The Rage of Dragons (The Burning Books #1) (25 page)

Somewhere in another realm, it seemed to Tau, he saw more men run into the circle. He heard Hadith shout something, turned, and saw that he was with Uduak.

As he moved his gaze back to Kellan, a small part of Tau wondered why his sword brothers had come, but that part was drowned out. He was reliving the day his father died.

Tau remembered Kellan standing over his father, watching Aren, hand cut from his body, scream and writhe in helpless pain, and every fiber in Tau’s being roared at him. His hate burned hot enough to immolate, his body shook with rage, and his thoughts were loud enough to be the voices of those around him.

Rip Kellan apart, they said. Wipe his evil from the world, they urged, and Tau listened.

“Who started this?” Kellan asked. He was with two Indlovu, and, bolstered by their presence, the Noble whom Tau had slapped with his sword answered the question by pointing.

Tau paid no attention to him or the two other Indlovu. They were nothing more than ghosts. The only thing of substance was Okar.

“Your name, Initiate?” Kellan asked him.

“Death,” said Tau, moving to kill the man who helped murder his father.

Kellan was surprised, Tau could see that, and it made the next breath even more astonishing. Kellan drew his sword and blocked Tau’s first and second strike in less time than it took to blink. Tau pressed on, heard more swords come free of their scabbards, and heard one of the Indlovu saying, “Hold. Let Kellan have him. It’ll be over soon.”

Tau let the full force of his fury loose, raging against Kellan, his dual blades whipping in and out like the skin-slicing sands of a desert whirlwind. He moved faster than the eye could track, every attack meant to wound, maim, or kill, but every attack met Kellan’s sword.

From the corner of his eye, Tau saw Zuri, hand over her mouth, run from the circle, and then he had no time to see more. Kellan had dashed forward, engaging him.

Okar had no shield. It didn’t matter. His sword played offense and defense both.

Tau took a cut to the arm that bled furiously. Kellan was not using a practice sword, and his blade slit flesh like it had kissed a whetstone that same day. Tau increased his pace, eyes focused, teeth clenched, and Kellan met him, matched him, surpassed him, until, in awe, Tau realized that Kellan was better. Much better.

Tau tried to stay in each moment, living alongside the ebb and flow of the fight, but his doubts grew, pulling at him, dragging his mind out of the swordplay, worrying at him. The voices of hate had gone quiet and he was left with the thought that he would die here and that his father’s murderers would live. His worries whispered that justice would not be done and it was because he was not good enough to take it.

Tau yelled in frustration. Kellan looked calm, fresh, as if he could fight at this impossible pace for an entire sun span. Tau was already near his limit, past it, in fact. His arms were heavy, his footwork clumsy, and he could no longer keep track of Kellan’s darting blade.

Tau skipped back, desperate for room and a moment to breathe. He glanced around. The circle was filling up. There were Indlovu, the ones who had come with Kellan and others.

There were also the men from his scale. Hadith had a sword in hand; so did Uduak. They looked like they wanted to help, but the Indlovu accompanying Kellan had their blades out as well, and the two groups were at a standoff. More to the point, all eyes were on the battle between him and Okar, and Tau saw his doubts reflected in the sorrowed faces of his brothers.

Tau blocked three, then four and five more attacks. He was a full step behind Kellan’s pace now and had no chance for offense. It wouldn’t be long until Kellan pierced his lackluster defense and killed him. Tau made space again, thought of calling for help, and rejected it. If he had to die, he’d do it like a man.

Then he saw Zuri running back into the circle. She had Jayyed with her. Tau felt shame, deep shame, because he was so grateful Zuri had found and brought him. Maybe Jayyed could stop this before Kellan killed him.

It wasn’t Jayyed who saved him, though.

“I said stop!” Zuri yelled, her hands aimed at Kellan. Tau saw her and leapt back as she doused Okar with enervation. Kellan had enough time to see Zuri and gawped at her. He had that much time, and then he was on his knees, caught in Isihogo and defenseless.

