Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (17 page)

Chapter 29: Capture

Tull heard a harsh voice. A foot kicked his ribs. He cried out and clutched Fava, not really yet awake. The sun rode high above them, and the gun had been taken from his hand.

Two men in red body armor bent over him, their faces covered with iron masks. A Crimson Knight shouted, kicked, and Tull sucked air painfully.

“Get up, Thrall!” the knight ordered. Tull rolled to his belly, tried to stand. His legs wobbled and his head spun. As he tried to stand, he found blood streaming from his nose and realized they had kicked him in the face.

For some reason, he recalled his youth, how his nose would bleed each time he got mad, and he felt inside the warm flow of peace, and Tull laughed.

The Crimson Knight struck him in the stomach, pulled him down by the hair, and slapped manacles on Tull’s wrist. Tull sat on his knees, unable to breathe, and found that his laughter turned to tears.

They kicked Fava, rousing her until she struggled to her knees. Tull shouted and tried to strike back, but a Blade Kin held him as the others manacled Fava and chained her in front of Tull.

For the next few hours, Tull staggered forward in blind pain as the Crimson Knights beat them and led them down from the hills.

Tull wondered why he had bothered to run. What could it have won? Freedom? He already had that. The Crimson Knights hurried them along with great energy, as if they were a stream rushing down a mountainside, as if they were a force of nature.

At the river, at least a hundred Blade Kin camped, tents pitched in a circle. The Crimson Knights threw Tull and Fava to the ground, and Tull lay, gasping, grateful for the rest.

After a few moments, he opened his eyes, saw the hem of a long black robe with red trim.

He looked up, and met Atherkula’s eyes. The old sorcerer seemed bowed by fatigue, his eyes rimmed with red. His jaw was set in anger. He demanded, “What were you doing at the isle of the Creators?”

“We went to kill them,” Tull said, “just as you did.”

“You are stronger than I thought,” Atherkula whispered, touching Tull on the chest, looking into him as if in wonder at something he saw beneath the flesh, “if you can raise yourself from the dead. It is a pity that you are not Blade Kin.”

“I tried to join once,” Tull said. “You wouldn’t let me.”

Atherkula closed his eyes, considered. “Of course you are the ones who stole Phylomon from prison. You left him on the island to fight the Creators?”

He opened his eyes and looked at the Blade Kin gathered around. “We’ll have to return to the island. Tantos must be warned.”

Atherkula made a sweeping motion with his hand, and the Blade Kin began tearing down the tents. They dragged Tull and Fava to a shore boat, threw them in the bottom.

One Crimson Knight sat on Tull’s chest, as if Tull had been born only for that purpose, to serve as a chair in the bottom of a boat. Tull’s lungs ached, and he struggled for each breath.

Fava was moaning behind him as the boat shoved off, and then they were just in the boat, gently rocking, and Tull felt at ease in spite of it all, cradled by the sea.

Fava’s bare leg nestled warm against him, and he longed to caress her, to turn and kiss her. He reached down and took her hand, and she clenched his, and that was all he needed.

He remembered when he was small, how his father Jenks had chained him to the bed in his room, and Tull would fight the chains, ripping the flesh from his ankles and wrists, twice snapping the bones in his own right leg, hoping to escape.

It had accomplished nothing, and now Tull lay feeling warm and fulfilled, accepting. He was drowsy, as if he’d just eaten a large meal and decided to nap on a warm summer day.

The sun above him was pleasant, and in his mind he sang the song to the spring.

“The grass lifts its face to heaven,
Both mammoth and cottontail bear young,
I am a chick in a down-feathered nest
Stretching my wings in the sun.

Ice water flows from the mountains,
Young bison kick their feet up for fun,
I soar like the horned-dragons northward
Before the geese bring the sun.”

As he recalled the words, he thought it strange.

He remembered how his mother had told him as a child that it was the geese who brought the sun north in summer, and it was the dragons who chased the winter away before them.

As a child, he accepted this as a reasonable truth. He could never remember having heard the song, yet its essence had remained among the Pwi.

