Chapter 9 Samson #2
“We know what you’ve been searching for.
And we can help. Far more than your little queen.
” There was a pause, a slight rustle, as if Akaros was shifting, and Samson could almost imagine him, his old tormentor, his once protector, holding the pod to his lips.
“Yassen’s maps were true. Amrithi exists, but not where you thought.
” He could hear Akaros smiling, that brute. “Remember, Ruru, you must be wicked.”
The light blinked off, and Chandi snatched the pod. The sensors and the lotus tumbled into the sand with a soft, muffled thud.
Samson stared. There was a wetness in his lungs, a pressure that swelled against the walls of his rib cage. If he spoke, he feared it would spill out. Bloody water so dark it could drown out the moons.
“Blue Star,” Chandi said.
“General,” Akino called from behind the boulder.
“They know.” His voice was a low rasp. He looked up from the fallen sensors, the spilled sand. He could almost taste blood, metallic and sharp, on his tongue. “They know about Agni and the amrithi.”
Chandi opened the pod, read the holos. Her mouth twisted. “They want an alliance.”
“A what?” Akino said.
“They…” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at Samson.
He met her gaze, and his questions were mirrored in her own. If the Arohassin knew of the ore’s existence, did they then know how to unlock it?
“Leave us, Akino,” she said.
When they were alone, Chandi handed him the pod.
“As soon as I saw this… thing, I suspected it was the Arohassin. The last time I saw black sand this far south, they left a rune for the old king. Purely to fuck with him.” She indicated a holo.
“Our intel was right. The Arohassin and the Jantari are in a stalemate, and it seems like the Arohassin want to break it, with us. They want to meet us, here in Magar.”
“When?”
“In ten days.” She studied him. “Are you okay?”
He made no move to open the pod. In fact, he had no desire to hold it, not when Akaros had held it too.
Something brutish and dangerous stirred within him.
Thick and black, seeping into his veins with a steady malice like Visha’s poisons.
The same familiar fury gripped his throat.
If he was going to be in the same room as Akaros, he would kill him.
He had sworn it.
“Blue Star?”
“He’s toying with us. With me.” Samson clenched his hands, his skin stretched tautly over his knuckles. “This is another one of his mind games.”
“A game we can play.” She waved at the pool of sand. “Why do you think they sent us this thing? They want to show us what they have. Weapons. Tech. An edge. Don’t you see? We can use them.”
“We don’t need the Arohassin,” he snarled.
Sparks flared down his hand, unbidden, but Chandi did not shy away. She held her ground, eyes steady, mouth fixed, and for a moment, his anger wavered in the face of her defiance.
“You’re not alone this time, Blue Star,” she said softly. “He can’t hurt you.”
His throat closed. He still remembered the sting of Akaros’s whip. The tremor in Yassen’s desperate cries. It had been long ago, when he was a boy, helpless, weak. But he was a god now. Powerful, radiant. And yet, and yet…
“Forget the Arohassin,” he said in Ambari, the old Sesharian tongue. “My Agni is enough. Or have you forgotten the Makara mines?”
The other half—when I saved you, when I saved you all—was left unspoken. Not as a threat. But a reminder. A reminder of all they had bled and sacrificed for, together.
“I have never forgotten Makara,” she said coolly, though something flickered in her eyes, something he could not quite place. “I know my debts.”
“Then trust me,” he said. “We do not need the Arohassin. I’ve led you this far, yes?
Look at what we’ve achieved, what we’ve soon to gain.
” He nodded toward the rising moons, to the Eternal Fire that blazed in the north.
“We have my Agni. We have Elena’s. We don’t need Akaros or his mind games to win freedom now. ”
Chandi nodded slowly, though he could still see doubt in her eyes. But when she spoke again, her voice had lost its chilly tone, replaced now by a potency that reminded Samson of the riptide that had delivered him to the fishermen, to safety.
“So what’s next, General?”
