by Jay Requard
in Issue 143, December 2023
Every time she shut her eyes, the jar of the wagon’s wheels or the shake of the cabin woke her, splashing bright red violence across her mind. Too exhausted to keep her eyes fully open, the memory reformed anew.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
Magic flashed, men screamed.
Blood.
Blood and screaming and iron thrusting, opening, piercing.
The wagon’s vibrations battered her aching feet. The clang of the shields, heavier than she expected when they first handed her one, and the thud of the overlong spears on the earth, roiling like rain-smashed water, and then stone, tiled and cracked with weeds had set a ruinous beat too timed too well to her heart’s.
A man died beside her, burnt alive by fiery magic. The smell of ash—boiled blood and skin—clashed with an incense stuck in her dark nostrils. That endless chant had rung inside her heavy helm, leaving her dazed throughout the battle. Everything was too heavy.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
Screams of the dead.
The shine of firelight on their spilled guts.
Pools of red, hot and bubbling up to her ankles, seeping through her sandals.
Unable to move every time the wagon jarred, or the rough bench underneath provided little support, nor did the two Grinders she wedged between.
Grinders.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya… Char-vak…
Now one of the Grinders herself, Pup dared to move her heavy, heavy head and scanned the covered wagon. Through the dim, stale space she spied thirteen more bodies crammed inside, all in states akin to hers collapsed in what little space they could. The stench of blood, coppery and dank, joined with the sweat steaming off every exposed bit of flesh. Those still awake whispered to each other, conversing over the thicket of spears and shields crowding the aisle between the benches. Too tired, a second worry entered of injuring herself if she dared shift her legs among the jumble of wet, rusted points.
Every bit of Pup, exposed or covered, was splotched by the grime of the battlefield, darkening her brown skin a gross gray. The smell did not bother her as much as the creeping sensation, itching here, running there, did in the crevices where flesh rubbed and chaffed.
She had traded the poverty of Karish’s alleys for this?
Trying to close her eyes amid the stench, the grumble, and the constant wet, they popped open again when the darkness in her mind exploded again.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
Blood. Blood and screaming.
She had killed a man at the end of her spear. Trapped in the confines of the sellswords’ phalanx, the choice had seemed simple then.
Before her spear broke his face like a melon.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
Bile worked in her empty stomach.
Pup held, too tired to move, but desperate not to vomit.
“Hey! Hey! Up, you lot! If you’re awake and the man beside you isn’t, move him until he is!” a voice near the front of the wagon barked. “And if they ain’t moving say something now!”
The entire cabin roused on the order. Men and women clamored on the benches, the sudden start of their legs knocking the forest of spears. She braced, hoping the old bronze greaves, which dug into the tops of her sandals and knocked her knees, protected her from the iron scratches. A few leaned forward and pulled off their helmets, dropping them atop the canopy of wooden shafts over shields and discarded swords, or resting them on bloody, dirty knees. Dulled by the haze of battle, every weary eye turned toward the front.
A man leaned forward, passing his black, red-crested helm to the sellsword in front of him. His dusky hair cut short to the brown scalp of a Dager from the west of Pup’s homeland. He spoke in loud, slow words.
“Everyone up?” He nodded when a loose murmur of grunts answered him. “Right. If you’re a pup who survived, raise your hand.”
Shoulders aching, but nowhere near as bad as her back, Pup lifted her right hand. She didn’t have the strength to answer.
“Right here, Wood,” said the sellsword across from her, another Sutian like Pup. “She raised her hand.”
Wood nodded, his focus fixed on Pup. “Fantastic. Glad you’re alive, new girl. Anyone else?”
No more hands rose from either bench. Pup lowered hers, unique and alone.
No longer paying her attention, Wood continued, “Captain wanted me to tell you all we succeeded. Wouldn’t have gotten back in this shit-wagon if we hadn’t.”
A few of the veterans laughed, a dark sound that unnerved Pup. Others remained silent and listened with hard, half-lidded expressions. More than a few remembered, their expressions haunted. Just like her. The sudden understanding eased the loneliness.
“Captain and Thumbs got their hands on Shagra’s Conch. We had to cut through a lot of those damned priests and their shit-bag minions, but we got them there. The Captain wants me to express his sincere and loving thanks and wants to remind every one of you, as he does to every other Grinder in the other wagons in front and behind us, that we will be rewarded richly once we settle camp. We have food and drink and the sun will shine on us tomorrow.”
The mention of alcohol and sunlight raised a cheer out of the veterans, all of them stomping their feet. The spear-forest clattered a terrible song to support their tired glee. As quickly as it rose it settled, a wave crashing on the depleted shores of their mirth.
