Kaustir, Chapter 4

[Zen]

"Well?" demanded the sand cat.

"Takeda, I'll speak to you after the party. Until then you're free to mingle."

The healer whirled around, her world spinning out of control. Hands braced themselves on the table, clutching at the edge in an attempt to stabilize herself. Amalia saw red, and felt her Aux darkening once more. Her eyes closed; her breath came in short and ragged.

"General, are you alright?" asked Coros.

"I'll be...Alright," she gasped. "Give me a minute."

The Aux bounded onto the table, its ethereal body passing through the trays of food and drink. Like wisps of smoke, the body dissolved and then reformed, but it never remained fully solid. It lowered its head, jutted its shoulders, and stared into the Crux's eyes.

"We're sick... It's bed time."

"Agreed," Coros said. "I will escort you to your room, General."

Rakar slid his left arm into the straps on his shield, which was resting one end on the ground, and the other end against his chest. This entire party had proved to be just as entertaining as he believed it would be. Unfortunately, that meant it was quite dull. Just as expected for a party centered around nocturne nobility.

Relief flooded the woman and her eyes refocused. Through her Aux's form she saw a blurry, pitch black form standing in the corridor. And when Matil leaped from the table, what Amalia saw made her lean against Rakar.

"... Theo?"

But she had to be delirious. Theo was dragged away, taken from her party's grasp by an unyielding stranger and yet, here he was, standing there.

"I must be delirious," she murmured.

Rakar moved to her left and put an arm around her shoulders to keep her from falling over as they made their way through the party towards Amalia's room.

"Just keep moving, General. I'll send for the healers after you are able to lie down and rest."

"Yes, of course," murmured the sand cat.

Both walked like they were in a drunken stupor, legs too weak and unstable to support weight. In her room, where the nocturne sun cast pillars of light onto her stone floor, Amalia fell onto her bed completely dressed. Before sleep overtook her, the healer said,

"Don't leave me. Please. I'm too scared."

His hand was reaching for the door as she spoke. After a short pause, Rakar opened it, and addressed the guards standing just outside.

"Fetch a healer. The General is sick."

The order was quick and to the point. Perhaps a sign of worry for her health. The draken made his way back over to her after closing the door. He pulled off his helm and set it on her bedstand.

"As you wish, General."

 

[unanun]

"Insufficient."

Lut Sar glanced over the maps that Durael presented to him. The fire mage had found him by secret insignia to a Wraith. He held out one of the scrolls, the parchment dangling to show a map, drawn painstakingly by Ture, denoting the ruins and mountain passes around the Secret City of Barvelle.

"Exquisite. But insufficient. Do you know why?"

"..."

"This map gives me no timely intelligence on the Barvelle city."

"Eimund from Tavark sent it with me."

"Who from Tavark?"

Durael swallowed on a dry throat. Wrong move. "A warlord. I think he appeared from the Northern Sea .. and brought a group of raiders and a mage with him. The mage knew how to command creatures of the sea." The pen that Lut was idly twirling in his hand snapped in two.

"Dear, dear, dear ...." The Kaustirian fire-mage could feel the tiger licking its lips. "Rogue warlords don't just come from the Black Sea. He is likely someone from Tavark who wants us to fight for his personal vendetta. The ruse is obvious." However, something wasn't right with Durael's story. That would mean someone went into the Still Sea ... and came back a different man.

Second strike. A pair of Wraiths locked his arms behind him, fingers soaked in interrupting ash breaking the spell lines on Durael's arms. "Durael. Your news is good, and the map is valuable. But you are of insufficient rank to be trusted. You were never meant to have this information .. this early." His mouth was gagged. A butcher's knife gleamed in the moonlight. "Your risk exceeds your worth."

"In recognition of your services .. I will take you apart after you're dead."

- - -​

"And who gave you permission to do that?"

I made my own independent judgement. Each minute that Lut Sar spent in the office with the Burning Sun, his back to him and facing out the window, he could feel the pressure on his head growing and growing.

"Who gave you permission to court martial a Kaustirian soldier?"

I did it for the greater good of your plans, Sun Above.

The Czar continued, as if he knew every word Lut Sar would say. "And what happened the last time you took that kind of discretion?"

