ARTHUR

Bathing in fire puts him into something of a haze. It always does. When he comes out of it, his clothes are mostly burned off and his boots have melted onto his feet. From his back, he stares up a pink wall from a spot of shade.

“We should burn them like they burned ours,” someone says nearby, which makes him snap his eyes shut and slow his breaths. Busuruli is not a language he knows terribly well, but over the past few years, guessing a war might come about, he’s forced himself to learn it. He knows enough to understand the angry woman’s words. She’s speaking to a comrade, but aside from the flapping of cloth in the breeze--flags? laundry?--there doesn’t seem to be anyone else nearby.

Two pairs of footsteps come closer and he focuses all of his attention on being still.

She kicks his boot. “Shouldn’t he have more burns?”

A woman groans. “Oh, don’t start, Yaala! We got enough to worry about without you being superstitious. He probably just landed on the edge of the flames and suffocated.”

“Then where’d all his clothes go? How’d they burn off but his skin didn’t? We should check his eyes.”

“Yaala, he’s dead. Look at him! He’s not even breathing! He’s not firecored! Yaala!”

When a thumb lifts his left eyelid, Arthur doesn’t give the woman time to even register the black iris. It’s not the red she’s looking for anyway. He kicks out at her knee, hops to his feet when she howls and falls aside, and pummels her companion to the ground. The path beneath them is smooth stone. He slams the second woman’s head against it hard enough that her skull busts open and blood splatters from it. He rolls aside just in time to dodge the first woman’s mad hurtle.

He’s up before she comes at him again, this time swinging fists. She spouts off a few curses in Busuruli that he doesn’t know. Around dodging her heavy blows, he tucks the words into his memory for later investigation. She has strength far greater than his and quite a bit of muscle, but he’s hit her knee once, and when he gets a chance to glance down, he can see it swelling.

He performs a series of dodges that leave her guard open, then strikes at that purpling kneecap when the opportunity comes.

She goes down hard on her side.

He brings his heel down onto her ribs. They crack loudly, and her pained wail has people yelling from beyond the nearest buildings, but he’s not terribly concerned.

He nudges her onto her stomach with that same foot, taking a moment to catch his breath as he stands over her. The undersides of his feet are hard as rocks from the formative years he spent hunting barefooted in the swamps of Simikee. There’s barely any feeling in them anymore.

“It’s nothing personal,” he says in Busuruli when he slams his bare heel down on the back of her skull. There’s blood and brain matter on his foot afterward, so he wipes it on her shirt. He then ducks behind a nearby building, a house with a line of laundry leading out from a corner rooftop to a wooden pole, and takes stock of his surroundings.

He’s inside the walls, that’s for certain. He can see pink in every direction, peeking over the massive Primrose Palace at the center of many smaller, pink buildings and fencing him in.

This is fine. It’s exactly what he wants.

On the ground where he had lain are ten dead Malroix soldiers, set aside from another larger pile of Busurli corpses that are also charred. He can only hope one of the Malroix is Commander Vonadieu.

He snags a pair of pants off the laundry line, yanks them on, and peels the rubber leftover from his boot off his left foot. Barefooted and barechested, he slips between buildings as more Busuruli come along to see what all the ruckus was about. It’s less effort than he expects to get into the palace, with them so distracted. From conversation in passing--the Busuruli are loud--he hears that they are trying to take the beaches back. They are not worried yet that someone might have gotten in, and the open windows on the lower floor of the palace attest to that.

Arthur slips into one with ease, pleased to find the room inside is empty of people, though it’s neatly arranged with colorful furniture, rugs, and wall tapestries. He has to hide several times as he works his way upstairs, where any leader with even half a brain would perch--for the vantage point. At one point, he stumbles into what he thinks might be an armory or a trophy room. It’s hard to be sure. An array of foreign weapons line the walls, and Arthur, weaponless, homes in on one that catches his eye: a glaive.

He takes it off its decorative stand and gives it a twirl, the curved blade on the end hissing through the air. He checks the edge. Blunt, but it will do.He grew up using a glaive. Of course, he’d also taken a lot of shit for using a weapon foreign to Simikee, but he’d been a master, and few could contend with his skill.

He’s near to sneaking back out of the room when a herd of people come thundering up the hall, screaming for someone whose name he doesn’t quite catch. He takes advantage and runs after the crowd to the largest room on the top floor, stepping out of the stampede at the last moment and pressing himself up against the open door with his heart athunder. In the rush, he’d seen the reason for their haste--an injured child.