“I don’t want it,” Tau said.
Themba grinned. “Just murder and mayhem.”
“Care,” Tau said.
“Or you’ll do me first, neh?”
“Enough, Themba.” Hadith turned away from him and raised his voice, shouting for the scale to hear. “Aqondise Anan will be here any breath now. Form up. I don’t know which scale will come with him this morning, expecting to fight and lose against us, but I know I don’t want to disappoint them.”
Some of the men laughed and all of them snapped to attention, forming up. Tau went with them.
The first scale they fought was Hodari’s. It was a slaughter. They ate after the skirmish and fought Tabansi’s men in the umqondisi quarter. Tau took out fifteen men and had to hold back to avoid injuring anyone.
“You’re Goddess blessed,” Umqondisi Tabansi told him when the fighting was finished. “I do not think I have ever seen a man so skilled with the blade. It is a gift of a new kind.”
Themba had been close enough to hear Tabansi’s praise. He’d winked at Tau. Tau ignored Themba and did not think himself Gifted. He wasn’t sure Tabansi would either, if he knew what Tau had done, and continued to do, to acquire and increase his skills.
After their third and final skirmish, another slaughter, the men ate and took to their rest. Tau went to the practice yards. He worked until it was dark, pushing himself as hard as he could, training until most in the isikolo were asleep.
He looked up at the cloudless sky. There were many stars, countless and shining bright across the breadth of the Goddess’s creation. It was at nighttime, alone, when he missed his father most, missed him so much it felt like all of Uhmlaba should stop and take note. Instead, the world moved faster, promising change, and the time for Tau to use its old rules to make things right was running short.
He knelt and closed his eyes. He went to Isihogo, to its demons, where spans meant less and suffering could be an ablution of sorts. It was time to fight in the Queen’s Melee. Peace could follow, but three men had to die first. It was time to kill.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MELEE
The first skirmish of the Queen’s Melee was chaotic. Scale Jayyed was matched against the Nobles of Scale Ozioma. They fought on the mountain battleground and, though the other competing scales were sequestered so they could not observe their opponents’ strategies, Tau had never seen the Crags so crowded.
The queen’s brother, Prince Xolani Omehia, opened the melee, both citadels were in attendance, and the Northern and Southern Isikolo stood empty, their initiates crammed into the area of the Crags reserved for Lessers. Full-blooded Indlovu and Ihashe as well as many private citizens had come to watch, and an endless horde of Drudge waited on them all. When it was confirmed that Queen Tsiora was traveling to see the games, the Crags crackled with tension and energy.
The queen would watch the final day of the melee and, thought Tau with bitterness, she’d use the occasion to meet with the gathered Guardian Council without raising suspicion. She’d leave Palm City, having explained peace to the Ruling Council, and she’d come to Citadel City to finalize it with the military’s leaders. She’d come to begin the end of the Omehi.
Over the past moon cycle, these thoughts had plagued Tau with as much ferocity as his demon visions, and the only thing that calmed him was fighting. When Tau fought he did not have time to think.
“Uduak, I need your unit to break that team of Indlovu on the ridge before they flank us!” Hadith yelled, receiving a grunt from the big man, who set off with his men. “Tau, they’ll come at us again. They need to break through.”
Tau didn’t need a strategic mind to know Hadith was right. Scale Jayyed had their collective backs against an unclimbable section of the battleground. The Indlovu had herded them here like the brainless harvest animals from the old stories. Hadith had ordered several pitched fights, but they’d not gone well. Scale Jayyed was unused to fighting against an equal number of Nobles. This, combined with the stress of the day, the massive crowds, and the skill of Ozioma’s scale, was overwhelming them.
Hadith had minimized their failures with cleverness. He refused to stick to unfavorable battles and was careful to lose as few men as possible, a critical tactic in the Queen’s Melee, where each winning scale entered the next round with the number of men left standing at the end of their previous skirmish.
Melee competitors began the tournament with fifty-four men. If a scale lost ten men in round one, they began round two with forty-four. If that same scale lost eighteen in the second round, they went into round three with twenty-six fighters.
Jayyed, who had returned to the scale but remained distant, Anan, and Hadith had devised several strategies to take advantage of the melee’s rule set. The main strategy was to “sacrifice” Uduak, the scale’s second-strongest fighter, and his unit to bolster any faltering line. Uduak’s unit was a reserve defense that would crash into a losing battle to save the scale. They could do this because it did not matter which man was “killed” in each skirmish. All that mattered were the numbers. Uduak could “die” in round one and still fight in round two, as long as the number of fighters they fielded balanced against the number they had lost.
This was why Tau needed to win. If he could get far enough into the tournament, he was sure to face Kellan. Kellan Okar was Scale Osa’s strongest fighter, and his umqondisi would field him in every skirmish.
“No, Tau! Stay back!” Hadith hollered. “Retreat!”
Tau wanted to hit something, someone, maybe Hadith. “We are running out of room to run!”
“This is not where we fight. The ground favors the Nobles.”
“You’ve said that for the past span,” Tau argued.
“You want to win? We have to fight smarter. We cannot match them man for man, and the moment we go into a skirmish undermanned, we’re done.”
“We’ve already lost men and taken none of theirs!”
“Four down in a span? That’s a victory, Tau.”
“The only victory is putting all of them down,” Tau said, as the time to stand and fight blindsided them.
“Indlovu!” screamed Utibe. He’d run into a unit of Indlovu that had circled around Scale Jayyed, and Utibe was backpedaling fast, trying to avoid being cut down by the men chasing him.
Hadith shouted orders. “This is it! They’ve split three ways but their timing is wrong. The main unit is still a hundred strides away and Uduak has the rest of them engaged on the ridge.” Hadith pointed at the Nobles chasing Utibe and called to his scale. “Stop running! We outnumber them. Full force, kill!”
Words Tau had waited to hear. He raised his swords and ran at his enemy. He rushed past a backpedaling Utibe and charged the closest Noble.
Tau heard his scale’s war cry as he leapt into the air and brought his dulled skirmishing blades together, clapping either side of the Noble’s helmet. The Indlovu’s momentum kept his no longer conscious body running a few steps before he collapsed, and by then, Tau was in the fray.
These Indlovu had never fought Scale Jayyed. They might have heard of Tau; most in the citadel had. They might have laughed off the stories, mocking their Noble brothers who had fallen to him. They might have told one another it would be different when they faced such Common scum. They might have laughed then, in the comfort and safety of the Indlovu Citadel, but they were in the melee, Tau was among them, and there was only pain.