The second man did so. Once Kelis’s hands were tied, the two attackers changed positions. The second man slipped his own dagger into place, clamping his other hand on Kelis’s shoulder and driving one bony knee down on his calf. Kelis fought not to wince at the pain.
“Kelis of Umae, I’m assuming,” the first man said. He stood tall in the starlight, his black skin silvered in sharp highlights. His teeth flashed when he smiled. Kelis wanted to make out his features, but his vision blurred, his eyes clogged with dirt and tears. “I am not impressed. Was such an important one really put in your hands? Oh, but you can’t answer, can you?”
“We should have followed him,” the second said.
“They’re near. I could see it in the way he was moving—a daydreamer wasting time. That’s why I took him down. We won’t have to deal with him when we grab her. One less.”
“No!” Kelis screamed into his stuffed mouth. He raised his bound hands before him, a begging gesture.
“What?” the first man said. “Are you not Kelis of Umae? Do you not protect a girl called Shen? This may all be a mistake, yes? Just tell us so if it is.”
There was a trick in the question, Kelis knew. He tried to figure it out, but the possibilities of it seemed as knotted as the wrestling moves that had trapped him.
“Tell us that the girl is not hidden down in the ravine just there.”
Kelis writhed as much as he dared, gesturing with his eyes, touching his fingertips to the gag.
Let me talk
, he tried to say.
Let me talk!
He did not know what he would say, but he needed to try.
The man spat in his face. “Ioma said I was not to kill you, but I piss on that. You’ve kept me waiting here too long. This story is yours no longer. Bleed him for the jackals.” The man grinned.
He was still doing so the moment his teeth exploded from his mouth. They flew to the side in a wet spray, propelled by a black shaft that shot through his cheek and out of sight in an instant. The man dropped in a howl of pain, falling away down the slope of the hillock.
Kelis planted his two hands on the dirt and bucked up against the man who held him down. Getting his feet under him, he used the bunched strength of his bent legs and smashed his backside into the man’s torso. He collapsed his upper body into a roll as he did so. The man’s feet went flailing into the air, and he fell headfirst over Kelis to the ground. Kelis rolled, got onto his two hands, and popped up again. He came back on the man before he could rise. He shot out a low, thrusting kick. It caught the man’s head against his heel and snapped it to the side. Solid contact, but the man scrambled up, slashing the air between them with his knife. Kelis circled away, trying hard not to trip. His hands were still bound. Going down again could be the end of him.
The second man kept the blade between them. The whites of his eyes glowed in the moonlight. He looked frantically between Kelis and the first man, who was on the ground, scraping at the dirt as if he would crawl away but did not remember how to do so. “Jos?” the man yelled. “Jos, what is it?” The high pitch that cracked his voice gave away that he knew clearly enough what it was, as did the fact that he snapped around and ran. Two steps and a low branch of an acacia tree scratched his face. He stumbled back from the thorns, cursing.
Kelis reached him. He slammed his bound hands over the man’s head and then hauled back with the full weight of his body. He yanked the man from his feet, swung him around, and then twisted as the vertebrae in the man’s neck snapped apart. He fell in a tangle with the dead man’s body. He had to struggle to get free of the man’s sickening, lolling neck and scrabble to his feet. This took longer than the act of killing him had.
Upright, Kelis stood panting, his eyes darting between the two men. He whirled at a sound, his fists clenched. Ready to kill again.
“Kelis, brother, it’s me.” Naamen moved out of the shadow of a tree. He held a knife low in his strong hand, pinned in place with his thumb so that his fingers stretched open in a gesture that conveyed that he would drop the weapon instead of use it if attacked. Those fingers stilled Kelis, brought him back from the murderous rage coursing through him. “Are you all right?”
Kelis looked between the two attackers, one still living. After Naamen removed his gag, he said, “I heard only a bird.” The words just came out, without thought.
Naamen studied him a moment, and then he used his knife to cut the cords on Kelis’s wrists. “Two birds. Assassin birds, I think. They fly no more. We should, though. We should fly fast.”
“Did you do that?” Kelis pointed at the man still writhing on the ground.
