The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya)

by Bradley Beaulieu

  “Where are the others?” Styophan asked Rodion.

  Rodion shook his head, his eyes expressing the worry seething inside him. “They were taken northward through the yurts while we were led here.”

  Styophan’s gut tightened like a skein of wet yarn left drying in the sun. “Why?” he managed to get out.

  “They spoke to one another in Haelish, but I don’t know what they said, Styopha.”

  Anahid stared on with a harried look about her.

  “Speak,” Styophan snapped. “We don’t have time to dance around the issue.”

  She glanced toward the entrance. When she spoke, it was barely loud enough for Styophan to hear. “I’ve told you some of the details of their wodjana.” She licked her lips. “But not all. I never thought it necessary, as I thought they would become our allies. Many men of Yrstanla have suffered greatly under their attention. They use foul magic with the blood of those they take. They bleed them, keeping them alive for hours or days at a time, using them to scry. There are those among the Aramahn that believe the soul of the tortured is drained in this process. We fear that the soul becomes lost, perhaps never to be reborn.”

  “They won’t do that to us.”

  “They will.” Her neck muscles were taut. Her eyes were wild, and her nostrils flared. “They will think me more powerful than the men. They will think you more powerful than me. We’ll be saved for last. They’ll hope to find what they want, but if they don’t, they’ll continue with us, one by one, bleeding us to see their future.”

  “We’re too valuable to Bahett.” He looked to the men. “All of us. He’ll take us back with him to Alekeşir, and he’ll ransom us back to the Grand Duchy.”

  “You, perhaps,” Anahid said. “Not me. Not Rodion or Vyagos or Oleg.”

  “I won’t let them leave you.”

  “You are a prisoner!” Anahid shouted. “A prisoner! Do you hear me? You have no sway among these people! We came here arms extended in friendship and they cut our hands from our wrists. Do not think that I for my Aramahn blood, nor you for your Anuskayan, will be spared from their attentions. We will not. Look beyond their kings, Styophan Andrashayev. They are guided by their wodjan, and only them, and they will demand blood at a time like this, upon this embrace between Hael and Yrstanla. It can be no other way. And they will use us to do so, for we are at the heart of their troubles.”

  Styophan had never seen Anahid in such a state. She always seemed so calm and centered. He could only think of shaking her, to draw her away from the horrors in her mind, but all of them were bound to iron rings, separated by leagues though they sat mere steps away from one another.

  “They’ll—”

  He stopped, for just then a wailing carried to them from the direction of the Place of Kings and its menhir. Though soft at first, it was a mere precursor to the outpouring of suffering that followed. It was joined moments later by another voice. He recognized them both. Vyagos’s higher voice joined by Oleg’s baritone, the two of them rising and falling in a terrible rhythm.

  He’d been so sure of what he’d been telling Anahid, but he realized now it had all been a foolish hope. He knew as well as Anahid how cruel the Haelish could be. He just hadn’t wanted to give up hope. Not yet.

  He fell against the post to which he was bound. He closed his left eye tight—feeling the muscles around his ruined right eye pinch—and knocked his head against the wood, praying to his long-dead father to make this stop. The wailing scoured him from the inside. It gnawed, as if his men were trapped within him and were digging their way out with teeth and nails.

  These were his men. His. He had taken them on as his sons the moment he’d nodded his head to Ranos, the Duke of Khalakovo, in his throne room. Dear Fathers, how he’d failed them…

  He stood, though it was difficult and awkward to do so. He pulled at his restraints, pulled against the stout yurt pole, yanking again and again until his wrists screamed from it. Eventually the sound clawed its way up his throat and found release in a long outpouring of grief and rage and regret. He threw himself into these simple motions, becoming little more than a beast of bone and muscle, pulling against bonds that utterly refused to release him.

  His head tilted up toward the sky as the cries of his men reached a new crescendo. “Leave them!” he cried to the worked leather of the yurt’s roof. “Leave them be!”

  But the sound of pain continued, on and on and on.