“Alright, settle.” Wood cracked a half-smile. “We’re going straight across the border into Dageria. Don’t know if this cult is going to come chasing us or not, but we’re going to get a good distance before stop. So that grub and grog is on the way, but it might be a bit longer. Just hold tight and we’ll feast when we stop. Shed the blood!”
Every single Grinder in the wagon answered his call with their own. “Save my brothers,” they intoned, no amount of exhaustion sapping the oath’s sincerity. The words reverberated in Pup’s ears and chest, something akin to the holy mantras of her people’s seers and priests. Having settled back at his end of the bench, Wood disappeared among the tired warriors. The quiet retook the cabin.
But only for a few minutes.
One of the men closer to the front of the wagon spoke up. “So nobody is going to say anything? Nobody?”
“Just another day,” someone replied, though Pup could not place the source.
“To Naraka with that,” said the first speaker. “Thumbs leapt the balcony and landed like it was nothing. You saw it, I saw it. Thumbs did that.”
A small rumble of laughter broke out among the sellswords, both sides shaking in their chest plates and pauldrons.
“Thumbs does a lot of things,” Wood said, the one clear voice in the din. “Some of you aren’t used to it yet, but that’s him. Marl too. Somehow that old man keeps up.”
“Marl ain’t a man,” said a Grinder at the other end of the wagon, a Sutian woman still capped in her red-crested helm. “Ain’t he the Captain’s brother?”
“Where did you hear that nonsense?” Wood asked. “No, Marl ain’t the Captain’s brother, and before you all go in awe and wonder, Thumbs is a man too. I’ve seen him piss and shit, just like the rest of you.” A long pause. “Though he might be cleaner about than you lot. I’d awe over that.”\
“They were cutting those priests down in droves before we even breached the steps down to the burn pit.” The mention of the scene conjured an immediate quiet again, and not too soon for Pup. Already the chant echoed at the edges of her hearing.
Char-vak-ya…Char-vak-ya…Char-vak-ya…
“Hey.”
The man to her right, his sandstone flesh darker than hers, nudged her.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
The push shifted her back to terror. Blood. Blood everywhere. She dared look at him. For all she knew, Pup had murdered right beside him.
“You hear that?” he asked, his dark eyes hard and alert.
Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!
“Hear what?” she thought herself foolish enough to ask, as if the chant existed in her head alone.
Wood shot to his feet. “Shields and spears! Shields and–“
The rest of Wood’s order tore away as the wagon’s wheels left the earth, a curious sensation she did not register until Pup spilled into the mix of bodies and weapons tumbling in the air. She blacked out in the twisting mass of screaming faces, gnarled limbs, and iron.
*****
Fingers dug into her temple as a hard, calloused palm smacked her cheek. A sear waking her from her stupor, Pup startled, eyes popping open to a bright, overcast sky. She inhaled hard to feed her air-starved body before a face popped into view, the owner’s voice loud in her ringing ears.
“You alive, soldier? Answer me!” a blond man of the west screamed in her language. “Answer me, damn you!”
A force pulled her up by her breastplate and shook her. Each knock stealing some of the air she had inhaled, her teeth clacked together. The sting in her jaw made the words tumble out. “Alive! I’m alive!”
The blond sellsword stopped shaking her and let go. His strong hands and heavy fingers peeled her eyelid up to expose her fully to the daylight. “What’s your name, pup?”
“Lava!” she answered, the name she had left behind in Sutia hammering in the center of her skull. Her helm had been thrown someplace. Nerves from scalp to toes lighting in electric fire, she twisted her head and eyes away from the man’s probing fingers. “Lava!”
“This one’s good!” He waved fast and impatient. “Wood! Wood, get over here! This pup made it!”
The blond sellsword darted away from her as Pup sat up, brushing the long tangle of her black hair from her vision. Ragged and dirty, she brushed the mess over her shoulders and slowly worked to her feet, an excruciating climb against the disorienting pain shooting through every limb. Steps uneven, she teetered as a familiar soldier marched up to her.
Capped in his low, angular helm, Wood held in her place. “You see me, Pup?”
She nodded weakly, more attentive to getting her feet under control.
“Then straighten up and find your gear, or something usable,” he said. “Hurry and get back to me! On the double!”
Wood marched onto the next dazed Grinder beside another heap of splintered wood and canvas. The trash was an odd detail, clearing the fog as she absorbed the scene. First she noticed how much debris surrounded her, the former boards of the carriage snapped and sticking out of the soil. Canopies surviving the fall, no matter how twisted or broken, remained intact in places where fire did not consume them. Smoke and sweat and iron, already hot in her nose, covered the stench of broken, bleeding bodies trapped in the burning piles strewn about the base of the cliff they had fallen from.
Or had been pushed.
The entire line of wagons carrying the Grinders Sellsword Company had fallen off the side of the mountain.
