to their table and flatly denied it. I said he’d never fucking do it, and to stop talking about it…” He looked down. “Hope I didn’t make it worse. I may have. Stupid of me.”

Ersev waved him off, distractedly. “Unimportant.”

“Appreciate that, Mightiness. I’ll be sure to be more careful.”

“Good. And it’s time he comes to see me. We need to nip this in the bud before it becomes a real problem.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Today, Miruz. I want to see him today.”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

—

A volley of arrows zipped down the alley that opened behind Olan’s tavern. A couple dozen Hodrir were taking turns popping up from behind cover and peppering the stacked hay bales at the end of the cul de sac. Turan nodded with satisfaction as he watched the next few men pop up from beneath open windows in the abandoned houses and fire their rounds into the targets.

They were getting better.

And Alakuz was thrilled. He’d been in a surprisingly cheerful mood the past few weeks anyway, which Turan was still deeply confused about but wasn’t planning to do anything to ruin. But the man had even gone so far as to smile when he told Turan he’d done well. He’d shown teeth!

Things were looking up.

“They’re good, your boys.”

Olan was standing next to Turan, like he usually did as long as it wasn’t raining. Something about the rain made his knee ache, apparently.

“They are.”

“So the strategy here is…to lure all the enemy’s men into my alley, or what?”

Turan laughed. “Pain in the ass.”

“You’re going to use me as bait, aren’t you?”

“You know what? That’s better than what I originally came up with. I might just have to.”

Olan chuckled. “Now, now, don’t jump to conclusions so fast. I think we can do even better.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Smart boy like you? Absolutely.” Olan threw a playful slap at Turan’s back. “So what’s the actual idea here?”

“It’s about finding places where we can restrict an enemy’s movement. There’s not a lot of us. If we’re by ourselves out in an open field somewhere, anyone with numbers is going to be able to get around us, and no matter how good we are, eventually that’s the end of us.”

“But in tight spaces—”

“Yeah. There are paths back home, in the Vesret, that a dozen men with enough arrows could stop hundreds of warriors in their tracks.”

Olan frowned. “The wall gaps are too wide to hold. You would have to set up in the streets around here.”

Turan nodded grimly. “If the situation came up, yeah, that’s what we would do.”

The old man shook his head. “This fucking city.” He spat. “Even in peace time, we have to prepare for the next catastrophe.” He spat a second time and then turned to face Turan. “What was it like where you grew up?”

“Hard. Dry. Not a lot of food. Just about enough to feed everyone, and not much extra, but the Kogon always made sure nobody starved.”

“Sounds beautiful. Here, a lot of us starved.”

“During the wars, you mean.”

“Yeah. Now too, probably, if anything goes wrong, but yeah. After my father died it was almost impossible for us to find any help. Dead soldiers aren’t any use to an emperor, you know, so there’s less inclination to feed their children.”

“What did you do?”

Olan looked out at the archers’ line again. “I got very good at taking things without being noticed.” His eyes narrowed. “It was that or go with my sisters’ plan, and that plan didn’t sit well with me.”

“What was—“ Turan stopped himself mercifully short when he figured it out. “Yeah.”

“That’s a choice everyone ends up making, sooner or later. Honestly, it’s nice to have a fucking army around again. At least the local girls don’t go hungry anymore. The last few years were bad. Very bad. But even before then, there’s never been enough to go around for everyone. At least not on this side of the water.” He tapped Turan’s arm and gestured vaguely westward. “Have you been over there?”

“Once. The day we arrived.”

“You think they have any streets that are this quiet and broken down on that side?”

Turan chuckled and shook his head.

Olan spread his arms wide. “Of course not! The rich people, they hide from us over there.”

“Do you think they’re afraid that if you see them, you’ll make trouble?”

“No, no, they have all the swords, what kind of trouble are we gonna make? I think they’re afraid to see us. I think they’ll feel guilty. The Zadath says to feed the hungry. Ruhol said, take care of your neighbor like he was your own family, because who knows, someday you might need your neighbor to take care of you.” Olan raised his eyebrows and looked meaningfully at Turan. “You’ve seen the temples over there. You think they don’t have enough to spare to take care of all of us poor bastards over on this side of the river?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Of course they do. Even when the city changed hands over and over, you know, the conquerors on both sides were so afraid of their priests that they never messed with the temples. They never sacked the old city. They let their men loose over here, on us, on my neighbors. I had to fight a few men off from my own fucking side one time, to stop them coming in here and taking what they wanted.” He spat, far more forcefully than before. “Bastards. And the rich people, they wrung their hands at the tragedy of it all, prayed for the souls of the dead and whatnot, but inwardly they sighed with relief and pretended not to see us, because if they looked at us, they’d see how badly they were failing in their duty to the Divine One.”

“It’s no way to treat people.”

Olan shrugged. “Eh. It’s the way it is. You lead these men, right? You’re a captain?”

“Yeah.”

“You get paid more than them?”

Turan chuckled. “A little more.”

“You think that lasts long enough, you might want to take a house over on that side? You know, some place just for you? You can afford it, after all. And you work hard. Nobody’s going to judge you. But maybe, once you don’t live with them anymore, you stop seeing the warriors you command as your people?”

Turan looked down, then back at the old man. “I hope not.”

Olan patted him on the shoulder. “That’s honest, at least. And a nice thought. You’re alright. I’d have been happier taking orders from you, I’m sure, than any of those pot-guts over there in the palace, with their fancy robes and jewelry and all that other shit.”

Turan laughed. “You haven’t seen my fancy robes.”

“Oh really? Big important man, huh? So sorry, Mightiness, that was so very foolish of me.”

“You have terrible manners for an old man.”

“I have terrible manners for anybody.”

—

The neighborhood that the tribe of Led had carved out for themselves would probably have been charming in a different time—or in a different version of the city, one not stripped bare by the demands of a decades-long war.

Regez was always impressed when he came over here; Oruz had chosen his tribe’s district brilliantly. It was equidistant from the three most important places in Ikune: the imperial palace compound was to the north and west, the Hall of Elders was to the north and east, and the fortress’s main market square was to the south. The tribe had no need to be closest to the palace, a superficial honor that several chieftains had squabbled over during the initial divvying up of the city. They were tucked safely out of the way so as not to flaunt their special relationship to the warlord, situated near everything they could possibly need, and free to fan out comfortably in the several streets’ worth of stone houses left behind by various fleeing residents in the aftermath of the last occupiers’ collapse.

Regez received the occasional bow and salute from a familiar face as he walked down the street towards the chieftain’s house: even after all the years he had spent at Ersev’s side, his insistence on keeping the moniker “of Led” made his tribe proud and kept them loyal to him and to his cousin’s family—and, of course, to Ersev by extension.

There were more women and children out and about than soldiers. Any woman in black who nodded to him received a deeper bow in return, out of respect for her loss.

Oruz’s widow and their son waited at the front step instead of within the house. The tribe’s dowager queen Omridi was a pale, severe-looking, but very handsome woman whose black mourning clothes only highlighted her dignity. She smiled sadly as he came out of his bow and reached up to kiss her hand.

“Cousin. It is good to see you.”

“You honor me, Vazkari. Your husband is sorely missed.”

Berez took Regez’s face in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks. “Regez. Seeing you gladdens our hearts.”

Regez smiled. Berez was the spitting image of his father. He bowed again.

“My Khogon.”

The three of them, having fulfilled their ceremonial obligations to each other and any passersby, walked inside. Omridi reached out and squeezed Regez’s hand affectionately. “I’ll leave you two to talk. Come see me when you’re done, if you have the time.”

“Of course.”

He and Berez walked down the hallway to the main sitting room of the house, and Berez pointed him towards a cushioned chair.

“I’m still getting used to this house.”

“It’s yours now. And you had better marry soon, by the way. Your mother can’t be the only woman ruling your household. The men will ask questions.”

Berez waved his admonishments away. “I know, I know.” He looked down for a second and then back up at his favorite ‘uncle,’ unsure of where to start. “I want to talk to you about how my father died.”

Regez nodded sadly. “It was a bad bit of business, sending our people up that mountain.”

“There is a rumor going around that you haven’t spoken with the Khogon since we returned to the city—and that you’re intending to demand a blood price.”

Regez was taken aback. “I don’t know where that second part came from. And Miruz just brought me a request from Ersev this morning to come see him.”

Berez cocked his head. “Wait a minute—have you not spoken with him? Not even once? We’ve been home for weeks!”

“The campaigning season is over. He hasn’t had any desperate need of my counsel, and he’s been giving me space to mourn your father and the rest of our kinsmen.”

“According to Miruz?”

“According to Miruz.”

Berez leaned in a little closer. “I don’t like this, Uncle. I know you saved his life, and I know he owes you everything he has, but having him act as a courier between you and the Khogon—”

“Don’t worry about him.”

“I…the rumor I heard names him as its source.”

Regez smirked. “Of course it does. It wouldn’t be a good rumor if whoever started it didn’t pretend to hear it from someone close to me.”

“Alright. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Alright.”

“Now, about the warlord’s son—”

Berez lifted a hand. “Let me stop you for a moment: I am not interested in dragging out any sort of awkwardness or trouble between the tribe and our Khogon of Khogons. We lost a lot of men, and the barbarians kept a lot of riches that we left on top of that mountain—fairly taken, by the way, and I have no quarrel with them over it. The only thing I care about is rebuilding our strength, so unless you have any particular objection—”

“No, no. I can live with that.”

“Good. Then the Tribe of Led will be more than happy to accept some token recompense and a quiet acknowledgement of a mistake, and we can move on with our lives and continue on as Ersev’s staunchest supporters.”

“Very good. I will pass that along to him.”

“And hopefully the Khogon will be grateful to me for being quick to forgive, and will remember that forgiveness in our future dealings.”

Regez smiled. “You’re a smart boy. Your father taught you well.”

Berez nodded. “He wasn’t the only one.”

The two of them sat quietly together for a moment, allowing Oruz’s memory some space in the room with them, then Regez stood to go. Berez stood too.

“Tell your mother I’ll make sure to come back and spend some time with her the next possible moment I am free.”

