The Blood Gift, page 21
“Ow!” Caiman yells. “What the fuck are these things?”
“Alerting us to the workings of your cuffs might’ve been nice,” Reed snarls at Ajani.
That’s when I see the rivers of blood dripping from their wrists beneath the bands of silver.
“What the hell are those things doing to them?” I shout. “Take them off!”
“They’re standard Acaccian cuffs,” says Ajani, nonplussed. “What do you want me to do? I wouldn’t march four supposedly very dangerous enemies in front of my liege unrestrained—and without having already initiated a small bloodletting for insurance.”
“Your standard cuffs make people bleed? Gods, how fucked up are you Accacian pricks?” Dannica raises her wrists, inspecting the cuffs, looking for a way to slip them, I’m sure.
“Why does that even need to be a thing?” I ask, reaching for calm.
Ajani sighs, exasperated, regarding me once more like I’m woefully ignorant and my ignorance is a personal affront. “There’s power in blood and in bloodletting. The latter provides our people ways of extremely weakening our enemies when we take them into custody. In the case of Praetorians, it’s a convenient way to seize control of your blood, shut down the nanoagents in it, and thus nullify the majority of enhancements that your hellish, unnatural biochips equip you with. It also makes Praetorians less of a headache to compel in a situation where focuses might be split since . . .” He pauses as if weighing what he wants to relay.
I arch an expectant brow. “You claim good intent, right? Well, give it up. Call it more good faith,” I press, in challenge. “I believe we deserve and have earned it, given my people have allowed you to shackle them and, apparently, their biochips.”
Ajani flashes teeth. Sketches a mocking bow. “I suppose you make a case, and you used maturity this time, like a good girl. I was going to say: since none but the most powerful Accacians can establish a compulsion link, and biochips make it . . . an arduous task, even then, where Praetorians are concerned.”
I carefully file that information away for safekeeping and retrieval later. I’m pretty sure it isn’t knowledge the Tribunal or the Praetorian ranks hold. Acaccia has definitely kept those secrets guarded. There have never been any lessons we learned in the academy, or during our lecture domes from the trials, or during the war meeting when Acaccia first attacked, that relayed any of that.
So why the hell did Ajani so easily give in and apprise me—and the other Mareenian Praetorians within earshot—of it? There’s no way in hell he’s that sloppy, that generous, or made that stupid by overconfidence. Which means we’re being given the knowledge to soothe our anger over the cuffs and keep us compliant only because he doesn’t intend for us to live long after the coming ordeal. I cut a look at my team. Their returned stares communicate they’ve already discerned the same thing.
“Your turn,” Ajani says. He walks to stand directly in front of me. He holds the same silver strip of metal in his hand that his marshals placed on Caiman, Reed, and Dannica.
I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me tense up, or balk, or give off any sort of reaction. I stare at him stoically and hold out my wrists. Inwardly, I brace for the bite of pain and instinctive aversion that will come whenever the cuffs draw my blood.
He lays the silver strip against my skin. I expect the metal to be cool. But it radiates warmth as it elongates and binds my hands. The sting I anticipate doesn’t come. Nor do I bleed. I glance up from my wrists, over to the guys and Dannica, who are still bleeding freely, then look at Ajani. “Why are mine different?”
“The blood-gifted don’t bleed other blood-gifted. Especially not other powerful ones. Unless doling out punishment, it’s uncouth. Besides being a blasphemy, unless under very specific circumstances, it’s fucking stupid. Subjecting people like you and me to a bloodletting only makes us more powerful and gives us added ways to attack. Your blood is a weapon, you already know that. What you don’t know are the many, many ways in which you can wield it as one. There’s a dozen more ways to kill a man with it than forming blood spikes. Yes, that method is a quick, dirty way to kill, but it’s also the most rudimentary and lacks any finesse.”
Okay. Grandfather’s lessons never covered any of that either. I admit I’m intrigued. I make a mental note to figure out how to murder people in myriad and cool ways with my blood after my squad and I survive assassinating a psychotic emperor and treacherous Apis.
