CHAPTER SIX

THE RETURN

It was early into the night and Salminde the Viperstrike, hailing from the Katuia clan and capital city of Nezra, had just settled into her sleep sack after a long day of travel, and within moments was already flirting with Zharia, the spirit storyteller of dreams. Though her mind was at rest, Sali, as she was known to those with whom she shared a hearth, had never felt as awake as she did at that moment with her barely conscious mind soaking in the sounds and sensations of the Grass Sea.

This land was always alive, but never more so than under the shine of the moons. Her heart sang along with the cadence of the rustling jungle, celebrating the abundant life that could be found everywhere throughout the Grass Sea: in the air, in the plants, and beneath her feet. Sali inhaled the scent of soil, vegetation, and rot, feeling a warmth bubble deep within her being even as the cool, wet air chilled her skin.

After two long years—a full six cycles—raiding Gyian lands far to the north near the white devils’ country, it was good to be finally home. It never failed to surprise Sali to rediscover how much she missed the rhythmic living earth rolling once more beneath her feet, as if a part of her had been cut off. The cold, soulless earth of the Zhuun lands had a way of dulling the senses. It had taken her nearly six weeks, but she was now finally entering the heart of the Grass Sea, and her long-dormant connection to this land was reawakening once more.

Sali’s wandering mind hummed as it continued to drink in her surroundings A nearby monkey howled somewhere from the direction of her feet. It was followed by a similar, slightly deeper howl, from the monkey’s rival. A violent rustling followed, and then a flock of starlings took flight. Beneath her on the jungle floor, her mare snored in long labored breaths. The soft creature, Zhuun-bred and unused to the humidity of the Grass Sea, especially during autumn of the third cycle, had been wheezing ever since they first stepped from firm ground to the constantly rolling earth shifting beneath her hooves.

The lullaby of the Grass Sea had nearly rocked her to sleep when she first heard it: the sound of voices and hoofbeats clopping on the ground. Sali became more alert to her surroundings for moments at a time, her senses searching, listening. A warrior’s mind never drifted far from consciousness. She pried one eye open, and then the other, but made no movement to leave the cocoon of her warm, safe campsite, nestled in the sheath of a blade of grass swaying in the breeze some twenty feet off the ground. Traffic was not uncommon along this route, although it was a strange time of the day for traveling through these dangerous and constantly shifting lands. One misstep could plummet someone into a bottomless pool that had opened up one day and disappeared the next.

Sali glanced upward, seeing the sky in full bloom. Two bright moons hung close together just beyond the jungle canopy while the southern horizon glowed purple, heralding the impending arrival of the third. To her side, hanging off the sliver of grass, was a small kiln serving as her hearth. It had extinguished hours ago but still emanated warmth.

The approaching strangers were getting closer, louder. There were four or five souls by their noises, riding on four mounts and with at least one woman among them. Their voices were quiet but conversational. A man and woman were disagreeing about a honking sound they had heard some way back. The man believed it a dire hippo. The woman, a fire peacock in heat. Both were likely mistaken since either creature would have slaughtered the lot before they ever got close enough to hear its crooning. If Sali had to guess, she’d surmise it was a death worm, which, contrary to its name, was completely harmless.

The conversation abruptly died as they passed underneath her encampment, and the world quieted again, save for that quarreling pair of monkeys going at it for another round. A choir of cicadas, which had gone on intermission earlier, returned with another song. Their symphony was now joined by the rattle of a giant snake slithering across a low branch.

A contented but also slightly sad sigh escaped her lips. While it was good to be home again and surrounded by these familiar trappings of the Grass Sea, Sali wished she could have returned under different circumstances.

She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift toward slumber. Sali was just about to take another walk with Zharia when her eyes flared open. Something was amiss, felt amiss, sounded amiss. She wasn’t sure what exactly, however.

Sali listened intently. The sounds of the Grass Sea were still there: the starlings, the quarreling monkeys, and the slithering snake.

That was when it hit her.

Sali sat up abruptly and craned her head over the side of the sheath. She stared at the ground. Her jaw dropped. Outrage burned in her and ruined the otherwise peaceful zen state she had been enjoying. “My horse…How dare they!”

Sali shot to her feet and scanned the winding path. It was near pitch-black, save for the intermittent lances of moonbeams piercing through the canopy, illuminating the ground with hues of blue, green, and cyan. She massaged her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger, concentrating her jing into her gaze. The world turned a green hue, helping the darkness clear.

