GIANTS, MEHEN THOUGHT AS HE CLIMBED THE PYRAMID TOWARD THE Yrjixtilex enclave, weren’t known for their love of the dragonborn. To the south, across the lava fields they called the Black Ash Plain, a savage tribe of ash giants made passage to East Rift, and the lands beyond, perilous. Not a decade ago, they’d waged war against Djerad Thymar, manipulated by more terrible powers the rumors said, but it hadn’t taken much. Not the sort of allies the Vayemniri took to.
But an army of stone giants? That could march straight through the Black Ash Plain, around the Lake of Steam, right up the Snowflake Mountains, to where the Brimstone Angel had taken Havilar—
Don’t get ahead of yourself, he thought, pausing before the Yrjixtilex enclave’s great doors with their silver pickaxes, their scores of carved Vayemniri overwhelming a copper dragon. He didn’t have giants. He didn’t have a plan. Farideh was still trying to go about it her way. Mehen would have to wait.
He could wait, he told himself. Until he couldn’t. Every time he managed to string a thought together that wasn’t a worry about his daughter, he would catch himself, guilty and frantic. How could he sit here, waiting and waiting—for gods and devils and warlocks—letting Farideh stand full in the face of danger and Havilar stay trapped the karshoji gods only knew where. He gave his name to the doorguards and asked for Kallan.
“He’s just left,” the woman on the right said.
Mehen sighed. “When will he be back?”
The guard glanced worriedly to her fellow—a glance made all the more obvious by the row of red jasper axeheads arched over her right eye. “He … He looked as though he meant to be gone some time.”
“We can tell him you were here,” the other guard, a red-scaled male, said crisply.
Mehen cursed as he turned, hurrying back down the stairs toward the market floor and the city gates. The stalls and shops of the market were largely closed, their owners recalled to defend the city, no doubt, as the threat of the King of Dust grew and the clans all mustered their forces. If he were a different sort, he might have thanked Dumuzi’s god for the good fortune, since closed shops meant thinner crowds, which meant it didn’t take him long to find Yrjixtilex Kallan trying to bargain his way onto a caravan guard.
“That army’s nowhere near as close as they’re saying,” he told the human merchant. “You head north now, I promise you’ll miss the fighting.”
The human, a stout, pale-skinned man with stringy hair and a pronounced Waterdhavian accent, folded his arms. “Army’s one thing. Spellplague’s another. And now I hear rumors of giants? Everybody on the Alamber knows if you’re going to get sieged, this is the city to be in. I’m not leaving for at least a tenday.” He looked up at Mehen. “Same goes for you. Everybody with goods to rot or a streak of insanity already left. I’m not paying guards to sit around.”
“Fair,” Mehen said. “But I was looking for him. Well met. You weren’t even going to say good-bye?”
Kallan smiled, but there was no warmth at all in his eyes. “You weren’t going to tell me your aunt was going to put me forth for Vanquisher?”
“Hang on,” the merchant said, frowning at Kallan. “You’re the new Vanquisher?”
“Karshoj, no,” Kallan said. To Mehen, he added, “And I figure if that’s where things stand, then Djerad Thymar and I are done. You can tell Vardhira that I went north to find Cayshan and the others.”
“She’ll send someone after you,” Mehen said. “She’ll go straight for your family’s farm.”
“Which is why I’ll be somewhere else.” He tapped the side of his snout. “Maybe I’m not the fool your aunt thinks I am.” He started off, back across the market. Mehen caught him by the arm.
“She doesn’t think you’re a fool,” he said. “She thinks you stand a good chance of winning. Specifically, of beating Uadjit. Anala might be a loose quarrel, but she doesn’t take on battles she doesn’t think she can win.”
Kallan laughed to himself. “What kind of elder votes for an unpierced, son of a shepherd, clutch-dodging sellsword over Kepeshkmolik Uadjit, who no one in this karshoji city—including you—seems to be able to shut up about?”
“Quite a lot of them,” a new voice said. Mehen looked toward the city gates. Uadjit stood there, fully armored, fully armed, and wearing her cloak besides. “Verthisathurgiesh, Ophinshtalajiir, Prexijandilin, Daardendrien. I suspect you might gather Kepeshkmolik too—my father can’t abide Arjhani, and he thinks Narhanna is a twit.”
“Someone else will add a candidate, I’m sure,” Kallan said in a friendly way. “But I doubt it matters—you’re clearly going to win.”
Uadjit looked down her snout at him. “If you think that, then where are you off to?” When Kallan didn’t answer, she went on. “They all know by now that you were the one who figured out the puzzle of the maurezhi. That you leaped upon its back to help bring it down. Anyone that talks to you can see perfectly well that you know how to negotiate—”
“Compared to the ambassador to Imaskar, sathi?” Kallan said. “I don’t think me getting an extra two silver or a bit of information out of a merchant means much at all.”
Uadjit’s expression darkened. “I’m also the mother of the boy trying to bring a maunthreki god to the Vayemniri. I guarantee that means a great deal more than where I’ve done my negotiating.”
“Lots of folks are kin to god-worshipers,” Kallan said. “Only a Kepeshkmolik would call it a death stroke.”
