The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

“I say it because if there was any way to deny you, they’d have done it,” she said. “The only way to get as far as you have, considering what they think of us, is to become undeniable.”

“You look awful,” she said. “There’s the sun chiding the cook fire for the hut’s swelter,” he said. Gifted Thandi chuckled, Nyah turned to her, and Thandi pretended she’d been clearing her throat.

“Because it’s wrong,” he said, working his way back to his feet. “It’s because the powerless, having no understanding or experience with how much real power can save or destroy, think too simply. They see things as either right or wrong, but the world and the purposes of those in it are distorted, misjudged when reduced to so basic a binary.”

The queen’s cause wasn’t his. Tau was fighting to get to Abasi Odili so he could rip him apart, turn him inside out, piece by bloody piece, because that was what it would take for the Nobles to see and hear a man like him. To be understood, he’d speak the one language the powerful share with the powerless, the language of pain, fear, and loss. The powerful had to be shown that people can only be pushed so close to the flame before they catch fire and burn everything down. He walked closer to the dragon.

Unable to take the heat, Tau stepped back. “When the time comes, I promise you freedom or a quick death,” he said. “As soon as I’m able, either way I’ll release you.”

“There.” The single syllable came from one of the biggest Lessers Hafsa had ever seen. She might even have confused him for a Petty Noble if not for the Ihashe grays he wore and the absence of the supplementary musculature characteristic of Noble males. Long ago, in her final year of studies, she’d wanted to write a treatise on the physical differences between Lessers and Greaters, but her adviser had warned her away from the topic, telling her that—

One moment the champion had been facing a mortal injury, and the next, he had one of his blades through the assassin’s sword arm, pinning it and the man’s poisoned weapon helpless. But it was the champion’s second sword that had spilled the most blood. It was buried hilt-deep in the assassin’s open mouth, and its point, having broken through the back of the man’s skull, vibrated like an instrument’s plucked string.

I believe that when his will finally fails him, he’ll die anyway, by his own hand.” “That’s not how I go,” the scarred swordsman said, as if his words were power.

The queen glanced at the champion before answering. “That’s not how we go,” she said.

He cut him once, twice, and as he’d done a hundred thousand times in the mists when demons came at him from every side, Tau thrust the sword in his left hand forward, a feint, reversed his grip so the point faced behind him, and threw his arm back. The black blade burned through the air until it met leather, flesh, the edge of bone, and finally, the softer stuff that tethers the souls of men.

Holding his weapon tight, Tau glanced over his shoulder and saw the stabbed man slice his fingers to ribbons as they danced drunkenly along the edges of the dragon scale.

Tau kept marching, limping. “Because the limits to which we’ve been yoked were never ours, and the stories we’ve been told about our nature, our insignificance, and our lack, they were never true.”

“The lie isn’t that we can’t be their equals. The lie is that they were ever anything but our equals.”

“And with that leg, you want to go scouting?” Themba asked. Tau opened his eyes. “I do.” Themba was pouting. “Stubborn as a dung beetle in an outhouse.”

The warlord, though moving at a crawl, was just to his right, and locking Achak’s position in his mind, Tau fled Isihogo for the real world. His soul still somewhere between realms, Tau willed his arms to move, throwing up his swords to block two of the twelve hatchets chopping at him. Ten hatchets slammed into thin air like they’d hit a wall, the illusory blades matching the height and angle at which Tau’s swords had caught and collided with the real Achak’s actual weapons.

“The illusions are reflections,” Tau told the dying man. “They have your burns on the wrong side.” Achak’s eyes went dim. “And earlier, I knocked free the hatchet in your left hand.”

“Rage is love… twisted in on itself,” he said, using some of the words she’d spoken to him on the night Zuri died. “Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.”

The fights that must be won come when they will, without care or concern for how tired, injured, or distracted a warrior might be. Tau knew that. He knew that the difference between the ones who stood and the ones who fell was that the truly triumphant taught themselves to meet all their fights, regardless of circumstance, in spite of the odds, and in defiance of fear.

Nyah waved away his objection. “If your ideas hold merit, they’ll win out in spite of your person.” “Yes, that’s the lie everyone unaffected by hidden hardships believes.”

