Open Chronicles Seven Warriors

[Jhinn]

MALAKATH​

The winds of the wastes whistled above the rocky outcropping. Higher still the blistering sun burned in the apex of the day. Malakath was a land of danger, some places more perilous than others, and here, north of the Jagged Teeth mountain ranges, few would willingly dare to tread.

But two souls, at least, were there. A man, and his quarry—both tieflings.

Jhinn squatted with his greatsword laid across his legs, his hands entwined, and he eyed his helpless and hapless prey. Toreth was his name, and he worked for the coward Zeuraad. Jhinn had come across Toreth in his pursuit of the latter, waiting for him in the Great Wastes. Toreth had been entrusted to "deal with" Jhinn, and so he raised his sword on sight, and Jhinn, too, had raised his. Only the wind and the dust stood witness to their duel. But it was won by Jhinn—not without cost, as some wounds did bespeckle his body where his armor had failed.

Toreth, however, lost more. His legs lay off to the side now, all the blood having by now spilled from them, and flies were gathering and buzzing about them. The legless Tor (his bleeding staunched with belts) sat bound, propped up against the rocky outcropping, Jhinn before him, interrogating him.

Yet he had not gotten much from his foe.

"Where is Zeuraad going?"

Toreth, brimming with defiance, laughed through his suffering. "What does it even matter to you? Your Master is dead—DEAD! Do you serve a corpse, Jhinn?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Understand what?"

Jhinn did not elaborate. "How many more are with Zeuraad?"

Toreth spat—or, at least, tried to spit, but the blood and spittle clung to his lips and chin. "Warriors, you mean?" Toreth laughed again. "Unless you're afraid of the whores he has with him too."

"The warriors, yes. How many."

"I'll tell you freely: six more. Six more warriors."

"Including Zeuraad, or not including Zeuraad?"

"Do you consider him a warrior?"

"No."

"Then not including him. Six more tieflings, just like me...heh, but if the Ascended King wishes it, with better luck. Six more, Jhinn. Out in the wastes. Waiting for you. Or maybe not. Maybe they'll follow their Master. Or maybe they'll be bidden to slit your throat in the dead of night."

"I do not care for your conjecture."

"It won't be conjecture if the blood is gushing down your neck," said Toreth, grinning with bloodied teeth. "Give up, Jhinn. Let your Master rest in the dirt. Listen to me, you could—"

Jhinn gently set his greatsword down and shuffled closer to Toreth and, with a sawbladed knife from his belt now in hand, roughly grabbed one of Toreth's horns and silently began to saw it off. Toreth hollered, and his cries sounded off the rocks and rugged landscape all about them.

"Someone's coming! Someone's coming!" he pleaded, merely making the claim up to buy a moment of respite.

Yet Jhinn said, "I know," and continued to saw away at Toreth's horn, almost done with his work, as the stranger approached.

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Spoiler: Music

The wastes. It was almost familiar to him, here in the other end of Arethil. Nothing but miles of unhewn rock and unclaimed territory. Barren, as only places of truly ancient barbarism got.

And that barbarism showed in the few denizens here. While the winds tugged at his jade robes and cloak, pulling the exotic silk into a wide wing beside him, Zahir's rich ostrich-leather boots cut into the outcropping with his relentless pace. There, on its very top, he saw a great bulk of a tiefling interrogating another - legless, and soon hornless, beneath the merciless cutting of a knife. The one loomed over the other as if in a painting, his gear and clothes seeming barely able to contain the chiseled, red musculature beneath - a great beast with hands; hands that knew only how to destroy, not to build.

A faint, disapproving furrow marred his thick eyebrows, above the scarf wrapping his face. Zahir's boots stopped, disturbing a mist of sand, whirled off by the wind. He carried no obvious weaponry or indeed his usual train of guards. Nothing but his eyes - matching the gold of an eagle - displayed any keenness.

"I see now. I was warned of tiefling diplomacy." He encircled the scene before him with a bejeweled hand, dismissive and dissecting like a sculpter unsatisfied with their current work. "It is indeed grim, as they told me it would be in Tirnua."

