Mirabar rushed across the clearing and to the edge of the plateau, then ran sure-footed down the path watched over by the sentries. She felt the sharp edge of something cutting across her inner senses and mistook it for excitement. Only when she rounded a bend in the steep trail and saw him did she realize it was sorcery, the echo of power she always sensed in his presence.
"Cheylan," she said in disappointment.
His handsome, aristocratic features were made all the more arresting by the fiery glow of his golden eyes. His long hair was braided in the intricate style of a toren. Like her, he wore the broach of a Guardian pinned to his tunic, a single flame in a circle of fire. But Cheylan had been born to a wealthy family, and so his was made of silver, whereas Mirabar's was only copper.
"Mirabar! I didn't know you'd be here."
He smiled and held out his hands, no doubt expecting a warm welcome. Though his hair was black rather than the fiery red of her own, he had the Dar-blessed—or Dar-cursed, depending on your point of view—fire-golden eyes which had once been common among the Guardians of Sileria long ago, before the Society had begun slaughtering them and encouraging others to do the same. A sign of the great power which was feared and persecuted by the Society, those eyes had made Cheylan, too, an outcast, despite his aristocratic birth and wealthy upbringing.
This similarity had created a common bond between the two of them when they met during the rebellion. It was even a source of attraction between them. Cheylan was the first man who had ever looked at Mirabar as a woman, rather than as a demon girl or a sorceress, and certainly the first who had ever touched her as a man touched a woman. She had tumbled willingly into the fiery warmth of the few stolen embraces they had shared.
So he seemed understandably perturbed when she brushed past him now without even a nod and gazed down the path behind him. "You came alone?" she asked, turning back to him.
He lifted a dark brow at her tone. "Yes."
"You saw no one else?"
"Such as?"
"Tansen."
"Ah." Cheylan studied her for a moment before saying, "Then he's not here? I thought he might be."
"Why?"
"I thought that mess lower down the mountain might have been his doing. But evidently—"
"What mess?" she pounced.
"You don't know?"
"Know what?"
"There are half a dozen assassins lying dead down there," said Cheylan. "All in one place. All killed with a sword. Or two swords, perhaps."
Mirabar's heart leaped with panic. "Fresh?"
"A day old, I'd say."
"Yesterday. He would have..." Her voice gave out for a moment. "He would have been there yesterday." She whirled and raced back up the path, heedless of Cheylan's puzzled voice behind her. "Najdan!" she called urgently. "Najdan!"
He appeared, shir in hand, before she had finished crying his name a second time. His face darkened when he saw Cheylan, whom he didn't like, and he moved toward him with open menace. "What has he done t—"
"No, no," she said impatiently. "It's about Tansen."
The rebels crowded around her, full of questions. She made Cheylan repeat what he had just told her.
"You think Tansen walked into a trap?" Lann asked her.
"And survived," Mirabar said. "Cheylan didn't see his body."
"Six," Najdan mused. "Yes, even wounded, perhaps he could defeat six."
"But if he survived, then where in the Fires is he?" Lann wondered.
Tansen knew something was terribly wrong even as he and Armian approached the village. There was no activity, no call of greeting. No old men sat outside the tavern at the edge of the village to exchange stories, share news, and play obscure Kintish games of strategy with intricately carved pieces worn smooth by years of handling. There were no children on the mountain path, no women at the water well, no shepherds on the hillside...
And then they entered the main square of Gamalan and saw the site of the massacre. Dozens of bodies. Everyone who had lived in this obscure, impoverished village, a community badly depleted by its long bloodfeud with the Sirdari clan.
The stench of death was unbelievable. The bodies lay under the merciless Silerian sun while flies swarmed around them, the ceaseless buzzing creating a thrumming drone which further disoriented Tan's stunned senses.
"No!" he cried. "No! No!" Over and over. No other word penetrated his thoughts, no other sound could emerge from his lips.
"Outlookers!" Armian warned suddenly.
"No!"
