— Parsa, Morufu's Hand —
Across the arid landscape, past spine-bearing trees that stood like tall men with arms upraised to the starry skies, past distant towers of bluffs, leaping down into dead dry riverbeds and back out again, then skirting a stretch of dunes that crawled slowly over the land, then swerving among hard-stemmed brush with fleshy spined leaves, his dark cream coat gleaming, white mane and tail streaming, twin horns thrust forward, a jimala raced the three moons. For a while, he slowed to keep pace with a raid of deadly franango while the tall ground-dwelling birds eyed him as potential prey, then he veered away and put on earnest speed again.
To the few who knew what a jimala was, they were known for being fast. This one wore a peytral of thin bronze scales across his neck and chest that made a slight shing-shing-shing noise as he ran, decorated with an array of small orange gemstones. The armor wasn't heavy, but it would turn almost any blade, and it kept his enhancements powered. With a Nexus disciple's blessings, this jimala wasn't fast. He was the fastest living thing. And he was on a mission.
Disciples had no need for messengers, ordinarily. They had prayers that let them speak to each other at great distances, so running from place to place wasn't very useful. If a disciple needed something carried at speed, they turned to enhanced couriers. Mostly, that meant enhancing a bulwark and their mount and sending them off at twice the speed any normal rider could reach, with three times the endurance. But, if the leader of all the disciples needed something carried, then His Holiness Phillip the Younger called on Parsa the Jimala. Parsa the Wanderer. Parsa Monsterbait. Parsa, the fastest living thing. There were no other jimalas to use, as Parsa's kind were too rare and too uniformly afraid to run freely in the world.
His next stop was among the dunes. He slowed as he entered the stretch of sand that migrated back and forth across the desert every year, following the wind. He took the dunes aggressively and the troughs more cautiously: there were reports of monsters in that area, and he didn't want to run headlong into an ambush spider's lair. He had to follow his navigation beacon for this one, the little line of light that lit up from his peytral when he was ten kilometers from his target, slowly shrinking as he got closer. The disciples who were his typical destination tended to move around, and following a light was easier than searching for them. Exactly how it worked was a mystery that didn't interest Parsa. He knew his target had some kind of token, and when he got close enough the light would appear to guide him the rest of the way. That was all he needed to know. Parsa's job was to run, not use the Spiritual Arts.
The light finally pointed downward as he crested a standing wave of sand. There was a Nexus disciple down there, with the usual bulwark of three fighters, guarding a fifth man who was ill-dressed for the desert. The sand had all been moved away to expose the bare ground beneath their feet, an orange-tinted material. The jimala slid down the dune gracefully and presented himself to the poorly-dressed man.
"Welcome to Darkmaw's Cradle!" The outsider spread his arms wide as if the stretch of exposed rock were a wonder to the senses instead of a stretch of hard flat ground, and the man's tail whipped around excitedly. "The wind must have uncovered the alluvial deposits here, and spirit from the sun soaked into the crystals, probably for years. Some animals like to eat the crystals and pow! Monstrification! It wasn't just Darkmaw, either. Almost everything around here was monstrified!"
Parsa grumbled at the man with his animal's voice and looked towards the passing moons. It wasn't that the researcher wasn't interesting, but he would go on for hours if Parsa let him. There were several like him in the desert, some of them disciples and the rest just plain outsiders like this one, and Parsa had met them all. They would talk until morning if he let them.
Disciples mostly knew Parsa's secret but kept it to themselves, partly out of respect for his people's taboos but largely because a healer's discretion was sacred. The researcher they were guarding, however, thought Parsa was just a cleverly trained animal.
"Right, samples! Two kilos of spirit-capable ore coming right up!" He opened the courier pouch designated for him and took out what was there, then put leather bags of ore samples in their place and fastened the bag securely.
"Lavradian brandy and Calique spices! His Holiness knows how to keep a man happy! Lucky horns!" He reached out to grab Parsa's horns, and that earned him a snort, a violent headshake, and a derisive tail flip.
"Not like that!" The disciple guarding the researcher scolded him. "Jimalas are proud. You don't just touch one without permission." It was a disciple Parsa didn't know by name, but he was grateful for the intervention. "Sorry about that. The man has no manners. Horns for luck?" He held out his dominant fist, and Parsa tapped it twice: once with each horn. Then he was gone.
