Blood Tithe

[Narran]

Prologue


Closed to the Freerunners of the Il'Jhain Abdos.

“Cut me.”

The flat demand, swaddled in malice and contempt tore through the silence of the bazaar like a knife.

“I’m sorry?” the trader asked, naturally shocked, but hiding his discomfort with a decade of haggling and stone faced aptitude for seeing through bluffs.

“Cut me with your knife.” Narran repeated, a dry and arid whisper of a breath pushing behind the words as they left his lips.

“I…I will do no such thing sir!” the trader began to retreat, his heavy bulk shifting awkwardly on wobbling thighs and too much date wine. He reached instinctively for the kukri tucked into his ochre sash, then looked down to see that it was gone. The stranger, swaddled in blue and white pressed the polished steel tip, laced with sugar glass, against the gullet of his contact.

“I was not asking you, I was not imploring you, I was telling.” The malice trebled in intensity, and with it, Narran broke through the trader’s defences and placed the blade firmly into his shaking fingertips. “Do you understand me, Suresh?” the Fallien native took it from him and smiled awkwardly. “So do as you are told.”

A flash of metal brought a momentary glimmer of purity and light to the centre of Irrakam. It ended with a trickle of blood, a soft, sickening crunch, and a scream that rose up into the chill air of the desert’s midnight.

[Mordelain]

“Suresh, you need to calm down, speak clearly, and tell me what happened.” Mordelain keened her gaze at the portly merchant, and took a deep breath that bordered on the strength of a hurricane. She had tried to be patient with her mentor, but twenty minutes of mass hysteria, babbling, and heavy consumption of her most expensive liquor had undone her usually calm façade.

“He cut his own throat.” The merchant said again, though clearly and with purpose. “Right in front of me, without hesitating, and without so much as a scream or pained expression.”

“What emerged from the cut, though?” Mordelain had been through enough drama this last month to be unparsed by his story. “Sand, I imagine.”

“Blood…” the merchant screeched.

Mordelain sighed and slouched back onto the pile of satin and silk cushions that formed her makeshift throne in the alcove of Suresh’s grand foyer. She had taken to checking her accounts and the fortunes of the Suresh Empire in clear view of the villa’s door and the courtyard fountain that trickled a gentle melody. The cool air and polished tiles, red, black, and white, reminded her fondly of the gleaming white walls of the Abdos. War between the Cult of Mishra and the Il’Jhain had erupted suddenly and violently, and with that outburst, the obligations of the Freerunners had shifted from spice running to the protection of Irrakam’s Outsider Quarter – Fallien’s estranged and now more hated immigrant population.

“So he was not of the Ghubar.”

“He was as flesh and blood as you and I, and more morbid for his sins for being so.” Suresh leant across the pillow bed and reached for the tall, silver wine chalice that rested at the centre of the small and circular table at the heart of the seating area. Mordelain had to clench her teeth to prevent herself from correcting the man on his own ignorance. The Ghubar were born of Fallien’s own soul, and had no volition to ever know their true origins.

“What do you think this means?” she raised an eyebrow, and then raised the other. Her perturbed expression brought a momentary smile to Suresh’s face as he leant back onto the bed of silk and drank greedily from the decanter. He finished the contents off on his own, and then looked about to see if one of his servants and employees was in earshot. He looked deflated when he realised it was too late in the day to receive the services he forked out half of his fortune for. He set the silverware back onto the table with a thud, and then buried his hands into the folds of his crimson robes.

“I thought you were the mastermind, Mordelain!” Suresh slapped his thighs beneath his robes. He caught her glare, and stilled his awkward enthusiasm. “In truth, I think Narran had been playing us from the very start. When he approached me with the proposition, something made me doubt every bone in my own body.”

“So why did you agree to ship his belongings here, you old goat?” the troubadour couldn’t help but lose her cool. The long afternoon, the crimson sun setting over the palace of the harlot Jya, and the screeching cry of the harpies on the north wind had slowly but surely eroded all hopes of a peaceful retirement for the messenger. She had to dance the dance of Irrakam’s melee for a few months longer before their grand scheme was realised.

“What can I say?” his eyes began to sparkle with guile and mischief, “I was tempted by his wit, words, and wiles.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Of course, the substantial amount of gold he paid for the privilege of being introduced to the city made it impossible for me to refuse.” He puckered his lips into a sour smile.

“That sounds like you.”

“Now Mordelain that is uncalled for. I am the victim in all of this.”

“Victim?” Mordelain yapped. She pushed herself free of the cushions and teetered to the edge of the bed until she was stable and safe on the tiles. “I hardly think so, my old friend. You are considerably richer for the effort you put in, and all you had to do was suffer one small slight at midnight in the moonlight.” She pointed to the door. “If it was too much, walk away and so no more of it.”

Suresh chuckled. “Now, now, there’s no need for idle threats. I am just as irate as you are about all of this. If magic is afoot, I want to know how to defend against it.”

“Magic has nothing to do with madness, Suresh. Narran has no place in Irrakam. We need to find him, and make sure he is seen well on his way from this blasted heath.”

[Narran]

Narran Orlouge walked the streets of Fallien like a leper, cantankerous and decrepit, and utterly self-loathing. Every step he made was a pained expression on his sand scoured face. Every twist and turn through the Outlander Quarter of Irrakam was a new discovery of pain.

