Page 45 of The Merciless Ones

I frown. “Hear what?”

“That.” She turns towards the imposing columns at the market’s main entrance. There’s a sound coming from the street beyond it, an immediately recognizable one: footsteps. Heavy, ominous – inhuman.

“They’re coming!” a man shouts, panicked. “The Forsworn are coming!”

The market erupts, merchants packing up their stalls, panicked customers jumping into the water. The river cows bugle their fury at this interruption, tusks flashing warningly, but the men in the water keep swimming, undeterred. It’s chaos now, everyone fleeing in all different directions as fast as they can. So we begin moving as well.

“Watch your step!” Keita calls, body swaying when an angry river cow slams into his boat.

“Same to you!” I shout as I leap lightly onto the next boat. It’s easy now that all the merchants and customers are running for safety, rats abandoning a drowning ship.

Behind us, those footsteps are getting closer, frighteningly familiar in their heaviness. It’s the purple deathshrieks. I don’t have to look back to know that it’s them – that they’re the ones everyone is calling the Forsworn.

“This way, everyone!” Li calls, jumping off the boat and running onto a nearby road, Katya and Nimita large shadows leaping across the rooftops above him. “Sanusi Square’s this way!”

We quickly follow his lead, all of us remaining in the same groups in case we have to split up.

“Here!” Li says triumphantly as he bursts around the corner. Then he stops.

The moment I turn the corner, I do the same. Sanusi Square, the once bustling, thriving plaza that connected many of the capital’s busiest streets and waterways, is now eerily devoid of people. Instead of stalls and bright little shops, macabre little platforms now line the square, female corpses in numerous states of decay displayed on them. The most alarming are the golden ones, of which there are four – one at each corner of the square.

Disgust roils my stomach. So this is what Hemaira has become.

And it’s all my fault.

I remain where I am, feet suddenly unable to take direction as I absorb the horror, the desolation that is now Hemaira. The very desolation I caused. I was the one who insisted on freeing the mothers to create a better world, but instead, I created this: a world of cruelty, of torture and deprivation. A world where women are forced into the shadows and their slaughtered bodies displayed in the streets for the world to see. My body is trembling now, a peculiar emotion expanding inside me. Something past pain, past rage, past guilt. A strange sort of numbness as I look up at the city I once knew.

Deka! Ixa urges, circling worriedly around me. He’s flapping ahead in his bird form, keeping an eye out for potential ambushes.

“Deka, keep moving!” Keita urges, pulling me along. “Li’s found a hiding place!”

I force my feet to move again, following without thinking, but even as I do, I see the massive purple figures steadily marching into the square from the side streets. The Forsworn. They’re corralling us in, ensuring that we have no place to hide.

“Hurry, Deka!” Keita pulls me into a narrow alleyway where the smell of fish is so pungent, it blocks out every other smell.

Massive reed baskets pile up at its end, next to the sluggishly moving river that butts up against the last building, and they’re all filled with rotting fish. But Keita and the others are moving towards them. I stiffen, the disgusting proposition jolting me out of my shock. “You can’t mean for us to—”

“Get in,” Keita says, pulling me under an empty basket.

The basket closes around me, enveloping my senses with the odour of rotted fish, and Keita huddles closer, his eyes only barely visible in the dim light that filters in through the tiny holes in the basket’s weave. “I know it’s awful,” he whispers, “but the fish smell should block their noses, while the river should confuse their ears. All we have to do is remain extremely still and we just might get out of this one.”

I nod, since that’s the only thing I can do. The odour is so strong now, it’s like a physical presence barrelling up my nostrils, but it’s nothing compared to the devastation I feel. Everything I’ve just experienced circles my mind: Zhúshan, the revelation about the doors, about Idugu and the mothers. And now there’s this – the depravity that is Sanusi Square – and I can’t do anything, can’t even think of helping the girls on those platforms. My friends and I are all trapped here, the Forsworn no doubt closing in, and even if I could reach the mothers right now, I’m not certain I would. All this time, I’ve trusted the mothers, done everything they asked. But they’ve lied, and now I’m questioning my own actions.

I try to remain in the present, but it’s nearly impossible here in the darkness, all my fears rushing up at once. I listen for the Forsworn’s rhythmic footsteps, try to latch onto them, but they’ve stopped. Or, rather, they are no longer marching, but instead seem to be shuffling around.

“What are they doing?” I whisper, pressing closer to the front of the basket.

“Nothing good,” Keita replies ominously.

Even as he says this, I hear it, the banging of massive fists on doors. It’s followed by a very familiar sound: screams, mostly male, but a few female too. I try to squint and see what’s happening through the basket, but all I see are shadows, movements. “What’s happening?” I whisper, edging impatiently closer.

I try to squint past the basket’s weaving. I wish I were nearer. I growl under my breath, annoyed. I wish I could see.

Almost the moment I think this, a peculiar prickling travels up and down my spine. Yes… Ixa says, his voice echoing in my mind, and then, suddenly, we’re both winging off the roof we’re perched on.

We’re—?

I blink, startled, as I feel the sudden lightness of my body, buoyed into the air above Sanusi Square by my wings catching a warm current. Wait… I nearly plummet, I’m so startled. My wings?

---