Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (21 page)

“A hundred times over, though she would never have needed my
help.”

“Well, she was a cunt. She took off and left me with my
father, that piece of—”

Before he could finish, Raith grabbed him by the collar with
both hands and hoisted him bodily upward. When he looked down, he was surprised
at Raith’s calm affect. “It isn’t your place to criticize her. You don’t know
the whole story of her life, or why she left. If you knew what she meant… what
kind of woman she was… you would never say such a thing.” Raith let him down.
“You’re not invincible, you know.”

He needs me like I need him
, Merrick thought.
I
remind him of her. Maybe he still thinks he can change my mind; convince me to
go live in Decylum
. Raith hadn’t said as much, but what other motive could
the man have for helping him? “I know,” Merrick said, but didn’t believe it.

“That’s the most important thing I’ll ever teach you,” Raith
said. “There are limits. There are always limits. If you learn nothing else
from me, know that staying within your limitations is the key to preserving
your gift… and by extension, your life.”

Merrick nodded, though in his mind he disregarded the
warning. He was bent on pushing the limits, not staying inside them. The
respect and admiration of the people depended on his ability as much as his
ambition. “Teach me to be like her. Teach me to do what she did, and I’ll go
far beyond it.”

“Slow and steady,” Raith said. “We haven’t discovered your
trigger yet. Usually it’s a memory… a feeling. Not always a strong one.
Sometimes focusing on a small thing is what it takes.”

They worked together in the paved lot until the light-star’s
heat drove them into the shade. With Raith’s guidance, Merrick was able to
narrow down his trigger to a specific feeling. Before today he’d never given
that particular feeling much credence, regarding it with only a sliver of
understanding; a fragment of something he could almost call an emotion. The first
time Raith’s coaching helped him ignite, it came as a surprise.

“Good, good, that’s it,” Raith said. “Keep it up.”

Merrick sustained the burn for a few seconds.

“Out. Extinguish it.”

Merrick did.

“Now ignite again. Feel what you felt. Isolate it.”

Merrick fixated on the sharp sensation once more. His
fingertips obeyed.

“Off again.” Raith held up a finger. “I’ll be right back.”

He returned a moment later with one of the Decylumites on his
heels. “This is Edrie Thronson. He’s received multiple injuries over the past
few weeks. He was shot in the thigh and stabbed in the shoulder with a spiked
weapon of some sort. The nomads patched him up and he’s recovering, but the
wounds are holding him back. Heal him.”

Merrick ignited.

At his touch, Edrie Thronson heaved an inward breath. His
eyes went wide.

Merrick felt the wrongs righting themselves, and knew when it
was over. He unwrapped the bandage around Edrie’s shoulder. Circles of scar
tissue were all that remained where the cloth was stained pink.

When Merrick looked at Raith, the old man was beaming. “It
has come to pass. You truly are the healer. The son of Myriad.”

“You talk about it like it’s some kind of prophecy or
something.”

Raith’s age lines seemed to soften. “Not a prophecy,” he
said. “A hope.”

CHAPTER 17

Home to Rest

The light-star was full in the sky when Lethari’s
trackers returned to camp with word that the hidden cave had been found. It was
Sigrede Balbaressi who burst into Lethari’s tent, throwing the flap aside in
his excitement and forgetting to ask permission to enter. Lethari was sitting
at his table, studying the goatskin record to determine where he might ambush
his next trade caravan when they set out again.

Startled, Lethari tossed one side of the goatskin over the
other to hide its contents. He stood and slid his body to block the tabletop
from view.

Sig’s eyes narrowed. “What is that you are doing, my master?”

“It is nothing. A work of history I am recording for my son.”

“Your quill is dry, Lethari. May I see what you have
written?”

Lethari took a step forward. “When it is finished. Now, what
have you interrupted me for?”

“Apologies, my lord,” Sig said, bowing. “This place you are
looking for… the cave. The trackers have found it less than half a day’s ride
north of here.”

Lethari was astonished. “North? Did we ride past without
seeing it?”

“As best I can tell, we passed it half a horizon to the east.
The traps we found must belong to the people of that place. Had we passed
closer, surely we would have noticed it.”

“The man who found this cave… did he enter? Were the people
hostile?”

“He did not go inside. He says the smell near the cave is
unbearable.”

“Have Jadoda readied. I ride at once. Prepare the
feiach
to leave by nightfall. We head south upon my return.”

“Yes, my Lord Lethari.” Sigrede bowed low, but stayed where
he was.

“You are dismissed.”

“With your favor.” Sig turned and left the tent, though
Lethari detected a hint of reluctance in it. Perhaps Sig had hoped Lethari
would hurry outside first and leave him there alone. Lethari would not make
that mistake; he tucked the goatskin into his bag before leaving the tent
himself.

Lethari had sensed Sig’s suspicions ever since that first
ambush on the Suruth weeks ago. Persistent as Sig might be to learn the truth,
Lethari would confide in neither him nor any of his other captains. They would
never permit him to go unpunished for keeping the record a secret.

