Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (14 page)

Merrick knew their supply of coilguns was finite, as were
their batteries.
Desperate times
, he told himself, ripping off the
plastic sheath to expose the bare metal. He heard Peymer try to warn him, but
he was already licking his fingers and pinching them tight to the thin copper
prongs. Electricity streaked up his arm and woke his heart like an alarm bell.
The power cell was dead in seconds, but Merrick was alive.

A fire ignited inside him. He let the coilgun and the power
cell drop, touching his fingers to Cluspith’s neck and chest once more. He
became aware that everyone around had fallen silent. The Revs were huddled
close, solemn and saddened, some unable to look at the man they assumed to be
dead.
Is he dead?
Merrick wondered. Cluspith was not talking, not breathing,
not moving.

The warmth began to flow outward. Merrick listened; felt for
a heartbeat. His fingers lit up, growing hotter and hotter, but the body in his
hands was cold.

Cluspith lay still.
No. No, no, this can’t be failing.
This can’t be… how can this not be working? I’m losing it. This was the one
thing I had to fall back on, and now even this is gone
. There would’ve been
a certain measure of relief in the thought, but not while Cluspith lay dead in
his hands.

Then Cluspith gasped. Air rushed in, and the lake of blood
began to drain like an oasis in drought. Cuts and gashes fused together. Scabs
and callouses formed before the eyes of Merrick’s audience like seams stitched
into fabric. Scar tissue knitted itself into existence. A murmur rippled through
the crowd.

Cluspith spoke. “Don’t stand in the daylight,” he said.
“Don’t stand in the daylight, Merrick Bouchard. You’ll burn.”

CHAPTER 12

Sand and Sky

The long year was drawing to a close, the days
shortening as the light-star drew its line further south along the horizon each
day. Lethari Prokin’s
feiach
stretched into the distance behind him,
thousands of mounted warriors strong, spread along the curves of a hundred
dunes. They would cross paths with a pale-skin trade caravan today, sometime
toward early afternoon. The
feiach
did not know this yet, but Lethari
did.

His corsil clumped down the side of a sandy knoll, high and
shadowless in the noonday light. Jadoda was fast and strong, with a coat of
coarse dark fur along the ridge of her back, though the animal was well into
middle age. Lethari glanced down at his satchel, wherein lay the prize of his
foresight. The goatskin record was as detailed as it could’ve been, and today
would be the first test of its validity. He had already worked out the place and
time, and even the manner in which his warriors would take the pale-skins
unawares.

“So you will have a son,” said Sigrede Balbaressi, who sat
beside Lethari on a corsil of his own.

“That is what my wife tells me,” Lethari said with a smile.
“She has not consulted a seer—that I am aware of. Yet she claims to know.”

“I should warn you, then,” Sig said. “If you wish to
challenge me over the number of our sons, I have not yet begun to live up to my
potential.”

Lethari laughed. “I am sure you have many more sons to give
to the world. And I know your Shonnie will be glad to bear them for you.”

“She may not be glad of it. But she will bear them all the
same, eh?” Sig roared with laughter, his massive frame bobbing in the saddle.
His corsil gave a braying call as if to claim solidarity with its master.

They rode on for a time, speaking of trivial things, laughing
and joking, while the
feiach
plodded along behind them. Lethari kept an
eye over his shoulder, aware that if he did not detect the pale-skins early,
their caravan might appear suddenly from behind a dune and take his people by
surprise. Looking back, he could just make out the thin wheel tracks of the
empty slave cages. Those same wheels would be carving deep gouges in the sand
by the time they returned home.

The goat herds were a loose cluster of tiny black dots
meandering down the side of a distant dune. Lethari’s horse scouts, mounted on
their wild, spirited sandbreds, trotted alongside the line, spread wide to the
right and left. And just behind him, inches from his face in the sheath on his
back, shone the emerald eyes and golden lizard’s head pommel of his sword,
Tosgaith, reforged by Cairmag Charani just in time for his departure from Sai
Calgoar.

“My Lord Lethari,” said Sig, “you seem absent today. If you
will permit me to ask, why do we travel the Suruth when we might take the
canyon instead? Would that not bring us through the hot lands more quickly, and
in the shade?”

The Suruth was a ridge of high dunes that ran along the
stretch of desert between the Brinescales and the Clayhollows. Along its
northern edge ran a wide sandy trough, where a well-kept
feiach
might
pass undetected from the south. Lethari knew the canyon of which Sig spoke; it
would’ve been easier to take that route since they had no slaves or trade
stuffs to carry. But he had taken them to the Suruth for a reason, and besides
that, it was not Sig’s place to second-guess him.

