Everywhere he looked there were signs of violence and panic. The village was not just dead — it had been murdered.
The people, however, seemed to have escaped. There were no bodies among the wreckage.
Shane sighed and wiped the sweat from his brow. Perhaps it was just as well. This way, he didn’t have to explain what he, a young noble from Stetriol, was doing wandering the Niloan jungle alone. But he had been looking forward to a meal. His stomach grumbled again, and this time it was echoed in a rumble of thunder overhead. Shane looked up. The village stood in a clearing, so he had a view of the sky for the first time in hours. The fading light of the sun illuminated storm clouds rolling in from the coast.
He walked among the empty huts until he found one that had been left intact. It had no door, just an open doorway, and Shane knew that said much about the people who had lived here. They had trusted their neighbors. That had apparently been a mistake.
He stepped into the doorway as thunder rumbled once more and the wind picked up. Shane could smell the rain coming and was glad for shelter, whatever had become of the people who’d built it.
The space, a single room, was simple. There was a bed of straw against the far wall, and various agricultural tools hanging from hooks. He searched a series of chests and found clothing, a tattered hidebound book, and a child’s doll, but nothing to eat. He caught a whiff of something foul, and realized it was his own body — he was soaked through with sweat.
Shane pulled off his boots with some effort, and his toes throbbed with relief. He removed Uraza’s talisman and put it and all the others into his left boot, then shoved both boots under the straw bed. He untied his tunic and shrugged out of it, hanging it from an empty hook. Immediately the night breeze from the open doorway cooled his clammy skin, spreading gooseflesh across his chest.
He crawled into the bed, traced a finger down the winding crocodile tattoo on his torso, and wondered what his life might have been like if he’d bonded with a koala instead.
Shane dreamed of a wolverine.
It was a warm summer day in Stetriol, and from his vantage atop a high hill, he could see his entire kingdom.
To the north was a crumbling castle covered in cobwebs.
To the west was wasteland, flat and barren.
To the south was an abandoned village, its huts built in the Niloan style but with iron instead of wood.
To the east was the glittering sea, and upon it the looming silhouette of a great warship.
Anywhere he looked, Shane saw suffering. His eyesight was too sharp.
He removed the talisman from around his neck, and suddenly he couldn’t see far at all. He could only see what was directly in front of him: a beautiful, verdant field of tall grasses and sunflowers.
And a squat, savage-looking wolverine.
“Fight me,” the creature growled.
Shane realized he held a saber in his hand.
“I’m just a kid,” he told the wolverine.
“Childhood is over,” it said. “Fight me.” And Shane realized it spoke with his uncle Gar’s voice.
The wolverine leaped at him, claws and teeth shining in the sunlight. Shane went to block with his sword — and the wolverine impaled itself on the blade. Its weight and momentum pulled the sword right out of Shane’s hand, and the animal fell to the ground in a bloody heap.
“I always knew you hated me,” it said in Gar’s voice. “I was vicious and cruel. But it was my nature. I could not help being that way.”
“I’m sorry,” Shane said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“But you hurt me anyway, Shane,” Gar answered. “You killed me, whether you meant to or not. And that,” he said, “is your nature.”
The night was still and silent, but Shane jolted awake, certain that something was wrong.
He held his breath and waited for his eyes to adjust to the faint moonlight coming in through the doorway. There was no one else in the hut. He could feel his boots still beneath the straw, and knew the talismans were safe … for the moment.
He crept slowly to his feet, painfully so, lifting his body from the straw an inch at a time so as not to make a sound. Next he retrieved his left boot and removed the tangle of talismans, placing them in a pile on the dirt floor. The silver wolf gleamed in the moonlight. He put it on, and it was cold against his chest.
The silence of the night receded immediately. He heard an owl taking flight, the soft murmur of a stream, and a sound like chewing.
And there was the unmistakable scent of death.
Shane had been on battlefields. He knew what death smelled like. But he’d never experienced it like this before, through the heightened senses of a wolf. It was overpowering, like a physical force pressing against him, and he stumbled back, gagging. He pulled the talisman over his head and dropped it back into the pile, where it met the others with a clink of metal on metal.
Instantly the smell was gone, and Shane froze, realizing how much sound he’d just made.
There was nothing for it but to leave. Something was amiss in this village, and his sleepiness was well and truly gone.
He crammed his feet into his boots and reached for his saber, which he’d set on the bedside chest. But something stopped him from gripping the weapon — a half-remembered dream about Renneg, the wolverine he’d spent so much time pretending was his own spirit animal.
Renneg was dead now. Murdered by the Greencloaks. Conor and Rollan had almost bragged about it when they’d told him.
The sound of laughter echoed through the village.
Gooseflesh spread across Shane’s skin, and this time it had nothing to do with the cool night air. He felt eyes upon him and he turned, very slowly, toward the hut’s only exit.
There was a creature in the open doorway, outlined in the silver light of the moon. It looked like a large dog that had been put together all wrong. It had big, beefy shoulders and a small waist, and it stood somewhat askew. Its ears pointed off at strange angles, and it had tufts of bristly hair around its neck, like a lion’s mane that had been hacked up and smeared with mud.