  He strained harder than ever. He thought surely his limbs would break, that his joints would fail, leaving him powerless once more, but then the pole moved. A scrape no wider than his thumb showed as the massive pole gouged the earth. This energized him. He pulled again, this time keeping more of his rage pent up within him. A long grunt escaped him, for he could not keep it all bound within, but the pole moved further.

  But then one of the voices fell silent.

  Oleg. He no longer heard Oleg’s cries.

  He locked eyes with Rodion and Edik, who stared back with venom in their eyes. Galeb, however, stared down at the hard-packed ground, nostrils flaring, the apple in his throat bobbing up and down, up and down. Galeb was one of the youngest of his men. He’d been a good fighter, and eager to prove himself, but this was more than he could handle. He was completely and utterly stricken with fear.

  Before Styophan could speak to him the yurt flap opened and in stepped Datha and three other warriors, each of them dressed in leggings only—no shoes, no shirt, the crushed and glittering remains of yellow jasper spread across their chests in tight, swirling patterns. The warriors were unfamiliar to Styophan. This in itself wasn’t strange, but they wore their hair differently than did the people of Clan Eidihla, and their leggings were of a different style, made from different leather. These men were even different from one another. Telling, then, that Datha had come with them. It showed how little power Kürad had when his men could not be trusted to perform this simple task—the gathering of sacrifices to slake the wodjan’s thirst for sacrificial blood.

  Datha’s eyes were bright and fierce and in no way sympathetic. Such a change, Styophan thought, from the long trek to Skolohalla. Styophan could smell upon his breath something earthy, perhaps a tincture given to the chief among this infernal ritual’s participants.

  “You will come with us,” Datha said to Styophan.

  Datha and one of the warriors began untying Styophan’s restraints while the other two went to Anahid.

  “Nyet!” Styophan screamed. “Leave her!”

  Datha brought his fist across Styophan’s cheek. His hand was as hard as stone—it dazed Styophan into silence, and in that moment, he found some small amount of clarity. Datha could have struck him much harder.

  “Do not speak,” Datha said to Styophan. “Not until you’re spoken to by the wodjan.”

  Styophan spit at him, and nearly unleashed a stampede of hatred against him, but there was something in Datha’s eyes. Not sympathy, but a concentration, as if he dearly hoped, and not for his own sake, that Styophan would obey, and it made Styophan wonder through his haze of anger whether he’d been wrong. Datha was expressing to him, in the only way he could, the way to save himself. I cannot save the men who were taken, he said, but you might yet be spared.

  He hoped it was so, for if Datha were fooling him, and he was allowing himself to be taken, he would deserve the shame to himself and his family that would follow his death.

  The other Haelish took him, their fingers digging into his arm like steel clamps. Despite his struggling they hobbled his legs and tied his wrists and guided him out of the yurt and into the cold night air. They did so with an ease and a disregard that made it clear just how powerless he was to prevent them. He was a lone sapling, they the avalanche, and they were charging down toward the base of the mountain, toward something momentous and terrible.

  They wove through the yurts, and soon came to the Place of Kings, the vast depression with its menhir pointing like a single, accusing finger toward an uncaring sky. In the
middle ground, circling the menhir, were dozens of massive braziers. Each held a tall wood fire atop it, and the collective light showed the Haelish warriors—hundreds of them—standing like sentinels around the great circle’s edge. Their eyes were closed, and they hummed in low tones, the sound of it collecting until it was very much like the massive wooden horns the mountain villages of Anuskaya used to warn one another of danger.

  With Datha leading the way, his warriors led Styophan and Anahid toward the menhir. Grouped around the standing stone itself were dozens of wodjan. They wore leather skirts, but like the men, their torsos were bare. Their skin was covered in patterns of black paint that glittered opalescent beneath the light of the braziers. Their faces were covered as well, the bold, intricate lines making them look animalistic. He saw the face of a badger on one, the face of a hawk on another, each with the reddened eyes of a woman who’d been breathing in the heady smoking leaves of the wodjan.

