The scene before him caught a strangle cry in his throat.
The camp was an inferno of twisted wood and metal. Almost every wagon had been tipped over and lit ablaze. The horse corral had been bashed to splinters, and to a one every animal lay still in its own blood, throat slit. Smoke plumed like a terrible beacon high into the sky, any hint of Her Stars swallowed by the light of the flames. Heat rolled in waves from the wreckage, roaring wild from the blaze.
For a stunned second Raz stood frozen, shock and terror washing over him.
And then he dashed forward, leaping clear over the remnants of what he thought had once been Karren and Sios’ small cart, landing in the broiling sand in the middle of the fiery ring.
“MAMA!” he screamed into the roar, whirling around and calling out, feet and tail kicking dirt and dust into the air. “FATHER! AHNA! AHNA!”
Nothing.
There was only the deafening cacophony of the fire, the cracking of wood and the groan of bending metal as somewhere an axle tore free of its hinges.
“FATHER! JARDEN!”
Nothing.
But then, for a second, there was something. What was that?
“WHERE ARE YOU?” Raz yelled, spinning in the heat as he scanned the ruined camp, trying to find the source of what he’d heard. “WHO’S THERE? WHERE ARE—?”
He stopped. In his frantic search he’d lost his sense of direction, but there was something about the burning wagon in front of him that made him halt, taking in the overturned ruin with wide eyes.
He knew that shape…
“No…” he hissed, stepping forward and automatically reaching out to the blazing silhouette of his parents’ cart. As he did, part of the covering fell, sending a wide jet of sparks into the air. Raz stopped dead, transfixed.
A blackened, charred hand reached out of the burning wood, fingers extended and resting against the upturned side floor like they were scratching at the timber, trying to get out. For a second the fire abated just enough for him to see by, and Raz caught a glimpse of a skull-like face and what looked like a line of silver hanging loosely from it. The metal was melted and twisted, and even as he watched the clanmaster’s chain fell from Agais’ nose, anything it might have been attached to burned away.
“No,” Raz breathed again, and the stone in his stomach became a boulder, dragging him helplessly down to his knees.
No. No. He’d heard something. He knew he had.
Tearing his eyes away from the burning remnants of his home, Raz searched again. This time he heard it clearly. A dull banging, coupled with muffled coughs and pleas. He couldn’t tell who the voices belonged to, but it didn’t matter. If there was a chance, even just a chance, that someone was alive…
Maybe Mama… Maybe Ahna…
His eyes fell on Tolman’s wagon, one of the few that still stood straight. Flames licked at its sides, and with a jolt Raz realized that a number of flat timber beams had been nailed over the front opening, effectively boarding it shut with barely space to see through.
Still, it was enough for him to catch sight of the gray eye that stared out at him between the planks, bulging in panic.
Raz leapt to his feet, ignoring the smaller flames around his ankles to reach the cart. The fire-weakened wood tore off in great chunks in his clawed hands, flying in every direction. In a matter of seconds he’d ripped the entrance almost completely open again. As soon as the space was large enough he reached in, grabbed the first handful of whatever felt human, and pulled.
Mychal emerged, coughing and drenched in sweat. His left arm was badly burned, and his pants had giant singed holes in them, revealing the ugly scarred stump of his missing leg.
“Mychal what happ—?” Raz started.
“Inside!” Mychal cut him off. “Get them out! Get them out!”
Unceremoniously Raz shoved his cousin out of the ring, clear of the fire. Then, with a massive kick that blew clear through the last of the planks blocking his way, he stepped into the burning cart.
It was like walking into a vat of boiling water.
The air shimmered around him in waves, forcing Raz to bring a hand up and cover his eyes as he stooped, avoiding the burning roof. Instantly the long hairs of his fur collar blackened and curled. Through the dry heat he blinked away he saw several forms nearby, and he grabbed for the closest one, pulling the person toward him.
Prida.
She fell, coughing and gasping, into his chest, her dark hair singed, her clothes so badly burned they hardly clung to her decently.
“B-behind me!” she wheezed. One of the other forms stood just out of reach, and this one Raz recognized.
“Grandmother!” he yelled, and the woman turned, gazing at him blearily through the heat. She seemed… calm.
From above there was a loud crack.
“Grandmother, hurry!” Raz exclaimed, dropping his arm from his face to shield Prida as burning splinters rained down on the both of them. It was so hard to breathe. The heat bit at every inch of his body.
The Grandmother stood for another second, then walked forward leisurely, as if she were strolling along in the market. Taking a blind swipe at her, Raz grabbed her shoulder.
And then they were out in the night again, all of them gasping and hacking soot.
As soon as he could see, Raz dragged them out of the ring and dropped them both hurriedly by Mychal, who was shivering in the sand nearby. Several townspeople crowded around him, covering his raw shoulders in a loose blanket to ward off the cold, doing their best to help.