“She’ll be disappointed.”

“I know. That’s why I’m making you tell her.” He reached out to embrace his cousin’s son, the nearest thing he had to a son of his own, and made his way out of the house no longer entirely dreading the conversation he was due to have with his overlord and oldest friend.

—

“You wanted to see me, Oproz?” Turan had been back from supervising the archers for less than half an hour before Makava came to get him.

“Yeah. Come.” Kareva gestured distractedly towards the other chair at his table.

“Everything alright? I was just over at our new friend’s place, watching some of the men…” Turan let his report trail off. Kareva had a strange look on his face.

“It’s been a month.”

“Sorry?”

“More than a month. That fucking coward still hasn’t—”

Shit. “Oproz, I thought you and Alakuz had already made a decision not to pursue this.”

“Alakuz has advised me to let it go about a thousand times now, but I can’t.”

Turan shook his head. “Your word is law, Oproz. If you give me the order I think you want to give me, I will carry it out, but—”

“No.”

Turan paused. “No?”

“If we don’t have proof, then you’re just a murderer, and since you’re an Ohta, it will blow back on all of us.”

“And we won’t have the numbers.”

“Or the warlord’s protection. He likes me, but there’s no way. Too brazen.”

“Which is why Alakuz keeps telling you to let it go, Oproz.”

Kareva tilted his head. “You think he’s right?”

Turan looked down at the floor, then back up at his chieftain. “No. Sakara owes me blood for my brother.”

Kareva nodded. “Yes he does. And you will have it. I just don’t know how to get it done. I can’t just, you know, interrupt a meeting at the palace and challenge Sakara in front of the warlord and all his followers. And he won’t let me catch him out in the open otherwise.” He scratched at his ear. “The only idea I have is risky.”

Turan sucked in his lower lip. “Go to them.”

“I go to them, yeah.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either.”

“But if that’s our best option—”

“I don’t see any other way.”

“Alright. I’m coming with you.”

“Turan.”

“We make it a…diplomatic thing. A friendly visit to one of their taverns, maybe, and you can casually ask if their Oproz is around for a word. Once word gets out that you’re there, he has to see you or it’ll look suspicious.”

“That’s good. I like that.”

“And we take a few of my men with us. Five or six. Not enough to be perceived as a threat or anything. Just enough of us to not make us an easy target if things go wrong.”

“If things go wrong.”

“Enough to stop him from trying anything, I mean.”

Kareva looked down. “Right.”

“We also don’t have to—”

The Oproz slapped the table to put an end to the discussion. “Yes, we do. Pick your men.”

—

“Mightiness?”

“Regez! Good to see you.” Ersev came across the table to pull him in for a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, as if nothing were amiss. “Have a seat.” He gestured with his eyes towards the jug in the middle of the table. “Too early in the day? Or…”

Regez smirked. “Have we met? Never too early.”

Ersev grinned as he poured two cups. “Didn’t think so. Been too long.” He handed one of the cups to Regez and let the smile fade from his lips. “To my dear friend Oruz. God rest him.”

Regez nodded. “God rest him.” The two men drained their cups, Regez looking over the rim of his for any indication of Ersev’s intentions. The man he knew was short and to the point with the people he loved and trusted. Little shows of affection like a kiss on the cheek or a toast were reserved for political displays—or for people who aroused his suspicions. The best thing to do would be to get right down to business.

“So, how did Oreik do in command, down in the desert?” He would give Ersev the chance to choose the tone and the pace of the uncomfortable part of the conversation. It was the least he could do.

Ersev rolled his eyes. “He has a lot to learn.” He shrugged. “But so did we, at that age. He’ll be fine.”

Regez sucked the inside of his lip into his teeth and bit down gently before letting his mouth relax again. An old trick to keep from reacting more strongly to something surprising.

“So he’s, um, still your choice to succeed you, then?” He’d meant to broach the subject differently, but the casual nature of Ersev’s response to his first question had thrown him off. His old friend was looking at him now, steadily, blinking slowly, trying to make a decision.

He was wrestling with it.

How the fuck was this something to wrestle with? The boy had embarrassed him and made an enemy of—

“I have a bunch of good years left. Plenty of time to help him see sense, turn him into a serious commander, wouldn’t you think?”

Regez willed himself to breathe regularly. He dragged his lips into something he hoped resembled a smile. “Certainly.”

Ersev smiled back. “Yeah.” His voice trailed off.

The two of them sat like that for a moment, staring at each other, clearly stuck. This was a fucking catastrophe.

Regez stood up abruptly. “Well, I’m here all day if you need anything. I’m glad we got a chance to talk.”

“Me too! Too fucking long. Come by later, we’ll have another cup of wine, catch up properly. I still need to hear about your mission as well.”

“Yes, Mightiness. At your convenience.”

—

Ersev felt sick to his stomach as he watched his old friend leave.

Fucking Oreik. He’d need to be set straight.

“Ulav!”

The leader of his guard popped his head through the door. “Mightiness?”

“Find my idiot son and bring him to me.”

—

The strangers looked like trouble.

They hadn’t taken off their outer cloaks when they walked in, which would have immediately put anyone with half a brain on alert for weapons. Even Sivrud noticed it, Lukaz thought to himself as he approached the table where the six men huddled.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Morning,” muttered one of the men seated at the table, without turning to show his face.

Lukaz took another step forward and put a hand on the handle of his saif. “Not wishing you any disrespect, but I wonder if there might not be somewhere else you’d rather take your afternoon meal today. We’re not overfond of outsiders visiting this neighborhood. They tend to make trouble.”

Six of the men looked to the seventh for his response. He was the smallest and slightest of them, but their body language marked him clearly as their leader. “You’ll have no trouble from us, Ohta,” he said, looking up enough for the first time that the sunlight caught his face.

His eyes were pale grey.

Lukaz-Ohta started, then his back straightened and his right fist snapped to his chest.

“Elakon, Kareva-Oproz. I heard you gave our new masters hell in the desert before you came up here. No charge for you or your men. I’ll see to it.”

His honored guest nodded slowly. “You honor us, Ohta. You have my respect.”

“I am at your service.”

“In that case, I have a favor to ask.” Kareva smiled, and Lukaz suddenly felt cold. “Have someone find my dear friend Sakara-Oproz and tell him I want a word, would you?”

—

“I need you to understand. What you did, sending them up there, it put us in a horrible bind.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Don’t ‘Yes, Father’ me. You shredded the ranks of our closest allies in this entire horde! Them not having our backs would massively destabilize our control of the situation here. And as weak as they are now, they’re hardly of any use to us, even if they were disposed to stay loyal! And I can’t guarantee that they are, because I sent my best friend on a pillaging mission that should have been yours, and you got a few hundred of his people killed.”

Oreik looked down and to the side, shifting his feet. He looked distracted. Ersev despaired of his son anew. This lecture was pointless.

“This is the last time I protect you from the consequences of your actions. He’s my oldest friend, and he’s a reasonable man, and I will talk him down from his rightful grievance against you. If you ever do something so stupid again, I can’t help you.”

Oreik threw his hands up in frustration. “Fine! Fine. I get it. I know I made a mess of things. I’ll apologize to him.”

“Apologize?” Ersev’s eyes widened in shock. “Are you out of your mind? You’ll do no such thing. What are you going to do, admit to the man that you see him as a threat? That your hostility led you to knowingly sanction the needless deaths of his cousin—of his flesh and blood—and hundreds of his tribesmen? That you have committed a crime against him? That your life is his, if he wants to take it? Or perhaps you’re going to say you didn’t mean for any of it to happen? That you weren’t thinking it through? You intend to admit to your complete incompetence and give up any claim to being a responsible person? No. Say nothing. Stay the hell away from him. Your inability to…” Ersev shook his head. “You are infuriating. Get out.”

—

Turan saw the tavern door swing open and a tall, somber-looking man with flecks of grey in his beard and at his temples strode slowly into the room as if he had not a care in the world.

“Elakon, Kareva-Oproz. Welcome to my district.” He smiled with a politeness that blew like a cool breeze through the barroom.

There was no warmth in Kareva’s smile either. “Elakon, Sakara-Oproz. I’m glad we finally have a chance to talk.”

“Would you prefer that we all talk together? Or should it just be the two of us?”

Kareva nodded in Turan’s direction. “Boys, go eat.” He turned his eyes briefly towards Sakara’s captain before bringing them back to Sakara himself. “Your man said he’s buying.”

Sakara smirked. “You think we pay here?”

—

Lukaz-Ohta led his guests down the hall towards the back room where the daughters of the owner were whispering over a cauldron of something hot and bland-smelling. Their young leader wrinkled his nose, searching for the flavor, then turned to his host.

“What’s good here?”

“Honestly? Not much. I’m trying to get the man to hire a couple of our girls, let them do the cooking, you know? Make our food. But he pushes back. So we eat what his daughters cook. It’s not like home.”

“No, don’t suppose it is.”

“They make a decent cup of tea, at least.”

“That’s something.”

“No wine, though. These easterners…”

Turan raised a hand. “No need to explain. Tea will do just fine.”

“Good. I’m Lukaz, by the way. Lukaz ul-Kulava.” He extended his arm.

The younger man took it. “Turan ul-Toruk. Thank you for your hospitality.”

Lukaz nodded. “It’s a pleasure. I’m just, you know, relieved to see…”

“Yeah.”

—

Sakara smiled indulgently. “So, let me guess why you’re here. I’ve been avoiding you all these weeks, and you are pretty sure you know why.”

“I am.”

“My boy, I have been avoiding having this conversation with you for your own sake. I’m trying to help you save face.”

“That’s an interesting favor to do for a man whose tribe you betrayed.”

“I swore no oath to you.”

“How about the one you swore to my father?”

