A Fading Sun
Page 29
Voada nodded and followed Maol from the room.
With Great-Voice Vadim III lashed to the railings of Maol Iosa’s war chariot naked and exposed, Voada rode with Maol Iosa out the river gate and along the muddy banks of the River Iska until they passed beyond Trusa’s wall, blackened now with soot. Flames enveloped the bridge over the Iska, and the middle span had already partially collapsed into the river. The windows of the palace gleamed red with fire. The entire city burned behind them, the heat of the conflagration at their backs.
Once safely away from the city, Voada had Hùisdean turn toward Trusa’s main gates and the Great North Road. There, per her instructions, a tall dais had been erected just to the side of the blackened and broken gates of the city. The banner of the Great-Voice had been taken from the palace and hung there upside down, mockingly. Voada’s army and the swelling numbers of Cateni who had joined them were massed there before the dais, thousands upon thousands of them flowing out into the distance.
“Take him up,” Voada said to the waiting quartet of Cateni who had once been slaves in the Great-Voice’s palace. Almost gleefully, they came forward, cut their former master from his bonds, and half carried him to the rude stairs of the dais and what had been prepared there. Voada would look at neither Maol nor Magaidh, who watched from near the steps of the dais. Instead, she followed behind the protesting Vadim, feeling her anamacha close at her side. In her head, she heard the Moonshadow’s satisfaction. They dragged the naked man up the steps, and Vadim moaned aloud when he saw the instruments placed on the table there—a table from his own bedroom in the palace.
When Voada reached the dais, she stepped forward and opened her arms to embrace her anamacha, borrowing from it the power to strengthen her voice. Though she called for Iomhar, it was the Moonshadow who answered. she told the shade.
The warnings of Greum, of Ceiteag, seemed distant against the warmth that she felt emanating from the anamacha in the storms of the Otherworld. Her protest withered in the emotions that she felt. She told herself that this wasn’t the time to struggle against the anamacha, that she would reassert herself with the Moonshadow later. This moment, this demonstration, was what she wanted.
As the energy of the Moonshadow filled her, she called out to the throngs before her, her voice as loud as the thunder of a summer storm, reaching all the way to the farthest of her followers. She wasn’t certain where the words came from, but her throat moved with them.
“My friends, my people, we’ve taken the capital of the Mundoa, the symbol of their empire in Albann. We’ve begun the great task of freeing all the southern clans from the chains that the Mundoa have placed around us, with which they bound us when they first came to this land. Our land, which we are taking back from them.
“This won’t be an easy task, even though we’ve made an important start under the direction of Ceannàrd Maol Iosa.” She glanced down; Maol was staring impassively up at her. Voada pointed over his head to the road. “Out there, to the west and advancing toward us, is Commander Savas and his army. It’s him we must go to meet next. It’s his army that we will defeat, and once we have done that, both Albann Deas and Albann Bràghad will be ours once more. I need to know this from you: will you help me do that, all of you? Will you become the spear and sword of the Clans?”
The cheer that erupted then was louder than her voice, a roar that she could feel hammering against her, that caused the voices of her anamacha to respond with an interior exultation. Voada gestured back to the Great-Voice, held in the grasp of his former slaves. “Look at him. Stripped of his title, his clothes, his money, his palace, his soldiers, his slaves. Look at him. He is nothing. Just a puny, frightened, useless man. That’s all he ever was.”
Voada stepped toward him, plucking up a pair of steel tongs and a curved Mundoan knife from the table. She nodded to the Cateni, who held the man’s limbs tightly, and one of them stepped behind the man, grasping his hair and pulling it back so that Vadim couldn’t move his head. Voada could see Vadim’s eyes widen further as the Cateni holding his hair also pressed the man’s nostrils together. The Great-Voice held his breath, but he eventually had to open his mouth to gulp air, and Voada plunged the tongs into his mouth, grasping the end of the man’s tongue and pulling it out. “He was once known as the Emperor’s Great-Voice,” she called to the crowd, who roared back at her. “Now we will take that voice from him. Forever.”
