A shout came from the main room, the sound of something-a chair, he thought-knocked over, the scrabble of feet on the packed-earth floor. He froze. Another shout and whispered curses and then sounds he couldn't place for a moment and then he could: the dull thuds of fists against flesh. He swung his legs free from the bed and set them on the floor. The light shining around the door frame shifted and danced and grew brighter. He watched it, hearing Mor's sharp inhalation of breath.
The door to their room flew open, kicked by a booted foot. Torches lit the room, cruel in their intensity. Through the torchlight the bodies of men emerged, burly, garbed in crimson. The first strode across the room and slammed a hand down on Ravi's neck. He leaned in close, studying the boy, the torch so close to his head that his features were a motley of distorted highlight and shadow. A second figure went to Mor. He was gentler. He placed a finger under Mor's chin and turned her so that the first man could see her face.
"Yes," he said, glancing between them, "you're two sides of the same coin. You two are one, together in the womb, together in your fate. Your councilmen told us true. Come on. On your feet, both of you. We'll not harm you if you come quiet."
He was so matter-of-fact, so casually intimidating that before he knew what he was doing Ravi was standing. He and Mor were pushed through the doorway into the main room. What Ravi saw there stayed in his memory only in fragments, disjointed images captured between the jolting motion of being shoved, stumbling. He saw his mother's face, openmouthed, her teeth looking like the fangs of a wolf or bear. His eyes shot around to find his father. He couldn't find him. He saw a commotion of men near the cook-stove, their arms and legs moving like those of some monster. He never did see him or pick out his body from among the motion, but Ravi knew that his father was at the center of it.
Ravi was roughly conveyed through it toward the door. His foot caught the side of the doorjamb, and he sprawled out into the night. He hit the ground hard on his forearms and elbows, rolled, and had a clear moment of thought as he watched the figures striding out after him. Red cloaks. They wore red cloaks! And that meant he and Mor were to be taken by the eaters! Older boys had told stories about such things, saying that from time to time the king to the south sent hunters through Candovia in search of the children his god loved to devour. Ravi had never believed it. It had never happened in his lifetime, and he knew older boys were cruel and liars. But now a man was reaching down for him; his father was pinned beneath a seething mass of limbs; his mother wore a wolf's face; his sister was crying out at some roughness.
The anger was in him complete and instant, like oil on a fire. He kicked at the man reaching for him, a glancing blow off his shin. This made him angrier and he kicked again and again, his legs churning as he squirmed on the hard-packed ground. The man cursed and jumped back, then came in again, his entire bulk trailing behind the point of his boot toe. Ravi tried to wrap himself around it and pull the man off balance, but the boot tore free and came on again. In a moment others joined it.
That was the first time they beat him senseless. Because Ravi was unconscious he remembered nothing of how they were bundled into a wagon waiting by the road. He did not hear his mother's wail or see her appear in the doorway, held back by a soldier's arm. Nor did Mor ever tell him of it. Yet somehow he knew. He knew as certainly as if she had lent him her eyes and her ears.
T wo days after the soldier squashed his nose-two days of travel, of beatings, of sleepless nights and numbing days-the children were herded with other groups from other villages near the coast. Many of them had been gathered in the coastal towns to celebrate the return of spring. Perhaps that was why they could be harvested in such great numbers. How the red-cloaked soldiers dealt with the children's parents Ravi was not sure. They could not beat them all, could they? Perhaps this was why they marched the children so mercilessly. Perhaps, but Ravi also felt certain there was more to it. Sometimes he could smell the pungent scent of mist carried on the breeze coming from the towns they skirted. It struck him with the melancholy that smoke from burned ruins would have. But the towns were not in ruins; not, at least, in the physical sense that was easiest to envision.
None of the children understood what was happening. Yes, they all knew the stories of the red-cloaked men, of the vanishings, but the stories had never been like this. They had heard of a child or two going missing every few years. Nothing more. And the tales had always said it was young children who were taken, none as old as Ravi and Mor. Whatever was happening now was a thing beyond even the nightmares that the older boys tried to weave into younger minds.
