“The citadel fields men from all three cycles,” Jayyed continued, “and some skirmishes have Enervators, so the battle can emulate true combat as much as possible.” He waited a beat and asked, “Who here has felt enervation?”
Tau considered staying silent. “I have,” he said when no one else answered.
“Indeed?” asked Jayyed.
“I fought with my… I fought at Daba.”
“Daba? That’s the largest raid the South has seen in a while. You were there?”
“I was.”
“Got caught in an Enervator’s wave, neh? Care to describe it for your sword brothers?”
Tau did not care to, but he cared to express that to Jayyed even less. “It drags you into Isihogo. Time slows and I saw…” He felt foolish.
“You saw…,” Jayyed urged.
“Demons.”
The men muttered; one snorted.
“It’s true,” Tau said, voice harder.
“You did. Everyone does,” Jayyed told the scale. “Enervation draws a man’s soul to Isihogo and then the demons come.”
Several men formed the dragon span with their hands, the winged sign to ward off evil.
“The demons from Isihogo cannot harm you, but they’ll make you suffer,” the sword master explained. “Once enervated and forced into the underworld, you will be attacked by the things that exist there.” Jayyed had the men’s attention, and even Chinedu held his coughs. “In war, a talented Enervator will hold your spirit in Isihogo until the demons have torn it to pieces, forcing it out of their realm and back to ours. This is worse than it sounds. The victim feels the agony of the demon attack as if it were real, and the experience is incapacitating. It renders men senseless on the battlefield, where they can actually be killed.
“A well-timed blast of enervation, just before our forces are entwined with our enemy’s, can mean the difference between victory and defeat for the Chosen, between life and death. Our Enervators, Enragers, Edifiers, and Entreaters are critical to the defense of the peninsula.”
“Umqondisi? They’ll do it to us when we skirmish?” asked Oyibo, a muscled and talented fighter with boyish features. “They’ll send us to the demons?”
Boyish features aside, Oyibo was steady. Tau had seen that in training. Oyibo did not look steady then.
“They will,” Jayyed said. “But the Gifted at the Crags are initiates as well, learning how to control their powers. They won’t hold you in Isihogo for long and they are asked not to try.”
Themba whispered to Tau, “They used to try. My older brother went through Ihashe training already. He told me the stories the umqondisi told him. The citadel had to leash their Enervators a few dozen cycles ago ’cause no one would fight in skirmishes.” Themba snorted. “Not fair, nor decent, letting a man’s soul get ripped up by monsters.”
“If enervated, you’ll see Isihogo,” Jayyed said. “You’ll see the demons in its mists. They’ll come for you. You’ll be released before they have their way.”
“Umqondisi?” asked Oyibo.
“Oyibo.”
“Yesterday, I heard one of the Proven in the mess hall. He was telling stories to the initiates about his time at the isikolo. He wasn’t old, a few cycles up on me. He said that, during one skirmish, a demon got him. He’s had nightmares since, always the same. It’s the one with that demon tearing at him.”
Jayyed didn’t answer right away. “The fast ones may get to you,” the sword master conceded. “Time is different in Isihogo. A single breath taken on Uhmlaba will feel like fifty or even a hundred in the underworld. That makes it difficult for the Gifted initiates to time things.”
Themba leaned over to Tau, his sour breath an assault. “Would rather the Ennies not send me at all.” He hawked snot into his mouth and spat. “Still, we’re better off’n what the hedeni get. Ennies hold them until the demons turn ’em inside out.”
Tau and the rest of the men of Scale Jayyed marched in silence after that, and by midmorning the flatlands had given way to the rockier crumble that formed the base of the Fist. The men marched upward and the pace slowed.
As they climbed, Tau wondered how, when compared to the southern mountain range, where he was from, any reasonable person could call the Fist more than a big hill. Well, a hill that had been worked over by a giant with a sledgehammer.
The Fist was uneven, dry, and covered in thin, loose-rooted shrubbery. Still, the hill, or mountain, was well positioned. It divided the point of the Chosen’s peninsula and, like the central mountain range, it separated North from South. The Fist was a natural barrier against heavy raiding from the ocean.
Tau had never been to Citadel City but knew it wasn’t far. The training city for the Gifted and Indlovu had been placed at the eastern base of the mountain, an additional layer of protection against sea raids.
The hedeni would need to navigate the ocean, march over the Fist, conquer Citadel City, and march another day inland before reaching the capital and other settlements. To do it, they’d need a thousand ships filled with warriors, a full invasion force. They’d have to risk all those lives on the water and make it ashore with enough fighters to battle past Citadel City. It wasn’t wise. It wasn’t done.
Instead, the major fighting happened at the Wrist, the deadened lands separating the relative lushness of the Chosen’s peninsula and the rest of Xidda. There, the hedeni came in endless waves. There, the majority of the Omehi military were stationed, lived, and fought. It was in the Wrist’s wide-open spaces that the Guardians had the greatest effect, and its desert sands were said to be littered with the charred bones of a million hedeni dead.
Given the numbers of hedeni, the Omehi, even with their dragons, should have been wiped out long ago, but the peninsula was a natural fortress and the Omehi had held it for near on two hundred cycles. Upon reaching the fighting grounds of the Crags, Tau imagined they could hold for a hundred more.
The Crags, a massive plateau of rocky and dead earth, stood halfway up the mountain. It was sectioned off into several battlefields meant to simulate the conditions the Omehi military faced in their endless war. To the west, where the plateau gave way to more mountainous territory, the isikolo and citadels practiced tactics, defenses, and attacks suited to the highlands. On the plateau itself, there were a thousand strides of ground that had been churned over and over until the topsoil felt and shifted like desert sands. This battleground matched many of the conditions in the Wrist. There was also a field of sown grass, out of place at this elevation, that resembled the majority of the peninsula’s flatlands.
Then there was the last battleground. Tau found it to be the most fascinating. It was a mock city that looked like the Goddess had scooped up a decent chunk of Kigambe and dropped it on the plateau. Tau stared in wonder at the city replica. He understood why it was the battleground used for the Queen’s Melee, the end-of-cycle competition between the highest-ranked scales. The battleground’s strategic and tactical possibilities were infinite, and it was tucked between two natural rises that had been cut into spectator seats. The city replica, surrounded by seating, was a war arena.
“Well, that’s something,” said Hadith.