“This is not going to go well,” Rel said to himself. “I have a goal, I need a plan.”
Time wore on. The speeches concluded, the debates began. The silence of before was soon a cherished memory as the modalmen roared and shouted at each other, or broke into discordant song. Brauctha took to his feet often. Shkarauthir opposed him. The cheers for the man eater were louder.
Rel looked into the cloudless sky. The sun was descending. He had not eaten all day and was famished. His eyes strayed to the bindings of the screen behind him. The panels moved on their laces, jerking at the posts with every breath of hot wind.
All of the modalmen were in the moot ground. If he were going to look around, now would be the time to do it.
He hesitated. They might kill him if they saw him leave. He might not get another chance. He at least needed to see the prisoners, if only to give them comfort that they were not forgotten.
“They’re going to kill me anyway, if Brauctha gets his way,” said Rel. “It’s now or never.”
He crept over to the nearest post, keeping out of sight behind lumps of masonry. If any of the modalmen saw his sneaking, they did not care.
Taking a deep breath, Rel loosened the laces holding the skin to the pole, and squeezed his way out.
Nobody paid him the slightest attention as the slipped away into the camp.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Abroad in the Camp
REL HEADED AWAY from the moot ring. The depth of the amphitheatre contained the noise of debate, and the leather screens offered further soundproofing, so outside the talk of the modalmen was quieter than he expected it to be. They would not hear him. He moved stealthily nevertheless.
The valley stretched wide. Devoid of giants it seemed so much bigger. The pregnant silence of desert mountains fell on Rel as he moved down the slope to the valley floor. The possessions of the modalmen seemed huge without their owners. Rel had an insight into how a mouse must feel, stealing across the floor of a human household when its persecutors were abed.
Looking about himself warily, Rel jogged toward the wagons on the far side of the lake. He guessed it to be about a mile. He tried not to imagine how quickly a modalman might cover the same distance
“Stop thinking about it,” he hissed to himself. “Your biggest threat is the hounds, Relly-o.” He winced at the jingle of his gear as he ran. The hounds were everywhere. They lay unmoving in the heat, sleeping with a predator’s confidence. He nervously glanced at every pack, checking for chains and running faster when did not see them.
Further thoughts on the matter of the hounds had him take a rapid detour to the Gulu Thek’s camp to fetch his gun and his sword.
As he crossed the lake bed he got a better view down the valley. The palisade had been finished in the night. The far end had been closed off with fresh stone timber rooted in the ground and chained together. Past the gate the dead forest lands dropped away in rolling hills, which descended step by step like a god’s stair, until they merged with the lower desert. Rel and his guardians had been gaining altitude for some time; although the foothills were modest in extent compared to the mountains, the desert shelved off gradually for such a distance that the bottom of the slope was lost to view. It was a clear day, and Rel guessed he could probably see for two hundred miles or more, but the human eye lacked the strength to make use of the mountain’s height, and long before the horizon the black desert blended into one, unbroken declivity of uncertain angle, dark grey in the bright light of the sun.
He crossed the lake, passing by camp after camp. He kept to the ritual paths only partly to avoid the hounds; he wished no disrespect to the modalmen if he could avoid it. Whatever chance he had to preserve his life he would take. There was no sense breaking laws he did not have to.
There were a number of features on the valley slopes. Crumbling scarps ruptured the ground in three tight clusters. Old drystone walls sectioned the hill north of the lake bed into a baffling series of squares. To get to the cages he must pass a large oval structure of undressed rock piled as high as a modalman. As he did, a peculiar noise arrested him, a snorting, wheezy sound like a monstrous snore. He had seen an enclosure like that before. He could not resist taking a look.
Rel had never been close to a dragon.
REL CLAMBERED UP stone blocks and looked over into the pit that lay on the other side of the wall. A few feet below the wall top, the sharpened bones of giant beasts curved over a pit dug fifty feet deep into the valley floor.
