The Rage of Dragons (The Burning Books #1) (17 page)

It felt strange, holding bronze again. Tau had his practice sword in his off hand and a shield on his right, more to protect the broken wrist than anything else. It wasn’t much and the shield felt awkward, but some protection was better than none.

He stood on one of the isikolo’s several small battlefields. This one was square, extending a hundred strides in each direction, and the valley’s water-starved grass rose to midcalf, making it somewhat difficult to run.

Tau was beside Yaw and Chinedu, near the front of their scale’s formation but a row back from Uduak and Hadith. They were facing Scale Chisomo. It was a good first test, Jayyed’s fifty-four against Chisomo’s.

Chisomo, a newer umqondisi, was Jayyed’s opposite. He was much younger and already a staunch traditionalist. His training focused on forms and he placed little stock in free sparring. And while Jayyed was tough on discipline, Chisomo exalted it as an art. His men polished their bronze swords and shields every evening and spent a substantial amount of time marching around the training grounds in perfect time.

Tau didn’t know how well Scale Chisomo could fight. He was pretty sure they would work well together, though, and that wasn’t something he could say for his own scale.

Two aqondise stood between the scales, acting as skirmish judges. The rules were simple. A fighter was “alive” until a bone in his body broke, he touched the ground with anything but his feet or knees, he was rendered unconscious, or he called for the Goddess’s mercy.

The aqondise watched for cheaters and the skirmish was won when one side was eliminated. Easy, like real war; all you had to do was survive long enough to slaughter your enemy.

“Scale Jayyed, weapons up! Scale Chisomo, weapons up!” called one of the aqondise.

The sound of bronze blades being unsheathed rang out across the field. Many of the other umqondisi, aqondise, initiates, Proven, and even a few Drudge had come to see the first day of skirmishes, and Tau was near enough to the battlefield’s edge to hear men making bets. The odds were in Chisomo’s favor. Scale Jayyed was filled with brutes, but, the thinking went, brutes were no match for disciplined men.

“Fight!” the same aqondise screamed.

The two judges ran for the sidelines and the men of Scale Jayyed charged, howling like bloodthirsty predators. Chisomo’s men were not cowed. They split into three smaller but equal teams. Tau recognized the formation from his father’s war stories. It was a standard Chosen military tactic, usually executed by an entire wing, but the principles were the same even with one-tenth the men.

The outer splits of the three-pronged attack aimed to flank Scale Jayyed, while the middle split joined shields and held fast. The middle would take the brunt of the charge, and if they held against the initial assault, the outer splits would be able to pick off half of Jayyed’s men in short order. There was only one thing for it. Scale Jayyed had to smash through the middle and break free of the flanking maneuver.

Hadith saw the same thing. “Three-prong flank!” he shouted. “Break the middle!”

They crashed into their opponents and were among swords and shields. Everywhere were snarling faces, flickering blades, and the metallic tang of oiled bronze and sweat-slicked gambesons. It was nothing like the training. It was more like Daba. Chaos.

Tau saw Uduak knock a man off the Chisomo defensive line and follow him into the middle of the enemy. Hadith tried to call him back, but Uduak either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Chinedu was bludgeoning one poor initiate, whose only defense was to hold his shield high enough to avoid being brained, and Yaw had already dropped a Chisomo man and was working on his second.

A lanky Chisomo fighter faced off against Tau and poked at him with a sword, like he was trying to prod a fire to life. Tau batted the attack off target and smashed his shield into the man’s helmeted face, and he went down. Behind the felled swordsman was a tall Chisomo initiate with rheumy eyes. The initiate spared his defeated fellow a glance, snarled, came for Tau, and they crossed blades.

Tau was adjusting to the heavier weight of bronze after so long with wood, but the man he fought was having a worse time. Tau’s opponent moved like he was wading in mud. He was slow, brutally slow, and trying to work his way through the intaka form, one of the first sword-fighting sequences Tau had learned as a boy.

