Chapter Ten // The Rope Goes Taut
"He's back."
Tekarn's head snapped up as though it were spring-loaded. Though Gekto hadn't donned full armor in years, he stood before Tekarn now in a padded worm-leather vest - the highest level of protection that the First Shadow would ever concede. The implication was immediately clear.
"Where?" Tekarn's only question as he shot to his feet. A sword and sheath were clipped in short order to his belt.
"Already inside," Gekto admitted, with a small grimace. "Somewhere in the Second Barracks."
"I was to be notified before-" Tekarn began, stepping past.
"I'm well aware," Gekto interjected, and now the two of them were striding side-by-side down the halls of the First Barracks. Dozens of hard-eyed men and women saluted as the two passed. "But the boy moved fast, and his new Shadow – Loken - moved even faster. They whisked him away the moment he passed through the main gate."
"He fears retribution, then," Tekarn grunted - a gruff expression of forgiveness to his Shadow, which Gekto accepted without comment. "Good. This won't take long."
The two of them stepped into the First Eltok's personal armory, where a pair of branded slaves were already waiting with pieces of bone-armor in hand.
"I'll fetch Asra and Hanzen," Gekto said, stepping back as the slaves began fastening Tekarn's armor in place. "Don't think we'll need more than that."
"Four should be sufficient," Tekarn agreed, flexing a gauntleted hand. "As I said, this won't take long. We'll reconvene shortly by the gate."
"By your will, Bloodied One," Gekto said, flashing the First Eltok that trademark crooked grin.
And so, consequences were coming for Kelsen - faster than the Second Eltok could possibly have imagined.
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"Dossas and Ferent are dead!"
"They've breached the front gate!"
"They're in the barracks!"
"They're killing everyone!"
"We have to stop-"
"Enough!" Kelsen snapped, brushing free of the physician's hands and rising sharply to his feet. His shoulder was wrapped tight in crimson-soaked gauze, and his eyes were laden heavy with rings of dark purple. Loken and a dozen other warriors were observing with a mixture of concern, agitation, and outright anger as the Second Eltok stepped forward and donned a deep-purple robe.
"I'll go and speak with him myself," Kelsen said, waving off his Shadow's concern as he started forward. The others followed him like a cloud, like a flowing cape of living flesh and lilac-painted bone. "There's no need to just keep throwing lives away. We'll give Tekarn what he wants."
“But how could he possibly know?” Loken hissed, in his ear, as the two continued down the hall with an ever-growing retinue behind him. “We were exceptionally careful. None knew save for myself and those who went with you.”
“Gekto’s doing, no doubt,” Kelsen answered bitterly. “Remember Amet, the man you found dead in that alley? He bore all Gekto's hallmarks – the torture, the opened throat. The First Shadow must have been using him somehow.”
“Bastard,” Loken snarled, shaking his head. “They’ve made us look like fools.”
“Maybe we are fools,” Kelsen muttered, to himself, too quiet for even his Shadow to have heard.
And so, the two parties met in the central foyer of the Second Barracks - a hexagonal, wide-open space with a floor draped in hundreds of multicolored, overlapping rugs. From the ceiling hung incense-burning canisters on rusted iron chains; from the windows there streamed intersecting beams of distorted sunlight. And upon the walls there were festooned innumerable trophies and prizes. What had been true for generations remained true even now – it was, above all else, pride that defined the Second legion.
On one side stood Kelsen, wounded and haggard but nevertheless unbowed, flanked by Loken and a dozen other warriors in death-masks and full battle regalia. They were a wary force, one bristling with a cautious sort of vitality that could clearly be seen in their darting eyes and hunched shoulders.
On the other stood Tekarn, stern and imperious, flanked closely by a smirking Gekto. On either side loomed his two remaining honor guard - Asra, a wiry woman with shaved head and pointed teeth tattooed along her jaw; and Hanzen, a dark-skinned, one-armed man whose crude prosthetic terminated in a viciously-flanged mace.
There was a single drop of blood staining Gekto's cheek. Asra's spear-tip was still streaked with gore. And, upon Hanzen's mace, shards of bone and strands of hair. The method by which The First Host had gained entry into the Second Barracks had been short, simple, and characteristically brutal.
