Chapter 5 Samson
SAMSON
We will rise, like seeds buried. We will rise, and even the metal blades of the Jantari will bend to our fury.
—from The Lament of Seshar: A People’s History
The inferno purred to him as Samson watched the smoke-clogged horizon warm to an acidic orange. Even the sun couldn’t break through the smoke of his flames. He didn’t know whether to take that as a sign of triumph or an omen.
They’re watching, the inferno murmured.
He turned his attention to the cage. It was a rudimentary perimeter made up of barbed wire and steel rods and Black Scale sentries.
Set outside the city with the ruined wall towering behind it, the cage had the quality of a chained and ruined beast. The Jantari soldiers within watched as he drew closer.
Some were sitting, others pacing, a few sharing a Rysanti-made cigarette that smelled like wet sulfur, but they grew still at his approach.
Their eyes, pale and shrewd, pierced him.
It brought an ugly memory, one of sand and dirt and screams ringing through salt air when similar eyes had watched from the beach, but Samson pushed the memory away as he joined the Black Scales.
Chandi glanced over as he neared. Still dressed in her black battle fatigues with her skull-hand tattoo wrapped around her throat, she looked like a shard of the black obsidian that lined the beaches of their island.
Like a fang of the Great Serpent, he had joked with her once.
Poised and always ready to strike. But Chandi had looked at him then just as she looked at him now, her eyes unpeeling him as if she knew whatever uncomfortable truth he was hiding beneath.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“And a warm hello to you too, Commander.”
“You pushed yourself enough today. Go rest. If your Agni—”
“I’m all right, Chandi,” he said firmly, though his body ached, and a tremor was already beginning to build up his arm. “I’ll go after this, I promise. I just wanted to see them.”
“To gloat,” she corrected.
He grinned. “Maybe we should send a holo to Farin. Greetings from Ravence. Signed, your beloved Sesharian pets.”
Chandi said nothing, but a patrolling Black Scale chuckled. Samson, biting back a smile, surveyed their prisoners.
“How are they?” he asked.
“Snapping like snakes in a pit.”
Chandi and his commanders had split up the Jantari throughout the city to minimize chances of riots. This prison only held a hundred soldiers, but still, Samson had asked for quick-fingered Black Scales to keep watch. Even a hundred Jantari soldiers could spell trouble.
Eight hundred Jantari soldiers left, in my care, he thought, and it sent a vicious thrill through him.
Great Serpent Above, it felt good. Delicious.
All these Jantari soldiers, defeated and imprisoned by Sesharians.
Chandi may not prefer to gloat, but he savored the sight of their muddied uniforms and broken zeemirs.
He had played a pet and puppet to Farin for so long that he had almost forgotten the sweetness of victory, selfish and hard-won.
All these suns, he and his Black Scales had answered to Farin.
Fought his petty battles, serviced his whims. Samson’s victories had never truly been his—they had been for Jantar. For their king.
But this one, this one was his.
And Elena’s, he thought after a beat. But unlike him, she did not revel in it, and it was this that made his smile falter.
“Elena regrets breaching the wall,” he said.
“I told you,” Chandi said. “She does not have the stomach for war. Or its costs. Let’s go to the Sona Range and be done with her.”
Samson said nothing, not because he did not agree, but because he did not wish to admit it.
Chandi was right, in her own way. Elena had never fought battles, never led an army, never played an obedient puppet to a king.
She was born into power, when he had had to claw for it, kill for it.
And now that she had finally bloodied her hands, she whimpered. Regretted.
It filled him with fierce awe and envy, a pernicious tangle that ensnared him tight. She was of Agni. How could someone like her, someone of power and made from power, regret? But it was her capacity to even feel remorse that made him ache—simply because he had forfeited it many suns ago.
Remorse had made him feel more human, less monstrous. And he grieved for that lost part of himself.
“She is of Agni, Chandi,” he said bitterly. “I owe it to myself to understand her powers. Maybe she’ll surprise us.”
Chandi scoffed but made no rebuke. He was her general, and like any loyal soldier, she knew when to hold her complaints.
Samson locked eyes with a tall Jantari standing by the fence line. The soldier was broad shouldered, with a thick neck and shaved head. Deliberately, he dropped his cigarette and, with his gaze never leaving Samson’s, crushed it slowly with the heel of his boot. Stamped, again and again.
