This largest group of platforms was kept purposefully separate from the rest. This was the oldest and most confusing part of the village, with huts and structures haphazardly built in layers on top of each other for generations. It didn’t matter which house’s territory he was in. Casteless quarters always felt similar, giving off an air of disintegrating shoddy construction and a general filthiness. The Law mandated that the living area of the untouchables be kept separate from that of the whole men. Bits of glowing ash were falling from the dark sky, and several buildings in the casteless quarter had caught fire. Ashok took cover behind the corner of a hut and listened. Something was screeching. It was a horrible, bloodcurdling sound. He hoped the demon had attacked a piglet because that sound should not ever come out of a human throat, no matter how low in status the human might be.
Keeping Angruvadal low at his side, Ashok stalked toward the darkened barracks where the cry came from. There was a sickening crack and the noise abruptly stopped. Ashok froze.
The demon knew he was here.
The huge hut was big enough to house dozens of casteless. Ashok’s eyes couldn’t quite pierce the shadows inside, but he knew that it was watching him. He knew the demon would look upon him and see a tall man, lean and hard, dressed in lamellar armor, plates lacquered gray and inlaid with silver, held together with leather and silk, not so different from some of the humans it had killed before, and hardly intimidating to something as strong as an elephant. Only unlike the others, this man was completely devoid of fear.
Something smooth and vast slid along the floor of the hut, blacker than its surroundings. There was a shimmer as a bit of firelight reflected off of its nearly impenetrable hide. It didn’t immediately barge into the open to try and eat him as he had hoped. He’d surprised the last demon he’d fought by side-stepping its charge and opening its guts with Angruvadal. This demon was not so stupid. No…This demon recognized that this particular human was somehow different than the others. It understood that this human wasn’t prey.
Both of them had magic in their blood.
Curious, the black shape slowly lifted itself from the floor and slid forward into the light. The demon flowed so smoothly that its movements were like pouring oil. It had to twist its wide shoulders to fit through the door. The soft wood crumbled to bits as the demon’s razor hide rubbed against it. Once on the platform, the demon no longer had to slouch. It rose to its full height, towering over Ashok. The young nayak at the jungle’s edge hadn’t been exaggerating its size at all. Sighting a demon on dry land at all was a rare experience. Most men would go their entire lives without seeing one. Ashok had seen four, and this was the biggest by far.
Demons came in many shapes and sizes, and it was whispered that truly vast beings had been seen amid the waves, but the ones he’d fought had been shaped like men…mostly…though each of them had been distorted in a different way. This one was too tall, its limbs too long, its fingers longer still, and each ended in a black point. There were three fingers, splayed wide, with a translucent webbing between them. Its legs were too short, too squat. Its head was a lump, nearly featureless except for a horizontal line that divided the lump in half.
“The ocean belongs to demons. Land belongs to man. So says the Law.” Ashok slowly lifted his arm, revealing his black steel blade.
The line across its otherwise blank face split open, revealing teeth, black and shiny and sharp as the rest of its body. It let out a hiss of air that sounded surprisingly dry and raspy. That was the first sound he had ever heard a demon make. It must have recognized the sword that had been dispatching its kind since the Age of Kings.
“The penalty for trespass, for either side, is death.”
Now they understood each other.
The demon bolted.
Ashok went after it.
Demons were faster than men, but a Protector was no longer just a man. He caught it before it could get around the side of the casteless barracks and struck. Nothing in the world was sharper than an ancestor blade, and it cut smoothly through demon’s back. Their blood was thin and milky, and it shot out as if it was kept under a great deal of pressure. That wound was deep enough to fell any normal being, but it only stung the demon.
It spun, swinging at him, but Ashok dodged aside as its claws obliterated the barrack’s wall.
Moving as fast as lightning, the demon lashed out over and over again. Ashok moved back, placing his body to avoid the blows and turning aside the rest with his sword. The demon’s claws and bones were grown from a material harder than steel, nearly as hard as the ancient sword, and glowing sparks rose whenever they met. Ashok was not concerned for his sword. The chips were from the demon’s bones, because nothing could harm this sword except dishonor.
