The Shadow Ink - Ink series | Part II

The Ngabo Guard compound smelled of boiled corn, wet leather, and the sour, metallic tang of too many young people sweating out their fear.

It was a functional sort of misery, built from heavy timber and volcanic stone that had seen three dynasties crumble and hadn’t found any of them particularly impressive.

I liked it well enough.

For a Grade Seven trainer, it was a decent place to park a body. If you kept your chin down and your temper under control, mortals generally assumed your lack of gray hair was the result of good genes rather than a different biological makeup.

They didn’t look at your eyes long enough to notice the color change; they were usually too busy watching your hands to see if you were about to break their collarbones.

It looked exactly the same as when I enlisted six years ago.

I remember that night, the weather had been foul even by Nganda standards. A storm that felt like handfuls of stones thrown by a very angry god, accompanied by the kind of thunder that rolls through your spine.

I’d been roaming the wetlands when something changed in the air. It was a drop in the ambient pressure of the realm, the specific, insistent pull of Binta’s string weaving itself into the fabric of reality.

You see, the divine have a very distinctive scent if you’ve been choked by it for five hundred years — it smells like metal and a complete lack of regard for anything with a pulse.

I traced it. Following the tug in my marrow, three miles past civilization to a miserable little smallholding that smelled of rotten cabbages and wet swine.

The girl was in the pigsty.

Anya. Her name resounded in my head.

She was fourteen, small for her age, and currently wedged between two rotting timber posts while the storm did its best to dissolve her like she was a stain on Nganda’s surface.

Her skin was the gray of a dead coal, her lips blue, her entire frame vibrating with a tremor so violent it looked like her bones were trying to escape.

I stood in the muck and looked down at her. Her signature wasn’t a whisper; it was a loud, clinging bell. It was Binta’s handwriting, clearer and heavier than anything she’d turned out since the second century.

It was the same density. The same specific, terrible weight.

I thought of Amara. The one I couldn’t save.

I stopped thinking of Amara because the process often involved tearing roofs off things with my bare hands, and I'd promised myself to live unnoticeably.

Anya didn’t see me. Her eyes rolled back, her consciousness slipping away as her mortal blood finally registered the terrifying volume of what was waking inside her. She didn’t drop; she slid, a clumsy, ungraceful drop towards the wet ground.

I crossed the sty without deciding to, my boots making a wet, sucking sound in the dark. I picked her up. She weighed nothing — just a collection of sharp ribs and wet, thin fabric.

She’s just a child.

I sat against the damp wood, hauling her small, freezing body against my chest, and let a fraction of the ancient heat behind my ribs bleed outward. Not enough to burn. Just enough to remind the air that I had once managed standard-issued suns for a living.

Her shaking slowed. After a long, hollow five clock ticks, her eyelids fluttered, and she looked up at me.

Children are annoying because they haven’t learned the basic rules of social survival yet. They don’t look away from things that are wrong.

She stared directly into my eyes, her pupils blown, her small fingers curling into the collar of my black shirt with a grip that was surprisingly fierce for a small, freezing child.

When I looked into her brown eyes, I knew it. With everything in my bones. I would keep her from Amara’s fate. I’d do what I couldn’t before. I’d be brave, I’d be strong. For her.

“You’re safe,” I told her. My voice sounded like two stones grinding together. I hadn’t used it for three days.

“You won’t remember this, Anya. The gods don’t like it when humans talk to things beyond their comprehension. But I’ll be here. I will keep you safe, no matter what. No matter how many suns they try to burn you with. I promise you.”

She didn’t argue. She just burrowed her face into my chest, sighed a deep breath, and went to sleep. I stayed until the rain turned to gray dawn and the chickens took their morning jobs too seriously.

That same day, I re-enlisted for the Ngabo Guard. New name. New history. No one could tell I’d been here before — human records tend to have a limit of what they can carry.

So I stayed close. I became a Guard again. I watched over her. And I waited for her.

Six years later, and it was finally time. I’d offered to be her companion for the awakening ritual — which wasn’t necessary, as it turned out, no Guard was willing to fight for a half-blood.

Humans can be short-sighted, forgetful, and shallow lumps of clay sometimes.

I’d kept my promise in the In-Between. I intended to continue to keep my promise after.

I dropped the parchment onto Commander Sefa’s desk. It was a training request, written in the stiff, bureaucratic hand the Guard preferred.

Sefa didn’t look up immediately. He was sixty, built like a beer drum, and had a scar across his nose that made him look permanently disappointed.

He read the parchment twice, then leaned back, his chair groaning in protest.

“Grade Seven trainers do not take rookie cohorts, Kimba,” he said, his voice flat. “You’ve been teaching the elite vanguard for six years. Why do you want fifty farm trash who don’t know which end of a pike is the sharp one?”

“I like the fresh air,” I said.

Sefa’s dark eyes drifted to mine. He looked for a long time, trying to find the joke, but I’d had five centuries to perfect my blank stare. “There’s a girl on this roster of particular interest to the kingdom — to the realm. A half-blood. New Conduit.”

“Is there?”

“Don’t play the idiot with me. It doesn’t suit your jaw.” Sefa tapped the desk with a thick finger. “The Elders are nervous about her. Her blood is… unknown. The first Conduit in our history of such blood. If she faints on the field, she’s a liability.”

“Then I’ll teach her how to stand up.”

He knew I was lying. We’d had this exact conversation two moon cycles ago when I offered to be her companion. But a Grade Seven request couldn’t be denied without a council vote, and Sefa hated meetings more than he hated rookies.

He signed the ink with a sharp, irritated flick of his wrist.

I took the parchment back, walked out into the mid-morning sun, and stood at the edge of the lower courtyard. Below, the new cohort was being unloaded from the timber carts — shivering, dusty, and looking around the stone walls with the standard-issue terror of the doomed.

I found her immediately.

Anya.

My half-blood.

She was standing near the front of the crowd, flanked by her best friend Kami. Her chin was slightly too high, her mouth set in a thin, cynical line that suggested she’d already formed an opinion about the Guard and found it entirely below what she’d expected.

My reasons for being at the Guard were simple enough if you broke them down.

First, a promise made to a frozen child in a pile of pig manure. Second, the memory of Amara, and the specific, white-hot hatred I still carried for the way Binta liked to clean her slate.

But the third reason — the one I didn’t write down, the one I didn’t even like to look at when the room was dark — was the gap between what the Goddess had designed Anya to be and what she actually was.

Binta wanted a pipe. She wanted an elegant, hollow thing to carry something through until the metal melted.

But the girl down there wasn’t hollow. She was solid, stubborn, and had a habit of looking at authority like she was figuring out where to drive the wedge.

On my way down to my new cohort, I picked up the chalk from the practice ledger and wrote her name at the very top of the morning roster.

Anya.

Welcome to the Guard, I muttered to myself, I’ve been waiting for you.