Now, the two Eltoks stepped forward - Kelsen defiant, with chin held high, while Tekarn's face remained entirely unreadable.
It was Kelsen who spoke first.
"Lord Tekarn," he said, addressing the First Eltok only by casual honorific - within the halls of his own barracks, even this was a respectful concession. "You should not be-"
Tekarn didn't say a word. He just took one more step forward and backhanded Kelsen with an armored fist, knocking a pair of teeth loose and sending a thin stream of blood arcing through the air between them. Too shocked to steady himself, the Second Eltok dropped to his knees, his robe draping over him like a funereal shroud.
One moment, total stillness. The next – an explosion of movement. Loken was charging forward, his sword pulled partway from its sheath, and yet even before Loken’s weapon could be drawn Gekto was upon him. The First Shadow darted forward like a viper, plucking Loken’s right eye with a precise dagger-strike before wrapping around the howling man and drawing that same knife tight against his throat.
"Not another step!" Tekarn barked, holding up a hand - and it was the sight of their Eltok humbled, their Shadow at knifepoint, and the First Eltok himself flanked by two additional, infamously deadly warriors that had the men and women of the Second frozen in place, hands on their weapons and hearts thrumming to the beat of the wa'tek. They all wanted to fight, to be sure - but none of them wanted to die.
"Hello, Loken," Gekto chuckled, one of his dark eyes peering out at the other warriors from over the man's shoulder. "Guess they’ll make anyone a Shadow these days."
"Worm take you," Loken spat, through teeth grit tight with pain. His eye was but a pool of blood and viscera that ran in a fat, turgid river down the side of his burn-scarred face. "You have no right-"
"I have every right," Tekarn thundered, and at once the foyer was ushered into abrupt and sacrosanct silence. The First Eltok's gaze had remained laser-focused upon Kelsen all the while, and now the young man was glaring back with a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.
"You would dare lay hand upon me, in the heart of my own domain?" Kelsen demanded, rising slowly to his feet. Shame was giving way to indignation, the fires of anger stoked by pain and adrenaline both. "You mutilate my Shadow?"
"You are lucky that I do not kill you where you stand, boy," Tekarn snapped, effortlessly dismissing the Second Eltok’s protestations. "You sought to hunt Arha. Do you deny it?"
And with that, finally, the mask of defiance broke, and suddenly Kelsen was nothing more than a very, very tired young man - a young man in far over his head. And perhaps even Tekarn felt the smallest twinge of surprise when he saw the shame on the Second Eltok's face.
"She killed my father," was all Kelsen could say. He was staring down at his feet, at the vibrant hexagonal patterns of the rug upon which he stood. “She deserved to die.”
"She was exiled," Tekarn growled. "She no longer existed - until you went and dragged her back into the light." At that, his expression hardened, and his chin tilted upwards. "She is dead, then?"
Silence. Slowly, the First Eltok's eyes went wide.
"You've gotta be kidding me," Gekto declared – letting out a genuine laugh as Kelsen withered beneath Tekarn's rapidly-intensifying glare.
"You departed with sixty Outriders," Tekarn said, sounding almost in disblief. But his fury was mounting quickly "How could you possibly have failed?"
"There were...complications," Kelsen said, after long moment's hesitation. "We isolated one of her honor guard - the weakling, the pale one-"
"You mean Zekval?" Gekto called, from over Loken's shoulder. "He was never much of a fighter."
"You didn’t see him," Kelsen said solemnly, his gaze still firmly downcast. "That man fought like a demon. Killed a dozen of my men and nearly took my own life-" he gestured to his wounded shoulder, "-before I was able to return the favor. And then, before we could fully regroup, there came another. The shieldbearer."
The mere memory of Nageth, roaring and bloodsoaked, drove Kelsen to momentarily silence. Tekarn only continued to glare in silence as Kelsen licked his lips, fidgeted uncomfortably, then continued.
"He was unstoppable," Kelsen declared, voice at once hesitant and awestruck. "Unstoppable. It took thirty men to bring him down and even then I was certain he would rise up and continue to slaughter us all. He-" His head sunk even lower. “He wasn’t human. He cannot have been.”