He slipped the pod into his pocket. “Cyleon.”
“But I thought Elena did not want to attack the mines.”
“She will.” He turned toward Magar. “I’ll make her see.”
He found Elena simply by feeling for the pull of her Agni. It was warm and steady, a constant blaze that made him envious of its sureness.
She crouched among the ruins of the watchtower, and when he settled down beside her, she shifted to make room.
Together, they watched the canyons change color.
From red to rust to a deep purple, they bled forth until the twin moons rose and shadows marked their faces. For a long time, they sat in silence.
Finally, as songbirds trilled, Elena spoke.
“The mother was wrong,” she said. “She shouldn’t have demanded the Sesharian boy be thrown out.
And the onlookers…” She shook her head, her face crumpling, and for a moment, he felt sympathy for her.
Because he knew what it felt like to have your own people act against your morals.
To feel your own faith break. When his father had bent to the Jantari, he had felt revulsion, but deeper yet, loss.
As if something integral had been broken.
“If you hadn’t acted, we would have had a mob on our hands.” She glanced down at the city. The lights looked small and distant, little candle flames that could easily be capped, or enraged. “Do you think they’ll tear down the temple themselves, or will you do it?”
He shifted away from the prick of her accusation. You are as stubborn as Leo, he thought. Both clung to their faith, even though they were not fervent believers. He supposed that was the nature of desperate men—to grasp the tattered remains of their belief as it burned down around them.
By tomorrow, word would have spread of his miracle. And they would come, the believers and the skeptics. They would come calling and leave bearing his sign. It was the natural progression of things.
The Ravani, the Sesharians, the Jantari—the world—would bow to his Agni. Their Agni.
But when he turned to her, he saw that she was folding into herself, shoring up, bracing for the worst, and at this, he felt true pity. Pity for her stubbornness, her inability to accept a new truth, however bitter.
The city temple was inconsequential. He had the Eternal Fire.
He was in no hurry to push his god—the Ravani would do that for him.
One day, they would raze temples themselves.
And he hoped, with a tired sort of pity as one would feel for a moth who flings itself, relentlessly, against the burning glass of a lantern, that she would have stopped believing by then.
Chandi would call him a fool. Visha would laugh and then try to tear down the temple herself. But for the first time in his life, Samson retreated.
“Would you want me to?” he asked gently.
Elena blinked. She stared at him with wary hope.
“If you don’t, then you have my word. I won’t touch that city temple.”
She searched his face, but he held still under her scrutiny, and after a while, she nodded. “Thank you.”
“In exchange, I need your help.”
“With what?”
For a moment, he considered telling her the truth. With my own Agni. With the ore.
His control of Agni had always been iron tight, precise to the point of obsession, but he had felt something tremble when the Eternal Fire had fought him.
Its subtle defiance, like a cat nipping at your hand before you pet it.
He had pushed back the flames with more force than he had needed before, and the effects of that effort still reverberated through him now.
Samson clenched his fist as he felt a spasm of pain flicker through his shoulder and chest.
How could she understand the costs of his power when hers remained constant? He could sense the steady thrum of her Agni, the vicious energy humming through her veins. It was cruel. How it taunted him as his own Agni faded.
“For Syla,” he said instead. “Draft a message. Something cryptic but familiar enough that he knows it’s you. Ask him to meet us north of the temple, deep into the Agnee Range.”
She pulled out a holopod. It was scuffed and battered, with scratches along the surface, but Samson recognized it at once, and his heart gave a strange shudder.
“That…” he began. He remembered Yassen’s fingers brushing his own, the moonlight limning the bridge of his nose and the crown of his head as they sat in the small courtyard.
“It’s his,” Elena said softly. She rubbed her thumb along the face, and for a moment, Samson felt a hot, irrational rush of jealousy and the urge to snatch away the pod. It was ridiculous and stupid, and yet, his throat closed in.
