by Caleb Carr
Turning to face the slowly brightening sky, Arnem breathes deep, glad to be away from the business of state and as confused as he can ever remember being. He will need some time, to assess all that has happened; time—and his wife. His Isadora: “Lucky, in that regard …” Why, of all the statements that the Merchant Lord has made this evening, is it such a trivial comment that echoes so relentlessly in the sentek’s mind? He knows of the rumors that circulate concerning the tragic illness of Lord Baster-kin’s own wife—who has not been seen in public for many years—and of the Merchant Lord’s heroic efforts to attend to his spouse’s every need; is it simply the unpleasant taint of envy in Baster-kin’s voice that sparked Arnem’s uneasiness? Does the appearance of any weakness, in this man who is ordinarily so haughty and self-assured, bring on some unwelcome sense that Broken itself is not so mighty as it appears? Or is Arnem displeased to think of himself as someone who can find room in his spirit, at such an important moment in the life of the kingdom, for base, boyish jealousy at the mere mention of his wife’s name by another man of influence and power?
Longing for the comforts of his home, his family, and slumber, Arnem turns to begin walking at a healthy pace down the Celestial Way toward the Fifth District of the city. But as he sets out he sees, through the early mist of a spring dawn, the distant sight of Lord Baster-kin’s Plain, and the black mass of Davon Wood spreading away beyond.
It is a vivid and unwelcome reminder, one that will make sleep impossible in the few hours he has until assembly sounds: for, when dawn breaks fully, Arnem’s oldest friend, Herwald Korsar—“Yantek Korsar,” Arnem says aloud, pointedly defying the stricture never to so refer to his comrade again—will be taken to that very edge of the Wood. He will then be tied by his forearms and thighs between two trees, after which two priests of Kafra—using ceremonial knives and axes from the Sacristy, their polished steel blades, engraved brass fittings, and well-turned ash handles making them seem unsuited to so base a task—will sever both of Korsar’s legs at the knee. If the yantek is lucky and the priests are skilled, only two swings of the sacred axes will be needed; but whatever the case, he will be left hanging, to bleed to death or be torn apart by scavenging wolves and bears while still alive, after having been literally reduced to the stature of a Bane. It is the ritual’s ultimate purpose (along with the suffering that leads to it), for no more ignoble end could be imagined—particularly for so great a soldier as Korsar …
Thinking of this, Arnem decides that he will run home, to the comfort that discussion of such subjects with his wife nearly always brings; and his pace, as he sets out, is rapid, indeed.
The Bane foragers learn the inscrutability of all gods—even their Moon …
THERE IS NO ONE ALIVE who knows Davon Wood better than do Bane foragers, of whom Keera’s party are the most experienced; and, while their lungs may be small, the foragers have developed the ability to maintain fast paces over distances far longer than any laurelled champions of the Tall. Imagine, then, how fast a Bane mother who is also a forager, and who harbors the deepest fears for the fate of her family, might run. Imagine it, increase it, endow it with any superlative you may wish to conjure—and you will yet be unable to describe the pace that Keera has set for Veloc and Heldo-Bah on the dash from the Ayerzess-werten to their home of Okot. More remarkable still, the two men behind her have never once complained of that pace, never once asked for respite; nay, not even for a sip of water from the skins they carry. For they know only too well that they are not mere athletes striving to add luster to their names: they are tribe members who have learned that the blackest horror has, after two hundred years of safety, struck their home; and they run to know what price the Death has exacted from their people.
Dawn begins to break, and life to stir, in the vast wilderness; but among the three foragers, it is noted only because the markings along the trail they follow become easier to see. It is a merciless bit of irony that these same markings, which usually impart the happiness of being ever closer to home, now only heighten the agony of the possibility that such joy may be gone forever. Keera’s disciplined mind works hard to push aside her mounting fears; but what occupies her thoughts instead is not hope of a happy resolution. Rather, she puzzles with the supreme mystery that eventually befalls every soul that harbors true faith in a divine providence:
How could her deity have forsaken her? How could the Moon have inflicted the Death upon her tribe and her family?
