Authors: David Farland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Genetic Engineering
She took Vo-olai into the house, set her on the bed, and fed her an apple. Vo-olai sat, and Wayan patted her back. “We should go hide somewhere,” Vo-olai said. “The Blade Kin are sweeping through the Rough. We should go hide in the woods, wait until Anorath escapes.”
“Or go down to White Rock,” Fava said. “The Blade Kin would never find us down in the mines.”
“Yes.” Vo-olai said. Vo-olai did not eat her apple, only held it. She looked at the floor for a long time.
Wayan found a brush on the floor and began combing the twigs from Vo-olai’s hair. “Anorath and Tchula won’t be coming back, will they?” Vo-olai said, “No one ever escapes from Bashevgo.”
“Maybe not,” Fava answered. “Yet we must be here, if they do.”
Vo-olai sighed deeply, staring at the floor, her brow furrowed. “No one ever comes back.…”
“We can make a home in the woods,” Fava said, worried. The girl’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. “We could live together and have fun, the way we did when we were children. And we could wait. Even in Bashevgo, they can’t always watch the slaves.”
“Fava, I’m going to go to Bashevgo,” Vo-olai, said, her voice panicky. “I’m going to go live with my husband and sons. If we can’t live here, at least we can live together as Thralls.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to do that,” Fava answered calmly, trying to soothe her.
Vo-olai nodded, set her apple on the floor. “Well, that’s it. I’ll go to Bashevgo.”
Wayan looked at Fava. He asked, “Is Tull in Bashevgo?”
Fava sat beside him. “Yes, I think so.”
“Are we going to go there?”
Fava pursed her lips, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to go,” Wayan said.
It was full night now. Fava laid Wayan and Vo-olai on the mattress, put a blanket on them. She could not help hesitating, sitting beside the bed and just touching the mattress where Tull had laid his head.
The kwea, the remembered pleasure she felt from this place, so filled her with longing. Outside, snow began to fall; she made a small fire, hoping its feeble light and smoke would not attract any Blade Kin. By the time she had finished setting the fire, Vo-olai and Wayan had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Being afraid takes much energy,
she realized.
Fava searched the house again. Much of what they owned had been taken—clothes and weapons—but they had food and bedding and pots for cooking.
I can get clothing,
Fava decided,
if I’m willing.
She stepped out into the darkness by the doorstep to loot the bodies of the dead Blade Kin. Their dark capes were thick and warm, as were the cotton tunics under their armor. Two of them wore packs which contained food and heavy overcloaks that would blend into the forest and brush. In one of the packs, Fava found a long knife and a sheath, the kind humans sometimes used for fighting.
She stopped for a moment, recognized the futility of what she was doing.
All my life,
she thought,
I’ve been afraid the slavers would come get me, and now I’m planning to give myself to them? The gods are playing cruel jokes with me.
She looked at the dead men at her feet. The Blade Kin would be hard on Tull for that. And he had killed more of their ilk at Denai. The Blade Kin would punish him.
The despair came heavier, darker, in deep waves. It knotted her stomach, and Fava bent over and retched, spitting up the small bit of potato she had eaten.
She’d known other women who grieved like this, women who starved themselves when their husbands died. The simple act of going to him might save her life.
Fava tried to think of Tull, tried to imagine living with him in Bashevgo. Perhaps they would have to work hard, but they would live side by side, and so the work would be easier.
Fava knew that she was young and pretty, that the Blade Kin would rape her, and she tried to imagine what it would be like, both for her and for Tull.
Tull would never be able to take it. He would kill any Blade Kin that touched her, and in the end they would execute him. She knew that Tull could never survive as a slave, and Fava realized that she wouldn’t want to survive herself. Her stomach knotted again, and she wanted to vomit.
She untied the straps to the Blade Kin’s body armor, took off their leather cuirasses. The snow began falling on them, already an inch deep.
When she stripped the under-tunic from the second body, she was surprised to find that it had tits. She felt to make sure, then pulled off the woman’s headgear.
There was little light to see by, but this Blade Kin was indeed a woman, a Pwi woman with a kindly face. Fava turned the girl’s head, saw that she had only one ear, a left ear pierced for earrings.
Fava grunted in surprise. She had heard of female Blade Kin, knew they were rare. She stared at the corpse for a long time, at the tall black boots, at the under-tunic and body armor.
She pulled on the boots, and found that they fit her. She held the stiff leather cuirass up to her own torso and found that it would have fit, if Tull hadn’t put a bullet through the woman’s belly.
She sat for a long time, in the darkness, with the snow falling. This little house, this little bay, felt so peaceful and quiet with the snow falling, the muffled world.
Fava closed her eyes, and the kwea of her house seemed to swell around her like a mist—the comfort she felt in Tull’s arms, the beauty of their wedding night. The raw unsatisfied lust she felt for him—not a lust for his body, but a lust for his life, for his dreams of spending a life together.
