I heard screaming, and wasn’t sure if it was mine or someone else’s.
My final thought was a curse directed at myself for being such a poor shot. If only I had been four inches lower.
And then all was black, the abyss absorbed the light and the sound and left me in the absolute dark with only the thumping of my heart beating fast all around me, and faster still, pounding at a frenzied pace like one of the oversized drums in the hippodrome back at Sunwrack.
Until that stopped too.
I woke up and felt the ground shifting and rumbling beneath me, and thought I must have still been in the grip of the spell the spindly Deserter had cast. But then I realized it wasn’t the ground at all, but us, as I ran my hands over the wooden planks of a broad wagon bed. All around me, Syldoon were crowded close, some curled into balls as much their armor allowed, a few groggily leaning up against the wooden side of the wagon, some supine, staring vacantly into the cloudless sky. There were nearly twenty of us packed in there.
My head pounded a thousand times worse than anything wine or sickness had ever accomplished—it felt as if a Deserter were squeezing my skull in its humongous hands, intent on crushing it to pulp.
I tasted blood and my tongue felt raw and bloated, and I realized I must have bitten it at some point, likely when I screamed myself into oblivion.
The wagon stank of sweat and piss and vomit and shit, one awful stench knotted with the rest, and it was all I could do not to vomit myself. I couldn’t tell if I had or not. My gambeson was soaked in sweat, but I didn’t think the vomit was emanating from me. The wagon shifted again, and my bones shifted with it, feeling as brittle as glass. I tried to reposition myself to get slightly more comfortable and discovered that my wrist was shackled to an iron loop on the side of the wagon, and there weren’t even enough links to stand up.
I leaned against the boards and looked over the edge as much as the short chain allowed. We were on a road, and while the overall terrain hadn’t changed much, the position of the sun said we had been traveling for half a day. Or longer. I imagined I would have pissed myself if it had been more than a day, and it didn’t feel as if I had, and my bladder ached. Every time we jostled over the smallest stone or a crack in the road, I thought my head was going to explode like a melon dropped from the highest battlements.
It was so very difficult to think, but it suddenly hit me that this was the largest wagon I’d ever seen, and since the humans feared horses, I assumed some other beast of burden must have been pulling it. I craned my neck and rose as much as the shackle permitted and looked ahead, feeling dizzy and then nearly throwing up as my stomach lurched when I saw what was harnessed to the wagon.
Four swaying rooters, or something closely related to the beasts I’d first seen in the Green Sea with Lloi and Braylar, each two or three times the girth and length of an ox or a bull, their knobby hides broken up by tufts of bristly hair here and there. There was a human walking alongside in simple linen trousers, goad in one hand, whip in the other, his own scarred back sweaty and dirty. It didn’t look like he fared much better than the rooters, who also bore whitish scars on their flanks. One of the beasts grunted and snapped its huge mouth at the rooter alongside it, and the whip snapped out across the hilly backside. The whip would have torn a man’s flesh from his bones, or drawn blood at the very least, but it didn’t even leave a mark on the rooter’s thick flesh.
I heard the Deserter before I saw him, his footfalls heavier than any creature’s in the world. Or at least the other half of the world—who could say what was normal or common on this side?
The sun shone off the brass plates, giving it an almost wet look, and for some reason that made me nauseous, and I started to look away as the giant ambled past, but stopped when I saw the man in the cylinder case on its back looking down, his hand next to the quiver of javelins, as if he were just looking for an excuse to pluck one up and pin someone to the wagon with it.
Vendurro said, “Starting to really develop a strong kind of dislike for those legless bastards.”
He was a few prisoners away, and looked as green as I felt. That should have provided a queer kind of comfort, but I hurt too much to feel anything good at all. Knowing he was alive was some true consolation though.
Another Syldoon next to him said, “Probably got no choice, Sarge—uh, that is, Lieutenant.”
Vendurro glared at him. “I don’t care if the Deserters lopped those legs off at birth or yesterday—a man’s always got a choice, especially when it comes to who he kills or who he don’t. He killed his own kind.”