They were marched through the morning and into the afternoon. Around dusk they came down through sea bluffs and got their first view of the great league vessels. Their size was hard to gauge. At first Ravi thought them no large craft, but then he realized they were quite far out. They were, possibly, massive. They lay on a shimmering expanse of azure. The twins walked hand in hand near the front of the column. Ravi felt the swish of the tall, damp grass against his legs and thought he was lucky to be up front instead of behind, where the grass would be trodden down and could not be felt. Then he thought himself unkind or a fool or both. This is not possible, he thought. Not possible. But they continued to move forward, the world denying his claim without the slightest hesitation.
Ravi squeezed his sister's hand tighter and watched the ships.
They slept on a narrow ribbon of sand that night, hemmed in by crumbly cliffs guarded by watchers. Some of the children feared the ocean and cried. Ravi wanted to shout at them to stop, but he knew that would be unkind. He did not wish to be unkind. That would be making a bad thing worse and doing it to others as innocent as he. He was angry, and he did not want to let that anger fade or be replaced by fear or docility. He wanted to do something with it.
"Swear to me that you'll never give in to them," he said. These were the first words he had spoken in some time. He did not look at his sister but instead gazed unfocused. He raked his hands through the damp sand, feeling the texture in his fingers.
When Mor did not answer, Ravi faced her and studied her in the yellowish light of the fires that rimmed the encampment. He took her by both wrists and held tightly enough that he knew his grip pained her. "Don't go quiet. Swear that you won't!"
Mor looked miserable. "Ravi, how can I? You see them."
He drew close to her face. "Swear it! Don't give yourself to them. Don't."
She began to protest again, arguing that she would have to obey, alluding to the things they would do to her if she did not. Ravi cut her off.
"You're not listening," he said. "What I mean is don't ever believe that you are a slave, no matter what they make you do. The red cloaks say that we belong to some others now. They say we're not our own masters and that we have no parents. But they're liars. That's what I'm telling you to remember. You believe that they're liars?"
He waited until Mor nodded, then he continued, "Don't forget that. Don't let them make their lies into truths. Never forget that you are Mor, sister of Ravi, child of the parents we share. Promise me that."
She promised, and he finally let go of her wrists. "Why do you say these things?" Mor asked. "You act as if we are separated, but we're not. Just be quiet and don't draw attention and they will leave us with each other."
Ravi said nothing, and was glad when she did not ask him to swear, as he had done.
Sometime in the middle of the night he decided what he would do. And it was the opposite of not drawing attention. Mor would not understand it, but if he managed what he thought he could, she would come to understand later. He did not know exactly how he would do it, but he resolved to try. He felt he would know the moment when it showed itself.
S econd to the league vessels themselves, the barges that approached the shore the next morning to transport the children were the largest human-made structures Ravi had ever seen. Squat rectangular rafts, they stretched wide along the shore, flattening the waves beneath them. They were made
of a slate-gray material, dull in a manner that seemed to capture the light of the risen sun. Ravi could not say what made them move, but something did, slowly, inexorably. And there were people aboard them. Not many, and not near enough to make them out clearly. But on one of the closer barges a cluster of five figures stood atop a raised platform. They did not move and were nothing more than outlines at first, but Ravi felt certain that each stared directly at him.
The children on the beach stared as if these silent things and those aboard them were more frightening than anything they had yet faced. They began to murmur and whisper. A boy near the twins said, "This is sorcery." Nobody denied it.
"Don't wet your trousers," one of the soldiers nearby said, guffawing. "Look at the lot of you. Gape mouthed like so many carp!"
Another added a remark about the smell of soiled undergarments. Still another-a bit farther away and moving forward with his arms outstretched to push the children in-made a joke about the enormous chopping block approaching them.