“We may jest of the lighter things, Sigrede,” Lethari said
sharply, “but do not question your master’s will.”

A quizzical frown passed over Sig’s face and was gone. “My
regrets, master.”

Midday came and went. While the light-star passed overhead,
Lethari grew more anxious by the minute. He kept his eyes forward as often as
he could help it, for it would not do to have Sig and his other captains
thinking him unfit to lead.

Finally, Lethari’s alertness paid off. When he felt the
rumblings of movement, he signaled his men to stop. Then he kneeled Jadoda and
slipped from his saddle to lay on the hot sand, listening. His captains and
their attendants did the same—Sigrede and Tallis, Dyovan Angeides, Cean
Eldreni. Even Amhaziel Bilmadi, the venerable soothsayer, lowered his old bones
to the sand to listen.

They were here. The pale-skin traders were coming, and
Lethari’s men realized it at once. He spoke to them quickly, but not without
the subtle confidence of practice. Pale-skin caravans as large as the one they
were about to face seldom had the mobility to flee from a fight, so Lethari
laid out his plans with this in mind. After a short briefing, the captains
scattered to round up their men and put themselves into position.

As word spread through the
feiach
, its wavy line
dispersed until there was nothing left of it on the dune tops but the faint
tracks of corsils in the sand. By the time the pale-skins caught sight of those
tracks, it would be too late for them.

Lethari drew
Tosgaith
from its sheath. The hilt was
hot to the touch, the emerald eyes in the lizard’s head glittering like green
fire in the daylight. He nudged Jadoda forward and took up his place beneath
the steep ridge of the Suruth, where the wind was sweeping sand over the lip to
form tiny dust devils in the slipface.

His heart raced in his chest, full of hope and promise. He
had warred with the pale-skins for as long as he had breathed, but this was the
start of a new war; a war he was destined to win. The soothsayer had foreseen
it, and Lethari had never been given reason to doubt the soothsayer’s
predictions.

The trade caravan was not expecting an attack. When the first
of the long wheeled flatbeds, pulled by a team of horses and laden with its
massive iron shipping crate, penetrated the low flank between two ridges of
sand, Lethari’s men did not move. Pale-skins began to pour through the gap:
trail-weary shepherds, merchants clad in decadent array, and the hangers-on who
followed the caravans from one town to the next by the dozens. Still, Lethari’s
warriors made neither sound nor movement.

Onward the traders came, crossing through the passage from
the windward face of the Suruth to the shielded one, moving roughly
northwestward. Lethari smiled when he heard the distant war cries of his
outriders, the signal of their advance toward the caravan. These he had sent
eastward along the inner lip of the ridge to circle around behind the column.

When the pale-skins saw the outriders, they began to grow
frantic. Lethari heard them urging their horses forward, hurrying through the
passage as though the sandy ridge would offer them its protection. They did not
run, which was as Lethari had expected; the flatbeds were too bulky for that.
Instead the pale-skins rounded their vehicles into a defensive semicircle,
corralling the old, the young, and the women within.

The distant outriders, meanwhile, had broken into a full gallop
toward the ridgeline. Lethari had specified everything down to the number,
ensuring his fighting force was larger than the one the caravan would bring to
bear. He had held back the largest portion of his
feiach
for the ambush.

As soon as the shepherds circled around to face the
outriders, Lethari raised his horn to his lips and blew a loud, long blast. The
pitch snapped from low to high, its cavernous bellow throbbing over the dunes.
BEHROOOOOO
.

Quick as a flash, men woke from the earth like vipers, shrugging
away the sheets of sand that had hidden them. Steel glinted from beneath their
cloaks as they slashed at the horses’ legs and tore men from the saddle. A host
of Lethari’s riders surged over one of the low dunes, flanking the arc of
flatbeds and blindsiding the shepherds from the right before they could turn
their spears. With their attackers too close for a crosswise thrust, the
pale-skins broke and fled left, their sole route of escape.

Only it wasn’t. It was just where Lethari had planned for
them to go. Now that they were cut off from their allies, he and his contingent
sprinted over the crest and barreled slantwise down the dune’s steep slipface,
where they crashed upon the fleeing shepherds in a deadly tide.

Lethari’s sword came alive in his hands, hacking javelins to
splinters and biting through leather and horseflesh as though it were softer
than tallow. The duneside gave his men the high ground; their corsils sat them
higher still than even the tallest horses ridden by the
lathcu
shepherds. The downward force of every scimitar and falchion strike was enough
to put the pale-skins back on their heels.