It made a sound like human laughter — eerily so.
The gold of Cabaro’s lion caught the moonlight, and Shane lunged for it. In a single fluid motion he lifted it from the ground, dropped it around his neck, turned toward the creature, and roared.
The sound that came from his mouth was weak and high-pitched. He sounded more like a kitten than a lion.
Shane realized with a chill that he’d mistaken copper for gold in the low light.
At the same time, the creature’s face came into stark relief. He could see the droplets of drool glistening from its razor-sharp teeth as it laughed again, as if genuinely mocking him.
And then the creature lunged.
Shane dodged it, and it wheeled around to keep its eyes on him from the center of the hut. He was completely cut off from his sword, the talismans were a hopeless tangle on the floor, and the space was far too small for Grahv. But now he had a clear path to the doorway. He held his fists out in front of him, trying to appear menacing, and inched sideways toward the exit.
He was still yards away when a second creature stepped through the doorway.
Shane’s heart sank as the animals hooted and cackled. He could smell death again, even without the aid of Briggan’s talisman. These creatures reeked of it.
He lifted his fists higher and growled. He didn’t need the Golden Lion to be fearsome. And he was ready to go down fighting.
There was a sudden motion across the hut and a sharp crack, and the creature that had just stepped over the threshold yelped and crumpled to the ground. If not for the Copper Falcon around his neck, Shane would have entirely missed the small iron ball, about the size of a walnut, that had come hurtling through the open doorway and now rolled away from the animal it had knocked unconscious.
The other creature turned toward the commotion, but that was all the time it had to react before a heavy staff swung down in
an arc and smashed it in the head, hammering it to the ground in a single blow.
Shane was slow to process what had happened. His eyes followed the staff back to the hands that held it — the hands of a young boy who stood in the doorway.
“Are you all right?” the boy asked.
Shane brought his fists down in relief — and then he saw the boy’s eyes go wide as he got a good look at the crocodile tattoo on Shane’s chest.
The boy led Shane out of the village as the first hint of dawn lightened the sky.
“Follow me,” he said quietly. “It’s not safe here.”
“No kidding,” whispered Shane. “What were those things?” He shuddered at the memory of the creatures that had attacked him — and, somehow worse, had seemed to mock him.
“Hyenas. Scavengers. I buried the people who died here, but I …” The boy’s voice faltered. “I didn’t bury them deep enough, and the hyenas found them.”
Shane remembered the horrible smell, the sounds of chewing in the night. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “That’s awful.”
“And you?” the boy said after a moment’s heavy silence. He didn’t look back, but Shane saw his fingers tighten on his staff. “Are you a scavenger? Come to steal from the dead?”
“No,” Shane said, feigning innocence before he remembered that he was in fact innocent. “No, I was only seeking shelter from the rain. What happened here?”
“Conquerors,” the boy said gravely.
Shane found he didn’t have anything to say to that.
They left the clearing and walked among the trees. Shane saw evidence that the rain he’d slept through had been a heavy one. The leaves still dripped with it, and the tall grasses were so wet that his boots were soaked within moments.
The village, he decided, must have been protecting Greencloaks. It was the only explanation for the savagery with which the Conquerors had descended. Resistance in Nilo had been sporadic — in general his army was having an easier time of it than they had in Zhong. But there were those who fought back. Those who sided with the Greencloaks, even sheltered them. And those villages were dealt with harshly.
Once they’d gone a fair distance, the boy turned to face him. He was several years younger than Shane and several inches shorter than his own quarterstaff. But he handled the weapon confidently, and raised it between them now in what Shane recognized as a fighting stance.
“You’re Marked,” he said. “Tell me what your spirit animal is. It looked like —”
“An Amayan alligator,” Shane answered flatly. He hoped the boy couldn’t tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator from a tattoo alone. Shane held his hands out at his sides, trying to look unthreatening. “I’m from Concorba,” he said, remembering the name of the Amayan city where Zerif had sought out Essix.
“Every Marked person I’ve seen is either a Conqueror or a Greencloak.” He waved his staff. “So which side are you on?”
Shane knew what the boy wanted to hear, but he couldn’t bring himself to pose as a Greencloak. He decided a half-truth would serve him best. “I’m trying to stop the war,” he said. “Listen … What’s your name?”
The boy watched him suspiciously. “Achi.”
“Listen, Achi. My name is Shane. Do you know why the Conquerors are here, in Nilo?”
Achi seemed uncertain. “They follow the Devourer,” he said at last. “He wants to gobble up the world. He wants to rule everything.”
Shane shook his head. “Not exactly. He wants the world to be free — free of the Greencloaks.”
Achi narrowed his eyes, and Shane realized he was sounding an awful lot like a Conqueror.
“And the Greencloaks want … the Greencloaks want to protect the world, but they’ll only do it on their terms. Both sides are so stubborn. The Conquerors are after the Greencloaks, and the Greencloaks are fighting the Conquerors, and places like Nilo get caught in the middle. What I’m trying to do is end this war once and for all.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Achi said, in a tone far too weary for a boy his age. He turned from Shane, hooked his staff through a loop in the back of his belt, and climbed the nearest tree with the grace of a cat.