Tansen felt Armian's grip and struggled against it. He felt Armian grasp something in his jashar and heard him mutter, "I need your yahr." He stumbled as Armian shoved him and said, "Stay behind me." He didn't understand, didn't care, knew nothing but the horror roaring through his veins.
"No! No!" He broke away from Armian, ran to the mute corpses, and started handling the stinking, heavy, blood-soaked bodies, looking for his own family. "No!"
"Tan, get back! Tansen!"
He saw the Outlookers then, their gray tunics, their clipped hair, their short Valdani swords. He didn't care. "No!"
Armian's shir glittered in the sunlight, its water-born blade slitting the throat of the first Outlooker to venture close to him. He swung Tansen's yahr at one who hung back slightly. The wood lashed through the air and connected with the Valdan's nose. Blood sprayed across Armian's face just before he whirled to confront another attacker.
Tansen turned his back on them and continued looking for the proud flow of his grandfather's white mane, the tapered elegance of his peasant mother's work-roughened hands, and the womanly curves of his once-skinny elder sister. He found friends, cousins, and aunts among the dead, but not his family.
"Are they here?" Armian asked. His voice was breathless.
Tansen looked up, barely able to see him through the flow of his tears.
"Your family," Armian clarified. "Are they here?"
He shook his head, staring. Three Outlookers lay motionless around Armian. The fourth was on his knees. Armian held him by the hair and pressed the shir against his throat.
"Are they dead?" Tansen asked blankly, looking at the three Outlookers lying on the ground.
"Two are dead," Armian said tersely. "The other will be dead soon, and why should I make it quicker for him?"
Hatred seared Tansen's blood as he looked at the Outlooker kneeling before Armian. A boiling rage flooded him, a thirst for vengeance so fierce it choked him. "Let me kill this one."
"Later, when we're done with him," Armian promised. He yanked the Outlooker's hair and prompted in Valdan, "Where is the boy's family?"
"I don't—"
Armian drew blood with the shir. The Outlooker screamed in pain, then babbled, "I didn't participate in the interrogation. I swear I didn't! I was just left behind to take you in case you came here, after all. We waited for two whole days, and then our commanding officer decided you weren't coming. He said you'd either died at sea or were already on your way to your destination. So he took the rest of his men with him and left us behind to—"
"How did he know about me?" Armian snapped.
"The pirate."
"Aljuna?" Tansen blurted.
"We had information, and when we caught the pirate at sea and you weren't on board anymore, we took him into custody before burning his ship. He broke under torture."
Tansen suddenly remembered the way Aljuna had squealed like a pig when they'd cut his palm for the bloodpact. It had seemed funny at the time. "He couldn't take pain," he said in a daze.
"What did the pirate tell you?" Armian demanded.
"A boy and an old man from a mountain village called Gamalan. He was coming ashore to meet them that night. Smugglers. They might have helped you if you made it to shore." The Outlooker's voice was shaking. He was panting with fear. "Please! I'll tell you anything you want to know."
"You certainly will," Armian said grimly.
"Only don't kill me!"
Tansen felt s
ick. "They're dead, aren't they?" When the Outlooker didn't reply, Tansen said, "Dead?" in Valdan, unable to choke out more.
"Who?" the man bleated. "The pirate? Yes."
Armian threw him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach. "The boy's family, you dung-eater!"
"Three have mercy, don't kill me!" The Outlooker started weeping with fear. "Please! I swear I had nothing to do with the interrogation! Don't kill me!"
Tansen felt even sicker. He had never seen a man beg for his life.
"This wasn't interrogation, you festering worm," Armian snarled. "This was a massacre!" He yanked the Outlooker's head up by the hair again and forced him to look at the dead of Gamalan. "There are children there, you maggot! Women and old men, girls and unarmed boys!"
"What..." Tansen swallowed and tried again, already knowing, in his churning gut, what the answer would be. "What interrogation?"
"The old s—sm—smuggler and h—his women," the Outlooker stammered, his eyes rolling with terror.