He thought of how his friend had knelt beside him in that glittering throne room and sung the oath. How it had put him on the side of a burning mountain, dead.
It was not Elena’s fault, he knew. Of course he knew that. But Samson wondered what would have happened if Yassen had not followed her, or if he had never offered the amnesty deal that had sealed his friend’s fate. What if? He clung to that if. Trembled to think of if.
What a simple, cruel word. In its two letters, his world skittered off-balance, threatening to tip and crash, all the regret and guilt bubbling up like boiling water if he thought too deeply, too long, about what if I had never called Yassen? What if he could have lived if not for me? What if—
“Here.”
Elena placed the pod in his hand. Samson jolted, blinking rapidly, shocked by the wet, crushing sensation in his eyes and nose. Her hand was gentle on his forearm.
“It’s just full of old bank accounts and the maps you gave him,” she said, and something in her voice told him that she sensed his pain, that it lingered in her too.
He took a small, shaky breath. “He was better than the two of us.”
“He was—is—if he’s still.” She stopped. Drew up her knees and circled her arms around them as if to hug herself. “It’s my fault. I should have listened to him and left the mines alone.”
“I blame me.” He laughed, short, acrid. “I should have never bargained his life away to Leo.”
“It’s not your fault—”
“I loved and lost him too, Elena,” he said, and his voice broke at the end. He looked away, clenching his jaw to stop the trembling.
They sat there in silence, weighed down by their own sudden, private griefs.
Samson traced the curve of the pod. He wished, more than anything, for it to ping with a message from Yassen, hurtling toward them in the dark.
He wished he had had the courage to tell him earlier just how much he had loved him.
How he had never forgotten him after all these suns.
“You’re lucky,” he whispered. “At least he knew that you loved him. At least he loved you back. I could never tell him myself.”
“He did love you, Sam.”
He smiled bitterly. Just not in the way I wanted.
His men had found no traces of the assassin in Jantar. Most of the mountainside had been burned or shredded by landslides. Yassen Knight was dead—of their making.
“I suppose gods do feel remorse, then,” Elena said.
He choked out a laugh. “Yes, we do.”
She gently took the pod from him and slipped it into her pocket.
Stay, he thought suddenly, wildly. He did not want to be alone in these canyons tonight, alone in his grief, watching a black horizon crowded by sharp shadows and distant moons. Elena began to rise, but then he reached for her.
She turned, her mouth shaping into a retort, and paused.
“Let’s just sit here for a while. Before we go back.” His touch was light on the inner skin of her wrist. “The world can wait for us a while, Elena Aadya Ravence.”
She considered him for a long time. Her lips pursed, and for a moment, he thought she would leave him alone to face his monsters, but then a slow smile curved her lips. “Tired already, Prophet?”
“Exhausted.” He leaned back. “Take pity on me.”
She laughed. The sound rang through the canyons, soft and quick, like a beautiful bird darting through the sky—out of his reach.
“I have no pity for you, Samson Kytuu.”
“None at all?” His hand was still on her wrist, and he felt her pulse jump. He smiled. “Why not?”
She considered. In the low moonlight, her eyes were large, luminous. “You don’t pity gods who can destroy you.”
He leaned closer, his breath brushing her cheek. “You are as much a god as me, Elena. You can destroy me too.”
He heard her breath catch, and it sent a thrill through him. She was so close that he could feel the heat of her skin, smell the gentle aroma of her hair, like jasmine intermingled with sandalwood. Her Agni pulsed. Deep red soil and white sandstone, he need only to reach—
Elena stepped away, and his hand fell back to his side.
Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and he tried not to stare, failed miserably.
She mumbled something about the temple and hurried off, dark curls tumbling over her shoulders.
He did not call her back. But the image of her Agni stayed with him, so vital, so furiously bright, and he realized, with gentle dismay, that Chandi was right.
Perhaps he would need to tap into Elena’s Agni sooner than he thought.