She ruled me. I was slapped. I returned to my duty with renewed fervor, filling the loft with echoes and howls.

  She pushed me on my back and slithered off her red oval chair. Once she’d grasped my throbbing member in her hand, she lurched forward, leered, and opened her mouth. This was a reoccurring game: closest she would come to finally doing for me what normally I loved best. I was denied. Still I felt myself go stiff, then thrum, thrum then shake, shake then explode.

  When I was finally able to control the shaking of my legs, I lifted my head to see that she still sat between them.

  They’re sometimes purchased from strong cages in our markets, and Adaline’s languid alertness was no different than one of them, the great hunting cats of Suela. And I never hated or loved anything more.

  Given the season, most of Pelliul had been overpowered by all the raging jasmine. Still, I lounged on the couch and took in from an open window a closing flower market and the oil from a fire guild’s final act.

  Adaline had holed up in that maze of mirrors she called a bathroom. Our time after spending each other to puddles was usually quiet. Alone, I was left to reflect.

  Her loft overlooked the belly of her studio in a way that always reminded me of the balcony in my family’s church. One just held sculptures and paintings in various arrangements of display or purchase; the other, sad people, including, of course, my mother. Having been the only one to rebel from Tersiona’s grace and abandon the Chapwyn faith, whenever my recent and foolish attempts at deliberation persuaded me a church was the best place to do so, I was forced to slink in and kneel at night, lest I risk running into them and revitalize her desperate hope I’d rediscovered religion.

  I leaned out of the window and took in a good whiff. It all seemed so foreign somehow, now, the cobblestones of a small square, the pickpocket alleys all leading away. The streets, what a relationship we’d once had.

  When I’d gotten out of the army, I was on, then off, then on them again, separated mainly by long bouts at the bar. My ill-fated relationship with society wasted no time returning. I tried, the whole light-hearted have-fun attempts that all aborted and buried themselves. The musical festivals were the worst, departing the city in overloaded wagons. I would stand in the swarm, at varying states of discomfort, stranded, drinking, and ultimately wishing I had brought my own horse.

  These were also the days where I bounced from job to job, usually kicking myself for having not reenlisted. The sheer number of changes that have passed my eyes makes it hard to believe that I didn’t hang up my White Sand quiver a hundred years ago. The Years of Peace began. Our land went from “Orisula” to “Rehleia.” The Conqueror was suddenly the “Municipal One”…and a year and a few loose coins later, while I was a stable boy picking up horse shit, we allied with those fig-eaters and marched north to war it out with Serabandantilith.

  Do you know what the definition of useless is? I do. It’s also the definition of frustration and the occasionally pathetic. It’s when a former member of an elite fighting unit realizes he has no other skills. Better judgement had me soon toss the broom and bucket—nay, throw the bucket into splinters and break the broom over a knee. I walked into the recruiters’ ready to sign my life away, this time with the desperation one can only reach having stared warless life in the face and much preferred war. Yet I was to be subjected to another disappointment, perhaps the greatest of them all. The White Sand, most beloved of the Conqueror’s men and the Scourge of Azad, had been disbanded forever. No need for reconnaissance when the entire Serab campaign was a one-sided carnival of burned huts and dripping swords.

  As the Years of Peace’s two-year anniversary commenced in the street, I was patching leaky roofs. One year later, I was the sourest recruit in the entire Metropolitan Ward. The people surrounding me changed from armed men ensuring their unit’s lethal pride, to befattened louts shamelessly preening themselves in front of an audience who’d all grown tired of their harrowing tales about braining pickpockets. Two years more, I was being fired.

  “Hand it over, Zevon!” Sarge hammered at me. “You know-everything, know-nothin’ prick.” My one and only shift sergeant wasn’t a bad man, just terribly impatient. That I was sluggishly returning my sabre only fueled his wrath.

  He may have been the occasional target of my discontent, but Sarge had also fought in Pelat. Eventually he had possession of all my gear, allowing the walrus to calm. “You don’t follow rules,” he said. “Ya don’t do what you’re told. I don’t know how you survived in the army—hot shot or not. Maybe you need to use that big bouncin’ brain of yours, Zevon, and attend some damn school somewhere.”