Tansen met Armian's gaze. "My grandfather. My mo... My..." He couldn't say it. Bile rose in his throat. His heart pounded with horror.
"My commander wanted to know wh—where the b—boy was," the Outlooker said, still weeping. "But they w—woul—would..."
"Wouldn't talk." Armian's voice was flat and hard.
"N—No."
Armian pulled on the Outlooker's hair until he was standing up, then said, "Show me." When Tansen followed, Armian turned and said to him, "Stay here."
"No."
"Tan—"
"They are my family."
Armian hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. "Show us," he ordered the Outlooker.
"Please..." the man whispered. "P—please, soron..."
"It's siran, you pig. And don't pollute our language with your filthy tongue."
"I'm sorr—"
"Shut up," Armian snapped.
The Outlooker led them into the best house in the village, a three-room dwelling in good repair. Tansen saw the village headman, who had lived here, dead inside.
Along with Tansen's grandfather, his mother, and his sister.
It was worse than anything he could have imagined. He would see it in his nightmares as long as he lived. He would never forget, never forgive, and never recover from what the Valdani had done to his family while he tended Armian in a coastal cave, blissfully ignorant of the slaughter of the innocents in Gamalan.
His beautiful, work-worn mother, with her small hands and her soft brown eyes, now lay gutted, her entrails streaming away from her corpse. They had raped his sister and stained her bruised thighs with her own blood. He tried to arrange her clothes, lest any man see what only her husband should...
"Tansen," Armian said.
... but she would never marry now. He looked away from her lifeless body and turned to his grandfather. They had broken all the old man's fingers and gouged out his eyes.
"But you did not... tell them... wh... where I w..." Tansen couldn't stop crying, couldn't draw enough breath, couldn't look away from the old man's ruined face, from the empty, blood-drenched eye sockets.
"I didn't do this, I didn't do this, I swear to you, I didn't do this," the Outlooker kept repeating, his strained voice the only sound besides Tansen's choked sobs in this dead village.
"We must burn them," Tansen finally said.
"No," Armian replied. "We will let others do that."
"No, I must burn them. My grandfather says a person cannot journey to the Otherworld if the body is not purified through fire, and we can't just—"
"People should see the Outlookers' work," Armian said. "The murder of women and children. The torture of an unarmed old man..." He put a hand on Tansen's shoulder and tried to make him understand. "If you burn them all, no one will know. The Valdani can claim it was disease or sorcery or a bloodfeud."
"I don't care what they cl—"
"We want people to know," Armian said. "When they see this, when the mountains talk of it, then people will hate them as much as you and I do."
"People hate them already," Tansen said dully.
"Not enough," Armian said. "Not yet."
Tansen looked around, his mind blank with shock. "Then... we will just leave them like this?"
"Yes," Armian said. "I'm sorry."
"Do you think..." He met Armian's eyes. "If I had been here..."
"You'd be dead, too."
"Perhaps I c—"
"You'd be dead, too," Armian repeated. "Even if we hadn't met, even if you had come straight home from the coast..." Armian shook his head. "The Valdani came here on a hunch. They did all this—" He gestured to the devastation around them. "—on a chance, a guess."
Tansen's eyes clouded with tears again.
"You couldn't have stopped them," Armian told him. "I couldn't have stopped them."
"Then..." He took his last look at his murdered loved ones. "Then I am left alive to avenge them."
"Yes. We will avenge them," Armian promised.
When they emerged from the headman's house, dragging the quivering Outlooker with them, Armian asked Tansen, "Is there anything you want to get from your own house before we go?"
He couldn't think. He could only hear the buzzing of the flies and smell the acrid odor of death under the brassy Silerian sun. "I just want to leave," he said at last.
Armian thrust the Outlooker in front of him. "You wanted to kill this one yourself?"
Though Armian spoke to Tansen in Silerian, the Outlooker seemed to understand the gesture, the moment. "No!" he wailed. "Please, don't! I beg you!"
Armian held the yahr out to Tansen.