The modalmen did not extend the same courtesies they had for their garau to the dragon. It was chained to a massive bronze ring set into the rock, its head bowed down with a spiked collar.
The dragon rested a head the size of a cab upon forelimbs, that, though they were larger than train carriages, it had daintily crossed under its snout. It was as fast asleep as a dray in its kennel. Nostrils Rel could have comfortably put his head into flexed with the bellows action of its lungs. The mountainous flanks rose and fell, scales rasping quietly on the ground as it breathed. When he had spied on the Giev En camp months ago, the dragon had looked big. At such close quarters it was immense.
Like all true dracon-kind the dragon had six limbs. The middle limbs were wings, as they were in draconbirds. But a draconbird was only the size of crow. Even draconlings, the six-winged cousins to draconbirds, rarely exceeded the size of a riding dracon. The dragon was as long as a floatstone merchantmen.
There were stories about dragons living in the Kingdoms, but if they had once dwelt in Ruthnia’s civilised lands, they had not done so for a long time. There were scholars that doubted dragons existed at all, dismissing the stories. Sea dragons were undoubtedly huge, but the great dragons of land and air? They could not exist, they said. There were no bones in the Kingdoms. No sightings. No proof. Only myths.
But here was a dragon; it could not be any other thing.
The upper half of its body was sparsely feathered. On the wings were long, layered flight pens, as on a true bird, though the idea of something so big lifting itself from the ground stretched credulity. However, chains holding the wings shut suggested that it could.
The plumage was red in the main. On every part except the wings the feathers were thin. Hard, scalloped black scales predominated. The belly was snake-smooth and pale rose, the scales there fine enough to allow deep wrinkles. The head sported a crest of skin whose sides were fringed with black down. The tail ended in a spiked club, but in between the knobs of bone projected blade-like feathers. The lower portions were as red as all the rest, but the tops were a brilliant, iridescent blue, their tips framing a green spot ringed in black. These feathers were damaged by captivity, all but a couple broken and dirty.
All four feet had three toes with vicious talons as long as swords, with a fourth, backward-curving spur. Such teeth as protruded from its closed mouth were longer still. The beast was a living weapon. In the stories they breathed fire. Another ridiculous notion, no other type of dracon kin could do so, but if all the other details from the stories were true, why should it not breathe fire?
The smell of it was entrancing, a smoky perfume that smothered the reek of the camp, and it was hot, radiating a warmth that felt like a second sun on Rel’s skin.
The dragon was as beautiful as it was deadly. Human bones were scattered all around its enclosure. Most were shattered to slivers, but enough remained whole that their provenance was easily determined. A few skulls lay about like discarded fruit stones.
Rel’s position on top of the wall afforded him a fine view over the camp. At last he could get a good count of the modalmen’s cage wagons. He was close enough to spy the prone figures of human beings like himself in every one of them.
There were hundreds of people there.
REL SCRAMBLED BACK down the enclosure and jogged across the camp ground of Brauctha’s people. The camps of the men-eaters were altogether more grisly in aspect than the Gulu Thek’s. Human skulls featured prominently in their decoration, spiked
in vertical rows on poles hung with wind chimes of finger bones that rattled in the breeze. The smell of spoiling meat was everywhere, and fat, sated flies buzzed about. Rel was used to unpleasant sights, but his stomach rebelled at the stench.
Black cauldrons, thankfully too high to see inside, were dotted around the line of wagons. He passed a heap of bloody human rib cages and spines. Tornadoes of flies scared up as he ran by.
He approached the cages. The smell coming off the prisoners was as bad as the stink of rotting flesh. They were in poor shape, all of them. A couple watched him with deadened eyes, saying nothing. Most were dozing in the heat, huddled up in their rags upon the wagon’s filthy floors.
“Hello! Hello!” Rel whispered fiercely, poking his head up to see into the cages. “Are there any here from the Gates of the World? Are there any here who speak Maceriyan?”