"And what of Arha?" Tekarn demanded, refusing to give the cowed young man even a moment’s respite. And finally, at that question, did Kelsen dare lift his head. Pale blue eyes stared out from behind curtains of onyx black as he spoke seven fateful words:
"I never even laid eyes on her.”
Tekarn moved fast, his armor rattling heavily as he strode forward and snatched up Kelsen's throat in one gauntleted fist.
The warriors tensed, preparing to move - but Gekto just turned back and fixed them with another one-eyed stare.
"I wouldn't," he cautioned, digging the knife in deeper, and in the crook of his arm Loken merely shook his bloodied head. The memory of Amet’s corpse was now fresh in his mind.
"Are you aware, precisely, of what it is that you have done?" Tekarn asked, as Kelsen struggled and thrashed within his grip. He cocked his head to the side, like a curious reptile. "I don't believe that you are."
"I'm sorry-" Kelsen choked out, clawing desperately at Tekarn's arm - but his fingernails met only crimson bone-plate. "It was a mistake-"
"I raised that woman," Tekarn growled, his grip tightening. "I made her not in my own image, but to surpass my image. She is the perfect warrior. The perfect general. The perfect enemy. Her honor guard, this 'Zekval' and the shieldbearer - you killed them, yes?"
Kelsen could only nod. His face was darkening rapidly, and his eyes were all but bulging out of his skull.
"There it is, then," Tekarn declared - and with that, he released the Second Eltok, allowing the boy to drop into a gasping, panting heap. "Now she has motive to destroy us."
"I don't...understand..." Kelsen managed, between hacking coughs. "What's...another enemy? War is what...we live for..."
"Victory is what we live for, you narrow-minded fool," Tekarn spat. "Our war with the Skade already eclipses any conflict of the past decade. And now there is another piece upon the board - one that will simply bide its time until we are at our weakest. She will gather followers. She will gather an army, and then she will wait patiently for the perfect moment to strike because that is what I trained her to do."
Tekarn stepped back, and his expression hardened once more. "She was to be a great boon to us. You decided otherwise - and now she is a threat."
After that, more words were exchanged - more threats, more admonishments - and eventually, the warriors of the First departed, stepping callously over the slain gate-guards as they exited the Second Barracks.
"She must be dealt with," was the first thing Tekarn said, when they were out upon the bustling city streets. There was an immediate ripple-effect in the crowd around them, as the citizens of the Worm both consciously and unconsciously formed a ring of distance between themselves and the armored warriors.
Gekto grimaced, and - in an all but unheard-of display of sympathy from the First Shadow - put a hand on his Eltok's shoulder.
"I'll take care of it," he said, quietly. "You don't need to see her die." But, when Tekarn turned his head, Gekto was surprised to see not even an ounce of consternation upon the First Eltok's face.
"No," Tekarn said firmly, patting Gekto's arm before shrugging it aside. "She is my creation. My responsibility. My mistake. She dies by my hand and my hand alone."
"So it shall be, then," Gekto declared at once, stepping back and snapping off a rare salute. "I'll gather twenty of our best." He turned his head. "Asra? Hanzen?"
"As you will it, Bloodied One," the Honor Guard intoned in unison.
"Good," was all Tekarn had to reply - and then he was already striding away with hand hands clasped tight behind his back. "We depart in an hour." Then, after a few steps, he paused - and shot Gekto a glance over his shoulder.
"Acquire one of Kelsen's Outriders," he ordered, his voice entirely void of emotion. "I don't care how you do it. We're going to need a guide."
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He had expected his own men to kill him on the spot.
Instead, despite his pathetic display of weakness Kelsen found himself being helped to his feet, buoyed upwards by a dozen bone-armored hands, as Loken stood before him marred but unbroken.
"Srel'ka," Loken swore, his voice dripping with contempt as he wiped at his gore-drenched face. "Killing our people on our sacred grounds. Disrespecting our Eltok and our Host as though we are nothing. That gve’ka doesn't care one iota for what happened to Lord Kagen - only for the life of his precious daughter." Loken's eyes flicked to Kelsen - and his snarl faded at once. He bowed his head. "Forgive me, Eltok. A Shadow should have fast hands. Mine were slow this day."
There was a rustling and rattling of armor - and Kelsen turned to see the assembled men and women of the Second kneeling in prostration, death-masks removed and fists pressed to chests. They were a silent and penitent mass before an exhausted, wounded twenty-year-old whose neck was still tinged a dark and violent purple.
