That was why Mena pressed her bizarre form of warfare in every way and shape she could imagine, adjusting it daily as the circumstances changed. She once flew a mad gauntlet over the Auldek camp, dodging and dipping, cutting at sharp angles to avoid the fréketes pursuing her. Behind her she trailed a falling snow of sorts, hundreds of short letters on small bits of paper, blowing out of the pack bags she had flipped open. Each note contained a personal entreaty to the quota slaves to desert the Auldek and come over to their own people. Each of them signed with the writer’s name, written in their native tongue, with the invitation to bring the note across to the Acacians and be personally welcomed home.
As far as she could tell, the fréketes did not often fly at night. She knew they could because one had done so on the night of the Scav’s first fiery attack, but they had never again dropped out of the dark, something Mena had feared. Instead, she owned the dark skies herself. On a night of low cloud she flew in through the mist over their encampment. She circled several times, testing, on edge for the beat of any wing other than Elya’s. Nothing.
An hour later she returned with Perrin dangling from Elya’s claws. They both dropped to the ground well inside the Auldek encampment. By the time Elya swooped back in to retrieve them, they had slit the throats of five sleeping watchmen and had tossed a sack full of poisoned meat out to steam on the frozen ground. Food for lions, she hoped.
Nor was there anyone in the air to answer her an hour later when she dropped a flaming kettle filled with pitch into one of the pens that held the antoks. She watched the large backs of the creatures from above, the tiny glimmer of the wick falling with the pot. When it hit the ground, the pitch must have splashed out underneath their legs. It ignited in one large sheet beneath them. She stayed above long enough to verify the deadly furnace of kicking, bellowing creatures that she had created. One of them crashed through the pen wall, and in the next instant the creatures were rampaging through the camp, all sizzling hair and flesh.
Confusion. Damage. It must be taking a toll on them. Mena despised it. There was no honor in an assassin’s tactics, in making war on animals and supplies. A strange thing to a call a war, really, this running skirmish through the arctic. It was nothing Mena had trained for or read about or studied. Not a style of fighting she had ever imagined. Fighting was not even the right word for it, but she did not know what else to call something so deadly. So desperately important. When she doubted her tactics, she had only to think of the lives of her soldiers to remember why she did these things. She had as many reasons for each treachery as she had souls in her army. For them, she would do anything.
Ten days since that first battle. Hundreds of lives lost. The ranks of the injured and incapacitated growing. Mena could not claim that they were winning, but they were not losing either. Since not losing was about as positive a situation as she could envision, she kept her people focused on the small victories they were accumulating. Each slave warrior they killed, any animal they lamed, every carriage or station they crippled, all the delays and inconveniences they created: small victories. On the rare occasions when they killed an Auldek: jubilation. Howlk had died; the frékete Nawth had been taken out of the war. Things that had seemed impossible could be accomplished. If they could keep doing what they were doing … If Aliver and his army ever arrived …
For the second time, Mena found herself standing inside a ring of her officers, interrogating a bedraggled, stammering, nearly frozen Rialus Neptos. This time, however, he brought a companion. The woman stood beside Rialus, unflinching under the men’s scrutiny. She wore a full body suit of some sort, so thick it would have hidden her completely, except that in the relative warmth of the tent she had pulled off her hood and stripped back the top of it. She stood with her shoulders and arms exposed, her chest covered by a thin tunic that showed both the sweat around her neck and the outline of her breasts. Meinish, if ever a woman was: gray eyed, delicately featured, with hair so blond it seemed to light the room with its own luminescence. She searched the collected faces with her eyes, touching on Mena briefly before moving on. Her gaze caught on Haleeven.
“Who are you?” Mena asked.
Rialus had been trying to say something, but he jerked to a halt. “Her?” he asked.
“Yes, but I asked her, not you.”
“Sh-she doesn’t speak much Acacian. Maybe none. I don’t know. I never—”
“Meinish, then? Haleeven, speak to her.”
He did, and she answered readily enough, her voice calm and deliberate. After a few exchanges, Haleeven said, “She wishes to join us. She was a slave to the Auldek, she says, but only a slave. Never willingly your enemy. She was like Rialus, trapped by the Auldek.”
Rialus ceased trembling. His head turned slowly to the woman, and he stared at her. He could not have looked more perplexed.
“She said that?” Edell asked.
“She did.”
“What’s her name?”
Haleeven asked her. “Fingel. She has served Rialus Neptos since he arrived in Avina, all the way to here.”
“We’ll have to ask her a thing or two about him, then,” Edell said, fixing Rialus with a dry, hostile gaze.
The two Meins talked a little longer. Haleeven screwed up his mouth at something she said. It looked like a grimace, but as he held the expression it showed itself as a smile. “She claims that Rialus is a good man.”
“She has reason to think we’d doubt it?”
“He told her as much himself. Rambled on often, even talked in his sleep sometimes.”
Rialus actually could look more perplexed, after all. His face reddened, and it was not from the warmth in the tent.
“I really look forward to talking with her at length,” Edell said.
Mena could see that there was something more behind her façade. “What else? She has more to say, I think.”
