Chapter 28 A Call and a Want and a Plea
A Call and a Want and a Plea
The throne room is packed with spectators. Almost the entire army of the Jagged Blade—eight thousand, according to Nugau—have come to watch. The space is thick with their heat, loud with their voices, luminescent with the shimmering colors on their cheeks.
Sascia stands in front of Orran, who’s strapping her into armor.
She’s been allowed to carry weapons for this exercise: a bow and quiver.
Orran moves in jerks and jolts; in the past six days while he’s been training her, Sascia has learned Orran can get very jittery when he’s nervous, a fact Thalla endlessly teases him for.
“Remember,” they say, low and comforting. “You’re smart. You’re fast. Think before you move, decide what’s best. Do not take risks.”
“Orran,” Sascia says, “that’s like telling a rooster not to crow at dawn.”
Their frown is epic. “What is a rooster?”
Sascia huffs, her perfectly good joke ruined by Orran’s cluelessness.
Armor straps secured, Orran rotates her by the shoulders to face the arena. On the other side sits a simple bell, positioned on the bare floor. Her task is simple: cross the arena and ring the bell before Nugau’s shadow magic can stop her.
She throws her shoulders back and begins jogging in place. Muscles need to be warm, Orran warns before every training session, and the mind needs to be sharp. Slipping an arrow from the quiver at her hip, she notches it into the bow and pulls it back in a practice draw.
The crowd in the cavern explodes with hoots and howlers.
“We’ll see who has the last laugh!” Sascia says, obnoxiously loud.
One of the aesin translates and a moment later the rest of them are hissing jeers. On a jut of rock above Sascia’s head sit Ktren and the rest of the Queen’s loyalists—the anti-Sascia faction of the aesin.
“It will not be you, my pretty. Our queen returns soon,” Ktren calls down. They toss an onyx bead to a short-haired aesin rushing through the crowd below. “My money is on you lasting less than a minute.”
With a timid glance at Sascia, the bookie pockets the bead and scurries away.
Six days ago, on the morning after their conversation about the itka’s purpose, Nugau stood in the dining area and announced, loudly and authoritatively, that Sascia would begin training.
I am tired of saving her weak ass from every creature she happens upon, Nugau had said in the aesin tongue, according to Thalla.
Besides, if she Claims to be an ambassador to Itkalin, she should know the worst we have to offer: serving in the military.
The soldiers around them had snickered. That same afternoon, almost a hundred of them had come to watch Orran train her.
Footwork, sword fighting, shielding, archery—day after day, Orran drove her until she lay in a puddle of her own sweat.
Then Nugau would take over. Shadows bowed to their magic, creating an obstacle course fashioned out of the Dark that left Sascia with very real scratches and bruises.
Naturally, the aesin had a blast watching Sascia fail.
Whether tentative allies or downright enemies, they watched Sascia fall and rise and fall again as though it was the entertainment of the decade.
Among that first batch of spectators was an unofficial bookie who saw a golden opportunity to profit from Sascia’s failings.
Now there are a dozen bookies hurrying through the groups of aesin gathered on the sidelines of the arena.
“Ready, human?” Nugau calls from their perch on an overturned train car. Their Darkprint gives a pulsing bloom of white.
“Ready,” Sascia says, amazed at how calm and measured her voice comes out.
Before her, the arena bursts with Dark. Sascia is moving before the first obstacle forms fully, swinging her bow to scatter Nugau’s dark shadows.
The second is just as easy. A swinging rod three times the size of Sascia’s body comes for her midriff—Sascia takes advantage of her momentum to drop to her knees and slide beneath it.
The aesin crow their approval and hiss their displeasure.
Sascia’s a good third of the way to the bell with minimal damage when Nugau decides to pull out the big guns.
Out of the Dark amassing in the corners of the arena steps a pack of Darkhyenas, fashioned from Nugau’s shadows.
Their torsos are longer than they should be, humanlike in their latticework of stark, starved ribs.
Their chins are frothed with hunger, their eyes glowing a brilliant white as they zero in on Sascia.
She nocks arrow after arrow between her knuckles and lets them fly in quick succession, just as Orran taught her.
The first smacks uselessly against the floor, but the second and third strike true—two of the shadow-hyenas dissipate into thin air.
Two remain, bridging the distance. As the hyenas near, so close now that she can hear their wet breaths, she lunges into a sprint toward one of the gaping holes in the walls where a torn tunnel spits its train tracks into the throne room.
The fastest of the hyenas is already at her heels, snapping at her calves.
She skids to an abrupt halt before the mouth of the tunnel and brings her bow down in an arc, slicing through the hyena’s body.
It evaporates into black mist that blooms around her ankles. Only one left now, but where is it?
A roar sounds at her back.
It is not the snarl of a shadow-hyena. It is the bellow of something far bigger and far angrier. A wave of terror rises from the aesin.
Sascia and Nugau planned meticulously for this, counted desperately on it, trained laboriously for it—for Mooch to create a rip between their worlds and lure out a real beast that Sascia can fight and defeat.
And yet it still takes every ounce of courage in Sascia’s brain to turn and see with her own eyes what awaits her.
Mooch and its rift are not visible from where she stands, their presence swallowed by the pure Dark seeping through the mouth of the tunnel straight ahead of her.
A ten-foot-tall body has stepped through it, so large it dwarfs Sascia.
Its head resembles a lion, with a lustrous mane of cut onyx and a row of teeth as thick as her wrists.
But its body is insectoid: at least eight legs that Sascia can see, two of which end in pincers like a scorpion’s, as though it is a twisted version of the mythological manticore.