"We stand behind you more resolute than ever, Bloodied One," Loken declared - he, too, was kneeling now. "Lord Kagen's legacy will not be tarnished - not even by the First Eltok."
Kelsen stood there in silence for a long, long time. And then, finally, he stepped forward and extended a hand.
"Rise," he commanded, pulling Loken to his feet, and all did so at once. He turned to face his loyal, assembled warriors, and when he spoke again there was something intangible yet strikingly different in his voice. "We have much to do."
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“Let us speak now,” Kor declared, with his usual warm smile, “of the so-called The Great Reformer.”
Atop that towering spire - the only structure in all the city to actually rise above the Worm itself in height - there sat the three most powerful men in the Wastes, all of them in various states of cogitation and repose. At the head, as always, there sat Kor, warm and congenial and largely content to merely observe as his peers bickered, jibed, undermined one another. To his left, the Grand Lord, who clasped a jewel-studded goblet in one hand and an oversized leg of meat in the other. To his right sat Zolak, Director of Providence - the thin and world-weary man who acted as a governor to the thousands of citizens and slaves below.
At the mention of that name, Zolak’s expression – already one of long-suffering exhaustion – sunk like a stone, and the old man hunched forward, steepling his fingers and shooting Kor a heavy-lidded glare. “Is this really necessary? Surely The Master has already been appraised?”
“The Master sees all,” Bartok agreed, leaning back in his oversized seat with a shark’s grin growing across his face. “But I, on the other hand, have been forced to content myself with mere rumors. I would find it rather enlightening to hear firsthand of your impending demise.”
“As though your own house is in any semblance of order!” Zolak hissed. Then, slowly, he relented, for through the words of the High Celebrant, The Master had made a very specific and pointed request. Such a thing was not to be taken lightly.
“Nokka,” the Director sighed, the word wriggling free from his lips like a curse. That was the birth-given moniker of a brilliantly charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious young woman who had taken the blessed city by storm, her platform based almost entirely upon the upheaval of the old and the ushering-in of the new. Zolak, Bartok, Kor - these men had nestled into their institutions like parasites, she claimed, and only through swift action could they be properly excised. She spoke of stagnation, of rot and decay, of a leadership that remained frozen in time as the entire world changed around them. She spoke of enhanced living conditions, of better food and more readily available water and more efficient waste disposal and this and that and after just a month the people had dubbed her The Great Reformer and claimed her as their champion. He explained all of this in short, clipped tones, the words delivered with the resignation of a man with one foot well in the grave. That she would defeat him in the next Consensus – a general election by which the citizenry chose their Director – was all but an inevitability.
“And, of course, there is one more thing,” Zolak finished, as Bartok’s grin grew wider and deeper and the Grand Lord drank deep of his rival’s great suffering. The Director looked Bartok dead in the eyes. “I am told that she has begun styling herself after the late Arha.”
For a moment there was pure, blessed stillness. And then with an animal roar Bartok whirled around and hurled his goblet, the heavy iron caving in the skull of the nearest slave as the Grand Lord seized another by the throat and hefted him high above his head. The slave remained eerily silent – for his tongue had long been cut out – and with another full-throated bellow Bartok slammed the unfortunate victim down upon the table, smashing him into bloodied pulp and sending chunks of gore and bone flying in all directions across the room.
Zolak wrinkled his nose and turned away, wiping at the brain matter now staining his sleeve.
Kor's smile was unwavering.
Bartok, now panting with exertion and adrenaline both, simply swiped the quivering blob of former human aside – as though clearing off a dinner table – and sank back into his seat, eyes still wide and bloodshot and his body all but trembling with teeth-gnashing rage.
“I,” the Grand Lord seethed, resting his fists upon the table, “am tired of hearing that fucking name.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it,” Zolak scoffed, still wiping at his sleeve. “I'm told that she wears her hair as Arha once did, and that her dresses are styled to resemble an Eltok's armor. She loudly proclaims that Arha was the first harbinger of the great upheaval to come, that her exile was an act of cowardice and self-preservation by-” he pointed to Bartok, then Kor, then himself, “-the desperate elite. Arha, you may remember, was already something of a celebrity before all this came about.” He shrugged his shoulders, resigned. “Now she is a martyr.”
