“Do you need to tap, Journeyman Edwards?” He said it in a quiet, deliberate way that seemed familiar somehow.
Edwards blanched. “No, sir.”
“Infinity,” my guide ordered.
The team simultaneously stepped to the side, widening the distance between themselves.
Edwards swallowed. His vampire circled him, weaving between him and the next navigator like a dog dodging poles at an agility competition.
Right, left, right…
Eye flash.
…Left, right…
The vamp’s eyes went bright red, the light mad and fueled by bloodlust. Edwards cried out. The undead lunged at the nearest navigator, lightning-fast, and froze, poised on its hind legs, wicked claws spread an inch from the young woman’s throat. She shook like a leaf but didn’t break formation.
The vamp folded itself back into a crouch with almost mechanical precision, sitting on its haunches. Its mouth opened, and my guide and the vampire spoke in the same voice in stereo.
“Team Leader Zhou, in your opinion, should Journeyman Edwards have tapped?”
Zhou closed her eyes for a long moment and opened them. “Yes, sir.”
“Did you order Journeyman Edwards to tap?”
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
“Journeyman Edwards has tapped twice already. Tapping a third time would get him kicked from the program, sir.”
“So, you prioritized the feelings of your team member over everyone’s safety.”
It didn’t sound like a question.
“Yes, sir,” Zhou confirmed.
“Journeyman Zhou, take your team to your superior and inform them that I’ve relieved you of your post. Journeyman Edwards, report to the personnel office for out-processing.”
“Please,” Edwards said, his voice a hoarse whisper.
My guide just looked at him.
Edwards turned around, his fists clenched, and marched back the way he came from.
“Dismissed.”
The team executed a turn, formed back into a line, and jogged to the right, disappearing between the buildings. Edwards’ vampire remained, still sitting on its haunches.
“Harsh,” I said.
“But necessary.” This time only the guide’s mouth moved. He must’ve decided the undead speaker had served its purpose.
He invited me to keep walking with a small gesture. We resumed walking toward the tall arena looming against the evening sky. Edwards’ vampire trailed us, perfectly in sync with our pace, like a loyal, well-trained dog. This man wasn’t just a Master of the Dead. He was good enough to head his own office.
“Before a navigator can move to tactics, they must prove their ability to control the undead. We deprive them of sleep, give them contradictory orders, force them to perform nonsensical, menial tasks, all of it designed to simulate the stress of real warfare. They are told they have three chances to tap, which is to admit that they’re unable to maintain navigation and ask for a break.”
“And if they tap three times?”
“They leave the program, but they can seek readmission in 6 months.”
He kept his voice casual and low, nothing suspicious, but unless someone was really close to us, they wouldn’t be able to make out the words.
“Tapping is a test in itself,” I said.
A navigator who lost control of their vampire in a population center would cause catastrophic casualties. Even if they notified the People immediately, acquiring control required close physical proximity. There would still be a slaughter.
My guide nodded. “One must experience being on the verge of losing control at least once and demonstrate sound judgement even when faced with serious consequences. Journeyman Edwards will not be returning to the Farm.”
The arena was directly in front of us, silhouetted against the glowing sky like a foreboding citadel.
“After all, not everyone is fit to pilot utukku-dami.”
Blood demon. Words from an ancient language. When infused with magic, they became words of power, but when spoken like this, casually, they resurrected echoes of the Kingdom of Shinar.
Alarm shot through me. I kept walking, keeping my breathing even, and glanced at him again. Calm, brown eyes, smart, observant. I identified the similarities now, the vaguely familiar proportions of his face, the line of his eyebrows, the cheekbones, the brown skin with an almost golden undertone, and the voice. Especially the voice.
“Sharrim…You are young,” a deeper voice murmured from my memories with the same steady cadence. “You have the power but lack control. Think of all the things he could teach you. Think of the secrets that would open to you.”
My father was born in our pre-history. Before our Shift, there had been another, the one that had ended the previous magic age and ushered in our technological era. The tech-Shift drove my father into hibernation, and he wasn’t the only one who’d gone to sleep. He’d chosen a very short list of people he trusted to support him in the new age. One of them was a quiet man who appeared to be in his sixties. He came from an old family. His father had served my father, as had his father, and his father, and on and on. His real name was Jushur, but my father called him Akku. The Owl.
Quiet, unassuming, always pretending to be less than he was, Jushur went by many different names. He’d moved through the People’s ranks, never drawing attention to himself, excelling at being overlooked and dismissed. He was my father’s secret eyes and ears. He’d served the most troublesome of Legati of the Golden Legion and had kept an eye on Hugh d’Ambray during his tenure as Warlord. When trouble brewed somewhere, Jushur would already be there, on the sidelines, anticipating the crisis and taking subtle steps to deal with it. He had six children, some born in the old age and others in ours, and all of them were just like him, fanatically loyal to my father and his bloodline.
I had discounted him even though he’d spoken to me directly three times. After my father had decided he did want to speak to me again—it took him almost three years—he finally told me about Jushur one night over beer and doughnuts, while he was rearranging the constellations in the sky of his realm to be more aesthetically pleasing.
The man walking next to me looked like a younger version of Jushur and sounded just like him. And he wanted me to know who he was.
Well, wasn’t that just peachy.
Ahead the gates of the arena stood wide open. As we came closer, a sheepish-looking navigator team with green stripes on their jumpsuits led a brown cow out of it. A big, white paw print marked the cow’s butt. Weird way to tag the People’s cows, but okay.
We walked through the gates. The floors of ancient arenas were made of wood and covered with a layer of sand to absorb the blood. This arena was stone, no padding. Every drop of blood was a precious resource.
Two men waited on the arena floor, near the gates. Behind them three vampires crouched in a row, still like statues.
The first man, on my right, was young, in his twenties, tall and thin. Everything about him seemed slightly too long: his dark hair, his nose, his chin. A single red stripe marked the shoulder of his jumpsuit. I’d cracked the code by this point. Red meant cadre, permanent staff of the Farm, and the more red you had, the higher your rank. This guy was pretty low in the chain of command.
A man like Barrett Shaw would have either known or suspected that one of his journeymen was up to no good. There was no reason for this guy to be in the arena if he was just some random navigator.
Hello, Onyx. We finally meet. I’ve come to chat about a child you sold like livestock.
The other man had two red shoulders on his jumpsuit. He was also tall, but unlike Onyx, who was thin to the point of looking fragile, this man was muscled like a decathlon athlete, lean and hard. An all-purpose build, equally fast, strong, and flexible, and the way he stood told me he had good balance. Onyx I could fold in half like paper. That man would dodge a fast punch and come back swinging.