The terrible circumstance and absolute wonder of her survival, whole and uninjured, seized Pup until Wood’s voice found its way to her again.
“Pup, fucking move! We don’t got time, girl! Move! Your! Ass!”
Spurred into action, she went in search, not knowing what to find first. The multitude of splinters, broken in all shapes and jagged, cluttered and covered flat-lying shields. Pup spotted an intact shaft under one of the fallen bodies, and gently removing it, she extracted an undamaged spear. Luck helped her find a helm next, slightly dented in the back but un-cracked and whole. Too tired to be pleased with either find, she used the first as a crutch while bending to slowly lift the latter.
“Pup!” Wood reappeared at her side. The sellsword had placed his helmet on his dark head, its blackened bronze smeared in mud. He shoved a sword into the belt around her waist, its three-foot scabbard bruising her hip as it passed through. “Get your shield and helmet! I need you on the line right now!”
“Yes… yes—”
“What, Pup?” Wood growled against the left side of her face, nose pressed against her cheek as he focused on securing her sword-belt.
She nodded hard, enraged that the Dager had broached her space. “Yes sir!”
“Good girl!” He ran off with a half-grin, snarling something under his breath before he caught up to the next unwary Grinder pulling gear from the wreck.
She thrust her arm through the straps tacked on the bronze shield’s wood-backed frame, its twenty pounds causing her to regret leaving Karish no matter how bad the squalor had been among body snatchers as bad as the Charvakas. Pushing down on the spear in her hand to lever it up the rest of the way, she planted the shaft in the mud before she craned down and plucked up the recovered helmet. Sized a bit smaller than the one the company had issued her the day she left a mark in their ledger, she forwent the strap under her jaw. A few steps to turn about in place, she spotted the rest of the sellswords forming at the edge of the tree line meeting the cliffs.
The first man who had woken her, the pale healer named Stitch, pointed at her. “Get your ass over here, pup! Move!”
Pup hurried to the group, already ten strong. Three more followed behind her, one of them stumbling.
“Get that man on his feet or sit him down,” the healer hollered, louder than before. “Wood!”
The sellsword who had led her wagon appeared at Stitch’s side. “Tents are up! We have the Captain resting.”
“Take over,” said Stitch. “And go find those two gods-damned idiots! We’ll be lucky if they’re not already dead out in the woods!”
Wood assumed the company surgeon’s place in command. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Stitch was the nice one! I’ll have to kick your ass if—”
Every single survivor able to stand walked if able or ran if possible to the call of the booming Dager. A few brought only swords, but all helmed and shielded again, they closed in their mass. One person pressed against Pup on the right, a tall man, all of his weight atop of her shoulder, but another on his opposite side ducked under his arm. A short man, he held steady so his brother could rest.
“Thank you, sister,” the first Grinder said to Pup. “I will owe you.”
Burdened then relieved in a breath, she simply glanced up at him and nodded, intimidated by his height.
Wood barked for their attention and gained it. “Eyes forward!” He surveyed them, his amber gaze roaming as he evaluated each in passing. Sometimes shaking his head, the shock of the crash had left a tremor in the hands gripping his spear, but feet set wide, he held in place. A slight haze of tears filled his vision before he banished it with a grunt. “I’m happy to see each and every one of you fuckers alive. I really am. But we’ve got work.” He thrust his spear behind him, toward the trees. “The Captain hit his head—” He heaved on the verge of breaking, the tears flowing down his ruddy cheeks.
One of the sellswords in the group spoke. “Just say it, Wood. We can take it.”
“Stitch is doing his best,” Wood said with cracking words, “but we’ve picked up the pieces of what happened in the middle of all this shit. The Charvakas knocked us off the road and took Shagra’s Conch after we landed. They went off with it, and low and behold, our brave Commander and Lieutenant took off after them!”
“Oh, those bastards,” said a woman. “Always those bastards.”
Wood stifled a mean laugh. “We’re going after them. I’m going and I’m only taking three of you with me. We need to run real fast to catch up. The rest will stay here, recover what you can out of these heaps, and guard the Captain with your life. Understood?”
Many nods clacked as the bottoms of their bronze helms knocked the collars of their breastplates.
Wood searched them again with more intensity. “Bucket, you’re with me. Sweet, you are too.” He leveled his focus on Pup. “And the new girl. On the march!”
*****
Last in the pack, Pup struggled to heft the heavy bronze shield on her right side. The point of her spear kept dropping behind her back as the shaft slid on her shoulder. In the midst of this juggling the need to keep up with Wood and the other two Grinders added a frantic energy. The three men, taller than her by a head and quick on their sandaled feet, she tried to maintain a constant sight on their helmeted heads, the only odd angles cut from the dark she could follow. Away from the cliffs they had survived, the four sellswords made a hard march.