Sakara leaned slightly to the left and shook his head sadly. “I actually never met him. Did you know that? I became Oproz six years ago. He didn’t show up for the Tapaa that year—completely understandable, of course. Terrible thing, what happened. We all assumed we would see him the next year, or the year after that...” He grimaced. “Our Kogon. A man who took his responsibility to us so seriously that no one’s seen him in six years. If he’d come to talk to me, or to Aravan ul-Zalan or Zimion ul-Zimion, to any of the other chieftains, and he’d said, ‘Look, we’re all going to be in big trouble unless we fight these northerners together,’ the Etela might be in control of this whole region today. But no. He disappeared. And these northerners smashed the Tvomir and the Sutrir and three other tribes, one after the next, like they were swatting fucked flies, before they approached me. So I made the best deal I could. And you’re here, too, so you must have seen reason.”

“I’m only here because you told them where to find us.”

Sakara leaned forward. “And that got me better pay for my men, nicer living quarters for their families, and a direct line of communication to the big man himself. My people went along with me. They went along with everything I did. They see the future coming, same as me. Same as you.” Kareva opened his mouth but Sakara waved him away. “Wait, no, don’t tell me, you’re better than I am because at least you fought them. You’re holier than I am. Closer to the gods.” He leaned in closer and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Fuck the gods. They let this happen to us.”

“The gods have nothing to do with what happened to my men. Eight hundred Hodrir died on Valtaa because you told the northerners about the scorpion.” Kareva kept his voice even and his face calm, but Sakara felt a chill as the younger man smiled at him. “The gods are not whom I would be worried about, if I were you.”

Sakara willed himself to sneer in response. “Very good. Take your revenge, then. Kill me, here and now, while I sit at this table with you. The warlord will nail you to a wall. And my men will finish what the Pohyor started on that mountain. Why wait? Let’s get it over with.” He spread his arms away from his chest, opening himself to an imagined blow. “Or, we can try to let bygones be bygones. There are few enough of us left, after all...”

Sakara’s voice trailed off as Kareva stood. The boy’s eyes seemed to have gone blank, and his right hand was sliding towards the knife his belt. Gods, is he serious? Sakara felt his hips freeze as he stared up into the face of death and wished desperately he’d brought a weapon—

“Oproz?” came a voice from behind him.

Kareva looked up, and suddenly the monster was gone and the boy was back in his place. Mostly. He looked back down at Sakara, through him, smiling thinly.

“I’m fine, Turan. We’re just finishing up.”

—

Kareva and Turan walked out of the tavern a few paces ahead of their men, Turan to Kareva’s left and slightly behind him, subtly vying for his attention.

“Are you alright?”

Kareva kept his eyes forward. “He didn’t even bother to deny it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to kill him. Slowly. And I will make damn sure he doesn’t have a sword in his hand when I do.”

Turan paused for a second. “Alright. We need to make a plan, though. And we probably ought to involve Alakuz, right?”

Kareva sighed and nodded, knowing what Turan actually meant.

—

Turan wanted Sakara dead, too. Of course he did.

But he couldn’t help thinking about the story one of the men had told him about that day in the desert on the way to the mountain, how just before the Oproz had executed one of the Dazvar-Muz for starting a fight in training, some sort of change had come over him (“as if an evil spirit had suddenly possessed him, or something,” his man had whispered), and then the blade had appeared in his hand and a man was gutted before anyone had a chance to react.

He hadn’t fully believed the story until now. But he could recognize a demon when he looked one in the eye. And he knew for certain that if he hadn’t excused himself to go check if Kareva needed anything, if he had walked into that room even five seconds later, they would all be dead right now.

—

“You’re back.”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“I’m glad. Sit.” Regez let out a small sigh of relief. At least his friend was back in front of him now, instead of the politician. “You’re troubled by the deaths of your tribesmen.”

“Yes.” Regez nodded slowly and firmly. Now they were going to get somewhere.

“That makes sense. So was I.”

What the fuck does that mean? “You’re not anymore?”

Ersev leaned forward. “I was furious, Regez. I knocked the boy clean on his ass when I first heard the report. And I looked into it thoroughly afterwards to make sure there was no impropriety.”

“And you found none? He sent them up there without a plan.”

“He was acting as commander of the whole horde. He sent the tribe of Led to kill our enemies, with a sound strategy—”

“—that Miruz came up with after the order to attack was already given!”

“—with a sound strategy that you would have approved of. Battles go wrong sometimes. We both know this.”

“They go wrong more often when the men commanding them don’t have a fucking plan.”

Ersev stared at Regez, clearly willing himself not to explode. “Maybe we should do this some other time, when you’ve got a better hold of yourself.”

“Maybe you should have asked me to come see you before my anger got to this point.”

“When would that have been, old friend? Before or after you referred to my son as—what was it? Oh yes, a ‘frothing idiot’—while you were speaking to men under your command?”

Regez knew that if he said what he wanted to say next, there would be no bond left to repair. “I—will come back later. Give us both a chance to cool down.”

Ersev held his gaze. “An excellent idea.”

As he closed the door, Regez heard the sounds of shattering glass and clay in the room behind him.

—

Alakuz shook his head emphatically. “No. The two of you are unbelievable. Respectfully, Oproz—“

“Save it. I know. But he has to answer for it.”

“I begged you to leave this alone. What was your plan, exactly? Cut a fellow chieftain’s throat in full view of his whole tribe, in the capital city of the warlord that you fucking swore us to? Maybe touch off a pitched battle in the streets we’re supposed to be keeping the peace in?”

Turan piped up. “To be fair, Ohta, he is the reason my brother and his whole company died, the reason that Metan—”

Turan’s next words died on his tongue as Alakuz whirled to face him, eyes wide with a rage Turan had never seen in them. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare use his name to try to justify something so fucking stupid. Metan commanded me to protect your friend here with my life, right after his brother tried to murder his father and got himself and hundreds of others killed in the bargain. Metan ordered me to protect the Prince, and then he walked away. This was supposed to be his job, and instead, he just fucking dropped everything and walked away, made me responsible for safeguarding the future of the whole fucking tribe, and I never asked for any of it!”

—

Alakuz slammed both of his fists down on the rickety old table, and it broke clean in two, yielding up its own responsibilities in turn. The three clay cups shattered when they hit the floor, spilling the wine within. It splashed onto Alakuz’s sandaled feet, and the shock of the cold and wet broke the momentum of his anger. He took a deep breath and nudged a few of the larger pieces away from himself with his right foot before he looked back up at Kareva and Turan.

“Not once did I ask for this. I would have been perfectly happy to live a normal, simple life, you know? Just be a soldier, take orders and fight on the line and eventually die an honorable death in battle, just like everyone else.” He sighed, and the scowl returned to his face. “But—since Metan made it my responsibility to look after the Oproz, I will be damned if I let him down, least of all by letting you two master strategists get us all killed out here, however many fucking hundreds of miles we are from home and with no way of protecting our women and children.” Alakuz looked back at Kareva, who looked absolutely stunned. “Respectfully, of course.”

Kareva never took his eyes off of Alakuz. “Turan, give us a moment.”

“Yes, Oproz.” Turan beat a hasty retreat out of the room.

Kareva and his teacher stood silently regarding each other for a long moment. Alakuz was breathing a bit heavily, but had regained his stillness.

“It was wrong of me to say all of that in front of him. Avzaka-min.”

Kareva kept his gaze steady. “I’ve never seen you lose control before.”

“That’s the first time it’s happened in years. Since before—before he first took me in.”

“Sakara needs to die, Alakuz.”

“Yes he does. But you’re not in a strong enough position to kill him. We need to secure our place here, secure the men’s families, regroup. We need to ensure our survival. You chose this for us. Now live with it.”

Kareva nodded. “Yeah.”

Alakuz allowed himself to relax ever so slightly. “And I’m sorry about—“

“It was the truth. Nothing to forgive.”

Alakuz sighed hard as he sat back down in front of his destroyed table. “It is an honor to serve you, Kareva ul-Varyta. No matter how it came to pass. That’s also the truth.”

The boy smiled back at him apologetically, almost sadly. “I hope so.”

—

You’re really going to let that piece of shit live, aren’t you? Gods, you’re even weaker than I imagined.

Kareva closed his door behind him, unbuckled his sword, and let it fall heavily on the floor next to the table as he sat down.

“Fuck off,” he said aloud to no one.

Then he stood back up abruptly and grabbed his sword belt. He had one more idea. It was a bad one, but it was better than sitting around waiting for the specter to come back.

—

Ersev had not stopped drinking after he’d finished his evening meal. This had been a long day, and the knock on his study door turned his stomach in knots.

“What is it, Ulav?”

“Kareva of the Hodrir requests an audience, Mightiness.”

Ersev was surprised at how quickly his mood turned. “Really? Excellent. Send him in. Kareva! Come.”

The boy looked a little more ragged than Ersev had seen him, but he still managed a smile as he entered the room. “Evening, Mightiness.”

“Good to see you, boy! The hell are you doing all the way over here, this time of night?”

“Honestly, Mightiness, I have a problem, and I’m worried I won’t be able to solve it without your help.”

Ersev slapped the table in front of him. “Well then! Let’s see if I can help you. What is this problem you’re dealing with, exactly?”

“I need to kill someone.”

Ersev smirked. “I see. Do you already have a victim in mind, or are you looking for me to recommend one?”

Kareva’s face turned deadly serious within an instant. “Sakara ul-Mikal, the chieftain of the Gvelir.”

Ersev’s smile froze on his face. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised: he’d been watching Kareva glare at the other barbarian across every room the two had shared together for weeks. Not that he wanted to let on right now. Better to let the boy talk, see if anything useful fell out. “The leader of the other Etela tribe?”

“Yes, Mightiness.”

“And what’s he done to earn your knife?”

“He gave you the location of Kalaa Ukruv’r.”

“Your fortress.”

Kareva’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Yes. He didn’t even bother denying it when I accused him of it.”

“And why would he? We’re all on the same side now.”

“A lot of my men are dead because of him.”

Ersev did not love where this was going, but it was at least encouraging that the boy had come to him instead of taking action unilaterally. He tilted his head slightly and slowed his delivery. “Well, Sakara might say that the reason those men are dead is because you chose to fight me. He might say that him giving me that information led to you swearing your loyalty to me, and that perhaps your wish to see him dead might speak to some dissatisfaction with your current situation.” He glared a challenge at his young petitioner.

