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Part 2 - War of the Grassy Desert

Chapter 1 - The King in Gold and Obsidian

The King of the Golden Raiment, Master of the Obsidian Spear, much-loved boy king of the Golden Tribes, planted his feet in a wide battle stance as his great two-man chariot slewed and roared across the battlefield beneath its roaring wheels. To his left, the chariot's reins wrapped tight around her bulging muscular arms, his oldest wife, more than thrice his age and head of his personal bodyguard, roared out in rage as the chariot slammed with horrid bone-shattering force through a clustered block of the hyena invaders, sending them screaming and leaping to the sides or else crushing and slicing them beneath the vehicle's wicked-bladed spokes.

King Nallak, all of fourteen years old and barely showing the beginnings of what all hoped would be a truly glorious golden mane, straightened with the smooth and certain grace of a striking cobra at the perfect moment for his shot. The great Bow of Yskar, almost as tall as he and built of ancient bone and enchanted steel, vibrated in his paws as he drew and released, drew and released, letting loose a hail of lethal barb-tipped bolts that hammered into and through the flesh of his peoples' enemies with unerring murderous accuracy.

The swirling, frothing mass of hysterically shrieking hyena warriors, clad in their ragged cloth and thickly gore-laden bronze armor cackled and warbled, squealing in glee and agony and rage, as they scattered like mice before the wildcat, only to swarm in again when the chariot began to slow on the uneven ground made of corpse meat and wailing wounded.

A swift twist of his head told him what he had feared, as dust flew past his unblinking, disciplined eyes. Ten hours of brutal, grueling battle with the invading barbarians in the unseasonable deadly freeze had utterly exhausted the great army of his kingdom, sapping their will and their blood in equal measure until they were groggy, unable to take advantage of the opening he'd created at risk of his own royal life, against all advice of his command staff and warrior-wives.

Nevertheless, with steely certainty borne of fourteen years of constant study and six months of ceaseless campaign told him of the inevitable. If he could not create some miracle here, the invaders would overtake his armies, slaughter them in their ten thousand, rip out their hearts and devour them with unceasing and unslakeable hunger.

Just as he had planned, the following bulk of his warrioress pride, the Harem Guard, smashed into the enemy as they closed rank behind him, shrieking out ululating cries of pride and ancestry, wrath and slaughter, shattering the block of hyena warriors and cutting them down in droves only to have them risk being overrun yet again from surrounding swarms that seemed, if anything, aroused more than horrified by their comrades' gorey demise.

These invaders were everything that fearful-eyed and maddened refugees had told him, in tearful-voiced fear and with their bleeding handless arms, the day of his coronation six months hence. Against the advice of his closest seers and generals, he had taken the threat seriously and immediately ordered extensive countermeasures be taken to halt the slow-moving but locustine advance of their deadly foe.

If only, he mused, he had known the true scale of the threat before them.

As his chariot crested a hilly ridge littered with arrow-strewn corpses of his foes, dead some hours now since midway through the opening phase of battle, Nallak grabbed onto the rim of his armored chariot's blood-drenched frontal plate and leaned forward to counter his diminutive height and gain some level of visibility. His charioteer and eldest wife slowed the thundering horses, who blew frothing blood and sweat from their lips in a ceaseless stream that mirrored his army's lather.

Down below, in the valley he'd sought to see, to fight his way to and shatter the enemy host by breaking through, what they saw stopped them in their tracks. Like a catastrophic flood, it roiled black and orange and red with a sea of deadly foes ten times the number his scouts had reported, and King Nallak, true-blooded heir to his legendary father and all his predecessors, bearer and master of the Obsidian Spear, king of all the Golden Tribes, stared down upon that looming death with cool nothingness sliding down his spine and fluffing out his tail ruff.

To his right, the thunder of an approaching cavalryman turned his head away from the screaming abyss below. Mounted upon its back, his elder half-brother crouched over his ornate and armored saddle, covered in the gore of his foes so deeply he seemed more black and scarlet than the lustrous white-gold that was his true fur tone. But for the vagaries of his father's odd will, Nallak would have been upon that horse, riding to the rescue and defense of his king in the golden chariot, wrapped in the leaden weight of his peoples' faith and undying loyalty. He almost let himself wish it had been so.

But his people deserved better. Not twenty leagues to the east, the largest of his kingdom's six great cities lay sprawled and wall-less, defenseless and open, built in better years when no threat could conceivably have assailed the wealth and affluence of the Golden Kingdom. Between him and there, only ten thousand beleaguered, exhausted, wounded soldiers still stood, of the twenty he'd brought to the great verdant savannah to fight.

His heart wanted to weep, seeing them so reduced, seeing so many maimed and dead upon the field. That they had died for him, willingly, crying his glory, only made their deaths the more savage and foul to him. They thought him their god, born to this world to be gloried by them. The truth, Nallak had always known, was that it was a convenient lie - That his family had long ruled, pretending to divine right, so that an ignorant and foolish common fur would feel right in following for his own benefit.

"My king! My king!" the rider gasped, breathless as his near-dying steed, curve-bladed khopesh clasped in shaking, white-knuckled, red-splattered fingers.

"Report, brother!" Nallak roared back for the benefit of his legions, thanking the Greater Gods that his voice managed not to crack, as they closed the gap between him and their own lagging mass.

The moment his brother failed to yell back, loud enough for all to hear, Nallak's heart wrenched in his breast. His brother, Sortan, had been general of the army to his north, reinforcements numbering six thousand and more, mostly of ship crews from the port cities at the Great River's delta with the sea. A glance behind his brother, as the general came to an exhausted halt, showed no sign whatever of his forces, and an arrow sticking from the rear of his steed's flank.

