Page 90 of The Gilded Ones

“Death Strikers, to me!” the captain repeats, waving a flag. It cuts through the mist, a barely-visible dull red glimmer. “To me!”

“Hurry, Deka!” Britta commands, urging her horse onward. “Let’s go!”

I shake away my daze. “Yah!” I say, urging Ixa after her and Keita.

Together, we race towards Captain Kelechi, who has now moved just behind the advance troops guarding the emperor. When we arrive, Emperor Gezo, White Hands and two generals are beside him, as are the equus twins.

“Your Majesty.” We all bow.

“No time for that now, this is a battlefield,” the emperor says. He turns to White Hands. “What is the situation?”

“They’re shooting at us from the hills there and there.” She points.

“Big old rocks,” Braima adds, and his twin nods.

The emperor turns to me. “Can you command them?”

I shake my head. “Not from this distance, Your Majesty. I’d have to ride over and—”

A volley of spears hurtles out the mist. Soldiers barely have time to get their shields up before it strikes the advance guard.

“Protect the emperor!” The call rises up, and a contingent of jatu splinters away from the advance guard and hurriedly covers us with a curtain of shields.

They do so just in time. Another hail of spears strikes, reaching even farther than the first one did.

“Oyomo’s breath,” one of the generals gasps, unnerved when a spear bounces off the shields. “They’re throwing spears – fecking spears.”

“We have to get Deka to them,” Captain Kelechi says.

“I have the solution to that,” White Hands offers. She hands me a steel cylinder that almost looks like a horn from a toros – a scaly, bull-like creature that lives on the shores of slow-flowing rivers. “Shout into that, and it will amplify your voice.”

I nod. “Yes, Karmoko.”

“You have to be closer, however,” White Hands says. “Much closer.” Her eyes look past the shields to the distance, from where yet more spears are hurtling.

My chest tightens in alarm. Surely the infernal armour cannot withstand that. And if an arrow hits any of my vitals, it’ll trigger an almost-death, forcing me into the gilded sleep for the rest of the battle.

“So she has to ride out there,” Keita says. He nods. “I’ll protect her.”

“No, you’ll stay here,” White Hands says, shaking her head. “Deka, Britta and Belcalis will go. Gazal will command the unit.”

Gazal, off to White Hands’s side, nods to us.

“Your task is to ensure that Deka is safe,” White Hands says. “Belcalis, you will signal us when it is done.”

Belcalis nods.

“But I’m her uruni,” Keita protests. “Where she goes, I go.”

White Hands turns to him. “Deka, Belcalis and Britta are alaki,” she says, “ones I’ve personally trained. They’re much less likely to die out there than you.”

“But—”

“You are the lord of Gar Fatu,” Emperor Gezo interrupts, “the last in your line. I will not send you out on such a dangerous errand.”

Keita bows. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

And that’s that. I carefully tuck the metal toros horn White Hands gave me into my pack, then nod at Keita, trying to convey all my feelings in once glance. Hope, fear…affection. He nods back at me, his eyes reflecting all the same things. I let the sight hearten me as White Hands nods at the hill.

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