Kareva’s facial expression didn’t change. He looked tired. He was probably just still feeling some bloodsickness from back the desert. Ersev knew the feeling. He would get over it eventually, come out of it stronger.

Ersev really was impressed with the boy. It was a pity he was an outsider; it made the idea of adopting him as son and heir a non-starter.

He let his expression soften again and stepped out from behind his desk to put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Kareva, you know I can’t give you another tribe’s chieftain just for being loyal to me, right?”

The boy’s head dropped a bit. “I know.”

“He provided me with a piece of information that I was able to turn to my benefit. I couldn’t let you kill him for that even if I wanted to. It’s bad politics.”

Kareva sighed. “I should have just done it without asking.”

Ersev snorted and shook his head. “Come on. You’re smarter than that, boy. Use your head: it would have taken me all of thirty seconds to figure out it was you, and I’d have had no other choice but to have you executed in turn. And you knew that already, because you are smarter than that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come to talk to me.”

He walked towards the door with Kareva in tow, and pulled Kareva a bit closer to him so he could whisper in his ear. “And listen. Just between us…it’s not like I’m fond of the man. I could never trust someone who offered up his own people to a stranger that quickly.” He smiled. “For the time being, why not focus on proving yourself indispensable to me, and let’s see what the future brings?”

He felt Kareva slump ever so slightly under his arm, obviously resigned, and he patted Kareva’s shoulder once, affectionately but decisively, to close the matter. “Good boy. Ulav!”

“Yes, Mightiness?” called the bodyguard from behind the door.

“Anyone else out there waiting for me?”

“Regez of Led, Mightiness.”

Ersev started to roll his eyes and then stopped himself, hoping Kareva didn’t see it. “Time for you to go. Please don’t hesitate to stop by again if you think of any other outrageous requests to make of me.”

This time the boy chuckled. “Yes, Mightiness.”

—

Kareva wasn’t sure he recognized the older man he passed on his way out of the palace. But he could tell he looked about as happy to be waiting for a moment with the warlord as the warlord was to be seeing him.

He walked back through the courtyard and through the palace’s front gate, meditating on the merits of waiting patiently for his opportunity to get his revenge—and how much more he might enjoy it if Sakara knew the warlord he had thrown his lot in with was giving him up.

That might make it worthwhile.

He was a few blocks from the bridge when he heard the shuffling sound coming from behind him. He turned his head slowly, hand resting on the pommel of his father’s sword, and saw a disheveled, bedraggled-looking man walking unsteadily towards him.

It took another moment for him to realize who it was he was looking at.

“Attala?”

“Oproz…”

The Ohta stank of wine. Dirt streaked his face, and spittle and dried food flecked his wild, unkempt beard.

“I’ve been wandering around this cursed city for days, looking for anyone I knew…”

He burst into tears. Kareva felt his heart start beating faster than it ever had before, felt himself start to sweat. He grabbed Attala by the shoulders and shook him.

“What happened?”

“They…they…” Attala sunk into Kareva’s chest, sobbing.

Kareva’s mouth dropped open, and from somewhere behind him, he heard a low, malevolent chuckle.

I told you.

—

Ersev was standing by the table again when Regez opened the door. He smiled, and Regez could tell he was trying to mean it. “Thank you for coming back again tonight, Re’z. I know it’s late.”

Regez smiled back. “For men our age, at least.”

Ersev chuckled. “Come on, sit down. Let’s have another drink.” He grabbed the half-empty jug of wine that he had been working on since the last time the two men spoke and placed it on the table in front of him.

Regez sat, and Ersev poured for them both before he continued. “Alright. We’ve known each other a long time. We’re both proud men—with good reason, I think you’ll agree—and I know I insulted you.” He lifted his cup slightly, then put it back down and leaned forward towards his second-in-command. “I know I hurt your pride, making you do the dirty work down in the desert. I was trying to make a point, and I may have taken it too far.”

Regez nodded. “I appreciate you saying so.”

“Good. I am worried, though, about your inability to keep your cool around my son’s men.”

“I spoke rashly.”

“You meant it, though.”

Regez looked down. “It was regrettable that I let my anger get the better of me in that moment, and that what I said gave anyone the impression that I…might not respect your son.”

Ersev looked at him coolly, evenly. “Alright. Anything else?”

Regez nodded. “Before we spoke today, I went to see my cousin Oruz’s son. The tribe of Led desires only a quiet acknowledgment from you that the order that led to Oruz’s death should not have been given.” He looked back up at Ersev. “Berez has no interest in being anything other than an enthusiastic, loyal supporter of yours.”

Ersev set his finished cup of wine down abruptly. “So he’s having a hard time finding that enthusiasm at present, is what you’re telling me?”

Regez cocked his head. “Mightiness?”

“Is he going to cause trouble or not?”

“He’s not trying to cause any trouble. He has simply lost his father and several hundred fighting men in a frontal assault on an incredibly well-defended position that no commander in their right mind would have sent—”

“Enough, Regez. Your contempt for Oreik was a problem for me when the only people who knew about it were me and you and Oreik. You and your nephew openly questioning his skill as a commander—”

“He has no skill as a commander!” That shut Ersev up in a hurry. Regez paused, wanting to stop himself, and finding it beyond him. “You’re trying to protect the reputation of someone who has no reputation to protect, just because he’s your blood. It’s beneath you.” He looked down. “Your son is a fool, and you know it. He can’t be your heir.”

“Or what?” Ersev’s voice was flat.

“I’m sorry?”

“Or what, Regez? It sounded like you just gave me an ultimatum.”

Regez’s mouth dropped open. “You’re questioning my loyalty now?”

“Well, you’re questioning my judgment, aren’t you?”

Regez rubbed his eyes with both fists to make sure he was seeing Ersev’s face clearly. “More than thirty years we’ve known each other. We’ve ridden next to each other in battle, we’ve plotted murders and negotiated alliances and stole part of your brother’s fucking birthright together. And all that time, I’ve never lied to you. I have kept your counsel, I have given you the best advice I could give you, and you’ve done rather well for yourself as a result, I might add…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “How dare you? I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me—oh, and by the way, if you want to talk about loyalty and judgment, what the hell were you thinking, leaving those barbarians alive after you put me on the hook for murdering their women and children? I have been by your side all this time, and this is the thanks I get?” He looked down again. “How dare you?” he asked again, more quietly.

Ersev stared at his oldest friend, unblinking. After a moment, he grimaced, then reset himself and dove in. “If you feel that way, I have to consider whether you should still be my first sword.”

Regez chuckled mirthlessly. “I was just thinking that myself.”

Ersev looked down and gritted his teeth. “Very well, old friend. Consider yourself relieved of your responsibilities.”

Regez sighed and nodded. “Alright. Fine. We should figure out how to announce it in a way that won’t cause a commotion. Maybe…send me to command the western frontier or something, keep things calm out—.”

“I will let you know what your next posting will be.” Ersev kept his gaze lowered. “That will be all.”

Regez stood. “Yes, Mightiness.”

Ersev didn’t look up.

Regez waited a few moments to see if his friend would at least meet his eye, then turned on his heel and walked out of the chamber purposefully, rigidly—even with his heart racing and his head spinning, he would be damned if he lost any face in this moment.

He kept his composure as he made his way down the hallway, taking slow, deep breaths without breaking stride. If he made it to that door, he could sit down for a moment and clear his head before he went home.

The door opened as he approached it. Miruz appeared in front of him, looking solemn and determined—and then stunned, suddenly, as he registered the presence of the last person he could have possibly wanted to see in that moment. He seemed almost to freeze in place.

Regez understood everything in an instant. He stood firm, waiting for Miruz to try to explain away his presence.

Miruz, to his credit, didn’t break eye contact. He didn’t look down, didn’t shrink from the confrontation. He stood just as still as his old mentor, confirming his suspicions, accepting the consequences. Regez appreciated that, at least.

After a few seconds, Miruz nodded and stepped past Regez into the hall to report to the warlord. Regez kept his eyes forward and left the palace without another word.

—

The rain was beginning to fall more heavily.

Kareva was holding Attala upright as they walked the last few hundred feet of the length of the bridge. Attala hadn’t said anything since they started walking, and Kareva wasn’t in any hurry to hear his story.

Suddenly, Attala stopped walking. He turned to the side, bent at the waist and was sick all over the ancient stones. When he raised back up, he nodded that they should get moving again. Kareva signaled him to keep quiet as they traveled across the bridge plaza and over the main road. When they were back in friendly territory, Kareva pulled Attala under the thatch roof of a darkened building and helped him lean against the wall.

“Tell me everything.”

“I filled the water skins outside Ukruv’r and rode to the coast, like we said. There wasn’t any sign of them on the sand route. No prints, no food waste, no bodies. I figured they decided to cut through the dunes instead, maybe avoid being followed? I don’t know. When I got to the sea, no one had seen them. I stopped at half a dozen villages, and no one had seen them.”

“That doesn’t mean they didn’t make it to Makan Alabar.”

“They didn’t. I spent four days there, searching high and low, every single neighborhood, every gutter, every back alley in the whole damned city. I even bribed the guards to let me search the fancier enclaves where the merchants and bankers live. They were nowhere to be found. They didn’t make it.” Attala stood up unsteadily. His eyes were red and wet with tears. “We have to go tell the men.”

He started walking in the direction they had been going before they stopped. Kareva jumped up and followed him.

“Wait.”

Attala shook his head. “It can’t wait. The men need to know.”

“Listen to me. We don’t have all the information we need yet. You never saw any bodies, did you? Did you?” He grabbed at Attala’s sleeve and turned him roughly around so that they faced each other.

“I didn’t, but—”

“Then we don’t know for certain.”

“They’re gone, Oproz.”

“We don’t know that. You’re clearly in a bad way right now, alright? I need you to trust me. I’m going to find you a place to stay a few days, to rest, to recover yourself. And I’ll have Alakuz send another few men down south. We’ll find them. Maybe they found an oasis somewhere that we don’t know about yet, or maybe—”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Attala didn’t look drunk anymore. His eyes were clear and full of scorn. “There is no water in that desert. Everyone knows that. If they didn’t make it to Makan Alabar, then they’ve all been dead for weeks. And I’ve got friends who need to know their wives and children are gone. I’m telling them. Now.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“Try and stop me.”