The forest, humid in the summer night, echoed with sounds unfamiliar to her urban ears, where the noise of her days had been the rabble of people or the animals that thrived in their squalor. Now the unknowable tapestry, once full of body snatchers, pimps, and slavers seeking homeless girls like her for twisted delights, rang with wildlife, near and far away, under the screech of night birds. Somewhere she thought an elephant lowed to their herd.
She almost stumbled when Wood halted. The other two Grinders stopped on the instant but weighed by the momentum of her weapons and gear, she skidded in the dirt. Able to right herself before she collided into Bucket’s broad backside, the man half—pivoted toward her and clapped her shoulder.
“Down,” Wood said.
The four sellswords squatted in the long grasses, beneath ironwood trees whose canopies blotted out a sky blanketed in brown, featureless clouds. Her eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness, Pup tried to spy on the cause of their concern when Bucket patted her on the shoulder. Quick to his bright, flashing eyes, she noticed his finger pointed in the same direction Sweet and Wood looked.
At the edge of a small glade a stream overflowed its banks, creating a muddy trough. The surface gentle and still, several humps broke the plain. She did not miss the small shift of moment past them in the next wall of trees, as if a shadow had stepped out for a moment, only to hide again.
“Boys have been working,” Sweet whispered over Wood’s shoulder.
“We’ll go right,” Wood said as he hefted the long spear in his right hand. “Keep an eye to the left, Sweet. Bucket, close the rear and keep it closed. New girl?”
“Yes sir?” Pup asked, surprised by the attention.
“Keep up. Bucket can’t keep watching you. Stay at my back or don’t follow at all. You hear me?”
For the firmness, the warning in the order, she also heard the need in his voice to stay close. He cared about her life and keeping it. “Yes, sir.”
“Shed the blood,” said Wood.
“Save my brothers,” Bucket and Sweet responded as they broke into position. Pup mumbled it as she hurried to stand.
The Grinders rounded the muddy field. Over the small divots hidden beneath the puddles, filled with water and sludge, no matter where Pup stepped wet seeped. Wood pressed them at an even pace and, passing the corpses face-deep in mud, scuttled them beneath the trees. He knelt down beside a body dressed in little more than a dark, homespun dhoti that wrapped the man’s lower torso and legs. Grabbing a shoulder, he rolled the dead man onto his back.
Entrails pulsed out of a large wound, grossly falling out as the body shifted. Opened by several clean stabs and a slash, the smell of offal and shit flooded Pup’s nose, flooding her throat in burning bile.
“Charvakas,” said Sweet, who had lowered his shield to the ground and rested on his spear. “Looks like Marl and Thumbs aren’t far.”
Screams broke the night. Several men wailed in terror before, second by second, they silenced.
Wood popped to his feet. “Close enough to be killing in earshot and getting theirs! On the double, Grinders!”
He charged ahead, paying no more attention to the dead cultist at his feet as Sweet and Bucket marched through the spilled guts. Unwilling to be left behind, Pup swallowed and paid the body no mind. Eager to get away, more screams stopped the fresh surge of life the brief respite had given her.
Men died in the shadowed dens, sometimes one or two at a time. Then short silences, stuttered between cries of death and the night song trying to reestablish itself. Before long the Grinders ran into another clearing after a short rise away from the fens. At the next tree line a figure squatted over another dead Charvaka. The outline of a sword in his hand, the blade gleamed dull with sticky blood.
Pup almost raised her spear and shield until the other three sellswords rushed to meet the figure in the darkness, who spotted their approach. Rising from his crouch over the dead fanatic, the killer used his free hands to comb back his long, blond hair, revealing a gore-splattered but handsome face, pale and sharp with bold blue eyes. A Helmlander from the far west of Talav, like the company’s surgeon Stitch, he nodded to Wood first.
“Glad to see you boys,” he said, weirdly at ease. “How many dead, Wood?”
“Just a few, Marl,” Wood replied, smiling in his helmet. “Captain’s in his tent. Where’s Thumbs?”
“After that damned conch,” Marl said as he backed away a few paces. “The forest is full of these damn Charvakas. Followed us all the way from Jaiaspur, the bastards.” He gave firm nods to Bucket and Sweet but paused on Pup long enough to furrow his unblemished brow. “Who’s this?”
“The only pup that made it,” said Wood.
Marl’s curiosity dimmed. “Ah. Lucky you, new girl.”
“What’s the plan, sir?” asked Bucket, his high, light voice surprising to Pup’s ears. “We go after Thumbs?”