There, near the far bend, several outlines were moving. Sali leaped to a nearby branch, nearly getting tangled up with the snake. The branch dipped under her weight and then sprang her forward. She landed on a blade of grass and hopped to another, carefully leaping her way toward the thieves across the jungle canopy.

Blade jumping was a popular and exhilarating pastime for Katuia children, one in which Sali had once excelled. It was also usually forbidden by the clan elders because serious injuries if not death were all too common. Not only did blade jumpers risk falling, they sometimes fell victim to four-winged scaled kunpeng whale-birds, giant horned Gudiao eagles, or many other such predators that hunted the skies above, often hoping to find a child-sized morsel. No one enforced this rule, however, since almost every Katuia had played this game at some point in their youth.

After several leaps along the canopy, Sali landed softly beside her roan, who now was standing alone. The mare greeted Sali with a nuzzle, completely unperturbed that she had just been stolen, and continued chewing a mouthful of hay. The sect marking was hanging in plain sight on the horse’s neck, which should have been a strong enough warning for anyone with ill intentions.

Sali spun slowly, eyeing the edge of the clearing. “What are you doing here by yourself, horse?” The two had been together since Sali had relieved a Zhuun officer wearing a panda head atop his helm of her, and they had developed a friendly working relationship. Sali grabbed the reins and was about to lead the mare back to camp when something tickled the back of her neck. She smelled an ambush. She was being watched. It wasn’t some innate ability or jing, just her instincts honed from years of battle.

Her fingers drifted down to her waist where her weapon, a whip known as a tongue, was coiled at rest. She gripped the familiar curved mahogany handle, feeling the static of its vibration as its thousands of tiny diamond-shaped metallic links came alive.

Five camouflaged figures rose from the nothing around her. The only thing that betrayed their presence was the shimmering of the air around them as they emerged. The more these shimmers moved, the more the air around them smeared as if a child were finger-painting on a canvas. Then, as if wiped clean of colors, the shimmers dulled into darkened silhouettes until they finally revealed five armed individuals. By this type of camouflage technique and the way they held their low stances, these appeared to be members of the Ikuan sect from the city of Ankar. What were they doing here? More important, why where they trying to rob her?

Undaunted, Sali directed her ire at them, stating the obvious. “You disgraceful wretches stole my horse! How dare you stoop to such craven acts.”

“Does it matter?” said one to her left. “A horse rides the same regardless of who rode her last.”

“Since when do People of the Sea steal from our own hearths? We raid the Zhuun, not each other,” she spat. “And to steal a horse is a low crime unworthy of the Ikuan sect.” In Katuia culture, to steal a horse amounted to worse than murder. It meant abandoning someone to make their own way through the Grass Sea.

“The hearth is extinguished,” said one to her left.

“The Sacred Braid is cut,” added another.

“Give up your weapons and food, bitch,” barked the one directly in front rather eloquently. She added hastily, “And your horse. Give up your horse too, and you might live.”

Sali pulled her cloak aside to reveal her bone-scale armor, its dull fossilized pieces identifying her as a viperstrike. That sent an anxious titter through the five. Two of her attackers hesitated. Two more began backing away. Only now had they realized their grave error.

The rude one, who appeared to be leading this outfit, did not appear deterred by Sali. She drew a jagged double-sided machete that widened into an ax-like fan. Definitely Ikuan. “The Khan’s dead, and so is Ankar, and so is the rest of Katuia,” the leader spat. “So unless you want to join them, bitch, you better shut your—”

Sali’s hands blurred as she snapped her tongue from her hip, cracking the air and slicing open the speaker’s hand, sending her machete spinning gracefully over the side of the pod. The woman was fortunate her fingers were not sailing alongside her sword.

The closest Ikuan looked too spooked to make a move. Hmm. Maybe they really hadn’t noticed the sect marking on the horse. Not that it mattered anymore. This crime could not go unpunished.

Sali retracted the tongue just as one of the thieves tried to take her head off with a spiked weighted club. She sent a jolt through the tongue, stiffening its spine until it became a long spear a head taller than she. The hardened tongue clashed with the club and guided it harmlessly aside, sinking it into the soft ground. She spared a killing thrust with the point of the spear, and instead whipped him across the chin with the butt.

The second Ikuan made it two steps toward her before a sharp thrust with the tips of her fingers to his throat sent him writhing to the ground. She whirled to face the third, who tried to slice her back open with his machete. He was joined by the foulmouthed woman coming from her opposite side. Sali faced off both and parried them handily, wielding her tongue as a staff. She danced between the two, avoiding them easily. Every time they struck at her, she bit back even harder. The two Ikuans found themselves on the defensive as her tongue twirled and flexed in the air around her.