Fingel fixed her eyes on Mena for the first extended time. She listened to Haleeven’s translation and deliberated her answer by pressing it between her thin lips for a moment. When she answered, Rialus, obviously understanding her Meinish, sat down on a campstool. He stared at her with an expression of complete mystification.
“She represents a contingent of domestic slaves,” Haleeven said. “A few hundred of them who want to desert the Auldek. She is a scout to find out if they would be received kindly. She’s asking for refuge among us. They’ll be coming tonight. She wants to make sure that they are not attacked when they approach.”
“She wants us not to attack a few hundred figures walking into our camp in the middle of the night?” Mena asked. “That could be a very foolish thing for us to do.”
Haleeven translated. Fingel dug around inside her body suit for a moment, and brought her hand out with a note pinched in her fingers. She offered it to Haleeven and then spoke at length. Haleeven listened a long time before offering his translation. “She says she found this, one of the notes you dropped among them. She’s not the only one who hid them and began hoping they were true. She says they will fight any way they can. Those who can will put poison in their masters’ kettles. They’ll take a few souls out of them. You asked for them to trust you in these notes; she asks that you trust her now as she returns it to you.”
The Meinish chieftain handed Mena the note. She rolled it over in her fingers. She let it look like she had to weigh the hazards carefully, but really she was hiding a swell of euphoria. This was what she wanted. This was the beginning of it. If some came now, more would follow soon. “Haleeven, tell her she is very welcome among us. They all are. We’ll accept every one of them home. When we have a moment of peace to do so, we’ll drop to our knees and ask forgiveness of them. I mean that literally.”
“Won’t she and Rialus be missed today?” Perrin asked.
“The other slaves will cover for them today. Say Rialus is sick, keep the door to his room closed. They won’t be found out today, and tonight they flee.”
“Only a couple of hundred?” Ede
ll asked.
Haleeven had the explanation for this already, too. “They kept the conspiracy very tight. They could have gotten more, but it was too risky.”
“Any warriors with them?”
Fingel must have understood the question. She guffawed and answered straightaway. “No,” Haleeven translated, “those ones will not come over. They are too far up the Auldek’s asses. But, she says, they will all suffer from the lack of well-cooked food, laundered clothes.” He smiled. “I think she’s right.”
“A couple of hundred may not be much,” Perrin said, “but it’s a start. It will put the idea in others’ heads.”
“Let’s hope it’s the trickle that starts the flood,” Mena said.
For a time the conversation turned to the practical matters of aiding the deserters. Gandrel suggested setting up a distraction like the explosions the Scav created on the first night that Neptos came across. A good idea, Mena thought, but not easy to arrange. The Auldek were more vigilant about patrolling their camp at night—or their lions were. The pitch was guarded particularly well. The small amount the Scav had stolen was all but used up. Mena had a single flame bomb left, and had not decided how best to use it.
Fingel, once she knew what they were discussing, explained that they had arranged for such a distraction themselves. One of the men who tended the woolly rhinoceroses was going to let them loose after feeding them a concoction that would put fire in their bowels. The creatures would purge themselves in great gouts of excrement. It would be messy, and they would be angry, hard to gain control of. While they rampaged, the others would make their escape.
The officers sat in silence for a moment, all of them, likely, imagining that scene. “There was never a war like this one,” Gandrel said. “Or if there was, they didn’t write it all down in the official records.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t either,” Edell said.
Looking at Rialus, Mena edged her tone and asked, “This is what you thought would buy your pardon? A few hundred cook slaves and bed servants. I thought you understood that I expected more from you, Rialus.”
The man blinked rapidly. He really did look confused.
“Rialus?”
It took him a while, but eventually he managed to say, “I—I brought other information.”
“Tell it, then,” Mena said, crossing her arms to wait through the long delay of his stammer.
End of Book Three
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SIX
The hunting lodge of Calfa Ven had once perched on a stone buttress high above the thick woodland of the King’s Preserve. The “nest of the mountain condor,” as the translation of its Senivalian name went, had catered to Acacian nobility for more than two hundred years. Standing on its balconies with wild valleys stretching out beneath her had been the closest Corinn had come to experiencing flight before her dragons brought it to her for real. It was a place of memories, of long horseback rides, of pastoral opulence, rich meals served by rustic staff, of cordials sipped beside crackling fires, of walks with her father and even images of her mother in health. A place of sunrises and sunsets and the ever-changing play of the light on the crowns of trees and over the granite outcroppings that jutted up like islands amid waves of foliage. It had been here that Corinn had bested Hanish at archery, thinking she hated him at the same time she was falling in love with him.
Now, having just climbed off Po’s back along with the ghost of Hanish beside her, she could not even recognize the field in which they had loosed their arrows. The lodge itself had been obliterated. Smashed and scoured clean from its granite foundation, nothing remained of it save the bases of the timbers that had secured the building to the stone. The outbuildings, stables and storehouse: all jumbled piles of lumber, broken and strewn about. The woodland in the valley had been scorched, trees snapped, others uprooted, splintered. Some of the largest trees twisted at bizarre angles, as if they had rendered temporarily molten. Great gashes festered in the earth, smoking, reeking of death. It was like this as far as the eye could see, an enormous scar with the former site of the lodge at its center.
