He rode past the mill, which stood with doors wide open and its wheel creaking. A smashed cart lay nearby, bags of flour torn and leaking down the banks of the creek.
At the tar kilns a dozen men lay on their backs in the dust, a rictus of death upon their faces. Two had been felled by arrows; the rest lay near picks or axes, killed in close combat.
A suggestion of sound, like a lament sung at immense distance, slid into his awareness. He started, then noticed his lips pricking, and shook his head. The noise was not natural—not when it stirred his magic like that. One of the dead had been a kindler, apparently—an ear, since the ghost manifested as an audible resonance. Ordinary folk died cleanly, but magic wielders sometimes lingered...
He whispered a prayer and turned to go. He had no time to dissipate the echo properly so its owner could be free. This one was weak; left alone, the echo would only flit around the ruins of Noemi for a few hours or days before it subsided. For now, he had other priorities.
What he sought would be at the durga.
But instead of striding away, he found himself hesitating again. Something about the posture of the bodies niggled. The men looked broken, scattered.
One man was curled in a fetal position. Another was missing an arm, and just beyond him, half a sheep lay in the grass. The shoulder and the sheep’s hindquarters were mangled, not cleanly cut. They seemed...chewed.
A few paces farther up the road, Toril paused over a deep, clawed footprint, nearly four spans long. The horse shied and tossed its head; apparently it didn’t like the idea of a rakshasa any more than he did.
Toril clenched his staff.
He rode on, now alert to every noise and shadow. Could the rakshasa still be nearby? Such beasts were gluttons; this one would be loathe to abandon its newfound food supply.
At the smithy, he saw two men with tattoos and topknots lying motionless—bandits, dropped by a sledge. The sight sparked a little hope, until he rounded a corner and saw the blacksmith with an axe in his spine.
A discarded longbow lay nearby. As he dismounted to retrieve it, he heard flies buzzing. The sound emanated from deep grass; he picked up a half-full quiver, took a step forward, saw a child’s hand, and turned to stifle the bile rising in his throat. Was this whole place a graveyard?
He opened his mouth to shout—if there was anyone alive in this carnage, he needed to find them quickly—then caught himself. He didn’t want to announce his presence to a rakshasa. He didn’t know who else might be waiting, either.
Oji had been right about one thing—this was no osipi attack. If Noemi had been a strategic target, the assault would have focused entirely on the stronghold. Most folk would have scattered, and the golden would have let them go. They never would have brought a rakshasa. This wholesale butchery was the work of barbarians, not men.
The horse was becoming dangerously skittish. Noemi was unfamiliar territory for it; Toril had taken Oji’s advice and selected a fresh animal for his escape, rationalizing that he was leaving a mount of greater value behind. So much for his indictment of horse theft.
“You can wait here,” he said, hobbling the horse near a stand of aspen. “You don’t like what you smell, and I don’t blame you.” The horse whinnied. “If you’re scared of a rakshasa’s footprint, you won’t do me much good in a fight.”
He continued on foot, unease prodding his leaden legs into a trot.
Inside the walled portion of the town, anything that was not adobe or stone had been razed. The smell of bloating bodies and charred flesh was strong, but overwhelmed by acrid smoke. The cooper’s shop was a pile of ash. A mass of rounded shapes broke the plane of carbon in one corner of the foundation, punctuating the sizzle and crack of coals. He realized with revulsion that they were corpses, many small enough to be children.
Toril’s jaw had been clenched in anger, but now he fell to his knees and vomited. Though not a seasoned veteran of battle, he’d seen death a few times. This was different. Despite an empty stomach, his body spasmed over and over from disgust.
He caught a flicker of movement as he straightened and wiped his eyes. Vultures were already scouting for carrion. He reached for an arrow, then cursed and turned away. Better to save his supply.
When he saw the gates of the stronghold his trot shifted to a lope. He’d guessed what he would find, but the sight of twisted metal and tortured hinges, brained horses and soldiers piled crushed and lifeless on the cobblestone, jolted him all over again. These were men he knew well—men who’d shared his campfire and drilled beside him, who’d given him a friendly wave as he’d ridden away less than two days before.