“You’re disobeying an order, Ohta.”

Attala cocked his head. “Are you joking? You’re joking, right? You think you still give me orders? The gods have clearly abandoned you. They’ve abandoned all of us. You can shove your orders up your ass.”

He turned to go, but Kareva didn’t release his grip on his arm. He looked Attala straight in the eye, willing him to see reason.

“Attala. Please. You’re going to get us all killed.”

Attala held his gaze. “Good. We should have all died on top of that fucking mountain.” He leaned in closer so his face was inches from Kareva’s, his breath rancid and steaming in the cold air. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, begging for your life. Your father would be ashamed of you. Your brother, too.” Attala twisted his arm out of Kareva’s grip and shoved him away, then turned and took a few unsteady steps out into the road.

Kareva could no longer feel the rain or the cold. He drew his knife and lunged, closing the distance between him and Attala on the tips of his toes, feet barely making a splash as they hit the ground. He grabbed Attala by his lank, unkempt hair and yanked backward savagely. Attala’s head snapped backwards as he stumbled. Kareva caught him from behind, covering his mouth as he stabbed upwards from below his ribcage. Then he ripped the knife out and brought it up to its rightful place.

Attala’s throat was open before he could make a sound.

Kareva felt the warm blood hit his wrist and fingers as he dragged them both into an alley and out of sight. He shivered as he sucked in breath after breath, furious, horrified at himself, desperately trying to regain control.

He felt Attala twitch one last time and then go limp, and he squeezed his eyes shut against an oncoming flood of tears and clenched his jaw in an attempt not to scream.

Then he heard the chuckle in his ear again. He was right, you know. You are a fucking disgra—

Next thing he knew, he was by the bridge.

Even through the pouring rain, he could see the silhouettes of the ruined ancient statues looming over the plaza. The burden over his shoulder was made heavier by the rain—and something hard knocked against his breastbone as he moved to readjust it.

It was the handle of his knife. It was stuck.

Suddenly he remembered what he was carrying. He willed himself not to cry out and hurried away from the middle of the road.

How long had he been carrying a dead body over his shoulder down the main fucking thoroughfare? How many people had seen him?

He looked around. Apparently no one else was foolish enough to be outside. And in this weather, it was more than likely no one would see him clearly enough to recognize him, anyway.

He took the last few steps towards the nearest wall at a run and slipped on the wet pavement, falling on his knees and dropping Attala onto his back in front of him.

He recoiled.

The point of his knife was buried an inch deep into Attala’s spine. Around it, there was nothing intact but his ribcage.

He had done it again.

He burst into tears as he stared at the mess he’d made. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. You deserved much, much better than this. Why didn’t you listen to me back there? We could have figured it out. I just needed some time and you had to run your mouth about—” he sniffed, still unable to say the name.

He grabbed the handle of the knife with his right hand and tried to work it free.

It wouldn’t budge.

He reached into Attala’s chest with his left arm, shuddering with revulsion and shame, and pushed down on his backbone as he redoubled his efforts to free the blade with his right hand.

The last warmth floated lazily upward out of Attala’s body cavity and into the cold night air as Kareva struggled.

—

Alakuz was sorely regretting leaving the Taverna. The extra gold he had declined to pay to spend the rest of the night with Rivi felt miserly and foolish now, a pittance he would never have missed.

He had walked over the bridge in almost total darkness—the torches, even covered, couldn’t withstand a storm like this, and the feeble light from the few lively buildings of Silta barely made an impression.

A flash of lightning overhead showed him the path he needed to take. He stepped out of the plaza calmly. He didn’t mind this weather, frankly. After all those years in the desert, it felt practically exotic.

He stopped at the sound of a voice.

Someone else was out here, muttering to himself.

He started walking again. Best not to wait around to find out if he meant any harm.

Another burst of lightning illuminated the road just outside the plaza and cast its light on a flash of metal.

Alakuz drew his weapon and leaned back into his stance. He waited.

Lightning flashed again, this time offering Alakuz a clear view of a young man who seemed to have just pulled a knife and was holding it up to his face.

It was Kareva.

And next to him was a body.

He didn’t. He fucking couldn’t have, after this afternoon. Could he?

He was on the Oproz in three strides. Kareva was still muttering to himself. “I’m sorry…I just needed more time, damn you…”

“Oproz.”

Kareva looked up, uncomprehending, terrified.

Stricken.

Heartbroken.

Alakuz felt his stomach start to sink. The body wasn’t Sakara’s.

He leaned over to get a closer look and recoiled with rage and disgust and disbelief. His fingers tightened around the handle of his sword. He turned back to face his protégé again, jaw clenched shut, staring hard into the face of the boy he had been made responsible for protecting, cursing Metan for making him swear to it.

Cursing himself for what he already knew he was going to do.

He sheathed his sword, knelt down, and picked up Attala’s body.

Kareva stared at him, mouth working, like he wasn’t sure Alakuz was really here. Alakuz turned away from him and started walking towards the pathway that led to the river.

After a moment he heard footsteps behind him. Kareva was following him.

He did not look back.

IN THE NEXT CHAPTER (available Sunday, February 15): Kareva makes a lot of noise in his sleep. Miruz makes a big target. Alakuz makes a discovery. Nobody is having a good time.

READ BACK: The Dead and the Dying | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14

(Need to catch up? The Shieldbreaker, Book One: The Last of the Etela is available here on paperback and here as an e-book.)

“Anyway. The boy did pretty well.”

Attala was waiting for the last hour of daylight, like he’d been doing the last several days.

“I would like to say I knew all along, but I don’t think anybody had any fucking clue. Maybe Alakuz did. He might’ve been the only one.”

Next to him, the horse responded in much the same way he usually responded when Attala talked to him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you don’t care, you don’t know any of these people. But you’re stuck with me, aren’t you? I’m the one in control of your food and water.” He chuckled and patted the great beast’s neck. “And you’re in control of how quickly we get to the sea. I know. We’re stuck with each other. So you talk now, as long as you like and about whatever you like, and we’ll call it even.”

The horse swished its tail and bent down to inspect one of the patches of grass that grew ever more sporadically at the southern borders of the red mountains that separated the Disputed Lands from the Turma.

Tonight they’d leave the mountain range behind completely. Before they reached the coast, there would be three or four nights of sand, just sand as far as they could see, and Attala was grateful for the weight of the several water skins he hadn’t had to open yet.

“A few more days, my friend, and then we’ll be at the water. And a few more after that, with any luck…”

He didn’t finish the thought. He knew to avoid doing anything that might draw the gods’ attention to this journey, just in case any of them were feeling mischievous.

—

“Alright,” started the warlord when everyone had taken their seats. “We haven’t had too many occasions to fight as one body since we came down here, and we have a few new faces in this meeting, so the first thing we’re going to do is go over our signals one more time...”

Kareva was struggling to pay attention. It had been five days since he’d first seen Sakara and since Turan had discovered that the entire fighting force of the Gvelir were alive and comfortably nestled—along with their families—in the southern district of Silta, just across the road from the Hodrir, having clearly gone over to the warlord’s side without a fight.

Five days was a long time to let such a betrayal of the gods go unpunished.

Kareva and his men could say they stood and fought, at least. Even though he had knelt to Ersev at the end, that act of holding their ground had allowed the Hodrir to keep their honor. But how soon would his men start grumbling if this disgrace wasn’t addressed? How long would Mikal ul-Zalan wait before he started screeching about denying the goddess her privilege again? Before he began comparing Kareva to Sakara?

Alakuz was right, of course. They were on the knife’s edge out here, caught between the judgment of the zealots within the tribe and the vulnerability of the women and children he’d knelt to protect. There was no question that he’d have to tread carefully around the warlord, especially early on, and give nobody any reason to question his loyalty.

But surely giving Sakara’s eyes and tongue to Mikal and Georz ul-Zimion would make them (and him) feel a bit better about that reality…

“…the black flag is for calling an actual retreat, and the red flag is for pretending to retreat. Your men don’t have to know the difference, obviously. Maybe it’s best if they don’t, honestly, for the purpose of selling the ruse. But you’d better fucking remember, please.”

The Khogon paused for a second, ostensibly to allow for a chuckle from those in attendance who felt like kissing a little ass, then went on. “If you see the red flag waving in your direction, you call ‘Fall back!’ like you mean it, have your men retreat five hundred paces, then call for regroup and go at the enemy again at full speed. If they’ve started pursuing you already, they will be disorganized and easier to break. And if not, at least you’ll hit them again with force.”

“Does it not strike you as a little odd that he isn’t here, though?” muttered one of the Pohyor across the table from Kareva to the man sitting next to him.

Kareva didn’t know who they were talking about. He nudged Alakuz with his left elbow ever so slightly, and felt him shrug in return.

Then he turned his eyes leftward again to where Sakara was sitting, still doing everything he could to avoid making eye contact.

Killing him would solve so many problems.

He felt Alakuz nudge him back, harder, and forced himself to turn back to the warlord’s discussion of the little colored flags on the table in front of him.

Ersev seemed to be wrapping up. “In three days, gentlemen, we exercise the whole horde outside the eastern walls. Three days.” He pounded on the table for effect. “We will be ready to hold what we have. Questions? No? Excellent. You’re dismissed.”

Sakara was up quickly from his seat and moving swiftly towards the exit. The six men he’d brought along with him followed close behind. The three who looked too much like Sakara not to be his sons kept their heads down. Only the very last man to rise from their table dared to meet Kareva’s eye for even an instant before he, too, looked down and hurried to join his chieftain.

Kareva looked back towards Ersev and the Guards flanking him, but they were already on their way out of the hall, presumably back towards the warlord’s chambers.

“Perhaps we should sit and have something to eat before we head back to the barracks, Oproz.” Alakuz had clearly been watching him again. He knew he could probably stand to be a little more subtle, in case he wasn’t the only one.

