Savage Legion Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  Publisher’s Notice

  The publisher has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This ebook is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this ebook, or make this ebook publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook except to read it on your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report.

  For Laython Wilkerson, my original instructor in savagery.

  And for Monkey Empire.

  PART ONE THREE SIDES OF A COIN

  THE MOURNING AFTER

  AHEAD OF EVIE, DOORS OF rotting wood are flung open. The sun is a curse shouted into her eyes, and she is prodded by the impatient end of a club up the mucky membrane of the darkened tunnel and out into the light of day. She feels soft, mostly even terrain under her moccasin-covered feet. She holds up a dirty hand, saluting the void of sharp gold filling her vision, and blinking until the motion snaps the world around her into something akin to focus.

  The space is vast and walled and forgotten. It must have been a training field for soldiers once, no doubt covered by green grass that is now just a memory made of yellow bladed husks. Broken wooden men slouch from their buried tree trunk bases, as if the hapless vague bipedal shapes are supplicating in defeat. Practice weapons dangle from rusty, loosened nails at the end of sticks mimicking an enemy’s sword arm.

  There are stubby little men and women armed with blunt sticks prodding them along, Evie and the rest of the drunks and dregs and bandits from the Capitol’s dungeon, herding them like feed into the center of the field.

  “Form a line!” a voice shouts with all the power and rage of a minor god burdened by their peers with mortal concerns. “Shoulder to shoulder and an arm’s span apart! I don’t care how you stand, but stand! Stand, I said, you miserable pickled jars of skin!”

  The voice continues to boom and command. Evie steps between two equally ragged, unwashed bodies and plants her feet in the neglected earth. She hopes the fabled “line” of which the angered god speaks will form around her so she’ll be required to move no more. Her head feels like a melon pressed between two scorching boulders.

  The demigod’s raging commands cease, and for a moment there is only blissful silence on the field, save for the steady, gentle rasping of hurried drunks.

  Then he steps before their assemblage.

  It’s him, the giant from the cells. He’s the one who took them all from the dungeon, loaded them onto a wagon, bagged their heads, and rattled them what felt like halfway across the countryside. He’s the tallest man she’s ever seen. His torso is like a hundred-pound sack of taro, bulging rolls of flesh pushing through the impossibly small vest he’s somehow managed to toggle together around them.

  “I am your wrangler,” he announces. “My name is Laython. You will call me ‘Tasker’ or you will call me ‘Freemaster.’ And from now till your bloody deaths on the field of battle in service of Crache… your name… is Savage.”

  Savage. Evie turns the word over in her mind, finding it offensive even by her standards.

  “Look to the spires of this field,” Laython instructs them.

  Evie tilts her head and squints through the harsh sunlight at the towers crowning the walls of the training field. They are each crewed by Skrain, the elite soldiers of Crache, resplendent in breastplates embossed with the ant, the nation’s symbol. Rich folds of leather extend from each shielded chest to cover their arms all the way to their wrists. They carry master-crafted Ancestor Hafts, long weapons crowned with horse-cutter blades. The faces of the Skrain aren’t visible to the rabble on the field, which seems appropriate.

  “What you see are soldiers. What you see is the exact opposite of what you are. There will be no shining armor, oiled leather, or fine steel for the lot of you. Oh no, my friends. You’re Savages. The rags you’ve come here in and any rusted pieces of scrap you can scrounge from the armory wagon is all you’ll need on the battlefield.”

  “What in the Fire Star’s light are you going on about?” Evie asks him.

  Laython scowls. “Calling out the name of outlawed gods is exactly what landed your raggedy ass here, girl! Now shut it!”

  Evie finds it easy enough to obey that command, as speaking hurts just as much as everything else right now.

  “You will not loot,” Laython informs them, casually returning to his public address. “You will not pillage, you will not rape, and you will not take battlefield trophies of any kind.”

  He walks up and down the first row of them, and by now Evie’s stomach has settled into the same perpetual numb state as her head.

  “You will not desert your regiment. You will not quarrel with, nor kill your fellow Savage. These commands are sacred, and the violation of any of them will result in your immediate execution.”

  “You expect us to fight?” another prisoner, older and portlier, asks.

  “I expect you to cause the same chaos and mayhem on the field of battle that you so dearly love to cause in city taverns. You’re not soldiers,” he reiterates. “You, each of you, are weapons. You’ll be hurled at the front lines of Crache’s enemies in waves thick enough to smash them. And in that chaos our Skrain will wipe away what remains. That is how we win. That is how Crache prevails, by the blood of Savages. Your blood.”

  “Why don’t you just kill us now?” the same portly old man asks, more meekly than defiantly.

  “Because that would waste good, solid material. And Crache does not waste any of its resources.”

  “We’re not the condemned,” Evie insists. “This isn’t right.”

  “It’s service,” he says with finality. “It’s a service to which you’ve all been called. That call cannot be refused. If you choose death then you’ll choose it meeting our nation’s enemies.

