The baker was sliding through the crowd. He was weaving his way toward the pantry door. Nicholas understood the plan. The baker was going to get help if he could.
She, too, glanced at the crowd around them, then back to him. “I could torture any one of them until they told me your name.”
“No,” Nicholas said, mimicking her tone. “You will not.”
“Such courage for a man in such a desperate position. If I were to kill you”—and as she spoke the words, she whipped the knife out of her belt and returned it to his throat, the movement so quick that he would not have been able to stop it even if his hands had been untied—“they would lose something precious.”
The servants, blood-covered and already battle weary, had looks of utter horror on their faces.
She was standing so close to him, he could feel her breasts pressing on his chest. “If I threaten you, I control them.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You give me such power that I think I’ll keep you.”
She turned to the Fey behind her. “Modify something in here for a makeshift prison, and disarm those poor people.” They moved to do as she asked. Then she faced Nicholas. “Tell your people that if they continue to fight, I will kill you.”
He said nothing.
She grabbed his bloodstained shirt and pulled him even closer. “Tell them.”
The collar dug into his neck. He nodded. She stepped back so that he had a clear view of everyone in the kitchen. The servants, from the young boys who cleaned out the hearth to the women who directed the work in the dining hall, watched him with wide eyes.
“My friends,” he said in Islander. “It doesn’t matter what they do to me. What matters is Blue Isle. Kill these creatures. Kill them all.”
For a moment the Islanders just stood; then they surged forward, almost as one body, catching the other Fey unaware. Knives went into Fey backs, grunts of pain echoed as Fey were bashed on the head, screams sounded from the far side of the room as an elderly woman pushed a Fey soldier into the hearth fire.
The Fey woman grabbed Nicholas, her knife again at his throat. “What did you tell them?”
“I think that is obvious,” he said.
NINETEEN
Rugar ran a stained hand through his caked hair and took a deep breath. He hurried down the dry patches of the muddy street toward the main street. Caseo, Rusty, and Strongfist followed. Even before Rugar arrived at the road, he saw things that made his internal chill grow.
Fey running, their long forms without grace. They weren’t waving their weapons or moving in an order. They were fleeing. Rugar had seen that action often enough in battle to recognize it. Behind them waddled overweight Islanders in black robes, shaking small vials of clear liquid. Some Fey clutched their arms. Others fell screaming to the cobblestone, writhing in an agony Rugar didn’t want to comprehend. A stink rose—burning flesh and something even more acrid, something he didn’t quite recognize.
The beating of his heart increased at the sound of terrified footsteps. He stopped in the shadow of a deserted storefront and watched as his mighty warriors collapsed in the face of armorless creatures brandishing what appeared to be water. His throat was dry, and he finally understood—from a victim’s point of view—how terror spread from person to person like fire in a wind.
Caseo came up behind him, his breath ragged, not from exertion but from fear. “They’re killing us,” he said.
“We’re letting them,” Rugar replied. His words were stronger than his confidence. He, too, wanted to turn and run.
But he couldn’t. He was their strength.
The mud had dried on his face, making talking difficult. He brushed the flakes away and shook them out of his hair. He needed to rally his people.
“Caseo,” he said, “send word to the troops near the palace. We need to inform them of this threat. If they know, they won’t be as frightened. When that task is done, I want you to gather the Spell Warders and see if you can counteract this poison. Try to find out what kind of powers these religious Islanders have.”
Caseo nodded. Having an assignment seemed to calm him. He hurried down one of the back alleys, his reedy form moving with a purpose he had seemed to lack only a moment before.
“Rusty,” Rugar said to his guards, knowing they were there without having to look for them. “Get word to the remaining troops inside and outside the city. They, too, need to know about this turn of events.”
“What about you?” Rusty’s gravel voice came from the area in the back and to the left of Rugar.
“Strongfist and I are going to see if the danger is as bad as Caseo says.” The shard of fear dug deeper into Rugar’s heart. His father had warned him. But none of them had realized that the conquerors’ terror seemed more powerful than any victims’ terror Rugar had seen. Perhaps because he shared it.
Before him the Fey were still running like frightened deer, oblivious to anything but escape. A young infantry boy tripped and fell on the cobblestone. The black-robed Islander, hurrying past, dumped the remains of his vial onto the boy’s back. The boy screamed, his features locked in a look of pain and surprise. His back steamed, and he was rolling, rolling, rolling as if to put out flames. Then, suddenly, he stopped moving. Even from Rugar’s distance he could see that the boy was dead.
Rugar turned away. His people were dying, and he had to find a solution. Quickly, before the terror spread and ruined the morale. All they needed was a way to kill the Black Robes. The Warders needed to know where to focus their spell designs. Since he had sent Caseo to the palace, he would have to go to the warehouse himself. Rugar slipped between two buildings and followed the narrow alley, heading in the direction of the wharf.
The smell grew stronger as he walked, but the screams had faded, replaced by low murmurs and the cries of beings in pain. At one intersection Strongfist moved as if to go to someone, but Rugar caught his arm. He didn’t dare lose his guard now. And, besides, until they knew what caused this odd wounding, they were better off not touching their comrades.