***

Chapter 30: Upon the Battlefield

Darrissea dogged Phylomon’s trail, treading with stealth the path that he had forged. During the nights, she walked only in moonlight, and thus avoided the watchful eyes of dragons. At dawn, she would conceal herself beneath rotting foliage, mindful of the hunting birds. She had no food, dared not light a fire, and so she was reduced to eating raw the small rodents she found in the grass.

All through her travels, a sense of foreboding grew in her. The land seemed too quiet, dead. She found it hard to believe that another human could be anywhere near. At least not a living human.

She had fallen farther and farther behind the Starfarer, until at last she found the mouth of the cave outside the city of blood eaters. There, she took a half-burned taper from the hands of a dead woman who had been rotting for days. She lit the taper.

A great battle had been waged. Darrissea followed a trail of corpses downward. Several times she found the corpses of Crimson Knights, their weapons crushed and broken, the armor torn from their bodies.

She put on some scraps of armor, shielding herself. She opened one man’s pack, removed some food, and sat to feed on bread and last summer’s apples.

When her third taper had nearly burned out, she found what looked like a star glowing on the ground.

It was an ancient glow cube, an artifact of the Starfarers. She squeezed it, and the light erupted from her hands so that it shone redly through her fingers.

A dozen yards ahead, she found the body of Tantos himself, smashed on the rocks. The crimson skin of his pyroderm had faded to a dull orange. She reached down to touch the Slave Lord’s chest.

With a tearing sound, a scrap of flesh broke away, wrapping itself around her wrist. Darrissea stumbled back in fright as the pyroderm grasped her, then she pulled it off, threw it to the ground.

It sat, wriggling, like a tapeworm.

“Come on, little one,” Darrissea said, and she picked it up, stuffed it into the pocket of her tunic.

For hours more she wandered, until she found a great cavern and held her glow cube aloft. The air was pungent with the reek of ash and rot.

Through all the destruction she had witnessed, nothing prepared her for this: the monolithic trees burned to rubble, the corpses of giants lying sprawled on the ground, a stream where the fish had boiled from the searing heat.

Darrissea followed the stream downward, until she found the Creator.

Perhaps its symbiote still lived, for the thing trembled as if in pain, but the tapering front end of the beast had been blown away. Where a head should have been was only a blackened depression. It stank of soured flesh.

As she wandered beside the pool, she found the body of Phylomon.

The symbiote that enveloped his hairless corpse was normally a washed cerulean blue—summer sky on the horizon. But he was grayish white now, the gray of paper ashes. The outer peel of his skin had dropped off in flakes, as if he were some ancient fish whose scales, being infested with sea lice, had become discolored and outworn.

Beside the body in the mud, lay the ashes of the cloth bag. The nine rods had spilled onto the ground, and Phylomon’s dead hand still clung to one.

So, the Starfarer failed us,
she realized, and wondered why she could not cry.

Perhaps she had known he would fail, had been sure that he would be dead ever since finding Tantos. It had all been hopeless from the start.

One Creator killed, and no more weapons except for the rods. Yet this island was filled with weapons formed by the Creators—blood eaters, the gray birds, a new breed of dragon. Phylomon had not finished his job.

Darrissea reached down for the harmonic resonators, gathered them in her arms like a handful of twigs, and tried to pull the last one free from the Starfarer’s outstretched hand.

The dead hand held tight, and Darrissea shook the rod.

The hand pulled away with it, and she gasped, stared. It was hollow, like a glove.

Darrissea probed the skin with her foot, squashed it, found it was all hollow, and had split down the back. She held her light close to the mud, saw naked footprints coming out of the water, followed them up into the deeply scorched moss.

There, on the ground between two logs, lay a tall naked man with unblemished skin and short golden hair. She touched his shoulder to see if he were alive, and the man raised up, looked at her with wide brown eyes.

“Help!” he cried, in Phylomon’s voice.

***

Chapter 31: Cage of Bones

Mahkawn lay in the arms of Pirazha with the sheets twisted around him, wrapped down around his waist so that the smell of sex was muted, and he could see sweet Pirazha’s beautiful body.

The late morning sun streamed through the window, and already his sons and daughters had run into the streets to play.

He had wakened softly from his dreams, and then lay with an empty belly all during the morning, content.

