Chapter Nine: Mother's Embrace
"What a fucking idiot…" the young soldier sighed.
He stood on the riverbank, rubbing the back of his neck, and frowned. A corpse lay on the ground at his feet, its blood seeping through the sand and gravel before dispersing in a red cloud in the stream below. The sour stink of a ruptured abdomen spoiled the air, though he didn't need that clue to discover what killed the man. The raw, gaping wound that cleaved him nearly in two was hard to miss. A mass of slippery ropes spilled out from his lower half, their oozing contents reminding the young soldier of the man's favorite morning meal: pork sausage and turkey eggs.
He wrinkled his nose with disgust.
A couple paces away and half hidden by tall grass, he spotted a woman's remains. Red paint smeared her bony cheeks and black, tattered rags hung off her gaunt frame, a body so malnourished that if he hadn't seen the arrows piercing her chest, he would have thought she had died from starvation.
Maybe she was a displaced Carja still loyal to the dead sun-king or a Nora outcast. Or perhaps she was a dishonored Tenakth or a Banuk exile. Bandits came from everywhere. As reliable as pus in a festering wound. And in his trek east, he discovered that no one cares if you revel in cleaning out the rot so long as you and it are gone when you're done.
The young soldier reached over and tugged the compound bow free from the dead man's hand. He examined its elegant curves, from risers to limbs, and judged its weight and balance. It was everything he'd coveted for the last week, his own bow a battered wreck he had looted off some bandit's body in the Carja badlands. That's where he had run into the dead man, a former soldier who remembered him from when they were stationed together in The Cut. He was the type of soldier who had a warrant waiting for him at Sunstone Rock.
He wouldn't mourn his passing.
But he would miss the company if that made sense. Perhaps it was his army years where he was crammed into stuffy tents with other men or the crowded prison teeming with commotion even though he was confined to his own cell. He didn't like being alone, because when he was, he only had his memories to fill the emptiness.
A twig snapped behind him.
He smirked.
Then he vaulted over the dead man in a dive.
A halberd sliced through the air in his wake. He pushed off against the ground as he rolled, adding a twist to his momentum. And as he came up, he spun towards his attacker. It was another bandit, all wiry muscle and sunken features. Must be part of a patrol from Devil's Thirst. The blade on his halberd dripped with blood. The murder weapon, he presumed.
Still airborne, he pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back and nocked it to the bow. And as his boots hit the gravel in a crunching slide, he drew back the bowstring and let the arrow fly. It thumped into the bandit's exposed chest, and the man stumbled as blood spurted from the wound in rhythm with his heart.
The young soldier watched as the bandit gazed at the gushing red fountain, catching the spray in his hand. He watched as the slow realization set in. That the violent struggle, no matter its beginning, had come to its inevitably messy end.
And he smiled.
The bandit lunged at him, roaring with rage. He jabbed with his halberd and his sloppy boots slipped on the gravel, his strength pouring out of him with every heartbeat.
The young soldier watched, unfazed.
Then the halberd hit the ground with a rattling clang. The bandit followed, first to his knees, wobbling. And then he collapsed, driving the arrow deep and ending his suffering, both in pain and in life.
The young soldier thought about the full quiver strapped to his back. He could have shortened the bandit's prolonged agony with another arrow. Hell, he could have aimed for his eye or throat to begin with and finished him instantly. Bandits were terrible about armor placement. They covered the shoulders, arms, and legs, but they left their heads and chests exposed. Though he had no room to judge with his breezy vest and a headdress that was more flashy decoration than protection.
Still the bandit had killed the dead man.
But perhaps the dead man shouldn't have started a fight while his more capable partner was taking a shit.
He thought about checking the bodies for a few shards when a voice shouted at him from behind.
"Don't move!"
The young soldier cursed under his breath. It just wasn't his day. Then he held out his hands and turned slightly to spy back over his shoulder.
A Nora man stood atop a boulder, his bow drawn. There was a practiced steadiness in his stance, evidence of experience that matched his weathered, nutbrown face and grizzled beard.
The young soldier frowned, lamenting his fashion choices, even though the fresh air felt good against his skin.
"I'm not here to make any trouble," he said, pouring every bit of soothing amiability he could muster into his tone. "These bandits ambushed my partner, and I avenged him. I don't have any intentions beyond that."
"That doesn't explain why you or your partner were here to begin with," the man said.
His aim was low, sighting a kidney shot. The young soldier would survive long enough to kill the man, but a fatal wound is a fatal wound. The bandit's death would be merciful by comparison. Archers were such a pain in the ass.
The man continued. "You're a long way from Meridian, and the Nora aren't welcoming to Carja who wander this close to the Embrace. What are you doing here? Were you an accomplice in the attack on the Proving?"
"I have nothing to do with any kind of attack on the Nora. I was following a Carja envoy headed for your homeland."
"Well, you missed them," the man said, "I manage the Nora Hunting Grounds across the river. Your friends journeyed back the way they came two days ago."
"And they attacked your Proving?" the young soldier asked, eyeing a patch of tall grass. The red tips on its heavy stalks matched his feathers. Not the best cover but given the lack of options, he didn't have a better plan.
"We don't know. A Nora war party is in pursuit, so we will have both answers and justice soon enough. But in truth, you look more like some of them than the envoy. You're not wearing a mask, but that headdress..."
