By the time she was finished reading the letter, its contents had begun to blur, and Katherine wiped furiously at her eyes. Alashia had known she was going to die, yet she had come to Valeria anyway, had sacrificed herself to avoid whatever possible futures she had seen. Katherine did not have the Chosen’s gift, but she understood well enough that, had Alashia not come to Valeria, she and Darl would not have either. Instead, they would have taken Sonya with them and traveled to Galia. Which meant that no one would have been in the city to try to save Alesh. And if he had died there, on that tree?
It didn’t bear thinking about, that was all. Alashia had made a sacrifice and, because of her, they still had a chance to…to what, exactly? Defeat a conspiracy? Defeat Shira, the Goddess of the Wilds, herself? To destroy the nightlings, once and for all?
Keep your faith, the Chosen had said, but Katherine feared she had lost it already. What hope did they have against the forces arrayed against them? The last part of the Chosen’s letter replayed in her mind, and Katherine rose, sweeping her gaze about the room in search of the girl. She didn’t see her and walked further into the common room, past tables of patrons laughing and drinking. The girl was gone. She went through the room again, ignoring the suspicious glances she received as she carefully examined each person’s face, but the girl, Marta, was nowhere to be found. Her master’s last order, and not even five minutes after receiving it, she had already failed.
She moved back to the barkeep. “Excuse me?”
“Ma’am? Everythin’ alright? Weren’t nobody botherin’ you, were they?” the tavernkeep asked, already reaching for a short, stout length of wood hanging on the wall.
“No, no, nothing like that. I just…the girl that I was speaking with earlier, do you know who she is?”
“Girl, ma’am?”
Katherine hesitated, surprised that the man didn’t know who she meant. After all, they’d been sitting right at the bar, and he couldn’t have missed them, if he’d tried. “You know, young, twelve or thirteen. I was just speaking with her.”
“Sorry, mistress,” the man said, eyeing her warily now, “but I don’t remember any such girl.”
“How can that be?” Katherine asked, frustrated, and wondering if the man thought to play some game with her.
But when he shook his head, he looked serious enough, and if he was pretending, he was a better actor than could be found in any of the mummer’s troupes she’d seen over the years. “No girl, ma’am. Just you.”
Katherine opened her mouth to argue but decided against it. Either the man was messing around with her—in which case, any further questioning was a waste of her time—or…or what, exactly? You imagined it? No, not that. She wasn’t imagining the letter she still clutched in one hand, after all. She noted several of the tavern’s closest patrons watching her with glances as wary and untrusting as the barkeep’s own, and realized that, in her exasperation, she had yelled that last. “Never mind. Thank you.” She hurried out of the tavern, away from the weight of those stares and breathed a heavy sigh of relief when she was in the street once more.
She folded up the letter, tucking it carefully into her tunic, then started toward the gate. The man had to have seen the girl, there was no way he could have missed her. For whatever reason, he had been joking—never mind that it wasn’t funny. That was all it was. Besides, Katherine had plenty of things to worry about already without adding to them. She needed to make it back to Alesh and the others, to tell them she had found them a way out of the city. And if they were lucky, they’d sneak away without Tesharna or the Redeemers being any the wiser.
Chapter Ten
Alesh ripped his blade out of the Redeemer’s stomach, watched as he collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap, and he felt content. Satisfied. These men had come for him, and they had paid for it, had suffered what they would have made him suffer, had they been able. He did not feel sadness or guilt, no shame at what he had done, at the dead bodies that lay scattered about him. He felt nothing at all, save for a dark hate. And, of course, the burning of the scar on his shoulder, a burning that had seemed to spread throughout the rest of his body into his heart, his mind.
He stood panting, his chest heaving from exertion, his mind full of dark satisfaction and a hate, an anger that killing the men had done nothing to quench. Then, a name seemed to appear within that maelstrom of thought, the swirling storm of fury that was his mind. Sonya. At first, the word appeared without context or memory, without any connection at all and therefore was bereft of any feeling or reaction. Then, in the slow, muddled way that awareness sometimes seeps back into a man when he first awakens, Alesh began to remember.
Sonya. She was his friend. His sister. The closest thing to family he had left. And she was in danger. He was running then, dodging around the shadows of the trees, heedless of the bushes and thorns that snatched at his clothes.
He emerged from the trees to see four corpses lying in front of the cave mouth. In the middle of them was an unconscious form, one he recognized as the Ferinan. At least, he thought the man was unconscious. He might have been dead—from this distance there was no way to be sure—but the two men standing over him had apparently decided not to take any chances and, even as Alesh watched, one raised his sword, preparing to strike.
There wasn’t time enough to reach them before the blow landed, so Alesh charged forward, hurtling the sword at them as he did. It flipped end over end until the handle struck the man in the shoulder, and he grunted, he and his companion turning to see the new threat.
They were both armed, Alesh now with nothing save his hands. He reached the men in another moment, and the first swung his blade in a wide arc. Alesh dodged to the side, surprised by how easy it felt, and then reached forward, grabbing the man’s face and slamming his head against the cave wall. It struck the stone with an audible crack, and the man’s skull seemed to reshape beneath his hands before he let go, and the man dropped.
