Humility

Iona had been in Ak-a-Kartam for less than ten minutes, and already she knew she would need to press Yuya to give an honest assessment of things in his first report to General Grant, Prince Abutai and Baatar Khan. There was a way of dealing with this city and the kingdom it ruled that had to be considered, grim as it might seem to a soul still as gentle as his. Gentle, not weak. Not any longer. She could bring him around to considering it, assessing it in his report, even if he would recommend waiting to try it until after diplomacy had failed.

Skinny beggars were not an unusual sight in any city. In most places, they enthusiastically approached you with a cup or a bowl, or at very least made a dramatic show of kneeling on their blankets. The beggars of Ak-a-Kartam had grown too skinny for that, had not a single shred of flesh to burn chasing passersby who probably couldn’t spare so much as a clipped coin-edge of copper, anyway. Instead, they sat languidly against the adobe walls lining the city’s main road, with only the strongest able to so much as follow the three of them with their gazes. She was fairly certain they had already passed at least two who had died where they sat, glazed eyes giving up their dew to the flies and the sun on these desert hills.

Under normal circumstances, encircling a city and starving it out took months or years. It could be so logistically demanding that the attacking force ran out of food before the defenders. Even when assaulting the walls would mean enormous casualties against all but the weakest defending forces, both approaches normally had to be weighed carefully in every siege, unless some alternative means of taking the city by deception, treachery, or negotiation could be found.

Circumstances here were not normal. If encircled and cut off from the countryside, Ak-a-Kartam would break within weeks, maybe days.

Iona had noted sharply increasing prices at the grain mills and bakeries of the last few villages before the capital city, and had the good sense to fill their saddle bags with dried figs and millet before they got inside its walls. As she, Gotai, and Yuya picked their way through the rougher outer districts, they noted advisories posted on the doors or shouted by the keepers of such inns as could be found near the city walls, all to the effect that no meals were available for sale. Just about every butcher’s shop, bakery, and market stall near them seemed likewise to be out of inventory, or nearly so.

While, thanks to her foresight, they had dry provisions, they were more inclined to use those as a supplement to offset high prices inside the city than to eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. Certainly not for their first meal after the long ride to get here. They moved deeper in, to more middling establishments the boys would be more comfortable in, even if they failed to feed her nostalgia for the waterfront flophouses where she had spent much of her childhood. Wherever they settled on, they would lay low and gather intelligence for a time, before they presented themselves at the palace as Cain’s emissaries. Which meant they couldn’t be ostentatious, but they had packed a wide selection of clothing, and could blend in just as well with small-time merchants as with rougher company.

They found a place tucked back from a market square in the center-east of the city, two stories tall with a shaded roof laid out with rugs and hookah pipes. Importantly, it had a perpetual stew over the fire, though it was watery and doled out sparingly. The only freshly-added ingredients were barely-edible sprigs of weeds, and sausages whose taste reminded Iona of a time her father's crew had been caught with nothing but the ship's cats to eat. But a long stretch on the road could make anything hot go down easy.

Once they had settled in, they sprawled out on the roof to eat, Iona directly across from Yuya, him cross-legged, her reclining with a rear railing overlooking an alleyway by her head, Gotai idly examining a hookah setup somewhere near her feet.

“Ye still don't smoke much, do ye, Yuya… Yuya?”

He sat rigid, spoon clutched over his bowl, eyes tracking something in the alley below them. She set down her own lunch and, cautiously, rolled on her belly and lifted her head to peer over the low wall.

There was a man walking briskly, casting wary glances behind him. Too young to be a priest of high rank, and wearing a sword that didn't look purely ornamental, but robed in saffron silk, with scenes of battle embroidered along the hem and shining patterns on the shoulders, only faintly visible to her with her light purplish eyes. Yuya’s dark eyes likely couldn't make those out at all. This was someone of means, almost certainly part of the civil or Temple service, but probably still low-ranking, a first-degree priest or a tax collector.

“Someone ye know, Yuya?” she whispered.

He held up a hand, shaking the sleeve of his tunic loose from a still faintly scarred wrist. “The last words I heard him say were ‘crucify him’.”

Iona drew a sharp breath, and her brow furrowed tight. She looked up and down the alley, and back over the roof. When she saw no one besides the tax-collector– the lack of even a single guard was unusual– she reached for a bundle, where her crossbow lay concealed.

She began to string a bolt, but Yuya held up a hand.

The tax-collector, seeming to catch the sudden motion from the corner of his eye, looked up. When he saw Yuya, his eyes squinted a moment, then went wide.

“Shit,” Yuya muttered, “there goes our anonymity.”