There was no doubt the damage to the pale-skin trading
company could’ve been greater had the routes been shared out amongst the warleaders.
In a small way, Lethari felt guilty for that, but he did not feel beholden to
Sig or any other man to tell the truth about it. The record was his, and he had
done with it what he thought best.
What Frayla thought best. And Amhaziel,
at the time. And my father, too
, he reminded himself. Lethari had never
been one to let the counsel of others sway him so easily, but it seemed the
habit was growing on him.

Lethari and a small retainer of scouts, warriors, and
medicine men set off north at a gallop, weaving their way through the dead
forest in a mixed herd of horses and corsils. The tracker who first found the
cave was Luchlais Haredin, a young man with unflawed skin who wore his hair
down his back in three long black braids. Luchlais had been too afraid to enter
the cave alone, he said; the air had been heavy with the stench of death, and
his belief in the spirits who haunted the Skeletonwood had sent him racing back
to camp immediately.

Lethari was afraid of many things, but spirits were not one
of them. Neither could he have become the great warleader he was by showing
fear in times such as this. So when Luchlais brought him to the cave entrance,
Lethari hopped off his corsil and strode down the narrow, muddy path without
waiting for the others.

The stench was just as the young tracker had described it;
Lethari had recognized the unmistakable mark of death from a distance. Inside,
the smell was strong enough to mask the humid fetor of sour mud and putrid
water. He covered his mouth and nose with his hood-scarf and pressed on.

The cave was cool, a welcome reprieve from the afternoon.
Clouds of black flies pestered the shapeless corpses heaped along the shores of
a deep muddy pool that stretched into the depths of the cave. There were rings
along the shoreline where the water had receded, leaving behind the half-buried
hulls of rusted cans, broken glass jars, plastic bottles, and the tracks of
wild scavengers who had come below to make a meal of what remained. Floating
debris bobbed in the recesses; thick clumps of knotted hair, the pale silver
gleam of dead fish, battered beverage cartons, and even a few red plastic
shotgun tubes.

Some of the corpses, but not all, were humans. Lethari knew
the deep green-brown scales and pale underbellies of the
calgaithi
at once.
Sanddragons, the great venomous lizards he’d had his sword’s pommel fashioned
to resemble. Even his blade’s name,
Tosgaith,
meant
Dragon’s Fang
in the Aion-speech.

Lethari had slain these beasts before. He’d seen them cooked
and eaten over a
feiach
’s fire. He had even seen them swarm to a bite,
drawn from horizons around by the scent of venom in their victim’s blood. But
he had never seen a massacre like this before.

There were corpses torn to shreds, raw rotting flesh
festering with maggots. Other bodies lined the high rocky shelves along the
back of the cave, whole but emaciated, as if they had starved to death there
for fear of leaving the safety of their hideaways. Jutting from a pile of
bodies in the mud was the worn leather hilt and burnished brass crossguard of
an old cutlass.

When Lethari drew it from the sanddragon’s body, the blade
gave a thin grating sound as it scraped between two rib bones. Flecks of dried
blood-spatter had crusted brown on the lower half of the blade, while its point
and forward edge came out black and wet, ripe with the smell of decay. Even
with his hood-scarf in place to stifle the scent, it was all Lethari could do
to keep from vomiting. Death was familiar to him; the stink of long-decayed
flesh in the bowels of a damp cave, however, was not.

After examining the cave as best he could without going near
the water, Lethari forced himself to endure the stench a little longer to
harvest the venom glands from two of the sanddragon corpses. He was relieved
and sickened by the time he returned to the surface. Leaning against the low
wall of the rocky bulge, he drank deeply and doused his head with a few cool
splashes from his skins.

“What did you find, master?” asked Luchlais, his own face
covered against the stench.

“No living thing but the flies,” said Lethari. “All who once
lived there are dead, or else they have moved on.”
Whoever Daxin Glaive
wished me to save, I have come too late for them
.

“Do you desire the dead brought above and buried, my lord?”

“Seal the entrance with mud and stone. That place is tomb
enough already.”

The work lasted well into the afternoon. When they were done,
they fled south through the Bones, leaving the hidden village and all the
secrets of its history behind them. When they returned to the camp, Sigrede
Balbaressi had prepared the
feiach
to move, as instructed. Lethari and
his retainers took a brief rest before riding to the head of the column to get
them under way.

They did not stop until late that night, when they reached
the edge of the dead forest and crossed into the region of open scrubland
surrounding the town of Bradsleigh. The pale-skins found these scrublands harsh
and pitiless, Lethari knew. But for his people, they were a place of richness
and plenty compared to the desolation of the wasteland.

Some of Bradsleigh’s residents would recognize Lethari as a
friend from his previous visits, but he did not want the sight of a large group
of
calgoarethi
to send the town into a panic. He left the bulk of his
feiach
to camp on the next horizon while he and a six-man procession bore Daxin
Glaive’s casket hence. Save for the carefully concealed cutlass Lethari had
found in the cave, they brought with them neither horse nor blade, a gesture of
peace toward those Lethari Prokin would sooner have spat on than traded with.