He had fought and defeated three demons, but combined, the many bearers of Angruvadal had killed nearly a hundred, and though their memories were not perfectly clear, their instincts remained, and they belonged to him now. The demon’s erratic movements were expected, almost predictable.
Ashok dodged a mighty blow and ran the edge of his sword up the demon’s arm in response. White blood hit him in the face. Demons didn’t have veins and arteries like a man. Instead the interior of their limbs was a solid slab of dense meat, white as snow, all of it soaked in their thin blood. But like a man, let the blood out and they began to weaken. The Protector attacked, lunging forward to drive several inches of black steel between its flexible ribs. Their vitals were hard to reach, and even when pierced, they didn’t die quickly. The creature flowed back, out of reach of the sword.
If demons felt pain, they never showed it. They were like Protectors that way.
It leapt to the side, crashing through a railing to fall to the next level. He thought about letting it go. No one really knew how demon’s bodies worked, so maybe he’d wounded it enough that it would slink off and die…But the Law was clear. The penalty was death, so he had to be certain. If the demon couldn’t dive directly into the depths, it would head for the surf. Where the two worlds met was no man’s land, but in anything not shallow enough for a man to see his feet, evil lurked, and then Ashok would be the trespasser. He had to catch it before then.
Without hesitation, Ashok leapt over the side after it. His boots hit solid wood. He could still feel the vibrations of the fleeing demon. This level was darker, damper, covered in hanging ropes and moist nets and the stink of fish. Only the casteless ate the unclean animals of the ocean. Catwalks stretched between the stilts and scaffolds. There were beds of flea-ridden straw in every corner. This place was nastier than the foul huts above. Even among the casteless there was rank, so how low did one have to sink to be the lowest amongst them?
There was a crash and a shout just ahead. Ashok ran down the catwalk, through a rain of smoke and ash from above and a mist of saltwater from below. A shack had been constructed of discarded garbage, using the stilts of a real building as a frame. There was a hole in the wall where the demon had smashed through.
Inside the shack were several women and children, filthy, ragged, and thin. The untouchables had been hiding, hoping the demon would pass them by, but instead they had wound up right in its path. A male casteless, old, defiant, and tiny, was the only thing between the monster and its victims. Ashok had never known that one of the non-people could be capable of real bravery, but this casteless dreg was defending the shack like he was a warrior defending the Capitol.
Only Ashok noted that the old casteless was holding the demon back with a spear. That was a severe violation of the Law.
The demon swatted the spear aside and the old man with it. It would crush the cowering humans just out of spite before leaping to the surf below. Only Ashok reached it first and drove Angruvadal through its back and out its stomach.
“You shouldn’t have come here, demon,” he said as he wrenched his sword free, spilling the demon’s dinner of partially digested villagers.
It twisted around and swung at him, but he ducked, and the blow shatt
ered several of the stilts instead. He stabbed upward, through its armpit, deep into the meat of its chest cavity. At this rate, the hut was going to collapse on top of them, and it was not his place to needlessly kill the property of House Gujara. “Get out of here,” Ashok ordered the casteless as he pushed the demon back against the other supports.
But rather than flee, the non-people were jabbering and squealing at him in their rough, mangled dialect. “There’s two of them!”
“Behind you!” A child pointed back the way he’d come.
The sword warned him as well, a sudden rush of instincts and a desire for self-preservation, and Ashok threw himself aside. Even then, a black blur of demon flesh rubbed against him. The interlocked plates protected his chest, but where the hot hide brushed against his face blood came welling up through his lacerated skin.
Two demons!
Both of the huge creatures were on him then, clawing and snapping. They were identical in size, shape, and viciousness. He’d never faced such a challenge before, but the sword had, and it told him exactly what to do. Ashok slashed and danced between the limbs, painting with blood and bone shard sparks. He hit them each with a dozen clean strikes, each sufficient to kill a man, but it barely slowed the demons’ onslaught.
