All of Ram’s rebellious enthusiasm deserted him in an instant. “The rookery? Now? Just the three of us?”
“We can’t go there tomorrow, can we? They’ll be wrecking the place. Wouldn’t do at all.”
“But—won’t the bazuu in it be—” What word was he looking for? Murderous?
“Tired, disarmed, and distinctly out of sorts. Here’s a little-known fact for you, cousin Ram: the night of dark dreams cuts both ways, and tonight is theirs. Nothing in that rookery will be in any shape to put up a fight, now that you’ve seen to their shabti. Now, shall we be off? It’s some distance, and we’d be well-advised to allow ourselves plenty of time. I can explain more fully once we’re there.”
They both looked at him. It occurred to Ram that, if he had any sense, he would turn around and run like hell for the camp. Nothing these two, or Kamenrag, could do to him would be as terrible as the vengeance of a whole rookery full of bazuu. But they didn’t seem all that alarmed by the creatures themselves. Perversely, Ram was curious.
And—it seemed the most important consideration of all, at the moment—he’d all but promised himself that he would break free. This was his best, if not his only, chance. It would be shameful, to be frightened back into doing a dog’s work. A man’s pride wouldn’t bear it; Father wouldn’t have borne it. Ram had faced down the shabti. He could face their masters.
“Lead the way.” He didn’t think he sounded confident, but at least his voice didn’t shake like it had when he spoke to Kamenrag.
“Excellent. Here, take these. We have a long night ahead of us, and we’ll need you strong and alert. I advise you to swallow the little one quickly, as the flavor leaves something to be desired.”
Ram hadn’t eaten all day. He made short work of Ushna’s rations: a strip of jerked meat, a sheet of bread, a handful of pine nuts, and a small, hard lozenge, together with a fresh canteen. As promised, the little pill was horribly bitter. Then they were off, Bal leading them at an easy lope on his long legs.
They traveled for hours, alternately jogging and walking through a dead landscape under a waning crescent moon. From time to time Ushna called a brief halt to look at something he kept in his pocket; Ram couldn’t see what it was by moonlight. Ram couldn’t have kept up, except the nasty little pill kicked in with a fresh burst of energy after fifteen minutes. Even so, he found himself stumbling at points from sheer weariness. It had been a long, strange day, and the night was bound to be stranger.
By and by he flagged again, and Ushna passed around another of the bitter pills for each of them. Then the run continued. It was nearly midnight when Ushna stopped them, in a spot of desert identical to all the others, and gave Ram a dulsphere in a netted cradle, hanging from a long cord loop. The light inside it was little more than a spark.
“I urge you, very strongly, to leave that on at all times,” Ushna told him, as he and Bal donned matching spheres. “While our friends in the rookery will not be feeling their best, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t destroy you in a second if you didn’t have it.”
Ram slung it around his neck, wondering if all this was actually happening. He felt more than a little lightheaded. “Where’s the rookery?” he asked. “I don’t see it.”
“Generally speaking, you don’t,” Ushna agreed unhelpfully. “Now, you were promised an explanation, weren’t you? We’ve come here tonight to break the rules.”
“Well, you’re blackbands, right?”
“We! We are blackbands, thank you very much, yourself included. But I was not referring to human rules. There are conventions in these wars, you should know, by tacit agreement. One of them is that, when the human force overcomes the shabti—as it always does, with losses large or small—it remains in place for the remainder of white day, to give the bazuu time to withdraw.”
“Withdraw to where? Another rookery?”
“It’s white day, Rammash. The only day passage between the worlds is possible. When the yellow sun rises tomorrow, the rookery will come unmoored from Ki, and everything inside it that the bazuu care about it will vanish forever. When your handmaidens attack it, they will be effectively cracking an empty eggshell. A meaningless gesture, and everyone who matters knows it.”
This took a moment to absorb. Possibly Ram was meant to ask something like ‘why,’ but he honestly didn’t care. He’d only signed up to make money; if these fights were as big of a farce for the bazuu as they were for humanity, that meant nothing to him. Instead he asked, “So, what are we going to do?”
“Hopefully, kill every bazu in the rookery, and collect any valuables we come across in the process. Which reminds me: Bal?” The silent giant drew one of his many blades, a short sword similar to Father’s, and shoved it into Ram’s hand. “We make a silver a head, so do look lively.”
“A silver a head? Who the hell is paying that?”
Ushna had been moving to take the lead again; now, slowly, he turned back. “I think, kinsman of mine,” he said carefully, “that at this juncture, it would be better for you not to know the answers to questions like that. And better still not to ask them.”
