"What's this?" Blays leaned over to close the gate behind them. "Keep the fish out?"
"The outer net keeps the bad fish out. The inner keeps the good fish in. And the space between is filled with tigerfish."
Dante caught a glimpse of something orange and whiskery drifting away from the boat. Volo came to the second gate and ferried them inside. To left and right, low dirt walls enclosed paddies of green stalks sporting a handful of oversized, teardrop-shaped leaves. The earthen walls were flat on top and wide enough to walk down, running to a wooden dock fronting the collection of rafts.
A few trees provided shade from the sun, which was otherwise plentiful, making the settlement smell less miasmic than the swamp around it. Volo brought them to the dock and tied up the canoe. They got out, sandals thumping on the boards.
On the other side of the dock, bodies bobbed gently in the water.
Others were sprawled on rafts, limbs trailing over the sides. Two hundred at a glance. Dante ran across the dock to the nearest of them, grabbing the woman's jabat and heaving her up onto the boards. Water streamed from her pale face. Her eyes weren't blinking and her skin was the same temperature as the water. A deep gash across her stomach threatened to spill her cooling organs across the dock.
Volo slapped her hand to her forehead. "I was just here!"
Dante scanned the wide clearing. "How long ago? Did you see anything out of the ordinary?"
"Such as a massacre taking place? It was fine! They were working! Fishing!"
Blays put a hand on her shoulder. "Did you know any of them?"
"I knew all of them." Her reddened face crumpled. "I knew…"
She broke into tears, sinking to the dock. Dante watched for a moment. Aware there was nothing he could do for her, he went to the bodies instead. He'd seen enough massacres to know that there were often a few survivors, but most of these people had been dumped into the water. Even if they hadn't bled to death, they would have drowned.
After he'd been investigating the bodies for a few minutes, Volo recovered enough to help the search. They went from raft to raft. Nothing but corpses. The front of the stone tower hung open. Dante sent a dragonfly inside. Blood spattered the first and second floor. On the top floor, bodies lay in a heap against the back wall.
Dante went up to check them in person while the others kept watch on the grounds. The corpses were women and children. No survivors.
He returned to the sunshine of the late morning, wiping his nose and eyes, as if that would cleanse them of the sight and smell of the blood.
"Whole village," he said.
Blays nodded. "Soldiers?"
"Animals would have chewed them up. Dragged them off. Had to have been people."
"Injuries almost look animal, though. All the puncture wounds."
"Spears," Dante said. "They don't have a lot of iron here. Even their soldiers were using bone-tipped arrows."
"And what about the ripped-up guts?"
"That I don't know. Maybe we should ask—"
"Over here!" Volo shouted. "Help!"
They ran toward her, jumping from raft to raft. She kneeled inside a shack, hand on the back of a young boy, his eyes staring blankly. He looked to be about twelve, but every Tanarian looked younger to Dante.
The boy said nothing as Dante checked him over. He showed a few scrapes and bruises, but nothing to be concerned about. Volo spoke with him in soft, quick words, mixing Mallish with a local dialect. Within a minute, he was making shy eye contact with the three of them.
"His name is Tap," Volo said. "I knew his family."
Dante gazed down at the boy. "Do you know who did this?"
The boy glanced up quickly, then spoke in a soft, worn-out voice. "The soldiers. They came in their boats and they told us to gather on the dock. They wanted to know, they asked, Who killed the others? But nobody knew what they meant. The soldiers, they kept asking who did it. And the people kept telling them they didn't know. Then one of the soldiers said…" He lowered his eyes, thinking. "He said, 'This is punishment for your treason.' That's when they started to…"
Tap choked up. Dante gave him a few moments to recover. "How did you escape?"
"I hid under the water. I breathed through a reed we use when we're spearing fish."
"Was there anyone else with you?"
The boy shook his head.
"Let's get him out of here," Dante said. "There's nothing more to see here."
Volo swung her head to the side. "You want to leave?"
"No, I want to get the food we came for, and then leave."
