“And us,” Anira said. “They gave them the quota.”
“The Auldek are the ones who really think their old cities are haunted. It’s they who want a new land instead. A war has given them a new purpose in life.”
“And given us Ushen Brae,” Anira said. “It’s a blessing that they’ve gone.”
Mor said something in Auldek. The others received it in silence.
Dariel glanced at her. She sat with her back to the group, looking not at Amratseer but toward the east. Dariel did not ask her what she had said. He was convinced she only spoke Auldek to keep him out of conversations, to draw the line between them, and remind everyone of it. He had a mind to ask her why she chose her enslaver’s tongue at all, but he left it.
L ater that evening, Tam nudged him awake. The excitement that surged through Dariel was not anticipation of hours sitting quietly on watch, listening to the sleeping and alert for the sound of any creature that might make a meal of them. That was not what he had planned. Whatever was to become of him, being in this land was a part of it. He was here, in this foreign place so far from home. He needed to know it completely, to learn, if he could, why his life was entwined so deeply with the fate of Ushen Brae.
He sat cross-legged for a time, but once Tam’s breathing slipped into its steady near snore, Dariel lifted his thin blanket from around his knees and stood. With his boots pinched between his fingers, he tiptoed across the stone, down toward the moonlit city.
The wall was massive. Draped with veins, fissured with cracks, cast in shadow and highlight by the moon’s gray glow, it dwarfed even the great wall around Alecia. Dariel had to walk along it for a time, climbing over roots and debris, around stone blocks that had fallen from the crumbling barricade. The night was loud with insect and bird calls, with scuffling noises nearby, and several distant roars, sounds that Dariel had heard before but that troubled him more acutely now. One of these rent the air in a way that he felt physically, as if it flew at him along the long stretch of the wall. The beast they called a kwedeir? Dariel had yet to see one, but he had heard about them, enormous batlike creatures the Auldek had domesticated and used to hunt fugitive slaves. They bite the head. Not hard enough to kill, Birke said, but just enough to get you screaming. They like that. Dariel had not believed the description. Now he wondered.
He reached a two-doored gate. One door was closed. The other-an enormous thing of old-growth trunks bound together with intricately worked steel-had fallen from its hinges and slammed back against one side of the entranceway. If he had not known better, Dariel would have thought giants had built this place.
The roar came again. He could not tell if it was closer, but it was certainly outside the city’s walls. He wondered if it would wake the others. Probably. Mor would rise, cursing him for a fool. He would not argue with her if she did, but when in his life would he ever stand before these gates again? What Akaran had ever been here to learn of the world as he was doing? None that he knew of. Of course he had to see what could be seen. Dariel crept into the shadow beneath the leaning door and entered the dead city of Amratseer.
The green stones of the place glowed with a low luminescence that Dariel could not figure out. As he moved through the cluttered lanes and alleys, he first thought the light was from the moon, but it was not only that. The glow seemed to fill even shadowed spaces, even the insides of houses viewed through the gapping mouths of doors and open crescents of windows. It was night, still dim and shadowy, but it was a different sort of night than Dariel had experienced.
He walked on the balls of his feet, careful not to trip on the vines or debris littering the stones. Just don’t get lost, he told himself. He proceeded straight ahead as best he could, sighting on the position of the moon and studying the shape of hills behind him for landmarks. Soon the high walls of the multistoried buildings blocked his view. Realizing this, he spun around. His heart pounded in his chest and a film of sweat slicked his forehead. This is absurd, he thought. I’ve only come a hundred paces. The way back is just there.
He decided to look around the buildings near at hand. Stepping into the entrance of one, he let his eyes adjust until he could see his way by the dim glow of the walls and floor. Intricately carved wooden chairs and benches took shape before him. No spirits, though. Not yet. An overturned bowl on the floor, a clutter of long rods leaning in a corner, a cloth hung from a hook…
He entered the next apartment down, a living space, chairs oddly arrayed in a circle, but with no table at its center. He found bedrooms and storage chambers, tiled rooms that must have been for bathing, balconies that looked out onto back gardens that were no longer gardens. They were overgrown enough that trees surged out of them and monkeys-several of whom Dariel startled as much as they startled him-climbed right from them to nest in shelter. How strange it was to walk into homes devoid of their intended inhabitants and yet so full of the signs of what had been.