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

"They were right," said Jhinn without looking to the owner of the new voice, sawing away still at Toreth's horn.

At last the horn snapped free from its base, and Jhinn held it in his other hand. Toreth panted heavily, sweat rolled down his forehead, and in frustration he demanded, "Aren't you going to ask me a question!?"

Jhinn dropped the horn and with his now liberated hand slapped Toreth, the latter tiefling's face whipping sharply to one side, and he kept silent for the time being. Only then did Jhinn look to properly reckon the man who was warned in Tirnua. Surprise flashed in his eyes and bent his brow. Master Mourne once harbored a great interest in the strangers from beyond the Portal Stones, strangers from the Unknown West. And the man was one of said strangers, for he did not speak in High Thanasyian as the men of Thanasis did, nor did he speak in the Red Speech of the Asmidarl, but rather in "Common", a language new to Malakath. Master Mourne had entertained a tutor of the language in his last years, and Jhinn had come to speak this Common Tongue better than High Thanasyian.

But that tutor was pale. Like a ghost, or a white howler.

"I have not seen a man of your like before," said Jhinn to him. "From where in the West do you hail?"

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Zahir folded his sleeves before him, patiently indulging Jhinn's question like a tutor before an insistent student.

"From Amol-Kallit. It is indeed far west from here. Beyond Elbion and Vel Anir, which you may have heard of."

He lowered his scarf to show a bearded, regal face, all sharp edges and neatly trimmed hair. The eyes shone out from this symmetrical bronze-and-black edifice like golden goblets in their centre - austere, aloof and sharply observant, watching him closely like Jhinn was an animal that could bite any time.

"You speak our tongue well - so I would extend civility to you, if you will take it." His face gained a meaningful look, chin tilting downwards, brow raising, eyes in the corner of their sockets as they kept fixed on Jhinn. "Sometimes, an enemy is better defeated over a cup of tea than with sword in hand."

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

...which you may have heard of.

"I have heard of neither," said Jhinn. "Little is known of the West here."

The tale was as old as the Ascended King himself, that of lands other than Malakath. But though belief in the Ascended King remained strong, notions of "Liadain" and "Epressa" had faded over the centuries like wind-weathered rock. All things in the West, prior to the awakening of the Portal Stones, had taken on a mythical air to them, and even still after. Jhinn himself did not even believe it, though the pale man, Master Mourne's language tutor, stood before his very eyes—he thought him a dragon-worshipper from the north.

But in time the truth, steadfastly defiant of error, overruled Jhinn's notions. Liadain and Epressa did exist, and this man—the Tirnua Traveler, the emissary of distant Amol-Kalit—had come from there.

So I would extend civility to you, if you will take it.

Jhinn nodded his assent, and Zahir continued, mentioning tea and swords.

"Then it is a shame for Toreth," he gestured with his chin to the legless tiefling, naming him for the stranger, "that I lack tea."

Toreth spat, a mixture of saliva and blood, and he looked warily from beneath his furrowed brow to Zahir.

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Zahir's eyes travelled down to the legless tiefling, and his mouth twitched with displeasure. He gathered his robes about himself, almost in a protective manner, and glanced out over the vista view, if only to distract himself from looking at the missing stumps for legs.

"I understand the need for self-defence. But there is a difference between necessary violence and barbaric cruelty." He took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, still looking away from Jhinn's bloody work. Perhaps inviting this brute to his camp was a mistake. But he would not know until he had a better measure of him. "Your enemy is teetering on the threshold of the afterlife. It would be dishonourable to let him float endlessly in this dying state. There is no more heedless a torturer than the desert wastes." With a great effort, he finally turned back to face Jhinn. "But the greatest of us can show mercy to their enemies. I would implore you to such action - either the mercy of a quick end, or to bring him back to his own. Once you choose, we shall drink and talk."

With that, Zahir turned, unable to sustain the smell of blood and fear in the air any longer. He began walking down the rocky ledge with a leisurely pace, slow enough for Jhinn to catch up to him.

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

Jhinn watched the Tirnua Traveler go, descending to lower ground and passing over what squat shadows the overhead sun cast.