  Sarge didn’t nod when I unloaded on him that I still needed adventure. Sure, some of the weapons were the same, but the jobs just too damn different. He just fiddled his mustache. His one-liner that followed about duty set me on high.

  “These jackals!” I burst. “On the streets—most need to be run through. Like we did in Azad. Hell, Sarge, like I heard you all did plenty down in Pelat.” At the time, I lived in festering housing near the entrance to the Parilgotheum. I calmed myself too. “I think I liked Azadis more than the people outside my apartment.” He nodded this time, also showing me the door.

  The fruit of night’s spent kneeling in churches is this getting-fired memory remains so unusually clear because it’s when I was confronted with a sobering fact. Some veterans could adapt back to civilian life. I couldn’t.

  Begrudgingly, I chewed on the old walrus’s advice.

  School, though, was as attractive as rolling in the nearest gutter. Schools attended by adults were for tuition-paying men who swung scythes by day and by night hoped to, one day, do all the land owning. Instead, I invested elsewhere. Handing all my departure pay to a doorman at the Pulsing Plum Baths, I attended the school of the drug-fueled orgy.

  It may have been my movement. It may have been my body, still chiseled by the sharpened edge of White Sand days. Knowing what I know now, I believe it was something else: infinite want, even in infinite abundance. Amidst the swaying flesh, there Adaline saw me. I was whispered to. All I had to do was promise to give her my all, at all times. The dreariness of life fell to the marble along with her robe. It was an easy promise to make.

  Adaline emerged from the bathroom. “The wagon’s all set,” she said, drying her hair. “Mostly sculptures from Nilghorde.”

  That I was destined for another trip to Azad in the morning was nothing new. I’d made at least a hundred trips back there since working for her. It was also nothing new that she’d come join me now and lay in a robe determined to stay open. What was unusual was her recent outbursts. It was as if she was arguing with someone else living in her head.

  It was understandable my boss and mistress would be acting a little strange since returning from her last trip. After that fateful orgy, Adaline had hired me as security for her convoys. A “muscled pet” to “protect her investments” sounded like a dream. Putting murderous skills once more to good use, my knowledge of customs and terrain served an even more apt purpose, as she’d stricken deals with seemingly every sultan and mullah in Azad. But she sometimes made the trek too, to ensure lofty contracts maybe, or, I cringed to think, to ravage the mind of some other man. Maybe a score of them.

  Her company had three convoys going at all times. If I were there, on that last one, I would have taken scalps, surely. Those damn Azadis—bandits had chased her wagon right of a cliff. No paintings to steal if pulverized on a rocky bottom. No Rehleian bodies to triumphantly mangle if done so already by a stupendous fall. What a waste. According to her, she’d jumped off the runaway wagon and hid until a convoy bound for Rehleia eventually happened by. No food, no water, that scorching heat—only a woman like Adaline could tell me she toughed it out and have me believe it.

  “Wagon’s all set,” I repeated, in the way I usually did, like I was back in the army and she my stalwart commander. When she put my head in her lap, I knew she wanted to talk. I’d fought there; if anyone could understand her traumas, surely it was I.

  “When you were in Azad, Arcus, did you learn anything about ghouls?”

  “…A little.” She detected my amused confusion. “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just find them fascinating. These desert creatures…are they dead, are they alive? Do those delightful children of the night even care?”

  Of the night, sure, but delightful—that was a most generous description leveled against beings who purportedly lived near graves and ate rotting corpses. “I know they’re supposed to have originated in Azad,” I said.

  “Anything else?

  “That’s about it,” I lied, hoping to steer the conversation back to normalcy.

  “All that time there, shooting arrows and hauling that big dick around, and you mean to tell me you never learned anything more?”

  “Well—”

  “I’ve learned loads of things. One of my favorites is there’s an especially cunning and contemptuous female ghoul they call Ghila—get out of my body!”