  “Welcome to the Savage Legion.”

  THE KNIGHT BEFORE

  “YOU’VE HAD HALF A GALLON of wine,” the bartender warned her as gently as a man missing half his face from an apparent mauling warns anyone. “I wouldn’t go mixing that with Voxic’s sting. This last batch I got’ll take the paint off a wagon.”

  Evie saluted him with her cup and a half smile while completely forgetting what he had just said. She retreated to a lone table in the middle of the dingy little establishment tucked into a secluded corner of the Bottoms. She was indeed drinking even more than usual, but that was entirely intentional.

  She’d just finished burning most of her throat away with half the cup’s contents when the apotheosis of all drunken, horrid bit players in sad tavern scenes straddled a chair beside her.

  “Have we fucked before?” he asked her, quite sincerely.

  Evie squinted, attempting to bring him into focus and immediately regretting the decision.

  “I can honestly say I’ve never felt worse about myself over anything in my life as I feel about the fact I can’t definitively answer ‘no’ to that question.”

  That was apparently far too many words for her potential suitor. “Eh?”

  “Just go away,” Evie said wearily.

  �
�Look here,” he began anew, “I didn’t mean to give offense. I just thought if we hadn’t had the pleasure of knowing each other—”

  And Evie had already had enough of the pathetic, predictable exchange. She already knew he’d keep talking. She already knew she’d keep rebuking him. She already knew he’d get angry and belligerent. She already knew when she finally crossed some irrational verbal line he drew, somehow “offending” this clod who had invaded her sacred space, he’d progress to physical violence. She had no patience for such a tired back-and-forth. She chose instead to skip straight to the end of the story.

  Evie moved faster than anyone that drunk is generally capable of moving. She stood up like a shot, her legs straightening so violently they knocked over her chair. One hand grabbed the man by his greasy hair and jerked his head back while the other took up the nearest bottle and smashed it against his cheek and jaw. The force and momentum were twin demons dragging him over the back of his chair to the stained floor of the bar.

  Evie’s mind left the flow of normal time then, although her body proceeded to kick the man on the floor as around her the rest of the drunken assemblage took their cue to descend into a full-on riotous brawl. She was only vaguely aware when other bodies assaulted her own, and even less aware when the city Aegins arrived to break things up and cart the chief offenders, mainly her, off to the dungeons.

  The cell was the next thing to cling to her awareness. It stank of shit and earth and unwashed bodies, as dungeon cells are wont to do, but it also smelled strongly of anise. In fact, it smelled mostly of anise. It may very well have been the sweetest smelling dungeon in which Evie was ever flung.

  “They feed it to us,” one of the other drunks explained after several minutes of Evie’s befuddled sniffing at the air.

  “Howzzat?” she managed, such as she was.

  “Anise,” said the drunk. “It riots wild out the back there. They feed it to us. It’s in everything, even the water. Makes your shit and piss smell like soap. Easier’n cheaper than washing us, or the damned cell. Starts to taste like poison after a few days, though.”

  Evie just nodded solemnly.

  Everything, absolutely everything, makes sense to a drunk when they’re deep down the well of their bender.

  “It’s not the taste that’s bad for you,” a much smaller voice assured them from the shadows. “Too much is bad for your insides. You can tell by how it changes the color of your water.”

  Evie squinted into the corner of the small cell at a slight girl propped there against the rough-hewn walls. Her legs were impossibly withered.

  “Did the Aegins do that to you?” Evie asked her.

  The girl shook her head. “A cart ran over them.”

  “How do you move yourself around?”

  “I have sheet tin under me most days,” the girl explained. “I grease the bottom with renderings from the bins behind the eating houses.”

  Evie nodded, just enough as not to upset her already throbbing skull. “Smart girl. What’s your name?”

  “Dyeawan.”

  “That’s not a Crachian name.”

  Dyeawan shook her head, but offered no more than that on the subject.

  “All right, then. I’m Evie. What did they arrest a little thing like you for?”

  “Begging.”

  “Is that right? I thought no one begged for food here.”

  “Well, I didn’t have the chance to do it for long, did I?”

  There was no trace of bitterness in her voice. In fact, there was playfulness, the kind that only a child can keep in such a dark place.

  Evie couldn’t help but smile.

  Dyeawan smiled back, and even through the grime streaking her face, through the shadows banished to the corner there with her, that smile shined.

  “Why did they put you here?” Dyeawan asked her as they both dozed upon the bare and stained cell floor.

  “I don’t think it was the drinking,” Evie mused. “I drink every night. It might’ve been the fight I maintain I did not start in the tavern, although that happens just as often. Of course, this was the first time I was still there when the Aegins arrived.”

  “So they arrested you for fighting?”

  Evie thought about it sincerely for a moment. “No. They let most of the folk in the brawl go.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I… vaguely recall squatting and relieving myself on the boot of one of the Aegins.”