The first things that greet us are the decaying, mangled bodies hoisted onto pikes sticking out of the ground around the war camp’s perimeter. The stench is unbearable and sears the inside of my nose. But I’ve seen death before. Tons of it. In many gruesome varieties, and the rotting corpses themselves aren’t what’s truly awful. Some of the dead wear the microprene combat suits of Praetorians. Some wear the green fatigues of common soldiers. Yet others, the majority of bodies, wear the clothes of civilians. Many of those common garments covering bodies so small they’re unmistakably children. The tears that rush to the surface are hot and angry and gutted. I don’t try to curtail them. I weep openly for the innocent. For such heinous mass casualty. I’d be as soulless as the monster I’m here to fight if I didn’t. No. The Blood Emperor is worse than a monster. He’s as vile and debased as a god. Like the world needed to be rid of the Pantheon, it needs to be rid of Nkosi too.
I knew this. I’ve always known it. History and the last war revealed that. But seeing what Accacia’s Blood Emperor is capable of up close and intimate—to not just see it, but to smell it and taste it—I stumble as we pass by a fresh cluster of bodies, more young among them, and dry heave.
The grisly displays don’t end once we clear the perimeter of the camp. More Mareenians, more bodies of men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians alike, are scattered among the camp’s interior. “Why? What is the reason for this?” My throat spasms, my voice unable to produce a pitch louder than a whisper from the unending horror. “Who is he making a spectacle for when everybody of the Isles is dead?”
Ajani waves a hand to the sky. “The newsvids. The rest of the world. My continent and yours. So the entire planet is reminded what’s at stake if it doesn’t remain at heel.”
The Apis’s words cause me to look up for the first time since landing. Flying beneath Iludu’s white sun and among the suffocating ash clogging the sky are several drones. It’s then that the full brunt of what I surmised in Ska’kesh, plus what Kissa spoke of, hits me. Nkosi rules even on the Principal Continent, his home continent that comprises his people, through torment, fear, and wide-scale death. And it’s how he will rule the Minor Continent now that he’s gained a footing. The territories that have sworn fealty have only negotiated the illusion of safety. Nobody, anywhere, can truly be safe or free as long as Nkosi lives and holds power. The sort of man who displays bodies of children as cautionary tales and war trophies across his camp is the kind of unhinged animal that takes only the smallest perceived insult or disobedience to turn rabid.
With that in mind, I keep walking toward the fire, instead of running as fast as I can away from it.
Reed, Caiman, and I are marched through the war camp with Ajani and ten of his men surrounding us. I slip into the mode of a Praetorian and take vital inventory of everything and everyone I spy around the camp. It’s crawling with legionnaires, hundreds, perhaps thousands. The scarlet uniforms are loaded down with visible weapons—blasters, knives, and nanogrenades; the enemy soldiers move about transient yet sturdy barracks erected from corrugated steel. There are several patrol groups out. I mark them because instead of moving as if they’re going to a set destination, they stalk about the camp constantly scanning for threats and intrusions.
Regardless of their activity, every legionnaire that we pass halts to bow low to Ajani.
The Apis strides out directly in front of us, keeping himself positioned between Reed and me. The profile of his face I can glimpse is set into a deep scowl. At first, I assume His Warlordship, who likes to play at refinement, absurdly finds the soot and shoddy lodgings of the camp beneath him. Then we pass a pair of soldiers on patrol who both visibly stiffen and pale as Ajani nears them. As they bow to him like the others, I see his gaze soften with empathy and ignite with fury all in the same moment. It makes me wonder if the permanent scowl he wears is less about the coarse surroundings and more about the hundreds of conscripted legionnaires in the war camp. If the reasons he fed me for wanting to depose his liege are true.
We navigate past the pair of Accacian soldiers and I twist my head around to look back at them, curious. They stare after us, their eyes lingering upon their Apis in an awed, enraptured fashion. The way they look at him, you’d swear they’d just bowed to a god as opposed to a mere man. I snort; I can’t help it. Then, I turn away and give the structure we’re approaching my full attention. The building is much grander than the utilitarian barracks we’ve passed, an imposing, octagonal-shaped pavilion with crimson pillars rising high; the distinctive, plush blue-black pelts of Principal Continent night bears hang between the columns in place of walls and are draped over the top of them to form a ceiling. The pavilion is ostentatious and reeks of pretentiousness and showiness. It reeks of someone who relishes spectacle, which means it can’t be anything other than the Blood Emperor’s war tent.