Ram held up a placating hand, and they resumed their march forward without another word. He didn’t realize until some minutes later that it hadn’t been a threat; nothing in Ushna’s tone had suggested dangerous secrets. It seemed his cousin had literally meant that Ram was better off not knowing. What that implied, Ram couldn’t guess.
They were moving more slowly now, at a steady walk rather than a jog, and Ushna regularly stopped to consult whatever-it-was in his pocket, occasionally muttering curses—apparently a bazu fortress wasn’t an easy thing to find. There was still no sign of anything but empty desert. Ram was about to ask if the rookery was somewhere underground, when Ushna held something shiny up to the moonlight, and the world vanished.
The sensation was disorienting; there was a sudden blind gap in his consciousness, as if Ram had abruptly fallen asleep, and slowly come awake again without knowing how much time had passed. As with waking, nothing was clear at first, but slowly a new reality coalesced around him, and he found that all three of them were standing indoors. The memory of Ushna’s explanation—surely not an hour ago—felt as ancient and distant as his earliest childhood.
They were in the single largest room Ram had ever been in, though he could not have said how large exactly. The walls and floor were dark and indistinct, the ceiling too high to see. The air was neither warm nor cold, the floor not hard or soft, and his feet made no sound as he shifted his weight. This was not a place, but the unfinished idea of a place.
Even Bal and Ushna, a few feet away, were barely visible. Aside from their three spheres, the cavernous chamber had only one light source: a lumpy, spindle-shaped artifact, fifteen feet tall, floating some distance above their heads. It glowed with much the same unpleasant light as the white sun, or the eyes of the shabti. Ram tried not to look at it.
“We’ll want to be out by sunrise, naturally,” said Ushna, as though nothing had happened. His voice was oddly flat, with no echoes from the walls. “Mind you, I’ve never been entirely clear on what would happen if we didn’t, but I don’t believe we’d care for the experience.” He was staring directly at the spindle-light, apparently untroubled by the glow. A spur was already in his right hand, the end of its string looped around his little finger. “Also, I’d advise you to keep your eyes on the enemy.”
“Where?” But the spindle was already moving, unfolding itself like a blooming flower into a bizarre shape: two enormous, membranous wings and a long, bare neck and tail, all held together by a ridiculous stub of spherical body smaller than Ram’s torso. There was no sign of any other limbs. It had been hanging upside-down; it righted itself with a strange flickering motion Ram’s eyes couldn’t quite follow.
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The face was as ugly as the rest of it, a mess of wattles and frills around two large eyes and a beaklike mouth. It gave off a horrible, ululating shriek when it saw them, then turned its face and folded its wings as a shield. Was it offended by the sight of humans, or only hurt by the dulspheres? Both? There was no way to tell, and no time to ponder the question; Ushna snapped his hand forward, and the spur shot out, catching it right in the center of its torso. It fell to the ground ten paces away; Bal was on it in an instant, neatly hacking the head off. Luminous white blood sprayed out of the neck, drenching Bal and spattering across the floor.
“Right there,” his cousin answered. “Which is not to say they’re particularly dangerous in a combat situation; there’s a reason they don’t come out and fight for themselves, after all. But it’s generally a bad habit, not looking at someone who wants to kill you. Almost unmannerly, isn’t it?”
Bal held his sword up close to his sphere, and the blood burned off instantly. The mess on his clothes was already drying off, retreating outward from the light at his chest. The Kur-light faded rapidly from the corpse at his feet as it bled out, until only three golden sparks remained to light the enormous dark chamber. Bal kicked the corpse—a cloud of white powder exploded off the bones—then reached down, retrieved Ushna’s spur, and threw it to him.
“Thank you, Balnibduka,” he said, catching it. He took three seconds winding the cord back around the shaft, then tucked it back in his quiver. “Have you ever learned to throw spurs, Rammash? They’re very handy.” Ram didn’t answer; his eyes kept turning back to the bazu’s body. “I take it that would be a no. Well, we can teach you. I’ve tried getting Bal to practice, but the man has an incurable and romantic attachment to close-quarters combat. I’ve told him it’ll do him a bad turn one of these days, but he won’t listen. At any rate, let’s not dally. I’d guess that’s one down, and … oh, thirty to go? Fifty? What would you say, Bal?”
The giant shrugged. “I suppose it’s a rather pointless question, when one considers it,” Ushna allowed. “The damned things reincarnate, after all. Thankfully it takes them a month, or we’d never get this job done. Come here, Ram.”
Forcing his eyes away from the carcass with difficulty, Ram dutifully walked back to his cousin’s side. Ushna pulled the little silver artifact out of his pocket, and the world disappeared once more. The bazu’s skeleton collapsed an instant before they vanished.
