Chapter 23 Samson
SAMSON
A wise man seeks fortitude. A fool craves happiness.
—a Sesharian proverb
Samson’s hands trembled as he raised his smoking pipe to his lips.
A single flame flared from his finger, bright and vicious, but then his chest spasmed, and pain nipped along his sword arm like a pup desperate for attention.
Desperately, he inhaled. The sweet and slightly earthy smoke of ganja rolled through him, dampening the pain.
The sun glimmered low on the horizon, sinking between two pointed rocks in the distance. The pale shadows of the moons began to appear over the canyons.
The Ravani knelt wherever he walked. As he turned down a street, heading back to the command center, their whispers followed, and Samson welcomed it.
He touched the head of a child who gazed up at him with big, curious eyes.
Beckoning to the child, he blew out a smoke ring and shot a single flame through it, much to the delight of the child’s friends.
Their awe sent a hot rush of satisfaction through him, even as his bones ached.
It was all a show. That was what the others—Elena, Farin, the great royal families—did not understand.
They had been born into their power and their performance had become their truth.
They believed their sovereignty was not an act, but a god-given right.
But prophets and kings were shallow, hollow titles.
Samson knew that once that illusion was broken, once the promise of safety and control was reneged, they would tear him apart as quickly as they kissed his feet.
The Ravani bowed to him now, but they were a fierce people. Proud, unwilling to lose. In a way, they reminded him of Sesharians.
They all relied on him. The Sesharian puppet turned into a general. They had come to him because, somehow, he had made them believe he was the right man to forge a new history. A world where every man was free.
But was he? Samson looked down at his hands as his body throbbed, the pain a restless visitor beneath the sweet narcotics.
Was he strong enough to withstand the madness?
Sparks blazed between his fingers. He drew on his pipe and let out a shaky breath as he ascended the hall steps.
Even now, he could feel the inferno’s hunger.
It was an insidious sensation, nibbling his stomach with soft kisses.
“There you are.”
He looked up to see Visha standing in the entrance. She had switched out her black gloves for long crimson ones, creating the illusion of being soaked in blood, wrist to elbow. The image fit her.
“Which poor soul did you gut out today?” he asked.
“Well, it would have been the ambassador, but our fair queen has whisked him away for a tour of the city.”
I’ll see you later tonight, Prophet, Elena had told him. Secretly, he looked forward to it.
Visha nodded to his pipe. “Can I?”
He took one last pull, and then breathed smoke out his nostrils. Visha retrieved the pipe and had a long draw.
She exhaled slowly, and for a moment, the smoke curled around her cheeks. It reminded him of when he had found her burning poisonous incense outside a Jantari officer’s quarters. She closed her eyes, nodded once.
“Right.” She handed the pipe back to him. “Finish it before you come inside. You’ll need it.”
He eyed her warily. “What kind of battle strategy did you draft this time?”
She gave her thin, vicious grin, the same one that had compelled him to join her and smoke out the officer. “The best you’ve ever seen.”
“That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Chandi said.
Visha scowled. “It’s ballsy, but it’ll work.”
“It exposes us to the Jantari,” Akino said. “We’re primed to get fucked.”
“You would know.”
Akino gave her a scathing look. “I swear, the Jantari and I were drunk—”
“Enough, you two.” Chandi scowled, turning to Samson. “This is too much, General.”
“Are you all right?” Akino asked, peering at Samson. “You look pale.”
“It’s nothing.” Samson sat forward, though sweat broke down his spine. “Start from the top again, Visha.”
Visha winked at Chandi and pointed at a mountain passage that began along the Cyleoni border.
It began to glow in red. “The only way into Jantar is this mountain pass from Cyleon. The Jantari will be patrolling their side of the valley, but according to our intel from miners, there’s an underground tunnel entrance hidden within this bluff. ”
She zoomed in on the holomap, indicating a tall, carved mountain wall. “We don’t know what the entrance looks like—”
“And you still think this is a good plan?” Chandi asked Samson.
“—but at least we know where it is,” Visha continued, glaring at Chandi. “This tunnel creeps under the mountain pass and leads to the northwestern forest surrounding Mine One.”
“The Jantari will have that tunnel covered,” Chandi said. “We’ll be crawling toward a trap.”
“Not if we spring a trap on them,” Visha said.
“What do you mean?” Samson asked.
Visha nodded toward the three glowing dots that indicated the mines. “What do you see there?”
“The Jantari mines,” Samson said.
“I know that, but where are they exactly?”
“On the mountainside,” Akino said slowly.
Visha nodded expectantly, waiting for him to continue, but Akino only stared at her. He shrugged.
Visha sighed and touched the mountain, her finger slicing through the holo and tapping the table. “They’re all downslope.”
They stared at her in silence.
“Honestly, guys, this isn’t alchemy.”
“Just get to the point,” Samson said.
“The ore deposit beneath the northern mines is just one fat lump. It’s deep but concentrated.
The Jantari planted three mines to pump all that shit out.