"Why are they doing that?" Ravi wondered aloud. "Why frighten us still more?"
His sister, holding his hand, did not respond.
The barges came on. The figures standing on the raised platform were more visible now. They were cloaked in hooded garments of the same dead gray as the vessels. The surf struggling beneath the crafts billowed out, grasping at the children's feet. They began to draw back, felt the pressure of others behind them, and began to panic. It spread as quick as touch. Over the rising confusion, Ravi heard the soldiers increasing their taunts. They knew this would happen. They were enjoying it!
This realization brought a shout to his mouth. "We are not slaves!" Without knowing he was doing so, he yanked his hand free of his sister's. He spun around, calling out over the heads of the mostly smaller children in all directions. "Do you hear? We are not slaves!"
His voice must have carried well, for many faces turned and stared at him-round faces, gaunt ones, sunken eyed and grime caked. In their eyes he thought he saw hunger, agreement. He thought he could stir that into certainty. "Just because they say we are doesn't make it true. We are not slaves just because they say we are!" His voice grew stronger. He asked them to look around. See how many they were. They were hundreds. Down the beach were thousands! The soldiers were few. How could they enslave so many?
He answered himself: "Because we let them!"
The soldiers noticed. They shouted to one another, to him. He saw two converging on him from different directions. The nearest was a bull, his shoulders bulbous and enormous, as if all his anger were gathering atop his frame.
Ravi grabbed Mor and pulled her away, both of them agile as anchovies. He slipped through the crowd, repeating again and again that they were not slaves. He told the others to fight, to run, to do anything but not give in. He couldn't tell if they were really understanding, or if the chaos had crashed over them, but all around the children jostled and scurried. They punched at the men who grabbed them and wrenched themselves free. A tide of them had pushed over a fallen man, and many small feet were trampling him as they surged down the beach.
Toward freedom, Ravi thought. He knew that Mor was beseeching him, but it didn't matter. He had her by the wrist and he was doing what he had to. He was changing everything.
"They cannot stop us all! Run to your homes!"
He had just spun around once more, mouth open, ready to flee if the soldier was too near. He was thinking it was time to join the others escaping down the beach. That's what Mor wanted, he was sure, and they would do it now.
He turned just in time to receive the full force of a soldier's tossed baton across his forehead. It had been thrown from a distance with great force and uncanny accuracy. It knocked Ravi's head back and turned his eyes to the cloud-heavy sky. Suddenly he had no legs. His body fell so that the back of his head was the first part of him to hit the hard sand. It left him stunned, breathless, one arm upstretched, his hand, which had just held Mor's, empty.
And then a fist closed over his hand, and a shape blocked the sky. The soldier yanked Ravi upward, spinning him in the air, then drove him face-first into the sand. He pressed his knee into Ravi's back, the full weight of him. Ravi's mouth formed an oval as the air inside him escaped. He gasped for more, but the man pressed him like he wanted to drive his knee through him into the ground.
"What to do with him?" he asked.
"End him," another of the soldiers answered, his voice calm. "It's a waste, but we'll still have her. The numbers will be right anyway."
Ravi, his head to the side on the damp sand, his lungs pressed flat, and his eyes rimmed with tears, watched a knife cut into view. And past it, he saw his sister, watching him, her face heartbreaking, desolate. A soldier had her by the shoulder, though it was clear there was no fight in her. Ravi wanted to tell her not to look, but he could not. And he did not have to. Something else caught her attention, someone whom Ravi could not see but whom she stared at with no lessening of her distress.
"Wait," another voice called. Ravi did not know whose it was, but the voice carried authority. It was a strange voice, inflected with sharp edges even though the speaker was unhurried.
The blade hung above him, waiting.
"He's got the spirit that eats death in him," the voice said. The speaker paused for a few moments. "He's got life in greater measure than most. I see another use for him. I think the Auldek will like this one."