With a single, harsh stroke, she severed the man’s tongue with the knife. Blood drooled from his mouth, over his chin, and down Vadim’s bare chest as he howled wordlessly. She held up the tongue to the crowd’s approval, then threw it down on the ground in front of the platform.
She had intended for that to be all, to let the man go back to his own kind, humiliated and mutilated, as a message to his people. She would let Maol take him and use him as a hostage if he thought it would help. She thought she would feel satisfaction at this small vengeance, but there was only emptiness inside her.
She felt pressure building within her. The real world and the world of the anamacha were intermingled in her sight, and the touch of her anamacha was like being back in the embrace of Meir, familiar and comfortable.
It felt as if someone else controlled her hand. Voada turned quickly back to the man, and this time the knife slashed deep and hard across his abdomen as Vadim screamed once more. The blade tore at muscle and cartilage, resisting vainly as Voada’s arm wrenched the weapon nearly from side to side. The gray coils of his intestines tumbled bloodily out from the wound, slithering to the floor of the platform. The Cateni holding Vadim released his arms, and the man fell to his knees, his hands clutching at the great rent in his body as if he were trying to stuff the ruins back inside himself.
He collapsed, and the crowd cheered, though Voada saw Maol grimacing in his chariot, and Magaidh’s mouth opened in soundless horror as she turned away. Voada’s anamacha glided away from her, and the real world snapped back into sharp focus. She could smell the blood and the smoke of the fire, could feel the shivers as she looked down at the Great-Voice’s corpse, could see the gore that stained her arm to the elbow. The acclamation of the crowd filled her ears as she stared out at them.
She also felt the horror widening her eyes, roiling in her stomach and rising to burn in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Magaidh, at Maol, but her voice was now only her own, unheard above the roaring of the crowd.
The oak leaf pendant around her neck, the brass torc of the draoi: both felt cold against her skin, as if the breath of some taibhse had touched them. She wanted to reach for the pendant, to stroke the silver and imagine Orla doing the same somewhere, but her fingers were too stained with blood.
Will you hear my name now, Orla? Do those around you talk of Ceanndraoi Voada, and do you know that it’s me? Will you come to me? Will I hold you again?
She felt … empty. Alone.
She let the knife drop from her hand.
30
The Merging of Intent
THE ASHES AND RUINS of Trusa still smoldered, spewing a film of gray smoke that the wind smeared over the sky and blew eastward. Dogs scavenged the corpses of the city, eating the flesh and scattering the bones of the dead, including those of Vadim III—all except his head, which had been hewn from his body and placed on a tall post before the city gates with a sign underneath in Cateni script: The Great-Voice is silent.
Voada didn’t know w
ho had mutilated the body—the Great-Voice’s former slaves, most likely.
Voada had sent word to Maol, Comhnall, and Magaidh to come to her tent in the encampment on the hillside outside Trusa where the Great North Road wound along the valley. The tent was dark enough that Voada could see Magaidh’s anamacha standing at her right side, and she knew that Magaidh could see the Moonshadow’s anamacha as well. Magaidh’s husband stood to her left. The war, Voada could see, had aged Àrd Mac Tsagairt. He limped as he had entered the tent, and his hair had gone nearly entirely gray, even if under his armor his body still held corded muscle.
The two bowed to Voada as they entered. Magaidh’s face was carefully arranged and neutral, and that saddened Voada. We were friends. I wanted us to stay friends … But that was her fault, not Magaidh’s. Or perhaps it was the Moonshadow’s fault. Voada glanced at her anamacha in accusation. I can’t use the Moonshadow anymore. I can’t …
She wondered if she would still feel that way once she was in Magh da Chèo again, with the storm howling around her and the Moonshadow close to her.
