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Chapter 2:
The Warrior’s Way


I


Hanuvar crouched at the trailhead, gripping his blood-tipped spear. The monster’s comings and goings had beaten a path through the jungle down to the rocky defile and into the yawning black cave where it laired. Its recent passage had silenced the closest birds and animals in the canopy; they watched and listened like he did. Out of sight the monster surely did the same, all while flexing its great clawed hands and wondering if the human who’d wounded it would follow.

Only a madman would confront the thing in the cramped darkness of its retreat. Hanuvar weighed another option. He had spotted a ledge to the cave’s side. He could leap diagonally to it from the descending trail without crossing in front of the cave mouth. From there he could lie waiting for the beast’s next emergence.

He was a study in quiet strength, a fit older man of broad shoulders, his short black hair and beard stubble peppered with gray. A sailor’s tan darkened his olive skin, apart from old scars that showed lighter on his muscular limbs. His frayed, knee-length tunic was as washed out as his eyes, beige where they were gray, but his strapped brown sandals were in excellent repair, as was his belt and the two dark flasks, short sword, and dagger that depended from it. The haft of a broad-bladed manaka sword, for slicing tropical foliage, thrust up over one shoulder.

Hanuvar’s gaze shifted to the sinking red smear of the sun, half hidden by the dense tree line on the hill behind. The birds resumed their clamor, but it would not be long before their sounds were replaced by those of the island’s night denizens. Much as he hated the thought of bedding down while this hungry beast ran loose, he could not afford to hold vigil outside its lair all night, nor to labor long hours smoking it out. He must depart in the morning, rested and resupplied for the next leg of his journey.

Reluctantly, he retreated.

By the time he’d returned to the boar carcass, rodents were into it. They fled at his approach, and he considered the ant-swarmed remains. He’d set a snare for the beast, but its squealing had lured the ancient bipedal monster from the jungle depths. It was the lizard, not himself, who had delivered the animal’s death blow.

While he had seen depictions of tarifen2 and read accounts of their savage predations, he had never seen a live one, nor had any reputable person of his acquaintance, for the green-scaled, man-sized predators had been exterminated from the lands of his people centuries before. Sailors from Volanus had revictualed in the Lenidine islands for uncounted years and had never reported tarifen here.

But then he had deliberately made landfall on one of the most remote islands in the chain, hoping to avoid both locals and Dervan naval patrols. While he supposed it possible the beast had swum here, more likely he hadn’t encountered an immigrant, but a lone survivor. In some ways, it was not unlike himself. Until that realization, he’d felt no affinity for the beast. But then it would have been strange to have experienced a sense of kindred when it had risen from the boar carcass, hissing from its dagger-fanged maw.

The scent of the raw meat and the musky odor of the boar’s hair and skin was strong contrast to the island’s abundant floral scent, baking greenery, and the underlying notes of rotting vegetation. Though the boar was hardly enticing now, Hanuvar’s mouth almost watered at the thought of smelling its cooking flesh. He had just decided he could smoke the ants away and recover a fair portion of the meat when the surrounding birdcalls dulled. The unmistakable sound of human laughter rose faintly over the ordinary cacophony of the jungle.

He stepped into the heavy, draping leaves and turned, seeking the direction of the sound. It lay to the west, the chatter of several men, a few voices raised in song, and a high-pitched piping instrument.

Deciding the novel noises were no threat, the birds resumed their raucous cries and drowned out the men before Hanuvar identified their language.

Working quickly, he hung the boar from a limb, cut its throat, and gutted it. There it would have to remain, for he dared no further preparations until he assessed the threat of the strangers. He cleaned his weapons by driving them into the ground, then resignedly abandoned the carcass and headed toward the intruders.



II


The isle stretched a little over three miles in length and was no more than a mile at its widest, a warped crescent with a bulge near its southern tip, where the monster laired. If the land had a name, Hanuvar did not know it.

He had dragged his sailing skiff ashore on the rocky western shore, concealing it under bushes he felled. A better beach lay along the inward curving eastern side, where white sand sloped gently from the clear blue waters to meet the wall of jungle. A small freshwater lagoon lay within easy walking distance of the shore, and so did the low line of hills curved along the island’s spine.