A claw broke mail and sliced into his left arm. Another claw cut a gash through his cheek. The fresh pain merely kept Ashok focused. He was unable to feel fear, only a cold calculation of the odds, and it wasn’t looking good. At least the first demon was no longer trying to escape.
The demons were bigger and stronger but Ashok was moving constantly, trying to keep one of the savage creatures in front of the other so he only had to respond to one set of attacks at a time. There was no room to maneuver here. The casteless were running or clambering down the hanging nets like monkeys. There was a loud thump overhead as a burning beam landed on their improvised roof. Instinct whispered to Ashok, and he swung upwards, smashing through the thin boards and spilling flames onto the demon’s heads.
They had no visible eyes, but the burning roof support seemed to blind them. Ashok stabbed, taking one through its pelvis, then he lowered his shoulder plate and crashed into the other, driving it off balance. The demon flesh scraped the paint from the ornate carvings of his armor, then grated across his now exposed arm. For a beast of the depths, the demon felt remarkably dry and hot. His ploy worked, and creature was put off balance and sent crashing through the ramshackle wall, over the edge, where it struck the hanging nets, thrashing about and entangling itself.
Seeing where it was suspended, Ashok leapt across, caught hold of the netting above the demon, and hung there, swinging in the fiery wind, dangling from the rough hemp with one hand. There was still a demon on the platform behind him, and the one thrashing below him, but that was only for a split second, because then Ashok struck at the ropes, cut them all in one swing, and dropped the entangled demon to the shore below.
It hit the rocks with a thud. Ashok glanced down and saw that fallen demon was twitching, its thick skull cracked open and leaking white. Hopefully that one was finished.
He scrambled up the ropes and rolled onto the top platform. The fire had spread quickly. There was a thump as the other demon leapt up and landed next to him. He attacked, but the demon intercepted his arm with a blow that would have killed an ox. Bones cracked and Ashok’s sacred sword went bouncing across the floor.
Damned blood loss…He must have been injured worse than he thought. He’d never lost hold of his sword before. He called upon the Heart of the Mountain to seal his wounds as he lurched to his feet, but the demon struck him hard enough to deform steel plates and knock him through the wall of a shed.
The Protector landed in a cloud of splinters. The shed was burning around him. Flames were licking up the walls as Ashok crawled in the direction of his sword. There was still air to breath near the floor, but his chest was so wracked with pain that it hardly mattered. The second demon followed him, webbed toes gliding soundlessly across the wood, its lump of a head clanking through the dangling chains and hooks, sending them swinging.
The demon would reach him before he could reach his sword.
It bent down and claws slid through his armor, clothing, and skin, hoisting him from the ground, up into the smoke and toward black teeth. Blood poured from the lacerations on his back, but he ignored the pain, and fought, striking with his elbow against the beast’s thick skull. All he did was lose more skin. It lifted Ashok up, then smashed him back down, through a support beam, and hard onto the floor.
Angruvadal was just out of reach. Ashok lay there, the air driven from his body, flat on his back, glaring at his impending death.
The old casteless appeared through the smoke, bellowing incoherently, and jabbed his illegal spear into the demon’s back. Even the finest steel had a difficult time piercing demon hide, so the blade bounced off harmlessly. The demon swiveled its eyeless lump of a head toward the casteless, not realizing in time that this non-person was no threat, only a momentary distraction, but it was enough for Ashok to roll over and lunge for his sword.
His fingers closed around Angruvadal’s grip as the demon turned back to finish him. The angle was awkward, but Ashok had desperate strength and the sharpest sword ever forged. Black hide parted, hardened bone shattered, and the demon toppled as its leg came off in a spray of shimmering white.
