Rad turned away and drew Attalos into a practice skirmish. Attalos managed better than Dam had at first. He parried Rad’s attack, pivoting around defensively, but Rad wore him down to a point where Rad trapped his blade helplessly in front of his chest. Rad cuffed Attalos’ throat with his free hand.
Rad pushed off Attalos with the ghost of a smile on his face. “You learn best fighting a more experienced opponent,” he said. “I had to do daily rounds with the veterans in my father’s company. We don’t have time for that kind of training out here. You ought to practice with each other.”
Dam locked eyes with Attalos grimly.
“Go on,” Rad said. “You’re not aiming to open an artery. Just get used to protecting yourselves. Keeping that blade raised.”
The two boys squared off. Even though it was play, Dam’s heartbeat pulsed at his temples, and his head was damp with sweat. He had to show his best in front of Rad and his friend, but on the other hand, they each had weapons that could gouge a serious flesh wound if they weren’t handled right.
Dam held his xiphos in front of him. Attalos swiped at him tentatively. Dam parried back, and the boys tried out each other’s strength, clashing and scraping their weapons. Hanhau was an expert warrior, Dam remembered. He ought to learn something that would impress Hanhau. Dam went at it more forcefully. He caught the side of Attalos’ blade, bending it away from him. It felt like he was gaining an advantage. Attalos twisted his weapon out of that and clobbered Dam’s blade, the vibration shuddering up his arm like a hammer on a bell. Dam’s sword fell feebly from his grip.
“That’s the idea, city boy,” Rad said to Attalos.
Dam looked down to his weapon on the ground. It was a painfully humiliating moment that was quickly cut short. Just then, Blix shouted back to the boys.
“I need you all up here now.”
*
Dam grabbed his xiphos and hurried over with the others to the lip of the bluff where Blix stood. The warrior stared out at the pitch black field. His hand was tensed on his iron crook, but Dam couldn’t see anything out there. He listened keenly, finally hearing a scurry of feet that made Dam think of an infestation.
“What is it?”
Blix pointed his crook at the field. “There.”
A shadow emerged from the darkness into the lantern’s glow. It was a gargantuan insect with a shell as big as a rowboat, barbed forelegs, and a scissoring mandible, alerted to the opportunity to shred flesh. The creature halted in the light, seeming to take notice that it had been discovered.
“Carrion beetles,” Blix said. “They must have been drawn out to this region from the smell of blood that Calyiches’ party left behind.”
Beetles? Dam thought. Meaning more than one?
The creature charged at them. Beyond, the silhouettes of more domed monsters scurried after it in a swarm. Blix bellowed out an alarm from the conch horn to call the men to arms back at the camp. He gestured for the boys to spread out along the ridge of their lookout. In proportion to the beetles, the bluff where they stood was not much of a barrier.
The first beetle charged up toward Blix, who batted its barbed forelegs with his crook to stop its advance, and then he drove the sharpened hook of his weapon inside the creature’s spiny jaws and ripped it out with a spatter of black blood. The monster foundered down the slope onto its back with a hair-raising squeal. It was quickly buried by a pack of its kind who sprung from the shadows to feast on its blood.
“We need archers,” Rad called out.
Blix shook his head. “That won’t help much. Iron bolts can’t penetrate their shells. You’ve got to get in close range to stab inside their mouths and gore their brains. Or if you can get them on their backs, strike between their plates into their guts.”
A line of beetles clambered over the feeding frenzy to advance to the shelf. Blix and Rad held their ground at the top, swinging their weapons for any legs they could reach. Sensible instincts told Dam to run, but their outpost was the only barrier between the monster beetles and the camp. He gripped his sword in front of him as Rad had shown him and surveyed the space below. Whether he was ready or not, the time had come for him to be a soldier.
A giant beetle scuttled up the rock shelf toward him. They were blind creatures, but as Blix had said, they had no problem sniffing out a meal. Dam swung his sword at one of the beetle’s forelegs, but the beetle had five other legs powering it. Dam swung at its other foreleg. The creature climbed higher. Its bristly antennae licked the air at Dam’s feet, and its spiked jaws—big enough to swallow his arm—gnashed.