I despise how hard my heart crashes against my chest as I gaze at it. I hate the Blood Emperor. I want to kill him. I’m planning to kill him. All that considered, I shouldn’t feel anything except blistering, vengeful rage. But there’s a huge part of me that also plunges into fear. Yes, it’s about the bodies staked around his war camp. It’s also about having lived my entire life studying a history of my people where the tyrant just inside massacred a third of the Republic and a quarter of the whole Minor Continent, with the abominable, staggering blood-gift he possesses. But more than any of that, Nkosi being the man who ordered my mother’s butchering and who tried to murder me in her womb sends the detested, ingrained fear shooting to interstellar heights with each step I take to behold him face-to-face.
But I’m not a coward—I’ve never been that—so I tell every drop of the fear to fuck off as I’m led toward the Blood Emperor in cuffs. I stack my spine, and I push my shoulders back. I hold my head high and unafraid and furious, letting an old friend—unbidden rage—lend me all the strength that I need for the impending confrontation. The ruse is for Ajani to present me as a captured war prize, but nobody ever said war prizes have to be quivering upon deliverance to enemy hands. And I refuse to be so. I’ve never been built like that and I never will be. I chance taking my eyes off the looming pavilion that inches ever nearer for a few necessary seconds to check on Dannica, Reed, and Caiman. The fact that they’re here alongside me is my one regret.
The trio don’t have the exact history with the Blood Emperor as I have, but they were children who grew up in a postwar society being cautioned and conditioned to both hate and fear the monster with hideous gifts across the ocean the same as me. And Reed lost his parents to the Blood Emperor’s crimes. All of that visibly culminates in the three of them appearing to be faring about as well (which isn’t good at all) as I am, seeing the pavilion that can’t house anybody other than Nkosi.
Caiman has lost all of his usual smug arrogance and casts me a nervous look that’s a knot of anxiety. His body is rigid, and he swallows thickly before snapping his eyes away from me and pinning them back on the pavilion.
Your asses should’ve stayed behind, I hiss at them in my head, my heart slamming harder against my chest. I can’t lose them inside. Everything has to go smooth. I have to protect them. I have to see them through this safely. My mind explodes with the harried thoughts and a thousand crushing worries that I can’t. That I’m not good enough. That I’ll fail. But I quash every last one of them, quickly, because being stricken with the lack of confidence while literally walking into the danger that we are will see them dead.
I look at Reed now. He holds his head high, his spine stiff, his entire body unbowed, refusing to be beaten. He holds himself like a proud Praetorian, a proud Mareenian, walking through the other side’s war camp and still saying fuck you to the enemy. Dannica displays something near identical.
Seeing their nerves of steel and resolve bolsters my own and helps me seal the last vestiges of fear away in the black box, slap a padlock on it, and pitch it into a black hole so it can’t resurface. Despite the grave situation at hand, my lips twist in a slight, admiring smile at my cohort brother and sister.
Then, we’re standing upon the pavilion.
You will not tremble, even a bit, when you enter, Grandfather orders me.
I will not give any Accacian or their bastard of an emperor the satisfaction, I promise him.
We are Amaris, we say together.
I start repeating Grandfather’s mantra in my head to help center myself. To keep my head on right and turn a laser focus on the task in front of me. I use the mantra to remember there’s no room for anything other than a successful op. I won’t fail. I won’t get my people killed. I’ll save Mareen. I’ll spare the innocent among what’s left of the Republic in the north and the rest of the Minor Continent the horrors that the Isles and the eastern and western cities have suffered.
Amaris are strong as Khanaian steel. We do not bend. We do not break. We do not yield.
Fucking ever. Especially to asshole, murderous emperors who feign godhood, I tack on, adding my own addition to the words Grandfather ground into me time and time again since I was little.