“That one’s ready to charge. Like a mohanti,” Chandi said. “Probably just as small-brained.”
Samson did not flinch under the soldier’s gaze, but he was not stupid.
The Jantari would revolt. It was in their blood to squash opposition, like it was in his blood to cut down their metal hands.
They were an inexorable pair. The tyrant and the rebel.
Changing faces, spaces, but dancing the same song all the same.
They’re always watching, the inferno purred.
Reflexively, Samson touched his lower chakra beneath his belly button, where the core spark of his Agni lived. Its hiss traveled up his abdomen, his chest, licking the insides of his throat. He could taste its hunger.
A few Black Scales who were warming themselves around a small fire suddenly jumped back as the flames swelled. Even at this distance, Samson could hear the inferno call to him.
But he clenched his hand, and the flames coiled back, hissing in displeasure. A shooting pain, sharp and electric like hitting his elbow against a corner, traveled through his arm and across his chest. Samson gritted his teeth. If it weren’t for the Jantari before him, he would have gasped.
“Blue Star?” Chandi asked, a tinge of worry in her voice.
“I’m all right, I’m all right.” Samson ran a hand through his hair to nonchalantly shake off the pain in his arm. His mouth felt strangely dry and swollen. The scar across his chest began to itch, but he fought the urge to pick it. Not yet.
“What happened to Edmund?” he asked, hoping Chandi would move on.
But she studied him, her eyes flicking from his arm to his face. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
No, he thought desperately. Not yet.
“Is that him?” Samson said, pointing to a man hunched over in the far corner. The Jantari general was talking fiercely to a group of angry, exhausted men. They seemed to soak in his every word. Ripples began to move through the prisoners, more turning toward their surviving leader.
“Shit,” Chandi said.
“Move Edmund,” Samson said. “Get him out before we have a riot.”
He glanced back at the glaring soldier. He had become deathly still, his shoulders taut like a pulled bow. Skies above, he does look like an ox. Uneasily, Samson looked away.
“Execute any pilots and their remaining commanding officers. That should shut them up for a bit.”
Chandi nodded and motioned to one of the sentries. “How many tonight?”
“All of them.”
Keeping the officers alive would only lead to a counterattack. Edmund may have his brawn, but without the brains of his operation, he couldn’t even lead a petty skirmish.
Samson turned to go when he felt a hiss travel down his spine to his navel, the inferno flaring in warning just as the tall brute flung himself against the fenced wall with a death keen.
The rudimentary fence quivered. For a moment, everyone stilled.
The rods teetered, the barbed wire rattling like scorpions in a pit.
And then a singular rod fell—right at Samson’s feet.
He stared down at it and then back up at the soldier. The man grinned and grabbed the barbed wire.
The air erupted.
At once, Jantari soldiers rushed the fence.
Chandi bellowed for the Black Scales to shoot.
Edmund jumped to his feet, screaming. Shots crashed through the grounds, quick and percussive.
A few Jantari went down. But the stampede built, soldier after soldier, pressing against the fence as it jerked in sharp, erratic movements like a branch in a winter wind.
Samson moved to unravel his urumi. One slash, and he could cut the tall soldier’s hands clean off—but something in the man’s eyes made him freeze.
“Butcher,” the soldier called him. He reached through the barbed wire, blood spilling down his hands as he grabbed the metal rods. “Farin treated you like a son. Raised you from the dirt. Trained you to fight like us. But even with all of that, you could never hide your true filth, could you, boy.”
The fence bent, groaning.
“Climb so high,” the soldier said as the fence bucked wildly, “in filth you lie.”
With a horrid crack, the fence snapped.
Chandi roared as pulse fire cleaved through the stampede.
There was no order to it. Shoot at will.
Soldiers collapsed. The tall man dashed toward Samson before he could react.
The Jantari grabbed his wrist, pulling him close as he raised his other fist. Reflexively, Samson drove up his arm to block the soldier’s punch and gasped as the man’s fist collided with his forearm.
White-hot pain jittered up his arm, his side.
More soldiers rushed through the opening, streaking past.
Kata, kata, kata, kata.
The rapid, percussive sounds of magazine pulses ripped through the air. The fleeing soldiers toppled, one by one.
Samson wheeled, trying to push the big man off him, but the Jantari used his weight to lock him in. His next punch landed right below Samson’s sternum.