The courtyard was littered with corpses, many with the vile, gaunt faces of bandits. Less docile prey here, Toril thought grimly.
Hasha lay on his side beneath another soldier, an axe resting on his knee. Toril squatted and rolled the stiff form onto his back, recoiling as a deformed shoulder and skull became visible.
“Tat!” he gasped, choking on the childish nickname. “I’m so sorry, Tat!” Tears clouded his eyes. He blinked them away, sinking to the stone so he could cradle his father’s head. Pools of blood, partly dry, crumbled and cracked open, allowing black liquid to soak his hands and lap. He sat there, not caring, not moving, not seeing, for a time.
Then dread penetrated his daze. “I have to find Malena,” Toril whispered. He rolled his father’s body off his thighs, stood, and reclaimed the staff and bow he’d dropped. “I’ll be back soon.”
The doors of the tower were smashed. He took the stairs three at a time, scarcely pausing over the bodies of servants and guards he’d known all his life.
Nothing.
The living quarters? He jogged through echoing hallways, boots splashing in puddles of wine on the threshold of the great hall. The door to his bedchamber was ajar. His bed had been overturned, his wardrobe, gear, and books pillaged.
Shards of glazed ceramic lay on the floor. Malena was a potter of some talent, he knew—the callous destruction of her handiwork reinforced thoughts that made him queasy.
An unfamiliar chest of cedar lay open by the window. It held women’s clothes, roiled and wadded and ripped. They reeked of alcohol and urine. Malena’s bridal sari had been crumpled in a corner, bloody bootprints on the rich red silk, beads strewn across the floor.
She was not there.
He checked his father’s chambers, the Voice’s, the kitchen, the library, the council room, and the staff apartments. All had been ransacked. The treasury was empty, a pair of broken locks from the strongbox the only sign of the stash of gold it once contained.
He climbed to the upper terrace, stepping gingerly over a clump of bodies at the top of the stairs. A vulture flapped out from the overlook, abandoning a motionless female shape: the Voice. She, like the unknown ear near the tar kilns, had left a resonance. She’d been an eye, so hers was a glimmer instead of an echo; rippling discolorations swirled on the stone around her body, distorting the flat surface and sapping color from the stain of blood.
He turned on his heel and headed down again. He would build her a proper pyre later.
The stables were dark, the stalls empty. He was about to turn to the storage cellar when a growl reached his ears. He squinted. A flicker of black and white moved near the far end, where the apples were kept.
“Hika?” he called softly. “Is that you, girl?” His father’s sheep dog had always been fond of the stables; she’d been here when he left the other night.
The dog seemed to hesitate, then gain confidence at the sound of his voice. Her tail thumped, but she made no move toward him.
“Did you find a good hiding place, Hika?” Toril said. “Are you wondering if it’s safe?” He stepped forward.
The dog whined.
Beyond the dog, a woman’s form sprawled in the darkness.
“Malena?”
Suddenly Hika barked and lunged toward him, teeth bared.
He flinched.
Then the doors of the stable slamme
d open, Hika shot past, and the trumpeting challenge of the rakshasa buffeted his ears.
Toril whirled, fear choking his breath.
The monster’s bulk blotted out the sunlight. It was too tall to enter the stable upright, but it was a cave dweller by nature, used to crouching and scuttling on hands and knees. It had abandoned its club in the confines of the building, and was crawling forward with one claw-tipped hand outstretched.
He slid an arrow from the quiver, nocked it, bent the bow, and let fly. Toril was an adequate marksman, but he had never been fast; haste skewed his aim, and rather than hitting the rakshasa in the eye, his shot grazed a cheekbone and embedded in the monster’s shoulder muscle.
The rakshasa bellowed in pain, bent its head to snap the arrow, and kept coming. Its chin was lowered to guard its sensitive throat, and it swung its tusks back and forth, ready to impale anything that got close.