Tau avoided the form’s first and second sweeping attacks before crashing his sword into the man’s side. He followed that with a cuff to the nose, then plowed into rheumy eyes with his shield, knocking the initiate to the ground and taking him out of the skirmish.

Two men came at Tau next, seeming more concerned with keeping out of each other’s way than getting to him. Tau cut high, expecting a block from the first. None came, so he clubbed the man in the helmet, sending him sprawling. The second man squealed a war cry and swung. Tau caught the blow on his shield, wrist pinging with pain, then used the shield to force the man’s sword low. With the shield out of the way, Tau came overhead with his sword. The blow connected and the squealer crumpled but didn’t go down. Tau hit him again. He went down.

Tau looked up, watching for the next attacker. There was no one in front of him. He had, along with Uduak, Hadith, Yaw, and Chinedu, blasted through the Chisomo middle split. The fighting was behind them now. The left and right splits were heavily engaged with the rest of Scale Jayyed, and it was a mess. Scale Chisomo’s discipline had melted in the furnace of first contact.

“Uduak, Tau, with me to the right split,” said Hadith. “Yaw, Chinedu, help against the left.”

“Why?” asked Chinedu. “Why should I… listen to you?”

“Let’s just win,” Tau told Chinedu, and he started toward the right.

“Other right!” Hadith shouted. “The right, from when we were first facing them.”

Tau stopped, shrugged, not quite sure what difference it made, but changed direction.

“C’mon, then,” Yaw told Chinedu, leading him the other way.

Fighting beside Uduak was a more pleasant experience than fighting against him. Tau knocked one more man out of the skirmish but saw Uduak blood one, almost break the leg of another, and charge a third to the ground. Then, having adapted to the momentum of the skirmish and getting over his awe at Uduak’s power, Tau sought his next opponent, only there wasn’t one.

Scale Chisomo had been eliminated to a man. It took a moment, but, realizing they’d won, Scale Jayyed cheered, swords and shields raised high as bets were traded to the sounds of grumbling and curses all along the battlefield’s sidelines.

Out of the fifty-four men they’d started with, Tau’s scale had thirty-two still standing. Yaw was a few strides away, his face bright with an ear-to-ear smile as he patted Chinedu on the back. Uduak and Hadith had survived too. Hadith was standing close to the big man, talking to him and pointing at details on the battlefield. Tau imagined he was already going over where they’d done things right and where they could have done better.

Tau turned away, trying to remain grim, but couldn’t hold back the smile. It started small, then crept across his face until he was grinning like he’d been in the sun too long. He pumped his fist, the wrong fist, and almost fell over from the pain. Eyes watering from the hurt, his mood still didn’t sour. Jayyed’s five had made it through the skirmish and the contest had been won. His scale had won!

Tau knew the rest of the day was his to do with as he saw fit. The surviving skirmishers of the winning scale were gifted that as a winner’s bounty, but he wouldn’t waste the time, not after Jayyed’s speech.

“Well fought,” Jayyed said, addressing the scale. “But we took too many losses and I own much of the blame for that. I’ve paid too much attention to individual sparring, thinking fifty-four men with better training could ensure victory. It’s not so. If we are to be the best, we can’t be just better-trained men, better fighters. We have to be the better scale.

“Chisomo had us on that front, though his initiates couldn’t make use of their advantage. Truth? I’m thankful they exposed our weakness. Now we can see it for what it is and burn it away. We’re going to learn how to work better together… tomorrow.

“Survivors, you have your day. The men who did not survive—you fought hard and well. You should be proud. Still, you have more to do and I leave you in Aqondise Anan’s capable hands.”

The men who fell in the skirmish couldn’t have looked less happy.

“Think the mess hall serves masmas this early?” Hadith asked Tau and Uduak, drawing a smile from the big man.

“Do have a thirst,” Uduak said.

“Let’s gather Yaw and Chinedu, those slackards, and find out,” Hadith offered.