Dam pounded his sword into the cap of its head. That barely dazed the creature. One of its forelegs grasped the top of the ledge. Dam jumped from that spot, searching wildly for a place to strike the impenetrable creature. He lunged for the spot between its snapping jaws, leaving his hand far too close to the creature’s mouth. He didn’t make a clean strike, but he heard a pop of soft tissue. The beetle’s head reeled. Dam cried out ferociously and struck inside its jaws again, carving his blade upward. The husk of the beetle collapsed while its legs writhed feebly. Dam swallowed back bile from his throat.
His victory was miraculous, but before Dam could take much account of it or glance to see how his companions were doing, two more beetles climbed over the one he had maimed. Dam swung for the one closest to him and tripped it. The other beetle gained up. Dam had barely handled one. How was he going to survive two?
He thrashed his xiphos and hacked off one of the creature’s antennae. He turned to the other, exploding with a roar, and struck out wildly for its jaws. That pushed the monster down the ledge a bit. From the corner of Dam’s eye, he saw its partner crawling up to the top. Its last pair of legs were crowning the lip.
Dam swiped cold sweat from his brow and faced the creature. Its barbed jaws were at the height of his belly. If it stampeded, it could easily knock him over and rip him apart with its knife-sharp legs. Dam slashed his sword in front of him. He had to try to intimidate the thing until he figured out some way to kill it.
The creature drew toward him warily. His strategy wasn’t working. He glanced back at the ledge where he had held off the other beetle. Its antennae and jaws had crested the hill. Dam backed away, caught his heel on uneven ground, and fell on his bottom. He did not drop his xiphos, however. That weapon was welded to his hand.
The monster lurched toward him. Dam sat up and guarded himself with his blade and his outstretched hand, praying to the gods for the best. He clashed against the creature’s pincer jaws. It pushed forward, pressing Dam’s back against the ground while he grasped his xiphos with both hands to brace the creature’s gnashing shears.
It felt like the end. Dam’s blade was caught at the back of the beetle’s jaws, and those pincers reached one hand’s width from his face. The rank stench of its insides curdled in his throat. Even if he had the strength to maneuver his blade to puncture the beetle’s mouth, its jaws would rip into his face when he did so. Dam remembered something Blix had said. It was a desperate tactic, but what choice did he have?
He relaxed his blade from the creature’s forward momentum for an instant so that its jaws hovered over his head and his sword was bent back parallel to the ground. With his knees bent and his feet dug into the ground, he used the traction of his sword to slide beneath the beetle. As the creature lurched forward, Dam stabbed upward wildly. He met thick walls of shell that wouldn’t give. Darkness closed in from the corners of his eyes. His strength was slipping away in a swoon. Dam screamed out hoarsely to will away his panic.
He jabbed his sword into a fleshy crevice of the beetle’s belly, and then he wrenched the blade out and stabbed even more viciously a second time. Thick, black blood poured down his arms. The creature wailed in distress. Dam forced his blade upward again and again, breaking open a gash that no monster, however big and powerful, could withstand. The beetle shuddered. Its lifeless body collapsed on top of Dam.
Now the danger was suffocation. The animal w
as mainly husk and weighed no more than a large man, but it spread over Dam like a tarp and was saturating him with its blood and guts. He tried to push it up and away from his body. That didn’t achieve much, so he tried to twist and crawl his way out from under it.
Scurrying movements surrounded him. A herd of beetles? Sharp legs scraped against the shell of Dam’s kill. Weight pressed down from its carcass. The horrible things were on top of him. They were probably on all sides of him. They had come to scavenge the dead beetle and when they discovered him, he would be a succulent surprise for their dinner.
Dam fumbled to get a grip on his xiphos. When the creatures turned over the shell to feast, it would be his last stand. By the gods, he would take as many of them along with him to his death as he could. Jaws scraped and dug beneath the shell. Adrenaline flooded Dam in a second wave of anticipation. The creature’s carcass lifted from his body.