When his head cleared, Ram found himself standing in an identical room; this one, however, had no less than five bazuu in it, all of them wide-awake, furious, and deafeningly loud. The three of them were surrounded by the flapping monstrosities, all screeching and warbling at once. Even the air in this room, far from the stillness of the last, seemed to be shifting and blurring like a heat-haze off the desert sand at noon.
Ram barely had time to register their surroundings before falling to the floor in a convulsive fit, thrashing and gasping helplessly. Bal yanked him roughly to his feet, and made him look at his own dulsphere; the fit passed at once. He managed to grunt something that might have passed for thanks, clutching his head—he’d hit it against the floor repeatedly. Ushna took him by the shoulder and spun him around, tugging him into position so that the three of them formed a triangle back-to-back.
“I did just warn you not to turn your back on them, did I not? There’s three of us for a reason. Look sharp!”
The five bazuu were circling around them now, still giving off a tremendous racket of strident curses and gargling cries. Strange currents still moved the air; there was no wind, no heat, but something subtle was in motion around them all the same.
“What do we do, Ushna?” he asked, carefully not turning around. “We’re surrounded.”
“Which is actually ideal. Against a man with a sphere, face-to-face, they’re really quite harmless.” Ram heard a swishing noise from behind him. “Damn. Missed. Anyway, rest assured that the situation is under control.”
Ram wasn’t sure about that; the bazuu were keeping their distance, and flying quickly. Ushna had a limited supply of spurs, they had to be out by sunrise, and they couldn’t move without exposing themselves. Were they supposed to chase these things down while waddling sideways in formation, or what?
But no further attacks came; the bazuu only continued flapping about in circles, screaming in frustration, while the air danced with their rage. After a little while, they began to flag, flying lower and slower. A hiss, a thunk, and a screech announced Ushna’s first hit, with the second coming moments later. A third bazu reversed course in a panic, crashing stupidly into a fourth so that they both fell to the floor. The last hovered in place in front of Ram, as far back as it could without scraping its wings against the wall, but eventually collapsed on its own. The dancing air fell still at once.
“See? Pyre-light’s like white light, to them.” They waited ten seconds, but none of the five rose again. “All right, I’d say we’re safe. To work, gentlemen! A silver a head!”
Bal and Ushna dispatched the fallen with the same brutal efficiency they’d shown before. They destroyed two apiece before Ram worked up the nerve to approach the last—the one that had fallen on its own. It looked up at him as he approached, but turned its face quickly from his dulsphere, and did not try to rise. The white skin twitched where the golden light fell on it.
Did he want to kill it? The bazu was repulsive, nothing like a human. It might not even be properly alive, as humans understood the term. He’d seen animals butchered before; he didn’t see how the vitals to support such a huge creature could be held in the puny ball of flesh between those wings. And Ushna said it would be revived in a month anyway—but then, what was the point of killing it at all? He didn’t know what they were doing here, or why, and it bothered him.
“Ram. We’ve got a whole rookery left to do here.”
Half-forgotten lessons about fighting fair nagged at him, the legacy of many long hours mock-tussling with Father. But this was a monster, and a slaver of human souls. It had probably made or controlled the shabti somehow. It was responsible for the deaths of men he’d known. That would have to be enough reason to kill it, even when it was helpless and couldn’t fight back. If nothing else, he could hate it for forcing him into this situation, when he was tired and bitter and wanted nothing more than to hide from the world.
“Rammash. Now.”
The bazu turned its face to look at him; he couldn’t read its expression. He jabbed the borrowed sword at its eyes, to make it turn back again, then swung the edge down in a halfhearted blow at the neck. It was enough; the flesh barely resisted at all, and glowing white blood came spurting out in great gouts. Ram hopped out of the way so none would get on his clothes, and held up his sword-blade up to his sphere as Bal had done. The bazu didn’t make a sound as it died.
“Good,” came Ushna’s voice from right behind him. “Now get digging. It might have something inside.”
“What?”
“Like this.” Ushna pushed past him and swung his sword down at the torso, splitting it open. Something round, red, and shiny came rolling out; Ushna stopped it with his foot, then flicked it up into the air with his boot-tip and caught it. “See? Bazuu don’t have pockets, or cabinets. Everything valuable’s going to be on their bodies, or in them.”
Hadn’t he come on this trip because he resented looting corpses? This wasn’t even a battle; it was a massacre. To hell with it, he thought. It wasn’t as if they were human, anyhow. He just wanted to get the night over with.