“No choice but to,” said Marl, bending at the waist. He wiped his sword on the ground, cleaning the blade of the mortal life he had shed. “There’s more out in these woods and they aren’t just going to leave us be. He and I got into several surprises when—”
The Lieutenant of the company’s words cut short when a resounding chorus struck up in the wood, weaving through the trees and scattering over the tops of leafy canopies, not moved by the breeze, but raw power. A mournful noise at first syllable, it vanished under an aura of malice, a petrifying chant which staked Pup to where she stood in the hot, hostile night.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
“They’re coming,” Marl said, his sword at the ready. He pivoted, facing the trees around them.
Braver than she by experience and measure, the four men moved as one, backs in a circle. The odd one out for her terror, Pup ogled the scene until Wood shouted at her, his face a mask of controlled rage. Staking his spear by its butt—spike in the ground, he reached forward and snatched her by her bare upper arm.
“Get the fuck in formation, girl! What’s wrong with you?” he screamed. “Spears up! Shields out!”
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
Forced into position, Pup only had time to set her feet when Marl shouted more orders.
“Keep wide! Keep wide! They’re going to come from all sides!” He placed himself in the middle of the diamond, on the lookout in every direction. “They use illusions of themselves! They’ll charge forward, five or six at a time, only to be one or two! Don’t let them get behind you! Keep every man in front of you and you’ll hit the right one!”
“Real ones bleed?” asked Wood.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
A note of dark humor inflected Marl’s answer as they braced for the wave. “Shed the blood!”
“Save my brothers,” the other Grinders intoned, and this time Pup along with them. Knees bent, she rested the shield on her shoulder and turned it outward. The spear came next, a relief when its long shaft rested on the rim. Much easier than hauling on the march, she wrung her hammer grip on the ashen rod, certain each finger found purchase. The scene from the last battle, tight in a fiery temple, could not have differed more to the current fray, but the open, cool air allowed her the calm to put herself together.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
Pup had been in the back of the phalanx when the Grinders first assaulted the Charvakas in western Sutia, not far from Jaiaspur when they finally gave her arms and armor. Cramped in a line of men who had held each other’s shields up, including her own, all she had to do that day was balance her spear and watch in horror as men died in front of her, including one underneath her marching feet that she had done herself. She blocked out the image of his face caving against the focused force of her spear.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
The cultists surged out of the woods, dozens and dozens at once. Dressed in dark brown dhotis like her father used to wear when he cleaned gutters, metal ornaments hung on their ankles, wrists, and necks, the piercings in their ears holding a gauzy shine, lustrous but wrong in some way. The varnas on their foreheads, sandalwood-painted glyphs for their cult, bore a sinking sun that rushed at her in dizzying numbers. Hollering at the top of their lungs, a few had brought poor men’s clubs, but in their greater numbers the chance of having her weapons wrestled away, then bashed to death by–
Marl interrupted her despair. “The men with the clubs! Guard against them! Only them!”
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
The howling Charvakas out of the midnight forests closed. Pup braced when the first bodies contacted the front of her shield.
And vanished when Marl stabbed over her shoulder, skewering a man in the eye before he brought his club down on her helm. Dying on the spot, three figures among the mass circling the Grinders disappeared in a blink, the source of their illusion ended by the deft kill. Many remained, but the features of the corpse in front of her, somewhat distinguishable, allowed Pup to orient herself. She brought her gaze up again, this time trained on the nearest cultist with a weapon. A short man in his later years, the foe nonetheless charged at Sweet, thinking to slip past her and surprise him.
Pup pivoted, aligned the head of her spear, and thrust. Only a few inches, the iron head pierced the bones of his face. The sudden jerk of his falling body wrenched the shaft from her hand. Illusions disappeared, leaving far less than before, as if great clumps of men had vanished like in a bad dream. Shocked at what she had done, she froze until Marl backed into her.
“Get your sword out,” he snapped. “Close ranks! Walk these bastards—”
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
A sudden collision to her left knocked Pup and Marl off their feet as Wood tripped a bleeding Charvaka into them. Marl sprung up first, quickly hewing into another cultist who appeared above Pup in an instant. Blood sprayed in her face as she sat up, and almost gagging, she rolled to both knees and drew out her sword. Short, with a wide blade terminating at a lethal point, she almost stood when a hand latched onto her ankle. The fingers warm and wet with blood that smear between the lacing of her sandals, she glanced back to find Wood’s victim gaping at her as the air he tried to breath leaked from his torn throat.
“Char-vak-ya!” he wheezed, his fading words as he squeezed with what might he had left. “Char-vak—”
She stabbed, again and again, breaking apart his nose and brow. The blood horrid and bright, something pink peaked through the holes she made. The sight of her murderous act, the insanity of dying men and shouting warriors, drove her insane. Fear, stark and unalterable in the moment, spurred her out of formation, away into the woods the moment the fingers loosened around her ankle.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
“Pup,” Wood shouted after her. “Get back—”
The Grinders’ voices, the cultist’s chants, meshed together in a cacophony that drowned out everything. Pup ran and ran until they faded in the gloom.