Past the moving sands, his gait changed as he hit tricky ground — kilometers of round rocks the width of a man's hand packed together like cobbles. He didn't have time to contemplate what strange confluence of events conspired to pave this part of Morufu's Palm with such an awkward surface. His focus was on navigating the obstacle at high speed. Each hoof had to hit the crown of a stone squarely or else he'd turn an ankle, and he wanted to do it fast. His body seemed to float while his legs worked furiously under him in a dancing, stuttering rhythm.
"Focus on getting there in one piece," Phillip had told him more than once. "Don't assume anything I give you to carry is worth your life unless I say it is." But Parsa liked going fast. That's who he was, and the cobbles presented an interesting challenge. Franango would avoid them unless they were chasing prey. Gurantors like to step on them — the giants' padded feet were massaged by the numerous small rocks — but wouldn't run on them because striking the cobbles hard was painful. Even humans didn't like walking on them. So, if Parsa could cross them at speed then he could use this stretch of desert as a barrier to pursuers.
Plenty of small creatures made their homes among the cobbles, aelemon's viper among them, but Parsa paid them no mind. If he was fast enough (and he was) then he was gone before most creatures fully recognized his presence.
Crossing the stones got him to a new kind of ground, a heavy soil that looked firm from a distance but subtly yielded to his hooves, robbing a fraction of his strength. He knew the winter rains would turn this kind of dirt into dangerous slick clay. Scattered grasses grew in tall clumps.
He knew his next destination by reputation, and he could find it by stars and landmarks: a large lake of black goop. The pool was night within night, swallowing the light of moons and stars. Parsa's people knew it as Scavenger Lake or, sometimes, Morufu's Sore. Creatures came out of it some nights to scour the region for anything dead and drag it back to the lake. Parsa had never seen one of the rumored scavengers, he just knew the lore. Most Calique avoided the place. Once in a while it would catch fire and burn for days, spilling its black ruin into the sky to shroud the land for miles downwind.
He took a risk and called out in a rising voice. It could attract unwanted attention but, if something wanted to hunt him, they'd find themselves exhausted and hungrier than when they started the chase. After a brief wait, a light flashed on the shore to his right, and Parsa headed that way until he found his destination: a camp for a disciple and three bulwarks. Sister Hypha was best known among the Calique as a healer, but like most disciples she could fight as well.
"Parsa! I have the samples," she said, as he came to a reluctant stop. There were still hours of night and early morning he could use to run. She took her ration of small luxury items from the bag marked for her and packed several flasks of black lake liquid into his courier bag.
"Refill?" With Parsa's consent, she put her hand on the center of his peytral and pushed her spirit at it, adding to the reserves of energy that kept him going at such an unreasonable pace. He had more than enough to carry him to Satoma, but topping off his reserves was always a good idea. One never knew what might happen, or if the next disciple would be so energetic.
"Horns for luck!" She held out her fist, and Parsa tapped it with each of his horns. Ever since he had lured the world's deadliest monster into a trap so it could be killed, this had been a thing. He didn't know how it started, but he couldn't say he minded the appreciation.
His next leg took him far to the north, to Satoma. He decided to avoid the roads again and head cross-country over the riverlands. Ocean storms sometimes ran aground in autumn and dropped their water to run in brief wild torrents until the earth swallowed it all up. These events were rare because the desert was ringed by tall mountains, but they left behind deep channels like blood vessels carved into Morufu's Palm.
Parsa pronked lazily over the narrow channels of dead rivers whenever he found them, sailing easily, four hooves together, back arched, head down, horns forward. He landed like a spring, took two more little bounds, and another high arch to cross the next ravine. The channels were deep, eight meters or more, and if he were on his own, he would measure each distance before making the leap. With a battery of Nexus enchantments working in him, he didn't fear coming up short or falling down.
His trumpet-shaped ears picked up a noise that didn't belong in the desert: hammering and digging. Parsa slowed and changed course to take him downwind of the commotion. He came to a ravine with guards posted at wide intervals, in pairs, and not Calique. From their pointed helmets and the smell of them, they were Kashmari.
Preparing the battlefield. That's what Pasha Phillip called it. Both sides were in the desert, attempting to change the landscape in their favor. There would be a skirmish here soon. Or, Phillip would let them invest their time and energy there and sabotage whatever they were working on before it could be used.
