The man bowed and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him with a quiet click. Serovek scrubbed a hand across his cheeks in a weary gesture. His beard was sorely in need of a clipping, and with the hesitant arrival of spring, he might as well just shave it off completely to stay cool for the summer months. One of the three garrison barbers had already set up his chair and knives in the bailey, hawking his services to those soldiers going about their morning tasks. His voice was loud enough to wake the sleeping mountain gods, and Serovek wondered why no one had yet dumped the man in one of the horse troughs to shut him up.
He returned his attention to Cermak’s letter, considering. While Brishen Khaskem had no control or say in Megiddo’s continuing fate, Serovek knew he'd appreciate news of the man who fought beside him against the galla. The prince regent had his hands full with raising and training the infant queen regnant while trying to keep the traumatized Kai kingdom she’d inherited from her slaughtered father from completely falling apart or falling into civil war, but Serovek believed Brishen would want to know.
He dragged a stool to the desk and sat down. The cold made his hands stiff, and he blew on them to warm his fingers before reaching for a quill. Tantalizing aromas of herbs and spice drifted to his nose from the still hot teapot, but breakfast would have to wait a little longer.
The ink in the inkwell had thickened to sludge, and he held the glass over another lit candle until the flame warmed and thinned the ink. He looked forward to writing this letter. Brishen had replied to the previous letters to him with an invitation to visit Saggara and partake of its hospitality. Belawat might consider Bast-Haradis an uneasy neighbor at best and a possible enemy at worst, but Serovek considered Brishen Khaskem a friend and looked forward to seeing him once more.
His lips turned up in a smile as he wrote. Winter had enforced a near total isolation for the garrison. Except for the necessary descent into the lowlands for patrol, those of High Salure had stayed close to home to wait out the snows and avalanches. It had been three months since Serovek crossed into Kai territory to visit the Khaskem and his pretty human wife.
And his magnificent second-in-command, sha-Anhuset.
The quill paused in its scratching on the parchment. Serovek rubbed absently at his midriff, a habit these days he hadn’t bothered trying to break. Every so often his muscles there would contract—memory of a moment when the Kai woman had rammed a sword blade into his gut with all her formidable strength before wrenching it free on a gush of agony and blood. The act hadn’t been one of aggression but of brutal necessity, and he knew, down to his bones, that were the Kai able to weep as humans did, tears would have welled in sha-Anhuset’s firefly eyes when she stabbed him.
He sighed and returned to writing. Mooning over the dour Anhuset only served to distract him from his purpose, and he put her from his mind to concentrate on his message to Brishen. When he finished, he sanded the parchment, folded it closed and sealed it with a wax stamp of his family crest.
There were plans to be made and his own trusted seconds to meet with, men who had held High Salure for him when he left to battle the galla and would do so again when he brought Megiddo’s body to the monastery where he once served as a heretic cenobite of Faltik the One.
His lightened mood, brought on by the anticipation of visiting friends at the new Kai capital, darkened once more. He blew out the candle, watching as black smoke from the extinguished wick rose in a serpentine spiral. Some of the galla moved like smoke, sinuous and choking. Others jittered and splayed like skeletal puppets pulled by a madman’s strings, their twisted limbs and black-fanged maws dancing to a discordant tune that made the ears of the living bleed.
He clapped a hand over his midriff a second time, remembering the feel of the galla swarming him and the spectral vuhana he rode. Even now, a crawling sensation purled along his skin and up his spine.
Galla had swarmed the lower chamber where the wound of the world pulsed and birthed the abominations as fast as he and his fellow Wraith kings butchered them.
Serovek’s heart tripped several beats at the memory of Andras’s desperation as he tried to claw the monk free of the hul-galla’s grip. The horde wrapped around Megiddo’s body like murderous lovers, a gleeful, writhing, gibbering mass. But it was Megiddo’s expression—that bleak acceptance of his horrific fate—that haunted Serovek most, his last word, a dirge that threaded his darkest dreams.
“Farewell.”
Chapter Two
You learn from your enemy; your enemy learns from you.
Anhuset
The sharp crack of a silabat stick against armor sounded loud in the room as did the curses that followed. Ildiko Khaskem careened into the wall before ricocheting back into the arms of her attacker.
Anhuset caught her neatly before pushing her back to the center of the imaginary circle in which they sparred. She spun the offending silabat in her hand with a casual flick of her wrist and offered the scowling hercegesé a faint smile. “You’re slow this evening, Highness. Maybe you should tell my cousin to leave you be for a day.”
Such familiar teasing didn’t go beyond the chamber’s closed door. Outside, Anhuset adhered strictly to the protocol of address and rank. Here though, with the human duchess as her student and she the teacher, Anhuset relaxed her rigid rules a little. And the hercegesé seemed to enjoy it.
At least most of the time. For now, Ildiko scowled at Anhuset and rolled the shoulder that had taken the brunt of Anhuset’s strike. She wiped away the perspiration beading on her forehead with the back of her hand before dropping into the familiar half crouch, her own silabat at the ready. “I only wish that had been the reason for my lack of vigor. The poor nursemaid and I were up all day with Tarawin and her sickly stomach.”
Ildiko did look particularly haggard this evening, and it wasn’t the weariness that came from spending hours indulging in pleasurable bedsport. Her heavy eyelids and the shadowy crescents under her eyes spoke of no sleep for an extended time. Anhuset recognized the signs. She’d pulled more than her fair share of long watches and guard duty. The boredom alone exhausted a person, though she suspected caring for a sick baby wasn’t so much tedious as it was challenging. She didn’t envy the hercegesé or Brishen the burden of parenthood.
The hercegesé dropped into the ready stance Anhuset had taught her: knees slightly bent, feet shoulder-width apart, body turned to the side to make herself less of a target. She gripped her pair of silabats in her slender hands, one raised perpendicular to her chest, the other elevated to her hip. The sticks acted as sword and shield. “Again,” she said.
Anhuset gave a nod of approval before mimicking her student’s stance. She lashed out, a calculated move that Ildiko parried with a quick block of one of her silabats. Anhuset didn’t give her time to counter-attack, going on the offensive with several more strikes that had Ildiko dancing across the room, grunting and cursing under her breath as she parried her teacher’s attacks.
“Better,” Anhuset said, landing a particularly hard strike against Ildiko’s crossed silabats that made the other woman stagger. “Hold with your forearms, not your wrists, unless you want them broken.”