The people contained inside were of many nations, but mostly drawn from the Black Sands side of the Appins. A lot of them had the flat, brown faces and narrowed eyes of the northern mountain tribes. There were a few Khushiaks and Croshashians scattered among them, but no pale, blue or dark skin one could find in other parts of the Kingdoms. As he ran further along the line of cages they roused themselves wearily, rolling onto their bellies or hauling themselves up the bars. A few spoke to him in foreign tongues, and he shrugged apologetically. The men, he noticed all the prisoners were male, were near death.
The next cage was half empty. The men inside were little more than living skeletons clad in rags. In the next they were all dead, yellow bones covered in tight, dried brown skin clad in rags.
The wagons after that had more Kingdoms men.
“Do any of you speak Maceriyan?”
A Khusiak glowered dolefully at him over filthy moustaches. His beard had grown thickly beneath them. A few ceramic beads remained threaded onto the braiding. “No Maceriyan. Go there!” he said gruffly, pointing along the line.
Rel nodded his thanks and came to more wagons holding people whose nations he recognised. More Khusiaks, Correndians, Mohaca and others. He stopped at the first and peered within. He breathed through his mouth to moderate the stench.
“Hello! Does anyone speak Maceriyan here, high or low? Are you the party from the rail head?”
Their reaction was only slightly less lethargic, but they understood, and several nodded. Their necks were so thin their heads appeared oversized, like children’s lollipops on paper sticks. Others spoke haltingly, as if they had forgotten how.
“We all do,” a soldier crawled his way forward on his elbows on knees, seemingly too malnourished to get up. The backs of his hands were covered in sores. “Captain Kressind, isn’t it?”
Rel nodded. “You are Sontiny of Corrend? I recognise you from the Fort.”
“You’ve a good memory for faces. I must have seen you all of twice.” The soldier said. “I hope you are the vanguard of a rescue force, and not a fucking mirage.”
“I’m here to help.”
Sontiny pushed his face through the bars of his cage and peered blearily past Rel. “Where are the rest? How many are you?”
“I am working on getting you out of here.”
“Fuck me,” said Sontiny with a groan. “It’s just you isn’t it?”
Rel couldn’t answer, because others in the next cage began to clamour.
“Wait,” he said.
“I’m not fucking going anywhere,” said Sontiny.
Rel moved to the next cage. At the fore was a young man Rel recognised.
“You, you were a translator for that merchant, Boskovin.”
“He is dead,” said the youth. “Poor merchant though he was, I am sorry.”
“I am too,” said Rel. “I am sorry for every death.” He looked behind him. “I can’t stay long. They’ll notice I’m gone and then I’ll be in there with you.”
“Did you bring cannon?” asked someone at the back. “They are going to need cannon. Big guns for these big bastards.”
A fellow with a ragged beard and an inflamed wound on his cheek peered at Rel. “I don’t see anyone else. It is just him!”
Rel looked back over the camp to the moot ground. The sounds of modalmen shouting drifted over the valley.
“Listen, I have to go, but I will be back, I have come a long way in pursuit of you; if I can, I will get you out.”
“What do you mean, you will get us out if you can?” Sontiny called over from the next cage. “You can’t, can you?”
“Please! You have to help us!” someone shouted in anguish. “They are eating us.”
Rel glanced back at the pile of raw bones and the flies swirling over them.
“Tell me everything you can,” he said. “Quickly.”
But the prisoners were too exercised by the hope of rescue, and they all shouted at him at once.
“He’s alone!” said Sontiny. “He’s no use to us.”
“Well, are you?” demanded the bearded man.
Rel’s expression told it all.
“See!” spat Sontiny.
“Is it true?” someone else called.
“It is, I am sorry. It is just me. Listen, listen!” he said harshly. “Quiet down, tell me what you can. Have they said anything about what they intend to do with you? Do they have any weaknesses? Do you know anything, anything at all I might use to save you from these creatures?’
