Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (109 page)

She reached out for his hand, but somebody else held her now, warm, worried, giving of his own strength, but it was not
his
hand, not Mikhail's. Had this been what it was like for
him,
to wish for one hand and receive another? She grabbed it anyways, thankful that at least one person in this miserable life cared about her. When she woke up again, the old woman had gone and, in her place, Dadbeh sat holding her hand, his mismatched eyes filled with worry. Beside him sat a younger woman and two old men, not the usual Kemet traders, but their extended family which often traveled with them. The two old men had recent scars, as if someone had beaten them and then decided to leave them alive.

Dadbeh introduced her his new friends.

"This is Khafra, Neby, and Tiaa.” Dadbeh pointed to the newcomers. “A fortnight ago, their caravan was seized by the Uruk after Khafra refused to give them half their trade goods in exchange for safe passage.”

Gita remembered the whispers, after the Uruk had snuck into her uncle’s house and tried to murder Mikhail. Immanu had tried to blame her for
that
atrocity, as well.

“Pareesa said it was all Jamin’s doing,” Gita said.

Dadbeh asked the three Kemet a series of questions. As the daughter of the village drunk, Gita had never had any reason to learn their language, but Shahla had taught to her a few of their more common words. Dadbeh’s expression was intense as he asked questions about his former friend. His mismatched eyes hardened with a combination of hatred and disappointment.

“They saw no sign of Jamin in this raid,” Dadbeh said. “Whatever his part in it, it occurred
after
they were ambushed.”

“How many men did they lose?” Gita asked.

“The Uruk killed Tiaa’s husband,” Dadbeh said. "Along with her brother and father. Neby is her great-uncle."

The three Kemet explained who they were, what the Uruk had stolen from them, and what they planned to do now that they were stranded in Uruk territory. Had the river really carried her this far? They seemed unaware of her status as renegade, and Dadbeh, thankfully, seemed unwilling to enlighten them. When they asked about the winged one, Gita hesitated, and then told them a half-lie. When she had left him, he'd been grievously wounded and she was uncertain whether or not he had recovered. The Kemet seemed satisfied with this answer.

Dadbeh waited until they filtered back out of the tent, and then he grabbed her hand.

"I found it," he said.

"You found Shahla's body?"

"No," Dadbeh said. "I found Mikhail's crashed sky canoe."

An odd burble of excitement bubbled through Gita's chest. His sky canoe? The one he had fallen from the sky in?

"Where?"

"About two day's walk from here," Dadbeh said. "We were with Jamin the day he tracked Ninsianna there, but for some reason, it was as if the pathway had been erased from our memories and the desert."

Gita frowned. Having caught a glimpse of the world in-between, such events did not happen by serendipity. It had always bothered her, the fact that none of the warriors had ever made trips back out to explore, if not to attack him, than for no reason other than half the females in the village would take a romp behind the goat shed just to catch a glimpse of Mikhail's legendary sky canoe. If the warrior's memory had been erased, she suspected it was the same forces which had given Mikhail such a spotty memory.

"How did you find it again?" Gita asked.

"He crash-landed next to a stream," Dadbeh said. "All streams eventually lead to the Hiddekel River. I simply moved downstream and traced all of the streams back for a three-day hike. It took me three fortnights, but at last I have found it."

"Why were you so determined to locate it?" Gita asked.

Dadbeh's usually-comical face twisted into an expression of hatred.

"That bitch did something to Shahla's mind," Dadbeh hissed. "I know she did. Shahla never experienced mental problems until Ninsianna felt she was a threat to her husband's affections."

"That's not Mikhail's fault," Gita said.

"No," Dadbeh said. "I don't blame
him.
Mikhail wouldn't have noticed Shahla if she'd thrown herself naked on the ground, covered by honey and pomegranate seeds. Not while Ninsianna had him under her spell."

Gita's mouth turned downwards into a sad smile.

"I know, eh?"

Dadbeh fingered his stone blade.

"I'd hoped to find something there I could use," Dadbeh said. "Something to go against the lizard demons who stole Shahla's body."

"Why?"

Dadbeh looked past her. His lone, hazel eye turned pure green, accentuating the contrast between the mismatched pair.

"I keep seeing her," Dadbeh said. "Sometimes, out in the desert. Like a mirage. Or when I wake up at night, she will be standing there beside me, holding that rag doll she held after…"

Dadbeh's eyes turned wet. He sniffled and pretended to itch his nose.

"Sometimes I see her too," Gita said. "Three times she came to me when I sat at Mikhail's bedside."

"What did she say to you?" Dadbeh said.

"She never spoke," Gita said. "But by the way she stood over him, it reminded me of the day she asked my help to get Mikhail to force her father to back off on his scheming so she could marry
you.
"

The cacophony of children bustling back into the tent along with their grandmother caused them to cut off any further conversation. Dadbeh grabbed his bow and strapped his quiver across his back.

"I found them on my way back to Assur," Dadbeh said. "I felt sorry for them, so I have helped them hunt game to keep their cook pot filled. It is a good thing I was delayed, or I might not have gotten them to help
you.
"

"There are no camels in Assur," Gita said. "Or in any village that I know of. They are only useful for traveling great distances across the desert."