"My apologies, brother!" the warrior lion, tall and powerful, gasped out, hanging forward over his horse's neck to pull off his helm, presenting his neck to King Nallak. Nallak felt like swallowing his tongue in revulsion and sorrow, as his own elder brother presented himself for execution for his failure.

Instead of drawing his khopesh, Nallak laid a gentle paw to the back of his brother's neck, running his fingers through the gloriously thick, plush mane, as he had done often in his younger years. Sortan was ten years his senior, a bastard born of a whore before their fathers' coronation.

"Raise your head, brother. We're not winning by enough that I can afford to lose my best general," he joked, though it felt flat even in his chest, like he was trying to force a stone up and out his throat. Based upon Sortan's sorrowful expression and sallow, shrunken eyes, the jest had no humor in which to grow.

"We have no choices left, brother," the elder lion whispered, leaning in toward Nallak. Behind him, the boy king heard his eldest wife's sword as she loosened it in the sheath. Sworn to defend him against any threat, internal or external, Nallak knew she was ready to strike Sortan down, though the idea that he might betray was so laughable the boy king nearly let the guffaw issue from his throat.

Instead, he used the paw in his brother's mane to push the other male more upright, and turned away toward the south.

"The Jackal mercenaries...They are still waiting on the border, aren't they?"

"Yes, my king. And again, I must warn you. The moment we allow them past the oasis fortress, they will be no less a plague of locusts than the hyena horde!"

Nallak's pause to consider had passed weeks ago, after a month of hard thought and debate, the cries of his furiously disbelieving advisors, even the suicide of one who had done so as protest to even the idea of allowing the thought of using such warriors. All his life, Nallak's father had fought the Jackal King, winning back territory long-ago lost to the invading barbarians of the southern deserts. In battle after bitter battle, mighty Yskar, born in a faraway land to exiled royals, had fought them with every fiber of his being and a mighty mixture of magics he had uncovered from his journeys the world over.

To hear that the Jackals might be welcomed back into the Golden Kingdom, onto land they had for generations defiled with their barbaric presence, Nallak imagined might cause his father to turn in his grave. Perhaps, he joked morbidly to himself, father would rise from the grave at the notion of it, and come to his peoples' defense once more, wielding the great black iron sword Nallak himself was not even strong enough to lift.

He had hoped his own armies would be enough. But to look upon the roiling doom that roared and hissed and giggled and stormed toward them down in that valley, he knew his own conclusion was the only option remaining.

"I have a mission for you, general."

Sortan's pause was thunderous in its silence, as if a great weight had just been dropped to a very great depth, echoing back with the sour silence of discontented acquiescence.

"I understand, my king. I beg you, retreat before that army crests the ridge. The Jackals will take a day or more to arrive, and you will not live that long up here!"

A lesser general, a lesser scholar, a male more ruled by pride than logic and strategy would have roared out that he intended to stay and fight. Pride would have allowed no less of a true-blooded Golden Tribe descendant, and especially the pride of a royal. To die so foolish a death would be a disservice to the people, and Nallak forced the thought from his mind with great and sudden force of will. Never for a moment did retreat for the purpose of saving his own hide even foul his mind with its presence.

"We go toward the fortress at Al Zar with all speed. Brother, signal the withdrawal as you go. Wind the iron horn!"

With a simple motion of his paw that nonetheless sent his crimson and gold-thread cloak blustering in the battlefield's freezing winds, Nallak drew another of their great and ancient kingdom's wondrous artifacts and royal symbols from his belt, and tossed it to his startled but no less swift and dextrous brother, who looked upon it, and Nallak, with eyes wide in wonder.

The Iron Horn was a forearm in length, carved in ancient glyphs that spoke of glories long-celebrated and battles cunningly won. It was scribed in text so tiny, one needed a lens to read, of the names of those who had born it into battle, of those ancestors whose sound it gave worship to. To bear it was the sign of the Golden King's ultimate favor, its bearer to speak with his voice and the voice of his ancestors, gone back five thousand years into the ancient past.

To blow it unrighteously was to invite death, instant and horrible, as its ancient and eldritch power sucked the winders soul into the enraged embrace of those who had blown it in justice over the eons since its birth at the dawn of the Kingdom.

As Sortan's thin black lips met the black iron device's ancient magical opening, Zahira, Nallak's oldest wife, his father's first but infertile bride, yanked upon the chariot's reigns and wheeled it toward the east, toward their own army's bloodied and confused ranks. The Iron Horn's sound shuddered the ground, hurling sand up from the ground in a great black cloud that would slow their enemies, blind and confound them, until he could be away toward the great solitary fortress ten leagues hence.

He only hoped reinforcement would come. Ten thousand, even with a great fortress, could not stop the hundred thousand he had counted in that valley at a glance. He wasn't certain, in his heart of hearts, that anything could stop them, reinforced or not. Nallak refused to let himself know the despair he understood was only too logical.

Especially since he knew at least a quarter of that force needed neither food nor water, only the scent of living flesh that was not that of their own filthy barbaric warrior people, to fight on forever.

A thousand times more exhausted than he could let himself look in front of the nobles that led his army and sat in council, the golden child, 14 year old King Nallak, finally stepped down from the chariot upon which he had held court once they'd reached the mighty fortress of Al Zar.

