Mardo held a plate of cooked meat down toward Indirk. A voracious instinct rose suddenly inside of her, the weakness and pain of her arms gone for the instant it took her to snatch the meat from the plate and bring it to her mouth, tearing off a huge bite with her pointed teeth.
“Careful!” Mardo flinched. “It’s hot. You’ll burn…”
The impulse passed and Indirk froze, mostly regretting the pulsing pain running through her arms and shoulders from the movement. She said, “Sorry,” with a full mouth and held the meat out by her claws to demonstrate that she wasn’t burning herself.
* * *
The Deadlands
1072 CR
After a century and a half, the Crimaddie sailed again across the perfect mirror of the still ocean. Here, beneath the clouds where the city of Idylmir – capital of the Deadlands, the world’s leader in murder and crime – sang its endless roar, a hundred miles of perfectly flat salt plains filled annually with just enough water to float a ship. The crew of the Crimaddie waded hip-deep in the mirrored sea, pushing the ship toward the Larlost Expanse with their own hands, their very muscles and bone. These were mostly othrizen. They were similar enough to anthrals – two arms and two legs, some with the kinds of hooves, horns, and tails that an anthral might have – but they looked nearer to beasts than anything. Among them were very non-anthral combinations of paws, antlers, large ears, some who had scales or feathers instead of fur or bald skin, all influenced by the blood of beasts passed down from their ancestors.
Huge cats worked alongside them, each as tall at the shoulders as any othrizen, but sleek and sinewy, animals in truth. White, red, gray, every color of fur, these cats shouldered into the ship to help their fellows move it through the sea. The Crimaddie was a modest ship, two sails, a crew of twenty othrizen and ten Guardian Lions.
One lion stood above all the others, twice as tall and three times as wide, its body burly and decorated with a luxurious red mane. It could’ve crushed a house with its paws. This lion moved to the back of the ship, lowered its head to push.
And a gold-furred hand lifted in front of its head. “Not you, Kairo. Keep your proud head high.”
The lion backed away to look down at the othrizen in front of it.
The captain of the Crimaddie was half the lion’s size, still immense compared to the other othrizen. He had his own mane of gold fur, though the huge jacket he wore matched the red of Kairo’s fur. This man could’ve passed for a sibling of Kairo’s, though he stood on two legs instead of four. Crossing his arms over his chest, he said, “You, Kairo, are the spirit of the Cry Madly. I’ll not have you doing grunt work. A thousand admirers watch you from the clouds.” He lifted one huge hand to gesture toward the haze that concealed the roaring city above. “Let them see you shine upon the Ideal Mirror, prince of the Saltblood, that they may dream of us until our return.
* * *
“I never would’ve guessed you weren’t…” Indirk had managed to sit in a chair at the small table, leaning heavily while she watched Mardo’s immense arms moving about the kitchen. He seemed fixed in place, like a loading crane swinging this way and that to move a pan from the stove to the basin, a plate from the countertop to the cupboard.
“It’s the ears,” Mardo said, taking a moment to slide his fingers into his mane and part it. Beneath were animalistic ears, furred inside and out, vanishing readily beneath his mane when he let it fall back into place. “And the tail. Larger, stronger, more fur. Some of us can pass as alpin anthrals easy enough, though my siblings had to leave the city when the ban came down.”
* * *
1075 CR
Indirk had been there, a younger spy in her first months in Gray Watch, still chafing against the starch in the admiralty uniform she had to wear for her cover, standing on a stony walkway above the bloodied quay. Watch officers wiped gore and fur from their blades, and the Commodore’s personal guard pushed a huge man with an abundant mane of flaxen fur up a gangplank toward an emptied ship. The gold-furred man was the only one left of those who had come on the ship, a captain with no crew, his great red jacket torn to ribbons upon his powerful shoulders.
He spun to eye the sea, where immense dark tendrils dragged a red-furred lion into the dark. Snarling first, the othrizen captain erupted with a bestial sound that echoed over the quay. “Idylmir will hear of this day. Next time you see an othrizen in this port, they will be here for the Saw’s bounty.”
And the old Commodore, who would soon be consumed by age and would not live to see the consequences of what he was about to say, straightened his clean jacket and practically whispered, “I appreciate the warning. From this day forward, then, no othrizen shall be permitted to set foot in Gray Watch.”
* * *
“Othrizen are born in litters of five or six,” Mardo sat heavily across from Indirk. His weight made the chair, the table, even the floor beneath him groan as he leaned forward to put a sweet-smelling circle of cake in front of her. “Each litter includes a Guardian Lion which will spend its life protecting the children. Each litter also includes a Stone Lion, an othrizen that is larger and stronger than the others, to be the provider and leader of their siblings. I was the Stone Lion of my litter.”