Stepping out into the night again, Dariel noticed an arched gateway a little farther in. Framed by tall buildings on either side, he could not see where it led. He walked toward it, under the shadow of the archway, and through into a massive courtyard.
What must once have been a marvelous tapestry of paving stones stretched before him. There was a patterning in the colors, he could tell, but it was stained and scarred and faded. The stones were heaved up here and there by tree roots that had escaped their plots, sending out shoots that burst through to become new trees and creating a ragged patchwork. The space was so immense that Dariel could barely make out the opposing archway through the screen of trees. Buildings on either side hemmed the courtyard, reminding him of the upper terraces of the palace on Acacia. Only much, much larger.
Some of the trees were massive, bizarrely so, trunks thicker around than any he had ever seen, branches like scaffolding devoid of foliage but cluttered with… No, Dariel realized. The largest of the trees were not trees at all. They were sculptures, with branches that served as perches for batlike, hulking figures. Some sat atop the limbs. Some hung below them. Kwedeir. Kwedeir carved in stone or cast from bronze or some other metal. Dariel walked toward the nearest of these sculptures, into the stencil of shadow beneath it. Were they life-size? It did not seem possible, but Birke had said they were large enough that an Auldek could ride on their backs. These were certainly that.
“This place… Corinn would hate this place for so many reasons.”
One of the kwedeir turned its head toward Dariel. The prince froze mid-step. It thrust its snout forward and sniffed the air. The creature’s two black eyes pinned Dariel between them. It was not a statue at all, a fact which suddenly seemed absurdly obvious. It was furred and dark and so clearly alive, quite different from the stone family among which it perched.
Dariel let out a whispered curse.
The kwedeir leaped into the air. Its wings flared out, black against the night sky. It let out a cry that seemed to tear the skin from Dariel’s face. He turned and ran. At full sprint he just barely reached the arch before the kwedeir. He bolted straight through as the creature flapped above it.
He was halfway to the row of buildings he had just explored when a moon shadow swept down on him. He jumped to one side as the kwedeir landed on the ground just beside him. It was all flapping membranous wings and awkward limbs and a snapping, inhaling, fetid snout full of yellow teeth. Dariel backed from it, tripped, and then he scrabbled away on all fours for a moment.
The beast grunted and leaped into the air again. It came down just behind Dariel as he hurtled through the nearest open door. The prince stumbled into a chair and sprawled over a table, slid off it, and crashed onto the floor. The kwedeir beat its wings. It kicked at the decaying stone around the doorframe, part of which collapsed at its first blow. It folded its wings and squirmed forward, bursting through the stone with the wriggling force of its body.
Dariel fled further into the apartment. He heard the creature break through and scrabble behind him. He ran through the apart
ment and into a small courtyard. He darted across it, leaped through a back window, down a flight of stairs, and into a dim passageway. He could not hear the beast anymore, but he kept moving. Through alleys, splashing through ankle-deep muck, under a bridge, and into a small cubicle of a room, in which he stood jammed into a corner.
When his panting had quieted enough that he realized he could hear a rodent squeaking somewhere in the room, Dariel let himself relax. He touched the tips of his fingers to his nose, clipping them together as if they were scissors. “By Tinhadin’s nose,” he said, an expression he had not used since boyhood, appropriate now, for his knees felt weak as a child’s.
How quickly would a thing like that forget him? Short memories. They must have short memories, surely. It would be on to something else by now. And if it did appear again? Be ready for it. That’s all. Fight it. He had not even thought to draw his dagger against the kwedeir. He tugged it free now and stepped into the doorway’s frame.