  She did it again. My rise was met by her palm, pressing down, insisting that I remain. “Adaline, I—”

  “Yes, that’s who I am, not this,” her face angered, “not this ghou—good grace of Tersiona, there’s a chill coming in.” Her expression was back to normal now, making me almost more concerned. “Should we shut the window?”

  A woman who’d always been the paragon of poise acting like this. My best judgment compelled me to just keep her talking, though I didn’t care much for the subject matter. “You know this girl ghoul’s name?”

  “And her lover’s,” she said, almost bragged, suppressing another twitch that rallied for an instant then was gone. “Gorial is his name. Her burly accomplice. Legends say they cause all sorts of mischief throughout the dunes—when not coupling like wild beasts, of course.”

  She began fiddling with my hair, instantly sapping me of my consciousness. “Do you know what romance is, Arcus?” I don’t know what I answered. I trailed off, only noticing at some point her strokes had grown rough, like a distracted owner preening a goat. “Filling that ever-ripping rent, most enjoyably. Defiling the world together. Gorial and Ghila. That, my useful chunk of meat, that is romance.”

  *

  As our horses plodded merrily in morning’s rays, Adaline’s shipment continued eastbound. The last of the Red Isthmus’s Rehleian land, this midsection of the world filled me brimming with nostalgia, a sensation that admittedly cooled as I’d come to recognize the various thatched huts and windmills. These hardy installments preferred wolves and raiding parties over losing the sustainable rhythm of rural life, often reminding me of my own grandparents, how they must’ve lived, and how dismally ruled I was by plumbing and money.

  A protocol that had saved Adaline whole chests of the latter mandated I ride first to the summit of any approaching hill. Doing so, I soon waved the wagon and its teamsters on. The route was banditless, giving me time to adjust myself in accordance with weeks in the saddle.

  Azad: a sun-brushed schizophrenia of flat desert then beshrubbed rolling hills, both littered with towering minarets, the twinkles of pit fires flickering, and then all the fortresses, their bulbous tops many and multicolored, their bodies built low, hugging blistering sand.

  Able to feel my ass once more, I executed my enduring ritual of spitting at Azad’s westernmost minaret.

  The tower was a white shard on the horizon. By nightfall, the road had taken our convoy under and past her.

  Beginnings of desert nights are blue with enchantment. I trotted well ahead of the wagon. In my loneness, surrounded by waking stars, I breathed in the hills. What orders had I carried out on that one? On that other, had I ever been?

  At the heart of all adventurers is a core of loneliness, for warriorhood is a lonely world. On the cusp of battle, standing armed with men whom you know better than your family, whom you can identify by belch or break of wind, you are still alone.

  When Azad attempted to take over the Red Isthmus, there was great concern our entire peninsula would be invaded soon after. For a time the Conqueror’s army fought both rebels in our land and pushed aggressively into Azad’s. Before we won our domestic war and were unified, the Conqueror hadn’t the formidability to negotiate with the six sultans and their sixty battalions of scimitar and spear. With a new and centralized “Rehleia,” the Azadi Agreement was signed, allowing peace and stability.

  I had fought in these lands, when there was fighting to be done, giving perhaps the best of me in the process. I’d spied on troop movement, or watched from the observation posts we’d dug the charge of the mighty Swift Saber into outmatched enemy hordes. The Conqueror had tasked us with the disruption of supply routes, giving me my most harrowing encounter when I laid three guards to waste after their armor clunked down right next to my burrow.

  The wagon caught up. I’d stopped at the fork, and even my horse seemed hesitant. We had to take the southerly path.

  “Is there no other way?” protested the accountant. He knew there wasn’t, and his rhetoric annoyed me. A minor debate ensued, going needlessly over alternate routes that would not serve us. After talk boiled over from my assurances to the moon’s gleam off my sword’s withdrawn blade, he stowed any further points of argument and the coachman guided the wagon wheels onto the uneven stone.

  The road from Pelliul to Azad was more or less a straight line. However, once deeper into the quicksand and pan shrubs, the road broke into a spider web of follow-on routes, some better and more traveled than their fellows. What we embarked down now was one that we took the least. It was less developed and hard on the horses, but the Azadi prince waiting at its end was paying Adaline a small fortune.

