Tusks of the Exiled

Chapter 1: What the Volcanoes Left

The ash fell in curtains thick enough to chew.

Skadda Veld crouched behind a spine of black basalt and watched the slaver caravan wind through the canyon below like a fat, wounded snake. Six wagons. Iron-banded cages on wheels. Twenty riders, maybe twenty-two—hard to count through the haze. Their mounts were steppe-bred aurochs, thick-necked beasts with curving horns capped in brass, snorting against the sulfur-laden air that rose from vents in the canyon floor.

She counted the riders again. Twenty-three. One more than she'd wanted.

It didn't matter. She was going to hit them anyway.

Two winters in the ash badlands had carved Skadda down to something essential. The broad, commanding frame that had once filled a war-queen's harness was now lean and hard, roped with sinew over heavy bone. Her skin, the grey-green of river clay common to the Black Tusk bloodline, had darkened to the color of char. Her tusks—

She had no tusks. Dagon Grund had seen to that. He'd had them broken at the root with a ceremonial hammer, the same hammer used to crack the skulls of oath-breakers and cowards. The stumps had healed into smooth ridges of gum, and when she ran her tongue over them, she tasted nothing but the ghost of what she'd been.

Below, the lead wagon lurched over a fissure and one of the cage-bars rang like a dull bell. Something inside the cage moved—a shape, hunched and shivering. The captives.

Skadda had not planned this ambush for the captives. She'd planned it for the food. Two days ago she'd eaten her last strip of smoked lizard, and before that she'd gone three days on nothing but ash-root tea and the bitter lichen that grew in volcanic crevices. Her stomach had become a clenched fist that no longer bothered to complain. But the slavers would have salt meat, hardtack, maybe even dried fruit if they were provisioned for a long haul. That was worth killing for.

Everything was worth killing for, out here.

She checked her weapons. A hand-axe she'd forged herself from scavenged iron and a haft of petrified wood—ugly, functional, balanced well enough. A knife made from volcanic glass, wickedly sharp but fragile. A length of chain she'd pulled from a collapsed mine shaft, wrapped around her left forearm as both armor and flail. No shield. No bow. No clan-marks, no war-paint, no banner.

Just hunger and hate.

The canyon narrowed ahead where two basalt pillars leaned toward each other like drunken sentries. She'd spent three days preparing the ambush point—loosening rocks on the eastern wall, digging a pit across the trail's width and covering it with a lattice of dried scrub and ash. The pit wasn't deep enough to kill an auroch, but it would break a leg, and a screaming beast with a shattered foreleg would do more damage to a column's order than any war-cry.

She moved along the ridge, keeping low. The ash was ankle-deep here, muffling her steps. Below, the caravan's point rider—a human, she noted, not an ogre—raised a hand and called a halt. The wagons groaned to a stop.

Skadda froze.

The point rider dismounted and walked forward, studying the ground. He was lean and weathered, with the look of a man who'd spent years reading terrain for a living. His eyes swept the trail ahead, and Skadda saw them linger on the patch of disturbed ground where her pit lay hidden.

He knelt. Brushed ash aside with his fingers.

Skadda's hand tightened on her axe. If he found the pit, the whole ambush fell apart. She'd have to hit them in open ground, one against twenty-three, and even her hatred wasn't stupid enough to call those good odds.

The point rider stood. Turned back toward the column. Opened his mouth—

Skadda threw the chain.

It wasn't a weapon meant for throwing, but two winters of improvisation had taught her that anything with weight and reach could be made to serve. The chain whipped through the ash-thick air and caught the point rider across the throat, wrapping once, twice. He went down clawing at the links, his warning dying in a wet gurgle.

Then she was moving.

She came off the ridge in a controlled slide, ash billowing around her like a grey cloak. The nearest rider saw her—an ogre, young, tusks still white with youth—and fumbled for his spear. Skadda was inside his reach before the spearhead cleared the saddle-sheath. Her axe took him in the armpit, below the leather guard, and she used his falling weight to drag herself up onto his auroch.

The beast bellowed. She drove her heels into its flanks and aimed it at the column.