“Vizier Nyah, I think the world is too complex for most things to be purely right or wrong. Given that, the way words, actions, or even intent is viewed depends on who is doing the viewing and on who is being viewed.”

“During the battle for this keep, I was in Isihogo with Gifted Zuri when her shroud failed.” Saying her name hurt more than he cared to admit. “The demons came for her, but I fought them away. It allowed her to draw energy from the underworld for longer than she could have otherwise.”

“So long as you do not take any of the underworld’s energy into yourself, your body here cannot be harmed by the demons there,” Tau said. “Note well, he said body,” muttered Themba, tapping his head. “Themba, I’ve done this before.” Themba opened his hands in Tau’s direction, as if to say the point had been made for him.

Isihogo was a realm with the substance of a waking nightmare, holding only enough detail to keep the mind captive. It

“Why you dressed like them, then?” she asked. Tau wasn’t sure he had a good answer for that. “I’m the queen’s champion.” “Liar,” the girl said. “Goddess’s bare ass, Nali!” the lead child hissed, making Nyah wince.

It’d be spare change to a Noble, but more than what most Lessers saw in a moon cycle. “Goodbye, Nali. Grow ever stronger and be powerful,” he said. “Bye, Champion Lesser. Goddess keep you close.” Tau smiled,

“We’re telling you the truth,” the queen said. “Long before we sailed to these lands, there were Nobles and there were Omehi and these were two separate peoples. It is why the Nobles are bigger and stronger than you and everyone like you. It is their gift.”

The thought hit Tau like a hammer. “Our Gifted… their gifts come from our race, the Lessers.” “Edification, enervation, and entreating are the gifts of the Omehi people,”

than he already does.” “Lady Gifted, as far as I know, the only path to becoming what others cannot is to suffer what others will not.”

“Themba,” he asked, “have you never met handmaidens with dragon-scale dirks before? How small is… ah…” Tau blinked. “I don’t know where you’re from.” Themba managed to look both shocked and hurt. “Nchanga. I’m from Nchanga, and I tell you stories about my home all the time. How do you not know where I’m from?” “Nchanga. Yes, I remember,”

“What does any such group, priding itself on being more than others, want?” she asked. “They wanted their claims and their beliefs about themselves to be true. They wanted to be more powerful and better than everyone else. So that’s what our queen promised them.” “Enraging,” Tau said.

“Her name is lost to time, but she was one of the most powerful Gifted this world has ever seen. She could walk the mists of Isihogo for a quarter moon before her shroud fell, and she’d seen the weave and weft of gifts from every race of man. She understood the nature of the Nobles’ power and she understood how to make it more.

“When the Cull had the Omehi trapped, the queen called down a Guardian to protect the people she loved, and she set the earth on fire. It took days for her shroud to fade, and when it did, the demons that had been waiting tore her asunder. “Her dragon, however, compelled by the memory of the queen’s will, blasted any who sought to follow the Omehi as well as the battleground on which the two sides had fought for more than an entire cycle of the moon. It is said that the land where that battle took place still streams with rivers of fire that smoke and fill the air with fumes so acrid they kill any who breathe it. Where we fight, the world burns.

Throwing its head back, the demon roared in pain, and Jabari began to laugh. It was a hacking cough of a thing, and he barked it in the face of the demon that had killed him. “I’ll be back. I’ll keep coming back,” he swore to the blinded beast, speaking around the blood that poured from his mouth before he died.

and we fought the Xiddeen as hard as we’d fought the Cull. In those early days, when the skies rained fire, the people of this land died in the thousands, and desperate to stop the carnage, the Xiddeen sent messengers with gifts, overtures, and foreign words of peace. The Dragon Queen returned their messengers to them one limb at a time.

“Fellate a scorpion’s sting, you wingless kudliwe!” the umbusi shouted. Tau tucked that one away for safekeeping. He’d trained among initiates, full-bloods, and Proven for an entire cycle and had never heard its like before.

Tau drew his weak-side sword and punched it into the man’s stomach. The dragon scale missed the man’s armored plates and was indifferent to the leather, meat, and muscle in its path. It went through the Noble like a shiver and he was dead before he could fall.

