“He’s probably delighted.” He snorted. “He and I are friends, but we have very different opinions on how an expedition should be led. He’ll enjoy himself a great deal more now that he’s in charge.”
Pella reached out a hand and offered him a pouch. He took it and felt the weight of the coins inside. “Expenditures. You’re back in the realm now, and the need to eat and sleep can be better accommodated with a few silvers than by pitching a tent.”
He nodded his head. “Like as not we’ll ride hard. That seems to be the only way these folks like to ride.” Pella’s ornery smile made him look away and cough into his hand a second time. He hadn’t meant it that way, of course.
Swech came up next to Pella as if summoned to make him even more uncomfortable. “The day is half done. If we’re to make good distance we should go.”
Wollis limped over and stood next to Merros as if for moral support. “We’ll be waiting for you when you return.” He took the horse’s reins and nodded a brisk farewell.
“Go home to your wife instead.”
“By the gods, man, why would I do that?” His second walked away without looking back.
Swech started toward her mount, and Merros gathered his belongings.
“Ride fast, Captain. Be safe on your journeys.”
“So are we going there merely to observe?”
Pella stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “You are. You are going to observe. The Sa’ba Taalor will follow their own instructions.”
“And where are they getting their instructions from?”
Pella pointed to where Swech was standing. “Drask delivered a message to them at the same time as Desh contacted me.”
“How?”
“You are endlessly full of questions.” She waved a careless hand toward the wagon where she stayed. “Tataya rests in the wagon now, recovering from her journey here.”
He frowned. No riders had come toward them. They were in the steppes now and the land was fertile enough in comparison to the Blasted Lands, but there wasn’t a tree or even a shrub that could have hidden the approach of a rider or even a wanderer walking under her own power.
Instead of making a comment, he headed for the woman giving him a ride to their next destination. They’d be riding together for a while. During that time he intended to learn more about the Sa’ba Taalor. He’d have time. There was very little else to do while riding.
When Pella laughed behind him he felt himself blush again and wished desperately that if she were indeed reading his thoughts she would do a better job of hiding that fact from him.
Eight
“It occurs to me that I have almost no clothes.” Andover looked at the room he’d been staying in and shook his head. What meager belongings he owned had been brought to him when Tega stopped by Burk’s smithy to let him know Andover had been assaulted. That had been a while back now and looking at his spare clothes – one pair of trews and two tunics – he shook his head. “Does it get as cold as I’ve heard in the Blasted Lands?”
Drask stood in the corner of his small room and looked at him. The man seldom spoke to Andover, but he was almost always nearby. “Yes. The cold will sink into your bones.”
“Do you suppose I’ll freeze on my way to your valley?”
“You are to serve as ambassador for your Emperor. Even if he were not planning on clothing you, I would find something you could use to stay warm.”
“I’m fairly sure whatever you might offer me would be too damned big. You’re really quite large.”
He could not see the man’s smile behind his veil, but he could sense it. “Adjustments can be made.”
“Do you really suppose the Emperor plans on clothing me?”
“From what I have seen clothes are very important to your people. You would no sooner be asked to represent your Emperor without the proper clothing than I would be asked to come here naked.”
Andover looked down at his new hands again and felt the same shiver of excitement. He had hands, which was amazing. They were real and they could feel things. And they were metallic. He shook his head in wonder.
Drask stepped closer. “Do they hurt you? Your hands?”
“What? No. I just. It’s hard to get used to them.” He looked to the other man. “I can’t thank you enough.”
Drask shook his head. “Not me. Truska-Pren.”
“Then I can’t thank Truska-Pren enough.”
“You will have your chance to thank him.” Drask put his right hand on Andover’s shoulder. “I will teach you how to offer your thanks when we travel back to the valley.”
“When do we leave?”
“Three days from now. First we wait for the rest of my people to arrive. There are offerings that must be made to your Emperor.”
Andover shook his head. “I don’t understand this. How have we never heard of your people before now?”
Drask shrugged his thick shoulders awkwardly, mimicking the gesture he’d likely seen from a few soldiers. “Your people have never reached the Seven Forges before now.”
Andover stared at his hands again, at a loss for what he wanted to say.
Drask spoke up. “The men who did this to you. The ones who ruined your hands. What happened to them?”
An instant anger swelled in Andover. “Nothing. They sit in a cell and await a decision. They are to be punished, but no one seems to know what their punishment should be.”
“They attacked you? They broke your hands because you looked at the girl Tega, yes?”
He hadn’t discussed the situation with Drask at all, but obviously someone had. What was there to say?
“Yes. A man named Menock claimed to be her fiancé and broke my hands because he saw me looking at her.”
“We have a name for such men where I am from.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Drask stared into Andover’s eyes. For the first time he noticed the faint glow inside the stranger’s own eyes. It was hard to see until you noticed it and after that it was hard not to see.
“Dead. We call them dead.”