“Even if they overlook it,” Uadjit said. “It would be inappropriate. The Vanquisher mother to the Chosen of … whatever we end up calling him? They’ll say Kepeshkmolik has seized the Vayemniri, and for them to be wrong, I cannot stand beside my son as ruler.”
Mehen considered the sagging scales around her eyes, her tight jaw. “You think he’s going to manage it.”
She shrugged. “He must,” she said, her voice thick. “We’re doomed elsewise. I know you were too busy making eyes with Arjhani in tactics lessons—”
“First off, I paid attention fine,” Mehen said. “Second, a plague-addled hatchling could see the trouble we’re in. No one in that conclave has a notion beyond doing what we’ve always done. We’ve gotten complacent and soft. An army full of demons, led by a man that calls himself a god—what are we going to do? Aerial strikes? A cavalry press? No one’s come up with a plan, because there’s nothing we know that will work, and testing the old ways means we risk killing our own. That leaves Dumuzi and his god of the lightning storms.”
Uadjit sighed. “It’s worse than that. That storm … the Second Blue Fire or the Rending or whatever you want to call it, that’s not the last of it. What the wizard noticed, it’s still the case—I talked to Kanjentellequor’s wizards when I went to see how they were voting. The planes are unstable. It’s likely to happen again. And we don’t have a way to prevent it, nor do we have a way to protect ourselves from it.”
“Except Dumuzi,” Kallan finished, “and his god of lightning storms.”
“Bad enough that he has to convince us all to change our ways,” Uadjit said, “but picture Anala, picture her allies accepting that now we must listen to a Kepeshkmolik hatchling, whose mother is the Vanquisher—now, right now, before the storms unmake us. Tyranny! Dynasty! The undoing of all we stand for! There is no way on any plane that they would see reason in time.
“Arjhani,” she went on more briskly, “will present the same problems from the other angle—my father has a tendency to forget sense when Verthisathurgiesh scrapes his scales—and even still, we’ll have Fenkenkabradon’s continuing tactical control.”
“More cavalry presses and aerial assaults,” Mehen said.
“Which of course assumes anyone can find Arjhani,” Uadjit said, all false cheer, “since he’s still slinking around avoiding anyone who might be a touch upset about him colluding with Fenkenkabradon.”
“How do you know he wasn’t just as surprised as I was?” Kallan asked.
“Because I know Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani,” she said darkly.
Kallan’s nostrils flared, his expression tense. “Narhanna,” he reminded her. Both Uadjit and Mehen snorted.
“Narhanna is an excellent secretary to her uncle,” Uadjit said carefully.
Mehen shook his head. “There is no way she’s not just the first person the Shestandeliath thought of. I suspect he’s kicking himself for that one.”
Kallan rubbed a hand over his face. “There’s a score of clans, and four candidates for Vanquisher? You really think no one will put forth someone else?”
“It’s only for a year and a half,” Uadjit reminded him. “We haven’t needed an interim Vanquisher in forty years, and there’s no clear answer about whether this counts as a term. No one wants to waste their best candidates.”
“Except Narghon,” Mehen pointed out.
Uadjit looked up at him. “I think Narghon knows I’m not truly in the running any longer.”
It was a pity, Mehen thought. For all the frustrations she had caused him, he knew Uadjit to be thoughtful, careful, and with a mind sharp and clear as a cut diamond. She would have made an excellent Vanquisher, among the best Djerad Thymar had ever seen.
“Have you taken up the rattle and altar yet?” Mehen asked.
Uadjit made a face. “Broken planes, no. I’m hoping there’s a way around that.” She glanced over her shoulder, as if her son might be just behind them. “I don’t know,” she allowed, “what’s true and what’s hearsay and what changes from god to god. But the maunthreki get up to some ridiculous things because their gods ask it. Garish robes, talking to statues, horrible off-tune chanting, asking someone who isn’t even there for every little thing.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how Dumuzi’s going to manage it, to be honest.”
“But he has to,” Mehen said, even though he agreed completely. “Could be worse? This Enlil doesn’t seem the sort to want blood sacrifices.”
“You aren’t helping.”
Mehen glanced out the gates of the city, toward the bustle of bodies there, the regiments of soldiers preparing to march toward Djerad Kethendi or to dig in and defend Djerad Thymar at the word of the Vanquisher. Any moment, he thought, they’re going to vote and things will get out of control.
“I was coming to say,” he told Kallan, “we ought to go take a patrol and survey these giants. Find out how many enemies we’re looking at and whether we might convince them to our side. Do you want to come along?”
Kallan gave him a crooked smile. “Have you ever taken down a giant?”
“I said survey,” Mehen pointed out. “We’re all hoping for allies. Even if it would be nice to beat the aithyas out of something that deserved it.”
“Assuming you can actually get close enough. What are you planning to do?” Uadjit demanded. “Steal two of the handful of giant bats we still have?”
“Could be one,” Kallan said, all innocence. “I can ride cozy.”
Uadjit raised a brow ridge. “One bat could hardly carry Mehen when he was eighteen. You’ll ground the karshoji thing a league out, riding together, I don’t care how cozy you get.”