Naamen shook his head. He did not need to explain further. Leeka stepped out of the shadows. He walked around the fallen man, picked up the spear that had shattered his jaw. With one swift movement, he slammed the point into the man’s back, aimed at his heart. He held it there a moment. The prone man did not move anymore. Leeka’s fingers loosened around the shaft, his fingertips light in their touch, as if he were measuring the effect of his strike through it. Then his hand clamped again. He yanked the weapon free and walked toward the two watching men. He held out a spear that Kelis realized belonged to Naamen.
“Let’s go,” the old man said.
Kelis and Naamen did so. It was only later that it occurred to Kelis that those two words were the most normal sounding he had heard from Leeka since the day he had vanished, years before, running in pursuit of the Santoth.
They roused Benabe and Shen just minutes after their encounter with Ou’s men. Their bodies would still have been warm as Kelis strapped Shen to his back and loped away into the last dark hours of the night, iron spear gripped in his fist this time. Benabe, after a few questions, was kind enough to leave the explanation of what had happened alone. She ran with them. She was stronger now, Kelis realized, than she had been at the beginning of their journey together. Or perhaps, like Kelis himself, she just wanted to see all this to a conclusion. Running took them there faster than walking. So they ran.
They pushed on into the morning, climbing into the rocky uplands. They passed through the afternoon, into a land of sheep and goats. They rested only when they stopped for water at the wells the herders marked. Twice they drank from ponds frequented by the grazing animals themselves. Exhausted by the late afternoon, they shared Shen’s weight between them, first one and then the other carrying her. On like this into the merciful cool of the following evening, through which they ran until Naamen stumbled, spilling Shen into the dry grass beside him. After that they cut the pace. They waited through the next day inside a vault of granite boulders, and then took to moving only at night as much as possible.
Throughout all this the Santoth hung there behind them. Sometimes Kelis pushed their pace, unconsciously trying to outrun them. But nothing ever changed. The sorcerers never seemed to fall behind, even though their gait—an ambling rocking motion—stayed steady. They could not be outrun. That did not stop Kelis from trying.
Aliver, I know these are your chosen sorcerers, but lend me your faith in them. Lend it to me, for I have need of it.
Melio held his mouthful of water so long that at some point he lost the world. Probably only for a moment, for when his eyes opened again, his mouth was still filled with water. Geena’s body still touched his. Wet ribbons of her short auburn hair striped her round face. “That was fun,” she said. She planted a quick, salty kiss on his lips. “Great to be alive, isn’t it? Thanks for the grab.”
Melio realized his cheeks were ballooned out, his mouth still full of seawater. He spat, which unleashed a fit of coughing and retching. He crawled out of the compartment. The fish that had crowded the hull were all gone, as was anything that had not been secured. The boat pitched about at the mercy of the chop.
Geena was already checking the sail for damage. “All well?” she asked, looking unaccountably chipper. “Everyone have all their fingers and toes and wiggly bits?”
Clytus held the broken mast for support. His shirt had been stripped off, and he stood, sending a string of curses after the league ship. Kartholomé did not waste his breath on them. He sat panting near the bow, his beard canted off to the side. One of his bone earrings was missing. Judging by the dribble of blood down his neck and the stain on his thin white shirt, it had been yanked free.
“They do that on purpose,” Clytus said. “They have a betting pool. The captain that runs over the most fishing vessels each moon cycle wins it.”
The galley lumbered away, looking slow and dull now, hardly the mischievous creature that had nearly sunk them. “The league,” Kartholomé muttered. “Nothing else like them in the world. Wait until you see, Melio. Wait until you see what I have to show you.”
Since the mainmast had snapped, they took up oars and bent their backs to pull on them. They headed west, sailing lightless under a sliver of moon. They kept the islands north of them, bulky shadows that they ran alongside of, until sunrise. They pulled into a small cove, managed to hide the boat in the overgrown foliage, and slept under the dappled light, to the ever-present sound of crabs creeping across the fallen leaves.