He heard the swish of something through the air, and ducked just as the sword’s blade passed over his head. With a growl, Alesh spun, launching himself at the man and tackling him to the ground, knocking the sword free as he did. Alesh had no blade of his own, but he needed none. He struck the man once, hard, in the face, then again. And again. Until his struggles slowed then ceased altogether.
Finally, he rose and stalked to the Ferinan, kneeling and checking the man’s heartbeat. Alive then, only knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, evidence of which could be seen in the blood running down his forehead. Frowning, Alesh stepped inside the cave.
His eyes scanned the gloom. “Sonya?” No answer, nothing save a silence that seemed menacing, full of deadly promise. “No,” he rasped. “No.” He ran outside, his gaze sweeping the woods for any sign. “Sonya? Sonya!” Realization struck, and his hands balled into fists at his sides as rage coursed through him. They had taken her. The fire of the scar, of his anger, grew, demanding action, demanding revenge.
Something fluttering against one of the trees caught his eye, and he stalked toward it. A parchment, tacked against the tree trunk with a dagger. Shaking with barely-restrained fury, Alesh ripped it free.
If you want the girl,
Travel south to the town of Celadra.
Come alone or she dies.
I will be waiting.
That was all, no signature to mark the man who had written it, and none was needed in any case. Alesh would learn who had left the message soon enough, would learn the reason before he ripped the life from his body. He shot one more glance at the Ferinan, lying unconscious. The others would be back soon. They would see to him. And there were no Redeemers left to harm him, not here, at least. Alesh had seen to that.
He started south, traveling into the darkness, a part of it, the only light to guide his way coming from the fire blazing inside him. They could not know what they had awakened, what they had set themselves against. But they would learn. He would teach them.
Chapter Eleven
The Broken walked the dirt trail as he had walked many others before it, with no regard for where it led, giving no thought to where it carried him from. The past was a river stretched out behind him, yet it was one that found itself brought up short by a mighty dam built in its path, a single frozen instant in time, after which nothing mattered, after which nothing could matter.
Broken, they had called him, and they had spoken true. What they did not understand—what they refused to see—was that it was not just him, but the world itself. The world was a garden, giving rise to all matter of growth. But what the others did not comprehend was that it was a garden in which the very ground itself was poisoned, the very air they breathed, and any fool knew that whatever might arise from such ground, whatever might breathe such air, was destined to be poisoned as well.
Some few of the world’s wise men might recognize as much, but such spent their time in libraries, their backs permanently bent from poring over scrolls and ancient parchments, searching for some answer as to the cause of the poisoning. Priests read their holy books, said their silent prayers, ones often choked with tears, searching for some way to cure it. Fools all. The why, the Broken knew, did not matter. The world was sick, was poison. Perhaps it had always been so, perhaps not. It made no difference.
And as for the cure…there was only one. Death. The one who brought that cure would be thought cruel, evil, but the truth was that what he did would be a mercy. The world was a dying man twisting and writhing in his bed, the agony he felt so great that all that issued from his mouth was foul and poisoned. Such a man, without hope of recovery, would not curse the one who brought him peace. Would, if he were able past the madness the pain brought, thank him for it.
Not that even the thanks mattered. The Broken—for so he thought of himself, the man he had once been having died years ago, along with his family—did not do what he did for thanks, would not have known what to do with it had he received it. He did it only because it was something that must be done, a necessity made clear to him as he knelt before two broken, bloody bodies, one that—
His thoughts cut off at the sounds of shouting in the distance, and he turned toward the direction from which they’d come. This close to the wasteland that was the southern desert, the trees around him were scraggly, pitiful things, bent and twisted, scratching out an existence in a place which seemed bent on refusing them. A clear enough analogue, if one were needed, for the world itself. Still, for all their poor state, the tree cover was enough to block the source of the screams from his vision.
The path curved up ahead. He followed it, not hurrying, only walking as he had been, and as he took a turn in the trail, moving toward the source of the screams, it was not curiosity that drove him, but an imperative even he did not fully understand.
***
Fifteen minutes later, he reached a clearing that sat on one side of the road. Bits of clothes lay scattered on the path, and here and there he saw crimson spatters of blood staining the debris. The grass was marred by the side of the road where the horses leading the wagon—or wagons—had been forced to charge off the path, toward the clearing. An ambush then, one they had not seen coming.
His gaze followed the trail left by the scattered debris, and the Broken saw, in the distance, that it was not a single wagon after all, but a caravan of half a dozen. Beset by their attackers, the drivers had fled off the road and had tried to circle their wagons in a desperate defense—one that had only been partially successful.
Five of the wagons had managed to get into a circle, but the sixth had been separated, cut off from the rest in much the same way as a herd animal would find itself cut off from the pack by predators. Now, it sat twenty feet away from the others, and a quick glance at the front where the driver slumped over the reins of the harnessed horses, unmoving, an arrow protruding from his chest, made the reason clear enough.