“Horses,” Mehen said. “We’ll take horses.”
“Just the two of you?” Uadjit said.
Mehen folded his arms over his chest. “All right. You want to come along?”
Uadjit regarded him levelly. “As it happens … Narghon wants me to do the same thing. As I said, I’m fairly sure he’s realized I’m not going to be Vanquisher any time soon. Except Dumuzi … I can’t leave him now.”
“Dumuzi will be fine, you know?” Kallan said. “Whatever happens to god-worshiping hatchlings in your clan, that’s not happening to Dumuzi. People might be getting angry, but everyone knows he’s got the ear of a power that can stop the karshoji Blue Fire, plus that shiny black axe you handed down to him—which enough people saw him plant in that demon’s chest. Nobody’s troubling Dumuzi right now if they have any sense. Besides,” he added, “he’s a good hatchling. Worst case, someone’s nasty at him.”
Uadjit regarded Kallan the way she might have a merchant being too effusive about the deal she was getting, and Mehen knew all too well what she must have been thinking. “Did you tell him you were leaving?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “I was rather hoping I wouldn’t need to go.”
Mehen suppressed a sigh. She would have to. He would have to. “We go fetch these giants, maybe we don’t need a god, and Dumuzi can be rid of all that.” And then I can convince them to help me smash Havilar’s prison open.
“Have you ever fought a giant?” Kallan repeated skeptically.
“No one’s fighting them,” Uadjit said. “At least, I doubt it. Gilgeam doesn’t like nonhumans. Why would he have a rearguard made up of giants?”
Kallan shrugged. “Why would he have demons in his army?”
“My guess? He feels he can control the demons. Master them. The maurezhi sounded like it was doing his bidding—or trying to look like it was. I doubt giants come with the same strings.”
“So how you going to pull them in to our side?”
“Can’t be harder than arguing with the Imaskari,” Mehen said. “And more vital to us all.”
“You sound like Narghon.” She glanced back at the city gate. “We’ll miss the Vanquisher vote, you know.”
“I thought that was part of the plan,” Kallan said.
Uadjit gave Mehen a dark look. “Why am I reminded of being goaded into skipping tactics?”
“Because you dragged your heel claws then too. Go tell Dumuzi you’re heading out. If he wants to come along, we’ll have him. I’ll get my things.” Uadjit left them, heading back up the pyramid toward the enclaves. Mehen cast a glance sidelong at Kallan. “Are you going to run off before I get back?”
Kallan watched Uadjit. “Nah. This hunt’s a little more to my liking. I’m sorry,” he added without looking at Mehen. “For assuming you were on Anala’s side with this. I didn’t … I didn’t want to ask and find out I was right, you know? Not my best quality.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Better than some,” Kallan teased. “ ’Specially given your idea of courting is riding off into the sunset to fight giants—or better yet, negotiate with them—with a handsome man and his ex-betrothed.”
Mehen turned away, as if he could avoid the compliment by looking out the gates. “I am on Anala’s side a little,” he told him. “At least I don’t think she’s wrong, even if she’s going about it in a pothach way. You’d be a good Vanquisher.”
“Flatterer.”
“I might be out of practice at this, but if that’s how I flatter, then drop me in the karshoji sarcophagus right now.” Mehen shook his head. “You are possibly the only person I know who could talk sense into any of those elders without them closing you out. You make people listen even when they don’t want to—so long as you’re actually talking to them.”
You could be Vanquisher, he thought, and turn the might of this city to my daughter’s safety. But he said none of this. Mehen could wait. Until he couldn’t.
“People only listen to me because I’m not in charge of them,” Kallan said. “Waste all my time delegating, letting people muck things up and arguing, arguing, arguing.” He made a face. “I’m better when I can just get everything done on my own terms and make the ones handing out assignments happy they assigned me. It’s how I get the good coin.”
“You think there was never a Vanquisher who did things like that?”
“I think if there were, he or she spent a karshoji kraken’s load of time getting an earful from prideful elders,” Kallan told him. “Besides, they’d poke me full of holes. Mar this pretty face.”.
• • •
DUMUZI STOOD BEFORE the Hall of Trophies, the passageway that connected the Vanquisher’s Hall and the Adjudicators’ enclave and Lance Defender barracks beyond. Its doors had been closed since the demon had run rampant through it, killing Vanquisher Tarhun and several guards. A white ribbon bound the door handles, themselves shaped from ancient dragon talons.
You surround yourselves with reminders of your time in bondage, the god’s voice noted.
So we don’t forget, Dumuzi thought. How swiftly could a tyrant rise? How dangerous could a usurper be? How quickly could they forget themselves what it meant to be the chattel of the dragon tyrants?
Perilously quickly, the god’s voice said. Flashes of another time, another world, danced before Dumuzi’s eyes, a waking dream. The dark-eyed people who must be Untherans, the first children of Enlil, bound by pale-skinned wizards, calling out for aid. The Untherans again, arguing the prices of slaves coming off a ship. This cannot happen again.