"I plan to help them get
their
camels back," Dadbeh said. "And then they will owe me the truth about the lizard demons."

"How can
you
overcome an entire group of mercenaries?" Gita asked.

Dadbeh gave her a cruel grin, one which sat uneasily upon the face of the kind man she had once known.

"I have
you
now," Dadbeh said. "You forget, I have seen the way you creep right up to a man and he never sees you until you are standing right in front of his face. As soon as you are well enough to walk, I shall take you to the sky canoe to see if we can't find a heavenly weapon. And then, after we have ambushed them, we shall return to Assur as victors."

"I can never return there," Gita said. "Every person in that village thinks
-I-
was the one who helped Shahla ambush Mikhail."

"Then we shall just have to find proof of your innocence along the way," Dadbeh said. He squeezed her hand, and then bent to plant a kiss upon her forehead, as though she was a little girl.

Gita stared at his back as he retreated from the tent to hunt their supper, this friend-of-a-friend who was now the only person left on Earth who cared if she was still alive.

~ * ~ * ~

Late-January: 3,389 BC

Earth: Village of Assur

Mikhail

"Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-nine…"

“Colonel Mannuki’ili!!! What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Mikhail scrambled guiltily to his feet. As he did, his enormous wings, which were the only part of him which had not shrunk, knocked the bundles of dried herbs off of the ceiling rafters.

“Sir! I'm doing pushups, General Needa, Sir!”

Sweat beaded down his forehead and his breath came in huffs, signs of exertion from an exercise that once upon a time he'd been capable of performing into the thousands. Needa stood before him, her wooden cook-spatula wielded before her like General Abaddon's sword.

“That wound just closed up,” Needa snapped, “and now you’re trying to pop it open again. What were you thinking?!!”

“That I need to get these pathetic excuses for arms back into shape, Sir!” Mikhail answered crisply, as though he answered an Alliance drill sergeant. He flexed one bicep to show his diminished muscle tone. “If you want me to go retrieve your daughter, Sir, first I must grow strong enough to fight!”

Needa sighed.

“Let me check how you’re doing."

Needa motioned for him to sit on the long, coarse bench so she could check his wound.

Mikhail stripped off his shirt and groaned inwardly at the hideous sight of the still raw looking, reddish scar tissue that covered the sunken crater that used to be his chest. He looked rather comical, he supposed, with his Alliance uniform shirt, his Ubaid kilt, his matted wings, and combat boots with socks that had sprouted holes from too much wear. Even his hair had grown longer, though thankfully his genetics spared him the itchy beard which so many Ubaid men wore with pride. What would Raphael think if he answered his distress call and found him in such a disheveled condition?

“See,” he said, “I’m fine.”

Needa examined the deeper scar which had finally stopped oozing puss, but the necrotic gangrene had taken a chunk of his pectoral muscle. He'd been forced to perform one-handed pushups because there was no longer enough muscle left on the left side of his body to push his own body weight up. Absent some miracle, not even the best Alliance surgeons would ever be able to give him back full use of his sword hand.

“It’s open … here …about the size of an olive pit,” Needa pointed. “If you don’t let it heal, it will re-infect.”

“Yes, Sir,” he said, not at all apologetic.

Needa checked his color, still pale from the winter.

“You need to eat more,” Needa said. “You’re still too thin."

She plopped an ochre-colored pottery crock in front of him, filled with a bit of leftover cold squirrel stew simmered in a congealed paste of mushy chickpeas, and pulled off the lid.

"Eat! You keep burning the weight off as quickly as you put it on.”

Mikhail forced himself not to groan. Yalda and Zhila had promised that if he came over this afternoon, they would ply him with bread and mead. How could he politely tell his mother-in-law, who did everything for him and expected very little in return, that even
he,
he who had grown used to eating the tasteless, remolecularized food cube rations of the Alliance military, would rather go hungry than eat her cooking?

“Weight won’t do me any good if I’m soft and puffy,” Mikhail said. “I’m still too slow and I can barely get into the air. If I was to battle the lizard people right this moment, we wouldn't stand a chance."

“You must eat more, then,” Needa said, “and don’t push yourself any harder than your body can keep up. If you get sick again, it will take that much longer for you to go and rescue Ninsianna. How sure are you that this white-winged Angelic won't hurt her?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Mikhail said. “But the Eternal Emperor would pay a hefty ransom to get his hands on a child of mine.”

Needa touched his wings.

"Ninsianna is very lucky that this Emperor you speak of holds her husband in such high regard."

High regard? Perhaps…  A more truthful statement would be that the Emperor was obsessed with the Seraphim genome and had been trying to entice him to produce such an offspring for years. Might the Emperor have…?

No! The Emperor would not do such a thing!

“What are you not you telling me, son?” Needa asked.

Mikhail hesitated, torn between his natural inclination to always tell the truth and that newer part of him, the part which had been burned by humans and this white-winged Angelic, to give an evasive answer.

“The knife that found its way into your heart could have been avoided," Needa said, "if only we’d shared the description of the Evil One that Ninsianna saw in her vision."