And from down the trail, even though her parents’ house was in ashes, she could still feel the years of happiness built up by accretion, weighing heavily. She recalled playing tag with her older brother around the lilac bush, the smell of an elk roast, the thrill of the day when her father first returned from Hotland bringing her the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the funny stories he told of how her uncle had tried to ride a triceratops.
For Fava, the kwea of peace and joy, and dreams of peace and joy, lay upon the hills like a wet blanket of snow, muffling the recent cries of war. She wanted joy for her children. Nothing less. To offer less would be impossible.
Fava thought,
If my husband is in Bashevgo, then I must go and free him, and to do that, I must look the part.
She pulled her long-knife from her sheath, and in one fluid move sliced off her right ear.
She sat, surprised for a moment by the searing hot pain, holding the stump of her ear.
Among the Blade Kin, a soldier always gave his ear to his first commander. Fava thought briefly of saving the ear, giving it to Tull when she found him, and she laughed and tossed the ragged piece of flesh into the brush.
A moment later, she became aware of something moving stealthily nearby. She peered up through the falling snow.
Someone—a shadow—hesitated on the trail leading to the house, only a dozen paces away, a human Blade Kin dressed all in black.
The human stepped closer and said, “There’s always someone stupid enough to return.”
***
Chapter 22: A Passing Grief
“Shhh …” one of the women in the cage hissed. “The Blade Kin are coming.” She huddled on a mat and ratted her hair so that if the Blade Kin came for sex, they would not take her.
Tull lay on his pallet. The ship vibrated from the workings of its great engines as it eased over giant swells in the ocean, a vast steel behemoth.
Tull lay in its belly as he had for days and nights. He could not tell the difference anymore. Sometimes, the ship stopped, and cannon fire rolled like thunder over the decks, then prisoners would swell into her belly—dazed Pwi with mud on their hands from working the fields, rich merchants dressed in finery and amazement—all of them shoved forward, down into the belly of the ship.
But this was not one of those times. Tull looked out over the cell. A hundred men, women, and children lay on their mats, unmoving, trying to feign sleep. Overhead, in the gloom, Blade Kin looked down from their outposts.
Keys rattled outside the cell door, and it swung open on well-oiled hinges. Tull lay listening for the whimpers of the Pwi women and children.
Someone softly walked to the mat next to his.
The girl on the mat there was named Ruwatta, a delicate child of eleven from the town of Fish Haven, as were most others in this cell. Tull closed his ears, closed his heart, as the Blade Kin took her.
There was no stopping it. Tull knew that. He could have jumped the Blade Kin warrior, managed even to break his neck, but the Blade Kin in the turrets above would just shoot him, perhaps killing the child in the process. He had seen it happen before.
Someone tapped his foot. Tull pretended not to notice, hoping they would go away. They tapped his foot again.
He turned over, thinking that the Blade Kin would take him, too, this time.
Above him stood a Neanderthal woman dressed in black robes with red trim, the uniform of a Carnadine sorcerer. Four Blade Kin guards stood behind her.
She studied him in the gloom, her mouth a tight line, betraying no hint of emotion. She bent over, studying his face, gazing into his eyes, as if she were a sculptor who hoped someday to make an image by memory.
“Tull Genet?” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“You have a wife? Fava?”
“Yes,” Tull said, hopefully.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you, she has been killed.” The words slapped him like a whip, and the sorceress pressed one of Fava’s tunics into his numb hands, a scrap of green cotton with yellow meadowlark feathers sewn around the collar. It was torn and spotted with blood, but he could smell Fava’s vanilla water perfume on it. “The Blade Kin caught her near Smilodon Bay. She tried to fight them when they raped her. They had to kill her.”
She touched Tull’s hand, wrapped her fingers around his to give him comfort. Blackness threatened to swallow him, stark, and he looked in her eyes, and saw … curiosity.
The woman watched him the way a child would watch a hog as it was being gutted. Curious, dispassionate. Totally empty.
The woman had no real sorrow in her voice, no pity. In fact, Tull looked at the glint in her dark-blue eyes, and imagined a smile behind them, as if she were amused.
Another test, he realized, to see if he were Blade Kin instead of a Thrall.
This wasn’t the tunic that Fava had been wearing during the attack, Tull knew. He suspected that the woman was lying. Still, a part of him was afraid. Fava could have grabbed it from the house, been killed later.
“What will you do now?” she asked. “I know the grief must hurt. I know you want to die.”
Tull fingered the tunic, wondered if Fava were really dead.
No, he decided. The Blade Kin were ruthless, but they captured slaves, they didn’t kill them. He’d been amazed at the efficiency with which the slavers had captured Smilodon Bay, taking the city by surprise, putting the merchandise to sleep rather than fighting some drawn-out battle.
No, they would not have killed her.