By the time we’re standing at the opening to the pavilion, where two heavy night-bear pelts meet to form a flap, I fully embody the mantra and have utter faith and conviction that Nkosi will die today.
19
As soon as I enter the war tent I see the man who’s been the evil, the monster, the savage murderer in my life for the entire time I’ve been on the planet. Nkosi, His Imperial Majesty of the Principal Continent, the Blood Emperor of Acaccia, and the megalomaniac bastard who killed my mother, sits against the far wall of the space atop a freaking godsdamned ruby throne. Other rulers would have their throne perched on a dais. But Nkosi’s rests directly on the plush, richly colored black rugs carpeting the ground. The fact that he doesn’t feel the need to sit above his inferiors affords him a deadlier air.
If any of the intelligence Mareen has gathered on him is true, the Blood Emperor is a man around 250 years old, having been blessed with extreme longevity by his blood-gift. His skin is dark brown, a rich, haunting ebony that’s near the same color as mine, and his features remain youthful, despite his two and a half centuries. In fact, he looks ageless. He could be a man of twenty, thirty, or a well-maintained fifty who’s aged like fine whiskey. His eyes shine a brown that’s nearly black and his dark skin gleams as smooth as silk. His cheekbones and jawline are pronounced, sharp as the Khanaian blade pressed against my hip and concealed beneath the black tactical pants and shirt Ajani first captured me in.
All of the Blood Emperor’s attributes congeal to paint a devastatingly handsome picture. I suddenly see why across some regions, he’s spoken of as having a lethal, dark beauty that rivals what the world remembers Hasani, the god of death and the After, to possess. And for all his vicious beauty, there’s an undercurrent of a brutality, of a terrible, hideous ugliness cloaking him like a second skin. The Blood Emperor is nothing like his Apis; Ajani projects just as deadly and pitiless a mien, but he also presents as the picture of urbanity near all of the time. Conversely, the Blood Emperor allows his savagery, the utter barbarism that comprises him, to ooze from his skin like an open sore he doesn’t bother to bandage. It washes over him and coats him like an exoskeleton he clings to and dons as an additional weapon to spread fear and terrorize all who have the misfortune of stumbling into his orbit.
Surrounding Nkosi are six additional men near the same level of imposing as their liege and Apis. Three of those bastards stand on each side of their emperor. Like Ajani is currently wearing, they’re clothed in a uniform that’s one chilling tide of black from the neck down, and from the neck up rests the scarlet collar that marks the vicious men that serve Nkosi unwaveringly as his Red Order. Though Ajani warned me they’d be here, and I prepared myself to come face-to-face with the terrors that have haunted my nightmares since I was a child, I still suck in a breath in their presence. My eyes dart from one to another, wildly looking over all of them.
Beside me, Reed, Caiman, and Dannica take in the same ominous cadre we’re being delivered to like winter does trussed up for the solstice. Dannica is the one who almost succeeds at appearing unaffected. But I know my cohort sister and see she holds herself too tensely, the usual relaxed swagger she wears having fled. Caiman, for all his arrogance, bravado, and projected fierceness, can’t quite keep his gold gaze from clouding over with fear. There’s evident fear in Reed’s frigid blue stare too. Honestly, who the fuck that is sane wouldn’t be about to shit themselves when standing in front of the warlords and the liege who’ve slaughtered hundreds of thousands the world over, callously and gleefully? But there’s also a deep icy fury and hatred that hardens Reed’s stare, in particular, as he takes in the man and his topmost generals responsible for the skirmish that killed his parents.
What if this is a trap?
The thought crashes into me as my palms turn slick with sweat. Fresh panic blooms, making my lungs burn and making me feel like I’m choking on the fires that burned Cara to ash. Now that my mind has latched on to the possibility of a setup, it won’t let it go. If this is a trap, I think, frenzied, we have no way out of this after letting Ajani cuff us and march us inside this war tent. Even if we get free of the cuffs, there’s no way the four of us can fight all eight of Accacia’s leadership and survive. Likely, we wouldn’t even fight just one of them and survive if the power Ajani has previously displayed is anything to go by.
