The sun had just peeked over the horizon on the Parsh Desert when the dancing started.
The dancers were a mirage, an illusion of hot air rising off the sand—one of the many curses of the desert. Altari folktales told of men and women who longed for these morning dancers with such passion that they left their camps and watering holes and raced toward the horizon after them. The stories all ended the same way: dry bones in the desert and the dead’s desires unfulfilled.
Anon would not have his followers chase morning dancers. He had promised them things with as much substance as a mirage—justice and vengeance and righteousness—but he would make those things real. He would deliver.
Beside him, a half-starved hawk master shivered in the morning cold.
“Stay focused, Aylex. When this is done, you’ll get a blanket, some ale, breakfast.”
The skin-and-bones bird man stood up straighter, eager to please. Or at least eager to be warmed and fed. The chains around his ankles had rubbed him red and raw, and the bronze collar around his neck had been even less gentle. His bare chest was burned an angry red and still bled where they had scraped the offensive falconry tattoos from his skin.
Anon would have words with the hawk master’s guards. Though he was their prisoner, he should not be abused. Were they not all prisoners of the earth, and would they not be confined again to dirt one day?
The Altari faith was the oldest on the plateau; the Altari people had been in the mountains before the Uztari had come and expelled them past the plains, into the wind-blasted desert. Generations of Altari had crawled so long through the sand that they ground it to glass beneath them. That was the slur the Uztari used against them: glass grinders.
Over time, many Altari had abandoned their faith, joined the Uztari bird cults, pledged themselves to the Sky Castle. They took falcons on their fists and hauled goods and equipment across the plains for the Uztari kyrgs in exchange for the briefest of earthly powers. They trapped hawks and traded in eagles. Even the Crawling Priests, who claimed to follow the old ways and cursed Uztari falconry, gladly lived beneath the protection of Uztar. They let the blasphemers feed them like baby birds in the nest. They were all complicit.
But there were other ways. Purer ways. Anon would not be a glass grinder. Anon would be the sharpened shard of glass that sliced the sin from the world. He was Kartami, the shard, who cut down the self-proclaimed rulers of the sky. Kartami faith was unshakable and Kartami power was unstoppable. They would roll like a sandstorm straight to the heart of Uztar and they would seize the skies. They would be purified, emptied, and sinless. When the sky was empty, they would be saved. They were almost ready.
But for now, victory demanded sin. Until their victory, Anon needed this hawk master at his side.
“Will it fly to you?” he demanded of his captive.
The man nodded. He raised his leather-cuffed arm, and though it shook, he held it out to the morning.
They’d raided a merchant convoy during the rising-wind season and had captured this master, Aylex. They’d slaughtered everyone but him. Even the ones who pleaded that they, too, were of his people—Anon cut out their lying tongues first. They thought that to be an Altari was a birthright, a bloodline, because they knew no history. Altari and Uztari were identities as changing as the winds, and to serve Uztar, to live like an Uztari on stolen land with eyes bent up into the blue, was to be Uztari.
Besides, if he wanted the defended towns and cities to fall, he needed fear to fly ahead of him. Word of his brutality might lead later foes to surrender without a fight. When facing a much larger army, terrorizing them in advance was his best hope of beating them.
After the executions, they took the silks for their kites and the wood and metal for their war barrows, anything precious they could find, but they left all the hawking furniture—the bird boxes, perches, leashes, bells, and jesses. The finely wrought hoods and anklets. The birds themselves, all save one, they ransomed back to the kyrgs or gave the mercy of death, one clean cut across the throat. The ransom was needed to fund the conquest, but the bloodshed was a holy act. Sacred carnage.
The hawk master didn’t speak for a week after the slaughter. He sunburned the way Anon used to as a boy, until his skin had hardened against the desert sun. It had taken some time to make the hawk master useful again, to accustom him to desert life, for which he was ill-suited. Had not so many Altari exiles been ill-suited to it as well? They had adapted. So would he. The Kartami spared this man’s personal hawk and let him care for it until it was sent to the Six Villages.