Shane looked up and realized they’d been standing beneath the boy’s campsite. He’d strung a hammock between two large branches, left out pots and pans to gather rainwater, and nailed a series of leather satchels around the trunk to hold the rest of his possessions.
“You don’t … live here?” Shane asked, incredulous.
Achi gazed somberly into the distance. “I’m the village elder now,” he said. “I have to keep watch.” He shot Shane a patronizing look. “Lucky for you.”
Shane ran his hand through his hair, brushing the bangs out of his eyes. The kid was obviously capable, but Shane couldn’t leave him alone in the jungle. Could he?
“Achi.” Shane sighed. “You’ve already done so much for me. I hate to ask for anything more, but … Which way to Zhong?”
Achi clucked his tongue and pointed. “That way,” he said. “Like, all the way that way.”
“I could use a guide,” Shane said. “I’d make it worth your while.”
Achi frowned.
“The village isn’t going anywhere. And I’m way more likely to get eaten without you.”
“That’s true,” Achi said. He considered it for a moment. “I’ll take you as far as the Mumbi.”
“I have no idea what that is, but it sounds fair. Oh, and Achi?” Shane flashed what he hoped was a winning smile. “Do you have anything to eat up there?”
They walked throughout the morning, stopping only briefly to stretch and share a drink from Achi’s waterskin. Shane was sweating again, and he knew the heat would get worse as the day went on.
As Shane put the waterskin to his lips, Achi’s eyes found the cut on his arm.
“Did the hyenas do that?” he asked.
Shane sighed. “A tree, actually.”
Achi didn’t smile exactly, but his eyes sparked with humor and the seriousness seemed to lift from his features. “You can’t leave a cut like that unclean. Hold on.” He went off a little ways into the brush and reappeared with a thick, broad leaf shaped a bit like the blade of a short sword.
Achi bent the leaf until it snapped in two. A clear gel bled from the broken ends, which he slathered over the cut on Shane’s outstretched arm. Shane felt a soothing, cooling effect almost immediately.
“See, I knew I needed your help out here,” he said. “Did you learn that trick from your father?”
Achi’s entire bearing changed in an instant. His shoulders tensed, his lips thinned, and his eyes went stony.
“What do you know about my father?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Shane said quickly. “I just assumed … You said you were the village elder, and I thought maybe you were following in his footsteps.”
Achi resumed applying the gel, but was considerably less delicate than before.
“I don’t believe in following in anybody’s footsteps,” he grumbled. “And for your information, the village elder doesn’t mess around with plants. He’s like … the leader.”
“Okay,” Shane said, trying to sound neutral, watching as Achi discarded the leaf and fished a long cloth bandage from his bag.
“Our healer was Miss Callie. She didn’t have any kids, so she taught me stuff sometimes.”
Shane watched Achi as the boy looped the bandage around Shane’s arm. He recognized the look of loss in the boy’s eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.
“Miss Callie sounds like a wonderful person,” Shane said, holding up his bandaged arm and admiring Achi’s handiwork. “You honor her when you use what she taught you.”
Achi’s eyes softened, just a little.
Hours passed, and miles, and for Shane there was no sign that they were making any progress, just the endless indistinguishable greenery. He only knew for certain that midday had passed when Achi handed him a stick of dried meat and called it lu
nch.
“Why don’t you let your spirit animal out?” Achi asked after a long stretch of silence.
“In this heat?” Shane responded, huffing as he followed the boy up a muddy incline. “He’d be awfully sluggish. And the terrain would trip him up.”
“If I had a spirit animal, I wouldn’t ever put him away.”
It never ceased to amaze Shane, the way people throughout Erdas talked about spirit animals as if they were a great gift. He’d spent his entire childhood terrified of summoning one. But in the absence of bonding sickness, people celebrated the bond — and coveted it.
Most of the Marked seemed to consider their spirit animal an equal and a friend for life. Shane’s bond with his own animal was much simpler. He regarded Grahv as a tool. He didn’t call the creature into its active state unless he needed its muscle. Or its teeth.
But he knew what question Achi was waiting to hear, and he asked it.
“What animal do you think you’d summon?”
Achi smiled. As Shane expected, the question thrilled him. “Maybe a monkey? I like to climb.”
Shane grinned. “I noticed.”
“But I fight like a boar.”
“A boar?”
“You saw me.”
“I saw you throw a rock from a very safe distance.”
“I saw you!” Achi countered. “Here’s how Shane fights.” And he flailed his arms and ran around in a tight circle, a look of mock panic on his face.
Shane laughed, a full belly laugh. Achi’s sudden playfulness had caught him completely off guard.
Then Shane felt the heat of the jungle quickly recede, and a chill swept through him, starting behind his eyes and creeping down into his toes. His muscles tensed, and he felt a thoroughly unpleasant sensation in his head, as if a cold, slimy tentacle were uncoiling within his skull.
Shane’s head moved of its own volition from side to side, tilted back to look up into the canopy above, then turned to regard Achi, who had drawn his quarterstaff to reenact his victory over the hyenas.
The Book of Shane 2 Page 2