Nu.

Would they ever see eye to eye? The Czar strode past him and out the door, brushing his hand against Lut's neck as he passed. Lut followed. Again, they descended the square staircase in the hollow of the Grey tower. The overflowing cups cut a dripping accent among their splashing steps. Many alcoves were empty, waiting for their replacements. Lut paused to look upward. The endless flights of stairs blurred together into a spiral.

"Everything must be perfect. Including you." The Czar moved to the next flight down, not waiting for him. "K'Larr's stink lingers in Avarath. You will don your mantle once again and help the Mayor with his cleanup."

"I believe Pegulis has contacted a Divine Weapon."

The last splash from the Czar's interrupted walk was deafening. Fwish. Water spun from his shoes as he turned to stare upwards at Lut.

The Soiree Ends, brown

The waters in Zirako finally ran blue again, the color of the ever clear sky. Of course, the water had never been blood, nor had it been dyed with blood to begin with. The blood of a thousand-thousand-thousand Ijit insects ran through it, raised in droves on rotting plant matter and crushed in giant grinder wheels. Each drop of Ijit dye was capable of staining a cistern deep red, and the Blue Tower trolls diligently dripped it into the downstream supplies every hour of the Soiree. The canvases covering the streets were withdrawn, and the streets were scraped clean for the resuming of regular activities.

The festival of alliances was coming to an end. The extravagance of the Soiree was precisely matched to its short duration, a firework that blinded onlookers with its brilliance before fading into fragrant smoke trails that lingered as long as the wind held still. Only the most astute could shield their eyes against the glare to see the sparks at the heart of the explosion.

In that spirit, the Czar gave two speeches to two different bodies. The first was to the Nocturnes, given at true night. They gathered in the Great Zorosk Hall, a huge, rectangular, featureless and colourless room carved deep into the mountain at the Grey Tower's base. The only colour was a pair of glow-maggot spheres that hung on either side of an obsidian chair upon which the Czar sat, head resting against fist.

"We have been scattered across Sunne by the cataclysm. Trapped by forest, ice, and sand, the years have eroded our minds."

"Isolated from each other, we forgot our lineages. Finally, at last, for just a day, we have reunited. But our brief time together is enough to fuse our rogue elements back into the primordial one. The one we all came from."

"Our source."

A rumbling swept the crowd. It was a deep mudra, ink block scratching on inkwell, and hammer resonating on forge, all in one. Three sounds from three Nations blended into one in the Zorosk.

"As we unfold our history in the future, never again forget."

Our source.

~

The second speech was given at high noon.

"My citizens. When I first found you, you were useless sacks of shit. Like drones with clipped wings, you couldn't even fly to find a queen to fuck."

"We were not born with an umbilical cord to fertile soil like the tree fuckers to the West."

"We were not born to a weak old sage who would spend his twilight days cramming fading, outdated teachings and morals into our helpless mind."

"We were born from lifeless sand, with only the faintest blessing of the Water Below to shape our form from the mud. For every drop of water and iron we collect, we had to sift a hundred times its weight in sand. But don't let our hardship fool you. Don't let the realization that we clawed our blessings from the sand cheapen them."

"I see saplings in the west united by fragile roots, and weaklings in the North frozen together. But we have forged our bonds not from circumstance, but by choice." The Czar paused to glance over the gathering, spattered with races from all over Sunne. Even behind him, the thorny forest-kin shivered in the heat. "And they are forged in iron."

He raised both hands into the air, as if daring the ancients to strike him down. "Citizens. Comrades. Our destinies begin to converge. Kaustir itself forms from the sand and we make our ready." He swept his hand to encompass First General Lortik and her group of warriors. "Our next generation of warriors grows before you." The crowd shifted their eyes, their attention. "They will dispatch the last obstacle that lies before our history that we will unfurl."

"A Divine Weapon hides between Zirako and Dorgrad. It disrupts the shipments that Governor Orvak sends to my forges, to my workshops, and to my armouries."

"General Lortik, you will go and cleanse the caravan road of the interlopers."

There was no room in the silence for cheering, only purpose as the crowd dispersed, leaving the General and her chosen ones to prepare.

End of Chapter 4​