By the time they reached the edge of the wharf, the smell was a ghost in his nostrils. The eye-stinging smoke had lifted, leaving only the white buildings of a thriving seafaring people, the sunlight reflecting off the wide waters of the Cardidas, and bodies strewn across the muddy ground like abandoned children’s toys.
He let out a small cry and went to stand in the carnage. He had stood among the dead before on countless battlefields, but they had never been his dead. Oh, he had lost a few here and there, but never so many and so hideously. A Spell Warder, recognizable only by his robe, lay at the base of a ramp coming out of the warehouse. Three Foot Soldiers, side by side, their faces gone, their hands fused to their chests, still twitched near his feet. They were suffocating—he knew that—only he had never realized that it was such a long, horrible way to die. They had no nostrils and no mouths and no indication of where those features had been. He was not a Healer; he had no idea how to save them.
No Black Robes lurked among the carnage, only a golden cat mincing around the bodies, stopping on occasion to paw at the remains. The reflection of light off the water was nearly blinding, and the rare moan breaking the silence was more horrifying than the screams.
Strongfist had left his side and was walking among the dying. He stood beside a shaking woman, his hands hovering over the remains of her face as if he were afraid to touch her. Finally she stopped, and he hunkered down beside her, his shoulders rounded in defeat.
“These Islanders have a great magick.” His voice shook with disbelief. They had never encountered any other beings with the same or stronger abilities.
“Perhaps they’re Fey.”
Rugar whirled toward the new speaker. Solanda stood where the cat had been, the skin around her eyes loosening in the last throes of change. She was naked. Her hands and feet were stained with mud.
“What did you see?” he asked, grasping for anything. If they were Fey, there might be an ancient magick, a way of
revenge.
“I saw them kill with their magick liquid,” she said, her voice as smooth as a purr. “But we kill with many devices, from our hands to our minds to our knives. Perhaps they have the same powers as well.”
“The Nye said nothing of this.”
“You believe the conquered?” Her words hung in the air. She placed her hand on one slender hip, and her eyes were as unfathomable as a cat’s. “They had many reasons to lie to us.”
He hadn’t relied entirely on the Nye. His people had looked up the histories, listened to the legends. No one had thought that the Islanders would have magickal powers.
Only those with the evil Visions had even suspected Rugar had made a mistake.
The moans around him made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “What did you see?” he repeated.
“At first I saw only a few of those smelly little men,” she said. “Then I changed and hid. And from my hiding place I saw even more. This poison kills.” She looked down at the Infantry soldier beside her. Two slender, perfectly formed hands grasped weakly at smooth skin where the face had been. “They have no Shape-Shifters, though, for I terrified one of their number when I changed before him. They also appear to have no women.”
Those facts seemed irrelevant to Rugar. Finding an immediate solution to this nightmare was the only thing that would satisfy him.
“I do have something that might interest you, though,” she said. “If you will follow me.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the dying boy. Rugar stumbled over bodies, over twisting Fey reaching for him. The stench was overpowering: burned flesh and fear and the beginnings of fetid decay, all overlain with the muddy scent of the river and the sharp odor of fish. Hands brushed his ankles. And the cries of the dying sounded discordant, like a choir out of sync and out of tune, yet filled with devastating emotion.
Solanda’s hand felt curiously cold in his, as if she, too, were part of the dead. She held him tightly, squeezing his fingers together, her nails digging into his flesh. She was as frightened, as bewildered, as he was.
He glanced toward Strongfist, who was still hunched over the dead woman. For a moment a fear touched Rugar: a fear that this horrible death was catching, like an illness that sweeps from person to person with no discrimination. But Strongfist’s features had not changed. He still leaned forward, shaking back and forth, as if the carnage were too much for him.
Rugar looked away from Strongfist, back in the direction they had come. No black-clad Islanders lurked. They must have felt they had done their piece there and were moving to other venues. How terrifying for his Fey: to be attacked by creatures they knew nothing of and then to die in ways they never had before.
When Solanda reached the warehouse, she did not go up the ramp. Instead she crept along the building’s side, keeping to the shadow. Her grip remained tight on Rugar’s hand. It was cold in the shadows—the sun had given the day its only warmth. A chill ran down his back. At least there were no dying there to grab for him, no one reaching for his unguarded flesh.
“Hurry,” Solanda said, and it wasn’t until that moment that he realized he had slowed in the safety of the shade. Everything had reduced itself to small points and images: the chill; Solanda’s dry hand in his own; a single voice, rising above the rest in a wail that mimicked the Fey victory cry; Strongfist huddled like a child against the destruction before him; the sunlight on the river reflecting joyfully into the fetid air. Taken as a whole, it was too much. Taken as a single image, it merely overwhelmed.
Solanda stopped at the other end of the warehouse. The ground was muddy there, but the only prints belonged to a woman and a small cat. This was where she hid, then, and where she chose to protect her find.
She released his hand and bent over. He rubbed his fingers. Her nails had left tiny indentations in his skin. She moved gingerly, with a delicacy and grace only the Fey Shape-Shifters possessed. She braced one hand on the side of the wooden building and, balancing precariously, reached with her other hand into the darkness under the stairs.