Covering the distance on foot was hard, sweaty work, the
casket awkward and heavy with the weight of Daxin’s possessions. Lethari and
his men endured it all the same. No sooner had they come within eyeshot of the
Glaive Estate than Lethari saw the distant shape of Savannah Glaive ascending
the hill and stumbling toward them at a run. He could hear her sobs, tormented
sounds that came between ragged breaths, thick with the sultry air.

She collapsed before she arrived, fainting sideways into a
heap, the fabric of her ankle-length skirt spreading flowers over the ground.
With one hand in the dirt and the other clutching her chest, she took it in
turns to sob and inhale, wheezing. She had her mother’s dark eyes and sharp
cheekbones, hair the color of rich honey like her father’s, and a rosy
complexion that was all her own.

Lethari realized she didn’t yet know whether it was Daxin’s
body or Toler’s they were carrying. She might assume it was her father’s, since
Lethari was the one carrying it. The Glaives were more friend to the
calgoarethi
than perhaps any other pale-skins had ever been. That was why, as soon as she’d
seen them coming, she’d known it meant the death of someone in her family.

“Bring the casket to the graveyard,” Lethari commanded them,
speaking in Calgoàric. Then, rushing over to kneel beside Savannah Glaive, he
said in the Aion-speech, “Do not try to rise. Breathe.”

Savannah spent a moment catching her breath. “How did he…?”

“Let us speak of that another time,” Lethari said. “He has
traveled these long horizons to return to the place of his birth and life. You
were the truest part of that life. He had a great love for you. This I saw
within him each time he spoke of you. Even when he was far away, you were the
thing he cared for most. I am sorry for you. Your father was a fine man and a
true friend. We will return him to the dust so his spirit may rest with the
fates.”

“Thank you,” she managed between sobs and wheezing breaths.

Saying the words made Lethari feel strange and uncomfortable.
They hadn’t come out right, or sounded the way he had imagined them. Thinking
he should say something more, he opened his mouth to speak again. But when he
saw the wistful look on Savannah’s face, he knew there was nothing more to be
said.

He helped the girl to her feet, and together they followed
the pallbearers along the pasture fence, down the gentle slope of Bradsleigh’s
eastern hill, past the Glaive Estate, and to the small graveyard at the
southern edge of town. Sheltered by a pair of massive juniper trees, the
graveyard stood beside a small dilapidated structure of wooden board that had
once been painted white. Lethari’s men used shovels brought by the townsfolk
and took turns digging until the grave was deep and wide enough to cover the
casket from head to toe.

There was little ceremony or fanfare, aside from the spirit
binding performed by one of Lethari’s shamans, meant to imitate the traditional
rites the
calgoarethi
performed during sky burials. As word spread, more
came to pay their respects and offer their condolences, visiting in a steady
stream until evening. Savannah invited Lethari and his men into her home for
supper, but the others refused, so he sent them back to the
feiach
and
supped with her alone.

“The master of this household no longer lives here,” Lethari
said, when he had cleaned his plate of the beef and soft buttered potatoes.
Savannah had made a small plate for herself, but had spent the time pushing its
contents around with her fork.

“Uncle Toler? No, he won’t come back here to live. He hates
this place. He won’t admit it, but he does. Does he know about Dad?”

“I do not think so,” said Lethari.

“I haven’t seen him in a while. He doesn’t come back so often
since they had their falling-out last year. He’s marrying Reylenn Vantanible,
you know.”

Lethari nodded, then looked away. His eyes fell upon the
dusty old bookshelves in the adjoining library, packed from floor to ceiling
with thousands of tomes, binders, folders, and notebooks. He knew all about
Toler’s engagement to Reylenn Vantanible. The last time he had visited this
household, Daxin Glaive had given him Vantanible’s caravan routes, as they had
existed back then. In return, Daxin had asked him to have Reylenn murdered.

Lethari had been sitting in the very same kitchen that day,
in the very same chair. Even now, he remembered the look of spite in Daxin’s
eyes as he’d made his request.
It’s a dirty, rotten thing to have to do
,
Daxin had said.
I know that. But you’ve got to do it for me, Lethari. You’ve
got to. Toler’s made up his mind, and there’s no changing it. He’s as stubborn
as I am, curse him. There’s no other way. She’ll poison our family if he
marries her. There will be little Vantanibles running around this house someday
unless we put a stop to this right now. Vantanibles!

Lethari had laughed at that, but Daxin had only stared,
fierce and intent, until Lethari had agreed to his request. It had been a
stroke of good fortune that Lethari’s Clay-brothers had owed him a favor. When
he’d sent word to them that Reylenn Vantanible was to be killed, they had acted
without delay. Had they only succeeded…

“Toler might take part of the herd for himself,” Savannah was
saying as she stood to begin cleaning the kitchen. “Or he might sell it off. I
know he’ll sell all the crates to Mr. Vantanible. He’s been planning to do that
for a long time now, but Dad wouldn’t let him.”

“Crates,” said Lethari, his interest piqued. “The crates in
the old paddock? Your uncle means to give them to the pale-skin trading
company?”