One of the sentries must have had night vision as a beast trait because he pointed at Parsa and said something to his partner. They probably saw him as some rare desert animal (which he was, after a fashion). It wouldn't take long for them to decide to spend a few arrows on him. Parsa spun around once to his left, once to his right, and shook his head vigorously, and was rewarded with a soft chime that meant his location had been recorded. He was supposed to do that whenever he encountered something unexpected, but it was the first time he'd used it.
Parsa dashed away before the soldiers decided they could augment their rations with roasted deer meat. A true hunter might have felt compelled to take a closer look or attack the enemy to prove his courage. Parsa had no such compulsion. He had seen something odd and marked it. He would report it fully in due course. He was a courier, not a scout. His job was to run and deliver.
Satoma first appeared as a glow of light in the distance, a flicker of red fire behind a wall. By the time he arrived, the garden was engulfed in flames. Above the garden's walls, he could see hundreds of towering palms on fire, sending up smoke to block out the stars.
The oases were life, protection, and water. They were intensively cultivated and loved by the Calique who called them home, each with its own symbolic colors and motifs. Calique knew each other instantly by the color on their eyes and lips, the width of their belts, and the callouses on their hands. Gardens were sacred.
But this was Satoma, and the Satomen had never been fully Calique. Their men purchased their women from Hyskos debt-slavers or captured them from other gardens, and held them like property. They ruled over their women, each man a Tyrant of his own house. The boys were brought up in their fathers' image, while the girls were sold to the highest bidder.
The Kashmari had raided the town in force and carried off all the women and children, then turned the town into a fort. They left the Satomen hunters alive to run around the other gardens, snatching away unwary women to be replacement wives. For the affront of carrying off young women and for attempting to interfere in his rise to power, Pasha Phillip had killed the Satomen down to the last man.
"Parsa!" Iraj, maul of Pashtuk, waved him over. He was easy to recognize from his thick keratin plates of armor over his head and back. They had only known each other for a little while, but Iraj was the first hunter to treat Parsa like anything other than a coward. That alone was enough reason for Parsa to move from Broken Ode to Pashtuk. "It hurts to see this, doesn't it?"
Parsa grumbled in response.
"The disciples capped the wells, so this place is finished as a garden for now. Don't worry. We brought gardeners to secure the seed vault, and we'll plant mischus over all of this. If someone wants to bring it back to life they can, like Nexus did with Red Tower."
Parsa sat on his haunches — not a natural pose for a jimala — and made signs with his hooves. It was awkward with an animal's legs and no fingers, but Iraj eventually got the gist of it.
"I'll get the location from Phillip and let the disciples know. Here's your load."
Iraj emptied his allotted courier bag of its delicacies and replaced them with a stack of writing boards, a few sheets of Nexus paper, and a wide jacquard sash.
"Some of the women here were Calique and were sold on to traders in the north." He stared longingly at Morufu's Teeth, the jagged rock formations blocking stars to the north. "Maybe we'll get a chance to bring them home to proper gardens. Let's hope our new Pasha doesn't bloody himself so much he forgets his compassion."
Parsa tonked, to let his maul know he was leaving.
"Do you need a refill? I can call a disciple."
The jimala shook his head, wheeled away, and departed at speed.
He had a good long run after that, south toward Sand Castle, down into the desert basin proper. He had to follow the guidance light to his next destination, a bend in the widest dead river. The doyennes said the great river continuously flowed with water, back when the ancients ruled the world with magic and machines long since lost. By the time Parsa found the place, the sun was near the horizon, washing out the stars' light and pushing the first hints of the day's heat into the world.
The disciple waiting for him was Brother Montague, or Minty to his friends, standing outside a crevice that was the mouth of an abandoned mine. Minty was the disciple who had camped on Sand Castle's mesa and picked off Darkmaw's children for a solid week, and thereby held the distinction of killing more cursed monsters than anyone alive.
"We found what he's been looking for," said Minty, after the usual greetings and exchanges. The updated load was too obviously rocks, bulky and uncomfortable. "Do you want to run for Bitter Spring, or rest here?"
Parsa pointed his horns to the interior of the cave.