The battle raged for more than an hour, the bulk of it wild
and turbulent despite its decisive beginning. Stragglers wandered from the
fighting and had to be culled. Shepherds, cornered and bleeding, fought like
wild animals against handfuls of Lethari’s warriors. Still the tide remained in
his favor, and the pale-skins’ resistance did not last long.

Gunfire began to ring out as the caravan grew desperate.
Lethari was accustomed to the noise; it always came late in the fight, and
always when it was going poorly for the shepherds. He used his own firearm so
seldom that he often forgot how loud it was. Yet the sound had become more a
herald of victory to him than a warning of danger.

When the fighting was over, the
feiach
penned the
survivors inside the circle of vehicles. Lethari beheaded the elderly who were
too fragile to live out the journey or too feeble to make decent slaves. He
threw the women into the slave cages, along with what children and youths there
were. The seed of the pale-skins was weak, and their offspring had become fewer
and sicklier with each passing year.

Lethari Prokin held the men out of the cages so he could
address them separately. “These are my finest savages,” he told them in the
Aion-speech, gesturing to the line of blood-soaked warriors standing behind
him. “Any man among you who believes himself brave enough to earn his freedom
may fight for it. A single combat, to end only in death, for each man who
accepts my offer. To each of the winners, I will give one horse out of my own
plunder, along with enough water for the way to the nearest pale-skin village.
As for the rest of you, there lies your future.” He pointed to the cages, full
of crying women and screaming children.

Several of the men accepted Lethari’s offer, raising their
hands and clamoring to be chosen. When he had caged those who refused, Lethari
finished explaining the terms. “To each of you who has chosen to fight, look to
the man beside you. This is the one you must defeat, should you wish to earn
your freedom.”

The contestants raised a cry of protest, shouts of ‘
Liar!
’
and ‘
Murderer!
’ and ‘
Cheat!
’ issuing forth from the cages.
Lethari’s warriors dispersed from behind him, laughing and jesting with one
another as they beat the slaves and silenced the dissenters with whips and
clubs. When it was quiet, Lethari spoke aloud for the last time that day.

“These are my sands,” he said. “They belong to my people. You
will earn your right to live on them, or you will serve their true masters
until the end of your days. Dyovan, choose the opponents and let the fighting
begin. Leave the cages where they are.”
So the lathcu women and children may
watch
.

The
feiach
made camp there in the late afternoon,
their fires surrounding the caravan’s remains. While many of the warriors
gathered around to watch the pale-skins fight with bear fists and feet to snuff
the life from their former companions, others in Lethari’s horde looted the bodies
of the dead, cut the draft horses loose, and tore apart every shipping crate in
the caravan until their packs and pack animals were overloaded with spoils.

The bouts lasted well into the evening, with many brawls
reluctantly entered and slow to start, or bitterly fought and slow to end.
There were tears and petitions from the combatants; screams of terror and fits
of sickness from the spectators in the cages. By the time it was over, the
ground was littered with dead
lathcui
. Only five pale-skins had managed
to escape with their lives, all of them badly beaten and hardly fit for travel.
Still, Lethari kept his promise. He gave them each a horse and three days’
fresh water, then sent them on their way.

That night, the whole
feiach
celebrated. There was music
and dancing, and bonfires that leapt so high they seemed to touch the stars.
But from the cages within the half-circle of flatbeds, there was only sadness
and mourning. The contests had provided fine entertainment for Lethari’s
people, but they had also served as the first step in breaking the will of the
new slaves.

Lethari liked knowing when and where to strike. Hiding the
goatskin record felt like a game; a game which, after a lifetime of loyalty, he
was surprised to find himself so good at. The idea of keeping a secret from the
king had filled him with dread at first, but now he was glad of having listened
to Frayla. He had served as the king’s warleader for many a year, but the
charge had never come so easy. It was like competing at stones and being inside
the mind of his opponent; there was no way he could lose.

The
feiach
moved on the next morning. They left the
empty shipping crates at the base of the dunes and burned the wooden flatbeds
beneath them. Without wheels or horses to pull them, the crates would go to
rust, or one day be swallowed by the shifting sands.

Lethari kept the goatskin record close as his
feiach
crossed the wasteland, never consulting it except when he was alone in his tent
at night. He turned his war party southward and intercepted another handful of
pale-skin caravans before they reached the Skeletonwood. With each new
conquest, a detachment split off from the
feiach
to return slaves to Sai
Calgoar or deliver pale-skin goods to the factory camp in Belmond for trade. No
one in the City of Sand had a taste for coffee, and few had any use for
tobacco, liquor, scrap metal, or canned goods.