Voada was seated in a velvet-cushioned chair, another item appropriated from the Great-Voice’s palace before the fire had reduced it to a stone-walled and roofless shell. Her left hand was on the chair’s gilded and intricately carved arm as her right touched the silver oak leaf she wore and stroked the polished brass of her torc. She gestured to the table to the side, set with flagons of wine and water as well as meat pastries. “Please,” she said. “Magaidh, Comhnall, take some refreshment.”
“Thank you, Ceanndraoi,” Comhnall said, but neither he nor Magaidh moved. Maol arrived a breath later, announced by the guards at the tent’s open entrance. I must apologize to Maol for what I did with the Great-Voice, Voada thought as the man made his own obeisance. Voada felt her anamacha press her left hand, their touch frigid as they merged with her. Voada could see that Magaidh noticed the interaction, while the two men did not.
Voada would have argued with the anamacha, but the three were staring at her, waiting. She took her hand away and placed it in her lap.
“We’ve all heard the reports from our scouts and from those loyal Cateni coming to us,” she said, nodding to Maol. “The Cateni of Velimese have risen up against their Mundoan rulers and have taken back the town. We’ve heard rumors of the same in Ladik and Var. We know that Commander Savas’ army is very near Velimese and will undoubtedly move against them as they move eastward. The question we have to answer is this: from here, where should we take our army?”
“South,” Magaidh said before either of the others could answer. “We should go south across the Iska. Savas’ army is hands of days behind us. We have a multitude of willing bodies with us, and we have draoi; we could build a new bridge across the Iska in a few days using the ruins and pilings of the old bridge. We could then take the Great North Road south to Ìseal or go east to Savur.” She spread her hands, and her anamacha mirrored her stance. Voada could hear the excitement in her voice. “If we have time before Savas’ army nears, we could take them both. Think of it: we take their two great ports before the news of Trusa reaches the Emperor’s ears and he decides to muster a new army from Rumeli. Maybe the Emperor would decide that Albann isn’t worth the expense and the lives it would cost to take back all we’ve gained. Ceanndraoi, I know that once we take their two great southern cities, the Cateni will rise up in every town and village in Albann Deas. We’ll have more Cateni to swell our ranks when we do face Savas, and we will crush him with simple numbers. All of Albann will be ours again, as you wanted it to be. As we want it to be.”
Both Maol and Comhnall were nodding as Magaidh finished. The anamacha still pressed near to Voada, its hand now on her shoulder. In Voada’s head, she heard Iomhar’s voice: <Ìseal … We died there when the Mundoa first came … To be avenged for that would be pleasing … > but his voice was only echoed by a few of the other dead draoi in the anamacha, and Leagsaidh Moonshadow’s voice was stronger and joined by more.
She shook away the image.
“I sympathize with what you’ve said, Magaidh, and your plan is well worth considering,” Voada said. Magaidh smiled uncertainly at Voada, but her gaze was also on the anamacha of the Moonshadow. Voada wondered how she could tell them that while she understood, she didn’t agree, without them thinking it was her anamacha speaking and not her.
For that matter, she wondered if she was entirely convinced of that herself.
“Unfortunately,” Voada continued, “going south is exactly what Commander Savas expects us to do, because he would do the same if the situations were reversed … which is why I feel we can’t follow that strategy.”
“That makes no sense, Ceanndraoi,” Maol said bluntly. “As Magaidh points out, we’re days ahead of Savas. Even if he guessed exactly where we would go, he can’t move quickly enough to reach us. The south is open to us. It’s ours if we want it. We should take it while we can.”