"What did he say?" asked Toreth blithely, grinning in morbid fashion. He did not speak Common, though Jhinn had no doubt that Zeuraad did, and Master Deimos above him as well. Deimos, it was known, kept quite a few outlanders in his inner circle.

"He invited you to tea," said Jhinn, a small twist of mirth curling the corner of his mouth.

"I spit on his offer. I don't intend to sup with some frail tiefless. Ask me your questions, and then finish me. It makes no difference. Zeuraad will see you slain."

Jhinn stood. "You will die..." He held his greatsword in one hand and passed his other over the blade, and a slight shimmer trailed in the shadow of his palm, and all the blood on the blade simply fell to the earth, "...when I allow it."

Another art of the tief, and Jhinn's sword flew from his hand and twisted in the air and sheathed itself in the scabbard on his back. He removed Toreth's long belt and began to work it, to fashion something yet unknown from it.

"It is foolishness, Jhinn, that you—you—you think you're the one doing the hunting. When you prove yourself more than a mere nuisance, Zeuraad will send you to the Ascended King! What...what are you doing?"

Jhinn now stood imperiously over the near moribund tiefling, for of the belt's long leather he had crafted a makeshift harness, and now he looped it under Toreth's arms. "Taking you with me," he said.

"What's your aim? To force the tiefless's tea down my throat?"

"No. When you give me the answer to my question, I will hold you to account." And now Jhinn hoisted the torso of Toreth up and wore him like a second pack, hanging him from his back, holding him aloft with the strap of the belt over his shoulder. "I would advise you tell me the truth the first time."

"Oh joy," mocked Toreth.

And now Jhinn along with his carried quarry descended down the same path Zahir had taken, and his pace was slowed naught by the additional weight of Toreth. In short time he came alongside the human from afar.

In the Common Tongue, he said to him, "Let us drink and talk, as you say. And if we are, you ought to know my name: I am Jhinn."

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Zahir turned his head as they walked, surprise marring his face at the legless Toreth being hauled along like a pack. It took him a moment to realise that Jhinn had opted for some sort of mercy. Perhaps. So he nodded in guarded greeting, leading him to his camp.

"I am Zahir Emen Afneth Emen Yamrek Balmahed." The words rolled off his tongue easily, having said them a thousand times and more. For a moment, he had forgotten he wasn't walking in the deserts of Amol-Kalit, but in Malakath, and so would have to shorten his name for strangers. With a small, apologetic smile, he added: "Ah, but you may call me Zahir."

Slowly, they approached the camp, a coil of smoke rising from a group of tents.

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

Jhinn blinked, his eyebrows rose and settled, and he remarked, "The fullness of your name is great...but Zahir will suit, yes." Briefly he wondered how common such a practice this was in the West. Surely a great many mysteries lay across the ocean.

Through the waste they went, rough land beneath their feet, spires of rock stabbing skyward from the ground as though a buried army wished to make war with earthen spears, and scrub, hardy plants, grew where naught else could. It turned out that Zahir's camp was small distance away from where Jhinn and Toreth had their duel, and would have availed itself to the eye if the landscape were flatter, less rugged, as were the more northern wastes.

But the number of tents proved a surprise to Jhinn. Merely had he thought differently, that Zahir had come by himself, balancing the risk for fortunes unknown.

"You are part of a host," said Jhinn. "Tell me: are you of their number, or do they serve you as master?"

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Spoiler: Music

It was some further paces before Zahir answered. He kept traversing towards the camp, its tents and single, morose banner growing steadily on the horizon. A great belt of cliffs shot up on their left, casting a shield of shadow beyond the camp.

"I am the master of this expedition. We have come on behalf of the empress-regent in Amol-Kalit. And she has sent her finest to scour these lands for their treasures."

In short order, they came close enough to see the turbans and thobes of this host, forms swaddled in protective cloth, tending to a small fire and pot. Zahir stopped and turned halfway towards Jhinn. His eye glittered like a coin, regal face in profile.

"Our means may be humble. But that shan't demean our imperial hospitality. I welcome you, Jhinn."

His eye did not only gleam with promise, but with demand. A demand for a fair exchange of courtesy, unspoken in his words of welcome.