The combat abilities between their two sects were at the far opposite ends. Ikuans, while excellent scouts and spies, and serviceable assassins, were not exactly known for their melee prowess. It didn’t make them any less brave, but they were still relatively ineffective against someone like Sali.

The man made the first mistake, lunging a hair too hard and losing his balance. Sali rapped him on the side of the head with one end of the spear while tripping the woman with the other end. They collided together in a tangled heap, barely avoiding skewering each other. Sali casually knocked the man across the temple as she stepped out of the way.

That left two more: the foulmouthed woman who was picking herself out of the muck, and a younger man who had not made a move the entire fight. Of course, the group’s neophyte. This must have been a sect unit before they had forsaken their honor and abandoned their duties. The poor boy likely had little choice in the matter.

“Salvage what little dignity you have left and surrender.” Not bothering to glance at the neophyte, Sali thrust the spear in his direction, the point stopping just close enough to miss his nose. At this point, she was showing off, but also trying to make a point. The boy tripped over himself backpedaling and fell, and then the ground around him gave way. He must have landed on a particularly soft patch. There was a rush of water and the hole became a new pond.

The boy’s head dipped below the murky water for several seconds, long enough for the freshly made pool’s surface to calm. And then he broke it violently again, flailing his arms and screaming before resubmerging.

Both Sali and the remaining Ikuan stared.

“Can he swim?” Sali asked.

The look on the woman’s face signaled that she had no clue.

“We should probably save the lad, yeah?”

The foulmouthed woman met her suggestion with suspicion, but then nodded and took a step toward the pond. Sali beat her to it. Just as the neophyte’s arms broke the water’s surface again, her tongue snapped out and lashed around his wrist. She immediately began to lose her footing as she curled the tongue around her forearm to get a better grip. The boy was big and waterlogged, and the ground around her feet was soft and slippery. Sali also realized she had turned her back to the woman and was now defenseless.

Sali looked over at the woman, who was just standing there nursing her cut hand. “Some help?”

The woman hesitated for a split second, then probably decided that his life was worth more than trying to take on Sali again. She scampered over to Sali, and together they pulled the neophyte back up from the pond. Once the boy was safe, Sali made a show of curling her tongue and hooking it on its holster. She scanned the rest of the Ikuans, who were still in the process of picking themselves up off the ground.

Sali continued admonishing them. “You say the Sacred Braid is broken, but you’re the ones breaking it. You say the hearth is extinguished, but you’re the ones putting it out. What do you have to say in your defense before I pass judgment?”

“Who do you think you are to judge us?” their leader hissed. At least she wasn’t calling Sali a bitch anymore.

“You saved me just so you can kill me?” the neophyte hacked in between breaths.

One of the others approached her and squinted. “I’ve never seen anyone flick a tongue so smoothly. Who are you?”

“My name is Salminde.”

The older man’s eyes widened. “You’re not just a viperstrike, you’re a Will of the Khan!”

“I am one of Nezra’s Eldest,” Sali conceded. “And yes, I am a Part of the Whole.”

“You’re on your Return.” Another spoke with reverence. He fell to his knees.

“Yes, the Return,” she replied, grimly.

A strangled cry gurgled from the foulmouthed woman, and then she charged Sali. That was not the response Sali expected. Her tongue nearly snapped again, but then the woman threw herself at her feet. “A hundred forgivenesses, Salminde,” she sobbed. “We did not know it was you.” The rest soon followed her lead.

“Forgive us,” the others begged. “We didn’t know it was your horse.”

“It shouldn’t matter if it was mine or not,” she scoffed. “But I understand how you could have missed the sect mark.”

“So you won’t kill us?” asked the neophyte.

Sali shook her head. “That’s not for me to decide. You shame your sect and Ankar with this lawlessness. If you cut the Sacred Braid, you must face punishment.”

That earned her a fresh bout of tears and pleas. “We had no choice. The hearths are cold now. We’re starving.”

“The Sacred Braid has unraveled.”

“Ankar is no more. No other city will take our people in.”

Sali fixated on that last bit, turning to the man mumbling it. It appeared he was suffering from a broken jaw. “What do you mean by that? What happened to Ankar?”

The Ikuans exchanged baffled looks. The neophyte hesitantly raised his arm. “You mean you don’t know?”

“Of course I know about the Khan. We all grieve for him,” she said curtly. “What else happened?”