As grooms took the reins, Nallak thanked the gods, privately and beneath his breath so only he and they could hear, that they had the common sense when they were mortals themselves to build Al Zar so that a court chariot could be driven directly into the royal chambers after holding a debriefing audience. The idea of dealing further with the simpering, prideful, angry incompetents who had inherited command of most of his legions from their own inbred fathers would have been unbearable. Albeit amusing, given the reforms he had quietly put into effect six months ago, that had placed true authority over the troops in the paws of those incompetent nobles' commoner serjeants.

Still, an outburst at their foolishness would have served no purpose, and could have caused them to withdraw the monetary and supply support from his armies, killing them as surely as and even more slowly than a hyena's barbed spear in the guts.

He succeeded in taking four steps toward the great steaming crystalline baths that occupied his personal chambers' front courtyards before a burly black-furred lioness grabbed him up around the waist and lifted him from the ground to near-crush him to her powerful chest. Her words issued forth as the growls of an angry, frightened warrior, as she laid kisses on his face and forehead. Nallak's feet hung off the ground by half a leg's length, as she spoke in her accented boom of a voice.

"If you ever sneak off to lead an army again, I swear to the gods I will drown you in your own fool pride! You nearly killed me with worry you little idiot!"

Behind him, Nallak could feel Zahira growl, in the rumble that rolled up his back. He held out a paw, the only thing he could get free of his mother's embrace, to signal the zealous, angry, aggressive old lioness to stand down. She would have been all too willing to engage her old rival in combat, given half the excuse.

"Mother, it was my duty. The same duty you always taught me to be more important than myself."

"Yes, but I am still your mother, not just your teacher."

Nallak laughed and gave a helpless, barely-mobile shrug, as the middle-aged warrioress scooped an arm under his aching ass, lifting the exhausted boy king as she strode fully-clothed into the cool waters of his bath.

"Also, remember you have no heirs of your own loins-"

He interrupted her, as his mother lowered his aching, exhausted, filthy form into water that felt sweet to his ice-burnt and battle-bruised flesh like honeyed salves and love in spring.

"I hereby proclaim Sortan my heir," he succinctly stated in a voice filled with authority and self-mockery, and in a moment shattered hundreds of years of precedent against naming one's own older siblings heirs to the Golden Tribe's leadership.

His mother stared at him for a second, her bright, foreign blue eyes first being half-obscured by her beetling brow, then shining brightly in mirth before being obfuscated from sight again as she shoved him bodily under the water. As he came up spluttering, she grabbed his cheeks in a grip that brooked no argument, and kissed him full upon the lips with a belly-rumbling laugh no native-born Golden Kingdom woman would have allowed herself in public.

"You are just like your father...Wild and wise and strong. I love you, my son."

Nallak flushed as he laughed, breathless and tired, soaked like a rat, but invigorated with the radiant liveliness that flowed from his mother like light from the sun. His arms, strong though small for his age, wrapped tight around her waist.

"I love you too, mother."

"Which is why you will let the harem wives do what we discussed."

Nallak sighed and buried his face against her chest, groaning in aggravation.

"Mother..."

"It is not so unpleasant, and you must!"

"Yet another archaic ceremony...Mother, the kingdom must look to the future, not the past!"

"And yet you must also not leave the kingdom's soul behind in the process. Besides, most young men would kill for what you have! Do not be ungrateful."

Nallak grumbled against her, then sat back and looked up, eyes sallow with bone-deep weariness and soul-deep sorrows.

"As you wish, mother, but please...Ask no more of ceremony from me for now. Many have died upon the field of battle, and I...Need time to..."

"I understand," she murmured, and drew the boy king, her beloved son, back into a loving embrace.

Stripped of his royal raiments and battlefield accoutrement, the slender, athletic Golden King felt more naked than being bare-furred could account. Laid out upon a warm heap of sumptuous-soft furs, he drew in a heavy breath of frankincense-thick air, cloying-strong and accented with clove and other expensive things besides. In the back of his muddled mind, a spark of aggravation sizzled at the fact such riches as these ceremonies cost could have funded better armor for his warriors, or any armor at all for the peasant levies who had died in droves for him the day before.

All around him in the shadowed ritual chamber, standing bare-pawed upon the cold stone that surrounded his bed of heaped feral furs, his Harem Guard held censers in their right paws, and swords in their left, ancient symbols of their place as bearers of the royal children and defenders of the line in both divine purity and mundane body.

"Oh soul who is two and pure, God and lion, divine and mortal, speak to me the words of greatest blessing!" cried the ancient crone, eldest of all servants in the royal entourage, and the only infertile female among the entirety of the Harem Guard. She, alone among the great pride of lionesses but for her single apprentice, had never been wife to a king. As Nallak closed his eyes, forbidden to lift his head to look upon her by ancient custom and religion, he imagined she had always been so ugly and that was why she was a virgin in her ninetieth year, and then chastised himself for the childish thought.

He responded with his sweet, resonant voice, which echoed about the great stone chamber and returned to him as if thrumming from deep within a bottomless cavern. His ancestors had designed it so, for in those days this ceremony would have been witnessed by the nobles and their daughters, and every show of power taken as a sign of royal virility and strength. Now, it was witnessed only by his wives, who ranged in age from just a few years his senior, toned and sleek and muscular young lionesses full of vigor and life, to Zahira, of the steely-limbs and wind-burnt face and hard-tied breasts, her sixty years concealed cleverly in armor, harsh musculature, and eyes full of a deadly cold fire that deterred all questions as to her fertility and eligibility for the Harem Guard.

"We who are two and pure, God and lion, divine and mortal, speak to you the words of greatest blessing," he responded, in the same chanting cadence that dripped from the hag's grizzled voice, continuing seamlessly and with great practice to the next part, "and say that I am ready, in my pure soul, to conceive my newest incarnation. I require a vessel that will test my imperfect mortal body, to determine the time of my breeding."