Hanuvar had avoided the fine stretch of sand to escape detection. The strangers apparently were less concerned with discovery, and as he neared them he wondered if he would find Lenidine natives, a Dervan patrol, a far-ranging trade ship from a nation of the Inner Sea, or something else entirely.

The rumble of human spech grew more distinct as he passed through the hills. He crawled into the shadow of a silver leaf palm and looked down onto the inviting stretch of sand, brown now as the sun dipped below the tree line behind him.

A sleek ship with a high prow and a single oar bank rode at anchor only a hundred yards out, its lone mast starkly outlined against the evening sky and the endless swath of water. Two crewmen sorted gear on its deck. The rest of the sailors, over two dozen, took their ease on the beach around a blazing fire. A few turned boars on spits while others lined up, laughing, to dip mismatched mugs and goblets into a large wooden barrel.

This was no Dervan patrol ship, and Hanuvar doubted these were merchants. Judging from the gold anklets on dirty limbs and the bright belts on worn tunics, these were mercenaries at best, and more than likely pirates, resting a half day’s journey from the better trafficked sea lane and its protectors.

Two thirds of the sailors were men, and nearly everyone shared the dark hair and complexion common to the people of the Inner Sea, although there were some coil-haired Herrenes, two ruddy blonds, and even a wiry, mahogany-toned Nuvaran, sitting with his back to the others while he faced the sea and played a somber melody on his reed flute.

Most interesting of all was the large, handsome woman in the brimmed, silver-banded hat. As she walked among them, one hand resting comfortably on the pommel of her sword, the other gripping a goblet, Hanuvar understood she was checking with the scattered groups. She consulted with the cooks, joked with a trio cleaning some blades in the sand, and moments later pushed others away from the liquor barrel. Apparently she didn’t want her crew drinking themselves insensible.

Female captains had been far more common among his own people than those of other lands, and for a brief moment his heart climbed at the thought he’d found a fellow Volani still alive and independent.

But then he saw the slaves and knew she could not be one of his own.

The three young native men sat under the guard of a surly, spear-bearing sentinel between the surf and the fire. Their wrists were bound behind their backs. They wore only loin clouts. Probably they’d once possessed the shell necklaces and bracelets traditional to their people, but those had been appropriated by their captors, only the first of the indignities that would be pressed upon them until they were sold to a Dervan flesh market.

Hanuvar’s lips turned down. He had witnessed uncounted preludes to violence in his time, but was far from inured to them, especially since the unpleasant fate in store for these young men was similar to that faced by the survivors from his own city.

His initial impulse was to work out a means to free them. Then he reminded himself this was not his fight, and that if he were to fail in this venture, he would be of no use to his people. As his father had taught him, he would pick his battles.

An unseasoned man might not have heard the faint whisking noise to his rear, or would have discounted it as wind. Hanuvar rolled immediately to his side, just before a spear drove into the ground he’d quitted.

He sprang to his feet, sword in hand, thinking to face a pirate scout.

What he saw instead was a wiry native girl, no older than fourteen or fifteen, her teeth showing white in a hateful grimace. She snatched her spear and thrust again at him. Hanuvar swept the jab aside with his forearm, grabbed the spear shaft back of the point, and advanced with a sliding step that forced her backward. She tripped over a tree root and hit the brush behind her with a leafy crash. That in itself might not have alerted the pirates, but the family of long-tailed parrots that rose screeching from a nearby branch surely did.

Hanuvar slapped the side of her head with the spear haft as she pushed to her feet. The girl dropped, moaning, one hand to her temple.

Hanuvar grabbed her spear and his own, pivoting to scan the camp site. The captain was pointing in their general direction, and a trio of men plodded toward their hill.

As he stepped back he found the girl struggling to stand. He hoisted her by the elbow and addressed her in her language. “Run, foolish child. Pirates come.”

He sent her stumbling and she regained coordination as she got under way. He left her, jogging deeper into the brush.

He retreated from his original camp to a wood-topped hillock closer to where he’d hidden his skiff. He had long since learned to adjust to setbacks, and so didn’t brood upon the lost meal and the delays this day had brought, or curse at the chill night that awaited him—for surely he could make no fire now. He had known true cold, and this would be but an inconvenience.

Darkness fell, the temperature dropped, and the wind rose. He didn’t expect the pirates to spend a long time searching, but he sat quietly, alert for them. He heard only the night calls of the jungle’s animals, and the lap of the ocean. He wondered if he would recognize the call of a tarifen, or if it made one.