Toril had already drawn another arrow, but there was no time to shoot again; the monster was just paces away and reaching toward him. Instead, he stabbed at the hand, driving the barb into a filthy palm.
This time, the rakshasa was close enough that he smelled its fetid breath as it shrieked. It clenched a fist around the shaft, but not before its claws raked jagged holes in Toril’s vest and nearly swept him off his feet.
Hika darted from a corner and snapped at the rakshasa’s inner thigh, avoiding a kick that would have sent her flying.
Toril used the distraction to exchange bow for staff. “Bulen zhová!” he shouted, spitting on the brass endcap and touching the metal to the nearest pile of straw. Flames rose, and the rakshasa, who was again preparing to lurch forward, raised a hand and blinked at the sudden light.
The staff was already jabbing out, Toril’s full weight behind it. It connected near the nose, smashing upward and into an eye socket with devastating effect.
The caterwaul this time almost burst Toril’s eardrums. The beast threw back its head and rolled sideways, hooking a tusk on the staff and levering Toril off his feet in the process, spattering an oily orange serum across Toril’s clothes, and making matchwood of two stall partitions.
Before the rakshasa could curl into a defensive ball, Toril was upright again, after it. His wrists still vibrating from the blow of the tusks, he swung the staff once more, this time aiming for a forearm.
The blow went wide.
Toril staggered when nothing checked his swing, slipped on loose straw, and fell on his shoulders, breath escaping at the impact. The back of his head hammered the floor, and he tasted blood from his tongue. He rolled desperately sideways, even as his lungs fought to re-inflate.
Meanwhile, the rakshasa had batted Hika over Toril’s head and launched itself from a crouch. It landed with one massive foot across Toril’s shin.
Never keen of sight and now blind in one eye as well, it did not seem to realize where its leap had carried it or how it had Toril pinned. It batted at the blaze and roared, its claws trenching the dirt.
Then it felt Toril try to free his leg.
The monster managed to twist its head far enough for a look with its good eye. When it understood, it arched its neck and let loose a roar of triumph. The muscles of its chest and shoulders bunched.
Toril braced his staff just as the rakshasa rammed its tusks down with the strength of a dozen men. The endcap vanished into the scaly skin of its throat at the back of the jaw, continued upward through the roof of its mouth and brain, and brought impaling ivory to a halt only when it reached the plates at the crown of the skull. The thunder overhead became a gurgle.
Toril’s hands, extended moments before, were now crushed against his chest by sagging flesh. Tusks hung overhead, close enough to see the cracks and dried gore at their tips.
He squirmed in the opposite direction of the monster’s slow-motion slump, grateful that against all odds, the staff had not broken and he could still breathe. After a few moments he managed to wrench first one arm free, then another, but it took several vein-popping grunts before his hips were out, and even longer for his boots and ankles. He might not have escaped at all, except for the lubricating gush of blood running down the staff.
Toril wobbled to his feet, limping a little. The air was heavy with smoke from the straw, but the rakshasa had scattered early flames enough to delay an inferno, and its bulk now shielded him from the heat.
“Malena?” he called hoarsely, half choking. “Hika?”
He kicked open the rear door of the stable to let in some light and air, then stumbled back to the form lying in the dirt behind a jumble of apples and sacks of grain.
It was his wife.
Bruises covered her face and arms; she was half-covered with a torn shift. A deep gash near the sternum seeped blood onto her belly; she was slick with it, her face pallid.
He dropped to his knees. The wound looked too low to have hit the heart; she was warm and breathing. Uttering an incoherent oath, he gathered her into his arms.
10
victim ~ Malena
A draft was tickling Malena’s face when she opened her eyes. The only light was a glimmer from the hearth. Night air was permeated with the foul, stomach-twisting odor of death.
It was quiet.
She lay stretched on her back on a cushion, a woolen blanket drawn up to her chin. After a few blinks, she recognized the room as her new, unfamiliar bedchambers—the place she’d slept alone, without her husband, on the night of the wedding.