Dumuzi looked up at the doors, at the carvings depicting Vayemniri, with every clan’s piercing carefully etched into the pale stone around them. Wondering if you could fit carvings of dark-eyed humans in between them.
What happens if I can’t convince them? Dumuzi thought. Do you force them?
Silence. That would not help matters. I see that.
This isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing, he thought to himself. You’re supposed to be finding Arjhani.
You don’t like how he preens, Enlil noted. You don’t like how he turns all things to himself.
Dumuzi studied the joints of the stone. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“Sorry?” He spun at the voice and found Farideh standing behind him. She put her hands up in a gesture of calm. “We don’t have to talk about anything if—”
“Sorry,” Dumuzi said. He waved vaguely at his own head. “Not you.”
She gave him a pitying sort of smile. “Mehen thought I should come talk to you. About … Chosen and gods and things.”
“That’s kind of you,” Dumuzi said stiffly.
“I don’t know how you convert thousands of Vayemniri,” she went on. “I don’t even know how you convert one.”
“Put him in an impossible situation and let him count the odds,” Dumuzi said dryly.
The moment he said it, a pang of guilt went through Dumuzi. That made it sound like Enlil was nothing but a convenience, a weapon snatched up in the heat of battle. And even if that were true, at the time … now he wasn’t sure he could imagine going back to life before the god began speaking to him—something far more likely to happen if Dumuzi kept thinking things like that.
You forget, Enlil said, I know you better than you think. I understand.
Dumuzi sighed. He understood too—Enlil would be better off with a more dedicated Chosen, but Dumuzi was all he could get.
“Dumuzi?” Farideh frowned at him, as though that hadn’t been the first time she’d called his name.
“Sorry.” Dumuzi rubbed his forehead along the row of his piercings. “Is this what it’s like? For you? I feel as if I’m half in one world and half in another. Every time I sit down, I fall asleep and dream, and even when I’m awake, it’s as if I’m tracking the dream through everything, like guano out of the bat stables.”
Farideh shook her head. “I don’t think Asmodeus is like Enlil. I don’t think he’s like most gods. Except … I suppose except like Azuth.”
“The one the wizard speaks to?”
“I suppose Azuth is more like Enlil in that,” Farideh said. “I only meant they’re intertwined still. Though I don’t know.”
He frowned. “Does he not tell you?”
“I’m not his Chosen anymore,” Farideh reminded him. “She … Bryseis Kakistos took that too.”
Another pang of guilt—how far from this world, from everything he knew to be right, had Dumuzi drifted that he spoke so casually about the crisis that took Havilar away? “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Have you heard anything from Havilar? From Brin?”
“No.” She got a distant sort of look. “Can you ask him questions? Will he answer in a way that makes sense?”
“I suppose,” Dumuzi said. “It works better if I’m sleeping or … I mean, if I’m not entirely here.”
“When I’ve seen Asmodeus,” she said, “there’s … there’s a sort of sigil on him, the way there is on you. I’m guessing, because it’s the name of Azuth, that this is the … spark, let’s say, that made Azuth a god. That’s the thing Asmodeus was trying to consume, but—”
She uses mortal words for immortal things, Enlil murmured. It can run a mind into a mire.
Dumuzi related this. Farideh frowned. “The part of Azuth that Asmodeus needed to become a god. Can we just call it a spark? Or a godhood? Does Enlil have that?”
A flood of singular emotion hit Dumuzi. “Obviously,” he said.
“But he didn’t die, right?” Farideh said. “He was just somewhere else. What if he were dead?”
It remains unless it doesn’t, Enlil said. As the storm comes, the dead wake—unless they don’t.
Dumuzi flinched. “I think he says it depends. It can stay. It can also go out. Whatever is happening with the planes and the gods and things seems to be waking the ones who kept their godhood despite being dead.”
“What if,” Farideh said, “you take the spark out of a god?”
Dumuzi’s chest grew suddenly warmer. That is what makes one Chosen, Enlil said. A fragment of strength, of power, shared out to better anchor us, to spread our words. Dumuzi repeated this, though the notion made him distinctly uncomfortable—deep down he couldn’t deny how little he wanted to be the one spreading any god’s words.
Farideh shook her head. “All of it, I mean. What happens if you take all of that away? Just ripped it out?”
Enlil fell still and silent before answering. “If the spark is removed,” Dumuzi repeated, “or if it dwindles too far, then that is not a god anymore.”
The words left a hollow spot in Dumuzi’s heart. They might have been speaking of Asmodeus and Azuth, but Enlil also meant himself. He had Dumuzi. He had one not-quite-true-believer, one reluctant Chosen dithering over how to approach the rest of the city like a hatchling suggesting his own qallim. That wasn’t a god. He wasn’t even sure what that was.
Farideh sighed. “Thank you. That’s better than I could have found on my own, even if I still don’t quite understand it.”
You’re not meant to understand it, Enlil said gently. Sadly.
“Don’t thank me,” Dumuzi said. “I’m nothing but the translator.”
She peered at him, her mismatched eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “How do I say thank you to Enlil then?”
“I … I don’t know,” Dumuzi said. From Enlil there was only silence for such a long time that Dumuzi began to worry he would have to invent something on his own.