He heard nothing more of the pirates until, finally, the distant sound of the flute cut the darkness again. Still he waited.

When a nearby footfall sounded, it was the girl, climbing her way up the hillock toward him. She paused to examine a limb he must have brushed against and then continued upward.

He stood and lowered his spear.

She stopped just beyond the weapon’s thrusting range and boldly raised her head. “I want my spear back,” she said.

He liked that. She said other things, but his Lenidine vocabulary wasn’t large. “Slow down,” he said. “Speak again.”

“Give me back my spear,” she repeated gruffly.

“You tried to kill me with it.”

“I thought you were one of them.”

“Then why did you think I was spying on them?”

“Pirates fight each other all the time. You look like them,” she added defensively.

His words sounded stilted even to him as he explained himself in her language. “You made things difficult for both of us because you did not think the situation through. Now the pirates know we’re here. They surely found our prints.”

She stared at him, then nodded once. “You are right,” she said, adding: “You sound like the war chiefs.” She pointed to the spear he held. “I can make another spear, but you already have yours, and I am running out of time.”

Time was his own adversary. He was curious to hear what challenge it presented her. “Time for what?”

“The pirates will probably leave in the morning. I need to free my brother and the other boys before then.”

He should have guessed that. “The odds are poor for you.” He bent to retrieve her spear, then lobbed it so it landed a few steps to her right. He tightened his grip on his own weapon but did not level it at her. “This isn’t a job for a single warrior. Where are the rest of your people?”

“This is the testing isle,” she said. “We’re here for the rite of the warrior’s way.”

In the Lenidines, custom sent young males to live for a week on a remote island. Often they were to return with a special feather or rock only found at the location, and that, in addition to living in the wild, confirmed their transition to manhood.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

She’d been waiting for that question, or one like it, for she took immediate umbrage. “I knew I could pass it, and better than they. I am the swifter runner, the better caster!”

“You came after them, on your own. Without the knowledge of your people.”

He knew he had guessed right when her anger rose. “You think a woman isn’t good enough to be a warrior?”

“My daughter is a warrior,” Hanuvar said. “So are many of her friends.” And most of them, probably all of them, were dead, but he did not say that.

The girl’s manner shifted to one of tremendous curiosity. “Where are you from?”

“Volanus.”

“You are really from there?” Her interest shone keen and bright, like the moon exposed by a cloud break. “They say that land has many chiefs and war chiefs who are women.”

His people had titled them counselors and generals, but the girl’s information was essentially correct. “Yes.”

She bubbled on with childlike fascination. “They say Volanus is so vast it takes more than a day to walk from one side to the other. Are there really great silver towers that almost touch the stars?”

He could not put from his mind the vision of the easternmost tower’s side being smashed in by a Dervan catapult stone, or of smoke rising from the roofs scattered over the temple islands.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “It’s a large city. There are silver towers, but they don’t come close to the moon. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

The native girl had crept closer and the moonlight shone on her wide eyes. She opened her mouth, almost surely to ask more of Volanus’ lost glories. “Enough,” Hanuvar said. “What is your plan to free these boys?”

“It has several steps. It will be hard to explain.”

“Draw it for me.”

She nodded as though this were wise, and retreated to brush broad leaves aside, exposing a swath of dirt, just visible in the moonlight. She drew with the point of her knife: the curve of the beach, the bonfire. The log where the boys sat. The greater wall of trees, the encroach of the jungle from the south and west.

He watched her work. “How long have you been on the island?” he asked.

“Three days. The pirates captured the boys when the sun was highest. I saw you sail in this morning, while my idiot brother and his friend were dreaming on the beach. I think one of them might have seen you.”

“If you saw me on the beach, you must have known I wasn’t a pirate.”

“I didn’t want an enemy at my back.” She looked up at him, her voice challenging, “You do not dress like a great warrior’s father.”

“My belongings were lost in a battle and long journey.”

Immediately she eyed him with more respect. A warrior returning to his home was very different from an outcast or criminal.

“I see your map,” Hanuvar said. “What is your plan?”

