13. The Gathering Storm
And so it went. Jack went from base to base, coaching the fighters of the newly-named resistance group "Jissa." The spider woman's name was befitting an effort like this.
It had a rocky start. Convincing the servants and artisans that they should fight was not easy, but his plants at the bases were slowly gathering resistance fighters. Convincing the blind healers that they could help, however, was nigh impossible.
Jack explained it to Sankra one more time. It was past midnight and they were whispering through the bars down in the holding cell. Jack was running a terrible risk just being here after hours and she knew it. Still, that wasn't doing much to change her mind.
"Jack, we're blind," she said, banging her head against the bars in frustration. "I'm telling you, unless somebody's injured, we'd just be in the way."
"And I tell you that every member of Jissa must be able to fight."
The other healers of Tarrenko were hanging on every word. Sankra had become their de facto leader during their imprisonment.
She groaned. "If I say yes, we could be killed."
"I you say no," Jack whispered forcefully, "You will be killed. And if that happened … I could not bear it."
It must have been the rough, pleading tone of his voice. Someone sighed wistfully.
"Shut up, Lila, this is serious," Sankra lobbed over her shoulder. She turned back to Jack, reached through the bars and snatched his hand.
"We do know something that could help," she admitted. "But you have to promise me that we'll be your last resort as an attack."
"I …"
"Promise me."
Jack squeezed her hand. "I promise."
"Then we're in."
"Yee ha!" said a healer in the back. "Long live Jissa! Revolution! Forward ho!"
She took two steps and smashed face first into the nearest wall. Jack winced.
And so it went.
The next two months were a flurry of training. Jack oversaw the whole process, right under the noses of the Generals.
Errol was the first to learn how to properly heft a spear. She learned from Jack using a hacked-off tree branch. Like the other regiment leaders, she decided that training could only safely go on after sundown, so she was regularly pulling her troops out of bed in the middle of the night. Within two weeks, the ten lines of bleary-eyed fighters were a perfectly coordinated attack machine.
Within three weeks, Ari had mastered the broadsword. Well it wasn't exactly a broadsword, it was more like a stick with a weight tied on the end, but she swung it in a perfectly controlled arc and pulled it to a stop three inches from Jack's face. Soon she had thirty women under her command learning the skill.
Joinu's fighters were progressing well. At one in the morning they were completing their practice session in the yard. Jack watched as one of them whopped her opponent into the dirt with a perfect judo throw.
Kleigo's breath frosted in the midnight air. A month into the training, her archers were getting quite accurate. She accepted a huge bunch of freshly-wrapped arrows (little more than dowels with feathers) from an artisan as her troops took practice shots with sticks. Jack checked the targets. Most of them were full of arrows. Not bad for firing with only the feeble light of a few candles.
Ebbi inspected a bamboo roll-down breastplate by the light of a small candle. Satisfied, she nodded at the worker who made it and put it on, tying it around her waist.
The artisans at all the bases were working overtime. The underground army needed temporary armor and weapons, and the workers were happy to provide them. Life had become a continuous stream of completing regular projects while secretly melting down glass to create pointy things. Kiki admired her latest project: a blue dagger. She eyed it and slipped it into her belt. Her hands had never been so steady.
Unt-Ork had a sizeable collection by now. She grabbed another glass ball, made of beads that the beadworkers had melted down and re-blown, draped in a wick, and poured in some smelly petrol. She capped it with hot wax and rolled it into her mattress with the others: that made 169 hand-bombs. It also meant she had to sleep on the floor, but that was a sacrifice she was willing to make.
The other Jissa forces had integrated the few healers they had into their regiments, acting in their original capacity. But Tarrenko had so many that Jack decided to train them as their own unit.
"The techniques I will show you," he told them, "Will save your life if you are attacked."
He had joined them in their cage. Sankra stood with her friends, listening to Jack and absently twirling the pendant of her necklace – a small pink bottle.
"Problem," she said. "We can't see you."
"You do not need to," said Jack.
He walked over to Sankra and took her hand, leading her out to the center of the cell. He pulled out some ragged cloth strips from under his armor.
"First, we join."
He stood behind her and gently tied her wrists to his wrists and her ankles to his ankles. He was impressively large and warm against her back. She tried, without success, to squash a smile.
"And now we move. Keep close to me."
He began to work through a twenty-step meditative form, shifting his weight and moving his arms and legs gracefully, attacking imaginary opponents with blocks and slow punches. Sankra struggled at first to go where he went, to make her hands and feet do what his did, but before long they were breathing in time, heartbeats synchronized, moving as one.
The other healers were getting antsy, so Jack tied himself to each of the other 12 women in the cage for a bit, letting them all have their turn. Sankra was the only one who showed any ability. It was disappointing.
A month into it, however, he was glad he hadn't given up on them. The healers' other senses had kicked into overdrive to make up for their blindness. Their compensation and determination, combined with Jack's training, was slowly changing them from a group of defenseless women into a small troop of Amazons.
It was mid-March when Jack finally decided the regiments were ready. The bases, monolithic testaments to greed and bloodlust, were about to implode thanks to the combined preparation of thousands and thousands of ill-treated people. Primitive armor, bushels of arrows, and scads of stick-spears were squirreled away in storage sheds. Knives and daggers and hand-bombs were tucked into the pockets of neatly pressed skirts. Fists trained in the fine art of combat for two solid months clenched in anticipation at the sight of soldiers, but the slaves' faces were placid as ever.
The Gunzai Empire wouldn't know what hit it.
All that remained was to raise the alarm. Jack had worked out the system with the other bases. Each satellite of the central palace had a huge fire tower, meant to be lit in bad weather conditions to light the way for soldiers.
And so, on a fateful blustery night, Jack climbed to the top of Tarrenko's fire tower and lit the flame. Ari watched through her telescope, looking out into the night. A few moments later, a tiny light flickered in the distance. A member of Jissa had lit the tower of Jilken. Ari raised her right hand as a sign of success and turned her telescope in the opposite direction. The bases weren't visible to each other during the day, but at night, with nothing to interrupt the white light flickering from the towers, the fire towers were clear beacons in the darkness.
Jack knew that the fire signal was going around the circle. They had already caught the attention of the forces at Jilken, which would in turn signal Spum, Filos, and Gorovi. Gorovi's fire tower was also visible from Tarrenko.
Ari saw it glow first. She raised her right hand again. The second sign.
Jack took a bag of red powder from Unt-Ork and gulped a little bit. Attacking at night was very risky, and he knew some people wouldn't make it out of this rebellion alive, but the rising moon gave them one thing: the element of surprise. It was their best chance for overpowering the bases and overthrowing the Empress. If they were going to act, they had to act now. Jack emptied the bag over the flames and stood back. Sparks flew and the fire turned electric blue.
It was the third sign. Jilken would follow their lead, as would the other bases, but their attack was starting right now. Hundreds of feet below him, the march began across the muddy ground. The Tarrenko regiment, 200 strong, bundled in their rags and tied securely into their best-we-could-do armor, ran silently into the fortress, weapons ready. They were ready to take back their lives and get some well-earned revenge.
Scaring soldiers half to death, stripping them of their weapons, and throwing as many as possible into the healers' recently vacated dungeon before Yazzi Digger figured out what was happening seemed to be just the ticket.
The war was on.
TBC