There was a hail of metal arrows, and the carcass fell back on top of Dam. War cries ripped through the night. Beetles gnashed and squealed. Blades shrieked against the armored creatures. Warriors gutted their opponents with juicy pops. Gradually, silence settled over everything. Men’s voices drew up frantically around Dam.
The shell heaved over, exposing Dam to the night. He tried to wipe the blood from his eyes and face with his bare hands, but they were shaky and coated with the foul stuff as well. He searched through a stinging blur to make out the men who had rescued him.
A hand gripped his and pulled him up very forcefully from the ground. Dam wobbled a bit on his legs. The world seemed to be careening like a ship on the open sea. The man who had helped him up supported his weight against his shoulder. Someone brought over a cloth, and the man cleaned off the blood from Dam’s face.
An opalescent glow brightened before his eyes. Dam recognized Hanhau. His boyfriend looked stricken by the sight of him. Dam couldn’t imagine how gory he must have looked. He had been smothered by a gutted beetle the size of an ox. Hanhau gripped Dam hard against his armored chest.
Chapter Seven
They didn’t have a moment to rest or even to speak about the victory over the carrion beetles. Ichika called the other warriors to action, hauling the carcasses into piles so they could be set ablaze. Every bloody part of them had to be incinerated so they would not draw more scavengers to the camp. In the stingy underworld, creatures scoured stone for any sort of flesh. The greatest worry was fire scorpions.
Miraculously, not one of Ysalane’s sixteen had been lost during the invasion. Blix had taken a gouge to his arm, Heron was bandaged from a hard fall on his head, but otherwise the battle wounds were routine scrapes and bruises. The warriors had mobilized quickly to back up the boys at their outposts.
Dam followed Hanhau to wash up down at the lake. He spotted Rad and Attalos helping the warriors clean up the camp site. They stopped their work for a moment and glanced at him with quiet respect.
Dam threw off his metal mesh apron and peeled his tunic over his head at the shore. The tunic would have to be burned, and he was happy to be rid of the bloodied thing that reeked of the beetle’s entrails. In the wake of goring the beetle and nearly being smothered by it, everything around him felt distant and unreal. He stripped bare in front of Hanhau without any modesty.
Then he looked down at his sandals. Anguish welled up from his heart. His sandals were the only thing he truly owned. He had cut out the soles himself by tracing his feet and cobbled together the laces at the leatherworks in the priests’ precinct. Now they were blackened with the creatures’ blood. They would have to be burned.
Hanhau bent down and gently removed the sandals from his feet. “They can be washed,” he told Dam. Hanhau stripped down to his under-skirting and carried the sandals and an armful of washcloths into the shallows of the lake.
Dam waded into the water. His arms, his legs, and his hair were slathered with greasy black blood. It had congealed in places into a putrid crust. He squatted into the water to submerge himself completely, and he scoured and wrung his hands through his thick hair. The water did its work, but still Dam wondered if he would ever rid himself of the awful beetle stench. No soaps could remedy that stink.
When he resurfaced, Hanhau guided him near and took up a washrag to scrub Dam’s face. He rinsed the rag and wrung it out and ran it clean over Dam’s neck and shoulders, down one arm then another. Dam hadn’t been bathed by someone else since he was a child. Having Hanhau wash him was many times more luxurious. He crouched down on the floor of the lake so he was covered below the waist.
Hanhau slid the cloth across his chest, and it tangled on something. Dam remembered he was still wearing Aerander’s amulet. Beneath his tunic and his apron, it had been easily forgotten. Dam hadn’t liked thinking about wearing the amulet anyway. He had plenty of strange things to think about on the expedition without wondering if the voice of a goddess was going to enter his head out of the blue. Hanhau’s face was pained.
“You could have been killed.”
Dam guided his boyfriend’s hand to wash beneath his arm. “I wasn’t.”
Hanhau’s hand stayed suspended in the air. He spoke in a strained mutter. “I thought I was prepared for this. I thought I could keep you safe.”
“You don’t have to stop washing.”
Hanhau looked at him crossly. “I’m serious, Dam. This expedition is incredibly dangerous.”