Chaos was her army. It was the only one she had.

The auroch plowed into the second rider's mount, horns clashing, and Skadda leaped clear as both beasts went down in a tangle of legs and fury. She hit the ground rolling, came up with the glass knife in her left hand and the axe in her right, and cut the hamstring of a dismounting slaver before he'd found his footing.

Three down in the first ten heartbeats. She needed to make the rest expensive.

The pit did its work. The fourth wagon's team stepped onto the lattice and the lead auroch plunged through, screaming, its foreleg snapping with a sound like a green branch breaking. The wagon tilted, cages sliding, and the riders behind it bunched up in confusion. Skadda was already among them.

She fought the way the badlands had taught her—low, dirty, without honor. She went for mounts instead of riders, hamstringing aurochs so their masters fell into the ash and had to fight on foot where her speed and desperation gave her the edge. She used the wagons as cover, ducking under axles, slashing at ankles. When a slaver cornered her against a cage, she grabbed the iron bars and kicked him in the knee, then opened his throat with the glass knife as he buckled.

The knife shattered on the next stroke, leaving her with a bloody hilt and a fistful of obsidian splinters. She dropped it and fought with the axe alone.

By the time the ash settled, eleven slavers were dead or dying. The rest had broken—scattered into the canyon's side passages, abandoning their cargo. Skadda stood in the middle of the wreckage, breathing hard, blood running from a gash above her right eye and a deeper wound in her thigh where a spear had found her.

She'd won.

The word tasted strange. She'd forgotten what winning felt like.

She limped to the wagons and began breaking locks.

The captives were a mixed lot—humans, half-bloods, a few young ogres with their tusks already filed for sale. They stumbled out blinking, some weeping, some too broken to do either. Skadda paid them little attention. She was looking for the food stores.

She found them in the last wagon: casks of salt pork, sacks of grain, a crate of dried plums that made her mouth flood with saliva. She tore into a strip of pork with her broken teeth and chewed, eyes half-closed, the simple pleasure of eating almost enough to drown the pain in her leg.

Almost.

"You're bleeding."

The voice was young. Female. Rough with disuse but carrying an undertone of authority that snagged Skadda's attention like a fishhook.

She turned.

The girl stood at the back of the last cage, gripping the bars with hands that were raw and scabbed. She was tall for her age—fourteen, maybe fifteen—with the heavy bones and grey-green skin of a pure-blood ogre. Her tusks were intact, small and sharp, the tusks of someone who hadn't yet earned her name-set. Her hair was black and matted, shaved on the left side in the style of the lowland clans. Her eyes were amber, bright with a feral intelligence that cut through the grime and exhaustion.

Skadda knew those eyes.

She knew them because she saw them every time she caught her reflection in still water.

"You're bleeding," the girl said again, pointing at Skadda's thigh. "If you don't bind that, you'll be dead before sundown."

"I've been dead before," Skadda said. Her voice came out as a rasp; she hadn't spoken to another person in weeks. "It didn't take."

The girl didn't smile. She studied Skadda with a flat, assessing gaze that was too old for her face. "You killed them alone?"

"The canyon helped."

"Who are you?"

The question hit Skadda like a fist to the sternum. She opened her mouth. Closed it. The words she wanted to say—I'm your mother, I held you when you were three days old and sang the naming-song over your cradle, I have dreamed of your face every night for two years—those words piled up behind her broken teeth and refused to come out.

Because the girl was looking at her the way you look at a stranger. No—worse. The way you look at a wild animal that might be useful or might be dangerous, and you haven't decided which.

"Skadda," she said. Just the name. No clan, no title.

The girl's face changed. The assessment sharpened into something colder. "Skadda Veld?"

"Once."

"The exile. The mad queen."

"Just the exile now."

The girl's grip on the bars tightened until her knuckles went pale. "My name is Imka. Imka Grund."

Grund. Dagon's name. Not Veld.

Skadda felt the world tilt. She reached for the wagon's side and steadied herself, and told herself it was the blood loss, not the sound of her daughter wearing her enemy's name like armor.

"Imka," she said. The name was a stone in her throat. "I know who you are."