The woman pointed off to the side. “See for yourself.”

Sali followed her finger off to the side, past the tree line. At first, she saw nothing, but then as her gaze rose she noticed something large and dark jutting up toward the sky. It couldn’t be natural. The edges were too smooth and the corners too straight. Besides, nothing that large could sit on the surface of the Grass Sea for long. She decided to take a closer look.

“You lot. Stay right there,” she ordered. “I order it as a Will of the Khan.”

“Yes.” They bowed, collectively staying there, alternating between heart-saluting—throwing their fists over their hearts—and bowing profusely. At least not all tradition and civility had fallen to the wayside.

Sali pushed her way into the thickets, being careful with each step. One wrong move and she could end up like the neophyte, plummeting into the bottomless abyss beneath the Grass Sea’s layer of land. That was why it was so dangerous to travel at night.

It didn’t take long to pick her way to a crushed field. By the looks the damage was no more than a month or two old. Many of the giant blades of grass were still flattened, slowly springing back up to standing. That meant something large, a city most likely, was responsible for this damage. Sali tilted her head the same angle as she studied the large structure jutting unnaturally toward the sky. Though the surface was covered with a thick layer of vegetation, there was no mistaking what she saw at one side: wheels and tracks.

This was the mangled wreckage of a city pod, one of dozens of large mobile structures that linked together to form their moving capital cities. This particular pod appeared to be one of the outer edges. What resembled a docking crane and watchtower still stood atop its platform. One end of the pod was completely submerged while the other end tipped up into the air; half of its wheels were missing and the track that rolled around them was broken and dangling like large jungle vines.

Sali knelt and checked the earth around the pod. Most of the evidence had washed away, but some of the deeper wounds still offered memories of what had transpired. She rubbed the grass blades bent unnaturally between her fingers and felt the length of the stems. Month-old scabs and faint stress marks ran all the way to the base of the plants. Fresh water had pooled around the bruises where the pod punctured the ground. Her mother used to say that rain was nature’s way of healing the wounds inflicted by people. Some wounds, however, were too deep to wash away.

Sali stood and followed the path of destruction. With the angle of the breaks and the crisscrossing lines, whatever had caused this had come from the west, and it had come quickly, cutting a wide swath without concern for the sacred sea beneath her feet. Sali backtracked around the pod and found another set of tracks. This time it was a pair of perfectly straight puddles, one shallow and green, the other filled with a black ooze, like half-day-old blood. Sled tracks and dried grease. By the width of the impressions in the earth, not just any tracks, but heavy carryalls. This entire field was the wake of an entire city in full retreat.

Sali walked up to the pod and examined it, looking for telltale signs of its origin and its death. Was this pod part of Ankar? What had caused its destruction? Why was a city pod so close to the Zhuun border this time of year? Katuia capital cities did not travel during the last cycle of the year when the Son and all three moons littered the sky. Nothing made sense.

There was an old Katuia saying: “Wage war at dawn. Hunt during the day. Drink in the evenings.” It was sound advice, and referred not only to the times of the day, but also to the three cycles of seasons in the year. The first cycle was the most temperate, with the coolest summers and warmest winters, so it was usually the most pleasant for raids and battles. The second yielded the best harvest and was generally when the cities traveled to follow herd migrations.

The third cycle had the harshest of all seasons: stormy springs, searing summers, howling autumns, and frigid winters. This cycle was when the clans stayed close to the hearth. It was when their people reconnected with families and allies to prepare for the raids of the following year. Fortunately this cycle was also the shortest, lasting only two months. Soon, a new year would arise, bringing back the first cycle of mild weather with only the sun and moon in the sky. They would then be joined by the green moon in the second cycle, and the purple in the third.

Katuia astronomers had always theorized that the number of moons contributed to the increasingly harsh weather. Sali could not understand how a moon could do such a strange thing, but she paid no attention to those people who spent their lives looking up at the stars. The seasons and cycles were the way they had always been. No other knowledge was necessary save for how their people lived in balance with the world around them.

Finding a nearby sprawl of grass, Sali squeezed between two blades near its crown and began to crawl toward its tip. The slightly sticky feel of the grass under her fingers brought her back to simpler times. Sali and her best friend, Jiamin, had always been climbing and jumping along these patches, sometimes all the way up to the canopies, each daring the other to see who could climb higher, who could get closer to the tip. They had spent much of their childhood in the Grass Sea canopies, either blade jumping or, even more risky, playing along the tops of the Grass Sea ceiling, seeing who could make the most dangerous climbs, runs, and jumps along the jungle canopy. Mali, her little bud of a sister, was often close behind, always trying to prove she could keep up. She never could, of course, at least not with Sali. No one could except for Jiamin, but he rarely bothered to tempt the same fates.