Though he had lost Tantos’ favor and the right to lead the assault against the Creators, he was taking refuge in other comforts. The smell of cooking fires and breakfasts in other houses made him hungry, and he thought absently of pushing his lover from bed, forcing her to cook him breakfast, when a sturdy fist pounded on the door.

“Enter,” he shouted, not willing to get up and open the door.

A Blade Kin entered, one of his Dragon Captains from the Invisible Arm of the Brotherhood, a human named Bittermon Dent. “Lord Tantos’ ship arrived last night, and our presence is requested at his palace immediately.”

“Our presence?” Mahkawn asked, for he could think of no reason why Tantos would send for the Dragon Captain. “How did you find me? I told no one I was here.”

“You were followed, Omnipotent,” Bittermon said.

Mahkawn sighed. Followed. An Omnipotent followed, as if he were a common criminal. He rolled out of bed, pulled on his tunic, robe and boots, strapped on his sword and eye patch.

When they got outside, the day was bright, clear, with the promise of warmth. On the barren ground beside Pirazha’s doorstep, the first tender leaves of a crocus were beginning to push through the ground.

As they walked to the train depot through the crowded streets, Mahkawn found himself eager for news. “How did the campaign go?” he asked. “Have you any word? Are the Creators dead?”

“No, no word,” Bittermon said, looking away. The Dragon Captain was a damned secretive man, and Mahkawn suddenly resented his game. “You have not even heard a rumor?”

“Very little, Omnipotent.”

Rage took Mahkawn, and he grabbed Bittermon’s ponytail, spun the ass, threw him to the ground, drawing his sword as he did so. “Answer me, damn you!” Mahkawn shouted, and his Neanderthal blood raged through him. His world went red and his hand trembled on the sword, and everything in him screamed out to kill the man.

Bittermon kept his eyes to the ground, “Forgive me,” he said. “The rumors are not good, and I did not want to speak them in public, for fear they are wrong. I beg you, wait until we have reached Tantos’ palace. We shall both learn the news there.”

Mahkawn stood, chest heaving, muscles twitching. He shouted and swung the sword down, turning it at the last moment so that it whizzed over Bittermon’s head, slicing off his ponytail.

“Damn you, damn you,” Mahkawn grunted and realized he had wronged the man with his impatience. He wiped the hair from the sword blade on his cloak, sheathed the old steel, then turned his back on Bittermon.

He had embarrassed himself, pulling a sword on an inferior in a fit of rage as if he were some old Thrall woman who could not control her emotions. “I, I am sorry,” Mahkawn said. “I thought … never mind.”

They rode the Death’s Head Train in silence, Mahkawn embarrassed.

I was caught spawning in the bed of a woman who can no longer breed, and I nearly slew one of my own Dragon Captains. What is wrong with me?

Yet Mahkawn knew what was wrong. He’d seen old Neanderthal Blade Kin do this before, saw the emotionalism surface in them. After a lifetime of fighting it, of denying that it existed, the Thrall in them would arise—often the first sign of senility.

I am but fifty-two,
Mahkawn told himself,
I am but fifty-two,
and already he could see that his life was over.

When they disembarked, Mahkawn was so preoccupied that he let Bittermon lead the way, and the young Dragon Captain took Mahkawn up the long route to the palace, through the Street of the Dissidents, up the long avenue where the skulls of Tantos’ old enemies glittered white in the walls on each side of the street, only the holes in their eyes and noses staying in shadow.

The scene was supposed to inspire the proper state of humility in those who might come seeking favors or mercy from Lord Tantos, and as Mahkawn walked up the street, a sense of foreboding grew in him.

Was it an accident that Bittermon had chosen this route, or had he been commanded?

As they passed the Cage of Bones before the doors that led to the great audience chamber, Mahkawn saw four Blade Kin in the cage, removing the starved corpse of the last dissident to have died there.

Bittermon opened the great iron doors, and they crept into the palace. Braziers of sulfur were burning as always, filling the audience hall with a stench, and at the far end of the hall, in his red robes of state, Tantos stood with his back turned, looking out the window.

Mahkawn cleared his throat, “How went the battle, My Lord?”