The crone turned her hoary withered form away from him, the shushing cloth of her ground-trailing rough spone woolen robe sliding thick along the uneven stones of the chamber floor, and crowed out to the surrounding females in a voice like glass blades upon slate stone.

"Honored wives of the Harem Guard, mighty warrioresses and masters of flesh and bone, who among you will step forward, though your life may be ripped from you by his mighty vigor?"

Nallak would have laughed at the sheer absurdity of it, had this ceremony not been so important to his mother, though she had refused to watch it. Zahira had argued loudly with her, that she was obligated to attend, even obligated to participate, that her refusal was a sign of weakness. His mother had responded by laughing in Zahira's face, and telling her she had no business watching this particular sort of act involving her son.

One of the lionesses cut his moment of smoke-scented silence, and in the echo of the chamber, and beneath the muffling mask half the wives wore, he could not identify her growling, throaty, husky voice.

"I will brave this danger, on behalf of the Kingdom. I, who have given up my name for this night, and wear the mask of my mother and her mother and hers on to the beginning of the Kingdom, will take this upon myself."

Despite it all, Nallak felt his heart thud and wriggle in his chest, uncertain just how he ought to feel in the circumstances. Thrusting such thoughts aside as useless in that moment, he shifted upon the silky furs, despite himself enjoying their delicate touch as he spread his arms and legs to either side. Gentle paws, full of power and muscle, but love and loyalty as well, took his wrists, pinning them to the furs in ancient symbol of his divine ancestors' unwillingness to harm their mortal brides, despite their own 'great and unpredictable divine power.'

Such things I do, he mused, to maintain the farce of divine blood.

With sour, wry amusement and a bubbling sense of nervousness that tickled tautly against his lungs, he wondered if perhaps, as so many little details of his peoples' rituals, this had a double purpose. Perhaps they were holding him down with gentle, powerful paws, so that he could not panic and flee in fright.

Certainly, his boyish cock found no pleasure in this, only a burning flare of embarrassment that shot up to his ruffled hint of a mane when his bed of furs shifted. The wife who had spoken, whose rumbling muffled voice he'd not been able to identify, would by now have divested herself of the mask, and likely her diaphanous robe as well. Her breath traced volcanically over his athletic thighs, causing tight muscle to ripple, sensitive and untouched by the paws of another since he was a child being bathed by his mother.

The crone, as if sensing his utter lack of arousal, or perhaps his disgust, crowed in her grating voice yet again.

"Then taste of him! Take his essence upon you, and tell us of its readiness!"

Young king Nallak jerked when a razor-toothed maw wrapped full around his limp shaft and downy balls, and felt a yelp bursting through his throat, before the iron paws of his eldest wife seized around his jaw, holding it shut that he could not embarrass himself. Despite knowing well he'd not be harmed, Nallak tensed potent muscle, prepared to struggle, only to find his body lulled by the incense, the narcotic drink fed to him before the ceremony, the very exhaustion that had led him to let mother talk him into this.

Zahira's stony voice spoke in a harsh whisper to the crone, her place as the eldest of wives allowing her to be the only that could modify ritual, or give instruction.

"Spread his feet. Kalla, Zirrah, bend his knees and hold his ankles in place."

The sounds of padding footpaws, smooth and silent as night, audible only thanks to his heightened, nervous alertness, approached his furred bed. Firm paws grasped him, as the maw around his male parts held its place, lips wrapped about him, barely protecting from the flesh-rending teeth beyond. His legs were soon lifted, bent at the knee, and footpaws replaced on the furs, held tight by the wives.

Zahira continued her instruction, then.

"Masked wife, pleasure him with your maw. If his body is unable to grow turgid, use your fingers in him as we discussed."

Her statement cut through his rising nerves, that tide of hot embarrassment breaking around the rocks of a mystery. There were so few his voracious mind had been unable to discover, in the libraries his mother had brought from her homelands. What Zahira now referred to, however, had not been spoken of. So far as he was aware, wise and yet naïve in some more private worldly ways, fingers were not used inside of males for their pleasure, only for medicine or torture.

Nonetheless, his thoughts were drawn back to the lips that caressed his unresponsive flesh, the rough tongue that bathed his limp shaft and struggled to coax the slightest sign of life from it. Nallak tried to think back upon the times he had stroked himself, brought his own pleasure, to assuage the burning need every youth he read of had felt at his age. He knew, from the reading, that any boy would give his right arm for such treatment as he had now, held down by beautiful, powerful women, in a place of sumptuous wealth, treated to their well-trained ministrations.

Yet he could not bring himself to enjoy it. Not so very far away, the wounded were crying and dying, guts slashed open and lungs pierced, entrails packed back into their bodies with prayer and surgery, like as not to die of infection or by their comrades' blades and corpse bonfires if signs of the Hyena Fever began to show upon them. He'd given that order himself, he recalled, upon completing his review of the scholar-surgeons' exhaustive study of that terrible plague's effects on both living and dead.

Among those who survived the war, his advisors had candidly advised him, many would still die of the incredible cold and unnatural snow that blanketed their once-warm lands. Crops would die in the ground, unsprouted and frozen by the frost, the very bees dropping from the air from starvation and chill.

Thus, when he felt the first prodding of fingers under his tail, he gave no complaint. As much as he had no desire to be here, suffering the obligatory 'pleasures' required of the Golden King that he might have an heir, he tolerated it with the hopes that giving of his own body could somehow, in some strange way, help his people in their darkest hour.

