T Lain: City of Fire

… The city burned.

Tahrain wiped his brow and peered into the darkness, straining his eyes to the north. Nothing but sand, he mused bitterly, but he knew that somewhere, perhaps a hundred miles away, Kalpesh burned—if it still stood at all.

And yet he, the city’s guard captain and Protector of the Opal Throne, abandoned Kalpesh’s defense and fled into the desert on a vital mission that looked more hopeless every hour. For easily the twentieth time that day, his brown, callused hand found its way inside his light chain shirt to the oilskin packet against his right breast. He looked up and scanned his eyes over the faces of the few men and women who now lay in small clumps silently around him. They did not notice as his fingers found the leather thong and checked its secure knot.

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Tahrain turned again to his remaining soldiers. His most loyal troopers, twenty of Kalpesh’s finest, followed him into the desert to die without any explanation. Only one man knew Tahrain’s true mission in the wastes, and he wasn’t even a man by most civilized folk’s standards. Most called him “brute” at best, but Tahrain knew differently. He looked for this brute among his exhausted soldiers.

The captain’s eyes found the person they sought. Every man and woman in their company lay splayed out under the black desert sky, hoping to forget hunger and thirst in the short respite a fitful slumber offered. Everyone but himself, he thought, and this one person. The brute stood alone, on the other side of their makeshift camp, looking northward into the desert night. When Tahrain had found him, years ago, the creature was alone, dressed in tatters, and nearly dead from numerous wounds. Even now his armor looked as if someone cobbled it together from three different-sized suits, and his weapon, a brutal greataxe, was stained and notched, and appeared as if its haft might break on the very next swing.

If this soldier’s kit looked mismatched and ugly, it was simply a reflection of the wearer. Long-armed and grey-skinned, he appeared to be made of disparate parts himself. His body refused to blend together in the normal way, as if his bulging eyes and jutting chin wanted to escape the confines of his face. His hair looked as if it had been hacked at with a knife, and it was obvious his swollen arms and legs had been, once. He wore no boots on his oversized feet but only light sandals, held on with makeshift straps.

Tahrain rose painfully and quietly. He did not want to wake any of the soldiers that managed to find sleep. Picking his way carefully around the huddled clumps, he moved across the camp.

The man who turned to watch his captain approach was a half-orc. Born almost certainly out of violence, forced to live hard and doomed to die violently, half-orcs looked as if their own bodies struggled to free their separate halves from each other. This struggle, Tahrain had heard, usually spilled out into the world, making half-orcs unpopular in civilized lands. Certainly, when Tahrain brought this one to the city and insisted he be nursed back to health, there had been more than a few who’d wondered (privately or aloud), “Why bother?”

Tahrain hoped to answer that question soon.

“Krusk?” he whispered.

The bulging eyes stared at Tahrain. One fang protruded from the half-orc’s lower jaw up over his scarred, thin upper lip. His face twisted into what others might interpret as a snarl. The captain knew it for a smile, as close to one as Krusk could get. That didn’t mean the half-orc was happy, though. Krusk was seldom happy.

“They’re closer,” he growled.

Tahrain nodded. He’d guessed as much. He cursed inventively at his pursuers, but only briefly. Krusk waited, as stoically as ever, for the captain to speak.

“How close?”

“Eight hours. Maybe nine,” Krusk grumbled in his deep, gravelly voice.

Tahrain didn’t know how the half-orc had divined this information, but he knew it was accurate. Among his soldiers he had many rangers—he was skilled in the lore of the wilderness himself—but Krusk had something more. If the half-orc said their pursuers were a day’s ride from catching them, the captain believed him.

Tahrain shook his head and sighed, “We won’t make it, will we?”

The half-orc simply stared at him, then looked away and shrugged.

“They’re weak,” he said eventually.

Krusk seldom spoke and knew little of tact. The half-orc probably didn’t even think calling the best soldiers of Kalpesh “weak” was an insult.

“But you’re not,” Tahrain finally said. “You could make it? Alone?”

Again the half-orc shrugged. He loomed almost a full head over the tall captain, but somehow the shrug made Tahrain think of a child who had something to say he knew his parent wouldn’t like.

“What is it, Krusk?” he asked gently.

Looking off into the darkness, back toward the pursuers they both feared, Krusk shifted his weight, digging holes in the sand.

“I won’t go,” he said after a long pause. “You saved my life.”

“As you’ve saved mine since,” Tahrain said. “If I were a man to keep score of such things, we’d be even. But we don’t keep score like that, do we, Krusk?”

The half-orc didn’t lookback, and Tahrain didn’t push. Arguing with Krusk was like arguing with the desert wind.

“Let’s get to our lesson, shall we?”

The captain took a few labored strides out into the darkness, farther from the camp, and Krusk followed. Tahrain walked until the two put a small dune between themselves and the other soldiers. He sat down heavily in the sand, with Krusk crouching before him. If the half-orc craned his neck, he could still see the exhausted soldiers. They’d done this for the past six nights, but Tahrain feared this would be the last time.

Drawing the leather packet from inside his mail shirt, the captain opened it slowly. He showed Krusk the brittle papers inside and talked him through the contents of each one, and made Krusk repeat, in a voice as low as the half-orc could manage, everything Tahrain told him. Krusk couldn’t read, but his memory was perfect. When they finished, Tahrain went over everything again. They started a third iteration but the half-orc put a hand on the captain’s shoulder. Only then did Tahrain realize he was drifting off, still talking though nearly asleep.

He shook himself and said, “I need sleep…” But as Krusk stood Tahrain grabbed his thick wrist. “Wait! There’s one more thing. Whether we make it to the canyon or not, Krusk, this has to get there, and beyond. It has to be kept from the hands of those who even now burn Kalpesh for it, and it has to make its way into the right hands. Even more than the protection of the city, this has been my sworn and secret duty, as it was my mother’s before me and her father’s before her. Every Protector of the Opal Throne swears to protect this beyond the lives of his soldiers and even the life of the city itself.”

Tahrain blinked, for a moment fully awake. He locked his dark eyes on the half-orc’s mismatched pupils, trying to will the barbarian to understand.

“I fear, Krusk… I fear my city has been consumed in flames by now,” he said, “but that doesn’t change a thing. Those who came to Kalpesh came for this. You can’t let them take it.”

He pushed the packet into Krusk’s hands. Taken aback, the half-orc fumbled the packet, then tried to hand it back to his captain. A small, golden disk among the papers shimmered in the starlight. Tahrain pressed the half-orc’s hands between his own, tucking the disk back into the pouch.

“No. This goes beyond everything else. There’s something I haven’t told you.”