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

Jhinn stopped as Zahir stopped, and he looked to him sidelong. Still there lingered a trace of that old strangeness, of seeing in the flesh men who were not of the dragon-filled north, but men who were from the Unknown West. The sight of other men of Amol-Kalit redounded this sense of strangeness, of impossible myth becoming embodied; but the surreal sense was fleeting, a mere echo of his very first encounter while Master Mourne yet lived.

An empress-regent, he had said, ruled in his lands. It brought to mind Darkspire, that accursed city, but Jhinn would wager their Western Empress to be far from mad, judging by her emissaries.

Our means may be humble. But that shan't demean our imperial hospitality. I welcome you, Jhinn.

"Humble or great, my gratitude remains the same. You will come to know these lands as harsh and deadly, but I will treat fairly with you."

He made to step off, but stopped himself, and a wry smile crossed his face, and he shook his head, and after that little moment he looked again to Zahir.

"Indulge me a brief and ignorant question," he said. "Do the orcs of the West still practice the ways of Uroghosh?"

He knew of orcs in Tirnua, rare though they were compared to the catmen and the bugmen. But the tales of the ancient adversary of the Asmidarl, Jhinn suspected, were very much embellished.

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Zahir indulged in a faint smile at Jhinn's questions. His questions of 'the West' hinted at a naivety about the wider world, an almost endearing quality to the otherwise stoic tiefling warrior.

"Some do, certainly. But those tend to be found more in the Blightlands. Many other orcs have forsworn the ways of their ancestors."

They filed into the camp, drawing stares and slack-jawed expressions: the legless tiefling on Jhinn's back subject to most of them. Rapid-fire questions loosed from Zahir's retinue, all shouted in their own mother tongue of Kaliti. Zahir mollified them with quiet answers of his own - his calm demeanour, more than anything, draining the heated blood of their tempers. In the end, a servant dressed in a knee-length robe fished out stools from the nearest tent, placing them meticulously around the singular firepit. A teapot blacker than soot rested over that fire, unleashing a faint aroma of fragrant and sweetened tea.

Zahir swept his cloak aside, taking a seat on one of the proferred stools. His outstretched hand indicated for Jhinn to sit in a seat opposite the fire, neatly arranged with a single, plush pillow - although quite small for someone of Jhinn's stature.

"Please, sit," Zahir urged, all whilst his retinue gathered around them - some sitting on chairs of their own, others squatting on their haunches, having nothing but the desert sands for a seat. The banner flapped weakly above them, like the broken wing of a hobbling eagle. The same servant who had brought out chairs glanced again at Jhinn's legless companion, asking a quick question of Zahir in Kaliti, all while serving up tea in small, clay cups. Zahir languidly waved his hand at him, accepting a cup of steaming saffron tea. "He asks whether you saved your friend from the jaws of a beast," Zahir clarified, before taking a pensive sip, noting Jhinn's demeanour by the fire. "We have certainly marked such creatures here, capable of exsanguinating careless travelers."

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

Jhinn nodded in that slow and successive way of a man who stood vindicated in his sober thoughts against the wild speculation of his fellows. A significant number of the Asmidarl entertained the idea that all the West (if "the West" even existed, and this too was a source of argument) was overrun by their ancestral enemy, the Orcs of Uroghosh, and that one day would come a great war, either the Orcs invading Malakath or the Asmidarl invading the West. Jhinn, who under Master Mourne had gained an understanding of the Asmidarl's history, pointed to that very history as evidence of the changing ways of a people; and surely then, it seemed a slim chance indeed that a millennias-old foe would have endured in the way the Triune Sisters would have remembered them.

They went into the camp, and Zahir's kinsmen crowded round in their astonishment. Stools and tea were produced, and all about Jhinn a tongue alien to him was spoken.

"You think you'll find sanctuary here? Among the tiefless?" mocked Toreth.

Jhinn merely let go of the harness and Toreth dropped roughly to the ground; this perhaps providing an answer in a more universal language to the translated question posed by Zahir. Jhinn then took his seat upon the stool, in his turn accepted the gift of tea, and said, "Tell them he is no friend of mine."