  With the deep sounds of the men thrumming through the very air, rumbling Styophan’s chest, the wodjan danced. They circled the menhir, some raising their arms to the sky as if begging the knowledge of the stars, while others spun low like a leaf on a windswept pond. Each of them—every one—had darkened hands, but it wasn’t the same color as the paint upon their stomachs and arms and breasts. This paint was muddier. Browner. And it slowly dawned on Styophan that it was blood. They had blood upon their hands. Blood from his men, who’d done nothing to them.

  As they moved beyond the circling wodjan, the space closest to the menhir was revealed. The Haelish kings stood there, as did many of their queens. Bahett was there with his guardsmen as well, but Styophan paid little attention to them.

  For staked to the ground, naked, his middle cut open, was Vyagos.

  His arms pulled above his head.

  His wrists tied to a wooden stake.

  His ankles were similarly tied, but it was the travesty between them that held Styophan’s gaze.

  A cut trailed from sternum down to his pelvis, opening the cavity and allowing plain view of all that lay within. His viscera had been pulled out and laid upon the ground in a clear pattern, though what in the ancients’ names it might mean Styophan had no idea.

  On the far side, Oleg was also staked to the ground, though—dear mothers—he still breathed. He breathed when his torso was cut stem to stern and his guts were thrown about. A woman stood over him, a bloody knife in her hand, her breasts hanging down as she peered into his eyes and his chest rose and fell as slow as the coming of winter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The other times harm had befallen his men at the hands of the Haelish, Styophan had been consumed with rage. But here, seeing his men like this, he had no idea what to think. He’d heard of the Haelish’s bloody rituals many times. Even in the tent while Anahid pleaded with him to understand, he thought he’d known how cruel they were, but here, standing before Vyagos’s lifeless remains, watching Oleg somehow draw breath, he was unmanned.

  He nearly tripped, hobbled as he was, but the Haelish warriors on either side of him pulled him up and dragged him before King Brechan. Kürad and Elean stood nearby as well. The mystery of the queen’s visitation in the woods, of her strange request to examine her, still haunted him. The other queens were little different—dark eyes with the same color. All but Queen Dahlia, the wife of King Brechan. Her eyes seemed more sunken, and they had the proper yellowish tinge with no signs of the strange orange that Elean exhibited. She coughed as Styophan watched, but she bore a defiant look, as if she’d vowed long ago to fight this disease, to win against it. It stood in stark contrast to the other queens, who seemed sick, certainly, but somehow accepting of it. It was a mystery that dogged him, but at the moment he could spare no thought for it.

  King Brechan wore an elaborate shirt of leather, braided with horsehair along the chest and arms. His crown of thorns rested upon his head, its hidden rubies glinting beneath the firelight.

  “The kings have spoken,” Brechan said in low tones. His eyes were hazy as he looked at Styophan. The whites were red. He’d been drinking, not alcohol, surely, but some brew prepared by the wodjan.

  Styophan saw to his left Anahid being taken to the northern side of the menhir stone. He nearly called out—nearly surged forward to fight for her—but the words of Datha rang true. He was sure that if he were to speak a single word, the wodjan would kill her, and him, and do so painfully. He would wait, for only in this did there seem to be some small chance of survival.

  Brechan continued. “It is judged that you brought the withering here. You and your brothers, the men of Anuskaya. You and your sisters, the women and the Matri. The wodjan have seen it while looking death in the eye, while speaking with her at long length.”

  Styophan felt sick. He meant the death throes of Vyagos and Oleg. The wodjan had used them to sift through the passages of time, to have questions answered from beyond the grave, from beyond this world.

  Brechan nodded to Styophan, his eyebrows pinching, perhaps in pain or confusion from the elixir he’d imbibed. “What have you to say?”

  Styophan looked at the gathered assemblage. Was he to defend himself from this? Was he to defend all of Anuskaya from these accusations? What could he say? They’d done no such thing. The rifts had caused the wasting. And since the conflict on Galahesh, they’d been spreading, faster and farther than ever before. It wasn’t the Grand Duchy that was responsible, but the Al-Aqim. But how could he tell the Haelish this? They would have none of it.