"Sure, come on in. We've fixed up a room as living space." Disciples could shape things, and powerful ones could mold earth into pits or hills or habitations in only a few hours. Montague took him to an underground room with good ventilation, cool walls, and a wide futon. The walls had cubbyholes for storage and benches for sitting. Disciples were a powerful group of people, but Minty took pride in serving his guest personally with a big bowl of purified water, porridge heated with his arts, dates, and more water. He even cleaned Parsa with a prayer.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Parsa turned down Minty's offer to remove his harness, knelt against the wall, and slept. He didn't normally like being indoors, but this space was soothingly plain. He also knew Minty would protect him while he slept: they shared a kind of bond, an unfamiliar sensation to Parsa but a welcome one. Both of them played important roles in killing Darkmaw. Parsa was confident Minty would protect him, while the disciple would trust him to carry anything, no matter how important.
Everyone rested during the day's heat if at all possible. It would be different once the cooler days of middle autumn set in, but that was still weeks away. Calique split their summer sleep between the noon hours and the midnight ones, and Parsa was no exception. He woke to find Minty preparing to send him off by consulting a piece of paper: all his enhancements had to be renewed and the disciple needed to know his 'numbers'.
"Fifteen speed, are you kidding me? Thirteen endurance, eight body, eight defense, five acuity. Does that sound right?"
Parsa stretched and nodded. Everyone trained to accept Nexus enhancements had to know their numbers. Otherwise, terrible accidents could occur.
"I've never seen numbers like that for speed or endurance. Okay, here it comes." Montague said his prayers silently, layered enhancements in the correct order to avoid injury, and refilled Parsa's gems. "Horns for luck," he said, holding out a fist. And then, "Run to the light, Parsa."
He was nearly out the door when Minty called him back. "If you see anyone strange skulking around, report but don't interfere. We have a special way of dealing with spies in this case."
Parsa agreed, and then ran out into the lingering heat of the day with the sun to his right, not quite touching the horizon. The basin was wide and flat, and he cruised over cracked ground studded with fat bulbous cacti and tough shrubs that secreted smelly oils. His main obstacle was the great river, which meandered back and forth and left dry, crescent-shaped lakes on its flanks. He stayed out of the river proper for the obvious reason it was too crooked a line. He took the crescent lakes he knew head-on, charging down to the narrow lakebeds to run on their sandy bottoms and back up again on the other shore. Others, he chose to go around because he didn't want to spend time finding the climbable banks. Finally, he turned away from the river entirely and struck across the basin for Sand Castle.
He was just starting to get up a good wind when he found himself in a battlefield. Spears came at him from a long line of hunters on his left. His first instinct was to bound to his right, which he did, but then he resumed his previous course and sprang into a dead run. They wouldn't get him again! He wouldn't let them herd him into their fighters.
Just as he thought he was free, he spied the men ahead of him, lying in wait under camouflage cloaks. The disguises were good enough that anyone not looking for them, or who was unfamiliar with the cloaks, could have walked right by and not noticed. But Parsa had seen it enough times to recognize the mottled reds and browns for what they were: danger. As soon as he saw one, he saw a hundred of them ahead.
He had a line of enemies he could actually see on his left, so that's where Parsa went. He took a sudden turn toward them, and then dithered back and forth as if he couldn't find a line to slip between the mounted men, and slowed dramatically. Spears were hurled at him, but they had led their target by too much and missed him. As soon as the riders tried to close ranks around him, Parsa leaped over them so high and so fast, they didn't have time to raise their spears or bring bows to bear on him.
He called grandly, his animal voice rising high and proud. This time, he'd made it through. These days there were always hunters in the desert skulking, ambushing, raiding, and opposing each other in teams hundreds strong. Whenever he ran into the wargamers, Parsa had to brave dulled spears and blunted arrows from all sides. Pasha Phillip had declared that any side could get points for 'killing' his courier, and he raised the reward every time Parsa survived. The better Parsa got at avoiding their ambushes, the harder they tried.
Parsa reached the mischus of Sand Castle after the sun's last arc was below the horizon and all the basin floor was in shadow. Every garden had that wide expanse of mixed plants around it, all hardy and good for appalons and gurantors to eat, tended by hunters and the husbanders. Sand Castle's mischus spread out in every direction for many kilometers, enough to feed a thousand animals year-round. He could see the grazers now as tiny dots in the distance, mostly appalons with a scattering of horses mixed in and a few big gurantors. To an outsider, it was just more desert: scattered plants, mostly low-lying, dotting the landscape. To the Calique, well-tended mischus was the first sign of a well-tended home.