He blew away the rising steam from the tea and took a sip, and for a brief moment his eyes flashed with delight, as he'd never before tasted this particular kind of tea, and he had found it pleasing.

"You will mark ruins among these lands as well, some of them those of my people. We have tried in ages and years past to make settlements north of the Jagged Teeth, and many of them have fallen—some to those selfsame creatures."

He looked up to Zahir, serious and stolid.

"It is said not only by the Asmidarl alone that the monsters of this land are the rage of Malakath incarnate. She is a harsh mistress, and does not suffer the weak to dwell upon her, and always does she contest even the claims of the strong."

Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

said, "Tell them he is no friend of mine."

When Zahir translated this, even briefer with no friend, a significant quiet killed conversation. The members of the retinue exchanged worried glances, busying themselves with filling their cups and bringing a round of Memsis biscuits. They kept their distance to Jhinn and didn't look him in the eye, but peered at this curious tiefling askance.

All except Zahir. The master of the expedition kept his gaze fixed on him, unflinching, folding his hands around his cup, listening with intent.

"You will mark ruins among these lands as well, some of them those of my people. We have tried in ages and years past to make settlements north of the Jagged Teeth, and many of them have fallen—some to those selfsame creatures."

Zaihr's face drifted away to see some of said ruins in the distance. Indeed, he had seen many attempts at civilisation. But all had failed to last. A warm sip of the flowery liquid punctuated his thought. A tinge of melancholy wound its way to his heart, at all this wasted potential, illustrated by broken rock. What was needed here was a strong, guiding hand, to lead these lands to longevity and prosperity.

"It is said not only by the Asmidarl alone that the monsters of this land are the rage of Malakath incarnate. She is a harsh mistress, and does not suffer the weak to dwell upon her, and always does she contest even the claims of the strong."

"Is it said how one might curry her favour, too?"

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

"One may as well try to curry favor with the wind or the tides. Or, more fitting, one of the great storms born of the sea."

Jhinn followed the track of Zahir's earlier gaze with a slight turn of his eyes and an even slighter turn of his head, and he beheld those ruins which now to great effect looked to be joining their brethren, the unhewn rocks, all about them. He looked back to Zahir.

"It may be that the greatest treasure to claim here is your very own life, and this only for another day. But I do not know your empress-regent. Will your lives be forfeit, if you return with merely your lives?"



Zahir Balmahed

 

[Zahir Balmahed]

Zahir chuckled lightly, leaning back in his seat. Two fingers neatly rimmed his cup.

"Nothing of the sort. She does not boast enough architects to throw us all wantonly into the charnel house." His timbre sobered, thick eyebrows drawing together. "But that doesn't mean our endeavours here are not of great importance. A firm governance requires solid foundations to rule from."

The loosing of grit and dirt from the nearby cliffs drew Zahir's attention. His head swivelled to look in that direction, but caught only a few distant rocks and pebbles drizzling down the decline of the nearby cliffs. From Jhinn's ominous warnings, he couldn't help but raise his guard towards potential beasts in the area.

Jhinn

 

[Jhinn]

"Firm governance...solid foundations..." Jhinn echoed, nodding in small motions and partaking more of his tea.

Toreth, ignorant of all that was being said in Common, spoke irritably out of turn in the Red Speech. "The tongue of the tiefless grates my ears. Would you—"

Jhinn without looking leaned and swung a backhand at his captive and the crack of the slap went resounding off the distant cliffs near the Westerners' camp. Jhinn straightened again in the stool, and Toreth abided in silence once more. With a brief glance Jhinn looked the way Zahir had looked, toward those selfsame cliffs, but only a thin veil of floating dust, a small tumble of pebbles, issued forth from there. He paid it no more mind.

"How old is the empire you serve?" Jhinn asked. "I am versed in the history of my people the Asmidarl, though not that of Malakath's other great powers. And I wonder, as I have with the Orcs, how the times have passed for those of the West—how similar, how different. It may be that the great dividing ocean has only cut a shared story into mirrored pieces."

The rise and fall of a people, like the tide, now surging to greatness, now ebbing to decline, and that which is new and vigorous coming again.

Zahir Balmahed