A moment later her reason for waiting in this spot and at this time came past. The man was heavyset and sweating heavily despite the relatively mild weather. He looked around with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Waiting for an attack.
The thin dart scraped across the back of his neck and he swatted at the irritation, scowling. A great number of insects swarmed the area and the winds had died for the moment.
Insects were known to bite.
He carried on for almost a hundred paces before he collapsed. Swech looked in his direction only because of the noises made by the people around him. She knew he was dead. She had killed him, after all.
While the people around him called for some form of assistance, or stole from the fat corpse in the case of one street child, Swech put the last of her Pabba fruit wedges in her mouth and sucked at the sweet juices.
The gods asked that she kill and so she did. She did not have to know why. The gods knew. That was enough.
Three
The air was colder as they scaled the side of Wheklam. There was little to hold on to and the rich veins of lead that ran through the mountain guaranteed that there would be few interruptions. Nothing grew at this height and according to Delil the lead was poisonous to the plants that might have been growing at this height in any event.
Andover Lashk did not question the girl. He had learned to have faith in her words.
He did not speak much as he climbed. Instead he focused on the task ahead of him. Delil was moving alongside him, his only constant companion since he had reached the Taalor Valley.
Down below the valley was rich with life. A thick forest of trees grew, and from a distance they were a beautiful, amazing sight. However, from up close they had been a hellish nightmare of thorns and odd creatures that lived among the twisted, gnarled branches. He could count seventeen bite marks on his left arm alone. Those were interspersed with a few dozen scratches from thorns and claws alike.
The discomfort was minor.
He looked to his left and saw Delil looking back his way, her face uncovered, her mouths smiling.
“Another hour, Andover, and you will meet with another of the Daxar Taalor.”
“Where are all the people?” He knew the answer but asked anyway.
“They have moved on. Wheklam is the God of Lead and the Sea. They have taken their ships into the waters.”
“Have you ever been on one of their ships?” He had never so much as seen the ocean, though he had heard it was an impressive sight.
“No.” She shook her head and wiped at the sweat on her brow. The weather was colder, yes, but the work of climbing was hot. “I am not close with Wheklam. I will be meeting with the god as well.”
Andover frowned at that. Not because he did not like her company – he most certainly did – but because of what he had been told before. “I thought every person faced the Daxar Taalor alone.”
Delil laughed. It was not a mocking sound, but one of simple surprise. “You have met two of the Daxar Taalor, Andover. Have you not yet realized that they are gods? If a thousand walked before Wheklam at the same time, in the same place, the god could make certain that each faced their destinies alone.”
Andover thought long on that and then nodded.
“What happens if someone does not meet a god’s approval, Delil? What happens if Wheklam finds me… unsatisfactory?”
Delil looked at him for a long time, her eyes moving over his face as if trying to memorize him. The night before, after they had climbed free of the forest and helped patch each other’s wounds as best they could, they had rutted under the stars. They had been together twice before but this time felt different, felt more like they belonged together. He had come to understand the ways in which her body moved, another mystery at least partially solved, and the feelings had been glorious.
Watching her as she climbed, he forced himself not to be distracted by those memories. As lovely as they were, dwelling on their past or on possible futures would likely lead to his death along the slope.
“You met my brother, Ventdril. Do you remember him?”
“Yes.” He could hardly forget the man. Another of the Sa’ba Taalor that made him feel like a boy not yet old enough to shave. The man was enormous and swung his sister like she weighed as much as a toddler.
“My brother was judged unworthy by the Daxar Taalor. The reasons are his to discuss, but perhaps he will share them in time.” She shrugged. “Possibly he acted in a cowardly fashion. Just as likely he disobeyed the gods. Whatever the reason, they broke him.”
“Broke him?”
“The Daxar Taalor offer us many chances, Andover. They can be very forgiving, but they are not merciful. Mercy does not make us stronger. So when my brother offended the gods one time too many, they broke him. They bent his body into a new shape; they took his mind and bent that, too. And they took from him all possibility that he could be seen as a Sa’ba Taalor.
“I saw him when he was punished.” She shook her head. “It was a just punishment. The Daxar Taalor are not like us. They do not make mistakes. They found him weak and broke him, the better for him to find his flaws. The better for him to find his way back. Sometimes the Broken return to us. Sometimes they die.”
She sighed and looked his way, smiling again. “Ventdril passed the tests set before him. He has earned the name Unbroken and been taken back into his people. He is strong and he is stronger than before.”
“So if you disappoint the Daxar Taalor, they ruin you?”
“No. They offer punishments to learn from. There are other punishments as well.”
“Like what?”
“The mounts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The mounts that some people ride are Sa’ba Taalor. Or they were. They are the ones who will not learn.”
“What do you mean?”
“If a person will not learn or cannot learn it is because of pride or a stubbornness. The Broken are punished because they have committed great crimes in the eyes of the gods. The mounts are different. They either will not learn or must be taught a harder lesson than most. They are changed and made to serve while they contemplate their actions.”