With terrible, hot-faced slowness, his boyish shaft began to tingle in the slithering wetness of his unknown wife's muzzle. Her tongue bathed him, at first tickling him with uncomfortable raspiness. Yet as his flesh became accustomed to the sensation, it faded to a strange weighty feel tinged with an odd sweetness that made him want to wriggle despite his immobile position.

When a finger, slick with something slippery and warm, alighted upon the tight ring beneath his tail, Nallak grunted again, into the paws that held his muzzle shut, giving a reedy growl as his balls popped free of the wife's muzzle. Despite his diminutive size, his shaft was growing, leaving her little enough space to hold his entire endowment as she had a minute ago.

Pinned to the downy fur beneath him, Nallak was unable to help a writhe of mixed pleasure and discomfort as a strange ache suffused his lower body. At once, he felt the urge to push down onto that probing finger, as it hooked and slid past his body's natural resistance, curling up inside his body. At the same time, he felt a desire entirely like the urge to piss, and yet entirely unlike it as well. Finally, a sense that he ought to run and hide and scrub at his skin until the fur came off slithered through some cringing part of his brain.

Someone, a wife whose voice he couldn't recognize in the conflicting flow of emotion and sensation that suffused his brain, leaned in and whispered, close enough that her warm breath soothed across the fluff of his rounded leonine ear.

"Relax, my king, please."

When warm, soft lips touched his own, Nallak arched and sucked in a gasp through his snout. Zahira's paw left his muzzle, only to leave it filled with the whispering wife's tongue. An explosion, hot and wet, electric and electrifying, blew outward from his down-covered balls, and Nallak yelled into the female's maw as her tongue invaded his muzzle. The finger under his tail curled up, and the sensation blasted to new heights, making the pinned-down boy king thrash and yowl on the furs, trying to throw his hips toward the heavens, drive his twitching maleness into the warm wetness coaxing it.

By the time it was over, Nallak lay half-sensate in the furs, his head cradled in the lap of one of the wives, who stroked his overheated face with a water-dampened cooling paw. Nearby, through bleary eyes, he saw Narine, one of the youngest wives, spitting into the crone's outheld silver bowl.

The hag looked down into it, long stringy fur nearly hanging into the mess of his seed as she leaned in and licked at the spittle within.

"No seed yet...His mortal body is still too young for children..." she said, in a hoarse whisper that echoed about the chamber. Nallak swore he could hear a weeping sadness in it.

Icy wind cut straight through his fur, as the boy king pulled his heavy cloak tighter, knotting it at his throat with a concealed shiver. Beneath his muscular haunches, a sleek and speedy night-black steed shivered and shimmied in echo of its dozen brothers and sisters, who bore six of King Nallak's wives and six high noble lions of the ancient blood. Upon his back, the very Obsidian Spear once wielded by his ancestors rested comfortably despite its length and bulk, and its cruelly razored black glass blade. He took solace in its presence, as even though it was considered an important piece of regalia, the king himself knew its magical secrets.

They stood just outside the golden sandstone-covered walls of mighty Al Zar fortress, upon its great granite bluff, which jutted out from the flat desert plain like a golden arrow shaft from a dead fur's breast. Built centuries ago to defend the Golden Kingdom from the western desert nomads, the sheer size of his mightiest fortress served to lend the young king a sense of stability and strength, though he knew the sense was all too illusionary.

So large as it was, Al Zar of the Tall Spires contained his entire army with space for more, almost ten thousand brave furs along with their camp wives and children, supplies and equipment.

When his bright blue eyes found the black shadow that writhed from horizon to horizon to his west, he knew it would never be enough. To his left, one of the aristocrats, a distant cousin of the royal line, cleared his throat and rubbed a paw through his thinning mane.

"My King, this battle will be glorious! Look at how many we will kill!"

Fool, Nallak thought, we could never kill that many with how few we have.

_ _

"Lord Farnak, you have already made your position clear." The lion to his left scowled, the smile vanishing from his heavy-browed face. Somewhere behind, Nallak could almost feel Zahira's eyes seek the fool out, watching him for an excuse to strike at the pompous noble. Farnak had made no secret, behind closed doors and out of his majesty's presence of course, just how he felt about asking outsiders for aid.

"My king...I merely think it is an insult to uor soldiers, to ask outsiders for help...Especially the Jackals! Your own fathe-"

Nallak twisted nimbly in the saddle, a storm of wrath flying across his golden face and burning-cold sky-blue eyes, his voice as barbed as his beloved spear.

"My father, blessed be his spirit, is dead, Farnak. He is not here to face this threat. I am. Do you not think, even if we defeat the hyenas, that an unused force of Jackals might not sweep into the Kingdom and finish the job? What then? We will accept their offer of aid. Question my decision again and your body will be left for the buzzards."

Cursing himself for losing his temper with so powerful a noblefur, Nallak twisted forward in the saddle again, and pressed his heels into the beautiful ebon racing horse's flanks. With little need for direction, the regal creature threw itself forward at a gallop, down Al Zar's mighty granite escarpment and the single path that wound up it, exposed to the lethal Royal Archers that lined its walls with their mighty composite bows and goose-feathered steel-headed shafts ready by the thousands.

Only one horse, and one horsefur in all of his entourage, could have hoped to keep up. Sure enough, after only a few seconds of leaving the royal escort behind, he could nearly feel the thundering hoof-falls of his pursuing companion, ever-faithful Johan. The sleek charcoal-colored lupine pulled up alongside him on his great grey-dappled foreign steed, as young Nallak careened with expert horsemanship down the trail, matching him pace for pace as the wolf's Atarasi-style steel scale armor shushed and clattered like a thousand tinny bells.