The Jackal persisted. “Deserters would probably lop off his head if he didn’t do it, is all I mean. And we’re nothing to him, Lieutenant.”
“We’re plaguing human, you ass. That one, who just went by in the basket? I saw him put a javelin through Minks. Right through his throat, before that she-devil Deserter took us all out. You can bet, I get a chance, I’m lopping off that bastard’s arms and leaving him alive to roll around and wish he had let the Deserters kill him when he had a chance.”
That shut the other soldier up. We were moving around a gentle curve in the road, and I stretched to look above the short wooden wall of the wagon to see behind us—there were two more identical wagons pulled by rooters, the first as full of prisoners as our own, the second not nearly as much. So what had been over one hundred and fifty men leaving Sunwrack had been cut down to about a third of that number.
All the horses were tethered and trailing behind the third wagon, and Deserters marched alongside the whole procession. There were a handful of humans as well around the wagons, servants or slaves, there mostly to goad the rooters along, walking with staves and costrels.
While they’d left us in armor and allowed me to keep my writing case, assuming it wasn’t a weapon, I hoped my translated pages and the remainder of the texts were still on the horses back there, and then felt guilty for worrying over ink and parchment when so many lives had been lost so quickly. I wasn’t even sure who among Braylar’s retinue was still alive besides Vendurro.
With so many bodies turned and contorted, it was difficult to tell even in our own wagon—I didn’t see Azmorgon’s bulk or the captain amongst the men. Though there was no mistaking Mulldoos’s pale stubbly scalp on the other end of our wagon, his head slumped over his knees, which were pulled up to his chest.
Half of the soldiers around us were still dead to the world, possibly for good, though if so, I imagined the Deserters would have left them behind with the rest of the corpses.
I called out to the Lieutenant, whispering as much as I could, but loud enough to carry, “Mulldoos . . . the captain?”
He looked up, with half his mouth still curled in a nearly permanent snarl, and said, “Can’t say. Saw him still struggling against that robed bitch when I went black. Him and his witch sister. Last thing I saw was the pair of them trying to stay upright.” He called out loud enough for everyone in the wagon to hear. “Anybody seen Cap?”
Those that were awake and moderately alert looked around, and one at the rear of the wagon said, “Pretty sure I seen him back there, Lieutenant, looking around a while back.”
“Pretty sure? That’s what you’re plaguing telling me, you scabby twat? Pretty sure?”
The Syldoon looked like he wished he never spoke. “Think so.”
I looked at Mulldoos. “Azmorgon? Soffjian?”
He could only muster evil in the eye that wasn’t obscured by a sagging lid. “If you think I give two shits about the Ogre or the Witch, then the Deserter witchcunt churned your brain something awful.”
I was glad I hadn’t been closer or he might have clubbed me with his big arm.
It struck me that this was how Henlester must have felt, trapped in his wagon. Well, he wasn’t surrounded by creatures long presumed to be deities, or hulking rooters, on the wrong side of the Godveil. But the sensation of having had everything taken from him—possessions, future, possibly life— and traveling to a des
tination he had no knowledge of; that I could absolutely relate to. And there was no likelihood of anyone riding to our rescue. I had always assumed getting captured by the Imperials was the worst thing that could happen to us.
I was so very, very wrong. If they suddenly materialized and somehow overwhelmed the Deserters, taking us captive in their name, I imagine most of the Jackals would have been relieved.
Human captors, even vengeful or furious ones, were a known evil. We had no idea what terrors the Deserters might visit upon us. It was clear they had no qualms about severing men nearly in half and using them for their own purposes.
A soldier next to me roused, convulsed, then got his legs underneath him enough to rise up and vomit down the side of the wagon.
The smell made another Syldoon a little further gag, but he managed to keep the contents of his stomach inside (or had already emptied it, it was hard to tell), before saying, “Gods, Kithrik, what did you plaguing eat, rotten yak?”
