TWO - SAYANA
SEVEN DAYS AGO
Why were so many raiders dumb as rocks?
Sayana stared at the camp in the valley, rolling this question around her weary mind. It’s not like the job was hard, was it? It didn’t demand intellectual brilliance. If the palace tutors, who had taught Sayana when she was growing up, had given a lecture on How To Be A Raider – which, to be fair, she would absolutely have attended, because that would have been awesome – it would have lasted approximately five minutes. Be scary. Steal shit. Don’t do stupid things that will get you killed.
Apparently, the group of geniuses in the camp below forgot that last part.
This particular raider clan looked to have about fifty souls in it, with about twenty gers between them – the circular tents favoured by those in the Tapestry. Except instead of, you know, pitching their gers on high ground – where they could actually see threats coming – the raiders had made camp in the valley itself, surrounded by hills. Sayana was at the top of one, flat on her belly in the frigid dirt.
To make this particular choice of camp location even more special, there was a nasty-looking collection of boulders on a slope to Sayana’s left – boulders that were probably just a badly angled breath of wind away from toppling to the bottom, flattening the raiders.
Sayana could think of worse places to make camp – a nest of scorpions, perhaps, or in the middle of the Great Desert – but not many.
She stared at the rockpile for a few moments, wondering if the Weavers would take pity on her, and send the rocks tumbling before she actually had to go down there. Then she could pack up her stuff and go home.
“No?” she muttered. “Nothing for your humble servant?”
The rocks didn’t move.
Sayana briefly wondered if she should sneak over and get them moving herself, cut across to the other hill and do what the Weavers were apparently too lazy or smug to do themselves . . . but that just seemed like a lot of work.
She looked back down at the camp. Right below the boulders, three raiders in furs and dark green robes were playing shagai, idly throwing polished sheep bones. One of the three shagai players had a red slash across his face, which made Sayana even more annoyed. That was a Rakada thing. That was theirs.
It was almost as annoying as the clan’s name. They called themselves the Flaming Death Skulls, because of course they fucking did. What was it with raider clans and awful names? If it wasn’t the Flaming Death Skulls, it was the Brotherhood of Blood or the Screaming Weasels or the Endless Waves of Terror. The corner of Sayana’s mouth twitched; that last one was pretty good, actually.
She was north of the Khar River, the Baina Mountains looming to her west. The suns were setting behind them, the Large Eye and the Small, casting light that felt cold and pale. It was late winter in the Tapestry – a mild one, but still cold enough to cover the brown grass with crusts of frost, to sheathe the lakes in ice. Sayana wore a heavy cloak of yak fur over her deel and her leather armour, along with a thick hat jammed down over her ears.
She normally enjoyed winters. You had to be bloody careful, to be sure, with the temperatures this low, but the place took on a different kind of beauty. The grasslands were silent . . . but it was the silence of deep sleep, of stopped time. As if the world was taking a deep breath before starting again.
Sayana had planned on spending the winter warm and comfortable, hanging out with the other Rakada, playing shagai and drinking airag, occasionally taking Princess out to hunt for food. But could she do that? Nooooooo. Instead, she was here, after a night where she barely got a lick of sleep, staring down at a camp full of irritating morons with a silly clan name.
She scooted away from the crest of the hill, and down the other side. The thick, black braid that hung down her back had got caught underneath her, and she pulled it loose absently. When the camp in the valley was hidden from view, she stood, and began to make her way over to where Princess was quietly dismembering a horse.
Sayana was not a small woman. She was a shade over six feet, arms and legs corded with muscle. But she was dwarfed by her lizard mount. Princess was double her height, her thick body covered by shifting plates of scales. In the frozen dusk, the scales were a drab green, but when the araatan thundered through the sunslight, they glimmered in a hundred shades of emerald and indigo.
And Weavers, she could thunder. Fast as a horse at a full clip, with stunning amounts of stamina, that big tail with its torso-sized knob of bone at the end swishing the air. If you got in front of her, good luck. Eaten, torched, or simply smashed aside by that gigantic head. Pick your poison. And if someone had told Sayana that an araatan’s bite actually was poisonous, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
She came to a graceful halt at the bottom of the hill. At least, that’s what she tried to do. What actually happened was that her foot caught in a tiny, invisible divot clearly put there to fuck with her. She stumbled, going to one knee, wincing as a sharp pebble dug into her left hand.
Princess ceased chewing on the horse and looked in her direction. One of her eyes was a dark socket – she’d taken an arrow in it during a battle, only a few months ago. The yellow pupil in the remaining one gleamed with what Sayana could swear was mirth.