Frozen wind buffeting them, blasting ice into Nallak's eyes, the young king rode his racing steed as if the stallion could steal away the aching nerves in his breast. Behind him, the fortress of Al Zar of the Tall Spires rose high into the storm-crow sky, enclosing so many of his subjects, and the fates of all those others who remained in their cities, armies and garrisons drawn away in this desperate attempt to stop the hyena host.

Finally, snout dripping from the chill, shivering in the thick fur cloak that buried his slight, athletic frame, the boy king slowed to a canter, a trot, and then a walk, as three of the Harem Guard trailed along behind them, struggling to catch up. A loud laugh tore from somewhere to his right, and the young lion turned in his saddle, to see tall, long-limbed and lanky Johan, with all his slender dueling scars and barbarian silver ear-piercings, come trotting over with playfulness dancing merrily in his Atarasi-green eyes.

"Majesty! Thank you for the entertainment! Hah! I will beat you one of these days, you know!"

Despite himself, despite it all, Nallak felt his jaw ache as it let out a smile entirely at odds with his royal desire to appear unaffected and emotionless, divine and unassailable. Here, his foreign friend, a diplomatic hostage so trusted as to be allowed to ride alongside his captors' king, was laughing and praising Nallak's horsemanship as if nothing in the world were wrong.

"Johan...How is it that you laugh, in these times?" His voice was quiet, as it came out, softly wondering if his close friend and sometimes-advisor had some kernel of wisdom that could calm his thundering heart. The wolf answered in his habitual merry boom.

"We Atarasi welcome the chance to join our ancestors, majesty! But the only way to do that is with bravery and victory, or else they throw you out for coming to the afterworld with no good stories!"

The knot in Nallak's chest unwound a moment, and from behind it burst a laugh, as he shook his soft-furred head at the grinning foreigner.

"You Atarasi are mad, to rush towards death in such a way. What of the people you would leave behind?"

Never losing his grin, Johan responded, as the first of the Harem Guard arrived, glaring angrily but unable by convention to direct it at Nallak himself.

"That's why only victory wins us our ancestors' praise, majesty. In death and victory, we defend those that come after."

"Hm. I see. It bears thought," he mused, while waving a paw for the others to follow. "Come. The Jackal King is only two hours away, but we must hurry if we're to reach him and return before the Horde reaches Al Zar. We've no time to waste. Zahira, if the nobles can't keep up...Leave them behind."

The grim-faced hard-chested warrioress clapped a gauntlet against her shining bronze-plated breastplate, steely-grey eyes as murderously empty as always.

Bringing up the rear of their small caravan, three nobles and their personal guards rode tightly together, speaking in careful tones of what was to come.

Kimbek Talroth's stiff black fur rustled in the unnatural-cold biting desert wind, burly scar-latticed arms crossed over his muscle-laden and iron-armored chest. The bones laced gracefully into his long dreadlocked headfur clattered in the wind to call the dead, to show his utter lack of fear. He was master of his people, a warrior chief over thirty thousand warriors, and stealth was for lesser creatures. The bells tied by wire to his armor jangled and clinked even when he stood stony-still and watched the coming Golden King.

To his rear, fifty of his strongest, finest Jackals hunched in the sand as was their wont, long powerful legs built for long-distance running bent and flexed. They could sit thus for hours, even days, in the most uncomfortable of conditions. What they could not do, he knew, was survive the starvation that wracked their homelands. For months now, by Kimbek Talroth's orders, his word-makers had spoken to the Golden Ones, offering and counter-offering, bargaining from a position of warrior's strength in the hopes of finding food and homes for his people.

Brave Sortan, faithful elder brother to the golden boy-king, sat to Kimbek's right, slightly ahead of the great desert lord, as befit a respected enemy. Sortan had proven his strength against the Jackals, in duel and pitched battle, at his now-dead father's side. Kimbek knew King Nallak to be wise, for he had sent someone that spoke the Jackal tongue and the Jackal way, if with a foreigner's accent. Sortan had bandages up both of his arms now, from the knife duels he'd fought upon arriving at the camp, to prove his sincerity and his brother's words.

Two dead Jackals had been laid out in the sand, away from their camp as was custom, to draw the carrion birds that would bear them to their ancestors. The third, severely wounded by Sortan, had begun to show signs of the Hyena Fever, and had been burned alive. As reward for his victories, and in an attempt to sow further connection with what Kimbek hoped would be their new kingdom, his own daughter sat with Sortan, quietly conversing with the strangely shy warrior.

As King Nallak's entourage came into view, riding over desert hills covered in blanketing white like a carpet of old bleached bone, Sortan stood, and Kimbek Talroth drew the great, battered and ancient bone-bladed war pike off his back, and stabbed the many-colored symbol deeply into the earth, proclaiming to all his people that truce was to be had here. Until the spear came loose of the soil, no Jackal would raise his weapons against another.

A shiver of nauseau slid from Kimbek's paw where it grasped the spear and into his gut, then wrapped itself up his spine, as he drew his paw away from the ancient artifact.

The noble young king, resplendent in gold and tan and silver, raised his paw upon reaching shouting range and stood tall and fearless in his saddle. Talroth felt a sense of pride in the boy, and touched a long, wide white furless scar that ran up his burly night-dark right arm, where the boy's father had once sliced him nearly to death with the great black flaming sword of his people. He felt proud, because his own war against the Golden People had strengthened them enough to have such a king, however under-age he might be.

