Scavenger of Souls (5 page)

When the one-sided conversation ended, the bearded man knelt by Aleka's stretcher, reaching for a brown pouch that hung at his belt. Tyris and I tried to get between him and his patient, but both of us were pulled back, me by the irresistible might of Archangel's iron hands, Tyris by a tug on the cord binding her wrists. The scarred man spoke again, raising his voice loud enough for all to hear. But his shifting eyes rested only on the teens and little kids, who stood in a huddle with Nessa at their head.

“Hear me,” he said, “children of the despoilers. You must know that you are ours now, and so long as you remain in the Sheltered Lands our word is law. We will heal this woman's injury, and if you allow us, we will heal that far greater injury
none of you has yet imagined you bear. But if you resist us, we will cast you out, and abandon you to the power that dwells in the Shattered Lands: the Scavenger of Souls.”

The name meant nothing to me, but a shiver went through me as he said it. Maybe it was the name, or maybe it was the effect of his rich, rolling voice, as mutable as the spinning prism of his eyes.

“Who are you?” Nessa said breathlessly.

His shoulders rippled in a way that made me think of squirming underground creatures, and the red cloak flared over his back, exposing again the lurid scars across his chest and arms. He raised his hands in a gesture of victory, as if he was reaching up to pull down the sky.

“I am Asunder!” he shouted, his voice turned to a symphony of voices by the canyon walls. “All who come to me are reborn, and become as little children again!”

The bearded man worked on Aleka for a good hour while the rest of us watched. Though he said nothing, he pantomimed all his motions in an exaggerated way, and Tyris's face passed from wariness to guarded approval. First he took the pouch from his belt and poured what looked like water into a clay bowl, then laid brown bandages in the water and kneaded them until they were soaked through. A pungent smell rose as he worked. Carefully he bathed Aleka's wound, wiping away the blood to expose the protruding bone. She winced but didn't flinch. Before setting the fracture, the man inserted
four long, thin needles, maybe made of bone, into her forearm above the break, and her face relaxed visibly. Then, with a swift, expert motion, he snapped her bone into place and wrapped another dampened bandage around her wrist. With this temporary cast holding her arm steady, he emptied a bundle of bright green leaves from a second bag at his side, and after grinding them in his mouth for a couple minutes, he spat out a lumpy green poultice and packed it evenly over the injured arm. Another layer of the brown bandages completed the cast, and the man stood, bowed low to Asunder, and returned his supplies to his bag. Then he vanished back into the canyon wall, slipping through a man-size fissure I hadn't known was there.

Aleka barely made a peep during the entire operation. Her face calmed, and what color she possessed returned to her cheeks. She looked up at me and Tyris with gratitude before closing her eyes, murmuring a word I didn't know:
“Melan.”
In seconds her breathing took on the smooth, steady rhythm of sleep. It happened so fast I wondered if there was some kind of drug in the healer's potion.

But I didn't have time to think about that. No sooner did Aleka drop off than Asunder's men approached us again, this time holding brown cloths and gesturing toward our eyes.

At the sight of the blindfolds, Wali's anger returned. “Are you kidding me?” he snarled. “What's with this secret-agent crap?”

Asunder's face showed no offense, but his eyes sparkled
as he turned Wali's way. “You are in our lands now,” he said simply. “And here our word is law.”

“Your word is bull,” Wali growled. “Why should we trust you?”

“Trust or no trust,” Asunder said, “you must obey.”

Wali's hands clenched, and for a second I thought he was going to launch himself at Asunder. Archangel must have sensed it too, because he stepped away from me to stand closer to his leader.

Asunder, though, didn't look worried. “Your spirit is admirable,” he said in his calmest tones. “But this is a fight you cannot win.”

“I'll be damned—”

“He's right,” I said to Wali. “You're not helping.”

Wali's anger shifted instantly to me. “I don't remember electing you leader. Just because she's out—”

“You have a better plan?” I said softly. “You want to take them all on?” Personally, I wasn't convinced we could take on Archangel alone, even if our hands were free. “What about the kids? What's going to happen to them if we get ourselves killed?”

Wali's look stabbed me. “Laman would never have put up with this.”

“Yeah, well, Laman's dead.” A pang shot through me as I said the words, the first time I'd said them out loud. “And so is Soon. Unless you want to join them, you'd better do what he says.”

Fury reddened Wali's face, but he shut his mouth and tried to control his breathing.

“All right,” he said. “But when they walk us off a cliff, don't say I didn't warn you.”

“If they walk us off a cliff,” I said, “I'll remember to thank you on the way down.”

Asunder had stood watching us argue, an amused smile on his lips. Now he signaled for his men to put on the blindfolds. I glanced around at our group, saw the bewildered expressions on Tyris's and Nekane's faces, the terror on the kids'. The old woman slept on in the warrior's arms. Only Nessa returned my look with a steely calm. Unexpectedly, meeting her eyes strengthened my resolve. I knew that if I was going to get us out of this, I had to think like a leader. And that meant making sure we didn't lose anyone else.

The last thing I saw before the strip blocked my vision was Asunder's self-satisfied smile.

