Chapter 91 What Is Mercy?
Khan was twenty feet from the council room door when the footsteps came after him.
He didn't slow down. He heard them and knew from the pace and the weight of them that it was one person and that the one person was not the rogue king, which meant it was someone who had decided the conversation was not finished. He kept walking until the hand landed on his arm, and then he stopped.
He looked down at the hand. Then up at the face it belonged to.
It was Ferris.
Khan removed the hand from his arm with the specific deliberateness of someone establishing a fact rather than making a gesture, his fingers closing around Ferris's wrist and lifting it away and releasing it.
Ferris looked up at him. The looking up was unavoidable and it was obvious he resented it.
"I'm going to give you some advice," Ferris said. "Submit to the king. You and your people, formally, publicly, before the two days are up. Distance yourselves from Maddox and make it visible. If you do that, the traitor brand stays with him and it stays away from you."
Khan looked at him for a long moment. He looked at him the way a man looked at something very small that was making a great deal of noise, with the particular patience of someone who was not threatened but was mildly interested in how long the noise would continue.
Then he smiled, It was a slow smile.
"We take chances," Khan said, "till Raja decides."
Ferris's jaw tightened.
"But you," Khan continued, the smile holding, "should worry what happens if Islanders leave." He tilted his head slightly, looking down at the commander with the ease of a man making an observation rather than a threat. "Who is fighting force here, yes? Who is most of your numbers now?" He let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to sit. "Think this carefully."
Ferris stared up at him with his teeth pressed together and said nothing, which was the loudest thing he could have said.
Khan held the smile for another moment and then turned and walked away.
He did not look back.
The Islander section of the camp was at the southern end of the warehouse complex, a cluster of spaces that Khan's people had made functional over the three days since relocation. They had arranged it, efficiently and without sentimentality, sleeping areas separated from gathering areas, the practical architecture of people who had been moving their whole lives and knew how to make anywhere workable quickly.
Most of his people were gathered in the main space when Khan came in. They read his expression before he spoke.
He told them what the meeting had been about.
He kept it plain and direct, stated the facts of what had been said and what had been decided. The two-day deadline. The traitor brand waiting at the end of it if Maddox didn't return. The commanders' push to go to war against Cesare's pack. The position Khan had taken and what it had cost in terms of goodwill.
The response was immediate and loud.
"Hum unhe usi raat maar daalenge." (We will slaughter them that very night.) A man said, with complete conviction, standing up from where he'd been sitting with his fists at his sides. Several voices rose in agreement around him, the sound of people who had been in a cage long enough that the idea of waiting for someone else's deadline felt intolerable.
"Haan, kyun intezaar karein? Hamari sankhya zyada hai." (Yes, why wait? We outnumber them.) Another voice, from the back.
"Lekin Raja ke bina? Kya yeh sahi hoga?" (But without the Raja? Would that be right?) That was an older woman, who sat near the entrance and had the particular authority that came from being old enough to have survived several situations that should have ended her. She said it quietly and it carried further than the louder voices.
The room split on that. Half the energy went toward the first man's position, the readiness of people who had been pushed past their patience and wanted to act. The other half went toward the woman’s, the caution of people who understood that acting without their leader meant acting without sanction, which meant acting in a way that could not be undone.
"Kuch log yeh bhi soch rahe hain ki Raja ne humein chod diya." (Some are also thinking the Raja has abandoned us.) A younger man, said it with the specific discomfort of someone giving voice to a thing that others were thinking but hadn't said.
"Aise mat socho." (Do not think like that.) Khan said it sharply and the room went quieter. He looked at the younger man directly. "Raja free us. A man who free you from chains not abandon you." He let that be heard. "He is coming back. We wait."
"Aur agar nahi aaya toh?" (And if he does not come?) the first man said, lower now.
"Toh hum apna raasta khud chunenge." (Then we will choose our own path.) Khan said it simply. "But we not choose it before we have to. Not yet."
The discussion continued, quieter now, people breaking into smaller conversations with the murmuring quality of a group that was not resolved but had been given enough to hold onto for the moment.
Khan was listening to the woman earlier say something to the woman beside her when he saw it.
Movement. At the gap between two of the stacked crates that formed the southern wall of their space, where the gap was wide enough that a person standing in it could see into the room without being immediately visible to anyone not looking directly at it.
There was a person standing in it.
Khan's eyes moved to the gap and stayed there and the person in it had not yet realised they'd been seen. He could see a shoulder, part of a face turned toward the interior of the Islander space, and the quality of the stillness of someone listening rather than passing through.
He did not change his expression.
He said at a completely normal conversational volume, "Wahan ek aadmi chhup ke sun raha hai. Mujhe talwar chahiye." (There is a man hiding and listening there. I need a sword.)
The woman, who was the closest to him, did not look toward the gap. She reached beside her and produced the blade with unhurried efficiency and calmness, not attracting attention to herself.
Khan took it.
He stood up slowly, and only then did the man in the gap register the change in the room's attention and look toward Khan, he saw what Khan was holding.
The man stepped back from the gap. He was one of the rogues, mid-level from the look of him, and his face was doing the rapid calculation of someone trying to determine how bad the situation was.
"I-I was just passing through," he said. His voice was shaking. "The camp is cramped, I was cutting through. I don't even speak whatever language you were—"
“Come out,” Khan said and walked toward the gap.