"Then you know I'm the war-chief's ward. When he finds out—"

"He sold you." The words came out flat. "Dagon Grund sold you to slavers. That's why you're in this cage."

Imka's face went still. For a moment Skadda saw something crack behind those amber eyes—a fault line in the bedrock of everything the girl believed. Then it sealed over, quick and hard.

"You're lying," Imka said. "Everyone knows you're mad. Everyone knows you abandoned your own blood and fled into the waste because you were too weak to—"

"I didn't abandon you." Skadda's voice broke on the last word. She hadn't meant it to. She'd spent two years hardening herself against exactly this moment, and it had taken her daughter less than a minute to find the crack. "I was told you were dead. Drowned in the mere, like your father."

"My father died in a raid."

"Your father was murdered. By the man whose name you carry."

Imka stared at her. The silence stretched until it hummed.

Then the girl turned her back and walked to the far side of the cage.

"Let me out," she said to the wall. "I'll go my own way."

Skadda broke the lock. She broke all the locks. And she watched her daughter climb down from the wagon and walk away without looking back, and she let her go, because the alternative was to grab her and hold her and beg, and Skadda Veld did not beg.

Not yet.

She sat down in the ash beside the wagon and ate another strip of salt pork and bled quietly into the ground and waited to see if the world would end or continue.

It continued. It usually did.

The other freed captives milled around the wreckage, uncertain. Most would scatter—back to whatever broken lives the slavers had torn them from. But three of them didn't scatter. Three of them came to Skadda.

The first was the one-eyed human she'd hit with the chain.

He wasn't dead. She'd misjudged the throw—the chain had caught him across the collarbone and jaw, not the throat, and he'd gone down from the impact rather than strangulation. He sat up in the ash, spat blood, and looked at her with his remaining eye—the left one, grey as a winter sky—with an expression that was equal parts fury and admiration.

"That," he said, touching his jaw gingerly, "was the worst throw I've ever seen work."

"You were about to warn them."

"I was about to tell them the trail was clear. I'm not a slaver. I'm a scout they hired three days ago because their last one got eaten by a rock-wyrm." He stood, wincing. "Name's Errol Sayle. Formerly of the Kingsgate garrison, until I had a disagreement with my commanding officer about the proper use of civilians as bait."

"Deserter."

"I prefer 'ethical objector with excellent survival instincts.'" He looked at the carnage around them. "You did this alone?"

"The canyon—"

"Helped, yes, I heard. But the canyon didn't cut those hamstrings or set that pit. You've got a tactician's eye."

"I've got a hungry stomach and no patience for conversation."

"Fair enough." Errol sat down across from her, uninvited, and helped himself to a dried plum. "But you're going to bleed out in about an hour if someone doesn't stitch that leg, and I happen to be handy with a needle. So perhaps we could trade—my medical skills for your food, and you can go back to being terrifyingly silent afterward."

Skadda looked at him. He met her gaze without flinching, which was unusual for a human facing an ogre, even a tuskless one.

"Stitch it," she said.

The second was Bruna.

She came out of the third wagon like smoke—thin, grey-haired, wrapped in layers of stained cloth that might once have been ceremonial robes. She was old, older than any steppe-witch Skadda had seen still walking, and she moved with the careful precision of someone whose bones had opinions about the weather. Her eyes were milky with cataracts, but they found Skadda with unerring accuracy.

"I dreamed you," Bruna said. "Three nights ago. You were standing in water up to your waist, and the water was red, and you were laughing."

"I don't laugh."

"You will." Bruna sat down beside her with a grunt. "The bones told me to wait for the tuskless queen. So I waited. The slavers were kind enough to provide transportation."

"You let yourself be captured?"

"I let myself be carried. There's a difference." She produced a leather pouch from somewhere in her robes and shook it. Bones rattled inside—finger bones, by the sound. "Shall I read for you?"

"No."

"Good. The news is mostly bad anyway." She ate a plum and stared at the ash-choked sky with the serene patience of someone who had seen worse and expected to see worse still.

The third was Tobben Klatt.