"Kimbek Talroth, we come to speak!" the young king yelled. At his side, the cunning-eyed Atarasi warrior Johan was serious-faced and alert, grey fur down and relaxed in the way Atarasi, in Kimbek's experience, never relaxed except when they were expecting trouble. To either side of the young king, six of his warrior wives caught up to flank him, protective and glaring at his own people, who glared back and smiled, and waited for excuses to fight.

Kimbek held up a mighty paw, and his own people quieted, calmng and lowering their hackles obediently. The time for battle was near, but not here and now. Not with the spear set into the ground.

"Come forth if you have the courage, Golden King, and we will speak!" the Jackal responded, in a voice to shake the sand and his enemies' bowels, a thunder borne of a lifetime of war and sand and slaughter.

With poise Kimbek found admirable in one so young, the Golden King rode forth from his bodyguards, who stayed behind looking angry and nervous, commanded as they no doubt were to let their king come forward alone and trust an old enemy. Johan, the Atarasi blade-champion, followed King Nallak halfway on his great sleek grey steed, and dismounted as was polite among his kind. Kimbek's people had neither the pastures nor desire for horses, except as occasional food taken from weaker peoples in raiding.

"Kimbek Talroth," the young king spoke, smile-less, as he approached with confident strides that left his heavy fur cloak billowing behind him. Beneath it, the great chieftain saw, Nallak wore the shining gold and bronze-inlaid breastplate his father had once worn. A few of the small number of scratches that adorned its enchanted surface were of his own making. "High Chieftain Kimbek, it is as we have discussed. The Mottled Horde stands upon my doorstep, and my kingdom turns to honored enemies in hope of peace and friendship."

The powerful Jackal chieftain's tall ears stayed pointed forward, as his head turned slightly to either side. The Harem Guard bore every sign of tension and readiness, eyes widened just that slight bit, paws ready and relaxed to reach for weapons swiftly without need to unclench first. Behind them, the six powdered noble-lions sat tall on their horses, smug in their superiority, in a way that made his stomach curl with derision. He was uncertain whether the disgust was toward them or more toward himself.

"You are wise to come armed and armored, Nallak-King, son of the Burning Blade. You are brave to confront me alone, knowing full-well that any challenge to duel you could not be given to a champion. Yet you are a child, and too small for such things."

Nallak nodded his head slightly, understanding the ritual involved with his statement. Kimbek waited for the interruption that tradition said should come. True to form, full-well understanding the Jackal traditions, Sortan stepped away from Kimbek's daughter and toward the two great leaders. What he said caused Kimbek's eyebrows to raise, with sheer surprise at the departure from tradition.

"My brother needs no champion, and has commanded me not to offer myself...Though it would be traditional to do so, and I would gladly die in his place were it necessary," the lion said, shoulders square and eyes filled with sincerity.

The great Jackal leader's stomach curled again, and as his paw grasped the spear of truce, he felt like vomiting with rage and disgust, as his eyes passed the two noble young warrior-leaders, and settled on the six noble behind. To their rear, his meeting place had placed a small stony ridge, in which, hidden by the desert's whim, a small cave rested behind cloth covered in sand.

"If, as we have agreed, Nallak-king, you allow me and mine to enter your lands, we will defend them. You will pay us in food and land for us to settle, and we will join the Golden Kingdom. These are your terms, yes?"

"Food is scarce, mighty Kimbek, greatest nemesis of my father. These unnatural snows upon the plains will wither our crops and starve the blood of my blood. But I gave my word, and know well that if the Mottled Horde sweeps into my lands, no amount of food will help us."

Kimbek Talroth, lord of the shifting sands, great bandit king and master of the thirty-thousand Jackal host, looked past Nallak once more, toward the simpering noblemen who shifted in their saddles under his glare.

"That is your final decision then? Once agreed upon, this will never be undone."

King Nallak strode straight up to the far larger, vastly more imposing male, and thrust out both paws, palms up, his body exposed to whatever violence the muscle-bulged and scar-ridden Jackal would visit upon him. A gesture of ultimate trust, of brotherhood. Somewhere, deep inside the cold, calculating chieftain's heart, he wept. On his exterior, though, he grabbed the boy's wrists, clasping paws with him.

Then, he kicked down the truce spear, and yanked the startled boy off his feet.

For a moment, nobody moved. As if trapped in freezing time, Nallak flew through the chill air, flung by the male he'd thought to be his new ally. When he crashed to the sand, already rolling nimbly to ablate the force, Kimbek's warriors surged forward, and a roar rose from the dune-covered cliff behind the Golden Kingdom's diplomatic party.

To Talroth's right, Sortan yelled in shocked anger, and slid back a pace whilst reaching for his sword. With paws impaired by the cuts Kimbek's warriors had died to give him, he was too slow, and Kimbek's daughter wrapped her muscular arms around his throat before the leonine champion could fully draw his curved khopesh. He fell back against her, spitting a curse, even as Johan the Atarasi sprung forward with a foam-flecked roar of fury and wrath echoed a moment later by the shocked sounds of Harem Guard, drawing blades and whirling to fight, only to find themselves faced not by a rush of ambushing Jackals but by a hail of arcing arrow fire from noble guardsmen emerging from the hillside.

The charging Atarasi wolf raised his greatsword and came on, howling like the wrathful wind as he charged with not an ounce of fear. Kimbek's paw fell to the bone truce spear and hurled it for the creature's left eye, only to have the fearless warrior throw himself into a roll beneath it and come up shrieking, eyes filled with murder and a strange glint of glee the canny Jackal knew to expect from his kind.