"There were kestrels among them?" he asked, and he caught himself before he instinctively turned to face the man.
"I don't know what those are."
"They're elite soldiers handpicked by the former sun-king. They fled when Avad seized control of Meridian. I don't know why they would attack your people. The days of slave trading and human sacrifice are over for the Carja. But either way, I've never aligned myself with them. The only ones who should fear me are the bandits who have taken up residence in your lands."
The man snorted. "Then you'll have your fill. All this civil instability has made it easy for them to take root."
The young soldier's shoulders relaxed. "You're letting me live?"
"You're brazen like the attackers, I'll give you that," the man said, and he eased the tension on his bowstring. "But they weren't so dumb as to blunder right up to the Embrace gate without their comrades. You just seem like the typical Carja outlander who believes that whatever the sunlight touches is yours to claim."
"Not wrong," he admitted with a shrug. "But if it's any consolation, you have my condolences for your losses."
The man nodded, his face downcast. "A whole generation of future braves wiped out. We hadn't seen a massacre like that for two years now. If it hadn't been for the outcast, all of them would have been killed."
"The outcast?" the young soldier asked, and this time he couldn't help but turn to face the man.
"Yes, she was born without a mother almost two decades ago. The Matriarchs considered her an abomination, or at the very least, cursed. They sentenced her to isolation in the Embrace, but by tribal law, if an outcast child proves themselves worthy of brave status, they're absolved and welcomed back into the tribe. She managed just that when the attack occurred. Fought off waves of these masked men when others fell. It took a massive blaze explosion and a fall from the ridge up by the Metal Devil to take her out."
The red desert and stampeding grazers flooded the young soldier's mind. "She died?"
He shook his head. "Not yet, though from what I've heard, it doesn't look good."
"She'll survive," the young soldier said, more to himself than to the man. "It's what people like us do."
"I hope so," the man agreed, slinging his bow onto his back, and then he paused thoughtfully. "What's your name, outlander?"
The young soldier blinked. How long had it been since someone hadn't known his name? Anonymity hadn't been his burden for years. Among some, he was as infamous as Helis or Jiran. A phantom whose legend was whispered over campfires. But now, he had the opportunity to become something new. To shed his old self and a name he'd stolen from the man with silver eyes and the sunlit room.
Yet, he thought about the prison cell, another sunlit room, and the number etched into its door. It seemed appropriate for his rebirth.
"Nil," he replied.
"Nil," the man repeated. "If you're as smart as you seem, you'll head back for Daytower before the less tolerant Nora catch you out here. Especially right now."
Then he backed away across the boulder and dropped out of sight.
OOOOOOOOOO
Nil leapt up for the ledge and grabbed onto it with numb fingers. He hung there, his boots braced against the rock face, and questioned not only his grip but the generous intelligence the hunting grounds keeper suspected he might have.
The moonlit night cloaked the snow-blanketed plateau below him, transforming it into smooth planes of silver spattered with wind-twisted trees. And overhead, the ancient metal devil loomed, its winding, vertebral tentacles breaching out along the ridge. A reminder that war is as old as the mountains themselves.
He gritted his shivering teeth as another icy gust blew through him, and his chest ached as though icicles filled his lungs. The Nora lands weren't The Cut, but they did dispel any fondness he might have felt for that frigid and unforgiving wasteland to the north. He loathed the cold, and he was pretty sure his balls had crept up so high, they were halfway to his sternum by now.
He wedged his boot into a crevice and pushed off for the final ledge at the crest of the rock face. He reached out for it and caught it, his fingertips digging in, and he hoisted himself up onto the ridge.
A jumbled mass of footprints in the snow marked the trail, and he followed it. From their spacing and how they overlapped, he could tell they were sprinting. Were they from excited youth about to prove their worthiness to their tribe? Or from desperate rescuers rushing to save the wounded? That he couldn't tell. All that was evident was their passion.
Then he reached the open field. A thin sheet of ice covered the ground, melted snow from the blast refrozen. It cracked under his boots as he walked across it and surveyed the devastation. The stench of burning blaze still inundated the air, bitter on his tongue, and he could see its work, charred black and radiating from the obliterated remains of an old cart at the center of the field.
There were no Nora left, though he could find the bloodstains marking where they had fallen easily enough. Their loved ones had been thorough, gathering up every bit of bone and tissue. But in the snowbanks along the fringes and on the small ridge overlooking the field, he found what he was looking for.
Nil knelt over a masked man, his corpse sentenced to the disgrace of a sky burial. The white mask was stark against the black hood and clothes that cloaked his body. There was a symbol, too. A red circle split by a line on one side. If political matters had ever appealed to Nil, he might have wondered what it meant. He would have been curious about who the attackers were and why they would target innocent youth racing through a rite of passage towards their adulthood.
Instead, he pored over the dead men's wounds. He examined the arrows embedded in their throats or through their eyes, shattering their masks. All with the same fletching. And all with the same toolmarks from their making.
Occasionally, he discovered one slain with a spear, the depth and angle of its strike demanding silence from its dying victim.
He forgot the cold, its chill replaced by the excitement humming in his chest, its warmth burning like a flame.
The ruthlessness. The cunning.
She would live.
He had to meet her.