The wail had stopped abruptly, making the underlying layer of moans suddenly audible. Rugar leaned against the warehouse, then pulled away when he realized that the wooden slats were swollen with water.
Solanda stood. She held a pouch between two fingers of her left hand. With her other hand she carefully pried the top open, holding the fabric apart so that Rugar could peer inside.
A vial sat in the center. It had an ornamental shape, with a narrow neck and a wide bottom. The glass had been carefully cut into fake diamonds that looked like the reflections off the lake. Even through the odd triangular shapes, he could see liquid sloshing within. The bottle was stopped with a cork that looked no different from any other cork Rugar had seen.
“How did you get this?” he asked. His skin crawled at being so close to a foreign agent of death, and yet he gazed at it with fascination.
She closed the pouch, pulling the leather thong tight, then slipped the thong around her wrist. “I watched them hide a small stash. When they appeared to be gone, I checked it. There are still a dozen or more bottles there, but I slipped the pouch over this one, careful not to touch it. I believe the Warders can use it to see what kind of magick we’re fighting.”
He let out a small breath of air. He would not have thought of risking his life for a single vial of poison. Yet she had done so. He was sorry he had ever thought her dispassionate or cold. She might have found the source of their salvation.
Only he didn’t know how to reach the Warders. He had sent Caseo to the palace. If Caseo had come to find him, then Caseo had sent the other Warders away. Rugar glanced at the warehouse, a shiver running through him. Was there more death waiting inside?
“Do you know where the rest of the Warders are?” he asked Solanda.
She clutched the leather thong as if it could protect her from all the horrors around them. She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Caseo sent them to the Shadowlands.”
Rugar straightened. Only he had the authority to send Fey to Shadowlands. Yet the order made sense. “Did they make it?”
Slowly she lifted her head. She had the deliberate, unshakable calm of a cat. “I don’t know. He asked me to wait in the warehouse while he went for you.”
Rugar frowned. The order made no sense. Shape-Shifters were rare enough, and Solanda was the only one they had brought with them across the Infrin. But Shape-Shifters could hide in plain sight, as Solanda had done. Which meant there was something in the warehouse to protect.
“The Red Cap pouches,” he asked, “are they—?”
“In the warehouse? Yes.” She took a deep breath, as if she was expecting his censure. “But none of the Islanders have gone inside.”
Rugar nodded. No excuse for her to leave her post in a normal situation, but this was not a normal situation. The moaning and the shifting, dying bodies were evidence of that.
But the Shadowlands. That was an idea. It would give him time, give them time, to determine what kind of weapon the Islanders were using against them.
“Take that into the Shadowlands. Tell the Warders to begin work at once and warn them how deadly this stuff is. If you see a Red Cap on the way in, make him start hauling pouches. We’ll keep everything in Shadowlands until we have this problem solved.”
She glanced at the vial, and something like fear crossed her face. She would not be able to change while carrying it. She would have to find a way in without using her feline form.
“Go quickly,” he said, letting her know he understood her dilemma.
She started around the building, then froze. He came up behind her, feeling the rigid spring in her stance. The sound hadn’t been evident behind the warehouse: the building itself must have blocked it. But on the side, the clop-clop of horses’ hooves rose above the moans and whimpers of the sufferers. He glanced around the building. The riders wore black robes. Dozens of horses and riders, all, he presumed, carrying more vials to the Islander fighte
rs.
Solanda let out her breath in a hiss. She could return to her hiding place under the stairs, but Rugar and Strongfist were trapped. They couldn’t hide in the warehouse: eventually the warehouse would be searched.
“Put that back in its hiding place,” Rugar said to her, “and hide with it.”
“Where will you go?” she asked.
“I’m going to get Strongfist. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right.” He turned his back on her without watching her change, a process that had always made him nervous. Instead, he launched into the field of the dead, stepping over bodies, wincing as hands brushed him, as voices pleaded for mercy, as Fey writhed in final agony. The pounding of the hooves grew stronger, and he wondered if the Islander soldiers could see him from the bridge.
Strongfist sat in the center of the bodies, his knees up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them as if he could isolate his heart from the sight of all his dead comrades. He looked up when he saw Rugar, but Strongfist’s eyes were glazed.
The hooves were closer, echoing on the wooden bridge. Rugar crouched beside his bodyguard, feeling the man’s terror. They had nowhere to hide.
Except right there.
“Play dead,” Rugar said.
Strongfist looked at him as if he were crazy. Rugar put his arm around Strongfist’s shoulder and pushed him onto his side. Rugar flopped beside him, facedown in the mud. The mud was thick and goopy there. He shoved his hands in it to the wrist, making it look, he hoped, as if they had dissolved.
The stench this close to the bodies made his eyes water. He prayed he was right, that the disfiguring was not catching, for if it was, both he and Strongfist were now infected.
He felt the pounding hooves more than he heard them. The horses had to be almost on top of them. He hoped that Solanda was well hidden.
His heart beat in time to the horses’ hooves. He closed his eyes and waited for the death in his Vision to come to pass.
Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (The Fey Series) Page 14