This was not how Tau had wanted it, but he’d take it. He ran for Kellan and lifted his blade for a blow that would, dull or no, take Okar’s head from his shoulders.

“No!” It was Zuri. She cut her enervating blast, Tau swung down, and, impossibly, Kellan had his sword up, blocking Tau’s cut. The Indlovu in the circle erupted in outrage.

“He’s trying to kill him!”

“The Lesser is insane!”

“Hang him!”

The surrounding Indlovu closed in. Scale Jayyed came to Tau’s defense, and Jayyed was there too. He got to Tau first, took him by the neck, and yanked him back and off his feet.

“Enough!” he roared. “Enough, damn you all. Enough!”

The Indlovu were howling for blood, their outrage mixed with disbelief. It shattered their worldview to think a Lesser would try to kill one of their own.

Tau struggled to get back to his feet but Jayyed had him.

“I said enough.” Jayyed squeezed Tau’s neck. “Was this a challenge? Blood-duels are not permitted between initiates.”

Kellan, still on his knees, was trying to shake off the vestiges of Isihogo. “Of course not,” he said. “I don’t even know this Lesser.”

Tau growled at that and Jayyed squeezed his neck tighter.

“Do you wish to press charges for the attack?” Jayyed asked Kellan.

Zuri gasped, and the Nobles who were close enough to hear raised their voices in a chorus of assent.

“What?” asked Kellan.

“Will you lay charges, nkosi?” Jayyed said again.

“Don’t. Don’t do this.” Zuri was facing Kellan.

Kellan looked at her like she was mad, but he schooled his features. “Are you ordering me to forfeit justice, Lady Gifted? How have I given such great offense that you would attack me and deprive me of my natural rights to restitution? Whatever it is I have done, tell me how I may make amends.”

“Don’t do this,” Zuri said, imploring Kellan more than instructing him.

“Remind me, Umqondisi,” Kellan said to Jayyed. “What is justice in this case?”

Jayyed answered in perfect monotone. “The offending Lesser will be hung, nkosi.”

“I see,” said Kellan to Jayyed, but looking at Zuri the whole time. “Then, you deal with him in whatever way you see fit. I’ve had enough madness for one day.” The Indlovu with Kellan protested, but he raised a hand, silencing them. “Are we done here?” Kellan asked.

Jayyed bobbed his head. “I believe we are, nkosi.”

Kellan gave Tau a strange look, turned, and sketched an unsteady bow to Zuri, his head still spinning from the underworld. “I beg forgiveness for any offense I have given you, Lady Gifted.” That done and with his back straight, he left the circle with all but one of his Indlovu entourage following.

The one who stayed behind spat in the dirt beside Tau. “Death? Death?” the Noble said, throwing Tau’s words back at him. “Nceku, stay in the dirt where your kind belong.”

Tau tried to go for him, but Jayyed wrenched him back in place.

“If you please, nkosi.” Jayyed said to the man by way of dismissal, his words respectful, his tone anything but.

The Indlovu smirked and left.

Jayyed turned to Zuri. “My thanks, Lady Gifted. We all thank you.” He dragged Tau to his feet and pulled him from the circle, shouting for the rest of the scale to follow. When they turned the first corner, Jayyed picked up the pace, almost running. “Scale Jayyed, we are leaving, now!”

“Don’t look back, don’t slow down,” Jayyed told his men. He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but he was scared. He forced his voice to sound neutral, like he was mentioning the heat. “Tau, if the citadel umqondisi hear about the duel before we get out of the city, I won’t be able to save you.”

“I don’t need saving,” the scarred young man said, trying to be tough but sounding petulant.

Jayyed clamped tighter on his neck. It had to hurt, but the initiate bore it, walking tall. Jayyed wanted to squeeze harder, force Tau to bend. “You’re a fool,” he told him. “A damned fool!”

Jayyed had rushed to the circle when word came that a fight had broken out between Lessers and Nobles. On his way, he’d almost run over a Gifted initiate. She’d come looking for Lessers and, finding Jayyed, had told him to follow her.