Raz had just turned around, taking a step back toward the cart, when a hand grabbed the hem of his shirt.
“D-don’t!” Prida gasped, breathing hard and looking up at him. Someone had thrown a blanket over her as well. “They’re gone. Delfry, Eara, A-Aigos…” She choked on her son’s name. “They’re gone, Raz. I… I saw them… saw it happen. Don’t go.”
Raz looked down at her, his eyes still stinging. Then he looked at the cart. Even standing there, he knew she was right. There were no more bangs or screams now. Nothing but corpses waited for him inside.
“Prida… Prida what happened?” Raz demanded, falling to one knee beside her and taking her face in his hands. “Tell me what happened!”
But the woman wouldn’t say any more. She stared back at him, her body shaking, tears streaming from her eyes to cut streaks down her soot-covered face and trail along his thumbs.
“Raiders.”
Raz looked at Mychal, who was staring wide-eyed back into the flames.
“Raiders. The slave rings… They came all at once. There must have been fifty of them. I was asleep, but the screaming woke me up. A group of men broke into our wagon and dragged my mother away. Then they…” He started to cry, turning to look at Raz. “They took my father, Raz. Slit his throat and left him and my brother to the fires. They threw me in Tolman’s cart while he was fighting one of them. I tried to get out, but they threw everyone else in after me and boarded the entrance up. The screams, Raz… I can hear them scream…”
Raz’s body was quaking. The heat of the flames had left him feeling icy in the cooler air beyond it. Still, even to this he was numb. Standing up slowly, he turned to look back over the remains of what had been his home, that imperfect, burning ring.
Dead. They were all dead. Nothing but falling ash and breaking wood moved in the fire. He thought he could see their faces, everyone’s faces, screaming out to him from the ruins.
Dead. Everyone…
And then something caught his eye. Something moving slowly, painfully across the ground near the edge of the ring to his left, partially shielded by the billowing smoke and distorting heat.
There was another survivor.
One last figure remained untouched by the flames. A man in chain and leather armor was crawling on his hands and knees between the burning wreckages of the Grandmother’s and what was left of Raz’s parents’ wagons. His left leg dragged uselessly behind him, and Raz saw the handle of a dagge
r protruding from above his knee.
Tolman’s dagger. Thrust in to the hilt.
Raz felt some raw chill flow through him. It wasn’t shock this time. It wasn’t an icy deluge of pain and denial. This… this was something far different. The chasm he had been toying with ripped upwards from inside him, and he suddenly felt himself suspended over its endless opening.
“Mychal, take Prida and the Grandmother and go. There’s an abandoned house three streets down from the butcher’s on the west side of the south market road. The one with the hole in the roof. I’ll be there soon.”
Behind him, Mychal looked up. His eyes were red and puffy against his ash-darkened face. His long bleached hair was seared, and the burns on his arms gleamed in the firelight.
“What are you…?”
But he stopped. Raz’s head had shifted a quarter turn, and what gleamed there in the one amber eye he could see scared Mychal so much he choked on the question.
“I said go.”
Mychal swallowed and nodded. With the help of one of the onlookers he stood up, leaning on Prida in place of his crutch, and helped the Grandmother to her feet. The old woman was shaking now, her eyes focused on something far past what was in front of her as she half smiled at nothing. The look on her face shattered the fragile vestiges of what was left of Mychal’s heart.
Her mind was gone.
Fighting the tremors of panic and despair that racked his own body, Mychal gently turned the two women away from the carnage that had been their families. They made their way as instructed, the ringing crowd parting to let them pass.
When they were gone, Raz let go, feeling himself swing even further over the dark depths of whatever this blackness was hiding inside him.
He took a step forward, then another one, leaving clawed footprints in the dust and sand to mix with the hundreds of others. The cold came in full, washing over him completely. It numbed him, crawling upwards toward his head.
When it reached his mind, an icy bane seeping into his thoughts, the world changed.
Red outlined every line and shadow. Like a mist descended it clung to the scene around him, highlighting every motion, every flick of the flames. As Raz walked slowly, deliberately hunting down the man who was doing everything he could to crawl away, the cold changed to cool, then warm, then hot.
And then it was boiling, agonizing rage.
The last few steps, Raz didn’t remember. Where he was twenty feet behind the slaver one moment, in the next he was beside him, one foot pressed against his side and shoving.
With a thump the man fell over, screaming and yelling, desperately trying to scramble away.
Raz heard none of it.
Pinning him to the ground by his throat, Raz fell to one knee again. He brought their faces inches away from each other, thin white fangs a whisper from flushed skin, staring into the pale brown of his captive’s eyes.
“Why?”
It was a single word, a long, drawn-out hiss of a question, but the injured man stopped struggling. He was silent, terrified and shivering. When no answer was forthcoming, the clawed hand around the man’s neck tightened.
“WHY?”
