‘They are stalling. As a Seventh-Slash, I can easily take on a dozen mortals at once, so let me handle the rest. We cannot let them break our lines,’ the Alif orders.
There is no time to reply as the shadow woman lunges at me. Adel faces the others. A black wall at her command sprawls out like dark water but before it can surge into me, my palm pushes outward, bracing the metaphysical energy. She flings a dense Veil and I dive and roll, my nur swirling around, absorbing the Veil through cuts of light.
But the Azadnian flicks her finger, gathering the shadows into a cesspool at my legs, and a part of me wonders how her spiritual wells are so full, how she has so much energy this far into battle.
I pivot, unbalanced, and she punches another black Veil that opens at my spine. My left leg kicks backwards, the balls of my feet intercepting her shots in a split barrage, sending wave after wave of nur, so she cannot project it back.
But it’s not enough. Exploiting my fragile balance, her ropes of shadow delve into the clay, erupting it beneath me. My foot bonds expand, and her shadows widen into a thin, dense net, forcing me to leap into different stances. Left, right, left and left, then right again, twisting frantically to avoid the tendrils. The warrior senses my delay, and she switches to close range, her shadow-engulfed shamshir swinging at my knee, her lips peeling back to grin.
My khanjar drops low, skip-catching to redirect her momentum before I rotate my torso outward and then duck, the blade betweenmy lips driving through the enemy’s shin, jerking up her calf, severing tendons. With a hiss, nur explodes from my tongue bonds, hacking the limb off.
Her mouth opens, grey eyes huge. She cries out at the bloodied stump. I lunge and my palms open to finish her, but the black wraps her like silk before the attack lands.
With another yell, a string of black shoots from her mouth right into my neck. My breath catches, and my throat bond manages a hasty barrier, but the warrior seizes on my distraction, her next shadow stomping on my knees; I crumble with a cry.
The shadows curl around my throat, squeezing. My dense neck bone hasn’t snapped, solely from iron-bone training. Her lips widen into something horrifying, though her eyes are wet.
‘Barbarian,’ she hisses, staggering on her good leg, the Veil propping her up.
My feet scramble for purchase, digging into muck. But she tightens the noose of black, my throat crushing beneath the pressure, my connection to Heaven winking out from my dimming senses, my mask plastered against my skin.
The pain is not real, it is not real, my breath wheezes.
The Qabl monks say to embrace pain in hours of meditation.Accept the bond of death, I remember, for a warrior’s blade is not the extension of the arm but of the very soul between existences. It is the ache for Heaven running from the Hells.
Rise, I command my bonds. In this plane of frozen time, my opponent’s soul pulses prominently at the centre of her ribs between a mesh of black-threading absent of a heart.
Biting back my nausea, I aim toward the pulsing. The nur erupts from my chest bond to hers like a waterfall, snapping the shadows. She screams.
Not a human but an enemy, I remind myself. I know the world is not so simply divided, but my energy intensifies when there are no subtleties.
As the butt of my right palm rises, it jams into her nose, rearing her head back. My bonds tighten, left hand clenching into iron-bone fist. I stoop in the third stance that Yabghu had drilled into my head, knuckles connecting below my opponent’s jaw. Her head snaps off in a clean nur-engulfed blow.
Staggering up, I have my first look at her ravaged face. A maw of grief unfurls within me, and I teeter on the brink of falling. She looks so young—
Another Azadnian replaces her, yelling in fury at their dead comrade. A sword slashes across my side. My teeth sink into my lip, cutting my cry. I wedge my blade into the ground before flying around, my legs ploughing into a liver strike, collapsing his form before my khanjar plunges into the soft muscles of his neck.
One falls, the next rises, in a never-ending flow. Battles are not about martial forms, I learn. They hinge on endurance, who can last the longest, because battles neverdamningend. I had in some ways viewed Za’skar as a game – the examinations, the duels; it was a contest of minds and blades – but I had fooled myself about its purpose: we were honed to become war monsters.
I hack my way forward, covered in gore, while spitting out blood – whose, I cannot tell. I crunch limbs underfoot. I do it again. And then again. It’s bleak. It’s cruel. But I do my duty under the name of an empire I detest to absolve myself of another. That thought steers me onward.
As I engage my blade with another enemy on the cliffs, I sight a small flank of warriors on the opposite side of the valley, at the mouth of the pass, observing the battle from above while retreating slowly.
My soul stirs and my knees clank together. From afar, I make out a throng of crane masks, a young man at the front standing on the stirrups of his mare, an ivory khanjar strapped to his velvet waist-sash, features indiscernible. The world quiets, except inside of me, where invisible hands pluck my heartstrings to a tune I cannot hear. My lips move instinctually.
‘Yun,’ I say, somehow knowing it’s him. And then I am yelling in abandon, ‘Older Brother!’
Mid turn, the horseman stiffens, as if the Divine has granted a small mercy and carried my cry through the wind to the other side of the river valley. He looks over his shoulder, but I cannot see his gaze, his expression.
His arm jerks up, commanding his men to follow him into the mountains. I back away. I cannot reach him; he is in enemy terrain. My clansmen were my home, but this is only the pattern of fate: that I should play a part in bringing about their demise.
I bury my face into my hands. Every instinct of mine yearns to run to my brother. Instead, I back away from the cliff. I don’t want to be here. Perhaps because war makes one feel small. Perhaps because in battle one’s worst fears are paraded before one’s eyes, but there is no fleeing, only watching comrades perish.
In war, you are nothing but a piece to push upon a map, discarded when you have fulfilled your purpose – assuming you are not dead. After, you are simply nothing.
A yell rips me from the grief, and I whirl. An Azadnian lunges and my hand raises, but she abruptly stiffens, a shard of ice piercing through her throat. It bursts. She collapses.
The Sepahbad stands behind her, a double-ended khanjar’s hilt between his teeth, while his other hand crushes into a fist, a line of ice formed from his fingers to the Azadnian. He follows my gaze to the lip of the valley and it hits me as we begin moving.
