Present day

  “Where did you find this, boy?” Heemlik asked, stroking his bird’s chin. Sun-Beak clicked his tongue, leaning into his master’s ungloved fingers. Heemlik was mounted up with his honor guard, Jadpers, and Kaanel on their horses, less than a mile from the hissing Fade. Their uniforms were the same ones they’d defected from the Ochre Company with, only the violet cloth parts were now dulled almost black.

  In Heemlik’s other hand, he held a glowing compass ring. Sun-Beak scratched its blue gem with his beak, and its blue beam pointed northeast, into the Fade. Sun-Beak pulled his head away and pointed his beak in the same direction.

  The Jel-Hangan Red Falcon, of which Sun-Beak was Heemlik’s prized specimen, is a bird of prey whose popularity as a scouting and hunting companion knows no borders. It is a graceful, savage creature, distinguished by its deep, reddish-brown tail. It knows how to hide in front of Mekkendor's two suns until it is too late to notice. It can recognize uniforms. It can recognize owners. It can detect ants and tear out eyeballs with equal ease. It lives on a diet of rodents, smaller birds, and of course, its owner's enemies.

  “Want me to check it out?” Kaanel asked. Heemlik looked down at the ring, then in the direction its beam was pointing. He gently lifted and lowered Sun-Beak a few times to warn the bird, and then threw the falcon up into the air above him. Sun-Beak beat his powerful wings and started circling overhead, careful to avoid the occasional streaks of mist. The Fade didn’t spray nearly as much inside the Gaar as it did elsewhere, but a bird’s body didn’t cope with that kind of damage very well.

  “Let’s all go together,” Heemlik replied, turning his horse. “It can’t be far.”

  To Heemlik’s satisfaction, the honor guard did not check to see if Kaanel was following before following him. It had only happened a few times, very early on in the rebellion, but still. Heemlik was glad Kaanel commanded such respect from the troops, but the chain of command needed to be steady in such unsteady times.

  Since the very beginning, Heemlik had named his new private army of rebels in the Gaar one collective title: The Steppe Hounds. Heemlik had changed course in time to save his husband, but not in time to save his dog. The species that died with the loyal friend was now immortalized in the minds of wary Ochre Company sentries and overseers, tainting the cruel collection of trophies in Abadir’s castles and outposts of the Gaar. The straw that broke the camel’s back in Heemlik’s mind was now the title of his resistance forces.

  The Adalaantian military all wore purple somewhere on their uniforms, but the Ochre Company by far wore the most, coloring their entire skirts with it. As blood was a sacred thing that carried sin around the body, red was an important color, and purple was seen as its superior, clean form. A soldier never knew how they would die and how much blood they would lose in the process, so it was important to live to a higher standard in case they were dispatched too cleanly on a battlefield. The purple of their uniform reminded them of this daily.

  To Heemlik, the abundance of purple on Ochre uniforms now served as a reminder of who they truly worshipped: the Fade. Thus, to distinguish rebel from enforcer, Steppe Hounds drained the purple dye from their uniforms, darkening it nearly to black.

  The soldiers who joined Heemlik’s forces were mostly young recruits, fresh faces to the Gaar who were shocked and appalled by their duties. That shock new in the Gaar’s decades-long history, but what was new was the escape route joining the Steppe Hounds represented. In exchange for dulling the violet of their uniforms, they could interrupt Staving rituals instead of carrying them out. They could save the enslaved instead of working them to death. The best soldiers were drawn from around the Adalaantian empire to serve in the Ochre Company, and for several months after the Steppe Hounds were created, many of them funneled straight from their first terrible weeks as Ochre Company men to Heemlik’s ranks. Hardened soldiers of the Gaar who had already been stationed there for several years, however, were much more likely to stick to Abadir’s side. Whatever qualms they’d had were long dead. Now, they had a long history of actions to justify, not invalidate by joining some rebellion that protected and rescued the people they deemed monsters out of necessity for their own sanity.

  The soldiers flanking Heemlik and his chief lieutenants were typical Steppe Hounds. Young, fresh-faced, but already hardened and tested. Not just anyone broke rank like that. Usually beards looked terrible on Adalaantian men in their late teens and early twenties, but not on people who would be selected for the Gaar, and then decide they were better than that.

  Heemlik especially valued his ranks after what had happened this year with the Fade. Mere months after declaring insurrection and shuttling his first few convoys of Gaar workers out of Adalaant, the Fade and its servant became much more active. It still respected the agreement with the Gaar, and never encroached on Adalaantian territory, but in Ecliptica and Barrid, the Fade started inching forward again and occasionally lashing out on population centers or the sites of skirmishes. It was not a good look that Heemlik’s rebellion started right before that, and his initial swell of new blood quickly thinned to the trickle it was today. Abadir’s narrative that the Gaar was needed to keep Adalaant safe was gaining traction. Even in Heemlik’s head.