A man now slumped on the floor beside her, arm extended, head pillowed on a shoulder. He was bare to the waist. At first she thought he was one of the bandits who had stayed behind to have his way with her again, and she fought back a cry of terror. Then a flicker from the fire brightened his face, and she recognized Toril’s features beneath ash and grime.
The sight of her husband unleashed a torrent of emotion. Terror and relief, shame, anger, guilt, fear of rejection—the feelings were so intermingled and raw, so primal, that they overwhelmed even the agony in her chest and pelvis.
Toril had barred the door; when she noticed, Malena almost giggled in hysteria. The fright of seeing a strange man gave way to self-pity and censure. Did he really think that this room held anything worth guarding anymore? Did he think she was worth the bandage he’d put on her chest? And was that the best protection he could think of? Where had her brave warrior been when she needed him?
Malena laid her head back, teeth grated against the pain, and wept silently. So much violence had reached her ears while she cowered in the stables—children crying, mothers calling out their anguish, and men grunting encouragement to one another as they pillaged. The stillness now was merciful; she could not stand to violate it with her own tokens of tragedy.
Especially, she could not bear for Toril to hear her. She’d been mostly naked when they stabbed her and she lost consciousness; the thought of her husband finding her that way, all privacy and propriety destroyed, body abused and handled by other men, in a mockery of the intimate experience they’d both expected after their wedding, was humiliating beyond degree.
What had he thought when he found her?
Words from one of Toril’s letters came back to her. “I know I was supposed to let my parents choose me a bride, but I confess I dropped several hints about you to my father. Something magical happened when I met you all those years ago, and you have often come to my mind since then. I am lonely. I need to share my life with someone. I am glad we will not be strangers much longer.”
No. She would not, could not allow her thoughts any further down that road...
Tupa! Her sister had been out there somewhere, perhaps. Somehow a bandit had been riding her horse. And Malena had done nothing—nothing but curl into a ball and hope not to be noticed. It felt like a betrayal.
Now maybe Tupa was dead—and her parents, too. Or if not dead, then kidnapped or imprisoned. The enormity of it left her numb, and the numbness in turn brought guilt. Why had she survived when they had not? Had her cowardice carried its o
wn punishment, by replacing a swift death with hellish memories that she would carry forever?
What about little Kinora? Had she survived?
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
She grieved for the battered husk of a body that had once been a young woman’s glory, for the maiden who’d fetched a high bride price and smiled so innocently at Toril. She felt soiled on the inside, where she could never be healed or cleaned. Her heart was sick.
An hour went by with only her sobbing hiccups and Toril’s snores, accompanied by an occasional pop from coals on the hearth and the distant chirping of crickets.
Her neck and arms throbbed, and especially her upper lip where the fat one had hit her. One of her teeth felt loose. With every breath she could feel the pull of the stab wound below her left breast. And her lower back and hips ached.
Thirst raged; Malena wanted water more than air. She tried moving her legs and couldn’t stifle the moan that rose to her lips.
She had to leave—find a corner someplace where she could just curl up and die. She didn’t want Toril to see her like this. She didn’t want anyone to see her, to know what they had done to her and try to hide the pity and revulsion in their eyes.
She could tell that the sun would rise soon. Already the room looked lighter. She forced herself to sit up. She had to clutch at the blanket to stay covered; the sudden movement of her arms was agony, and a wave of dizziness left her disoriented. She lost her balance and fell forward off the bed, jarring Toril awake in the process.
She hated him, then, as he put his stubbled cheek next to hers, slid his arm behind her knees and across her bare shoulders, and lifted her back to the cushion. The very carefulness of the gesture conveyed the pity she was dreading.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here with you. Just rest.”
“Let me go,” Malena croaked. “I don’t want your help.” She clenched her teeth and struggled to sit up, but her shoulders remained on the blanket. After a moment she realized that Toril was holding her down.
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