He stood there for some time, his eyes scanning the sky and moving over the buildings rising around him. Nothing swept down from above. The sounds were all the same as before. He had just moved farther out into the lane, hoping to get his bearings, when something rounded a nearby corner and snapped to stillness, staring at him.
It was not the kwedeir, but when a growl started low in its throat and the hair along its ridgeline rose in an angry bristle, Dariel knew it might just as readily kill him. A hound. A lean, long-legged creature as tall as the hunting dogs at Calfa Ven. Its eyes shone the same color as its short tan hair. It crouched with its head stretched low to the ground, the muscles in its shoulders taut and bulging. It stepped forward. Once, and then again, muscles and joints smooth in action.
Dariel hunkered down, slashing the knife in warning.
The winged shadow swept in, blocking out the sky and freezing the hound with one paw upraised. The kwedeir hovered over it. The hound cocked its head, sensing it. Before it could react the kwedeir folded its wings and dropped. It slammed the hound to the ground and clamped its jaws around the canine’s head and neck. The hound struggled, but the kwedeir raked its hind claw down its back, ripping deep gouges. It pressed down, driving its weight through its hind legs. The hound began to yelp in short, frantic bursts. And then the kwedeir bit hard. The cracking of bone was audible, as was the squelch of fluids spraying through the creature’s jaws. It did not pause a moment, but flared its wings and surged upward. The dead hound swung sickeningly from its jaws as it labored up above the height of the buildings, over them, and out of sight.
Dariel did not move from where he stood framed in the doorway. He simply lowered himself to the stones and sat, panting just as heavily as if he had been running again. “Did that just happen?” He looked from side to side as if there might be a companion there to verify it for him. There was no one, of course, but that did not stop him from asking the question several more times as he gradually caught his breath.
As before, he realized he should move again because he heard squeaking somewhere in the room behind him. Or, not squeaking exactly… more like whimpering, snuffling. There was a pattern to it, as if rodents were making noise and then going silent. Calling and then listening. Come to think of it, the sounds were nothing like those of a mouse or other rodent.
Dariel rose and crept back into the room. There was a crate there he had hardly noticed before, turned on its side, its opening facing the wall. He approached it and stood silent beside it long enough to hear the whimpering again. With his dagger thrust before him, he caught the crate with his toe and pushed it to one side until he saw what lay huddled within.
Two pups. Big-eyed and cautious, staring at him. Innocence in rounded features and floppy ears and slightly trembling jaws.
“Oh… look at you,” Dariel said. He sheathed his knife and reached in cautiously. “Look at you.” He stroked one of the pups on the head. It tried to back away. “Shhh. No, no, it’s fine.” His touch was gentle. His fingers sank into the soft fur, over the ears, and then down under the chin. The other pup inched forward. Its eyes were the same color as its fur, a slightly auburn tint now that he was up close. Just like the hound outside. Dariel offered his hand for it to scent. After doing so, the pup slapped its pink tongue wetly against his knuckles. Before Dariel could smile with the joy this gave him, a realization stopped him.
“That was your mother, wasn’t it?” Dariel moved to the doorway and scanned the scene. It lay as it had before, dark and glowing at the same time, still and crackling with unseen motion, silent and filled with a cacophony of sounds. Exactly the same, yet different now.
Looking back at the pups, Dariel asked, “What am I going to do with you two?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Rialus Neptos went to bed each evening swearing to himself that he was not betraying his entire race. To really be doing what the Auldek asked of him would make him the greatest villain in the history of the Known World. He could think of nobody else who had sunk so low. Not even during the unfortunate years he served Hanish Mein had he been such a traitor. He had just been biding his time then, pretending to serve Hanish and the Numrek. He had proven as much by bringing the Numrek into Corinn’s service and saving the empire! He would find a way to do so again. He would lie and fabricate, confuse and obfuscate, trick and deceive and somehow emerge from it a hero for the ages. He had to. He had a wife, Gurta. He had a child who might already be born and living in the world. Didn’t that matter more than anything?