Rising up from the center of that vast expanse of mischus was the mesa of Sand Castle, tall enough to still be sunlit, its layers of different colored earth boasting the eons it had stood over the shadowed basin below. Eighty meters high and more than three thousand meters wide, it was large enough to contain a small city, with enough garden to feed it.
It was impossible to tell from the outside, but the mesa wasn't solid. It was a ring of rock, a natural defensive wall that had protected the interior city and its garden from hostile humans and howling windstorms for hundreds of years. It was a strange convergence of geography, a perfect Calique garden site in the middle of a desert at the center of their continent. It was a natural crossroad, and since it had reopened, caravans had started running again, making up for lost time, never mind the inconvenient time of year. Every nation had unmet demands for goods, and merchants were eager to oblige.
Parsa changed course again and slowed to an almost normal pace, to join the wide trade road connecting Sand Castle with all corners of Tenobre. The last of the day's departures had come out of the gate, a convoy of trains pulled by shaggy gurantors, their six padded feet thumping softly, back-swept horns trailing the banners of their owners. The beasts were plodders of great endurance and their walking speed was deceptively fast. Each one could pull a train of three or four big carriages hitched together. Traffic east and west were unrestricted, but cargo going north to Kashmar and Dace was inspected. Nexus and the Calique didn't want certain supplies going north, and Kashmar didn't want the spies who would inevitably come with the trains. If the upper continent wanted restricted goods, they would have to take their chances on the oceans.
The road was best taken at a leisurely canter to avoid accidents, so the cartmen and their passengers got a good look at the rare animal. They assumed he was the pasha's pet, a status symbol of some kind, and cleverly trained. As long as doyennes' taboos held Calique tongues, outsiders wouldn't know what he was. Excepting healers, of course. Somehow healers always knew, but discretion was as much a part of their creed as the four divine tenents.
Parsa was spotted by the gatemen as soon as he was clear of the convoy, and they blew a fanfare to announce his arrival. Every drayage company and garden had its tune, and they played Pashtuk for the jimala. It was a welcome sound to one who had long felt out of place.
The wide gate had been repaired and rehung since Darkmaw's occupation, and the cliff face around it was reshaped in her likeness. The gate was her mouth, guarded by scything appendages as tall as a man. The subtle warping of rock around the gate hinted at her vastness, and her stingered tail rose above it all. The defeated monster's two great pincer claws were reassembled and mounted by the entrance, poised to crush invaders and shove them into the gate. It was said Darkmaw ate a thousand Calique, and when she died the Calique ate from her to take back the flesh of their lost people and return them to their gardens. But they had also taken Darkmaw into them, made her part of themselves, and turned her into a terrifying protector of all they loved. Parsa shivered as he passed through the gate. He liked to brag he was the only person who faced her at close range and lived, but it was only worth the bragging because she had been death incarnate. He hurried through so he wouldn't leave a trail of humiliating pellets behind him.
Past the gate and tunnel, he found the customary flagman, a member of the Society of Respectable Cartmen who directed incoming caravans and riders. He signaled a right turn for Parsa, which took him toward the stables for rich noble's appalons and prized horses. Semi-permanent offices for the Cartmen and other international guilds were carved into the cliffs by the main gate. Several blocks of free-standing buildings clustered there, though many were in ruins. An outsider would think this was the center of Sand Castle: the rock rooms and buildings where all the merchants and their supporting industries gathered, the big market plaza covered in awnings of woven palm fronds to keep off the sun, the exchange where bulk commodities were bought and sold, inns and restaurants to house and feed them all. There was brisk trade going in the market stalls despite the ruined buildings around them. But the heart of Sand Castle lay elsewhere.
The next flagman tried to send him the wrong way, toward buildings meant for outsider mounts. Parsa ignored the misdirection and kept to the main avenue between the mesa facades and the buildings until he found the stable set aside for the pasha and his guard. He strode up the ramp on his own, entered his customary stall, and allowed a Calique stablehand to unburden him and hang the bags and peytral on pegs. Unlike most stalls, his had a tall door to ensure privacy. Parsa allowed the boy to brush him down, which wasn't unpleasant, but he was glad when the boy left.