“I should have flayed her alive when I had the chance,” Bartok all but bellowed. “I should have visited a thousand tortures upon her-”
“But you did not,” Zolak interjected drily – and here, now, there came a shift in the currents between them – “on the advice of Eltok Tekarn.”
“What are you playing at…?” Bartok growled, his patience thoroughly shot. “Out with it, you miserable little gve’ka.”
“Trace back the years, the histories – the through-line by which we have all arrived at our present situation,” Zolak said, gesturing sharply. “Who do we find, at the nexus of it all? Tekarn.”
“Careful,” Bartok threatened, his expression darkening. “Do not speak on matters you do not comprehend.”
“A child could comprehend it,” Zolak laughed, without humor. “The Demon of the Wastes – the man they call the greatest living Winnower. A myth made flesh. A man for whom their respect far eclipses your own.”
“You-”
“You killed his friend,” Zolak continued, his attack relentless – digging the point of the blade in deeper and deeper. “Or lover, whatever. You gave the most dangerous man in the city every reason to hate you and then you kept him like a pet. What a surprise, then, that his daughter would emerge as an existential threat to your rule! Are you truly so prideful and stupid as to not see that she is the product of every word Tekarn does not speak, of every action Tekarn does not take? Does it really escape your understanding that she is but the echo of Eltok Ekane’s death?”
“I would advise,” Bartok said slowly, "that you reconsider your tone."
“And now the wave only continues to rise!” Zolak snapped, for he had listened to three decades of threats from the Grand Lord. “The threat that Nokka poses far eclipses that of Arha or Ekane. Tell me-” his head swiveled rapidly around the room, “-do you truly believe that she will stop with me? I’ve heard her speeches, and let me tell you-” he pushed a pair of wireframe spectacles up his nose, “-it is all three of our names that I hear from her mouth, again and again.” He jabbed a bony finger at Bartok. “She will come for you next.”
“Ha!” the Grand Lord barked, his boiling rage broken temporarily by a stab of sudden absurdity. “I welcome her challenge gladly. I’ll break that woman in a thousand different places before I finally allow her to die.”
“Winnower fool,” Zolak spat. “This is beyond your domain of muscle and bone. Nokka will find a weakness, a proxy, an opening, and then she will use it to destroy you. She’s just as perceptive as me – if not even more so, which means that she sees it just as clearly as I do. The apocalypse you’ve chosen to keep close by your side.”
Finally, meaning dawned. The Grand Lord straightened and rose like a cobra preparing to strike, his beady eyes gleaming amidst the shadowy folds of his face. A different kind of anger gripped him now – anger like cold, howling, bitter wind.
“Tekarn is mine,” Bartok declared, hands splayed out on the table as he leaned forward. “His past, his present, his future. All mine. I killed his lover and I killed his daughter and still he dares not raise a hand against me. He is a tool, one that I have wielded effectively for decades. I will not sacrifice my greatest weapon in the face of your whinging paranoia. This is the way of The Master, is it not? To control, to dominate. To take something stronger than you-” his hand closed tight into a fist, “-and break it into a favorable shape. I broke Tekarn like a master, Zolak. Like an artist. His obedience remains my greatest triumph.” And finally, with that, he settled back into his seat once more. “I will hear no more of this.”
That was the end of it, then, Kor declared. Now it was time to discuss practical solutions.
“I won’t win a Consensus against her,” Zolak admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “No amount of bribery, intimidation, or tampering can overcome the deficit between us. She has the entire city right here, in her fist – to borrow Bartok’s clumsy little metaphor.”
“Then we look to other solutions,” Bartok declared, folding his flabby arms. “As much as I would savor your defeat, Zolak, I have little interest in sharing this table with such a creature such as her. Thus I will do with blades what words cannot.”
“You would have her killed?” Zolak asked, his eyebrows raising incrementally in a subdued expression of surprise. Then, almost immediately, they returned to their original position. “That's fine by me.”
“I’ll pull some of Kelsen’s Outriders for the task, then erase them after the deed is done,” Bartok nodded. “No martyrs – not this time. We’ll make it look like a suicide.”