“I have water jugs. Clay. This afternoon I gathered snakes. I put them in the jugs, and stoppered them. I will throw the jars into the middle of the pirates. They will break, and snakes will crawl everywhere. The pirates will run and cry like babies.”

Hanuvar smiled wryly. “They’ll certainly be surprised.”

“While the pirates are distracted, I will sneak close and cut the boys free. The pirates will chase us, but I will set stakes before I throw the jars, and the pirates will trip over them in the dark. That will slow them down. We will reach the boat, and paddle from the island.”

“The best plans are simple ones,” he said approvingly. “And the gods love daring. What is your name?”

“I am Takava. Who are you?”

He bore one of the most famous names in the world, one likely to be recognized even here, by a young woman impossibly removed from the Dervan Empire and the ruined city of his people. Speaking the truth would only complicate matters. “Call me Melgar,” he said, taking the name of his youngest brother, whose ashes he bore in one of the flasks at his belt. “Your plan has fine features but you’ve missed some of the challenges.”

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin defiantly. “You know better because you are a man?”

“I know better because I have led more battles. Do your warriors challenge chiefs when they offer counsel?”

“No,” she said grudgingly. “What have I done wrong?”

“The limbs of the boys will be hard to move after you free them.” He struggled to explain what he meant with his limited vocabulary. “Their arms and legs will be stiff. They will not move fast.”

Her smooth forehead furrowed.

“Your diversion is clever,” he assured her. “But it may focus too much attention on a single place, from where you throw the snakes.”

Her little shoulders slumped, and she no longer resembled a budding war hero, but a discouraged adolescent. “What am I to do?”

“Allow me to make a few suggestions.”



III


Some had once thought to control Trisira through force of strength, but she knew true power lay not just in a slash with a sword arm, but a few drops of the right substance stirred into a goblet, or bright coins crossing the right palm.

True leadership was about wits, and required constant alertness. And so she never drank as deeply as her comrades, always kept her temper, and wakened at the change of every watch. Thus, from old habit, she roused at two bells to check on the crew.

The fire still blazed on the soft beach, and the men and women lay circled in the sand, in their bushy hair and mismatched clothes looking much like flotsam washed from the ocean depths. At the thought that their still forms resembled corpses she swore and made the sign against the evil eye, hoping she wasn’t conjuring a dark future.

She saw the cook’s broad chest rising and falling. As though the visual cue weren’t clear enough, many of her crew snored. Reassured, Trisira pushed to her feet, and Golius, sitting watch with his back to the fire and the waves, nodded to her.

She walked about the camp, stopping to look at the three sleeping boys, still bound, their lead ropes tied to a stone anchor her men had dragged ashore. Finding them this afternoon had been a lucky break. They’d fetch a fair price at the right market, and the short, handsome one might sell high.

Light sparked on the edge of her vision, and she turned to spot the flare of a campfire, a quarter mile away on the low hills west of their position. That evening the parrots had been startled from the brush beyond the beach, and her men had found two sets of tracks, though it had been too dangerous to follow far in the twilight. The boys claimed that the only other person on the island was an old man who’d beached his boat earlier in the day, and knowing that they were on their traditional manhood rite and the isle was routinely unoccupied, she doubted they lied. They were supposed to be alone. The old man might have had a passenger the boys hadn’t seen. But why would he have lit a fire?

Trisira found the sentry at the far end of their camp nodding off and cuffed him awake. She showed him the distant blaze with a jab of her finger. Quietly she wakened her first mate, Olocano, and sent the Nuvaran to investigate with four men. As they headed out she woke two more sailors to stand watch.

Might some native have set a beacon to warn other islanders someone had interfered with the manhood rites? The Lenidine natives could have a man watching out for the boys. But if so, it didn’t make sense for their guardian to light a fire to the south, for the populated islands lay northward. The more Trisira pondered the situation the more confused she became. It might just be possible the Dervans kept some lone scout on the island, who meant to alert a patrol vessel to her pirates. But the Dervans beached at night, and she happened to know that the fleet was spread thin owing to the worries of war in the west. Might there really be ships beached nearby to observe that beacon? She doubted that.

She paced the camp edge, eyes turned from the fire. As she studied the dark wall of jungle something directly west made an alarmingly loud cawing noise, like a hybrid of bird and human. At almost the same moment, an object hurtled from a group of boulders on her right. Time slowed as she spun to eye it, and she could have sworn it was a clay water jug, a red spot of flame reflecting on its rounded side.