The hardest part of being a courier was the change to human form, and jimalas didn't like to be seen by non-jimalas while they went through the transformation. It took time for all the bones to shrink and grow again, for the fur to disappear, and hide to turn into skin. It was embarrassing to be seen between forms, but the hardest part for Parsa was the diminished senses at the end. He felt partially deaf and blind when he was human. He could handle being slower: this form liked things slower, but the world seemed so dull.
When his transformation was done, he put on a simple robe from his courier bag, tied his long cream hair up in cloth, and applied Pashtuk colors on his face (umber for his eyes, forest green for his lips). He lacked a proper woven belt, but so did many men his age, so there was no shame in the green sash he tied around his waist instead. Satisfied, he hefted his gear and left the stall through a secret door, and closed it carefully behind him.
He felt his way down the hidden passage, a lightless dive deep into rock, to land in a storeroom belonging to Pashtuk, two arcs away from where he'd started. The people there were glad to see him, and the young women greeted him with sweet smiles and brief touches. He had missed the gathering hour, but they made him promise to attend the next day. He stepped outside into a swift descending night and would have been blind if not for the street lanterns kept lit by Nexus practitioners. He struck for the interior, past the two blocks of large buildings, to find the inner avenue running between the garden and the town.
The garden wasn't what it used to be. Darkmaw had ravaged most of it, mainly by being too large not to crush everything in her path. What should have been a few hundred hectares of multi-storied forest was a patchwork of standing palms here and there, surrounded by broken stumps and felled logs. The undergrowth was all pulled up and turning brown. The gardeners worked hard every day, harvesting what could be harvested, salvaging what could be salvaged, and deciding how much apparent ruin to leave in place to feed and shelter new growth. The seed vaults were secured deep inside the mesa, and there were enough skilled gardener women to lead the work. With disciples to speed up regrowth and some extra labor from the men, they could have a functioning garden in half a year instead of five or six.
Maul Iraj had traveled far in his younger days, and he told Parsa something hard to believe: that most cities in the world were inside-out. Other people clustered their buildings together, put a wall around the buildings, and left their farmland outside the wall. They grew a single crop at a time on each plot of land. Ridiculous!
He took the inner avenue six arcs around at a gentle run, appreciating the gardeners' progress. Although gardeners were always women (or men willing to pretend to be women), every Calique child grew up doing chores for them and understood the work required to feed a garden's people. Even as men, they could be called to help with big harvest days or when there was heavy lifting to be done. As children, Calique competed to climb trees the fastest and harvest the most dates and coconuts. As youths, they snuck by pairs into shaded bowers to kiss and touch each other past the gathering hour. As adults, they fed and dressed their families from the garden's bounty. When they died, their bodies were composted and spread among the trees or mounded carefully around new plants. Everything came from the garden, and everything went back into it.
The eighth arc of Sand Castle, almost directly opposite the front gate, belonged to the doyennes. Behind the pillared facade was the great round room where they gathered with their tablas, negotiated agreements between gardens, and counted out everything important. Light spilled down the wide stairway and brought with it the rattling of abacuses. In normal times, their work for the day would be done, and each doyenne would be with her people in their home arc. But wartime wasn't normal, and the pasha needed things from every garden. Camouflage required cloth and dye. Enchanted goggles needed leather fittings. Weapons required bronze. Men and mounts had to be fed. The secret desert refuges had to be stockpiled. Instead of each garden supporting its own hunters, the pasha had decreed that all would help all. If there were spoils to be had, they would be divided according to what each garden gave. Wise Anisca, the pasha's doyenne, was known as a deft hand at such divisions. No doubt she was with them now, rattling the beads alongside them.
The ninth arc was home to Bitter Spring and held a rare sight in the city: a few undisturbed blocks of buildings. While the people rested in cliff-hewn rooms, the pasha had these buildings for his home and offices. This pride of place was well-earned by Bitter Spring. Whenever Kashmar invaded, as they seemed inclined to do every twenty years or so, Bitter Spring always paid the highest price. After Satoma, which wasn't truly Calique and was practically on Kashmar's doorstep, Bitter Spring was the closest to the invaders. It seemed doubly fitting to install the pasha there.