This time there was a gurgle of a response. Loosening his grip slightly, Raz waited for it to come again.
“T-told us to do whatever we wanted… said you deserved it… w-we don’t know—AAH!”
The man screamed suddenly as he was lifted and slammed back into the ground, hard. Along the spine of Raz’s neck, the blue-orange crest flared like a drawn blade.
“WHO? WHO SAID WE DESERVED IT?”
Silence again, and this time Raz snapped. With a feral roar that made even the men in the crowd around them step back a pace, Raz lifted the slaver clear off the ground with one hand. The man’s good leg kicked, and he grabbed at his captor’s wrist, trying to relieve the pressure on his throat. Raz moved forward, coming to a halt at the edge of the inferno that was all that remained of Sameyl’s cart. The flames were so close they could both feel the heat eating at them. The blackened forms of Sameyl and his sons leered from beneath the burning wood, dead faces laughing at what they saw.
“Keep an answer from me again,” Raz hissed, squeezing so tightly he felt claws puncture skin, “and I swear by the Sun, Moon, and all Her Stars that I will feed you to the flames.”
Another gurgle of a reply, and Raz lowered his arm so the man could partially stand.
“Ayzenbas!” the slaver gasped, his face turning purple and his eyes popping. “Crom Ayzenbas! Y-you got in our way! He said you got in our way!”
The agony spiked, as did the rage. For a long moment Raz stood, his thoughts tumbling. He dropped deeper into the dark, the fragile human conscience that had taken so long to build barely holding up a fight.
“Where?” he finally asked. “Tell me where I can find Ayzenbas.”
This time the answer was prompt.
“Blue Horizon! A brothel in the west slums! Crom does all his work out of the back rooms! Now, please! Let me go! Please!”
Raz was silent for another moment. He could feel the balance inside him shaking.
“And you?” he breathed, looking past the fires and up at the Star-gone night. Somewhere, in a section buried deep now by the brutal side of his soul that was roaring forth, Raz realized that his deities had abandoned him to the dark. “Who did you butcher?”
“Wha?” the man gasped. “I-I’m paid! It was all business! Don’t—!”
“Who?”
The question was a deadly hiss, but the slaver was silent, breathing hard and clutching at Raz’s wrist.
“WHO?”
Another silence, and Raz’s world shifted into an even darker shade of red. He took a step forward, ignoring the flames that licked at his furs and feet. The man screamed, the fire biting at his legs, searing the hair off the back of his head instantly.
“I don’t know who!” he shrieked. “Some girl who threw a rock at me! An old man! The one who stabbed me in the leg! Please!” the man seemed to sag as he started to sob. “Please… my family… let me go back to my family… please…”
In a single fluid motion, Raz ripped Tolman’s dagger out of the man’s leg, brought it up, and slashed the slaver’s throat wide open. The cut was so vicious Raz felt the blade nick bone, and blood gushed from the wound to flow over his wrist and fingers.
Pulling the twitching form close, he waited until the dying eyes met his.
“My family will have to do,” he hissed.
Then Raz drove the blade into the man’s chest and shoved him backwards into the fire.
It was a long time before the figure stopped writhing in silent torment. Unable to scream, he thrashed, clutching at his body while the flames tore into him. The smell of burning flesh and hair filled the air once more, and finally he seemed to crumple and lie still. The fires had eaten away his clothes and boiled into his skin, but Raz didn’t look away until the face was gone, blackening like those of the family the man was curled beside.
When he did finally pull his eyes from the figure, Raz didn’t do it because he’d seen enough. His gaze only faltered as a shine caught his attention, a glimmer of something lying on the ground a ways away, half buried in the ash and sand by the remains of Jarden’s home.
Raz moved as though in a dream, only barely aware that he’d made the conscious choice to investigate the curiosity. In the half existence he was suspended in, he found himself standing over the source of the gleam, staring down at it.
The bronze-tipped end of a bleached-wood staff.
The rest of the weapon was still there, too, mostly hidden by the mixed dust that had been kicked over it during the struggle. Reaching down, Raz picked it up carefully, lifting it free. As he did, something else came out of the ashes. Something clinging to the other end of the staff.
The better part of Jarden’s left arm fell to the ground with a thump.
For a full minute Raz looked down at the limb, his eyes fixed on the fingers that had so shortly bef
ore been alive and well. Then his gaze moved up, following the length of the arm. He traced the familiar scars—the two that extended farther down than the others, then the rest of them—as high as he could.
The flesh blackened and ended, cut off by fire.
But still Raz followed the path his eyes had taken, and it was only a second before he found what he was looking for. There, half buried under blackened wooden planks and embers, the charred, beaten skeleton that had been his uncle’s body lay spread. In death the man did not seem happy or at peace. The wet sockets of his skull stared straight up into the night sky and his jaw hung loose, fleshless face screaming at the dark and smoke above.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 18