“As I told Magaidh, I hear you, and I sympathize, Ceannàrd.” Maol’s head cocked to one side, and his eyes narrowed, but Voada continued. “Yet … here’s the problem with that plan, as I see it. You’re all correct; Savas can’t stop us should we go south, but he will send a ship flying to Emperor Pashtuk as soon as he learns that’s the way we’ve turned. The message he’ll send on that ship will tell the Emperor just how desperate the situation is for the Mundoa. Pashtuk will respond with more troops and more ships, and we’ll be beset on all sides: from Savas’ army to our north, the emperor’s forces landing along the southern and eastern coasts, and the Storm Sea at our backs in the west. We’d be caught in a snare between them all, and even the power we draoi command and the troops we’ll recruit from the Cateni wouldn’t be able to withstand them. Eventually, we’d be caught and killed, and all resistance will collapse. Those of the northern clans who survive will flee across the Meadham and into the mountains again, and the Mundoa will rebuild their cities and their fortresses in Albann Deas. Only this time the walls will be taller and wider, more soldiers will be guarding them, and the Mundoan treatment of the Cateni will be harsher. Everything, everything that we’ve accomplished so far will be undone.”
At the end of the statement, Voada paused, taking a deep breath.
“We must meet Savas now,” Voada said to them. “We must engage him now, while he’s weak and while he’s expecting us to run from him, not turn and meet him. We’ll strike, and we’ll crush him, and as Magaidh has suggested, all the Cateni will rise with us. The clans will once again hold Albann north and south, and if Pashtuk does bring another army here, we’ll be waiting for him, strong and unified and ready.”
She looked at each of them, holding their regard. She rose from her seat and moved away from her anamacha, not letting them touch her as she walked to where the trio was standing; Magaidh, at least, noticed that.
“You’re my comrades and my friends: Maol, Magaidh, Comhnall. I want—no, I need—to make amends to each of you. I’ve seen that you worry about me. I’ve heard your concerns, and I understand them. And each of you has been right, at least partially. The Moonshadow’s anamacha … it has been hard to stay in control of them, to keep the Moonshadow away from me. I was told by Greum Red-Hand and Menach Ceiteag how dangerous this
anamacha can be, and I’ve learned that they were right. I’ve heard the Moonshadow’s voice, and I’ve used her even though …”
Voada’s voice broke. The anamacha moved toward her with those words, and Voada glared; the anamacha halted where it was. She gathered herself again. “ … even though I shouldn’t have. I don’t intend to make that mistake again. But I’m still mostly the same person I was before I became a draoi. At least, I want to believe that. But I also know this: the responsibilities we’ve taken on, the battles that were thrust upon us and the battles we’ve begun, the deaths we’ve seen and the deaths we’ve caused, the terrible losses …”
She stopped, holding each of their gazes in turn and searching their faces for sympathy and understanding, uncertain of what it was she found there. “Those events have changed us all,” she said finally, “and not always for the better. For the way I’ve treated you all because of that, I apologize. Especially to you, Magaidh,” she said. “You have no idea how much I value your friendship and your advice.”
“Then take the advice we gave,” Magaidh answered. Voada could hear iron in the woman’s voice.
Voada shook her head sadly. “I can’t,” she told Magaidh. “Not because you suggested it or Maol agreed, and not because the Moonshadow is making me say this, but because I simply don’t believe it’s best for us, and only one of us can lead the army we’ve gathered. So that’s the question: am I the one who leads us, or aren’t I? Magaidh? Comhnall?” Neither answered. Voada looked to Maol. “Ceannàrd?” she asked.
Maol remained silent, his lips pressed tightly together. He said nothing.
“Then we know what we’ll do,” Voada said to them. “Tell those you command to make ready. We go north and west to strike the head from the beast.”
The town of Velimese sprawled along the lazy, swirling currents of the River Slaodach, the thatched roofs of its buildings like the warts on the back of a gigantic brown toad. Stormwind Road, the main west/east route in northern Albann Deas, originated in Gediz on the Storm Sea and passed through Velimese and Siran on the way to its intersection with the Great North Road near Trusa. Then it meandered northeast toward Pencraig, where it ended. Altan’s forces approached Velimese cautiously.