From his broad leather belt, Kimbek Talroth wrenched free his twin hand axes, weighting the things in his paws as they gleamed dully in the overcast storm-light. Bells jingled in his fur, bones clattering in the rising wind, as the howling swarm of his warriors washed past him, any sound of the boy king lost in the thunder of charging footpaws.

Johan's great gleaming sword came in high, a move Kimbek had heard called the 'Storm Crow' strike, bearing all the wolf's speed and strength. Had the warrior been any poorer in reputation, Kimbek would have taken advantage of the obvious opening, sidestepped the strike and struck like lightning for his throat. Johan, though, was no fool, and though he charged a teeming horde of Jackals without thought for being one wolf alone against dozens, Kimbek knew better than to think him fool enough to throw his life away for nothing.

The Jackal leader was almost startled when, as he darted to one side instead of striking, the wolf started laughing, a baying throaty sound, and caught his own downward motion and slashed sideways. If Kimbek had stepped into that, he would now be dead, he knew with calm certainty, sliced in half at the waist. Instead, he was able to hop over the strike, footpaws leaving the ground entirely in a spray of ice-crusted sand. The Jackal wasted no time, landing light upon his footpaws, and charged forward, chopping overhand and overhand with rolling blows of his hand axes, using the shorter, faster weapons to force his great-weaponed enemy to backpedal and defend.

Johan rolled his sword left and right, taking axe blows on the thick of the blade's base, using it like a shield before planting a footpaw and pivoting around Kimbek's back, forcing the Jackal to throw himself forward and roll through the sand. He spun to face his foe in time for the roaring lupine killer to charge him again, utter ferocity and aggression in his stance.

All around, the Jackals streamed past, never sparing a moment to help their chieftain. He would have slain any fool enough to intercede. This was a duel of honor, between two great warriors. Besides, his Jackals had their duty, and carried it with their customary stoic violence, as they swarmed over the Harem Guard in a roiling tide of black and grey fur.

"Betrayer!" the wolf roared, slashing and slicing, forcing the Jackal lord to dodge back, "Liar! Honorless dog!" he continued, lunging and bobbing to dodge a counter, slamming his crosspiece forward in a vicious jab when the Jackal got in close. Kimbek had no retort but to grow increasingly cold, calculating, swiping, slashing, hewing at his foe, ducking a flung boot-tip of sand. Only to find his foe suddenly gone.

Cursing out biliously in his native tongue, Kimbek whirled, in time to see Johan, laughing with fury, slashing through his oncoming warriors, headed toward where the boy king had landed amidst the ebon swarm.

Nallak flew through the air, flung whole-body by the Jackal he'd hoped and prayed to be his peoples' salvation. Even as he hurtled, the boy king's adroit mind whirled with possibilities, calculation, a thousand possible reasons for such a total betrayal not only of himself and kingdom, but of Kimbek Talroth's own unshakable warrior principles.

The ground slammed him hard, even as he rolled to break its crushing force, spraying sand. Well-trained and no longer a battle-virgin, his paw flew to the Obsidian Spear, snapping the holding catches on his back as he rolled to his feet and brought the wind-fast weapon about to slash its wicked volcano-glass blade through the face of an oncoming enemy. Hot blood flew into the royal lion's face, and he whipped his spear around to ward off a wicked blow from a cloth-wrapped wooden club.

The spear's long black blade flared with angry volcanic red light, runnels of seething heat and power sliding through it in the shapes of runes so ancient even the Golden Kings had forgotten their literal meaning. The spirit of it, though, was well in-tune with what Nallak needed. He yelled out the ancient words scribed in the crystals deep within the eons-old blade, and whipped the spear around behind his neck to clear enemies back a pace.

Got to get clear...Have to reach the horses...!

_ _

Someone lunged, and Nallak ducked aside, lithe body propelling him in the shifting, crunching sand as a Jackal warrior near twice his size bulled through the space he had just occupied. A swift whirl of the Obsidian Spear and he sliced the off-balanced warrior's hamstrings, burning the wounds shut as the spear shrieked against the creature's skin.

Another came at him, the sea of black fur all around him pressing in like a drowning tide. Heart hammering, Nallak ducked under an axe stroke, stabbing blindly forward, uncertain if his razor-edged blade struck home, and lashed out with its weighted rear end, slamming another Jackal back and away from him.

Then Nallak was reeling to the side, stumbling, nauseous, eyes filled with stars from the impact of something heavy against his temple. Swift motion of his spear brought a shriek from that side, as whoever had struck him caught the blazing-hot spear in his gut.

For a moment, the swirling sea of lustrous black fur seemed to pause. To his right and behind, Nallak's turned head saw as Zahira, mighty and ever-faithful, turned and struck another of the wives from her saddle, slicing her guts open to spill upon the sand as a feral smile broke across her stony face. He took in Johan, charging, bleeding from a cut over his eye, slamming his blade straight through a Jackal warrior at the waist. He saw three nobles upon their horses, laughing, surrounded by archers that rained arrows down on the remaining Harem Guard, pinning armor to body and body to blood-drenched sand.

His world froze then, as if the sliding molasses of time had finally crystallized. Betrayed, he saw, by his own eldest wife. Laughing nobles, unarmored yet unconcerned. Dead Harem Guards, shot down from behind while rushing to save their embattled king. Ambush by the desert's honorable barbarians, at a banner of truce. His elder half-brother, being dragged across the sand by a half-clothed jackal girl.

The incoming blackness of a cudgel, made of gnarled and sun-baked hardwood, as it careened for his forehead.

Then the pause of time turned to a dearth of it entirely.