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  Still, the Steppe Hounds showed loyalty. They trusted Heemlik to defeat his father and the Ochre company, however he chose to do it. Whether that was killing him or reconciling with him. They did not know Heemlik had passed up a chance to end this war before it began. Heemlik had been very careful about that story, and Jadpers and Kaanel had no choice but to support his lie that Abadir had escaped that day at the base of the stairs. The rank and file did not know Heemlik would do whatever it took to spare his father and rescue him, as Heemlik himself had been rescued. They would not understand. They did not know Abadir as Heemlik did. Kaanel and Jadpers were the only people who knew. Although Heemlik was sure they told a few people, prisoners they grew close to perhaps, those individuals either didn’t believe them or knew there was nothing they could do to convince the average Steppe Hound that their leader had lied about a chance to end Abadir right at the start.

  Sun-Beak circled in the air back where Heemlik had released him; he hadn’t followed overhead this close to the Fade. Heemlik brushed hot smoke off his shoulder as the Fade struck him. He stopped his horse, and his entourage did the same. The ring was still pointing into the Gaar, but Heemlik didn’t care about it anymore. He was much more concerned with the body on the ground.

  She was young, narubati, and badly injured. The girl’s legs were missing from the knees down. Her skin and clothes looked like a giant had picked her up and thrown her around its room like a doll. Bones stuck out in horrific places. Skin had been scraped off in large, dirty patches. She’d probably been bald before whatever happened to her, but Heemlik was hesitant to say for sure given her general condition. At least she was alive, given the faint rising and falling of her chest.

  None of the entourage had gasped in shock or surprise. This was the Gaar, after all. What did surprise Heemlik, however, was what Kaanel pointed out just as he spotted it:

  “She doesn’t have any Fade burns on her skin anywhere.”

  “And she has a slave engram,” Jadpers added. That was odd. Slave engrams were forbidden in Adalaant, but this was about as far deep into the harshest part of Adalaant a person could get. The soldiers accompanying them exchanged glances, but said nothing.

  Scriptomancy of any kind was strictly forbidden in the Kingdom of Adalaant's borders. They didn't need magic to control their laborers. Gods and whips worked just fine. Heemlik knew about engrams; he'd had tutors to teach him about the world beyond Gaar-Adalaant. In order to exterminate evil, you had to know what it looked like. And of course, there was his scriptomancer husband.

  Heemlik dismounted and approached, gesturing for Kaanel to follow. “She can’t have been here long. With injuries like that, I’m amazed she’s still alive.”

  Heemlik knelt beside the girl and examined her hands. The engram on her cheek made no noise, but it pulsed gently when he touched her. He noticed a ring of skin on one of her fingers that was noticeably cleaner, where the ring must have been situated before Sun-Beak slid it off with his beak.

  “Jadpers,” Heemlik called. “Bring your horse over here. Kaanel will write some healing engrams on her to get her stabilized, and then we’ll sling her onto your horse with you and carry her back to the camp. We’ll shuttle her out of the Gaar with the others.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jadpers replied. Her naruglid had gotten a lot better in two years, but her voice still had that distinctive Prisnidine breathiness. The soldiers held a noticeable distance from her; Heemlik could teach them not to kill her, but he couldn’t teach them to be comfortable around a Prisnidine.

  Jadpers was looking very closely at the legless girl as Kaanel gently started writing on her with his moon-shard.

  “What do you make of her?” Heemlik asked one of the men. He cleared his throat and peered at her.

  “Um, I’m not sure, sir. She can’t have been from around here with a slave engram on her face, but I’m not sure how she got all the way here without us or the Ochre Company catching her.”

  Heemlik respected that the man wasn’t making things up just to have a better answer. His father had trained Heemlik to notice this in a subordinate, and to honor it.

  “What about you?” he asked, turning to the other. “Why don’t you think she’s got burn marks from the Fade, even though it’s right there?”

  The other man pursed his lips. “Could be a vampire, sir. Maybe her eyes and teeth have returned to normal in the time it took us to find her.”

  “That can’t be it,” the first man shook his head. “If she was a vampire, she wouldn’t be in such rough shape. She’d either be fully healed, or the person who did this to her would’ve finished her off. Nobody who somehow takes down a vampire leaves them alive. You can’t hide from something with that sense of smell, especially if this vampire managed to drink any of their blood.”

  “True,” the second man nodded thoughtfully, stroking his beard.

  Heemlik rubbed his chin thoughtfully as Jadpers and Kaanel lifted the beaten girl onto the Prisnidine lieutenant’s horse. Then, he turned away and pocketed the compass ring.

  “Mount up,” he called, returning to his horse. “We have a long line of work camps to visit on our way to Timoor’s checkpoint. I want to be there before Trecery.”

  “Less than two months is going to be quite a push,” Jadpers grunted.

  “The people we’re rescuing will be used to that,” Heemlik replied bluntly. He kicked the sides of his horse, and the group was off to rendezvous with the main force.