Andover was shocked. “Those great monsters are your people?”
“No. They were and they might be again. But they are being taught important lessons by the gods.”
Andover looked at the ground close to his face and nodded, trying to grasp the implications of what she said.
“Andover!”
He looked toward Delil as she called and watched her arm point upward. There was an obstacle, something different on the slope. Something different, large, and moving.
“What is that?” he asked, but the answer did not matter. It had a shape not at all human. It was coming for them. That was all that mattered.
“That is a Broken. Prepare yourself. They are mad beasts.”
The two of them were half-prone on the mountainside, but the angle meant they were almost standing. The slope of the mountain was rough, and while his feet were aimed toward the ground far below, his knees and his hands alike were carrying most of his weight.
In order to fight the damned thing he would have to risk falling to his death.
There would be no running from the slavering thing coming at him.
The creature had a face, but it was uneven, as if someone had taken a sculpture shattered on the ground and reassembled it using mud and clay from the river. Most of the body was equally off-kilter, but much worse. The torso was stretched and too long. The limbs were functional enough, but none of them came close to matching and there seemed to be a few too many.
While he was contemplating the approaching enemy, Delil reached into her garb and pulled out one of the long, deadly daggers she had sheathed on her body. He heard the sound of her exhaling and then saw the blade cut through the air on its way to her target.
The dagger cut the gray flesh of the thing, slicing into the oddly sinuous neck of the monster
and stopping its forward charge.
One malformed hand reached for the dagger and fumbled it free of the wound. The blood flow from that cut immediately increased and the thing looked toward Delil with murder in its bulging eyes.
The sound it made was a war cry, a bellow for Ordna. Andover recognized the name of the Bronze God, though he knew almost nothing of what the deity demanded of its followers. Whatever the case, apparently the nightmare in front of him had failed the god.
And now the Broken sought a way to right that wrong.
The misshapen thing charged again, dropping to all fours, as the slope of Wheklam grew more extreme.
Delil was ready. Andover prayed that he was.
His left hand held tight to the side of the mountain, fingers clutching for purchase. His right reached around to slip his great hammer from where he held it.
And the hammer fell away, lost from his grip in an instant as the Broken pounced and smashed into him with its full weight.
Andover grunted and let go of the mountain, not by choice but because he was thrown free of the surface. Gravity and his enemy’s weight did the rest. For a sickening moment he was falling backward through the air. Broad, warped fists pummeled into him and did their best to break his body, but his furs took a great deal of the impact.
There was no time to think. Had there been that sort of luxury, he’d have surely screamed himself to death. Instead Andover reached out with his iron hands and caught the flesh of his enemy, hooking his metallic fingers into the gray folds of scarred, stretched skin and doing his best to rip into the muscles underneath. There was no conscious thought, only a need to kill his enemy before the favor could be returned.
The world rolled in a half circle and Andover felt his body turning. He could make no claim of having chosen to move his body but it moved just the same, and a moment later the gods themselves smiled down on him as both he and the beast landed against Wheklam’s surface, skidding and scraping as they bounced twice.
How far had they fallen? He did not know. He only knew that he was fortunate enough to be on top when they crashed into the ground.
Something in the body under him broke; the warped face opened a bloodied mouth and shrieked in pain. The folds of skin he held so tightly in his grip did not slip, but instead split, and he felt his fingers slide through the ruined hide of the thing and clutch into meat and gristle.
Then they were sliding again, falling further down the slope, rolling apart from each other as his fingers pulled free of their prize.
Drask Silver Hand, Delil and Bromt had told him how to take a blow and how to recover from falling down. They’d explained the principles and then they had thrown him again and again until he learned.
Those torturous encounters as they wandered slowly through the Blasted Lands very likely saved his life.
The ground blurred as he fell and bounced and ricocheted off rocks and deep cuts in the face of the mountain, and through it, he let himself roll and absorb the blows over the least vulnerable parts of his body.
So he was beaten senseless by the rocks and not killed by them.
The thing he’d been fighting was not as lucky. A rock met with its face and came out the victor. Parts of the face were stuck to the rock. The rest of the Broken rolled away and flopped lifelessly against the slope of Wheklam.
Andover stood up slowly and checked himself. Nothing was broken.
Far above, roughly at the same height he’d been at before falling, Delil waved to him.
He carefully nodded his head and looked her way. It was a long climb and he had a ways to go.
He did not find his hammer on the way up.
Depending on the day and the whim of the Daxar Taalor, the Mounds could be as close as a week away from the Seven Forges, or could take a lifetime to find.
It had not been much more than a week for Drask Silver Hand as he rode his mount, Brackka, to the forbidden territory.
A lifetime of rules still rolled in his head as he violated the orders of his gods in order to obey them. None were ever allowed to enter the Mounds. None dared explore them. That had been the truth for as long as he had been alive, and yet he now crouched on the edge of a massive stone structure covered in ice and looked down into a faintly lit tunnel that descended well below the ground and into the very heart of the forbidden.