Champion Tau Solarin hefted his swords and charged the thickest mass of the demons. Demons and men had a language in common, Tau thought, and he meant to have a pointed discussion.

The women, men, and children of the keep had been placed on either side of the path leading to it. They were lying on their backs, each of them speared through the gut and held to the ground like a collection of beetles. Their hands had been tied to their neighbors’, so they formed a chain, and every fourth or fifth person in the chain had had their arms cut off at the elbows. It was a broken chain of the dead. The reward for a queen’s broken promises.

“Demons?” she said. “When?” “Now.” “Here? In this tent?” “Yes.” “Where?” Tau pointed behind her and Tsiora turned. “Champion,” she said. “Yes?” “We see it too.”

“Priestess, a fighter who will only go into battle when they’re at their best fights for pleasure and not principle,” he said. “The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we’ll only defend them in the sun.”

trident. “A trident?” “Yes, it’s an… ah… an old weapon. Osonton, I imagine. It’s like a spear with three points.” Tau tilted his head. “Why would you want a spear to have three points? That’s like a sword with three points,” he said. “It makes no sense.” “I didn’t say it made sense,” Kellan said. “It’s just the name of the thing.” Tau looked to Hadith. “You see? All the old stories are like this.”

Esi’s skin, the same dark velvet as the space between the stars, glowed with an allure matched only by the curve of her lips. Her cheekbones and chin were graceful, her nose the perfect place for gentle kisses, and she had eyes the sugared brown of a honeycomb. It was like looking at Tsiora, but because it wasn’t actually his queen, Tau’s defenses were down, and the thought surfaced before he could stop it—she was beautiful. “Goddess wept,” Tau said.

The dragons were intelligent; they had to be to hold the Gifted in Isihogo. They must have some sense that the calls they answered were a trap, and they came anyway. Without regard for themselves, they answered every cry, holding hope that one day it would be their missing child they found instead of bondage.

The black wrath, diving too fast for Tau to see, struck the beastling with it claws, driving talons through the body of the smaller dragon and into its neck, forcing the beastling’s head to the dirt. The bigger dragon roared, the sound setting Tau’s heart to pounding, and then, maw wide as the gap between the living and the dead, it snatched the beastling’s head in its jaws and cracked its skull, breaking the smaller dragon’s bones, scales, and face to pieces.

With its hold secure, it clawed and climbed its way up the back of the wall dragon, until in position and holding the helpless creature in its grasp, Black Wrath blew fire, coating its prey in a sluice of flame so hot and bright it turned night to day. The wall dragon writhed and screamed, but Black Wrath held it tight, blanketing it in a sheath of blazing suffering that burned the ensnared drake in a pyre of its own flesh.

“Nyah…,” said the queen of the Omehi as she shunted all of her power into her vizier. The sudden burst of light was blinding enough to push the demons back, and, eyes burning, Tau shielded his face. Her power drained, and glowing faintly, Tsiora dropped to her knees, exhausted, defeated, stricken. “Nyah, I love you,” she said, winking out of Isihogo’s existence.

“Champion, you… you must come back to us,” Tsiora said, and it muddled him to see her like that, so totally unmasked. She wiped tears from her face. “Above all else, Tau, we wish for you to come back.” So many had been lost to bring him here. “There is nothing in Uhmlaba that could stop me,” he told her as he left.

but I don’t see you hurting her or yourself. You may not love her, but you do care for her.” “It’s love that lets me do it,” Esi said. “It’s my love for you that lets me do it.” “Then you’ll break my heart,” he said, “because, after killing someone you care for, you’ll be lost too.” “Look what she’s done to us. I hate her.” “Don’t say that. Don’t even think

Still, it was her dress that held Esi’s attention. The material was layered and overlapping, simulating the appearance of scales, simulating the appearance of dragon skin. The effect was striking, and when Tsiora stepped onto the balcony, she didn’t look like a queen—she was one.

She still remembered every time her sister had become angry or upset and lashed out, telling her that she’d never be queen. Tsiora used to tell her that all the time. She’d tell Esi that, though they looked alike, they were different in all the ways that mattered. She’d tell Esi that she wasn’t special and she’d call her broken, mocking her and changing the words to her favorite songs