One of the human slaves (or very poorly cared-for servant) walking along the side of our wagon handed the closest Syldoon a leather costrel of some fluid or other. The Jackal grabbed it, sniffed the short spout, and then figured if our captors wanted us dead, they could have done the job easily enough when we were all unconscious. He took a swig as we all watched, waited just to be sure he hadn’t been poisoned anyway, and then handed it to the soldier next to him.
The slave was watching the Syldoon drink, apparently waiting to reclaim the costrel after it made the rounds. He had a narrow face and a nose bent in several directions, as if uncertain where to go. It looked nearly useless to breathe out of. Half his head was shaved and the dark hair on the other half was in multiple braids that formed a curtain on his shoulder. There was intelligence in the close-set yes, even as he looked wary and skittish, and a disturbing design branded or scarred onto his cheek. I scooted as close to him as I could, earning a curse from the Syldoon next to me who’d just vomited, and then said in my best Old Anjurian, “Where are they taking us?”
The slave’s expression turned nearly to horror when he realized I spoke his language (or some butchered version of it anyway) and he started to sidle away.
I said, “Wait. Please. Tell me your name. Please.”
The man looked uncertain, perplexed, possibly still frightened; it was hard to be sure. He took a small step back towards the wagon as he kept walking alongside, but not so close that he could be grabbed by anyone inside.
Staring straight ahead, several moments passed. Finally, he whispered, “Bulto.” And then again, with slightly more force and volume, as if he hadn’t told anyone his name in a long time, and had forgotten how to do so. “Bulto.”
I lowered my voice. “Arki. I am Arki. Where are we going, Bulto?”
Bulto looked immediately ready to bolt again. But after deliberating and looking around as he kept pace, he said, “Roxtiniak. You go to Roxtiniak. To see the Matriarch.” Or what I assumed meant “matriarch,” or “mother.” It was hard to be sure.
“Roxtin—?”
“Roxtiniak,” he repeated, slowly.
“That’s a—” I struggled to think of the word for “region” so I tried, “City? Or a place? Is it a place?”
He seemed to understand city and he nodded. “Big,” I think he said, though there was more to it than that. But that seemed to be the gist. Big.
“Thank you, Bulto,” I replied, and tried to smile.
He was staring at me when we both heard a Deserter bellow something at him I couldn’t understand, clipped and guttural. The man’s face went pale, except for his crooked nose, which appeared incapable of changing hue. He spun around and raised his arms above his head.
The Deserter took three broad strides, covering a remarkable amount of ground very quickly, and backhanded the man across the face.
The giant hadn’t put much force behind the blow, but Bulto still slammed into the wagon and fell to the road, looking up, his nose rebroken, blood on his lips as he opened his mouth and pleaded.
While the Deserter didn’t strike him again, he bent down low, grabbed Bulto, and lifted him to his feet the way a father might a disobedient child that had suddenly gone limp.
Bulto was still babbling so quickly I couldn’t make any of the words out even if they were some variant of Old Anjurian.
With thick lips curling, the Deserter shouted something in Bulto’s face, pointed at our wagon, scolded him a final time, and then stalked off.
Bulto sagged slightly, knees weak, and I thought he might fall to the ground again, but he steadied himself against the wagon, wiped the blood off his chin, and walked away without another word.
Apparently he no longer cared about the costrel.
I heard Mulldoos say, slur really, “Learn anything useful before you went and nearly got that scrawny prick killed?”
“I asked where they were taking us,” I replied.
“And?” he asked.
I looked down the road, not knowing what the answer meant. “He said we’re heading to a big city called Roxtiniak. At least I think it’s a city. To see ‘the Matriarch.’”
Mulldoos grabbed the costrel from the soldier next to him. “Matriarch, huh?” After a large swig, and with water dribbling down his chin, he added, “Prefer to look a person in the eyes before gutting them. Guess I’ll have to forego that pleasure when I off this giant Matriarch horsecunt.”
We rolled along for a few more hours, and what struck me most was how unpopulated the area was. There were the skeletal remains of some ancient human villages and small towns, mostly fallen to the ground with the remaining structures reclaimed by nature, almost entirely obscured by bramble and vines and moss and thorny trees and grass. But no Deserter holdfasts of communities, and no sign that men lived on this side of the Veil except for the few slaves traveling among us and those workers we first saw climbing the columns.