“As I said, that's all fine by me,” Zolak said, dismissing the Grand Lord with a wave. “I have little interest in the particulars.”
“Do you want her to suffer?” Bartok asked.
Zolak froze. Thought, for a moment.
“I would,” he said, finally, and that was that.
And then the High Celebrant rose to his feet, and all heads turned at once to regard him.
You feel it, don't you?
You can feel it coming.
Another storm.
Oh, you can all but smell the ozone in the air.
The chaos, squirming beneath our skin.
The madness, echoing out in the sound of the sun.
The hunger, creeping along the invisible skeins of reality.
I must confess that I am overcome with a terrible impatience.
But, then again, who can blame me?
After all, it's in my nature.
"Gentlemen," Kor said, clasping his hands together. His smile had grown to the point where it was now something else entirely. "I congratulate you on the fruits of another productive meeting. [May your teeth remain sharp and your bellies remain empty.]"
"Na vas san-vakt dossemas ke sozs, da vas genen dossemas kroskt," the Director and Grand Lord repeated.
When all was said and done, the two of them descended that long and winding staircase in a silence that would not - that could not - be broken. Back, then, to the land of the living.
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Tekarn was but a sweltering statue, baking beneath the merciless afternoon sun, as Gekto stepped over and told him what he already knew - that the village had been abandoned, that both Arha and the Voshtarri had vanished without a trace. That they had arrived too late.
"No trail, no tracks," Gekto was saying. "Hundreds of people, gone-" he snapped his fingers, "-just like that." The First Shadow knew better than to appear apologetic before his Eltok - and it would have been counter to his nature, anyway. Instead the bad news was delivered with a faint sort of bemusement, a half-winking veneer of can-you-believe-this-shit?
The journey to the Voshtarri village - which, even now, was being ransacked by Tekarn's men - had been an arduous one, a slog through an endless ocean of flesh and teeth that had seen one veteran split wide open and another gruesomely torn to shreds. The men and women of the First Host had finally broken into that clearing exhausted and gore-drenched, only to find a hollow diorama of the village they sought; empty huts and abandoned farms and a gentle, whistling breeze that crept up and down the streets like a ghost.
At the outskirts of the village, they had found a small mound of dirt and a slab of wood that read, in the Old Tongue, NAGETH. And then, below it:
FOR YOU, THE WORLD WILL BE MADE RIGHT.
A cold fist was closing itself over Tekarn's heart.
Now, eighteen warriors of the First Host - and one silent, hooded Outrider - stood at attention before their Eltok as his Shadow continued to speak.
"There's nothing more we can do here," Gekto was saying. "But I can get my people on this, later. Or perhaps the Outriders - we could have them try and fix the mess their Eltok created. Nobody vanishes without a trace, Tekarn. There is always something left behind."
"It is as you say," Tekarn interrupted, without affect. "There is nothing more we can do here."
Gekto just grimaced and nodded.
"She was here," the First Eltok continued, his gaze sweeping over the village's silent corpse. "She was close."
"She got lucky, stumbling upon a paradise like this," Gekto offered, gesturing to those same abandoned huts. "Now she'll be at the mercy of the Wastes. Our problem might very well resolve itself."
"No," Tekarn said, his voice cold with certitude. His hands, clasped at all times behind his back, were tensing reflexively. The memory of violence, of a savage beating delivered with misery in his heart. "I know very well the woman I created. The Wastes will not be enough to hold her - nothing is."
Tekarn stood there for some time, contemplating - etching every detail of the village, of the grave, upon the surface of his mind. Recalled the sound of her voice, the color of her eyes. Took all those little minutiae and assembled them into a singular figure and understood that this figure would haunt him until the day he died. Understood that his only mission, his only purpose - damn Bartok, and damn the Skade - was to remove her from this world. To undo her.
And so, he was barking orders, and so the First Host were marching out.
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And so, upon his return, he found a woman of Providence waiting for him.
“My name is Nokka,” she said, her smile perfect and unvarnished even as a crowd of filthy warriors shouldered past, their boots kicking up a cloud of dust. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, First Eltok.”
“What do you want?” Tekarn snapped, impatient, and indulging the woman only because he knew she was of interest to the Grand Lord. The nature of that interest, of course, was obscured to him – Tekarn was blind and deaf to all that transpired beyond the Winnower Quarter. But he knew well enough that this woman was significant, and not to be taken lightly.