Two of the bandits were busily ransacking the back of the wagon as the Broken watched, discarding what they deemed of no worth and loading the rest into the saddle bags of their waiting horses. They were too busy going about their business to have noticed the single horseless man watching them from the road.
The other wagons were further on, the bandits circling them from horseback, firing arrows at them intermittently. The caravaners had brought guards, but either they had skimped on spending too much coin, or they had woefully underestimated the dangers they might face in their journey. Three men—their dress marking them as hired mercenaries—lay dead near the wagons, and he could make out two more knelt inside the protective circle, firing crossbows back at their more mobile attackers.
But for all their efforts, the outcome was not in doubt—six bandits circled the wagons, using their mobility to fire a seemingly endless supply of arrows at the beleaguered defenders from all directions—and in moments another of the mercenary guardsmen was down, spurting blood from where a wooden shaft had caught him in the neck.
A tragedy then, one in which no hero would come to save them, and one that would be over in half an hour or less, depending on how long it took the remaining mercenaries to realize they’d be better off siding with the bandits, turning on those they’d been hired to protect. It would happen, sooner or later, of that the Broken had no doubt. Mercenaries had a reputation for such changing loyalties, but the truth was that they were not alone in their corruptibility, and any sins they committed were ones they shared with the world itself.
The Broken watched the carnage for another minute, then another. Had anyone been present to witness him, they would have been shocked at the lack of expression on his face, surprised by the blank regard with which he took in the bloody scene, and the stillness of him standing there, unmoving and unmoved, as if he were no living thing at all, only a part of the landscape, witnessing, without feeling, the bloody play taking part before him.
He watched. He waited. Then he moved. And for all the truth his brothers had laid open when they named him Broken, there was nothing of that in the swift, predatory grace of his passage through the tall grass of the clearing. He had no sword or spear—his weapons had been stripped from him when he was exiled—but then he needed none. After all, he was the weapon.
The two bandits were still looting the wagon, loading their horses down with the stolen goods, and they did not notice the Broken’s approach until he was nearly upon them. Finally, one must have heard the swishing of grass, and looked up from his horse’s bags. “Aye, who the fuck are you then?”
The Broken said nothing. But he did give answer. He rolled under the horse’s head before bounding toward the man, leaping into the air and bringing his knee crashing into the bandit’s face, meeting nose and cheek and teeth and shattering all in a fountain of blood. He landed on one knee beside the bandit as the man collapsed to the ground, choking and gurgling on his own spit and blood and broken teeth.
The Broken paid him no mind, turning instead to the other bandit who was busily pulling a sword from where he had stowed it on his horse. The Broken did not hurry, taking his time instead, walking in the slow, swaying grace that was the beginning of what his once-people had called the Dance.
The bandit knew who he was—what he was. He could see the truth of it in the man’s gaze, in the naked fear painted across his face. He watched as the urge to flee warred with the need to kill this man, this thing which had come upon him, and in that way conquer his fear. The Broken continued closer, in no hurry, waiting without any feeling one way or the other to see how it would go.
“Bastard,” the bandit growled, then he made his decision and charged. Death then, but it was always going to be that, no matter his choice. The Broken side-stepped the over-handed strike, lashing out with the ridge of his hand into the man’s throat. A crumpling beneath his hand as what was there gave way. The dead man toppled, the sword falling from his hands, and his face began to turn blue as he pawed vainly at his throat, searching frantically for air that would not come. The Broken watched him struggle, watched his hands t
urn to desperate claws, raking at his throat as if somehow he might fix that which had been broken. Had he spoke, the Broken would have told the bandit it was no use—what was broken could not be mended, not truly, and what was taken, what was lost, could never be found again.
In another moment, it was over, and the Broken turned to stare at the remaining bandits. They circled the wagon, another guard down now, whooping and yelling, the attackers glorying in their own strength, their own impending victory. The dead man’s sword lay at his feet, within easy reach, but he did not touch it, would not. For the truth of the blade, of the sword, was one he had abandoned long ago, its whispered secrets, ones that had once tasted like cool water on a hot day, soothing and fine, had long since turned to ash in his mouth.
No, the sword, his people believed, was the refinement and seeker of truth, a companion of the Dance, and what truths it held were false and without flavor to him now. So he left it, moving instead to one of the horses. He emptied the saddle bags of the goods the bandits had stowed, for the road he walked was one of death. In such a place, such a world where the dead and dying lay stretched out before him, one of the darkest truths was that coin—and all its trappings—meant nothing, were nothing. They were only the frantic scramblings of a dying man at a fatal wound already received, a terrified, desperate hope in a world where it did not belong.
He leapt onto the horse and gave its reins a snap, and then they were moving, flashing across the field toward the nearest bandit. The man turned at the sound of his approach, spinning his own mount around, and gave a shout as he saw the Broken closing in. He aimed the crossbow, and the Broken lay low on the saddle. In his haste, the bandit’s shot went wide, and in another moment, the Broken was on him. He planted his foot on the horse’s back, leaping off as it charged past the bandit and his mount. He sailed through the air, directly at the man, and he grasped hold of the bandit’s head with both hands as he hurled past.
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