The robed figure raised a hand, and one of the attendants went into a side chamber, brought out Tull and Fava.

They were chained hand and foot, and Mahkawn gaped at Tull as the Blade Kin forced the two to their knees. Both had purpled and swollen faces, for they had been badly beaten, and Fava leaned against Tull for support.

The robed figure turned, and Atherkula stood, wearing the robes of state: the red hood, the heavy belt with the golden scourge tucked in behind it.

So Tantos had died.

Mahkawn could not help but think that the outfit looked somehow baggy on the old Neanderthal. Atherkula was too short and too broad for the fit, yet his eyes were the glittering, unfeeling eyes that Tantos had once had, and his smile, the tight, slightly upturned lips, were very similar.

Ah, he wears the mask of state well,
Mahkawn thought, looking at that cruel smile.

“Come and see what I have found,” Atherkula said, and he walked down to the prisoners, stood glowering at them.

“What of Tantos?” Mahkawn asked.

“The battle went ill for Tantos,” the sorcerer said heavily, and waited as if Mahkawn might say something to console him. “The Creators killed him, destroyed his forces. Only one of our Crimson Knights escaped to tell the tale. We will have to mount a larger assault.”

Atherkula touched the scourge at his belt meaningfully, a tone of boastfulness in his voice, “I will lead Tantos’ armies now.”

“What?” Mahkawn asked. “Tantos may have given you that right. But do you think you could replace him? Have you considered what the other Slave Lords will say? You will start a war! They will want a human in your place!”

“They have no reason to fight me,” Atherkula answered. “Tantos gave his scourge for me to wield, and the right of succession falls to me. He has no offspring to claim his throne, and he saw that I would lead well in his stead. We do not need human lords to govern us any longer. The Blade Kin can govern themselves.”

Down at their feet, Tull looked up at Atherkula and laughed, a bitter laugh that touched Mahkawn to the bone. Tull said, “So, the slaves will hold the keys to their own shackles? What a prize you have won! You will be able to take Tantos’ seat at the next arena games!”

Atherkula pulled the scourge from his belt, raised it threateningly. The golden chains on the scourge glimmered in a ray of sunlight from the high windows, and the sharp flanges at their ends sparkled.

Tull spat on Atherkula’s feet.

Atherkula swung the scourge, a whistling blow that struck Tull across the face. The golden chains on the scourge could not tolerate the impact, and half of the balls thumped across the floor. Tull sat for a moment, blood oozing from the cuts on his face, as if he had been clawed by a lion, then he pitched forward, face down.

“You will not mock me,” Atherkula said softly. “I will not tolerate it. As the Minister of Retribution, I’ll finish the job.”

He turned to Mahkawn, eyes flashing. “You were ordered to kill this man, and failed to fulfill that order. As of today, you are no longer Blade Kin. I will find a suitable job for you as a Thrall, gutting fish on the docks. Bittermon Dent will take your office.”

Mahkawn bowed his head in submission, dropped to one knee. The first act of a tyrant was always to remove the opposition, and Mahkawn knew he could not withstand the sorcerer. Grimly, he realized that he did not even want to fight.

A job at the docks. Nights in bed with Pirazha. Learning to become a father to his children.

He pulled off his black robe of office and laid it at Atherkula’s feet. Bittermon scooped it from the floor and fumbled with the pin, placing it on his own shoulders.

Atherkula continued, “As for you, Tull Genet, you shall die upon the Street of Dissidents, locked within the cage of bones! Guards, take this rabble from me!”

Blade Kin guards ushered forward from their hidden alcoves, pulled Tull and Fava to their feet, and Bittermon placed his hand on Mahkawn’s shoulder, lifted him.

Two Blade Kin escorted the old general from the room. Mahkawn was so stunned that he felt as if he were stumbling through a dreamworld. They took him out into the bright sun, down the Street of the Dissidents to the Death’s Head Train.

The huge engine sat among the green fields, a monstrosity of black iron with its great Pwi skull on the front.

This is the last time I shall ride this train,
Mahkawn mused,
now that I have been stripped of rank.