It crashed into pieces against a rock near the fire, flinging broken clay and writhing serpentine forms.

One of her men woke, screaming at the dark shape wriggling over his naked chest.

“Snake!”

Even the drunkest of her sailors wakened, cursing and shouting and screaming, as the snakes raced through the camp site and over them. In their alarm, the frightened reptiles sometimes clamped on exposed legs and arms, or reared up to hiss warning.

Trisira tried to scan the darkness for attackers, but she’d ruined her night vision when she’d turned to watch her people fight the snakes near the fire. Out there in the darkness someone shrieked insults at them. She shouted at her second mate to take men and kill their taunter, then hurried into the midst of her sailors, ordering them to stop panicking, but she might as well have tried to order wild piglets. Only after she’d pulled a venomless tree snake from the hysterical cook did she spot four figures darting toward the jungle, the tallest in the lead. The three who followed were smaller, their stride wobbly. Her slaves.

“The slaves are escaping!” she shouted. “After them, you dogs!”

Two of her men grabbed spears and bolted in pursuit. Trisira followed, hand to sword hilt. The four figures reached the beach edge then disappeared into the dark curtain of trees.

Ulren, her second mate, was only a few steps behind. He was a middling sailor but a cunning swordsman and swift runner. Eager for the fight, he shouted at the boys, promising vengeance.

And then he tripped headlong in the sand. He let out a long scream the moment he landed, stopping only to draw a shuddering breath.

His companion, the big Ceori tribesman Hovan, slid to a stop, staring down at his friend working feebly to rise. A moment later Trisira halted beside them. Ulren had tripped over a staggered line of tree limbs to land belly first in a field of sharpened wooden points.

The swordsman screamed the louder as he pushed up on one trembling limb.

The stink of offal hit her. Trisira had smelled enough comrades or foes take stomach wounds, or defecate in battle, to know one or both had happened to Ulren, and the high-pitched screaming was an irritant. She looked up at the swaying line of fronds through which the slaves had fled, and pointed Hovan through it.

The northman shook his head. “The tall one was no normal,” he said in his barbarous accent. “Silent like a forest ghost.” His gaze shifted back to his friend, now sitting upright and moaning.

“Help me, Captain!” Ulren begged, then fell into a shuddering cry again.

A dark wet hole showed through his cheek, and a snakelike thing hung down from his belly. Part of an intestine had been torn free, along with a chunk of muscles and flap of skin. The biceps of his sword arm trailed from a few strands of fiber alongside his elbow. Seeing this, he cried out once more.

Trisira’s first slice hit, but Ulren didn’t stop shouting until the blade buried deep in his chest and found his heart.



IV


Hanuvar knelt with the boys only a few feet from the jungle’s edge, watching the captain peer in their direction while the big Ceori looked down at the dead man. Four more pirates had run up behind her, asking for orders, but she continued to stare into the darkness. He doubted she could see them.

Finally, she backed away, snapping orders Hanuvar couldn’t make out. She was the most dangerous. If he’d had one more soldier in his force he would have arranged for a spear or arrow to bring her down in the initial onslaught. Leaderless, the pirates would be far less likely to cause additional trouble.

But he had only himself and the girl, and Takava had set the fire and performed the bird calls beautifully from the other end of the camp, then shouted insults until some of the pirates had pursued her into the jungle.

The boys had remained quiet throughout the rescue and the flight. Finally, as the captain retreated with the others, one of them whispered at Hanuvar’s back. “Who are you?”

“A friend of Takava’s.”

The shortest of the three spoke in wonder. “Takava is here?”

“She planned your rescue,” Hanuvar answered. “If not for her, you’d be heading out to sea at dawn, to be the playthings of old women, or men.”

“That pirate captain said I was pretty,” the short one said, oddly defensive, “and promised to take care of me.”

“Then go back to her, fool,” one of his companions said derisively. “If she liked you, would she put you in ropes?”

The third boy spoke directly to Hanuvar. His voice had a deeper, rasping quality the others lacked. “Will they come into the jungle after us?”

“It’s unlikely, but not impossible. Let’s find Takava.”