The next night they turned in to the Thousands. They inched forward slowly, sharing the post of lookout on the bow, at the tiller, or on the oars. The place took its name from the numberless islands that jutted up everywhere. Some just reefs barely parting the surface of the ocean, others large outcroppings bursting with vegetation, loud with birdlife, and crowded with small monkeys that Kartholomé claimed swam between the islands regularly, hunting snakes.
“Snakes?”
“Yeah, there are a lot of them on the small islands. On the bigger ones the league has mostly killed them off.”
They reached one of those large islands that afternoon. They pulled the boat aground on a small beach, hemmed on one side by a sheer rock face and on the other by a tangle of vegetation. The beach dropped quickly so that only a few feet out the water fell away into deep blue. This was why Kartholomé knew the place. Midsized frigates and transports could pull up to the beach. Leaving Geena to watch the boat, Kartholomé led the other two up a fissure in the stone that became a steep path. The beach was lost from view almost immediately.
The climb was short, and soon they walked through a forest of palm trees. The fallen fronds crunched under their feet. A few minutes later, Kartholomé brought them to the edge of a slope above a large valley. He indicated with a wave that this was the view he had brought Melio to see.
Melio stepped beside him, wrapped a hand around a palm trunk, and looked out over a compound of buildings and clearings, water tanks and training fields. Military units marched through maneuvers in one area. In another, soldiers sparred with wooden swords. In still another archers shot at distant targets. Men and women filed in and out of the buildings. A line of wagons pulled in and people began to unload them, passing the crates into the gaping mouth of an enormous storehouse. For the second time in recent days, the sigil of the league blazed out at him, this time burned into the slanting roof of the warehouse. The leaguemen, it seemed, wanted even the heavens to see their prosperity.
“What is all this?”
“This is what the league gets up to in private. This is where they train their army.”
“The Ishtat?”
“No, no. That’s on Lavren. This is Sire El’s little project.” Kartholomé propped his foot up on a root and leaned on his thigh, continuing to survey the scene below them. “The league started a breeding program years ago. The idea was that they could make quota slaves themselves instead of having to collect them from around the empire. The Fanged Rose let them take over the Outer Isles to do whatever they wanted. Sort of compensation for Dariel blowing the platforms to bits. The last eight years they’ve been hard at it, but they were breeding even before that. Ever wondered why the Ishtat are so loyal to a bunch of cone-headed freaks? The Ishtat are loyal because they’re part of the family. Each and every one of them, Melio Sharratt, was fathered by a leagueman and a concubine herself bred for the purpose.”
Melio’s gaze snapped over to him.
“You heard me,” Kartholomé said. He ran his fingers down his beard and then gave it a tug. “It’s quite a regime they have set up. I don’t know much about it—just what some of the Ishtat let slip when drunk and disgruntled with Papa. Seems that all the leaguemen are descended from just a handful of founding members. They breed children, and select some of them to have their heads bound. Those become leaguemen. Others they make Ishtat. Others become workers and all that. Some get discarded. Heard about worse things, but you don’t even want to know the details.”
Melio did not want to know the details, the logistics, the methods of such mass impregnation. Yet he could not help thinking about it. He saw storehouses of beds, leaguemen moving from one to another, a woman in each, babies crying beside them. He hated the thought. Leaguemen raising children like livestock, while he and Mena had not made their real love into a child. He still wanted nothing more than that. By the Giver, if she had only allowed it when they had the chance!
“I see you’re thinking about it,” Kartholomé said. “Don’t. Like I said, the Ishtat are raised on another island. These guys are a newer thing, not the same bloodline. Sire El’s army. They’re from quota stock, born and raised for it. If they don’t show an aptitude for fighting, they’re sent away as regular quota. Or they used to be sent as quota. That’s all changed now.”
Melio asked, “So what are they training for?”
“Good question. Answer: any eventuality. To the league it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses, because they know that either way they’re the real winners. If that’s all that matters to you—if you don’t have a sliver of morality in your body—well … it’s easier to adapt. No qualms and questions to wake you at night, you know? These soldiers may help take over the Other Lands. They may be given something to do in the Known World. I think it all depends on what happens with the Auldek invasion.”