The old words do not suit, the god finally said. I am not as I was, not entirely. The world is not as it was. Tell her these words …
“Prominent one whose words are well-established,” Dumuzi said, “whose words bring comfort like fine oil for the heart, whose command and support are things that are immutable, whose utterances take precedence, whose plans are firm words, Great Mountain, Father Enlil, your praise is sublime!”
Farideh pursed her lips. “I just repeat it?”
“And do this,” Dumuzi said, cupping his hands to his mouth and exhaling hard. Her look grew more skeptical, and Dumuzi had to agree—no one was going to want to do this ritual, but how could he tell Enlil that? What kind of Chosen told his god that his prayers sounded pothach? “Do you think we should work on it?” he asked stiffly.
“I would work on it,” Farideh said. But she repeated the words and the gesture, and in that moment, Dumuzi saw how she was symbolically offering a share of her breath to Enlil, the god with storms in his blood …
A crackle of electricity danced up the scales on Dumuzi’s neck, and all of a sudden he felt a bit light-headed. Farideh looked at him, alarmed. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Are you all right? Dumuzi thought.
Yes—the answer hummed in his blood, firm and forthright, and in it, Dumuzi saw the answer.
The Vayemniri might not lean upon a god the way other races would. But Dumuzi knew enough ancestor stories to be certain they knew the value in acknowledging an ally, in repaying a debt. If he could convince them it wasn’t a trick or a trap …
Behind Farideh, he watched as the first of the elders returned for their conclave.
“I have to go,” Dumuzi said.
He hurried back toward the Vanquisher’s audience chamber, past the weapons of Vanquishers of old. The conclave had not yet begun and only a few of the elders were there—including Verthisathurgiesh Anala, whose brow ridges lifted as he appeared.
“Dumuzi,” she said, greeting him warmly. “I’m glad to see you’ve returned.”
“Matriarch,” he said formally, bowing with more solemnity than strictly necessary. “I would speak with you. About your offer of space for a shrine. I will need it, as it happens.”
Anala’s amber eyes narrowed, the only hint that she was annoyed at Dumuzi. “Oh? Did I offer that?”
“You did. Shall I find you after the conclave?”
Anala pulled her gauzy crimson wrap close around her shoulders. “I’m afraid I’ve been called to approve Verthisathurgiesh’s contributions to the defense of Djerad Kethendi.”
“They haven’t already left?”
“No,” Anala said slowly, and Dumuzi saw the rebuke implicit in his words. “As I said. I must review them and send them off.”
As they spoke, more of the elders entered, Kepeshkmolik Narghon among them. Uadjit was nowhere to be seen. Nor, Dumuzi noted, was Kallan with Yrjixtilex Vardhira.
“Are you voting on the Vanquisher today?” he asked.
“That is the intent,” Anala said, her tone annoyed as Fenkenkabradon Ishkhanak entered, leading Arjhani. Dumuzi’s father, slight, compact, and handsome in his best armor, scanned the room, his gaze carefully gliding past Anala and Dumuzi. A stab of anger went through Dumuzi—Arjhani had not so much as asked after him in the time since Dumuzi had killed the demon on the pyramid’s peak—but he smothered it. He shouldn’t expect anything different from Arjhani.
The Shestandeliath patriarch had arrived with Narhanna, their matching silver chains swinging as they surveyed the conclave. Dumuzi counted piercings—jade plugs, mother-of-pearl moons, jasper axe heads, bone studs, silver skewers, copper owls, dark steel antlers, pale jade rings, and more. Enough.
You have to do it, he told himself. There’s no time to waste.
“I wish to address the conclave!” he shouted above the murmurs. The elders fell silent, gazes cast askance—who was this hatchling to broach protocol as if he’d been raised in a cave? Dumuzi clenched his jaw, fighting his nerves, fighting the urge to apologize, to take it back.
I am with you, Enlil reminded him. But Narghon was already pushing his way through the crowd and Dumuzi’s heart had climbed right up his throat.
“Stop,” Narghon hissed. “This is not the time, not the place, and you are not free to speak.”
A lifetime’s lessons of following his elders nearly broke Dumuzi’s resolve. He focused instead on that growing sense of sureness, that strength. “I have a matter for the conclave, Patriarch. I speak for the god, not Kepeshkmolik.”
“Let the boy speak,” Anala said, in tones all too eager, to tweak Narghon’s snout. There it is, Dumuzi thought, the clearest confirmation he would get of Anala’s true intentions when it came to Dumuzi and Enlil. You can still use it, he thought.
You cannot build a city on a foundation of deceit.
“Speak your piece,” Anala said, her eyes never leaving Narghon’s. “We have much to attend to.”
Dumuzi took a deep breath—this first, the shrine, and the rest later. “We are Vayemniri,” he said to the assembled elders. “We don’t let our debts linger. We earn the balance—we are not slaves nor are we slave masters. And so I wish to collect what is owed Enlil, Father of Storms.”
“You cannot claim a debt for an unasked-for service,” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. “In my day, we called that extortion.”