CHAPTER ONE
When the Balbara lookout shouted the alarm, Princess Mena Akaran was up from her campstool in an instant. She broke from the circle where she had been sitting with her officers and climbed the ridge at a run. She drew close to the sharp-eyed young man, sighting down his slim, brown arm and out from his pointing finger across the arid expanse that was central Talay. It took her a moment to see what he did. Even then, it was neither the creature itself she saw nor the party who hunted it. They were too far away. What marked their progress were the billows of smoke from the torches the runners carried-that and a yellow smudge at the rim of the world that must have been dust kicked up by their feet. They seemed to be as far off as the horizon, but the princess knew they would close that distance quickly.
She half slid down the sandy slope and regrouped with her officers. One captain, Melio Sharratt, she assigned to the farthest southern beacon; to the other, Kelis of Umae, went the northern beacon. They already knew what to do, she told them. It was only a matter of seeing it accomplished, timing it perfectly, and having luck on their side. She left it to them to get the others in position and remind them of their instructions, but before she dismissed them she urged them both to act with caution.
"Do you hear me?" she asked, leaning close to the small group. She took Melio by the wrist to remind him of this but did not look in his face. She knew his grin would hold constant, dismissive of the danger moving across the plain toward them. He may have become the head of the Elite, but the role had done nothing to alter him. His longish hair would be cast casually across an eye, often swept aside only to fall in place again. They had wed five years earlier. She had never hidden her love of him from others, but neither did she let it distract her at moments like this. She spoke as if her words were meant for all the hunting party, as, in truth, they were.
"I want nobody dead. Only the foulthing dies today," she said.
"Those words coming from you?" Melio asked. "Will you abide by them yourself, or will this be like last time, with that-"
Mena spoke as if she had not heard him. "Nobody else. That order falls on each of you personally. We've lost too many already."
Her eyes settled on Kelis. The Talayan's gaze was as calm as ever, his skin dark and smooth, his eyes slow moving. It was a face she had grown to deeply care for. In a strange way this Talayan was a living reminder of her eldest brother. Aliver had grown to manhood with him as his companion. Kelis had known her brother during the years that she had been separated from him. Even now, after all the evenings they had spent talking about what h
er brother had been like then, she still did not feel they had conversed enough. She hoped they would have many evenings more.
She made a point of not meeting Melio's eyes as he moved away. If they were together again, whole, at the end of the day, she would show him just how much she felt for him with all her body. That was the way it had been with them lately: distant as they faced danger, enraptured with each other in the short reprieves afterward.
The next half hour was a whirl of preparations. Moving among soldiers, shouting instructions, checking everything personally, Mena was as slim and leanly muscled and sun burnished as she had been during the war with Hanish Mein. She still wore the sword with which she had swum ashore on Vumu as a girl, but she was far from being that girl. Only an unobservant eye could fail to see that her lithe form contained within it a coiled energy hardened by loss, by war, and by an inner struggle with the deadly gifts that seemed to define her. There was love within her, too, but she kept that on a short tether. It was a softness that was difficult to spot within the Maeben fierceness she so often had to rely upon. Had she the time and the quiet, she would have chosen to settle into the kinder aspects of her nature and come to know them again, but the peace that followed the end of the war with Hanish Mein had hardly allowed it. Maybe when this work was done she could lay down her sword and rest.
She caught her breath only when all the preparations that could be made had been. She climbed back upon the ridge and stood where the lookout had. The chapped skin of Talay spread out before her, miles upon miles baking under a flawless blue sky. She watched the creature take on shape and proportion as it closed the miles, the smoke of its pursuers driving it toward the trap Mena had laid for it.
This was not the first of these foulthings she had faced. Indeed, she had been at the work of hunting them for almost four years now. She had seen eight of them killed, but she'd also lost hundreds of her soldiers in the process. And each time was different. Each creature was its own atrocity and had to be dealt with accordingly. Each trap was an elaborate construction that, if it failed, needed to be abandoned to prepare for some other opportunity.
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