"They butchered these people. We have to find them! You can kill them!"
"And then what? Another group of soldiers is sent to slaughter another village in retaliation?"
"This isn't fair. These people did nothing." She advanced on him, jabbing her finger at his chest. "They died because of what we did!"
Dante squeezed his eyes shut. At that moment, he would have rather taken a swim in a tub full of ziki oko than get roped into another internecine bloodbath, but he had no idea how to express that without sounding like a complete asshole.
"He's right," Blays said. "We've seen this a hundred times. If we go after the culprits, the crown will fall on you like a drunken mountain. These people are dead—and we're going to honor their deaths by not doing anything to get more innocents killed in the name of vengeance."
"But justice is only what we make of it," she said. "If we sail away, what does that make us?"
Dante could only shake his head. Years ago, he'd harbored the same burning wrath she was feeling right now. If he'd been ten years younger, he probably would have gone ripping off into the swamps to track down the killers and chum the waters with their guts.
He told himself that path led only to more ruin. But did he reject it because he was wiser? Or because after he'd risked everything to help the Collen Basin, only for them to turn on him the moment it was convenient, he no longer cared about anyone's troubles but his own?
A tear slipped down Volo's face. "It makes us cowards."
But she went with them nonetheless, gathering food from the village and stashing it in the canoe. As they padded away, the sun shined warmly on the waters and the dead alike.
~
They moved onward with cold purpose, and the grim knowledge that even if they found Naran, and executed Gladdic, they would walk away from Tanar Atain leaving some crimes unavenged.
Dante scouted the way ahead with a small armada of dragonflies and water striders. Following the sinking of the war canoe and the massacre at the village, soldiers prowled the swamps constantly, forcing Volo to backtrack and detour down obscure paths barely wide enough to permit their canoe. As they squeezed through the shrubs, ticks gathered on the tips of the branches and flung themselves at the warm human bodies.
Sometimes when a patrol neared, there were no alternate routes for Volo to flee through, requiring Dante to harvest a solid wall of brambles around the canoe, hiding them until the threat had passed. They kept Tap with them—Volo had a friend in the capital who she wanted to hear the boy's story—but the boy made no trouble. If anything, he was so quiet and pliable Dante worried that the things he'd seen in the village had cored what was vital inside him, leaving behind a shell of flesh that could only sometimes remember that it had once been something more.
When he wasn't securing their path, Dante studied both the swamp dragon horn and the ether. No matter how he approached it, the horn's nether remained immobile. Yet its presence reminded him of the shaden. He had a wild idea that if he learned how to access the stored shadows, he might be able to make himself resistant to nether, just as the dragon had been, but for the moment, that remained no more than sheer speculation.
He had better luck with the ether. He could still only command a highly limited portion of the light, but he seemed to have unlocked a more precise control of what he had to work with. The night after they'd gotten back on their way, he broke a small twig, leaving it d
angling from the branch, then let the emptiness fill him. The twig glowed, straightened, and reattached itself to the tree.
The following day, one of his dragonflies entered a clearing. Another raft-village was spread across a broad expanse of paddies and docks, protected by the two-part net fences. A team of soldiers watched from the shade as villagers waded into the shallows, cast strange plow-like objects into the water, and dredged up loads of silt, constructing a new paddy.
Every time a worker crawled out of the water, leeches spangled their legs and trunks. The soldiers watched impassively. If a worker took too long resting in the shade, they were dragged across the dock and shoved back into the water. Dante didn't tell Volo what he'd seen.
Dawn came slow, the sky oppressed by black clouds. The air was as still as crystallized ether. Two hours into the day's voyage, the clouds opened as if they'd been slit. Rain slammed through the canopy, battering Dante's scouts to bits. He tried slaying a small pink fish and sending it ahead of them, but it couldn't see far enough through the water to be worth the effort.
Abrupt flashes of light speared through the rain-racked trees, followed by the boom of thunder. Rain gathered in the bottom of the canoe, obliging them to bail it out with a bowl.