The prisoners were shouting now, making Rel nervous. The translator got the message.
“The one called Brauctha is their leader,” said the young man. “He’s the worst of them.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tuvacs,” he said, as if his name were an unimportant detail. “I don’t think they brought us here to eat us. It’s like they have been testing us, winnowing out the strong from the weaker, though chance has played its part and killed enough of us.”
Lots of men started shouting. Nearby, a hound rolled over and yawned. Another stretched and shook its head, setting its muscular body into waves of motion. A third lifted its head and looked directly at Rel.
“Please!” said Rel. “Be quiet. The more I can learn now, the better it will go for you.” They quietened a little. Rel turned back to Tuvacs. “What makes you say they are testing you?”
Another young man pushed forward.
“They killed the children first, then the women. They have kept only the men.”
“Who are you?” Asked Rel.
“I am Rafozak. They ate them,” he said with horrible matter-of-factness. “And they have argued over which of us to devour, and which to keep. Troublemakers have more frequently been spared.” He spared a glance for a fellow sat in the shade, who glowered at Rel.
Rel frowned. “Then they have something else planned for you.”
“What?” Asked the bearded man.
“I do not yet know.”
“How come you are free?” asked Tuvacs.
“I came here with some of the modalmen, they are not all of the same mind regarding us. They rescued me, in fact.”
The glowering man laughed and shook his head. The noise was rising again.
“It is true. They saved my life. They call the clans on this side of the valley the man-eaters.”
“Maybe they’ll save us too!” someone said. Someone else was crying. Another shouted madly.
A commotion was setting up all along the line of wagons. Rel backed away. More hounds of Brauctha’s clan were waking, and staring at the line of cages. Their clan marks pulsed.
“Look, please, be quiet. I am going to have to go. If they find me out here alone they will kill me.”
“What are they going to do with us?” asked the bearded man. “Are they going eat us all?”
“I said I don’t know,” said Rel, “but I don’t think so.”
“Why?” said Sontiny
“I don’t know!” Rel said. He looked back to the moot. “I’m going now. I will find a way to get you out of here. They are voting now to determine whether or not they move on t
he Kingdoms. I do not have time!”
“Why are they attacking us?”
“They don’t care about the Kingdoms,” said Rel. “Most of them don’t even think we’re human. They call themselves the true men. There’s something else, something worse coming.” Rel backed away. The hounds were up, and growling, straining at their chains. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Stay strong. For yourselves, and for the Kingdoms.”
He turned and ran, leaving the men in the cages to shout after him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Pleasant Surprise
THERE WERE EXACTLY three female physics in all of Karsa, two of whom were based in Karsa City. Katriona insisted, of course, of course, on patronising one of them, even though her reputation was nothing compared to that of a man, and her office was in barely salubrious terraces at the Upper Lockside. Finna, she was called. Demion Morthrock loved his wife, and he indulged her in many things most men would rather divorce over, but even he had his limits. Gender was no way to select a physic.
Demion waited, cane in one hand, handkerchief in the other. He dabbed at his forehead and stuffed his handkerchief into his pocket, only to anxiously pull it out again. Dab, stuff, pull; dab, stuff, pull. Over and over, until the cloth was soaking. The waiting room was poorly ventilated and hot as the fiery hell, but his profuse sweating came from worry as much as the summer heat. He stared at the physic’s plain wooden office door as if it was the gate to said hell, with all its torments hidden behind.
This will not do, Demion! He scolded himself, and forced himself to look elsewhere. Finna’s waiting room was clean but uncomfortable, with scratched wooden benches that could have done with a good polish and a set of decent cushions. His recently enlarged behind kept sliding forward in a most undignified way. The wall’s green paint bulged with unsightly blisters where the rain had got into the mortar. The windows were tiny and open, letting in little but the screeching of seabirds and the stench of the Lower Lockside further down the cliff. The floor was wood, old, varnish worn off and the planks dimpled by the high heels of working girls.
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