They retreated. In the dark, he had little sense of the boys save that one was shorter, and one had a distinctive voice. The shorter one continued to bicker with the one who’d mocked him, and Hanuvar admonished them to silence. After, not a word was spoken. He stopped now and again to listen for pursuit. Finally, they climbed the hillock where he and Takava had made their plans.

She hadn’t returned. Hanuvar bid the boys to sit, then searched the surrounding brush. He found no signs of recent passage. “Did you learn anything about the pirates?” he asked them. “Was the pipe player a capable warrior?” Hanuvar had seen him leading the party the captain dispatched toward Takava’s fire. A second group had hesitated to go deep, but the pipe player had slipped into the foliage.

The raspy voiced one answered. “He’s the crafty one. The captain calls him Olocano. He is the subchief. He speaks our language, better than you. He seemed to know jungle ways better than the others.”

That wasn’t the kind of news Hanuvar had hoped to hear. Either Takava was hiding from pursuit, or she had been found, meaning capture, injury, or death. And unfortunately there weren’t just human adversaries to contend with. There were savage-tempered boars, and, even worse, a wounded tarifen, likely hungry and angry both. Since he had seen it in the daytime, it probably wasn’t a nocturnal hunter, but he wouldn’t have bet his life on that, much less hers.

He explained to the boys about the tarifen, asking if they’d seen it.

“We saw its tracks,” the smaller one said. “We thought it was a spirit.”

“It’s not a spirit. It’s a hungry animal.” Hanuvar unsheathed his manaka blade, and his knife, telling them to make spears to defend themselves with, and to use these weapons in the meantime if needed.

“Where are you going?” asked the raspy-voiced one.

“To find Takava.”

“I am her brother,” the boy said. “It is my duty to go.”

He shook his head. “Stay. Three of you together are a bigger threat to the tarifen, if it comes. If you hear the pirates closing in on you, head to your boat and get away.”

He didn’t wait for their response.

While Hanuvar was an experienced woodsman, this jungle was different from the lands he had most frequently traveled. His step was neither as light nor as sure as it would have been in a northerly woodland, and the darkness was an impediment no matter the climate.

He picked his way forward, and as he turned south he heard the shouts of men’s voices saying one of the slaves had gone this way. Neither he nor the boys had left tracks in this direction, so the pirates had to have stumbled across Takava’s prints.

Before much longer, bright points of light winked in and out as lanterns passed among trees. Pirates were beating their way forward through the jungle in two groups. They would only be pressing forward if they were certain of their quarry. And there were only two reasons Takava had not already shaken them. Either she was slowed by a wound or, knowing her pursuers were tracking her steps, she was deliberately keeping them from the half of the island where the rest of them had retreated.

This latter option was most likely, and Hanuvar’s respect for her climbed higher still. A leader needed to put her charges before herself.

The slap of feet on leaves rose behind him. Hanuvar crouched, wheeling, just as a small form hurtled from the brush and lantern light spilled onto him from only a few paces out.

His spear was up but he recognized Takava rushing him and turned the point. She grabbed his arm and tugged him to one side, calling him to drop. He did, even as something alternately black and gleaming struck her side. She gasped as she fell.

One of their pursuers let out a savage, exultant cry.

Hanuvar scrambled to his feet, helping her rise, shifting as he did so. A second knife blade soared a foot past his shoulder.

He understood then that the louder pirates were putting on a show, and that someone even more clever and capable was following on the flank.

Takava was having trouble rising. Hanuvar lifted her in his arms, the spear borne beneath her. She was lighter than he’d guessed.

Head low, he turned south. His hands were soon wet from her blood-soaked tunic. Despite the shout of pursuers and the bright spot of a distant lantern, he paused to shift her in his arms. She was pressing her hand to the wound. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“It doesn’t feel good.” Her laconic aplomb, more to be expected from a veteran warrior than a youngster, impressed and alarmed him.

“Did you get the boys free?” she asked.

“Yes. They’re fine.”

He found his way uphill and down and finally emerged into familiar territory. There, in the moonlight, was the little clearing with the trail that led into the rocky defile. The glow of the pirates’ lanterns was only a hundred yards or so behind.

He searched vainly for new tracks made by the tarifen, but the moon’s light was little aid for fine details when he was moving at a jog.

There was nothing for it but to take the chance. He raced halfway down the rocky slope and then sprang—not toward the cave, diagonally to his left, but toward the rocky ledge he’d spotted earlier, diagonally to the right, sloping back from the trail.

