Mother Earth

Grant and Yuya rode side-by-side, scouting ahead of the convoy. They were nearly back to their war-camp, maybe two days, and the route from there to Cain’s encampment would be a foolhardy place for the Bekhites to attack them.

“So, Yuya, you have a girl back in Japan?”

Yuya laughed. “Only tried asking someone out once. I was a first-year at the time, fifteen years old. I’m seventeen now– or, maybe eighteen? Has it been a full five weeks since I got here? Anyway, my point is, I was still being teased over the incident until the day before I came here. Never seemed worthwhile to try again. What about you, Grant?”

The Texan sighed. “Her name’s Sarah. We’d been going steady since not long after I got out of the navy… not quite three years, yet. The same morning I came here, I was thinking whether I oughta get her a ring. Hey, Yuya?”

“Yeah, Grant?”

“That shaman talked some hot shit about how strong his supposed god was compared to other supposed gods. But he said he only knew a little about our world. You don’t suppose he’s been there, do you? Do you reckon… if you learn magic, do you think you’ll be able to get us back?”

Yuya considered it. “I can’t say I have the clearest idea of what magic can and can’t do here, but… my last memory of Earth is coughing up blood and falling down some stairs. Yours is a gun going off in your direction. Even if we don’t feel particularly dead… it does seem like a one-way trip, Grant. I’m sorry.”

The rode on in silence for what felt like a long time, though the late morning sun had not gotten much closer to the top of its arc when Grant straightened in his saddle. He fished his binoculars from his pack, and looked to a black patch on the horizon– was it moving?

“Bekhites. Yuya, warn the others.” Grant strung his bow and kicked Silver to a gallop, while Yuya wheeled Haiseiko around. He quickly crested a hill behind them, where he drew his sword and waved it at the convoy beyond.

“Bekhites!”

Prince Abutai shouted back, “How many? And where is Grant?”

Yuya looked behind him. The Bekhites were closing rapidly, and Grant was charging their left flank. “Trying to draw some off towards the east, or else to get himself killed. About thirty of them, it looks like.”

Another pair of scouts rode up from the convoy’s rear. “Bekhites from the south! At least twenty, including a shaman!”

Abutai took stock of the terrain. Though it was mostly flat, the convoy had been caught in a slight depression, with hills in front and behind. “Daguk, get the wagons circled! Piran, take the rearguard up that hill! Sauhur too! Vanguard, form up on me! Yuya, take this and fall in.” As Yuya and Abutai rode close, something long and wooden struck Yuya across the chest and rolled into his lap. A long, ash-shafted lance with a small steel tip.

The Cainite van advanced in a wedge, and sure enough, Grant had doubled back to their right, shooting behind him as half a dozen Bekhites pursued with bows and lances. Yuya started to angle off in his direction.

“Not yet! Let him lead them out of position. Lancers, hit their main formation on our left. Archers, between the two groups. Passing volley, then circle behind them, and everyone double back here!”

Yuya came behind Abutai to get on his left, and tucked the lance under his armpit. Arrows flew around him, horses and men screamed, and speartips glinted madly as the Bekhites countercharged them.

He and a Bekhite in a looted Jalabartan nasal helm locked eyes only for a split-second. Yuya leaned forward, his foe brought his lance overhand, and they met. Yuya couldn’t tell weather the resistance he felt was from a leather cuirass, a horse’s back, or unprotected man-flesh. Before he could see where he had struck, his helmet came down hard against his forehead, and he saw stars.

Next he knew, he was on the ground. The Bekhite was climbing to his feet slowly, his horse on the ground behind him with blood along its back. The man clutched at his inner thigh where his own blood mingled with his mount’s. Behind both of them, Haiseiko was still on his feet. Yuya held out a hand to rise, and felt the Bekhite’s lance in the ground beside him.

The cannibal’s sword came out, and Yuya rose to one knee, hurling the spear from an awkward two-handed grip. His foeman sidestepped it, but stumbled. At that opening, desperation came over Yuya, a half-thought, half-felt recognition that if he did not kill now, he might not get another chance. He drew his sword and swung high. Two sabers clashed, but the parry was just a little late and a little weak. Yuya followed through with the cut until it grazed the Bekhite’s neck. Now bleeding from two nicked arteries, he dropped his weapon, his sword-hand clutching his jugular, then collapsed.

Coming out of the tunnel-vision of the fight, Yuya saw that he now stood amid the bodies of Cainites, Bekhites, and horses, with a few similarly unhorsed men on both sides, busy fighting each other or checking their injuries. The two halves of the mounted Cainite formation were in front of him, both circling back counterclockwise. A Bekhite arrow whistled past him from behind. He grabbed the lance where he had thrown it, whistled for Haiseiko, and rode to catch up with Abutai.

When the Cainite vanguard had regrouped, they turned to finish any dismounted Bekhites who still fought. In final tally, they had inflicted about two casualties in that exchange for every one suffered, and the remaining Bekhites harassed their now-circled wagons timidly as the drivers defended from their cover with bows and slings. Once their leader noticed Abutai’s group preparing for a second charge, they broke off southward to join their second warband in its engagement against the Cainite rearguard.

