Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 748: A New Osha Clan

The darkness worked against both sides.

When the targets became indistinguishable from the sand—when no torchlight remained to pick out a rider from the night behind him—the machine gun squads lost their accuracy. They could still keep the cavalry from committing to a clean charge, but not with the same decisive sweep as at Coldwind Ridge. A few dozen warriors always managed to push through the barrage, howling as they closed on the artillery position, and each time they did, Danny was already waiting.

The cavalry behind those men couldn’t see what had stopped them. They couldn’t see their companions shatter and fall. What they saw was the rampart’s muzzle-flash from the Longsong Cannons and the flickering lights on both flanking sand hills, and the cannons were louder and more visible and more obviously deadly—so they charged the cannons.

This was a gift.

From the rear, the warriors couldn’t tell what had happened at the front. The riders who had broken through the machine gun barrage and come close to the rampart disappeared without explanation. The men behind continued as if by momentum—constant, repetitive, certain that enough pressure would eventually breach the defensive line. For the watchdog’s veterans, this was the way war worked: constant slashing and charging wore down any defense. Speed itself was a kind of power. No hired soldier, no slave army, had ever maintained a line against that kind of sustained pressure.

So they kept coming.

Danny’s count reached twenty. He settled into it—loading, acquiring, exhaling, firing—the rhythm self-sustaining now, the motion almost quiet.

He noticed the competitor sometime around the fifteenth kill.

The pattern was unmistakable once he looked for it: a lead rider Danny had already acquired would suddenly fall before his own trigger broke. Always to the same side. The consistency meant it wasn’t random. It meant the other shooter had a fixed position near one of the sand hills, was hitting the torso rather than the mount, and was choosing accuracy over speed—predicting the rider’s path, accounting for the desert wind before each shot rather than correcting after the fact.

The desert wind was variable. Always. To maintain that accuracy in it, at night, against moving targets on horseback—

Who is this?

Danny didn’t know whether the other sniper was from the precision shooting squad or someone else the king had equipped separately. He didn’t know the man’s face or his name or his history. He knew only the testimony of the fallen—the clean, consistent manner of their dying, all to the same side, all hit in the torso—and it was enough to tell him something essential about the person behind the rifle.

He was excellent.

Danny increased his pace. He was not willing to be outshot. Not tonight, not with Malt watching from behind his right shoulder, not with the new gun in his hands that His Majesty had made specifically for him.

He did not want to lose.

The cannons finally went quiet in the second half of the night.

Thuram listened for the sounds that should have followed: the thunder of returning hooves, warriors calling to one another in victory, the rough humor that came with a successful counter-attack. He heard none of it.

The watchdog had sent nearly two thousand warriors into the desert. Even a defeat should have produced survivors—stragglers coming back in ones and twos, chaos of the kind that left noise in its wake. After the roaring and the shouting faded, what remained was simply silence. As if something had swallowed them, bone and flesh together, and gone quiet about it.

Iron Axe had told him to redirect every clansman who came to help toward the fires, not the fight. Thuram had done it. The blazes in the oasis were mostly controlled now. But the oasis’s center—where the watchdogs had lived, where the most fertile and most sheltered ground had been held for years by the Iron Whip and Bonegrinding clans’ hounds—was still burning.

He could not decide whether what he felt was satisfaction or something closer to fear.

He had always wanted to see the watchdogs suffer. He had fantasized about it—an aggressive challenger rising suddenly, or a patron clan losing patience, or any of a dozen small humiliations scaled up to something decisive. The Osha clan’s end had given him a particular kind of pleasure: not because he’d hated them, but because their destruction was vivid and complete, and vivid, complete destruction was what the bloodstained place had always offered in place of everything else.

But it was Iron Axe who had done this. Which meant Iron Axe was now trying to pull him into the next phase.

He should advise caution—recommend that Iron Axe first consolidate the bloodstained place before setting his sights on Iron Sand City itself. It was true that the golden-eyed woman with the dark hair was extraordinary, but the Divine Lady of the Raging Flare clan was no simple opponent either. And the Raging Flare clan—first among the six—controlled the structure of the holy duel. If they chose hand-to-hand combat for the format, he was not confident the dark-haired woman would win.

A holy duel was called open and fair. It was, in practice, a competition between clans—preparation, intelligence, traps laid before the ring was opened, and manipulation within it. Being the better warrior was not sufficient. The exile of Osha had proven that precisely.

What Thuram could not account for was the King of Graycastle’s interest in the desert.

Northerners had never wanted the desert. To them it was barbarism, poverty, heat. They forbade Mojins from entering their kingdoms. They did not meddle in clan disputes. Only the tradesmen moved between the two worlds, and they came for slaves. Queens of Clearwater had made their moves here once, and two clans had paid for aligning with her—fed some strange pill and dissolved with the promises made to them.

Order and oasis, Iron Axe had said.

The Three Gods Emissary legend held that when the next emissary came, the Southernmost Region would return to what it had once been—green land, moving water, grass. Nobody had ever made it happen. If anyone ever did, the clans would not need to fight over water and food.

But that was legend. This was not.

Dawn came finally, a thin line of cold light above the eastern horizon.

Then Thuram heard the horns.

Not the deep blare of an ox horn—something sharper, crisper, a different register entirely. Repetitive. Coming from the desert side.

A column emerged at the border of the oasis.

Soldiers, not warriors. They moved in horizontal formation—organized, deliberate—and advanced into the bloodstained place with an evenness that had nothing to do with courage or rage. The watchdog’s remaining fighters rushed out with drawn swords to meet them, and then a flat series of gunshots sounded and the swordsmen fell. The rest scattered immediately, abandoning their moaning companions without a backward glance.

The soldiers entered the oasis. They moved to the watchtowers and occupied them. They encircled the tavern.

A woman came through the door.

Blue-grey hair. Dark complexion. Thuram had not seen her in seven or eight years—but resemblance was its own kind of memory. He recognized her mother’s features in her face.

He went to his knees. His forehead touched the cold floor.

“I swear by the Three Gods that my clansmen and I are yours to command.” His voice came out rough, stripped of its usual performance. “From this day forward, you are the chief of the new Osha clan.”

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