He landed on its edge, teetering for a moment, then leaned forward. Aided by the overhang’s rearward slope, he caught himself, crouched, and pushed into the greenery.

Some small thing scurried from their path and into the protective cover of a nearby shrub, partly overhanging the back of the ledge. Whatever it was seemed frightened of them, which was probably a good sign. Gently he laid Takava down.

“Lie still,” he whispered.

“I will.”

He freed his sword and cut off a swath from his tunic, then pressed it to her injury. He felt a deep gash in her side. He worried the knife had penetrated an organ.

He lay next to her, told her to keep her eyes down. She lowered her head and both hid under the drooping fronds of a fern.

Only a moment later the captain arrived with a band of panting men, dark figures at first, then briefly outlined as a lantern bearer came up behind them. The Nuvaran Hanuvar now knew as Olocano squatted by the trail head, then pointed down slope.

Five more pirates turned up. There were ten total, talking quietly among themselves, all but the first mate looking grim and sour. They might not be voicing their feelings, but their stances revealed them. They didn’t want to be here. Hanuvar hardly blamed them. He wouldn’t want to be tearing through the jungle searching for a fugitive in the middle of the night either.

The hard-eyed captain pointed down slope. “You can stop your bellyaching,” she said. “Olocano says one of them’s wounded now, and they’ve retreated to that cave.” She pointed downslope. “They’ve nowhere to go.”

“We know how to get people out of caves,” the Nuvaran said calmly.

“Indeed we do,” the captain agreed. “You three, trim some of those limbs down.”

The thought of the chase being over seemed to invigorate the pirates, for they turned immediately to work, hewing through the bushes with their wide-bladed weapons.

The captain came halfway down the slope, obliterating any sign of Hanuvar’s own passage. Their first fortunate break in some time.

She peered at the cave, lifted a hand to one side of her face, then shouted: “We know you’re in there! And we know one of you is bleeding. If you come out now, we can treat you. You don’t have to die.”

As the light played across the ground near the cave Hanuvar slitted his eyes. He wondered what it would take to anger the tarifen or draw its interest.

It might be that he’d wounded the beast more severely than he’d thought, and that the thing was dead or dying inside its lair. It might be that it was out hunting this very moment.

The captain stepped out of the way as two of her men dragged bundles of branches heavy with broad, thick leaves up to the cave maw. A scrawny pirate used lantern doors to fix the light on the ground in front of them.

Hanuvar wished that they’d be quicker about it because Takava’s injury needed tending. He had left off praying weeks ago, and could not imagine why the gods would save an injured girl who wasn’t from their own land when they hadn’t shown any interest in preserving their own people.

The first two pirates started back up the trail with the captain, and another one started down, bearing more leaf-heavy branches.

“It’s going to grow really unpleasant in there,” the captain shouted from the trail head. “Fast. And once I get this smoke going it may be hard to stop. I can’t guarantee that we can get you out alive even if we want to.”

The pirate reached the pile of tree limbs and dropped his bundle on it. “I can hear one of them moving around in there,” he called up to the captain.

“Come on out!” she called.

When the tarifen burst from the cave, its scales shown in the lantern light, a dozen different shades of brilliant green. Its wicked sharklike teeth glinted yellow-white as it roared.

The pirate with the lantern screamed. He shook as he swung the light into its face. The beast slitted its great eyes and pounced off powerful black legs.

Too late the pirate dropped the lantern and reached for his weapon. The light wobbled madly as the tarifen’s curved talons shredded flesh and muscle and fabric, and the shadows of the struggle were painted on the nearby foliage. The monster closed its crocodile maw on his neck and silenced his screams. Blood spurted and the beast shook him like a dog with a duck, then released his body and looked up slope.

The captain had been shouting for her men to ready spears, but the pirates were already in retreat. As the tarifen bounded up slope, the captain and her mate bolted after them. Hanuvar heard a scream, and the monster’s roar, and a death rattle and the sound of tearing flesh. Then the beast growled and padded in pursuit of the others.

“It doesn’t feel as bad now,” Takava said weakly.