Parsa followed his nose to where men were cooking a late dinner for the pasha's staff, their communal kitchen throwing daytime heat from its windows. The smell of tangy squash, coconut soup spicy enough to make him sweat, herbed grains with vegetables, dates, and honeyed nuts made him furiously hungry. Parsa followed the platters of food almost to the dining area but remembered to tear himself away. He still had a delivery to make. The people here knew him well and directed him towards the pasha without question. It wasn't until he reached the man's personal guard that he was examined closely. A young spine-haired bulwark judged his features and inspected his bags, then laid hands on his body to frisk him. This one was a pretender, like so many Nexus bulwarks, women who could fight and therefore dressed as men. They adopted the habit solely in deference to Calique sensibilities. In their home garden of Red Tower, Nexus people did the job they wanted to regardless of their gender and wore whatever clothes they felt were appropriate. Men could train as healers, women could train to fight, and nobody had to pretend. In his short time at Red Tower, Parsa had been shocked by it twice over. The first was when he realized they didn't separate their jobs by gender. The second came two weeks later when he realized he no longer cared.
Parsa soon found himself in a big square room that was a scale model of the land. The desert was beneath his feet, under a transparent floor, and people could walk around like God walking on the sky. It had evolved a lot since his last visit, with many new features and some old ones refined. Tablas and apprentice practitioners placed markers around the floor and then updated them as people moved through the desert. Parsa knew at a glance where all the Nexus disciples were deployed, where Kashmari had been spotted, the state of the various gardens, and which gardens were fighting wargames.
Pasha Phillip the Younger, Maul of Mauls, Defender of Every Garden, Thunderous Doom, Blade in the Night, Dean of Practitioners, Eldest Brother and Hierarch of the Reformed Unity Church, stood near the north end of the map where Parsa had bumped into Kashmari forces, reading a report. He was improbably young — barely old enough to be acknowledged as a hunter, hard-muscled but spindly from recent growth. His dark and light brown brindle hair fell down past his shoulders, and his eyes were green today. He wore his cloth wrapped in a skirt, like the Calique men who patrolled the streets and kept the peace, with the loose end thrown over one shoulder to leave his right arm bare. An indigo tattoo of branching complex ferns ran the full length of his exposed arm: the mark left behind when lightning strikes flesh.
There was little ceremony among Calique, only basic courtesies. Parsa stood near him and waited to be acknowledged.
"They're making paths through the river lands, just wide enough for appalons," he said to Parsa's unasked question. "I'm not sure how much good it would do them, but they have a lot of laborers in the area."
Parsa signed, What will you do? He seldom used his voice in human form.
"We have to survey the whole area to make sure there aren't more roads we don't know about. After that, I have a few ideas." Parsa hadn't known Phillip for very long, but he knew that smile, the one that said he'd thought of something devious and deadly for his enemies. Maybe he imagined the killing intent that shone from the younger man's eyes, but Parsa thought of the hundred Satomen that Phillip baited to their deaths. He seemed to be a young man of extremes, full of love and goodwill for everyone around him until they crossed him hard enough to end up on his bad side.
Nobody should want to be on Phillip the Younger's bad side. The chances for survival there were far too slim.
Phillip took the courier bags from Parsa and moved them to a nearby table to unpack. Every article was of interest and deserved a brief examination. He muttered things like, "I thought so," "Interesting," "I can use that," and "Just what I've been looking for." Parsa didn't doubt that every bit of it somehow fit into his plans to defend the gardens from Kashmar. He even spent time examining the jacquard sash and marveled over its intricate motifs: weeping women led into bondage; men with swords upraised; stolen children.
I can run again tonight, he signed.
The disciple scanned him with an invisible will most people couldn't feel, but Parsa felt it touch him everywhere. The sensation was gone after a moment. "You had a good run today. Rest tonight, and you'll be faster tomorrow. You must be hungry — let's get something to eat."
They went to the dining hall together, guards trailing behind them, and just as suddenly as he'd been the planner of mass deaths before, now he was a normal(ish) young man sitting among the hunters and the bulwarks and the disciples, taking in their stories, pulling food from the same platter, and laughing. Parsa even let himself be coaxed into relating his run-in with the wargamers with silent hands and big expressions.
He had never been with men like this, accepted and at ease, all on the same side. He owed that to Pasha Phillip, and it was just one of his many little miracles.