“I claim we owe him our gratitude,” Dumuzi said, embarrassed at how his voice shook. “Or have my elders taught me poorly?” His heart sped further at the strange and suspicious looks this garnered.
“My, Narghon,” the Ophinshtalajiir said. “Your hatchling has a very bold tongue.”
“He has our gratitude,” Narghon said, ignoring old Kaijia. “No one has said otherwise.”
Dumuzi fought the urge to tap his tongue to the roof of his mouth, to taste for the scent of danger. “No one has said otherwise, but no one has said their thanks. That’s what I request. That’s all he wants.”
“Right now,” someone snorted.
“It isn’t so much,” the Daardendrien patriarch said, scratching the row of bone studs in his jaw. “I assume we can’t—”
“We can’t at all!” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. “Why are you entertaining this nonsense?”
Anala studied Dumuzi with a puzzled expression. “What is it—”
But then a young woman with Kanjentellequor’s silver skewers in her jaw and a Lance Defender’s badge on her shoulder came barreling into the audience chamber. All eyes went to her as she searched the room.
“Who is in charge?” she gasped, almost a plea—Let them have made the Vanquisher vote, let someone be in control of this.
“Still the conclave,” Narghon snapped. “What’s happened?”
For a moment, her eyes searched the room again, as if hoping beyond hope there would be someone in charge. “Djerad Kethendi’s forward regiment has been destroyed,” the young woman said, still panting. “The King of Dust turned magic on them, terrible demons ripped their bats from the sky. They say it happened so fast. Those that aren’t dead are captured, except the five who escaped.”
“How many captured?” Kaijia demanded.
“We don’t know,” the Lance Defender said. “But Djerad Kethendi can’t support another attack like that. The conclave there wants orders.”
“Armies from the clans will reach there soon,” Anala said. “There will be reinforcements.”
“Djerad Kethendi’s forward regiment was a thousand strong,” Narghon said. “Clearly this King of Dust is skilled in magic, and his demons are worse than the first one he turned on us. The forces we’ve spared may hardly wind him.”
“Such a thing to say about our warriors,” the Clethtinthtiallor matriarch said. But a grim silence surrounded her—if Djerad Kethendi had lost so many, then it would not matter how loudly they praised their warriors’ skills.
“We need to establish a Vanquisher,” Vardhira said.
“We need to act,” Narghon said. “What would a Vanquisher do? Pull away more of our attention while we get him or her settled in? We need to set a strategy—”
“Which is why a Vanquisher—”
“Enlil,” Dumuzi said, trying to be heard above the shouting. “You cannot have a strategy that ignores—” But no one would hear him.
Anala took him by the arm and marched him swiftly from the room. “Dumuzi, noachi,” she said, “come back later. Let us settle this, and we’ll discuss your god and his concerns after.”
“But—” The doors shut in his face, the guards barring the way. “I need to get in there,” he told the Adjudicators.
The man on the left gave him a sympathetic look. “It will be all right,” he said. “Go find your agemates.”
Dumuzi snapped his teeth, feeling a frustrated cloud of electricity building between his teeth. So close—he’d been sure that would get through to them.
The god pressed upon him, and he felt as if the black-scaled dragonborn walked beside him, wordless and sorry and crackling with the same frustration, and yet knowing that this was exactly what was bound to happen. It made Dumuzi’s head ache.
Another reason I need more followers, Enlil said. You cannot be everything.
Being something was almost too much for Dumuzi. He’d rushed in with broken words and clumsy gestures and nothing like a plan. There wasn’t time to figure out how to be perfect at this and there wasn’t time to be less than perfect.
The doors to the conclave opened only wide enough for Verthisathurgiesh Arjhani to slip through. Dumuzi looked up, surprised at his father’s appearance, but then Arjhani caught him by the arm, steered him down the hallway.
“I love you,” Arjhani hissed. “You know that, and I’m sorry you’re angry, but have you given the slightest thought to how much you’re upsetting me? To how badly you’re damaging my chances?”
Dumuzi shook him off. “Your chances?”
“I could be Vanquisher,” Arjhani said, sounding furious. “I could be, but then my son is shouting all manner of nonsense out of order in the conclave he hasn’t been invited to—”
“I’m trying to save this city!” Dumuzi burst out.
“You’re trying to make that god at home,” Arjhani said. “You shouldn’t trust people just because they pay attention to you. Have you not learned the lessons of Esham-Ana?”
Dumuzi felt as if he might faint or explode, and he could only wait and see which. “That’s not what that story’s about,” he managed.
“I think I’ve learned my ancestor stories. Well enough to know better than to fall for such tricks.”
“Tricks?’ Dumuzi demanded. “But … You’re … Fenkenkabradon only nominated you so they could keep hold of the Lance Defenders.”
Arjhani’s expression contorted in rage. “How dare you.”
“It’s the truth!” Dumuzi cried. “Ask anyone. You’re their puppet in this. How could you not know?”
Arjhani slapped him across the face. “Shut your mouth. If I’m a puppet, then what are you?”
Dumuzi stood for a long moment as his father’s footsteps faded away, hands balled into fists, trying to ignore the surge of the god all around him. He didn’t want pity. He didn’t want power. How was he different anyway? Arjhani wasn’t wrong.