He’d known that tensions were high after Oyibo’s death, but he hadn’t expected things to go so far. He’d come into the city with his men, ignoring common sense because he was also burning for a fight, and that was stupid.

“You have no idea how close to death you came,” Jayyed told Tau, struggling to keep his voice calm, a man commenting on the heat. “Dueling an Indlovu? Attacking a Greater Noble!”

And the Gifted had blasted Kellan Okar with enervation. Jayyed hadn’t believed his eyes, and that was before Tau tried to kill the man.

“If it had been anyone but him, you’d already be strung up,” Jayyed said.

“I will kill that man.”

“That man? Do you know—”

“You don’t know—”

“I do!” he screamed at Tau, losing patience and having to wrestle it back. “I know exactly what Okar did, and I know what he didn’t.” Jayyed could feel the vein in his neck throbbing and Tau shook himself free from his pinching fingers.

“My father—”

“Kellan Okar didn’t kill you father!”

“He attacked—”

“Under orders! Under direct orders by the chairman of the Guardian Council and perfectly in his right to kill him. Can’t you see? Okar did everything he could to follow orders and still spare him.”

“You think I’ll accept that?”

“You fought Okar today. Don’t you think that, if he’d wanted to kill your father, your father would have died by his hand?”

Tau was silent. Jayyed knew why. He might not want to face the truth about Kellan, but Tau couldn’t pretend he wasn’t already a better swordsman than his father had ever been.

Tau’s efforts, without benefit of birth or natural talent, had allowed him to surpass the skills of his peers and many of his betters. Still, there were limits. Tau could not have held Okar for much longer, and his father could not have held Okar at all.

The brash initiate simmered like a pot ready to boil over, and the roil of emotions on his face reminded Jayyed of the moment he’d recognized him at the testing. At the time, it had been only a few days since he’d watched Dejen Olujimi ram a blade through Tau’s father’s chest. Only a few days, and Tau had changed.

The boy, with his angry and weeping wound, had looked like a savage in the fighting circle against Uduak. Jayyed had wondered how Tau managed to get cut so badly. He remembered thinking the wound would fester. It could kill the boy, and as the match began, he remembered thinking that when Uduak was through with him, the scratch wouldn’t matter at all.

Jayyed had heard about Uduak half a cycle before the testing. He’d had him watched, and, as expected, Uduak was exactly what Jayyed was looking for. Jayyed found more like him, but Uduak was the first choice for his new scale, and at the testing, the brute did not disappoint. He’d smashed his way through everyone he faced, and then he faced Tau.

The boy was small, even for a Lesser, and it should have been a slaughter, but Tau fought Uduak for the full two hundred count. It seemed impossible. It wasn’t, and that challenged Jayyed’s thinking in ways that worried him.

In the first moments of the fight’s aftermath, Tau’s feat felt threatening and Jayyed had wanted to dismiss or deny the accomplishment, but denying a thing just because he’d rather it not be true would make him no better than the Royal Nobles of the Guardian Council. So, he chose to do the opposite. He chose to see Tau as a beacon of hope.

Jayyed had gone to the other umqondisi. He’d argued for Tau. He’d burned important favors to have the match declared a tie, to get Tau into the isikolo. And, when it was all done, wondering if he was playing himself for a fool, Jayyed went to see the boy.

He’d spoken with him, sensing the young man’s doubts. They echoed his own. Hiding those reservations, Jayyed had chosen to be encouraging. He wanted Tau, the boy who had achieved the impossible because he could not see how impossible it was, to continue to believe in himself, to know that Jayyed believed in him.

He wanted to see if Tau could continue to defy the odds, because if what Jayyed had learned was true, the Chosen needed to see that almost as much as they needed a better breed of fighter. They needed to believe that odds could be defied.

He’d given Tau a chance and, bolstered by superior training, but more through inhuman effort, the boy had become the thing Jayyed had both hoped and feared to create. Like dragons, like Gifted, like Ingonyama, Tau, a Lesser, had become a living weapon.