  The three of us clinking along did share at least one agreement. Despite handsome payments, we still thought it strange our employer would send us this way, and so soon after what had happened. But Adaline Ouvarnia was as extreme in her persistence as she was all else, and we abided on.

  As we now bobbled down the very road Adaline had almost died on but a month ago, my unnerved colleagues had petitioned we wait until daylight. If reminding them the extra bags of silver for returning early hadn’t worked, the sword certainly did. I had to admit, though, it would stay loose in the scabbard.

  Treks like these were tours through the dead. Graveyard after graveyard—mostly slain Azadi fighters, but such plots were also broken up by burial sites older than the dunes.

  Passing the first of these, I was reminded of Adaline’s odd talk—well, oddity in general, but in particular her romantic talk of ghouls. I didn’t want to encourage her, but I’d heard a thing or two myself about those creatures.

  More than just wars, the barren kingdom was riddled with legend and witchery. At the top of this list was the colonization of ghouls. Spoken about by our prisoners as if as real as the hair on my arm, they were said to have originated in the desert’s cool burrows.

  Many nights us White Sand would mock their rumors. Men who knew no life but the one thundering in their chests or dripping off preferred weaponry pissed on graves and stamped the ground. “Come, you,” a brother had drunkenly challenged, “lurking fucks. Taste somethin’ foreign!”

  We were told they delighted in roaming the dunes and the outskirts of villages in the guise of wild dogs, much to the lament of whatever mutt came across our arrow’s range. Also, and I still remember my team leader’s exact words before an especially dangerous mission: “Well, Zevon, if we do get overrun, let’s hope those ghouls eat us.” Causing endless jest was a myth that ghouls could eat certain parts of a corpse, surprising widows and toppling weeping kin out of their chairs, reassuming the role of that very corpse amongst the living.

  Our path took us under the lee of a jagged hill. More stone in this area, all three of our horses glided a bit easier as we followed a long curve leading us by yet another patch of graves. Embedded in a plateau on the slope of the hill, on our left sat a cemetery, neglected and leering. I was hugging my saddle all the harder. The drop-off to our immediate right—there were few cliffs in Azad, but we had been bottlenecked by one of her highest.

  We rode closer in parts like this, the wagon’s horses nearly breathing down my neck.

  “What was that?” the accountant whispered.

  “Probably just the wind. Relax.” I hadn’t heard anything.

  “There it is again. Arcus, you don’t hear that?”

  “Hear what?” I turned to the coachman, pulling his eyes from our left-hand side. “Don’t let the coin-counter rile you. Keep moving.”

  But there was something now, there was, coming from up on the slope.

  The moon had risen to shine the world into hues of black and grey. Rocks had been dislodged, and their sounds and shadows were rolling down to greet us.

  “Ghouls be lurkin’ here,” the coachman said.

  “Shut…” I stopped to listen. “…shut your mouth.” Jackals were prevalent in these parts. “Jackals are prevalent in these—”

  An arrow whizzed by my head.

  The wagon stopped. The horses reared as cries descended upon us.

  “Shit!” I freed my bow and nocking an arrow, recognizing the clank of shoddy armor immediately: primitive Azadis, riffraff who’d either missed out on old battles or been raped by them. Now the guerrillas waged a personal war, one they’d insure would never be over.

  The wagon careened past me. When I was able to see again, what may have been four or five men was now a charging dozen. They had ran out from behind headstones to become shaking blades in the moonlight. I dropped two of them with as many arrows, then put two more in another before he had the chance to cough on me his blood.

  I had thought for an instant some night creature had arrested my horse. She kicked and whinnied perilously as the first arrow plunged into her. Even in the ball of dust, I could see something had stopped the wagon ahead. Abandoning my horse as she fell, pin-cushioned, I ran toward my only cover. From the protection of the wagon, I could perhaps mount a defense. I’d encountered such men in recent years, but never this many.