Tansen met the Firebringer's eyes, the cold eyes of an assassin.
He looked at the trembling Outlooker, drenched in sweat, weeping with fear. Begging, pleading, wailing for mercy.
He felt the hard wood of the yahr in his hand. He felt the thick woven gossamer cord that held the two sticks together, that turned a couple of pieces of polished wood into such a deadly weapon.
I'll have to beat him to death.
The yahr was a striking weapon. How many blows would it take, Tansen wondered? When would the Outlooker stop screaming? After the second? The third? Or maybe not until the seventh or eighth?
How will I know when he's dead?
Should he crush the skull to be sure, only stopping when he saw the splatter of brains? Or would Armian, who had killed before, tell him when he could stop? What would it feel like, the death of a man at his hands?
Tansen turned away and was abruptly sick, retching as humiliating waves of nausea overwhelmed him.
"Dar have mercy," he croaked.
"May the Three have mercy on me," the Outlooker whispered, waiting for his uncertain fate.
Tansen handed the yahr back to Armian, ashamed. "I can't."
"It's all right," Armian told him. "The first time is always the hardest. Today was not the day, that's all." He looked down at the Outlooker. "We're leaving now."
The Outlooker nodded, too afraid to speak, watching the hypnotic sway of the yahr as Armian toyed with it.
"You will return to your commanding officer," Armian instructed, "and tell him nothing."
"Nothing," the Outlooker repeated in a choked voice.
Armian put the end of the yahr under the Outlooker's chin and tilted his face up, so that their eyes met. "If anyone follows me to Liron, I will know that you have given me away, and I will return to kill you."
"Yes." The Outlooker licked his lips. "I understand. I will say nothing."
"Tansen." Armian met his eyes. "Let us leave this place."
Only when they were far outside the village did Tansen finally ask, "Why did you let him live?"
"Never destroy a useful tool, son. He will send the Outlookers haring off to Liron in the south while we go north to Shaljir."
"But he said he wouldn't tell them."
"You didn't believe him, did you?" Armian grinned. "By the time his commanding officer demands a complete a
ccount of what happened in Gamalan, he will have convinced himself that he acted shrewdly after his three companions died. He will assure himself—and especially others—that he wasn't truly afraid of a couple of barbarians like us, and he will be eager to think he tricked me into revealing our destination—which he will gladly report to his commander. That," he added, "is the way of men everywhere."
"I have never seen a man beg for his life," Tansen said slowly. "It made me—"
"Don't dwell on it now." Armian slapped him on the back. "You'll learn not to let it bother you."
"I will?" He didn't think so. He wasn't sure he wanted to. But perhaps an assassin must. And he... "I want to be an assassin," Tansen said suddenly. "There's nothing else left for me now."
"What about the rest of your clan? W—"
"There is no one." He explained about the bloodfeud with the Sirdari. "There were only a few Gamalani left, and they were all in my village."
"Then I'm even sorrier," Armian said after a long pause. "They died because of me, because I am here."
"So you must understand now," Tansen said. "You must see."
"See what?"
"Why the Valdani fear you so. Why the Outlookers will do anything to stop you."
"You think they know about the Alliance?" Armian asked, frowning. "About the plan the Moorlanders have sent me to discuss with Kiloran?"
"No." Tansen impatiently waved aside things he didn't understand or care about. "They know you're the Firebringer!"
The sun beat down on Zarien's head as he returned to the water source he had found in the night, still trickling fluidly down the rockface, and refilled Tansen's waterskin. His bruises ached where rocks had struck him during the earthquake. His feet hurt like at the Fires, as the drylanders said. He was so hungry he felt lightheaded, but he didn't want to leave Tansen alone long enough to find food.
The warrior was even worse off now, stirring fitfully in his fever dreams, lost in the shoreless world of near-death. Whatever he saw there obviously troubled him. His muttered exhortations were harsh and angry, or else full of sorrow and grief. His skin was hot, and the bleeding wouldn't stop.
The White Dragon Page 12