“You stubborn intulo!” Jayyed railed at him as they rushed for the city gates, fleeing like criminals. “Think! Think for a breath. Kellan didn’t even remember you from the day of your father’s death. You were nothing more than a crazed Lesser and he still didn’t want you to die. Can’t you see? He’s not the bloodthirsty villain you’d like him to be. If he were, he would have killed you long before I arrived.”

Tau said nothing.

“Yes,” Jayyed said, hammering the point home. “You’re not too stupid to see that.” Jayyed aimed for a nerve. “I’ve watched Kellan Okar fight for the last two cycles. Almost without doubt, he’ll win a guardian sword when he graduates. He will, without doubt, become an Ingonyama. He’s the best Indlovu the citadel has seen in twenty or thirty cycles!”

Tau turned his scarred face away. “You told us training would outdo talent,” the boy said. “You worked us half to death with promises that we could be like them.”

“What?” Jayyed countered. “You think Kellan Okar doesn’t train? You think he wakes at midday, gorges himself, poles Noble women in the ass, and then, when occasion merits, happens to fight like that?”

Themba, marching behind them, spluttered, trying to hold back a laugh.

“Move off!” Jayyed hollered.

Themba ducked his head, the chastisement chasing him and the other men away.

“I do nothing but train,” said Tau. “I give my life to the sword. That’s what you asked. It’s what I’ve done. You told me I would be their equal. You told me—”

“Tau,” Jayyed said, afraid to admit what he must. “Kellan is… There aren’t enough spans in the day for you to out-train that one. He’s a Greater Noble, but for much of his life, the other Nobles treated him like a pariah. He lives his life in defiance of that, as if to prove that he is more than ‘the coward Okar’s’ son. He’s in the citadel practice yards for as long as you are in ours. You have to understand, he lives his life as a rebuke to his father’s legacy. That, coupled with the fact that he’s…” Jayyed trailed off.

“Bigger, stronger, faster,” Tau said, finishing Jayyed’s unspoken thought. “He’s Noble and that makes him too much to overcome.”

Jayyed hesitated. Sometimes too much hope leads men to bad ends. “He’s too much to overcome,” he conceded.

“That’s it, then? I’m a Lesser and the best I can do, after giving my life to the sword, is to match their weak?”

“They think we can’t even do that,” Jayyed told him. “And, if you want the truth, I wasn’t sure we could either.”

“How can you tell me that, when you led a scale of Lessers to the Queen’s Melee, to fight against the Nobles’ best? How can you tell me there are heights to which I cannot climb, when you were the one who forged the paths?”

“I am not like you,” Jayyed said, the words frightening him as he spoke them.

“You work harder than I do? Smarter?”

There was no one close enough to hear their conversation, and Tau needed to know some of the truth. Telling him was the right thing to do, but it didn’t make the words easier. “My father was a Greater Noble,” he said.

Tau jerked as if he’d been whipped. “What?”

“Before I was born, my village was attacked in a raid. The Indlovu came but the hedeni had already razed most of it. They were retreating and my mother’s parents were murdered. They were among the last to die and my mother was next. Three savages came for her. A Greater Noble got there first. He killed them. He saved her. He felt he was owed. My mother was not yet a woman. He thought it safe to use her.”

Tau shook his head as if the words made no sense. “No… Lesser-Noble crosses are not permitted.… The babies are stillborn.”

“Not all,” Jayyed said. “When my mother learned she was pregnant, she told the other villagers that she’d lain with one of the Lessers who died in the raid. I was born later that cycle, alive.”

Tau didn’t say a word. He was staring at Jayyed and taking quick, shallow breaths.

“I’ve spent my life fighting and killing, doing all in my power to help my people survive,” Jayyed said. He paused then, unready to tell Tau everything and deciding to explain only as much as he needed to know. “A few cycles ago, I found something that could help. I’d learned how to spot many of the characteristics of a Lesser-Noble cross.”

“What? Why?”

“Because we’re losing the war,” Jayyed said. “We’ll never match the hedeni’s numbers, and the only way we avoid annihilation is with Gifted and better fighters. But we have too few Gifted and too few Nobles. Our Lessers are better trained than the hedeni, but the difference between a well-trained Lesser and a hedeni warrior is too slight. We’re losing.”