With hours of daylight left, Volo guided them onto the shore of a nondescript island. "You get out here."
"No offense," Blays said, examining the trees, "but your people didn't choose a very glamorous spot for their capital."
"The capital's two miles from here, fool. That's why you have to get out now."
"You'll have to forgive me. When we hired you to take us to Dara Bode, I stupidly assumed that meant you'd take us to Dara Bode."
"If I did that, they'd catch us. And all three of us would wind up in the dungeons. Or was that how you planned to meet your friend?"
Dante brushed a strand of damp hair from his brow. "Why don't we try the same trick we used to get out of Aris Osis?"
She gave him a look like he'd suggested an archery contest using themselves as targets. "Is your head full of mud? What business would I have bringing two dead hari into the capital?"
"Then what are you going to do instead?"
"Tell you to get out and wait here. Only I hadn't planned on you being defiant and ruining everything."
Dante pressed his lips together and debarked, bringing his gear with him. Once he and Blays were ashore, Volo gave them a nod and shoved off, disappearing north into the driving rain.
They strung their cloaks between some shrubs and huddled beneath them. After an hour, Dante went down to the banks, slew a water strider, and sent it skimming a few hundred yards in the direction Volo had gone. As it surveyed the waters for incoming boats, Dante cursed himself for not sending a fish to follow Volo into the city.
Their cloaks sagged with rain, dripping on them. A short while later, one tore free from the shrub, exposing them to the downpour.
Dante sighed, crouching in the muck. "How long do you suppose we should wait here?"
"That depends," Blays said, "on how long it'll take you to build a boat."
"Why am I the one doing the building?"
"Would you trust me to build a boat? I'd probably build the keel on the top and the deck on the bottom. In fact, I don't even know what either of those words mean."
Thunder rumbled sporadically, like the rantings of a drunk man who kept falling asleep mid-sentence only to snap awake and continue his ravings a few seconds later. As the gray skies dimmed, a large outrigger canoe appeared in the water strider's sight. The boat was painted bold yellow and trimmed with pale blue. It sported a figurehead of an angry-looking fishing bird with a crested head. Lean men in yellow jabats paddled on through the rain.
The outrigger came to a stop within a hundred yards of their island. The captain of the vessel stood and peered about. He bore a delicate mustache. Wispy as it was, it was the most facial hair Dante had seen since entering Tanar Atain.
"Sirs Pendelles and Smallhorn!" the man announced. "My name is Bo Tuin. I have been sent by Volo to retrieve you." He gazed across the hazy swamp. "I'm getting soaked, sirs. Might want to come out before I decide to go home and dry off."
Keeping the nether in easy reach, Dante moved from behind a tree. "Over here."
The canoe made landing. Bo had brought clean jabats for them, powder blue with a shovel-shaped icon on the breast. They changed behind a shrub. They came back to find the captain gazing up at the rain-lashed branches.
"The trees protect us from storms such as these," Bo said. "Give us fruit and such, too. You could say the trees seem to care for us. If so, suppose we've got any obligation to care for them?"
Dante and Blays exchanged a look. Blays cleared his throat, deciding it was his turn to handle the dana kide duties—or, possibly, he just wanted to. He did seem to get a kick out of discussing things he didn't care about in the slightest.
"Depends, doesn't it?" Blays paced thoughtfully, sandals squelching in the mud. "If a man comes by my house and steals some old firewood I'd been meaning to get rid of, he's done me a favor. But do I really owe him anything for it?"
Bo pursed his lips. "So we'd have to figure out if the trees intend to help us. I'll have to ask them sometime!"
He grinned, opening a knapsack. The greeting seemed to be over already. Either Bo wasn't much for formalities, or he didn't think they had time to indulge in them. He produced a pair of looped ropes.
"Pardon the shackles," he said. "But you're escaped hari, being returned to the estate of Do Riza, your master." The man grinned wider. "Don't worry, sirs. The Do is a very merciful man."