“A quick conversation, if your schedule would allow it,” Nokka said, her voice a lilting and musical chime in comparison to Tekarn’s blunt, clipped speech. The First Eltok shared a brief glance with his Shadow before uttering a mere grunt of assent and gesturing for the ‘Great Reformer’ to follow. He was at once exhausted and restless from his fruitless venture, and so he wished to see this pointless exchange dealt with as quickly as possible.
Gekto waited outside the door for perhaps fifteen minutes, ears perking up at the muted, incomprehensible tones that grew steadily in rhythm and volume from beyond the wall. Then, the door creaked open, and Nokka stepped out into the hallway, telling Tekarn that she hoped he would consider her offer – to which Tekarn angrily insisted that she leave him to his work.
Via the tip of Gekto’s boot, the door swung abruptly shut, and Nokka turned now to see the dark-eyed Winnower looming in the corner, arms folded and mouth turned quite definitively into a frown.
“You shouldn’t be here,” was all Gekto said. There were daggers resting between those words, plain as day. Yet somehow the woman before him seemed only to brighten at that cold suggestion.
“You must be Gekto,” she said, warmly, and suddenly the entire universe narrowed to a tiny sliver and Gekto had the strange and overwhelming feeling that the two of them were the only living things in all the grand universe. This, he would come to learn, was simply how it felt to fall within the locus of Nokka's undivided attention. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“Have you?” Gekto scoffed, for the tales told of the First Shadow were grisly ones indeed. He had recovered, by then, from that momentary vertigo. “Then I’m surprised to see you appear so at-ease.”
“Should I be frightened?” Nokka asked, cocking her head to the side – almost a perfect mirror of the gesture Gekto so often performed. “Do you intend to do me harm?”
“I might,” Gekto replied, flashing a smile that was really just a display of teeth. “The longer you stay, the worse your odds are gonna get.”
There was, then, clearly the beginning of a long and pregnant pause – one that was immediately aborted as Nokka broke into an nigh-musical peal of laughter, one that left Gekto genuinely startled as the politician laughed and laughed, then finally let out a contented sigh and reached up to wipe a tear from her eye.
“I’m sorry,” she chuckled, and now her words – though still immaculate and pleasant – were laced with a distinct undertone of condescension. It was like seasoning on a dish, subtle and yet at once entirely unmistakable. “I just can’t take any of you seriously. Every Winnower I encounter here wants to murder me – and that’s just a temporary reprieve from wanting to murder each other! The threat of violence is so thick in the air here that, well,” she shrugged, “I'm quite desensitized. And now, you, perched there in your shadowy little corner, snarling these comical half-threats-” Again, another peal of laughter. “I really am sorry, but you just sound ridiculous.”
Gekto was a very, very difficult man to anger. The First Shadow preferred to take the world in stride, quietly amused by the misfortune and suffering and chaos of it all. He was a man supremely comfortable in his own skin, who had proven himself an apex predator time and time again, even amongst a race of superior warriors. Insults – those he could not answer with the point of a knife – simply slid off his back like water, acknowledged perhaps with a chuckle or shrug of the shoulders and little more.
And yet, in just the span of a minute this woman had brought forth within him a level of indignation he had all but forgotten existed. And so, falling back at once upon the old and reliable, his hand drifted to the dagger on his hip as he told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was making a grave mistake.
But the Reformer just shrugged, turned on her heel – shot him a wink that flash-froze his anger, then shattered it in place – and left him stunned, shell-shocked at all that had just occurred. Baffled that he could be set so off-balance by words. Mere words! Even now he felt his ire rising once more, though he quickly bit it back down with a brief, indulgent little snarl.
Nokka was simply an opponent that no Winnower was prepared to face - a woman for whom strength meant nothing, and who cut warriors to ribbons on a battlefield that their minds could scarcely even comprehend. Amongst the Worm's chosen, arguments were won with fists and blades. Even Gekto, perhaps one of the oddest and most subversive Winnowers to ever live, simply lacked the tools to contend.
"Ridiculous," Gekto muttered, beneath his breath, as he opened the door and prepared to speak with his Eltok once more.