Po cried out in frustration as he flew over the valley. In all that expanse no other living thing moved, nothing for him to hunt. He fled from place to place, chased by evil vapors in the air, uneasy. He wanted to leave, but Corinn did not respond to the wish.
In all of it she recognized the same accursed song that had set worms eating through her flesh. In all of it, Santoth rage. Had she any tears left within her, she would have cried. She took the scene in dry-eyed. She had called this devastation upon the place. What right did she have to cry over it now?
“It is changed, but we knew it would be.”
I should not have sent them here.
“You had to send them somewhere,” Hanish said. “This place … was full of memories for you. For us. It came into your head when you needed to name a destination. You could have chosen much worse places to send them, Corinn.” As he talked he walked around her, trying to sift through the ashes with his feet. He did not seem to notice that the toe of his boot did not really push objects about. He left no footprints, touched nothing in the world except for her.
You don’t know all of it, Corinn thought to him.
“No, I don’t. But still, let’s not talk about this.” He straightened and took in the desolation of the valley again. “What we should be asking is, where are the Santoth now?”
That’s clear enough. They don’t exactly walk lightly on the ground. They’re out there. They won’t stop searching. Corinn gestured with her chin, indicating the wide world around them. They’ve gone in different directions. No doubt some are heading back toward Acacia. We soared so high on the way here. Perhaps we flew over some of them. This is like the rage they experienced when Tinhadin exiled them. They may yet kill many people.
“That’s why we’re going to stop them. Call Po back. We should—”
A woman’s voice reached them. “Queen Corinn? Is—is that you?”
They both spun around, searching for the speaker. She was so still that Corinn’s eyes passed over her, only to snap back a moment later. A woman stood with something gripped to her chest, half hidden behind the rubble of a collapsed wall. She stepped out from behind it. “It is you, isn’t it?”
Corinn touched a hand to her cowl, which still hid the lower portion of her face. Realizing that was not a gesture that would serve as an answer here, she nodded.
The woman said something over her shoulder. A second woman emerged. Like the first, she bore a bundle in her arms. Just after, a third head peeked out. She came more reluctantly. As they picked their way forward through the debris, Corinn recognized them both. The first woman: Wren, Dariel’s lover. The second, Gurta, Rialus Neptos’s recent bride. The third was a girl who worked in the lodge, Peter’s daughter. She could not remember her name.
“Steady, Corinn,” Hanish said. He stepped up close, one hand at her elbow, one at the small of her back. “They are not ghosts. They live, and so, I think, do the babes they carry.”
He was right. The bundles in the women’s arms were unmistakable, as was the care with which they cradled them. Corinn felt her breath escape her. She leaned more heavily into Hanish.
“You see?” he asked. “There is still life here.”
When Wren reached them, she bowed her head and said, “Your Majesty.”
Gurta tried to do the same, but her eyes were round circles that would not leave the queen’s face. “What’s happening?” she asked. “They came here and destroyed everything. They killed everyone but us. We would not have survived if Bralyn hadn’t hidden us. She knew of a cave.” She paused, looking from the queen to Wren, a desperate intensity in her eyes. “It was horrible. They … I don’t know what to call it. They tore the world apart. They stayed for days, raging. They were demons. I know it sounds mad, but look around. Only great evil could do this. Queen Corinn, you should not be here. They may come back. The place may be cursed. It is cursed. I
can feel it. Isn’t it cursed, Wren?”
The slim woman kept her smoothly lidded eyes on Corinn. She did not seem to be listening to Gurta at all, except that when prompted she did speak. “Queen, how do you come to be here? Alone?”
Corinn shook her head.
Wren misunderstood her. “I saw you ride in. I know that … thing out there is yours. But are others coming?”
Hanish said, “Show them.”
Corinn did. She pulled down the cowl and tucked it under her chin. All three women drew back, staring, aghast. Yes, that’s the horror of me. They could not hear her, of course, or see or hear Hanish. Unsure how to proceed, Corinn just stood, looking into the women’s faces as if into three mirrors, each of which showed a different reflection.
Wren began the conversation again. “Those ones did this to you, didn’t they? The same ones that came here.”
Corinn nodded.
“Oh, Queen, I’m sorry. They are so awful. You … you’re chasing them, aren’t you?”
Again, the queen nodded.
“Tell me you are going to destroy them.”
Blinking her eyes closed for a moment, Corinn answered with a third nod.
“Good,” Wren said. “I don’t know how you could possibly do that, but if anybody can, I guess you can. That’s what Dariel would say.”
At the mention of her brother, Corinn’s eyes went to the bundle in the woman’s arms. She stepped closer and pulled back the blanket to reveal a tiny child’s sleeping face. So small, with thin tendrils of black hair and a fist, a little ball of a fist, clenched just beside its face. “This is my baby,” Wren said. “Your niece, if you ever wish to call her so. She was born early. I got ill, bad ill. She wanted out of me. She’s all right, though. Small but strong. Like me.” The woman smiled.
The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy Page 54