*****
Pup stumbled, her plodding steps interrupted by a root she never saw. Her shield heavy enough to drag her to the left, her helmeted head clacked on its inward rim as she landed hard, in its shallow bowl. She rolled the other way, toward her sword hand, careful as she kept her blade above her head as she let go of the bronze-plated mass she had carried. Her shoulder and left hip searing, she slowly arose in the murky night. The shouting and chants had diminished only so much, and echoing through the twisting trees and scrub, she could still hear screams behind her.
Aware of what had happened, what she had done—of another man she had killed—Pup looked about in stark terror.
She gripped the hilt of her sword tight, wringing her right hand around the swell between the stopper-shaped pommel and ring-guard and fought the heaving in her chest. Sealing her lips together, Pup strode onward. Warring thoughts in her head tried to hamper every step, worries of how the Grinders might treat her if they came across each other again, if they’d accept her mad reasons.
If they even lived out there in the night, fighting against overwhelming and hellish magic.
Some small part of Pup hoped she never found them again.
The trees began to cluster the deeper she went. No light from the stars through the forest roof offered any help, if any had arisen past the storm clouds she last remembered before the Grinders’ carts tumbled down the cliffside. The ground under her sandals, soft with rot, dipped in places, but never so rigorous to harry her march.
What lay ahead did that for her.
The shouting had faded, but the chanting remained, growing syllable by syllable in clarity.
“Char…vak…ya…”
Flame in the distance, slipping rays of red light through the trees, stopped her cold.
“Char…vak…ya… Char…vak…ya…”
Strong in its certainty, the chant conquered everything. Not one voice, nor a pair, but a whole chorus sang in unison around a great bonfire, their bodies blocking its blaze as Pup closed on their position. The intonation, the sincerity, drew her back to dark nights in Karish, when body-snatchers who posed as wandering ascetics led their sick adherents out hunting girls like her in the dingy lanes, forever mumbling some broken mantra as they did.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
Hunched by the words, she ground her teeth in every effort not to scream, exhale, anything to keep away the chattering fear tight in her neck and shoulders. Closer and closer to the source, she remained where the shadows laid claim against the firelight. Dozens and dozens of men, maybe one hundred strong and each clad in dark, stained dhotis, swayed their arms and bodies to the endless words falling from their mouths, every intention shouted at the light in the center.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
Numbed by the power, Pup remained fixed from where she watched. Ensconced between two saplings, she blanked on what to do, where to turn, seemingly lost for her cowardice and foolishness. Illusionary or not, the numbers before her offered only a hard, violent death. Then, before all other things, her attention drew to a figure approaching the bonfire, one man out of the crowded ritual space.
In his hands he bore an old, mottled conch shell, its pinkish shield and twists painted with white chalk mixed with oil.
“Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya! Char-vak-ya!”
Unable to move, unable to think, Pup gasped as the cultist raised Shagra’s Conch high. The profane object shone with an unnatural gleam.
“I told the Captain there was more to you,” spoke a steady baritone beside her, “but I never thought you’d make it out here.”
Startled, Pup tried to dodge away from an attack that never arrived. The infiltrator remained fixed where he stood, looking down at her with his fierce grass-green eyes set in a sandstone face, dark like hers and beautiful, the chiseled outline of a warrior who stood out among every other warrior she had ever seen. He had brought only his sword. Then something odd caught her attention, a strange detail to the thumb of his sword hand. The fist gripping the hilt of his iron sword, the natural digit split at the second knuckle, sprouting a sixth growth that twisted to join tips with the first thumb.
“You’re, I mean you-you must be,” Pup said, almost swallowing her words.
“Thumbs,” said the Commander of the Grinders Sellsword Company. “Is the Captain alive? Or Marl?”
She answered without hesitation, unable to hide the truth behind whatever pitiful excuse she imagined in that moment. “I ran away from them. We were fighting the Charvakas in the woods and I—” Pup kept her gaze forward, too scared to see his reaction to her shameful admission, “I just kept running.”
He sighed, so light she almost missed it. “It happens.”
Pup dared to turn her head in his direction. “Aren’t you going to call me a coward?”
“You ever killed anyone?” he asked, ignoring her question.
She shut her mouth, then opened it again, her tongue too dry. “Tonight. And back at the temple.”
“Then not a coward.” This time Thumbs glanced her way, checking her over as he started to rock on the balls of his sandaled feet. “You’re going to have to make a choice now, Pup. You can either run beside me and kill more men, or you can run behind me and kill the men I fail to slay the first time. Either way when I give the order you follow it. Understand?”
She gaped at Thumbs and nodded, bereft of a better answer.