“He can’t avoid us forever,” he muttered, in spite of himself.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Oproz,” Alakuz muttered back to him. “I’m just hungry.”

—

It took Attala a moment to realize he had actually made it to the beach; he had been hearing the distant crashing of waves for quite some time before the Sea of Suola actually became visible to him.

Long, thin grass was growing here, too, no more than fifty yards from the water. He looked around for something to tie his horse to, but nothing looked sturdy enough to hold him if he spooked. They’d have to keep moving for now.

A thin fog was coming in off the water in the early morning light as they came to a pristine sandbar, which immediately brought forth the one thing that had been bothering Attala for a few days now.

Even if they had been trying their level best not to leave a trail to follow, a few thousand people traveling together would have had to leave some signs of their existence behind them—food waste, broken wagon wheels, at least the remains of a pyre or two, right? Something?

They must have traveled through the dunes, that’s all. It’s not the way I would have done it, but you can still certainly reach the city that way.

He was probably just worrying because of his own fatigue. He was running a bit short on water, and he’d been out of food for a day and a half. Nothing he hadn’t experienced before, or couldn’t handle, but a journey like this did tend to weigh on a person.

Which provoked another thought: if the refugee caravan was traveling through the dunes, they’d be moving pretty slowly—with that many children along for the walk, the twenty-three days that had passed since they left home might not have been enough time for them to reach Makan Alabar yet.

He might even catch up to them on his way down the coast.

He gave a gentle tug on the reins and turned south down the beach on foot, keeping an eye out for a suitable place to secure the horse so he could spear some fish or eel. Getting a chance to eat something freshly caught would do him a world of good. He’d come upon something sooner or later.

—

Alakuz stood at the left end of the Hodrir line atop the wall, a few hundred yards north of the Eastern Gap, watching thousands of men on horseback practice large-scale maneuvers on the ground below.

It was folly. The exercise itself was harmless enough—he’d never imagined a scenario where the Pohyor would engage in full-speed mock battles against each other on horseback, for obvious reasons—but the battle plan they were acting out would be pointless if the warlord was actually expecting an attack from the east. The enemy in that scenario would likely be several legions of disciplined Jara’am heavy infantry (bribed away from the Runir emperor’s control, as it turned out, by a forward-thinking regional governor mere months before Varyta the Younger attempted his coup), totaling at least the same number of men as the Pohyor had—and with enough long spears to make cavalry charges pointless.

Not to mention, they were far enough in front of the walls to render the Hodrir archers useless.

It would be better to have everyone dismount, let the easterners march into the city, find places to slow their advance to a crawl, and let their ‘auxiliary troops,’ as the warlord and his senior advisors insisted on calling both tribes of the Etela, appear out of nowhere and wreak havoc from the flanks.

Of course, it wasn’t his place to tell anyone that, except for Kareva (whom he’d already told). But it did make him feel uneasy about the man they were serving.

—

Ersev was no fool. He didn’t need to run a mock battle to know that his forces would be at a deep disadvantage if the easterners came after them.

The truth of it was, even before Oreik squandered those two thousand warriors in the desert, Ersev had no interest in fighting the Jara’am. The overwhelming numerical advantage that had led to so many easy victories in their first two seasons of campaigning had made his chieftains rich, but also probably a bit complacent. Ersev had very little confidence that his tribes could win a battle against the quantity and quality of warriors the easterners could amass against him.

In fact, he already had peace feelers out to them, through some of the local luminaries with connections to the east. He had a son, after all, and it turned out the man who ruled in Jarane had only daughters. There was no reason to assume they were destined to be enemies.

But for now, if only so that his warriors wouldn’t be completely unprepared for the worst if it came, he’d have them ride around on the plains outside the city’s crumbling eastern walls and call it training.

It gave them something to do, at least.

—

“Come on,” Zamal ul-Ganruz muttered to himself.

He stood alone in the courtyard holding a wooden training sword in his right hand and his thick, iron-ringed wooden shield looped over his left arm.

He took half a step forward with his left leg and planted it with his toes pointed inward, like he’d done every day of his life, and put his weight on it to thrust his shield forward into its place in the wall.

A shooting pain raced from his thigh down to his knee, and he felt himself wobble, and his leg buckled and he pitched forward, tucking himself behind his shield to let his left shoulder take the brunt of the impact.

“Fuck!” he hissed quietly into the gathering dusk.

It wasn’t the pain he was worried about. That wasn’t a surprise, given how deep that spear blade had gotten into his leg. It was the weakness. His leg wasn’t holding any part of his weight up right now. Without a walking stick of some kind, he was useless—which meant that in battle, he was useless.

“Fuck,” he whispered again, quieter. What the hell was he supposed to do around here if he couldn’t fight? This wasn’t like back at Kalaa Ukruv’r, where the wounded could learn a skill to keep contributing to the tribe. Not that he’d ever paid much attention to anything else in the first place…

No. He wasn’t going to start thinking like that. He set his jaw and prepared to push himself up onto his good knee. He’d go again. He’d keep going until it worked.

Just then, he heard the gate swing open, and the familiar cacophony of a few hundred warriors cracking jokes at each other’s expense filled the air around him.

“Well, well! Look who’s back at it!”

He hung his head. The last thing in this whole world he could have wanted was for the rest of the boys to discover him down on the fucking ground.

A few pairs of hands grabbed under his shoulders all at once, and suddenly he was standing again. He forced a grin.

“Hello, boys.”

“Hello, Zamava! You been down there a while?” Toruk ul-Mikal’s smirk was affectionate, at least. “Working on a new technique the girls back home didn’t teach us, perhaps?”

“Oh, fuck off.” Zamal laughed in spite of himself.

“Are you coming out with us tonight, Zam?” called out Tanaz ul-Zimion in passing from a few yards ahead of them. “Tormava here has just informed us that he discovered the best brothel on this side of the river two nights ago, and we’re giving him the opportunity to prove it.”

Toruk shrugged with mock humility. “I mean, you know me, brother. I don’t lie about these things.”

Zamal clapped his friend on the shoulder. “You go on without me. I’ve still got a bit more work to do on this new move you caught me practicing.”

Toruk chuckled, then cocked his head. “You sure? Might do you some good to get out of here for a night.”

“I’m alright, brother. Truth is, I’m tired already. Leg is still acting up.”

Toruk grabbed and squeezed Zamal’s shoulder in turn. “Alright, well…don’t let it get you down, yeah?”

“Course not. The gods gave me a third for a reason!”

“Ha! Yeah. In case of emergency!” Tormava grinned. “I’ll do you proud.”

“I never doubted it for a second. Enjoy yourselves.”

Zamal was not ready to admit to Tormava or Tanaz that the real reason he wasn’t going to join them was Limani and his son: if she was going to take him seriously, it might be useful to show her that he could control himself a bit when he was on his own.

He had no need to rush to have that conversation with the boys, though. When it looked like the women and children were safe to come north and join them, then he would find a way.

And then? They’d understand.

Probably.

Hopefully.

—

Attala came upon the first village in the gray of twilight on the second night after he and his horse reached the coast.

There was a little wooden palisade, but no guards. There wasn’t much here worth taking, probably, and the few people who were still out of doors regarded him with barely anything more than a resigned curiosity as he led his horse towards the well in the middle of the square.

A young woman was at the well already, drawing water into a bucket. She looked up suspiciously, eyes darting back and forth between his sword and his horse, and it was only when he lifted his hands and took a step backwards in the universal signal of meaning no harm that she nodded a greeting and gestured for him to come closer.

“Evening.”

“Evening. Where are you coming from?”

“Kalaa Ukruv’r. I’m Etela.” She stared blankly at him. “From north of here.”

She shrugged. “Alright.” Her indifference made him comfortable enough to ask what he really wanted to ask.

“Listen. Have you seen any other Etela come this way in the past few days? Large group of people? I guess not, right? I would have expected to see some sort of trail…”

“No. But I suppose I could keep an eye out for them. How big a group are you talking?” the girl asked. “Twenty? Thirty?” She paused, surprised. “A hundred?”

“A few thousand, actually.”

The girl’s eyes widened for a second or two, and then she burst into peals of laughter. “You—you had me going there for a minute, I have to admit. I thought you were serious.”

She walked away without so much as a goodbye, still laughing to herself. “Can you imagine? A few thousand people. What would that even look like?”

—

Alakuz was in his chambers when Limava stuck his head in.

“Evening, Ohta.”

“Aravan ul-Ganruz. What can I do for you?”

“No, no, I don’t need anything. Guards are set for the night. I’m on my way out.”

Alakuz cocked his head. “Over the bridge again, I assume? Not to the same places our men are visiting?”

Limava smiled. “We’re captains, Alakuz. We can afford to visit the ones that have baths on premises.” He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, gently. “Can I ask you something? When you are looking for a woman, you know, for something more serious than just to keep the bed warm for a night or two, do you have some idea of what you’re supposed to look for?”

Alakuz chuckled. “That’s what you came in here to ask me?” he asked, though in truth, he’d been friendly with Limava for long enough by now that he knew not to be surprised by anything that came out of his mouth.

“Honestly, I came to invite you to come out with me.”

“No.”

“No, you’re not coming out with me?”

“No, I don’t know what to look for any more than you do.”

“You were never serious with any of the girls back home?” Aravan raised a hand. “I know, I know, you like your privacy—”

“It’s alright. No, I never was.”

“How come?”

“You mean, besides the obvious answer?”

Limava shook his head. “You know, you make too much of that. A man with your reputation, who gives a fuck if you look a little different, if your father was an outsider? It wouldn’t matter.”

Alakuz looked at him steadily. “I’m not as sure about that as you are.”

Limava shrugged. “Suppose you’d know better than I would.”

“Plus, there’s the Oproz.”

“He doesn’t want you to have a woman?” Limava’s eyes twinkled mischievously.

Alakuz snorted. “Knock it off. You remember what things were like after we put down the rebellion?”

“Yeah. It was bad.”

“Metan told me he didn’t trust anyone else to protect the boy while things were in flux. He needed someone loyal, someone who had no thoughts of taking over…”

“Right—”

“...someone the tribe would never accept as their ruler, not in a thousand years—and who knew it, too, so he wouldn’t try anything funny.” He looked at Aravan meaningfully. “It does matter, you know.”