“Just let me kill the bastard.”

“Penitent!” The tax-collector called up. “I know what you are. I tried to come back and free you, once I worked it out.”

“Fortunately, I was favored by Heaven before the jumping scorpions finished eating me. You would have been too late.”

“I… know what really happened, and I spared young Ashset's life. He is in the city now, you may be able to help him.”

“Ashset? I haven't made up my mind whether I want to thank him, or to kill him. I know which one I'd rather do to you, Uzdel.”

“If you would kindly refrain, I am under orders to leave the city quietly, and resume my duties in Ak-Toum. Less selfishly, I would urge you to keep well away from the tabernacle of the God Bulan on the temple grounds, and any of his priests. You can find Ashset in the temple, but do not make it known to anyone else that you are not of Nod.”

“Why? What do I have to fear from the false Lugo god?”

“Our own god, Khur, is… unwell. I do not know how that comes to pass, for an immortal, but I suspect his visiting counterpart may be to blame. Bulan has expressed an interest in seeing you. These two facts, taken together, lead me to believe you had best not give him the opportunity.”

“Your recommendation is noted. To your great fortune, I am a forgiving man. I will allow you to leave this city… as I left the cross you put me on. Down to your undergarments, now.”

“Now, Penitent, be reasonable.” As he spoke, he brought his right index finger to his left forearm. “I was only doing my duty.”

Yuya whispered sharply, “He's signing a silent incantation, tracing Antediluvian writing on his skin. Don't shoot, I'll handle him.” Then, louder, “Din eparu Hiway samayat, yid’im hei!”

With that spell, as Uzdel's own stirred the air around him and whipped up his robe, Yuya leaped down directly at the djinn-invoker. The wind and dust surrounding the Jalabartan sorcerer coalesced into the shape of a man’s upper body, held out its hands to the falling Penitent, seized his leg…

And directed his foot straight into Uzdel’s face. The tax-collector fell with blood streaming from his nose, the djinni dissipated with the spell invoking it, and Yuya stood with a foot on Uzdel’s chest and the point of his sword above his eyes.

“Did… did you just… command my djinni? Using a variant of the same incantation I captured you with months ago?” His eyes went from the tip of Yuya’s sword to the mirror hanging from his neck. “Underhanded little thief. You’ve fallen in with the Cainites, then.”

Yuya bent down, drew Uzdel’s broad-headed sword, and cast it aside. Then he found an inkwell in among the clutter pockets inside his robe, dunked a thumb in it, and drew an Antediluvian ideograph on the tax-collector’s forehead as a priest might anoint a congregant with sacred oils, muttering an incantation all the while.

Struggling desperately, Uzdel barked his own incantation back at Yuya, then only stared at him in horror. “I have built up this connection with the djinn for years. How can you simply–”

“I will be taking your weapon, your money, your fine robe, and anything else of value on your person.”

“I have told you what I have in order to help you.”

“And that is why I’m taking milder vengeance than you deserve. It is well you did not do to my friend Grant what you did to me. Be glad I am not taking your life or your tongue; my companion up there desperately wants to put a bolt in your chest. Run back to your governor in the Eastern Province, and do not disobey a single one of his commands, unless he is such a fool as to send you back after me. I am here as an instrument of the Lord of Death, from whom not even your gods are safe.”

Later that day, as they scouted out the streets nearest the Great Temple, Yuya laughed about the encounter. “I had been working on that spell ever since I started learning to speak Antediluvian. I built it around bending the effects of the first spell ever cast on me in my own favor, thinking we might come here and run into djinn-invokers casting similar spells at us. I never expected the same djinn-invoker to try hurling the same spirit at me.”

Gotai stroked his chin. “And the mark you put on his head? ‘Desolation’, was what it said, right?”

“Sealed his power completely. He can’t commune with his djinn anymore… at least, not until he scrubs it off. I wonder if he’s figured that out, yet.”

His dark eyes twinkled, and Iona got her hit of nostalgia today, after all. He might well have one his gamble, that the mix of terror, anger and shame that djinn-invoker would be feeling at this defeat, as well as his stated distrust of the Lugo god, would prevent him from speaking of the altercation until he was out of the city. Either way, when he eventually spoke, he would start to garner a ferocious reputation for Yuya, as a dark, otherworldly sorcerer trained in savage lands who could effortlessly wrest control of spirits from men who had studied and practiced at the Great Temple for years. And he had done it with an act of mercy, a withholding of retribution richly deserved.

Iona decided that she had found her new captain. She would ride, sail, or walk even on bare feet with Yuya for the rest of her days, to the ends of Nod and beyond.