He was the least likely warrior Skadda had ever seen. A human, enormously fat, with a round, ruddy face and small bright eyes that sparkled with the particular intelligence of a man who has made his living knowing things other people don't. He'd been in the second cage, and he emerged with the careful dignity of a merchant stepping out of a carriage, brushing ash from his stained silk vest and adjusting his collar as though he were arriving at a trade-fair rather than a massacre.

"Tobben Klatt," he announced, extending a meaty hand that Skadda did not take. "Salt-trader, formerly of the Windbone circuit. Dagon's men seized my caravan six weeks ago on a trumped-up charge of tariff evasion—which, I grant you, was technically accurate, but selectively enforced. I believe they intended to sell me to the mines." He looked at the dead slavers. "I appear to owe you my life."

"You owe me nothing."

"Madam, I am a trader. Debts are my religion." He patted his vest and produced, from an inner pocket, a small leather-bound ledger that he'd somehow kept through weeks of captivity. "I also happen to possess something you may find useful, should you be the Skadda Veld whose name is still whispered in certain clan-halls with something between terror and reverence."

"What could a salt-trader have that I need?"

Tobben smiled. It was a warm, genuine smile, the smile of a man who understood that information was the most valuable commodity on the steppe.

"Every secret Dagon Grund has," he said. "Every debt he's dodged. Every chief he's cheated. Every promise he's broken." He tapped the ledger. "It's all in here. I kept records, you see. Old habit. A trader who doesn't know his customers' weaknesses is just a man with a cart."

Skadda looked at the ledger. Then at Errol, who was threading a bone needle with practiced hands. Then at Bruna, who was humming tunelessly and sorting her finger bones by size. Then at the retreating figure of Imka, already small against the grey horizon.

"Forty days," Bruna said suddenly, without looking up.

"What?"

"The Moot of Fire. It's been called. The clans are gathering at the Windbone's heart." She held up a bone, turned it in the dim light. "Forty days. Dagon means to be crowned Ash-king over all the clans. Overlord of the steppe."

Skadda went cold. The Moot of Fire was the oldest rite on the Windbone—a once-a-generation gathering where the clans acclaimed a single ruler, an Ashqueen or Ash-king whose word became sacred law, unbreakable, divine. The last Moot had been before Skadda's birth. If Dagon claimed it—if the Salt-Mother priesthood blessed him before the assembled clans—his rule would become holy writ. Every crime he'd committed would be sanctified. Every lie would become truth.

And Skadda's vengeance would become blasphemy.

"Forty days," she repeated.

"Give or take. The bones are imprecise about calendars."

Skadda stood. The stitches in her leg pulled, and she ignored them. She looked north, toward the steppe, toward the grasslands she'd been driven from, toward the throne that had been stolen and the daughter who'd been sold and the husband who'd been murdered.

Forty days. No army. No tusks. No name.

But she had a tactician with one eye, a witch with half-true visions, a fat man with a book of secrets, and a hatred that had spent two years growing teeth.

"We go north," she said.

Errol looked up from his stitching. "We?"

"You owe me a life-debt. Bruna's bones told her to follow me. Tobben has a ledger full of leverage and nowhere safe to spend it." She met each of their eyes in turn. "I'm taking back my clan. I'm stopping Dagon's crowning. And I'm getting my daughter back."

"In forty days," Errol said.

"In forty days."

"With no army."

"With no army."

Errol tied off the last stitch, bit the thread, and stood. He was taller than she'd expected, lean and scarred, with the economical movements of a man who'd learned to fight in tight spaces.

"Well," he said, "I've followed worse plans. Usually my own."

Tobben tucked his ledger away and smiled his trader's smile. "I'm in. If nothing else, the story will be worth a fortune."

Bruna said nothing. She was already walking north.

Skadda followed her. After a moment, so did the others.

Behind them, the ash fell on the dead like a slow, grey burial, and the canyon swallowed the memory of violence as it had swallowed everything else the badlands produced—quietly, completely, without judgment.

Ahead, somewhere beyond the haze, Imka walked alone.

Skadda would find her. She had forty days, and she had spent two years learning patience from volcanoes.

She could wait a little longer.