  He looked to Queen Elean, who stared on with a look of intense concentration, as if she cared about the outcome of this conversation very much. Her eyes… Her apparent affliction… He didn’t even know why he cared, but he did. It seemed part and parcel of his fate—his and the fates of his men.

  And then he caught Bahett, this regent from Yrstanla who stood to gain so much from the Haelish. The war between them would be stopped. He could focus his forces eastward to meet the oncoming threat of the Grand Duchy’s push onto the continent. He might even gain allies among the Haelish, as Styophan had planned to secure for Duke Ranos. Standing behind Bahett were three swordsmen in boiled leather armor. They stood easily, eyes watching the proceedings lazily, but Styophan knew these would be the very sharpest and brightest of the Kamarisi’s swords.

  Styophan looked to the other queens. The one to Brechan’s right, his wife, had the same dark eyes as Elean. A brazier burned nearby, shedding light on her face, on her eyes, and Styophan could tell that they were the same hue as Elean’s. He looked to another of the queens, and another. There were seven of them in all, and he could see it now, plain as day. With the exception of Dahlia, they were all afflicted in the same manner as Elean.

  Nyet, Styophan thought. Not afflicted. Suffered. They suffered from this condition, because it was something that had been done to them. They were victims.

  He stared into Bahett’s eyes. He was staring back with a look of cold discomfort, as if he’d rather this night be done and his treaty signed so that he could return to Alekeşir and resume his role at the Kamarisi’s side.

  And then Styophan knew.

  Cold prickled his skin. A shiver shook him from the mere certainty of this newfound insight.

  It was Bahett.

  Bahett had done this.

  Styophan didn’t know how, but he had. He’d poisoned the queens. His resources were considerable, and the knowledge held within the library of Alekeşir and the wise men that groomed it were vast. Could he not find a poison or a venom that could mimic the withering given the right dosage? How else could all of the queens have contracted it? The wasting was indiscriminate. But a poison? That could be delivered precisely given the right access, and it would give Bahett exactly the leverage he wanted: a reason for the kings to join him, or at the very least to cease hostilities while he took care of the upstart islands.

  As Anahid was laid down on the ground, his mind raced. How? How could Bahett have done this?

  Elean was watching hi
m intently. Did she know? Did she suspect where his thoughts were headed? Perhaps she did. Else why would she have called him to her that night in the forest?

  And then, for the love of all that was good, he remembered her words. More and more of the picture filled in, and as he looked over Bahett’s shoulder, full understanding finally came.

  Bahett glanced over his shoulder to where his three Kiliç Şaik stood, curious as to what Styophan was thinking, but then his expression returned to the same look of disinterest he’d had ever since Styophan had arrived—disinterest, Styophan thought, when men had just been put to death in front of him.

  Brechan, meanwhile, stared down at Styophan, his face growing angry. He was waiting for an answer to the charges he’d leveled. But how could Styophan respond? He couldn’t simply accuse Bahett. It would be discarded as a desperate attempt to free himself and his men.

  “The withering started among the islands,” Styophan acknowledged with a nod, “but it isn’t the withering that stands among you now.”

  Brechan’s face constricted into a look of confusion. “It does stand among us, everywhere.” He motioned back to where the women stood. “Even the queens.”

  “Evet,” Styophan replied, “they look as though they have the wasting, but they do not.”

  Brechan’s face grew even darker. “I can see it with my own eyes.”

  “As can I, but they aren’t the symptoms of the withering, King Brechan. They are the symptoms of a poison, rendered to your queen.” He stared at each of the gathered Kings. “Rendered to all of your queens.”

  “We are no fools, Styophan Andrashayev. There are hundreds who’ve taken ill. Dozens have already died from it. Our graves are filled with their bodies, and you tell me that Yrstanla has poisoned all of them?”