We marched in darkness, the warriors guiding us with their hands as our path sloped gradually upward. At one point the darkness became absolute and the air turned chilly, and I figured we'd entered a cavern that cut into the wall of the gorge. We banked this way and that in the dark, our footsteps taking on the echoing sound of an enclosed place, and before long I lost my bearings. When we emerged into semidarkness and the hotter air of the outside, I became convinced our detour had served no purpose except to confuse our sense of direction. But then we sheared inside the canyon
wall again, and this time we didn't come out into the open. Instead, we stopped moving. I felt hands untie the blindfold, and I took my first look at the world around me in at least an hour.

For a moment it was as dark as the world inside the blindfold. Then torches sprang to light, and I blinked in the sudden brightness. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that we stood inside a tunnel, a bare gray space of solid rock no more than five feet across, with a curved ceiling that hung a mere foot above our heads. Archangel's hulking body stooped nearly double to fit in the cramped space. A strange, musky odor filled my nostrils, maybe from the smoke of the handheld torches.

Asunder took the lead once more as we started down the tunnel. The torches threw our shadows against the walls, and I realized those walls weren't as bare as I'd thought. In fact they were covered, floor to ceiling, with stick-figure drawings in faded red and brown. I picked out images of humans with animal antlers, hunters tracking four-footed creatures, dancers spinning around rough sketches of campfires. My eyes were caught by one drawing that had been rendered with more than usual detail: a solid brown shape that rose to two sharp points, with a single human figure standing between the uprights. The artwork, flickering and twisting eerily in the torchlight, sparked the word I'd been searching for to describe our captors, a word I had no memory of learning about a people I'd never imagined I had the possibility of seeing.

Cavemen. They were like cavemen.

But not dirty, hairy, backward cavemen. Archangel might be stooped, but I could tell he wasn't stupid. Like the rest of them, he was far cleaner than us, lacking the layer of accumulated grit that clung to us like a second skin. Their skimpy outfits were neat and unsoiled, and though their weapons might be primitive, they'd made ours look like pathetic toys. I wasn't sure whether Asunder and his followers were a survival colony, but they operated like a people perfectly at home in their surroundings, totally unlike the desperate, day-to-day fight to stay alive I'd known under Laman and Aleka.

We walked for maybe fifteen minutes, the drawings parading on both sides of us in an unbroken mural. If the tunnel had been built by human hands, it hadn't been built with humans Archangel's size in mind. But the giant lieutenant showed no signs of discomfort as he followed along, not even a hitch in his breath to suggest his lungs were compressed by the awkward position. I had just turned to inspect him, hoping to catch a hint of his thoughts in his broad, expressionless face, when I bumped into the warrior in front of me and realized Asunder had called a silent halt.

I looked around and saw that we stood in a spot where the tunnel branched into three. Curtains made of the same material as Archangel's cloak hung over each entrance. Asunder turned to face us, and though his eyes were only a dark flicker in the torches' glow, I had the creepy feeling they were directed at me.

“We stand within the outer circle of the Sheltered Lands,” he said. “Here you will rest for the remainder of the day, while your minds are permitted time for reflection. Your blindfolds we have removed, that you might see clearly the promise we hold for all who seek the one true way. Your hands will remain bound until it is shown to us that you have chosen to accept the gifts we have to offer.”

He lifted the central of the three curtains, revealing a shallow cave lit only by the tunnel's torchlight. When the warriors began to herd us toward the opening, it was obvious these were prison cells. And when they began to divide our colony into three—adults in one cell, teens in another, little kids remaining in the company of the warriors—Nessa and I jumped forward at once to prevent them from separating the children from the rest of us.

The reaction was immediate. For the first time since they'd captured us, they pointed the wicked-looking spears at our chests, surrounding me and Nessa with a palisade of lethal spikes. Before any of us could move, we were pinned by the warriors, Archangel holding Wali so tightly it was as if his body had been frozen into stone, the adults and children hemmed in by a swarm of armed men. The leader shook his head sadly, but his eyes flashed with the first sign I'd seen of anger. This time when he spoke, there was no mistaking that his words were aimed at me.

“You will find that a leader's first charge is to compel obedience from his people,” he said, torchlight coloring the
facets of his eyes. “For their own good, lest disaster befall them. Perhaps that is one lesson your former leaders, in their folly, neglected to impart to you. Let us hope for your sake that you discover this wisdom before it is too late.” Then, with a dismissive toss of his head, he signaled his warriors to lead us into the caves.

“Great move, Commander Querry,” Wali said.

The four of us were alone in one of the cells: me, Nessa, Wali, and Adem. We'd been here for hours, the only change in the monotony coming when two of Asunder's people pushed aside the screen and entered to give us brown mats to sleep on. They kept their heads down and said nothing, and it took me a second to realize they were women, long-haired like the warriors, wearing brown bands across their chests and around their throats in addition to their loincloths. When they left, Adem retreated to a dark corner, huddling against the wall, but Wali resumed the pacing he'd begun when we arrived. As he walked, his hand played with the hollow of his throat, as if he was still feeling for the ring they'd taken from him.

Now he stopped in front of me and snapped his fingers an inch from my face. “Ground control to Querry. Come in, Querry.”

“I heard you,” I said.

“So what's the plan, boss? We going to stick around and learn more of that bastard's ways of wisdom?”