“I cared for her very much,” Tull said, and he let some of his fear, some of his real sorrow, creep into his voice. “I suppose I shall need to get another woman.”
The sorceress glanced at the four Blade Kin guards behind, dismissed them. When she turned back to Tull, her voice became husky, her movements wary.
“My name is Chulata,” she said. “I need a man, too, for the night. May I comfort you?” She slipped off her black robe.
Her under-tunic fit her tightly, displaying the curves of her body. She was strong and shapely, seductive.
He decided to turn the tables, to test her.
“I’m not sure that you could satisfy my tastes.”
Chulata raised a brow in surprise. “Who is more to your tastes?”
Tull put his hands behind his head, considered possible lies. “I slept with a Dryad of the aspens last summer while on my way to Denai. Now the rest of you women seem … tiresome.”
It was a half-truth, and the honesty carried in his voice.
Chulata frowned, took Fava’s tunic from him, and her hand trembled with nervousness or anger, he could not tell which. She would be wondering how he could have escaped the Dryad’s spell. The Pwi always succumbed to Dryads, served them as slaves.
“I will dispose of this for you,” she said, then glanced at him over her back as she left.
Tull lay on his mat and wondered if he had passed the test. He smiled at the way Chulata had lost her composure at the end, counted it a small victory.
An hour later, Chulata returned, her composure having returned. “You say you have slept with a Dryad. Can you prove it?”
Tull considered. If he had not been certain that they were testing him before, he was now. “Ask the innkeeper Theron Scandal from Smilodon Bay. He saw it.”
“Yet you fought our Blade Kin at Smilodon Bay. You held off our men while your wife tried to escape? You did it because you wanted to save the woman you love, you wanted her to escape. Your love for her is what made you fight so fiercely!”
Chulata tried too hard to manipulate him into the wrong answers. Tull felt that she was confused. She almost accepted him as Blade Kin. He decided to tease her.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said, and her expression remained unchanged. “Perhaps I did care for her too much, and it clouded my judgment. In the dark I didn’t know I was surrounded—still, I must think about it and decide.”
Tull hesitated, as if considering, then asked, “You have been ordered to have sex with me, haven’t you?”
Chulata did not answer.
“I hope so,” Tull said. “I want you to spread your legs for me. But we will do it at my convenience, when I command you for my own reasons. Do you understand?”
Chulata stepped back, stumbled on a mat where Ruwatta had been. Chulata’s face went dark, and she must have felt foolish, so she turned and marched back off with all the resolve and dignity she could muster.
Chulata went to General Mahkawn’s private quarters. He called her in, and she found him dressed in only a black breechcloth, setting his knives on the table by his bed, as he prepared for sleep.
“I spoke with Tull Genet,” she reported. “You are right, he talks like a Blade Kin!”
Mahkawn nodded. “And when he saw the tunic of his wife?”
“Nothing! A passing instant of grief, nothing more. He suggested himself that he would need a new woman, but none have pleased him since he slept with a Dryad.”
“Did you try to seduce him?” Mahkawn asked.
Chulata felt her face burning. “Yes, but he did not take the bait. He isn’t your normal Pwi, willing to bed any girl who offers.”
“Perhaps we should not be so surprised, if he seems more human than Pwi,” Mahkawn said. “His father is human. Tull is Tcho-Pwi. There is a slim chance that Tull was born to be a Blade Kin.”
Chulata gritted her teeth. “I do not trust him. You can’t think to make him Blade Kin.”
Mahkawn nodded. “Perhaps Tull does require further testing.” He went to his desk, pulled out the brass ball he’d found in Tull’s home. He pushed the tiny button on top, watched the three-dimensional image of Anee expand out, nearly filling his small room.
Mahkawn kept little in the room—weapons, a bit of clothing. He lived the ascetic life of a warrior. The holographic image showed a great white storm swirling out of the blue southern oceans toward the Rough, bringing warm rains. By the time they reached Bashevgo, the rains would turn to snow. Mahkawn waited a moment, and the image of the world faded. The brass ball became only an oddity again. Mahkawn stared at the ball, mystified.
He poured himself a small glass of rum, swallowed it. Chulata still waited by the door. Mahkawn watched her—a beautiful girl.
A passing moment of grief. Nothing more. That is all the emotion that Tull had showed when notified of his wife’s death.
Mahkawn wondered,
How will I feel when Pirazha dies. Will I be able to contain so much pain? A passing moment of grief? Tull may be more Blade Kin than I am,
Mahkawn thought.
He admired the big Tcho-Pwi, sleeping down in his cell.
“Stay. Mate with me tonight,” Mahkawn said to Chulata, “if you will.”
It had been many years since he’d asked a Blade Kin to sleep with him. Perhaps Chulata could sate his craving, turn his thoughts away from home and his Thrall lover.
“I would be honored,” Chulata said, her voice betraying excitement at the prospect of sleeping with an Omnipotent. She closed the door behind her.
***