The two guards sat on either side of him, so that he was sandwiched between them. Their dark-red wool robes smelled of grease and smoke and nights in the snow, the way that they do at the end of winter, and Mahkawn studied one of them—a young Neanderthal, hardly more than a boy, yet his jaw and neck muscles were so rigid that Mahkawn would have sworn that he could crack his head open on those muscles.

I could fight him, kill him now and try to use my men against Atherkula,
Mahkawn realized, yet he felt fatigued, weakened by age.

What would be the purpose? To set myself in Atherkula’s place until the human Slave Lords depose me? Shall I take a place in line among the despots who rule?

The young guard flexed his muscles, and his hand drifted absently to the sword at his side, and with great clarity, Mahkawn understood that Atherkula anticipated such a move, and that he would not allow it. These guards would be his assassins. Atherkula planned to kill Mahkawn, just as he would kill Tull, only more quietly.

And I, I am fool enough to dream that I might yet survive the coup.

Mahkawn savored the way Tull had spat on Atherkula. He wished that he had done the same, committed some last act of defiance. It was admirable. Altogether admirable. Good strong Blade Kin stock. Mahkawn rested his eyes.

My son. I almost called him my son, once. He is better than all the Thralls I have spawned put together.
Mahkawn grinned. He should have understood his own infatuation for the boy long ago. A son. That is what he wanted, a Blade Kin son.

Ayaah, would it not be good,
Mahkawn thought,
if Tull really were the Okansharai.

He toyed with the idea of trying to use his power to free Tull. He could gather some men and get Tull to a boat, send him back into the Rough so that Atherkula could fret.

The old sorcerer could have me, but not those under my protection.

Mahkawn could barely recall a single instant of the trip back to the train, and kept trying to focus, to recall some detail of the trip, but all he could recall was Atherkua’s ancient chinless face, the tight cold smile, the piercing blue eyes at once haughty and empty.

Mahkawn lay his head back on the crimson silk cushions and closed his eyes, confident that the assassins would strike soon, before the Death’s Head Train even reached Bashevgo.

Mahkawn casually moved his hand to the dagger concealed up his left sleeve, then whirled and struck.

Shortly after dawn, Darrissea and Phylomon emerged from the caves, and made their way down the mountain. Phylomon wore pants taken from a dead blood eater, carried a bent sword taken from the body of a Blade Kin.

He urged Darrissea forward, moving as fast as he was able to on wobbly legs, setting white rods in the ground.

They reached a fork in the road, and Darrissea ran ahead, but Phylomon shouted, “Not that way—blood eaters!” and he urged her to a second path.

After nearly an hour the canyon opened onto a broad plain, and Phylomon looked off into the distance—clouds were rising around the island, clouds of birds in vast flocks that zagged back and forth wildly.

Phylomon stretched, letting the sun play over his naked chest. His skin was paler than Darrissea had imagined, like the flesh of a child. She imagined that perhaps this was the way a God would appear, or perhaps all Starfarers had been beautiful.

Yet his face was drawn, haggard.

“Are you going to be all right?” Darrissea asked.

Phylomon nodded. “It will be hard to adjust. I feel … drained. The symbiote did all it could to keep me from boiling alive.”

He shook his head grimly, as if still in pain.

“We can rest here,” he said. Phylomon looked weary, as if he would drop, and in the sunlight Darrissea could see some white puckering welts on his back more clearly. The flames had burned right through the symbiote, crisscrossing the Starfarer’s back with reddened skin, as if he had suffered under the lash.

He stumbled a little, and Darrissea held him. “Come, sit and rest.”

“No,” Phylomon said, nodding toward the birds. “Something is happening. They’re like—starlings—in the fall, nervous, preparing to migrate. Look at them! Every hour we stay gives the Creators more time to launch an attack.”

“So you want to hit them first?”

Phylomon nodded. “The caves back there are magma tubes. The mountain was a volcano. The resonators might do enough damage here, if we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not lucky?”

“At the very least, I think I can collapse the caves. It might only seal the Creators in, until they can dig free, but it might kill them.”

Darrissea watched the clouds of birds weaving across the sky. He was right, something was happening. She could feel it in the air, an electricity that made her skin itch.