Page 4 of The Merciless Ones

Even while she’s being burned alive, Melanis is still luminous.

I peer at her through the crack in the heavy wooden door, her hair shining lustrous black between the flames, body lithe and graceful despite being contorted in a rictus of pain. Once upon a time, Melanis was known as the most beautiful alaki in all of Otera. She was one of the war queens: the first four of the Firstborn children of the Gilded Ones, who were also their most powerful generals. Gold-tipped white wings like Mother Beda’s aided Melanis in soaring to the heavens, and divine light seemed to shimmer from deep inside her skin. People sang songs in her name, threw flowers at her feet. They called her the Light of the Alaki.

That was then.

Now, Melanis’s eyes, once described as translucent pools, are burned-out holes of darkness. Her lips, once heralded for their rosy sheen, have crumbled into slashes of charcoal, and her dusky brown skin curls and peels. No sign of her wings or celestial glow remains: they’ve gone the way of all the divine gifts the mothers once bestowed upon their children, back into nothingness. All that’s left of the alaki that was once Melanis the Light is a burning, screaming mass of flesh lying across the hollowed-out stone altar built directly atop the cauldron of magma below, chains of celestial gold stretching her taut over the flames as they have for the past thousand years, while moonlight shines down upon her from the glass dome in the chamber’s ceiling.

The golden-masked priests in the inner chamber intone prayers as they walk in slow, unrelenting circles around her. They don’t even seem to notice the chamber’s stifling heat as they throw sacred oil onto the pit, coaxing the flames there ever higher. The odour of burning intensifies, and my muscles clench again. I close my eyes, focus once more on the necklace the mothers gave me. It stretches from chin to chest like a neck guard, delicate threads of celestial gold interlinking to form hundreds of tiny, star-shaped flowers that double as a very light, almost weightless chain mail underneath my armour.

The Gilded Ones used their blood to create it – an everlasting symbol of their love. Like them, its beauty cannot be damaged or broken by the swords of man. Like them, it always vibrates with divine power, a steady and comforting presence. Although I struggle to feel that comfort now. The odour of burning flesh is too heavy, too overwhelming. It curls in sinister plumes through the crack in the door. My chest tightens; my breathing strains. I try focusing on the necklace again, fighting the rising darkness, until—

A mouth to my ear, words spilling out with kindness. “We’re here, Deka.”

Belcalis.

Even though she doesn’t like touching others, Belcalis’s arms are around me, holding me close. Lending me her strength. She’s the only other person in our group who’s experienced the horrors I have, so she knows what it feels like to have the memories take you over, to be held prisoner by your own mind. Her arms tighten, and my breathing slows. I’m safe. I’m always safe with my bloodsisters at my side.

Once my breathing has returned to normal, I pull myself out of her arms, then glance at the others. Ready? I gesture in battle language.

Everyone nods back. Ready, their expressions say.

I kick open the door.

The head priest, a tall, dark man carrying a staff tipped by the kuru, Oyomo’s sun symbol, whirls towards us, head cocked to listen for our footsteps. The moment he does, he snarls one word: “Alaki.”

The priests begin tapping the floor with their staffs. When the sound reverberates through me, I hiss in a breath. I know what they’re doing. It’s the same thing tree-tapper monkeybirds do when they’re searching for insects in tree trunks. “They’re sounding for us!” I shout. “Loosen formation!”

The others obey just in time. The priests attack en masse, staffs whirling in menacing patterns when they’re not tapping to sound for us. Each one seems vicious, strong – they’re all much taller and larger than I am, perhaps a deliberate choice for all priests guarding Melanis. Even then I’m not frightened – not like I used to be.

Just a year ago, the sight of men wielding weapons would have terrified me. Back then, I would shiver at the merest suggestion of violence from one of them. Now all I can see is the lack of organization; the clumsy way the priests hold their staffs, like they’ve never actually used them in battle. These aren’t hardened warriors, years of training under their belts. They’re ordinary men, men who gave up their lives in service to Oyomo, to maintaining and imposing the established order.

But I don’t make the foolish mistake of underestimating them. It was ordinary men who tortured me in my village cellar, ordinary men who killed me over and over again until White Hands came and rescued me from their clutches. There’s nothing worse than ordinary men.

I lift my atikas as I rush to meet them head-on, the long golden swords gleaming in the darkness. Carve out a path, I sign to Britta and the others. I’m going for Melanis.

Got it, is Britta’s silent reply as she barrels into the first wave, the others following her.

I keep my focus on Melanis as the atikas slice and cut, misting blood into the air. She is little more than a hand’s breadth in front of me now, her body still burning in the flames. Every time I see her there, struggling against her restraints, my rage surges…as do memories of my own time on the pyre. All that agony, that unending pain…

Burning was one of the many ways Elder Durkas and the other village elders tried to kill me after they discovered I was alaki and imprisoned me in the temple cellar. They tried nine times before accepting defeat – multiple poisonings, beheadings, drownings, dismemberments. And all the while, my human father, the man I thought was my flesh and blood, stood back and did nothing. That was, of course, when he wasn’t also beheading me himself.

His face flashes in front of me, grey and hollowed out, and my body turns cold. I force myself onward, teeth gritted as the clanging of metal blots out every other sound.

More feints and parries, sword thrusts. More priests falling all around me. Slowly, surely, battle joy – that intense state of concentration where minutes compress into seconds and hours disappear in the blink of an eye – surges inside me. All I can see now are my swords, the bodies falling under them. Euphoria rises within me as my body becomes the blade, just as Karmoko Huon, my first battle instructor, taught me. The minutes merge, time becoming a whirl of sweat, blood and corpses.

Then I’m there, before her. “Melanis…”

She’s still, body hung limp over the open pit. Now that the priests aren’t actively encouraging the flames from the caldera below, the fire has lessened just enough that it’s not fully searing her as it was before. It’s so low now, I notice what I hadn’t previously: Melanis’s entire body is glowing, a faint, shimmering white that’s distinct from the flames. I gape. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even when I enter the deep combat state and see the white and shimmering essences of all things.

Even stranger, she’s not falling into the gilded sleep – no sign of the golden sheen that covers alaki when they experience a death that isn’t their final one. But then, Melanis is a Firstborn. It takes a lot more to kill her kind than it does the newer alaki.

No wonder the priests have kept her burning for the past thousand years.

Another wave of anger crashes over me at the thought.

I nod, and Katya and Britta rush forward to carefully lift Melanis from the flames, the chains clinking as they move with her. She screams the moment they pull her from the altar, her entire body jerking from the pain, but she doesn’t fight, doesn’t even seem to truly notice us. She’s lost in her own world, as she’s probably been since the day she was first chained in this nightmare of a temple.

Torture will do that to a person.