Going to sleep thus convinced made waking in the morn all the more peculiar. He found himself surrounded by the enemy. He watched himself go through motions that looked, smelled, and felt like the very treason he so despised. The situation was complicated enough to challenge his capacity for knotted excuses. The Numrek had never, in fact, been true to the Akarans. The “allies” he had brought Corinn had been planning the conquest of the entire Known World all along. The Auldek horde progressing around the curve of the world were every bit the threat they considered themselves to be, and they were daily educating themselves on all things Acacian-with Rialus as their instructor. At what point, exactly, would he transform himself into the agent of Acacian defense that he believed himself to be?
“Hey, Rialus leagueman!”
Rialus heard the shout from outside his room. He recognized the voice-Allek’s. He sat cross-legged with a writing cushion before him, pen poised above it. Just leave me, Rialus thought. Go on. He had begun yet another journal attempt at outlining his actions, justifying and explaining how he was handling himself while with the Auldek. He thought such documents would prove useful should he ever be called before Queen Corinn. For some reason, he found it quite hard to organize his arguments coherently.
Fingel uncurled herself from the corner of the room and moved for the door. Rialus waved her to stillness. Don’t play dumb, girl! he thought, as he had many times before. The Meinish young woman, his slave since Avina, showed a dogged unwillingness to ever anticipate his desires. It should be dead obvious that he would not want to be disturbed.
“There is someone at the door,” she said, staring at him with her gray eyes.
As if on cue, the circular portal was yanked open, letting in a howling beast of a wind that surged through the chamber, making it instantly frigid. A furred figure stepped across the threshold. He was bundled from head to foot, hooded, and wore black goggles. He cast about a moment, no doubt letting his eyes adjust to the dim lamplight.
“Rialus,” Allek said, “get dressed. Stop all that scribbling. Sabeer wants to massage your feet. Or… she wants you to massage her feet. I forget which. Either way, she asked for you. What charm have you put on her?” he asked.
“No charm but my wit and the pleasure of my company,” Rialus said.
The hooded figure guffawed. “Right. Your charm. Come, Rialus! Show me your charm at work. She’s in the steamship.”
“Please tell her I’m busy. I’m-”
“I’ll drag you by your locks if you
don’t start dressing now. I’ll enjoy it, too. Just like last time.”
Still an ogre, Rialus thought. “Fine,” he muttered, setting his pen aside and tidying his supplies. “I’m coming. Keep your nose on.”
Rialus carefully pulled on his fur-lined leggings and boots. He shrugged himself into his sealskin jacket. The garment draped bulkily about him. He had learned the hard way that if it hung loose, wicked fingers of cold found their way to his skin, so he cinched down the buckles. He even strapped on the visor to protect his eyes, and then tugged his hood in place. All this for a walk that would only take a few minutes. Damn this place. So thinking, he followed Allek out.
The wind smacked him as if it had clung just above the door, waiting to pounce on him. He stood on a platform running along one side of what the Auldek called stations, rocking, taking in a scene he still barely believed. His room was but one chamber of several in the large wooden and steel structure, a rolling tower that churned across the frozen earth with unrelenting steadiness. All around him other stations rolled, pulled by long lines of harnessed rhinoceroses, the same woolly breed that the Numrek had ridden down into the Known World. The structures creaked and groaned. The creatures bellowed and snorted. The blown snow obscured further stations, making it feel like they went on forever, out beyond the reach of his vision.
The vessels were relics of ancient Auldek travel, quickly outfitted for this journey. Indeed, much of the preparation was made easier because of the great stores of old equipment and devices the Auldek had but to dust off and haul into use. The stations. Cargo wagons. The sleds. Stores of arms and supplies, tons of grain and other foodstuffs in crates and barrels. All of it slid into motion more rapidly than Rialus would have thought possible. Slaves had tended herds of the beasts outside Avina. Rhinoceroses. Antoks. Kwedeir. Not to mention the freketes. Rialus had not seen much of the monsters since the cold weather had set in, but he understood them to be housed in stations outfitted for them.
The Sacred Band a-3 Page 5