Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter

Author:Evan Winter [Winter, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Adult, Science Fiction, war
ISBN: 9780316489768
Goodreads: 41952489
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2019-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

MURDERER

Here’s my mercy!” Tau said, bringing his sword down and hitting bronze on bronze, hard enough to shake his bones. Uduak stood beside him, his oversized blade holding Tau’s killing blow aloft, a handspan above the Indlovu’s head.

“Move!” Tau screamed at Uduak, the rage in him enough to make the big man take a step back.

“No,” Uduak said. “They will kill you.”

“He murdered Oyibo!” Tau told him, eyes blurring with tears. He hadn’t cried since Aren and didn’t want to now, but watching Oyibo die had made old wounds new again.

“They will kill you,” Uduak repeated, using his blade to turn Tau’s aside.

“Yeth. Merthy!”

Uduak clubbed the kneeling Noble in the side of the head, knocking him unconscious, and Tau stumbled back, away from his beaten foe. He let his swords fall to the dirt and went to Oyibo, knelt beside the body of his sword brother, and cried.

All around him was chaos. He heard the tumult, but it seemed a thing apart, a thing across a distance he could not traverse. He heard they had won. Uduak’s prong had bored through the Indlovu’s defenses with ease. Hadith’s prong had struggled until Uduak’s men joined them, helping them finish off the rest of the defenders.

They’d found the Enervator. Not enough time had passed for her to manage a third attack. She’d surrendered and they had come to sweep up these last two Indlovu, her bodyguards. That was when they saw the skirmish’s true cost.

The rest of the morning went by in a blur. Oyibo’s body was taken from the battlefield and prepped for burning as the umqondisi from the citadel suggested punishing Tau with death, or at least whipping. In skirmishes, men were injured and sometimes killed, but the citadel umqondisi argued that Tau had forfeited his right to protection under skirmish rules when he ignored the Noble’s calls for mercy.

Jayyed and several other umqondisi protested this, begged even. They claimed Tau had become emotional at the death of a sword brother. They claimed he had not heard or, at least, had not understood the calls for mercy from the Noble’s mangled mouth.

The citadel had not liked that but stopped short of calling the claims lies. Instead, they focused on the Indlovu’s condition—a mangled face, a broken arm and leg!

Things that happen in a skirmish, Jayyed told them. He asked, who among them had not broken limbs or received a lump or two? They were warriors, not farmers. Besides, was it not an Ihashe initiate they had to burn this day?

A Lesser, a Common, the citadel umqondisi had replied, as if they spoke of grains of sand on a beach, all the same and easily replaced.

A man who would have fought for the Goddess and the Omehi against the hedeni, Jayyed told them, his anger beginning to show. It all flowed over and beyond Tau, as he tried to understand Oyibo’s death.

Tau had begun to treat the world of the isikolo and citadels as a game. Fighting with dull swords, playing at battle.

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