What the gods demand must be done. That, too, was the simple truth of the matter. Ydramil, the God in Silver, made demands. Drask obeyed all of the gods, but as his chosen deity, he listened even more carefully when Ydramil spoke.
Ydramil was sometimes called the God of Reflection and demanded a certain level of calm from his warriors. Drask would never have said it himself, but more than one of the Sa’ba Taalor had commented on his dedication to the god’s demands. It was rare for him to lose his temper. In comparison to some his patience was a truly staggering achievement.
He waited in the raging winds of the Blasted Lands, a growing storm – a Ta-Wren, a Cutting Wind, to be sure – until he knew that his prey had moved on, and then, finally, he descended into the darkness below.
The people of the Fellein had advantages. They were greater in numbers. They had not, however, spent lifetimes adapting to the Blasted Lands.
Drask slipped easily down the rope his prey had left behind; his silver hand holding his weight with ease and resisting any possible rope burns.
When he landed in the dust of endless ages, he did so softly, despite his size.
Drask was not the largest of the Sa’ba Taalor; still, he knew, he towered over the foreigners.
None of that mattered as he slipped lower into the tunnel, listening for the sounds of the people ahead of him, their footprints obvious in the narrow passage.
The tunnel was not for traveling. It was little more than a path that hot gasses had once used to escape the destruction of Korwa, the great seat of the First Empire.
The ground was uneven and often rounded, making walking upright nearly impossible. One had to move with feet far from the base of the tunnel, often crouching and leaning on the wall for support in order to move forward.
Drask was not bothered by this. Great Ydramil believed that reflection was best learned by overcoming diversity, and adapting. Countless times in his life he had crawled over, under or through the obstacles placed before him by the gods in an effort to train him.
Up ahead of him, not far away, he could hear the Fellein as they stumbled, fell, cursed and barked at each other, impatient to reach their destination, even though they surely had no more idea than he did as to where it was they were going.
Behind him, above him, the air caught the opening they had all used to descend and sent a whining note tumbling down the way they had come.
Drask stood perfectly still and listened to the sounds of the people ahead of him.
“What is that?” A man’s voice. He sounded nervous. He had every reason to be nervous. Any place forbidden by gods must surely be a cause of anxiety.
The female – he was almost certain it was Tega, the student of Desh Krohan, the sorcerer, a cause of some trepidation – spoke softly, but he heard her well enough. “It’s the wind. The sound started a moment before the winds behind us picked up.”
“Aye. Makes sense.” A different male.
They continued on and Drask observed his surroundings. The walls cast a pale light. He had thought at first it might come from lichen growing along the walls, but there was no lichen. Nothing seemed to grow here, though he had seen some of the atrocities that came from the Mounds. No, the pale luminescence came from crystals in the walls. The light would be useless in the Blasted Lands proper, where perpetual twilight and endless storms would have muted them to nothing, but here, in the calm of the labyrinthine tunnels, a patient soul could use the light to guide the way.
As has been stated before, among his people Drask was known for his uncanny patience.
He followed, and he listened.
Tolpen Hart spat as he crouched low
to the ground and studied the tracks in front of them.
“Hard to say.”
Tega looked at the hunter and shook her head.
Nolan looked too, and sighed. “We know it isn’t a deer, man. You only have to look at the size of the print.”
“Yes, Nolan.” Tolpen looked at him and scowled. “But is it one track or a dozen crossing over each other? I can’t tell without more light.”
Nolan bit back an angry remark. The man was right. He was simply growing impatient. The world he knew was somewhere above him. Here, down in these maddening depths, there was only dirt, rock and glowing stones that hurt his eyes if he looked at them for too long.
He had not signed up for the Imperial Army to walk where the ground was above him. It felt too much like being buried in a grave. That notion alone was enough to make his skin shiver. Bodies should be burned, not buried. It wasn't natural.
Nolan pushed the thought away. He had signed on to the army because it was his duty. He had been chosen for this particular mission because the Empress herself thought him worthy. His father would have surely taken him outside and cleared his mind of any notions of what he was supposed to do in the Imperial Guard. His was a position of great honor and he would do well to remember it.
“We’ve torches.” Vonders Orly was, in Nolan’s opinion, the only reason the sorry lot of them were still alive. The man’s family had sought fortunes in the Blasted Lands for years, and had located enough baubles and treasures to live a life of ease. There were few in the Fellein Empire who could have predicted what would happen when they started their quest to examine the Mounds, but Orly was the one who warned them against the worst of the storms and saved them from foolish errors again and again.
“We do,” Tega agreed. “But if we use them, what might we attract to us?” The passage they were moving through had slowly opened up until the light from the crystals faded into a haze. They could see scant inches in front of their faces and the gloom was not something they were adjusting to. It was simply there, a palpable darkness that swallowed their vision.
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