Page 18 of Ensii
Talitha snapped to Kurzik. “Are you our ally or a looter?”
Kurzik glanced to the side. “It’s true. Your people are wealthy.”
The ensaak could have punched him. Nonetheless, he settled her mind. “We leave everything,” she said flatly. Turning to Gilsazi, she added, “Ifanyoneis caught taking anything off the bodies, I’ll cut off their thumbs.”
Gilsazi’s brows rose. He looked between Ashek and Talitha, but didn’t comment.
“If anyone is caught taking idols, I’ll kill them,” Ashek said flatly. “Pass it on, Kurzik.”
Talitha waited until Gilsazi and Kurzik had left to lean toward her husband. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Ashek’s mouth tightened. “Thank you for not fighting me on this.” There was a kind of stiff concession to his words, an apology he didn’t want to give.
The ensaak tossed an arm in the air and slung her sword over her back. “It’s only a matter of time before they realize we’ve defeated Krispos. They will send more soldiers.”
“Yes, but we both expect as much.”
Zula strode out of the shadowy darkness, bloody spear in hand. Though dark patches of blood spattered her clothes, she appeared unscathed. “My lady, listen!”
Talitha strained, struggling to hear. The soldiers were dragging the corpses of the dead Ilians to one side, clearing the road. They were heaped in a great pile like carrion. Talitha didn’t think she had ever seen so many Ilian bodies in her own homeland.
Distant, like the murmur of a fountain, the city stirred. It wasn’t quite the sound of a riot, it was definitely a crowd, but shouts were raised through the streets, loud and spreading.
“It seems young Saorin is doing his work,” Talitha assessed. She only hoped he had been well-received. His sister was already a weight on her conscience. She didn’t need the boy added to it as well.
“Make your soldiers ready. We’re moving on.” One way or another, they didn’t have time to waste. “Come.”
Their forces rallied, forming into lines and ranks once again. The Dunedrifters and northerners did not have the same regimented discipline as the Ilians, but they managed. Duendrifters—Talitha would need to stop thinking of them that way. They were Hudspethites, her allies, her people, and her husband’s followers.
Ashek took his place at her side in the ranks and Talitha’s mind wandered to the question of would he be accepted? Would the reforms and the changes they had agreed to send the city into an uproar? Would Talitha face assassination attempts because of her decision to uproot the war goddess cults?
But she was getting ahead of herself. For now, the narrow streets were empty, even if the crowd was coming.
Along the rooftops, Breida and her scouts had climbed back up and leapt from building to building. They paused every so often, listening and waiting. Any one of the buildings could be housing an ambush. The others were depending on them to detect it before it was too late.
“I hope Breida is as good as she seems to think,” Ashek muttered.
“She is,” Shaza replied, matter-of-fact. “Don’t encourage her, though.”
“No?”
“No. You’ll regret it surely as I did.”
Talitha wasn’t sure what that meant, but had the feeling there was a great deal to their story these past weeks.
The streets broadened as they left the roads of the water mine district and entered the city proper. The square where the street joined the main city was one of the largest in Ilios, spanning the same width and length as the battleslave arena of Radir. A central monolith engraved with the story of her grandfather’s great conquests jutted up from the center—five times the height of a man.
It wasn’t visible in the dark, but wrapped near the midpoint of the upper portion was a pictorial telling of the siege and slaughter of Hudspeth. Talitha was abruptly self-conscious, though she doubted anyone else would even recall it was there. Talitha just remembered because she had seen the pictograph once it was carved, before the monolith was raised.
The grieve was of sirrushes and soldiers and fire and twisted naked bodies splayed on city walls. As a child, it had terrified her. It wasn’t helped by her brother Sargon’s taunting that “this is what happens to the enemies of ensaaks. Best not be my enemy, sister.”
Her grandfather had watched them silently, shrewd gaze on them as the mason proudly explained his work and courtiers and attendants oohed and aahed in all the right places. Sargon had kept pulling her hair and pinching her arms and sides, so badly that she had bruised under her short chiton. But she didn’t make a sound or even move. Her grandfather had just watched while she took the abuse, his face a stone wall around his cold heart.
That had been when Talitha realized her grandfather knew more than he let on. That was the moment she realized he would never help her, never rescue her, no matter how much she wanted or needed him to.
“This place is eerily quiet,” Gilsazi muttered. “It’s an unnatural quiet.”
“Yes,” Talitha agreed. The square served as a market on most days and the flotsam of the crowds piled under their feet. Heaps of rotting produce, broken bits of wagons, discarded pieces of cloth, shards of pottery, and the endless oddities and miscellany of a market lay strewn across the cobbles.