The man came out from between the crates, which was the correct response given the alternative, and stood in the Islander space with the body language of someone who wanted to appear unconcerned and was not managing it.
"Look, I have every right to walk through this part of the camp," he said. "We're all on the same side here. The king wouldn't appreciate you doing anything that—"
“Your king.” Khan corrected and kept walking toward him.
The man watched the sword and took a step back. Then another. "Alright, let's not do anything that creates a problem between our groups, yeah? I'll just go back the way I came and we'll say nothing about—"
His back hit the far wall of crates.
Khan stopped in front of him and looked down at him with no expression, it looked like he was just performing a function.
The man looked at the sword.
Then he looked at Khan's face.
Then he looked at the sword again.
"Please," he said. The performance was entirely gone now. "Please, I wasn't doing anything, I swear on my life I wasn't—"
He tried to shift. The change began, the shimmer of it moving across his skin, and Khan reached out and gripped his collar before the shift could complete and held him in place with one hand while the other brought the sword up.
The man made a sound that was not a word.
He was crying now, properly, and a dark stain spread down the front of his trousers, and Khan looked at him without expression and said, "Bura mat suno." (Hear no evil.)
The sword moved.
The man screamed.
Khan stepped back from the blood and looked at the ear on the ground and then at the man pressed against the crates with his hand against the side of his head and his mouth open and nothing coming out of it except sound.
The sword moved again.
"Bura mat suno." (Hear no evil.)
The second ear joined the first on the ground.
The man was shaking, fully shaking, his legs barely holding him. Khan looked at him for a moment and then reached forward and gripped his jaw, and the man made a sound of pure terror, and Khan looked directly into his eyes and said, "Bura mat bolo." (Speak no evil.)
The tongue came next.
By the time Khan finished and stepped back, the man was a thing held together by animal instinct and nothing else. Though he was still standing, just barely.
Khan looked into his eyes and said, "Bura mat dekho." (See no evil.)
He held the man's face between his hands and in a flash, the sword had sliced both eyes, effectively blinding him.
An earth-shattering scream, then Khan let him go.
The man moved like a wounded animal without dignity, scrambling along the wall and through the gap between the crates and gone, and the sound of his departure faded into the general noise of the camp and was absorbed by it.
Khan handed the sword back to the woman.
She took it without comment and silently began to clean the blood off of it.
The Islander space was quiet for a moment, and then it was not quiet, the normal sounds resuming, these were people who had seen worse and were not particularly disturbed.
Khan's tent was at the eastern corner of their section, a modest space with a sleeping mat, a small chest and the single personal item he carried everywhere, a carved piece of dark wood that had come from a tree on his island, he had kept it with him throughout until he returned to his island and had no need to carry it again.
He pushed the tent flap back and stopped.
Two women were inside, both of them from the Islander group, both of them looking at him with sultry eyes. They were barely dressed, each had long fine skirts that caught the light and shimmied when they moved, with slits on each side and a simple thin saree that covered their chests.
One of them moved toward him immediately, her hand going to his arm, her voice soft.
"Raja ke pehle aana chahiye. Unki shakti aapko de sakti hai." (You should come before the Raja arrives. His strength could pass to you.) Her fingers moved along his forearm with the purposeful ease of a woman who understood what she was doing and why.
The other came from the other side, her hands finding his shoulders, and the logic of it was an old Islander belief, held genuinely and practiced openly, that intimacy with a strong warrior transferred something of their strength and that the warrior in turn was renewed by the giving of it. It was not manipulation. It was simply what they believed.
Khan stood in the middle of it and felt their hands and felt nothing move in him except a distant awareness of their presence.
He was thinking.
The two-day deadline sat in the front of his mind and would not be moved by anything the women were doing with their hands. He thought about the meeting and the commanders' faces and Ferris's jaw and the rogue king standing up and saying two days with the finality of a man who had already decided what came after.
He thought about his people in the gathering space, the ones who wanted to fight that night and the ones who wanted to wait, and the ones who were beginning to ask the question he could not yet answer about whether Maddox was coming back.
He had not known Maddox long. That was the simple truth of it. Long enough to stand in a prison corridor and watch him speak to a room full of broken people with an honesty that didn't perform itself. But he’d known him long enough to know that the man led from somewhere real rather than somewhere calculated.
But not long enough to know how he thought. Not long enough to know whether Maddox wanted to fight in the rogue king's war or had separate plans.
The woman on his left said something against his shoulder as she kissed it.
Khan's lip pulled back.
The fangs came without him deciding to show them, and the growl was low and without anger. It was a simple warning. Both women went still and then went back, reading it correctly, and a moment later the tent flap moved and they were gone.
Khan stood alone in the tent.
He sat down on the sleeping mat and put his forearms on his knees and stared at the ground and thought about Silena. She was out there, she and the three others he had sent in four directions, and no one had sent word yet.
Two days.
If Maddox was not back in two days the Islanders would split. He knew that with the certainty of someone who knew his own people. The ones who wanted to fight would align with the rogues because fighting was available. The ones who wanted to wait would drift, directionless, and the coherence of the group he had built out of the freed prisoners would come apart at the seams.
Everything they had built in that prison corridor, everything Maddox had offered them, would dissolve back into the same scattered nothing they'd come from.
Khan looked at the piece of carved wood on the chest.
He had carried it through worse than this.
He hoped Silena and the others were fast.