Chapter 4: Winners and Losers
Fourteen days after Mahkawn left South Bay, his great iron ships began plowing through the ice at the Straits of Zerai to reach the docks at Bashevgo.
For hours they moved at a slow grind, crashing through the ice again and again, the gleaming lights upon the hills of the city beckoning them, until at last he was forced to give up hope of reaching the docks.
The ship’s captains turned off the engines, settled for the night, and let the ice freeze around the fleet.
At dawn Mahkawn climbed down from the ship and trudged through a thick fog over the frozen sea for the last two miles until he reached the city of Bashevgo and made his triumphant entrance.
There was no cheering, no crowds, yet Mahkawn felt his victory keenly. In history books children of future generations would read of the Black Cyclops and his conquest of the Rough.
From the basalt walls of the city, Mahkawn climbed onto the gleaming golden laser cannon that sat atop the Wall of Five Hundred Cannons, which guarded the straits below, and as the morning sun touched upon him, he gazed down into the white sea of fog and ice and fired laser blasts to cut the ice, freeing the black ships so that they could enter the harbor.
Afterward, he rode the Death’s Head Train from Bashevgo to Mount Sidon, which hunched above the city.
From the days of the Starfarers, there were still vast buildings on the mount, constructed from exotic materials, designed with otherworldly domes and spires.
Beside these were newer buildings.
Three hundred years after the Starfarers had built here, captive Neanderthals had crafted monolithic buildings in black stone and then decorated them with horrific statues and columns.
Historians called it the “Decadent” period of architecture. Somehow, the older structures seemed to be the newest, the shiniest, the most radiant.
Mahkawn’s private train—the Death’s Head Train—was a macabre relic from that Decadent period. It had a giant engine of black iron, and upon its front was a bas relief of a Neanderthal’s skull. The train seemed to radiate evil, and no one could mistake it for anything other than the personal trans-port of the Black Cyclops.
After the thirty-minute ride, Mahkawn went to meet Lord Tantos in his palace chambers.
The Lord seemed distracted, yet Tantos spent the day debriefing Mahkawn meticulously, exacting death counts of Blade Kin versus numbers of slaves taken, ammunition spent versus booty captured.
Mahkawn delivered his records, listing the names, home cities, and description of each captured slave.
All in all, the mission had been a financial success—fifty thousand slaves taken, versus twenty-seven hundred Blade Kin dead.
The balance sheets showed that amount Lord Tantos feared he might have “squandered” on weaponry and salaries would be earned back more than triple when booty from the expedition was sold off, along with the excess slaves.
Then of course, there was the land. When the Mastodon Arm of the Brotherhood crushed the Hukm in the south, there would be hundreds of thousands of square miles of land, much of it already under cultivation.
All in all, it was a glorious war.
Yet near the end of the debriefing, Tantos took the log of Smilodon Bay and read over the names. He asked with a tone of concern in his calm voice, “You did not capture the Starfarer?”
“No,” Mahkawn repeated for the third time during the debriefing.
“I would be happier,” Tantos urged at last, “if you would lay his dead body before me.”
The Lord drew back his hood, exposing his own red symbiote. No one knew better than Tantos how hard it was to kill someone protected by such a creature. He peered down at the book, stuck one red finger on a name, read off Tull’s description, height, and weight.
“And this Tull Genet? Lord Atherkula informs me that this big Tcho-Pwi killed two of his sorcerers, along with one of our Crimson Knights. He suggests that we make an example of him, let him die in the cage of bones. Have you put him to death yet?”
“No,” Mahkawn said, controlling his anger, wondering how Atherkula had sent word so fast. “The death sentence is perhaps deserved, but the young slave is good, strong fighting stock. I wish him to fight in the arena, to earn the privilege of becoming Blade Kin. He also has training as a Spirit Walker. Rather than waste him, I believe he might come to serve in place of one of the sorcerers he slew.”
“You think he would serve us, fresh from capture?” Tantos asked. “Dubious. I doubt you could break him. If he fights as well in the arena as he does in the wild, he might well win his life. Yet I suspect that he’ll remain Pwi at heart, and try to escape the first chance he gets.”
“We have caught him twice. We could catch him again,” Mahkawn said.
“I think,” Tantos said, “perhaps Atherkula is right. Maybe we should execute him outright.”
“Humor me,” Mahkawn asked and Tantos looked at him askance. “I want this one, badly.”
“Very well,” Tantos said, obviously swayed by his good mood. “I will give him to you, but under one condition. At the spring festival you may let him fight in the arena, but on the morning before his first fight, you will take a hammer and break both of his thumbs.”
Mahkawn frowned. “But he will not be able to hold a weapon! He will lose power to his blows!”
“Tull is a big man, an accomplished fighter. Anyone who can strike through the armor of a Crimson Knight should not be allowed to fight in the arena without a handicap. Don’t you agree?”
One could not disagree with Lord Tantos. It was far too dangerous.
“If you wish, my lord,” Mahkawn said, thinking, Perhaps it would be kinder to execute Tull outright.
Tantos closed the books. “You did well,” he said, “yet I fear it may all be for nothing.”
Tantos stood and walked to his window, looking to the north. In his shadowed hall the roaring fire highlighted the red hues of his cheeks. “In the past month we have had numerous reports of white snakes in the ice, attacking our citizens. You yourself were attacked by the Creators. We’ve had to pull our Blade Kin out of the northern reaches of the Rough. In southern Craal, thousands of people are dying by drinking strange parasites carried in the water. We must strike back at the Creators soon.”
“I would lead such an attack, my lord,” Mahkawn asked, hoping that in this he might be honored a second time.
Tantos continued staring north. “We cannot attack the Creators until we know where to find them. They’re sending gray birds to watch our city walls, and I have some of my Blade Kin prepared to follow the birds on hover sleds, like bees to their hive, when they return to the Creators. Within a few weeks we hope to know where to hunt. You will be among the ranks of that attacking force, but I myself will take the lead.”
“As you please, my lord,” Mahkawn answered, dismissed.
He left the palace while the sun hung low over the snowfields, and as he watched his hot breath steam from him, Mahkawn thought of dinner. The cold was causing the arthritis in his left shoulder to flare up. A sour mood settled on him.
I’ve been defeated, he thought. He had hoped that this campaign in the Rough, a campaign he had prepared for over fifteen years, would be his last, but now it seemed the Creators conspired to rob him of peace.
Even Atherkula, with his wagging tongue, had managed to rob Mahkawn by convincing Lord Tantos to take Tull’s life.
Mahkawn thought briefly of Tull, of his little home in Smilodon Bay, the simple pleasures Tull had taken with his wife and child. The fact that Mahkawn had irretrievably lost that option as a way of life made him feel even more defeated.
He thought of his own favorite, of Pirazha in her stone house, and the kwea of his time spent with her.
It had been months since he had spawned with her, and he thought longingly of her golden eyes, of the orange hair going silver, of the sagging breasts with the dark nipples that had suckled his children.
I’ve been too long at sea, too long without sex, Mahkawn told himself.
He went to the Death’s Head Train. Right now he needed Pirazha more than food or drink; he needed the sweet perfume of her sweat, the embrace of her arms, the taste of her kisses.
He convinced himself that he should spawn, but a small voice inside ridiculed him: She breeds, but gives you only Thralls. Why not find a woman more worthy? Besides, is it really spawning anymore, now that she is past the age of childbearing?
Mahkawn answered himself angrily, almost defensively, No, but I shall spawn with the Thrall anyway. I’ve earned that much.
Mahkawn made his way to her cottage, a defeated man.
***