And this morning, it returned.
The bird flew away from the rising red sun, passing through the mirage of dancers like an arrow through smoke, and time seemed to slow as it bent back its wings, stretched out its talons, and caught its master by the fist. The small leash from the glove was quickly attached to the hawk’s anklet, so that master and bird were tied together again.
A tear trickled down the hawk master’s cheek.
“You are happy your bird is returned to you?”
Aylex nodded. “Yes. I am.”
Anon took a deep breath. He was offended by the sight of the hawk on the man’s arm. He hated the man for taming the bird, and he hated the bird for allowing itself to be tamed. “Give me the message.”
Aylex untied the small box from the bird’s anklet and handed it to Anon, who used the ring on his index finger as the key to open it. He unrolled the parchment inside and read the words his spy reported, his lips half-parted and his heart pounding in his chest.
“Visek! Launa!” he shouted, which made the hawk and hawk master jump where they stood. Two of Anon’s squad leaders came running from their tents to stand before him.
Visek and Launa were echoes of each other in appearance, the younger man with skin as dark as the older woman’s, like the black soil of the mountains to which all Altari longed to return. They had been with Anon since the start of his campaign, when he rose up against an elevated Altari ruler of a grassland village, his false title given to him by the occupiers of the Sky Castle. He was a traitor and a fool and he’d disgraced the community by holding pigeon games, a stupid sport where gamblers tried to lure each other’s flocks. A local novice, a boy studying to be a Crawling Priest, had arrived to denounce the sport and had, in his zeal, poisoned some of the bird feed. When caught, he was to be whipped.
Anon, who did not call himself Anon at the time, intervened. He took the whip from that foolish ruler’s hand and choked him to death with it. Then he declared that all who would restore the greatness of their people and free the skies of sin should rise up with him as the last shards of the true Altari civilization. That was the moment the Kartami were born. Only the novice boy and his young mother followed. They were Visek and Launa.
Kartami numbers grew as they attacked Altari collaborators and slaughtered traveling Uztari. Anon saw the power of the pair of fighters who loved each other as mother and son. So he devised that all his warriors would be paired by bonds of love. Parents, lovers, siblings. To be a warrior of the Kartami was to love so greatly that you would tie your life to another in battle, and the life of your pair to the fate of your faith. The brave went into battle for their own beliefs, but the victorious went into battle for their beloved’s belief in them. Only Anon fought alone. His love was for all of them.
His warrior pairs had never lost a battle.
“Tell the commanders,” he ordered them. “We will break camp and ride ready. Four lines, eight squads across, eight barrows per squad.”
They each looked to the earth once sharply, then turned to inform the commanders. It would not take long. Anon had devised a system of command that could mobilize all 512 of his warriors as suddenly as a storm, and he could command them with flags and calls while they rolled across the desert without slowing.
“May I have that blanket now?” the hawk master pleaded, his eyes cast down at his blackened feet.
“First we must send our reply,” said Anon.
The hawk master let a whine escape his mouth with a quick glance at his hawk. “You’ll send Titi away again so soon?”
Anon slapped the master across the face with the back of his hand, the heavy ring he wore cutting the skinny man’s cheek. “Your bird has no name!” he shouted. “If I ever hear you name it again, I will feed it your organs while you still live, understood?”
Aylex nodded, chastened. If only all Uztari were as easy to break as this one.
Behind him, pairs of Kartami rolled their war barrows into line, tents and blankets tightly packed inside, battle kites mounted to the fronts. The flyers strapped themselves into the kites while the drivers checked their spears and bows.
Anon had no doubt that his Kartami would soon rule the skies alone, and from their vast emptiness, a new civilization could be born. Then they would break their kites and leave the sky pure and unsullied. But before that time could come, he had more compromises to make with the falconers and a deal to strike with the worst of them. He studied the parchment once again, composing his message.
“Tell them that if their report is true, I will not miss this chance,” he said to the hawk master. “Tell them to do what they must to make the girl comply, but tell them that I will have this ghost eagle.”