Has she brought it on her people, by battling the Knights with her brother and Heldo-Bah, and thus insulting the Priestess of the Moon? It cannot be, for then the punishment would be hers alone. And what of Heldo-Bah’s many crimes, and Veloc’s too-frequent participation in them? There are no answers, here, either, for Heldo-Bah has paid the price with the loss of his freedom forever, while Veloc, too, submits himself to punishment when he thus angers the Priestess, the Lunar Sisters, and the Groba Elders; and even if he did not, where is the divine proportion in meting out plague to punish a few brawls? Is not the Moon a deity of compassion? And if she is not, then what marks her as superior to the Tall’s absurd and vicious golden god, Kafra?
There—in the distance: Keera can see the trees thin, and then, away past that point, the last of the downward grade that ends in the rapid drop of the high cliffs that form the northern edge of Okot. In mere moments, they should be upon—nay: They are upon them already! Hidden, in the ghostly light that is the Wood at dawn: huts. Bane huts. Deserted. And no sign of the fires that should be burning, now, with great-bellied cook-pots atop them, heating the morning gruel with boiled wood-fruits—dried apples, pears, and plums—that, sometimes fortified by a few thin strips of boar’s back cooked on a skillet of flat iron, constitutes nearly every Bane’s first meal. But here, among these twenty or so thatched huts … nothing. Not even the light of fat-lamps within …
For the first time, Keera slows, and comes to a halt. As her lungs work hard, she stares about in bewilderment, fearing—not fearing, hoping—that she has lost the trail, and stumbled upon some old settlement that has fallen into disuse: the sort of place in which Heldo-Bah spent much of his early manhood. But the markings are just where they should be, prominently cut into large rocks and ancient trees. Now as ever, Keera is on the trail she intended to follow, and she and her companions are in one of the northern settlements that surmount the cliffs ahead: they are, in fact, among the community of Bane healers and their families, who carry on their noble work inside the caves that pock the faces of those same cliffs, the barely accessible retreats called the Lenthess-steyn. It is possible, of course, that the healers are in those caves even now, if the Outrager Welferek spoke the truth, and did not concoct a callous lie to spare himself torment at the hands of Heldo-Bah; and yet—
If the healers are in the Lenthess-steyn, then where are their families? Where are the signs of daily life? Where are their children?
Heldo-Bah and Veloc draw up next to Keera, each man more winded than their leader, and both, like her, staring about in consternation.
“Where—?” Veloc draws in one enormous breath, in order to speak the question that all are asking themselves: “The healers—their wives, their husbands—?” (For women are among the most skilled of the Bane healers.) “Have they been attacked?”
“I’ve warned them!” Heldo-Bah declares in a gasping roar, putting his hands to his knees and bending over, the better to take in air. “How many times have I warned them? Move the healers, I’ve said, they are atop the cliffs, too far north, they will be the first to go, should the Tall find us, but who listens to a criminal—yaeeyah!” The gap-toothed forager squeals in pain as Veloc swats an open hand across the exposed back of his head. Heldo-Bah thinks to retaliate, but a look at Veloc, who nods quickly at the still-silent Keera, reminds him that the only order of business, now, is to discover what can have happened here.
Anxious to redeem himself for his thoughtlessness, Heldo-Bah approaches a hut. “Well, we’re not going to learn anything if we don’t l
ook …”
Keera spins about when she hears this. “Heldo-Bah!” she calls, displaying something as close to panic as she ever has. “Do not enter—if the Death has taken the healers, it will take you too!”
Heldo-Bah knows not to enter, at this moment, into an argument with Keera over whether he is really foolish enough to enter a plague hut; and so he limits his reply to, “Believe me, Keera, I have no intention of going inside!” Heldo-Bah draws to a stop; and then advances on his toes. “These huts have not been attacked,” he calls, spying slapdash crescent Moons that have been painted on each structure’s door. “They’ve been abandoned—abandoned and sealed, Keera!” The door to the hut he approaches is shut tight, and across every window opening thick planks have been fixed. Any gaps around the door and between the window openings and the boards have been filled with a thick paste, white streaked with purple: almost a mortar, which has not yet had time to fully dry.