“I am not a fighter, Drask. You are a fighter. I am a weapon smith. And I’m only an apprentice.”
Drask reached out suddenly and grabbed Andover’s hands. He held them fast and raised them until Andover was forced to look at them, to see the fine workmanship, the amazing finesse with which they had been crafted.
“These are a warrior’s hands. They are the hands of a weapon smith and a warrior and a man. You are not given these hands without purpose, Andover Lashk. You are given these hands because Truska-Pren, the God of Iron, the God of Armed Combat, has given them to you. He does not grant his blessings without a reason and he does not offer his blessings to cowards. Do you understand me?”
He nodded. He would have nodded just as vigorously if the man had asked him if he wanted to weave butterfly wings from silk and then fly to the Great Star. Drask exuded a confidence that was nearly contagious.
“Your Emperor asks that you serve as his ambassador. That you go to my country and speak to my kings. That you learn to understand our ways and better create an alliance between our people. You understand this, yes?”
“Yes, of course.”
Drask nodded. He squeezed Andover’s hands and Andover marveled that he could feel the pressure exerted on the artificial extremities. “Then know this. My people, my gods, are not always kind. They do not respect weakness. They respect strength. If you would be respected, you will have to demand satisfaction.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guards who hurt you. You must fight them. You must punish them for what they did to you.”
“I don’t know.” Andover shook his head.
Drask shook his head right back. “You do know. I am telling you. If you do not fight them, if you do not restore your honor in this fashion, you will fail your Emperor. You will dishonor yourself in the eyes of my people and the eyes of my gods. You will lose face before Truska-Pren.”
“How–?”
Before he could finish his question Drask interrupted him. “If you lose face before Truska-Pren you could well lose the very gift he has granted you.”
Andover pulled away from the stranger’s grip. “What?”
“You understand already.” Drask pointed. “Your hands come at a price. You must now pay it. Demand satisfaction from the men who took your hands. Do this thing, Andover Lashk, or risk losing the hands you have been given.”
Andover stared at his hands for a very long time. While he stared, the stranger who had granted him those hands slipped away as silently as a bad dream.
The night found Merros Dulver sleeping in his own country for the first time in months. It did not, however, find him sleeping in a room. They were in the middle of the plains to the south of the Wellish Steppes. Aside from wild grasses and the occasional tree there was little to see as far as the horizon. Two days of traveling had moved them a great distance, leagues farther than he’d expected. The damned things the Sa’ba Taalor rode on were fast and had the endurance of a dozen horses. They also moved differently from horses, which meant that his hips, thighs and buttocks were sore in places he had not been prepared for because he had no idea how to ride comfortably on the beasts.
All of which meant that when sleep finally came for him it came hard and fast. When he awoke he found that several of his fellow travelers were down at the river bathing. Because he desperately wanted to wash the stench of the Blasted Lands from his body he joined them.
Males and females alike washed themselves in the waters of a tributary that ran down from the steppes. The water was as clear as the sky and almost as cold as the Blasted Lands themselves. Just the same, Merros followed the lead of the people around him and stripped down and moved into the stream. To the last, the people with him were covered in scars, except for their faces, which remained hidden behind veils.
Merros shook his head and looked down, moderately embarrassed by both the shape of his body and oddly enough by the lack of scars. If the people with him judged him, their veils hid whatever decisions they had come to.
Within an hour they were on the move again, heading toward the south. Swech sat before him on the saddle and he rode, his hands resting on two runners that seemed designed specifically to allow a second rider. The beasts – he still could not decide if they were feline in nature, but he was leaning in that direction – were larger than horses by at least half again and capable of pulling the carcasses of several heavy animals. He supposed it was possible that they often carried more than one rider with ease.
Swech looked at him over her shoulder and for a moment her veil shifted, showing more of her face than he had seen before. Her nose was straight and slightly shorter than he would have expected; he could not see her mouth. He found the glimpse oddly intoxicating.
“Tell me about the place where we go. What is it like?”
“Very warm.” He thought back. It had been a few years since the last skirmish he’d been engaged in. “The land is flat, and the ocean is nearby. The winds are almost always blowing, but not like they do in the Blasted Lands.”
“Will there be so much… green?” She waved her arms and he looked around them. He hadn’t thought about it, but he could only imagine how different this was for her and her people.
“No.” He thought for a moment longer. “Have you ever been away from the valley or the Blasted Lands?”
“No. Never.” She looked away from him and he could sense that she was, if not embarrassed, at least uncomfortable with her lack of knowledge.
“Before I traveled there, I had never seen a place like your valley. You will see a lot of things you have never seen before.” He pointed. “This, this is just an unsettled area. There are many. But there are a lot of towns between here and Roathes.”
She shook her head but made no other response.
Just to keep the conversation going, he asked, “Did you make all of your weapons? Tusk said he did.”
“We all do.”
The notion still shook him. “Why?”