“I hear you.” Limava thought for a second. “You’ve done a good job with him, by the way. The Oproz.”

“I appreciate that. But then, even if you were right, I have to ask: when, in your imaginings, would I have also had time to take on the responsibility of a wife?”

Limava chuckled. “Fair enough.”

“Right?”

“Well, you don’t seem to need to protect him day and night so much now. He’s got his own master to serve.”

“And so you propose that I use my first free moments in six years to visit a brothel with you?”

“Spoken like a man who hasn’t been with a woman in so long, he’s forgotten what it’s like! Come on, man. This city is a wonder.”

Alakuz caught himself trying to think of another objection to raise and stopped. “What—what would I have to bring along with me?”

Aravan chuckled again. “Coin.”

“I knew that. What else?”

“I mean, I don’t go anywhere around here unarmed. These people seem harmless enough, but you spend enough time drinking in brothels, you’re bound to make enemies somehow, right?”

“I’ll take your word for it. A sword, then?”

“Honestly, just your fucking scowl ought to be enough to keep them from looking at us funny, but yeah. Sword’s what I’ll be bringing. Anyone can get hold of a knife.”

“Right.”

—

Uskol ul-Aravan could tell why the boys liked this place.

He would have preferred to drink alone tonight, but Antaz ul-Inaz and Lukaz ul-Zalan had, for whatever godsforsaken reason, continued to take an interest in him. They’d dragged him out with a gang of carousers led by one of the Limavar, Toruk ul-Mikal, whom everyone called ‘Tormava’ (though in truth, this particular use of the nickname may have been ironic), and when he’d protested, Lukaz had told him that if he was going to be a moody prick, they’d rather he at least be a moody prick among friends so they could watch his back.

One of the tavern’s girls sat down next to him. “Hi!” she said, a bit too brightly.

“Hi yourself.”

“You looking for company?”

He shrugged. “I’m with these over here, and they talk enough as it is—”

He was interrupted by a none-too-gentle slap on the shoulder.

“Don’t mind him,” said Antaz to the girl. “He’s gone a bit touched in the head, you know, and he’s forgotten what he’s supposed to do next.”

She laughed. “Shall I remind him?”

Antaz grinned. “Someone should!”

She took Uskol’s hand and squeezed it gently, reassuringly. “It’s five,” she said softly.

He shrugged and reached into his pockets, then followed her down the hall.

When they were done, she rolled off of him and he lay there for a while, staring at the thatch on the roof in silence.

“What does Uskol mean?” came her voice from next to him.

“Hmm?”

“I was just thinking...in the Zadath, there’s this prophet named Ez’kel. I wonder if there’s some kind of connection?”

Uskol chuckled in spite of himself. “I’m pretty sure none of my people are named after eastern prophets.”

She giggled. “Fair enough. So what does it mean?”

“It’s a southern word... it means ‘faithful servant.’ The year I was born, the leader of our tribe became high king of all our people. A lot of newborn boys were named Uskol that year. A lot of girls named Uskoli, too.”

“It’s pretty.”

“Thanks.” He turned to face her. “My best mate was named Uskol, too. They needed to use our fathers’ names to get our attention back home. Well, my father’s name. He was a bastard, so…”

“Was?”

“Yeah. He’s gone now. The last battle we were all in before we came here, down in the desert, he sacrificed himself to save me and a lot of our friends.” He looked down and shook his head, still unable to shake that last grin on his friend’s face. “Stupid joker charged alone out into the middle of a gap in the line, no one covering him, no one—”

He stopped when he noticed her hand on his arm.

“Sorry, love. I’m going to stop you there.”

“Sorry?”

“My father fought in a war when I was a child, and he came back broken into tiny pieces, too. I’ve had my fill of sad stories.” She rubbed his arm, clearly trying to seem sympathetic. “You’re handsome. I bet I’d fancy you, if you weren’t stuck somewhere else.”

Part of him wanted to hit her, but it wasn’t her fault he was the way he was.

He stood, fished through his pocket for an extra coin, and dropped it on the table next to the bed. Then he walked out of her room and out of the tavern without another word to anyone.

—

Kasad made eye contact with Haman and raised his eyebrows. Oreik was falling all over himself again. It was time to go.

The two of them lifted him up between them, throwing his arms over their shoulders, and staggered towards the Vemma’s front door.

“…fucking…cunts,” muttered Oreik.

“Couldn’t’ve said it better myself, Mightiness,” Kasad grunted. “Come on. We’re off home.”

Their man at the door leaned down to whisper something to Haman.

“What was that?”

Haman inclined his head outside the door. “Two men wearing swords. One he’s never seen before.”

Kasad frowned. “Enemies?”

Haman grunted as he repositioned the Prince on his shoulder. “Nah, he doesn’t think so. Just wanted to let us know.”

As they hauled their patron past them, Kasad turned to look at the two men: they were quite the pair, and they were certainly not Pohyor.

“Evening!” shouted the one with the light hair and the easy smile.

“Evening!” called Kasad back, slowing to a stop.

The man came a bit closer. “Do you have to take him far? Need an extra pair of hands or two?”

Haman shook his head. “Don’t trouble yourself, friend. He’s just had a long night. So have all the girls!”

The stranger chuckled. “I can imagine. Safe home, then.”

Kasad smiled back and nodded. “Enjoy your evening.”

The other one, the one with darker skin, nodded politely as he passed them. He hadn’t said a word, but something about the look on his face unnerved Kasad.

“Where’s he from, do you think?” muttered Haman across Oreik’s unconscious form, the moment the strangers were in the door and out of earshot.

Kasad snorted. “This fucking army. They’ll let anyone join up, I guess.”

—

Alakuz felt his eyes widen as he and Aravan entered the main room of Taverna Vemma. There were gold-inlaid mosaics here like the ones in the palace, but these were hidden by hanging bolts of silk, flowing reds and pinks and purples, so the mosaics (and the gold) were visible only when you looked intently—and that meant trying to see past the bonanza of beautiful, barely adorned flesh on display in front of the silk. Impossibly beautiful women pantomimed every carnal act imaginable—alone, with each other, with equally beautiful men, with men who were not men and women who were not women and a few who might be something else entirely—waiting for a customer to come up with the proper amount of coin to lure them off the wall and into one of the back rooms.

He shook his head, stupefied. This place was clearly made for much wealthier men.

“I told you,” muttered Limava. “This city is a wonder. Just relax. We take a seat and the girls will come to us.”

“Alright.”

Limava patted him on the shoulder and guided him to an empty table near the wall. The two of them sat down, and Limava simply leaned back and smiled like a man without a care in the world.

Three more breathtakingly beautiful women appeared as if out of nowhere.

Limava’s smile widened. “Hello, girls! I’ve missed you terribly.”

One of them giggled. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never met you before.”

“Then I’ve missed you most of all!”

Two of the girls laughed, and the one Limava had missed the most immediately made herself comfortable on his lap.

The third girl sat down next to Alakuz. She leaned in and whispered in his ear, “I don’t think he’s that funny.”

Alakuz smirked. “Neither do I.”

“Good. We can be friends, then. I’m Rivi.”

“Alakuz.”

“You want to go talk somewhere else? Leave them to their little jokes?”

He turned to look at her. The smooth skin around her dark green eyes glittered, as if someone had painted her with a light coating of impossibly small diamonds, and her smirk made it clear that even before he opened his mouth, she knew he would say yes.

“Yes.”

—

Rivi was pretty sure she had never seen anyone who looked like this man before.

It wasn’t the darkness of his skin that set him apart, really, so much as his stillness. In a room overflowing with the most perfectly curated depravity a person could imagine, there might be nothing more fascinating than a man who could hold his gaze steady. His attention was on her alone from the moment he turned his head towards her. He never broke eye contact, even as she gently placed the hand he wasn’t using to dig through his pockets onto her thigh.

She felt herself becoming flushed. She stood up, and he followed closely behind her through the main room and down the hall into the bedrooms in the back, and when she turned to close the door behind he was there in front of her and they were on each other in a flash, door still halfway ajar, and she felt him hardening between her legs as he lifted her up and carried her over to her bed, and she gnawed on his lower lip and squeezed her legs tight around his hips and guided him out of his trousers and into her with her free hand, and as he entered her, his eyes widened and he groaned quietly, and she grinned and kissed him again, harder, pleasantly surprised to be enjoying herself, and suddenly he was breathing heavily and she knew he was done for and she worked herself against him even harder and he groaned even louder and exploded within her and she groaned as well, squeezing her thighs around his waist, celebrating her victory.

She fell with a sigh and a giggle onto her bed, pulling him down on top of her, and as they fell her left hand went to the center of his chest and she saw his gaze drop down to her garnet ring, and for a second, as he stared at it, his features hardened, and she beheld the true nature of his stillness and tensed slightly beneath him.

He must have noticed. His eyes came back up to hers, and he was calm. She relaxed too. He hadn’t struck her as the type whose violence would follow him into a woman’s bed. He was clearly in better control of himself than that.

“Where’d you get that ring from?”

“A friend.” She chuckled as he tilted his head in confusion. “Another customer, I mean.”

“It’s pretty. Did he say where it was from?”

“No. You want to buy it or something? I’m not that attached to it...”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I’m sure it looks better on you than it would on me, anyway.”

Rivi smiled and rolled back on top of her guest. “I think you could make it work.”

“Oh could I, now?”

Rivi felt him begin to rise up again and reached down to guide him. “I think you could make just about anything work.”

—

Alakuz didn’t decide, exactly, to stop thinking about the garnet. It just happened.

—

Turan was up with the dawn again and out exploring.

Most of the men from his company had gone out with Aravan’s men the night before after the ‘training exercise’ that had mostly been a few hours of standing at attention, bows and arrows next to them at the battlements, ready to fire at some imaginary enemy if they hypothetically broke all the tribes on horseback and started to march on the city.