Frowning, Dante allowed himself to be bound. Men with the bearing of bodyguards helped them into the canoe. The bodyguards tossed Dante and Blays' cloaks into the water and slipped their swords onto their own belts.
In soft Gaskan, Dante said, "Are we being arrested for real?"
"These days, I've been arrested enough that it doesn't bother me," Blays said. "But if he says he's sorry, but he has to pretend-kill us, that's when I'll complain."
The rowers pulled hard, racing to the north. Once they were underway, Bo made his way back to them, holding onto the mast for support. "Stay quiet through the gates. Your questions will be answered at the Do's estate."
Dante nodded. "Who is this Do Riza? What's his interest in us?"
"I am but an agent of the hand, sir. Have you ever seen a talking hand?"
"One time," Blays said. "I've sworn off Galladese gin ever since."
Dante sat back and resolved not to worry about anything until they'd arrived at their destination. The way forward soon grew littered with rafts and the half-sunken wreckage of them. It was still raining hard as the trees opened before them and they looked on the great city of Dara Bode.
The city was composed of a series of concentric rings. The outermost was a stretch of open water about four hundred feet across. Where it touched the forest, the branches were neatly chopped back. Large round areas were enclosed with nets; Dante suspected they were fish pens.
They came to another ring of two net-fences. A gate stood across the outer net, wide enough to allow the entry of one of the big barges they'd seen wallowing through the waterways. Bo spoke to the green-uniformed guards there, who gave Dante and Blays a close look, then added a few knots to the little string-board they used to keep records.
The guards waved them through the two sets of gates and into the next ring, a sprawling patch of aquatic farmland. Paddies of the teardrop-leafed plants alternated with stands of short green-trunked trees growing in tight clusters. These bore extremely long, rectangular leaves, some of which had tattered into thin strips. Squat green fruit grew in heavy bunches—bananas. Dante had seen them in the Plagued Islands. Even in the rain, a skeleton crew of laborers was out among the plants, using bone-headed hoes to uproot purplish roots from the paddies. Others inspected the banana trees. Wherever they spotted fruit starting to turn yellow, they hacked down the entire tree and cut loose the bunch.<
br />
The canoe navigated through the farms and into a manic sprawl of rafts. People sat under roofs of banana leaves, sheltering from the rain as they passed around bowls of food, tossed dice (which seemed to exist in every land Dante had visited), and fooled about with cubic wooden frames strung with innumerable threads and shiny glass beads. If not for the rain, the noise of their boisterous arguments would have been deafening.
Dante crinkled his nose, but the smell of the city was oddly minimal, and largely overpowered by the scent of the rain. Clear lanes were maintained through the raft-slums. They sliced forward, coming to another ring of wooden platforms supporting simple homes and shops. There was a general lack of smoke. In the few places it was rising, people waited in line carrying covered clay pots and strings of uncooked fish, waiting to make use of the communal kitchens.
After so long on the water, Dante could smell the damp earth ahead. Past the platforms, manors of dark brick stood on artificial islands, protected from unwanted traffic by brick walls. Wooden watchtowers rose from the corners of the islands. Further ahead, stone towers defied the stormy sky. The canoe pulled up to an island dock. The men hopped out and helped Dante and Blays, who were still shackled, debark without falling into the water.
They were brought through a wooden gate and into a courtyard of ludicrously-hued flowers. There, Bo passed them off to a servant named Ki, who brought them to a sparse sitting room and informed them that the Do would see them shortly. Ki removed the ropes from their wrists, but didn't yet return their swords.
Blays took in the pastel hangings and the bamboo benches along one wall. "This room's a little too nice to hack us to bits in, isn't it?"
"Whoever the Do is, he hasn't brought us here to murder us," Dante said. "He'll want something from us. Something he can't do for himself."
"Pick his own crops?"
The door opened. A guardsman entered, followed by a slim Tanarian in a tailored yellow jabat and black sandals with straps that rose to his knee. A second guard brought up the rear. Dante offered a shallow bow to Riza, but the man waved him off.
The Wound of the World Page 37