Even in the lantern’s ruddy glow she was pale. The rock was heavy with her blood. The girl saw the direction of his gaze, considered the blood, then faced him. She looked more tired than alarmed. “Your city,” she said. “Is it really as beautiful as they say?”

Not for all the treasures of the world would he have told her what it looked like now. Instead, he spoke of the Volanus of his memory. “It is. In the morning, the priestesses of the sea temple sound the horns to greet the sun’s emergence from the waves. The light gleams on the spires of the silver towers, so bright they seem aflame. The buildings climb steeply along the shore, gilt with bright tiles of blue and red and gold. The water of the fountains rises along the wide avenues. People from all corners of the world walk her streets, bringing their wares to sell and trade. At night there is music, and folk gather at the stages to hear the stories of our people.”

“Women really can be warriors there?” she asked.

“Yes. But only the brave and clever ones. Like you.”

“Why are you crying?” Her weakening voice sounded critical. “Warriors don’t cry.”

“They do when a hero dies,” he said.

She must have liked that, because her last expression, before it blanked in death, was a smile of approval.



V


At dawn they buried her near the shore. While the boys held graveside vigil, Hanuvar returned to the white beach to find the pirates vanished, leaving only their dead behind. Among them was the captain, though she had not perished from the bite of the monster. A sword stroke had cloven her from behind. It might be that the first mate had decided on a promotion, or that some lower hand had taken out his frustration. Her killer might have been the Ceori whom the sea birds were nibbling, further down shore.

He saw no tarifen tracks on the beach, nor did he seek them or their maker, for he kept to the island’s north. The boys helped him hunt, cook, and smoke a boar that day, and he sat with them over an evening meal near Takava’s grave. He had already told them he would leave in the morning.

“How much longer will you stay?” he asked.

“Until the trial is over,” the short one answered, “and we are warriors.”

Hanuvar studied the indecision on their somber faces for a long moment before speaking. “I think your grandfathers would say you have passed your trial.”

“Melgar is right,” said Batera, Takava’s brother, he of the raspy voice.

“You have a story to tell your elders,” Hanuvar said.

“It is a story of our defeat,” the short one said dispiritedly.

“Maybe you can have your own story some day. This is the tale of a beast, the last of its kind, who hunted your enemies for you, and an island that should be its sacred ground. But most of all it is the tale of a brave warrior who would have been a war chief.”

“You mean Takava?” the short boy asked. “Women cannot be war chiefs.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, but fell silent at Hanuvar’s dour look.

“If your people had made no place for her at their fires, I would have made a place for her at mine.”

Batera eyed him curiously. “In your city?”

“In the battles that lie ahead. I would have been glad for a keen-eyed warrior of good sense. Tell your chiefs that a general of Volanus said this.”

“I will,” Batera vowed, and the others nodded.

He left the next morning at sunrise. His last look back showed the boys readying their own gear for their hike to their boat. His eyes shifted to the palm waving over the deep grave where they’d buried the girl, then he turned his attention to the current, and the wind, and the long journey that lay before him.

History tells us that every last Volani fell by their sword or was carted off to slavery, but that isn’t entirely accurate. At this late day many of you likely know that in the years before the city’s destruction, Hanuvar had led thousands away to found a hidden colony, and had in fact returned to Volanus to seek additional colonists, arriving just before Derva delivered his city’s death blow.

But there were other survivors even than these. Hundreds of traders and sailors were absent during their city’s conquest because they were travelling the Inner Sea. Hundreds more had grown wary about rumors of a renewed war with Derva and had already fled to other lands.

Lastly there were a handful, driven by personal ambition, cowardice, greed, or some combination thereof, who had thrown in their lot with the winning side.

—Sosilos, Book One




2 While a Volani word, tarifen is originally of Ruminian extraction, and can be loosely translated as “blood-claw.” Once indigenous to the continent of Kenasa and some of its outlying islands, today the tarifen survive only in history and myth, for they have been hunted to extermination, although (almost certainly apocryphal) reports of individuals and small hunting packs in remote lands persist. A bipedal lizard ranging from four to eight feet in height, the tarifen were voracious and as likely to stalk humans as other game. Unlike other large carnivores, they possessed no fear of man. I have personally viewed a collection of dried tarifen parts in a Nuvaran palace, reportedly preserved from a great hunt two hundred years previous. Even dead the large fanged mouths and terrible claws are striking.

Silenus


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