They’re distanced for safety, but they didn’t count the mountain grade.
If one mine collapses, the others risk falling too because they’re all downhill. ”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Akino rebutted. “Why would the Jantari make such a stupid mistake?”
“Greed,” Samson said. He saw it now. How had he not seen it before?
Farin had built these mines to reap the land, damn the consequences.
If there were landslides caused by the nearby drilling, he didn’t care.
After all, Sesharians were working those mines.
Sesharians and lowborn Jantari soldiers. They were all expendable to him.
“It works in our favor,” Visha said. “General, you and Elena can burn through the tunnels as our first offense. We and the Cyleoni soldiers can follow as the second wave. Once we take out Mine One, the others will topple like dominoes.”
He hesitated. He remembered his weakness after capturing Magar, the waning of his Agni. He had already given too much. Even he knew he could not lead another attack like Magar, at least not for a while.
But there was something else. He tried not to recall the memory, but it came anyway, sticky and vile. The closed walls, the stale, fetid smell of sweat and blood. Screams echoing beneath the earth. Him, frozen in the dark tunnel, palms sweaty around his pulse gun.
How could he tell them? These men who fought and bled for him, these men who would follow him blindly into battle. How could he tell them that their Blue Star, their infallible Prophet, was afraid of the dark?
Before his ascent, before he had become a war hero for Jantar, he had become a traitor to his own people.
He had joined the Jantari army after he had fled the Arohassin, thinking he could sell his secrets for safety.
But he had been foolish. With one look, a Jantari officer had sent him to serve in the mines.
Not as a miner. He hadn’t been that merciful.
The officer had made him an overseer of the Sesharians.
He wore the garb of a Jantari soldier, armed with a zeemir and a pulse gun, and patrolled the underground tunnels while his people toiled.
He had hated the cramped walls. The dark, wet scent of the earth.
His Jantari counterparts snickered whenever he passed.
Coward, they had called him. Some even went as far as to ridicule him, stealing his clothes from their shared lockers, jumping him in dark tunnels.
On one occasion, he had wet himself. They had lorded that over him for the rest of his service.
But their taunts hadn’t really bothered Samson. It was the miners’ whispers that had threatened to undo him. On his patrols, the Sesharians had glanced at him with disgust. Rustblood, they spat as he passed. Traitor.
He had wanted to tell them that he was one of them. Couldn’t they see?
But they only saw the gleam of his zeemir and the glare of the winged bull on his chest.
Beneath the table, Samson gripped his knees.
That had been long ago. The officer who had assigned him that station was long dead now.
The soldiers who had taunted him were buried deep within the earth.
He had made sure of it. The same Sesharians who had worked in those mines were now free men, serving him.
He was the redeemer. The ember that had sprung from the ashes.
He would lead them to glory and free their home from the silver shackles of the Jantari.
And he was afraid.
Visha and Akino looked at him, expectant, but only Chandi met his gaze. Only she recognized his hesitation as fear.
“No,” she said, and silently, Samson thanked her.
“What?” Visha turned to Chandi.
“Exposing Samson and Elena is too risky. Especially in enemy territory.”
“But we did the same in Magar,” Visha began, but Chandi held up her hand. She pointed at Mine One.
“The tunnels won’t work, Visha, because it traps us all. If we get caught during the landslides, we won’t be able to escape. And not just us, but also the Sesharians working the mines. We can’t just leave them.”
Visha rubbed the back of her neck. She stared at the map, her eyebrows knitting together.
“Wait,” she said suddenly. “What if—”
She was interrupted by a loud bang at the front of the hall. They sprang up at once. Samson pulled out his urumi as Chandi shouted for the men in the armory to guard the doors. But it was only Akiri. The twin weapons master called them to come out, quick, look, look!
Samson was already midway down the stairs when he heard it. The roar of engines. His heart stuttered and dropped. Had the Jantari launched a counterattack? Was Farin finally making his move?
But Akiri pointed north, to the Agnee mountains, and in the fading dusk, Samson saw the shape of a tanker lift into the air.
“What?” he began.
“Did the Cyleoni fucking abandon us?” Visha said.
“They’re gone,” Chandi said, looking at her holopod. “Both of them.”
“Sir!” A soldier jogged up the steps, saluted, and handed him three things: her urumi and anklets.
“General,” Visha said.
Samson took them with shaking fingers. A message was crudely etched on the urumi, and he raised the blade to read it.
The Yumi never liked urumis. I’m leaving it with you.
“General.”
She knew about the trackers in the anklets. She knew, and she had left him. She had fucking abandoned him. Samson searched the sky, but the tanker was already fading into the distance. The urumi and anklets hung limply in his hands.
“General!”
He turned, a snarl on his lips, when Visha pointed behind them and into the hall. On the table beside the holopanel, the metal lotus began to glow a deep incarnadine. Then it began to vibrate.
Suddenly, alarms blared. Samson whipped around to see pulse fire coming from the walls as the tiny shapes of his soldiers ran up and down the ramparts.
“The Arohassin are here.”