“I’ll go first,” he said, raising his sword to the ready. “Whatever you do, don’t lose sight of me. Fight back-to-back with me if you must but keep up.”
“By the gods, man!” She looked to the cultists again, their swaying arms and high chant a ringing forest of nightmares. “There’s too many of them!”
“There always are,” said Thumbs as he strode forward, wheeling his sword in his right hand to stretch his wrist. “Shed the blood.”
Pup balked in silence for a whole second before she followed. She did not finish the motto, oath, or whatever insane mantra these killers had made for themselves.
Thumbs dashed forward, his black hair flying off his handsome face as he sprinted past the first two cultists on the outlying edge of the circle. They ignored him until he hewed one of them down, his sword opening a man’s neck. The spray of blood from the falling dead coincided with the same moment dozens of other cultists, illusionary bodies, blinked out of existence. Shocked by the sudden show of violence among their retinue, several of the real Charvakas turned in his direction in time for his second charge. Their corresponding copies moved at once, some dashing to swarm the lone swordsman, others halting long enough to draw their clubs. A few rushed to their leader, the only unique figure among them.
Pup ran up to the man Thumbs had killed as he went at the rest, thankful when the still body remained in place. Passing by it, she raised her blade up and aimed herself at one of the club-wielders. She ran through four of him before she reached the real man, who startled when Pup brought her sword around. At the full end of her arm, the blade caught him on his dark forehead, opening flesh to the temple. He died with a gasp before his knees gave out.
Horrified by the ease of it, Pup tore her gaze away from what she had done to watch Thumbs kill two men in an instant. Illusions vanished as Charvakas bled.
Pup spotted the head cultist flee into the darkness while his guards charged the roaming death she followed. Diverting from Thumbs, she chased him into the thicket while the rest died under the sweeping blows of the sellsword commander. Her quarry scampered over fallen trees and broke through shrubs, the brambles scoring his brown body bloody before he tripped in the dark. Up on his knees before she came upon him, he raised the conch and pressed his lips to it.
The note blown from Shagra’s Conch quaked the earth. A short burst, given with the lagging breath of a frantic man, knocked Pup onto her back as the ground shot up, soil and stones flying in her face. The night provided no point to orient herself, and stabbing out with her sword first, she swiped wildly as she got to her feet.
The next note, more assured than the first, knocked Pup back down. This time she sat up, aching deep in her bones, but was unable to lift her sword. Blinking through the dust, she made out of the figure of the Charvaka as he came to her, the conch low in one hand. She saw the outline of a dagger in the other.
Pup tried to lift her sword again, her right shoulder slow to register her mind’s plea. He brought his weapon up, the point slanted right for her eyes. Too late to block, she held bravely before the Charvaka shuddered in place as Thumbs’ sword flew over her head and transfixed his stomach. The shocked cultist dropped his dagger first before grasping the hilt of the offending sword, unable to process the deathblow through his agony.
The conch, mottled rough and pink, fell from his hand as well.
“Now, Pup, now!” Thumbs bellowed behind her.
Pup stood up, sword in both hands to find the needed strength, and chopped the man down.
*****
Marching through the woods beside Thumbs, Pup kept checking between him, tall and tiger-like with his intense aura, and the conch she carried in her left hand. Having survived and won against odds she never considered herself capable of enduring had left her speechless.
“The job gets worse,” Thumbs said in the darkness, as if he read her thoughts. “This never gets easier. You did well tonight, but you have to keep doing well every day and night until you’re dead or you leave rich. Understand, Pup?”
The truth as fresh as the gore covering her, the fullness of the night’s events crashed together. How had she survived?
Heavier in her hand now, part of her wanted to toss Shagra’s Conch away, or break it against the ground, the joy of her victory dashed along with it. Her bloody sword in the other, she squeezed tighter to the hilt. Instead of the nightmares that had shaken her so easily before, the first conquest of the magical shell from the Charvakas had dulled the things she had seen, simply more memories of a hard life.
Unless she kept marching as a sellsword. Then, like Thumbs said, it got worse.
But as a Grinder. The name meant so much more now than when she left her mark in the Captain’s ledger. It was hers, to know and to be and to own.
“But why?” she asked Thumbs, “why do you keep going? The money isn’t that good. The danger is, as you say, worse and worse the longer we seek it. So why?”
His stride never breaking, Thumbs scanned the shadows ahead.
“I had so many reasons when I joined the Grinders,” he answered, almost at a half-whisper, “because there is money and I grew up the son of a poor warrior. I know what money can do. But you’re right. At some point the gold does not glimmer enough. Then the reason was because this is what my father did, and his father before him, so they could have lives after this. But I don’t know how anyone lives after this and neither did they. So, Pup, at some point I had to look around. The reason I stay is because I love the Captain, Marl, and I love the company. I would rather march to the farthest shores than see these people—my people—poor, or alone, or desperate without knowing that someone, even if it is only me, will stand beside them. That’s why I’m still here: because they’re all I really have in this world that means anything.”