“Not a word,” Sayana told the araatan. “Don’t act like you’ve never tripped over your own feet. I’ve seen you.”
It wasn’t true. Princess was disgustingly agile, for something so large.
The lizard gave a low, rumbling growl, that big tail swishing through the air. Sayana rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t have another horse for you. You haven’t even finished the first one.”
Princess snorted, and gave the carcass a dramatic little shake. Sayana sighed, rubbing the back of her head.
It had been a bloody long winter.
The whole point of taming the giant lizards in the first place was so that she, and the rest of the Rakada, could live their best lives. The raiders in the Tapestry had been struggling to survive, a dying breed against a much stronger army. When the araatan had left the mountains for the grasslands, in search of food, Sayana had had the bright idea to tame them to use as mounts. Which had been an absolutely wild ride.
But they’d done it. Which meant that the Khan – Sayana’s father, thankfully only by birth – should have left them alone. Abandon his quest to move everyone out of the Tapestry and into his crowded, stinking city.
Anyway, after things calmed down, Sayana and her fellow Rakada had taken a well-deserved break to enjoy the results of their hard work.
It had been quite a restful eighteen hours, all things considered.
Turned out, Sayana’s dream of liberating the people of the Tapestry from the Khan’s rule was all well and good, but some of those people decided that, actually, they’d prefer to remain in city of Karkorum, as opposed to returning to grasslands which not only still had regular raiders, but now also had the kind that rode giant, ravenous lizards.
And since raiders still had to raid for supplies and food, especially with the winter creeping down from the mountains, they were starting to fight one another. Compete over who got to rob who.
A whole whack of those raider clans helped the Rakada win the day, fighting alongside Sayana and Princess. An enormous fire-breathing lizard evened the odds, but Sayana had still needed help to get it done. Those clans began asking the Rakada for favours. Asking for help with raids, so they didn’t lose so many of their own people if things got hairy. Asking for help in conflicts with other raider clans. Asking, quite reasonably, to be taught how to tame lizards of their own.
Before long, Sayana and the others were embroiled in an exhausting, ever-shifting web of alliances, favours, tiresome blood feuds. There was always someone pissed off at them.
It didn’t do any good just to say no. They’d tried that, and it brought no end of trouble. Which meant they’d spent the whole winter running around, putting out fires – ironic, given how easily an araatan could start one – desperately trying to deal with problems so that everyone would just leave them the fuck alone.
And the Khan might have stopped forcing people to move from the grasslands to the city, but he wasn’t just sitting there in a huffy sulk. He still sent his army after other clans, still had his troops show at the least convenient times imaginable.
The Tapestry wasn’t peaceful. The Tapestry was fucking chaos.
Eventually, Chimeg and a few leaders from some of the larger clans came together in a loose alliance – a very loose one, constantly in danger of collapsing like a badly erected ger. But that only solved half the problem. There were plenty of holdouts causing trouble, including the Flaming Death Skulls.
Oh! And lest anyone forget, the two countries that bordered the Tapestry – Ngu, past the southern deltas, and Dalai, on the other side of the Baina Mountains – had taken a special interest in the Tapestry lately. They were sending their own raiding parties, groups of scouts, probing for weakness. There were constant rumours of massing armies, troops poised to take the Tapestry.
It wasn’t the Rakada’s job to deal with invaders. No one could reasonably look at any group of raiders, bristling with blades and bows and bad intentions, and come to the conclusion that they were the ideal defensive force.
But it turned out that the Khan and his army of conscripts were completely useless at dealing with the scouting parties Dalai and Ngu sent. When those scouts started capturing and killing the nomads the raiders needed to, you know, actually raid, it fell to the Rakada to actually do something about it.
Sayana’s mouth twisted. On second thought, maybe the Khan and his army weren’t that useless. Why spend your time fighting your enemies when they could fight each other?
She really did hate giving her dad credit for anything.
Sayana climbed up Princess’s front leg, hands moving automatically to the scales that gave her the best grip. In seconds, she was on the lizard’s back, swinging her leg over the saddle.
It was possible to ride Princess bareback, but only if you were entirely comfortable with the idea of never having working thigh muscles ever again. The saddle she sat on was a wide stretch of oiled leather, with multiple handholds for when Princess was moving at a full clip. Fall off a horse, and you could roll to safety. Fall off an araatan, and you’d be lucky if you could still walk.
There was a safety tether – a wide band of leather with a metal clip at each end – and Sayana made damn sure it was secure around her waist.