“Stay well back!” Keera commands, now facing each hut in turn, noticing the same purple-streaked white paste about every opening, and retreating as if from some deadly enemy. “Quicklime and meadow bells—it is plague of the bowels, then,” she says. “They will have removed all of the families to—”
A new voice interrupts: “Ho! What are you doing here?”
The three foragers close ranks to watch as a Bane soldier emerges from the dawn mist east of the healers’ huts. He wears the standard protection of the Bane army: a hauberk, extending from elbow to neck to knee, and composed of iron scales stitched onto deerskin. It is armor far more ambitious in design than it is effective in battle, during which the comparatively broad spacing of the large scales caused by the limitations of Bane metalworking too often allows both spear and sword points to penetrate gaps, while the size of the scales makes movement difficult. Like Welferek, the soldier carries a short-sword in the Broken mold, save that his is an obvious Bane imitation, its steel being of a visibly inferior quality. The same is true of the single-piece helmet that covers his head and nose: the brass fitted to the edges of the iron sections cannot hide the inferior grade of the iron itself. What he lacks in quality weapons, however, the young man makes up in self-possession: the Bane army—as reimagined by its leader, Yantek Ashkatar—is a relatively new creation, less than a dozen years old, and the men who fill its ranks hide their inexperience and inferior arms with all the courage they can muster, although they disdain the arrogant pride of the Outragers, for whom they have as little liking or use as do the foragers.
“Entry to this settlement has been forbidden by the Groba,” the soldier says firmly. But, as he comes closer, he notes the hefty sack that each of the newcomers carries. “Ah,” the soldier noises with a nod. “Foragers.” The lad is still raw enough to feel that he must not allow his lack of experience to show, especially at this crucial hour; and so he buries it beneath a tone of authority. “But I perceive that you are only just returning. You answer the call of the Horn?”
“Oh, admirable,” Heldo-Bah answers, spitting onto the ground near the soldier’s boots. “You must already have achieved high rank, with that kind of quick thinking—” Veloc delivers a sharp elbow in his friend’s side for this, which allows Keera to ask:
“Where have they been taken? The families that lived here—surely the plague cannot have taken them all.”
But the soldier’s eyes are on the most notorious member of the party: “You’re Heldo-Bah, aren’t you? I recognize you.”
“Tragically, I can’t return the compliment,” Heldo-Bah replies.
“It’s no compliment, friend, believe me,” the soldier says, with a sour laugh. He half-turns, and assumes a more respectful tone. “And that would make you Keera, the tracker?”
“Please,” Keera says, uninterested in reputations or conversation. “What’s happened to them? And what—”
Suddenly, she turns fully about on the toes of one foot, stopping when she faces just north of east. She puts the infallible nose in the air once again, and having sniffed, her face goes pale, as she turns back to the soldier. “Fire,” she says, in almost a whisper. “They are burning huts!”
The soldier nods at the huts around them. “And they’ll be burning these, soon enough. Sealing them has not confined it.”
“But what do they burn now?” Veloc asks impatiently.
“The northeastern settlement; it was taken first—”
“No!” Keera cries, loosening the straps of her bag, dropping it, and dashing in the direction of the smoke on the wind. “That is my home!” Veloc follows quickly, as Heldo-Bah picks up Keera’s sack and throws it on his back beside his own. He looks at the soldier, shaking his head and spitting again.
“Well done, fool. Speaking without thinking: continue with it, you’ll rise to sentek like a star crossing the heavens …”
Heldo-Bah rushes to catch his friends, and contrition enters the young soldier’s face; he has enough pride of rank left, however, to call, “But you can’t go there—we’ve surrounded it, they’ll not let you near!”
Heldo-Bah, the added weight of Keera’s bag scarcely slowing him, bellows back, “We’ll just brave that risk!” as he moves on, through the sealed, ghostly huts, and into the shadow world of the woodland morning.