They were all so free and light back then, long before Sali had shaved the sides of her head and declared her intention as a warrior. Long before she had donned the scale armor and learned how to snap death with her tongue. Long before she had become a viperstrike and engaged in a never-ending war and seen the deaths of her friends and clan mates.

Sali continued to climb until she reached the highest arc of the blade. Just as her weight caused the tip to dip and bounce back, she reached up and pulled herself to the next blade, navigating it until she could reach the next, each one bringing her closer to the pod. She eventually ran out of grass to climb.

She stood up carefully. Balancing precariously on the increasingly narrow piece of grass, she continued to inch forward, pushing down slightly, feeling the blade’s bounce react to her weight. With each bob, the grass pushed back harder. Finally, Sali timed the last bounce and sprang toward the pod.

Her feet slipped on the mud-coated surface, threatening to send her sliding into a newly formed lake on the other side. Every step she took sent her skidding three more. The platform undulated unsteadily as she grabbed a hold of a beam post. It was indeed an end-pod, one stationed at the edge of a city. It had four structures: a watchtower, a crane, a guardhouse, and a small garage to house bixis, the squirrel gliders, and other assorted vehicles.

The first thing that came to mind was relief. This platform wasn’t part of Nezra; she knew every pod in her home city up close. Each city was born from a different clan and was built from a different part of the Grass Sea. Nezra hailed from the far northeastern edge. Her skin was painted green, like young ivy, and her flesh was bamboo, koa, and macassar. This pod was painted yellow with twisted iron bones and sun-bleached teak flesh. The iron of these bones was hammered, which meant its city likely came from the southeast, likely Ankar as those Ikuans had indicated.

How had this pod ended up here, and were there others?

Sali focused on the watchtower creaking at the edge of the pod. She drew her tongue and, with a snap of her wrist, extended its tip to the nest on top of the uppermost platform. As it retracted, the tongue pulled her with it, up and onto the watch nest. She landed lightly and perched on the thin railing.

Sali looked out from this perch and her breath caught in her throat. From here to the horizon, as far as she could see on either side, now under the full glow of the three moons, the fractured corpses of the cities of Katuia littered the sea. Pods, too many to count, lay broken, burned, splintered, and crushed, each a small wreckage in an ocean of green. Some belched black smoke; others seemed to have already burned to a charred iron frame. Others still had almost succumbed to the flora of the sea itself.

There must have been a great battle here. These were the corpses of more than one city—two, possibly three. The buildings still standing looked dilapidated, some with roofs caved in, some missing walls. Just past where she stood was the ruin of another pod from Ankar, and then another farther along. The city left a trail of pods that ended halfway to the horizon. At the end was a large cluster of pods arrayed in a rough circle. Ankar’s final resting place.

Sali didn’t know how long she stared at the shattered remnants of her civilization, but she couldn’t look away. She counted the pods, trying to determine which other cities had fallen and whose people were lost. How many of her friends and comrades were dead? Swallowed up by the depths of the Grass Sea? She thought of Mali and Jiamin again, and muttered a prayer of thanks that her proud grandfather, once the clan chief of Nezra, did not have to bear witness to the fall of a Katuia city. She held on to a glimmer of hope: None of these pods looked like Nezra. It was a small blessing, and a selfish one, but Sali could not lie to her own heart.

Sali eventually spied a city far to the southeast. It was barely a speck, but unmistakable. A large spot of black in the sea of green. Chaqra, the Black City and final resting place of the Khan, still stood a few days’ ride away. That was where she could find the answers and put to rest this compulsion driving her.

Sali leaped down off the pod the way she came, bouncing off a nearby blade and then clinging to the stem of a weed as she slid down to the ground. She hurried back to the gyre where she had left her honor-bound prisoners and was unsurprised but mildly disappointed to find them gone. Sali suppressed her irritation. Their cities were broken, and her people now flouted their honor. It was almost too much to bear. At least they left her horse this time.

She was tempted to hunt these criminals down, but the Pull of the Khan had no more patience. Upon seeing the Black City of Chaqra, the Pull had flared up with renewed urgency.

It was time for Salminde the Viperstrike, the Will of the Khan, to return home to fulfill her solemn and final duty, and merge her part of the Eternal Khan’s soul back with the Whole.

It was time for Sali to die.