He isn’t right, Enlil said, but what else would he say? Dumuzi rubbed the scales of his cheek. You can’t ape Enlil’s old ways, he told himself. You can’t just try to please the elders. You need another way and you need to find it yourself.
Dumuzi climbed up to the Lance Defender barracks, winding his way through busy corridors followed by nearly empty ones. No one was teaching classes to cadets. Everyone was preparing for war. Remembering his dream, he made his way through the bat stables and up onto the launching platform at the pyramid’s peak.
A jolt of sick panic hit him as he stood where not six days before Dumuzi had dealt the maurezhi a killing blow with the Black Axe of the Moon’s Champion. He’d climbed the pyramid itself, trying to chase down the killer of his friends, the killer of the girl he’d been smitten with, believing he had doomed himself, and suspecting he might die. Lightning snapped in his teeth.
You survived, the god’s voice reminded him, in tones that smoothed Dumuzi’s nerves and quieted the lightning breath. There’s no danger here. I am with you.
Three dozen young dragonborn arrayed themselves along the wall, looking down at the forces rallying on the plain below. Beyond, the Kuhri Ternhesh snaked toward Djerad Kethendi. Dumuzi peered at the horizon as he approached his father’s unsupervised polearms class, but the land rose up between him and wherever the King of Dust’s army waited.
“Look at that,” someone said. “They’ve added another regiment of glaive bearers.”
“That’s the Ninth Blue Cohort. My cousin’s there.”
“Must be expecting a lot of ground forces.”
“Any day now they’ll have to add cadets to the ranks,” someone replied. “That’s what my uncle says.”
Which of the students looked back at Dumuzi first, he couldn’t have said. But one moment their eyes were all on the plains below, and the next they were on Dumuzi. One, his cousin Saitha, a reddish-scaled Kepeshkmolik girl, stepped out of the crowd.
“What’s at your back?” she asked with a nod.
Dumuzi shrugged. “Still have my shadow. What do you think?” he added, nodding toward the edge and the armies below.
Saitha hesitated. “It’s bad, isn’t it? I heard they let you into the elders’ conclave. Do you know how bad?”
Three dozen pairs of eyes watched Dumuzi. It would be proper, he thought, to demur. To let the elders handle this. Sometimes there was value in the bare truth and sometimes it was wiser to say what needed to be said and no more. Six days ago, Dumuzi might have told them he wasn’t really sure, that they should all go home and stop gossiping. This was too serious.
“The Kethendan forces have been slaughtered,” Dumuzi told them. “At least fourteen homesteads are just gone, and it sounds like there’s a good chance the Blue Fire will come again.”
“But you can stop it,” asked a tall boy near Saitha, an Ophinshtalajiir with jade rings in his jaw. “You stopped it, that’s what they’re saying. You did a spell.”
“That is not what they’re saying,” retorted a Shestandeliath girl—Ereshkin, Zaroshni’s cousin, Dumuzi thought, a pang of grief going through him with the recognition. A pang of grief that kept him silent as she added, “They’re saying you channeled a god, right in front of everyone, and made it do that.”
Murmurs raced through the crowd before Dumuzi found his voice. “Not exactly,” he said.
“They’re saying you killed the maurezhi too,” the Ophinshtalajiir boy said.
“No,” Ereshkin said, the silver chains that ran from her nostril to her ear shaking with her head. “I heard it was Master Arjhani.”
The Ophinshtalajiir boy frowned. “I guess that’s more likely.”
Dumuzi ran a thumb over the head of the black axe. “That was me. And … I didn’t make the god—make Enlil—do that. He just did.”
Saitha gave him a deeply skeptical look. “Why?”
“Because he wants to help,” Dumuzi said. “Because … He was here before we were, and he left his people in the wrong hands. He’s … I think he wants to atone for that, but I think, too, he just sees we need help. We need him.”
“Do we?” Saitha asked.
“We did,” Dumuzi pointed out. “Or do you think I’m the sort of person who can run up the pyramid and plant this axe in a demon’s chest and then make a wall of lightning to protect the city?”
“So … can he do that again?” the Ophinshtalajiir boy asked.
“Not yet.” Dumuzi considered the young Vayemniri before him. They were all in the year before their Lance Defender service—hatchlings by the elders’ measure, not yet experienced enough to be thrown into the field or allowed their own decisions. Dumuzi’s peers, or close to it. “I need help with that.”
Saitha tilted her head. “What kind of help?”
“Well … your help, I suspect.” Mehen’s suggestions, the words of Enlil, Farideh’s notions all boiled together in his thoughts. It could work. If he’d stood in the group of cadets instead of in front of them, he would have at least listened.
“I stand with an offer of engagement,” Dumuzi said, as formally as if he were one of their elders suggesting a qallim agreement. “Enlil will aid us if we acknowledge him. In exchange, though, we agree not to put anyone in shackles—not the Untherans, not ourselves, not the god. Anyone who gives him worship belongs to him like a clan-mate, and so belongs to the city. You will strive to be true, to be kind, to follow the laws and traditions we have set out. When he has helped us, we will acknowledge it and thank him, just as we would a comrade.” A sea of skeptical faces considered him, whispering to each other. Dumuzi took a deep breath. “For two years. The same as a term with the Lance Defenders. After two years, we will reconsider and renegotiate as needed.”