“I’ve caught on,” Dam said. “You might have noticed that I got covered in beetle guts.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Truly? I look like I’ve been birthed from a beetle’s bowels.”
Hanhau hid his face in shadow. Dam stood up in the water. He was getting an uneasy feeling from Hanhau again.
“You’re not going to tell me that I’m going back to the city.”
Hanhau said nothing.
“I could have been killed. You could have been killed. Any of us could have been killed. But we weren’t,” Dam said. “You said that we’re comrades out here. That means that you have to treat me as an equal.”
“We’re not just comrades. You’re more than that to me.” Hanhau hesitated for a moment. “Your people call us ‘the banished race,’ and the elders teach us that we were forsaken by the Creator God. But when we met, I knew that wasn’t true. He sent you to me, from the surface world, and gave me someone to love.”
Warmth spread across Dam’s chest. He clasped Hanhau’s bare shoulder and massaged the tension in that spot. Pushing up on the tips of his feet, he pressed his lips against Hanhau’s. It was just a peck, and no one was around to see it. They were all back at the camp. But Dam could feel Hanhau’s body compacting warily.
“You’re more than a comrade to me too,” Dam said, “but if we can’t do a little thing like that, we might as well just be comrades.”
Hanhau slid his hand into Dam’s. He squeezed, and all his pent up tension nearly crushed Dam’s bones. “You have to be careful,” he told Dam.
Dam removed his aching hand and shook it with a scowl. “I’m doing my best. I took on two of those carrion beetles.”
“You fought honorably. The other warriors are impressed.”
Dam grabbed a washcloth drifting nearby and scrubbed at his belly. “Blix and Rad did most of the work. Rad taught me and Attalos how to use our swords. We did all right, I guess.”
Hanhau grinned. They sat together in the gentle waves of the lake looking back to the camp while Dam finished his washing. Bonfires sparked and raised up fiery columns on the shore. A commotion broke out about the horrid stench. Everywhere, burning embers floated in the air like a snowfall of shiny gold.
Hanhau held Dam’s hand below the water. “We can’t clean up everything,” he said. “There’s blood splatter all around the camp. The beetles will come back.”
“What can we do?”
Hanhau stared toward the shrouded mountains. “We’ll have one last rest and take that passage through the mountains where Calyiches led his party. All of us will go. It’s not
safe for anyone to stay back at the camp.”
*
Later, when everyone was gathered around a fire for food and drink, Hanhau proposed the change in plans. Rad, Attalos, Callios, and Heron shot up to their feet and hollered. The warriors joined in thumping their armor-scaled chests. They were one company, and they would stay that way through their expedition.
Blix cried out, “The iron belly of the caterpillar drums forward. Let our enemies cower from the rumble of our march or die from the hail of our blades.”
Chapter Eight
The trail into the mountain headlands was narrow, with steep climbs and far-spread footholds. They took things in stages to conserve their energy and to allow Hanhau and Ichika to scout above for the possibility of falling rocks. Naturally, without sun or sky, Dam found it impossible to perceive the extent or height of the barrier they scaled, and the terrain was too troublesome to manage torches. When the warriors’ light was near, he could make out the mountain’s marbled textures. In spots, it was as white as ivory; and as black and grainy as silt elsewhere. It was an ancient range of mountains, cropped up from the steppe like the colossal teeth of a titan.
Should its jaws tremble and clench, his group had geared up with harnesses strapped across their chests and around the high flanks of their legs. They had linked to one another with a climbing line. Blix was the lead, and he looked after Rad. Rad spotted Dam for their climbs, Dam spotted Attalos, and so on to Callios and Heron and the flail bearers.
After they had achieved some height, Hanhau called for them to stop at a ledge where they could take swigs from the water flagons. Dam looked out the way they had come. Beyond a few yards, all he could see was an eternal hollow of shadow. The mating of the fireflies on the lake had ended. Somewhere down there, they had left mounds of ashes from the bonfires of the beetles. Everyone said the beetles would come back to scour the land clean of any trace of blood and flesh. Wind shrieked from the heights above Dam. As hospitable as their anchorage was, it seemed like a harbor between one wicked zone and another.
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