Chapter 221: Picking Up A Head

Malik had to look somewhere else for a moment.

His eyes landed on the guards once more.

Safira came out of the smoke to meet them.

She crossed the last ten paces in one stride.

The first guard raised his sword with a startled cry, only for her to strike him in the chest with the flat of her palm.

It was a small movement.

The force that came out of it was larger than anyone would have guessed.

At least anyone who didn’t know of her strength, for she was the most destructive of Malik’s people.

The guard turned corpse flew backwards through the flap of the red tent, and the second guard, who had been standing right behind him, went with him in a tangle of arms and legs. The tent buckled, its center pole bent.

For a single heartbeat, the entire red structure leaned.

Then, without pause, the cloth tore.

It ripped from top to bottom, and the whole tent came down.

A lacquered chest that had been sitting on a table inside went over with it.

It struck the ground, bounced twice, and split along one side.

Something rolled out.

It was round and pale, moving across the rocky ground in a curve.

Soon after, it stopped ten feet from the post.

Face up.

Literally in this case.

Nobody could breathe.

The camp stopped.

It happened in a single instant.

A man who had been running toward the south bank froze with one foot in the air. A Faraja officer in the middle of a swing stood stiff as a post, his blade a hand’s width from a man’s neck.

The man he had been about to kill forgot to flinch.

Even the horses seemed to lift their heads.

Everybody looked at the thing on the ground.

It was a head.

It had long blonde hair, matted with blood and dust.

The cheeks were hollow, and the lips were slightly parted.

The eyes were half-open, and they were golden, a glazed gold, staring straight up at the sky.

Everyone was familiar with whose neck this head belonged to.

It held a face they so desperately longed to see.

Malik’s head.

What remained of the Sultan of Devil’s Maw.

A sound came out of the nearest Faraja.

It was a broken noise, like a whistle.

The man beside him dropped his sword.

It clattered on the stones, and nobody turned to look.

Safira stood where she had struck.

Her palm was still raised.

Slowly, her fingers had begun to tremble, and the faint light she had been holding at her wrist flickered out.

She stared at the head with unblinking eyes.

For a moment her face was entirely empty, the face of a woman who had been told a very simple fact and could not make her mind accept it.

"Teacher..."

It was almost soundless.

In the center of the camp, the enemy captain had risen from behind a barrel.

He was a heavy man with a ragged beard, and he stood with his sword half raised and his mouth open.

An ugly smile began to spread across his face as he understood what had happened.

It was the smile of a man who had just been handed a card he did not know he was holding.

"Retreat! Retreat, all of you! Get away before their wits return!"

The bastards almost immediately ran away, abandoning all they owned.

Their hopes and dreams... their one plan for striking it rich didn’t matter before certain death.

While the Invaders escaped, nobody else moved.

At the base of the post, in a pool of dirty light, Huda’s head had not turned.

Her eyes were still fixed on the same spear. If she had heard the tent fall, she gave no sign.

If she had seen the thing that rolled across the ground, it had not reached wherever she was

Only one person in the camp was still moving.

The owner of that very head.

Only Malik was walking.

He had come out of the smoke with the same unhurried pace.

The rag across his face had slipped a little at the corner thanks to the wind picking up, and it tugged at the hem of his cloak as he walked across the broken stones towards the head.

Malik did not look at the retreating soldiers, the shattered tent or the faces of the people who had been willing to die for the man whose face lay in the dirt.

He only looked at the head.

It stared back at him with those glassy golden eyes.

Malik studied it for a long, long moment.

It was his own face, down to the smallest features.

Somebody had been very careful while making this thing.

They had measured it and had taken a long time over the work.

It was exceptionally well done.

He stopped two paces from the head.

Very slowly, he crouched, with his one good hand resting on his knee, and reached down.

His fingers closed around the hair.

It was thick and gritty with dust.

He slowly lifted the head off the ground and turned it until the golden eyes faced him fully.

The camp held its breath around him.

Nobody told him to stop.

The cohort remained frozen where they were while somewhere behind Malik, a woman made a small noise in her throat and covered her face with both hands.

Perhaps they thought a one-armed cargo-handler had gone out of his mind with grief and wandered into the middle of a battle to cradle a dead man’s face.

His Sultan, whom he seemed to have sacrificed so much for.

It was a fair guess.

He could see it in the way they looked at him, with pity and horror pulled together into a single expression.

But that was so far from the truth.

It was to the point of being hilarious.

After all, this Malik was holding his own head.

One with a face closer to his truth than his current one.

Hilarious indeed.