“That is what the gods demand. The Daxar Taalor say we must learn to forge our own ways, and that means we must make our own weapons, hunt for our own food and till the land if we would have crops.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What about children?”
“Children too. We learn to make weapons when we are small, so that when we are old enough to train we already understand the weapons.”
“How old were you when you made your sword?”
“Which one?”
Seriously?
“The first.”
Swech laughed. “Seven. It was not a very good sword.”
He thought about what he’d seen at the last smithy he’d been to, watching the man hammering away at a length of blazing hot metal, watching the sparks that danced away with each blow. He tried to imagine a seven year-old girl using the same hammer to shape the rough metal, or even the smaller hammers to work on the nearly finished product and shook his head. “I can’t be surprised.”
“Have you ever made your own weapons?”
“No. I haven’t even shoed a horse.”
“What did you do when you were growing up?”
“Honestly?” Merros thought about that. “Not really very much. My father was off handling life as a soldier, and my mother stayed busy. She’d find a few odd jobs about the house for me, but mostly just to make sure I wasn’t underfoot. When I was old enough I joined the army. Before that, I just did what my parents told me to do.”
“What about your gods?”
“What about them?” He shrugged. “I have never been a very devout follower.”
Swech turned her entire body to look at him, her eyes surprisingly wide above the veil. “And have your gods had nothing to say about this?”
“I don’t think my gods are quite as concerned as yours.” He felt his face flush red. “Drask told me that your gods told him where to find me. That your gods spoke directly to him. None of the gods of my people have ever spoken directly to me. Or to anyone that I know for that matter.”
Swech turned away from him, shaking her head. “They do not speak to us every day. They speak when there is something that must be said. There were many who were called to look for the travelers. For you.” She was silent for a few moments and he looked around them at the other riders, checking for landmarks or signs of a town anywhere in the distance. “Your gods confuse me.”
Merros nodded. “That’s alright, they confuse most of us.” He stared at her back for a moment, mesmerized by the play of solid muscles under skin that varied between nearly flawless and heavily scarred. “So tell me about your gods, Swech. Tell me what makes you so obedient to them.”
Swech nodded her head and looked around. The beast under them let out a grunt and then a noise that could have been a roar waiting to happen or possibly just gas.
“The lands were not always as they are now. You know this.” Merros nodded his agreement. “When the land was shattered, when the war of sorcerers took place and the city of Korwa was destroyed, everything along with it was ruined too. The lakes were boiled away, the ocean was pushed aside. The great fields of battle were burned to dust along with armies so vast that they spanned the horizons.” Her words were passionate, but bore the metered tone of tales recited again and again. “All destroyed by the men who thought they were gods. All that was left was what you call the Blasted Lands. All that remained was dust and ash and smoke. The ground was so hot that it boiled. That is why there are so many uneven places there. Even a thousand years later, the Ta-Wren, the cutting winds, have not smoothed away the waves of earth.”
Merros found himself drawn to the story. Possibly it was her passion for the tale, possibly merely boredom. It could have been a bit of both.
“Do you know that not everyone died?” She spoke with a reverent awe. “A thousand years ago the Ta-Wren were harsh
enough to polish stone in a few days, but not everyone who was in the fields of battle died. The ones who lived were broken, though. They broke and they bled and they suffered first in the great heat of Korwa’s death and then in the biting cold that came afterward. The Daxar Taalor call that the First Forging. The spirits of the people were hammered and leveled until the impurities could be driven from their flesh and bones and then they were allowed to cool off, the better to prepare them for what happened next.”
“What was that?” Damned if he wasn’t being drawn along. She shot him a look and he apologized before allowing her to continue.
“There was nothing left but wreckage. Dust, ash, the charred remains of too many people to count, and the glass spires of the Mounds. The people who survived tried to go to the Mounds first, seeking shelter in the hidden tunnels where the earth still moves and the air screams. But there were things in the Mounds that could not be challenged. They killed anything that came too close and so the people were forced to move on.
“After they had walked a great distance and traveled through the clouds for too many days to count, the people began to die off. There was no water. There was no food. And finally seven of the survivors got together and decided to move on while the rest fell to exhaustion. They meant to go on, to find a place of shelter for those too tired to move any further. But because they were warriors and because they were human they did what all people do when they are angry. Those seven argued as they walked. They debated what could be done. Finally they all agreed that it was better to die as warriors than to live as victims. When they could no longer move forward they found whatever weapons they could scrounge – mostly melted remains of weapons or the bones of the dead – and they prepared to attack each other.
“The Daxar Taalor saw as they fought in the Cutting Winds and stopped the air from moving long enough to watch. The seven battled until all were broken and bloodied, but so great was their spirit that they would not die. And the gods looked upon them and asked what it was they wanted.
“Two of the people could still speak and they answered. ‘We want to live,’ said Wheklam. ‘We want to grow strong again,’ said Ordna.
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