The last shadow-hyena is pressed between one of these pincers, its neck slowly dissolving into black.
The crowd goes wild with panic.
A real, bona fide Darkbeast stands before them.
This was the crux of her and Nugau’s plan.
For the aesin to accept this grand performance as a Heart Trial, it needed to be truly dangerous.
Sascia needed to show the army that humans and aesin could work together by showing off how Mooch could help her defeat an actual Darkbeast. The idea sounded better before she found one looming above her.
It lunges without warning.
Six days of Orran’s defensive drills have now been instilled in her brain; Sascia pivots out of its way and grabs an arrow from the quiver, jabbing it up into the beast’s belly.
It roars in fury—one of its pincers is already in front of her, far too close.
It rams into her breastplate, knocking her off-kilter.
As she falls, the Darkmanticore’s jaws snap around the empty space where her head was only a moment ago.
On the ground, Sascia stumbles backward frantically.
Before her, the beast’s limbs susurrate loudly against the rock as it rears for another attack.
“Fight, you fool!” Nugau screams from their perch. The desperation in their voice is real, but the timing is carefully chosen.
This is Nugau’s signal.
“Mooch!” Sascia calls. “Now!”
Her awareness shoots out, an arrow into the Dark, as Nugau has been instructing her this entire week. Her frantic mind forms a simple message; a call and a want and a plea. Help.
Mooch pops out of the Dark directly above her head, and dives toward the ground. With every flap of its luminescent wings, the fabric of the world splits. A nick at first, then a slice, then a rift. Sascia lifts her arm, fingers splayed, and Tae’s nova-sword drops straight into her waiting hand.
Bow and arrow she’s mastered as well as she can (which is to say, barely adequately), but the sword is different. She’s got an eye for it, according to Orran. It feels comfortable in her hand, the movements flowing and natural.
The crowd cries out in surprise at the doorway between worlds in the center of the arena, at the itka coming to the rescue, at the blade of white that bursts from the hilt of the nova-sword.
Sascia brings it down in an arc, just in time to slice one of the Darkmanticore’s pincers.
The beast throws its head back and roars in pain, and Sascia scrambles to her feet, holding the nova-sword between her and the beast with both hands.
She should end it now. She has the advantage while it’s distracted, a clear shot at its furry neck.
But as it thrusts she hears that sound again, the susurration of flesh against stone, except it is not flesh—it’s a chain.
A heavy, black gemstone manacle weighs down one of its many hind legs, its chain dragging on the ground to disappear back into the tunnel of Dark.
And now that she has noticed it, Sascia looks for other things: the open wound beneath the shackle, the hairless patches on its fur, the ribs pushing against its starved belly.
A centuries-long winter had stricken our lands. We would have died if our ancestors hadn’t discovered that the Ul’amoon radiate heat and that trapping them beneath the earth would save our civilization. This is one of those trapped Ul’amoon, doomed to a life as the aesin’s radiator.
The aesin are drawing their own blades, scrambling out of their perches. They scream at her in their own language, in hers—“Kill it!”
But Sascia can’t. Mooch is hovering in the air before her, between her nova-sword and the frenzied monster.
But the Darkmanticore is no longer a monster to Sascia.
She can see it properly now. It’s an animal, a wounded, mistreated animal, doing anything and everything to survive, just like that rat that bit her on her fifteenth birthday.
She and Nugau thought their plan was straightforward: an arena of aesin to witness her prove her Claim, an Ul’amoon lured out of the Dark by Mooch to reveal their shared enemy, a nova-sword to demonstrate how humans and aesin could work together to fell the beasts, the very reason the itka brought their worlds together.
But Mooch is standing in her way. Which means slaying the Ul’amoon can’t be the soron mola.
The itka open the door between worlds so that they can help one another, and once upon a time, the itka opened the door between Itkalin and the dying world of the Ul’amoon, which means that the itka want—that Mooch wants—to save these scary, violent creatures too.
Mere seconds have passed while Sascia stands there and thinks, but as soon as she’s reached her conclusion, as soon as she’s made her decision—I won’t kill it—Mooch flies at her face, boops her nose, then dashes upward.
It dives in an arc over the Darkmanticore, opening a rift, and between one blink and the next, the Dark has swallowed the Ul’amoon back into Itkalin.
Tension settles on the arena like a breath held. Sascia and Mooch didn’t defeat the Ul’amoon, not as she and Nugau planned, not as the aesin usually do, but the threat is no longer here and that—that is a victory. The only question is whether the aesin will accept it.
With Mooch fluttering around her head, Sascia walks to the end of the arena, leans down, and rings Nugau’s bell.
The room erupts with cheers.
On every bleacher, every hanging balcony, the aesin are throwing back their heads and howling. The bookies are running around like crazy, trying to answer calls. Even the Queen’s council members seem impressed, their faces slack with surprise. And across the cavern, Nugau is smiling.
The princet stands on the side of the overturned train car, a lithe presence that demands everyone’s attention. They place their hand on their chest and begin: thump, thump, thump.
The aesin don’t take too long to follow. Sascia’s Claim to peace is picture-perfect: here is their victory, here is their time-traveling god, here is a way for their worlds to be allies—
Nugau’s head snaps to the other end of the throne room. Their lips part. Their hand freezes. The heartbeat of the Claim trails off.
The Queen stands at the entrance, in her massive armor and floor-length furs. She takes in the packed room, the elated aesin, the triumphant princet, the human at the center of it all, and her violet gaze narrows like a viper readying to strike.