  Dyeawan laughed.

  “While singing,” Evie added.

  The girl laughed harder.

  “That would do it, then,” she said.

  “No,” Evie said seriously, and something in her tone put an end to Dyeawan’s laughter. “No… it wasn’t until they asked me if I had a home to go to and I told them I didn’t. That’s when they arrested me. When they found out I was a vagrant.”

  For the first time sadness crept into Dyeawan’s small voice. “They didn’t even bother to ask me.”

  Evie reached up and stroked the stringy tendrils of the girl’s hair.

  “You’ll be all right, little slider,” she assured the younger woman, trying to make her voice motherly without really knowing what that sounded like.

  “You don’t look like you belong here,” the girl said, surprising Evie. “Not really. And it almost sounds like… like you wanted the Aegins to come.”

  Evie stared at Dyeawan oddly in the half dark.

  “What an odd thing to say.”

  The younger girl shrugged. “I notice things other people don’t see sometimes. That’s all.”

  Evie nodded thoughtfully. “It appears you do.”

  Before the dawn, Laython came, wrapped in a heavy furred coat, and surveyed them in the cells. He barely said two words to the jailor, but they were enough. The cells were emptied, and all of them were loaded onto Laython’s wagon behind the dungeon. He left Dyeawan behind; he only took the able-bodied.

  Dyeawan never awoke to find Evie and the others missing from the unusually sweet-smelling cells. She did, however, awaken to a face mostly hidden beneath a black hood. A cloud of acrid dust, dancing in the light of the morning pouring through the window’s bars, dredged her face and lips, filling her nostrils. Somehow she knew the unnatural sleep would overtake her before she felt it begin to spread icy numbness through her arms and torso. She also knew she would indeed wake up again, but it would be someplace else, far from here.

  As she’d told Evie, Dyeawan had a way of seeing things, mostly subtle truths, that wouldn’t otherwise occur to most people.

  WHERE ONLY STONE STEPS ASCEND

  WE ARE NOT FLOWERS. WE do not wilt.

  Lexi hears her mother speak those words in her memory as she sits outside the chambers of the Gen Franchise Council. It’s here her grandparents and Brio’s grandparents came to petition to form Gen Stalbraid. They named their franchise after the steel woven together to push and pull the city’s first sky carriage.

  The bench beneath Lexi is carved from the translucent white-and-blue stone of the chamber wall itself. The entire Spectrum, including most of its fixtures and even furnishings, are carved from a single mountainous piece of stone, a marvel of engineering whose secrets are lost even to the best masonry Gens in Crache. The Spectrum is the physical, intellectual, and bureaucratic center of the Capitol, making it the center of Crache itself. No structure in all the nation’s sterling ten cities rivals the scale or beauty of the Spectrum’s massive domes, sky-piecing spires, and corridors so tall and expansive they feel more like mountain halls than the arteries of a city edifice. The sculpture of the national ant in the Spectrum lobby is said to be the largest ever crafted.

  Oval lamps are ensconced up and down the towering walls of every one of those corridors; the same lamps that hang from stakes curved like shepherds’ staffs along every city street and on every corner. The lamps were one of the first major innovations of the Post-Renewal Age. Each lantern houses two insects, a male and a female. They’re nocturnal creatu
res, hibernating in the bottom of the lanterns during the day and rising at the edge of dusk, precisely when darkness spreads through the streets. Upon rising, the two insects couple, consummating their nightly union. As they do, their small and bulbous bodies are filled with a bright luminescence that streams through the panes of their glass cage and radiates in every direction.

  They make love all night, lighting the entire city with a preternatural passion that is the sole engine of their brief existence, never with the slightest awareness of the gift they’re giving to the citizenry. After a month they wither to ash, from which their offspring rise and begin the cycle anew. With very little maintaining, each lamp and its inhabitants can light the night for years.

  Lexi often reflects upon how it’s all quite beautiful, if one chooses not to focus on the whole “incest” aspect of it.

  We are not flowers. We do not wilt.

  Those are her mother’s words, spoken to her from a room in Lexi’s mind where she keeps the memory of the woman as she was.

  It’s very different from the final room in which Lexi saw her. It’s a room in which the air doesn’t smell like death. Her mother sits there with her head raised high and proud, not pressed into a pillow, its slip stained brown by the poison expelled from her lungs. In that room in Lexi’s mind, her mother’s hair shines three different fiery colors in the light of the midday sun, hues for which they made up names when Lexi was a child. The day Lexi’s mother died, what remained of that hair was a few wisps gone gray that moved against her scalp like lonely spirits in bone-white graveyard.

  On that day, her last words to her only daughter were the same ones she’d spoken to the girl whenever strife crashed in heavy slate waves over their lives.

  The great stone doors to the Gen Franchise Council chambers open, somehow without the slightest scraping sound, and an elderly Aegin pokes his graying head through.

  “Lexi Xia!” he calls out.