Abutai followed hot on their heels. In the tumult on the southern hill, Yuya saw Grant darting in and out, loosing arrow after arrow. Sauhur sat stationary in the wild frenzy of horsemen riding past each other, any Bekhite horse throwing a mad fit and trying to throw its rider if it was led too close to him. Within the gap this opened in the fighting, a boxy wooden chariot behind a two-horse team had been parked, the pair seeming immune to the aura, their driver stepping down to face the shaman on foot.

This was a Bekhite shaman; Yuya could imagine no other explanation for what he saw. There wasn't the same fear in his motions as the other Bekhites showed for the Cainite shaman. His eyes, Yuya couldn't see; he wore a hooded rawhide cloak, stitched from sections about the right size and shape to be human remains. In the opening, there was a bronze mirror like the ones adorning Sauhur’s armor, covering his face.

As the Bekhite shaman alighted from the chariot, Sauhur's spell washed suddenly over his horses, and they fled in a panic. A hand came up to his reflective mask, and he removed it. Though Yuya was still closing at a gallop toward the melee, he saw enough detail of what laid beneath to make his hot-running blood turn ice-cold.

The hand lifting the mask had red marks around the palm and up and down the fingers, rounded bite wounds. The shaman’s eyes were a blazing orange and bloodshot, darting about madly. His skin was jaundiced, his cheeks hollow and gaunt, his lips… he didn’t have anymore. Dark, jagged scabs outlined a permanent skeletal grin. He licked his teeth, then bit down hard on his tongue.

He howled, not like a man in pain, but with a low, distorted parody of a wolf’s cry. His fingers, forearms and feet stretched, the bones audibly cracking and reforming, until the shaman crouched on four limbs and could still look a man on horseback in the eye. Fingerbones grew to sharp points that broke the skin beneath the fingernails, and a second and third row of teeth sprouted from his jaw. His fiery eyes were extinguished like candles blown out, becoming cold, dead spots of glassy blue. His breath formed a mist, and hoarfrost grew on the grass around him in defiance of the late summer sun.

Sauhur sang some incantation now, half-chanting and half-whistling, in the same language the tax-collector Uzdel had used to control his djinn. The lanky monster crept toward him slowly, until he cried, “Your name, demon! Tell me what you are called!”

In a voice like cracking ice, the monster obliged, with a bitter tone as though giving in to duress. “We are the counsellors of Yog the Final. I, who speak for the whole, am Wasaquay, the world-devourer’s herald.”

“In the Lord of Death’s name, leave that man’s body, Eater of Men, and never return!”

“This body is ours, now. He has given it freely.” The creature lunged at Sauhur.

Grant rode in from its left side, swinging Silver dangerously close to its long reach, and planted an arrow in its flank. It continued forward, and slammed into some invisible wall as Sauhur held up his hands. “Back, Penitent! This foe is beyond your strength!”

Heedless, Grant came behind the monster and loosed another arrow at its haunch.

It turned and, with uncanny speed, leapt over Silver, ripping Grant from the saddle and casting him on the hillside. As it climbed over him, he got his sword free and slashed at its face. Yuya could see as he closed in that Grant’s cut was sloppy, a twisting blow more befitting a baseball bat, and the sword did not bite deep. The creature raised a hand.

At full tilt, Yuya slammed his lance into its back. He had no training with any kind of polearm, had never practiced for a joust at the quintain, so he shattered his lance and nearly unhorsed himself off Haiseiko’s backside as he slammed into the frost-demon. Perhaps that was for the best, as all warmth was sapped from the weapon and the hand holding it at the moment of contact, and he could barely open his numb fingers to cast aside the broken end as he pulled himself back into the saddle.

Though the broken lance sat fully through its gut, the creature turned, its dead eyes casting a spell of fear that kept Yuya from either fleeing or drawing his sword. It opened its mouth, then its face impacted air turned solid.

Sauhur had ridden up beside him. The fear-trance left Yuya, and he drew his blade.

The creature bit again, and cracks formed in the magical wall, visible in the air like a breaking window.

“Can I trust you not to falter, Penitent?”

Yuya looked where Grant laid, sprawled on the ground, clutching his frostbitten sword-hand. “Whatever needs doing, I’m your man.”

The shaman touched the spine of his sword, and ran a finger down the fuller. Fiery Antediluvian writing appeared where it trailed, and when he finished, the weapon and Yuya’s hand burst into flames. Yuya jumped in surprise, but he remembered his word of a moment ago, and held the hilt tight. He could only faintly feel the flames’ heat, and on closer inspection, they seemed more to hover around him and his blade than to engulf them.

At the sight of the fire, the monster hesitated.

“My barrier will not stop rightly-ordered creatures, even if they are Penitents. Go!”

Yuya screamed, terror and fury intertwined, as he charged through the immaterial cracks. The demon-shaman opened its mouth, its jaw unhinging, and Yuya let the muscle-memory of swinging a scythe in the fields take over. The clean horizontal cut struck the overstretched tendons at the corners of its mouth, and the flames exploded outward. Yuya closed his eyes instinctively and pulled the cut through. When he opened them and looked behind, the creature’s head was reduced to two charred stumps.

The remaining Bekhite warriors cried out in alarm, and in ones and twos quit the melee to flee back over the plains. Most of the Cainites cheered, but rather than meeting their eyes, Yuya looked back to Sauhur.

The shaman gave him only a curt nod. That was enough. The White Circle waited.