The Silver Sparrow

Treason

The Rishis appeared just before the sun dipped behind the mountains. There were fifteen of them—tall dark figures dressed all in black like creatures of the night that arrived too early to feed. He had been riding back to camp, keeping a generous distance behind Hasheem when they came into view, had waited and watched more than a dozen Black Desert mercenaries, armed to the teeth as if about to head into battle, targeted one man carrying no more than a sword, a bow, and an empty quiver.

The ogui who had only the day before been defeated by Zozi and had just now proven to be a poor shot during the hunt didn't make a run for it. Instead, he exchanged a few words with the Rishis, nodded, squared his shoulders, and with an unreasonable calm, cleared the sword from its sheath.

What happened after that could be called treason, depending on how one chose to see it.

From the distance, Khali reined in his horse to watch from behind a nearby rock as the Rishis closed in on their target. In the middle of that circle of fifteen battle-hardened men, Hasheem—swift as a bird and smiling while at it—began to weave his way through them like a dancer switching from one partner to the next. He rode high on the saddle, sword leaping from grip to grip like a living thing to strike and parry, and in fluid efficiency managed to slip through three men to come out untouched on the other side.

He turned the mount around. A dagger materialized, disappeared, and somewhere, someone dropped from a horse. Lay dead. The big Rishi on his left swore, axe high and snarling after seeing the first man's fall, came riding in and swinging right for the head. Hasheem raised his blade to block the blow—

and switched the grip in midair the last minute, dipped low to clear the axe's path and from his opponent's waist snatched himself a dagger, plunged it into the man's back as they passed, bringing him down in an instant. The blade came off, took down another in the chest with an easy flick of the wrist.

Three down. Twelve to go. All in a matter of minutes.

Another rider came up from behind, curved blade gleaming in the dying sun. Hasheem, somehow sensing the attack in the middle of that commotion, turned, kicked his horse into a gallop and headed straight for the man. The Rishi's blade swept low as they came together, nicked an arm as Hasheem slipped off the saddle and hung on to the right flank of his mount to dodge the blow. At the exact moment when the steel bit into his flesh, when the two horses came together, the ogui reached out with his sword hand, took the opponent's rein with two fingers that came momentarily off the scabbard. Yanked hard from underneath. The horse neighed a piercing sound, threw the rider off its back as it reared up and knocked him unconscious with its hooves on the way down.

Still dragging the riderless horse along as he climbed back up on the saddle, he reined in the mare and used it to block the attacks on the left as he fought the men to his front and right. An opportunity opened, was seized, and with a timely release of the horse, Djari's deadly swornsword broke through a line of three more riders coming at him all at once. The fight went on, and all the while Khali watched, glued to the scene as the man continued to use everything at hand—the sand, the sun, the empty scabbard, his bare hand sometimes—to wound and unhorse his opponents.

Warriors didn't fight like that. They fought with pride, with rules, with skills honed to perfection by years of practice. This was something else, something the ogui had been hiding, lying about to hold a secret. It wasn't even swordsmanship, not the kind he knew. Compared to the White Warriors, the man was clumsy at best in the way he wielded his blade, but as much as Khali didn't want to believe what he was seeing and how betrayed he felt, there was a chance—a real chance—the ogui might come out alive fighting fifteen Black Desert mercenaries. Alone.

And he would have done just that, Khali would have bet on it if Djari hadn't appeared out of the blue.

He saw Hasheem turn abruptly in her direction, froze in the middle of the fight like a stunned gazelle sensing a predator. The Rishis turned with him and saw, just as Khali did, Djari's long, iconic silver hair billowing behind her almost in a damning proclamation of what she was.