The Protector struggled back to his feet. Now it was the demon’s turn to crawl. One arm was hanging useless at his side, but Ashok could fight with either, and he went about methodically hacking the demon to pieces.
The demon rolled over and raised one of its claws, almost as if it were begging for mercy. The line opened in its lump of a head, and alien sounds poured out, a series of incomprehensible hisses and gurgles. Ashok paused for a moment. He’d never known demons had language. There was no way to know what it was trying to say, but it didn’t matter, the Law was very clear on this matter.
“You are guilty of trespass.” Then Ashok swung and hacked a massive chunk of flesh from the top of its head.
There was a crack as more supports gave way. The floor shifted hard to the side. He could withstand unbelievable pain and recover from injuries which would instantly kill a normal man, but that didn’t mean he could breathe smoke or survive being in a collapsing stilt house as it was consumed by fire. It was time to take this fight elsewhere. Ashok put his boot on the dying demon and shoved it over the edge of the platform.
Chapter 2
Protector of the Law, twenty-year senior, Ashok Vadal, stood on the damp rocks watching the burning village slide into the sea. The two demons were lying in the sand where they’d finally died. They were unclean, so he would leave them for House Gujara’s wizards and alchemists to pick over. Every part of a demon’s body was incredibly valuable for the magic stored within. The profit to be found in those two bodies was worth far more than the loss of a single poor village.
His body ached, a few bones had cracked, but the bleeding from his many wounds had slowed to a trickle. Ashok would need to rest for a few hours in order to let the Heart of the Mountain do its work. The Heart was the source of the Order’s power and their greatest secret. The covenant was simple; it kept them alive and made them strong. In exchange they protected the Law. Within a day he’d be ready to fight again. When the Heart was done with him, he would die, but until then he would serve.
Someone was stumbling along the beach in the first light of the dawn. At first Ashok thought it might have been one of the Gujaran warriors since he was carrying a spear, but it was the old casteless instead. The untouchable was a tenacious one, but he’d been born into the wrong caste.
“The monsters are dead, but how are you still alive?” the casteless asked him.
Ashok did not immediately respond, first because the casteless’ dialect was thick, uneducated, and difficult to understand, and secondly, because he wasn’t used to being spoken to so directly by someone of such low station. The further one got from prope
r civilization, the more the legal divisions between the castes became blurry, but still, he was of the elite, the first caste of governors, and this wasn’t even a real person. Living by all this saltwater must have driven the old casteless mad.
“I was stronger than they were.”
“You are bleeding.” The casteless was right, but his wounds would heal as they always did. It was very hard to end a Protector’s life. It was kill them quick, or not at all. “And your face…” the old casteless made a scraping noise.
No one would ever accuse Ashok of being pretty, even without any new scars, but this old fool was giving him more important things to be concerned about. “Your overseers are failing. It’s against the Law for a non-person to possess a weapon.”
It was as if the casteless had somehow not expected the challenge, but they weren’t very bright. He held the shaft close to his chest protectively and shouted, “It’s mine!”
“No…It is not.” Ashok scowled. The Law demanded that he go over there and cut the casteless down for this violation, but Ashok was wounded and very tired. He quoted the statute from memory, “A non-person may only possess the tools granted to it necessary to fulfill its assigned duties. Casteless are never allowed to take up arms.”
“I didn’t steal it. I found it washed up on the beach.”
“Good.” If he’d stolen it from a warrior, then regardless of how exhausted Ashok was, he’d have to execute him on the spot. A member of the first caste didn’t thank a casteless for anything, but this creature had saved his life, so Ashok had no desire to harm him. “Then you may live.”
The area was being secured by the paltan. Several warriors had spotted him and a shout went up that the Protector was still alive. Then they saw the first dead demon and began to cheer. That noise turned into a stunned silence when they saw the second demon. No one had expected that. Word spread quickly and more warriors came running. Soon he had a crowd on the beach, all staring at him and the two huge, lifeless bodies. Even in the stillness of death, they were still sleek and intimidating.