She leaned forward, scratching a spot just below one of the grey horns that stuck up from the back of Princess’s neck. The lizard shuddered in pleasure, giving off a groan that Sayana had long since come to recognise as: you are my favourite person in the entire world. At least, that’s what she told herself it meant.
Tuya would probably know. If—
She shook her head. She was not, absolutely not, going to think about Tuya.
The eagle hunter had helped her tame Princess. Well, helped may have been a bit strong: Sayana had kidnapped her and forced her to do it. And in the end, when they’d triumphed, after she’d ridden Princess into battle for the first time, after she’d begged Tuya to stay . . .
A kiss on the cheek.
A whisper:
I will remember you.
And then Tuya was gone. Heading for the distant mountains.
Princess tensed, her contented growl lowering in pitch, and Sayana pulled her hand away, frowning. “All right, all right, bit much, was it?”
A shiver went through the araatan’s body, its torso shaking from side to side. Sayana hung on – she’d long since got used to the lizard’s movements, but there was something about this one she didn’t like. It didn’t feel like a shiver of contentment; it felt like Princess was trying to shake something off. Was she wounded somewhere? A cut Sayana hadn’t noticed?
“Last one, girl,” she promised. “Deal with these idiots, and then we’ll go home. I’ll find you a nice antelope herd to chase, how about that?”
When she’d first started talking to her araatan, Hogelun had given her endless amounts of shit. She has absolutely no idea what you’re telling her, you realise that? Hogelun had said. You’re just talking to yourself.
Then Sayana had caught Hogs murmuring sweet nothings to her own lizard, and had given her the most satisfying Cut ever, flicking her thumb off the underside of her chin so hard that her teeth actually clacked together.
Sayana took a moment to check her bones. She didn’t wear as many these days; when your primary method of attack was a gigantic lizard, you didn’t really need to wear human bones to scare people. But the Rakada did like to keep up appearances, and it’s not like they could call themselves the Bone Raiders if they didn’t in fact wear bones, could they?
Her main decorations were a necklace of bone chips, and several human ribs woven into the sleeves of her deel. All in place, but looking grey and tired. She really should get around to replacing them . . .
Maybe I can get myself a flaming death skull or two, she thought bitterly.
Ah yes. The Skulls. They’d refused to ally with the rest of the raiders, demanding tribute and territory. And they’d been doing what Hogelun called evil raider shit: rape and murder and mutilation. Fun times.
Chimeg had asked them, nicely, to reconsider. They said they’d think about it, and Chimeg had pointed to her own araatan – she had one of her own by now, they all did – and said that that was an excellent idea, because she would hate it if any fellow raiders came down with a bad case of cooked alive and then eaten.
Well, apparently, they didn’t think hard enough. The evil raider shit continued, as did the attacks on other clans. It was exactly the kind of behaviour you’d expect from people who spied a nice valley with a big pile of rocks on a hill above it and went, “You know, this is a fabulous place to make camp.”
Right now, the other Rakada were off tracking down a bunch of soldiers from Dalai who had crossed the border. Sayana had gotten back to camp too late to join them, so she’d decided to deal with one of the thousand tasks they were apparently destined to spend the winter doing. That particular task being the Flaming Death Skulls.
A single Rakada trying to take down a camp of fifty raiders would be a quick route to horrible death. A single Rakada and a single araatan would make it a quick route to horrible death for everyone else.
Sayana didn’t even have to kill that many of them; just find the leader, or leaders, and have Princess bite them in half. She didn’t know who the Chief of the Flaming Death Skulls was, exactly, but she’d figure it out. You could always spot the leader of a raider clan. They had a particularly cocky strut. Even Chimeg had it sometimes.
Either way, it was amazing how quickly a group of raiders reconsidered their life choices once the person in charge got eaten.
Kill the Chief, stomp a few tents flat, let Princess snack on a horse or two, go home. That was all Sayana wanted on this frozen evening.
She clicked her tongue, pulled gently on the grey horns to swing Princess towards the hill. The araatan moved reluctantly, and she sighed. “Come on, sweetheart. Who’s my best girl?”
Her best girl grumbled, but began to plod laboriously up their side of the slope. The lizard didn’t move like a horse; instead, it was a kind of heavy, rolling shimmy, those big claws chewing up the dirt, her head swinging from side to side, body swaying.
As they neared the top, Princess began to pick up speed. “There we go,” Sayana growled. She pulled her bow from her back, slipping arrows from her quiver. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about. Let’s do this.”