“Going to spar with the rest for a bit,” Tau said. Uduak tilted his head at Tau, staring at him like he was an oddity, or an idiot. Hadith looked like he was going to say something, thought better of it, and walked away instead.

“Uduak,” he called, “let’s ease that thirst.”

Uduak waited a breath, still watching Tau. He grunted and strode off.

“Out of the dirt,” Anan shouted to the men from Jayyed’s scale who had gone down in the skirmish. “You thought that was a beating. You’ve seen nothing. Run twice round the grounds and then we do some real fighting!”

The men who didn’t have to be carried to the infirmary looked wearied and defiant, but they got up and they ran, and Tau went with them. He could feel Jayyed’s eyes on him.

Let him watch, Tau thought, as Jayyed’s words came to mind: “The days without difficulty are the days you do not improve.”

Tau ran harder. He was not the strongest, the quickest, or the most talented, not by any measure. He knew this and knew he could not control this. However, he could control his effort, the work he put in, and there he would not be beaten.

He made a pact with himself, a pact he swore on his father’s soul. If he were asked to run a thousand strides, he would run two thousand. If he were told to spar three rounds, he would spar six. And if he fought a match to surrender, the man who surrendered would not be him. He would fight until he won or he died. There would be, he swore, no days without difficulty.

Jayyed was true to his word. The scale trained teamwork and tactics, which were new to Tau, who found the concept of coordinating battle efforts complicated. It worked, though.

Scale Jayyed fought two more skirmishes and won them. Tau survived both. So did Yaw, Chinedu, and Hadith. Uduak was “killed” in the second one, after men from Scale Thoko targeted him.

In that battle, several of Thoko’s men swarmed Uduak, using the same strategy the hedeni did against an Enraged Ingonyama. Uduak made them pay. He fought like one of the mythical beasts from Osonte, dropping three of Scale Thoko’s men before going down. One of them had a cracked skull.

Before Uduak fell, Tau tried to help. He forced his way to the big man’s side, and for a time, they fought back to back. Thoko’s men ignored Tau, thinking the scarred runt unworthy of their attention. Their minds changed after Tau battered two of them to the dirt. And they realized the full extent of their error when Yaw, Chinedu, and Hadith joined him, helping Scale Jayyed rampage through the Thoko ranks.

Tau spent the rest of that day training with the men from Scale Jayyed who had fallen. When they ran, Uduak ran beside Tau. When they sparred together, Uduak was less violent.

Tau noticed but didn’t think on it. His training consumed him. His dedication was absolute, and the hardest fights were not with the other men. They were with himself.

Every day a part of him whispered that he could rest, that he had done enough, that he could stop. Every day, the lies were whispered, and every day, Tau made himself relive the moment his father died. It was sick, masochistic. It was the only way he could keep himself going.

Time blurred, days cascaded one into another, the Omehi’s endless war with the hedeni raged, and an initiate from Scale Idowu died in his bed. He was found in the morning. He’d bled from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, and his skin had ruptured like meat cooked too long on a spit.

Demon-death, the rumors went. It might even be true. Tau knew a family back in Kerem who had lost a child to a demon-death. Whatever the actual case, everyone paid more attention to their morning and evening prayers.

It was around this time that Tau’s wrist healed enough to wield a blade. He didn’t trust it and still fought with his off hand. It made sense; he’d become better with his left than he’d ever been with his right, and on the day they marched for the Crags to watch some of the other Ihashe scales fight the Indlovu, Tau was a difficult match for everyone at the isikolo.

The march to the Crags took from predawn to midmorning, and Jayyed counseled his scale on what they were going to see. “All of this prepares us for war. The skirmishes in the Crags allow Indlovu initiates to experience fighting against heavy odds. For us, and the Northern Ihashe Isikolo, it’s a chance to hone our tactics.”

“And get the bones kicked out of us,” Themba mumbled as he marched beside Tau.

“The citadel fields men from all three cycles,” Jayyed continued, “and some skirmishes have Enervators, so the battle can emulate true combat as much as possible.” He waited a beat and asked, “Who here has felt enervation?”