“We’re losing? Who knows this?” Tau asked.

“Not many, and some who should know refuse to believe.”

“But you believe it? So why send us to fight and die in a war we can’t win?”

“Because I think I’ve found a way to stave off our end,” Jayyed said, thinking carefully about how to word the next part. He wasn’t ready to invoke the queen’s name or reveal the endgame, and he didn’t think Tau was ready for that either. “I have to hope that, if we can last several cycles more, we can find a way to finish this war, without our people being wiped out.”

“Scale Jayyed? Are we to play a part in seeing that hope realized?”

“The rest of them are,” Jayyed said. “You were never part of the plan.”

“My sword brothers… they’re of Lesser-Noble blood?”

“They are,” he said. “Once I learned that cross-caste children survive in much larger numbers than we’re led to believe, I realized that, in them, there’s a chance.” The unburdening was cathartic. Jayyed had held this for too long. “I filled my scale with as many crosses as I could find. If I was going to challenge our ideas and laws on crossing the castes, I needed to prove that the offspring of these unions make better fighters than the standard Lesser.”

He knew he should ease Tau into this, but he also wanted him to understand. “I need proof that we can create a new and necessary caste, between Nobles and Lessers. The Guardian Council won’t heed my warnings about the war, but maybe they’ll take my help. If they see the strength and possibilities of cross-caste warriors, the council might allow us to find and train them separately. If we can do this in the open, future generations will be stronger with this new caste. This is my goal, and in pursuing it, I found you, a pure-blood Lesser with a Noble’s determination.”

He offered Tau a small smile. “You gave me more hope. You see, maybe we can help more Lessers reach the limit of their potential. Those Lessers, alongside Nobles, Gifted, and cross-castes, can help us hold the peninsula until, one day, this war ends.”

Tau was not looking at Jayyed when he spoke. “You want to create a new caste, something between Lessers and Nobles? You’ll make a new training school for them, something between the isikolo and citadel?”

Tau was too quiet, but at least he understood. “Yes,” Jayyed said. “That’s right.”

Tau looked at him then. “Hadith, Yaw, Chinedu, Themba, Uduak, they’re cross-castes?”

Jayyed nodded. “Yes. And, when all this began, I was so very certain Uduak would be my greatest find, but it seems I’ve discovered something more.” He willed his words to do more than be heard. Jayyed wanted his aspirations understood.

“I’ll tell no one,” Tau said, and Jayyed knew the boy was not convinced.

They walked in silence, the weight of the confession heavy between them, until, as they marched out of the city’s gates, Tau spoke, his tone sharp. “You raised me up with bold words and ideals that you don’t believe. You don’t think Lessers can be great. All you think is that those of us who share Noble blood can be more.”

“You say that, yet I took you into my scale.”

“Tell me why,” Tau said.

“I wanted my men to see that with enough determination our natural limits can be pushed.”

“I think you wanted to shame them into working hard enough to never lose to someone like me.”

“What you’re calling shame I think of as pride. I wanted them to share the determination and pride that you have in yourself. Granted, I had no idea you’d become good enough to match a few Nobles. That’s not something I thought possible.”

“You’re content to be less than,” Tau said.

Jayyed shook off the comment. “I’m telling you that you can be proud and that your achievements prove that all Lessers can do more.” Jayyed smiled. “We all have our place, but perhaps the gap between Noble and Lesser is not as wide as most think. Perhaps—”

“No. After all you’ve done and all you’ve seen, you still believe they’re better than us. You still think blood determines destiny.”

“You want to know what I think?” Jayyed asked, his frustration slipping free. “I think that, especially after today, a Lesser should know better than to believe he can match a Greater Noble.”

Tau reeled as if slapped, then rounded on Jayyed. “They tell me that we’re winning the war. It’s not true. They tell me that the offspring of Nobles and Lessers die in childbirth. It’s not true. They tell me that we are Lessers, but I’m starting to think that’s also not true.”