“This is not over…”

The bloodied cut across his abdomen was self-inflicted, but even so, he placed the blame for it on every other living soul on the island. The vigil of ignorance the sand mage surrounded himself swaddled himself on could not negate the fact that he was bent on destruction. Not even the gods of the blazing sands could blot the hatred in the scythe wielding mute’s heart.

“I will see to your end, Suresh…” he whispered, sandy voice piercing and grainy in the twilight of midnight. He turned another corner, and stumbled, footloose and fancy free into the bazaar that rested before the Abdos. In the daytime, the tethered canopies were crowded with a hundred traders peddling their wares from across the dunes of Fallien. At night, however, there were only empty wooden slats and stands, coarsely echoing and shaking beneath the torrential onslaught of the chill winds that swept in from the North.

“You are the weakness in this Citadel’s walls…”

An hour prior, he had attempted to gull the lofty merchant into ending his life with a cursed kukri. The corrupted silver blade and ivory handle of the relic blade would have dredged the mute’s soul into the merchant’s, binding the legacy of the Mute race into the very heart of Fallien’s Thayne soul. When it transpired that the merchant did in fact have free will, a soul, and a conscience, Narran had taken it upon himself to shock the creature into hatred by seemingly taking his own life.

He had lain, pained and exasperated on the bloodied tiles of the market place for half an hour. He had waited, with baited, pained, and tired breath until he was certain he was alone. His simmering eyes turned to the night sky when the silence fell, and he could only muster a smile.

“Yes,” he whispered.

A night owl cowed the stars with his call.

[Mordelain]

Mordelain did not know what to do with her plans. In the ensuing months after her encounter with the Al Thayne Shansi, her ideals about the world, her goals, and her intentions had slowly been picked apart. Every day had been a painful reminder that stagnation had become a way of life in Fallien. She felt more and more pressured by her own self-doubt to do something there, then, and now. Suresh, her mercantile mentor, had to keep urging the messenger to bide her time, or risk her careful weaving of threads snapping.

“It really is not that easy, Suresh.” She said with a dash of immaturity and a wave of contempt. Though stoic, reserved, and keenly intelligent, Mordelain did not find it easy to accept her mentor’s superior grasp of Fallien’s culture. “The longer we wait, the stronger he will be.”

“If you achieve all you have set out to achieve in the coming months my dear, then no amount of divine providence will stand in your way.” He tipped the cup in his pudgy fingers side to side, inspecting the dregs of the imported Radasanth Milam tea with keen disinterest. The morning was swift becoming noon, and the day was passing them by as they conversed in deep seated rhetoric. Time was being wasted, and wasted time made Suresh uneasy.

Mordelain attempted to speak, but resorted to a long sigh as she leant to the table that rested between them. Her crossed legs were swaddled by the folds of a thick woollen blanket, to keep out the chill of the still warming air. She tossed it aside to give herself room to move to pour them both another cup from the tall, ornate, and expensive silver pot. She made a strong show of stirring the Luke warm water with the teaspoon clashing against the cup noisily. Suresh flinched at every turn. He stared at her.

“You keep telling me you have allies you could call on.” She slid the cup across the table’s polished veneer, and Suresh replaced his empty vessel with the replenished one. “Yet,” she sat back into her pillow throne, “I never hear nor see them.” Suresh had promised her resources time and time again, and whilst he had delivered on those promises when they moved against the Thayne of Fallien, and against the Cult of Mishra, Mordelain was a demanding woman.

“Has my help up to now not been satisfactory?” he glared. He sipped his tea, and then redoubled his glare. “You are becoming a lofty idealist indeed in a city that loathes your kind.”

“Come Suresh, I’m not going to bite that particular lure. I need your help to achieve this final piece of the puzzle; I will do anything for you in return.” The promise came with a sparkle in the dancer’s eyes, sapphire glow and hearty truths. “We have come too far together to give up now.”

“What would you ask of me?” he shrugged. The sun began to rise over the ramparts of the apartment’s third floor balcony, and started to dance in ochre and gold across the black and white marble of the open air lounge. The sound of bazaar chatter from the beyond drifted in along with it. “I have no engagements today until the afternoon Council with the other Bedouin merchant masters.” He set his cup, now emptied, onto the table. He leant back and used his flat palms to hold his hefty bulk aloft. Mordelain could not help but draw comparisons between him and a large yak.

“I need someone who knows the insides and outsides of the dungeons.”

Suresh blinked. “Pardon?”

“I have the Tower of the Ghubar. I have the allegiance of the Freerunners, the Bedouin of the Northern Oasis, and the fealty of the remnants of the Cult of Mishra. I have an audience with Jya, to enact the last scene of the plan. I do not, however, have a crucial item.” She produced a small fold of paper from the white fur cuffs of her traditional il’Jhain garb. She unfolded it and held it out at arm’s length. Suresh teetered forwards to snatch it from her.

His jaw dropped as he realised what he was looking at.

“You want to steal the Sands of Life?”

Mordelain, for the first time in her life, smiled with more malice than happiness.

“Is there no better way to kill a chronomancer?”

Suresh found it hard to disagree. He had thought of a thousand and one ways to rid Fallien of Narran Orlouge, but this…he grinned. This was by far the most ingenious method.

“None save the end of time itself my daughter.”