Tau considered staying silent. “I have,” he said when no one else answered.

“Indeed?” asked Jayyed.

“I fought with my… I fought at Daba.”

“Daba? That’s the largest raid the South has seen in a while. You were there?”

“I was.”

“Got caught in an Enervator’s wave, neh? Care to describe it for your sword brothers?”

Tau did not care to, but he cared to express that to Jayyed even less. “It drags you into Isihogo. Time slows and I saw…” He felt foolish.

“You saw…,” Jayyed urged.

“Demons.”

The men muttered; one snorted.

“It’s true,” Tau said, voice harder.

“You did. Everyone does,” Jayyed told the scale. “Enervation draws a man’s soul to Isihogo and then the demons come.”

Several men formed the dragon span with their hands, the winged sign to ward off evil.

“The demons from Isihogo cannot harm you, but they’ll make you suffer,” the sword master explained. “Once enervated and forced into the underworld, you will be attacked by the things that exist there.” Jayyed had the men’s attention, and even Chinedu held his coughs. “In war, a talented Enervator will hold your spirit in Isihogo until the demons have torn it to pieces, forcing it out of their realm and back to ours. This is worse than it sounds. The victim feels the agony of the demon attack as if it were real, and the experience is incapacitating. It renders men senseless on the battlefield, where they can actually be killed.

“A well-timed blast of enervation, just before our forces are entwined with our enemy’s, can mean the difference between victory and defeat for the Chosen, between life and death. Our Enervators, Enragers, Edifiers, and Entreaters are critical to the defense of the peninsula.”

“Umqondisi? They’ll do it to us when we skirmish?” asked Oyibo, a muscled and talented fighter with boyish features. “They’ll send us to the demons?”

Boyish features aside, Oyibo was steady. Tau had seen that in training. Oyibo did not look steady then.

“They will,” Jayyed said. “But the Gifted at the Crags are initiates as well, learning how to control their powers. They won’t hold you in Isihogo for long and they are asked not to try.”

Themba whispered to Tau, “They used to try. My older brother went through Ihashe training already. He told me the stories the umqondisi told him. The citadel had to leash their Enervators a few dozen cycles ago ’cause no one would fight in skirmishes.” Themba snorted. “Not fair, nor decent, letting a man’s soul get ripped up by monsters.”

“If enervated, you’ll see Isihogo,” Jayyed said. “You’ll see the demons in its mists. They’ll come for you. You’ll be released before they have their way.”

“Umqondisi?” asked Oyibo.

“Oyibo.”

“Yesterday, I heard one of the Proven in the mess hall. He was telling stories to the initiates about his time at the isikolo. He wasn’t old, a few cycles up on me. He said that, during one skirmish, a demon got him. He’s had nightmares since, always the same. It’s the one with that demon tearing at him.”

Jayyed didn’t answer right away. “The fast ones may get to you,” the sword master conceded. “Time is different in Isihogo. A single breath taken on Uhmlaba will feel like fifty or even a hundred in the underworld. That makes it difficult for the Gifted initiates to time things.”

Themba leaned over to Tau, his sour breath an assault. “Would rather the Ennies not send me at all.” He hawked snot into his mouth and spat. “Still, we’re better off’n what the hedeni get. Ennies hold them until the demons turn ’em inside out.”

Tau and the rest of the men of Scale Jayyed marched in silence after that, and by midmorning the flatlands had given way to the rockier crumble that formed the base of the Fist. The men marched upward and the pace slowed.

As they climbed, Tau wondered how, when compared to the southern mountain range, where he was from, any reasonable person could call the Fist more than a big hill. Well, a hill that had been worked over by a giant with a sledgehammer.

The Fist was uneven, dry, and covered in thin, loose-rooted shrubbery. Still, the hill, or mountain, was well positioned. It divided the point of the Chosen’s peninsula and, like the central mountain range, it separated North from South. The Fist was a natural barrier against heavy raiding from the ocean.