Turan had spent most of the exercise amusing himself by watching Alakuz, Georz and Mikal try to mask their obvious disgust with the entire proceedings (this was the first time he’d ever seen Georz and Mikal agree with Alakuz wholeheartedly about anything), and when that got boring he turned to look out over the vast, wasted space behind them.

An enormous section of town between the main streets seemed to be completely deserted: there was no sound or sign of life, even in broad daylight, until you looked much deeper into the city, nearer to the central road that connected the Eastern Gate to the Market Square and, Turan knew, to the bridge. Slightly to the right of the Market Square, he could make out the ruins of the old Runir imperial towers, and he knew that if he followed the outside of the walls, eventually he would get to the northern stables where the Hodrir horses were stalled.

But the question of what lay between those places was still nagging at him. So here he was, out on his own again in the early part of the day.

Near the road that ran north-to-south across the easternmost border of their district, from the Imperial ruins to the northern sections of wall, he saw a smaller footpath that he had not yet followed. The buildings around here weren’t much more intact than in the fully abandoned areas of town—most of the windows here were boarded up, too, announcing perhaps a bit too loudly that there was nothing for any invaders to look at.

He turned left again where the pathway forked, hand on his sword hilt in case of any surprises. No one was here. Or, at least, no one was presenting themselves.

The buildings here were painted brightly, or must have been years ago the last time anyone used this as a market street. More boarded doors and windows greeted him as he continued. There were no corners to turn, just this one alleyway that seemed to go on forever until, rather, abruptly, the path stopped. A couple of buildings seemed to have collapsed into the middle of the path, and no one had bothered to clear the detritus.

Unless it had been left there on purpose.

He put his hand on his sword and turned around, instinctively turning his back to the rubble, waiting for the ambush that should have come next.

There was nothing.

There were no enemies to fight here. There would have to be people first.

He went back the way he came and saw something he’d missed: one building had its door open. An older man with long, braided mustaches and no beard was leaning against the doorframe.

When he saw Turan had noticed him, he smiled and stepped down into the street.

“What are you doing out here, young one? This alley is cursed, you know.”

Turan raised his eyebrows. “Cursed, did you say?”

“At least that’s what I assume. Hardly anyone comes this way at all. It’s a terrible place to own a tavern.”

Turan chuckled. “So then, what are you doing here?”

The old man shrugged. “Where else should I go? I own this place. And at least it’s quiet. Nobody gives me any trouble.”

Turan cocked his head. “The northerners don’t bother you?”

The old man shrugged his shoulders, chuckling. “Honestly, my friend? I don’t think they know I’m here. They hardly ever cross the bridge into this part of the city in the first place, you know, and when they do, they tend to stay on the main pathway. You’re the first warrior to set foot in this alley in a couple of years. You’re Etela, right? From the south?”

Turan looked down to the black steel of his sword, hanging casually from his belt. Damn it. He’d have to be more careful to actually stay inconspicuous the next time he went exploring. Then again, this fellow didn’t seem to be wary of him at all.

“Yeah, I’m Etela.”

The older man slapped his knee. “I knew it! My old man told me stories about your people from when he fought in the Prince’s army. Said the southern mercenaries were the scariest bastards in the whole force.” He grinned. “Said he was glad they were on his side.”

“I’m sure he gave a good account of himself, too.”

“In the war he survived, at least, sure. That’s when my family first came here. Has to be…forty years ago, now? Maybe more. They blend together a little, these days. Just wait until you’re old.”

“Most of us don’t get old.”

The old man smiled. “Ah, yes. It does take some skill.”

Turan chuckled in spite of himself. “How is the wine in your place?”

The old man shook his head. “I don’t have any wine. My apologies. My God forbids it.”

Right. Turan had heard that in a few places already. “No, no. Forgive me. I forgot myself. How is the tea in your place?”

The man grinned. “Pretty weak. Not much tea to be found around here these days. But it will warm you up.”

“Good enough. My men will be happy with that.”

“Your men?”

“We are new around here. There are a few hundred of us, and not everyone has found their favorite taverns yet.”

The man scratched at the left side of his mustache. “And you think they’re going to want to come drink weak tea in a deserted alley in the middle of nowhere?”

Turan smiled. “They’re going to want to hear about the wars their forefathers fought in.”

“That, I can help with. And I can keep my nose out of whatever you’re actually planning to do around here.”

Turan’s mouth dropped open. “I think you ha—”

“Come on, I knew as soon as I looked at you. You spend half an hour exploring all of this, eh?” He waved his hand in a sarcastic display of the majesty and splendor of his dusty little corner of the world. “You’re up to something. I told you, it takes some skill to get old. You should be a bit more careful. I’m Olan, by the way.”

“Turan.”

Olan clapped him on the back. “Well met. Anyway, what do I care what you have in mind for the place? It’ll be nice to have some company around here.”

“And some customers.”

“Sure.”

—

In the three days it took Attala to get to the second fishing village, his concerns blossomed into genuine fear.

The girl’s laughter was still ringing in his ears. He found himself thinking about it from her side, pondering the sheer preposterousness of what he was asking her: did a traveling party roughly ten or twenty times the size of your entire fucking village happen to pass by without leaving a trace?

Could they have tried to make it to Makan Alabar without touching the coastline, perhaps as some wild attempt to avoid detection? It was a mad decision with that many vulnerable travelers, but if they were that worried about the Pohyor chasing them down, maybe that’s what they’d done.

There was no reason to go into the village. They wouldn’t have seen several thousand Etela refugees, either.

He was distracted enough by his failure to find any signs of a big party that he completely missed the three sets of fresh footprints right near where he set up his camp for the evening.

They came that night, all three of them, skinny and bedraggled and not nearly quiet enough to be seasoned thieves. The horse whickered at an unfamiliar sound, and that was more than enough to snap him into wakefulness. He drew his sword as quietly as he could and waited in his tent.

By the time they knew he wasn’t asleep, it was too late for them.

The first one died soundlessly an instant after lifting the flap of the tent.

The second one screamed, more out of surprise than rage, and swung his shitty rusty sword wildly in Attala’s direction, and Attala’s parry snapped the thief’s blade. It flew past him as he whipped his own sword around and gutted the stunned, horrified boy holding half a sword.

The third took two steps backward, stumbled in the sand, and fell right on his ass. He lay back and dropped his weapon, stretching his arms away from himself. Attala stood over him, blade dripping red, and the thief burst into tears.

“Please,” he sobbed.

Attala turned his head and spat. “The only thing you can still control is how you die. Don’t be a fucking coward.”

The young brigand—though it wasn’t entirely possible for Alakuz to tell how old he was in the darkness—sniffled hard, fighting back his tears. Then he kicked out with both legs at once at Attala’s midsection, a desperate attempt to create enough space to roll away from the point of the blade.

It wasn’t a terrible idea, Attala thought, as he stabbed downward.

The boy gasped at the shock of the blade entering his body, and then his legs flailed out in front of him aimlessly and he moaned softly.

Attala nodded. “Alright. It’ll be over soon. And at least you went out fighting, like your friends. You have my respect.” He pulled the blade out of the boy’s torso and slammed the point down once, hard, through his exposed neck.

The boy gurgled for a second and then lay still.

Attala was on the move before dawn broke. The bodies would eventually wash up somewhere on the shore, he knew. But he was three days’ ride away from the city at most, so they wouldn’t be his problem.

—

Uron-Ravat wouldn’t have expected to see as grand a personage as Miruz of Toskalne at a common soldier’s tavern. There were fancier places over by the river for the important men—even the ones who were more famous than important.

But when Miruz sat down and asked to join them, he had supposed that as long as the big man was buying the drinks, no harm would come of it.

Now he wished he’d said something. The assorted Guards at his table were drunk, much too drunk to be safe around an officer so close to the warlord, and the conversation had quickly turned to gossip about the bosses. Uron had grimaced the first time Regez’s absence had come up, and now one of his men, an Aelar named Sunod, was openly asking Miruz about his own patron and whether he and the warlord were still friendly.

It was disgraceful. Uron started to interrupt, but Miruz beat him to it. He was scowling, but he seemed to be reasonably calm as he began his response. “Now, hold on a moment…”

Sunod hurried to walk his foolishness back. “No, no, Miruz, don’t misunderstand us, we mean no disrespect.”

“Of course we don’t,” said Malka, the Kudar next to him, who’d been egging Sunod on.

“All the same.”

They both raised their hands at once, deferentially. “Forget we asked,” muttered Sunod.

Miruz’s scowl fell slowly away from his face. “Alright. And just so you know, I’m not worried.”

There was a moment of quiet as the boys all waited for someone else to ask him to explain himself. Sunod was finally unable to help himself.

“No?”

“I mean, come on, it’s Regez of fucking Led! He’s Ersev’s right hand. Even if he does think Oreik sent his tribe up that hill for personal reasons, it’s not like he’ll actually demand a fucking blood price or anything. He’s too smart, and they’ve known each other too long.” He looked around the table. “What? You asked!”

The other men around the table sat in stunned silence for a bit too long. “Blood price?” asked Malka in a hushed tone.

Miruz leaned back suddenly, eyes wide. “No. No, that’s not what I—he’d never fucking do it, is what I meant to say. He’s the Khogon’s man, through and through. There’s nothing to worry about. That’s all I meant.”

“Yeah,” said one of the other men across the table, a man Uron didn’t recognize. “Of course. That’s all we took from it.”

Miruz seemed to exhale. “Good! Sorry. Too much wine, I guess.”

Uron disagreed wholeheartedly. There was not nearly enough wine.

And for that matter, Miruz didn’t actually seem all that drunk.

But that was above his pay grade. He put it out of his mind and reached for the nearest jug.

—

Kareva sat at the table in his chamber, scraping the edge of his knife against a whetstone in the dark, imagining Sakara on the sharp end of it.

He stopped for a moment when he saw the first rays of dawn appear through the window, then turned his head towards the far corner of the room.

The specter sat there staring at him, saying nothing, looking utterly, infuriatingly content.

Kareva turned away from him and took up the whetstone again.

IN THE NEXT CHAPTER: Several important conversations go very, very poorly.

READ BACK: The Dead and the Dying | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13