Moved by his answer, Pup quieted for the rest of the hike through the hilly forests, now silent to the natural song of the birds, animals, and insects. Then new voices emerged out of the din, shouting a mix of languages, including Suti which drew her ears. At the top of the next hill they stopped to look upon the company as it set a small camp. The sellswords had gathered what gear had survived the wreckage and set their tents, most clustered around the largest near a ridge. A team of men and women, lacking arms but still in their armor, picked debris off one of the overturned carts.
Thumbs led the way down. “Don’t get lost once we’re in camp. Stay with me the entire time.”
Pup nodded as they reached the camp’s border. The two Grinders posted at its edge exclaimed loudly when they saw her and Thumbs trudge out of the woods, bloody and somber. The word spread of their return in a few seconds, one swordsman calling out here, or a spearwoman undulating her relief with a Dager prayer shouted full to the night sky, so her gods of horse and stars heard them, or the pair of men who intercepted them.
Marl threw himself at Thumbs, wrapping his arms around the tall warrior. “You stupid son of a bitch! I told you to stay with me!”
Wood came after him, nodding to Thumbs in greeting before his focus, as well as Marl’s, fell on Pup. Quick to spot the conch in her hand, their expressions mystified her.
Clapping his hands on his face, Marl spoke first, “Well, this is unexpected.”
“She found me in the forest.” Thumbs stood between her and his comrades as they took new measure of her. “Stole the conch back herself.”
“Now wait a second!” Wood waved away the possibility with his hands. “You’re telling me a snot-nosed little pup—”
“She kept up,” Thumbs finished before the Lieutenant had his say. “I believe I win this bet.”
“Wait,” Pup said, “you all were betting on whether or not I’d make it?”
“Where’s the Captain?” Thumbs asked.
Marl signaled for them to follow, and on the order he had given her, Pup did not lose him as she fell in beside Wood. The Dager studied her with an incredulous expression the entire journey.
The company medic, Stitch, happened to exit the same time they reached the half-open flaps of the Captain’s tent. His hands bloody as he slid his surgeon’s tools into a small leather case, he brightened when he saw the four headed his way.
“Stay here,” said Thumbs.
Marl and Wood halted along with Pup as the company’s commander attended to the medic, the pair falling into a whispered conversation. Before Stitch left Thumbs turned to Pup, his hand out. Understanding the unspoken command, she placed Shagra’s Conch in his palm, happy to be rid of the damned thing. He entered the tent without another word, alone with the captain of The Grinders Sellsword Company. The three stood there with Stitch, who came to loiter beside Marl as they posted at the healing tent.
“So,” said Marl, “I think we’re going to have to find her a name, Wood.”
The Dager beside her stared at the ground with his amber eyes before he spat on it. “Guess we do.”
“What?” Pup asked, her exhausted daze broken at her fellow sellsword’s odd subject.
“A name, girl,” said Marl. “All sellsword’s got to have a name.”
“She’s scrappy,” said Stitch. “Bucket and Sweet told me she did really well in the woods with you two.”
“Did they?” Wood answered. “You should probably go check their fool eyes.”
“No, we had a Scrappy once,” Marl said. “And she’s too pretty to be called Bloody. Or Pretty. Neither will wear well.”
“Stubborn?” offered Stitch. “I met a Sirtya during our time back at Bol-Braka whose name translated into ‘stubborn.’”
“No, that isn’t it.” Wood brought his gaze up to Pup, suddenly self-consciousness remembered the blood clotting in her hair and the miserable state of everything else. Then, without explanation, the Dager sellsword leaned forward in her space and sniffed hard. “She smells terrible, like the streets where we got her. Now look at her! Might be a bit before she gets a wash. What about Stinky?”
“Stinky?!” Pup said, her voice raised in protest. “Stinky?!”
“That’s it,” said Marl with a big smile. “Let’s call her Stinky!”
The four men cackled like the little boys she used to run with in Karish, too innocent to do anything worse than what was natural to them in the way of violence, but the tone did not hurt her feelings. She watched in awe as these brave, brave souls celebrated her. Furrowing her dark brow for a second, Stinky reached up and brushed bloody strands out of her face before the ludicrousness of the day brought laughter out of her too. The fading stars gleamed brighter as the coming dawn’s light raced across bloody skies full of rain clouds, a better end than the one she expected.
©December 2023, Jay Requard
Jay Requard‘s work has appeared in Bards & Sages Quarterly, Mirk Fantasy Magazine, and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine. He is also the author of several novels. His urban fantasy trilogy The Blessed and Possessed is due out in 2024 from Falstaff Books.