The northeastern is in many ways the most important of the Bane settlements, for it has always been the belief of the Groba that, should the Tall ever determine the location of Okot, they will enter by way of this less direct approach. And so, for several years, the residents of the settlement have been witness to the construction of a stout palisade just beyond the outer limit of their several rings of huts: the Groba’s attempt, in pursuit of the Lunar Sisterhood’s vision, to offer at least the appearance of a defense. But Okot as a whole is too vast and ill-arranged a community for even its tireless builders to enclose it in one palisade; and so, half a mile to either side of the large gate in the wall that guards the northeastern route into the central square of the town, the fortification simply stops. It has ever been the ambition of the Groba Elders to continue its construction, but both the builders and the current commanders of the Bane army are hard-pressed to see the reason for any more of a show than has already been constructed—and they are confident that the palisade would be but a show, should the Tall army ever arrive in force with their engines of war.
Keera reaches the westernmost end of the palisade, covering the mile’s distance from the lime-sealed healers’ huts in mere moments. But here she hesitates: the upper flames of the enormous pillar of fire ahead are already visible. Her anxious pause allows Veloc and Heldo-Bah to catch her up, and Veloc lays hold of her right wrist.
“Sister,” he says, himself filled with anxiousness. “I beg you, let us go in first. If nothing else, let Heldo-Bah go. He knows how to manage these boys that the Groba calls soldiers, and he knows Ashkatar well—”
“Although I’m not entirely sure how much help that will be,” Heldo-Bah murmurs, making sure that Keera does not hear.
“—and he can prevent any more confrontations that eat up precious time,” Veloc goes on, giving Heldo-Bah a warning glance. “He can ensure that we get news without delay. Correct, Heldo-Bah?”
“Of course,” Heldo-Bah answers, his gentler tone reflecting a change in his heart. “Keera—I will. I pledge it.”
Keera had thought to be the first to the flames; all through the run from the river, she had become ever more determined to confront whoever has control of the disastrous state of affairs. But now, faced with the sight of fire scorching the leaves of the forest ceiling—
For the first time in their lives, her brother sees her lose heart. This cannot be happening, says her visage; and yet it is …
Keera clasps her hands before her face. “But I—” She searches the morning sky for the Moon, the deity who, it seems to her, hides in shame behind the western trees. “But I was ever faithful!” she cries, and correctly: she has always been among the most devout of Bane women, outside of the Lunar Sisterhood, and yet now s
he watches the flames consuming the home that she made in accordance with the tenets of her faith, and in which she taught her children to be similarly devout …
Veloc looks to Heldo-Bah, as he puts his arms around his sister. “I will bring her presently,” he says to his friend. “Go, and learn what you can.”
Heldo-Bah nods, dropping his own foraging sack, along with Keera’s, and heading off down the palisade; although his own trepidation makes him approach the scene of evident destruction at half-speed. Even this is fast enough, however, to cause the first soldiers to become visible just as he comes within sight of the burning huts themselves.
At the approach of two pallins (and why, in the Moon’s name, Heldo-Bah asks silently, did they feel it necessary to adopt the ranks and organization of the accursèd army of Broken?), Heldo-Bah hears a crack, and sees that groups of soldiers are felling unburned trees to create a cordon of emptiness around the conflagration and prevent its spread: for, despite the moistness of a spring morning in the green wilderness, fire as hot as this is strong enough to spread through any woodland.
“Stay back, forager!” one of the pallins coming along the palisade calls out with authority, trying, like all the Bane army, to keep some semblance of order and prevent such torturous bewilderment as Keera is now experiencing from becoming fully fledged panic throughout Okot. Nevertheless, the unpleasant familiarity of being spoken down to causes Heldo-Bah to reach, imperceptibly, for his knives. He can see that the soldiers are covered in sweat and ash, and that their bodies are burnt, in several spots fairly badly.
“We act on the orders of the Groba!” a second pallin shouts.
Ready to let his knives fly at any moment, Heldo-Bah asks the soldiers: “And what makes you think I’m a forager, you scaly little snakes?” (It is a popular taunt: Bane soldiers are mocked, even by children, for the resemblance of their armor to the scales of a snake.)