After passing a few more long-dead settlements, our road connected with another broader avenue, and not long after, we saw some populated farming settlements at the base of some hills, though at some distance from the road. The dwellings themselves looked simple and sparse, but what caught the attention was the hilly land beyond. I’d only seen agriculture and farming on level land, but here, the hillside had been cut into terraces, the face of each covered in stone, and the crops on each level going up the entirety of the hill. The figures or farmers were difficult to make out, but I saw straw hats.
No matter what side of the Veil you were on or who your overlords were, the sun was the sun, and the floppy hat your friend.
An hour later, we rounded a bend and I saw something that stopped my breath in my chest for a moment.
There was the same warping, twisting, alien energy that composed the Godveil, only this time instead of being shaped into a towering curtain, it was bent into a massive dome in the middle of the plain.
And the road led directly towards it.
It was only after gaping and feeling the nausea return that I realized there were several large carts coming towards us and away from the dome, pulled by single rooters and with Deserters seated in them and human slaves goading the beasts. As they got closer, I saw the Deserters weren’t dressed like our captors at all in their leather and brass armor, but outfitted in clothing that was utterly plain in color (having none at all, being undyed linen and wool and silk) but gaudy in design, nonetheless—voluminous sleeves adorned with bells and tiny strips of cloth somewhere between fringe and streamers, belts crisscrossing their chests, festooned with metal baubles and strangely patterned badges.
The giant horned occupants of the cairns gawked as they passed our procession, or at least gave that impression—without eyes it was difficult to say for certain. But while they were a different caste or profession than the giant Deserter warriors escorting us, their chalky skin was equally marked in those faint swirly designs, asymmetrical and elaborate and arcane. One slim female in a cairn shook her head slowly as she took us in, her lips curled in wha
t could only be distaste, and she ordered the slave to hurry the rooter along.
When our convoy was a hundred yards out, the tang of vinegar reached our noses, even more intense and powerful than the smell approaching the Godveil, and as we got closer I saw that the dome was somehow more tangible. Where the Godveil masked what lay beyond, disguised it in the shifting currents of energy like heat waves, you could still discern the shape or outline of things. But this dome was less translucent, and the rippling was more like the shifting waves in a deep lake than the eddying energies of the Godveil, more substantial somehow, nearly opaque, and not even showing the silhouette of what lay beyond.
I swallowed hard as we rolled closer, and felt the same trepidation as I had approaching the Godveil. There was the horrible compulsion to continue towards it, a drawing that was nearly irresistible, as well as the certainty that doing so would only bring madness or death, except the choice to continue or turn back was no longer ours. And we no longer had Bloodsounder to protect us.
I was sure the Deserters hadn’t captured us for any other reason than to sacrifice us to this thing, and I looked around and saw similar fears, even on the faces of these hardened and oft-times brutal soldiers.
The Deserters heading the other way must have been making a pilgrimage or a sacrifice or something else, but I felt absolute terror wash over me just then, absolute and irrefutable.
We were being led to our slaughter. That was the only explanation.
But then our procession stopped, and a Deserter continued on ahead, walking down the road, closing in on the oscillating mercurial dome.
I pulled my chains tight to try to get a better vantage point, and I wasn’t the only one.
The Deserter raised a fist, shouted something that would have been unintelligible even if I had understood the tongue, and then turned and slowly walked back to rejoin his massive brethren ahead of our wagon.
I waited, straining, feeling the pull of the rippling surface of the dome, and the terror of it too, and then suddenly another Deserter appeared, walking through the wall of the dome, approaching our procession, and even from a distance I noticed the obvious difference in size and physique. She was outfitted like the other female we’d seen during the battle, the one who had ensorcelled an entire company of Syldoon, the one difference being she had a long spine projecting up between her shoulders and above her head, fitted to a harness on her back.
Chains of the Heretic Page 18