Mortal words for immortal things, Dumuzi thought as the murmurs built and built.
Not always the wrong choice, the god’s voice murmured in his thoughts. You say it how they need to hear it.
“Are we … allowed to take an offer like that?” said a boy near Saitha, white-scaled and stocky and wearing Clethtinthtiallor’s piercings across his cheeks. “By the laws, we’re not adults yet.”
“But you are your own people,” Dumuzi pointed out. “You belong to the city and the city belongs to you. This doesn’t reflect on your clan. You can be everything you’re asked to be, and still make this agreement—think of it like a sellsword contract.”
“People don’t get exiled for sellsword contracts,” Ereshkin pointed out.
Saitha uncrossed her arms and came to stand beside Dumuzi. “I can do anything for two years,” she said with not a little bravado. “How do I agree?”
Dumuzi faltered. “It’s … I might need help with that. The way he did things before, it won’t work for us. But.” He cupped his hand to his mouth and exhaled sharply. “That. And think your thanks for the lightning wall. We’ll see if that’s enough.”
Saitha glanced back at her friends, as if she couldn’t quite believe this. “You have to mean it,” Dumuzi warned. “Don’t bother if you don’t mean it.”
The look of skepticism didn’t quite fade from Saitha’s expression. But she closed her eyes and cupped her hand to her mouth, silent a moment before the soft exhale of her breath.
Again the crackle of electricity raced up the small scales at the back of Dumuzi’s neck, a hint of Enlil’s growing power. Again he felt light-headed and his heart started pounding. The presence of the god swelled in his thoughts—more solid, more pleased, more real.
But this time, Saitha and a few others clapped a hand to the backs of their necks, startled by the sensation. Saitha’s gold eyes widened and Dumuzi grinned, almost giddy. It was a start—finally a start..
• • •
PREXIJANDILIN HESKAN, SON of Ghesh, of the line of Namarra, did not kneel before the King of Dust until the demons made him. With his commanders dead, he rose to the leadership of Djerad Kethendi’s forward guard, a dubious promotion—there were only ninety-two of them left and all of them prisoners of this hairless, sneering maunthreki.
As his knees hit the cold, dusty ground, hands tied behind his back, Heskan met the King of Dust’s imperious gaze and knew he was the next to die.
“I find the world of Abeir-Toril very much not as I left it.” The man sat upon a dais, even though he was larger than any of the priests around him in their spotted pelts. A pair of winged human-looking women with cruel claws flanked the gilded throne. Shadow-skinned creatures piled at his feet like a hideous rug. Behind him, a tent all embroidered and filigreed, but growing tattered. Its patterns reminded Heskan absurdly of the ancient, dusty tapestry hanging just beyond his brother’s rooms in the enclave back in Djerad Thymar. Beside the man, on a folding table, was a haversack, its contents spread across the table’s surface. On the man’s lap was a thick book, bristling with bits of paper and shivering with enough magic that Heskan felt it all down his scales.
Beyond, the city rose from its own ruins, bathed in the cold light of a winter sun, and the Untherans worked as if sleep would never come.
“Whose lands are these?” the man demanded in an idle sort of way.
“The Vayemniri hold these lands,” Heskan said. “You stand in Tymanther.”
The heavy weight of a club slammed into the middle of his back, driving the air from his lungs and knocking him onto his face. Clawed hands pulled him back up to his knees and he tasted blood in his mouth.
“I am the master of all you see,” the King of Dust declared. He plucked a small mirror from the pile, the size of his palm. It flashed in the sun as he turned it, one side polished, one side enameled with a symbol of grain sheaves. “The price of treason,” he went on, “is death. So I ask again: Whose kingdom do we stand in?”
“The Vayemniri,” Heskan said.
Another blow to the back, this one hard enough to send an explosion of pain through the left side of his ribs. Broken, he thought, lying on the ground, feeling each agonizing breath. The man set down the mirror and picked up a steel disk emblazoned with a scroll.
“Whose lands?” the King of Dust asked, all innocence.
“You can ask a thousand times,” Heskan shouted. “It doesn’t change the truth. We are here. We have made this land our own—you cannot change history. We’re not going anywhere, certainly not in the face of a pretender and his army.”
The slow smile that spread across the tyrant’s face, baring gleaming-white teeth, sent a shudder down Heskan’s scales. “I am the Lord of All Unther Reborn. I am the Son of Victory. I am the God Who Walks the Plane. History is what I say it is. This world is mine, it has always been mine, and I have already crushed you.”
Crushed the forward guard, Heskan thought. There were more warriors in Djerad Kethendi, and more still in Djerad Thymar. They had miscalculated badly, yes, but they would not do so again. He hoped.
“So I ask again,” the King of Dust said, “who rules this land?”
“The Vayemniri,” Heskan said, bracing for another blow.