Indirk stared at the cake in front of her. “I can’t eat this.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.” He frowned. “I thought Revash carnivates could usually…?”
Brow furrowing, Indirk spat, “Not me. Sorry.” The anthrals of Gray Watch were mostly Revash, ethnically descended from settlers from Revan some thousand years past. Indirk Correlon was supposed to be Revash, part of her cover, so should’ve been able to eat all kinds of things. But carnivates from the Laines, children of the Rhyqir, needed to stick more closely to meat, cheese, fish, that kind of thing.
Mardo took the plate away from her and set it beside the kitchen basin. “My siblings left with the rest of the othrizen that got thrown out of the city after that business with the Crimaddie. They joined the big march back to Idylmir.” There had been a few hundred othrizen, mostly poor laborers in Angolhills tenements like this one, choosing a life of poverty over life under the thumb of the Deadlands' organized crime. “Hado went with them back then, escorting our savings to pay off our debts to the Saw. He just got back a week ago.”
Indirk frowned. “You’ve been here alone for fifteen years?” When Mardo didn’t respond to that, behaving as though he hadn’t heard her at all, she said, “What’s the Saw?”
“The Saw Bektel. The Saltblood Cartel, I mean.”
“Oh. That sounds awful.” Indirk looked down at the large cat, the great black Guardian Lion that lay lazily on a rug near the cold fireplace. The tiny, white-furred Avie was unwisely sniffing the creature’s face, and Hado looked very much like he was resisting the urge to take a bite. Indirk said, “Does he… understand when I speak?”
Hado turned his feline gaze up at her, staring blankly.
“He is a lion,” Mardo said, “But he is also othrizen, and my brother. He understands you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude. I just don’t get it.”
“We’re used to it.”
“It doesn’t change how I think of…” Indirk started, but slowed, and stopped. Her mind had wandered. She’d been thinking, imagining, without realizing, recalling a dream that she’d had while she’d lay in pain. She stared, then, at the table. She watched the grain of the wood, how it was perfectly still, how its shapes never changed. She said, “Mardo, that dancer you invited me to go see…” Indirk couldn’t bring herself to say Norgash’s name. In her mind, she could recall the sight of the dancer perfectly, but the thought came with an uncomfortable heat, and her heart could remember only the shine of sweat on skin, the bend of hips, belly, arms, the working of Norgash’s fingers upon her own body. It was hard to remember Norgash’s tail, and the woman’s hair had been subsumed in fire.
Mardo said bluntly, “I wouldn’t know if she’s othrizen any more than I’d know if anyone else is.”
“Right. Of course.” Indirk shook her head, seeming to strain against her own thoughts. The pain in her body piqued suddenly. Mardo had extracted the claw that had been stuck in her arm, but she could feel a phantom of its presence radiating pain through her shoulder and chest. She grit her teeth and swallowed hard, a chill washing over her skin.
“Indirk?” Mardo stood and leaned toward her. “Are you well?”
“These… Guardian Lions…” she started, struggling to form the words to ask, “They’re always lions, right? They’re never… reptiles or… anything like that?” Out of her memory, the rattling seemed to echo, the shadow of the serpent teasing at the corners of her vision. She put a hand over her eyes as if she could hide from the thought of it.
“Always lions,” Mardo said carefully. “I’ve never heard of any other kind of guardian being born. Are you sure you’re alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” Indirk said, but the weight remained. For a second, things had almost made sense. If Mardo had just told her that, yes, sometimes instead of a lion there could be a serpent, then maybe Indirk could’ve breathed, could’ve moved on. Then she could’ve seen the serpent as a creature, and Norgash as a dissident living and plotting in secret, but such a simple explanation was robbed from her. The serpent remained a monster, an inexplicable horror. And Norgash, some kind of haunting witch, a flaming siren in her dreams, whose skin Indirk still desperately wanted to taste.
The back of Mardo’s hand brushed Indirk’s shoulder. He’d come around the table, huge but quiet, and eyed her closely.
Indirk looked at his hand. “I don’t want to go to a physician.”
He sighed. “Indirk…”
“I don’t want to go anywhere. It’s not…” The thought of going anywhere felt like too much. “Just let me stay here, please. Having a Guardian Lion around sounds… safe.”
“It does help,” Mardo said, as though confessing something. He looked to Hado, as though waiting for the lion to provide some input, and ultimately said, “Alright. Stay awhile. You’re safe here.”