Tau had never been to Citadel City but knew it wasn’t far. The training city for the Gifted and Indlovu had been placed at the eastern base of the mountain, an additional layer of protection against sea raids.

The hedeni would need to navigate the ocean, march over the Fist, conquer Citadel City, and march another day inland before reaching the capital and other settlements. To do it, they’d need a thousand ships filled with warriors, a full invasion force. They’d have to risk all those lives on the water and make it ashore with enough fighters to battle past Citadel City. It wasn’t wise. It wasn’t done.

Instead, the major fighting happened at the Wrist, the deadened lands separating the relative lushness of the Chosen’s peninsula and the rest of Xidda. There, the hedeni came in endless waves. There, the majority of the Omehi military were stationed, lived, and fought. It was in the Wrist’s wide-open spaces that the Guardians had the greatest effect, and its desert sands were said to be littered with the charred bones of a million hedeni dead.

Given the numbers of hedeni, the Omehi, even with their dragons, should have been wiped out long ago, but the peninsula was a natural fortress and the Omehi had held it for near on two hundred cycles. Upon reaching the fighting grounds of the Crags, Tau imagined they could hold for a hundred more.

The Crags, a massive plateau of rocky and dead earth, stood halfway up the mountain. It was sectioned off into several battlefields meant to simulate the conditions the Omehi military faced in their endless war. To the west, where the plateau gave way to more mountainous territory, the isikolo and citadels practiced tactics, defenses, and attacks suited to the highlands. On the plateau itself, there were a thousand strides of ground that had been churned over and over until the topsoil felt and shifted like desert sands. This battleground matched many of the conditions in the Wrist. There was also a field of sown grass, out of place at this elevation, that resembled the majority of the peninsula’s flatlands.

Then there was the last battleground. Tau found it to be the most fascinating. It was a mock city that looked like the Goddess had scooped up a decent chunk of Kigambe and dropped it on the plateau. Tau stared in wonder at the city replica. He understood why it was the battleground used for the Queen’s Melee, the end-of-cycle competition between the highest-ranked scales. The battleground’s strategic and tactical possibilities were infinite, and it was tucked between two natural rises that had been cut into spectator seats. The city replica, surrounded by seating, was a war arena.

“Well, that’s something,” said Hadith.

“It’s bigger than my village,” added Yaw.

“Meant to be like if the hedeni got into one of our cities?” asked Themba. “Ask me, we lost already, if they ever get that far.”

Tau had heard more than enough from Themba. “So, they get to our cities, you’d like to lie down and take what they give us?”

Themba was about to answer, but Hadith cut in. “He’s not wrong. Once the hedeni are in our cities, we can’t call the Guardians down on them in any good way. The dragons would burn everything and kill as many of us as they would them. If our enemies get into Palm, Kigambe, or Jirza, it would mean the end of us.”

Themba smirked, vindicated. “Like I said, they get that far, we’re already dead.”

Anan strode over. “Too much talking. Stow your gear. We’re for the desert battlefield to watch Scale Njere tackle a third of Scale Oban.”

“Fifty-four Ihashe initiates against eighteen from the citadel?” Tau asked. He knew they let themselves be outnumbered, but a third of a scale wasn’t enough men to do much and Tau couldn’t see how the Nobles would come out on top against such odds.

“They’ll have an Ennie,” Anan said, as if that alone made up the gap in men.

“Happy to be watching and not fighting, then,” chimed in Themba.

“Hurry over,” Anan said. “We’ll listen in on Umqondisi Njere’s strategy. Maybe the plan will be simple enough for even you lot to learn something.” Anan pointed to where Scale Njere was already gathered. He went that way himself, not bothering to see if they were following.

“Planning ain’t gonna make much difference.”

“Shut up, Themba.” Hadith seemed to have had enough of him too.

Tau left them arguing and followed Anan. Lessers against Nobles. This he wanted to see.